Dilgo Khyentse

Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche was born on the third day of the third lunar month of the Iron Dog Year, 1910, in the Denma region of Derge, in Kham, Eastern Tibet, during a Kalachakra Tantra teaching given in his family’s house by the master Ju Mipham, who named him Tashi Paljor. His family traced its line back to the eighth-century king Trisong Detsen, and both parents were children of ministers to the King of Dege. He wasn’t meant to become a monk. When he was a year old, a disciple of Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo declared him that master’s reincarnation, and monasteries from the Nyingma, Karma Kagyu, and Sakya schools all wanted him. Ju Mipham told his father to keep the boy home a while longer.

Shechen Monastery, one of the six Mother Monasteries of the Nyingma school, finally claimed him in 1912. He took novice vows there in 1919 and was formally enthroned in 1925 as Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo’s tulku, given the name Gyurme Tekchok Tenpai Gyeltsen. Over the following years he studied with more than fifty teachers, including Shechen Kongtrul Pema Drime and the eleventh Tai Situ at Palpung Monastery, absorbing the Guhyagarbha Tantra and its commentaries from Khenpo Tubga at Kyangma Ritro. He married Khandro Lhamo, a young girl whose union with him had been predicted by his teachers; she spent years in retreat at his side and later fled Tibet with him and their two daughters for Bhutan in the late 1950s.

What strikes me most about Khyentse Rinpoche’s life isn’t the titles or the enthronements. It’s that after losing a homeland, he spent the rest of his life rebuilding what could have simply vanished: teachings, lineages, whole libraries of realization carried out only in memory and testimony. He became the head of the Nyingma school in 1988 and taught the Dalai Lama among many others, but his real work was custodianship, holding a tradition together with nothing but will and travel.

He died on 28 September 1991. Khandro Lhamo outlived him by decades, tending Shechen Orgyen Chozong Nunnery in Bhutan until her own death in 2003, her body reportedly remaining in meditative warmth for days afterward, as reported by Shambhala’s Snow Lion Review.