Quick Answer
The book Tibetan teachers hand a new student first, written by a master who gave up his monastery to wander as a beggar and who mocks anyone, lama or layman, who practises for show. It sets out the preliminary practices of the Nyingma school, from the reflections that turn the mind toward practice to the devotion that carries it through, in language that is plain, funny and unsparing. It assumes you are inside the tradition and have a teacher. If you are and do, it is indispensable. If you are not, it is the most honest picture of what Tibetan Buddhism asks of a person that exists in English.
Key Takeaways
- The four thoughts first: human birth, death, karma, suffering. Everything follows from taking them seriously.
- Ngondro is the foundation, and the book is its manual.
- Patrul spares nobody, least of all lamas.
- The teacher is the path, and the book says how to choose one.
- Padmakara's translation is the one, and the notes are why.
17 min read
What This Book Is
Kunzang Lama'i Shelung, The Words of My Perfect Teacher, was composed by Patrul Rinpoche in the middle of the nineteenth century as a written record of the oral explanations of the preliminary practices he had received from his own root teacher.
It is a commentary on the ngondro of the Longchen Nyingtik, the cycle of teachings revealed by Jigme Lingpa in the eighteenth century that became the most widely practised system of the Nyingma school. Its subject is the foundation of the path: the reflections and practices a student undertakes before receiving the main Vajrayana teachings, and which the tradition holds to be, in the end, the whole of the path in seed.
The Padmakara Translation Group's English version, published by HarperCollins in 1994 and revised for Shambhala in 1998, runs to around four hundred pages with introduction, notes and glossary. It has become the standard text for Western students of the Nyingma and related lineages.
A caution the book itself gives. Patrul says repeatedly that the practices he describes require transmission from a qualified teacher and are not to be undertaken from a book alone. That applies to the formal ngondro in the second half. The reflections in the first half, the four thoughts, are open to any reader, and they are the part of the book that reaches furthest beyond the tradition.
Who Patrul Rinpoche Was
Orgyen Jigme Chokyi Wangpo, known as Dza Patrul, was born in 1808 in the Dzachukha region of Kham, eastern Tibet, recognised in childhood as the reincarnation of a local master, and educated in the monastic system with every distinction.
He then walked away from it. For most of his adult life he owned nothing, lived in caves and hermitages or on the road, dressed as a beggar, and taught whoever he met: monks, nomads, bandits, women, children. Stories of him are legion. He is said to have arrived unrecognised at monasteries where his own texts were being taught, to have been mistaken for a servant by lamas who then discovered who he was, and to have given away everything he was offered.
He was also among the most learned men of his age, a master of the philosophical curriculum, a poet, and the author of a body of work that remains central to the Nyingma school. He died in 1887. The combination of great learning and total simplicity is what the tradition remembers, and it is what the book sounds like.
The Perfect Teacher
The title is not about Patrul.
Kunzang Lama, the perfect or all-good teacher, refers to Jigme Gyalwe Nyugu, Patrul's root guru, from whom he received the teachings on the preliminaries many times over. Patrul insists at the outset that the book contains nothing of his own: it is what his teacher said, set down as faithfully as memory allowed, and its authority is the teacher's, not the writer's.
The claim is a convention of the genre and it is also a stance. The book's whole argument culminates in guru yoga, the practice of devotion to the teacher, and a text that presents itself as an act of that devotion is practising what it teaches. Patrul's own teacher had received the teaching from Jigme Lingpa's disciples, who had it from Jigme Lingpa, who had it, in the tradition's account, from Longchenpa in vision. The book is a link in that chain and knows it.
The Longchen Nyingtik
The system the book serves, briefly.
The Longchen Nyingtik, the Heart Essence of the Vast Expanse, is a cycle of practices revealed by Jigme Lingpa in the 1760s after a series of visions of Longchenpa, the fourteenth-century master who systematised the Nyingma teachings. It became, over the following century, the dominant practice lineage of the Nyingma school in eastern Tibet, and through the Tibetan diaspora it is now among the most widely practised systems of Tibetan Buddhism in the world.
Its preliminaries follow the standard Tibetan form: the outer preliminaries, which are reflections, and the inner preliminaries, which are formal practices done in large numbers. Patrul's book is the classic commentary on both, and every later Longchen Nyingtik teacher has taught from it.
The Structure
The book has three parts and a clear architecture.
Part one, the outer or ordinary preliminaries: the difficulty of finding the freedoms and advantages of a human birth, the impermanence of life, the defects of samsara, the principle of karma, the benefits of liberation, and how to follow a spiritual friend. These are reflections, to be contemplated until they change the mind.
Part two, the inner or extraordinary preliminaries: taking refuge, arousing bodhicitta, the meditation and recitation of Vajrasattva for purification, offering the mandala, the practice of kusali or offering the body, and guru yoga. These are formal practices with visualisation, recitation and accumulation of numbers.
Part three, the swift path of transference: phowa, the practice of directing consciousness at the moment of death.
The order is the order of the path, and a reader who follows it from the beginning is being led through a curriculum.
How to Listen
The book opens with a chapter on how to receive the teaching, and it sets the tone.
Patrul gives the traditional analysis of the three defects of the vessel: the pot turned upside down, which receives nothing; the pot with a hole, which retains nothing; and the pot with poison in it, which corrupts what it receives. He describes the six stains, pride, lack of faith, lack of interest, distraction, inward tension and boredom, and the five wrong ways of remembering. Then he describes the right way: the attitude of a patient toward a doctor, of a traveller toward a guide, of a person who knows their house is on fire.
The chapter is a preface, and it is also the first practice. Before a single teaching is given, the reader is asked to examine how they are about to read, and most readers find the examination uncomfortable.
The Precious Human Birth
The first of the four thoughts, and the one that governs the others.
A human birth with the freedom and opportunity to practise, Patrul argues, is rarer than a blind turtle surfacing once a century with its head through a yoke floating on the ocean. He works through the eight freedoms and ten advantages one by one, and asks the reader to check whether they have each. Then he asks what they are doing with them.
The chapter is where the book's urgency begins. If this birth is that rare and that brief, and is the only condition in which practice is possible, then wasting it is the one real catastrophe, and everything ordinary life values is measured against that. Patrul is merciless about how most people spend their advantages, and he includes monks and lamas in the indictment.
Impermanence and Death
The second thought, and the chapter readers most often return to.
Everything composed will decompose. The universe will end; the great masters have died; the reader will die; the time is uncertain and the causes of death are many. Patrul gives the traditional contemplations and then does what the tradition does best, which is to make the abstraction concrete: the yak herder who plans for next year and is dead by evening, the lama who intends to practise after the next ceremony, the reader who is reading this sentence with a finite and unknown number of breaths remaining.
He is not morbid. The contemplation aims at priority rather than fear. A person who has really understood that they will die, and soon, and do not know when, will not put off the one thing that matters, and the chapter is designed to produce that understanding rather than describe it.
Patrul tells the story of Geshe Karak Gomchung, who practised in a cave whose entrance was blocked by a thorn bush. Each time he went out the bush caught his robe, and each time he thought he should cut it back, and each time he thought that he might die before he came back and should not waste the time. He never cut it. He practised in that cave until he attained realisation and died, and the bush was still there. Patrul tells it without comment. A reader who thinks the story is about thorn bushes has not understood the chapter.
Karma
The third thought, treated at length and with precision.
Patrul sets out the ten negative actions, three of body, four of speech, three of mind, and their results, and the ten positive actions and theirs. He explains the four aspects of a complete action, the object, the intention, the act and the completion, and the ways in which results ripen: as the corresponding experience, as the corresponding tendency, as the environment one is born into.
The chapter is where the book is most systematic and where a modern reader may resist most. Patrul does not argue for karma; he describes it, as a natural law the tradition takes as established, and he applies it with a rigour that includes every idle word and passing thought. The effect, for a reader who takes it seriously, is a complete moral accounting, and the book intends exactly that.
The Sufferings of Samsara
The fourth thought, and the tradition's cosmology at full stretch.
The chapter walks through the six realms, hell beings, hungry ghosts, animals, humans, demigods and gods, and the sufferings characteristic of each, in detail that Western readers have found either overwhelming or absurd. The hells are described at length; the human sufferings of birth, ageing, sickness and death are described with the plainness of someone who had watched all four.
The purpose is renunciation: the conviction that no state within cyclic existence, however pleasant, is a place to rest, and that the only sane aim is liberation from the whole of it. Readers who cannot take the cosmology literally can take the argument, which is that every condition is temporary and that clinging to any of them is the source of the suffering they contain.
Refuge and Bodhicitta
The beginning of the inner preliminaries, and the turn from reflection to practice.
Refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha is the entry to the path, and Patrul explains its levels, its visualisation, the field of refuge with the teacher at its centre, and the prostrations that accompany it, a hundred thousand of them. Then bodhicitta, the resolve to attain enlightenment for the sake of all beings, in its aspiration and its application, with the four immeasurables of love, compassion, joy and equanimity, and the training in exchanging oneself for others that later became the tonglen of the mind-training texts.
The chapter on bodhicitta is the book's moral centre. Everything before it has been about escaping suffering; everything after it is about doing so for others, and Patrul's stories of compassion, including the famous account of the bodhisattva who gave his body to a starving tigress, are told to make the aspiration real.
Vajrasattva and the Mandala
Two practices, described in detail.
The Vajrasattva meditation is the purification of negative actions through visualisation of the deity above the crown, the descent of nectar, and the recitation of the hundred-syllable mantra with the four powers: regret, resolve, reliance and remedy. Patrul explains each element and its meaning and insists that the four powers, not the visualisation, do the work.
The mandala offering is the accumulation of merit through the symbolic offering of the entire universe, built up in heaps of rice on a plate, again and again. He describes the thirty-seven-point mandala and the shorter forms and explains why an act of pure imagination counts: because the mind that gives everything is the mind that has nothing to protect.
Both practices are done in large numbers, and both, he says, accomplish anything only if the attitude is right. A hundred thousand mantras recited with a wandering mind are a hundred thousand wasted breaths.
Guru Yoga
The culmination of the preliminaries and the book's longest and most fervent chapter.
Guru yoga is the practice of visualising the teacher as the embodiment of all Buddhas, praying to them with devotion, receiving their blessing, and finally merging one's mind with theirs. In the Nyingma tradition the teacher is visualised in the form of Padmasambhava, and the chapter gives the visualisation, the seven-line prayer, the Vajra Guru mantra, and the initiations received at the end.
Patrul's claim is that this practice, more than any other, opens the mind to realisation, because devotion dissolves the sense of separateness that all the other practices work on from outside. He tells the stories of the great disciples, Naropa, Milarepa, and others, whose realisation came through faith in the teacher, and he is clear that a student without devotion is a student without a path.
Choosing a Teacher
The chapter that balances the previous one, and the one Western readers most need.
Patrul is uncompromising about devotion once the relationship exists. He is equally uncompromising about examination before it does. He lists the qualities of a genuine teacher and the marks of a false one, and the marks are specific: teachers who seek wealth and honour, who teach what they have not practised, who flatter students and punish criticism, who claim realisation and show its opposite. He warns that a wrong teacher is worse than none and that the student is responsible for looking.
He also lists the faults of students, and the chapter on following a spiritual friend, placed among the outer preliminaries, is where a reader learns that the tradition's emphasis on the guru comes with an equal emphasis on the guru's qualifications. Later scandals in Tibetan Buddhism in the West have sent many readers back to this chapter, and it holds.
The Transference of Consciousness
The third part, on the practice of phowa.
Phowa is the method of directing consciousness out of the body at the moment of death, through the crown, toward a pure land. Patrul describes the five kinds of transference, the visualisation and the recitation, and the signs of success. He presents it as the swift path for those who have not completed the main practices, a way of making the best of death even if the life fell short.
The chapter is short and practical, and it connects to the broader Tibetan literature on death that Western readers know from the Book of the Dead and Sogyal Rinpoche, both of which assume it.
The Voice
Why the book is read when others in its genre are not.
Patrul writes in the colloquial Tibetan of eastern nomads, with proverbs, jokes, insults and stories, and the translation keeps the register. He is funny about pretension, brutal about laziness, tender about animals and the poor, and dismissive of rank including his own. He tells a story about a lama who taught for gold and a story about a bandit who was moved by a single teaching, and he plainly prefers the bandit.
He also writes as someone who has done every practice he describes, in a cave, for years, and who knows exactly which shortcuts a student will try. The voice is the book's authority, and it is why students who resist the cosmology still finish the text.
The Translation
The Padmakara Translation Group, based in France and working under the guidance of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche and later Pema Wangyal Rinpoche, produced the English version with the direct involvement of lineage holders, and it shows. The prose is clear, the technical vocabulary is consistent, and the extensive endnotes explain terms, identify persons, and give the oral clarifications that a Tibetan teacher would supply.
The Dalai Lama's foreword, Dilgo Khyentse's introduction and the translators' note place the text in its tradition. There is no better English edition, and for a text of this importance there is unlikely to be one for some time.
The Difficulties
Three, and the tradition itself acknowledges the first.
It is written for insiders. The book assumes the Tibetan cosmology, the six realms, the literal hells, the reality of rebirth, and does not argue for any of them. A reader from outside must translate constantly.
The devotion is total. Guru yoga as Patrul describes it asks for a surrender that has been abused, and the book's safeguards, real as they are, sit in a different chapter from its demands.
The numbers. A hundred thousand prostrations, a hundred thousand mantras, a hundred thousand mandalas. The book explains why and it remains a great deal to ask of a person with a job.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you are beginning practice in a Nyingma or Kagyu lineage, since your teacher will assign it and you should know why.
Read it if you know Tibetan Buddhism through Trungpa, Pema Chödrön or Sogyal and want the classical text they were drawing on.
Read the first part, the four thoughts, whatever your tradition. It is the most forceful statement in any literature of why a person might decide that practice is the only thing worth doing with a life.
Read the chapter on choosing a teacher before you choose one.
The book's argument is a single chain. This birth is rare. It is short and its end is unknown. What you do in it has consequences that do not stop at death. And nothing in the round of existence is a place to rest. If all four are true, then the only rational act is to practise now, with everything, and the rest of the book is what practising with everything looks like. Patrul's genius was to make the four links feel true rather than argue them, through stories about people who did not believe them until it was too late. The reader who finishes the first part and does not feel some urgency has, by the book's own account, not read it.
The four thoughts, the preliminaries and the teacher, from the master who wandered as a beggar.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our comments on the book's insider assumptions and its demands are set out above and were not softened for the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Words of My Perfect Teacher about?
The preliminary practices, or ngondro, of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism: the four thoughts that turn the mind, refuge, bodhicitta, purification, mandala offering, guru yoga and the transference of consciousness, explained as Patrul's own teacher taught them.
Who was Patrul Rinpoche?
Dza Patrul, 1808 to 1887, a Nyingma master of eastern Tibet, recognised as a reincarnate lama, who abandoned his monastery and rank to live as a wandering beggar, teaching wherever he stopped. He is remembered as one of the most learned and least pretentious teachers of his century.
Who was the perfect teacher?
Jigme Gyalwe Nyugu, Patrul's root teacher, a disciple of Jigme Lingpa, whose oral explanations of the Longchen Nyingtik preliminaries Patrul recorded from memory. The book claims no originality: it is his teacher's words.
What are the four thoughts?
The reflections that turn the mind away from worldly concern: the rarity of a human birth, the certainty of death, the law of karma, and the suffering of all conditioned existence. The first part of the book treats each at length.
What is ngondro?
The foundational practices a student completes before the main Vajrayana meditations, traditionally a hundred thousand repetitions each of refuge prostrations, the bodhicitta vow, the Vajrasattva purification mantra, the mandala offering and guru yoga.
Is it for beginners?
It is written for them, in the sense that it is the first text of the path, and its language is plain and its stories vivid. It assumes commitment to the Tibetan tradition and a teacher, and does not explain that tradition from outside.
What is the book's tone?
Direct, earthy, funny and severe. Patrul mocks lamas who teach for gain, students who practise for show and everyone who imagines they have time. He tells stories of yak herders and bandits beside stories of saints.
What does it say about the teacher?
That the guru is indispensable, that the student must examine a teacher carefully before committing, and that once committed, devotion is the practice. The chapter on guru yoga is the book's culmination.
Who translated it?
The Padmakara Translation Group, under the direction of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, with a foreword by the Dalai Lama. The translation, published in 1994 and revised in 1998, is the standard English version.
How does it compare to the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying?
Sogyal Rinpoche's book is a modern presentation for Western readers and draws heavily on Patrul. This is the source: a nineteenth-century text for Tibetans, with the tradition's assumptions intact.
Can it be practised from the book?
The reflections in the first part, yes. The formal practices in the second require transmission from a teacher, and the book says so. Reading it without a teacher gives the view; practising it needs the lineage.
Who should read it?
Anyone beginning Tibetan Buddhist practice, since most Nyingma and many Kagyu teachers assign it first; readers of Sogyal or Chogyam Trungpa who want the classical source; and anyone who wants the four thoughts stated with full force.
Leave the thorn bush
You have something you keep meaning to do before you begin the thing that matters. Clear the desk, finish the course, get through this month. Patrul's whole book is an argument that the desk will never be clear and the month will never end, and that the geshe who left the thorn bush uncut understood something you are still avoiding. Name your thorn bush. Then ask whether you would still cut it back if you knew, as he knew, that you might not come back to the cave.
Sources & References
- Patrul Rinpoche. The Words of My Perfect Teacher, trans. Padmakara Translation Group, revised edition, Shambhala.
- Jigme Lingpa and Patrul Rinpoche. Longchen Nyingtik ngondro texts, as cited in the translators' notes.
- Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. The Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones, a commentary on Patrul's own root verses.
- Ricard, Matthieu. Enlightened Vagabond: The Life and Teachings of Patrul Rinpoche.
- Tulku Thondup. Masters of Meditation and Miracles, on the Longchen Nyingtik lineage.
- Sogyal Rinpoche. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, for the modern presentation.