Gdams ngag mdzod Shechen Printing/Volume 2/Introduction

Translators’ Introduction

In all the annals of Tibetan Buddhism, Jamgön Kongtrul Lodrö Taye must appear as in many ways incomparable. His five great treasuries together with his own compositions fill a library of over one hundred volumes. As a founding member of the rime, or nonsectarian movement, he demonstrated a prodigious erudition and assiduity, collecting together the texts and lineage transmissions of the whole of the Tibetan tradition, thereby preserving many that were threatened with extinction. Tireless in promoting and preserving these same lineages, he spent many years in solitary retreat, meditating on them in his hermitage of Tsadra Rinchen Drak. To be sure, when one considers all the details of his life, one is bound to conclude that Jamgön Kongtrul was not only one of the greatest masters ever to have appeared in the history of Tibetan Buddhism but also one of the greatest scholars and religious leaders of all time.

He worked constantly in close consultation with his friend and mentor, Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo, whom, though seven years his junior, he did not hesitate to regard as his “lord guru.” It was to him that in 1862 he offered his first massive work, the ten-volume Buddhist encyclopedia known as The Treasury of Knowledge. Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo responded with the prophecy that it was only the first of five great treasuries that Kongtrul would eventually produce. Of these, and from the point of view of the Tibetan tradition as a whole, The Treasury of Precious Instructions must rank as one of the most important, for it brings together in a single place important texts of all Tibetan schools envisaged as eight chariots of transmission. Its aim was to establish in the face of threat, and to protect from the danger of decay, the full range of the eight great practice lineages of Tibet. “To preserve these,” Ringu Tulku observed in his preface to the translated catalog, “is to preserve Vajrayāna Buddhism.”

It was not a moment too soon. Until the nonsectarian movement breathed new life into them, many of the Tibetan traditions of learning and practice were, after centuries of proscription and neglect, already in a lamentable state of decline. And yet more terrible dangers threatened. From the completion of The Treasury of Precious Instructions and its first transmission to a small group of disciples in 1882, less that seventy years would pass before Tibet was itself assaulted and overrun by the Chinese communist forces. And in the cultural and religious wreckage that followed, Kongtrul’s great treasuries would be among the most important sources from which Tibetan masters could reassemble their teaching traditions in exile and rebuild anew the tattered remnant of their immense heritage, eventually transmitting it to the West.

The Treasury of Precious Instructions has grown with time. The original ten volumes first printed at the monastery of Palpung in Kham were again printed in the twelve volumes of the Kundeling edition in the early 1970s. Many more texts were subsequently added until a new edition in eighteen volumes was assembled and published under the auspices of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche at Shechen Monastery in 1999. It is this Shechen edition that has been followed for the translation into English.

The first of the eight lineages, preserved in the first and second volumes of The Treasury, is the one that historically appeared first: the Nyingma, or Old Translation, school. In his autobiography, Kongtrul records that from what he regarded as the most important and representative elements of the Nyingma school, he selected texts related to what he called the “three yogas”—by which he meant the teachings and practices of the three inner tantras according to the nine-vehicle structure used in the Nyingma tradition. The texts selected as representative of the first two yogas, the generation-stage practices of mahāyoga and the perfection-stage practices of anuyoga, together with those belonging to the outer “mind class,” and the inner “space class” of atiyoga, mahāsaṅdhi, or the Great Perfection, are assembled in the first Nyingma volume. Subsequently, the texts belonging to the “pith-instruction class,” specifically those related to the unsurpassed secret section—the Heart Essence, or Nyingtik—form, for the most part, the contents of the second Nyingma volume, which is translated here.

It is easy to see why Kongtrul followed this scheme. Although, rarely, lineage holders of the Great Perfection can be found in other Tibetan schools, it is true nevertheless that its teachings constitute the most treasured and distinctive feature of the Nyingma tradition. In order to introduce and contextualize the Heart Essence teachings, we will endeavor to provide a theoretical explanation of its doctrine followed by a brief history of its origins and transmission to Tibet in a manner coordinated with the contents of the present volume.

The Great Perfection and the Heart Essence

The most profound and essential tenet of the buddhadharma, at least in the understanding of the Nyingma school, is that within the mind of every being, as its bedrock, fundamental stratum, or element, lies the buddha nature. Though utterly hidden by layers of obscuration accumulated from beginningless time, this nature is perfect. It is not an existent thing in the ordinary sense of that expression since it lies beyond even the distinction between existence and nonexistence. And yet it is blissful and replete with all the qualities of enlightenment. Concealed and unrecognized, its presence is nevertheless felt, dimly and confusedly, even in the most elementary organisms of sentient life in the ignorant clinging to self-identity and the ever-present thirst for satisfaction and happiness.

Expressed in more sapiential terms, the buddha nature is equated with the mind’s true nature, primordial wisdom, the limpid, clear state of awareness (rig pa) that precedes and remains unmodified, though obscured, by discursive, dualistic cognition. It is like the surface of a vast, immaculate mirror in which the whole range of phenomenal existence appears reflected. In usual circumstances, the surface of this mirror is undetectable, invisible, and yet it is the one factor that makes the vision of those reflections possible. Transcendent in the sense of forever remaining pure and unspoiled by any adventitious circumstance, awareness is nevertheless immanent in every experience. All that appears, whether good or bad, is the display of awareness—awareness, the nature of the mind, the ground of both samsara and nirvana.

The direct introduction to the nature of awareness and the sustained experience of it leading to manifest enlightenment constitute the essential method of the Great Perfection teachings, the purpose of which is to break through the all-enveloping shell of the thoughts and emotions of the ordinary mind, like clearing away the clouds in order to reveal the ever-present, yet hitherto obscured, sun.

In order to define and situate the teachings of the Great Perfection within the doctrinal scheme of Mahāyāna Buddhism, it is helpful to refer to the doctrine of the three kāyas: the dharmakāya, the body of ultimate reality, followed by the rūpakāya, or body of form, which in turn comprises the sambhogakāya, the body of enjoyment, and the nirmāṇakāya, the body of manifestation, whereby the path to enlightenment is revealed to beings.

Tracing the activities of the three kāyas in reverse order, we may say that for the sake of beings in samsara, who are strongly caught up in the desire to achieve happiness and escape suffering, and who are therefore in need of instruction in ethical discipline, meditative concentration, and wisdom, the teachings, mainly in the form of sutras, are set forth in the causal vehicle of characteristics by the supreme nirmāṇakāya, the Buddha Śākyamuni, appearing in the form of a renunciant.

For beings of higher capacity, who are able to penetrate more deeply into the nature of things and who are able to transform defilements into their corresponding wisdoms, the teaching of the tantras, the resultant vehicle of skillful methods, is set forth by the sambhogakāya, the buddha Vajradhara, arrayed in the silks and ornaments that symbolize the qualities of enlightenment.

Finally, for fortunate disciples of the highest capacity, the teachings of the Great Perfection, which introduce the nature of the mind, are directly set forth, not by the rūpakāya, but by the dharmakāya, the primordial buddha Samantabhadra, who, as the expression of the mind’s most fundamental ground, is naked and has the deep-blue color of unfathomable space.

This presentation of the Mahāyāna teachings in terms of the three kāyas raises a number of important points. First, just as the three kāyas are facets of the same awareness, the nature of the mind, so too the different vehicles are all expressions of the same dharma. However different they may be in teaching and methods, they are essentially one and without contradiction, suited to the different capacities and aspirations of beings.

The second important point is that, whereas the sutra and tantra teachings are set forth by the rūpakāya in its varying forms, the teachings of the Great Perfection belong, as we have said, to the level of the dharmakāya. This means that, although the Great Perfection, or atiyoga, is generally classified as the highest of the inner tantras, it nevertheless stands apart from them and in fact transcends them. The Great Perfection speaks of the primordial ground, which is prior to the division between samsara and nirvana and is the ultimate expanse of self-arisen awareness. Those who are able to follow this path do not purify or remove mind-obscuring defilements through the use of antidotes as in the lower vehicles. Instead they recognize directly the present, intrinsic, primordially immaculate “great perfection” of the mind itself, which is pure from the beginning and has never been stained.

The eight lower vehicles, from the Sūtrayāna to the anuyoga instructions of the inner tantras, are designed to cater to the needs of practitioners of lesser capacity, and their teachings are set forth and implemented on the level of the ordinary discursive mind. By contrast, the Great Perfection takes as the path not the ordinary mind but the nature of the mind, the primordial wisdom of awareness. And it is with the introduction and recognition of that nature that the path of the Great Perfection begins. The difference between these two approaches is stated clearly by Khangsar Khenpo Tenpa’i Wangchuk in his commentary to Longchen Rabjam’s Treasury of the Dharmadhātu:

There are two kinds of dharma. One appears in the eight successive vehicles (up to and including anuyoga) where the ordinary mind is taken as the path and the result is accomplished through the concerted effort of adopting and rejecting. Contrasted with this is the teaching of the Great Perfection, in which primordial wisdom, unstained by the ordinary mind, is taken as the path. . . . Now the ordinary mind is a consciousness that apprehends the objects of the senses; it is a consciousness that accumulates various propensities . . . and all of the lower vehicles, which take the ordinary mind as the path, are therefore based on methods that are by nature manifestations of the display of awareness’s creative power [not awareness itself]. They were set forth as a means to relinquish or clear away the mental factors and manifold habitual propensities of the ordinary mind. For according to the eight gradual vehicles, pure primordial wisdom is actualized when the mind and mental factors are relinquished. By contrast, the tradition of atiyoga states that, without relying on an object or subject of purification, the mind and mental factors are already—in their very nature and in this very instant—the indwelling primordial wisdom.

It is for this reason that although the teachings of the Great Perfection are set forth in a vast collection of scriptures, which are of necessity couched in human language, it is important to realize that they are constantly straining to express meanings and experiences that lie beyond the reach of ordinary thought and word. This is why the Great Perfection is not a tenet system in the commonly accepted sense: a body of theoretical propositions culminating in an intellectual position, or view, about the nature of the mind and phenomena. The “view” of the Great Perfection is the actual vision or experience of this nature. It is revealed as the nature of the mind itself and must be pointed out, directly introduced, to a qualified disciple by an accomplished master and holder of the lineage. It is only when this introduction takes place, and the disciple sees the nature of the mind, that the path and practice of the Great Perfection begins.

The Transmission of the Great Perfection Teachings

In recent years, the Great Perfection has stimulated a good deal of interest in the Western Buddhist academy. The research is ongoing, but already much scholarly work has been done in the attempt to clarify questions about the origins, dating, and transmission of texts, the manuscript lineages and the complex relations between them, and possible links between the Great Perfection teachings of the Nyingma Buddhist school and those of the indigenous Tibetan tradition of Yungdrung Bön, and so on. These questions are of abiding interest, but in the present context—namely, the Nyingma section of The Treasury of Precious Instructions—it seems more appropriate to sketch out the story of the arrival of the Great Perfection in Tibet according to the traditional account with which Jamgön Kongtrul was familiar and which is taken for granted by Tibetan masters, scholars, and practitioners down to the present day. Beginning in a mythical past and gradually coalescing into recorded history, it is a rich and fascinating tale, filled with superhuman figures and miraculous events, and a line of masters that comes down in unbroken sequence to the flesh and blood, if highly extraordinary, figures of our own time.

Originating from an utterly transcendent source—namely, the dharmakāya—and appearing gradually in the human world through the activity of the rūpakāya, the teachings of the Great Perfection are said to pass through three kinds of transmission: the mind-to-mind transmission of the victorious ones, the transmission through symbols of the vidyādharas, and the oral transmission of spiritual masters.

In the mind-to-mind transmission of the victorious ones, the teachings are said to arise from the primordial buddha Samantabhadra himself. In the eternal present of the “fourth time,” they pass directly to his retinue, the sambhogakāya buddhas of the five families, who, as his outward reflection, are of the same nature as himself. This first transmission, from the dharmakāya to the sambhogakāya, beyond time and place, thought and word, occurs entirely within the realm of natural and effortless luminosity. Subsequently, the sambhogakāya buddhas Vajrasattva and Vajrapāṇi transmitted the teachings—in a form accessible to beings—to Adhicitta in the Heaven of the Thirty-Three Gods and to the nirmāṇakāya Garab Dorje in the human world.

Garab Dorje

There are several stories of the appearance in this world of Garab Dorje. Miraculously born of a virgin, and a being of preternatural beauty and spiritual and intellectual gifts, he received directly from Vajrasattva, appearing to him in a vision, the six million four hundred thousand verses of the Great Perfection tantras, all of which were delivered according to the mind-to- mind transmission of the victorious ones.

Withdrawing to the Śītavana charnel ground, Garab Dorje is said to have instructed the ḍākinīs and other disciples who gathered round him. As the first human teacher of the Great Perfection, at once a figure of legend and of history, Garab Dorje acts as the bridge between the transcendent realm of the buddhas and the human world. It is with him that the transmission through symbols of the vidyādharas is said to have begun.

Mañjuśrīmitra

The next master in the lineage of the Great Perfection is Mañjuśrīmitra. He became the principal human heir of Garab Dorje and received from him the full transmission of the six million four hundred thousand verses of the Great Perfection. When the time came for Garab Dorje to depart from this world, dissolving into a mass of light, he miraculously bestowed upon his disciple as his parting testament, The Three Statements That Strike upon the Vital Points, written on a parchment in ink of lapis lazuli and enclosed in a tiny casket the size of a fingernail. This teaching is the first of The Parting Testaments of the Four Vidyādharas translated in the present volume.

Having received the transmission of the full range of the Great Perfection teachings, Mañjuśrīmitra arranged them into the important threefold classification of mind class, space class, and pith-instruction class. In his commentary to Longchen Rabjam’s Treasury of the Dharmadhātu, Khangsar Khenpo Tenpa’i Wangchuk defines the three classes as follows:

Practitioners of the mind class of the Great Perfection consider that phenomena are the mere display of the creative power of awareness, the enlightened mind. They therefore assert that phenomena are the outward arising of awareness. Practitioners of the space class say that since within the expanse of awareness, phenomena are the self-experience of that same awareness, they are its ornaments in beautiful array. In other words, they say that phenomena are simply the self-experience of awareness; they do not speak of them as being its outward arising. Finally, for practitioners of the pith-instruction class, the whole of phenomenal existence manifests within the state of awareness. Phenomena are nonexistent and appear in the manner of a magical illusion. And since phenomena are posited as being empty forms, which merely appear, they are neither the mind nor different from the mind.

Within this threefold classification, the pith-instruction class is the most important and the one most practiced nowadays. Mañjuśrīmitra is said to have remained in the charnel ground of Sosaling absorbed in meditation for a period of over a hundred years. Here it was that Śrīsiṃha, the next great holder of the Great Perfection teachings, encountered him.

Śrīsiṃha

Śrīsiṃha was born in China. In early adulthood, he ordained as a monk and spent ten years at Wutai Shan, the Five-Peaked Mountain sacred to Mañjuśrī, where he studied and practiced the outer and inner tantras. At length, Avalokiteśvara appeared to him and told him to go to India and seek out his master in Sosaling. Following these instructions, Śrīsiṃha remained with Mañjuśrīmitra for twenty-five years, in the course of which he received the entire range of teachings and pith instructions of the Great Perfection.

When the time came for Mañjuśrīmitra to leave this world, there occurred a scene similar to the one that had attended the departure of Garab Dorje. As the master disappeared into a mass of light, he bequeathed his parting testament to his lamenting disciple. This teaching, The Six Meditative Experiences, is the second of The Parting Testaments of the Four Vidyādharas translated here. Śrīsiṃha went on to make a second important innovation, dividing the teachings of the pith-instruction class into four sections: outer, inner, secret, and unsurpassed secret, the last of which is generally referred to as the Heart Essence, or Nyingtik. From the point of view of the Tibetan tradition, Śrīsiṃha was a lineage holder of particular importance since all the great masters who brought the Great Perfection teachings to Tibet were his disciples: Vimalamitra, Guru Padmasambhava, and Vairotsana.

Jñānasūtra and Vimalamitra

Next in the lineage of holders of the Great Perfection teachings are Jñānasūtra and Vimalamitra. They were contemporaries, friends, and both became scholars of great eminence. Vajrasattva appeared to them in a vision and told them that if they wished to attain full enlightenment in their present lives, they should seek out Śrīsiṃha and request his guidance. For reasons unknown, Jñānasūtra was detained in India, and so Vimalamitra set out alone, traveled to China, and met Śrīsiṃha at his residence in the legendary Bodhi Tree Temple. From him Vimalamitra received the oral transmission of the first three sections (outer, inner, and secret) of the teachings of the pith-instruction class. He then returned to India, met again with Jñānasūtra, and transmitted to him all that he had learned. Thereupon, the two friends set out together for China with the intention of requesting further instruction. They stayed with Śrīsiṃha in the charnel ground of Sosodvīpa and after twelve years of study and practice under his direction, Vimalamitra, content with what he had received, returned to India. Jñānasūtra however stayed on and at length received the full transmission of the pith-instruction class, which included the unsurpassed Secret Heart Essence.

The time eventually arrived for master and disciple to separate. Some days after Śrīsiṃha had departed on a journey, Jñānasūtra beheld him in a glorious vision shining with light and realized that he had passed into nirvana. In great lamentation, he fell to the ground weeping, whereupon he received the last testament of his master, once again written in precious ink and enclosed within a tiny casket. This was the teaching called The Seven Nails, the third of the four parting testaments.

Returning to India, Jñānasūtra was reunited with Vimalamitra in the charnel ground of Bhaseng. He transmitted to him all the additional teachings that he had received from Śrīsiṃha, in particular the Heart Essence section of the teachings of the pith-instruction class, which Vimalamitra had not yet received. Finally, the moment arrived for Jñānasūtra himself to pass away. Appearing in a mass of light before his desolate friend and disciple, he bestowed on him The Four Methods of Leaving Things as They Are, the last of The Parting Testaments of the Four Vidyādharas. Jñānasūtra’s final gift to Vimalamitra brought to a conclusion the symbolic transmission of the vidyādharas, which had begun with the transmission of Garab Dorje to Mañjuśrīmitra. Henceforth, it is with the teaching of Vimalamitra to his Tibetan disciples that the oral transmission of spiritual masters begins.

Transmission to Tibet

The transmission of the Great Perfection teachings in Tibet passes through three important masters, all of whom were, as we have said, disciples of Śrīsiṃha: Vimalamitra himself, but also Guru Padmasambhava and the great translator Pagor Vairotsana. The contributions of the latter two masters will be discussed presently, but for the moment, the traditional account continues with Vimalamitra.

Tradition has it that within thirty years of receiving the final transmission from Jñānasūtra, Vimalamitra attained the rainbow body of great transference. This is the supreme accomplishment, rarely achieved, of the teachings of the Great Perfection, in which the attainment of buddhahood is accompanied by the dissolution of the gross elements of the physical body, which are transformed into light. No longer subject to ordinary death, the yogi is able to remain indefinitely in this world, visible to other beings according to need. Vimalamitra gradually made his way to Oḍḍiyāna, and it was there, toward the end of the eighth century, that he received and accepted the invitation of King Trisong Detsen to go to Tibet. He remained there for about thirteen years, during which time he transmitted the full range of the Great Perfection teachings. He eventually withdrew, reputedly at the age of over two hundred years, to Wutai Shan in China, where he is said still to reside.

With the assistance of Yudra Nyingpo, Kawa Paltsek, and others, Vimalamitra presided over the translation of many scriptures of the Great Perfection. Most importantly, he conferred the teachings of the Heart Essence in conditions of the strictest secrecy to a small group of disciples consisting of King Trisong Detsen, Prince Mune Tsenpo, Nyangben Tingdzin Zangpo, Kawa Paltsek, and Chokro Lui Gyaltsen.

The scriptures of the Heart Essence, thus transmitted by Vimalamitra, fall into two groups: the oral pith instructions and the seventeen tantras translated from Sanskrit. Tibetan tradition tells us that, for the sake of future generations, Vimalamitra himself committed the pith instructions to writing in four volumes in inks of different colors: gold, copper, turquoise, agate, conch, and turquoise. And since the time had not arrived for these teachings to be disseminated beyond the select group just mentioned, Vimalamitra hid them, together with the translated tantras, in the cliff of Gegung at Chimpu near Samye.

As a means of preserving the teachings of the Heart Essence till times more propitious for their propagation, Tingdzin Zangpo, one of the small group who had received them, constructed the temple of Zhai Lhakhang in Uru, and concealed there the seventeen tantras of the Heart Essence and other scriptures. Before attaining the rainbow body, he ensured the continuation of their oral transmission by giving it to his close disciple Be Lodrö Wangchuk. Keeping these teachings secret throughout his life, this master also attained the rainbow body but not before passing the transmission to Drom Rinchen Bar, who again attained the rainbow body after giving the transmission to Neten Dangma Lhungyal. When the time arrived for the written teachings to reappear, Dangma Lhungyal, already in possession of the oral transmission, recovered the texts that had been hidden by Tingdzin Zangpo over a hundred years before in Zhai Lhakhang. At length, he transmitted these texts to the celebrated yogi Chetsun Senge Wangchuk and instructed him to make copies of them. Chetsun did so and then reconcealed the originals though not, it seems, in their original hiding place.

At some later point, Vimalamitra appeared in a dream to Chetsun and told him to find the texts of the pith instructions that he himself had hidden in Gegung at Chimpu. Chetsun successfully recovered the treasure texts and, following Vimalamitra’s instructions, took them to Oyuk Chigong in Tsang, where he practiced them in secret for seven years. During that time it is said that Vimalamitra came to him in person from his mystic abode in Wutai Shan and stayed with him for two weeks, teaching him and bestowing on him directly the full oral transmission. So it was that Chetsun Senge Wangchuk brought together the pith instructions, the written scriptures, and oral transmission of what would eventually be known as The Heart Essence of Vimalamitra (Vima Nyingtik).

Chetsun eventually gave the transmission of these teachings to Gyalwa Zhangtön Tashi Dorje and shortly afterward disappeared in a mass of rainbow light in his meditation cave at Chigong at the age, so it is said, of one hundred and twenty-five years. It was from this point onward that the transmission passed, in a clear historical succession of lineage holders, from Gyalwa Zhangtön (1097–1167) down to Rikdzin Kumaradza (1266– 1343) and from him to Longchen Rabjam (1308–1363). The Heart Essence of Vimalamitra represents the unbroken oral lineage, or kama, of the Heart Essence teachings as distinct from the teachings of The Heart Essence of the Ḍākinīs preserved as spiritual treasures, or terma.

Guru Rinpoche and The Heart Essence of the Ḍākinīs

In addition to the Great Perfection teaching coming down from Vimalamitra, we should also consider the lineage that passes through Guru Padmasambhava. Like Vimalamitra himself, Padmasambhava was a disciple of Śrīsiṃha. In addition, he received in direct transmission from Vajradhara the so-called Chitti and Yangti yogas which are similar to the Heart Essence but are found only in certain revealed treasures. The body of the Great Perfection teachings, the seventeen tantras and pith instructions of the Heart Essence, were transmitted by Padmasambhava to his consort Yeshe Tsogyal and to a great multitude of ḍākinīs. For this reason, this tradition is known as The Heart Essence of the Ḍākinīs. Concealed as a spiritual treasure, it was eventually revealed in the thirteenth century by Pema Ledreltsal, and from him it passed through the intermediary of Gyalse Lekpa Gyaltsen to Longchen Rabjam.

Vairotsana

For the sake of completeness we should briefly mention the part played by Vairotsana in the transmission of the Great Perfection teachings to Tibet. A disciple of both Vimalamitra and Guru Padmasambhava, Vairotsana also encountered—admittedly under extraordinary circumstances—Śrīsiṃha, himself, the master of his masters. From him he received directly the teachings of the mind class and space class and became the holder of a lineage that came down eventually to Longchen Rabjam. He also received the Heart Essence teachings directly from Garab Dorje in a pure vision. These teachings, henceforth known as The Heart Essence of Vairotsana (Vairo Nyingtik) were concealed as treasure.

Longchen Rabjam thus inherited the two great streams of the Great Perfection tradition: the oral transmission of The Heart Essence of Vimalamitra, which he received from his master Kumaradza, and The Heart Essence of the Ḍākinīs, which had been preserved as treasure. For The Heart Essence of Vimalamitra, he composed a collection of thirty-five commentarial instructions known as The Innermost Essence of the Master, and for The Heart Essence of the Ḍākinīs, he composed the fifty-five instructions of The Innermost Essence of the Ḍākinīs. All together, these collections are referred to as The Four Parts of the Heart Essence, which, despite its name, contains a fifth, concluding commentary called The Profound Innermost Essence, which summarizes the contents of both commentarial collections.

Within the terma tradition as a whole, The Heart Essence of the Ḍākinīs occupies a position of particular importance, for according to the mysterious working of terma revelation, it is regarded as the “mother” of all subsequent Heart Essence teachings that appeared as treasures in the ensuing centuries.

The Second Nyingma Volume of The Treasury of Precious Instructions

As Kongtrul himself states in The Catalog of “The Treasury of Precious Instructions,” the main component of the second Nyingma volume consists of texts belonging to The Heart Essence of Vimalamitra and The Innermost Essence of the Master. Nevertheless, The Heart Essence of the Ḍākinīs was not entirely forgotten. Originally, and again according to the catalog, a text of pith instructions titled The Precious Golden Garland according to the Tradition of Padma, which belongs to The Innermost Essence of the Ḍākinīs, was also selected for inclusion. However, for reasons unknown, both the Kundeling and the Shechen editions of The Treasury omit this text and replace it with a collection of instructions by Guru Padmasambhava, which are found in both the scriptural and terma collections of the Nyingma school.

Following the Heart Essence scriptures and the empowerments written by Longchenpa, Kongtrul included his own composition on the practice of the Heart Essence, the celebrated Mother and Child commentary. The volume continues with a series of other auxiliary texts belonging to the Great Perfection generally: the essential instructions of Guru Padmasambhava and the Guide for Meditation written by Longchenpa for his Finding Rest in the Nature of the Mind. This is followed by elements taken from The Trilogy of Natural Openness and Freedom, again by Longchenpa. The volume concludes with several ritual texts composed by Kongtrul himself.

Acknowledgments

It was an honor to be invited to participate in the mighty work of translating Jamgön Kongtrul’s Treasury of Precious Instructions. Therefore, first of all we would like to express our admiration and gratitude to Eric Colombel and the Tsadra Foundation for their extraordinary and generous commitment to the completion of this great project.

Many of the texts contained in this volume were difficult to understand and translate, but we have been very fortunate in the assistance that we have received from Tibetan masters, both tulkus and khenpos. Of these we wish first to express our gratitude to our personal teachers Taklung Tsetrul Pema Wangyal Rinpoche and Jigme Khyentse Rinpoche. We must then give thanks to Khenchen Pema Sherab, to whom we owe an unrepayable debt of gratitude, and to his faithful assistant, Khenpo Sonam Tsewang, both of Namdröling Monastery, Mysore, India. In addition we would like to express our special thanks to Shechen Khenpo Gyurme Dorje and to Dagpo Tulku Rinpoche of Mindröling. Finally, our thanks are also due to Nikko Odiseos and to our patient and long-suffering editor Anna Wolcott Johnson of Shambhala Publications. This volume was translated by Helena Blankleder and Wulstan Fletcher of the Padmakara Translation Group.