Gyalsé Shenpen Thayé and the College of Shri Singha

In 1848, in the Rudam valley of Kham in eastern Tibet, new walls began to rise on the valley floor below the glaciers. They belonged to a shedra, a monastic college where monks spend years studying the great texts. It was named after Shri Singha, an early Indian master of the Great Perfection.

The man who built it was Gyalsé Shenpen Thayé. Story 48 tells how Dzogchen Monastery began in this valley, and Story 11 tells of Patrul Rinpoche, who taught here for years. This is the story of the scholar who stands between them, and who is less often remembered.

His name is almost a portrait. Gyalsé means "heir of the Victorious Ones," a title for a bodhisattva, someone who lives for the awakening of others. Shenpen Thayé means "boundless benefit to others."

A boy from Gemang

The Treasury of Lives, an online encyclopedia of Tibetan lives, says he was born in 1800 at Gemang, in the north of Kham. His father was Tsewang Norbu and his mother Karma Chödrön. Rigpa Wiki, a reference site kept by a Buddhist community, also names Gemang as his birthplace.

His life stories say that the heads of several monasteries each hoped to claim the child as the rebirth of one of their own lamas. His parents turned them all away.

Then sorrow came. While the boy was still young, his father went out to stop bandits who were driving off his horses, and was killed. The Treasury of Lives says it was this loss that turned the boy toward the religious life.

Around that time he met a lama from Dzogchen Monastery named Dola Jigme Kelzang. The boy went back with him and was presented to the head of the monastery, the Fourth Dzogchen Rinpoche, Mingyur Namkhai Dorje (1793–1870).

At some point he was recognized as the rebirth of Terdak Lingpa, the great master who founded Mindrolling Monastery in central Tibet. His story is Story 40.

Many teachers

At Dzogchen he studied both the Kama and the treasures. Kama means "the spoken word": teachings handed down without a break from teacher to student, many of them reaching back to the time of Guru Rinpoche in the eighth century. The treasures, terma, are teachings Guru Rinpoche is said to have hidden for later revealers to find.

In 1818, at nineteen, he went with a few close friends to the First Dodrupchen, a great disciple of Jigme Lingpa (Story 86). He served and studied with the old master for about three years, until Dodrupchen's death in 1821.

His teachers were many. Both sources name Jigme Gyalwe Nyugu, Patrul's root teacher (Story 43), and a quiet scholar named Sengtruk Pema Tashi. The lists hold a small surprise: the Treasury of Lives names Patrul among both his teachers and his students, and Rigpa Wiki does the same with Jigme Gyalwe Nyugu. Friends in that world often received teachings from one another, so both may be true.

Then he travelled. The Treasury of Lives follows him across Kham and lower Amdo, to a cave of the translator Vairotsana in Gyalrong (Story 26). Rigpa Wiki says he practised at sacred places from Mount Kailash in the far west to a mountain in China, and became a master of both learning and realization.

The Treasury of Lives adds a quiet detail. His life story says he was destined to reveal treasures himself, but he chose not to. Instead, late in life, he took full monastic vows from Sengtruk Pema Tashi.

Rigpa Wiki says that after the First Dodrupchen died, he looked after Dodrupchen's monastery for some years. There he began a yearly forty-five-day practice of the Guhyagarbha Tantra, the great tantra at the heart of the Kama. In the first year young Patrul was his assistant, and in the next two Patrul led it himself. Practices like this are received only from a qualified teacher; the site's Find a Teacher page can help.

The earthquake

In 1842 an earthquake almost destroyed Dzogchen Monastery. The Fourth Dzogchen Rinpoche was then staying with the king of Derge, Damtsik Dorje, who paid for the rebuilding. The Treasury of Lives says the work was carried out under Shenpen Thayé's direction. Rigpa Wiki says he took charge of the monastery and rebuilt it entirely.

Gifts from disciples across the region let him do more. In 1848, the Treasury of Lives says, he founded the Shri Singha college, known locally as Shri Sengge Ri.

Two wonders at the founding

The tradition remembers the founding with two wonders, and the Treasury of Lives tells them as legend. Shenpen Thayé is said to have chosen the site after a vision of Shri Singha himself, the master of long ago, sitting on a rock in the Rudam valley.

When the college was consecrated, the same account says, the wild yogi Do Khyentse Yeshe Dorje (Story 29) suddenly appeared and drove a ritual dagger into the ground, blessing the place.

The sources differ a little on who led the college first. The Treasury of Lives says Sengtruk Pema Tashi was enthroned as its first abbot, with Shenpen Thayé as the second. Rigpa Wiki simply calls Shenpen Thayé its founder. Either way, the college was his work.

Keeping the spoken word

What he is remembered for most is care for texts. The Treasury of Lives says he gathered many Nyingma works, among them the great commentaries on the Guhyagarbha. From central Tibet he brought back collections of teachings that were missing or incomplete in Kham.

At the request of two of his students, Minling Trichen Sangye Kunga and Pelri Tulku Pema Wangyal, he gathered the ritual texts of the Kama into a set that could be published. Rigpa Wiki speaks of a few volumes, the Treasury of Lives of one. He also had woodblocks carved, so that texts could be printed again and again.

Rigpa Wiki says he then began a yearly cycle at Dzogchen of all the rituals, ceremonies and sacred dances of thirteen great practice cycles of the Kama, and that many Nyingma monasteries later took up the custom. He also set a careful monastic discipline, with a yearly retreat in the rainy season, as in the Buddha's own time.

It was patient, unglamorous work. Because of it, a whole thread of the old tradition kept its strength in the east.

The teacher

As abbot of the college, the Treasury of Lives says, he taught above all the Guhyagarbha. His own writings fill two volumes, with commentaries on that tantra and on grammar among them.

His students became the great names of the next generation. Rigpa Wiki lists Patrul, Do Khyentse and Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo, the three masters remembered as rebirths of Jigme Lingpa. Khenpo Pema Vajra, who later headed the college, was another.

Rigpa Wiki quotes the great Dudjom Rinpoche, who wrote that his kindness and legacy to the teaching "surpass the imagination." It adds that Tulku Thondup, a modern scholar of the Nyingma, felt he had never been properly acknowledged.

Devotion to the Lotus-Born

His love for Guru Rinpoche shows quietly in his writings. Lotsawa House, a library of translated Tibetan texts, keeps a short prayer of his that calls on Padmakara, the Lotus-Born, as the one who "embodies all the buddhas' compassion," appearing in this age in the saffron robes of the Indian master Atisha.

Lotsawa House also has his commentary on a well-known smoke offering. In it he retells a story from the tradition: at Samye, when King Trisong Detsen fell ill, Guru Rinpoche had clean wood burned as a smoke offering, and the king recovered.

In later years he founded a monastic centre at Gemang, his birthplace, and stayed there from time to time. So he is also remembered as Gemang Rinpoche, the first of a line of Gemang lamas.

The records do not agree on when he died. Lotsawa House and Rigpa Wiki give 1855, and Rigpa Wiki adds that some say 1869 or 1870; the Treasury of Lives gives 1855 or 1869.

His college outlived him by far. Rigpa Wiki's list of those who studied or taught there reads like a roll call of the next century's great scholars, Mipham among them (Story 12).

The fifth line of the Seven-Line Prayer pictures Guru Rinpoche surrounded by a great retinue of dakas and dakinis. Shenpen Thayé spent his life gathering a retinue of his own: teachers, students and old texts, so that words handed down from Guru Rinpoche's time would go on being heard.