Becoming Vimalamitra: Manufacturing the Supernatural in Tibetan Buddhism By Joel Gruber

https://www.academia.edu/29544393/Becoming_Vimalamitra_Manufacturing_the_Supernatural_in_Tibetan_Buddhism?nav_from=20995e37-461e-4e4e-a03a-c58a4fba22f9 Tibetan Buddhists live in a cosmology and maintain a worldview that cannot be easily fit into the standard Western definitions of scientific materialism. As the anthropologist Geoffrey Samuel (1946–) explains in Civilized Shamans: “Constantly reincarnating [saints] do not fit comfortably into a linear historical sequence, but there is no reason why they should. They are not part of a world based on such sequences” (1993, 296). Samuel’s summary of our struggles with understanding Tibetan history is illuminating in its simplicity: it points out the obvious. As students of religion, we need to be more careful when attempting to understand Tibetan literature. We need to refrain from unthinkingly grafting our own versions of history, biography, time, space, and religious experiences onto an entirely different world. Prior to summarizing Vimalamitra’s namtar, allow me to first present a short quote from the American philosopher/novelist David Foster Wallace (1962–2008), who, before tragically taking his own life, may have been imploring students to save their own during his famous graduation commencement speech at Kenyon College: If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying or miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options.... [It is] not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true.... The only thing that is “capital T True” is that you get to decide how you are going to see truth. (2005) When we consider that too many of our artistic and philosophical geniuses, like David Foster Wallace, have a strikingly high history of depression and/or suicide, best exemplified in the opening line of Allen Ginsberg’s (1926–1997) “Howl” (1956), “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” perhaps our normal is less sane than we currently recognize. Perhaps our limited conception of history, scientific-based reality, and our secularized vision of happiness too frequently leads to lives that are “annoying andcmiserable.” Instead, as Wallace urged the Kenyon College graduates, perhaps we should strive to pay better attention to options that are less normal, particularly when they are not as miserable and depressing as the standard materialist worldview. Continuing the use of Wallace’s terms, the “mystical stuff” described in the sections you are about to read is not necessarily true. But there is no doubt more than a little truth to Wallace’s claim that the only “Capitol T” truth is that we choose how we see truth.This chapter details several supernatural features of Tibetan Buddhism’s “oldest” sect, known as the Nyingma, or the Ancients, by focusing on the legend of Vimalamitra and the Tibetans who claim to have met and even become emanations of him. The chapter argues that, for Tibetans, supernatural encounters with a long-deceased saint are evidence of enlightened activity resulting from the meditation-based ritual performance and visualizations of saintly namtars. ...