Naropa University: The Truth About Naropa's History

Naropa University sits in Boulder, Colorado as a private, non-profit (501c3) institution, founded by a holder of a Tibetan Buddhist lineage who wanted a real academic home for undergraduate and graduate students. The choice of Boulder was deliberate. The high elevation and the mountains echo the classical Tibetan world the founder came from. Its sister organization, Shambhala Mountain Center, sits up in Red Feather Lakes, Colorado, in similar terrain.

For most of its existence the school has run across three campuses: Arapahoe, Nalanda, and Paramita. The reputation it carries is built on the idea of an 'Enlightened Society,' pursued through a liberal arts education covering psychology, neuroscience, religious studies, interdisciplinary work, and a long list of other subjects. Students have often had the chance to sit with recognized Tibetan Buddhist lineage holders, which deepens the mindfulness training that runs through the curriculum.

Of all the schools in Boulder, Naropa may be the strangest and the most compelling. Three things explain why: where it came from, how it teaches, and what it could become. Start with the origin. The founder was Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher counted among the most gifted scholars his country produced, recognized at birth as a reincarnated Tulku of the highest rank. He also adapted to Western life with unusual speed after he and his companions were forced out of Tibet under threat of execution. For the rest of his life, working alongside the Dalai Lama, he carried Tibetan Buddhism westward.

The teaching method is the second reason. Naropa pairs a serious academic workload with meditation practices drawn from Eastern traditions. Students can meet one-on-one with Tibetan Buddhist religious leaders inside an accredited classroom, and that combination laid the groundwork for mindfulness-based higher education in psychology, religious studies, neuroscience, and more. The third reason is potential. The school was built to act as a point of clarity in a culture that tends to reinforce belief systems rather than let people perceive the mind directly. Academic and contemplative training are woven together so students can train their attention rigorously.

That training has given Naropa students a reputation of their own. Mindfulness practice there aims at self-awareness, executive attention, and self-regulation, and the coursework keeps academic study and contemplative study running side by side to get the most out of both. The experience is hard to match anywhere else in the country, partly because the roots go deeper than at institutions trying to offer something similar. By meeting privately with Tibetan Buddhist lineage holders, Zen lineage holders, and others, a student can earn a fully accredited degree while working on interior awareness with people who have mastered these practices. 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.

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche is remembered as a prolific teacher, author, poet, and artist. He brought Tibetan Buddhism to the West by establishing more than 200 meditation centers and the first fully accredited Buddhist university. His was a life worth remembering, but to make sense of the legacy 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 significant teachers within the Kagyu school. Kagyu is one of the six principal schools of Himalayan Buddhism, sometimes called the 'oral lineage' school, and it is one of several 'newly interpreted' schools that grew out of Vajrayana. Vajrayana is one of the three vehicles to enlightenment, the others being Sravakayana and Mahayana. That tradition is where Naropa's own orientation begins.

His childhood was built around a punishing schedule of study and training. Three of Tibet's most respected teachers, Jamgon Kongtrul, Dilgo Khyentse, and Khenpo Gangshar, prepared him to become supreme abbot of the Surmang monasteries and governor of the Surmang region. He completed his studies, took the degrees of Kyorpon (Doctor of Divinity) and Khenpo (Master of studies), and was fully ordained at twenty.

Soon after, he followed the Dalai Lama out of Tibet during the 1959 uprising, a failed bid for freedom against communist China. He led a group 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, advised the Young Lamas Home School. In exile he started learning English, convinced that language was a way of joining mind and body. In time he would teach English to Americans. Western sympathizers helped him win the Spalding Scholarship in 1963, and he left India for Oxford to study comparative religions along with philosophy and fine arts. In 1967 he went to Scotland and co-founded a meditation center with Akong Rinpoche, the place now called Samye Ling, the first Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the West.

Change came before Naropa ever existed. In 1969 he left Scotland for Bhutan and spent ten days in solitary retreat, where he reportedly faced a problem he could not solve: how to reach Western students who were both dazzled and intimidated by his robes and his teaching. He worried over the rising materialism of the age and spoke often of a dark time. Not long after returning to Scotland, he was in a car accident with a female companion. The circumstances remain disputed, but the crash left his left side permanently paralyzed. He treated the accident as a turning point, shedding his robes and vows in 1970 and arguing that the West needed a Dharma stripped of its cultural trappings. He then married his young English wife, Diana Pybus, and crossed to the United States at the request of his students. In North America he opened his first retreat center, Karma Choling, in Vermont. Westerners came to him in numbers, many unable to believe this unconventional man was a Buddhist leader at all, as the earliest people around the project could attest.