Rinpoche was born in 1934 to a nomad family from Nangchen, Kham. He left home at an early age to train with Lama Zopa Tarchin, who was to become his root guru. After completing this early training, he lived the ascetic life of a yogi, wandering throughout Tibet and undertaking intensive, solitary retreats in caves and living in charnel grounds practicing Chöd. At Tsurphu Monastery, the historic seat of the Karma Kagyu lineage, Rinpoche continued his training with the lineage head, the 16th Gyalwa Karmapa, and other masters.
Exile in India
During the 1959 Tibetan uprising Rinpoche fled Tibet, leading a group of Buddhist nuns over the Himalayas to safety in Bhutan. He subsequently went to northern India, where he spent the next nine years at the Buxa Duar Tibetan Refugee Camp. Here he studied and mastered Buddhist scholarship and was awarded a Khenpo degree by the 16th Karmapa and the equivalent Geshe Lharampa degree by the 14th Dalai Lama. At the direction of the Karmapa, he subsequently settled in Bhutan, where he built a nunnery, retreat center, and school.
Shentong views the two truths doctrine as distinguishing between relative and absolute reality, agreeing that relative reality is empty of self-nature, but stating that absolute reality is "empty" only of "other" relative phenomena, but is itself not empty. This absolute reality is the "ground or substratum" which is "uncreated and indestructible, noncomposite and beyond the chain of dependent origination." Dolpopa identified this absolute reality with the Buddha-nature. The shentong-view is related to the Ratnagotravibhāga sutra and the Yogacara-Madhyamaka synthesis of Śāntarakṣita. The truth of sunyata is acknowledged, but not considered to be the highest truth, which is the empty nature of mind. Insight into sunyata is preparatory for the recognition of the nature of mind. Hookham explains the Shentong position, referring to Khenpo Tsultrim's Progressive Stages of Meditation on Emptiness. Khenpo Tsultrim presents five stages of meditation, which he relates to five different schools or approaches:
"Sravaka meditation on non-self" - meditation on the emptiness of the skandhas and the non-existence of a personal self;
"Cittamatra-approach" - meditation on the mind-stream, the ever-continuing process of perception, and the non-duality of perceived and perceiver;
"Svatantrika-Madhyamaka approach" - meditation on all dhammas, which are empty of self-nature, and the negation of any "substance";
"Prasangika-Mdhyamaka approach" - meditation on "the non-conceptual nature of both the appearance of phenomena and their self-emptiness." In this approach, all concepts are to be abandoned;
Shentong - meditation on Paramarthasatya, Buddhajnana, which is beyond concepts, and described by terms as "truly existing." This approach helps "to overcome certain residual subtle concepts," and "the habit - fosterd on the earlier stages of the path - of negating whatever experience arises in his/her mind." It destroys false concepts, as does prasangika, but it also alerts the practitioner "to the presence of a dynamic, positive Reality that is to be experienced once the conceptual mind is defeated."
Progressive Stages of Meditation on Emptiness, by Khenpo Tsültrim Gyamtso Rinpoche, translated and arranged by Shenpen Hookham, Zhyisil Chokyi Ghatsal Publications
Stars of Wisdom: Analytical Meditation, Songs of Yogic Joy, and Prayers of Aspiration by Khenpo Tsültrim Gyamtso, translated by Ari Goldfield and Rose Taylor, Forewords by the Seventeenth Karmapa and the Dalai Lama, Shambhala Publications,
The Sun of Wisdom: Teachings on the Noble Nagarjuna's Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way by Khenpo Tsültrim Gyamtso Rinpoche, Shambhala Publications,
The Moon of Wisdom: Chapter Six of Chandrakirti's Entering the Middle Way with commentary from the Eighth Karmapa Mikyo Dorje's Chariot of the Dagpo Kagyu Siddhas translated under the guidance of Khenpo Tsültrim Gyamtso Rinpoche by Ari Goldfield, Jules Levinson, Jim Scott & Birgit Scott, Snow Lion Publications,
