Dakini Niguma

Commentators on earlier posts have asked or made reference to relationships between the Shangpa lineage and the Jonangpa.^[1] In response, I thought to sketch some of the overlapping threads among Shangpas and Jonangpas in order to draw a few historical connections.

The Shangpa lineage, as Tibetologist Matthew Kapstein has described, is like "some vine that adorns a whole forest without being able to stand by itself" so much so that it "may strike one who follows its twists and turns as being virtually an omnipresent element in Tibetan Buddhism."^[2] Being so, its fairly safe to say that transmissions from the Shangpa lineage have penetrated each of the mainstream Sarma (or "New School") traditions of Buddhism in Tibet while no institutionalized representation of the contemporary Shangpa tradition is known to survive in Tibet today. With striking parallels, transmissions associated with the Jonangpa are also like an unbroken vine complexly intertwined within many of today's mainstream traditions. However, despite the (still) common conception that the Jonangpa no longer endure as a living tradition, they maintain an institutional presence in contemporary Tibet.