The Treasury of Lives - Biographies of Himalayan Religious Masters

A branch of the Nub (gnubs) clan, long famous for their Nyingma tantra teachings, lived in the Shab (shabs) Valley, not very far from Sakya Monastery in Tsang Province. Gyaltsa Rinchen Gonpo’s (rgyal tsha rin chen mgon po) father belonged to the Nub clan, while his mother is simply called a ‘princess’ (lha gcig). He had a much younger brother named Kunden Repa (kun ldan ras pa), born thirty years after him. (According to Tsewang Rgyal (tshe dbang rgyal) Kunden Repa was Gyeltsa’s nephew, not brother.) Gyaltsa he was five, he learned reading and arithmetic. At a very young age he felt an aversion to the vicious cycle of samsara, and turned his thoughts toward Buddhist matters.

When Gyaltsa was nineteen he relocated in Central Tibet, where he furthered his studies, returning to Shab at age twenty-five. Although asked to take a wife, he gradually gained his father’s permission to remain single, finally ordaining at the age of fifty-four.

Overall he is said to have had eighty-two teachers. While his teachers were mainly of Kagyu lineages, among them were some prominent representatives of the Nyingma, two of the direct disciples of Padampa in the Shije lineage, as well as teachers of Cho. Pagmodrupa should without doubt be considered his primary teacher, since it was under his guidance that Gyaltsa achieved a practical understanding of Mahamudra.

Although Gyaltsa might have inherited some family wealth, it is said that he used to engage in trade and bartering of goods. In any case, his wealth enabled him to offer considerable patronage to the community at Pagmodru It is not clear if he was a monk at the time, and it was only much later in life that he took complete monastic vows. Perhaps he took all the vows simultaneously, which sometimes happens, especially when older men join the order. Soon afterwards he decided to form a small monastery where he could stay with only a few monks and suffer few distractions. He purchased a property in the area known as Tropu (khro phu) where he built a temple with residences for monks, twenty in number. At age sixty he became quite ill, bleeding through the nose until he nearly died, but he was healed by a vision of his teacher Pagmodrupa who descended through space riding on a lion. He died at age seventy-seven.

Although his accomplishments in the worldly sphere may appear modest, his nephew Tropu Lotsawa Jampa Pel (khro phu lo tsa ba byams pa dpal) would make the small monastery he founded in the Shab Valley famous throughout Tibet. Seeds planted with faith tend to grow.

Sources

Roerich, George, trans. 1996. The Blue Annals. 2nd ed. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, pp. 705-7.

Tshe dbang rgyal. 1994. Lho rong chos ’byung. Lhasa: Bod ljongs bod yig dpe rnying dpe skrun khang, pp. 328-9.

Dan Martin
August 2008