A Treasury Built to Outlast a Sect: Kongtrul and the Rime Movement

By the middle of the nineteenth century, Tibetan Buddhist scholarship in Kham had grown sectarian enough that whole transmissions were at risk of dying out simply because they belonged to the wrong school. Jamgon Kongtrul, together with Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo and a handful of like minded teachers, answered this not with a new doctrine but with an editorial project on a vast scale: gathering, cross checking and republishing the teachings of every major Tibetan lineage rather than only their own. The result is remembered as the Rime, or non-sectarian, movement, and its lasting monument is the Five Great Treasuries Kongtrul himself compiled, spanning a general commentary on the whole Buddhist path, a collection of the empowerments and instructions of Tibet's eight practice lineages, the core Kagyu tantric material, and the sixty three volume Rinchen Terdzo gathering the Nyingma tradition's treasure teachings. The project was conservationist as much as devotional: many of the texts Kongtrul assembled survive today only because his collection preserved them, since some of the source lineages he drew from had already shrunk to a handful of living holders by the time he began. Later Tibetan scholarship, across Kagyu, Nyingma and Sakya alike, treats the Five Great Treasuries as a reference library rather than the property of any one school, which is exactly the outcome the Rime movement was built to produce.