Shri Singha and the Teachers Between

Between Garab Dorje, the first human teacher of the Great Perfection, and Guru Rinpoche, the Nyingma tradition remembers a short chain of teachers. Each one received the teaching whole, kept it safe, and placed it in the hands of the next. This story follows two links in that chain: the scholar Manjushrimitra and his student Shri Singha, whose name means "Glorious Lion".

The Great Perfection, Dzogchen in Tibetan, teaches that the mind's own nature is already pure and awake. This page will say no more than that. Its practice is given in person by a qualified teacher, and the Find a Teacher page is a place to begin.

These lives reach us as sacred history. The page mainly follows The Jewel Rosary History by the fourteenth-century master Longchenpa, translated by Adam Pearcey, and sets later summaries beside it. Where the tellings differ, it says so.

The scholar who sorted the teachings

How Manjushrimitra, a learned brahmin from west of Bodhgaya, came to Garab Dorje and received his last testament is told in the story of Garab Dorje. This one begins just after, with a disciple left alone with everything his teacher had given him. One encyclopedia summary says they had been together for seventy-five years.

Now, the accounts say, Manjushrimitra gathered the teachings and arranged them into three series, called Mind, Space and Pith Instruction. The names are enough for this page. What they hold is for a teacher to explain.

The innermost part he divided again, Longchenpa says, into a spoken transmission and an explained one. The first he set down in notes. For the second he could find no one ready, so he hid the texts as a treasure inside a boulder marked with a crossed vajra, north-east of the Vajra Seat at Bodhgaya, where the Buddha awoke.

A crossed vajra is two diamond sceptres laid across each other, a sign of what cannot be broken. Then Manjushrimitra went to live in a charnel ground called Sosadvipa, to the west of Bodhgaya. A charnel ground is a place where the dead were laid out or burned. In the tantric tradition it is a place of practice, because nothing there can be pretended away.

A boy from the far east

Far to the east, in a town Longchenpa calls Black Shokhyam in China, a householder and his wife had a son.

The accounts do not agree on where this was. Rigpa Wiki places Shri Singha's home in Khotan, an oasis kingdom on the Silk Road, now in western China. A museum note says simply that he was born in China. Another telling makes his parents a king and a queen.

Later summaries say he studied with teachers named Haribhala and Bhelakirti and soon became known for his learning. Then, the tradition says, Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, appeared to him with a message: if he truly sought awakening, he should go to the charnel ground of Sosadvipa in India.

The mountain of five terraces

Here the tellings part again. In one summary, Shri Singha was not yet ready to go.

He went first to Wutai Shan, the five-terraced mountain of northern China honoured as the earthly home of Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom. There, it says, he became a monk and studied for thirty years. Rigpa Wiki, following Tulku Thondup, speaks of seven years with his teacher and then thirty years of monastic discipline.

Longchenpa says only that the same prophecy came to him a second time, in a bathing pool to the east of Wutai Shan. Either way, the mountain stands in his story: broad, flat, grassy summits above the trees, cold enough for snow in summer.

This time he went. The journey took nine days, Longchenpa writes, and in all that time his feet never touched the ground; he travelled a forearm's height above it. Another summary credits him with the yogic power of swift walking. However it is told, the man who once delayed did not delay again.

At the charnel ground

At Sosadvipa he found Manjushrimitra. He bowed to him, walked around him in respect, and asked to be guided and cared for. The master accepted him. One summary says he stayed twenty-five years.

When the teaching was complete, the accounts say, Manjushrimitra rose into the sky above the charnel ground and dissolved into light. Shri Singha cried out in grief, as his teacher once had. And as before, a tiny casket came to him, holding a last testament known as The Six Meditation Experiences. In Longchenpa it falls from the sky; in another summary his teacher appears once more and places it in his hands.

Hidden in a pillar

Shri Singha went back to the boulder near Bodhgaya and took out the texts his teacher had hidden. He carried them east. At a place Longchenpa calls the Tree of Awakening in China, he arranged the innermost teachings into four cycles, called outer, inner, secret and unsurpassed secret.

Longchenpa says he hid the first three cycles in the top of a pillar in a temple called Gateway to Myriad Auspiciousness. Later, following a prophecy from a dakini, a female being of wisdom, he hid the fourth there too. Another summary divides the hiding places between two temples. Then he went to live in a charnel ground called Siljin, in China.

Two scholars at Bodhgaya

Meanwhile, two scholars were living at Bodhgaya: Vimalamitra, from western India, and Jnanasutra, from the east. Longchenpa says both had mastered all the learning of their day.

One day they walked a short way west, to a marshy thicket full of flowers. There, the account says, Vajrasattva, a buddha of purity, appeared in the sky. He told them that after five hundred lifetimes as scholars they had still not reached the goal, and that if they wished to be free in one life, they should go to Siljin in China.

Vimalamitra set out at once and received much of the teaching from Shri Singha. Back in India he met his old friend and told him, in Pearcey's translation, that he had met "an emanation of a buddha". So Jnanasutra went too. Shri Singha taught him everything, Longchenpa says, including the fourth and unsurpassed cycle.

When Shri Singha in his turn dissolved into light, the casket that came to Jnanasutra held The Seven Nails. Lotsawa House marks that text as restricted, and this page leaves it there. Another summary places Shri Singha's passing on a road, as he went to visit the king of Khotan.

Jnanasutra later passed the whole teaching to Vimalamitra, who carried it to Tibet. Rigpa Wiki says that after thirteen years there Vimalamitra left for Wutai Shan, where the tradition holds that he remains in a body of light. The mountain where Shri Singha's journey began is also where his student's student is said to dwell.

Guru Rinpoche and Vairotsana

The tradition remembers two more of Shri Singha's students. Rigpa Wiki, following Nyoshul Khenpo's history of the lineage, says Guru Rinpoche went to a charnel ground called Parushakavana, where Shri Singha gave him the teachings of all three series. He stayed twenty-five years, receiving them and reflecting on them.

Wikipedia says Shri Singha conferred the Dzogchen tantras on him. Longchenpa's chapter does not mention this meeting, and some accounts trace Guru Rinpoche's share of the teaching through Vimalamitra instead, or through a vision of Garab Dorje himself.

The other was the Tibetan translator Vairotsana, who crossed the Himalaya to find him. Where he found Shri Singha, and how the teaching was kept secret, is told in the story of Vairotsana.

What historians say

Historians cannot fix these masters' dates, and the chain as told is hard to fit into ordinary time. One encyclopedia gives Manjushrimitra's death as 740. Another notes that if he knew Garab Dorje, he would have lived centuries earlier.

One scholar places Shri Singha's later home in Andhra, in south India; Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche once suggested Burma. The tradition is content to hold the story as it was handed down.

One pair of hands to the next

What stays is its shape. Each teacher gave everything. Each student waited, travelled, bowed and asked.

The third line of the Seven-Line Prayer speaks of Guru Rinpoche's wondrous, supreme accomplishment. Behind that one line the tradition sees long years of patient receiving, in charnel grounds and on mountains, by teachers who were students first.