Karma Lingpa belongs to the distinctive Tibetan institution of the terton, the treasure revealer. In Nyingma understanding, Padmasambhava, the eighth century master who established Buddhism in Tibet, concealed teachings, termas, in rocks, lakes and the minds of future disciples, timed to surface when the world would need them. The terton is the person karmically appointed to find one. Tradition records Karma Lingpa as the son of the master Nyida Sangye, born in the Dakpo region of southeastern Tibet in the fourteenth century, and says he drew his treasure, while still a young man, from a mountain in the region.
That treasure was the cycle called the Self-Liberation of the Peaceful and Wrathful Deities through Contemplating the Zhitro, the Karling Zhitro, a body of tantric ritual and instruction centered on the hundred peaceful and wrathful deities encountered in visionary experience. The transmission histories say he passed the cycle under seal to his son Nyida Choje, through whom it spread across central and eastern Tibet in the following century. Beyond the lineage records, the biographical trace is thin: dates are approximate, the details vary between histories, and modern scholars such as Bryan Cuevas have shown how much of the received life is reconstruction by later lineage holders. What is certain is the cycle itself, which became one of the most widely used funerary liturgies in the Tibetan world.