Sakyong Mipham: Father and Son
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche held the first place in the Sakyong Lineage, and people still know him by the title "Dragon Earth-Protector." His son, Sakyong Mipham, is the second and present Sakyong, carrying the plainer title of "Earth-Protector." From the time his son was young, Trungpa told him that the world was not ready to understand what "Earth-Protector" meant. He described it instead as a kind of philosophical king: someone who leads other people through goodwill and devotion rather than force. The royal imagery sits right there in the words Sakyong and Sakyong Wangmo, the latter being the Sakyong's wife, yet neither title claims power in any ordinary political sense. What they point to is obligation. To hold the lineage is to accept a duty toward humanity, a form of leadership offered during an age shot through with social, political, and religious corruption.
Father and son both wanted a world run on kindheartedness. Trungpa built the groundwork for Shambhala Buddhism, naming it after a legendary realm of awakened beings. His aim was practical as much as spiritual: he wanted a tradition that could speak to modern people while keeping older wisdom intact, something that would actually draw them in. Once he had left Tibet, he saw that teaching had to continue, and that it would have to hold ancient insight alongside the fast spread of materialism and modern life. Buddhism, as he understood it, shows a person the reality of suffering and ways to ease it one life at a time. Shambhala was meant to do something similar at the scale of a whole society, with a stronger emphasis on community and a cause that reached across the globe. His son now keeps that cause alive.
The Sakyong was born in India and spent his first years with his mother in a refugee settlement. Tibetan and Hindi were the languages of his childhood; English came later, when he was still young and joined his father in Scotland. His studies ran along two tracks. On one side sat the Buddhist dharma, the ritual texts and practices that belonged to his heritage. On the other came Western art, philosophy, and politics. Speaking to Tricycle magazine years afterward, he suggested his father had conceived him with real deliberation, shaping him to move gracefully between two worlds so the lineage could one day pass into his hands.
After arriving in the West, he ran many of his father's events and programs. He trained in contemplative disciplines and in martial arts, picking up Tibetan, English, Chinese, Japanese, and American cultural fluency along the way. Trungpa plainly intended for his evolving idea of Shambhala to continue, and that intention took root. He held that Buddhists could reshape society and strengthen the common sense of what it means to be human. In the years since his death, the Shambhala community has started foundations, meditation centers, schools, and a good deal more. You could argue the whole project has outgrown what its founder dared to hope for.
When Trungpa died, his son did not step straight into leadership. He went to Nepal to study under a great teacher, and during that gap the sangha started to splinter. Osel Tendzin led Shambhala in the interim, a figure who stays controversial to this day even though his name rarely comes up in conversation. He died not long after Trungpa. The Sakyong then took the role of lineage holder, and he met some psychological hostility from senior figures in the community at the start. For all his youth, people say he carried the new weight with an ease, a generosity, and a gladness that surprised them. Before long it was obvious that the Shambhala vision was not merely going to hold together; it was going to grow.
He is not a copy of his father, and he is not especially like him either. Trungpa was known for exploits many found hard to defend, and the two men lived quite differently: one a heavy drinker and smoker, the other a runner and a keeper of tradition. Still, a genuine respect ran between them, each recognizing something large in the other. Trungpa saw his son as a great leader and a reincarnation while the boy was still the Sawang. His Holiness the sixteenth Karmapa, one of the senior Tibetan authorities responsible for identifying reborn teachers, saw the same thing. Trungpa brought his son to meet the Karmapa, and near the close of the visit he sent the Sawang out to wait in the car. With the boy gone, Trungpa asked the Karmapa not to announce publicly that the Sawang was the reincarnation of Mipham the Great. He had his own design for how his son's greatness should unfold. A public recognition then would have obliged traditional Tibetan leaders to pull the boy immediately into formal study, and Trungpa wanted him kept on the path he had laid instead. The Sakyong speaks of his father's legacy with that in mind. Whether the man was enlightened or half-mad, he shouldered a burden past measuring and left behind a community worth having. - Kate Mattes