Tibetan Buddhism

Longchen Nyingthig

Andreas Walsh

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Jigme Lingpa

Longchen Nyingthig

- (Tibetan: ཀློང་ཆེན་སྙིང་ཐིག་, Wylie: klong chen snying thig) is a systematic explanation and practice of Dzogchen within the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. It was revealed by the great scholar and adept Jigme Lingpa (1730-1798). Jigme Lingpa discovered them as a "gong ter" (or "mind treasure"), teachings that are discovered within the enlightened nature of the mind.

Tradition holds that this lineage was bestowed by Padmasambhava on his closest disciples - the king, the consort and the translator - in the eigth century. But they were to be held in silence and not publicly diseminated for a thousand years. When the thousand years had passed, the incarnation of the King Trisong Detsen appeared in Tibet in the person of Jigme Lingpa.

Longchen Nyingthig can be translated as "Heart Essence of the Vast Expanse," but Longchen (great expanse) has a secondary meaning that refers to Longchenpa (1308-1364), one of the greatest masters and most brilliant teachers of the Nyingma lineage. Although they lived 400 years apart, Jigme Lingpa is considered Longchenpa's main disciple and it is a series of visions of the master in 1759 that convinced Jigme Lingpa that the time had come to transcribe the Longchen Nyingthig terma and begin to teach it.

When Longchenpa appeared to Jigme Lingpa in the three visions, he received the blessing and transmission of the wisdom body, speech and mind of Longchenpa, empowering him with the responsibility of preserving and spreading Longchenpa's teachings. As a result, Jigmé Lingpa became the lineage holder of the Vima Nyingthig and Khandro Nyingthig as well as his own revelations, and all these lineages flowed together.

Contents

Tsering Jong - Jigme Lingpa's Gompa

A Short History of Longchen Nyingthig

In 1756, at the age of 28, Jigme Lingpa, a monk of Palri Monastery in Upper Tibet, went into strict retreat to concentrate on creation/completion practice. One night during this retreat he had a visionary experience where he flew to the stupa at Bodnath, where a dakini entrusted him with yellow scrolls containing the Longchen Nyingthik. He kept his revelation secret for seven years, and then in 1764, gave the first intitiations to a group of fifteen disciples. After that the teachings spread rapidly through Tibet, and Jigme Lingpa established a hermitage in Central Tibet at Tsering Jong, Long-Life Valley, where he could oversee their propogation. They were first published in woodblock form in 1794.

Jigme Lingpa died in 1798, soon after travelling to Drikung Thil to view his son, Tenzin Chokyi Gyaltsen, enthroned as the reincarnated head of the Drikung Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism. The last empowerment he gave was White Tara.

In the period of religious repression that began after 1959 Tsering Jong, by then an Ani Gompa inhabited by some forty nuns, was completely destroyed. It has since been rebuilt, but Jigme Lingpa's reliquary chorten disappeared and no trace has ever been found of it.

The Contents of Longchen Nyingthig

Longchen Nyingthig provides a mix of practice, commentaries on practice, and assorted teaching texts. Traditionally, the practices (sadhanas) can be divided into the following categories:

Tashichho Dzong, Bhutan Tashichho Dzong

This work by Andreas Walsh et al. is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License;