Dr. Cécile Ducher - "The Six Yogas of Nāropa’s Many Incarnations"

Among the most famous and secret practices of the Kagyü tradition are the Six Dharmas of Nāropa, completion phase practices associated with various Highest Yoga tantras, which the Kagyü founder Marpa Lotsāwa (ca. 1000–1081) received from his guru Nāropa. In this talk, we will explore how the formation of this collection of practices was more complex than its simple title seems to imply, and how the early masters of the Kagyü school synthesized it in various ways. For this exploration, we will focus in particular on a collection called Sekharma, named after Marpa’s house, where scrolls containing his secret instructions were discovered by the tertön Guru Chöwang (1212–1270). This collection is fascinating for three reasons. First, its status as terma is unique in the Kagyü school. Second, it offers a rare window onto how the Six Dharmas were pictured in the late 11th century, before they were fixed under the umbrella of the “Six Dharmas of Nāropa” sometime in the 13th or 14th century. Third, its confidentiality and rarity make it somewhat less loaded with secrecy than the actual Six Dharmas, whose instructions still represent the heart of the Kagyü lineage. Although this talk will not describe the practices themselves, we will explore the content of the collection together, in order to understand it and to discover how its various incarnations reflect the currents that shaped the building of the Kagyü tradition in the 12th century. Cécile Ducher earned a BA in Buddhist Studies at the Karmapa International Buddhist Institute in Delhi, where she studied for 6 half-years many of the classical texts of a traditional Buddhist education. She then earned an MA and PhD in Tibetan Religious History at the EPHE (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris), where she studied under the direction of Matthew Kapstein. Her MA thesis is about Marpa Lotsāwa’s biographical tradition, and her PhD about the Marngok Kagyü tradition, that is to say the tantric teachings that were introduced by Marpa in Tibet, transmitted by the Ngok Family and preserved in Jamgön Kongtrül’s 19th-century treasury, the Kagyü Ngakdzö. She won the 2019 Khyentse Foundation Award for Outstanding PhD Dissertation in Buddhist Studies. The talk was entitled: "The Six Yogas of Nāropa’s Many Incarnations: Marpa’s Terma Revealed in the Fifteen Scrolls from Sekhar" To download the presentation: https://drive.google.com/drive/folder...