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by Jeffrey Hopkins
Khan-sur Nga-wang-lek-den was born in 1900 in Yak-day on the border between
the central and western provinces of Tibet. He was a singer and player
of a guitar-type instrument before entering the Go-mang College of
Dre-pung Monastic University. He trained for a while to develop the
multi-tonal voice to become a chant-master but was encouraged to enter
the scholarly path. He eventually earned the Ge-she degree as second in
the annual competition at the annual Prayer Festival.
He entered the Tantric College of Lower Lhasa, and became abbot prior to
the invasion of Tibet by the Chinese Communists. At the time of the
invasion, he had already been elevated to the position of Abbot
Emeritus and, after fleeing to India, helped to reestablish centers of
Buddhist learning and meditation in India. Events brought him to France
where he tutored several monks, and in 1968 he came to the Lamaist
Buddhist Monastery of America in Freewood Acres, New Jersey (now the
Tibetan Buddhist Learning Center in Washington, New Jersey), where I had
studied and practiced from 1963 to 1968. I met him on summer vacation
after serving as a resource assistant at Haverford College in the spring
of 1968 and before entering the University of Wisconsin graduate
program.
On first meeting, we were sitting in what would have been the living
room in an American ranch house but which was originally the temple in
Ge-she Wang-gyal's monastery, adorned with multiple wall-hangings. He began
speaking about the foundational topic of refuge in such a profound,
eloquent, and moving way that tears came to my eyes. Soon I asked him
for teaching on the view of emptiness in the highest philosophical
school, the Middle Way Consequence School, and he started through
testing me by teaching the non-Buddhist sections of Jam-yang-shay-pa's
huge Great Exposition of Tenets; I accepted the challenge, and in time
he taught me the Consequence School section twice. The clarity and range
of opinions that his expositions contained were exactly appropriate for
me at a time when, after five years of motivational training by the
charismatic and often chaotic Ge-she Wang-gyal and after a fascinating
introduction to the literature of tenets that study with Ge-she Lhun-drup
So-pa provided.
In February, 1970, I invited Khan-sur Lek-den to teach at Tibet House in
Cambridge, Wisconsin, founded by the late Professor Richard Robinson and
myself. Khan-sur Rin-po-che (Precious Former Abbot), an embodiment of the
unified practice of sutra and tantra and transmitter of ancient Tibetan
knowledge of meditation, taught at Tibet House for a year and a half. In
a series of fifteen lectures, he set forth the paths common to sutra and
tantra, freely and intimately, as part of the transmission of Tibetan
Buddhism outside of Tibet, during which I served as his interpreter.
This series of lectures is comprised of those sessions. Vast from the
viewpoint of setting forth the compassionate deeds of Bodhisattvas and
profound from the viewpoint of presenting the empty nature of phenomena,
these practices shine with the sun of Buddha's teaching reflected so
brightly in snowy Tibet.
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About the Lectures
These
lectures are available in book form in: Kensur Lekden,
Meditations of a Tibetan
Tantric Abbot, translated and edited by Jeffrey
Hopkins,175 pp.;
(Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications, 2001). |
