Marpa Lotsawa Quotes on Knowledge
Marpa Chökyi Lodrö (1012–1097), the Tibetan translator (lotsāwa) whose three journeys to India brought back the Mahāmudrā teachings, the six yogas of Nāropa, and the tantric cycles on which the Kagyü lineage of Tibetan Buddhism would be built, gave the second diffusion of Buddhism in Tibet one of its founding figures. The framework transmitted to Marpa by his teachers Nāropa and Maitrīpa frames the highest knowledge as the direct, non-conceptual recognition of the nature of mind itself — luminous, empty, and uncontrived — and the long pedagogy Marpa imposed on his most famous disciple, Milarepa, gave the Tibetan tradition its archetypal narrative of the guru-disciple relationship through which such knowledge is transmitted.
Quotes
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Attributed to Marpa Lotsawa:
“I traveled to India three times for the Dharma; what I brought back was less than what I learned in the going.”
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Attributed to Marpa Lotsawa:
“Translation is not the carrying of words across; it is the carrying of mind across.”
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Attributed to Marpa Lotsawa:
“Tilopa is in Naropa; Naropa is in me; in due time, I shall be in my pupils.”
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Attributed to Marpa Lotsawa:
“What is given by a true teacher cannot be measured by the time it took to give it.”
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“Middle way" is defined [by professors of Nirakara] in terms of a self-awareness that is not nil; it appears as blue, etc. objects, but characteristics do not arise in it.”
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“To professors of Mayopamadvaya, "freedom from the four extremes" is [to know that] the characteristics are false, and [in reality] clear light. The following system had evidence for its beliefs.”
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“To know the emptiness of objects is to know emptiness free of appearance and free of coverings. That is the Middle Way from which the "subsequent" or conventional has been purged.”
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“The Madhyamasatka of Metri ,The Tibetan and Himalayan Library, Adyar. Library Bulletin vol. 25, pp. 539-49. (1961)”
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