Ratna Lingpa and the Hundred Thousand Tantras

In the fifteenth century, in the deep southern valleys of Tibet, a treasure revealer named Ratna Lingpa took on a task with no visions in it at all. He went looking for old books.

The books were the tantras of the Old School, the Nyingma, scriptures that had come to Tibet in Guru Rinpoche's time. Many survived only in scattered copies, and some scholars doubted they were genuine. Ratna Lingpa gathered them together. This is his story, told as simply as I can from the old accounts.

A boy of Lhodrak

Guru Rinpoche, Padmasambhava, is the "Lotus-Born" master to whom the Seven-Line Prayer is addressed. The tradition holds that in the eighth century he hid teachings to be found in later times. These are called terma, "treasures," and the people who find them are tertöns, treasure revealers.

Ratna Lingpa was born in 1403 at Drushul in Lhodrak, a region of steep green valleys just north of today's Bhutan. Jamgön Kongtrul, the nineteenth-century master who wrote short lives of the treasure revealers, names his father as Dode Dar, a wealthy man, and his mother as Sitar Men. The birth fell, he says, on the fifteenth day of the first autumn month of the Water Sheep year.

He was regarded as the rebirth of Langdro Könchok Jungne, a translator and one of Guru Rinpoche's twenty-five close disciples.

The accounts remember a quick child. Kongtrul says he learned to read and write without effort, and that from about the age of ten he began to have pure visions, glimpses of the world as sacred. He also studied the Dharma widely.

Three scrolls

When he was twenty-seven, the traditional accounts say, Guru Rinpoche came to him in disguise. Kongtrul describes a wandering renunciant from Kham in a yellow hat and yellow robes. The Treasury of Lives speaks of a yogi dressed in yellow raw silk.

The stranger held out three scrolls, one white, one red and one blue, and asked him to choose one. Ratna Lingpa answered that he wanted all three.

Because of that answer, the accounts say, he received the treasure lists of three lifetimes, and revealed in one life what would otherwise have taken three. That is why he is remembered by three names: Ratna Lingpa, Zhikpo Lingpa and Drodül Lingpa.

I like this story for its plainness. He did not bargain or hold back. Offered a gift, he simply said yes to all of it.

Twenty-five treasures

From the age of thirty he began to reveal treasures in the cliffs and caves of southern Tibet. The first came from a rock called Khyungchen Drak, and others followed at Dritang Koro Drak and at Kharchu Pelgyi Puk, the "glorious cave of Kharchu." The sources count twenty-five revelations in all.

Kongtrul writes that wondrous signs were seen when the treasure came out at Kharchu, and that over his life Ratna Lingpa met Guru Rinpoche twenty-five times. These are the tradition's words, and I pass them on as such.

His cycles range widely: practices of the guru in peaceful and wrathful forms, of the Great Perfection (Dzogchen), and of Mahamudra, the "great seal" teachings on the nature of mind. Two remain best known: the Tsedrub Sangdü, a practice for long life, and the Phurba Yangsang Lamé, a practice of the deity Vajrakilaya. Such practices are received from a teacher, so I only name them here.

A prayer from the Copper-Coloured Mountain

Ratna Lingpa also left short prayers that people still say. One is a prayer to Guru Rinpoche in four lines. A note with it, in his own voice, says that while he was bringing out a cycle called the Fourfold Secret, he found himself one night on the Copper-Coloured Mountain, Guru Rinpoche's pure land, and met him there. The heroes and dakinis, the male and female beings of awakened energy around him, were chanting the prayer together. When he woke, he wrote it down.

In paraphrase, the prayer calls on Guru Rinpoche as Pema Tötreng, the Lotus Skull-Garland, in whom all buddhas are gathered. It asks him to care for us in every life, to calm what stands in the way, and in the end to bring us to his realm of Lotus Light. Samye Translations published it in English in 2023 from an unpublished manuscript. I have not found it in other sources, so its history is best held lightly.

It is not the Seven-Line Prayer. The Seven-Line Prayer is older and far better known, and it begins in the land of Oddiyana. Ratna Lingpa's verse is a separate, shorter prayer with its own story.

Yet the two meet. One of his treasures is an invocation for the tenth day of the month, the day kept for Guru Rinpoche. Among its instructions, it tells his followers to chant the Seven-Line Prayer in a clear voice, to the sound of drum, conch and cymbal.

He also wrote Cloud Banks of Blessings, a long prayer recounting eleven deeds of Guru Rinpoche's life. Among its first verses is the one the Seven-Line Prayer also remembers: the child born in a lotus in Oddiyana.

The Hundred Thousand Tantras

Now to the old books. In the fourteenth century the great scholar Butön Rinchen Drub shaped the Kangyur, the collected words of the Buddha in Tibetan. The Treasury of Lives notes that he left out major Nyingma tantras, scriptures the Old School traced to the early translators of Guru Rinpoche's time. Their Indian originals were in question, and so was their standing.

Outside the great collection, these texts were at risk. They lived in handwritten copies scattered among temples and family houses, each one written out leaf by leaf.

In response, the Treasury of Lives says, Ratna Lingpa gathered the tantric heritage of the Nyingma into one collection, said to have filled forty-two volumes. In valleys without printing, a work like that meant finding copies and having them written out again by hand.

Such a collection is called the Nyingma Gyübum, the "Hundred Thousand Tantras of the Old School." Ratna Lingpa's own set no longer survives. But it is said to have been the basis for the edition that Jigme Lingpa assembled three centuries later, in the 1770s, and through that work it lives on in the collections studied today.

Treasure revealers are usually remembered for what they found. Ratna Lingpa is remembered too for what he kept.

Sons and students

Ratna Lingpa was a lay master with a family, and his lineage passed first through his children, especially his son Rigdzin Tsewang Drakpa. Kongtrul speaks of four "heart sons" and of family and student lines that continued down to his own day.

His students included the Sixth Karmapa, Tongwa Dönden, and the Second Drukchen, Kunga Peljor, two of the great teachers of his century. Kongtrul says his teaching reached people from Mount Kailash in the far west to Gyalmorong in the east.

He died in 1478 or 1479. The sources differ by a year, as often happens when Tibetan ages are counted from birth as one. Kongtrul says that in his seventy-sixth year he passed into the palace of Lotus Light amid great wonders. Pema Lingpa's life story adds that the young tertön of Bhutan saw him in a dream that very day, saying goodbye.

The lineage today

Four centuries later, Jamgön Kongtrul received in eastern Tibet the parts of Ratna Lingpa's cycles that had come down there, and his great collection of treasures, the Rinchen Terdzö, includes Ratna Lingpa's texts. Kongtrul writes that he set up regular group practice of them at Palpung Monastery.

The Treasury of Lives notes that the long-life and Vajrakilaya cycles are still practised, and his prayers are now being translated and recited in English. I could not confirm the details of his family line in our own time, so I leave that to those who know it.

Whenever someone opens a volume of the Old School's tantras, or says one of his short prayers, a little of his patient work goes on. For anything beyond recitation, the practices he revealed are given by a qualified teacher; the Find a Teacher page on this site is a place to start.