The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep

"If we cannot carry our practice into sleep," Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche writes, "if we lose ourselves every night, what chance do we have to be aware when death comes? Look to your experience in dreams to know how you will fare in death. Look to your experience of sleep to discover whether or not you are truly awake."

A well-known saying in Tibetan states, "One should explain the lineage and the history in order to cut doubt about the authenticity of the teaching and the transmission." Therefore, I begin this book with a short story of my life. I was born shortly after my parents fled the Chinese oppression in Tibet. Conditions were difficult and my parents placed me in a Christian boarding school, where they hoped I would be cared for. My father was a Buddhist lama*, my mother a practitioner of Bön*. Some time after, my father died. Eventually my mother remarried a man who was a Bön lama. Both he and my mother desired that I live within my culture, and when I was ten years old I was taken to the main Bön monastery in Dolanji, India, and ordained as a monk. After living in the monastery for some time, I was recognized by Lopon (Head Teacher) Sangye Tenzin Rinpoche as the reincarnation of Khyungtul Rinpoche, a famous scholar, teacher, author, and meditation master. He was well known as a master astrologer, and in western Tibet and northern India was famous as a tamer of wild spirits. He was widely sought after as a healer with magical abilities. One of his sponsors was a local king of Himachal in Northern India. This king and his wife, unable to bear children, asked Khyungtul Rinpoche to heal them, which he did. The son that they bore and raised is the present day Chief Minister of Himachal Pradesh, Virbhardur.