Orgyen Topgyal Rinpoche

Orgyen Topgyal Rinpoche (also spelled Tobgyal) was born in 1951 in the Nangchen region of Kham in eastern Tibet. He is the son of the Third Neten Chokling Rinpoche, Pema Gyurme, whose seat, Neten Gön, was founded in the mid-nineteenth century. The Neten Chokling line is one of the incarnation lines associated with Chokgyur Lingpa.

At the end of the 1950s he left Tibet with his parents. After about ten years of travel through Sikkim, Nepal, India and Bhutan, the family settled at Bir in Himachal Pradesh, where in 1967 his father began a new Tibetan settlement and started building Pema Ewam Chögar Gyurme Ling, now usually called Chokling Monastery. When his father died in a road accident, Orgyen Topgyal, then twenty-two, took on the task of completing the monastery.

His teachers included Dzongsar Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö, his father, the 16th Karmapa and Khamtrul Rinpoche, and above all Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, his root teacher. He served Dilgo Khyentse as ritual assistant and chant master from the late 1960s until 1991, and first travelled to the West with him in 1975. His organisation’s biography says his knowledge of Vajrayana ritual grew through that service.

He is known for his memory of the histories of past masters and his grasp of Vajrayana practice. Rangjung Yeshe Publications presents him as having a natural learning and a gift for explaining the teachings. He recounted the life of Chokgyur Lingpa, which was published in English as The Life of Chokgyur Lingpa, and his talks have appeared as Straight Talk: Discourses on Practice. He also trained in thangka painting and has commissioned sets of thangkas of lineage histories.

Rigpa Wiki records that he raised the young Fourth Neten Chokling, his father’s reincarnation, and handed him full responsibility for the monastery in 2004. He was a member of the Tibetan Parliament in exile for Kham, elected in 2000 and again in 2005. He lives in Bir, and he has led drupchen practices and taught regularly at Rigpa centres and elsewhere since 1996.