The Sakyapa School of Tibetan Buddhism
Virupa was the abbot of Nalanda University, which
was a great centre for Buddhist learning in India during the seventh century C.E. Tens of thousands of young
monks gathered there from all over India to study the five major and five minor sciences. Virupa had been chosen
as the most learned and accomplished of all those monks. He became known as the Venerable Dharmapala, which
means 'Defender of the Faith."
During the day, Virupa taught many classes in philosophy, logic, and other sciences. He was always very careful in his observance of the monastic code, and in setting a good example for the other monks at Nalanda, but secretly he spent his nights practising Tantra. Virupa practiced in this way for about twenty-four years but received no inner experience from his meditations. Eventually he got discouraged, and threw his rosary down the toilet.
The next evening, an ugly low caste woman appeared. She was dark, almost blue black in colour and gaunt. She said; "You've done a bad thing by throwing away your rosary. I am your deity and you should have been meditating on me. Get your rosary, wash it carefully, scent it with perfume, and resume meditation, but meditate on me".
Virupa realised that this woman was Vajranairatmya, the consort of the Tantric deity Hevajra, so he did what she asked. Almost immediately after sitting down, Vajranairatmya appeared with her entire mandala and proceeded to give the instructions and blessings of this particular meditation.
That very night, Virupa attained incredible insights and ascended to the first of the ten Bodhisattva levels. Each night thereafter he progressed and in six nights he had reached the sixth level, which is the stage of irreversibility. He soon after achieved Buddhahood.
Virupa started eating meat and drinking wine, and he didn't go to class. It seemed to the other monks that their abbot was also having female visitors at night but what they were really seeing was the deities manifesting to him. Finally, they told him that he was setting a very bad example for the young monks and so he left the monastery.
Virupa then meditated in the jungles and became sunburned and dark, and also quite fat from eating meat. His hair and his beard grew long and he had started to wearing garlands of flowers, which was in very bad taste for Buddhist monks. People stopped calling him Venerable Dharmapala, and began calling him Virupa, which means "The Ugly One."
One day Virupa was on his way to Varanasi and came to the river Ganges, but the boatman refused to take him across because he had no money for the fare. Virupa pointed his finger at the Ganges and said, "You're quite a holy river, I understand, and of course quite pure. 1 myself am an ugly Buddhist monk and don't want to dirty you by swimming across, so please back up." The Ganges parted and he walked across.
Virupa became known as the yogi who stopped the Ganges in flood and as one of the eighty-four Mahasiddhas. One of his Indian disciples wrote a commentary on his instructions, and later another Indian disciple wrote a commentary to that commentary. This was repeated several more times over the centuries.
Khon Konchok Gyelpo (1034-1102) the founder of the Sakya order received Virupa's written instructions and the initiations which had been passed from one yogi to another and brought to Tibet by Gayadhara in the eleventh century. He also received them from Virupa who in a mystical fashion transmitted the teachings to him directly. Konchog Gyelpo built a monastery in the Tsang province and named it Sakya, or White Earth monastery, and so the school of Buddhism which was practised there took the same name.
Gyelpo had four sons; Kunga Nyingpo, Sonam Tsemo, Dakpa Gyeltsen and Palchen Opochey. His first son, Kunga Nyingpo, like his father attained exceptional spiritual prowess. He held all of the lineages of the Sutra and Tantra teachings of Nagarjuna and Virupa. The second son Sonam Tsemo became a learned scholar at the early age of sixteen. He had visions of meditational deities and many of his disciples became highly realised.
Dakpa Gyeltsen, the third son received lay vows and showed strong signs of spiritual maturity in his youth. At the age of eleven he gave his first teaching on the Hevajra Tantra. The principal disciple of Dakpa Gyeltsen was his nephew, the famous Sakya Pandita who achieved mastery over Buddhist and non-Buddhist philosophy, logic, Sanskrit, poetry, astrology and art which he studied under many Indian, Nepalese, Kashmiri and Tibetan adepts. When he was twenty-seven years old, after meeting with the Kashmiri Pandita Shakya Shribhadra, he became a fully ordained monk and maintained his vows without least infraction. His works such as the Treasury of Logic on Valid Cognition and the Discrimination of the Three Vows are famous even to this day.
