A Movement That Catalogued Its Own Treasure Revealers

Because the terton's claim to have discovered a genuine treasure is inherently difficult to verify from outside, the tradition itself developed internal criteria and warnings about false tertons from an early period, and the nineteenth century Rime, or non-sectarian, movement in eastern Tibet undertook a major project of collecting and systematising terma literature, most associated with the scholar Jamgon Kongtrul, who compiled a large anthology of treasure teachings and helped establish a canonical list of the tradition's most authoritative tertons, an effort that gave the diffuse and individually unverifiable phenomenon of treasure revelation a more organised textual and institutional shape than it had possessed before.

That cataloguing project did not eliminate the underlying problem it responded to, since new claimants to the terton role have continued to appear into the present, and senior Nyingma teachers still exercise real discretion in deciding which revelations to accept into wider practice and which to treat with caution, so recognition of a terton today rests, as it always has, on the judgement of established lineage holders assessing an individual claim rather than on any fixed external test that could settle the question mechanically.