In 1990, Kyabjé Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche taught one thousand five hundred people at Rigpa’s summer retreat in Prapoutel in the French Alps. Over ten days, he gave the most important empowerments and teachings for the complete practice of the Nyingma path and Dzogchen. An unprecedented gathering of masters were present. Sogyal Rinpoche later wrote of this remarkable occasion:

I think in particular of the teachings Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche gave in the south of France near Grenoble in the last year of his life, when, gazing out toward the valley and the mountains, in a setting of almost Tibetan grandeur, he granted the transmission of the most important Dzogchen teachings to 1,500 students, many of them, which gave me particular joy, students of mine from all over the world. A number of the masters present felt that through this act in the last year of his life, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche was placing his seal definitively on the coming of these teachings to the West, and blessing their reception with the accumulated power of lifetimes of meditation. For my part, I felt, with amazed gratitude, that he was giving his blessing also to all that I had been trying to do for the teachings in the West over the years.

For Rinpoche, it was one of the crowning moments of his life to see and hear how deeply, and with what joy, this great master appreciated what he had achieved in his work. Of the retreat itself, Rinpoche observed: “the real significance of this we can hardly comprehend. Only in the future, and over many years, will the realization of its meaning slowly dawn, as its reverberations are felt...” At Prapoutel, almost casually and without ceremony, Khyentse Rinpoche did a divination that gave the go-ahead for The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, and also blessed the site for a future retreat centre in France, Lerab Ling.