Tradition holds that terma teachings were originally esoterically hidden by eighth-century Vajrayana masters Padmasambhava and Yeshe Tsogyal, to be discovered at auspicious times by treasure revealers known as tertöns.
[citation needed] There is another occasion involving Chaitanya, who deposited his divine love (prema) for the great saint Narottama Dasa in the Padma River in Bangladesh.
[4] The central Mahayana figure Nagarjuna rediscovered the last part of the "Prajnaparamita Sutra in one hundred thousand verses" in the realm of nāga, where it had been kept since the time of Gautama Buddha.
If the concealed or encoded teaching or object is a text, it is often written in dakini script, a non-human type of code or writing that only a tertön can decipher.
Padmasambhava and Yeshe Tsogyal and principal students secreted away and hid religious texts, ritual objects, relics, et cetera, to be discovered when conditions were ripe for the revelation of their contents.
In the 19th century, the most famous three were the Khyen-Kong-Chok sum: Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo, Jamgon Kongtrul and Orgyen Chokgyur Lingpa.
Earth treasures include not only texts, but also sacred images, ritual instruments, and medicinal substances, and they are found in many places: temples, monuments, statues, mountains, rocks, trees, lakes, and even the sky.
Occasionally, full-length texts are found, but they are usually fragmentary, sometimes consisting of only a word or two, and they are encoded in symbolic script, which may change mysteriously and often disappears completely once it has been transcribed.
The mind-terma are constituted by space and are placed via guru-transmission, or realizations achieved in meditation which connect the practitioner directly with the essential content of the teaching in one simultaneous experience.
Once this has occurred, the tertön holds the complete teaching in mind and is required by convention to transcribe the terma twice from memory (if of textual nature) in one uninterrupted session.
Though somewhat contentious, the kind of revealed teaching embodied in the terma system is based in solid Mahayana Buddhist traditions.
Teachings were hidden by masters such as Lishu Tagring and Drenpa Namkha, often inside Buddhist temples, as in Samye and Lhodrak.