Tsele Natsok Rangdröl and the Lamp of Plain Words

Where the forests of Kongpo meet the river country of Dakpo, in south-eastern Tibet, there stood a monastery called Tsele. In the seventeenth century its best-known master carried the place's name as part of his own: Tsele Natsok Rangdröl.

His name can be read as "variety, freed by itself." He is remembered less for wonders than for books: short, clear guides that people still open today. This is his story, told as simply as the sources allow.

A child of the borderland

Rigpa Wiki says he was born in 1608 near the border of Kongpo and Dakpo. A record kept by the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC) names his birthplace as Zhokha, and another of its entries gives the year as 1605, so even his birth is held a little loosely.

As a child he was recognized as a tulku, the rebirth of an earlier master. That master was Tendzin Dorje, who died around 1605. BDRC notes that Tendzin Dorje had founded houses of study and practice in the area, among them a retreat centre in Kongpo meant to keep alive the teachings of Gampopa, the great Kagyu teacher of the Gampo hills.

So the boy was brought to Thangdrok, the monastery his predecessor had built. The tradition also counted him as a rebirth of Götsangpa, a much-loved yogi of the Drukpa Kagyu, and so he is sometimes called Kongpo Götsangpa. Götsang means "vulture's nest," the cliff retreat from which that earlier yogi took his name.

Two rivers of teaching

Tibet's schools are sometimes pictured as rivers. The Kagyu, the lineage of Milarepa and Gampopa, treasures a tradition of meditation called Mahamudra, "the Great Seal." The Nyingma, the oldest school, which looks to Guru Rinpoche, treasures the tradition called Dzogchen, "the Great Perfection." Tsele drank deeply from both.

His ordination name, BDRC records, was Karma Rigdzin Namgyal. His teachers included two great lamas of the Karma Kagyu, the Third Pawo Rinpoche, Tsuklak Gyatso, and the Tenth Karmapa, Chöying Dorje; the Kongpo master Sönam Wangpo; a scholar the accounts call Gangra Lochen; and the Nyingma treasure revealer Jatsön Nyingpo.

The records do not quite agree about Gangra Lochen. Kongtrul's account calls him a teacher, while BDRC lists a translator of the same name and time, Zhenpen Dorje, among Tsele's students. In that age teachings often passed in both directions between friends, so both may be true.

Jamgön Kongtrul, the nineteenth-century master who gathered so much of Tibet's learning, preserved a short account of him. It says Tsele came to understand the scriptures and oral instructions of both sutra and tantra, in the newer and the older schools alike.

His home country helped. Dakpo was Gampopa's land, where the Kagyu had taught for centuries, and Kongpo was rich in places linked with Guru Rinpoche and the Nyingma treasure revealers.

Jatsön Nyingpo and the Karmapa

The Rangjung Yeshe Wiki counts Tsele among the principal students of Jatsön Nyingpo, a Kongpo monk who revealed the Könchok Chidü, "the Union of the Precious Ones," a treasure with Guru Rinpoche at its heart. A terma, or treasure, is a teaching the tradition says Guru Rinpoche hid in the eighth century for later revealers to find.

With the Karmapa there is a small, warm detail. Chöying Dorje, only four years older than Tsele, is remembered as a painter as well as a teacher. The Treasury of Lives mentions in passing that he once made a painting of a deity especially for his disciple Tsele.

Water and molasses

Kongtrul's account keeps one homely detail about his character. Tsele was very strict in his discipline, it says, and never let alcohol touch his tongue. Even when a ritual feast called for a little liquor as an offering, he had it made from water sweetened with molasses.

It is not a story about rules for their own sake. It shows a man who kept his vows with care, in small things as well as large, and who found a gentle way to honour both the ritual and his promise.

A lamp of plain words

Tsele's collected writings fill several volumes. Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche speaks of five, and a reprint made in Gangtok in 1979 runs to eight. Among them are guides that have been translated into English as Lamp of Mahamudra, Mirror of Mindfulness, The Circle of the Sun, Empowerment and The Heart of the Matter.

Mirror of Mindfulness is about the bardos, the in-between states of life and death. It is a fitting subject for a master of Dakpo: the best-known bardo teachings in Tibet, the cycle the West calls the Tibetan Book of the Dead, were revealed by Karma Lingpa in these same Gampo hills.

Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche explained what makes them special. In an age like ours, he said, what helps most is not a long scholarly treatise but a triyik, a "guidance manual": a short, complete teaching. He recalled the great Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö calling Tsele's writings "short and concise, profound and encompassing."

These are not books to practise from alone. Their translator asked that some of them be read only by those who have received the proper permission from a teacher, so this page simply names them. If one of them calls to you, that is a door to open with a teacher, and the Find a Teacher page can help.

Questions about the Lotus-Born

Tsele also turned his care to the life of Guru Rinpoche himself. He wrote a set of replies to questions about the great biography of Padmasambhava, the Zangling Ma, the account linked with the twelfth-century treasure revealer Nyangral Nyima Özer. Part of it appears in the English translation of that biography, The Lotus-Born.

The Seven-Line Prayer's second line remembers that Guru Rinpoche was born on the heart of a lotus. The old biographies tell his origins in more than one way. Most speak of a lotus on Lake Dhanakosha, in the land of Oddiyana; some tell of a birth from a mother's womb.

Tsele read the old accounts closely. As this library's story From Prince to Yogi notes, his reply observes that the Zangling Ma gives about five years in the palace and five in the cremation ground called the Cool Grove, and it discusses the womb-birth version alongside the lotus birth that the prayer remembers.

For anyone who recites the prayer, that care is a quiet gift. It suggests that devotion and honest attention to the sources do not have to pull against each other.

Students, caves and the later years

Students gathered around him. The Rangjung Yeshe Wiki names Gampopa Sangpo Dorje, whose title ties him to Gampo, together with Bomting Chöje Mipampa and Tau Pema Lodrö. BDRC adds others from both the Nyingma and the Kagyu.

In the later part of his life, Kongtrul's account says, he stayed at Palri Gotsang, at a cave called Deshek Tse "in the south," and in other quiet places, and there he brought his realization of Mahamudra and Dzogchen to completion.

Lho, "south," is also the first part of the name Lhodrak, the district of southern cliffs beyond the mountains, and Tsele is often remembered in connection with Lhodrak as well as with Kongpo and Gampo. I could not confirm which of his retreats lay there, so I leave the map a little open.

The year of his death is not settled. One BDRC record gives 1677; a traditional list of his line says he passed away in his seventy-fourth year.

What remains

Two centuries later, Jamgön Kongtrul counted Tsele among his own former lives, and the tradition also sees him as an emanation of Vairotsana, the great translator of Guru Rinpoche's time. In the twentieth century, Rigpa Wiki says, Chökyi Lodrö and Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche encouraged the study of his writings as especially suited to our times. The translator Erik Pema Kunsang brought several of them into English. The line of Tsele rebirths also continued: BDRC lists a third Tsele tulku, Kunzang Lekdrub, born once more in Kongpo.

I found no source tying Tsele to the Seven-Line Prayer in particular, and I will not claim one. What I did find is a master who received a treasure centred on Guru Rinpoche, who wrote with care about the Guru's life and birth, and who kept his words short enough to carry.