Padmasambhava rupa

Object location: Living room

This figure of the semi-mythic ‘Guru Rinpoche’, as Padmasambhava is also known, is a modern, hand-coloured Nepalese image that Sangharakshita brought for himself in 2005 on an Order convention at Wymondham in Norfolk, England, a convention that also marked his 80th birthday. He kept the image on his personal shrine. Padmasambhava, who is revered as a second Buddha by Buddhists in Tibet and the wider Himalayan region, is said to have spontaneously appeared, fully enlightened, in the calyx of a lotus, an emanation of Amitābha and Avalokiteśvara.

Padmasambhava was an important spiritual figure for Sangharakshita and a number of images of Guru Rinpoche are held in his personal archive. These include an impressive set of thangkas representing the eight manifestations of Padmasambhava, which Sangharakshita originally displayed on the walls of the Triyana Vardhana Vihara, his monastery in Kalimpong, after purchasing them in the 1950s. 

Though I had never seen the figure of Padmasambhava before, it was familiar to me in a way that no other figure on earth was familiar: familiar and fascinating. It was familiar as my own self, yet at the same time infinitely mysterious, infinitely wonderful, and infinitely inspiring. Familiar, mysterious, wonderful, and inspiring it was to remain. Indeed, from then on the figure of the Precious Guru – Guru Rimpoche – was to occupy a permanent place in my inner spiritual world, even as it played a prominent part in the spiritual life and imagination of the entire Himalayan region.

Facing Mount Kanchenjunga, The Complete Works of Sangharakshita, vol. 21, p.93