Lochen Dharmashri, Eye of the World

Before dawn in central Tibet, the great Tsangpo river runs grey and wide between bare hills. In a dry side valley to the south stands Mindrolling, the monastery two brothers founded in 1676. This is the story of the younger brother, a monk who spent his life making sure that what he had been given would not be lost.

His name was Ngawang Chöpal Gyatso. He is remembered as Lochen Dharmashri, or simply Minling Lochen, "the great translator of Mindrolling." Dharmashri is the Sanskrit form of Chöpal, "glory of the Dharma." He lived from 1654 until the war of 1717–18.

Story 40 tells of his elder brother, the treasure revealer Terdak Lingpa, and Story 28 of their niece, Jetsün Mingyur Paldrön. Here we stay with Lochen himself.

A younger brother

He was born into the Nyö, an old family of Nyingma teachers. His father, Sangdak Trinlé Lhundrup, died in 1662, when the boy was about eight. His brother, eight years older, became his teacher as well as his brother.

Mindrolling calls Terdak Lingpa his principal guru. From him Lochen took refuge, the first step of a Buddhist life, and the bodhisattva vow, the promise to work for the good of all beings.

At twelve, Mindrolling's account says, he received from his brother an empowerment, a ceremony that formally opens a practice to a student. It was for the Rigdzin Tukthik, the first treasure Terdak Lingpa had found. A treasure, or terma, is a teaching the tradition says Guru Rinpoche hid long ago for later times. Mindrolling dates that find to the tenth day of a lunar month, the day kept for Guru Rinpoche.

The same account says this empowerment ripened the boy's mind, so that every vow he took afterwards grew from it.

An old translator

Mindrolling and Rigpa Wiki both name him as an emanation, a rebirth in the tradition's sense, of Yudra Nyingpo. Yudra Nyingpo was one of Guru Rinpoche's twenty-five close disciples: a prince of Gyalmorong, in the far east of Tibet, who studied with the exiled translator Vairotsana and became a great translator himself.

Lochen means "great translator," a title of honour for a scholar. Lotsawa House notes that the Tibetan word for translator is said to come from a Sanskrit phrase meaning "eye of the world."

Robes from the Great Fifth

At fifteen he took the vows of a novice monk from the Fifth Dalai Lama, who governed Tibet and was close to the brothers. At twenty he received full ordination from him.

The Dalai Lama also asked him to receive a particular line of the Vinaya, the Buddha's code of conduct for monks and nuns. Mindrolling explains that this "Lower Tibetan Vinaya" had come down through Kham, in the east, and survived the persecution of Buddhism under King Langdarma in the ninth century.

Lochen became its great keeper, teaching it and living by it. Mindrolling says he gave full ordination to about five hundred monks. At Mindrolling he served as khenchen, the senior monk-abbot, beside his brother, the lay head. Treasury of Lives counts him the second to hold that seat.

A mind like a library

Mindrolling remembers him as one of the most learned people in Tibet's history. Its list of what he mastered is long: ritual, Indian and Chinese astrology, the chants and sacred dances of the Nyingma, monastic discipline, Buddhist philosophy, the whole collection of Nyingma tantras, and grammar, prose and poetry.

His collected writings fill twenty volumes by Rigpa Wiki's count and twenty-four by Mindrolling's. They open with long commentaries on two great Nyingma scriptures. His two explanations of the Guhyagarbha, the "Secret Essence" tantra, are still praised for their clarity.

His commentary on the three kinds of vows, called the Wish-Fulfilling Grain, was still being taught at Mindrolling in the twentieth century, Treasury of Lives notes.

Not everything he wrote is long. In one short piece, translated on Lotsawa House, he looks back to the eighth century, when the abbot Shantarakshita taught Tibet's king the ten virtuous actions. Lochen suggests, modestly, that beginning with those simple rules was a way to give people sound understanding and trust in cause and effect.

Two streams

The Nyingma school keeps two great streams of teaching. Kama, "the spoken word," is the long line passed from teacher to student since Guru Rinpoche's time. Terma are the treasures, found again by later revealers.

Lochen worked on both. Rigpa Wiki says the kama teachings the brothers gathered were later expanded and, in the twentieth century, printed in some forty volumes by Dudjom Rinpoche. Treasury of Lives notes that they also compiled the Döjo Bumzang, "the Wish-Granting Vase," a great collection of treasure practices.

Mindrolling adds how such teachings survive. Terdak Lingpa gave his treasures to Lochen, and Lochen passed them on to Terdak Lingpa's son Rinchen Namgyal. A lineage, in this sense, is not so much a library as a chain of people, each handing on what they were given.

Sixteen years of teaching

Mindrolling says he taught every subject he had studied, with its empowerments and instructions, at least three or four times. From the age of forty-eight until he was sixty-four, he taught the Guhyagarbha without a break, to a circle of about sixty students.

Among those Treasury of Lives lists as his students are his niece Mingyur Paldrön, his nephew Rinchen Namgyal, and the young nobleman Polhané, who would one day govern Tibet. It also lists the Sakya throne-holder Kunga Tashi, who was both his student and his teacher.

A thread of devotion

No source I found records Lochen's private prayers. But Guru Rinpoche runs through his life like a thread.

The tradition counts him as the rebirth of one of Guru Rinpoche's own disciples. His first empowerment was a treasure that Guru Rinpoche is said to have hidden. The tantra he taught for sixteen years is one that Guru Rinpoche himself is credited with explaining, in a short work called The Garland of Views.

And he lived at a monastery that, from his brother's time, gathered on the tenth day of the lunar month to offer the Lama Sangdü, the treasure cycle that holds the Seven-Line Prayer.

The Fifth Dalai Lama wrote a short prayer for Lochen's long life. It opens by asking the compassion of Ngayab Lingpa to clear away all harm. As I understand it, that is a name for Guru Rinpoche, "the one of Ngayab," the island of his Copper-Coloured Mountain. Those who prayed for Lochen turned to Guru Rinpoche to do it.

His brother wrote a four-line prayer to him, at the request of a community of monks. It praises his learning and his realization, and ends, in Adam Pearcey's translation for Lotsawa House: "Chöpal Gyatso, at your feet I pray."

The storm of 1717

In 1717 war came to central Tibet. An army of Dzungar Mongols from the north reached Lhasa that autumn and took the city. They favoured the Gelug school, and they turned against the older schools, damaging Nyingma monasteries and putting several of their leaders to death.

Mindrolling was among the places attacked. Lochen Dharmashri, then in his sixties, lost his life, and so did his nephew Pema Gyurme Gyatso, Terdak Lingpa's eldest son.

The sources remember his death a little differently. Mindrolling's history says he was killed the day the monastery was attacked, in 1717. A biography quoted by Treasury of Lives says he, his nephew, the Dorje Drak master Pema Trinlé (one of his own teachers) and other Nyingma leaders were put to death beside the Kyichu river, near Lhasa. Rigpa Wiki says only that he was killed in the war of 1717–18.

There is no need to dwell on how it happened. What his students carried away with them was what he had taught.

Many streams

Within a few years two of those students, Mingyur Paldrön and Rinchen Namgyal, were raising Mindrolling's walls again, and a third, Polhané, gave much of the funding, as Story 28 tells.

Mindrolling quotes Dudjom Rinpoche's history of the Nyingma school, which says that from the two brothers, as master and disciple, the lineage branched into many streams. They ran east to the great monasteries of Kham, Katok, Palyul, Shechen and Dzogchen, to Golok in Amdo, and as far as Gyalmorong, the homeland of the old translator Yudra Nyingpo.

The empowerments, tantras and vows in this story belong with a qualified teacher, and the site's Find a Teacher page lists places to begin. The Seven-Line Prayer itself is open to anyone.