Dorje Lingpa and the Golden Needle

In 1370, the old accounts say, a young Tibetan treasure revealer came down from the snowy passes and saw the Paro valley spread out below him. He did not know this country, yet he wrote a song about how happy it all made him.

His name was Dorje Lingpa, and he had come south because of a dream. This is his story, told as simply as I can from the sources.

An orphan of Dranang

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 and his disciples hid teachings in rocks, lakes, temples and the minds of students, to be found when the time was right. These are called terma, "treasures," and the people who find them are tertöns, treasure revealers.

Dorje Lingpa is counted as the third of the five "king tertöns," the greatest of the treasure revealers. He was born in 1346 in Dranang, a valley on the south side of the great Tsangpo river in central Tibet, into a family of tantric yogis. As a child he was called Orgyen Zangpo.

He lost his parents early. The Treasury of Lives says only that both died while he was very young. The scholar Samten Karmay, reading Dorje Lingpa's own writings, says his mother died when he was three and his father when he was seven. An aunt brought him up, and at eight he took a novice's vows at a place called Lharikha.

Behind the image of Tara

At thirteen, the accounts say, he found his first treasure at Tradruk, one of Tibet's oldest temples, in the Yarlung valley. Rigpa Wiki says it lay behind the temple's statue of Tara, a female buddha of compassion, and that in that same year Guru Rinpoche appeared to him seven times in visions.

Among the papers were lists pointing to treasures hidden elsewhere.

At fifteen he brought out many more. The sources name different places. Rigpa Wiki says a cave at a rock called Ökar, where Guru Rinpoche came to him in person. The Treasury of Lives and Karmay name Namchakdrak. Among these finds was the Lama Kadu, a cycle with Guru Rinpoche at its centre.

The finds kept coming: medicine, astrology, rituals, and even teachings of Bön. Bön is Tibet's other ancient religion, with its own founder, Tönpa Shenrab, and its own path. A later scholar called these finds "mad treasures," and Karmay notes that Dorje Lingpa claimed most of them before he was twenty. Rigpa Wiki counts forty-three great troves; the Treasury of Lives gives a hundred and eight treasures.

A dream that pointed south

Dorje Lingpa saw himself as a rebirth of Vairotsana, the great eighth-century translator. Both Buddhists and Bönpos remember Vairotsana as a master of Dzogchen, the "Great Perfection," a teaching on the mind's own nature. Rigpa Wiki adds that, like all five king tertöns, Dorje Lingpa was an emanation of King Trisong Detsen, who invited Guru Rinpoche to Tibet.

In 1369, staying at a hermitage called Chuwori in upper Yarlung, he dreamed of a monk he took to be Vairotsana. The monk gave him a bell and a vajra, the small ritual sceptre that stands for what cannot be broken. Then he pointed south and said, in Karmay's translation, "your would-be converts are down there, that way!"

Karmay adds a lovely detail: the bell was a flat one, of the kind used in Bön, while the vajra belongs to Buddhist tantra. One gift from each tradition, from a single hand.

Into the land of Mön

To the south lay Mön, the country we now call Bhutan. Tibetans then called it the "unlit land." Dorje Lingpa travelled by way of Ralung and Phari and came down into the Paro valley.

In the first month of 1370, by his own account, he and a yogi named Togden Gyabum went to Taktsang, the Tiger's Nest. Guru Rinpoche is said to have meditated on this cliff. In a cave there they found a copper box.

Inside were Buddhist tantras and Dzogchen teachings of the Bön tradition, chief among them the Serthur, the "Golden Needle."

"I am Padmasambhava"

He hesitated to share the Bön texts: they were in sixteen different scripts, he said, and he had learned only Buddhism. In 1371, while he was teaching at a Bön temple in Bhutan called Kubum, his students urged him on.

Then, as Karmay retells his account, he dreamed of Padmasambhava with a sign of Bön wheeling about his crown. He thought, "This is not Padmasambhava." The figure answered that he was Padmasambhava, and also the Buddha and Tönpa Shenrab, and that the time had come. If the film of ignorance is not lifted from the eye, the figure asked, what use is a golden needle?

The image, it seems, is of a healer's fine golden needle, used to clear a clouded eye. Dorje Lingpa wrote the texts out in thirty-nine sections and dated the work 1371, signing it with a Bön name, Bönzhik Lingpa. A refuge prayer from the collection, now translated on Lotsawa House, names Taktsang as the place where the treasure was found.

Karmay calls him the first to put clearly into words the "oneness of Bön and Buddhism." Another of his names was Yungdrung Lingpa, a Bön name, and later he often called himself Pema Lingpa. He is not the famous Bhutanese tertön Pema Lingpa, who was born about a century later.

Treasure before a crowd

That year, Karmay writes, he seems to have begun something new among Nyingma revealers: a "public revelation," where people were invited to watch a treasure being brought out. At a place called Orgyen Yiblung Dekyiling some three hundred people came. He did it again in the Punakha valley.

Along the way, nuns asked him for teaching, and he answered them in song. Karmay senses real affection in him for the monks and nuns of Mön.

Snow on the passes

In 1374 he set out east for Bumthang. Two high passes lay under snow, and he was struck by snow-blindness and had to turn back. In the end he got through.

Bumthang, in central Bhutan, became the heart of his work there. He found more treasure in a cave near a lake, sat in retreat, and taught the Great Perfection. An old house there is still said to have been his.

The sources differ on how long he stayed: three years, says the Treasury of Lives; a little less, says Karmay, who notes that a few dates in the songs contradict one another. Both agree that he returned to Tibet in 1376. Karmay also found that he came back to Bumthang in 1388 and began restoring the ancient temple of Jampa Lhakhang.

The chief of impostors

Back in Tibet, the story goes, he visited his friend Barawa in the Shang valley. Barawa came with gifts and kindly asked him to dress properly the next morning, since his clothes were worn out from the south.

The next morning a procession came to greet him, and the leading ladies wore tiger and leopard masks. Dorje Lingpa took a lama by one hand and a masked lady by the other, had everyone join hands in a chain, and began to dance and sing. In the song he called himself the chief of impostors, come to this land.

The Treasury of Lives says the song was about dropping the habit of splitting the world into what to accept and what to reject. Karmay reads it as gentle mischief toward a welcome that was a little too proper.

Songs at daybreak

His songs are among his great gifts. Karmay says he had a habit of writing down at daybreak what he remembered of the teachings that came to him in dreams. In a short song translated on Lotsawa House, he says that through his guru's kindness, "this yogi is feeling happy and well."

He could be hard on himself, too. In one poem he teases himself for claiming to need little while needing more than anyone. In another song, sung to nuns who welcomed him to Gungthang in western Tibet, he set his words to the melody of the mani, the mantra of compassion.

He taught for three more decades, and the Treasury of Lives names the Fourth Karmapa, Rolpe Dorje, among his students. In a letter of 1384 to his disciples in Bhutan, he worried that if he came in summer, too many followers would come along and find it too hot.

He died in 1405, at about sixty. Rigpa Wiki and the Treasury of Lives both pass on the tradition that his body remained without decay for three years.

The rites go on

His family line continued in Bhutan through his son Chöyingpa, and the household of Ugyen Chöling in the Tang valley traces its ancestry to him. In Tibet his Lama Kadu nearly died out until Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo revived it in the nineteenth century. In Bhutan it never stopped. In 1999 Karmay watched it at the heart of the autumn festivals at Ugyen Chöling and at Jampa Lhakhang.

The Lama Kadu and the Golden Needle are held by teachers in living lineages, and this page says nothing of how they are practised. If you feel drawn to them, the Find a Teacher page can help. The Seven-Line Prayer itself is open to anyone.