The Treasury of Lives

The Eleventh Zurmang Trungpa, Chokyi Gyatso (zur mang drung pa 11 chos kyi rgya mtsho), was born on March 5, 1939 in a nomadic encampment in the Nangchen region of Kham. He is popularly known as Chogyam Trungpa (chos rgya drung pa). "Chogyam" is a contraction of the first and third syllable of his personal name (the final "m" is borrowed from the fourth syllable, as per common Tibetan pronunciation). In publications his name is often written "Chögyam."

There are many sources for the life of Chogyam Trungpa, including his own autobiography, which he revised twice, and several biographies in book form. Many students have published memoirs of their time with him. Trungpa has been featured in both popular and academic publications, from magazine articles to studies of contemporary Buddhism, and there are scores of websites dedicated to his memory. Almost all of these are hagiographical. In recent decades more critical reporting has appeared, mostly in online forums and non-Buddhist publications. These include investigations of abuse at the organizations that he founded, and reevaluations of his teaching methods and his leadership practices.

Trungpa's father was a minor landowner named Yeshe Dargye (ye shes dar rgyas), and his mother was named Dungtso Dolma (dung mtsho sgrol ma). According to Trungpa's autobiography, Born in Tibet, from which most of the information in the initial section of this article is drawn, Chokyi Gyatso was his parents' second child. After he was conceived his father abandoned his mother, and she remarried before his birth. His stepfather raised him as his own.^[1] A younger brother named Damcho Tenpel (dam chos bstan phel) would also be identified as an incarnation, based at Kyere Monastery (skye re dgon).

Soon after his birth a lama from nearby Tashi Lhapuk Monastery (bkra shis lha phug) passed through and blessed him. The lama told the parents that he wanted the child for his monastery, and to therefore keep him clean and well cared for.^[2]

Before the lama could return for him, however, the child was recognized as the reincarnation of the Tenth Zurmang Trungpa, Karma Chokyi Nyinje (zur mang drung pa 10 karma chos kyi nyin byed, c. 1879–1938), whose traditional seat was Zurmang Dutsitil (zur mang bdud rtsi mthil). The identification was made by the then fifteen-year-old Sixteenth Karmapa, Rangjung Rigpai Dorje (karma pa 16 rang byung rig pa'i rdo rje, 1924–1981), who was visiting Pelpung Monastery (dpal spungs dgon) in Derge. Envoys from Zurmang Monastery had earlier petitioned the Karmapa for an indication as to where they might find the reincarnation of the Tenth Trungpa. While at Pelpung the Karmapa is said to have experienced two visions that provided the location of the birth village, the composition of the family, and the names of the parents of the next Trungpa incarnation. The names given in the vision were those of Chogyam Trungpa's biological father and a combined name of the mother's given name and nickname, facts that initially delayed the search party's arrival at the correct dwelling. Trungpa wrote that when the search party arrived at his home, slightly more than a year after his birth, he welcomed the monks as though they were old friends and blessed them when they left.^[3]

In the early 1940s the Sixteenth Karmapa visited Zurmang, and the young Trungpa was brought there to be enthroned. His parents were given land in their home region in exchange for the child. They accompanied him to Zurmang, where his mother remained until he was five years old. Later, after her husband passed away, Trungpa's mother lived outside the monastery wall with a sister of the Tenth Zurmang Trungpa, tending cattle. The Fifth Rolpai Dorje Tulku, (rol pa'i rdo rje sprul sku 05), then the head of Dutsitil, served as sponsor of the enthronement. He and the head of Dutsitil's sister institution, Zurmang Namgyeltse (zur mang rnam rgyal rtse), the Garwang Tulku (gar dbang sprul sku), gave the child vows and the name Karma Tenzin Trinle Kunkhyab Pel Zangpo (karma bstan 'dzin 'phrin las kun khyab dpal bzang po).^[4]

Trungpa was trained at Zurmang Dutsitil. His initial tutor, with whom he lived from the age of five, was a man named Asang Lama (a sang bla ma), who had been a student of the Tenth Zurmang Trungpa. For two years they lived together in the hermitage of Dorje Khyung Dzong (rdo rje khyung rdzong), which the Tenth Trungpa had established for three-year retreats. After moving back down to the monastery for a three-month reading transmission of the Kangyur by a Genchung Lama (rgan chung bla ma), Trungpa was assigned a new tutor, Apo Karma (a pho karma), and his studies increased in rigor.^[5]

Before the child was ten years old he met two incarnations of the great Jamgon Kongtrul ('jam mgon kong sprul, 1813–1899): the Second Pelpung Kongtrul, Khyentse Wozer (dpal spungs kong sprul 02 mkhyen brtse'i 'od zer, 1904–1953) and Shechen Kongtrul Pema Drime (zhe chen kong sprul pad+ma dri med, 1901–1960). Pelpung Kongtrul gave Trungpa his novice ordination vows at the age of eight, while he was passing through Zurmang. The following year Shechen Kongtrul traveled to Zurmang to give the transmission of Jamgon Kongtrul's Treasury of Advice (dam ngag mdzod), a ceremony that proved so popular with the local people that the lama initially fled to the hermitage and then fell ill from the effort. Shechen Kongtrul would remain Trungpa's closest teacher until he fled Tibet. One year after that teaching, Dilgo Khyentse Tashi Peljor (dil mgo mkhyen brtse bkra shis dpal 'byor, 1910–1991), who had received teachings from the Tenth Trungpa, arrived in Zurmang to give Dzogchen teachings.^[6]

For the next ten years Trungpa moved around Kham, returning to Zurmang between tours to learn about the administration of the monastery. Monastic tours are a standard practice for high lamas, a way both to raise revenue and to transmit teachings to communities outside their own monasteries. They were also opportunities to receive training, and Trungpa stayed at Shechen Monastery (zhe chen), Pelpung, and other monasteries for extended periods to receive transmissions of Kagyu and Nyingma teachings. His first study period at Shechen, to train with Shechen Kongtrul, was at the age of thirteen. He brought two cows to provide himself with milk and butter. Shechen Kongtrul gave him the transmission of the Treasury of Revelations (rin chen gter mdzod), another of Jamgon Kongtrul's collections, after which he joined the monastic college, Lekshe Nyida Ling (legs bshad nyi zla'i gling), which Shechen Kongtrul himself had established. On later visits Shechen Kongtrul would teach him the works of the great Nyingma philosopher Longchenpa (klong chen pa, 1308–1364).^[7]

Despite his hope that he would remain at Shechen for an extended period of time, he was quickly called back to Zurmang in the wake of an abbot's death. He soon traveled to Thrangu Monastery (khra 'gu dgon) to represent Zurmang at the funeral of the Eighth Tralek Kyabgon Rinpoche (khra legs skyab mgon rin po che). Pelpung Kongtrul also attended the event. It was their last meeting, as he died soon after.^[8]

Trungpa assumed his duties as a lama while still a teenager. In the mid 1950s, on a visit to Drolma Lhakhang (sgrol ma lha khang) outside of Chamdo—not to be confused with the famous Longtang Dolma Lhakhang (klong thang sgrol ma lha khang)—he met his close friend and future collaborator Akong Tulku (a dkon sprul sku, 1940–2013). Already Trungpa was presiding over massive religious ceremonies. On that occasion he gave the Treasury of Revelations. His tutor Karma Norzang (karma nor bzang) gave the reading transmission, and Trungpa performed the empowerments.^[9]

On these tours during the first half of the 1950s, Trungpa repeatedly encountered Chinese Communist troops and officials, who were moving deeper and deeper into Tibetan territory. After the Communist People's Liberation Army (PLA) defeated the Nationalists in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, Mao Zedong, the head of the Chinese Communist Party, had declared Tibet to be part of China. The PLA immediately began to build infrastructure in Tibetan areas in Kham, nationalize land and establish communes, and assert authority over monasteries. In his autobiography Trungpa describes feeling both dismay at the rapid industrialization of his homeland and also fascination with the technology and the window the changes offered to the larger world.^[10]

In the mid 1950s Trungpa went to Dzongsar Monastery (rdzong sar dgon) to receive the transmission of the Kālacakra teachings from Khyentse Chokyi Lodro (mkhyen brtse chos kyi blo gros, 1893–1959). On the journey there from Shechen, Trungpa passed through the town of Manigango, where he heard a story of a local man who had attained the rainbow body, a sign of the attainment of enlightenment. The man had been a servant and a laborer, untrained in formal religious practice but devout and compassionate, and dedicated in his meditations. On the eve of his death, a year prior to Trungpa's visit, he requested that his family not disturb his body for a week. Slowly his corpse shrank in size, emitting rainbow-colored light before vanishing altogether, leaving only his hair and nails. The fact that a layperson without any exalted connections or status could attain enlightenment was a significant inspiration for Trungpa, a clear sign that one did not have to be highly educated or ordained to be liberated.^[11]

In 1955 at the request of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso (da la'i bla ma 14 bstan 'dzin rgya mtsho, b. 1935), the Sixteenth Karmapa toured Kham to gather information on the situation there under Chinese occupation. The Karmapa stopped over in Derge to great fanfare and enthroned the Twelfth Situ, Situ Pema Donyo Nyinje (si tu 12 pad+ma don yod nyin byed, b. 1954). The young Trungpa attended the ceremony and had a short audience with the Karmapa.^[12]

Not yet eighteen, Trungpa was increasingly tasked with serving the administration of his monastery. In Derge he had spoken with the Sixteenth Karmapa about expanding Dutsitil's monastic college, and he spent several years pursuing the idea, completing construction in 1958, the year he himself earned the degree of khenpo (mkhan po). At the same time, increasing numbers of refugees from the east side of the Drichu ('bris chu), or Upper Yangtze River, were passing through Nangchen on their way to central Tibet, bringing reports of destruction and violence at the hand of the Chinese Communists. Trungpa debated for several years whether to leave his homeland, torn between his duties to his community and the increasingly dire warnings from all around him. Shechen Kongtrul had himself already left for central Tibet, and had invited Trungpa to join him.^[13]

In early 1959, at the age of twenty, back at Zurmang, Trungpa received full ordination from Rolpai Dorje, who urged him to leave Tibet. The Communists had recently occupied Zurmang for a period of several months and had demanded an exorbitant sum from the monastery to permit it to stay active. Rolpai Dorje informed Trungpa that Chinese officials were now seeking him, for reasons unknown. He left his monastery immediately, with the intention of hiding from the Communists, and, ultimately, arranging his flight from Tibet.^[14]

The circumstances of his final decision to leave were that Trungpa was in the Lhatok (lha thog) region of western Kham to participate in the enthronement of a new king. Invitations from anxious monasteries came in from all directions, including one from Yak Monastery to the south of Chamdo, to give the transmission of the Treasury of Revelations. He agreed to this, and while there sent messages to the Karmapa's main seat in Tibet, Tsurpu Monastery (mtshur phu), begging the Karmapa, Dilgo Khyentse, and Shechen Kongtrul for advice on whether to stay in Kham or leave. He was hiding near Yak when word came from Zurmang that the monastery had been ransacked and that there was an active search for him. On learning of the uprising in Lhasa that began on March 10, 1959, at the age of twenty Trungpa finally decided to set out for India.^[15]

Chogyam Trungpa described his escape to India in harrowing detail in Born in Tibet. Akong Rinpoche accompanied him. They wore lay clothes and although they tried to keep their party to just a handful of people, it grew as more people joined. The uncertainty of which route to take was constant, and the journey was often treacherous. The landscape was unfamiliar and arduous, and more than once they ran into Chinese soldiers who fired upon them. There was not enough food in any valley they passed through. People went hungry, fell ill, and those who could continue were forced to leave others behind. Many in their growing party lacked resolve, debating whether they should stay and fight with the resistance, and they received conflicting advice and reports from senior lamas and people they met. They traveled with both lay and cleric, peasants and nobles, including, for a brief period, the queen of Nangchen. Trungpa left Kham on April 23, 1959, and crossed the border into India on January 24, 1960.^[16]

India

En route to India Trungpa met a nun named Konchok Peldron (dkon mchog dpal sgron, 1931–2019). Two years later, on November 15, 1962, she gave birth to his son, Ösel Rangdrol ('od gsal rang 'grol), who would later be known as Sakyong Mipham (sa skyong mi pham) and become head of Trungpa's international organization. Tibetan ordination includes a strict vow of celibacy. Trungpa was at this time still an ordained monk; he would not formally return his vows for another five years. Konchok Peldrom, forced to abandon her own ordination by the birth of a child, later married a man named Lama Pegyal (bla ma pad rgyal) and had another son, Gyurme Dorje ('gyur med rdo rje). She was in later years brought into Trungpa's organizations and referred to as "Lady Konchok Peldron."^[17]

Trungpa remained in India for three years. For most of that time he served as advisor and teacher at the Young Lama's Home School in Dalhousie, a school for incarnate lamas established in 1960 by Freda Bedi (1911–1977). Bedi, a British citizen married to an Indian politician, later became the first Western woman to ordain in the Buddhist tradition, and received full bhiksuṇi vows in Hong Kong in 1972, after which she was known as Gelongma Palmo (dge long ma dpal mo). She worked as the Sixteenth Karmapa's western secretary for many years. Funding for the school was provided by Christopher Hills (1926–1997), a British author and health-food advocate who had encouraged the Indian government to give refuge and support to the Tibetans fleeing the Communist takeover of Tibet. Akong Tulku assisted with the administration. Konchok Peldron and their son lived in a refugee camp elsewhere.^[18]

 

Britain

During his brief stay in India, Trungpa studied English with Tibetologist John Stapleton Driver (1931–2014), who was in India researching a dissertation on Guhyagarbha. Driver and Bedi are said to have together successfully arranged a "Spaulding Fellowship" for Trungpa at St. Antony's College, Oxford, where both had studied. With money from the fellowship, Trungpa spent four years in Oxford, from 1963 to 1967, and while he took classes, it appears that he never matriculated at the university nor earned a degree.^[19] In Born in Tibet, which Trungpa first published during this time in England, he wrote that he came to appreciate how "Western art cut through all hesitations to freely express whatever strange things came out of one's head."^[20] Akong Tulku once again accompanied Trungpa. He worked as a hospital orderly and shared a small apartment with Trungpa and Tulku Chime (sprul sku 'chi med, b. 1941) of Benchen Monastery (ban chen dgon), whom Trungpa had known in Kham (and who was briefly a teacher of David Bowie).^[21]

In 1967 Trungpa and Akong Tulku were invited to take over a declining Buddhist center in Scotland named the Johnstone House Contemplative Community, established by a Canadian Theravadin monk named Ananda Bodhi. Born Leslie George Dawson (1931–2003), he later took the name Namgyal Rinpoche and taught in Toronto in the Tibetan tradition. Together Trungpa and Akong inaugurated a monastery there, named Samye Ling (bsam yas gling), which is often considered the first Buddhist monastery in the West. Trained in traditional Tibetan monastic Buddhism, yet affected by the Communist takeover of Tibet, and drawn to the countercultural values, language, and behavior of his generation in Britain, Trungpa now faced a choice between transmitting what he knew in the orthodox methods in which he had been trained, or developing new ways of teaching Buddhism to the West. He famously chose the later option.

Barely a year after moving to Scotland, Trungpa traveled to India and Bhutan on the invitation of the Bhutanese royal family, who were patrons of Trungpa's beloved teachers the Karmapa and Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. While there, Trungpa gave teachings to the crown prince, Jigme Wangchuk ('jigs med dbang phyug, b. 1955) and took the opportunity to spend ten days in retreat at Taktsang (stag tshang), the famous hermitage in Paro sacred to Padmasambhava. According to later editions of his autobiography, he had an experience of intense devotion to Padmasambhava and the Second Karmapa, Karma Pakshi (karma pa 02 karma pakshi, 1204–1283), which engendered a firm conviction of the unity of Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen, the central teachings of the Kagyu and Nyingma traditions. He composed^[22] a sādhana, or meditation manual, to actualize this union. He wrote that the practice would "exorcise the materialism which seemed to pervade spiritual disciplines in the modern world. The message I had received from my supplication was that one must try to expose spiritual materialism and all its trappings, otherwise true spirituality could not develop."^[23] By the term "spiritual materialism" Trungpa meant attachment to and pursuit of certain meditative states and accomplishments, which, he argued, only served to reinforce the ego and so was counter to the path of liberation. This would henceforth become one of his main themes and arguably the teaching for which he was best known. A collection of edited lectures expanding on the topic was published in 1973 under the title Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, which remains one of the best-selling books on Buddhism.

In Calcutta and Delhi, in October, 1968, Trungpa met Thomas Merton (1915–1968), an American Trappist monk who was in India to attend the interfaith Spiritual Summit Conference. Merton described Trungpa as "a completely marvelous person. Young, natural, without front or artifice, deep, awake, wise."^[24] This was a month before Merton famously met the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, after which Harold Talbott (1939–2019) brought him to Chatral Rinpoche Yeshe Dorje (bya bral sangs rgyas rdo rje, 1913–2015) in Darjeeling. Also present at one of the meetings in Delhi was Lobsang Lhalungpa (blo bzang lha lung pa, 1926–2008), the first translator of the Life of Milarepa.

The retreat and the meeting with Merton significantly influenced Trungpa. As suggested by his description of his retreat, he accepted the countercultural insistence that mainstream religious institutions were bankrupt, corrupted by "spiritual materialism." Often cast as a halmark of Western Buddhism, whose adherants are sometimes mocked as competing to get the best enlightenment, Trungpa would lay the same charge against his fellow Tibetans. In 1974 he taught that in the Tibet of his childhood Buddhist masters had been "more concerned with building solid gold roofs on their temple, constructing gigantic Buddha images, and making their temples beautiful and impressive than with the actual practice of their lineage. They sat less and did more business."^[25] He asserted that this was a process of decline that had been going on for some time. "Tibet began to lose its connection with dharma" well over a hundred years ago," he claimed, and Buddhism there "slowly, very irritatingly and horrifically, began to turn into ugly spiritual materialism."^[26] The monasteries and religion of Tibet that was then being systematically destroyed by Communist China, Trungpa asserted, had already been corrupted by "spiritual materialism." Trungpa focused his attention on what he called the "practice lineage," by which he meant personal meditation, shorn of its traditional supports. The meditation that he would teach was the "practice, which had long been forgotten" by the religious communities of Tibet.^[27]

It is a remarkable assertion, and contrasted sharply with the teachings of other lamas, who were actively building new temples in India and who would dedicate their activities to spreading Tibetan religion around the globe. Trungpa's rejection of the outward forms of traditional religion, both Tibetan and Western, was coincident with an embrace of the values, practices, and dreams of the new counterculture. His students were not, for the most part, coming to him to trade one fully-formed ritual and belief system for another—they were not leaving their Anglican and Catholic churches to join a Tibetan Buddhist order. Nor, as expressed in the 1974 lecture quoted above, was Trungpa interested in creating one, at least at the beginning. Trungpa would not try to reconstruct traditional Tibetan religion in the West. He would endeavor to create something new. For the next two decades Trungpa's teaching would focus on the "spiritual" freed from the "materialism."

Chogyam Trungpa's innovations did not come easily. He was barely thirty, living in a foreign country with few familiar supports. His companions were two traditional monks who did not share his thirst for invention and experimentation. As a result, his time at Samye Ling was not a complete success. As he moved away from his traditional training, increasingly fascinated by the rebellious language and behavior of the young people who were drawn to him, he adopted many of their ways as his own. Trungpa engaged in sexual relationships with students, which he would continue to do through to the end of his life, and took to using drugs and drinking alcohol, actions which led to conflict with Akong Tulku and others. And yet at the same time he was not fully convinced his British disciples could follow him where he wanted to go. As he wrote of his students in his 1977 epilogue to Born in Tibet, "they seemed to be missing the point."^[28]

In 1969 some of Trungpa's talks from Samye Ling were collected and published as Meditation in Action by Stuart & Watkins. Soon after it came out Samuel Bercholz, the co-owner of a bookstore in Berkeley, California, asked to publish it in America. It was released in the fall of 1969, the first title of Shambhala Publications, which over the last fifty years has grown to become a premier publisher of Buddhist books in English. That year Trungpa was naturalized as a British citizen. His son, Ösel Rangdrol, arrived in Scotland to live with him, while Konchok Peldron remained in a refugee camp in India, where she had married several years after Trungpa left for England.^[29]

In early 1969, Chogyam Trungpa blacked out while driving under the influence of alcohol and crashed into a novelty store in Northumberland, England. He did not have a driver's license. He later wrote that the cause of his black out was his mental anguish from the struggle to find a clear path forward in his teaching.^[30] There is no record of how he avoided charges. He recovered in the home of students Christopher and Pamela Woodman. Trungpa would leave his son with these students after departing for America in 1970, and be forced to fight them in court to retrieve the child in 1971.^[31]

Among the Britons who had come to Samye Ling to study with him was a fifteen-year-old girl named Diana Pybus. Pybus had first seen Trungpa, then thirty, in the fall of 1968 at an event in London. She had already read Born in Tibet, but she did not get to hear him teach that night, as Trungpa had collapsed on the stage before speaking, from illness or possibly alcohol.^[32] Soon afterwards she attended a lecture series on Padmasambhava in London, and then in early 1969 she convinced her mother to allow her to attend a program at Samye Ling. Pybus' mother and sister went along. Over the course of the following year Pybus snuck out of her boarding school to spend weekends with Trungpa, and she recalled that the two had sex for the first time in October 1969, shortly after she turned sixteen, the legal age of consent in Britain. In her autobiography she wrote, "Later on, I realized that it was rather outrageous for us to be sleeping together, but I also thought it was terrific."^[33]

Trungpa went on to have seven "wives," known to his community as "secret consorts," or "Sangyum,"^[34] and he is said to have pressured other female students to serve as sexual partners. Women who refused were ostracized. One of his "wives," Leslie Hays, was twenty-four when her relationship with Trungpa began in 1985; he was forty-five. Hays told the Denver Post that Trungpa beat her and was emotionally abusive, and that "the vows she took bound her spiritual husband’s abuse inside of her."^[35] While Tantric Buddhism does include practices known as "sexual yoga," Trungpa appears to have made no pretense that any of his sexual relationships were in service to his own (or his partner's) religious practice. In 1985 Trungpa appointed these seven women to serve as board members of Vajradhatu, the organization he founded in 1973 (see below).^[36]

While some of these sexual relationships were kept secret, many were known by the community. Trungpa had a public reputation for propositioning women and taking them to bed. The British nun Tenzin Palmo related how Trungpa ran his hands up her leg when they met in England, very soon after he arrived in the country; she drove the heel of her shoe into his foot. He persisted, unsuccessfully, in pressuring her to have sex with him, boasting that he had been sexually active since he was thirteen. Tenzin Palmo explained that it was Trungpa's misrepresentation of his ordination status that offended her, his pretending to be a celebate monk while attempting to seduce her.^[37] For many decades she and other close female students, like their male counterparts, served as apologists for Trungpa, downplaying the abuse and even shifting the blame for his predatory behavior on the women whom he took to bed.^[38]

Trungpa's Tibetan companions were not the only ones who were scandalized by his behavior; many of his British disciples were as well.^[39] In the face of their disapproval, in October 1969 Trungpa formally disrobed. He was no longer willing to follow the path of his traditional Tibetan training and to fulfill the expectations of the ordained incarnate lama other than to teach the dharma in the way that he saw fit. Trungpa positioned himself to teach a dharma that was of Tibet but not Tibetan, a Western Buddhism that was not merely a modification of Asian Buddhism. It would appear that Trungpa's dharma would belong to neither East nor West, and could therefore be embraced by a counterculture that was by definition a rejection of any authority.

On January 3, 1970 Trungpa and Pybus married; recent Scottish law permitted a girl of sixteen to be married without parental permission. She took his clan name, Mukpo (smug po) for her married surname. Perhaps because she was upper class, and one of the first to take advantage of the new relaxed marriage laws, and because she had married a Tibetan lama more than ten years her senior, the British press took notice, and Trungpa did not welcome the media storm it engendered; stories ran around the country of the sixteen-year-old girl who had run away from home to marry her guru. Britain was becoming increasingly intolerable for Trungpa and they left soon after. Diana Mukpo wrote that the period from the automobile accident to their departure for America was for Trungpa a dark period of depression and illness.^[40] Trungpa and Akong did not part amiably. Samye Ling continued to thrive under the leadership of Akong Rinpoche. Following Trungpa's departure he is said to have declared the henceforth no one at Samye Ling was to break British law.^[41] Only in 1981, on the insistence of the Sixteenth Karmapa from his deathbed, did Trungpa and Akong end their conflict.^[42]

America 1970–1972

Chogyam Trungpa and Diana Mukpo flew to Toronto in early 1970 and stayed in Montreal for six weeks while they applied for visas to the United States. Several American students from Samye Ling who had left Britain with them bought a large dairy farm in Barnet, Vermont with the intention of establishing a residence and teaching center for Trungpa. Initially named Tail of the Tiger and renamed Karmé Chöling in 1974, it became Trungpa's first center in North America, and was the location for his first teaching in North America, a seminar on Gampopa (sgam po pa, 1079–1153) and Milarepa (mi la ras pa, 1040–1123). Trungpa went on two significant trips to teach in other locations: Bercholz invited him to teach in California, and a group of students at the University of Colorado, Boulder, brought him there to give the series of lectures that would appear as Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism.

Trungpa did not arrive in the United States with a high opinion of American dharma students, nor of their teachers. He wrote that the students "seemed to lack any understanding of discipline, and purely to appreciate teachers who went along with their own neurosis. No one seemed to be presenting a way of cutting through the students' neurosis."^[43] Trungpa was adamant that students  confront their own mind—or, in the language of the time, their "neurosis." Part of his genius was to confront them directly in their own language, and shock them out of their preconceptions of what a Buddhist teacher should be; he began one talk in 1970 with this statement to the audience: "It's a pity you came here. You're so aggressive."^[44]

The one exception to Trungpa's low opinion of fellow dharma teachers was Shunryu Suzuki (1914–1971), the founder of San Francisco Zen Center and Tassajara, whom Trungpa met during his 1970 visit to San Francisco and again in 1971 shortly before the Zen master died. Suzuki sparked Trungpa's deep appreciation for Japanese culture, and strengthened Trungpa's resolve to root his teaching in basic Buddhist śamatha-vipaśyanā meditation. Trungpa, who spoke of wanting to develop a Buddhism that would transcend "the cultural characteristics of particular nationalities," was particularly taken by Sukuki's American Zen, which was built with only slight connections with institutions back in Japan,^[45] offering Trungpa a model for developing a form of Tibetan Buddhism that would be independent of Tibetan religious authority. Both men were among the earliest and most successful promoters of individual meditation, paving the way for what, in the early twenty-first century, has become known as the mindfulness movement: a meditation practice that is shorn of any religious structures or supports.

In Boulder Trungpa was immediately drawn to the Rocky Mountain landscape, so similar to his homeland of Nangchen. He and Diana stayed on the outskirts of the city and taught in a house in town and then in the Integral Yoga Institute run by disciples of the Indian teacher named Swami Satchidananda (2014–2002). As the community around Trungpa grew—among those who gathered were members of a commune outside of Boulder whose members were known as "pygmies"—they established a meditation center in town called Karma Dzong (now the Boulder Shambhala Center). They later acquired 600 acres in Red Feathers Lake, which they named the Rocky Mountain Dharma Center (now the Shambhala Mountain Center). In gathering his community he had no obvious models to follow other than Suzuki Roshi's center in San Francisco. Buddhist teaching and practice in Tibet was an activity almost entirely confined to monasteries and temples, as hermits who settled in caves and householders who attained rainbow bodies were exceedingly rare. Trungpa's meditation centers were one of his central and most widely-imitated innovations.

Although Tail of the Tiger in Vermont remained a main center for his teaching, Trungpa settled in Boulder, and remained there until the last year of his life. In March 1971 Diana gave birth to her first of two children by Trungpa, Tenzin Lhawang Tagtrug David Mukpo, whom the Sixteenth Karmapa recognized in 1976 as the reincarnation of a lama named Zurmang Tenzin Rinpoche (zur mang bstan 'dzin rin po che). Their second son was born in 1973, named Gesar Arthur, whom Dilgo Khyentse identified as the reincarnation of Trungpa's beloved master, Shechen Kongtrul. Diana Mukpo had two additional children with Trungpa's doctor, Mitchell Levy, while still married to Trungpa: a third son, Ashoka Mukpo, born in 1981, and a fourth, David, born in 1986. Although they lived apart for some years, Mukpo and Trungpa never divorced. Trungpa is said to have considered both Ashoka and David to be his children, even as he acknowledged he was not their biological father. In 1988 Mukpo and Levy adopted an eight-year-old Tibetan girl, whom they named Chandali.

1973–1975: Vajradhatu, the Infamous Halloween Party and the Rise of "Crazy Wisdom."

Chogyam Trungpa's activities during the 1970s were marked by an expansive exploration of modalities of teaching, the establishment of scores of new Buddhist centers, and the hosting of his Tibetan masters the Sixteenth Karmapa and Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, who publicly affirmed for his American audience Trungpa's authority to teach. As his activities grew, Trungpa instituted a more organized structure and culture to his work, initiating both an international dharma organization and a repertoire of rituals and formal modes of dress and behavior.

Trungpa had been speaking about "neurosis" since the early days of his time in the West, and his interest in Western psychological therapy went beyond merely adopting its language to teach Buddhism. In 1972 he initiated Maitri Space Awareness, intended as a therapeutic program that made use of the concept of the five buddha families to address different psychological conditions. The idea was that people experiencing specific mental conditions—understood as the inverse of the enlightened qualities of the corresponding buddha family—respond differently to certain space configurations, colors, and meditation techniques. Trungpa opened a center in suburban New York dedicated to Maitri, in a house donated by a student. Although the New York center closed in 1976, Maitri remains a core practice of the Shambhala centers and of Naropa University's program in Buddhist Psychology.^[46]

The following year Trungpa initiated the Mudra Theater Group, a fusion between Tibetan religious dancing ('cham) and American experimental theater, as well as some subtle body practices (rtsa rlung). Trungpa was then writing plays, and he sought to use theater as a new form of Buddhist practice; where Maitri worked with the mind, Mudra would work with the body. It was less successful. A 1973 conference for experimental theater troupes co-organized by Trungpa did not end well, after students behaved boorishly at a performance of Robert Wilson's (b. 1941) company, the Byrd Hoffman School of Birds. Trungpa himself, after trying to stop his students from interfering with the piece, decided to join them. Trungpa's talk on the egoism of artists the following day did little to soothe the bad feelings.^[47]

At the same time Trungpa was making use of more traditional methods of teaching, at least in their outward forms, gathering his students together to lecture on specific topics. In 1973 he initiated annual meetings to train his students, called The Seminars, and, later, Vajradhatu Seminaries. The early seminars were chaotic, as much parties of dancing and drinking than meditation practice. Students got in the habit of arriving at scheduled lectures two hours late because Trungpa would rarely arrive at the appointed time; he once remarked that he came late in order to let the audience work through and exhaust their expectations before he began his talk. The seminars were three-month residency programs in Buddhist doctrine, literature, and practice, and were the training grounds for the first generation of non-Tibetan teachers in Trungpa's growing community, and, ultimately, the setting for his transmission of tantric teachings.

By 1973 Trungpa's scattered activities and properties were in need of a central organizing body. He established Vajradhatu in Boulder that year. Individual dharma centers in cities across the United States were renamed Dharmadhatu Centers. A California student of Swami Satchidananda named Thomas Rich (1943–1990), who had met Trungpa on his first visit to Boulder, was the first administrator. When they met, Rich was using the name Narayana; Trungpa later gave him the name Ösel Tendzin. In 1976 he gave him the title of Vajra Regent and named him his dharma heir, the person who would inherit his religious authority and supervision of his students.

Perhaps one of Trungpa's most significant achievements, in terms of establishing Buddhism in North America, was the founding of Naropa University, the first Buddhist institution of higher education outside of Asia. Initially under the administrative control of Vajradhatu, it began as a summer session 1974, with courses taught by famous writers, musicians, and religious teachers such as Ram Dass (1931–2019), Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), Anne Waldman (b. 1945), Joan Halifax (b. 1942), and John Cage (1912–1992). Trungpa apparently wanted to name the new school after the famous Indian monastic university Nālandā, but others felt it would be too presumptuous.^[48] So he named it after the eleventh-century Indian Buddhist saint Nāropa, who had served as one of Nālandā's last abbots. Ginsburg and Waldman organized the creative writing program, which they named the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. More than 1,500 students came for the first summer. The first formal degree programs began the following academic year, including bachelors and masters degrees in Buddhist Studies, psychology, and the arts. Naropa gained full accreditation in 1985 and currently offers both undergraduate and graduate degrees.

Trungpa's iconoclastic behavior brought the college controversy right from the start. In 1975 the poet W.S. Merwin (1927–2019) arrived at Naropa to study with Trungpa, and agreed to teach at the Kerouac school. Trungpa and Merwin formed a bond, and when Merwin asked that he and his girlfriend, the Hawai'ian poet and activist Dana Naone, be allowed to attend that autumn's seminary, at the Eldorado Lodge in Snowmass, Colorado, Trungpa agreed, apparently letting them in ahead of a long waiting list of students. Merwin and Naone generally kept to themselves, attending the lectures and meditation sessions and performing their community duties, but opting out of the socializing.

Two months into the three-month seminar Trungpa decided that the school would throw a Halloween party. Merwin and Naone attended briefly before returning to their room. When Trungpa arrived he ordered several students to strip naked, at least one of whom did so unwillingly, and he gave a speech about the party being a vajra feast, or gaṇacakra. One student later explained that this was a challenge to the community to shed their inhibitions and engage in outrageous behaviors: "you have to be able to handle the wildest kind of energy and still maintain your awareness."^[49] Gaṇacakra are, traditionally, highly controlled rituals involving deviant behavior: participants eat meat, drink alcohol, and engage in sexual activity, although traditionally these were visualized rather than physically enacted.^[50]

One student, Brigid Meier, recounted how when Trungpa arrived he asked for a kiss, and when she moved in close he twisted her arm and bit her lip, drawing blood. Keeping his hold on her, he then bit her cheek, making marks that lasted for a week.^[51] When Trungpa noticed Merwin and Naone's absence he sent his students to invite them down to the party. They declined, Trungpa refused to accept their response. Students forced their way into Merwin and Naone's room, smashing a sliding glass door and breaking down the locked hall door. Naone screamed for help and Merwin attempted to fend them off with a broken bottle, but the two eventually surrendered and were led down to the party. Trungpa ordered his guards to strip off Merwin and Naone's clothes. Naone called out to the watching students to intervene. Trungpa is said to have punched the one man who attempted to stop the guards, bloodying his nose. The naked Merwin demanded to know why the two of them were the only ones naked, at which point other students began to strip off their clothes, and Merwin and Naone were allowed to return to their room, where students were already cleaning up the shattered glass and furniture.

Merwin and Naone stayed at Naropa until the end of the seminar—Merwin later explained that they wanted to receive the Vajrayana teachings. Once the story got out other authors demanded an explanation, if not an apology, and the incident earned national attention after prominent poet Robert Bly began speaking about it, and after poet Ed Sanders had his Investigative Poetry class at Naropa research the incident in 1977. The class produced a 179-page report, excerpts of which were first published in March 1979 in Boulder Weekly, and were used for an article in Harper's in February, 1979, by Peter Marin.^[52]

The infamous Halloween party was not an unusual occurrence in the Vajradhatu community. Rampant alcohol use and sexual activity continued largely unchecked, and many critical accounts of Trungpa's activities continue to be published. Trungpa's students have described the extensive degree to which community members enabled Trungpa's alcoholism and sexual misconduct—some perpetrating abuse themselves with little repercussions.^[53] Community members, even parents of abused children,^[54] turned their attention away from the harm it caused, offering explanations taken from Tantric mysticism: "Trungpa Rinpoche said that because he had Vajra nature [a yogically transformed and stabilized psychophysiology], he was immune to the normal physiological effects of alcohol."^[55] Trungpa was said also to have taken to alcohol in order to come down to the level of his students.^[56] And, again using the language of Tantra, Trungpa is said to have "drunk the poison"—taken on the passions of samsara to bring them under the power of the enlightened mind—in order to better serve his disciples.^[57] Nor was alcohol the only drug taken; In his memoir John Riley Perks describes dropping acid with Trungpa and other students, and Nancy Steinbeck, in her memoir The Other Side of Eden: Life with John Steinbeck, alleges that Trungpa had a $40,000-a-year cocaine addiction.^[58]

Much of Trungpa's iconoclastic behavior—including his alcoholism, cruelty to animals,^[59] and sexual misconduct—was categorized by his community as "crazy wisdom." Trungpa first used the term himself in two seminars given in Colorado in 1973, the lectures of which were edited and published in 1991 under the title Crazy Wisdom. The lectures, however, suggest that Trungpa did not then have a fixed definition of the phrase.^[60] Trungpa's student Jeremy Hayward later explained that "The actions of a master of crazy wisdom naturally create chaos in the environment that breaks through the conventional logic and limited, fixed reference points of others."^[61] That chaos was believed to havea liberating quality. There is an historical basis for the assertion; the Karma Kagyu tradition has long venerated individual saints whose behavior shocked and offended social norms, exposing the delusions of saṃsāra and enabling moments of insight into the true nature of existence. The tradition venerates as saints largely semi-mythical beings known as mahāsiddhas who embody this Tantric ideal. Certain historical figures were also lionized for their eccentric methods and given the epithet of "mad yogis" (smyon pa), and heavy drinking and sexual activity was often a part of these men's activities. Activists and scholars have drawn attention in recent decades to the long history of exploitation of women in Tibetan Tantric Buddhism for the religious advancement of men.^[62]

The "crazy wisdom" label has been used by some in the Vajradhatu community to enable and perpetuate abuse, and to justify harm. Midal wrote of Trungpa that "Certain surprising things he did can seem shocking today, and may also have seemed brutal or crazy at the time, but thanks to them the persons they were aimed at were able to open fully."^[63] Midal also asserted that "A measure of [Trungpa's] compassion can be gleaned from the reports of a number of female students who experienced spending intimate time with him as a very precious communication."^[64] A counterpoint to this troubling justification is that many of those students have spent decades dealing with the trauma of the abuse, which has been increasingly documented by journalists and in online forums.^[65]

The Karmapa's Visit of 1974

Even in his drive to create a Buddhism shorn of Tibetan cultural characteristics Trungpa had never fully turned away from his own masters, and in the mid-1970s he brought both the Sixteenth Karmapa and Dilgo Khyentse to America to teach his students. The effect was to bring his unorthodox methods into communion with Tibetan traditional religion. According to Didi Contractor, a student of Swami Muktananda (1908–1982) who had helped arrange a 1972 meeting of Muktananda and the Karmapa, the Karmapa was at the time disturbed by the way in which Trungpa "was modifying the traditional teachings to fit into the West and about the effect that the West was having on him." The visit of the Karmapa to America would be the opportunity for Trungpa to reassure his master.

The 1974 visit was the Sixteenth Karmapa's first to the United States, and Trungpa welcomed him in high style. The entourage, which included Kalu Rinpoche (kar lu rin po che, 1905–1989) and Freda Bedi, by then ordained and known as Gelongma Palmo, first landed in New York City where, on September 21, 1974, the Karmapa performed the black hat ceremony at the local Dharmadhatu center. They went on to Vermont, where the Karmapa gave Trungpa's center its current name, Karmé Chöling, then on to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and finally to Boulder, where the Karmapa again performed the black hat ceremony and gave several empowerments for Trungpa's disciples. During the ceremonies the Karmapa publicly affirmed Trungpa to be a lineage holder of the Karma Kagyu tradition. The Karmapa did this in a written proclamation.^[66]According to Rick Fields' narrative in How the Swans Came to the Lake, the Karmapa's visit also had the effect of preparing the ground for Trungpa to teach his students Tantra. They had received some esoteric teachings from Trungpa, and had performed the preliminary practices, but now the Karmapa's transmissions enabled more advanced practices.^[67] The visit also inspired Trungpa to make more Tibetan classical literature available to English readers, and so in 1975 he established the Nalanda Translation Committee, which primarily translates liturgical works for American practitioners.

Trungpa's biographer Fabrice Midal describes the Karmapa's visit as a turning point in Trungpa's teaching style. Trungpa had welcomed the Karmapa in full traditional splendor, insisting on perfection down to the details. Students who previously had attended events in casual clothes were now required to wear suits and dresses, and to adopt deferential behavior towards the visiting dignitaries. The visit reconnected Trungpa to his lineage roots, to the formal demands of tradition. But rather than simply returning to traditional teaching methods, Trungpa appears to have been inspired to create new modalities of formality, drawing from Japanese and Western customs as well as Tibetan.

Following the visit, Trungpa became interested in the use of costumes. He took to wearing a suit and tie, although he would occasionally wear a Tibetan chuba or Japanese robes, or later, military-style uniforms that he designed. He studied and performed Japanese flower arranging, or ikebana, and tea service, both highly formalized ritual acts. He created what he called Kalapa Ikebana to combine Tibetan and Japanese elements, and he also adopted Japanese kyudo archery, which he studied with a teacher named Kanjuro Shibata, whom he brought over from Japan.^[68]

Part of the new formality was the establishment of a military-style guard that would come to be known as the Dorje Kasung. Members of this corps, who trained in a strict hierarchical regimen, had the responsibility to act as bodyguards to the teacher, whoever that might be, and would station themselves at entrances and along the walls during teachings not unlike secret service officers guarding diplomats. David Rome, Trungpa's close disciple who had served various roles throughout the early 1970s, was the guard's first head. Dorje Kasung members were required to do annual summer training in Japanese martial arts and purification rituals. The practice of the Dorje Kasung has been largely woven into the Shambhala framework of the "path of the warrior," where it is spoken of as a distinct path, one of service and a means of embracing aggression in order to overcome it.^[69]

The formality increased in 1976 with the visit of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche and a second visit by the Karmapa. That year Trungpa set up what he called the Kalapa Court, modeled on the mythical Shambhala kingdom of the Kālacakra Tantra. Under this metaphor, Trungpa placed himself at the center of a maṇḍala around which were arrayed his attendants, disciples, and institutional structures. The idea was to initiate a set of formal protocols for accessing Trungpa, who had previously been available to anyone at almost any time—Diana Mukpo commented that previously students routinely entered the bedroom she shared with Trungpa at all hours of the night.^[70]

The structure involved household staff similar in function to an English aristocratic manor house, with students elevated to certain positions of service within the household, adopting Tibetan titles such as kasung (bka' srung) and kusung (sku srung), traditional terms that mean "guardian of the teaching" and "bodyguard," respectively. Trungpa went as far as having his American students learn to speak with a British accent.^[71] Trungpa was surely also thinking back to the royal structures of his childhood in Tibet, where he was chaplain to the kings and queens of the kingdoms of Kham such as Nangchen and Lhatok.

Within the Kalapa Court framework, Trungpa was to be referred to as "Your Majesty," and his wife as "Lady Diana."^[72] Students took to serving Trungpa, Diana, and Ösel Tendzin as a form of practice, with the teachers understood to have permitted that service as an expression of their generosity.^[73] The aristocratic structure, Trungpa maintained, enabled compassion and veneration, two core Buddhist virtues: those on the upper strata of the hierarchy were to feel compassion for those below them, while those on the lower strata were to venerate those above them.^[74]

The establishment of the Kalapa Court further formalized a culture of obedience to the authority of Trungpa and his successor, Ösel Tendzin. It was loosely based in Tantric notions of guru devotion—the idea that the teacher is not simply the representative of the Buddhadharma but is a buddha in person and therefore worthy of veneration and submission. Such theories of guru devotion and submission are put into practice in Tibetan contexts in highly ritualized settings and are rarely taken literally, much less embraced outside a close teacher-disciple context.^[75] Moreover, Tibetan literature is replete with admonitions against accepting a guru without first examining their qualities and qualifications. Blind obedience, at least in the literature, is not encouraged, for, as scholar Holly Gayley put it, "that elevation, and that idealization, doesn't leave room for a human-to-human encounter and the kind of accountability that's needed in Buddhist communities for their teachers."^[76]

In Trungpa's orbit, however, all who joined were expected to pledge absolute fidelity to Trungpa. Trungpa's 1978 book Glimpses of Abhidharma states that one must give one's body to the guru. In Empowerment, also published the same year, he wrote that one must give oneself as a gift to the guru.^[77] Not to do so entailed serious consequences. As Steven Butterfield described it, students were taught to pray for a horrible death should they discuss the teachings with the non-initiated, and they were told that if they ever tried to leave the community they "would suffer an unbearable, subtle, continuous anguish," and that disasters would pursue them "like furies."^[78] Students were taught about "vajra hell," the particularly vicious rebirth for those who rejected or spoke badly of their teachers.^[79]

Trungpa's new formality did not greatly alter his methods in the lecture hall. Midal describes how, at the 1984 Kalapa Assembly and Vajradhatu Seminary, he began his talks at random hours, one day at three a.m. and continuing into the daylight hours, another day starting at six p.m. and only ending after eleven. Midal comments that "in this way, night became day, and day became night. At seven in the evening, it was time to organize breakfast. The students were thus led to abandon their usual points of reference." Trungpa's disciples celebrated these "situations of chaos" which they believed could "liberate in unexpected ways" and, in their disorientation, magnified their devotion to their guru.^[80]

Shambhala

In 1976 Trungpa began teaching what came to be known as the Shambhala revelations, which forms the core of what has since grown to an international institutional network supporting a body of secular practices. These stood alongside his Buddhist teachings until the Vajradhatu and Shambhala organizations were merged in 2000. At the heart of the Shambhala teachings is what is referred to as "the path of the warrior," a set of methods for cultivating courage and selflessness in the goal of creating what Trungpa called "a global enlightened society." Although generally presented as a non-religious teaching, Trungpa's initial teachings on Shambhala were collected in a book published in 1984 under the title Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, and additional teachings fashioned as revelations have been separately printed over the last several decades.

The histories of Tibetan treasure revelations are notoriously flexible, expanding and developing as the corpus of texts within a single revelation grows in size. Trungpa's first published mention of the realm of Shambhala was in his autobiography, where he mentioned that during a brief pause on his flight from Tibet he "began to work on an allegory about the kingdom of Shambhala and its ruler who will liberate mankind at the end of the Dark Age."^[81] That text did not survive, although he later reconstructed parts of it as a core text of the revelation.

Various narratives assert that Trungpa continued to mull over the meaning of Shambhala for years before giving several lectures at the 1976 and 1977 seminars. More details were added later. As described by Midal, on the night of October 25, 1976, Trungpa received a visual mark—what the Shambhala tradition now calls the ashe—in which the treasure teaching was contained. Trungpa asked students for brush, pen, and paper, and put the image down; drawing the ashe continues to be a central practice in Shambhala centers. Additional scriptures for the teaching—written in English—came to Trungpa over the course of several years, and he took as his treasure name Dorje Dradul (rdo rje dra 'dul). Trungpa maintained that the source of the treasures was Gesar of Ling. This mythical Tibetan folk hero, he claimed, was an emanation of Padmasambhava, who is in turn the source of most Tibetan treasure revelations.^[82]

Trungpa presented the Shambhala teachings on "path of the warrior" using metaphors of courage and militarism, and conceived of it as a new avenue to liberation. In the fall of 1976 Trungpa offered Shambhala Trainings, apparently inspired by a visit earlier that year from Werner Erhard (b. 1935), the founder of EST, or "Erhard Seminars Trainings." The EST model was an intensive course over two weekends that promised to "reprogram" consciousness in order to, it was claimed, fully realize human potential. EST was wildly popular in the 1970s, but faced significant criticism for cult-like mind-control practices, and in 1984 was modified and renamed "The Forum." Trungpa adopted the model of the intensive mind-changing seminar, and although the program had a rocky beginning, Shambhala Trainings continue to be offered around the world.

Over the next several years Trungpa's organizations continued to grow, and he, his wife and other associates continued to open new types of centers, from child-care facilities to horse farms. Vajradhatu centers opened in multiple countries, and Trungpa's trainings, both Shambhala and Buddhist, grew in complexity. While Trungpa had named Thomas Rich his dharma heir in 1976, in 1979 he named his eldest son, Ösel Rangdröl Mukpo, as his heir to the Shambhala lineage, with the title Sawang, meaning "Lord of the Earth" (sa dbang).

Trungpa's successors maintained the culture of abuse within the organizations. Ösel Tendzin used the absolute authority invested in him by Trungpa to coerce many members of the community, both men and women, to engage in sexual activity while knowingly infected with HIV. Accusations include having guards hold a man down as he raped him. Ösel Tendzin claimed that Trungpa had told him his meditative accomplishments would shield his victims from infection.^[83] While many inside the organization defended Ösel Tendzin, a large section of the community spoke out and demanded his resignation, bringing the community to the point of collapse. In the face of a growing crisis Ösel Tendzin was eventually ordered by Dilgo Khyentse to go into retreat, although he refused to surrender control of the organization. He died of AIDS in 1990.

Following Rich's death Ösel Rangdröl Mukpo took control of both Buddhist and Shambhala organizations. In 1995 the Third Penor Rinpoche (pad nor 03, 1932–2009) invested Mukpo with the title Sakyong (sa skyong), meaning "Protector of the Earth," and identified him as a reincarnation of Ju Mipam Gyatso ('ju mi pham rgya mtsho, 1846–1912), a great nineteenth-century lama who famously declared he would not be reborn anywhere but in Shambhala. In 2000 Mukpo merged the Vajradhatu and Shambhala organizations under the umbrella of Shambhala International. Trungpa's other sons have declined to serve as religious teachers; Gesar Mukpo released a film, "Tulku," in 2009 that documents the lives of five Western-born tulkus, including himself. Ashoka Mukpo works in International Human Rights. Tagtruk Mukpo, who is intellectually disabled, lives in supportive housing in Vermont.

In 2018 Sakyong Mipham resigned as head of the organization after long-standing allegations of sexual misconduct were made public by Buddhist Project Sunshine; the board of Shambhala International, which had shielded him for as long as they could, resigned en mass in disgrace. Despite the many well-documented claims of misconduct, Mukpo retained control of the organization. His announcement in early 2020 that he would resume teaching was met with widespread criticism and the resignation of many prominent teachers.

Halifax: Trungpa's Final Years

Chogyam Trungpa first visited Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1977, and in 1980 he established a residency there, although he continued to spend most of his year in Boulder. According to Midal, the isolation of Nova Scotia appealed to Trungpa. His health was already in decline, explained by some as the cost of his relentless activity, and by others as the long-term effects of alcoholism; he took a one-year hiatus in 1983–1984 to enter retreat in Nova Scotia.

In 1983 his student Pema Chödrön (b. 1936) established Gampo Abbey—named after Gampopa—a Karma Kagyu monastery in Cape Breton. After Trungpa's death in 1987 the Ninth Thrangu Rinpoche, Karma Lodro Ringluk Mawai Sengge (khra 'gu sprul sku 09 karma blo gros ring lugs smra ba'i seng+ge, 1933–2023) became abbot. One of the innovations of Gampo Abbey is the availability of temporary ordination; individuals are permitted to ordain for a minimum of nine months. It has served as a prime training center for North American Buddhist practitioners; a three-year retreat center named Söpa Chöling was established there by Thrangu Rinpoche in 1990. Pema Chödron has become one of the most widely respected and revered American-born Buddhist teachers, and her books, such as When Things Fall Apart and The Wisdom of No Escape are widely read. In 2020 Pema Chödron resigned her position as senior teacher in protest of Ösel Rangdrol Mukpo's return to teaching.^[84]

In 1986 Trungpa moved his home to Halifax, together with  the international headquarters of Vajradhatu and Shambhala. That September he suffered a heart attack, and he passed away on April 4, 1987. The cause of death remains in dispute. Midal states that Trungpa's doctor, Mitchell Levy, whom Diana Mukpo later married, initially announced that the cause of the heart attack was diabetes and high blood pressure, and that his death was brought on by a bacterial infection.^[85] However, Levy later stated in an interview published in the website Chronicles of Chogyam Trungpa, that Trungpa had chronic liver disease brought on by his long-term drinking.^[86]

Trungpa is said to have sat for three days in tukdam (thugs dam), a meditative state that follows the death of the body. His body was then taken to Karma Chöling in Vermont, where he was cremated on May 26. Many great lamas attended, including Dilgo Khyentse, the Twelfth Tai Situ, the Third Kongtrul, Lodro Chokyi Sengge (kong sprul 03 blo gros chos kyi seng+ge, 1954–1992), and the Twelfth Tsurpu Gyeltsab, Drakpa Tenpa Yarpel (mtshur phu rgyal tshab 12 grags pa bstan pa yar 'phel, b. 1954). His remains are interred in a stūpa in Colorado.

The Twelfth Trungpa, Chokyi Sengge (drung pa 12 chos kyi seng ge, b. 1989), was recognized by Tai Situ in 1991. He is being trained in Tibet at Zurmang and Pelpung monasteries.

 

_________________________________________________

Publication of this biography was made possible through support of National Endowment for the Humanities.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Additional Bios Sponsored By National Endowment for the Humanities