The Truth About Naropa University's History

Naropa University sits in Boulder, Colorado as a private, nonprofit (501c3) school granting both bachelor's and master's degrees. A Tibetan Buddhist lineage holder founded it, and the choice of Boulder was deliberate: the mountains and thin air there echo the high-elevation world of classical Tibet. Its sister organization, Shambhala Mountain Center, sits up in Red Feather Lakes, Colorado, for similar reasons.

For most of its history the school has run across three campuses, Arapahoe, Nalanda, and Paramita. What people associate with Naropa is the idea of an 'Enlightened Society,' pursued through a liberal arts education in psychology, neuroscience coursework, religious studies, interdisciplinary programs, and other fields. Students have had regular chances to sit with recognized Tibetan Buddhist lineage holders and work on the mindfulness practices the school teaches.

Of all the universities in Boulder, Naropa is arguably the strangest and most compelling, for three reasons: where it came from, how it teaches, and what it could become. Start with its origins. The founder, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, was one of Tibet's sharpest scholars, born as a recognized reincarnated tulku of the highest rank. He also adapted to Western life remarkably fast once he and his companions were forced out of Tibet under threat of execution. Alongside the Dalai Lama, he spent the rest of his life carrying Tibetan Buddhism into the West.

Then there is the method. The academic work is genuinely demanding, and it runs in parallel with traditional meditation practices drawn from the East. By letting students meet one-on-one with Tibetan Buddhist teachers inside an accredited classroom, the school built a foundation for mindfulness-based higher education in psychology, religious studies, neuroscience, and beyond.

And there is the potential. Naropa was built to be a point of awareness in a culture that mostly reinforces cognitive belief systems while ignoring direct perception of the mind. Students get to train the mind rigorously, with academic and contemplative work woven together rather than kept apart. That combination is hard to find anywhere else in accredited American higher education.

Naropa students have a reputation for serious training in mindfulness practices aimed at self-awareness, executive attention, and self-regulation. The coursework pairs academic study with contemplative work so that learning has the best chance of taking hold. The experience is genuinely unlike almost any other program in the country, and the reason is depth of origin: no other institution has roots quite like these. Sitting one-on-one with Tibetan Buddhist lineage holders, Zen lineage holders, and others, students can earn a fully accredited degree and develop their interior awareness under masters of mindfulness at the same time. The bachelor's programs span Contemplative Art Therapy, Contemplative Martial Arts, Contemplative Psychology, Creative Writing and Literature, Early Childhood Education, Environmental Studies, Interdisciplinary Studies, Music, Peace Studies, Performance, Religious Studies, Visual Arts, and Yoga Studies.

The man who started it, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, was a prolific Buddhist teacher, author, poet, and artist. He is remembered mostly for bringing Tibetan Buddhism to the West, founding more than 200 meditation centers and the first fully accredited Buddhist university. To understand what he and the school left behind, you have to go back to the start.

He was born in February 1939 in the Kham region of Tibet. Before he turned two, he was recognized as the eleventh reincarnation of the Trungpa tulkus, a line of important teachers in the Kagyo school. Kagyo is one of the six main schools of Himalayan Buddhism, often called the 'oral lineage' school, one of the 'newly interpreted' schools that grew out of Vajrayana. Vajrayana is one of three vehicles to enlightenment, the others being Sravakayana and Mahayana. That tradition is where the thread leading to Naropa begins.

His training was relentless. Three of Tibet's most respected teachers, Jamgon Kongtrul, Dilgo Khyentse, and Khenpo Gangshar, guided him toward becoming supreme abbot of the Surmang monasteries and governor of the Surmang region. He completed his studies with the degrees of Kyorpon (Doctor of Divinity) and Khenpo (Master of Studies), and was fully ordained at twenty.

Not long after, he followed the Dalai Lama out of Tibet during the 1959 Tibetan Uprising, a failed bid for freedom against communist China. He led a party of roughly 300 monks on foot and horseback across the Himalayas into India; only 13 survived the crossing. He stayed in India from 1959 to 1963, and on the Dalai Lama's counsel he worked as an advisor to the Young Lamas Home School. During those years in exile he started learning English, convinced that language was a way of joining mind and body. Later he would teach English to Americans himself.

His effort won over Western supporters, and in 1963 the Spalding Scholarship took him from India to Oxford, where he studied comparative religion along with philosophy and fine arts. In 1967 he moved to Scotland and co-founded a meditation center with Akong Rinpoche. That place, now called Samye Ling, became the West's first Tibetan Buddhist monastery.

While living at the monastery in Scotland, he reached a turning. In 1969 he left for Bhutan and spent ten days on solitary retreat, wrestling with how to reach Western students who were both dazzled and frightened by his robes and his teachings. The world's growing materialism troubled him, and he spoke often of the dark age he felt he was living through. He was not sure how to go on.

Soon after returning to Scotland he was in a car accident with a female companion. The circumstances are still debated, but the crash left his left side permanently paralyzed. He treated it as a catalyst. In 1970 he set aside his robes and vows, arguing that the West needed a Dharma stripped of cultural trappings. He then married his young English wife, Diana Pybus, and traveled to the United States at his students' request.

In North America he moved quickly, opening his first retreat center, Karma Choling, in Vermont. Westerners came to him in numbers, though plenty of them doubted he was a Buddhist leader at all, given how unconventionally he behaved. The early co-founders of Naropa could tell you as much.