Yongdzin Lopön Tenzin Namdak Rinpoche was a lineage holder of the Yungdrung Bön tradition, born in 1925 in Eastern Tibet. He received an outstanding education at the leading monasteries, taking monastic vows at the age of seventeen and studying Sutra, Tantra, and Dzogchen under great masters. In 1952, at Menri Monastery, he earned the degree of geshe (Doctor of Philosophy) and became head teacher (Lopön). Because of the Chinese occupation, however, Rinpoche endured severe hardship: he was wounded and spent ten months in prison, but in 1960 he managed to escape to Nepal, saving the tradition's most important texts and relics.

In the early 1960s, Rinpoche became a key figure in bringing knowledge of Bön to the West. At the invitation of Professor David Snellgrove, he worked at the universities of London and Cambridge, where he took part in producing the book "The Nine Ways of Bön" — the first scholarly study of this tradition in the Western world. Returning to India, he devoted his efforts to saving his people and their culture: in 1967 he founded a settlement for Bönpo refugees in Dolanji, and later played a decisive role in restoring Menri Monastery and in the election of its 33rd abbot, His Holiness Menri Trizin.

The restoration of the educational system became his principal work in the years that followed. In 1978, Rinpoche opened the School of Dialectics in Dolanji, raising a new generation of teachers, and in 1987 he founded Triten Norbutse Monastery in Kathmandu, Nepal, with a full curriculum in philosophy and the Tibetan sciences. Thanks to his tireless work, the Yungdrung Bön tradition not only survived in exile but, by the late 1980s, began to return to Tibet itself. 

On June 12, 2025, His Holiness peacefully entered parinirvana at his retreat residence in Kathmandu, Nepal.