The Karma Chakme Reading Transmission: History, Teachings and the Blessing of Sacred Sound

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Site Editor’s Note: With the completion of Part One of the Reading Transmission of the Complete Works of Karma Chakme at Karma Triyana Dharmachakra, we are pleased to share with you a series of articles and materials gathered for the KTD Mandala Blog by translator Michele Martin.

These articles seek to illuminate the history and contributions of Karma Chakme, a 17th Century master of the Kagyu tradition, whose 60-Volume Collected Works are being read aloud at KTD by Vajra Master Lama Tobden as a blessing for Dharma students and practitioners.

We’re also including summaries of a series of short talks given by the lamas of KTD to help those attending the transmissions – and all of us who are reading about them – get more out of the event and feel its blessing.

The transmission program is a first-ever event of its kind for KTD, and we’re delighted to share these materials with you.

Thanks to Michele Martin, a longtime friend of KTD and translator, for the gift of these articles, which we hope will inspire readers to learn more about Karma Chakme and his Dharma legacy.

Introduction to the Karma Chakme Reading Transmission Teaching Series

Every day at the beginning of the reading transmission, the Vajra Master asked that students listen “free of the three faults, the six stains and the five ways of misremembering.” To better understand what these are, three of the teachers at Karma Triyana Dharmachakra were asked to give short talks on the first two topics and on reading transmission (lung in Tibetan) in general. A summary of these talks follows. Afterward, three of the lamas who finished a three-year retreat under the guidance of Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche were asked to give talks as well. These three kindly wrote summaries, which follow after the first three reports.

A classical literary reference for these three ways to listen is found in Kunzang Palden’s the Nectar of Manjushri’s Speech: A Detailed Commentary on Shantideva’s Way of the Bodhisatttva, translated by the Padmakara Translation Group, Shambhala Publications, Boulder: 2010, pp. 23-26. To complete the picture, on page 25 of his text, the five ways of misremembering are the following:

To recall the words but not the sense,
The sense but not the words,
To remember without understanding,
Or to turn the order upside down,
To remember the reverse of what was meant:
All these faults you must avoid.