From Indian Siddhas to the Kagyu Lineage

The teaching's own lineage traces it to the Indian tantric adept Tilopa, who is said in traditional accounts to have received it directly through visionary experience rather than through an ordinary chain of textual transmission, and who passed it to his student Naropa after subjecting him to a famous series of difficult trials. Naropa in turn taught the Tibetan translator Marpa, who made several journeys to India specifically to receive the instruction and carried it from there into Tibet, teaching it in turn to his own student Milarepa, whose disciples founded the various Kagyu lineages that carry the teaching down to the present day. That chain places mahamudra within a wider current of tantric instruction that moved out of the network of Indian Buddhist siddhas, wandering adepts who often operated partly outside formal monastic institutions, and into the more monastically organized setting Tibetan Buddhism developed as it received and systematized Indian material over the centuries that followed. The historical record of the earliest links in that chain rests substantially on hagiography rather than on independent outside documentation, which is itself typical of how tantric lineages generally are remembered and transmitted rather than a peculiarity of this teaching alone.