My Eight Main Teachers — part 7
And then, last but one, Dudjom Rinpoche, also an incarnate lama, a tulku. And perhaps the leading authority on the whole Nyingmapa tradition. Unlike Dilgo Khyentse he was very short, very short indeed, with rather feminine features. He’d been married quite a number of times, and he was rather fond of whisky. He lived in rather regal style — in a large house with his wife, current wife, and family — and was not very easily approachable. Some people said that the current wife kept people away; I don’t know about that. Anyway, I managed to approach him and I received quite a number of initiations from him. So you’ll notice that I’d received by this time initiations from several different lamas, and three of these lamas were in particularly close connection with one another and formed a sort of group: that is, Jamyang Khyentse Rimpoche, Chattrul Samye Dorje and Dudjom Rinpoche. They had quite a lot of disciples in common, that is to say disciples who had received one or other initiation from all of them, different initiations from all three of them. So I was told, I think it was by Kachu Rimpoche, that one day a discussion arose among the disciples of all three of them as to which of the three was the greatest, the most enlightened, the spiritually most developed. So someone was deputed to go and ask Jamyang Khyentse who was the greatest of the three, or whether there was any one of them who was more spiritually developed and enlightened than the other two. So Jamyang Khyentse heard the question, he nodded Yes, yes, there is out of the three of us one who is definitely more enlightened than the other two. But,
he said, You people will never know which one it is.
There’s quite a lot in that if you think about it.
Dudjom Rinpoche died not so very long ago, and he was still working on his great work The Nyingmapa School of Tibetan Buddhism, which has been brought out in two fat volumes by Wisdom Publications — we hope to see it soon, it’s been on the stocks now for a couple of years and many of us have paid our subscriptions in advance; but we’re still hoping to see it. When it does come out it will be a work of paramount value and worth, covering all aspects of the Nyingmapa school and tradition, everything.