Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche: An Unconventional Life

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche wore many hats: Buddhist teacher, prolific author, poet, painter. Most people know him for one thing above the rest, which is carrying Tibetan Buddhism across the ocean to Western students. He planted more than 200 meditation centers and founded Naropa University, the first Buddhist college in the United States. His name still stirs argument. To make sense of what he left behind, it helps to go back to where he started.

He was born in February 1939 in Kham, a region of eastern Tibet. Before he turned two, teachers identified him as the eleventh incarnation of the Trungpa Tulkus, a succession of respected masters inside the Kagyu school. Kagyu is one of the six principal schools of Himalayan Buddhism and often goes by the name of the oral lineage. It grew out of Vajrayana, one of three vehicles toward enlightenment, the companions being Sravakayana and Mahayana.

Childhood for him meant study, and plenty of it. Three of Tibet's finest teachers took charge of his education: Jamgon Kongtrul, Dilgo Khyentse, and Khenpo Gangshar. The plan was for him to become supreme abbot of the Surmang monasteries and to govern the Surmang region. He completed the full course of training, earned the degrees of Kyorpon and Khenpo, and received ordination at twenty.

Then the ground shifted. The 1959 Tibetan Uprising against communist China collapsed, and like the Dalai Lama he had to run. He guided a group of roughly 300 monks on foot and horseback over the Himalayas toward India. Thirteen of them lived to see the other side. He reached India and stayed from 1959 to 1963, advising the Young Lamas Home School on the Dalai Lama's counsel.

During those exile years he picked up English. He had a theory that language could knit mind and body together, and later, teaching Americans, he complained that they were careless with their words. The idea of carrying the buddhadharma to Western students had taken hold of him. Westerners warmed to him, and in 1963 the Spalding Scholarship took him out of India and into Oxford, where he read Comparative Religion along with philosophy and fine arts. In 1967 he went north to Scotland and, with Akong Rinpoche, established a meditation center that became Samye Ling, the first Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the West.

In 1969 he left Scotland for Bhutan and spent ten days alone on retreat. He came out of it facing a problem he could not solve. His robes and his teachings seemed to leave Western students both starstruck and scared off, and he could not see the way through to them. The materialism he watched spreading disturbed him; he spoke often of living in a dark age. Not long after returning to Scotland, he crashed a car with a woman companion beside him. What exactly happened that night is still argued over. The wreck left his left side paralyzed for good.

The accident turned him. In 1970 he set aside his robes and monastic vows, saying the West needed a Dharma stripped of its cultural packaging. He married a young Englishwoman, Diana Pybus, and crossed to the United States when his students asked him to come.

He moved fast once he landed in North America. Karma Choling, his first retreat center, opened in Vermont, and he spent long stretches there. People came in numbers, though many of them doubted this man could be a Buddhist leader given how he behaved. The following he built was loyal and nothing like traditional. That same year he set up Karma Dzong, a Buddhist community, in Boulder, Colorado. Boulder turned into a rising center of practice. He lectured at the University of Colorado and launched the Shambhala Mountain Center. By 1974 Naropa had opened its doors to all sorts of restless students, a crossroads where poets, painters, and clergy could run into one another. He wanted sparks to fly between cultures and faiths, with everyone chasing the truth rather than dwelling on what divided them.

Through the 1970s Buddhism spread in his wake as he kept traveling and opening centers for one cause after another. He gave the West the buddhadharma, and he gave himself a steady supply of controversy, inventing the phrase crazy wisdom along the way. His life ran loud and ended early. He died in 1987 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The cause of death drew as much dispute as everything else, most likely liver damage from heavy drinking, and still people loved him. His cremation at Karma Choling drew more than 3,000 people from around the globe. Some swore that rainbows filled a cloudless sky in his honor.

His remains lie now in the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya at the Shambhala Mountain Center in Colorado. Two years after his death, in 1991, his reincarnation Chokyi Sengay was found in Tibet. His eldest son, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, carried the Shambhala lineage forward in the West. For all the scandal around how he lived and the oddness of how he taught, the man stayed beloved, and the mark he left shows in the thousands of lives he reached. - Kate Mattes

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