Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen

"Auspicious – what dwells in the heart of all sentient beings, The selfness of all, the highest lord of all lineages, The producer of sentient beings without exception, great bliss, In that way, may auspiciousness bring peace to you today! Auspicious – what in the triple world is pure form, Formless, good form, and form free of subtle particles, Indivisible with all living beings, Buddha Nature good in that way, May its auspiciousness bring peace to you today! Auspicious – what takes form resembling eight prognostic images, Form that is indestructible like space, free of beginning, end and middle, Referenced as shunyata, Buddha Nature good in that way, May its auspiciousness bring peace to you today!"

"I bow down to and go for refuge in the glorious sublime master and all the glorious accomplished ones. Please accept us with your great love at all times. I bow down to the dharmadhātu, the ground which is devoid of all relative conceptual labeling, which is the ultimate, the thoroughly established1. I bow down to the ground which is free from all kinds of thought, the unconditioned self-arisen wisdom."

"Alas, my share of good fortune may be inferior, but I think a discovery such as this is good fortune... My intelligence has not been refined in three-fold knowledge, but I think the raising of Mount Meru has caused the ocean to gush forth. I bow in homage to the masters, buddhas, and kalkis, by whose kindness the essential points, difficult for even exalted beings to realize, are precisely realized, and to their great stupa."

"Dolpopa Sherab Gyeltsen was born in 1292, 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... In the year 1321, when he was twenty-nine years old, Dolpopa ascended to the monastic seat (gdan sa) of Sakya Monastery... The Karmapa significantly prophesied that Dolpopa would quickly become even more expert in the view and practice... Yonten Gyatso convinced Dolpopa to teach in the assembly at Jonang, and also taught him many more systems of esoteric knowledge, such as Lamdre, the Five Stages (rim lnga) of the Guhyasamāja and the Cakrasaṃvara, Zhije and Chod... [After he passed, his] ...body was placed in a wooden casket anointed with perfume and adorned with silk and precious ornaments, and put inside the crematorium...When the cremation began, the smoke rose only a few feet and then streaked to the stupa, circled it many times, and finally disappeared to the west. The men and women practitioners offered butter lamps on the roofs of their individual meditation huts, so that the entire valley sparkled... each of them made prayers with tears flowing down their faces."