Karma chags med
Karma Chakme was born in 1609 in the Nyomtod region of Kham. He trained first in his father's Nyingma lineage before entering the Karma Kagyu world. He took novice and full ordination at Tsurpu Monastery in 1627, where he received the name by which he is known, and studied closely with the Tenth Karmapa Choying Dorje, the Sixth Zhamar Chokyi Wangchuk, and the Zurmang Trungpa. His life spanned the turbulent decades of the Mongol invasion and the fall of his Rinpung and Karma Kagyu patrons, and he spent his later years—including a thirteen-year retreat begun in 1645—in intensive practice and writing before his death in 1678.
His Aspirational Prayer for Sukhāvatī (the "Chakme Sukhāvatī Prayer") remains one of the most widely recited prayers among both lay and monastic Tibetans. His retreat manual Mountain Dharma: Advice on Retreat (ri chos mtshams kyi zhal gdams) became a classic practical guide for practitioners. Crucially, he served as scribe to the visionary Terton Mingyur Dorje, transcribing almost the entirety of the Namcho ("Sky Teaching") treasure cycle, later collected into thirteen volumes, and he is remembered for compositions synthesizing Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen.
His influence on later generations was profound and his students founded lineages that carried both currents of his inheritance: Tsondu Gyatso and Pema Kunga established the Upper and Lower Nedo Kagyu lineages, while his student Rigdzin Kunzang Sherab drew on the Nyingma side to found Pelyul (Palyul) Monastery, which became one of the six "mother monasteries" of the Nyingma tradition. His works were canonized in a sixty-volume Collected Works published by Nedo Monastery in 2010, and he was recognized through a line of seven subsequent reincarnations. Later masters relied heavily on him—historians Guru Tashi and the Eighth Situ Chokyi Jungne, and the great nineteenth-century polymath Jamgön Kongtrul, all wrote about him—and his reach extends into the modern West, where Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche taught Mountain Dharma at Karma Triyana Dharmachakra in Woodstock, New York, which became a series of books published at KTD: Karma Chakme's Mountain Dharma. Also see the Karma Chakme Series at Lotsawa House.
(Sources: Ngawang Sherpa , "Karma Chakme," Treasury of Lives, accessed July 20, 2026, http://treasuryoflives.org/biographies/view/Karma-Chakme/9084.
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