The Complete Rinchen Terdzö Published by Shechen Monastery!

Thanks to the hard work of many people over the course of many years (and perhaps lifetimes), the most complete edition of the Rinchen Terdzö Chenmo (རིན་ཆེན་གཏེར་མཛོད་ཆེན་མོ་) in seventy-one volumes is finished and printed.

Shechen Monastery held a celebration on March 29, 2018, to commemorate the conclusion of this important project. Kyabje Shechen Rabjam Rinpoche and Shechen Monastery honored Dakpo Tulku Rinpoche and his team–Matthieu Ricard, along with Sean Price and Eric Colombel of Tsadra Foundation–who all put a concerted effort into the project’s completion which was more than thirteen years in the making.

Limited printed copies of the collection are available from Shechen Monastery. To access the entirety of the texts digitally, search through the collection, or learn more about it, see the online catalog here: Rinchen Terdzö Chenmo: The Great Treasury of Rediscovered Teachings.

The Rinchen Terdzö website presents a searchable catalog of all texts in the Rinchen Terdzö Chenmo and includes full unicode Tibetan texts with metadata. Currently, (2018) volumes 1-64 and 68 have been updated and we will finish work on the final volumes of the Shechen edition this year.

The Rinchen Terdzö Chenmo is the largest of the Five Treasuries that Jamgon Kongtrul the Great (‘jam mgon kong sprul blo gros mtha’ yas, 1813-1899) compiled throughout his life. This extraordinary collection is comprised of the main Rediscovered Treasures (gter ma) of Tibetan Buddhism and the texts necessary to bestow the related empowerments and explanations to practice them.

Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo traveled for thirteen years throughout Central and Eastern Tibet in order to collect the texts and receive the transmissions for the many lineages that had become almost extinct and held by only a few people. The actual redaction and editing of the Rinchen Terdzö was accomplished by Jamgön Kongtrul at the monastery-hermitage of Dzongsho Deshek Dupa, a secluded mountain retreat located between Dzongsar and Kathok, where Khyentse Wangpo had revealed a set of termas related to the Eight Herukas (grub pa bka’ brgyad).

Wooden-blocks were then carved at Palpung Monastery creating a sixty-volume edition. From this edition, another set of wooden-blocks was carved at Tsurphu Monastery with three additional volumes. These three included the ‘dod ‘jo’i bum bzang, which was compiled by Minling Terchen Gyurme Dorje (1646-1714) and is considered to be the “seed” of the Rinchen Terdzö, the autobiography of Jamgön Kongtrul, and the root text of Chogyur Lingpa’s Lamrim Yeshey Nyingpo with a detailed commentary by Jamgön Kongtrul. (Read more of the introduction by Matthieu Ricard.)

Visit the Rinchen Terdzö Chenmo: The Great Treasury of Rediscovered Teachings online to learn more about it!