This is Lesson 1 from A Comprehensive Commentary on the Words of My Perfect Teacher, the opening class of the entire series. The teacher introduces the text — The Words of My Perfect Teacher, a guide to the Longchen Nyingtik preliminaries — explaining its title word by word, its place as the summit teaching of Tibetan Buddhism, and its remarkable scope: His Holiness Jigme Phuntsok Rinpoche's foreword confirms that the teachings of all four Tibetan schools, as well as the major schools of Han Buddhism, are contained within it.
The teacher urges open-mindedness across sectarian lines, warns that skipping the preliminaries in favour of high tantric teachings leads to eventual collapse of practice, and describes how senior disciples of the lineage — precisely because they completed ngondro — remain steady and humble decades later. The lesson then works through the opening homage verses, introducing the Three Lineages (mind, symbol, and hearing) and offering individual homages to Longchenpa and Jigme Lingpa, closing with an insistence that faith in these lineage masters is the indispensable root of all realization.
