The Story of the Prayer

A hundred stories, seven lines

This library has now told a hundred stories. They visit lotus lakes and cliff caves, treasure revealers and wandering teachers, bakeries and hospital wards. Almost every one of them comes back, in the end, to the same seven short lines.

So this hundredth story is about the lines themselves: where the tradition says they came from, how they travelled from voice to voice across the centuries, and how they come to be said tonight in many countries.

The Seven-Line Prayer, in Tibetan Tsik Dün Söldeb, is a short invocation of Guru Rinpoche, the "Precious Teacher" Padmasambhava, who helped bring Buddhism to Tibet in the eighth century. In plain words, it remembers his birthplace in the northwest of Oddiyana and his birth from a lotus. It honours his wondrous accomplishment and calls him by his name, the Lotus-Born. It sees him surrounded by dakinis, makes the wish to follow him, and asks him to come and bless. A short mantra closes it.

A song with no author

Most prayers have an author. The tradition gives this one none. Jamgön Mipham, the great nineteenth-century scholar, describes it as arising by itself, like a sound that reality makes on its own. Khenpo Sodargye, a teacher of our time, says it was not composed even by Guru Rinpoche: it is the prayer with which the buddhas call him to come.

Within that view, the accounts keep several threads, and they do not all tell the same story.

In one, the prayer is older than his arrival in the world. A treasure text revealed by Jamgön Kongtrul, quoted on Rigpa Wiki, has Guru Rinpoche remember countless dakinis, female wisdom beings, inviting him into this world with one voice, in a melody of seven lines. Rigpa Wiki calls it the invocation by which he came.

In another, a dakini gives the lines to Buddhist scholars in India who were losing a great debate. They sang them together from a temple roof, the accounts say, and Guru Rinpoche appeared among them. The Nalanda Translation Committee, like Mipham, sets this at Nalanda, the great monastic university; many retellings place it at Bodhgaya instead. That story is told in full in The Dakini and the Origin of the Seven-Line Prayer.

In a third, the prayer comes to Tibet in his own hands. The Nalanda Translation Committee writes that he gave it to King Trisong Detsen and his subjects, and then hid it in many treasures, so that it was found again and again by later revealers.

The tradition holds these threads together without strain. A reader should still know that they are different accounts, from different texts, and that each is told here as the tradition tells it.

Hidden for the future

Those hidden teachings are called terma, "treasures". The Nyingma school holds that Guru Rinpoche and his companion Yeshe Tsogyal concealed teachings in rock, water and the minds of disciples, to be revealed centuries later by destined people called tertöns, treasure revealers.

Found in Lhodrak

The history that scholars can trace begins in the thirteenth century, with Guru Chöwang (1212–1270), a lay master of Lhodrak in southern Tibet. Among his revelations was the Lama Sangdü, "the Secret Embodiment of the Guru". Treasury of Lives lists the Seven-Line Prayer as part of it, and Lotsawa House presents his text as the prayer's original revelation.

That text speaks in Guru Rinpoche's voice to the fortunate people of the future. In paraphrase: go somewhere quiet, let the shortness of life touch you, and trust him completely. Grand offerings and praises are not needed. Simply pray with these seven lines, wholeheartedly, again and again. Its last lines ask that it stay hidden until it meets a wise and compassionate man named Chökyi Wangchuk, which was Guru Chöwang's own name.

So two ways of seeing meet at one door. History finds the earliest written prayer in Guru Chöwang's revelation and cannot follow it further back. The tradition sees an old song recovered, not a new one composed. Both are honest about what they see. His life is told in Guru Chöwang and How the Prayer Spread.

How seven lines travelled

The Lama Sangdü did not stay in one valley. Treasury of Lives records that it became the core of a great yearly sacred dance of Guru Rinpoche's Eight Manifestations, performed at most Nyingma monasteries, usually on the tenth day of the fifth or sixth lunar month.

In the nineteenth century it became the main guru practice in the Rinchen Terdzö, Jamgön Kongtrul's great collection of treasure teachings, and Rigpa Wiki notes that all the schools of Tibetan Buddhism practise it, especially on the tenth day of the month.

The seven lines also travelled on their own. The Nalanda Translation Committee notes that Nyingma practitioners recite them three times at the start of any practice, and that Kagyu and Sakya practitioners use them very often too. Lotsawa House calls it the most famous and widely chanted of all invocations of Guru Rinpoche.

Why this prayer, out of so many? The sources suggest a few reasons without claiming to settle it: it is short enough to learn by heart, its own instruction asks for nothing but sincerity, and great teachers kept recommending it. And a verse attributed to Guru Rinpoche, quoted on Rigpa Wiki, says that when someone calls him with longing through this prayer he will come, like a mother who cannot resist her child's cry. For many, that image is reason enough.

Mipham's White Lotus

In eastern Tibet, Jamgön Mipham (1846–1912) wrote the best-known explanation of the prayer, White Lotus. He called the prayer "the most majestic of all prayers" to Guru Rinpoche (Rigpa Wiki). He first wrote the book in 1870 and finished it in 1901, at the request of a devoted attendant who, the colophon says, had recited the seven lines 1,300,000 times.

In brief, White Lotus opens with the story of how the prayer came into the world. It then reads the lines in their outer sense, as the story of Guru Rinpoche's life, and goes on to hidden meanings that teachers say hold the whole path. Those are for a qualified teacher to give in person; the Find a Teacher page is a place to begin. Mipham also built a much-loved practice around the prayer, A Shower of Blessings. His story is told in Mipham and the White Lotus.

Others added their own words. Dodrupchen Jigme Tenpe Nyima and Thinley Norbu wrote short commentaries, and Dudjom Rinpoche composed an offering text for Mipham's practice at the request of Sakya Dakchen Rinpoche, a master of another school. The prayer kept crossing lines.

Tonight, in many places

Today the prayer is said far beyond the valleys where it was first written down. In Himalayan monasteries it opens the morning's practice. Around the great stupa of Boudhanath in Kathmandu, people walk circles at dusk with prayers on their lips and beads in their hands; for many Nyingma practitioners among them, these are the seven lines.

Translation groups print it in their daily chant books, and Lotsawa House offers the prayer and texts about it in English, German, Spanish, French, Chinese and Tibetan. Some people recite it hundreds of thousands of times. Others, in a quiet room in a city far from the Himalaya, say it once before sleep.

The hundredth story

Nearly eight hundred years have passed since Guru Chöwang brought the written prayer to light, and the tradition says it is far older. Its shape has not changed. It remembers who Guru Rinpoche is, and then it asks him to come.