your bridge home
Saints and Poets
They demanded his weight in gold to release him. He told his nephew to spend it on bringing a scholar from Bengal instead.
Yeshe O, king in western Tibet, was captured by a hostile ruler, and the ransom set for him was his own weight in gold.
His nephew Jangchub O collected it, and the accounts say it fell short by the weight of the king's head.
He went to his uncle in the cell to tell him he would raise the rest.
And the old king told him not to.
Tibetan tradition preserves what the king said, in substance.
That he was old, and would die soon in any case. And that the gold should not be wasted on an old man's body.
There was a scholar in India, at Vikramashila, the greatest monastic university of the age, named Atisha. Buddhism in Tibet had decayed in the two centuries since the collapse of the old kingdom.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.