Rime: The Tibetan Non-Sectarian Movement

The Rime (ris med, literally "unbiased" or "without partiality," often translated "non-sectarian" or "eclectic") movement arose in nineteenth-century eastern Tibet, in the region of Kham, as a response to what its founders regarded as an excessive and doctrinally impoverishing sectarianism that had come to characterize relations among Tibet's Buddhist schools, particularly after the Gelug school's political ascendancy following the fifth Dalai Lama's 1642 establishment of the Ganden Phodrang government, an ascendancy that some non-Gelug institutions experienced as marginalizing or actively suppressive of their own textual and contemplative traditions. The movement's leading figures — Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo (1820–1892), an extraordinarily prolific scholar and terma revealer based at Dzongsar Monastery; Jamgön Kongtrul Lodro Thaye (1813–1899), himself trained across Kagyu, Nyingma, and Sakya lineages; and the tertön Chogyur Lingpa (1829–1870) — were not affiliated with a single school seeking to displace the others, but rather actively sought empowerments, textual transmissions, and instruction across the full range of Kagyu, Sakya, Nyingma, and, to a lesser extent, Bon traditions, treating sectarian lineage boundaries as an obstacle to preserving Tibet's full contemplative and doctrinal inheritance rather than as a fixed feature of authentic transmission.