your bridge home
True Valor
The mountain spirits were wrecking the building site. He did not drive them out, he swore them in as protectors of the thing they were attacking.
Shantarakshita had come from Nalanda with impeccable credentials and a complete philosophical system, and the building would not stay up.
Fire, flood, illness, failed harvests. What was raised in the day came down in the night. The Tibetans said their own gods were objecting, and they were not obviously wrong.
Shantarakshita, to his credit, recognised that this was not his department, and told the king to send for somebody else.
Padmasambhava, the Lotus-Born, came from Oddiyana, generally identified with the Swat valley, in what is now northern Pakistan.
He was a tantric adept, rather than a monastic scholar. And the tradition surrounds his origins with the miraculous.
Born from a lotus on a lake. Adopted by a king.
And eventually leaving the court, for the charnel grounds and the practice of the cremation-ground tantras.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.