Teachers, Practice, and Travel

Abstract

Chapter 3 turns its attention to the formative phase of Shardza’s youth. The chapter explores how the biographies present the emergent inclinations and religious orientations shaping his temperament. These were determined in large part by a breadth of religious teachers, by the style of training he adopted, and by an important early pilgrimage he undertook that brought him into contact with a broader cultural world. These lasting and varied influences provided an important basis for alternative representations to emerge. They allowed Shardza to be ultimately fashioned by his biographer as an open-minded but well-informed polymath who transcends and reconciles typically contrasting religious types, becoming a great adept and a prolific scholar, a nonsectarian visionary, and a committed Bönpo monastic.