Longchenpa spent much of his adult life without institutional protection. He trained at Sangphu, the great scholastic monastery, and left it; he received the Seminal Heart transmissions from a teacher named Kumaradza while living in extreme poverty in the mountains; and he then fell out with the ruling Phagmodru administration in a dispute that made central Tibet unsafe for him.
He went to Bhutan and stayed roughly a decade, founding monasteries that still exist, taking a partner and having children there. He was eventually able to return, and died in 1364 at the age of fifty six. The pattern of his life, moving between retreat, exile and brief institutional involvement, is visible in the work, which is written by someone with time and without a committee.
His influence was slow and then decisive. Four centuries later Jigme Lingpa, who revealed the Longchen Nyingtik cycle, presented it as received from Longchenpa in visions, and that cycle became the most widely practised body of Nyingma material in existence. Effectively every Dzogchen lineage now active runs through Longchenpa either textually or by that visionary route, and the Western presentations of Dzogchen that appeared in the twentieth century draw on his exposition more than on any other source.