Dölpopa Sherab Gyaltsen
Dölpopa Sherab Gyaltsen (1292 –1361) was born in the Dolpo region of present-day Nepal. He took ordination as a novice monk in 1304 and spent the following years studying the tantras of the Nyingma tradition. In 1309 he traveled to Mustang to study the treatises on the vehicle of the perfections, epistemology, and abhidharma under the master Kyiton Jamyang Drakpa Gyeltsen. In 1321 Dolpopa ascended to the monastic seat of Sakya Monastery and in 1322 he left Sakya and went to Jonang Monastery, where he received from the master Khetsun Yonten Gyatso the complete transmission of the Kālacakra Tantra, the Bodhisattva Trilogy, and the Kālacakra completion-stage practices of the six-branch yoga.
Books, Courses & Podcasts
Mountain Dharma
Available early! Use code MD20 at checkout to save 20% through April 21.
A brilliant annotated translation of Dölpopa Sherab Gyaltsen’s Mountain Dharma that opens a masterpiece of the Jonang tradition to Western readers and presents Dölpopa’s provocative ideas about a true, eternal, and established reality that still impact Buddhism today.
The controversial master Dölpopa Sherab Gyaltsen shook Buddhist Tibet when he taught that an eternal enlightened essence, or buddha nature, exists in full form in all living beings. The ideas discussed in Mountain Dharma are still as provocative as when Dölpopa first taught them, impacting Buddhism to this day. Dölpopa identified the ultimate with the buddha nature, or sugata essence, which he held to be eternal and not empty of self-nature. The buddha nature is perfect, with all its characteristics inherently present in all living beings. It is only the impermanent and temporary afflictions veiling the buddha nature that are empty of self-nature and must be removed through the practice of the path to allow it to manifest. Dölpopa establishes the validity of his theories with an ocean of quotations selected from Indian Buddhist scriptures and treatises of indisputable authority, showing us that the ultimate is a true, eternal, and established reality, empty merely of other relative phenomena.
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