My Teacher

I met him in September 2011. In the same week I took refuge. He gave me the name I sign at the bottom of everything here.

In the fifteen years since I have seen him roughly thirty times — in retreat, on pilgrimage with the sangha, and in the plain sitting-with that a real relationship is mostly made of.

He is from Kham, in eastern Tibet, in the vicinity of Dzogchen Monastery. He entered the monastery as a very young child and was raised inside the classical Nyingma training. He took the khenpo degree at the Shri Siṅgha college. Afterwards he taught in that same college for years, then went into long retreat in the mountain hermitages above the monastery.

He is a tulku. He is the reincarnation of Gendün Chöpel. He holds the Longchen Nyingtik transmission — the mind-treasure Jigme Lingpa revealed in 1757 at Chimphu, in a series of three visions of Longchenpa, who himself gathered the Dzogchen that reached Tibet through Padmasambhava and Vimalamitra, and before them from Shri Siṅgha, Manjushrimitra, and Garab Dorje. This is what he carries. This is what he gives.

He gave me the Ngöndro and the instruction to do it properly. The outer accumulations are complete. The inner accumulations are underway. I intend to finish within the next two years, and I will not describe the inside of that practice in public.

He has corrected specific mistakes in my practice on more than one occasion. The corrections were technical, precise, and unmistakably from someone who knows the tradition from the inside rather than from a book. One of them changed the shape of a decade of my sitting.

He has been patient with a rate of progress that is, by monastic measure, slow. A teacher who treats a lay Western student as a monastic teacher treats a young monk in Tibet will lose the lay Western student. He has never treated me that way. The training he has given me is designed for the life I actually live.

He has told me things about my practice that I did not want to hear and that turned out to be right.

He has never asked me for money beyond the standard student offerings appropriate to an occasion. He has never asked me to organise, or to promote. He has treated the relationship as what it is.

I asked in 2011, and I have been glad since.

— Оргьен Йентен Дордже