This passage comes from the first talk in Ken McLeod's Learning from the Lives of Lineage Holders series, which focuses on the founders of the Shangpa Kagyu lineage. Throughout his talks on Sukhasiddhi, Niguma, and Khyungpo Naljor, Ken repeatedly returns the question of how to read namtar or spiritual biographies.
Rather than approaching namtar as history—or dismissing them because some events seem improbable—Ken encourages us to ask what they carry. Listening to the series as a whole, I found it helpful to distil his approach into five questions:
- What freedom or transformation is this story pointing to?
- Why might this story have been preserved?
- What is this story telling us? What does it suggest about practice?
- What is symbolic in this story?
- How does this illuminate my own practice?
I've been using these questions as supports for reading David Templeman's translation of Tāranātha's The Seven Instruction Lineages. I ask what each mahasiddha story points to, and how I might work with this in my own practice. Read this way, a namtar becomes much more than an inspiring account of an extraordinary practitioner. It becomes a living practice instruction, a way to discover the freedom they were preserved to reveal.
From Sukhasiddhi: A Doorway to Awakening
Ken McLeod: I’m going to take various stories from various teachers’ lives, but I want you to think about them quite deeply, because most of the incidents that are recorded, while they may have actually happened, that’s not why they’ve come down to us today.
They’ve come down to us through the centuries because there’s something in what the record is. And one of the things that I think is very important for us is to be able to read or hear these stories and understand what they carry—and not only understand what they carry, but also know how to work with that in our own practice and in our own lives.