All I Need

"Khunu Rinpoche returned to Varanasi toward the end of the 1950s where he remained based until near the end of his life. By this time his learning had made him a well-known figure and he had a position teaching at the Sanskrit University. Nevertheless he retained essentially a lifestyle of renunciation, declining the salary that ordinarily would have come with the post and living in an unassuming part of Varanasi with an old friend from the 1930s, Jobo Ganga-gire. This dear Hindu friend of Rinpoche had an old temple in Lakasa which he looked after.

Rinpoche built a room on the top of that temple and would always, after his journeys to Bodh Gaya, or after spending the hot season away in Sikkim where he was a personal guru to the royal family, return to live there. Khunu Rinpoche had a spontaneous kindness that extended to all equally, regardless of their sect, religion, or nationality. He saw the great hardship of Tibetan refugees arriving in north India in 1959. He saw that these Tibetans, who had admitted him to schools, taught him, and given him work, were now dazed by the loss of their country and their way of life, often nearly destitute, with little but the clothes on their backs.

Khunu Rinpoche felt for these refugees deeply. He taught many of them, among them the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. These students would, in later years, refer back to that time and recall the kindness that Khunu Rinpoche embodied. In addition to teaching the refugees through personal kindness and example, Khunu Rinpoche went to Mussoorie at the Dalai Lama’s request to instruct the Tibetan refugees in grammar and poetry, remaining there for nearly a year. It was through this work in particular that Khunu Rinpoche became well known to the Tibetan refugees in India...

Tubten Pemo met Khunu Rinpoche some years before his death in the mid-1970s in Kathmandu, Nepal. She and a number of other foreigners who had gone to Nepal to study Buddhism asked Rinpoche if there was anything he needed that they could supply . He said, “No. I have all I need because I have bodhicitta,” and the next day, he sent an offering of one rupee (the equivalent of three or four cents) to each of the foreign students...

Some time before his death Rinpoche moved to the Tashi Shuling monastery (Shur Monastery in the local dialect) in a quiet part of Lahaul. He stayed there with his longtime female companion, the Drikung Khandro. Each afternoon it was his custom to give a teaching for about two hours from the Jewel Ornament of Liberation.

On February 20, 1977, while in the middle of teaching the wisdom chapter of that book, Rinpoche suddenly, and without any change in the kindly, peaceful expression on his face, died. His ashes have been enshrined in a number of reliquaries in the region straddling the Indo-Tibetan border in the state of Himachal Pradesh."

-- Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen (1894–1977), known also as Negi Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen , was born in 1894 in the village of Sunam which lies in the forest-clad Kinnaur district of India in the western Himalayas. Khunu Rinpoche was neither a tulku nor a Buddhist monk but a layman who took the lay practitioner's vows.

Among several teachings that the Dalai Lama received from Khunu Rinpoche was the celebrated Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra of Shantideva. The Dalai Lama called him the “Shantideva of our time”.

His seminal work on bodhicitta was translated and published under the title of "Vast as the Heavens, Deep as the Sea: Verses in Praise of Bodhicitta"