|
|
 |
This evening I would like to talk about the Vidyadhara Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and the significance of his life, about the lineage heritage that he represents, and about the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya and the meaning of consecrating it. When you see the Great Stupa at Rocky Mountain Shambhala Center, it is somewhat shocking or overwhelming. Whenever I have encountered the Stupa or even looked at a photograph of it, I realize that, whatever my memories of the Vidyadhara are and whatever concept I have of him, the significance of his presence was much larger than anything I can conceive of. It is helpful to think of the Vidyadhara not merely as a person—certainly not as an ordinary person—but more as an inconceivable spiritual force. The meaning of his coming to the West and establishing the dharma here is like the migration of a certain kind of weather, or the migration of a cosmic force or a river of spiritual influence. The Vidyadhara, as extraordinary as he was, was not an isolated figure but part of a lineage of spiritual energy that has come down and continues.
In Tibet there were four main schools of teachings: Kagyü, Nyingma, Geluk, and Sakya. Those schools had many fruitful interactions as well as controversies and occasional polemical exchanges. As a result, around the 1850’s a number of teachers, especially in East Tibet, were very interested in pursuing an ecumenical approach. Among them were two exceptional teachers: Jamgön Kongtrül the Great and Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo. These teachers are intimately interwoven with the Karma Kagyü transmission, the Nyingma transmission, with Trungpa Rinpoche’s life and training, and with our practice.
Jamgön Kongtrül the Great and Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo were especially involved in this ecumenical movement, called the Rime. Each of them was a great master in his own right who studied extensively with as many as 150 teachers from all the different schools. Coming especially from the view of the dzogchen, or the ati yoga teaching, they said that we can take an overview of all the teachings. There are many ways to practice the dharma, and we don’t need to regard any of them as being in conflict.
Jamgön Kongtrül the Great
Jamgön Kongtrül the Great in particular was interested in this unbiased, nonpolitical Rime movement because he had suffered different sectarian pressures. He composed a great many treatises and commentaries. It is said of Jamgön Kongtrül the Great that if you look at all of the things he wrote, you would think that he had spent his whole life composing treatises. But if you look at all of the things he practiced, you would think that he spent all his time in meditation. And if you look at all the people and the things he taught, you could conclude that he spent his whole life teaching. Such was the character of his life.
Many of the commentaries that Jamgön Kongtrül the Great composed have become the practice commentaries for everyone in our Karma Kagyü lineage. Many of the commentaries used in the three-year retreat at Gampo Abbey are by Kongtrül. When Khenpo Tsültrim teaches, many of the texts we study are by Jamgön Kongtrül the Great. He also compiled a large number of treasure texts, called The Precious Treasury of Discovered Teachings, or Richen Terdzod. That text figured prominently in Trungpa Rinpoche’s life, which I’ll explain in a moment.
Jamgön Kongtrül the Great was a principal guru of the Tenth Trungpa. He had five major incarnations, two of whom also played an important role in Trungpa Rinpoche’s training. The first of those was Jamgön Kongtrül of Sechen, a Nyingma monastery. The Sechen Kongtrül was Trungpa Rinpoche’s root guru. At the age of three, Gesar Mukpo, one of Trungpa Rinpoche’s sons, was recognized by Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche to be the current incarnation of Sechen Kongtrül.
The other incarnation of Jamgön Kongtrül the Great was Jamgön Kongtrül of Pepung monastery, the main monastery of the Situ Rinpoches. The Pepung Kongtrül gave Trungpa Rinpoche his bodhisattva vow. The subsequent incarnation of Pepung Kongtrül was His Eminence Jamgön Kongtrül Rinpoche, who visited North America in the late 1970’s with His Holiness the Sixteenth Karmapa. Later, around 1992, he was tragically killed in an auto accident. His incarnation is now in Pullahari monastery in northern India.
Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo
The second important teacher of the Rime tradition, Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo, was a teacher of the Sakya and Nyingma traditions. Jamgön Kongtrül the Great and Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo used to hang out together and do things like finding treasure texts and composing treatises. The Vajrakilaya sadhana that we do that His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche transmitted came from Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo.
There were a number of prominent incarnations of Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo. The ones we know best are Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, who many of us had the good fortune to meet and who was one of Trungpa Rinpoche’s root teachers. Another was the eminent master Dzongzar Khyentse Rinpoche, whose previous incarnation died in Tibet. The Dzongzar Khyentse we know is the third in that line.
So both the Kongtrüls and the Khyentses are very close to use through teachings that we have received. The river of their influence flowed directly into Trungpa Rinpoche’s life and from him to us.
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Trungpa Rinpoche was born around 1939 to a peasant family in eastern Tibet. He was discovered and recognized to be the eleventh in a line of incarnations of the Trungpa tulkus. The first Trungpa was a student of the master Trungmase, a student of the fifth Karmapa; so the Trungpa line began around 1400. Its seat was the Surmang group of monasteries in eastern Tibet. When Trungpa Rinpoche was around eight years old, he met his root guru, Sechen Kongtrül, for the first time, at Sechen monastery, and he received practice instructions from him. These instructions included the first pointing out of the fundamental mind nature, which is usually given later, after a student has preparation. But highly gifted persons like Trungpa Rinpoche are sometimes given this transmission early on.
When he was only 14 he was asked to give an empowerment of the cycle of teachings that Jamgön Kongtrül the Great had compiled, called the Rinchen Terdzod. It involves about a thousand different practices. He had to give several empowerments a day for six months. He was one of three people in Tibet who were empowered to give this cycle, so it was urged on him to do so, and although he was only 14, he managed to do it.
Now we move forward to 1959. Since about 1950, the Chinese have been exerting increasing political pressure on Tibet. The Chinese authorities are increasingly meddling in the affairs of the monasteries, interfering with teaching activity, showing propaganda films in the monasteries, starting to arrest prominent teachers, and by 1959 the situation was becoming unbearable. The Vidyadhara was uncertain what to do. No one really knew what the future was. Some teachers said that the best thing was to stay in Tibet. Other teachers said, "We don’t know what the future will bring. We may have to propagate the teachings in a new situation at another time."
At this point, because communications were cut off, Trungpa Rinpoche was on his own. Of course, the bursar of his monastery and many other people wanted him to stay, but he realized that he needed to leave Tibet. He left with what he could, some books and manuscripts and a few rupas that he was able to carry. Other things he had to leave behind. I heard that he wrote a 1,000-page book on mahamudra teachings, which he had to leave behind in Tibet. He set out, first on horseback and later on foot with about 300 people from his monastery and his district, over Himalayan mountain passes to India.
This journey took about two and a half months, and many people fell by the wayside. Often they didn’t know which way to go because the Chinese were in one valley and they were in another, and they didn’t want to be captured. On one or two occasions Rinpoche had recourse to divinatory vision, with which he was gifted, concerning which way to go. At some point they had nothing to eat but boiled shoe leather. Finally, they made it to the border of India, and just as they were crossing the Brahmaputra River, 300 of them were captured, and only six made it out of Tibet. Rinpoche made it to India along with Akong Tulku and a few attendants. That was the kind of risk taking and determination that he had to manifest when he was 19 years old. You can read all about this in Born in Tibet.
In India he served as a tutor for the Young Lamas Home School, formed by the Dalai Lama for young tulkus. In the refugee camps he met an Englishwoman named Freda Bedi, who was the wife of an English diplomat. She had become a student of His Holiness Karmapa. She taught Trungpa Rinpoche English. Out of that he received a Spalding Scholarship to Oxford University. In 1967 he took a steamship to the United Kingdom, where he studied at Oxford for two years. I believe he studied comparative religion, because he talked later about having read William James and the English spiritual classic, Cloud of Unknowing, and similar books. He also studied western psychology and philosophy.
The Vidyadhara had the experience, which he described in Born in Tibet, that when westerners would meet him, he felt that they regarded him as some kind of exotic zoo animal. They would say, "Let’s go meet the lama from Tibet." He felt he was being viewed as some sort of exotic creature. That became an issue for him later on. He and Akong were offered a contemplative community in Scotland, which was originally called the Johnstown Contemplative Community. At that point he began teaching, and a few students from that period are still around. At the same time the Vidyadhara began to feel tormented by the enormous cultural gap between his training and his life in Tibet and what things were like in the U.K. He was trying to figure out how to present the dharma, particularly the profound wisdom that he understood, in the western world.
That culminated in a retreat in Bhutan in 1969. During that retreat, the Sadhana of Mahamudra, which we are about to do this evening, came to him. That Sadhana expresses a certain kind of breakthrough inspiration that became important for him. As he says in Born in Tibet, "I began to realize that I would have to take daring steps in my life. It wasn’t going to work to play it safe."
As a result of that, he decided to take off his monastic robes, and he married Diana Pybus, which was somewhat shocking to the Pybus family. It also upset Akong and some of the trustees at Samye-Ling and created turmoil. Partly as a result of that turmoil and political chaos, or disagreements about the governance of Samye-Ling or about how to teach western students, Rinpoche and Diana decided to come to North America. In 1970 they crossed the Atlantic. They spent some time in Montreal waiting for visas, and then came down to Vermont where they were offered a farmhouse, which became Tail of the Tiger, which became Karmê Chöling.
Rinpoche began to travel and teach. Sam Bercholz invited him to Berkeley, so he went to Berkeley. Karl Usow invited him to Boulder, so he went to Boulder. He traveled around to about forty or fifty different places. If you look in the Shambhala Archives, you can see that over the period of his life he gave thousands and thousands of teachings. In the first few years he was constantly traveling, which was the beginning of founding centers throughout North America.
During this period of practice leading up to the Stupa consecration, we will see some videos produced over Trungpa Rinpoche’s life, which are just brief snippets of his teaching activity. Of course, many of his seminars have been published, so we have a body of his oral instruction in that format. In Shambhala Training we present his Shambhala teachings, another set of oral instructions we have from him.
When we speak about a great teacher like Trungpa Rinpoche, the force of the presence of that wisdom does not terminate at the teacher’s physical death. Of course, those who knew and practiced with Trungpa Rinpoche will have more confidence about that. Those who are new to the Shambhala Center might not have any reason to have confidence in what I am saying, but nevertheless I will say it. I think what happens is that, over a period of time of meeting various teachers and practicing, we get some confidence that the enlightened mind of the teacher or the spiritual force of lineage transcends physical death and is available to us as practitioners.
So Trungpa Rinpoche’s presence in the West and his work with us represents not only the work of a single man. It also represents the presence of a whole stream of spiritual energy that has come to the West and has, so to speak, impregnated and fertilized the situation here. His energy is living energy, and it is not of his mind alone. It also includes the whole river of energy from the Kongtrüls, the Khyentses, the Karmapas, Tilopa, Naropa, Guru Rinpoche, and so on. All of those streams of energy are manifested in the mind of Trungpa Rinpoche and in the minds of all realized masters. So there is a presence of spiritual blessing and power. That sounds fine in the abstract, but as practitioners how do we connect with that? How do we use that to strengthen our practice, to help us open ourselves to ourselves, to overcome our self-deception, and to acknowledge our inherent wisdom?
There are many ways. The basic point is working on ourselves, understanding and working with the teaching that has been given, and working back and forth between our experience of neurosis or confusion, and wisdom. In particular there is the practice of supplicating or invoking the teacher’s energy, and the Sadhana of Mahamudra is related with doing just that. It is invoking the energy of the teaching and the lineage. Trungpa Rinpoche says in the introduction to the sadhana that he wrote this practice because of the many obstacles of the Dark Age and to enable people to draw on the spiritual strength of the lineage.This sadhana combines the Kagyü and Nyingma lineage teachers. The central figure of Dorje Trollö—a manifestation of Padmasambhava in a very unleashed form—is put together with four of the Karmapas. So the Kagyü tradition of mahamudra and the Nyingma tradition of ati yoga are combined or merged or dissolved together in one practice.
Generally speaking, in the Buddhist view, everyone has an innate connection with spirituality. In the Buddhist tradition we talk about the buddha nature. In the Shambhala tradition we talk about basic goodness. Both of them mean that there is a spiritual instinct in everyone, and often that awakens naturally in our sense of longing for meaning, of wishing to be kind and compassionate to others, and of wishing to do something constructive. At the same time, to bring out that spiritual instinct with conviction and in a powerful way, usually we need the help of a spiritual tradition. And to bring it out in a really powerful way, you need the help of a profound tradition. That is why we value very much the connection with the spiritual master, or in the vajrayana tradition, what we call the guru.
Again, given that there is the presence of some blessing in the environment, how can we connect with it as practitioners? First, whenever there is a meeting point of an accomplished teacher and receptive students, that transmission takes place. That is the ordinary teaching situation. Another situation occurs when the teacher dies, or passes into parinirvana. Traditionally, at that time one practices a lot because the blessings of the teacher are available in the environment in a very powerful way. A third time of receiving or invoking the blessing is whenever we are engaged in dharma-related work, work related to bringing down or propagating the wisdom and insight of the Shambhala and Buddhist traditions. If we are not too neurotic about it and if our motivation is proper, that naturally invokes the presence and blessing of lineage.
Now we have the fourth situation, which is the building and consecration of the Great Stupa. The Stupa consecration is somewhat analogous to the time of the teacher’s parinirvana. An auspicious coincidence is being created by the work on the Stupa, and so it is also a time to invoke the teacher’s blessing.
The Four Stupas
In accord with the tantric teaching, we can talk about four aspects, or four kinds of stupa: the primordial stupa, the physical Stupa in Colorado, the Shambhala Center, and one’s being. Each of these four types of stupa can be talked about as having the aspects of body, or manifested form; speech, or communication and atmosphere; and mind, or wisdom.
The primordial aspect of the stupa is that the guru’s enlightened body, speech, and mind are self-existing from beginningless time. That enlightened body, speech, and mind of the teacher simply exists, originally, or primordially. The enlightened mind of the teacher is completely unobstructed, all pervasive, and beyond form. The enlightened speech of the teacher is manifested in his unceasing compassion, or in the general influence of the teachings. The emanation, or body aspect of the teacher means the capability of manifesting in various forms to teach beings in any realm.
The second aspect, or the second stupa, is the Stupa that we actually build, which is this monumental structure in Colorado. It has been created through a tremendous outpouring of devotion of all kinds of people who have worked on it. That Stupa is a particular kind of skillful means that has been developed in the tradition to represent and bring down and embody the energy of the teacher. The reason to build a concrete structure at RMSC is to embody the primordially existing body, speech, and mind, to give the primordially existing aspects of the teacher a way of manifesting. The physical form aspect of the Stupa includes the symbolism of the four gates and so on. The speech aspect of the Stupa consists of people’s prayers and aspirations and all of the mantras and so forth. Then there is the mind aspect of the Stupa. Khyentse Rinpoche says that when a great master dies, his physical body dissolves, and at that time you build a Stupa, which reminds you that the teacher’s mind remains indestructibly in the dharmakaya. In other words, it remains as completely open potential. So the Stupa is the symbol of the mind of realization, and the teacher’s energy of realization is brought down and manifested in that way. Again, Khyentse Rinpoche says, "You should build this Stupa because it will serve as a lightening rod or antenna to bring down the blessings of your teacher."
The third notion of stupa is that any dharma center, any Shambhala Center, is in a sense like a stupa. A physical environment has been created that contains and protects the practice and is full of forms and symbols that remind us of the practice. That is the body aspect of the teacher’s energy. Within the Shambhala Center there is also the presence of dharma teaching and the presence of practitioners who have understanding. That is the speech aspect of the teacher. There is also the mind presence, wherever people are practicing meditation. In that sense every Shambhala Center has the same, or an analogous force as the Great Stupa in Colorado. It is the representation, a container of the enlightened body, speech, and mind of the lineage. The Vidyadhara also talked a lot about living with sacred outlook. He spent a lot of time doing dharma art seminars and teaching people to create an uplifted living environment. So if you create an uplifted living room with Shambhala principles, that is also a container of the body, speech, and mind of the teacher.
Finally, we could say that there is an esoteric aspect of the stupa, or of consecrating the stupa, that is in some sense the body, speech, and mind of the teacher and is related with our own body, speech, and mind. That is, if we are willing to relate to the present moment, to let go of habitual impulsive neurosis, to be compassionate, to trust our own wisdom, then the energy of the lineage begins to come into our body, speech, and mind. In that sense, the body, speech, and mind of each practitioner are like a stupa.
So to sum up, the Great Stupa at Rocky Mountain Shambhala Center is a focal point or magnetizing point of the guru’s body, speech, and mind, which exists primordially. We are doing the same thing when we create and manifest a dharma Center or a practice program: we are bringing down the body, speech, and mind energy of the guru so as to unfold the wisdom within the body, speech, and mind of the practitioners.
I would like to talk just a little more about some ways to think about Trungpa Rinpoche. First, the teacher is completely beyond form. Even in the earliest sutras, the Buddha is quoted as saying that, if you want to perceive what the Buddha is, what the tathagatha is, you cannot just look at my physical body, the physical form. You cannot just look at what you think are my feelings or perceptions, at what you think is my state of consciousness. All of the form that you might perceive, all of the feelings or the perceptions that you might sense, all of the states of consciousness that you might impute—the Buddha has gone beyond all of those things. All those are transcended. The tathagatha has gone beyond, has accomplished the cessation of the compulsive recreation of those things. Therefore, even though the tathagatha, the Buddha, appears before you in a human body, the teacher is beyond a body, beyond sensations, beyond what you perceive as a consciousness—immeasurable, unfathomable, like the ocean, untraceable by the conventional mind.
This points to the dharmakaya aspect, the aspect of the teacher’s realization that is completely beyond form, beyond ordinary mind, beyond experiences, beyond culture, beyond death. That is the essence of the realization. In the earliest tradition people did not make statues of the Buddha. The Buddha was represented simply by a wheel of dharma or by a stupa, which represented the Buddha’s mind—that completely vast and open and non-dwelling mind. On the one hand, for the teacher, there is unbounded freedom. But to teach others, to relate to others out of compassion, there has to be a further manifestation, which is what we call the form body of the teacher, the body of communication, the body of emanation. We know that in the form of lineage teachers. At the same time, it is said in the vajrayana tradition that the primordial Buddha, Samantabhadra, emanates teaching from beginningless time in all world systems, in all universes. Teaching is always being emanated wherever there are beings in dualistic confusion. There is always some energy looking to capture their attention and lift them out of their confusion. In that sense our lineage both has and does not have an historical beginning.
The general Buddhist tradition that we know started about 2,500 years ago with Shakyamuni Buddha, who set in motion a tremendous river of spiritual teaching. In terms of the Great Stupa, Shakyamuni Buddha is the historical origin of our lineage. There is a big statue of Shakyamuni Buddha on the first floor. In terms of the natural emanation or spontaneous emanation of teaching from the enlightened state, on the upper floors are the Chakrasamvara mandala and the Vajrasattva mandala that represent the spontaneous emanation of liberating energy from basic awake space.
Our lineage heritage is incredibly rich. The founder of the Kagyü lineage, the Indian siddha Tilopa, received many teachings and transmissions. He received the four principal lineages of transmission from all the streams of practice in India, which he passed on to Naropa, who passed it on to Marpa and so forth, down to the present time. Both the Kagyü and Nyingma lineages represent the accumulation of the wisdom and realization of thousands of people who were involved in a human journey like ourselves, who practiced, who experienced personal difficulties, physical illness, troublesome disciples, hypocritical donors, political conflicts, and social chaos, but they still managed to carry on the teaching and pass it down to us.
From that process, certain figures stand out, like Marpa the Translator, who had to journey to India three times and then translate the teaching from the Indian cultural context to the Tibetan cultural context. We can compare the Vidyadhara’s activity to Marpa’s activity, in making a bridge between cultures, in translating the teachings—both in literal meaning and in actual translation work—and in living a family life. We could compare the Vidyadhara to Gampopa. Gampopa put together the essence of the tantric teaching that he received from Milarepa with the gradual path training of the hinayana, mahayana, and vajrayana teaching that he received from the Kadampa tradition, so that people could be led gradually and ripen to a state where they could practice the advanced vajrayana teaching. We could compare the Vidyadhara to Padmasambhava, Guru Rinpoche, one of the founders of the Nyingma tradition. They both faced the challenge of transplanting the teachings into completely new cultures. The political energy and to some degree people’s psychic space or spiritual space was already occupied by indigenous Tibetan ideas. Padmasambhava had to both pacify and subjugate the spiritual and political chaos of this completely different culture into which the vajrayana teaching was going to come.
One of the most characteristic things about Trungpa Rinpoche’s teaching was his realization that moving spiritual teaching from one culture to another is not simple. You could not take a Tibetan mentality and religious or cultural paradigm and just plop it down in the Western world. That was not going to be very effective. You had to completely engage the new culture on its own terms and come to a real meeting between the new culture and its own. He realized that cultural forces are very powerful. The whole ego-structure is shaped in part by cultural forces, not just by psychology. So in the early days he would give seminars with titles like Tibetan Buddhism and American Karma, which said that we have to grow Buddhism in North America, we have to practice in English or French or Dutch, western students have to teach western students, and it has to be integrated with western life.
Although he founded Gampo Abbey, it was not his primary project. His primary idea was to create a western tradition of lay yogin practitioners, people who were involved in work and in family life and in that context also practiced the vajrayana teachings. In line with that, he presented the Shambhala vision that dharma should not only be a religious affair of monastic people, but also carry a complete social vision. It needs to infiltrate society. In early years he talked a lot about infiltration, which was partly motivated by political vision. He knew what had happened in Tibet, where after 150 years of Buddhism, underwent a period of persecution, and the monasteries were particularly vulnerable. He said that you have to create a lay yogin society so that if Buddhism is ever persecuted in the West, it is hard to wipe out. It is invisible; it is everywhere. It is integrated into the fabric of the culture, and therefore it will take root and be sustained. So his vision of how to teach had many, many aspects. To an extraordinary degree he was able to leave his own cultural reference behind and jump into our culture and create a marriage of his tradition and the contemporary world that we share.
Question: Would you talk about the integration of the Vidyadhara’s vision in Nova Scotia?
Lodrö Dorje: It is an aspect of the Shambhala vision. Obviously, the Vidyadhara worked with individuals. To an astonishing degree he made a personal relationship with hundreds and hundreds of students. But in addition to that, he viewed things on a sociological level. He would introduce things to five or 10 or 40 students, and then he would watch what they did. Sometimes people could digest it and sometimes not. If they became a little unhinged, he would say, "Maybe this is a little too electric for them, so I’ll give a community talk, which will tone it down." He was always experimenting with what kind of teaching people could assimilate, how you could awaken people’s sanity, and at what level they could receive the teaching. In the Buddhist tradition, you talk about three levels of the three yanas, or nine levels of the nine yanas, so there are a lot of different levels at which you could teach.
When he decided to move to Boulder, Colorado, I think it was because it is in the center of the country. In terms of the buddha families, Boulder has the character of buddha. It is a somewhat bland culture, and therefore it is open ground, and you could begin to create a Buddhist society there. Similarly, when he was looking for a further place, he hit on Nova Scotia because again he felt it was a place that was not too heavily occupied, like New York City or San Francisco, and somewhat traditional and not heavily corrupted by materialism. That made it accommodating to how you can propagate the teachings and how you can infiltrate society. That was always part of his message. His view was that the Buddhist teachings need to take root in the West in a western way. That would happen by practitioners taking part in ordinary affairs, whether education, healing arts, or politics, and in that way a dharmic—as well as Shambhalian—perspective could gradually enter society.
The idea over these next nine days is to do a practice intensive as much as we are able to bring down the lineage energy—which we have been bringing down all this time anyway—but in a more concentrated fashion, and to relate to the extremely rich heritage that the Vidyadhara manifested. Not only did he manifest it himself, but he also created the ground. In 1985, he said, "I feel I have had to do all of the donkeywork in teaching you and entering you into the path of dharma and creating some basic understandings. And now that I have done the donkeywork, then the Karmapa and Khyentse Rinpoche and other people can teach you."
Because the Vidyadhara did all that donkeywork, now Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche can continue his work. Because of that, Thrangu Rinpoche can found the Gampo Abbey and since 1987 create the three-year retreat tradition there and present the mahamudra teaching to our students. Because Trungpa Rinpoche did the donkeywork, Tenga Rinpoche and Thrangu Rinpoche, along with Khenpo Tsültrim, have been able to transmit the six yogas of Naropa, which is one of the main treasures of our lineage. That is beginning to be practiced at Gampo Abbey and elsewhere. Because of Trungpa Rinpoche, Tenga Rinpoche could present the Chakrasamvara teaching. In 1985, Trungpa Rinpoche asked Tenga Rinpoche to come and teach the Chakrasamvara tradition. When Tenga Rinpoche came to Boulder he said, "I have been asked for these teachings many times before. Up to now I have never agreed to give these teachings in the West. But now, because I am being asked by Trungpa Rinpoche, who is the King of Dharma, if I give these teachings now, it will benefit many, many hundreds of students. So now I will do it." So he spent a month with us communicating that tradition. There is a whole stream of transmission and teaching, which the Vidyadhara enabled by his work here, and we are the recipients of all that.
Thank you for your attentiveness. We can afford to be amazed by what we have.
Edited by Donna Holm
COPYRIGHT 2001
|
|
|
