Timeless Rapture: Inspired Verse from the Shangpa Masters

The Shangpa Masters and Their Lineage 305
impression that for him, the amazing didn’t seem out of the ordinary.
He met Niguma on three occasions. The first time, Tangtong Gyalpo
had just received the main lineage transmission from Jinpa Zangpo.
Niguma appeared hovering on a cloud in space, then came to earth to give
him empowerment and many teachings, to answer his questions, and to
share a vajra feast. Based on that series of instructions, he wrote texts still
used in Shangpa retreats, very original versions of Niguma’s Six Doctrines
and other meditations.
For their second meeting some years later, Niguma appeared as a singing
fifteen-year-old girl with a large flock of sheep and goats. Tangtong Gyalpo
asked her where she was from, what her name was, and why she was
singing. She replied that she had neither homeland, family, nor name and
that as a girl, she wasn’t able to help sentient beings. She said she sang of
sadness at the wheel of life, but no one listened to or understood her song;
yet she claimed to have come to that place to make a spiritual connection
with Tangtong Gyalpo. He asked her for teaching; she told him to wait
there while she took her flock away and gathered offerings for a vajra feast.
She returned in the middle of the night with many other young women,
explaining that some of her companions had gone to India and Nepal to
collect feast offerings (!); had he been waiting long? It was at this point that
she revealed herself as Niguma and gave him further guidance.
Niguma’s comment that it proved difficult to help others as a woman
was a complaint that Tangtong Gyalpo had heard before; sometime after
his first meeting with Niguma, Bodhisattva Great Compassion had
appeared to him and predicted that he would meet a wisdom dakini.
When Tangtong Gyalpo encountered a fifteen-year-old girl singing verses
from a tantra, sitting with a skull cup full of alcohol, he suspected that she
was the dakini. When he asked her for instruction, she related that she had
traveled to all the places in central and western Tibet where many people
gathered, with the intention to give her teachings to fortunate individuals,
but that Tangtong Gyalpo was the only one who had recognized her.
Although Tangtong Gyalpo had many such encounters with female teachers
and dakinis, and had many realized female disciples, he seems to have
been an exception in such impartiality.
Tangtong Gyalpo’s third meeting with Niguma is only alluded to in the
one biography I have read. Close to the end of his life, a disciple to whom
Tangtong Gyalpo had given the traditional Shangpa teaching cycle gained