Dragon Thunder: My Life with Chogyam Trungpa by Diana Mukpo


Re: Dragon Thunder: My Life with Chogyam Trungpa by Diana Mu

Postby admin » Sat Aug 10, 2019 5:02 am


While I was riding with Arthur Kottas, I learned more about the program for foreign students at the Spanish Riding School. Based on passing an entrance examination, both men and women could be accepted at the school for a three-month period. They were taking one or two foreign students at a time. I aspired to become one of those students.

I talked to Kottas about this after I had been training with him for some months. At that time, he told me that I would need at least another year before he would feel comfortable allowing me to take the entrance examination. I continued training with him throughout 1978.The training program was demanding. As a student, you were rarely praised. The feedback was almost always negative, and the constant criticism served as the encouragement to improve.

In addition to taking lessons at Kottas's barn, his students were allowed to watch the morning classes at the Spanish Riding School. At least three or four days a week, I would go to the school in the early morning. I never tired of watching the riders.

When I first arrived in Vienna, I had left Gesar in Boulder. He stayed at the Court with Pat because I didn't know if my living situation in Europe was going to be stable enough for him. It was difficult for him to be separated from me. He used to ask Pat to call me so that we could talk on the phone. He was quite concerned about when he could join me. After about six months, I found a nice house to rent, with a garden with plum trees and a beautiful lawn.

When I moved into my little house in Vienna, on Roterdestrasse, I arranged for Pat to bring Gesar over to live with me. (By this time Jeanine had returned to the United States.) Pat and her new husband, Tom Adducci, both lived in the house with us. Soon after Gesar arrived, I took him to a performance at the Spanish Riding School, which he loved. It gave him some idea of what his mother was doing all this time in Vienna.

When he was four-and-a-half, Gesar enrolled in kindergarten at the British Diplomatic School in Grinzing, a very nice area of Vienna. Although his school was conducted in English, he also learned German during his time in Vienna. I think this was a positive time in Gesar's life. He found it exciting to live in Europe. However, the other children sometimes teased Gesar on the bus to school. They called him Quasar, and then they called him Gay-sar. For the winter, I bought him a Russian-style fur hat, and he looked very cute in it. The kids would steal his hat and throw it around the bus.

As the end of 1978 approached, Kottas and I agreed that I was ready to take the entrance examination to become a foreign student at the Spanish Riding School. I was both terrified and excited by the prospect that I might actually be riding there in the new year. I wrote a letter to the director of the Spanish Riding School, Colonel Albrecht, requesting that I be allowed to take the entrance examination. My test was scheduled for the middle of December.

The day of the examination arrived. Afterward, I wrote to Rinpoche, describing my experience:

The whole thing was quite fantastic. It should have been a time to be most paranoid, because I was being judged by the best school in the world. Strangely, I felt very at home. I arrived at the Spanish Riding School twenty minutes before the test and was very nervous. I roused my sense of confidence.

As I set foot into the sand of the arena, I was overwhelmed with the feeling that it was sacred ground. Siglavy Beja, the riding master's star horse, was led out. He was wearing a bridle inlaid with gold. The groom held him as I mounted and then I put all four reins in one hand (left) and dropped my right hand and as I walked past the portrait of Emperor Karl, I saluted. I then proceeded to ride. The reins are held in the traditional manner with three in the left and one only in the right to leave room for the sword.

The commands were called and as I started to ride, I realized that I felt completely at home. The horse was the most wonderful one I have ever ridden. He is a Lipizzaner stallion, like the old sculptures with a baroque neck. He felt so strong and energetic. There was never speed, but only rhythm and power.

At some point I was told to stop. I dismounted and saluted. The director came and shook my hand and told me that I had passed. I am very grateful to my teacher for his support throughout the test.

Riding in such a beautiful environment on such a magnificent horse, I was totally carried away. The environment had its own magical wholesomeness, and I lost all awareness of myself. Only afterward did I realize that it had been like a dream with only impressions of color and energy. It was very brilliant. I hope I don't sound overdramatic, because I feel very grounded. It was the most intense experience of my life. I now understand what you mean when you talk about 100 percent lack of doubt.

You know, without your teaching, I never could have appreciated the experience. Thank you.

Even now, when I look back on the entrance examination, I remember how awe-inspiring it was to ride in that hall for the first time. The manege, or the arena, itself is huge: fifty-five meters long, eighteen meters wide, and seventeen meters high. Forty-six columns support the gallery. The interior is entirely painted in white and bathed in light, which comes both from the windows in the hall as well as the magnificent chandeliers that hang from the ceiling. It felt like such a gift to be able to ride in these circumstances. During the test I remember thinking, "Even if I don't pass this examination, at least I've ridden in this hall."

Spanish Riding School

As Christmas 1978 approached, I felt a quality of joy and celebration in my life. It had been a long and difficult journey with many ups and downs, but I felt now a sense of satisfaction that I had accomplished a cherished goal: to be accepted as a student in the Spanish Riding School. I looked forward to beginning my studies there in the new year.

On December 24, 1978, I rode in a Christmas quadrille at Kottas's barn. A quadrille is when a number of riders execute all of the same dressage movements in formation together. It is quite beautiful and requires a great deal of harmony and communication among all of the riders and their horses. After the quadrille, we had a party where a hot alcoholic punch was served. I had invited Gesar, Pat, and Tom to come and watch the quadrille and stay for the party. Pat had driven her car to the barn, and she took Gesar home early in the evening. Tom and I stayed later, and we both got a bit intoxicated. I had just purchased a used powder-blue Mercedes. Tom volunteered to drive my car home, and I accepted. On the road from the barn going through the Vienna Woods, there were steep hairpin turns. The road was quite icy. At a certain point, as we were driving around one of these hairpin turns, Tom said to me, "Hang on." Up to that point, I hadn't realized that anything was the matter. However, the car was skidding out of control on the ice, and the road was about to go into an even sharper turn. Tom tried to drive the car off of the road between two trees so that we could come to rest in a field. However, the passenger side of the car, just behind my seat, impacted with the tree. The tree crushed my seat forward against the dashboard, and I knew immediately that I was seriously hurt. I wasn't wearing a seat belt. I think if I had been, I would have died, actually, because of the way the tree came through the back seat. The only thankful part was that Gesar had gone home earlier with Pat. If Gesar had been in the back seat, he would have been killed.

I remember knowing that I must have broken some bones, but I still wanted to get out of the car, which I probably shouldn't have. People from the barn pulled me out of the car, and I remember lying on the road. Tom was fine, but he was hysterical. He nearly got run over because he was completely panicking. A doctor who had been at the quadrille stopped to help us, but without medical equipment, he couldn't do much.

They called an ambulance, and I was taken to the hospital. I didn't have any say about where the ambulance took me. They drove me to what they call in Germany a Gastarbeiter Krankenhaus, which is a sort of immigrant workers' hospital. Most of the patients were Turkish workers who didn't speak German. At the hospital, I told the staff that they absolutely were not allowed to cut off my riding boots. It's funny the things you fixate on in a situation like this. It turned out that I had fractured four ribs and that I had a fair amount of bleeding into my lungs and chest cavity.

The facilities at the hospital were primitive. The beds didn't even crank up and down. There was a metal bar that hung from the ceiling, and if you wanted to sit up, you had to grab hold of it and pull yourself up. It was Christmas Eve, so they had to get the doctor on call to come into the hospital from a party he was attending. A rotund, white-haired Austrian doctor arrived. As he leaned over me and was asking me how I was feeling, he exhaled what seemed to be pure Schnapps. I became terrified about what might happen to me at that point. Altogether, the hospital stay was frightening and uncomfortable. The only good thing was the food. However, I couldn't appreciate it that much because I was in a considerable amount of pain and they were stingy with the pain medication. My ribs weren't just cracked; they were actually severed. I had a liter of blood in my left lung.

When word of the accident got back to Colorado, the rumor went around that I'd been driving the car and that I shouldn't be allowed to drive myself anywhere ever again. Actually, of course, I hadn't been driving. But we hadn't gotten insurance on the car yet, and the car was destroyed. It was a total disaster.

I remember feeling somewhat devastated while I was in the hospital. My teacher Kottas didn't visit me once. My mother didn't call me either. I had been fighting with my mother over the phone for a few weeks prior to that, over petty things. But she couldn't let things go enough to just pick up the phone and ask if I was okay. I felt abandoned by her once again.

I talked to Rinpoche frequently by phone from the hospital. After a few days, I told him that I wanted to come home to the United States to recuperate, but he was concerned about my traveling when I was badly injured and said that I would have to stay in Austria and weather it out: In fact, I don't think they would have let me get on a plane at that point. Mitchell Levy, Rinpoche's doctor and my very good friend, stayed in communication with me. He explained to me that the doctors in Vienna didn't feel I was stable enough to travel. I was quite miserable. After a week in the hospital, I was allowed to return to my house in Vienna, but then I had to return to the doctor because I hadn't reabsorbed some of the blood from my chest cavity and I continued to be in a great deal of pain. The doctor decided to insert a needle in my chest to try to drain off some of the blood. Something went wrong, I became very ill again, and I had to go back into the hospital for another week. When I was finally sent home, I had to stay in bed for over a month. I was laid up altogether for seven weeks. I wasn't allowed to ride at all for several months. This was depressing to me because it delayed my entrance into the Spanish Riding School.

In May of 1979, I was finally well enough to start riding at the Spanish.
I would go to the school in the morning, and then I would go back to Kottas's barn and ride there in the afternoon. It was a busy schedule.

There was a strict dress code at the school. Every day I would ride in white breeches and immaculately clean boots, and I polished my spurs every day with silver polish. I wore a white shirt with what we call a white stock tie, a blackjacket, and a black derby, which is a hat somewhat like a bowler hat.


The horses live across the road from the manege in stables built for the Spanish Riding School. In the morning, they are led by the grooms under the big arches across the road, right through the traffic, and all the traffic stops for the horses. The horses are born black, and as they grow older they become first gray and then white. However, to this day, they still try to have a dark horse in the school, just one horse of a different color. Lipizzaners are not very big horses, but they're very powerful. They have short backs and strong necks, and often a baroque look to their head, somewhat like the Michelangelo paintings of horses. Some of them have a bit of a Roman nose.

I would arrive at the school at 6:30 to 6:45 every morning and pick up my plan, which would tell me which horses I would be riding and who my instructors would be. Every day began with a longe lesson, followed by two other lessons. Sometimes the head rider would be kind enough to let me ride his horse, in which case I would have a longe lesson and then be allowed to ride three other horses.

The format of the lessons was extremely formal and traditional. The rider comes into the arena at exactly the prescribed time for the lesson. You would salute the portrait of King Karl, the founder of the Spanish RIding School, and then you would track to the right. You would perform the exercises and make corrections as dictated by the instructor. At the end of the lesson, you would line your horse up parallel to the short side of the arena. Then, you would dismount, salute your instructor, and then, if you. wished, you could ask him a question. At this point, periodically the director would come out and you would face him and salute him also.

Dressage has been practiced in an unchanged form at the Spanish Riding School for the last four hundred years. The transmission of this equestrian art form is mainly an oral tradition, handed down from one rider to the next. The form that is practiced at the school is a little different than the form of dressage that's practised in competition today. Although the Lipizzaners are not used for competition, the Spanish Riding School is still to this day the holder of the classical ancient tradition of dressage, as it was practiced in the sixteenth century.

I remember my first day there vividly. My initial lesson was a longe lesson, which seemed to go fairly well. For the second lesson, they brought in a horse with a snaffle bridle (a single set of reins with one bit), and I started to ride him around the arena. The instructor said "Oh you think you're so good, but you're terrible. You can't even put this horse on the bit. [This refers to the horse having the correct head positions.] You're a dreadful rider. What's more, your posture is terrible. You don't sit up straight at all. We're going to ask you to ride with a whip behind your elbows to make you sit up straight. Don't lean on it; don't apply any pressure, because this is the property of the Spanish Riding School, and we'd prefer that you don't break it."

I was in physical pain that day as I rode because my broken ribs were still healing. At a certain point, I started to sweat, and my hat started to slip. The instructor said, "Look at you. You look like you came out of the heurigan," which is a wine bar in Vienna. I remember thinking to myself, I wish I had come out of the heurigan. This would be more pleasant if I were drunk." Then the instructor said again, "Oh look at you. You think you're so good, but you still can't put the horse on the bit." It was a dreadfully demeaning experience.

Later on, I learned that none of the riders at the school could put this horse on the bit in a snaffle bridle. They only rode it in the double bridle, which is much more refined and powerful. The instructor was just being nasty because it was my first day and this was how they treated all the new riders. As well, I think there was definitely a stigma about women and foreigners riding in this venerable Austrian institution. But fundamentally, this is just their way of teaching.

After I finished for the day, I was upset and also noticeably disoriented. Driving back to the barn to ride my horses in the afternoon, I took a wrong turn and ended up heading in the direction of Czechoslovakia. I was preoccupied by my disastrous ride that morning. When I finally got turned around and made it to the barn, I said to Kottas, "So, are they going to kick me out?" He laughed at me and said, "No, no, this is normal."

I had been waiting for so long to study at the Spanish Riding School, and after just one day, I was feeling deeply discouraged and humiliated. However, I was determined to go forward. I remember thinking, "If I want to get the training and I want to learn this properly, I am going to have to take my personal feelings out of the situation. I'm going to have to take nothing personally and try to take only the good out of this. I have to use my time to learn. I must try my best and not become upset with anything that anybody says." Amazingly, I stuck to this, and this attitude held me in good stead the entire time that I rode in the school. Rinpoche had given me the basic advice that I needed when I started riding with Kottas, and now I found that I could give myself the advice to persevere at the Spanish, knowing that this was a precious opportunity that would not come again.

There's definitely value in the approach they follow at the school. Putting intense pressure on people creates such a sharp edge that people have to push themselves very hard to absolutely do their best. On the other hand, sometimes this approach can have a demeaning and degrading aspect to it. When you are trying your best and the teacher is still relentlessly criticizing you, ultimately you may begin to loathe your instructor. In fact, I think this method encourages that. I definitely went through periods of that when I was training in the school. The mentality is that you will get good in spite of your instructor. You feel that, because they're so demeaning, you're going to show them.

When I'm working with my own students, I try not to rob them of their self-esteem. When people are learning a discipline, it's essential at times to put pressure on them. I had witnessed Rinpoche using this approach with people, including myself, many times. You have to inspire people to perform at their best. However, if you make people feel worthless, you create aggression between teacher and student. I feel that 99 percent of what I learned in the Spanish Riding School was fantastic, but I percent was, for me, about learning what not to do as a teacher. This is just my opinion. I don't feel qualified to pass judgment on the methods they use at the school because they've produced brilliant riders and brilliant horses. It is my personal feeling, however, that we should always work with students in an uplifted manner.

As time went on, my experience in the school became more and more enriching. I think I earned respect by sticking with the program and not being overly reactive. I was given exceptional horses to ride, and I had exceptional instructors. I also had the opportunity to broaden my knowledge about dressage and horsemanship in general by reading books in the wonderful library at the school.

At the Spanish, I also began to understand dressage in another way, as a true Shambhala discipline. The discipline of dressage is a very direct way of harnessing windhorse. At times when I was training there, my riding would completely "click." When everything clicks into place, the experience is unbelievable. You feel that nothing whatsoever is happening, in a very positive sense. How do you verbalize that? Your mind and your horse's body become as one. You experience a regal, uplifted feeling that Rinpoche would describe as the experience of the universal monarch. At times it goes beyond even that. You can have an experience of non-thought, mind beyond mind. The horse also shares some of this experience, I believe. The horses get absolutely hooked on the energy and the discipline if the rider is good.

Recently, I was listening to one of the top coaches in the United States talk to his students before they went around the ring at a horse show. He said: "Pull yourself up. Let them know that you're there. Radiate confidence when you go around the ring. Make the judges say, 'look at me.'" From my perspective, he was basically explaining in his own way how to raise windhorse. He had obviously had this experience himself, and he was trying to communicate it. I believe that the best riders all understand this.

So much of riding is working with your own state of mind. If you let your mind get in the way, you can't work with your horse. I see that in terms of my own development, and I see that in watching other riders and working with students. To be a good rider, you have to go beyond your conceptual ideas about it. You've got to constantly question yourself, to question your state of mind, to push yourself, to constantly be looking at yourself. Otherwise, you don't get any better. There's never a feeling of having mastered the discipline. You can never master dressage. Anybody who's any good is constantly learning. There's never a sense of having arrived at an ultimate destination.

Dressage also teaches you the ability to focus. If you're riding well, even at the most basic level, you don't think about anything except what you're doing. You are completely focused. You have to have control over your mind. If you can't control your mind, you definitely can't control your horse's mind. I learned this over and over again while I was training at the Spanish Riding School.

The head rider, Ignaz Lauscha, was extremely generous to me during my time at the school. He was in his sixties at that point and close to retirement. He took me under his wing, and he would sometimes let me ride his best horse, which led the quadrille at the school on a regular basis. Lauscha was a wonderful instructor, and the horse was also an amazing teacher because he was fantastically trained. With this horse, you could go from the extended trot into passage and back into the extended trot with the most delicate of aids. The extended trot is when the horse is able to trot with the farthest possible reach of the legs. Passage is a very slow, floating trot. (It covers ground, unlike the piaffe, which is trotting in place.) In passage the horse is able, as he trots forward, to hold a very high degree of suspension. He's able to hold himself in the air for longer periods of time, giving a very noble gait. It requires a great deal of strength. One might say it's sort of like equine push-ups. Lauscha's horse was gifted in both the passage and the extended trot, and he could move from one to the other flawlessly.





Ignaz Lauscha had the most beautiful tack on his horse, the most beautiful bridle inlaid with gold. Once when he let me ride his horse, he asked me to ride a half halt before I performed the next movement. A half halt is a rebalancing of the horse. You brace your back, you close your leg, and you push the horse more up to the bridle, so that you are encouraging the horse to shift the center of gravity more to the hind legs. It's sort of punctuation in your riding. He asked me to rebalance the horse, and he wasn't satisfied with the way I did it, so he said to me, "Come on. Half halt!" Then, I made a much bigger one, at which point his gold bridle broke into all these little pieces. I remember them falling to the ground. He said, "Well, you did what I told you, but you broke the bridle!" He was really nice about it. I'm sure it must have been already weak.

Another time I had some difficulty when the director gave me his horse for a lesson. He was well known as an international judge, but he wasn't a fantastic rider. He thought he was an excellent rider, but he had some problems. He had a stallion that he used to ride all the time, and everybody used to laugh at him when he was riding because he used to ride around the arena in a peculiar gait, which he thought was passage. He looked very snotty, with his nose and his chin held up as he rode. We would all sort of snicker at him because his horse was doing the strangest thing with only his front legs whilst the hind legs shuffled along. Then the terrible day came when he said to me, "Because you've been studying so hard, I'm going to allow you to ride my stallion." I thought, "Oh no," because I knew I could never produce passage on that horse. It was a dreadful lesson because he kept saying to me, "Ride passage, ride passage." Probably the horse was doing exactly the same thing with me that it did with him. He obviously had no idea that this was what the gait looked like when he was riding, so he could only be critical of me. Everybody was laughing while I rode.

Another movement that I worked with quite a lot at the Spanish was the flying changes of lead, when the horse changes from one leading leg at the canter to the other leading leg at the canter, without any trot or intermittent walk steps. He just reverses which leg he's leading with in midair. At Grand Prix, the highest level of dressage, a horse learns to do that on every single stride. It's a very difficult movement, because the horse is really no longer cantering at that point. According to the classical view, which is that dressage uses only the natural movements of the horse in the field, the flying change at every stride is a controversial movement because you actually have lost the gait of the horse at that point. So you're taking the training beyond what the horse would naturally do.

One day when I was riding Siglavy Dubovina, the horse of the head rider, he said to me, "All right, just canter down the center line, through the pillars, making flying changes every stride." I had no clue how to do this. (The pillars, by the way, are two posts that are two-and-a-half meters high, with one-and-a-half meters of space between them. As part of their training, the most advanced horses often stand between the pillars and do piaffe, the trot in place, for a long time.) Flying changes at every stride was one movement I hadn't yet ridden. As I rode past Kottas, I said to him under my breath, "How do I do this?" And he said to me, "In the Spanish Riding School we don't ask questions." So I just turned down the center line, and I gave the horse the aids that I thought would be correct for flying changes every stride. The horse was so beautifully trained that he just did it for me. I was thrilled.

There are many classical movements, classical figures, in dressage, just as there are positions in ballet. In dressage, however, many of the figures have their roots in battle movements. For example, canter pirouette was used in battle when you came with a sword toward your enemy. Then, to leave, you'd continue in the full pirouette. The canter half-pass and the trot half-pass, when you go both forward and sideward, were supposed to confuse your opponent, because he couldn't know on which line you were traveling. The flying changes of lead in the air made it possible to turn and escape quickly.

The military origins of dressage are reflected in many customs at the Spanish. For example, when you ride with a double bridle with four reins in the Spanish Riding School, you ride with three reins in the left hand and one in the right. (I mentioned this in the letter I wrote after my examination.) This tradition came about so that your right hand wouldn't be too encumbered to use a sword in battle
. Normally, outside of the Spanish, we ride with two reins in each hand. Some military traditions are ubiquitous, however. For example, the main reason that one always mounted the horse from the left side was because the sword used to be on the left hip, so you didn't want the sword to hit the horse as you went over the top. That is now the universal convention. Also, in the Spanish Riding School the mane has to be on the right of the horse's neck. This was so that if you drew your sword, you wouldn't have the mane caught up with your sword.

There are also classical dressage movements that are only practiced at the Spanish. These make up what is called the "haute school," or the airs above the ground. They are not practiced in modern-day competition. However the Lipizzaners are especially talented at these movements. I had the opportunity to experience many of them while I was riding at the Spanish. When I had photos taken at the end of my time there, I did some of these movements for the photographs. I didn't do them on a daily basis, however. One, called the levade, is an amazing expression of collection and shifting of the center of gravity to the hindquarters. The horse actually sits down and brings the forehand completely off the ground. You see many statues in Europe in that pose. Unlike when a horse rears up, in the levade the horse's legs are bent. In the pesade, the horse also has his weight completely on the hind legs, but he is raised up even a little bit higher, but is still on flexed hind leg. This is completely different from when horses rear, which is disobedient.

Then you have the capriole, which is a battle movement in which the horse jumps off the ground and kicks out violently with both hind legs. You could unseat your opponent in that way. There is another movement called the courbette in which the horse comes up on his hind legs, and he jumps forward four to six strides on his hind legs. In battle, you could use that move to advance on your opponent. All in all, it must have been a beautiful war!

I remember the rich feeling of being immersed in the training at the school. Periodically my mind would just stop, and I would think, "How incredibly fortunate I am to be in such a wonderful situation as this." It was so brilliant riding on those horses in that hall, which itself was exquisite and uplifting. There is nothing I've done either before or after that matches that experience. I feel extremely fortunate to have ridden in the Spanish Riding School, and I had that sense of appreciation and almost awe during the whole time I was there.

At the end of my three-month session, I talked to the director, Colonel Albrecht. I said to him, "I know I've almost completed the session. However, I want to understand this tradition more fully, because I want to become a well-trained instructor in the future. I'd like to request that you let me stay for a further few months. In that way, I can learn even more, so that I can take some of this tradition home with me." When the director told me that it was all right and I could stay longer, I was so happy that I gave him a huge hug. He was appalled, I think, but he said I could return.

After I received the acceptance to stay on, I went home to Colorado for a few weeks of the summer, knowing that I would be allowed to return in the fall. I began to ponder what I was going to do in terms of future training after the Spanish. I had a wonderful situation training at Kottas's barn, but after riding in the Spanish itself, I felt that my time in Vienna was drawing to an end. When I was home, Rinpoche and I discussed my future direction. At one point, he suggested to me, "The training at the Spanish Riding School is excellent classical training for you. However, from what you've told me, the competitive tradition is centered in Germany at this point, and I think you will want to understand both schools and both traditions. To complete your training properly, perhaps you should ride in Germany for a few years."

Rinpoche's instincts about my riding career were amazingly accurate. As I said earlier, he had a connection to horsemanship that went back to Tibet. Rinpoche had a white Chinese thoroughbred in Tibet which he rode from earliest childhood on. His horse could do passage, the slow, floating trot in which a horse hovers above the ground a little bit, in moments of suspension. It looks very elegant and lofty. He said that when he would travel to a new monastery, he would do passage as he entered.

Horses were part of his culture. People there still traveled everywhere on horseback; in fact, in parts of Tibet they still do. He always loved horses. But how he knew what was good for me in the Western riding world is a bit of a mystery. His advice to me at this time was instrumental in my decision to leave Austria and go to Germany. I don't think I would have gone there without his influence.

In the latter part of 1979, I wrote to Herbert Rehbein, who was the current German professional champion and legendary in terms of his ability to produce Grand Prix horses. In my letter, I asked if I could bring my horses up in late 1979 and study with him when I had finished in the Spanish. I was happy to receive a letter of acceptance, and I took my horses up to northern Germany just before Christmas in 1979.

Herr Rehbein worked for a man by the name of Otto Schulte Frohlinde, an elderly gentleman who was a patron of dressage. He had built a facility north of Hamburg, which had a stunning indoor arena, as well as beautiful stalls for the horses. It was a first-class, state-of-the-art riding facility. The floors in the barn were mosaics in brick, and everything was Immaculate and magnificent. After my horses were transported up there, I had a chance to settle in over Christmas.

After the Christmas holidays, I met Herr Rehbein. I was struck by his persona from the start. He had the real air of a master. He was very genuine, a man who had a thorough mastery of his riding yet was always gentle and kind. He was someone whom Rinpoche would have said had authentic presence. He was a wonderful instructor. I remember thinking during the first few weeks that I rode with Rehbein how accurate Rinpoche had been in recommending that I go there. I had experienced some difficulties with my big Hanoverian horse, Warrior. Herr Rehbein was brilliant in helping me to sort out these problems.

When I was at Gronwohldhof, Rehbein's barn, I was also given the opportunity to ride other horses apart from my own. I had many opportunities to feel Grand Prix movements on different horses. Rinpoche termed the place a factory for producing great horses, and it was quite a marvelous environment in which people could learn. Rehbein provided a very open ground, and when you saw the people working around you, they didn't make many mistakes as riders. You found yourself going along with the program, and it worked. It was very different from Vienna. There wasn't a lot of external pressure. The approach was quite positive for everybody. Things went well for people, and so you went along.

I'd heard about Herbert Rehbein for a number of years before I began studying with him. He was known at that time to be one of the greatest dressage teachers and riders. He was quite selective about whom he would teach. He also had a reputation for ignoring people who had come to study with him. Sometimes he would say, "Good morning," and that was it. He wouldn't teach them directly at all. He was thought of as a moderately outrageous character, in his own way. This was familiar to me, so it didn't really bother me. I found that he was very helpful with my riding. Herr Rehbein taught that if you're rash and aggressive with your horse on a regular basis, this reflects a lack of knowledge. There are many different ways to communicate something to your horse, and you have to be flexible. If you try to teach your horse something, and he doesn't understand right away or doesn't respond, you don't become aggressive. You have to think, "Can I explain this a different way? Do I need to break it down? What in the communication isn't working? What do I need to establish again in terms of the basic rules?" He stressed that trainers who frequently beat their horses and are abusive to them are never going to produce a good end product.







I've seen horses that shake before their saddles are put on, and I've seen horses that, when they're taken to learn piaffe, will actually lie down because they're so afraid. I witnessed this during my time in Vienna -- not at the Spanish, but at other barns. You need to be firm, but you never need to be abusive. Of course, if the horse is really out of control, sometimes you have to use very strong methods, but that should be rare.


Herr Rehbein had an enormous amount of experience and seemingly endless psychological resources. He was able to help me train my horses in a very kind way. I learned a great deal from him in a short time.

In this training environment, I felt a sense of genuine relaxation for the first time. In my heart, I'd always known the way that I wanted to ride my horses. When I came to Rehbein, I felt that I was given the freedom to experiment. Everything started to come together. It was a magical time; the riding became very cohesive. In terms of learning how to train horses, it was the first time I was able to trust my basic instincts thoroughly and take possession of the knowledge that I'd accumulated. I felt that he empowered me to do that. I always felt that the hallmark of Rinpoche's teaching was his ability to appreciate people's strength and then to give them the freedom to express this and to develop their own intelligence. Herbert Rehbein was that type of teacher too. Studying with him, I started to come into my own.

I remember watching Herr Rehbein doing a canter pirouette on his horse. He had a feeling of complete, total relaxation. I was watching him ride in front of the mirror, and he was looking at himself in the mirror. His horse was executing an absolutely perfect canter pirouette. I looked up and realized that Rehbein had the reins in one hand and was fumbling in his breast pocket with the other. I finally realized that he was looking for his cigarettes. He managed to pull out a Marlboro and light it, while the entire time, his horse stayed in a double or triple pirouette that was absolutely perfect, right in front of the mirror. Rehbein was really a riding genius, the likes of which the century did not see again.

After spending a few months at his facility in the beginning of 1980, I took my horses over to England for a few months. Gesar had been enrolled in school there the previous fall. Tom and Pat had taken him over. I didn't want to keep putting him in and out of school, and I knew that -- at this point in time -- I could only stay at Rehbein's for a few months. We had rented a small house in England that was called the Deerkeeper's Lodge, on a large estate. You went down a long driveway to this ancient house, built in the sixteenth century.

I came over to England to have the opportunity to compete my horses there.
At that time, all foreign horses in England had to go through a test at the National Riding Centre, and then you were told at which level you had to compete. But I felt that I was forced to compete at a level that was too difficult for my horses, especially for Warrior. I think the English didn't want foreigners to bring their horses into the country and then start winning in all the shows. There was a bit of a prejudice toward me, I felt, because I had trained my horses on the continent. However, all in all, I enjoyed the time I spent in England reconnecting with my English roots.

When the Tao is present in the universe,
The horses haul manure.
When the Tao is absent from the universe,
War horses are bred outside the city.

-- Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tsu, by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English

This was the end of a long period when I had quite a bit of independence in my marriage. Although I felt very committed to Rinpoche, at the same time, I was living my own life. There was an interesting tension there. I had realized years ago that I couldn't spend my life having doors slammed in my face, and there was definitely an element of that when I was around him. Everybody wanted to get to Rinpoche, and I was sort of superfluous, on some level. Once when we were on vacation in Mexico, the person helping Rinpoche opened a swinging door for Rinpoche to go in, and then just let it go in my face. At times, it was like I was invisible. I felt that I needed to pursue something for myself or I was going to get depressed. As a creative person, I couldn't play the role of his passive wife all the time. People didn't feel they could be judgmental about Rinpoche, but it was easy for people to be judgmental about me. I didn't want to get caught up in that. Instead, I concentrated on developing myself, through engaging in a discipline that I had a great passion for.

During the years that I was in Vienna, I tried to spend seven months in Europe and seven weeks back home. I had that formula in my mind, seven months and seven weeks. I made a point of coming back for things that were important to Rinpoche. I also started the Shambhala School of Dressage in Boulder, and it continued during my absence. A student of mine and fellow rider, Mary Louise Barrett, would run the school when I was away. I would teach when I came home.

Marie Louise Barrett on Aragorn. HITs/Centerline Dressage, MFS, 8/21/2010

During the summer of 1981, after spending several months in England with Gesar, I decided to leave England and return to Colorado for an extended period of time. I wanted to concentrate on developing the Shambhala School of Dressage, where I was trying to introduce classical dressage training. I decided to bring one of my horses, Shambhala, home with me.
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Part 1 of 2


Back in late February 1977, a few months before I had first moved to Vienna to study with Arthur Kottas, Rinpoche went into his year's retreat in an old farmhouse in Rowe, Massachusetts. The property was close to Charlemont, and we always referred to the place simply as "Charlemont." Charlemont was an old house, so old in fact that there was a separate little room for the telephone. When anyone called to talk to Rinpoche, he had to go into this little booth off of the living room to speak with the caller. There was a large country kitchen and dining room on the main floor, as well as a living room and an office off of that. This was well before the era not only of cellphones but also of home computers. There was a typewriter in the office that was used for typing up the various documents and poems that he wrote throughout the year. Upstairs, there were a number of bedrooms.

According to Rinpoche, there was a ghost in the house, named Rosie, and Rinpoche was very fond of her. Once when I was visiting him, he said, "You know, I was at the top of the stairs today, and Rosie was standing there with blood pouring down her chest. We were talking about the arrangement of the furniture, and she wasn't sure if she liked the way that I'd changed the furniture around." I could sometimes feel Rosie around Charlemont. As I was drifting off to sleep, I would feel that there was somebody else in the room. Rinpoche used to say that when someone dies, they become a ghost if they don't know that they're dead. At the right time, you can release them from being a spirit by telling them that they're no longer alive. Rinpoche never wanted to exorcise Rosie because he liked her so much.


"Only two," he replied.

I almost fainted.


"May, 1853," she said.




Another time while I was visiting Rinpoche during his retreat, a local farmer dropped by the house. He had heard that a Tibetan lama was staying there. There was one area of the farmer's fields where the grass didn't grow normally. The grass lay flat in that area and it was a strange silver color, and he was having nightmares about two-headed cows being born there. He fertilized the grass and tried other things, but whatever he did, the grass wouldn't grow properly. Rinpoche said, "Fine, we'll come along. We'll see." So all of us who were there at the time went out to the field with him. From a distance you could see that the grass in that area was quite different. It looked unhealthy. Rinpoche took his walking stick with him. While he stood on the edge, he had everybody else sit in the middle of this area. We sat there and practiced meditation while he walked around with the stick tapping the ground and doing various chants. After a while, he said he had done the exorcism. He told us it was very sad, because somebody was stabbed in this place, and they were continuously reliving their death. "Now I've released him into the bardo," he said. We went back to the house and didn't think anything more about it. A year after Rinpoche's retreat, when the owner of the house was there, the farmer came by again, and he said he'd done some research. He had discovered that there had been a highway in the old days running through the field. Exactly in the location where the grass didn't grow, as best as the farmer could tell, a young man had been waylaid by a highwayman and stabbed. The farmer said that the grass had grown back normally the year after the exorcism was done.

As I mentioned earlier, Rinpoche took John Perks and Max King along as his staff in retreat, and throughout the year, other people were invited to visit and spend time with him there. A lot of the time that Rinpoche spent in Charlemont, it just seemed that he was hanging out and not doing very much. There was a shrine room there, and occasionally he did some formal practice, but most of the time, he sat and talked with people in the kitchen or the living room. Hanging out with Rinpoche was quite demanding, somehow. It wasn't like being entertained or anything. During one period of the retreat, Rinpoche, Max, and John all learned to catch flies that were buzzing around the kitchen with their bare hands. They would sit quietly and when the fly landed, they would swipe it up in their hand and then put it outside. That was what they did for entertainment.









"Oh?" I said, accepting the wager.



"No, Sir." I said.




"But Gurdjieff was a man," I said.



Max in particular found it hard to be in this isolated situation after the first few months, and by the end of the year, he was ready to go back into "private life." Both he and John did the cooking. John got into a phase where he did a lot of Indian cooking, and he would sometimes make a great feast of Indian curries.

Rinpoche got reports about what was happening in the Buddhist community while he was away. During the first few months, his newly appointed regent made a tour of the various dharmadhatus, or meditation centers, around the United States. There were reports of Osel Tendzin being very demanding and heavy-handed with people. People found the Regent to be an accomplished teacher, but he was also extremely critical of students at times, in ways that they found demeaning and excessively negative. I think he settled down after a couple of months, but it was in some respects a troubling sign of things to come in future years.

Later in the retreat, Rinpoche received messages expressing much more appreciation for the Regent. I heard from Rinpoche that people described the Regent as a very insightful teacher with a true grasp of the Buddhist path. I had few opportunities to hear him teach, in fact.

Occasionally, Rinpoche would leave the retreat -- usually for a short jaunt to a nearby city. He would sometimes go out to dinner at a restaurant or go shopping. I think he ventured as far as Hartford, Connecticut, to buy some ties. Usually, he had a female companion staying with him in Charlemont. I was used to this arrangement by this point. I had my own life, and as far as I was concerned, he was there for me when I needed him. It really didn't bother me.

A lot of what Rinpoche was doing in retreat that year -- when he wasn't catching flies -- was working on various aspects of the Shambhala teachings, elaborating on the basic vision he had already conceived. When Shakyamuni Buddha became enlightened, there were no Buddhist teachings or Buddhist texts. He had the experience of enlightenment and then gradually he began to expound the teachings, based on what he had realized. In a similar way, when Rinpoche received the stroke of Ashe in 1976, it was a primordial experience of the heart of warriorship. Everything else came out of that over a long period of time. While he was in Charlemont, he said that he could feel Padmasambhava breathing down the back of his neck. Padmasambhava, as you may remember, was a very important figure in the transmission of Buddhism from India to Tibet. He was an unconventional teacher who used whatever means were necessary to wake people up. Rinpoche identified with him a great deal.

John Perks brought a record to the retreat called Trooping the Colour, which is the music from the Queen's Birthday Parade, a ceremony held each year where the Queen of England reviews the troops on horseback. Rinpoche took one of the well-known tunes from this and wrote lyrics for a Shambhala anthem, which was sung hundreds of times during the Charlemont retreat and thousands of times thereafter.
Over the next few years, he wrote a number of Shambhala songs. Rinpoche did a lot of other writing during his retreat as well, including a little unpublished volume about the Shambhala world called Court Vision. It has chapters in it about the different roles that people would play in the Shambhala kingdom, including a chapter on the Sakyong Wangmo -- which was me. My role was described as the binding factor within Shambhala, harmonizing all the energies in society. Rinpoche wrote that she should provide the people of Shambhala "with a sense of genuine relationship to, and appreciation of, the kingdom. She must fully inspire them with a sense of loyalty and a natural sense of refinement. It is her task to harvest peace in Shambhala, by developing sophistication and communication."1

I think about the kingdom of Shambhala as a way of describing how one might relate to one's life altogether. If we live an uplifted life, with kindness and decency, we might come to recognize that we are living in this kingdom. All these years later, I am still working with understanding my role as Sakyong Wangmo: what it means to me in a personal, intimate way, how I can possibly live up to this, and how I can be helpful to others. The chapter on my role in Court Vision was a challenging portrait, to say the least.

Over the years, I have come to appreciate the Sakyong Wangmo as a manifestation of the feminine principle. The Sakyong Wangmo represents the left side or the left hand of the Sakyong, who represents leadership overall in the Shambhala world. The feminine principle of the Sakyong Wangmo supports the Sakyong principle. In order to create a good society, you need to have the masculine principle of the Sakyong, which is steadfastness and action. At the same time, you also need to have the feminine principle, which is nurturing and gives birth to situations. In any society, it's very important to have both aspects of leadership.

While at Charlemont, Rinpoche also worked on the designs for Shambhala flags, pins, and the various Shambhala awards that he had created before leaving Boulder. He arranged for a number of medals to be handcrafted in England. He took the designs over with him when he came to Europe in the fall for my birthday.

Rinpoche made another long journey during the year he was in retreat. He left Charlemont in June to travel to the province of Nova Scotia on the east coast of Canada. At this time, he was already thinking about moving the headquarters of Vajradhatu to Canada, although there were very few people who knew this then. He felt that in the long run the United States would not be the best home for the Shambhala world. He sensed that in the future there would be a great deal of aggression to deal with in America; whereas he thought that in Canada the atmosphere would remain more peaceful and workable. Rinpoche was not afraid of obstacles such as aggression, which he regarded as simply the raw material of human life that we have to work with. He simply felt that certain environments were more conducive than others for the development of the Shambhala teachings and the personal development of his students.

On September 13, Ed Sanders wrote again to Ed Dorn, "there's been certain amount of pressure to print The Party, and now there is a two-vote margin in the class, not counting me, to do so. Report came in yesterday that the Vajra guards were recently training wearing Canadian Mountie uniforms, and that the word 'democracy' is now being used apparently at Naropa as a catch-all word for the ills of the world ..."

R.C.M.P. Mounties (Royal Canadian Mounted Policemen)

On September 23, Sanders wrote to me again. The vote had shifted, he said, but some class members still hadn't responded to the latest poll, which was being conducted by a member of the class, Al Santoli. "The issue is democracy, as I see it," Sanders said....

In January I overheard Allen talking to some innocent-looking young Naropa students at a party. He was telling them that, yes, it was true that this Merwin thing had taken place, but that individual rights don't apply on a seminary situation, so that Merwin only got what he had coming, and besides, yes, Trungpa was challenging the foundations of American democracy -- but that democracy was anyway a failed experiment, the atom bomb proved that, and now what Trungpa was up to was a whole new . . . a whole new "experiment in monarchy!" The students nodded numbly. What was wrong with an experiment in monarchy?
I ground my teeth all the way home....

And American culture! "How dare you criticize American culture!"...."democracy, shit! What we need is a new Hitler." Democracy, nothing! They exploded the atom bomb without asking us. Everybody's defending American democracy. American democracy's this thing, this Oothoon....everyone wants to go back and say, "Oh, no, we've got it comfortable. Here are these people invading us with their mind control."....So, yes, it is true that Trungpa is questioning the very foundations of American democracy. Absolutely.....Trungpa is asking if there's any deeper axiomatic basis than some creator coming along and guaranteeing his rights....the Bill of Rights. The whole foundation of American democracy is built on that, and it's as full of holes as Swiss cheese.

-- When the Party's Over, An Interview with Alan Ginsberg

Allen's become a sort of lapdog and apologist for a Tibetan monarchist who loathes anything that smacks of democracy -- no wonder they push Thomas Hobbes in the "Vajra Politics" courses at the seminaries -- particularly Hobbes Leviathan. Frankly, as Trungpa gleefully did a couple of years ago at Naropa, proclaiming the "death of Hippiedom" (Trungpa encouraged his students to vote for Nixon vs. McGovern, Ford vs. Carter -- and if invited, would've had one of his Guards burn the tires of his Mercedes to get to dinner at Nixon's White House, but he wouldn't have been caught dead at an anti-Viet war poetry reading).

I think the Beat trip is dead. For the cover of the investigation, as far as I'm concerned, they ought to have a picture of Allen, in his Uncle Sam hat, wrapped in the Shambhala flag, pissing on Walt Whitman's grave -- and Neruda's, too!!! At least, Allen as a "Beat" is dead.

-- More Naropa Flack: Letter from Jim Hartz to the Berkeley Barb, May 10, 1979

The Literature Advisory Panel which participated in the 1979 fellowship recommendation process included Ron Padgett, a former Naropa poetics instructor. ("The luck was that Ron was on the board, for them," commented Steve Katz, another member of the Panel).

It was suggested by Tom Clark to David Wilk, Literature Program Director of the NEA, that the awarding of $150,000 in fellowships to one small, identifiable group of writers amounts to the wholesale federal subsidy of an avowedly anti-democratic literary movement.

"Personally, I'm upset about it," Wilk responded, "but publicly I can't say a word. I can't disagree with what you're saying about where the money went; all I can tell you is that I had no inkling that this could happen. I'm just an administrator. It's out of my control."

-- The Big Payoff

-- The Great Naropa Poetry Wars: With a Copious Collection of Germane Documents Assembled by the Author, by Tom Clark

Rinpoche had picked Nova Scotia as a possible home base from looking at it on a map of North America. He had never been there. I personally had never been to Nova Scotia either, and I couldn't quite imagine what we would do there. After his trip, he told me that the people he met there were open and kindhearted, and that something about the place reminded him of Tibet, oddly enough. He insisted on traveling with his party throughout Nova Scotia as Prince Mukpo of Tibet. I have no idea what people actually thought, but in some respects it was no stranger for the Nova Scotians than if he traveled as a high Tibetan lama. Certainly, he did not intend to enter Nova Scotia incognito. He was ready to make an impression on the place and engage the energy from the moment he set foot there.












Word was spreading that the Prince of Bhutan was staying at the motel. The organizer of the festival approached me and asked if the Prince would like to have the Beauty Queen "presented" to him. "Delighted" was the response from the Prince when I relayed the message. There is a picture in a local Nova Scotian newspaper showing a ring of Apple Blossom girls, and in their white-dressed center, with the Queen on his arm, is the smiling Prince. The caption reads "Prince of Bhutan meets Apple Blossom Queen. The Prince and his party are touring the Province."

Meanwhile, the phone at the Best Western motel was ringing nonstop with offers of property for sale. Jerry was freaking out about the FBI finding out that we were planning to take over Nova Scotia.

"Who else would want it?" asked the Regent.


I didn't entirely understand what he was doing with the Shambhala teachings at the time, but now when I look back on this era, I see it in terms of how I see Rinpoche altogether -- as a great mahasiddha, someone who is presenting the essence of the teachings to people in their ordinary lives. From that perspective, I view his activity in terms of his compassion for his students and his vision for a time far into the future. It is hard to communicate just what an extraordinary and visionary person Rinpoche was. What I can communicate is simply how he manifested for me and the kind of absolute love I had for him and faith that I relied on to get through the difficult times. During 1977, sheltered as I was in Vienna with my own household and daily life, I was able to look with some equanimity on the early stirrings of Shambhala in North America.

At the end of the year, Rinpoche finished the retreat in Charlemont and visited Karme Choling before flying to Boulder. I flew to the East Coast to meet him, and we flew back to Boulder together. It was an amazing homecoming. People had missed him so much, and he was overjoyed to see everyone. He picked up the reins and dove into his work with a great deal of renewed energy.

During the last six months that he was in Charlemont, he had asked his senior students to put together a program of meditation for non-Buddhists. We had come up with the name "Shambhala Training" for this program, and various senior students had been working in small study groups, trying to decide how best to present meditation together with the Shambhala teachings in a nonsectarian way. The various people who in Rinpoche's absence had directed the first weekends of Shambhala Training seemed to have only a vague idea what they were doing. They tended to rely on a parody of charisma, with little substance to it. So when Rinpoche returned to Boulder, he had a lot of work to do to put Shambhala Training on a genuine footing. Rinpoche began meeting with the Shambhala Training directors several times a week, introducing material on how to present the basic teachings to people in a direct, genuine fashion. After these meetings, which lasted throughout the early months of 1978, Shambhala Training took root. It became the main vehicle for Rinpoche and his students to introduce meditation and the path of the Shambhala warrior. Now, more than twenty years later, tens of thousands of people have gone through this program, and it continues to address the popular interest in meditation. I was there for a few of these early meetings, but then I was off to Vienna again, and I did not return until the fall.

There were several other Shambhala ceremonies that spring. Rinpoche empowered the members of the board of directors of Vajradhatu as ministers in the Shambhala kingdom, and he also had a ceremony jointly confirming John Perks as the Kusung Dapon and James Gimian as the Kasung Dapon of Shambhala (dapon means "chief" or "general" in Tibetan). I think that in essence, all of this was about making the people in his world think much bigger about their responsibilities. Rather than purely seeing themselves as administrators in a church, he wanted his senior students to view themselves as having a duty to society, a duty to help others on a big scale. There was always the danger that people would get an inflated view of themselves, and in a way he encouraged that. He would create a situation for people to expand their feeling of self-importance, and then he could prune that back, undercut it, and encourage people to develop genuine warmth and commitment.

This is not dissimilar to what occurs in a Vajrayana abhisheka. When students complete their preliminary practices, the empowerment they then receive is based on a sort of coronation. During the abhisheka, the student is presented with a crown, which symbolizes that one is the lord or lady of a particular family or energy. One is given a scepter, a bell, and other implements, and one receives a new name. The idea is that you are transforming ego into enlightened being. At the beginning, when you receive abhisheka, in a sense you are pretending to be something or someone. It's only through a long process of practice and surrendering that you can give up your small, ego-centered schemes. If you don't actually make that transformation, then you are just confirming your egomania. That is one reason that there are so many warnings about the Vajrayana path. The Shambhala empowerments are similar: one is assuming a new identity in the society of warrior bodhisattvas, and here too there is risk involved. However, Rinpoche was quite inspired about creating this new mandala, or Shambhala world.

Another seminary was held that spring, and there were more than 250 participants. This time, the seminary was held at the Balsams Hotel in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire. For many years, Vajradhatu arranged to rent grand old hotels that were not being used during their "down season." I don't think these hotels close up this way anymore. However, during this era, Vajradhatu was able to rent the entire hotel and take over running it for three months or more to hold these big programs. We provided our own kitchen staff, people did their own laundry and kept their rooms clean, and participants had jobs on a rota to clean the common areas. Usually, we converted a ballroom or large dining room into the meditation hall. It was like converting the hotel into a monastery for the period of the seminary. This was before we had expanded the facilities at our own centers to accommodate these large programs.

During this seminary, Rinpoche had a love affair with one of the participants, Cynde Grieve. He was quite in love, which he shared with me when we talked on the phone. This relationship went beyond what I was used to, and it was a little shocking at first. However, Rinpoche was so warm and loving with me, and so open, that I couldn't hold on to my insecurities. The reference point of a conventional monogamous marriage did not apply to our relationship, which remained very strong.

Cynde Grieve and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, 1978 Dixville Notch, NH
photo: thanks to Walter Fordham

That summer, Rinpoche was scheduled, as usual, to teach a seminar at the Rocky Mountain Dharma Center. The subject of the seminar was announced as "Warriorship in the Three Yanas." Yana literally means "vehicle" and refers to the stages on the Buddhist path, the Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana. Several hundred people came to hear the talks. Rinpoche invited the members of the Dorje Kasung, the vajra guards, to set up an encampment in a field at RMDC, above the main facilities. There were about forty participants in the encampment, which was separate from the main program. Rinpoche decided that, although he was lecturing at night in a large tent down below, he would live at the encampment up above during the seminar and conduct intensive training there with the small group of Dorje Kasung.

Rinpoche lived in an L.L. Bean cabin-style tent at the encampment that first year. A few years later, he designed a white Tibetan-style tent that had a bedroom and a sitting room in it. It had beautiful embroidered patterns sewn onto it. Just below his tent there were two rows of smaller tents for the leadership of the Dorje Kasung, including David Rome (now known as the Kasung Kyi Khyap, or overall commander of the Dorje Kasung), the two dapons, and other Dorje Kasung leaders. Other members of the Dorje Kasung lived in three large white tents farther down the hill. In later years, when there were up to three hundred participants, Dorje Kasung members lived in tents along the perimeter of the camp. There was also a meditation tent and a dining tent within the camp. All the kasung wore uniforms, which at that time consisted of khakis purchased from Army surplus. Later, we designed our own uniforms.

You couldn't just walk into this camp. There was a front gate, and you had to present yourself to the Dorje Kasung member on duty and state your business. Tent poles were erected on a parade ground, and the Shambhala flags were raised every morning and lowered in the evening, with the Dorje Kasung standing at attention and saluting. The Dorje Kasung sang the Shambhala anthem as well. The parade ground was a fairly flat area for drilling, which was a discipline that everyone learned at the encampment. From my experience of it in later years, I realize that it contains many of the same elements as dressage does, without the horses of course. At the encampment, marching was taught with tremendous emphasis on the precision of the discipline; the Dorje Kasung were learning mindfulness and awareness and invoking the energy of windhorse through the practice of drilling. It is quite an exhilarating experience to march in formation with so many other people. In a sense, everyone has to have one mind for the exercises to really work. In the discipline of the drill as it was taught at the encampment, there was an emphasis on learning to channel energy in much the same way as we teach our horses collection in dressage.


Stop such foolishness as respecting Confucius, revering Christ, or believing in Shakyamuni! Believe in the emperor, the embodiment of Supreme Truth, the one God of the universe! Revere the emperor for all eternity! Imperial subjects of Japan should not seek their own personal salvation. Rather, their goal should be the expansion of imperial power. Needless to say, they will find personal salvation within imperial power. Inasmuch as this is true, they must pray for the expansion of imperial power. In front of the emperor their self is empty. Within the unity of the sovereign and the people, the people must not value their self, but value the emperor who embodies their self.

Loyalty to the emperor, which is the highest moral training, should never be done with the expectation of receiving anything in return. Rather, it should be practiced without any thought of reward, for the emperor does not exist for the people, but the people exist for the emperor .... The emperor does not exist for the state, but the state exists for the emperor.

This great awareness will clearly manifest itself at the time you discard secular values and recognize that the emperor is the highest, supreme value for all eternity. If, on the other hand, your ultimate goal is eternal happiness for yourself and salvation of your soul, the emperor becomes a means to an end and is no longer the highest being. If there is a difference in the degree of your reverence for the emperor based on your learning, occupation, or social position, then you are a self-centered person. Seeking nothing at all, you should simply completely discard both body and mind, and unite with the emperor.54

-- The Emergence of Imperial-State Zen and Soldier Zen [Chapter Eight], [Excerpt] from "Zen at War", by Brian Daizen Victoria

Before the encampment began, Rinpoche phoned me in Vienna to tell me how excited he was about this new program, and I received many reports about what happened there, both from him and others I was in touch with in Colorado. Many of the people down below at the seminar at RMDC didn't know what to make of the encampment. Some of them found it threatening, others just odd. All of the Dorje Kasung members would pile into a couple of old trucks to drive down to the evening talks, where there was a special section for them set aside in the tent. Rinpoche was giving a series of talks on how the Buddhist practitioner is a warrior who is rousing the energy of enlightenment. Up the hill, the Dorje Kasung were raising the warrior's cry and setting off a cannon every morning. It really pushed a lot of people's buttons.

A number of people decided to make raids on the encampment, which I think Rinpoche may have clandestinely encouraged. At night, therefore, there was a lot of activity in the camp responding to the invaders. Rinpoche would egg the whole thing on, by encouraging the camp to defend itself and suggesting that the Dorje Kasung should try to take prisoners. Then, he would do things to undercut the quality of people playing Cowboys and Indians. He started to develop various training exercises, and he introduced little twists that sharpened people's intelligence. For example, both the invaders and the defenders would use their flashlights to move around at night. Rinpoche pointed out that many flashlights have a red plastic edge to them, which makes the light glow slightly red in the dark. He told all the Dorje Kasung members to tape over the red plastic so that, if they saw a red light shining, they would know it was one of the "enemy." He also conducted exercises for the Dorje Kasung in which he taught them to lie down and be absolutely still in the dark. Later, he expanded this to show people how to "be like a rock." He had people do this for quite long periods of time, so that they began to learn how to blend into the darkness and the landscape while waiting for someone to attack. From what I heard, that first year was mind-blowing for the Dorje Kasung members who attended. It started with them being awkward and uncertain and feeling that they were pretending to be something, but by the end, people felt that they were connecting with some deep thread of warrior lore. It had a big effect on people, and Rinpoche certainly was delighted. The encampment became an annual affair.

I was not able to attend the encampment until 1980, the third year, when I actually brought horses to it and worked with a group of people there who were starting Windhorse, a division of the Dorje Kasung that we formed for people who ride. It was the Shambhala equivalent of the cavalry, I suppose -- an unarmed cavalry, however.

Altogether, it seems interestingly synchronistic to me that I connected with the military tradition of the Spanish Riding School right around the time that Rinpoche began taking the Dorje Kasung much more in the direction of military discipline through the introduction of the encampment training process. What I found about the Spanish was that here was a tradition that relied so much on military discipline, yet no one uses horses in battle any longer. So it was taking the essence of the strength of that tradition and using it in an entirely different way. I suppose you could say that it is a Western martial art at this point.

Similarly, within the Dorje Kasung training, Rinpoche wanted to adopt aspects of the Western military tradition without the aggression and without the intent of killing others or causing harm. In some sense, his approach to the encampment was similar to having matches in aikido, but on a much bigger scale involving large groups of people. He was, to some extent, choreographing the whole situation so that it would allow people to uncover and work with aggression and fear. There is the appearance in the martial arts that you are working with an external enemy, but you discover that in fact the first thing you have to do is to work with your own state of mind and overcome the internal enemies. Of course, there are actual obstacles in life that one must confront. Ultimately, the Dorje Kasung discipline can prove to be a powerful ally in working with those external issues, but primarily it is a mind-training discipline that develops strength of character and teaches one to synchronize body and mind. Then it can provide the basis to work with chaos and conflict.
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Postby admin » Sun Aug 11, 2019 3:43 am

Part 2 of 2

As well, Rinpoche always loved what he called "tent culture." In Tibet, he traveled in caravans from one monastery to the next over a period of days. The monks walked or rode on horseback and at night they camped. He loved this life. It was also how he lived for ten months when he walked out of Tibet. I think, being the person that he was, he had taken something very positive from that long, difficult journey and he wanted to share this outdoor life with his students. A great part of what he brought to the encampment was his appreciation for this. He also found that there were similarities between the military bivouac culture he created at the encampment and the monastic world that he came from. The quality of order and hierarchy applies to both. Rinpoche understood this as the ground of freedom, not the ground of aggression. I think that many of his students came to feel this quite profoundly as a result of the experiences they had at the encampment.

It is by distortedly exalting some men, that others are distortedly debased, till the whole is out of nature. A vast mass of mankind are degradedly thrown into the back-ground of the human picture, to bring forward, with greater glare, the puppet-show of state and aristocracy....





The two modes of the Government which prevail in the world, are --

First, Government by election and representation.

Secondly, Government by hereditary succession.








-- Rights of Man, by Thomas Paine

For me, these same years were also a time of committing myself to a discipline that had been firmly rooted for centuries in the life of the nobility in Europe. It was the kings and queens of Europe who kept dressage horses and built the great arenas for them to perform in. So, strangely enough, although I was away for much of the developing years of Rinpoche's Shambhala vision, I was also immersed in a regal training, of sorts.

In October 1978, I returned to the United States for the first Kalapa Assembly, the first large Shambhala program for the presentation of the most advanced Shambhala teachings. In this situation, as he had done in travelling through Nova Scotia, Rinpoche insisted that everything be conducted in a court mandala, with all of us living together in the Kingdom of Shambhala, but in Snowmass, Colorado! He presided over the assembly as the Sakyong, the ruling monarch of Shambhala, and I was at his side as the Sakyong Wangmo.

The first assembly was held in the same hotel in Snowmass where two of the earliest seminaries had taken place. Because the hotel could only hold about a hundred people, the assembly was divided into two two-week sessions, as there were now around two hundred people practicing the Shambhala teachings at the highest level. The whole program lasted for a month.

Rinpoche gave seventeen talks over the month, which was about one every other night. There was meditation practice during the day, people attended discussion groups, and then there were formal dinners, banquets, and a number of ceremonies. One of the highlights was a troupe of bugaku dancers performing an ancient repertoire of dances of the imperial court of Japan, who happened to be touring the United States at this time.

Bugaku Dance at Kurama dera in Kyoto.

The imperial way is the Great Way that the emperor has graciously bestowed on us to follow. For this reason, it is the Great Way that the multitudes should follow. It is the greatest way in the universe, the true reality of the emperor, the highest righteousness and the purest purity .... The imperial way is truly the fundamental principle for the guidance of the world. If the people are themselves righteous and pure, free of contentiousness, then they are one with the emperor; and the unity of the sovereign and his subjects is realized.

Is there anything that can be depended on other than the emperor's way? Is there a secret key to the salvation of humanity other than this? Is there a place of refuge other than this? The emperor should be revered for all eternity. Leading the masses, dash straight ahead on the emperor's way! Even if inundated by raging waves, or seared by a red-hot iron, or beset by all the nations of the world, go straight ahead on the emperor's way without the slightest hesitation! This is the best and shortest route to the manifestation of the divine land [of Japan].

The emperor's way is what has been taught by all the saints of the world. Do not confuse the highest righteousness and the purest purity with mere loyalty to this person or that, for only those who sacrifice themselves for the emperor possess these qualities. This is the true meaning of loyalty and filial piety....

The underlying assumption of the "imperial way" was that the nation is in essence a patriarchal family with the emperor as its head. It was taken for granted that individuals exist for the nation rather than the other way around. Equally important was the assumption that some men are born to rule while others are to be ruled because men are by nature unequal.


Rinpoche's lectures reminded me in a way of the first seminary, in that he was giving an overview of the entire Shambhala path, and he was pouring both information and emotion into his talks. He was sharing his heart of hearts with people, trying to give us the essence of his understanding of the Shambhala teachings. That aspect I found magical and wonderful.

I was not so enamored of other things. I could see the point of Rinpoche as Sakyong; he was transmitting the wisdom of Shambhala to people, and I saw him as a unique human being. I thought that there should be an acknowledgment of his leadership and the wisdom that he embodied. Seeing him as the Sakyong, a spiritual king and protector of the earth, was not difficult for me. However, I couldn't understand why we were building up so many other people, putting them into positions that I thought were rather bogus. What was the point of having all these lords, ladies, ministers, and generals?

So at the beginning of the first assembly, I was quite uncomfortable. Actually, a lot of the participants were having quite a hard time adjusting to this new Shambhala world.
I was certainly not the only one. Everybody was calling me "Your Highness." I had Dorje Kasung members accompanying me wherever I went, and Rinpoche wanted me to have my own personal attendants and all the rest of it. I found it incredibly awkward and unsettling to land in the middle of this heightened environment and to have to function in that world. I trusted him fundamentally, but I thought things had gone crazy. Actually, in some ways, from a conventional point of view, things had gone crazy and I was expected to uphold this crazy world! It was one thing to adjust to it, but I was actually supposed to be a spokesperson for what was happening.

I remember the day that this all came out. He and I were together in the suite at the hotel, and I broke down crying at some point. We were out on the balcony of the suite, which was on the roof of the hotel. Things were overwhelming to me. He sat down with me and started to explain his thinking. He was very sweet.

I think it was a hallmark of the way Rinpoche taught that he always appreciated something about a situation. Even in the worst of the worst conditions, he could always find wisdom. In this case, he started describing his appreciation for Mao Tse-tung. In spite of the devastation Mao had wrought in Tibet, Rinpoche admired certain aspects of his approach. Only someone with such a big mind, like Rinpoche, could appreciate someone like Mao, who had done these awful things that had destroyed Rinpoche's life in Tibet. He described to me how Mao Tsetung proceeded when he decided he was going to conquer China. The first thing he did was to create the complete structure for the future government. Rinpoche said that Mao understood that when you attain power, there's a lot of chaos. You prepare for that future transition by having a structure in place that can function when things change. Rinpoche said that this applied to what we were creating with Shambhala; we had to plan for the chaos. If nothing else, Rinpoche had to plan for his own death. He wanted the people he was training to be prepared to go forward after his death and to have a big view of their responsibility and their duty in the future. He wanted to put them into positions of responsibility now so they would be fully trained and able to function after he was gone.

He explained to me that the future of the dharma in the West would inevitably involve pain and chaos. He thought it was quite sensible, in a strange way, to draw on Mao's approach. And you know, I actually could accept this. It made sense to me because I could see that the way he was working with people was preparing them to take on more responsibility, either within Vajradhatu or the larger society. You could see that people were becoming much more tamed and much more commanding at the same time. At that point, I was more able to relax and accept the situation.

After we talked, things seemed better to me. I decided that we weren't really nuts, although we were decidedly eccentric. What we were doing had a purpose that was founded in truth. Rinpoche also said that he was trying to provide an example for people, a structure for them to learn how to be, in ways that would be helpful to them. He talked about the importance of manifesting Shambhala society within our day-to-day lives. He was always thinking about how he could bring more people in and how he could work with people in an intimate way.

While I could accept this intellectually, it was extremely difficult for me to accept a total lack of freedom in my everyday life, which my role implied. Whenever I was living in Rinpoche's world, there was absolutely no break, no time off, so to speak. For so many years, even my bedroom wasn't my own. My attendants would come in and out of the bedroom all the time, and I was expected to be kind to them. There were constantly other people in the house. If I went into my kitchen, there were always other people there, even at three A.M. Although people were polite to me, there were people serving at the Court, especially men, who didn't understand what I needed for my children and myself. One of the reasons I was so upset, even in 1978, was that I could see that becoming the Sakyong Wangmo meant the complete relinquishment of my freedom, and that was extremely difficult for me to accept. Rinpoche was asking me to do what he had done, which was to accept having no privacy. Even now, I find this difficult. I have my own life, but when I go to programs with the Shambhala community, after three days, I think, "I'm so glad I don't live like this all the time!"

I gained some insight into how Rinpoche lived his whole life when I went to Tibet after his death. I saw that many of the teachers there live this way. They are completely accessible. People just come into a teacher's room unannounced all the time. I realized that this was how Rinpoche grew up -- without any understanding of what privacy meant. He belonged to the people. Maybe it's easier if you've grown up in that environment.

It was, however, a big jump for me. Rinpoche wasn't any longer just the Buddhist teacher going into his office and giving talks. He was essentially asking me and his whole family to join him in this new teaching adventure. He was asking me to also take on a role and to train people as well as train myself. Now it wasn't just that he wanted me to put up with students being around all the time. He also wanted me to think of myself as a teacher or a role model in the Court. It was intense and challenging. At the same time, it was remarkable, given his upbringing and his culture, that he wanted to offer such respect and responsibility to a woman. He had developed tremendous respect for women, and proclaiming my role as the Sakyong Wangmo was a way of expressing that.

Rinpoche told me that I was him, basically, that we were one mind. He said that I was the feminine representation of the Sakyong. He told me that I had the responsibility of nurturing the feminine in our world: the cultural and enriching aspects of the kingdom. He said that we had to work together as a team and therefore that he wanted to put me on the same elevation as him. In my role as Sakyong Wangmo, I was given the responsibility to create our kingdom's culture.

In the 19th century, American and British women's rights—or lack of them—depended heavily on the commentaries of William Blackstone which defined a married woman and man as one person under the law. Here's what William Blackstone wrote in 1765:


-- The Blackstone Commentaries and Women's Rights, by Jone Johnson Lewis

That was what I was working with during the first Kalapa Assembly, and that was a huge leap for me at that point. On another very personal level, there was another big development in my life at this time. I became romantically involved with Rinpoche's doctor, Mitchell Levy, during the first assembly.

Before the assembly started, I was in Boulder with Rinpoche for a little while. It was the first time I had seen the new Kalapa Court, located at the corner of Eleventh and Cascade in Boulder. The house on Mapleton had proved too small for all of us, so we had found a new house, which was renovated over the summer of 1978. Rinpoche was able to move into the new Court a little while before the assembly started. He was anxious to share it with me. He and the Regent had worked together on the furniture and the interior decoration with various other people in the sangha, such as Robert Rader, a talented interior designer.

The new Court had much more light and a wonderful feeling to it, and it had more room for everyone, along with a beautiful garden. It was where we lived in Boulder until we moved to Nova Scotia in 1986, and it worked quite well for us. In the beginning, Rinpoche and I had a bedroom with a sitting room attached to it, and the Regent and Lila, who was now Lady Rich, were next door to us. Osel also had a bedroom on the same floor upstairs. Down the hall were rooms for Vajra and Anthony, the Regent's children, and a room for Gesar. The living room downstairs had blue rugs that had dragon designs cut into them. They were custom-made for the Court, and they were supposed to be very special, but they didn't turn out so well. I used to call them the bath mats, which Rinpoche hated. All in all, however, the new house was a great improvement.

When I got home, I had a bad cough, and I was sure that I had bronchitis. I had a tendency to get respiratory infections at that time because I smoked. The night I got in from Vienna, Rinpoche and I had dinner together, and I was coughing a lot, so he suggested that I go downstairs and see his doctor, who was hanging out in the basement. The new Court had a full, finished basement on the ground floor, with quite a lot of light, so it was much improved over the old house. John Perks and his wife Jeannie lived there; Shari and Bob also lived in the basement, and soon Walter and Joanne Fordham also joined us as part of the live-in Court staff. The people who had these live-in positions were close students and friends, not servants in the traditional sense. Rinpoche's lineage is called the Trungpa lineage, and in Tibetan trungpa means one who is close to the teacher, which basically means "servant." It is quite a desirable thing in this lineage to serve the teacher because this is how you receive the most intimate training.

In addition to bedrooms, offices, and a staff living room in the basement, the Court also included a little carriage house where various staff people lived over the years. During certain periods, John Perks organized staff dinners, which took place in the basement either before or after the family ate. It was quite a nice setup and a lot of socializing in the house went on down there.

In any case, I went down to the basement and looked around and finally found this young Jewish gentleman, whom I'd never met before. This was Dr. Levy. He had a great deal of hair at that time; it almost looked like he had an Afro. I told him that Rinpoche had sent me to see him and that I had bronchitis. He told me, "I hate patients who diagnose themselves." Then he listened to my chest and said that he didn't think that I had bronchitis, and I was probably okay. I insisted that I had bronchitis, and he got a bit pissed off. There was chemistry between us right from the start.

I proceeded to go on up to the assembly, where I became increasingly ill. Mitchell came to see me again and realized that I actually did have bronchitis. In the course of treating my illness, we developed a liking for one another. In addition to being Rinpoche's doctor, Mitchell was also one of his main attendants, or kusung. Rinpoche liked having him around, so Mitchell was there a lot. He was in the suite all day. After I got to know Mitchell, I developed a real crush on him. Finally, I confessed to Rinpoche that I wanted to sleep with his doctor. Rinpoche thought that was a great idea. He told Mitchell that he should ask me out on a date. Mitchell had only been married a few months, so this idea freaked him out quite a lot at first. At the same time, he and his wife had what you would call an open relationship; but he still hesitated. Finally, he decided that he'd like to spend time with me, so he asked me out and that's how we got together.

I suppose this sounds like it was a quite casual arrangement, which might be shocking to people. At the beginning, I did think of it as a casual liaison. My husband, as many people knew, had a great number of girlfriends. It was something that I accepted, and perhaps because that was our arrangement, I also had the occasional indiscretion myself. In my case, there were not many of them, and they didn't have a great deal of meaning to me. Sleeping with somebody else had been an expression of friendship, and of course of youthful passion. I imagined that spending time with Mitchell would be the same. But that was not at all the case. From the very beginning, I had a special connection with him. At that assembly, we spent a fair amount of time together. By the end, we developed a strong bond, and I was falling in love with him. Rinpoche didn't seem to have a problem with it at all, at least not at that time. It got a little bit rockier later.

I didn't exactly think that I was having an affair. I didn't conceptualize the relationship much at that time. It was just what was happening. Mitchell's wife, Sarah, knew what we were doing. In my mind, I figured everything was okay. I was married to Rinpoche, and Mitchell was married to Sarah. Mitchell and I had a nice relationship too, and it was going to be fine. I suppose it was a little naive on my part.

For the next two years, while I was living in Vienna, Mitchell and I saw each other whenever I was back in Boulder. When I was in town, we would spend about one night a week together. It seemed to be fine with everybody. It was, more or less, completely agreed upon. I adored Mitchell. I loved him. I found that there was great communication between us.

For me, one offshoot of the creation of the Court was that, in general, I found myself emotionally isolated from people. Having friendships with people was quite loaded in some ways. I had only a very few close friends. Other relationships seemed to be clouded by people having an agenda of personal gain. It was difficult to get away from that. I found that it was rare that I could have a relationship that didn't come with a lot of baggage.

My life was quite lonely at times. I felt a separation between me and the rest of the sangha, with me being the Sakyong Wangmo and being served and all of that. I imagine that my experience was somewhat like the queens of old. On some level we had recreated that culture. I felt that I had a fresh relationship with Mitchell, one completely outside of all of that. With him, I could really be who I was. I could share things with him, and I felt that he understood me better than almost anyone, except Rinpoche. My relationship with Mitchell gave me something to look forward to when I came home. As well, I could share my whole crazy life with him, without having to edit anything or hold anything back. I found that quite freeing. We shared a lot of the same perceptions, which was extremely helpful.

So this year, 1978, proved to be a watershed in our lives. After the Kalapa Assembly, I returned to Vienna. According to the Shambhala calendar, which we began to use in our community during this era, the new year usually comes in late January or February. The ten days at the end of the year are supposed to be a very tricky time, filled with obstacles. 1978 and early '79 was the Year of the Earth Horse, interesting for me because I was so involved with the horse world at this time. The very end of 1978 was when I had my automobile accident, which certainly seemed inauspicious. Because of this occurrence, I couldn't return to Boulder for the celebration of the New Year.

During the period that I was recuperating, Rinpoche phoned me several times a week to see how I was doing. In the middle of January, Rinpoche phoned me to tell me about a crisis involving the Vajra Regent. Since Rinpoche's return from Charlemont the previous year, the Regent had continued to manifest a lot of heavy-handedness and arrogance. He had moments when he really shone, and he worked extremely hard to grow into his role as Regent, but he also had a kind of street fighter's mentality that dumped a lot of aggression on others at times. More than that, he seemed to get carried away with who he was. In the fall of 1978, Rinpoche and the Regent taught several meditation programs together called "Transforming Confusion into Wisdom." They taught one in Boston and one in Los Angeles. The title of the seminar seemed to exemplify what Rinpoche was hoping could be accomplished in working with his Regent, Osel Tendzin.

By January 1979, while I was recovering from my accident, things were getting out of hand. One night Rinpoche attended a birthday party for Ken Green, who was a member of the Vajradhatu board. During the party, several board members took Rinpoche aside and began complaining to him about the Regent's conduct and their fears that he was becoming an egomaniac. On the spot, Rinpoche called a late-night meeting of his board of directors at the Kalapa Court to discuss the issues involving the Regent and his abuse of power. All the members of the board, as well as the two dapons, were summoned. David Rome was the chairman of the board, in addition to his other duties, and he also attended. That night, the Regent was at a private house party for gay men across town. Even before he and Lila moved into the Court with us, I became aware that the Regent was interested in men as sexual partners. He was, at the very least, bisexual.

It's probably important to clarify that Rinpoche did not have a problem with the Regent's sexual orientation per se. He was concerned with whether the Regent treated others properly, regardless of the sexual politics. Rinpoche had himself been concerned about the Regent's arrogance for some time, and that night in January he decided that it was time to do something about the situation. He called over to the party to tell the Regent to come to the Court to join the meeting. When the Regent didn't appear, Rinpoche sent Dapon Gimian to find the Regent and tell him to return to the Court right away. The Regent didn't appear for another hour.

When the Regent finally arrived, Rinpoche tried to get the board of directors to confront the problems with the Regent. They were all gathered in the blue room, the room with the blue rugs, in the Court. Rinpoche asked various members of the board to address the Regent directly and to say what they thought the problem was. Apparently, as Rinpoche told me later, the members of the board were rather feeble in their statements. After some time, Rinpoche said good night and went upstairs. Most of the board members left, but several people stayed behind to review what had happened. At that point, nothing had been resolved. Those who remained were David Rome, the Kasung Kyi Khyap; Jim Gimian, the Kasung Dapon; Lodro Dorje [Eric Holm], who was the head of practice and study and had the title of Dorje Loppon; and Michael Root, the Regent's chief of staff. The Regent was also there. Rinpoche sent John Perks down to ask everyone downstairs to join him.

They went upstairs to Rinpoche's sitting room, where he suggested that they all drop acid together. When Rinpoche had given bodhisattva vows earlier that month, a student had presented him with quite a large vial of LSD as a gift. As part of taking the bodhisattva vow, you give something to the teacher that symbolizes surrender to you. For this student, giving up drugs was that gesture. Rinpoche had held onto the vial of LSD, and he produced it for this occasion.

Rinpoche asked John Perks to be the attendant for the night, so John didn't take LSD. He was there to take care of everybody. As the LSD started to take effect, the Regent started to manifest more and more in a caricatured feminine way, as a woman. He was apparently quite outrageous and somewhat sleazily seductive, fawning over Rinpoche and the others. Rinpoche was trying to talk to him about the problems with his comportment as the Regent, but the Regent was quite out of it, and didn't seem able to hear what Rinpoche was saying at all.

At one point Rinpoche decided to phone me and asked me to talk to the Regent. (By the way, Rinpoche didn't change at all when he took LSD. Not one bit, although he understood completely what other people experienced on drugs.)

So I left to go to India, and I took a bottle of LSD with me, with the idea that I'd meet holy men along the way, and I'd give them LSD and they'd tell me what LSD is. Maybe I'd learn the missing clue....

At one point in the evening I was looking in my shoulder bag and came across the bottle of LSD.

"Wow! I've finally met a guy who is going to Know! He will definitely know what LSD is. I'll have to ask him. That's what I'll do. I'll ask him." Then I forgot about it.

The next morning, at 8 o'clock a messenger comes. Maharaji wants to see you immediately. We went in the Land Rover. The 12 miles to the other temple. When I'm approaching him, he yells out at me, "Have you got a question?"

And I take one look at him, and it's like looking at the sun. I suddenly feel all warm.

And he's very impatient with all this nonsense, and he says, "Where's the medicine?"

I got a translation of this. He said medicine. I said, "Medicine?" I never thought of LSD as medicine! And somebody said, he must mean the LSD. "LSD?" He said, "Ah-cha -- bring the LSD."

So I went to the car and got the little bottle of LSD and I came back.

"Let me see?"

So I poured it out in my hand "What's that?"

"That's STP ... That's librium and that's ..." A little of everything. Sort of a little traveling kit.

He says, "Gives you siddhis?"

I had never heard the word "siddhi" before. So I asked for a translation and siddhi was translated as "power". From where I was at in relation to these concepts, I thought he was like a little old man, asking for power. Perhaps he was losing his vitality and wanted Vitamin B 12. That was one thing I didn't have and I felt terribly apologetic because I would have given him anything. If he wanted the Land Rover, he could have it. And I said, "Oh, no, I'm sorry." I really felt bad I didn't have any and put it back in the bottle.

He looked at me and extended his hand. So I put into his hand what's called a "White Lightning". This is an LSD pill and this one was from a special batch that had been made specially for me for traveling. And each pill was 305 micrograms, and very pure. Very good acid. Usually you start a man over 60, maybe with 50 to 75 micrograms, very gently, so you won't upset him. 300 of pure acid is a very solid dose.

He looks at the pill and extends his hand further. So I put a second pill -- that's 610 micrograms -- then a third pill -- that's 915 micrograms into his palm.

That is sizeable for a first dose for anyone!


And he swallows them! I see them go down. There's no doubt. And that little scientist in me says, "This is going to be very interesting!"

All day long I'm there, and every now and then he twinkles at me and nothing -- nothing happens!
That was his answer to my question. Now you have the data I have.

-- Be Here Now, by "Ram Dass," aka The Lama Foundation

Rinpoche said to me, "Sweetheart, I need your help. I need you to talk to the Regent. You have to bring him back. Make him understand what's happening." So Rinpoche passed the phone to the Regent and said, "Here's Diana to talk to you." For some reason, the Regent refused to believe that it was me. He kept saying, "Jane, is that you? Is that you, Jane?" I kept telling him that he should listen to what Rinpoche was saying to him, and that he should remember who he was. But he couldn't hear me at all. He passed the phone back to Rinpoche, saying, "That isn't Diana. That's Jane. I don't know what you're talking about."

After I hung up, still unable to get the Regent's attention, Rinpoche smashed his hand down on the coffee table in our sitting room at the Court and screamed "NO!!!!!!!!!!!" I heard that it was earsplitting. He put a dent in the table with his hand. Finally, he got through, and the Regent crumpled at his feet.
Rinpoche placed his hands together in front of the Regent's face. He held up his two hands, cupping them as if they were holding a treasure. Indicating the space between his hands, with everyone as witnesses, he said to the Regent, "This is the dharma. This is unbelievably precious. And if you pervert the dharma, I will destroy you. You have to understand that I made you, and I can destroy you."

It was a very heavy message. After Rinpoche lowered the boom, so to speak, the Regent was a mess, and he became much more gentle and humble. He sat at Rinpoche's feet and tried to pull himself together. A few hours later, Rinpoche said that he wanted the wives of all of the people who were there to come over. Everybody phoned their spouses, who provided more witnesses to what was going on. When the ladies arrived, Rinpoche didn't say too much about what had happened. He asked everyone to join him downstairs in the front hallway of the Court. He said that he wanted to do a calligraphy to mark this occasion. He had a huge calligraphy brush that was kept on a shrine in the house. He asked for the brush to be brought into the hallway, along with a bowl of black sumi ink. He also asked for a long roll of paper, which was unrolled and spread out to give him room to do the calligraphy. Then, with everyone gathered around him, he made a huge slashing stroke with the brush and screamed the word NO again. Ink went everywhere. The entire hallway had to be repainted, and everyone's clothing was splattered with ink. It was a deafening message. At the end of the year, Rinpoche did another calligraphy for the Regent, which is made up of the word no, with the N inside of the O. At the end of 1980, Rinpoche wrote a poem about what he called the "Big No." Later, in 1982, he talked about the experience when he was conducting a Shambhala Training in Boulder. His talk was on the subject of self-deception. He said:

The antidote to a setting-sun mentality is to be free from deception. In connection with that, I'd like to tell you about the Big No, which is different than just saying no to our little habits, such as scratching yourself like a dog. When we scratch ourselves, we try to do it in a slightly more sophisticated way. But we're still scratching, and there is a limit: we have to learn how to be human, as opposed to how to be an animal.

The Big No is a whole different level of no. I think it's public knowledge; anyway, you should know that my Vajra Regent and I took LSD at the Kalapa Court, my house, some time ago. The concept of the Big No became the main point of our trip; That No is that you don't give in to things that indulge your reality. There is no special reality beyond your reality. That is the Big No, as opposed to the regular no.

The ordinary Shambhala type of no applies to things like not scratching yourself or keeping your hair brushed. That no brings a sense of discipline, rather than constantly negating you. In fact, it's a yes, the biggest yes.

When we took LSD together, the Big No came out. Everybody was indulging in their world so much. So how to say no? I had to crash my arm and fist down on my coffee table and break it. I painted a giant picture in the entrance hall of my house. Big No. From now onwards it's NO. Later on, I executed another calligraphy for the Regent as another special reminder, which he has in his office. If you want to look at it, you can. You can look at no no.

You cannot by any means, for any religious reasons or for any spiritual metaphysical reasons step on an ant or kill your mosquitoes -- at all. That is Buddhism. That is Shambhala. You cannot destroy life. We have to respect everybody. You cannot make a random judgment on that at all. That is the rule of the king of Shambhala. You can't act on your desires alone. You have to think, contemplate, the details of what needs to be removed and what needs to be cultivated. It's up to you.2

That message meant a great deal to him. It was meant not just for the Regent but also for all of his students. By the way, when this talk was published in the book Great Eastern Sun, we decided not to mention the LSD because it seemed unnecessary. But at this time, I feel that I have to tell the whole truth. Rinpoche didn't take drugs a lot; he used them very occasionally to break through with people who were particularly stuck. That was usually when he employed something like LSD.

His dalliance with Western pharmaceuticals soon blossomed into full-fledged addiction that clouded his judgment. Although his drinking and sexual exploits were never kept secret, his staggering coke habit was well concealed from his students....

In the end, the final proclamation of a guru’s worth can be found in his students. Those who remain loyal to Rinpoche’s vision display the pathetic lack of identity found in every cult. They are unhappy pod people who toast his posthumous brilliance with pretentious, self-aggrandizing platitudes. Denying his abuse of power and his rampant addictions (a $40,000-a-year cocaine habit, along with a penchant for Seconal and gallons of sake), they exhibit symptoms of untreated codependents.

-- The Other Side of Eden: Life With John Steinbeck, by John Steinbeck IV & Nancy Steinbeck

Yes, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche used cocaine -- a lot. Although there are people who have publicly talked about this using their real names, most of us 'in the know' don't for several reasons. First, cocaine is highly illegal. We don't want our names forever attached to cocaine and CTR on the internet. We have private lives, and don't want our kids, clients, and colleagues to know we were involved with cocaine (or that we stood on the sidelines as we watched our then-guru sniff and drink himself to death). Second, we don't want to be trolled by current Shambhala members, some of whom have voracious appetites for denial-fueled revenge. Current practitioners want to believe that CTR was upfront with everything he did, and they cite his horrific alcoholism and womanizing as examples of things he did not hide. So the realization that he was indeed a regular cocaine user -- and one who was not upfront about this -- rubs harshly against the myth of his openness. Another thing to keep in mind when trying to get info on this is that not a lot of people were aware of his cocaine use. His inner circle put forth considerable effort -- frequently laced with lies -- to conceal this. In any case, enough people did see it and I think in the future you'll find more and more people coming forward.

-- Prasunya, Reddit

One day I arrived at the court for a shift and I was told I was to receive another transmission from Marty Janowitz. I assumed this was to be like the others, perhaps he was giving me TGS transmission early. Marty told me this transmission was extremely sacred and was only known to a few close students. He then pulled out a vial filled with a white powdery substance. Marty told me it was ground up vitamin D or something. (I really can’t remember exactly what he said it was). He put a bit of it on the spoon and told me to rub it on my gums, which I did. It was not cocaine. It was part of our job description to always carry a vial of “Tabi” which was the code name for cocaine. Due to his paralysis, CTR only had the use of one hand, so when he called for tabi it was our job to go into the bathroom with him, keep him steady, help him get his penis out before he wet his pants and put the coke on a spoon for him to inhale. It was also our job to keep his nose clean, and as you can tell from the picture, we were not always successful. Later, when I went to the bathroom alone, I put some on my gums. It was definitely cocaine.

This is another secret I have kept for over 30 years. I can no longer keep it. I believe it is not of benefit to anyone to keep this secret anymore. I believe it’s important for the followers of Shambhala to know what really happened in the “inner circle” of the court. We all -- every one of us -- didn’t know how to say “no” to CTR. We were so busy tripping over each other to do his bidding that we never questioned why an enlightened mediation master would need copious amounts of cocaine and alcohol every day. We never questioned why he spoke of every woman or young girl in sexual terms. It was supposed to be a great honor to sleep with him. No one wondered if his sexual appetite for his female students might be unhealthy.

-- The first time I met His Majesty Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, by Leslie Hays

Maybe anyone put in the Regent's position would have gone through a period of being bloated like this. Certainly, everyone has plenty of self-deception to work through. But in the Regent's case, it was extreme, and I think Rinpoche felt that this was a kill or cure situation. It was his lineage that was at stake here, the depth of the teachings that he wanted to ensure would remain intact after his death. He was counting on the Regent to carry that forward, and I think that already by this time, Rinpoche had serious doubts that the Regent could carry this load.

After the Big No acid trip, Rinpoche and the Regent went on a vacation together to the house in Pitzcuaro where we usually stayed. They spent about ten days together, along with some other people who Rinpoche invited along, including Dapon Gimian and his wife. The Regent was very meek and gentle during that time, Rinpoche told me, but the real question was: Would it last? Would it take?

With these events, the Year of the Earth Horse came to an end in the Shambhala world. The last day of the year, February 26, 1979, there was a full solar eclipse. It was the last full eclipse of the millennium that was visible from the continental United States.


If you know "Not" and have discipline,
Then the ultimate "No" is attained,
Patience will arise along with exertion.
And you are victorious over the maras of the setting sun.

How to Know No

There was a giant No.
That No rained.
That No created a tremendous blizzard.
That No made a dent on the coffee table.
That No was the greatest No of No's in the universe.
That No showered and hailed.
That No created sunshine, and simultaneous eclipse of the sun and moon.
That No was a lady's legs with nicely heeled shoes.
That No is the best No of all.
When a gentleman smiles, a good man,
That No is the beauty of the hips.
When you watch the gait of youths as they walk with alternating cheek rhythm,
When you watch their behinds,
That No is fantastic thighs, not fat or thin but taut in their strength, Loveable or leaveable.
That No is shoulders that turn in or expand the chest, sad or happy,
Without giving in to a deep sigh.
That No is No of all No's.
Relaxation or restraint is in question.
Nobody knows that big No,
But we alone know that No.
This No is in the big sky, painted with sumi ink eternally.
This big No is tattooed on our genitals.
This big No is not purely freckles or birthmark,
But this big No is real big No.
Sky is blue,
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
And therefore this big No is No.
Let us celebrate having that monumental No.
The monolithic No stands up and pierces heaven;
Therefore, monolithic No also spreads vast as the ocean.
Let us have great sunshine with this No No.
Let us have full moon with this No No.
Let us have cosmic No.
The cockroaches carry little No No's,
As well as giant elephants in African jungles --
Copulating No No and waltzing No No,
Guinea pig No No.
We find all the information and instructions when a mosquito buzzes.
We find some kind of No No.
Let our No No be the greatest motto:
No No for the king;
No No for the prime minister;
No No for the worms of our subjects.
Let us celebrate No No so that Presbyterian preachers can have speech impediments in proclaiming No No.
Let our horses neigh No No.
Let the vajra sangha fart No No --
Giant No No that made a great imprint on the coffee table.3
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Part 1 of 2


The Shambhala New Year, the first day of the Year of the Earth Sheep, was celebrated on February 27, 1979, the day after the solar eclipse. I was still recuperating in Vienna from my car accident, so, as I mentioned, I was unable to be in Boulder to attend the festivities. Rinpoche began the day by giving a sunrise talk at Dorje Dzong, the headquarters of Vajradhatu in Boulder. The entire Buddhist community, including several hundred families with infants and children in tow, packed the shrine room for his address, which he gave seated on a Tibetan-style throne at the end of the room. Following his talk, he returned to the Kalapa Court for a day of celebration, which began with an elaborate breakfast. About fifty people were invited to breakfast, and many stayed at the Court socializing throughout the day. Other community members had parties throughout Boulder to celebrate the holiday. That evening, those who had been to the Kalapa Assembly convened again in the shrine room, where Rinpoche conducted a ceremony of empowerment for his son Osel, appointing him as the future Sakyong king of Shambhala. This event did not conclude until dawn of the next day.

As Osel had matured from a shy young boy into a more confident teenager, we all began to see a gentle strength in him and a nascent regal quality. In particular, his connection to his father was notable. Rinpoche had had in mind for some time that Osel would eventually take on the role of future Sakyong. He had talked to me about this in 1976, when Osel was only thirteen years old. Rinpoche had explained to me that, in addition to the traditional Buddhist lineage that he planned to hand down he also wanted to establish a family lineage for the Shambhala teachings. A family lineage is common in other Tibetan lineages -- the Sakya and the Nyingma traditions for example -- but unusual for a Kagyu teacher such as Rinpoche. However, in the context of the two important streams of teaching that he presented, it made perfect sense to have these two lineages of transmission.

Rinpoche could see things in people long before others could make them out. In any case, in 1978 he had begun talking more broadly with some of his senior students about his eldest son becoming the Sawang, which means "earth lord." That is the title that Rinpoche gave him to indicate that he was, in essence, the crown prince of the Shambhala world.

In some respects, the ceremony for Osel was similar to earlier Shambhala ceremonies, but it was more elaborate and grand. It was referred to as the investiture of the Ashe Prince. The evening began with a lhasang, a traditional Tibetan ceremony that involves the burning of juniper to produce smoke. This is done to summon the dralas, or the Shambhala deities, the elemental forces of the Shambhala world. In this case, since the whole program took place indoors, the fire was built in a large Oriental incense pot, and Rinpoche himself fanned the fire while everyone circled around it, inhaling the smoke and chanting the Shambhala victory cry. Osel led the procession circling the fire, accompanied by a group of Dorje Kasung members carrying Shambhala banners and flags.

During the main part of the ceremony, Osel was questioned on his knowledge of Shambhala principles. Then, he performed the stroke of Ashe and was proclaimed the Sawang. Rinpoche had arranged for a beautiful deep-blue velvet cloak to be tailored for the Sawang and presented to him at the end of the evening. He also gave him three Shambhala awards, appointing him to the Order of Ashe, the Order of Shambhala, and the Order of the Trident.
We now had these medals, which were presented at the ceremony. The Order of Ashe is the award that only the Sakyong or his heir can hold. It means that the ruler of Shambhala is connected to primordial vision and that he can join heaven and earth, or vision and practicality, by bringing down the qualities of Ashe into his own heart and into the life of the kingdom. From a Buddhist perspective, one would say that Ashe represents both the quality of bodhichitta, or awakened heart, and the fundamental quality of egolessness, which must pervade the Shambhala Kingdom for it to be genuine. If the person at the center of the kingdom is preoccupied with building himself up, if he is trying to use power to solidify his territory, then Shambhala would become just another oppressive model for society. Or it could just become a joke. What gives integrity and life to the kingdom is the razor knife of the Sakyong's intellect and the deep heartsblood of his compassion. This is the Order of Ashe.

The Order of Shambhala represents the accomplishment of all four qualities of warriorship: tigerlike meekness, or genuineness; lionlike perkiness, or energy; garuda-like outrageousness, or compassion beyond concept; and dragonlike inscrutability, which is again the quality of egolessness and not being caught in concepts.The medal is a beautiful eight-pointed star with the animals of the four dignities enameled in a circle in the center. The Order of the Trident is the highest military, or kasung, award. The three prongs of the trident represent/ piercing the heart of passion, aggression, and ignorance, the three fundamental attributes of ego.

The celebration was indeed magnificent. I sent a message to the Sawang congratulating him since I was unable to attend. It occurred to me later that it was quite interesting timing, coming just two months after the "Big No" affair with the Regent. Rinpoche now had two heirs: one Buddhist and one Shambhala. This could make for a double triumph in the future, or it could help to ensure that at least one of his lineage holders might come through for the future. Rinpoche was a realist; while he completely believed in the magic of the lineage, he also knew what could go wrong. I also found it interesting that he chose for his Shambhala heir someone from a younger generation, which seemed to me to make a great deal of sense. The Sawang was just sixteen at this time, which meant that Rinpoche could work with him during these early formative years and hopefully train him for a long period of time before the Sawang would actually have to take the reins. Among other things, Rinpoche hoped to show him that the Shambhala style of rulership was not about puffing oneself up, but that it meant accepting the heavy yoke of responsibility and working continuously for others. Rinpoche had grown up with this approach to leadership and had had the importance of duty and humbleness hammered into him from an early age.

Creating two lineages of transmission also established ongoing tension between the Regent and the Sawang. Rinpoche had in some ways encouraged a similar dynamic between me and the Regent, as I discussed earlier in describing our mutual Shambhala empowerment. Rinpoche often seemed to set up these kinds of competing energies, as a kind of system of checks and balances that prevented any one of his students from consolidating too much power.

The sixth seminary came and went in the spring of 1979 and was held that year at the Chateau Lake Louise, a grand old hotel on Lake Louise in Alberta, Canada. More than three hundred students attended.



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Saturday $7,000
Minimum food and beverage spend: $25,000

-- Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise Wedding Venue Information Guide

That summer, Rinpoche and the Regent taught a joint seminar entitled "The Warrior of Shambhala" at the Naropa Institute. Many of Rinpoche's talks were later included in Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior. The second Dorje Kasung encampment, now called the Magyal Pomra Encampment, took place in September at Rocky Mountain Dharma Center, following Rinpoche's annual summer program for the public (no longer combined with it).

In September 1979, His Holiness the Dalai Lama made his first visit to America. Members of the Dorje Kasung were very involved in the visit. They organized motorcades for His Holiness's party wherever he traveled in North America, and they worked with local law enforcement officials in major cities to help with crowd control and in general to provide security for His Holiness and his entourage. Rinpoche asked Karl Springer to greet His Holiness on Rinpoche's behalf when the Dalai Lama arrived in New York on September 3. Mr. Springer traveled to many cities with His Holiness to help assure that proper protocol was observed. In early October, when His Holiness returned to New York, Rinpoche, the Regent, and the entire board of directors of Vajradhatu flew to New York to meet with him. Rinpoche felt that it was extremely important for his senior students to meet the Dalai Lama, whom he himself had not seen for more than ten years.

His Holiness and Rinpoche had several private meetings during the visit. Rinpoche was so happy that this great spiritual figure and the leader of the Tibetan world finally was setting foot on the American continent. I was unfortunately away for much of this, but I was able to meet and spend time with His Holiness in New York just before his departure from North America. I was arriving from Europe to attend the Kalapa Assembly and spend time with Rinpoche. Although His Holiness was not able to stop in Boulder during his first visit, when he returned in the summer of 1981, he spent about a week with our community, which was a great blessing for everyone.

Why did the Dalai Lama, touring America for the first time, cancel from his itinerary a visit to the acknowledged capital of Tibetan Buddhist religion in America, Boulder, Colorado?

The local lama, Chogyam Trungpa, had extended the invitation through his Vajradhatu organization. A Boulder stop on October 5 appeared in the Dalai Lama's early tour schedule. Then in mid-tour the schedule was changed without explanation. Extra days in Seattle were added, followed by a direct trip to Ann Arbor, leaving out Boulder.

Would a Frenchman tour Canada and leave out Montreal?

What were the Dalai Lama's reasons?

The word from the Buddhist community here is that there's bad blood between the big lamas. Karl Springer, an officer in Chogyam Trungpa's organization, last year charged the Dalai Lama with conspiring to assassinate the Karmapa, another exiled high lama, originator of Trungpa's power. Assassination talk is common in the Trungpa camp.

Letter from Glenn H. Mullin to Tibetan Review, Aug. 17, 1979

As documented in the last issue of the Tibetan Review, the actions of Karl G. Springer, so-called Director for External Affairs of the Vajradhatu meditation centres of Chogyam Trungpa Tulku, in sending out notices to all Vajradhatu centres slandering His Holiness the Dalai Lama and generally badmouthing the Tibetan Government-in-Exile, are irresponsible beyond belief; but they are no surprise. Throughout Buddhist groups and Tibetan sympathizers in America, there is a near-universal recognition that most movements associated with Trungpa are both politically naive and spiritually bigoted. I state this openly because I would not like the actions of Trungpa's 'Director of External Affairs' to be interpreted by the refugee community in India as representative of the work done in the names of all lamas in the west. This type of sectatrian bigotry is not associated with the centres of great teachers like the Sakyapa Lama Dezhun Rinpoche of Seattle, the Nyingma Getrul [Gyatrul] Rinpoche of California, or of Gelukpa Lamas such as Geshe Rabten, Geshe Zopa or Kyongla Tulku. Nor is it representative of Kargyu teachers such as Kalu Rinpoche, or, for that matter, of the Karmapa. It is difficult to know whether the general sectarian vibration associated with Trungpa's groups are reflective of the attitude of Trungpa himself; but, if not, he should be informed that by working in the West he is placing himself within Western ethics, meaning that a leader is responsible for the actions of his underlings.

The murder of Gungthang Tsultrim, will perhaps never be solved; but as with every sensitive event in the history of the refugee community in India, it was obviously manipulated by the Chinese anti-Tibetan agencies as a weapon to weaken the internal unity of the Tibetans. That Tsultrim's own associates were aware of this is evidenced by the fact that immediately following the incident a large number of them travelled to Dharamsala, spoke to His Holiness and the government there, and then offered long life prayers for His Holiness.

I sincerely hope that Springer's claim is untrue that, unlike His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Karmapa takes no interest in the Tibetan movement working to free Tibet from Chinese occupation; but Springer's views that if this were true it would somehow prove the latter's superior saintliness is half-witted. But he is correct on one point: he himself is in dire need of some key by which to be able to conduct himself and his work sanely.

Also, the motivation of His Holiness and many other Lamas in contributing to the Tibetan resistance movement is deeper than mere concern for the six million Tibetans who are placing their hope in them. The real reason for their concern was succinctly put by the Bhutanese delegates to the International Buddhist Conference in New Delhi last year: "Until the 1950's all of our Lamas, as well as those of other Himalayan Buddhist regions such as Sikkim and Laddakh always looked to Tibet for their training. Now that Tibet is destroyed it is hard to say how secure these Buddhist traditions will remain." Also, the former Health Minister of the Janata Government, Mr. Raj Narain, hit the nail on the head when at the same conference he stated: "You might as well face facts: unless Tibet gains her freedom, the Buddhist traditions of central Asia are bound to perish." The level of training that monks of any of the four sects presently receive in comparison to the training in old Tibet is mere primary school. For centuries Tibet has been the seat of Vajrayana Buddhism and the reservoir from which large sections of the populations of Mongolia, Laddakh, Siberia, Turkestan, Bhutan, Sikkim, etc. drew their spiritual inspiration and learning; which is, of course, why Mao was so keen to destroy Tibet as a country and as culture. The effect, he conjectured, would have the same effect on central Asia as the Roman destruction of the Druids had on Europe. It is not that the Lamas in India take time off from teachings in order to fight for Tibetan freedom; rather, it is merely a matter of their making a show of their direction from time to time. Springer may think that it is more important to convert a few Americans to weekend Buddhism than for the Lamas to try and hold together the rapidly fading splinters of their spiritual legacy here in India; but not everyone would agree with him. In Tibet not only every sect leader but also every abbot and Rpoche had a certain political as well as spiritual authority, which generally worked out more as a privilege than a burden; now that the hourglass has been turned it would hardly be a demonstration of religious qualities to turn their backs on that aspect of their trip. Perhaps some lamas do not have time at the moment to give any energy to the Tibet issue, but time will tell whether or not they will have time for Tibet when her independence has been won by the sweat of others.

As stated above, the Chinese are always looking for an opportunity to manipulate the situation in India. It could be that they will see Springer's letter as an opportunity to rid themselves of Karmapa, who has always been a pillar in the refugee community. Normally they do not like to harm the lamas, as it has the effect of creating a martyr, which strengthens the spirits of the refugees. But here Springer has built a bit of a different situation.

To rub salt into the wound he has made, Springer's supposed letter of apology to the Representative of the Tibetan Government in New York in actual fact is no apology. A look between the lines will show that all he was really doing was patting himself on the back for "having shaken up the boys at the top."

Moreover, his wild theory that Tibetan Government-in-Exile wishes to secularize the Tibetan community in India and therefore see the sect leaders as obstructive to their work is absurd beyond conception. All Tibetans are fully aware that the Lamas are the principal upholders of the Tibetan culture; without their influence, Tibetan culture is basically tukpa and momos, with the occasional Agu Tonpa joke. As His Holiness the Dalai Lama stated in an interview published by the AAP in America a few years ago, "Here in India we have had three main objectives: to settle the various groups of refugees, to establish monasteries of the different spiritual traditions in order to preserve our cultural heritage, and to do anything possible in the direction of freeing Tibet from the Chinese." I think there was wisdom in both the choice of objectives here mentioned and the order in which His Holiness mentioned them.

Springer's accusation that the Tibetan Government is sectarian is also completely off the wall. Not only do they partronize all Buddhist sects, His Holiness has made large personal donations to the Tibetan Muslims in Kashmir who are no longer even refugees. Perhaps in his few weeks in India Springer may have heard the occasional grumble about this and that, but he should have looked a bit deeper at the complexity of the refugee situation before leaping into absurdity. Having spent almost a decade in various refugee communities in India and known intimate friends from all the sects, I have no doubt that the general level of morale of the communities is high. As in any system there are squabbles and dissension, but these are a sign of healthy community, not of internal chaos. As Abe Lincoln put it, you can't satisfy all the people all the time.

Glenn H. Mullin

Letter from Lud Kramer to Tom Clark: Accompanying (1) excerpts from The Tibetan Review and (2) notices from the Office of Tibet indicating a change in the Dalai Lama's American tour schedule -- leaving out Boulder, September 13, 1979

The attached with reference to yesterday's conversation. I ignore the specific reasons for the scheduling change, but surmise that Mr. Springer's apology was found unsatisfactory.

The Karmapa established his numerous centers in this country so as to give his lineage proper, authoritative representation, which he may feel is not transmitted by Trungpa's centers. Since the Karmapa discovered and confirmed the present Trungpa's Tulku status and accepted on two occasions Trungpa's lavish hospitality, the Karmapa's present non-recognition of Trungpa is a harsh step, which Trungpa's inability to curb his outrageous womanizing and boozing probably precipitated.

Trungpa's preoccupation with assassination, never appearing without his retinue of armed (?) guards, his heavily guarded (against whom?) residence, his community's feudal structure with it's deadly court intrigues makes good copy: I hope you will publish a sequel to your excellent earlier coverage of the Boulder Buddhist scene!

lud k.

-- The Great Naropa Poetry Wars, With a Copious Collection of Germane Documents Assembled by the Author, by Tom Clark

All through this period, the imposing sixteenth Karmapa served as the highly visible rallying point for the Fourteen Settlements' opposition to the United Party. In the wake of the plan's defeat, the Tibetan exile community ended up deeply divided, just the opposite of what the Dalai Lama and Gyalo Thondup were trying to achieve. And against the Tibetan leader's pleas to forget old quarrels, apparently some officials in his exile administration in Dharamsala developed a resentment of the dissenting leaders.

On March 13, 1977, Fourteen Settlements political head Gungthang Tsultrim was shot several times at point-blank range while walking in his backyard in Clement Town, in the northwestern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. Simultaneously, the electricity was cut to the local area, allowing the shooter to escape. When apprehended in Kathmandu, the murderer, Amdo Rekhang Tenzin, told the Royal Nepalese Police that the Tibetan exile government had paid him three hundred thousand rupees (about thirty-five thousand dollars) to assassinate Gungthang. [4]

Even more shocking, the hit man claimed that Dharamsala offered him a larger bounty to kill the sixteenth Karmapa. Nepali authorities handed the murderer over to India, and he repeated his story under interrogation there at a maximum-security prison in Lucknow.

When news of this assassination and the plot against the sixteenth Karmapa came out, large groups of angry demonstrators from the Fourteen Settlements group filled the streets of Dharamsala to protest against the exile administration's potential involvement. Meanwhile, back in the still quasi-independent kingdom of Sikkim, the location of the sixteenth Karmapa's seat at Rumtek monastery, the royal government provided the Karmapa with eleven armed bodyguards.

It is unclear what role the Dalai Lama himself played in the resurrection of the rivalry between his government and the Karma Kagyu school in India. Only twenty-four years old when the Tibetans fled to India in 1959, he relied heavily on the counsel of his advisors. The experienced ministers of his administration had their own views on how best to preserve Tibetan institutions in exile, and their counsel must have carried weight with the inexperienced lama-leader. Many of these ministers continued to see the religious schools outside their own Gelug as rivals, and sought ways to defend against them.

Perhaps as a peace offering to lamas of schools outside the Gelug, shortly after Gungthang's murder, the Dalai Lama invited Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, a leading lama in the Fourteen Settlements group, to become one of his teachers. After this, Dilgo Khyentse became closely associated with the Tibetan leader, and later went on to teach in Southeast Asia and in the West.


The second Kalapa Assembly took place in October in Big Sky, Montana, near the site of Little Bighorn -- Custer's last stand. Big Sky is on the edge of the mountains in Montana, and the sky does seem very expansive there. It seemed a good place to hold the assembly. Not only was I in attendance for this, but Rinpoche made sure that I was thoroughly visible in my role as Sakyong Wangmo. My mother also made quite an impression. By this time, she had acquired her own Shamhhala title. She was now the Grand Duchess of Pago, and she gave talks at the assembly on decorum. She even had a meeting to which only men were invited, so that she could talk to them about manners, grooming, and romance. I wanted to hear what she had to say, so I and another woman, Gina Jarowitz (my attendant at the time), actually crawled surreptitiously into the room under a number of tables that had long tablecloths on them. Among other topics, my mother talked about being appreciative and respectful of women and stressed the importance of good grooming. She said that women are attracted to a man when he is wearing "fresh linen, is clean shaven, looks lovely, and perhaps has a little bit of aftershave lotion." "I tell you," she commented, "it turns the girls on and it is very nice. You should be more dashing." At times, I had to control my urge to break out in laughter.

Rinpoche organized an elaborate and elegant birthday party for me at this assembly. The women came in evening gowns and the men wore tuxes. Members of the Dorje Kasung came in uniform. Rinpoche and I were seated on a raised platform. There were toasts, including spirited remarks by Rinpoche, and a cake was presented to me with a tiger, lion, garuda, and dragon design made from colored icing. I made the first cut in the cake with a sword that Rinpoche lent me. Then there was waltzing. Due to his paralysis, Rinpoche could not do ballroom dancing. At many of these formal Shambhala events, he would ask the Regent and me to have the first dance. We made quite a good-looking couple, I think.

However, off the dance floor, the Regent and I continued to be at odds during this time. We were really more and more distant from one another. One night during the assembly, the Regent stayed up quite late after one of Rinpoche's talks singing old fifties songs at the piano in the dining room of the hotel with a bunch of his cronies. I happened to walk through the room while he was holding forth, and I found the environment completely self-indulgent. There was a sandwich board there with information about the next day's events, and I kicked it over in disgust and yelled at him about how he had a total lack of Shambhala decorum. Then I went up to Rinpoche's bedroom in the hotel. A little while later, the Regent burst into our suite and insisted on seeing Rinpoche. He was crying and carrying on, saying, "She doesn't love me. She misunderstands me. You have to help me." Rinpoche calmed the whole thing down, somewhat, and later he made remarks to the whole assembly about this incident. Rinpoche had been talking at the Kalapa Assembly about overcoming arrogance and harmful habitual patterns. He referred to what the Regent had done as an example of "overindulging sacred outlook." Then, he asked me to explain what that meant. I talked about the difference between being caught up in personal or group neurosis versus appreciating the world as sacred, by cultivating sanity, lack of arrogance, and straightforwardness. Publicly, the issue appeared to be resolved; privately there was still quite a gulf between us.

After this incident, Rinpoche and I had a real heart-to-heart talk about my role as the Sakyong Wangmo. Rinpoche gave me very direct advice. He said, "You should never question yourself. You're the Sakyong Wangmo. Any instinct you have, just go with it. Don't second-guess yourself. Just do it." That was provocative advice because it was easy to misinterpret that to mean that anything goes. Do whatever you want. Sometimes I found it confusing to figure this out. Now, at this point in my life, I definitely think twice about things. I felt that when Rinpoche was alive, I could afford to experiment more in my decisions and my relationships with people. When Rinpoche was around I always felt that if I pushed myself too far, I would get helpful feedback from the environment that he helped to create. You could take chances, and you felt that the situation was protected. Now, I feel that I have to be more careful not to hurt others. We did a lot of crazy things in those days, which worked out okay. Even if somebody got their feelings hurt, people felt fundamentally loved and appreciated in the world that Rinpoche created. It was a more controlled learning experience. At times it was like being in kindergarten. You take chances when you're learning, and you finally figure out what works and what doesn't. Or it's like being a child learning to walk. The parent is there to catch you, kind of saying, "Yes, that's walking. Go ahead and walk."

Rinpoche said something else to me in that conversation at Big Sky, which I thought was very important. He counseled me, "You should always be impartial. When somebody comes to you and they complain about something, you've got to be able to see the other side." Then he said, "Whenever things go wrong, though, I blame myself." He continued, "The problem is always my problem when things don't work." He also advised me: "The worst thing you can do in your life is to surround yourself with yes-men. You know, you want to make sure you can trust the people you're with for genuine feedback." This was how he lived, in terms of the people around him. He insisted that the people who were close to him tell him what they really thought about things. He encouraged critical thinking in everyone.

On the way home Allen says the bodyguards don't carry guns, but they are trained in tai-chi and art of flower arrangement. "They are experts," he says, "but their jobs are very complicated. Trungpa is gravely, maybe fatally ill, he's an alcoholic megalomaniac and he can't keep his hands off the girls. Some time ago we invited a Tibetan lama to check out Trungpa and give us his opinion about the state he is in. The lama concluded that wisdom might still reside in him, but that his body is sick and polluted. Indeed, we sometimes see a glimpse of his enlightened being, but mostly he's a pain in the ass. His guards are very tense, because he's so unpredictable and does weird things. A few months ago, he suddenly threw himself backward down the stairs, to test if the guards were alert. They were not and Trungpa had a heavy concussion. We try to restrict his obsessions as much as possible, but it's a heavy task. After all, what do you do when the king has gone mad? You shield him off from the outside world, praying for a rapid and worthy demise."

It's good to hear Allen talk so openly about this. He says he doesn't feel insulted by Campert's remarks about the mafia. "There are more poets at Naropa who feel that way and I think it's all right. Crazy wisdom wants no followers."

-- Milk, Volume One, by Hans Plomp

I remember at the end of this conversation, he was sitting there looking at me sort of quizzically. He said, "How come I never get sick of you? You know, I sometimes get sick of people, but I just never get sick of you." I guess that was paying me a big compliment!

At the end of the assembly, Rinpoche talked publicly about the role of the Sakyong Wangmo in his last talk to the participants. He made extremely personal remarks about me that continue to inform and inspire me at times when I become discouraged about my life. He was so honest -- not everything he said was 100 percent complimentary, but it was so true, which made him that much more lovable to me. Rinpoche said:

Some quarters would say that keeping Diana is very expensive. I have had to tell these people: It is not keeping Diana that is expensive, but it is keeping Diana as the Sakyong Wangmo that is expensive. That expensiveness is not counted purely in pounds or deutschmarks or Austrian schillings or American dollars or Canadian dollars. Her vision is unyielding and good. Her intention is pure; her intention is to help elegantize the world. You know that already, in some sense .... From her presence and existence in sharing my life, the Sakyong Wangmo has provided lots of sharp edges and lots of warm memories and lots of sad stories .... The Sakyong Wangmo's vision and her fearlessness and her particular type of impatience have brought us here [to America]. Therefore she deserves to sit on the same platform with me as a teacher of Shambhala vision.

I am thankful to her. Her observations are sometimes like a bee sting -- sharp and powerful. And when you try to deceive the Sakyong Wangmo, it is like holding the stem of a rose; the thorns prick your fingers. The Sakyong Wangmo will say, "That was a deception. You can't even kiss me." ... How has the Sakyong Wangmo become such an important person? People might question how such a young English lady, an English girl, has suddenly become a queen. How could that happen? But it is not an accident. It is the plan and the vision of the forefathers of the Mukpo lineage ....

One thing is certain about the Sakyong Wangmo: she is expert in telling the truth. And she gets very irritated when lies are told to her, of any kind .... Often certain people are jealous of the Sakyong Wangmo; and they are tempted to challenge her authority and her power .... But that kind of energy has never been found in the history of all the queens in the universe. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Sakyong Wangmo has manifested as a real disciplinarian and a disciplined person. She has combined the Shambhala vision, and she also takes positive pride in what happens in our kingdom. And my profound love, love affair, and respect go to the Sakyong Wangmo.1

Those remarks were both inspiring and intimidating -- a lot to live up to. I think I'm still trying to actualize what he was saying there. There was something else that Rinpoche talked about in this lecture that was very helpful to people, which was explaining the rationale for the uniforms that he was wearing more and more frequently. He had designed a number of military uniforms for himself, which he had tailored in England. He wore these initially at the Magyal Pomra Encampments, but now he was also starting to wear them when he presented some of the Shambhala teachings. By this time, some of the senior members of the Dorje Kasung, particularly the Kasung Kyi Khyap and the dapons, also had dress uniforms that Rinpoche had designed.





People had very mixed reactions to this. Many people were concerned about this military culture at this time, and it's still the case that people are shocked when they see photographs of Rinpoche in a military uniform. That's quite understandable, actually. In his talk at the Kalapa Assembly, he said that he had been studying the history of uniforms to determine which ones were the product of aggression and which elements could be used to invoke the energy of warriorship in the positive, Shambhala sense. He talked about uniforms as bringing down the power of the dralas, bringing down the magic of Shambhala. On one level, he wanted to inspire people with the overpowering majesty of his dress. He also talked about transforming the perverse, aggressive energy of the conventional military into a pure manifestation of warriorship without aggression. He felt that the power of the military form was something that needed to be harnessed in the Shambhala world, because of the level of chaos and conflict that is unavoidable in modern life. Rinpoche was particularly brilliant and fearless in his ability to take on degraded cultural manifestations and transmute them into something sacred. On the individual level, he said that people would encounter terrifying visions in the bardo after death, and that if they could come to terms with his military manifestation during this lifetime, it would help them to work with the wrathful energy they would encounter in their journey after death.

Some people embraced his approach to the Dorje Kasung that way; others turned away. For myself, I never doubted his motivation nor was I put off at all by this approach at this point. For one thing, I was in the middle of my experience at the Spanish Riding School, where I was exposed on a daily basis to how the magnificence of military and regal traditions could be uplifting. The hall that I rode in was unbelievably brilliant and somewhat overpowering, yet that was encouragement to me in my riding and it helped to give me a better seat on the horse and more command of the energy. So this made perfect sense to me in terms of how Rinpoche was also manifesting in his dress.

When I went back to Vienna at the conclusion of the assembly, I had a truly positive sense about what Rinpoche was doing. The second assembly was a turning point for me. I felt more in tune with the Shambhala teachings and their manifestation in the Shambhala world. I began to understand how the Shambhala approach could be a skillful means of presenting Buddhism, or its essential features, in the West. Many of us in the modern Western world have lost our connection with the dignity of earth. Shambhala was bringing things down to earth, I realized, while also acknowledging the sacred or magic quality of existence.

We stayed several days in San Francisco before boarding the Japan Air Boeing 747 for the ten-­hour flight to Japan, to be followed by the flight to Hong Kong. Rinpoche and I were seated in first class. He wore one of his Savile Row suits and was traveling as the Prince of Bhutan. I was in the uniform of an army major, English style, but with the Shambhala insignia. Mike had given me Rinpoche's medication and some sleeping pills to keep him quiet. As we winged over the Pacific we were served Japanese sushi and lots of sake.

Rinpoche wanted to go to the bathroom and as always I went with him. We both went inside the aircraft bathroom so I could help him take down his trousers and raise them again after he was done. On returning to our seats Rinpoche loudly demanded my aisle seat and more sake. I became a bit alarmed. I had to get him to sleep before he began sending me to the pilots with messages about meeting with some head of government in Hong Kong. It had happened to me before!

"Time for pills, Sir," I said smoothly, as I handed Rinpoche two sleeping pills. Rinpoche took them easily and swallowed them with a big glass of sake.

"More," he said.

"More sake, Sir?" I asked.

"No. More sleeping pills."

"Well, Sir, Mike said ..."

"More," he commanded.

I gave him two more, twice the prescribed dose. He flushed them down with the last of the sake.

"Wheee!" exclaimed Rinpoche, as he took the empty sake bottle and threw it down the floor toward the front of the aircraft. It bounced off the feet of the formally attired Japanese stewardess. She came over and I half stood up in the seat.

"Sorry," I said. "The Prince would like some more sake."

The stewardess politely did a half bow and went to get the ordered sake. As she left, Rinpoche moved past me and out into the aisle with remarkable swiftness to the main exit door of the aircraft. I reached him just as he had taken hold of the door handle and was beginning to turn it.

"Sir," I hissed under my breath.

"What do you want?" He looked at me like I was crazy. "Let's go for a walk," he said brightly.

"Sir, Sir!" I exclaimed near panic. "We are at thirty thousand feet over the ocean in an airplane!"

"Oh," he said innocently. "I thought we were at the Court."

As I steered him back to our seats he noticed the stairs leading to the top deck of the airplane. "Let's go to bed, then," he suggested as he started up the steps. "Sir," I quietly explained. "Those beds have been reserved for other passengers." I finally got him back to the seat and sat him next to the window to prevent further escapes.

"More sake," he said. I rationed out another glassful and I tried to get him settled down. I was praying that the sleeping pills would finally kick in. He seemed to nod off. For the first time in hours I relaxed in my seat and stretched my legs.

"Major," he suddenly said, startling me, "tell the pilots to radio ahead and let the Emperor know that I will be one hour late for our meeting." There I was, back on the front line in an instant. I reluctantly got up out of my seat and walked toward the pilot's cabin, as if on my way to the electric chair. I hated having to do this. A stewardess intercepted me at the entrance.

"Can I help you, sir?"

I thought quickly. "Could I have a pillow?"

She found a pillow and I returned to Rinpoche, who seemed to be sleeping. I had only just sat down when he asked, "Did you send the message, Johnny?"

"Yes," I lied.

"Good. Then go ahead and also tell them to notify the High Commissioner in Hong Kong that we will meet on Wednesday."

Up I got again. I went over to the stewardess and told her that the Prince of Bhutan would appreciate it if the pilot would radio the British High Commissioner and let him know that the Prince would be unable to meet with him next week. To my surprise she just said, "Of course, sir."

When I returned to my seat Rinpoche was banging his head against the side of the plane. Bang, bang, bang. He would hit his head and then grind his teeth.

"Sir, Sir. Can I put a pillow under your head?"

He growled as I stuffed the pillow between his head and the wall. The gentleman in the seat behind us leaned over and asked, "Is the Prince all right?"

"Fine, fine," I answered testily. I was suddenly aware of the other first class passengers looking over at me, looking like they thought I was crazy. I felt totally paranoid in my uniform. An elderly woman was eyeing me suspiciously. Did they think Rinpoche was a real Prince? Ugly thoughts entered my mind. Has Rinpoche been talking to them while I was up front with the stewardess? He could have told them anything! Perhaps he intimated I was planning to hijack the plane or even that I was planning to overthrow the Bhutanese government! I was outraged. Why do these people think I am crazy? He's the crazy one!

I stabbed a look at him in the seat next to me. There he was, sleeping like an innocent child. Or more like a well-fed tiger, I thought sarcastically. At least things seemed to have finally settled down. The pills were working and he was sleeping with a soft rhythmic snore. Relieved, I switched off the overhead lights and waited a few more minutes before heading to the back of the aircraft to take a break with the boys.

Carl saw me coming down the aisle. He must have noticed my haggard look because right away he asked how things had been going up front.

"Jesus, I need a break. He's acting crazy again." And I detailed all the things I had been dealing with since the flight began.

"Here, have some coffee," said Carl.

"Here, have a drink," Bob offered. I took both and we sat chatting for about ten minutes. Then Carl volunteered to sit with Rinpoche for a while, which I readily accepted. I walked him up the aisle to the first class section and pulled back the dividing cur­tain. There was Rinpoche, upright in the aisle, supported on either side by a passenger and from the rear by a stewardess and smiling broadly.

"The Prince wants to make a speech to the passengers," declared the man on his left.

"It's okay, it's okay," I said hurriedly. "We'll take him now."

They looked at Carl and me suspiciously. Yeah, I thought, let them think we're going to assassinate the gentle Prince. "It's not a bad idea at that," I muttered to myself.

"That's it," I said to Carl in a peeved tone, as we dragged Rinpoche to the back of the aircraft. "That's it for his tricks." I was taking charge of this situation!

We reached a row of empty seats, where I pushed up the arms to make a bed for Rinpoche. Bob got a blanket and pillows. The gentle Prince settled down and snuggled into the makeshift bed, delighted by all the attention. He seemed to be getting to sleep right away this time, which satisfied me immensely. I'd done it. It had been six hours of this stuff and now he would sleep. Bob, Carl, and I would be able to stand in the aisle and talk, drink, and enjoy the rest of the flight. I silently congratulated myself on my fortitude and prowess in handling a difficult situation.

I glanced over to check on Rinpoche one last time. Something was not right. His stomach was bouncing up and down like Jell-o. I realized he was laughing! I looked more closely and saw he was winding a small ball of yarn. With disbelief my eyes followed the yarn from Rinpoche's hand to the sweater of the sleeping passenger in the seat in front of him. I made a clumsy dive to snatch the ball of yarn away from Rinpoche, waking up the passenger in all the commotion. He looked blearily down at the ball of yarn in my hand and then at his partially dismantled sweater, slowly recognizing the connection.

"Sorry," I said lamely. "I found this on the floor." I dropped the small ball of yarn into his hand. He looked at my uniform and said nothing, but he did move to another seat farther away.

"Let's have breakfast," piped up Rinpoche cheerily. Wondering about the time, I looked at my watch, but couldn't see the hands. I looked again, but it seemed like a foreign object. I peered out the aircraft window to assess the position of the sun and it took me a full minute to realize the window shade was closed. Finally, I raised the shade, only to find it was pitch black.

"Is it breakfast time?" asked Rinpoche with a touch of sarcasm.

I flushed with anger. "Yes, Sir, perhaps we could get the Emperor to serve it."

Bob ran off to get breakfast and Rinpoche called Carl over to him.

"I want you to get the first class stewardess back here so I can fuck her," Rinpoche said to him. Poor Carl began to protest, but Rinpoche wouldn't stand for it and so off Carl went on his mission. I was delighted to be off the hook and have Carl take my place. I was almost joyful. Rinpoche looked at me sharply.

"Get some sake," he growled, grinding his teeth.

I brought Rinpoche a full bottle and he drank it down as if it were water.

Down the aisle toward us came Carl with the demure stewardess in tow. Another helpless victim, I was thinking.

Carl came near and drawing himself up formally said, "Your Royal Highness, may I present Ms. Yamomuch. Ms. Yamomuch, his Royal Highness, the Prince of Bhutan." During this gracious introduction the Prince sat on the edge of his seat like Quasimodo about to leap from the bell tower of Notre Dame. He was swinging his arm back and forth, sake was dripping from his mouth, and his red eyes were rolling like a Mahakala.38 He ground his teeth and gave a primordial growl. We were all frozen in fear, including Ms. Yamomuch. I noticed his swinging hand was moving ever closer to Ms. Yamomuch's kimono. The next instant Rinpoche turned his head and looked at me with the piercing eye of a hawk. I was so bewildered by the look I could not even be sure he had turned his head.

The buzz of a thousand flies fills the space around me. I see us all frozen in place and Rinpoche is running around us in a counterclockwise direction. His hair is long and streaming out behind him as he runs. There we are, standing in the middle of a desert. I can see the sky, the sand, and the rocks quite clearly. Rinpoche is running around yelling crazily.

He made a move to reach up Ms. Yamomuch's kimono. I snapped out of it and the others jumped to pull him back. Carl stopped Ms. Yamomuch from falling backward into the plane aisle.

"Very nice to meet you," she said in a high, meek voice as she retreated back to her station. I flopped down in a seat, totally exhausted. This had been going on nonstop for hours. I had had enough, and I just passed out into sleep.

Carl woke me about a half an hour before we were to land in Japan.

"Where is he?" I asked, a bit anxiously.

"He's asleep," Carl reassured me. "He went to sleep right away after he met the stewardess. Is it always like this?"

"Most of the time," I answered.

"God help us," he stated.


We are not a monastic society in the West, and we will never be a monastic society here. Part of Rinpoche's brilliance in how he brought dharma to the West was creating the means for people to connect with meditation outside of a monastic situation. From my perspective, if Buddhism can't become part of your life, in the way that you deal with your children, the way you do your dishes, the way you celebrate, the way you conduct your life and your business altogether, then it's not really true. It's just an idealized concept. It was very powerful the way in which Rinpoche brought the dharma into people's households and taught people how to have a dignified way of conducting their lives. This brought the members of hippie society -- of which there were many in our community -- back into being productive members of society at large.

When I returned to Boulder the next May, I was looking forward to spending time in the Kalapa Court. For the first time, I thought that I might be able to take my seat in that environment in a much more comfortable way. I felt that I was finally making friends with the whole thing.

For some time now, I had had attendants when I was living at the Court. Pat and Tom had been somewhat in that role in Europe, but they were so much part of the family and it was such a relaxed environment that I didn't think about it in those terms. However, Boulder was more intimidating. For one thing, there were many more people coming through the house and coming through my life as kusung, my personal attendants. Rinpoche stressed that I really should try to be kind and welcoming, even if I didn't feel comfortable around some people, even if occasionally I didn't like somebody. He told me that it was important to people to serve at the Court. It meant a lot to them, and I had to take this into account.

By the summer of 1980, several people had come and gone as the head of my service in Boulder. Whether it was my lack of maturity, the chemistry between me and the people in that role, or other factors, several situations had fallen apart on me already. Then in 1980, Rinpoche asked two young women to take over my service: Dierdre Stubbert (whose husband, Ron, was the director of finance for Vajradhatu) and Jane Carpenter. Something really clicked between us, and to this day, we continue to have a close relationship. They have both been immensely helpful to me, through all kinds of ups and downs. There were a number of other women who became kusung around this time, with whom I'm still quite connected. So perhaps it was a maturing of the Shambhala world. I wish the earlier situations could have worked out, but sadly they did not. I am still grateful to everyone who helped me and especially to those who went through the very early days, which were a learning experience for all of us.

When I came home in May of 1980, Rinpoche had developed a routine in his life in the Court, into which I tried to fit myself. As well, I developed my own routine, which included spending a good deal of time involved with the development of the Shambhala School of Dressage. While I was in Europe, as I mentioned earlier, Marie Louise Barrett had been the main instructor in my absence. Marie Louise had a background in the hunter-jumper world. She had grown up in Virginia, where she had developed her skill as a rider. She became interested in dressage and we became friends. Another woman, Beth Sproule, became the third instructor.

By 1980, we had our own rented facility. Over the years, the school was located east of Boulder in Louisville and later in Erie, which are both just outside of Boulder. We had a number of school horses on which people could learn, and some members of the community bought horses that they stabled at the school. Many sangha members became interested in dressage and started taking lessons. Additionally, there were a number of other riders who began training with us at the school. Many of the teenaged students from Vidya School also took lessons with us, as part of their PE requirement. For its time, the Shambhala School of Dressage was really one of the best facilities presenting classical dressage training in that part of the United States. At that time, there were very few options for people interested in this discipline.

Rinpoche took a great interest in the school. He came up with the name for the school. I had wanted to call it Windhorse Academy, but he thought that the Shambhala School of Dressage sounded more imperial, which of course he liked. At one point, he started designing the permanent facility that he thought we should build at some point in the future. The design was in some respects reminiscent of the grandeur of the Spanish Riding School. He had the innovative idea that the horses should be stabled above the indoor arena and that they would be ridden down long ramps into the arena. We never got that far, I'm afraid. After the school had been functioning quite successfully for about four years, both Marie Louise and I moved away from Boulder and the school was dissolved.

During the years that the school existed in Colorado, Marie Louise and I competed in dressage shows in the area. Once when I was riding in a show near Boulder, Rinpoche phoned me at the show grounds to say that he was coming to the show to watch me ride. I thought, "Oh no!" I still had it in mind that I wanted to keep my professional world as a rider a little bit separate from my life with Rinpoche. Up to this point, I had been fairly successful. Rinpoche arrived at the show, to my horror, in full military uniform.





In dressage competition there's a rule that spectators have to be at least ten meters from the edge of the dressage arena. Not knowing this, Rinpoche's kusung and kasung put a chair right next to the arena, so close that he could have almost put his feet up on the rail. Before the competition starts, you have sixty seconds to ride around the ring. I rode past him several times, saying, "Get back! Get back! Get back!" Finally they got the message and moved his chair back. I rode the test, feeling completely paralyzed with a combination of fear and embarrassment.

After I finished, I put the horse away, and then I went to see Rinpoche for a minute. The judge for my test, Tom Poulin, was quite prominent in the United States. He was someone I was acquainted with. While I was standing with Rinpoche, since the test was finished, the judge had a break and decided to come over. As he approached, Rinpoche said -- much to my horror -- in my ear, "Sweetheart, let me meet the judge!" I acted as though I hadn't heard him. I said hello to the judge, and we started to talk about my horse and how the performance could improve. Then, I heard a voice saying, "Sweetheart, introduce me to the judge." So I said, "Mr. Poulin, I'd like to introduce you to my husband, Trungpa Rinpoche." Then Rinpoche said, "You know, so many husbands are resentful of their wives riding, but I'm completely supportive. I buy my wife the best saddles, only the best." I was thinking to myself, "It's going to be all right. This is going to be okay." Then I saw Rinpoche looking into the distance at another horse, and he said, "Isn't it amazing that ... " There was a long pause during which Mr. Poulin and I were waiting for him to finish his sentence. Finally he continued, "Dressage horses can shit and run at the same time?"

The unbelievable thing is that a few years after Rinpoche died, I saw Mr. Poulin and he said to me, "I was so sorry to read in Time magazine that your husband died. I was so impressed by him." So I guess you never know.
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Postby admin » Mon Aug 12, 2019 11:03 pm

Part 2 of 2

Initially, I was only going to be at home for my usual seven-week stint. (I was based in England at this time.) Rinpoche and I had been trying to have another child, and after I was home about six weeks, I found out that I was pregnant. I decided not to return to Europe. I arranged for one horse, Shambhala, to go to a facility run by Gunnar Ostergaard, a trainer on the East Coast of the United States, and I arranged for Warrior to go from England back to Herr Rehbein's facility, to be cared for until my child was born and I could take up my career again.

While I was trying to conceive a child with Rinpoche, I was still seeing Mitchell. We had slept together -- with contraception -- during the month that I got pregnant. (We had spent a night at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, which inspired the film The Shining.) When I found out that I was pregnant, I went into a bit of a panic, but I told myself that the baby had to be Rinpoche's. I mentioned my anxiety to Rinpoche, and he told me not to worry about it. I tried not to, but there was definitely a question mark in my mind. Mitchell and I joked that we were going to name the baby Isaac if it was his.

In the early stages of the pregnancy, Rinpoche and I decided to go to Mexico for a vacation. We invited Mitchell and Sarah to come along, and John Perks also came as the cook and butler. Beverley Webster, Rinpoche's private secretary, also accompanied us, and Ron Barnstone, who was originally from Mexico -- his mother was Marty Franco -- came along as driver and kusung. I was having a lot of morning sickness during this period, so the trip was physically difficult for me. I found it almost impossible to find appetizing food in Mexico. Sometimes I would wake up very hungry in the early morning, and there would be nothing to eat in the house. Someone would have to go to the market before we could have breakfast. John Perks did a lot of cooking. I remember being hungry one day and smelling duck from the kitchen. I went into the kitchen and lifted the pot with anticipation of getting myself some broth. There was a whole duck in the pot, with its beak, eyes, and feathers still on it. I felt very vulnerable at that time, so John's soup didn't amuse me.

While we were there, we listened to audiotapes that Louise and Roger Randolph, the owners of the Patzcuaro house, had left at the house. They had been to see a psychic who told them that Louise was the reincarnation of Nefertiti and Roger was Akhenaten. They had made a tape of the conversation with the psychic, which we found very entertaining.

I also had an encounter with a ghost there. Rinpoche always felt strongly that I should sleep on the left side of the bed, and he would sleep on the right. It had to do with how the feminine and masculine sides of the body are viewed in tantra. When we were first married, we had a picture of Vajrayogini hanging over the left side of our bed, and a picture of Guru Rinpoche on the right. I would sleep with Vajrayogini above my head, and Rinpoche would be on the right, with Padmasambhava above him. In Patzcuaro, we had a double bed that was not that big. It was a chilly evening, and I remember we lit the fire before we went to sleep. I woke up, and Rinpoche had crowded onto my side of the bed, so that I had only a few inches to sleep in, which was quite uncomfortable for me, especially being pregnant. I got up and I walked around to his side of the bed, where there was at least half the bed, and I thought, "Oh good, I can have some space." I fell asleep there. Suddenly, I was woken up. Rinpoche was screaming at me, "You can't sleep on my side of the bed. What are you doing here?" He was really nasty, and I was completely angry with him. I said to him, "Well then, fuck you. I'll just go and sleep by myself. Have the whole bed!" I walked out of our bedroom, and I fell asleep in the guest bedroom down the hall.

I woke up about an hour or two later. There was something in the room with me. I could almost make out the shape. It was a dark shape, and it was definitely a woman. It felt like very evil energy, and I was scared to death. I got out of bed and walked rapidly down the corridor to our bedroom. Rinpoche was sitting bolt upright in bed, with his legs crossed. The flames in the fireplace made designs on the walls of the room. Rinpoche slowly turned to me. I hadn't opened my mouth, but he said, "Don't worry, Sweetheart, she's just been here too. I've taken care of it."
I returned to my allocated space in the bed and ceased all further complaints! We never saw her again.

This was, however, not the only encounter with negative energy that we had in patzcuaro. Over time, Rinpoche came to realize that there was a lot of black magic being practiced in that area. Once, when he went shopping in the downtown square, Rinpoche wanted to go into a little antique store. While he was there, he told his attendant, "These people practice black magic." The shopkeepers seemed very sweet and ordinary, apparently. However, at a certain point, he asked them to look for something in the back, and while they were gone, he pulled aside a curtain on one wall of the store. Behind it was an altar to the devil. He told me that it was quite creepy. The Randolphs had a lot of books in their house about Aleister Crowley, who was very involved in the dark arts. Rinpoche thought he was a malevolent person. We had some concern that the Randolphs might have gotten themselves into some of the black magic that was being practiced down there, although we didn't know for sure.

"It came out that the end of this sitting period we were going to have Vajrayana (they had gone through Hinayana and Mahayana). So ... Rinpoche ... not only did he command to have a Halloween party, but he also commanded that every one attend and wear a costume. It was very definitely set up as a kind of pre-Vajrayana feast, because the idea of Halloween, with all these bizarre costumes, and putting on masks -- it's kind of like admitting your neurosis -- like, who you come as, Halloween, on our scene, has been ... adopted as our Tantric holiday: because there's so many contradictions in it: the idea of unmasking and putting on masks, and dressing up: it's kind of getting totally samsaric, in other words.

"Vajrayana has a good deal to do with totally connecting with Samsara. So, the word was out, and everyone was quite shocked that we were going to have a party, that Rinpoche announced he was going to attend, that there was going to be very formal -- that Rinpoche had something in mind: that he wanted to have kind of a 'courtlike' atmosphere, and that every(one) had to wear a costume.....

Trungpa arrived around 10:30, looking baleful. Butch haircut. Flanked by guards -- fortunately, because he was very drunk, and they caught him twice, when he fell. He whispered with the guards. Something was said to be brewing: one of the secrets he'd been preparing. A few minutes later a woman student in her sixties was borne in, naked, held high by guards. She let them carry her around the room, then struggled to be let down. Finally she was released and ran out. Trungpa giggled, did a strip tease, was carried around, in turn. Dressed again....


-- Behind the Veil of Boulder Buddhism: Ed Sanders, The Party, by Ed Sanders

In Satanic rites a woman, a virgin is much better, acting as an "altar" is essential. In the US I've seen wooden supports anatomically shaped so as to host the priestess in a laid down position. In Italy it's usually an uncomfortable table.

-- What I Saw at a Black Mass: An Interview with Massimo Introvigne, by Maria Grazia Cutulu

Many believe Chogyam Trungpa has unquestionably done more harm to Buddhism in the United States than any man living. He has identified the Buddha Word with a gospel of illusions. But he will pass, as Devadatta passes, always a failure, through the Jataka Tales.

I do not believe in invoking the State, a deity of illusion, least of all against its own hallucinations. The CIA giveth, the CIA taketh away. But the powers that be would be well advised, to deport Trungpa to his native land, where after due reprocessing he might be given a hoe and sent to a commune in Northwest Tibet. One Aleister Crowley was enough for the Twentieth century. No matter, all passes. The Buddha Dharma alone endures.

-- KENNETH REXROTH, from "The Great Naropa Poetry Wars: With a copious collection of germane documents assembled by the author, by Tom Clark

While we were there, we took a number of drives around the area. One day while driving around, we discovered some small pyramids. Rinpoche was excited about this, and he wanted to do a ceremony at the top of one of them. We went up to the top of the pyramid with an incense bowl and juniper so that we could have a little Ihasang fire. I decided to wear a pair of expensive new shoes that I'd bought recently in New York at Saks Fifth Avenue. It was a beautiful day with a clear blue sky. There had been a drought in the area. Rinpoche did the lhasang, and within five minutes clouds gathered and there was a torrential downpour. I was upset at Rinpoche and I said, "Why did you do this? I just bought this nice pair of shoes and now they're ruined!"

They wanted to know what I had been doing. I told them that I had just been in the city of Tula, Hidalgo, where I had visited some archaeological ruins. I had been most impressed with a row of four colossal, columnlike figures of stone, called the Atlanteans, which stand on the flat top of a pyramid.

Each one of the almost cylindrical figures, measuring fifteen feet in height and three feet across, is made of four separate pieces of basalt carved to represent what archaeologists think are Toltec warriors carrying their war paraphernalia. Twenty feet behind each of the front figures on the top of the pyramid, there is another row of four rectangular columns of the same height and width as the first, also made of four separate pieces of stone.

The awe-inspiring setting of the Atlanteans was enhanced by what a friend, who had guided me through the site, had told me about them. He said that a custodian of the ruins had revealed to him that he had heard the Atlanteans walking at night; making the ground underneath them shake.

I asked the Genaros for comments on what my friend had said. They acted shy and giggled. I turned to la Gorda who was sitting beside me, and asked her directly for her opinions.

"I've never seen those figures," she said. "I've never been in Tula. Just the idea of going to that town scares me."

"Why does it scare you, Gorda?" I asked.

"Something happened to me in the ruins of Monte Alban in Oaxaca," she said…..
The conversation faded. I asked the others if they had anything to say. The little sisters glared at me. Benigno giggled and hid his face with his hat.

"Pablito and I have been in the pyramids of Tula," he finally said. "We've been in all the pyramids there are in Mexico. We like them."

"Why did you go to all the pyramids?" I asked him.

"I really don't know why we went to them," he said. "Perhaps it was because the Nagual Juan Matus told us not to."

"How about you, Pablito?" I asked.

"I went there to learn," he replied huffily, and laughed. "I used to live in the city of Tula. I know those pyramids like the back of my hand. The Nagual told me that he also used to live there. He knew everything about the pyramids. He was a Toltec himself."

I realized then that it had been more than curiosity that made me go to the archaeological site in Tula. The main reason I had accepted my friend's invitation was because at the time of my first visit to la Gorda, and the others, they had told me something which don Juan had never even mentioned to me; that he considered himself a cultural descendant of the Toltecs. Tula had been the ancient epicenter of the Toltec empire.

"What do you think about the Atlanteans walking around at night?" I asked Pablito.

"Sure, they walk at night," he said. "Those things have been there for ages. No one knows who built the pyramids. The Nagual Juan Matus himself told me that the Spaniards were not the first to discover them. The Nagual said there were others before them. God knows how many."

"What do you think those four figures of stone represent?" I asked.

"They are not men, but women," he said. "That pyramid is the center of order and stability. Those figures are its four corners. They are the four winds, the four directions. They are the foundation, the basis of the pyramid. They have to be women, mannish women, if you want to call them that. As you yourself know, we men are not that hot. We are a good binding, a glue to hold things together, but that's all. The Nagual Juan Matus said that the mystery of the pyramid is its structure. The four corners have been elevated to the top. The pyramid itself is the man supported by his female warriors; a male who has elevated his supporters to the highest place. See what I mean?"

I must have had a look of perplexity on my face. Pablito laughed. It was a polite laughter.

"No. I don't see what you mean, Pablito," I said. "But that's because don Juan never told me anything about it. The topic is completely new to me. Please tell me everything you know."

"The Atlanteans are the nagual. They are dreamers. They represent the order of the second attention brought forward. That's why they're so fearsome and mysterious. They are creatures of war but not of destruction.

"The other row of columns, the rectangular ones, represent the order of the first attention; the tonal. They are stalkers. That's why they are covered with inscriptions. They are very peaceful and wise; the opposite of the front row."

Pablito stopped talking and looked at me almost defiantly, then he broke into a smile.

I thought he was going to go on to explain what he had said, but he remained silent as if waiting for my comments.

I told him how mystified I was and urged him to continue talking. He seemed undecided, stared at me for a moment, and took a deep breath. He had hardly begun to speak when the voices of the rest of them were raised in a clamor of protest.

"The Nagual already explained that to all of us," la Gorda said impatiently. "What's the point of making him repeat it?"

I tried to make them understand that I really had no conception of what Pablito was talking about. I prevailed on him to go on with his explanation. There was another wave of voices speaking at the same time. Judging by the way the little sisters glared at me, they were getting very angry; especially Lydia.

"We don't like to talk about those women," la Gorda said to me in a conciliatory tone. "Just the thought of the women of the pyramid makes us very nervous."

"What's the matter with you people?" I asked. "Why are you acting like this?"

"We don't know," la Gorda replied. "It's just a feeling that all of us have; a very disturbing feeling. We were fine until a moment ago when you started to ask questions about those women."

La Gorda's statements were like an alarm signal. All of them stood up and advanced menacingly toward me, talking in loud voices.

It took me a long time to calm them and make them sit down. The little sisters were very upset and their mood seemed to influence la Gorda's. The three men showed more restraint. I faced Nestor and asked him bluntly to explain to me why the women were so agitated. Obviously I was unwittingly doing something to aggravate them.

"I really don't know what it is," Nestor said. "I'm sure none of us here knows what is the matter with us, except that we all feel very sad and nervous."

"Is it because we're talking about the pyramids?" I asked him.

"It must be," Nestor replied somberly. "I myself didn't know that those figures were women."

"Of course you did, you idiot," Lydia snapped.

Nestor seemed to be intimidated by her outburst. He recoiled and smiled sheepishly at me.

"Maybe I did," he conceded. "We're going through a very strange period in our lives. None of us knows anything for sure any more. Since you came into our lives, we are unknown to ourselves."

A very oppressive mood set in. I insisted that the only way to dispel it was to talk about those mysterious columns on the pyramids.

The women protested heatedly. The men remained silent. I had the feeling that the men were affiliated in principle with the women, but secretly wanted to discuss the topic just as I did.

"Did don Juan tell you anything else about the pyramids, Pablito?" I asked.

My intention was to steer the conversation away from the specific topic of the Atlanteans, and yet stay near it.

"He said one specific pyramid there in Tula was a guide," Pablito replied eagerly.

From the tone of his voice I deduced that he really wanted to talk. And the attentiveness of the other apprentices convinced me that covertly all of them wanted to exchange opinions.

"The Nagual said that it was a guide to the second attention," Pablito went on, "but that it was ransacked and everything destroyed. He told me that some of the pyramids were gigantic not-doings. They were not lodgings but places for warriors to do their dreaming and exercise their second attention. Whatever they did was recorded in drawings and figures that were put on the walls.

"Then another kind of warrior must've come along; a kind who didn't approve of what the sorcerers of the pyramid had done with their second attention, and destroyed the pyramid and all that was in it.

"The Nagual believed that the new warriors must've been warriors of the third attention, just as he himself was. Warriors who were appalled by the evilness of the fixation of the second attention. The sorcerers of the pyramids were too busy with their fixation to realize what was going on. When they did, it was too late."

Pablito had an audience. Everyone in the room, myself included, was fascinated with what he was saying. I understood the ideas he was presenting because don Juan had explained them to me.

Don Juan had said that our total being consists of two perceivable segments. The first is the familiar physical body which all of us can perceive. The second is the luminous body which is a cocoon that only seers can perceive; a cocoon that gives us the appearance of giant luminous eggs.

He had also said that one of the most important goals of sorcery is to reach the luminous cocoon; a goal which is fulfilled through the sophisticated use of dreaming, and through a rigorous systematic exertion he called not-doing. He defined not-doing as an unfamiliar act which engages our total being by forcing us to become conscious of its luminous segment.


He called the smallest the first attention, and said that it is the consciousness that every normal person has developed in order to deal with the daily world. It encompasses the awareness of the physical body.

Another larger portion he called the second attention, and described it as the awareness we need in order to perceive our luminous cocoon and to act as luminous beings. He said that the second attention remains in the background for the duration of our lives unless it is brought forth through deliberate training or by an accidental trauma. He said the second attention encompasses the awareness of the luminous body.

He called the last portion, which was the largest, the third attention -- an immeasurable consciousness which engages undefinable aspects of the awareness of the physical and the luminous bodies.

I asked him if he himself had experienced the third attention. He said that he was on the periphery of it, and that if he ever entered it completely, I would know it instantly because all of him would become what he really was; an outburst of energy.

He added that the battlefield of warriors was the second attention, which was something like a training ground for reaching the third attention. The second attention was a state rather difficult to arrive at, but very fruitful once it was attained.

"The pyramids are harmful," Pablito went on. "Especially to unprotected sorcerers like ourselves. They are worse yet to formless warriors like la Gorda. The Nagual said that there is nothing more dangerous than the evil fixation of the second attention.

"When warriors learn to focus on the weak side of the second attention nothing can stand in their way. They become hunters of men; ghouls. Even if they are no longer alive, they can reach for their prey through time as if they were present here and now.

"And because prey is what we become if we walk into one of those pyramids, the Nagual called them traps of the second attention."

"What exactly did he say would happen?" la Gorda asked.

"The Nagual said that we could stand perhaps one visit to the pyramids," Pablito explained. "On the second visit we would feel a strange sadness. It would be like a cold breeze that would make us listless and fatigued; a fatigue that soon turns into bad luck. In no time at all we'll be jinxed. Everything will happen to us. In fact, the Nagual said that our own streaks of bad luck were due to our willfulness in visiting those ruins against his recommendations.

"Eligio, for instance, never disobeyed the Nagual. You wouldn't catch him dead in there. Neither did this Nagual here, and they were always lucky while the rest of us were jinxed, especially la Gorda and myself. Weren't we even bitten by the same dog? And didn't the same beams of the kitchen roof get rotten twice and fall on us?"

"The Nagual never explained this to me," la Gorda said.

"Of course he did," Pablito insisted,

"If I had known how bad it was, I wouldn't have set foot in those damned places," la Gorda protested.

"The Nagual told every one of us the same things," Nestor said. "The problem is that every one of us was not listening attentively, or rather every one of us listened to him in his own way, and heard what he wanted to hear.

"The Nagual said that the fixation of the second attention has two faces.

"The first and easier face is the evil one. It happens when dreamers use their dreaming to focus their second attention on the items of the world, like money and power over people.[~ the world of the 1st attention]

"The other face is the more difficult to reach and it happens when dreamers focus their second attention on items that are not in or from this world, such as the journey into the unknown. [~ the world of the third attention]

"Warriors need endless impeccability in order to reach this face."

I said to them that I was sure that don Juan had selectively revealed certain things to some of us, and other things to others. I could not, for instance, recall don Juan ever discussing the evil face of the second attention with me.

I told them then what don Juan said to me in reference to the fixation of attention in general.

He stressed to me that all archaeological ruins in Mexico, especially the pyramids, were harmful to modern man. He depicted the pyramids as foreign expressions of thought and action. He said that every item, every design in them, was a calculated effort to record aspects of attention which were thoroughly alien to us. For don Juan, it was not only ruins of past cultures that held a dangerous element in them. Anything which was the object of an obsessive concern had a harmful potential.

We had discussed this in detail once. It was a reaction he had to some comments I had made about my being at a loss as to where to store my field notes safely. I regarded them in a most possessive manner and was obsessed with their security….

"It is easy for me to understand why the Nagual Juan Matus didn't want us to have possessions," Nestor said after I had finished talking. "We are all dreamers. He didn't want us to focus our dreaming body on the weak face of the second attention.

"I didn't understand his maneuvers at the time. I resented the fact that he made me get rid of everything I had. I thought he was being unfair. My belief was that he was trying to keep Pablito and Benigno from envying me because they had nothing themselves. I was well-off in comparison. At the time, I had no idea that he was protecting my dreaming body."…

"It takes time to make a perfect Nagual," Pablito said. "The Nagual Juan Matus told me that he himself was crappy in his youth, until something shook him out of his complacency."

"I don't believe it," Lydia shouted. "He never told me that."

"He said that he was very crummy," la Gorda added in a low voice.

"The Nagual told me that in his youth he was a jinx, just like me," Pablito said. "He was also told by his benefactor not to set foot in those pyramids and because of that he practically lived there until he was driven away by a horde of phantoms."

Apparently no one else knew the story. They perked up.

"I had completely forgotten about that," Pablito explained. "I've only just remembered it now. It was just like what happened to la Gorda. One day after the Nagual had finally become a formless warrior, the evil fixations of those warriors who had done their dreaming and other not-doings in the pyramids came after him.

"They found him while he was working in the field. He told me that he saw a hand coming out of the loose dirt in a fresh furrow to grab the leg of his pants. He thought that it was a fellow worker who had been accidentally buried. He tried to dig him out. Then he realized that he was digging into a dirt coffin: A man was buried there. The Nagual said that the man was very thin and dark and had no hair.

"The Nagual tried frantically to patch up the dirt coffin. He didn't want his fellow workers to see it and he didn't want to injure the man by digging him out against his will. He was working so hard that he didn't even notice that the other workers had gathered around him. By then the Nagual said that the dirt coffin had collapsed and the dark man was sprawled on the ground; naked.

"The Nagual tried to help him up and asked the men to give him a hand. They laughed at him. They thought he was drunk having the d.t.'s because there was no man, or dirt coffin, or anything like that in the field.

"The Nagual said that he was shaken but he didn't dare tell his benefactor about it. It didn't matter because at night a whole flock of phantoms came after him. He went to open the front door after someone knocked and a horde of naked men with glaring yellow eyes burst in.

"They threw him to the floor and piled on top of him. They would have crushed every bone in his body had it not been for the swift actions of his benefactor. He saw the phantoms and pulled the Nagual to safety to a hole in the ground which he always kept conveniently at the back of his house. He buried the Nagual there while the ghosts squatted around waiting for their chance.

The Nagual told me that he had become so frightened that he would voluntarily go back into his dirt coffin every night to sleep long after the phantoms had vanished."

-- The Eagle's Gift, by Carlos Castaneda

While we were in Patzcuaro, he also composed a new Shambhala practice called the Werma Sadhana. In this practice, one identifies with the primordial Shambhala lineage and connects oneself to that lineage by visualizing oneself as the Rigden, or the ruler of Shambhala. One really has to take on the power and the majesty of the Shambhala world in order to accomplish this practice.

By this time, there were a number of Shambhala texts and practices for people to do. The Werma Sadhana became important for everyone who completed the advanced levels of Shambhala Training. Eventually, this was a group of several thousand people. While many of the core practices that Rinpoche transmitted to his students were ancient, traditional practices from the Buddhist tradition, the Werma Sadhana was part of the unique cycle of Shambhala terma, or teachings, that he received in the West and that he gave to his Western students. He was very careful about sharing these texts and practices with other Tibetan teachers. He shared them with His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche and others with whom he had a strong bond, but he didn't generally want them to be propagated outside of his own teaching environment. He emphasized that students should begin with Shambhala Training and progress through the Shambhala program of education until they were ready to do advanced practices such as the Werma practice.

"The werma is an important class of Bon deities. The werma are the angry, ferocious and fearless ones, the dgra lha of the arrows and lances.

-- Werma, by Chinese Buddhist Encyclopedia

The wisdom of the Pon tradition was very profound, extremely profound....

The basic Pon philosophy is very powerful; it is much like the American Indian, Shinto, or Taoist approach to cosmic sanity. The whole thing is an extraordinarily sane approach. But there is a problem. It is also a very anthropocentric approach. The world is created for human beings....

The Pon tradition of Tibet was very solid and definite and sane....

Our Pon tradition is valid, because it believes in the sacredness of feeding life, bringing forth food from the earth in order to feed our offspring. These very simple things exist. This is religion, this is truth, as far as the Pon tradition is concerned....

For instance, we think the body is extremely important, because it maintains the mind. The mind feeds the body and the body feeds the mind. We feel it is important to keep this happening in a healthy manner for our benefit, and we have come to the conclusion that the easiest way to achieve this tremendous scheme of being healthy is to start with the less complicated side of it: feed the body. Then we can wait and see what happens with the mind. If we are less hungry, then we are more likely to be psychologically jolly, and then we may feel like looking into the teachings of depth psychology or other philosophies.

This is also the approach of the Pon tradition: Let us kill a yak; that will make us spiritually higher. Our bodies will be healthier, so our minds will be higher. American Indians would say, let us kill one buffalo. It is the same logic. It is very sensible. We could not say that it is insane at all. It is extremely sane, extremely realistic, very reasonable and logical....

Philosophies of this type are to be found not only among the Red Americans, but also among the Celts, the pre-Christian Scandinavians, and the Greeks and Romans. Such a philosophy can be found in the past of any nation that had a pre-Christian or pre-Buddhist religion, a religion of fertility or ecology -- such as that of the Jews, the Celts, the American Indians, whatever. That approach of venerating fertility and relating with the earth still goes on, and it is very powerful and very beautiful. I appreciate it very thoroughly, and I could become a follower of such a philosophy. In fact, I am one. I am a Ponist. I believe in Pon because I am Tibetan.

-- Crazy Wisdom, by Chogyam Trungpa

I think he really felt that these transmissions were meant for the West, and he wanted his Western students to be the lineage holders of this tradition. In a sense, this was yet another reason that he put such emphasis on the Court mandala and the roles of his family and his students in that mandala, particularly myself, his son the Sawang, and his senior students who became ministers, generals, diplomats, teachers, servants, and leaders in that world.

After the encampment Rinpoche returned to Boulder and I returned to my faltering attempts at inn-keeping in Nova Scotia. Some months later he came for a visit. A group of us were sitting around him drinking Scotch and sake. We were dressed splendidly in Scottish kilts, jackets, sporrans, shoes, and the socks with red swatches. I was thinking about the Celtic issue and how Rinpoche continually brought up the idea that he wanted me to do something with Celtic people. Every time, I had brushed it off as a trick Rinpoche was trying to play on me. Suddenly, in the midst of my reverie, he jumped up, pointed at me, and said, "That's it!"

In confusion at having my train of thought cut through in that way I said, "You mean we should all wear kilts?"

"No," he prompted, "larger, bigger vision."

I thought of the largest thing I could. "Lineage," I said. He nodded, smiled, and sat down. He intended to stay longer at our inn but was overtaken by sickness and so returned to Halifax and then to Boulder.

Later, I realized that he had picked the Celtic Buddhist lineage for me to work on. It was not something I would have picked for myself. But somehow, quite skillfully, he had nailed me to a course of action which I had no choice but to follow. It was like holding a hot potato that I couldn't drop....

Rinpoche: "Johnny, have you ever been to Iona?"

Johnny: "Iona! You mean the island in Scotland? No, Sir."

Rinpoche: "You should go there after I die."

Johnny (alarmed): "You are not going to die!"

Rinpoche (reassuringly): "No, of course not; we will grow old together. Perhaps sometime you could go to Iona and read the Sadhana of Mahamudra in the cathedral."

Johnny: "Why?"

Rinpoche: "The air is very clear there. You will like it."

Johnny: "Okay, Sir. I'll do it."

Rinpoche: "Great! Let's drink to that."


After we came back to Boulder from our little holiday, I had a wonderful time being at the Court with Rinpoche. I was actually becoming used to daily life there. I would meet once a week with the head cook, Shari Vogler. Shari had been with us now for a very long time. She and I would design the dinner menu for the week. For a while, we had a buffet breakfast at the Court. Rinpoche was feeling healthy and energized, and we had a little more semblance of family life than usual. The buffet would be set up in the blue room for the family, and we'd often have dinner there too. We had wonderful meals there, real family gatherings. Osel and Gesar were both living in the house, and we would all get together for meals. I remember that once Rinpoche set the table for breakfast himself. He even put English toast racks on the table.

His Holiness the Sixteenth Karmapa came for his third visit that summer [May, 1980]. His health was in decline. He had had Bell's palsy, and a few months later he would be diagnosed with stomach cancer. It was to be his last teaching visit to America, which we did not know at the time.

While he was in Boulder, His Holiness attended another Shambhala holiday that we held each year: Midsummer's Day, which was celebrated appropriately enough on the summer solstice [June 20].

Litha was long known as Midsummer, an older name for the Solstice that emphasizes the actual course of the warmer months in the Northern Hemisphere. Summer was considered to begin around May 1st, when Beltane (or May Day) is celebrated, with June 21st marking the midpoint of the season. The name “Litha” is traced back to an old Anglo-Saxon word for the month of June, and came into use as a Wiccan name for this Sabbat in the second half of the 20th century. However, many Pagans continue to use the more traditional “Midsummer.”

-- The Wiccan Calendar: Litha (Summer Solstice), by Wicca Living

For a number of years, the Shambhala community used a large acreage south of Boulder for this occasion. Ken Green, the director and minister of internal affairs, and a staff of many dedicated volunteers (and a few paid staff members from Vajradhatu) organized this spectacular festival. A raised viewing platform was set up for His Holiness, Rinpoche, myself, our family, the Regent, Lady Rich, and their children. The members of the Shambhala community lined both sides of the broad pathway that led up to the platform.

At the beginning of the day, Rinpoche and I rode in together, he on his horse Drala and I on a gray mare that a sangha member loaned me for the occasion. Rinpoche and I were both dressed in white, and our horses had beautiful saddle blankets and colorful pennants on their bridles. Behind us, other members of the Court and the Vajradhatu administration and staff marched in, followed by members of the Dorje Kasung and many other groups, such as the Nalanda Translation Committee, teachers at Naropa Institute, students of Alaya Preschool, Vidya School, and their teachers, and all manner of other groups in the community. Many groups carried banners with the name of their organization, and many carried decorative flags and other banners. People would cheer as each new group passed by. Almost everyone in the community was in the parade. People lining the sides of the road would leave their place in the audience to march in with one or more groups and then return to view others as they presented themselves.

After Rinpoche and I rode in, we assumed our place with His Holiness on the viewing stand. As groups arrived at the platform, they would bow and present themselves to all of us and then go off to the side. After the opening parade, there was a large lhasang to bless the occasion and then skydivers, hired for the occasion, landed in the field and presented themselves to His Holiness. Following that, there were many entertainments, some in front of the viewing platform and others in locations around the property. There were games for both children and adults, and everyone had a picnic. It was quite a glorious celebration of summer and wonderful to share with His Holiness.

At this time, Gesar was just a seven-year-old boy. During the Karmapa's visit, Gesar found a little bird that had fallen out of the nest. He fed it and tried to keep it alive. The Karmapa loved birds and kept an aviary at his monastery in Sikkim, so he took quite an interest in Gesar's bird and told him what to feed it. However, after the Karmapa left, the little bird died. Our family went to RMDC for the beginning of the Dorje Kasung encampment, and we decided we would bring the bird and have a funeral for it halfway up Marpa Point, which is a small peak on the land. Rinpoche and I were walking up the mountain, and Gesar was skipping ahead of us, carrying the dead bird in a box. I said to Rinpoche, "I don't think we've done a good job." And he replied, "What do you mean?" I said, "Well, Gesar's not showing any signs that he cared about his bird. He should be a little bit emotional. His bird died." Rinpoche said, "He's a Tibetan. We aren't sentimental." I thought that was quite an interesting answer, and I decided that I was going to pursue this line of questioning to find out how far he would go with his reasoning. We had a little dog at this time, a Lhasa apso narned Yumtso who was absolutely devoted to Rinpoche and went everywhere with him. I said, "Well, come on. How would you feel if Yumtso died?" And he said, "That would be okay." And actually, a few years later, when Yumtso died, Rinpoche didn't have much of a reaction at all.

Then I thought of Rinpoche's horse and said, "All right then. How would you feel if Drala died?" He replied, "Well, that would be expensive." Then, very foolishly, I upped the ante, and I said, "Well, how would you feel if your wife died?" He said, "Oh well, that would be cheaper." Then he broke into a wide grin.

Although I was pregnant, I had accompanied Rinpoche to RMDC to attend part of the third Magyal Pomra Encampment. A number of my riding students from Boulder were also there, as members of the newly formed Windhorse Division of the Dorje Kasung. We worked on the equestrian version of drill, which included some rudimentary movements for a quadrille. I was not able to ride, but I worked with people in any case. It was very helpful for my training as a teacher to go through this period. I had to learn to be much more skillful in explaining what I wanted people to do and how to improve their riding.

We had purchased Drala for Rinpoche the previous year. The horse, a Lipizzaner stallion, had been sold to someone in Florida by the breeding farm in Piber, Austria, where the stallions are bred for the Spanish Riding School. This horse, originally named Maestoso Trompeta, was already quite old, about fifteen at the time. Rinpoche wanted to start riding again, and the members of the Dorje Kasung and the graduates of the Kalapa Assembly gave the horse to him as a birthday gift. We renamed the horse Maestoso Drala. Rinpoche loved him. It was amazing that, in spite of his partial paralysis, Rinpoche was quite a good rider. He started going to the stables as often as he possibly could given his teaching schedule. I asked my colleague Marie Louise to be Rinpoche's riding instructor. I didn't think it was workable for me to teach him, as his wife. The summer of 1980, we brought Drala up to RMDC for Rinpoche to ride at the encampment, now widely referred to simply as MPE (for Magyal Pomra Encampment).

I had never been able to attend an encampment, so I wanted to be there for a few days, even though it wasn't that easy for me since I was pregnant. The Dorje Kasung rented a small trailer for me to stay in. Rinpoche gave me a hard time about being such a wimp that I needed to stay in a trailer. After I left, a few days before the end of the program, I learned that he moved into the trailer!

The year 1980 was the first year that Rinpoche instituted a formal skirmish, rather than relying on random attacks by outsiders. The camp was divided into two armies, one led by the Vajra Regent Osel Tendzin and the other by the Kasung Kyi Khyap David Rome. Before the action commenced, Rinpoche asked each of the commanders to agree to a number of rules, and they were asked to sign a document saying they would adhere to these rules. After the commanders signed off on the rules, the two opposing armies would be marched up into a series of highland meadows where the skirmish would take place. Each participant would be given a certain number of small flour bags, which they could use as "weapons." When someone was hit with a flour bag, he or she would be "dead" and would have to remain out of action. All of this was outlined in the rules. There were other rules, such as, if the opposing team gave water to someone who had been hit, that person could join the opposing army. One rule, the most important tenth rule, was only visible on the carbon copies of the document signed by the heads of the armies. Either commander could have discovered this rule; but neither did, as it was not visible on the top copy they signed.

During the battle, the two commanders were responsible for their armies' strategy; and the soldiers were expected to follow their commands. The Regent's strategy was quite aggressive; he had his army attack the other group quickly. He had many "hits" with the flour bags and killed many of the opposing team. David Rome seemed quite lost and somewhat fearful in his approach, and as a result, he marched his army into the hands of the opposing team, where they were largely slaughtered. A small band from David's army (which was led by Mitchell and included the Sawang in its ranks) did escape the first battle and spent hours trekking around Marpa's Point, trying to avoid capture or "death." In the end, they staged a final futile assault on the Regent's army and were all "slaughtered." Watching one's comrades falling down in the midst of the hazy flour smoke was quite realistic for people. They saw firsthand the devastation that war can bring. On the other hand, for many of the participants the skirmish seemed to be a lighthearted game, a fun way to spend the day.

At the end of the day, following the final battle of the skirmish, a vivid rainbow spread across the sky, filling the entire meadow where the last action took place with light. Rinpoche and his party had set up their camp that afternoon on a large outcropping of rock in the middle of this field, where he could watch the dramas unfold. When a member of either army "died," he or she was sent to Rinpoche's camp, which became known as Bardo Rock.

After the final battle, he directed all of the Dorje Kasung members to return to the main camp. There the skies opened up and the rain fell in sheets. In the midst of this downpour he discussed the results of the day's skirmish and graded the performance of the armies and their leaders. As he began to speak, people's mood changed drastically, as they began to realize that they had missed the point. Lacking a microphone, Rinpoche had to yell in order to be heard over the noise of the downpour. He was standing under a tarpaulin, but the troops had no such protection from the weather. They were being soaked by the rain. No tape was made of Rinpoche's remarks, but a "scribe" took notes, writing at a frantic speed to catch his words. Rinpoche told the assembled students that in fact they had all lost. No one had understood the main point of the exercise. At this point, he revealed the hidden rule, the tenth rule, which was the fundamental message he was trying to convey. This rule read: "Lack of proper strategy, causing greater loss of life, is cause for loss of battle." Then he explained to everyone, "Our task at Encampment is to rewrite the Oxford English Dictionary so that the meaning of the word war would be 'victory over aggression.'"

Rinpoche said that before the skirmish began both armies looked quite good with their various pennants and flags flying and their energetic sense of windhorse. He gave both armies a point for that. However, the Regent had a Buddhist problem, because his approach was to kill others. He lost a point for that. David Rome had a Shambhala problem, because he allowed his own family, his own troops, to be sacrificed. He lost a point for this. Mitchell was graded down for having had the right idea and then going against his better judgment. He had the idea that he and his small band should surrender, but instead, they attacked the Regent at the end of the day, and all were killed, including Rinpoche's son. Mitchell, as the commander of this ragtag band, was also marked down for allowing the Sawang to be killed in battle. Nobody got a passing grade.

Rinpoche's remarks were an utter shock. Many of those assembled started weeping, recognizing the aggression they had put into the exercise and the problems they had overcoming it. Rinpoche told everyone that they would have to go back the next day and conduct the entire exercise again. People were exhausted, but he was not interested in how tired they were. Indeed, both armies marched back up the hill the next morning. Rinpoche switched the commanders, so that the Regent led what had been David Rome's army, and David led the Regent's original troops. They conducted a skirmish with hardly a shot being fired.

In later years, strategy progressed and there were many more skirmishes, some with no "killing," and some with a minimum loss of life.
However, the first and most fundamental message -- that victory or conquest could not come out of aggression -- was the most profound.

Soon after the encampment ended, my doctor put me on bed rest because I was having some bleeding with my pregnancy. Rinpoche and I would hang out in bed together, and it was a very sweet, loving time for us. One evening, we had a small dinner at the Court to celebrate Mitchell's birthday. I was able to get up for this, but then I went back to bed and I watched The Exorcist on TV. Later I came downstairs to the kitchen to see Rinpoche. After we chatted for a while, Rinpoche went up the back stairs of the Court with his kusung, and I remained in the kitchen. He was in a playful mood, and he was jumping around on the stairs in a jaunty way. The kusung should have been behind him but was in front of him instead. Then I heard an incredible crash. I thought that somehow a chest of drawers had been pushed down the stairs. It turned out that Rinpoche had fallen and hit his head. When I found him at the bottom of the stairs, I became hysterical because he was briefly unconscious and I thought he was dead.

Mitchell was still at the Court, and he came immediately when he heard the crash. He came and examined Rinpoche, who was now awake and seemed fine -- much to our relief -- although upon examination, Mitchell found that he had a mild concussion. We decided to keep Rinpoche at home for the night. The next day, Rinpoche complained of a headache and said that, if he were anyone else, he "would have been licking ashtrays," referring to the intensity of the pain. Rinpoche's relationship to pain was quite different from most people's. Mitchell rushed him to the hospital at this point, where they found that he had bled into two small areas of his brain. He was allowed to come home, but he was confined to bed for a while.

We both had to stay in bed, and we started fighting. We had completely different sleeping and waking patterns, so we were constantly waking one another up. The whole atmosphere, which had been so sweet, was just awful. I now realize that Rinpoche was probably in a terrible mood because his head hurt. One night we had a horrible fight; we broke just about everything in the bedroom. I can't remember what it was about at all. I do remember both of us screaming and throwing things and breaking them. When the kusung came in, the whole room was in a shambles.

Rinpoche used to say that he appreciated being able to fight with me. There was nobody he could fight with like that, nobody to whom he could show such irritation, because of who he was. We didn't fight a lot, but we would have the occasional, really intense fight. Sometimes it got wild, but then it was over immediately. Neither of us ever hung onto it. The anger was never there the next morning.

In some ways, the accident on the stairs was a profound turning point in Rinpoche's life. I've always felt that he changed in a fundamental way after that. After the accident, I sometimes felt that he was no longer 100 percent in this realm. Certainly his teaching became a lot more atmospheric after that. I would say that he became less interested in transmitting the details of the teachings, but in some ways his lectures actually became more powerful because he radiated the essence of the teachings into the environment. He didn't have permanent brain damage or anything like that, but something shifted after his fall. Later, when I looked back, I felt that the accident was the beginning of a physical decline that ended with his death in 1987. I don't know exactly why I feel that.

Superficially at least, Rinpoche recovered thoroughly, and he continued with his schedule of teaching in the fall. In early January 1981, he went up to Chateau Lake Louise for the seminary again. This year it was followed by another Kalapa Assembly, where Rinpoche introduced the Werma Sadhana to all of the students there.

I stayed in Boulder until I was about a month away from giving birth. Then, I drove up to Lake Louise with Mitchell and moved into the suite with Rinpoche at the Chateau. I went over my due date by more than a week, and finally the doctor there decided to induce labor. I went down to the Mineral Springs Hospital in Banff to give birth.

Once again, Rinpoche proved to be a fabulous labor coach. He would tell me when to breathe and when not to breathe, and he always knew just the right time. I was in a Catholic hospital, and they had a cross on the wall of my labor room. Many of the nursing staff were nuns. I had extremely painful back labor because the baby was turned around. I was dilated at nine centimeters for several hours before the baby came out, and at the end I was screaming, ''Jesus Fucking Christ, Jesus Fucking Christ," because of the pain. They wouldn't give me a decent painkiller. It was quite primitive. Later, when I came back to Boulder, my doctor there said, "I can't believe they didn't turn the baby around." At one point, one of the nuns was in the room, and she said, "Take a deep breath now." It was completely the wrong time. I screamed at Mitchell, who was also in the room with Rinpoche and me, "Get this fucking woman out of here." She disappeared and never came back.

When the baby was crowning, I asked the doctor, "What color is the hair?" and he said, "Oh, just a little darker than yours." I'm quite blond. When he said that, Mitchell ripped his surgical hat off. He was beside himself. The baby came out; he was a beautiful little boy, cherubic looking, really. He was put in a little incubator in the corner, a bassinette. Rinpoche and Mitchell both ran over and stood over the baby in the delivery room, talking about whose he was. From some point of view, it was hysterically funny. They couldn't decide who the father was, so at a certain point they decided it was theirs and not mine. It really wasn't clear to any of us. Taggie had been quite Caucasian in appearance at first, whereas Gesar looked Asian right away.

They had run out of the blue blankets they usually wrap the baby boys in, so they wrapped our son, Ashoka Alexander Mukpo, in a pink blanket. The nurses gave him back to me, and I had him in my arms, and they wheeled me out into the corridor outside the delivery room. All the members of the Vajradhatu board of directors were waiting there, along with John Perks, Mitchell's wife, Sarah, and a few others. Out I came with this very pink baby in a very pink blanket.

At that moment, I started to feel that I was bleeding. I turned to Mitchell and said, "I'm hemorrhaging." Mitchell said, "Oh, it's okay." He was somewhat distracted, to say the least. So I had to endure showing the baby to all of the directors, while all the time I knew I was bleeding. By the time they got me back to my room, I had a dinner plate-sized blood clot where the blood was congealing under me. There was blood dripping off the bed, and they had to give me a transfusion. The nurse kept saying, "Why didn't you say something? Why didn't you say something?" I just said, "Well, I tried."

When people had their babies in that hospital, the policy was that the babies would go to the nursery. I refused to have Ashoka taken there; I wanted to have him with me. I remember the nurse saying to me, "You're feeding him too often. You should have him on a feeding schedule. What are you going to do if you have to vacuum your house and the baby wants to eat?" I said, "Well, I don't vacuum my house." I was able to take him back to the hotel the next day.
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After Ashoka was born, we were at Chateau Lake Louise for several weeks. Rinpoche didn't seem concerned at all about whether or not Ashoka was his son. He loved him; he always loved him. When Ashoka was three weeks old, Rinpoche picked him up and said, "This will be the next Lord Chancellor of Shambhala!" When Ashoka was little, Rinpoche also used to say, "Something is really special about this baby."

A few weeks after Ashoka was born, we received a letter from His Holiness the Karmapa saying that Ashoka was the incarnation of Khamnyon Rinpoche, the Mad Yogi of Kham, a very important Kagyu lama who had monasteries in both Tibet and India.
We decided to wait and not to make any plans about Ashoka's future at that time. There was the question of Ashoka's parentage, and we didn't know what effect that might have in the future.

When we first brought Ashoka home from the hospital, I was staying with Rinpoche in our bedroom at Chateau Lake Louise. Rinpoche thought it would be nice if the baby was in bed with us, as we had done with Gesar. We tried this arrangement, but Rinpoche's kusung seemed to come into the room almost every half hour. Rinpoche was having stomach problems in that era, which continued for some time. He would get nauseous frequently, which was one reason that he would ring for a kusung to come in.

I on the other hand was experiencing some postpartum depression, or at least my hormones were raging and I felt vulnerable and exhausted. I desperately needed to rest at night. With people coming in all night long, and the baby waking up all the time, I finally freaked out completely and started screaming at Rinpoche. We had a huge fight. Rinpoche started screaming back at me and chased me around the bedroom until I finally barricaded myself in the bathroom with the baby. He thought I was being unreasonable. I took a room down the corridor at the hotel so that I had a separate place to sleep with the baby. After that, we got along fine.

The Kalapa Assembly took place at Lake Louise while Ashoka was just a tiny infant. I would bring him to the talks, and there was a screen on the main stage that I used for privacy when I needed to nurse him during an evening presentation. A number of times during his presentations at the assembly, Rinpoche asked me to make remarks to the assembled students or to answer questions. He continued to want me to participate actively in the assembly.

Soon after we got back to Boulder, the Regent and Lady Rich moved out because we needed the room for the new baby. They rented their own house a few blocks away from us, which Rinpoche named the Kalapa House. I also wanted and needed to have my own bedroom at this point. Rinpoche very sweetly arranged for me to have $1,000 to decorate my sitting room, which was off of my bedroom. This was the first time that I felt I could have my own space and arrange it the way I wanted within the Court.

Right after Ashoka was born, an article was published in one of the national dressage magazines about my training in the Spanish Riding School. During this period, there was considerable interest in my riding experience, and several magazines ran features about the time I had spent at the Spanish. I saw the magazine about three or four days after giving birth, and I felt so out of shape compared to how I looked on the cover of this magazine. I thought, "Oh my goodness, it's going to take a long time to get back into this shape." Funnily enough, when I returned to Boulder when Ashoka was just a few weeks old, I got a telephone call from a television producer who wanted to do a feature on the Shambhala School of Dressage for the Arts and Entertainment network. The only time they could possibly film me was then, when Ashoka was a newborn. I had to ride for this, even though I felt inadequate. I managed to pull myself together, and it went very well, in fact. The Arts and Entertainment feature was initially aired locally, but then it was chosen at the end of the year to be shown nationally.

During the period when Ashoka was an infant, I appreciated life at the Court in many respects. I could see that it was a wonderful situation for a lot of people in the community to have contact with Rinpoche in an intimate way.

Rinpoche had a daily routine at the Court in Boulder. Of course, being Rinpoche, he constantly disrupted or changed the routine, but still there was a predictable pattern to his life. When he first woke up in the morning, his kusung would come in and present him with tea bowls for the main shrine downstairs as well as for the shrine in the kitchen and for the personal shrine in his sitting room. Rinpoche would add gunpowder tea to each bowl and then pour hot water into the bowls. Then the kusung would take the bowls and put one on each shrine, as an offering to the protectors, the forces that guard the Buddhist teachings. This daily offering is traditional in many schools of Buddhism.

Once, when Ashoka was quite little, he was in bed with Rinpoche and me. That morning the kusung was a man named Scott Forbes. When Scott came in with the tea offering bowls, Ashoka grabbed at one of them. I said, "No, no, don't do that. That's the Buddha's." So Ashoka sat back and let Rinpoche do the offering. A couple of hours later, we were walking through the hallway of the Court. Scott Forbes was standing in the hall. Ashoka stopped and he pointed at Scott and he said, "Look, Buddha!"

Some mornings, Rinpoche would take a shower before breakfast. He insisted that we should only have white towels in the bathroom. His philosophy was that with white towels you could see if they were dirty. Rinpoche himself didn't like to shower, but he insisted that we had to have these pristine white towels. A little later, he went through a phase where he took long baths in tepid water, uncomfortably lukewarm. He had a fear of water and disliked bathing. Somehow, however, he leaned into the bath thing and made it a regular activity for a while.

The Tibetans are very foul in their habits, some of which I may mention here. In the house in which I stayed there were some twenty servants, and they brought me a cup of tea every morning. They never washed the cup which I used, but brought tea in it every day, and they would say that it was quite clean, for I had used it only the night before, though it was as dirty as it could be. They think cups are unclean if they have been used by their inferiors, but they never wash those used by themselves or their equals, for these are clean in their eyes, though it is disgusting even to look at them. If I asked a servant to wash my cup, it was wiped with his sleeve, which might be quite wet and dirty from being used as a handkerchief. Then he said it was clean, and poured tea into it. Just think of it! It is impossible to drink out of such a cup, but still one must do so, for it would only arouse their suspicions to be too strict about such matters. It seems to be nothing compared with his other unclean habits that the Tibetan does not wash his plates and dishes. He does not even wash or wipe himself after the calls of nature, but behaves like the lower animals in this respect. To this there is no single exception, from the high priest down to the shepherd; every one does the same. I was, therefore, much laughed at and suspected when I followed the Japanese custom in this particular, and even the children would laugh at me. I was much troubled at this; still I could not do otherwise. This was a still greater trouble in the tents, for in Jangthang I used to have four or five dogs beside me whenever I retired for private purposes. You can well[265] imagine how terrified I was at first, though I soon got accustomed to them. And no sooner had I gone away than the dogs devoured the excrement. For this reason there is little or no filth lying about in Jangthang.

Nor are these the Tibetan’s only unclean habits. He never washes his body; many have never been washed since their birth. One would scarcely believe that they boast in the country, if not in towns or cities, of never having been washed. It calls forth laughter from others to wash even the hands and face, and so the only clean part about them are the palms of the hands and eyes, all other parts being jet-black. The country gentlemen and the priests, however, have partially cleaned faces, mouths and hands, though the other parts of their bodies are just as black as can be. They are quite as black on their necks and backs as the African negroes. Why then are their hands so white? It is because they make dough with their own hands with flour in a bowl, and the dirt of their hands is mixed with the dough. So Tibetan dishes are made of dirt and flour, and the Tibetans eat with their teeth black with sordes. It is a sickening sight! Why do they not wash their bodies? Because they have a superstitious belief that it wipes off happiness to wash the body. This belief is not quite so prevalent among the inhabitants of Central Tibet as among those of the remote provinces north of the Himālayas.

It is necessary at betrothal to show not only the countenance of the girl, but also to show how black she is with filth. If she is all black except her eyes, and her dress is bright with dirt and butter, she is regarded as blessed. If she has a white face and clean hands she will be less fortunate, for she is said to have washed away her luck. Girls are equally superstitious about this, for they too attach much importance in courting to the black[267]ness of the boys. I know it is difficult to credit what I have just stated; even I myself could not believe it until I had visited several places and seen Tibetan habits for myself. People below the middle class have no change of clothes, but generally dress themselves in torn and filthy rags. They blow their noses into their clothes in the presence of others. Their dress is often as hard as hide with dried dirt. It is as it were a concrete of butter, filth and mucus. But people above the middle class are a little less untidy. The priesthood especially are instructed to wash their hands and faces and keep their clothes clean. They are somewhat cleaner, therefore, but only in comparison with their people. It was often very difficult for me to accept invitations to dinner and tea amid these foul habits. While at Tsarang I tried very hard to get accustomed to them, but it is difficult to overcome physical revolt.

-- Three Years in Tibet, by Shramana Ekai Kawaguchi

After Rinpoche had been awake for a little while, either before or after his morning ablutions, Shari would often come into the bedroom to consult with him about his breakfast. Sometimes he would get up and have breakfast downstairs or in the backyard; often he would eat in his sitting room. He liked to have what he called "bandit soup" for breakfast. This was frozen beef that Shari would shave into very thin slices and arrange artfully in a bowl. Then Rinpoche would have a small teapot containing boiling hot water, which he would pour over the strips of beef. The hot water would cook the meat a little and make a soup broth. (It was called bandit soup because when bandits were on the run, this is the kind of breakfast they could make quickly.)

Usually, Rinpoche would eat breakfast in his pajamas or his Japanese bathrobe, his yukata. Then he would dress for the day's work. He would indicate to his kusung what he wanted to wear for the day, and he or she would bring his clothing to him. He had a big walk-in closet where all his suits, uniforms, robes, and other clothing were kept. Sometimes he would go down to the office at Dorje Dzong. Other days, he would conduct business at the Court. As time went on, he spent more and more time at the Court and held many of his meetings there. He seemed in this era to be moving away from the corporate, office-based approach to business within Vajradhatu. Having seen the neurosis and limitations of that model, he began to make the Court the location for most meetings and the focus, or power spot, for decision making. The night before or first thing in the morning, Beverley Webster would bring over a typed schedule with his appointments for the day. She might also meet with him about what he was doing that day. In addition to his kusung, as time went on, he had an attache, who was both like a super-kusung and also someone to help oversee the conduct of business. The presence of the attaches was an important part of making the Court function not just socially but as the center of the business mandala. The attaches would brief people coming to meet him; they sat in on his meetings and made lots of phone calls on his behalf, and Rinpoche often would discuss possible developments and decisions with them. He especially began to rely on this approach after David Rome moved to New York in 1982 to run his family's publishing business. Before that, David did a lot of this himself. After David's departure, Jim Gimian took over many of the functions of running the office with Beverley. There was a core group of three attaches: Mitchell, Jim, and Marty Janowitz -- who was appointed the Kusung Dapon in the early 1980s after John Perks left. Rinpoche called them the "three musketeers." Altogether there was a group of about ten attaches, including several women, who rotated through the Court and also traveled with Rinpoche.

In the evening, there were often meetings, lectures, or other events that Rinpoche attended. Sometimes, this called for a change of wardrobe before going out. During this era, if nothing was scheduled in the evening, Rinpoche and I would sometimes go unannounced to somebody's house for dinner. There was one period when Rinpoche wanted to do this several times a week. We would decide whose house we were going to, and we would just show up at the door without warning. People were very hospitable, and usually they made quite a nice meal for us. Sometimes people were totally unprepared for guests and quite shocked by our arrival.

In addition to the everyday activities at the Kalapa Court, we also hosted many receptions, dinners, and celebrations of all kinds.
If Rinpoche had been away for any period of time, there was a reception to welcome him home. Members of the board of directors and their spouses, staff from Vajradhatu and Naropa, and other invited guests would come to the Court the night he got home. He would greet each person, and people would join us in the blue room while he talked about the trip and about what would be happening next in Boulder. People were always anxious to see him, and these were generally very enjoyable gatherings.

Shambhala Day celebrations at the Court became more and more elaborate as the years went on. Often, Shari and other Court staff would prepare two or three elaborate meals for our guests on Shambhala Day. Sometimes a community member with culinary talent would volunteer as a guest chef for one of the meals. We could have sit-down breakfasts and dinner banquets for fifty or sixty people by turning the blue room into a dining room with long banquet tables and a head table for Rinpoche, me, and the rest of the family. During the rest of the day, people retired to different rooms to talk, have coffee and drinks, and to play board games. Rinpoche thought board games could be both engaging and edifying pastimes. He himself enjoyed the Oriental game of ming-mong, which is a game of strategy, a variation of go. He detested card games and I don't think we allowed them at the Court.

One year, after breakfast I invited a group of women up to my sitting room and we pulled out the Ouija board. It was a lot of fun at first, but then we contacted the spirit of a student of Rinpoche's who had died the previous year. Then we started talking to a lokapala, or a worldly deity. Who knows what was real about this? Rinpoche finally came along and said that he thought it was not healthy to continue. He was not much of a fan of indulging in the supernatural, especially not in the way that Westerners use these things as a parlor game.

In later years, we had receptions at the Court for visiting Buddhist teachers, and occasionally we hosted dignitaries who came through Boulder. Once we had a reception for a representative of the Chinese government. For Rinpoche, having a Chinese official at the Court was quite a coup. He looked like the cat that swallowed the canary that evening, I thought.

On another occasion, the widow of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi was invited from San Francisco to the Kalapa Court for the opening of a Japanese tea house that Rinpoche had built in the garden. (I believe that the tea house was donated after his death to Naropa Institute and was moved onto their campus at some point.) It was a lovely occasion and wonderful to see Mrs. Suzuki again. A few years later, when some students began studying the Japanese tea ceremony, they would come to the Court almost every night of the week to take classes and practice the discipline of tea ceremony, or chado. That was another feature of how our house was used: it was available for classes and small gatherings, almost like a community center. Rinpoche wanted our home to be the focus for Shambhala culture, which was wonderful for the community but less satisfying for me in my desire to have a family home.

During this era, Rinpoche -- among his many vocations -- was quite involved with the presentation of Dharma Art, which refers to teachings on art in everyday life, as well as general aesthetics and the application of Buddhist and Shambhala principles to artistic disciplines. He spoke about nonaggression as the basis for genuine art, and in his seminars he gave demonstrations of flower arranging, calligraphy, and object arrangement, which students also worked with in small groups. At times, Rinpoche also talked about his photographs and about language and poetry in these, classes. Allen Ginsberg was a participant at several of the major seminars. Jerry Granelli, the eminent American jazz percussionist and composer, helped organize early seminars in California and was quite active with the early programs at Naropa. Over the years, Rinpoche was invited to do a number of ikebana or flower-arranging exhibitions. Later, the exhibits evolved into Dharma Art "installations" in which Rinpoche placed extraordinary flower arrangements in rooms that he and his students designed and created. At the end of 1980, he and a group of students had done a major Dharma Art installation at the LAICA (Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art) Gallery. In September 1981, Rinpoche went to San Francisco for several weeks to give a Dharma Art seminar and to do an installation there.

As with so many other areas, his artistic endeavors drew a large group of students to him, some of them professional artists but many not. A group called the Explorers of the Phenomenal World was formed to explore the principles of Dharma Art and to work on the exhibits and installations. One of the directors of this work, Ludwig Turzanski, was a professor of art at the University of Colorado when we arrived in Boulder. Ludwig and his wife Basia were our close friends from the earliest days in Boulder.

In 1984, after his retreat in Mill Village, which John Perks wrote about in his book, Chogyam Trungpa (CT) decided to marry some more women. To his devotees, this decision came directly from the Rigdens, who were these supposed ‘heavenly beings’ who sat around in the clouds above outer Mongolia and directed the actions of the self-proclaimed universal monarch. Apparently they had nothing better to do than watch the sangha and tell his majesty what strategic moves he should make in his efforts to take over the world. At first, the Rigdens said he should take three more wives, so in order of weddings that would have been Karen Lavin, Cynde Greives [Grieve], and Wendy Friedman.

But as time passed they upped the number to five. That’s when I met him. I was number five and I was groomed to be attractive to him by the father of the children I nannied for. During the summer of 1985, after our wedding, CT apparently fell in love with Ciel, and she became number 6. Agnes Au followed about four or five months later, I think, bringing the total number of wives to 7. But just to be on the safe side, they had 250 copies of the marriage licenses made.

I need to say here that Ciel first slept with CT when she was very young, 13 or 14 years old. Of course people will deny this but it is the truth. She told me herself. I doubt anyone out there has the guts to back me up on this, however. Most still want to believe he was omniscient and powerful and not some pervy, rapey asshole who preyed on children. If your daughter was sleeping with the king of the universe at that age, would that be OK?...

Ciel married CT on her 18th birthday. I was at the wedding, as were the other wives, and I remember her parents brought Polish caviar and vodka, or maybe it was champagne. Her father made a toast, saying he gave his daughter to CT completely, that he trusted him with all of his heart and soul, and that he was honoured to become part of the family, or something similar. CT toasted him back as his father in law and thanked him for his kindness or generosity or something. (Folks can you imagine?)

-- The Life and Death of Chogyam Trungpa's Child Sex Slave: Ciel Turzanski [Drukmo Nyima], by Leslie Hays [Drukmo Dashen]

As the interest in ikebana grew, it became common for students to come several times a week to create arrangements in various rooms of the Court. I had always loved having fresh flowers, but this took on a whole new dimension, bringing color, elegance, and wonderful fragrance into Court life.

While I appreciated the world of the Court, it had its difficulties. Although there was a sense of well-being and harmony there, at the same time, it was not entirely satisfying for me personally or for our family. For example, when Ashoka was little, his bedroom was in a corner of the Court, right next to a room we called the kusung station, which was where the various servers would hang out when they were not on duty. If Rinpoche rang, the kusung were supposed to walk around the corridor to get to Rinpoche's room. The alternative was to cut right through Ashoka's bedroom, which had two doors. I would say to them, over and over, "Please don't go through Ashoka's bedroom." But instead of taking a few extra steps, the kusung would usually run right through his bedroom, often when he was asleep. Most of the time, they woke him up.

During this era, I was having a difficult time in my personal life. No one was consciously admitting that Ashoka was Mitchell's child, but it was becoming more and more apparent that this was the case. On the one hand, perhaps it was irrelevant. Rinpoche accepted Ashoka, he loved Mitchell, and Rinpoche and I were getting along extremely well most of the time. On the other hand, nothing fit together for me in my life. I started to feel quite groundless. I would sometimes break down and cry uncontrollably. Finally, Rinpoche asked Ed Podvoll, a psychiatrist who was directing the psychology program at Naropa, to come and see me. I used to talk with Ed a couple of times a week, trying to resolve things. A lot of the problem, I realize now, was that, for a long time, I really couldn't admit to myself that Ashoka was Mitchell's baby. It was a struggle to continually dismiss the obvious.

As well, I wanted Rinpoche to be more involved with the family on a day-to-day basis. When he was first getting up in the morning I would go in and sit on his bed and say, "Please, I need just a little bit for me and the family. Just once a week have dinner alone with the kids and me. I know you have a duty, and you have a job. But I need something, just once a week." We'd have these conversations, and I'd always end up crying. He would promise to make time, and then usually nothing would happen. After a couple of months of doing this on almost a daily basis, I stopped. Two or three days later, he came into my bedroom and sat on my bed and said, "Why don't you come and talk to me any more in the mornings?" I replied, "It's just too painful." He said, "Oh no, you can't stop. I'm starting to rely on these conversations you have with me." And I told him, "You know, I'm not masochistic. Why am I going to come in every day? It's too painful. You don't relate to your family at all. Now I've decided to give up. I've started to move forward, and you're saying you're unhappy about that?" I couldn't believe it.

Rinpoche may have been a mahasiddha, but he was also a man. And like some men, he seemed to have a double standard about extramarital affairs.
The fact was that I had fallen in love with Mitchell. I know that it was difficult for Rinpoche. He had a lot of relationships, but he usually didn't fall in love with these other women. After Ashoka was born, Rinpoche sometimes worried that he was losing me. In fact, I was deeply in love with Mitchell. When I was a child, my father had talked to me about how it was possible to love more than one person in your life. He had told me that love was very big; it wasn't a small thing at all, and that one's life could accommodate loving many people. I found that I loved Mitchell more and more, and that our love for one another was genuine, strong, and growing.

There was another side to the whole thing, which was the relationship between Rinpoche and Mitchell. They were very close. One night, a few years later, the three of us were in Maitland, Nova Scotia, staying at the Great Ship Inn. I was going to bed early, and I wanted Mitchell to come to bed with me. Rinpoche was in the bathroom, and I went in there and said, "Let Mitchell off duty. I want to hang out with him." "You know, Sweetheart," he said to me, "the problem is, we're both in love with the same person." It was so very sweet. In its own way, it was workable, but there were definite difficulties. I can't deny that.

At this time, I didn't think that Mitchell and I were ever going to have a normal life together. That didn't seem possible. He was married. I was married. But we did have our time together. For me, partly it was that I enjoyed being able to share part of my life with someone who was more my own age, from my own generation. We would do simple, ordinary things like go to the movies together. We shared things that I just didn't do with Rinpoche anymore. At one point, I said something to Rinpoche about him being a father figure in my life, especially since I'd been so young when we got together. He didn't like my saying that, but there was something to it. I also did have a real craving to have a more quiet life and a more normal relationship. So there was some push and pull between Rinpoche and me, although we continued to love one another a great deal.

When Ashoka was about six months old, I took him with me over to Germany for a period of time. I had decided to go to Gronwohldhof and get back into my riding a little bit. I had sold Shambhala, one of my horses, in part because there were a number of people who had invested in buying him, and people needed to get their money out. I had Warrior with me in Germany. I was there training for several months. I felt that I had to get on with my life and that getting back into my career in riding was the healthiest thing for me to do. I did feel more of my own strength from that, and in many respects, it helped to cheer everything up in my world.

Throughout 1981, Rinpoche was preoccupied with His Holiness the Karmapa's illness. The Karmapa was very ill with stomach cancer, and Rinpoche went to visit him a number of times. He was distraught about the Karmapa's condition. Mitchell became involved in His Holiness's medical care and arranged for him to see Western doctors. In the end, His Holiness came to Mt. Zion Hospital in Chicago for medical treatment, and he died there on November 5, 1981. We all felt it as a great loss. He was truly a great leader, a dharma king. At the same time, when Rinpoche performed a funeral ceremony in Boulder for the Karmapa, he talked about His Holiness's death as a blessing to all beings and especially to the Western world. As he put it:

Each time the departure or arrival of a Karmapa takes place anywhere in the world, it is a blessing in that particular land .... We do not regard His Holiness's death as an attack by unexpected obstacles. We can see it as a blessing. Never before has any realized person such as the Buddha, Jesus Christ or Mohammed set foot in the Western world. The Western world needed taming. It needed the compassion and skilful means of enlightened mind. It needed the blessings of the Karmapa to conquer the ground and bring the great fruition of the Practice Lineage.1

Very soon after the Karmapa died, Rinpoche went to Rumtek, His Holiness's seat in Sikkim, for several weeks. There, he spent time with all of the other Kagyu teachers, those who lived at Rumtek as well as those who descended there when His Holiness died. Because of my commitments in Europe, I was not able to accompany Rinpoche. It was the first time that Rinpoche had been back to Asia since 1968, apart from a brief visit to Hong Kong to see the Karmapa in the hospital earlier that year. He told me that when he would get up in the mornings, there would be hundreds of Tibetans waiting outside of his hotel hoping to catch a glimpse of him or to receive his blessing when he came out of the hotel.

As is traditional, His Holiness's body was preserved in salts for a period before the cremation. The body was placed within a special ceremonial closed coffin in the main shrine room at Rumtek for several weeks, and many people came to practice there and to pay their last respects. Rinpoche took a number of students with him to Rumtek, including the Regent, Mitchell, Dapon Gimian, the Dorje Loppon [Eric Holm], as well as John Perks, Karl Springer, and several others -- Ken Green, Chuck and Judy Lief, and a few assistants. They all spent time practicing in the shrine room at Rumtek with the Karmapa's body. To be able to practice in the presence of the teacher's body during this period is said to be a great blessing. After Rinpoche's death, I experienced the power of this. One can still feel the teacher's presence, and the energy of his compassion is quite available. The party could not stay for the actual funeral. (There had been a misunderstanding about the date of the cremation.) Rinpoche said that it was more important, in any case, to be there during the early period after His Holiness died.

After returning to Boulder, on the day of the cremation in Rumtek, Rinpoche conducted a funeral for His Holiness in the main shrine room at Dorje Dzong. It was during this sad and moving occasion that he made the remarks above. During the funeral, he also shared with all his students his feeling that with the death of the Karmapa his duty to the lineage became even greater. He had a sense of a heavy cloak of responsibility being placed on him. He felt more and more that the propagation of Shambhala vision was of great importance for the future of Buddhism in the West. From this time onward, he put even more effort into teaching, particularly emphasizing the advanced levels of Shambhala Training.

In May, 1982, His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, who had enthroned Gesar in Berkeley, returned to the United States. At Rinpoche's request, His Holiness had agreed to perform a Shambhala enthronement ceremony for Rinpoche and me, which is generally an empowerment for a secular ruler, usually a king or queen. Khyentse Rinpoche had performed this ceremony when the current king of Bhutan was enthroned.

This empowerment is called the "Blazing Jewel of Sovereignty" and is commonly referred to in our community as the Sakyong abhisheka. In 1974, the Karmapa confirmed Rinpoche in the Buddhist lineage as a holder of the Vajrayana teachings, a vajra master.




Now it was very meaningful to him that Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche would come and confirm him as Sakyong. Rinpoche viewed this ceremony as an important landmark in the Shambhala teachings coming to the West. He told me that as part of the Sakyong abhisheka, His Holiness would give me the empowerment as Sakyong Wangmo. This was not a necessary part of the ceremony. Rinpoche could have asked His Holiness to do the ceremony just for himself, but he chose to make me the Sakyong Wangmo. He wanted me to feel that I was part of the ruling principle. I think this came out of his respect for women and the feminine aspect of society. He understood that Tibetan culture had become somewhat stagnant because it was such a male-dominated society. In order to create a rich society here in the Western Shambhala world, he felt that we needed to also empower the feminine principle. So while more of the focus during the ceremony was definitely on him, as it should have been, I was also empowered at the same time.

We started out wearing simple white clothing, somewhat like being on stage in our pajamas. This signified our basic human nakedness, which was adorned progressively throughout the course of the enthronement.

White clothing has significance in many religious faith traditions. Some of these traditions include:

• Buddhism: In many Asian cultures, white clothing is worn as a sign of mourning. It is the traditional color of funeral garb. In Sri Lanka, lay Buddhists wear white clothing during ceremonies and auspicious times. In Thailand, dedicated lay devotees who take on 8 precepts (called Upāsakas / Upāsikās) wear white.
• Christianity: Christian baptismal garments are traditionally white. Some churches also adopt white clothing for certain members of their clergy or religious; best known is the white clothing of the pope. Angels in human form are described as wearing white clothes.
• The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: LDS members attach particular significance to white clothing. The officiant and the proselyte at a Mormon baptism are both dressed entirely in white. It is traditional, though not required, to dress babies and small children in white when they are blessed. In recent years, it has become common for men who bless or pass the sacramental tokens to wear ties and white shirts. Additionally, temple workers and temple patrons dress in white temple attire to work in the temple or participate in temple ordinances. LDS undergarments are also white.
• Hindu: In funerals, the Hindu people wear white casual clothes in respect of the dead. Widows and sometimes widowers are expected to dress in white clothing to signify their status. (See Mourning (Hindu).)
• Judaism: The ceremonial kittel (Yiddish/Ashkenazic Hebrew: "robe or coat") worn on religious holidays, is white to symbolize purity. The tallit katan(Yiddish/Ashkenazic Hebrew: "small tallit") is likewise white in color, as, on high holidays, is the gartel (Yiddish/Ashkenazic Hebrew: "belt, girdle, or sash").
• Islam: Islam encourages men to wear white clothes for it if known as the purest of colours. Muslim men wear white especially on Fridays. It is preferred for Muslim men to wear a white ihraam (special garments for Hajj), which consists of an izaar (lower garment) and a rida’ (upper garment) when going to the pilgrimage to Makkah. This is symbolic to the fact that everybody will die and the fact that it portrays simplicity. White is the preferred colour for the shrouds of the dead in Islam. Prophet Muhammad has been reported to have said: 'Wear your white clothes, for they are the best of your clothes, and shroud your dead in them.' (Reported by Abu Dawood and al-Tirmidhi).
• Mandean: Adherents dress in the Rasta, a required white garment worn during baptisms and other ordinances.
• Santería: Initiates in Santería are required to wear white clothing for a year, white clothing is also standard attire for attending Santería religious services.
• Sikhism: Kundalini yogis, as taught by Sikhi master Yogi Bhajan, wear all white and cover their heads to expand their auras and practice mindfulness.
• Voodoo Entire white clothing is considered a default attire for lay worshippers attending Voodoo ceremonies as a sign of purity and modesty. White attire is also worn during initiation and ordination ceremonies. White is considered sacred to the Voodoo spirits of Dahomean origin and is sometimes worn by Voodoo adherents on days sacred to Dahomean spirits.
• Wicca: Ritual robes are often made from white cloth, with little or no decoration, according to the customs of certain traditions. White represents holiness and purity.
• Zoroastrianism: Priests of the faith dress in white robes and caps.

-- White Clothing, by Wikipedia

His Holiness was on a throne to Rinpoche's right. Rinpoche started out in a normal chair. I was seated throughout the ceremony on a chair to his left. His Holiness blessed our clothing, which we then put on. For Rinpoche, there was a white naval uniform, which from then on was always called the "abhisheka uniform."


I put on a beautiful brocade chuba that was custom-made for this event. Rinpoche then ascended a throne at the same height as His Holiness.

Rinpoche was given a white naval peaked cap, and His Holiness blessed a small white gold tiara inlaid with diamonds for me (a gift from Rinpoche). We also received special shoes, which in Rinpoche's case had a vishva-vajra (a diamond scepter with prongs in each of the four directions) drawn on the soles. Normally, you would never walk on that sacred symbol, but the king can walk on it, because for him the whole earth is regarded as a sacred golden ground covered in vishva-vajras. His Holiness also blessed various medals and presented them to us. These were the medals that Rinpoche had designed in 1977. We also were given beautiful velvet cloaks, which were edged with a custom-made brocade that came from Japan and included a special tiger-lion-garuda-dragon emblem as part of the design. (The cloaks were made by Deborah Luscomb, one of several talented seamstresses in the community who over the years made special articles of clothing or shrine cloths for members of our family. She had made the cloak for the Sawang's investiture as well.)

At a certain point, Rinpoche was given a large conch shell that he blew, signifying the proclamation of the king's command. Then a bugle played the Shambhala anthem. Many other offerings and toasts were made to Rinpoche -- and to me -- and he made remarks about the significance of the event. He talked about the role of the Shambhala monarch in conquering the setting-sun or degraded aspects of civilization. He also spoke about the need to create a Great Eastern Sun culture based on sanity, gentleness, and wakefulness.
This was the role that he saw for himself, for me, and for all the citizens of Shambhala. In our case, the citizenry of Shambhala is spread throughout the world. While Rinpoche established the Kalapa Court as the focus or center of the Shambhala world, he knew that people would connect with the wisdom of Shambhala in many different places and at many different times. While giving this wisdom a seat at the Kalapa Court, he also wanted to extend the Shambhala principles to anyone who connected with this path of warriorship.

All four of our boys were there: Osel, Taggie, Gesar, and Ashoka. When Rinpoche returned from Sikkim, he had brought Taggie back with him. We thought that we would try having him at home once again, since nothing much had changed while he was in Asia. We took him to a whole new group of doctors who put him through a new group of tests, but nothing seemed to help. At this time, Taggie was living in the Court. He had an attendant at the enthronement so that he could witness it, although I don't think he knew what was going on.

For Osel, this day had special meaning because he knew that he would be receiving the same empowerment at some time in the future. In fact, he was given the Sakyong abhisheka in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1995, conducted by another great Nyingma teacher, His Holiness Penor Rinpoche.

Gesar was old enough to understand that this was an important event. He held himself with restraint and dignity throughout the long afternoon. Ashoka, meanwhile, was just a little over a year old. By the end of the afternoon, he was climbing all over me, the stage, and Rinpoche. At one point, Rinpoche was sitting on the throne in his regal uniform with Ashoka on his lap. They seemed quite happy together.

There were about two hundred people invited to the ceremony. I think it had a lot of meaning for everyone who was there. You know, in telling you the slightly whacky story of my life, I worry that what gets lost is the larger view, the larger significance of the events in Rinpoche's life. On this occasion, the whole environment was completely luminous. It was a superpowerful event in what was a powerful environment in any case -- all the time.

Rinpoche understood that the age that we live in calls for the proclamation of dharma as the imperial yana, the imperial vehicle. This is a dark and confused time, a time when people have lost much of the dignity in their lives. It takes a very bright light to get people's attention because they are so lost and jaded. Rinpoche was willing to shine forth that light, even if it was somewhat shocking, even when it was hard for people to make sense of. This was one occasion when the word "glorious" really applied. His Holiness was also a thoroughly luminous and expansive human being. He was magnetic, powerful, and so kind. On this day, Khyentse Rinpoche was beaming, and you could see the connection between him and Rinpoche. They were very close. It was a wonderful occasion. I didn't think so much about the implications as far as my own path was concerned. I felt that it was an affirmation of all of us, of all of Rinpoche's students. It also was an affirmation of hopefulness for Western society as a whole.

Shambhala Anthem

In heaven the turquoise dragon thunders,
The tiger's lightning flashes abroad.
The lion's mane spreads turquoise clouds,
Garuda spans the threefold world.

Fearless the warriors of Shambhala,
Majestic the Rigdens on vajra thrones.
The Sakyong kingjoins heaven and earth.
The Sakyong Wangmo harvests peace.

The trumpet of fearlessness resounds,
The all-victorious banner flies.
Temporal and spiritual glory expand,
Rejoice, the Great Eastern Sun arises!2
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In the summer of 1982, not long after the Sakyong abhisheka, I moved up to Nova Scotia with Gesar and Ashoka. (By this time, we had concluded that nothing was going to change with Taggie. The monastery in Sikkim was willing to have him return, and Rinpoche felt this would be the kindest environment for him at the time.)

Rinpoche was talking about moving to Nova Scotia at some point in the future. He had toured the province again in 1979, and at the end of 1981, he had spent several weeks there, culminating in a seminar at the Keltic Lodge in the northernmost part of Nova Scotia, on the island of Cape Breton. He became more and more enthusiastic about the place with every visit. Beginning in 1979, a few of his students moved there from other parts of Canada and from the United States. When I arrived, there was already a small dharmadhatu in Halifax.

I thought that the sanest thing for the children and me would be to move up ahead of him and get a farm there, where I could have horses, and the children could have a more normal life. I bought a farm in Falmouth, near Windsor, Nova Scotia, which we named Willowstream Park, after the farm that my parents had owned in South Africa. I brought several horses up there, including Warrior. I had also purchased a young stallion at Gronwohldhof when I'd been in Germany the previous year. I bred him to more than twenty mares in Nova Scotia in the spring of 1982.

Rinpoche was excited that I was going to live in Nova Scotia. He saw me as pioneering the development of the Shambhala world there. For me, it was both an attempt to participate in furthering the vision that he was trying to promote and a way to have a personally sane existence. Being married to Rinpoche was sometimes like being married to a cosmic force rather than a human being. As time went on, this was more and more the case. I felt the need for a more ordinary human existence, which I thought the situation in Nova Scotia would provide.

Rinpoche had asked Jane and Tom Ryken, two senior and trusted students, to live on the farm with me. They were very committed to us and helped the family a great deal; we had quite a pleasant household for most of the year that we were there together. A student of Rinpoche's from Australia, Geoff Martin, also joined us and was a great help. We had a large vegetable and flower garden, and I used to do a lot of pickling and canning. Ashoka was happy running around on the farm, and Gesar enrolled in King's Edgehill, an excellent private school in the neighborhood.


SCHOOL FEES / $17,750 / $41,750 / $54,500

-- 2017-18 Tuition Fee Schedule, by King’s-Edgehill School

Rinpoche used to come and visit periodically, and Mitchell also came up a few times.

There was an indoor arena a half-hour from the farm where I could ride, and I started competing Warrior in a number of local shows. I received excellent scores competing at the lower international or FEI levels, and I was invited to ride in a clinic in Toronto with the Canadian Olympic coach at that time, Johann Hinnemann. At the end of the clinic, Hinneman told me that he liked the horse but felt that he would do better at Prix St. Georges, the first international level, than at the Grand Prix level, the highest level of dressage. Hinneman suggested that I sell Warrior.

After going to Toronto, I seriously got the riding bug again, and as my opportunities were so limited in Nova Scotia, I decided to move back to Europe in early 1984, to continue training and find a horse with more potential. I sold Warrior and moved over to Germany with Gesar and Ashoka, intending to stay for the whole year. After looking around a bit for a new horse, I went back to Gronwohldhof, Herr Rehbein's facility. There was a horse there, Poseidon, that I had known about for several years, that had always appealed to me. When I rode him, he was a beautiful mover and gave me a good feeling. I thought that I should purchase him.

Hinnemann was skeptical. He called and said, "If the horse is already eight years old and he hasn't been successful competitively, there's something wrong and they shouldn't be selling him to you." I called Herr Rehbein at that point, who was furious that someone was saying these negative things. I had suddenly ended up in the middle of a political upheaval. I decided to trust Rehbein, so I went ahead with the purchase.

After several months training at Gronwohldhof, I began to have doubts. Poseidon was very big, and he proved to be spooky and quite difficult to ride. Later, I learned more about his medical history -- had I known these details earlier, I would not have purchased the horse, because the prognosis was not good. In retrospect, I don't think Herr Rehbein was malicious in selling me the horse in any way. He took an educated gamble. He was trying to help me find a good horse that I could afford. In the end, I lost on that gamble.

After riding the horse for more than six months, I found that he was getting more and more difficult to ride. The difficulties with my horse coincided with the time that I was supposed to return to North America to visit Rinpoche, who had begun a year's retreat in MillVillage, Nova Scotia. So in the fall of 1984, I went to MillVillage, and then I spent time in Boulder. This provided me with time to think about whether Poseidon was the right horse for me. I decided to sell Poseidon. I phoned Rehbein at that point and asked him to sell the horse. For months, I continued to call Gronwohldhof to ask if he had been sold. Every time I called, I was told, "No, No, he hasn't sold yet." This continued for almost a year.

During this period, Vajradhatu experienced severe financial problems. Most of my own financial affairs were handled by the organization. I kept asking if my bills at Gronwohldhof were being paid, and I was told that they were. It turned out I was almost a year in arrears, without my knowledge. The people at Gronwohldhof had basically repossessed the horse without saying that was what they were doing. Then Poseidon went lame. He was no longer worth anything, and Vajradhatu had let the insurance lapse. It was a fiasco.

In some quarters of Vajradhatu, there was resentment about the expenses connected with my riding, and I started to question whether it was worth going through all the negativity, especially when nothing seemed to be working out. I became depressed about my riding career.
I was also quite worried about Rinpoche's health at this point, so I decided to stop riding. As it turned out, I didn't resume my career for four years, until after Rinpoche's death. Today, I find that I have more enjoyment and love for my discipline than ever before in my life. But at that particular time, that four-year hiatus was necessary.

I left Germany in the fall of 1984 and went to Nova Scotia, where Rinpoche was in retreat. He had contacted me and told me that he wanted me to come over to receive the Vajrayogini abhisheka from him in retreat. After all these years, I still had not had this transmission, and Rinpoche seemed to feel that this was extremely important at this time. He was planning to confer another important empowerment, the Chakrasamvara abhisheka, after his long retreat, and he wanted me to be able to take that as well. Chakrasamvara is the consort of Vajrayogini and a very important yidam in our lineage. Vajrayogini represents the wisdom aspect of the teachings, while Chakrasmavara represents the practitioner's skillful action and compassion. Since wisdom and compassion are indivisible, Vajrayogini and Chakrasamvara are joined in union in the iconography. These are some of the most profound and important teachings that Rinpoche could transmit to the West. Looking back now, I feel that he knew that his life was coming to an end, and he wanted to be sure that I received these transmissions from him.

The house he was living in was an old sea captain's house about two hours outside of Halifax. There was a large kitchen on the main floor, and people would hang out around the kitchen table at odd hours of the day and night. Near the kitchen there was a shrine room where the staff, and occasionally Rinpoche, would practice. There was a spacious dining room where Rinpoche ate at all hours of the day and night -- his schedule changed a lot -- and a large living room. The main cook, Joanne Carmin, who we called Machen (which means "chief cook" in Tibetan) also had a room at the very back of the house on the first floor. She spent the entire year in retreat with Rinpoche. There was always at least one attache, and one kusung on duty, and Rinpoche had a number of other guests who came and went. There was also a little guest bedroom on the first floor, where Gesar stayed when he visited his father for several months. Upstairs, Rinpoche's bedroom was a large room with a walk-in closet and a separate bath. Other bedrooms for the staff and visitors were also on the top floor.

The year before he went to Mill Village, Rinpoche had been on a schedule that was often totally turned upside down. He got into the habit of staying up all night and sleeping during the day. During the all-night sessions in this era, he began teaching his students elocution with an Oxonian accent, the English accent of a person educated at Oxford University. He wrote exercises that his students practiced with him at all hours of the day and night, and he also wrote a novel about life in the Shambhala Kingdom, which he liked to have read aloud in Oxonian, sometimes at three or four in the morning.

By the time he got to Mill Village, his schedule of activities was even stranger. He would often stay up for twenty-four to forty-eight hours straight, and then he might sleep that long. No one knew when he would be awake or when he might be sleeping. Sometimes, he would eat dinner three times in a day; sometimes, he would hardly eat at all.
It was not very easy to be part of his staff or his household at that time.

Rinpoche's approach to retreat was quite different from the approach of a group retreat where everyone feels good and relaxes and communes with nature or with God. Rinpoche's retreats were more like the trials of Christ wandering in the desert or what ascetics in various traditions went through in their caves. Altogether, retreat in the Buddhist tradition is meant to be very tough. It is an undistracted opportunity for a student to work on unraveling ego and neurosis at a fundamental level. Rinpoche was both doing that for himself and he was also working with his students. The situation he created for himself and others in retreat was stripped bare of the conventions of everyday life. He was free to be exactly as he was, without any pretense. Even beyond the personal and interpersonal level, he was working on the karma of his whole community in North America, trying to liberate what was stuck both now and in the future.

I felt that his approach, how he worked with himself and with others in retreat, was the spiritual equivalent of the tough training that I went through in Vienna. He was creating an uncomfortable space for himself and other people, an almost ruthless space where you constantly felt groundless -- you have the ground pulled out from under you so that you realize what life is about at the most fundamental level. Eventually, you might realize what buddhanature is, the heart of enlightenment, stripped of all pretenses and concepts. But while you are going through the process, you totally lose any reference point to a goal. This process is very, very uncomfortable.

Sometimes people ask me what meditation practices Rinpoche himself did, and I realize that, in some respects, it's a strange question. In a very real sense, everything he did was practice. This may be a dangerous thing to say, because if students were to take this to mean that they don't need to do formal meditation practice, that would be a big mistake -- encouraging self-deception. However, I do feel that for Rinpoche, especially in the later years, his life was his practice. From time to time, he joined his students in the sitting practice of meditation, and he took part in the major practices he gave to people, such as the Sadhana of Mahamudra, the Vajrayogini Sadhana, and various Shambhala practices. But in general, his practice was his being, or vice versa. Very early on, in 1971, a student asked him if he ever meditated, formally. Rinpoche's response was: "That seems to depend on the situation -- but formal sitting, in terms of imposing it on oneself, somehow doesn't apply anymore." The student said, "Apply to whom?" And Rinpoche responded: "To whom. That's it!"1 I think his response here is another way of expressing the groundlessness one encountered at Mill Village. For Rinpoche, there was really no contrast between practice and everyday life, and there was nobody there to ask the question. For most of us, sharing that space was unsettling, sometimes deeply so.

Before going to Mill Village, I spent time studying the Vajrayana teachings that Rinpoche had given us to help prepare myself for the abhisheka. Rinpoche had phoned the Vajradhatu ambassador to Europe at that time, Steve Baker, and asked him to tutor me before I left Germany. The more I read, the less sure I felt about what I was about to do. I had a lot of questions and, one could almost say, doubt during this period of time. I didn't feel through and through that I was necessarily ready to take on this commitment. I wanted to understand what I was getting into if I took this transmission. I wasn't sure that I would be completely genuine if I took this empowerment without complete conviction. In my own way, even before I arrived at Mill Village, a spiritual crisis was growing within me, which seemed to be exactly what Rinpoche was provoking in everyone there.

When I got to Mill Village, Rinpoche said that I had to do twenty-one prostrations, twenty-one vajrasattva mantras, twenty-one mandalas, and twenty-one recitations of the guru yoga mantra on the day of the abhisheka before he would give me the transmission. I had never completed my preliminary practices. Traditionally, people do a hundred thousand of each of these practices, so he was letting me off pretty easy! However, I still resented him telling me what to do. I did the first three parts of the practice, but when I got to the guru yoga mantra, I had to visualize Rinpoche as my teacher. I was totally angry with him at that point for insisting that I take this abhisheka. I was conflicted about Rinpoche being both my husband and my guru. I found it difficult to reconcile these two things during this period. I thought to myself, "What the hell am I visualizing here?"

I was pushing the boundaries, wanting to discover for myself what made sense, what worked and what didn't. I had never had a chance to have a teenage rebellion, in a way, because I had married Rinpoche so young. I thought, "Why on earth am I in the shrine room doing this stuff?" So I came out and I said to him, "This is ridiculous." He got really angry with me. He screamed at me and started pounding his hand, saying, "Go back." He told me to go back and finish the practice. I was pissed off, but I went back and completed it.

I was also uncomfortable with the fact that in giving me the abhisheka, he seemed to be presenting Vajrayana as the highest reality. I was feeling that there were other valid positions in the world and that we were isolating ourselves as a community if we didn't acknowledge this. I was having a meltdown. The abhisheka was going to take place later that night. I wrote him a letter asking, "Aren't there other truths? Aren't there other realities?"
In response, he wrote me this prose poem on the night that he gave me transmission:

To Lady Diana Mukpo on the Occasion of Receiving the Abhisheka of Vajrayogini

Why so?
Cheerful birthday once again.
You are my only eyes, heart and life as well as my breath.
Nonetheless, we haven't been together for a while.
Thinking of you is like a sudden flash of lightning in a cloudy night time.
Remembering your smile and your face relieves my pain.
Now and in our previous lives, we have been bound together by the chain of karma.
This letter was written with a combination of sadness and joy.

The reason why we are together in this lifetime is only due to the buddhadharma and the guru.
The little I have been able to help others is because of meeting the only authentic guru.
It is by the blessings of the guru that I am not insane.
However, these days, many people are insane.
Two world wars and nuclear weapons and other chaotic situations have occurred.
Your practising the dharma is not just for me, in the same way that taking of medicine is not for the doctor.
It is in order to cheer up others and blossom their lives.
The Vajrayana teaching is the highest of all.
It is the greatest magic that Buddha has ever taught.
Just as you need a mother to begin with as an infant, Vajrayogini practice is very necessary.
If one realizes the importance of that, one would understand all the Vajrayana teachings.
It is necessary to develop eyes in order to see the brilliance of various flowers.
Then one can develop an understanding of both spiritual and temporal ways.
This is not just thought up by somebody.
It is 2,500 years of wisdom.
I am presenting the ghanta, dorje, and damaru [bell, scepter, and hand drum] as a birthday gift.
They are like a horse and saddlery.

One might say: "Is this the one and only way? But we have become civilized and no longer act as cavemen."
Obviously, everyone would agree that the sky is blue.
One might ask: "Aren't there other truths, other ways?"
There might be, but mathematics must begin with zero.
One might say: "I don't want to buy any (one) else's viewpoint."
In this case, one is not buying others' viewpoint, but trees have to grow up from the ground.
They never take root in the air upside down.
But in any case, one is not buying somebody's view.
The Communists might say: "Lenin's view is the only way."
There are things with view and opinions.
There are also other things without view and opinion, which, as we know, is shunyata [emptiness] and is free from opinion and concept.
Vajrayogini herself represents nonthought.
There are ways to experience that, free from skandhas [ego] and fixed opinions and so obtain universal freedom.
That is why we have the story of the arhats [Buddha's disciples] who died of heart attacks when for the first time Buddha proclaimed the teachings of shunyata.
Once Nagarjuna said: "I have no axioms; therefore what I present is without dichotomy."
I would like to invite you into this enlightened world.
Once more, I would like to express that you remain as my greatest inspiration and companion.

With profound love and thanks,
From your best friend,

I don't know if this will speak to others as it did to me. It was one of those times that Rinpoche was talking directly to my heart and my intellect at once, and he completely disarmed me. My hesitations dissolved on the spot, and I realized that my seeming irritation was actually more a reflection of my connection to him and longing for him. So I wrote this poem in reply:

Chogyie to the Rescue

Your kindness and brilliance go beyond conceptual mind.
Your generosity has transformed my life.
I was lost in the clutches of confusion
Searching for sanity and reference point
And along came Chogyie,
The first genuine person I'd ever met.
You demonstrated that the phenomenal world is merely a playground
To be captured with kindness and skillful means.
Your heart is unsurpassable.
You have taught me to believe in myself.
Your awakened mind is the source of my loyalty to you.
You nurture your students with loving kindness and include them in our Mukpo family.

I'm so glad I met you.
Please prolong your life for the benefit of others
I love you.
Your devoted wife and student.

Does it seem odd that we wrote poems to one another? I suppose in a way it is, but it also was a way of reconnecting with him. In particular, I supplicated him in the poem to prolong his life because I felt that he was beginning the process of dying while at Mill Village. No one else seemed to realize this was happening at the time, which was one thing that made it so difficult for me during this period.

We proceeded with the abhisheka, which I felt as a breath of fresh air in what I experienced overall as a hot, crowded room. After giving the abhisheka, Rinpoche gave a little talk. There were several other people who received the abhisheka, and he gave a lecture to all of us about the principle of Vajrayogini and how to regard the practice.

During the remainder of my visit to Mill Village, I felt anything but receptive to the environment. I couldn't relax there, and I found that Rinpoche wasn't there for me in the way that I counted on him to be. It was very difficult.

During the last years of his life, Rinpoche intensified the training of a number of his close, older students -- including me. I, like many others, was to be left with many unfinished lessons to work out in years to come. The story of two great figures in the lineage, Marpa and Milarepa -- which I referred to much earlier in this book -- involved Marpa setting impossible tasks for Milarepa, asking him first to build and then tear down building after building. This was part of purifying Mila's karma. Marpa would often be drunk and abusive when he dealt with Milarepa. These stories of surrendering are colorful when they refer to events in the past, but when they are about something that happens in your own life, it's much less easy to accept or understand. The atmosphere at Mill Village evoked those classic tales and was anything but easy.

Altogether, I was there for a week or so, and I became incredibly claustrophobic. I felt a lack of personal space; things seemed to be closing in on me.
I had Ashoka with me, and that made being there more difficult. If Rinpoche slept for twenty-four hours and then was up for twenty-four hours, it was completely incompatible with being with a young child. So at one point, I said that I would like to go into Halifax and stay at the Court on Dutch Village Road for a few days. This was a house that had been recently purchased for us. Rinpoche was planning to spend an extended period of time in Halifax, probably beginning in 1986, so this house was purchased with the idea that it could be his residence at that time. In the meantime, some sangha members were living there and fixing it up, and Rinpoche stayed there when he was in town. He told me that it would be fine if Ashoka and I went up there. I left as quickly as I could pull my things together! When we got to the house, I spent a nice evening there. Ashoka stayed in bed with me, and we had a bath and watched movies on television together and went to sleep early.

The next morning, around seven o'clock, a kasung walked into my bedroom and said, "Rinpoche is on his way down." I couldn't believe it. I finally had found a corner of privacy and space, and now he was coming there. The Sawang was staying at Mill Village at this time, also, and he arrived in the car with Rinpoche at the Court. We all gathered in the living room. By then it was close to 8 A.M. Rinpoche wanted to play a game that he loved, called the "qualities game," in which people would ask him questions about the quality of something they were trying to guess. They would ask questions such as: "If the subject of the game were a meal, what kind of meal would it be?" And he would say something like, "It would be a hot dog." Or "It would be roast beef and Yorkshire pudding." You could get a good idea about what you were guessing from the pattern of a number of answers. A British monarch might be described as roast beef, while Rinpoche was more likely to describe an American president as a hot dog.

That was the traditional way that the game was played. But starting in this era, frequently there was no subject. In other words, there was no correct answer and therefore no end to the game. Rinpoche would just give answers, and they weren't related to guessing anything. The game ended when he wanted it to end. Period. This was heightening my sense of being trapped and uncomfortable.

More broadly, I was increasingly upset because I sensed Rinpoche was going into another realm at this point, and I didn't know how to reverse things. He often didn't seem responsive or grounded in the way that I was used to. I felt that everything was spiraling out of my control.

I once asked His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche why, when you had these descriptions of how far out Vajrayana experience was, the great teachers like himself were all so kind and ordinary. He said to me, "It's that way on the outside, but if you could see into my mind, it might look completely crazy to you." So Rinpoche, in a sense, was letting people see into his mind and into their own -- with nothing covering up anything.

Mill Village was the last intense opportunity he was to have to train the people around him, and he didn't let up for one moment. He didn't even say, "Now, I'm training you and this is going to be really uncomfortable." He just was the way he was, and you had to deal with it. It was outrageous in a whole new way; this time, it wasn't glorious outrageousness. It was really tough. The point seemed to be to push people in the environment until they couldn't hold it together anymore -- then see what happens. He didn't relent until people lost it in some way.

At one point during this retreat, a person visiting Rinpoche asked him why he was being so tough on one particular staff member. Rinpoche had been relentlessly breaking this person down, waking him up over and over again during the night, criticizing him, and on and on. This visitor was in a car with Rinpoche and the person Rinpoche had been tormenting, so to speak. The visitor asked, "Why are you being so hard on so and so?" Rinpoche said, loud enough so he could be overheard, "I have to make him feel as bad as I possibly can."
Somehow this made the person feel a little bit better. Later Rinpoche indicated that this person was really very close to him -- he wasn't mad at him or anything. He just was trying to get through the facade and work with what was there.

Again, this was very familiar to me. What Rinpoche was doing at Mill Village had a similarity to the tactics at the Spanish Riding School, where they push people to such an extreme that a person discovers what he or she is made of. The difference in what Rinpoche was doing was that his approach was not based on aggression but was using aggression, turning it on its head, to break through the fundamental aggression. This is similar to how he worked with the Dorje Kasung discipline. It is both the heart of his brilliance and often the most misunderstood part of his teaching.

On the morning Rinpoche arrived at our home in Halifax, when the qualities game mercifully ended, I went upstairs to escape, but Rinpoche followed me. I encountered him in the upstairs hallway. He was standing with Osel, leaning on his arm. I said to him, "This situation is terrible. It's really awful. You are getting completely crazy. You are getting completely out of control, and you're killing yourself. You're drinking yourself to death." And he said, "Well, do you know what's the matter with you? You're a punk." (He was referring to my hairstyle; I had had my hair cut short and spiky in Germany.) I came right back at him. I said, "I may be a punk, but I'm not drunk." With that, he tried to hit me, but he missed.

From my perspective as his wife, which I think is different from a student's perspective, I felt that the whole thing, my whole life, was falling apart. In earlier years, when people were having difficulty accepting Rinpoche or his latest campaign, they would come to me and ask, "Is everything okay? Is everything going to be all right?" I could always say, with complete conviction, "Everything is going to be fine." I had so much faith in Rinpoche and what he was doing. But in the later years, I would have had to say, "I don't know. I really don't know."

As Rinpoche's wife, my role seemed to be to nurture him and help to keep him on this earth, in some ways. To see him sacrificing his body and going beyond the bounds of good sense in terms of his health was excruciating. Maybe that was a lesson in itself. One of the stories about Milarepa is that the last time he was with Gampopa, his dharma heir, when they parted, Mila lifted his cotton robe so that Gampopa could see his emaciated body covered in scabs and sores. "This is the dharma. This is the truth," he said. The end of Rinpoche's life had some of that aspect to it.

When I look back at this period of time now, it still makes me incredibly sad. Yet I can see now that Rinpoche was still doing an amazing amount during this final era. Things actually weren't falling apart. During the year that he was in Mill Village, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior was published, and it was a great success. Rinpoche continued to work closely with Shambhala Training, and when the administration faltered, he moved forcefully to make changes so that the project would remain strong. During this period he also directed a group of students to upgrade the facilities at RMDC, overcoming hesitations within the board of directors, so that we could hold the seminary and Kalapa Assembly on our own land starting in 1985. There were a number of projects like this, which he kept in touch with and moved forward during this period. He was also working on what I can only call a nonconceptual level in terms of planting seeds in Nova Scotia. I don't know how else to put it. He was feeling out the energy of the place, and he was putting parts of himself into the environment there. It was something like that. But as his wife, seeing that he was less and less in his body and less and less healthy, it was heart-wrenching. Sometimes, I think that he kept me away, at arms length, during this era because he knew that he was going to die relatively soon, but he just had to go forward.

Rinpoche at times was like a typhoon, or a hurricane. Viewed from afar, a hurricane appears orderly and beautiful; from inside, it is dangerous, chaotic, and difficult to endure -- unless you are in the eye. The eye of the storm is absolutely still and calm. I think that for much of my life with Rinpoche, I could find the empty center, which was calm and open. I could feel the brilliance and the power, but I wasn't buffeted around by it. However in the later years, I felt that I was part of the swirling chaos. Rinpoche threw everyone into that whirlwind. I think that was deliberate on his part. After his death, I could begin to see the larger pattern again, its power, beauty, and meaning. I realize now that the immediate chaos, though painful and excruciatingly real, was a passing confusion. I find that what endures is the big picture, the vast vision that Rinpoche communicated.

Around the time that I was in Mill Village visiting Rinpoche, Mitchell and Sarah decided to separate after what had certainly been a very difficult time for them. When I left Mill Village, I went back to Boulder, where Mitchell and I were able to spend time together. The Regent and Lady Rich were living in the Court at Eleventh and Cascade. I was supposed to have stayed in Germany for the whole time that Rinpoche was in Mill Village, so we had given them the Court for the year. Rather than try to move in with them, which really didn't appeal to me, I got my own apartment, where Ashoka and I stayed. (Gesar was in Nova Scotia for the rest of the year.)

The next month I found out that I was pregnant again. Once again, it happened while I was using contraception. It was, of course, another big drama, but this time there was no question about whose child this was. David, my second son with Mitchell, was born in August 1985.

At the time of David's birth, Rinpoche was conducting the Magyal Pomra Encampment again. He asked me if I wanted him to be present at the birth, but I told him it was not necessary. My mother, however, actually came to the hospital. Somehow, she was able to accept my unconventional relationship with Mitchell, and she was delighted to have more grandchildren. Mitchell's mother was also there. The two grandmothers waited in separate rooms during my labor, as they were not overly fond of one another. After the baby was born, they both were ushered into the room. When Elaine, Mitchell's mother, saw David for the first time, she remarked, "Another Jewish doctor is born!" My mother countered, "The best part of this child is English!"

Rinpoche had the Dorje Kasung at MPE fire off the big cannon to celebrate David's birth. Rinpoche was very sweet to David when he was an infant, but Rinpoche didn't live long enough to spend much time with him. David was just eighteen months old when Rinpoche died. Rinpoche's hope was that we would name the baby Yung-lo, after the Chinese emperor who built the Forbidden City and was a great warrior-king. Rinpoche felt that this child would have a particular connection to martial energy and that this name would be very appropriate for him. Rinpoche said that this child would be the next Kasung Kyi-Khyap, the commander of the Dorje Kasung. I wanted to call my son "David." Emperor Yung-lo was also a ruthless tyrant who killed many people before converting to Buddhism, so I thought it was a strange name to saddle my son with. However, after thinking about it, I realized that all of our children had Shambhala names and that I trusted Rinpoche's inspiration. My son's birth certificate reads Yung-lo David Mukpo.
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Postby admin » Wed Aug 14, 2019 10:21 pm

Part 1 of 2


In early April 1985, Rinpoche concluded his retreat at Mill Village and prepared to return to Boulder. Since he had been away for so long, there was great anticipation about his homecoming. The day before Rinpoche was scheduled to fly out of Halifax, he and the staff arranged to leave the retreat without notifying anyone in Halifax or Boulder that they were moving up the departure. They left one person behind manning the phones at Mill Village, who was instructed to maintain the illusion that Rinpoche was still there, while making him unavailable to any callers.

Rinpoche and his small band of pranksters flew out of the Halifax International Airport a day early. Their escape was not discovered until the next day, when Rinpoche did not appear for his previously scheduled flight. His whereabouts were unknown. Even I did not know where he was. The Dorje Kasung in Boston, New York, and other likely cities were asked to check the airports he might fly through, and a contingent was sent to the Denver airport. However, Rinpoche had flown into Denver before anyone was aware that he was missing, and he was staying in a hotel in Denver under an assumed name. He was not found.

The night of his expected arrival, a large welcome home gathering and blessing had been planned in the Dorje Dzong shrine room in Boulder. Although people had no idea whether he was going to appear -- or whether he might be in Tahiti, for all they knew -- still the community gathered and waited. There were close to a thousand people in the shrine room. The Dorje Kasung went to the airport at the hour that his original flight would have gotten in, but he did not appear there.

Finally, just at the time he was scheduled to arrive in Boulder, he and his staff pulled up to the curb of Dorje Dzong in a limousine. The Dorje Kasung were there to greet him -- they were waiting there not knowing if he would come -- and he entered the building, took the elevator up to the top floor to the shrine room, and he ascended the Tibetan throne from which he gave remarks and a blessing to everyone assembled. Rinpoche had always loved April Fool's jokes, and this was one of his best (although it came a few days after April 1!). People's reactions to this joke included a wide range of emotions. Some were amused; others were irritated, confused, or angry. Behind that, everyone felt a sense of empty heart and potential loss. Rinpoche's "disappearance" pointed out that we can't take anything for granted. Given that he died two years later, almost to the day, it was perhaps part of the preparation for what was to come. His death, so close to April Fool's Day -- April 4, 1987 -- may have been the biggest joke he ever pulled.

Throughout 1985, Rinpoche continued the schedule of teaching and meetings that he had followed for many years. For the first time, both the Vajradhatu Seminary and Kalapa Assembly were held at RMDC in the summer of 1985. Hundreds of new tents had been purchased, and the facilities had been upgraded to expand the capacity of the center so that it could house hundreds of participants for months at a time. We still hold the seminary at RMDC, now called the Shambhala Mountain Center. The facilities have grown over the years since Rinpoche's death, but he laid the ground by insisting that we begin to use our own center for these large, advanced programs.

Rinpoche made his final visits to many of the city centers where he had been teaching over the last seventeen years. Of course, people did not know that it was the last time; I do not know if he knew this although I strongly sense that he was aware that he would not live much longer. He toured Europe in December and January of 1986, where he gave the Vajrayogini abhisheka -- the first time ever in Europe and the last time during his lifetime. He made his last visit to Karme Choling in June of 1986, where he gave a seminar on the indivisibility of the Shambhala and the Buddhist teachings.

In April of 1986, Rinpoche conducted the Chakrasamvara abhisheka for about three hundred of his students in Boulder. It was very important to him to be able to transmit this teaching to people. The fact that he finally gave this transmission was a mark that he felt that the Vajrayana teachings were firmly established. The ceremony takes two days to complete. It was exhausting for him; his health at this time was quite fragile. He was, nevertheless, delighted to accomplish this. I too was delighted to be present, and I realized his kindness in having pushed me to take the Vajrayogini abhisheka the year before. Without that transmission, I could not have received this final empowerment from him.

Rinpoche conducted his final Kalapa Assembly early in the summer of 1986, and this was followed by the last Vajradhatu Seminary he presided over. There was also an encampment during the summer, but Rinpoche came and went from it very briefly. At the seminary, he gave fewer and shorter talks, and much to everyone's surprise, he left RMDC early and asked the Dorje Loppon Lodro Dorje to give the final talks, with the Vajra Regent conferring the Vajrayana transmission at the end.

Rinpoche had plans to go to Halifax to spend the year, beginning in the fall. Initially, this was just to be a one-year visit, after which he expected to return to Boulder. I was planning to remain in Boulder and visit Rinpoche from time to time, rather than move the whole family up for just a year. But all of that was to change, with very little warning.

One day, in August of 1986, while we were at the Kalapa Court in Boulder, Rinpoche asked for me, telling his kusung that it was urgent. I was somewhere else in the house at the time, but I joined him in the bedroom. He said to me, "The time has come. I want to move to Nova Scotia, permanently. We all have to go. You and the children should make plans to come with me. We should leave next week." For some reason, this seemed fine to me, even though it came out of the blue and was the opposite of what I had been intending. He was also proposing to leave several weeks ahead of schedule. It reminds me a bit of when His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche informed me that Gesar was a tulku and we should enthrone him right away. Something about how Rinpoche addressed me made me feel that I definitely should do whatever he wanted at this time. I said to him, with really almost no hesitation, "Okay, we can go."

Then, he said to me, "We're going to move into the Regent's house in Halifax. That will become the Kalapa Court." While that might sound quite straightforward, actually it was quite a bold move. In 1985, Rinpoche had asked the Regent and Lady Rich to move to Halifax to work on developing the organization and the community there, in preparation for Rinpoche to come in a year or so. Through the efforts of the Regent and other members of the community in Halifax, they had found a building on Tower Road for Vajradhatu to move into. There was one woman in our community, Martha Bonzi, who was an extremely generous patron of Rinpoche's work. She had provided funds for the Naropa Institute over the years, and she gave very generously to many other projects, such as funding the activities of the Nalanda Translation Committee. In this instance, she donated the funds to purchase the Tower Road building. There were extensive renovations throughout 1985, and in January 1986, Rinpoche had gone up for the official opening of the center, which was attended by local politicians, religious leaders, and businesspeople as well as the members of our community.

545 Young Avenue, Halifax

The Regent had then found a house that he thought would be suitable for himself and his family to live in. It was a three-story mansion on Young Avenue, one of the most expensive areas in Halifax. The Regent began renovating his house, and he spent exorbitant amounts of money on the project, hundreds of thousands of dollars. There were many complaints about the money he was spending and the manner in which he was preparing to live. To be fair, he and Lady Rich had a large family that included four children (they had twins born in 1981). They certainly needed a lot of space. But the approach the Regent was taking seemed over the top. It appeared that he was going to have quite a lavish lifestyle, beyond anything that Rinpoche and I had ever had. I think that he felt that he was going to assume Rinpoche's role as the head of the community, sooner than later, and this was the kind of house that he envisioned for himself when he was in charge. At the same time, Vajradhatu was experiencing extremely tough financial times. Everything else aside, it was questionable for us to invest so much money in his household.

Up to this point, Rinpoche had heard all the complaints, including some from people close to him whom he trusted a good deal, but he had not done anything about the situation. Then, in this one fell swoop, he dealt with the whole problem. He sent a senior student, Larry Mermelstein, to deliver the message to the Regent that Rinpoche was moving to Halifax and would need his house. Then, Rinpoche phoned the Regent to confirm this. Of course, the money had already been spent, but the Regent didn't get to live in the luxurious palace he had built for himself. As it turned out, he was building it for his teacher, a twist that was not lost on many of us. The Court on Dutch Village Road, where we otherwise would have gone, was a much more modest dwelling, both in size and the level of renovation and interior decoration. It would in fact have been extremely odd to have the Regent living in a house that was so much grander than his teacher's.

According to what I heard, the Regent suffered terribly after Rinpoche's phone call. When Larry gave the Regent the news, his first reaction was, "Whatever the guru wants." However, he then became both angry and distraught and descended into a depression that lasted for days. He didn't want to give up his house, but Rinpoche was the one person he couldn't say no to. I heard that he threw things around that night after the call, he was so angry. I believe this, because when our staff arrived at the new Court on Young Avenue in Halifax -- to move in our belongings before Rinpoche and I arrived -- there were holes in the bathroom walls where towel racks had been taken out of the wall, and there were large screw holes in the wall in the Regent's bedroom where a built-in shrine had been removed from the wall. They took the fixtures and the shrine with them, I guess.

The same day that Rinpoche informed me that we were all moving, he asked Mitchell and me to go for a drive with him. We got into his Mercedes, which had a custom license plate that read TLGD (for Tiger Lion Garuda Dragon). Mitchell was in the front seat. He was riding shotgun, and there was also a driver. Rinpoche and I were in the back. Rinpoche wanted to go to all the places that we had lived in Boulder and places where important things had happened. We drove up Boulder Canyon, and the first stop was the Four Mile Canyon house. He wanted to see that again. Rinpoche kept saying to me, "Tell Mitchell. Tell him about it."

After that, we went by the Red Lion Inn, which is a restaurant up Boulder Canyon where we had many wonderful meals. We went down to the first Karma Dzong, 1111 Pearl Street, and Rinpoche kept saying, "Tell him. Tell him about it." We retraced our early life in Boulder. I began to feel concerned, because Rinpoche seemed to be saying goodbye to everything in Boulder. There was a sense of closure that made me uneasy.

This drive reminded me of a ride that I had taken with him in early 1984, shortly before I went to Germany for the last time. At that time, Rinpoche had been spending a lot of time in bed, and he seemed somewhat depressed, actually. Finally I said to him, "Come on. Let's get up and go for a drive somewhere." He wanted to take a drive up into the mountains, up Left Hand Canyon, north of Boulder. While we were out driving, I said to him, "You've got to cheer up." He was in a very black mood. I said again, "You've really got to cheer up." He didn't respond. So I said, "Come on, look out of the window. It's beautiful. It's a beautiful day. Look out. Remember, Shambhala Training, the Great Eastern Sun, and all of that." He just growled at me. So I said, "What's the matter with you?" He replied, "I'll be dead in three years." That certainly set me back. I said to him, jokingly, "You probably will, won't you, just to show me that you're right." I made light of it, but I had never forgotten that conversation. Now, this drive was feeling strangely reminiscent of that. I had the same feeling of his impending death, although he didn't mention it.

Rinpoche went ahead of me to Halifax. I went to Florida briefly before I joined him. I had taken David to a beautiful baby contest when he was seven months old, and we had won a reduced-price trip to Disney World. So Ashoka, David, and I, along with one of my kusung, Nancy Craig, all went on a short trip to Disney World, and after that I flew up to Halifax.

It was now September of 1986. We all moved into the Court at 545 Young Avenue. It was an impressive building, but to me it didn't have the warmth or the accommodation that the Court in Boulder had had. The Court on Eleventh and Cascade felt so open and bright. The house in Halifax always felt slightly oppressive and cold to me, even though it was magnificent. There wasn't a sense of comfort in the home. Rinpoche was very sweet to me when I arrived and seemed very happy to see me. He had invited a number of students in the Buddhist community to greet the children and me at a reception in the living room. He seemed excited at the prospect of our new life and pleased that the whole family had joined him up there.

I moved into an apartment on the top floor of the house with Mitchell and the two younger boys. Gesar had a room on the floor beneath us, close to where Rinpoche occupied the large master bedroom, which the Regent had painted gray with gray curtains. It was a sleepy room, but it had large windows that looked out on Young Avenue.

The apartment I shared with Mitchell felt like a great luxury. I had struggled for so long with needing personal space for the children and myself within the Court environment. After David was born, I had actually moved out of the Court temporarily, into a house on King Street in Boulder, to try to provide some kind of family sanity. As I described earlier, this was a struggle for many years of my marriage to Rinpoche, especially as the family grew. Having my needs accommodated within the Court in Halifax felt great. I found that I could relax and actually appreciate Rinpoche more.

In our apartment, Mitchell and I had a combined living and dining room in the apartment, and there was even a small kitchen upstairs. We usually had dinner downstairs with Rinpoche, but I could make breakfast for the kids upstairs if I wanted, and I kept snacks for them there too. There were bedrooms for us and for the children, and even a playroom. I spent a fair amount of time with Rinpoche, but I also had my own space. Mitchell and I being together was just an accepted feature of life at the Court at that point, and everyone seemed fine with it. My kusung would come into the apartment, but I was no longer subjected to having the people serving Rinpoche running through and forgetting that anybody else existed.

Rinpoche did not seem well physically. He looked gaunt, and his skin had taken on a dark color. He would sleep for long periods of time, and sometimes even when he was awake, he would be less than lucid. At this point, we were aware that Rinpoche had some health problems that were going to be difficult to address, especially if he continued drinking. That was one reason that he had planned to spend the year in Halifax: he was supposed to take time off from his demanding schedule to try to get a handle on his health. Rinpoche had had diabetes and high blood pressure for years, which are both diseases that many Tibetans develop in the West, perhaps due to differences in climate, altitude, and lifestyle from the environment in which they grew up. Added to that was his excessive use of alcohol over many years, which at this point in his life was overtaxing his liver.

Mitchell had come up to Halifax with us, but he was just on a visitor's visa at that time and couldn't work in Canada. He still was on the staff of St. Anne's Hospital in Denver, so after a couple of weeks, he had to fly back to Denver to work for several weeks.
During that time, I stayed in the house with my three children.

One evening I went down to see Rinpoche. He was in the bedroom sitting on the side of the bed. I saw that he was bleeding from a cut on his ear. I asked him what had happened, and he said that he had fallen and cut his ear on the side table by the bed. He was trembling, and he was bleeding quite profusely. He said to me, "Look, I cut my ear. I can't stop the bleeding." He didn't want me to call anyone, but I insisted. I was very concerned about him. The kusung came in and we got his ear bandaged, and then they left us alone. I said to Rinpoche, ''I'm worried about you. Something's not right with you. You shouldn't be lying in bed all the time. Tomorrow, let's open the curtains and let some daylight in. We can go out. What can we do for you at this point?"

He said, "It's too late. It's too late."

So I started to spend more time with him, hoping that I might cheer him up. He told me a number of things that were on his mind. He said, "The situation with the Regent is terrible. We've got to dismantle him." He was very specific about this, but I had no idea what to do. Several times he said to me, "The Regent is terrible. We should take his position away. He's dreadful." I couldn't imagine how we would go about getting rid of him. A few years earlier, I had complained to Rinpoche about the Regent, and he told me, "Fine. We'll get rid of him. But who else can you imagine? Who could do the job?" He had named some people and then broken into laughter. "Who is there?" There didn't seem to be anybody else he thought could do the job.

During this time, he also said to me, "We should reconfirm you as Sakyong Wangmo." We never did anything about that, either. Sometimes, when I tried to talk to him, it felt as though he had completely checked out. Other times, he was right there; he would come back, so to speak, and we would talk. However, the situation was tenuous. It was not easy to have an ongoing stream of communication with him during that time.

One late afternoon in September, I had just put David to bed. The kusung on duty came running into my apartment, asking, "Do you have a syringe? Do you have some kind of syringe? Rinpoche's not breathing." Not knowing what they meant, I just ran downstairs with one of the bulb syringes that we had for the baby. Then I saw that Rinpoche was not just having trouble breathing; he was unconscious. I screamed at them to phone 911. Then I tried to suction out his throat, which didn't work. I remember trying to put my hand down his throat to see if there was an obstruction. It felt like ages before the ambulance came, but it was just a few minutes. I was allowed to ride in the ambulance. I remember asking, "Does he have a heartbeat?" just as they started CPR. He had definitely had a cardiac arrest. We finally arrived at the emergency room in the Halifax Infirmary, on Queen Street. They took him in the back, and it seemed like aeons while we waited, while they worked on him. We didn't know if they were going to be able to bring him back or not. Eventually the doctor came out and said that they had been able to reestablish a pulse. I was allowed in to see him, and he was completely comatose in the emergency room. Eventually, they admitted him upstairs. Later, I remembered that there had been a lunar eclipse that day.

Rinpoche was completely comatose for at least the first seventy-two hours. Yet I felt his consciousness in the room during this period. That was my perception, in any case.

Mitchell was working in Boulder when Rinpoche had his cardiac arrest. He immediately got on a flight to come to Halifax. About fifty other people got on a plane in Denver the day after Rinpoche's heart attack and flew up. The minute that Jim Gimian heard about Rinpoche, he phoned a travel agent in Boulder and booked every seat on the flights from Denver to Halifax for the next few days. (He and his wife, Carolyn, had been scheduled to come up later that month anyway. They and their infant daughter, Jenny, were going to live in the Court with us as staff for the next year.) Jim held all the available seats, and then he phoned people to offer them a seat. Everyone wanted to come. So within the next forty-eight hours, about a hundred of Rinpoche's most senior students arrived in Halifax, from Boulder and from other places, not knowing what his condition was or if he would recover. We put up about twenty people at the Kalapa Court. Every possible room was used for people to stay in.

While Rinpoche was still in a coma, two important Kagyu lamas who had been very close students of His Holiness the Karmapa, Jamgon Rinpoche and Situ Rinpoche, flew in. They went to see Rinpoche in the intensive care unit at the Halifax Infirmary. I talked with Situ Rinpoche at the Court after he had seen Rinpoche. He said, "We hope that Trungpa Rinpoche will recover, and we're doing all kinds of practices for him. But if Trungpa Rinpoche decides to change bodies, this is no problem." I thought to myself, "Well, that's easy for you to say."

Rinpoche's students -- wherever they lived -- gathered together to practice meditation and to do various chants and practices for his recovery and overall to express their love and devotion for their teacher.

Within a few days, Rinpoche regained consciousness, but it became apparent that he had suffered brain damage. We didn't know how much or whether it was reversible. Eventually we brought him back to the Court. We had a special hospital bed put into his room, and we hired private nurses to care for him around the clock, along with our own people. The nurses became very connected to Rinpoche and to our family, and four of them attended his funeral in Vermont the next year.

Over the next few months, his physical condition went up and down. Throughout this period, everyone in the community continued to practice intensively, alone and in group practice sessions, trying in whatever ways they could to encourage Rinpoche's return to a state of health and also to work with their own state of mind in this difficult situation. He never regained the ability to speak, really. I remember trying to get him to talk, and at one point he was actually able to imitate some of the words that I said. I felt optimistic for a short period. At a certain point, I remember clearly that he said, "I want beer." He definitely said it, although I know that Mitchell didn't believe me when I told him this.

Although there was a phase when we thought that some rehabilitation might be possible, in early March 1987, he began to degenerate again. He was readmitted to the hospital in mid-March of 1987.

I had many dreams about Rinpoche during this period. In January I dreamed that he was standing in a palatial bedroom. He was in his mid-thirties, at the peak of his teaching career, wearing an orange brocade robe. He was very handsome and manifested in the dream in somewhat wrathful form. In the dream, he pointed at me with two fingers, and he said, "I am going to die soon." He opened his eyes wide and said, "The whole thing is up to you now." I interpreted this to mean that I would have to take responsibility for the Shambhala teachings he had given me, as much as I could throughout my own lifetime. In early February, I had another dream about him. He was lying in a single bed on his right side, as the Buddha lay during his parinirvana, or death. He said to me, "I am going to die very soon, and I am very concerned that the circumstances around my death go well."

When he was readmitted to the hospital, he had severe bloodclotting problems. At some point, they had inserted a stomach tube. Toward the end of March he began to have bleeding from the hole in his stomach. Right around this time, I was away for a couple of nights. I went down to New York to attend a trade fair because I was opening a children's clothing store in Halifax, and I had to go down to buy stock for the store. I was in close communication with people in Halifax, so that if I needed to come back right away, I could. I felt that if I continued to do ordinary things and behave as if everything were all right, maybe it would be. I was on some sort of emotional hold at that point, as was everybody. I was taking sleeping pills every night, and functioning on automatic pilot. They phoned me in New York to say that Rinpoche's condition was deteriorating, and I rushed back. The night after I returned home, I had another dream in which Rinpoche and I were in Tibet together. I was in the waiting room of a monastery there. His Holiness the Sixteenth Karmapa came to greet me. He was in the prime of his youth, wearing a brocade vest and monks' robes. Standing with him was another very great teacher, His Holiness Dudjom Rinpoche, the head of the Nyingma lineage, also in the prime of his youth, wearing a gold robe and an earring in one ear. Dudjom Rinpoche's hair was long and glossy black and styled like a yogi's hair. Trungpa Rinpoche was also there, also in the prime of his youth, and he was wearing monks' robes. He was about twenty-three or twenty-four and his head was shaved.

First, His Holiness the Karmapa entered the room. He sat on an elevated armchair. Then His Holiness Dudjom Rinpoche came in and sat on a slightly elevated couch. Finally, Trungpa Rinpoche came in and took his seat on the same couch. Then, I entered the room and sat on the floor, cross-legged in front of a coffee table, opposite Trungpa Rinpoche and facing the Karmapa. His Holiness had a very nice teacup in front of him. He was explaining something to me, something very straightforward and simple.

The next night, I had a dream in which His Holiness the Karmapa and His Holiness Dudjom Rinpoche appeared again. The Karmapa pointed to an empty seat and said that they were waiting for Trungpa Rinpoche to join them. Exactly at that moment in the dream, the beeper next to my bed went off. It was there in case of emergencies. I phoned the hospital, and they told me to come right away, that Rinpoche was having terrible bleeding. When I got there, I learned that he was hemorrhaging from the hole where the stomach tube was inserted. Basically, his entire body was breaking down. It became evident that Rinpoche was going to die soon. He had been in one of the regular wards of the hospital, but now he was readmitted to the intensive care unit.

Because of his father's dire situation, Osel, the Sawang, returned from England where he was studying. Many, many people in Halifax came to see Rinpoche for the last time at the hospital. Many others flew in. The hospital even gave us a special sitting room for the people waiting to see him. People were allowed to file into his room in the ICU, several at a time, to say their good-byes. The hospital also allowed us to keep a number of our own staff people on duty, so we always had five or six people around Rinpoche, although there was very little to do. It was such an emotional and heartrending time for people. Many people broke down as they came into his hospital room. This went on for about a week.

On April 4, it became evident that Rinpoche's death was imminent. I, the Sawang, the Regent, and a group of close students went in and stayed with Rinpoche. We practiced all day and on into the evening. Rinpoche developed aguinal breathing, deep breathing from the brain stem. This went on for awhile, and then there were long gaps between breaths. Then, at a certain point, Rinpoche opened his eyes and stared, completely alert, completely awake, intensely into the room. I remember his eyes were as dark and as sharp as ever. At that point, I supplicated him. I said, "Please come back." He closed his eyes and took two more breaths and then he died. Although he had many of the classic health problems that develop from heavy drinking, it was in fact more likely the diabetes and high blood pressure that led to abnormal blood sugar levels and then the cardiac arrest. He died from urosepsis, a result of complications from the heart attack.

Our people, particularly Mitchell, Jim Gimian, and Marty Janowitz, had been working with the hospital to establish what would happen when Rinpoche died. Once again, the hospital was amazing in accommodating us. We had a prearranged plan. Marty had been getting information together on exactly what we should do with Rinpoche's body when he died, according to the tradition of how the body of a great teacher is treated.

Special Tibetan syllables, which are called the seed syllables of various deities, were painted on small pieces of paper and placed on his eyelids, his nostrils, his mouth, and other parts of his face and body. His body was put on a stretcher. We took him downstairs in the elevator and wheeled him out the back door. He was transported back to the Court in an ambulance. When we arrived at the Court, there had been a Tibetan throne already prepared in the living room. Everything else had been cleared out of the room. Mitchell, Jim, and Marty dressed the body in the special chuba that had been selected. His body was placed in meditation posture on the throne, and on his head they placed the special red teaching hat that Khyentse Rinpoche had given him and which he wore for abhishekas. I remember it was quite cold. It was snowing and all the windows were left open so that the body wouldn't decay as quickly. An honor guard of the kasung and kusung was placed on either side of the body, and people practiced in the room with his body around the clock. Later, we learned that for the first time in decades, ice clogged the Halifax harbor in the days before Rinpoche died.
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Part 2 of 2

That night, when I finally lay down for a few hours, I dreamed that I was with Rinpoche in a palace. There were four gates in the four directions: blue in the east, yellow in the south, red in the west, and green in the north. It was one large room with the four gates and many pillars. Rinpoche and I were in the center of the palace. He was dressed like a young prince. He was wearing a crown inlaid with jewels and he had a beautiful necklace and earrings. We were making love. (In the dream, he had a huge penis.) The atmosphere was luminous. He had no color and no personality. There was only intense energy. He was facing east, and we were making love lying down and standing up. Then I awoke.

Hundreds of people came to the Court to practice over the next few days. We did all of the practices that Rinpoche had given us throughout the years. Much of the time, people did the sitting meditation practice that Rinpoche had stressed as so important. We also did the Sadhana of Mahamudra, which he had discovered in Bhutan in 1968; the Vajrayogini Sadhana, which he had transmitted to so many students; and the Werma Sadhana, the Shambhala practice that he had written when we were in Mexico.

When a very realized lama dies, they say that the heart of the teacher remains warm for several days while the teacher remains in a state of samadhi, or meditative absorption. I had always been a skeptic about this. However, every day I would put my hand underneath Rinpoche's robes and feel his heart center. It remained warm. Initially, I tried to explain this to myself, thinking that the clothing was keeping Rinpoche's body warm. Then I realized: there's no obvious source of heat here, and the clothing was not going to keep a cold body warm. However, for three days, the heart center stayed warm. Also, there was never any rigor mortis with the body, which is quite unusual.

On the third day, I put my hand on Rinpoche's chest and it was cold. This was the sign that the samadhi was over. At this time, fluids also began to escape from his body, which is another indication that the samadhi has ended.

The Vajra Regent had wanted to accelerate the cremation. He thought that it should be done as soon as possible. He was in touch with His Holiness Khyentse Rinpoche to see when Khyentse Rinpoche could come over and perform the funeral ceremony. Khyentse Rinpoche said that he wanted to wait seven weeks before the cremation. The Regent did not want to postpone the funeral that long. However, he could not overrule Khyentse Rinpoche's wishes. So plans were made to hold the funeral at the end of May, and we used traditional Tibetan Buddhist methods to preserve Rinpoche's body, again according to the instructions that are prescribed for the treatment of the body of a great teacher. Rinpoche had left the outline of these instructions in his spiritual will, which he had composed during the Mill Village retreat. For the details, Marty, Mitchell, and Jim consulted with several lamas who knew what to do.

A special coffin had been built to hold Rinpoche's body after the samadhi was broken. At that time, his body was put in the coffin for transportation down to Karme Choling. Karl Springer arranged to charter a special jet from Air Canada, and he got permission to transport the body across the Canadian-U.S. border. The jet was designated TLGD One. It was a large plane that would hold about 150 people. The coffin was in the front of the plane, and Rinpoche's family and many of his close students rode down on the plane. We flew directly into the airport in Burlington, Vermont, where a hearse picked up the coffin. We rode in a motorcade to Karme Choling, which is about an hour away.

I stayed at Bhumipali Bhavan, the house where Rinpoche and I had stayed so many times, with Mitchell and my children. Taggie was still in India, and we didn't bring him over for the funeral. Everyone else was there. The Sawang had his own house near Peacham.

Two Tibetan lamas accompanied us to Karme Choling to assist with the ongoing preparations of the body for the funeral. Lama Ugyen had been a student of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. He had been working with the Nalanda Translation Committee for a number of years. Lama Ganga flew to Halifax from Los Angeles to assist us. The traditional method involves preserving the body in salts prior to the cremation. Rinpoche's body was placed in a special box in the center of the shrine room at Karme Choling. The body was kept in an upright posture, as though seated in an armchair, and the box was covered in satins and brocades. Elaborate shrines were constructed on all four sides of the kudung, or "body relic," with candles and incense burning on the shrines throughout the day and night. Many of Rinpoche's uniforms and other clothing and personal objects were also displayed in the four directions surrounding the kudung. At the beginning and end of practice periods, students could come up and circumambulate the body and look at his belongings. There was always an honor guard in the shrine room, with several of the Dorje Kasung standing at attention on the sides of the kudung and others posted at the entrance to the room.

You could come in and practice at any hour of the day or night; people wandered in or signed up to practice at different times. There were also large group practices throughout this period. We did the Sadhana of Mahamudra and the Werma Sadhana at certain times, and people gathered to practice the vajrayogini Sadhana together.

There were thrones and seats for the various lamas and dignitaries set up in the four corners of the shrine room as well. Throughout the month, many Tibetan teachers came to pay their respects and to practice in the shrine room. In the evenings, a visiting teacher would often give a talk. There were four main teachers from Rumtek whom the Karmapa had empowered to carry on the lineage after his death. One of them, Shamar Rinpoche, was not able to attend the funeral itself, but he was one of the first visiting teachers to arrive during the intervening weeks and he did various ceremonies in the shrine room there. He also gave a talk one evening. The other three, Jamgon Rinpoche, Situ Rinpoche, and Gyaltsap Rinpoche came for the cremation itself.

Buddhist teachers from other traditions also came to Karme Choling, some briefly and some for an extended stay. Kanjuro Shibata Sensei, the archery master and bow maker to the emperor of Japan, who had made a very close connection with Rinpoche and our sangha, was at Karme Choling for almost the entire time. He worked on painting the purkhang, the structure in which Rinpoche's body would be cremated. Purkhang literally means "corpse house" in Tibetan. It had the appearance of a small stupa. The Sawang's mother, Lady Konchok, also was there. She worked on many of the preparations for the funeral. She had first come over to visit Rinpoche and the Sawang in 1986, after a separation of many years. She was becoming a beloved part of the community, and it was wonderful to have her there.

My mother spent several weeks at Karme Choling. She brought two of her closest English friends with her, Jack and Alex, whom Rinpoche had earlier nicknamed Thomson and Thompson, from characters in the Tintin comic books.

The Regent oversaw many of the arrangements for the funeral, and I have to say that he spared no expense. A number of major donors had given money for a trust fund that was originally intended as an endowment for Vajradhatu. There was provision, however, to use the funds for cases of extraordinary need. The Regent felt that the funds from the trust should be used for the cremation, and I think we all agreed. Vajradhatu flew many people from all parts of North America, as well as from Asia and Europe, to Vermont and paid for hotels or rental houses for many of the dignitaries. A movie crew filmed all of the preparations, as well as the cremation itself, and a corps of photographers documented the funeral and the weeks that led up to it. The Dorje Kasung set up an encampment up the hill from the main Karme Choling building, close to the site where the cremation would take place, in a big open meadow. About 150 members of the Dorje Kasung lived there for over a month. They provided all manner of service: guarding Rinpoche's body in the shrine room, providing drivers and other help for the family and invited guests, and helping in many, many other ways.

As I mentioned, a small circular building, called the purkhang, was constructed for the cremation in a meadow above the main buildings at Karme Choling. This structure was large enough so that Rinpoche's body could be elevated in the upper portion, with openings on all four sides at the height of his head. Below this was an area where the fire would be built. The purkhang was decorated with gold leaf and other pigments. In the four corners surrounding it, large platforms were erected. Thrones were built for His Holiness, the Kagyu teachers, and other officiating teachers. There was also space on one of the platforms for the family, the Regent, the members of the board, and other senior students.

During the last few years, after the Mill Village retreat, Rinpoche had officially appointed a group of seven women as his heart companions, or sangyum, which is usually a term reserved for the guru's wife. He had asked the sangyum both to be his personal attendants and companions during the last years of his life and to help provide leadership in the community. He had envisioned them overseeing the board of directors, and he considered them to be part of his family. So they were to be seated with us as well.

As the 33rd anniversary of my Sangyum ceremony passes, I am filled with devotion to the great guru who duped us all and the rapist culture that has defined his legacy. I pay homage to the omniscient one who managed to make thousands of people believe he was enlightened and that this way of being was something to aspire to. I pay homage to the sangha who made it their mission to keep the truth about how he really lived and died secret. I pay homage to the dharma that was built on the belief that elevating narcissists who claimed to have so much more knowledge than the rest of us would result in the blinding bright light of enlightenment. I pay homage to the students who devoted their lives and often their livelihoods and their intelligence to a deeply disturbed sociopath. I pay homage to the Mukpo lineage -- which began some 40 or 50 years ago, built on the ravings of a madman who appointed a child molester and murderer to hold his seat. I pay homage to the men who drove that sick bastard, tom rich, around the back alleys of cities late at night looking for prostitutes when the secret was out about his deadly infection and he was too arrogant and addicted to power and sex to care about the men he was infecting. I pay homage to the trees and the greenery and so on. I pay homage to Doctor Death who succeeded in allowing this “master” to kill himself with alcohol, cocaine and forced vomiting. I pay homage to my sangyum sister wives who are probably experiencing some pain and anger due their own ignorance about being used as a sex slave by the great enlightened one. I pay homage to his two sons -- Gesar and Osel, -- who grew up to be violent, abusive sex offenders like their father.

I pay homage to Tagi -- a true innocent here, who’s mother gave birth through the haze of a fifth of scotch and a scalding hot bath. I am sorry his life was ruined the moment he was born to her. I am sorry that she chooses to spend her money on horses rather than her son and that Tagi now lives in a state-funded group home. I am sorry the Mukpo’s think disowning Gesar means they must disown his child, who didn’t get even a birthday card from this heartless, rich family. I pay homage to the ministers and acharyas and shastris and Kalapa board members who managed to cover up Osel’s crimes for 25 years, silencing and kicking his victims aside with false friendships and trinkets. I pay homage to the women acharyas, including Pema, who want this man to come back and continue robbing the coffers of an organization that claims to be founded on kindness and compassion. I pay homage to the women enablers who sold their sisters down the river in order to maintain some seat of import in this rape culture of sham.

But from my heart, and for real, I stand 100% with the victims of Osel Mukpo. I am broken hearted for everyone who has taken their lives along the way, especially for those who were under the spell of this false idea of enlightened society. I pledge to keep telling my truth, regardless of the deep hatred that comes my way from current defending members of the sham organization. I forgive my younger 23-year-old self for thinking we were all on some grand mission to bring the dharma to the heathen hordes of small people who needed to find a greater meaning in their lives. Please, I hope everyone who is questioning this gets help and support from outside of the cult. You are so much more than this perverted idea of crazy wisdom.

-- An Anniversary Recollection of my Sangyum Vows, by Leslie Hays



CT was not the only powerful man to reach out to Ciel -- her love affair with Mitchell Levy began when she was 16. WE ALL KNEW -- JESUS CHRIST WE ALL KNEW....

Ciel married CT on her 18th birthday. I was at the wedding, as were the other wives, and I remember her parents brought Polish caviar and vodka, or maybe it was champagne. Her father made a toast, saying he gave his daughter to CT completely, that he trusted him with all of his heart and soul, and that he was honoured to become part of the family, or something similar. CT toasted him back as his father in law and thanked him for his kindness or generosity or something. (Folks can you imagine?) The wedding was a very big deal that summer. Of course, only people who had attended Assembly were invited to this event.


All of them came to Karme Choling and helped with the practice and other preparations. Karme Choling itself was filled to the rafters. Many of the regular residents generously moved out of their rooms into tents in the fields surrounding the main building, while the sangyum, the board, and other senior students -- many of whom had brought their whole families -- were given rooms in the house. There was a whole wing of Karme Choling set aside for families with young children. The place was packed. I have already mentioned the dreams that I had before Rinpoche died. I continued to dream about him. Sometimes one has dreams that are obviously just the product of one's discursive thoughts. Other times I have experienced lucid dreams, where I have self-awareness within the dream. In that situation, there's almost a voice in my head that says to me: "Look at this; this is it." There's some sort of reality and texture that is very different in a lucid dream. While I was staying at Bhumipali Bhavan, I had a few dreams that felt significant to me. Once, after I had gone to sleep, I woke up in my dream to find myself in the bedroom, in my dream body. Rinpoche was sitting in the room, which looked exactly the way it did when I was awake. Rinpoche was in the chair by the shrine that we always had in the bedroom. He was naked, sitting as he often did with his left leg bent at the knee, his left foot resting on the other knee. I said to him, "So here you are. What's going to happen to you? Are you going to be reborn?" And he replied. "No, not now." He said, "I think I have to rest for awhile. I'm going to go and rest in the dharmadhatu." (The dharmadhatu is a realm without form; the big, impartial space of dharma.) This dream felt very sweet and ordinary, as though he were simply explaining the situation.

Several weeks before the cremation ceremony, Khyentse Rinpoche arrived from Bhutan. I remember him coming in the door at Karme Choling. He was such a wonderful old man: tall, massive. He was having a little trouble walking at that point. His knees weren't good, and he leaned very heavily on his attendants. I don't know how old he was exactly, perhaps around eighty. He was definitely getting on in age. You could see how exhausted he was after his long journey. He was still so gracious and kind to everybody. He gave all of us who had assembled a blessing, and he made a few remarks about how good it was to be with Trungpa Rinpoche's students, and how he was going to provide guidance to us in the days to come. Then he went upstairs to a special room that had been prepared for him. It was a large room usually reserved as a secondary shrine room, which was turned into a combined bedroom and sitting room for him. The next day, after he'd had a chance to rest, he began to check into all the arrangements that were being made. Over the next weeks, he would come down every day and practice with people in the shrine room. However, he spent a lot of time in his quarters upstairs, where he would receive people for private meetings and small gatherings.

I started to visit him every few days, which he encouraged. He told me that I should never hesitate to come to see him if I had anything to discuss. It was amazingly generous of him. He would sit cross-legged on the huge bed with his mala, his rosary, in his enormous beautiful hands. The whole room felt luminous to me, golden, whenever I went to see him. I found it a tremendous relief to spend time with him during this period.

I was able to discuss many issues with Khyentse Rinpoche. In particular, he wanted to know if I had had any dreams about Rinpoche. He thought these might be helpful in finding Rinpoche's reincarnation. I told him that I wasn't sure there would be an incarnation that we could find. Given Rinpoche's immersion in Western culture, I wondered at that time if there would be a tulku in the traditional sense. I told him that Rinpoche had told me and many of his other students that he was planning to be reborn as a Japanese scientist in Osaka. Khyentse Rinpoche said, "You shouldn't worry. Trungpa Rinpoche might have many rebirths. There might be many incarnations. It's like when you look at the moon reflected in a bowl of water. If you look in more than one bowl at a time, you may see many, many reflections. But all are reflecting the same thing." He continued, "Trungpa Rinpoche can be reborn in many different manifestations. That's possible." I didn't really understand that, and I still don't, I have to say. But this is what he said.

He also told me that the dream in which Rinpoche and I were making love was in the middle of the Chakrasamvara palace, which had never occurred to me. He said that Rinpoche was the manifestation of Chakrasamvara in that dream, and that the interpretation of the dream was that I was Rinpoche's true consort.

He also told me that any problems in my relationship with Rinpoche, which had occurred at the end of his life, were completely repaired, and that the dream was also symbolic of this. He gave me advice on how to raise my sons and promised to help educate them as they grew older. He talked about how Trungpa Rinpoche was like his son, and that they trusted one another completely, and that therefore he would definitely do whatever he could to help me and to help our community. He asked me to write and tell him about my dreams after the cremation ended, which I did. He told me that I should question Trungpa Rinpoche in the dreams about where he was going to be reborn. I tried to do this, but I didn't find anything out that was that helpful.

As the weeks went by at Karme Choling, Khyentse Rinpoche's wisdom in allowing seven weeks between the death and the cremation became evident to me. I think it was absolutely necessary for people to have this time to process what had happened. In the days after Rinpoche died, I remember feeling how strange it was to be alive when he was dead. It seemed very strange that I could still walk on this earth when he did not. For all of us, his death was not a simple issue of burying somebody and getting on with your life. He was the reference point of everybody's life. Meeting him and. studying with him was the most precious thing that had ever occurred in the lives of his students. Now, in the future we would all have to sort out our entire lives without him. It's difficult for me to know how to talk about this. However, I can truly say that we needed the time, those weeks, to prepare for the cremation.

The ceremony itself took place on May 26, 1987. Thousands of people came for the ceremony. Early that morning, I arrived from Bhumipali Bhavan dressed in a Tibetan chuba, and my sons were also dressed in traditional Tibetan clothing. We had rust-colored chubas made for the three boys. I had one that was dark green. Mitchell was dressed in his khaki uniform. He was one of the eight Dorje Kasung who carried the palanquin containing Rinpoche's body in the procession from the shrine room at Karme Choling up a path that wound through the woods to the clearing where the cremation would take place. Among the others were the Kasung Kyi Khyap, David Rome; the Kasung Dapon, Jim Gimian; and the Kusung Dapon, Marty Janowitz. These four marched in front. In the back of the palanquin were four other senior Dorje Kasung: Hudson Shotwell, Suzanne Duquette, Jan Wilcox, and Dennis Southward. Barry Boyce held a huge umbrella on a long pole that hung above the kudung, providing a canopy.

The procession was led by a lone piper, who played "McPherson's Lament" and a mournful tune he had composed for the occasion. Behind him came a small group of Tibetan monastics as well as Western monks and nuns from Gampo Abbey, the monastery Rinpoche had started in Nova Scotia. Then there was a large contingent of the Dorje Kasung, followed by the body in the palanquin carried by the eight students. Then came the rest of the Dorje Kasung marching very slowly, extremely slowly. Behind that was a procession of people who had been particularly close to Rinpoche, led by our family, including the four boys and me. The Regent, Lady Konchok, my sister and her husband, the sangyum (female companions), the board of directors and their wives, and others all marched in the procession. Khyentse Rinpoche and the other high lamas who were going to lead the ceremony were already up the hill on their thrones when we approached. The entire procession passed under a large wooden gate, which had been erected for the occasion, and slowly approached the purkhang. The four pallbearers then placed the body in the purkhang.

When we completed the climb up the hill, we took our seats. I was seated with the Regent and the Sawang on a wooden platform close to the purkhang. The other members of the family, the sangyum, members of the board, and other close students were also nearby. Khyentse Rinpoche was seated on a throne on the main platform to the left of me. He was leading the practice and his seat directly faced the purkhang containing Rinpoche's body. Before the practice itself began, everyone assembled there was invited to circumambulate the purkhang in a clockwise direction and to offer a white scarf, a khata, as they walked past the front of the stupa. The Sawang, the Regent, and I led the offering procession. We were told to try to throw our khatas through the ornate window opening in the front of the purkhang, through the little hole where you could barely see Rinpoche's face screened from view but sort of peeking out. I remember that my khata went right into that opening. There were thousands of people attending the funeral, so it took quite a long time for this khata offering. From time to time, the honor guard around the stupa would have to remove the hundreds and hundreds of white scarves that were accumulating on ropes strung in front of the purkhang.

It was tremendously colorful up there in the meadow. I noticed how beautiful the purkhang was, ornamented with its gold designs and with the Mukpo colors: brilliant white, bright red and orange, and deep blue. These colors were used in the Mukpo family emblems that adorned the corners of the monument. While everyone was walking around the purkhang to pay their respects, I had the opportunity to look out and see the thousands of people who were assembled there. It had been cool and misty in the early morning, but the sun burned off the mist, and it was a brilliant sunny day with hardly a cloud in the sky. People were standing or sitting on chairs and blankets they had brought with them, and the crowd spread out across a great expanse. There were also tents for special guests and invited dignitaries. James George was there, the Canadian High Commissioner to India and Nepal, whom Rinpoche had met in the 1960s. Ato Rinpoche was there from England. Several Zen teachers with whom Rinpoche was close also attended the funeral. There were many dignitaries who had come to his cremation.

After everyone completed their circumambulation, we began the ceremony itself. The main text that the Western students used was a fire offering connected with the vajrayogini Sadhana that Rinpoche transmitted to so many of us. All of us practiced this together. His Holiness and the other Tibetan teachers practiced a number of other fire offerings in Tibetan. After the practice had gone on for some time, the fire for the cremation was lit. According to tradition, no one who had known Rinpoche could light the fire. So they had to search for someone with no physical connection to him. One of the monks from India, I believe, performed this service. At a certain point, which was a different point for different people in the audience, I think almost every one of us broke down. It was impossible not to weep, not to be overcome with the tremendous sadness of this moment. As the flames were lit, a cannon was fired off, and for many of us, that was the moment when the tears started. Not surprisingly, many of us wore our dark glasses that day. While the flames were burning, Shibata Sensei and three of his senior students performed a traditional ceremony, which is done when an emperor dies. At the four corners of the purkhang, they plucked empty bows and then offered straw sandals to the fire.

When the fire offerings were finished, there was one announcement, the only announcement during the entire day. "Ladies and gentlemen, the Shambhala Anthem." We sang as we wept.

At the end of the afternoon, as the fire subsided, after the body had been consumed in the flames, we looked in the sky and there was a succession of rainbows. The most dramatic was a circular rainbow that circled around the sun in the sky above the purkhang. It was absolutely circular and quite vivid. This was written about in the press as an amazing phenomenon. A white cloud in the shape of an Ashe appeared, and three hawks circled and circled. Other small clouds in the sky looked to many onlookers like tigers, lions, garudas, and dragons. They too were tinged with rainbow light at one point. Two of the senior teachers accompanying His Holiness Khyentse Rinpoche later interpreted some of the auspicious signs: fog in the morning, which was neither too high nor too low, and which hung like a protective parasol over the area; then the rainbows, then the clouds shaped like khatas, ritual scarves; and finally the three hawks, dakinis or celestial maidens, who had taken the form of birds and were welcoming Rinpoche.

After the formal part of the cremation had ended, I remained up in the meadow to have the opportunity to talk with people. It was very moving to see and speak with so many of the people who came to the cremation ceremony. I realized even further what a profound impact Rinpoche had had on people's lives. Speaking with people who were so filled with love and sadness, it was impossible not to be affected.

Several days after the cremation, I had to go back up to the meadow. This time there were very few of us. Traditionally, several days after the cremation of a great teacher, there is a ceremony where the purkhang is opened and the bones and ash are removed. As Rinpoche's consort and his wife, I was expected to accompany the lamas up to the purkhang. Someone opened the section where Rinpoche's remains were, and they told me that I should be the first one to reach in and pull out a bone. Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, a young teacher who was being trained by His Holiness, was in charge of this ceremony. As I looked into the purkhang, I saw a pile of charred bones. I hadn't expected to be so shocked, but it was very traumatic. I kept thinking, "I never thought I'd see you in this condition. I never thought I'd see you like this." While I was peering into the stupa, somewhat stupefied, Dzongsar Rinpoche said, "Go on, go on." He handed me a khata, and I had to lean in and draw out a bone, which I finally did. Then the rest of Rinpoche's bones were taken out. Some, including a section of his pelvis and part of his skull, were preserved to be placed in the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya that we were planning to build at RMDC. Many others were pounded down to make tsa-tsas, which are small sculptures in the shape of stupas that are made from various substances including the bone relics and ashes of the teacher. Later, these would be given to various of Rinpoche's disciples and to the many meditation centers he founded, as objects of veneration to be kept on the shrines in each center. Some of his major disciples were also given one of his teeth to keep as a relic. One of these was later placed in the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya.

'During the seven weeks between Rinpoche's death and the cremation, we could ride on the energy of the situation most of the time. We were carried along by all the work that needed to be done to prepare properly for the cremation. Khyentse Rinpoche's presence also buoyed people's spirits. During the weeks that led up to the cremation, it was almost as if the power of Rinpoche's energy kept him alive for us. With the conclusion of the cremation, there was a huge deflation. His presence had definitely moved on.

Everyone was left with the realization that now they had to live their lives without the support and presence of Rinpoche. There was a quality of emptiness and loss. Something unfathomably precious had been lost from this world. Something amazing had passed through this world and now was gone.

At the end of the spiritual will that Rinpoche wrote in 1984, he said,

Altogether we are happy to die. We take our joy along with us. It is unusually romantic to die:

Born a monk,
Died a king--
Such thunderstorm does not stop.
We will be haunting you, along with the dralas.
Jolly good luck!1

I know that for me, I will continue to long for him, as long as I have breath. I am left, however, not only with a broken heart but with a tremendous appreciation of my life. I remember one evening sitting with him in a restaurant by the water, and he said to me, "You know, you should appreciate this. This is our life. This is our marriage. It won't be like this forever." I laughed him off a little bit. Now, in retrospect, I realize that he was saying something profound about impermanence and the importance of appreciating one's life. I learned from him to appreciate the world as sacred.

As his wife of seventeen years -- in a marriage that not only had tremendous highs but also had its low points, which were not easy -- I can attest to the fact that Rinpoche was not an ordinary human being. His actions cannot be imitated, neither should they be interpreted by conventional reference points. Rinpoche had no other motivation in his life than to enrich the lives of others and to make the world a better place. He gauged all his successes in those terms. His sole motivation was to enrich the lives of others and create a world in which others could flourish.

He taught me that in order to save the world, one must begin with oneself. One of the main thrusts of his teachings was to trust oneself and to rely on one's own basic sanity. I have tried to take that teaching to heart. He devoted his life to showing others that path. His every moment was devoted to helping other people. To be able to live one's life with a fraction of the wisdom and compassion that permeated his would make one an exceptional person.

As the model of sanity and compassion in my life, he continues to guide me. Throughout my life, I continue to question myself as to how he would want me to handle one situation or another. He is no longer outside of me, so when I turn to him, I turn to my own wakefulness. He will always be my gold standard.

There is a song that Rinpoche loved by Robert Burns. It is called "The Winter It Is Past." He owned a treasured recording of the Scottish vocalist Jean Redpath singing this melancholy ballad. Later, one of Rinpoche's students, Jane Condon, used to sing it to him in a beautiful soprano voice. Sometimes when I think of him, especially when I long for him, I hear this song in the background:

Oh the winter it is past and the summer's come at last
And the small birds sing on every tree
Their little hearts are glad but mine is very sad
For my lover is parted from me

Oh the rose among the briar by the water running clear
Has charms for the linnet and the bee
Their little hearts are blessed but mine can know no rest
For my lover is parted from me

For my love is like the sun, in the firmament does run
Forever constant and true
But his is like the moon that wanders up and down
And every month it is new

All you who are in love and cannot it remove
I pity the pains you endure
For experience makes me know that your hearts are full of woe
A woe that no mortal can cure.2
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Postby admin » Wed Aug 14, 2019 11:18 pm


To my astonishment, it will have been almost twenty years since Rinpoche's death when this book is published. Contemplating this, two things come to mind. One is how quickly life passes. In some respects, the years since Rinpoche's death seem like the blink of an eye. Also, when I think of what Rinpoche accomplished in just seventeen years in North America, I am in awe.

Even in sickness and death he continued to have enormous influence. Following Rinpoche's cardiac arrest, during the period leading up to his death, and for several years after he died, a stream of students moved to Nova Scotia from the United States, other parts of Canada, and Europe. Several hundred of his most senior and closest students settled in Halifax and other areas of the province. While he was alive, I think that people felt that they had all the time in the world to fulfill Rinpoche's wish that we would join him in Nova Scotia. Now it became clear that we had no time left at all. This inspired people to pick up and move themselves, their families, and businesses to this new homeland.

Whether they joined in this odyssey or not, wherever they were, all of Rinpoche's students now had to take responsibility for the teachings they had received from him. Rinpoche appreciated and magnetized people with talent and intelligence. During his lifetime, he supported everybody, and, at the same time, he expected a lot of people. He asked them to live up to their own highest expectations. The people who were close to Rinpoche have developed into remarkable human beings. Uniquely, individually, his students have led incredibly productive lives, which I feel have had a profound and beneficial effect on other people.

When the teacher dies, it is like breaking a vase; the air that was held in the container mixes with the whole of space. It is partially in this sense that the teacher's death is a blessing. Similarly, Rinpoche's students, who were held together in the circle of his life, were released and let go to find their own way. Many have remained in Nova Scotia, Boulder, and other major centers he founded, but many others are spread around the world.

In its own way, his death was the beginning of a tremendous period of growth for a lot of people, including myself. However, it was not a particularly easy time for any of us. During his lifetime there had been a dependence upon Rinpoche for sanity and for a confirmation of our personal worth. After his death, when that external reference point was gone, people hit rock bottom in states of depression, anger, and psychological poverty. Then slowly, as people began to internalize his teachings and turn those teachings into their life path, realization began to occur on many different levels. It is like the story of Ananda, a monk who attended the Buddha for many years. It's said that Ananda didn't fully understand the Buddha's teachings when the Buddha died, and that was when his personal journey really began to move forward.

Following Rinpoche's death, the Vajra Regent moved immediately to consolidate power, and he began to slowly weaken the community's financial and psychological support for my family. Within days after Rinpoche's death, I learned that his life insurance policy had already been cashed in before his death to help pay Vajradhatu's bills. I began to panic a bit about how I would provide for my family. I went to see the Regent and reminded him that Rinpoche had intended to put the house at Mill Village, which Vajradhatu now owned, into my name. I told him that I wanted to sell the property and put the proceeds in a trust for my children's education. The Regent agreed, and the house was put on the market. At the time of the sale, however, I was only given something like ten thousand dollars. The rest went to Vajradhatu. Initially, the Regent offered me a monthly stipend, which I think was $1,400 a month to cover my living expenses. (The mortgage on the Court was covered by the organization.) Less than a year after Rinpoche's death, however, the Regent told the comptroller of Vajradhatu, Bill Karelis, to stop sending me a monthly check. To his credit, Bill refused to cut us off, a kindness that I have never forgotten.

William Karelis enters the courtroom at the Boulder County Jail on Friday (Paul Aiken / Staff Photographer - Daily Camera)

-- Former teacher at Boulder's Shambhala accused of sexually assaulting student: Community expelled mentor over separate misconduct allegations in 2004

I felt that I should continue to support the sangha in whatever ways I could, and this included teaching within Shambhala Training, something that Rinpoche had always encouraged me to do. The year after Rinpoche died, when I was asked to teach an advanced level of Shambhala Training in Texas, the Regent wrote to me, telling me that I was only qualified and authorized to present the most elementary levels of the teachings. This was typical of how he attempted to belittle the family. He began to refer to the Sawang as "the little prince," a term he employed in the most derogatory fashion.

Rinpoche had left instructions that a committee consisting of myself, the Regent, the Sawang, the Kasung Kyi Khyap, and the two dapons was to be convened to help with the transition after his death. I was to chair this committee. The Regent never once brought this group together. Rather than seeing it as his role to support the family and to advise the Sawang as he grew into his maturity, the Regent obviously felt threatened by us.

In late 1988, the community learned that the Regent was HIV positive and had developed AIDS. A young man in the community who had had a brief sexual encounter with the Regent was diagnosed with HIV and could only trace his illness to the Vajra Regent. I did not know about the Regent's condition until this all came out. I learned later that Rinpoche had arranged for the Regent to be tested for HIV, without his knowledge, in the mid-1980s. Rinpoche had then met with the Regent to inform him of his illness and to warn him to be careful not to infect others. The Regent didn't heed Rinpoche's warning, it seems.

There was an uproar in the Buddhist community -- and in the press. The Regent, without actually being stripped of power, was forced by actions of the board and other community members into retreat in California. Finally, with the intercession of His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, the Regent gave up his attempt to exercise authority over Vajradhatu and he was in a sense exiled into retreat for the remainder of his life. Early on in this crisis, I traveled from Halifax to Boulder where I gave a talk to the community in which I said that I thought that the Regent should step down, for the good of everyone. Although I was criticized in some quarters for taking this public stand, I feel that it was necessary, and I have no regrets. The Regent's family and a small group of students who remained loyal to Osel Tendzin established a community in Ojai, California, where a few of them remain today. The Regent died there, from complications of AIDs, in 1990. We are as of this writing still working to have a genuine reconciliation of the two communities, based on dignity and truth on both sides. This troubling chapter in the history of our community continues to haunt us, as perhaps it should. It serves as a powerful, ongoing reminder of the dangers of self-deception, especially on the spiritual path. It was not just the failure of one individual. In a sense, we all failed. Sometimes I think that it will be the sum total of the achievements of all of Rinpoche's students that will ensure that his wisdom remains. In that sense, we are all burdened with the responsibility for transmitting his teachings and seeing that his legacy endures.

In the years following Rinpoche's death, I found that some people were looking to me for leadership, but many also wanted to tell me how to behave and what to do. There was no malicious intent, but people started to become domineering and brittle with one another. In Rinpoche's absence, not surprisingly perhaps, numerous power struggles developed. Vajradhatu was having tremendous financial problems, and some of the negativity about this became focused on me.

Rumors also abounded during this period. At times, they were quite petty. To give an example, at one point, Ashoka had a pet turtle that ate small quantities of ground beef. One evening, I went down to the kitchen and found out that we had run out of this food. A volunteer was preparing shrimp for dinner, and I cut a small sliver of one of the raw shrimps to feed the turtle. A few days later, I heard that a story was going around the community that Lady Diana had a pigeon that only ate lamb chops!

Under financial pressure, the board of directors decided to sell the Kalapa Court and only informed me after the decision had been made. I was to be given the money from the sale, with the expectation that I would buy a house somewhere else in Halifax. I felt like a pawn in a male power play. The negativity was permeating my family life as well as my public life. Criticism sometimes came in the form of poisonous letters, some anonymous and some not. Eventually, I reached a point in my life where I experienced no personal joy at all. Strangely, it reminded me of how I had felt growing up in England. People seemed to have tremendous expectations about how I should behave, which had no relationship to my own experience or instincts. The situation weighed on me very heavily.

Eventually, in 1989, Mitchell and I decided to move the family away from Nova Scotia to Hawaii -- just about as far away as we could get. We expected this to be a temporary move. We had been through such a stressful time that we needed to go to a place that was isolated and relaxing. Mitchell wanted to get back into his medical career, and he was able to get a good position in a hospital in Honolulu. Our family needed the time to heal. We stayed in Hawaii for three-and-a-half years. Mitchell and I married in 1990, in a small family ceremony in a Buddhist temple there. In Hawaii, we were able to discover some family unity and provide a normal environment for the children, which was very important.

Soon after Rinpoche's death, the Sawang traveled to India to study with His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. He remained there until 1990 when, with the death of the Vajra Regent, he was called upon to assume the leadership of the Vajradhatu community. In 1995, he received the Sakyong abhisheka from His Holiness Penor Rinpoche. Penor Rinpoche also recognized Osel as the incarnation of Mipham, a great Tibetan teacher who died at the beginning of the twentieth century. Osel Mukpo is now widely known as Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche. In the mid-1990s he changed the name of the organization from Vajradhatu to Shambhala. He continues to propagate the dharma teachings of his father. In 2005, he married Semo Tseyang Ripa in a private ceremony in Boulder, Colorado, and they plan a large public celebration in Halifax in 2006. I have been asked to conduct the public ceremony for them, and I am delighted to be able to welcome Lady Semo Tseyang into our Mukpo family in this way.

Taggie returned from Sikkim soon after Rinpoche's death. For many years now, he has been living at Bhumipali Bhavan at Karme Choling. Although things have not changed a great deal with him, I have recently been extremely pleased to see that he is more cognizant and has an improved ability to converse with people about simple subjects. His seizures have finally been controlled. I think he is content, and I am so grateful to all those who have supported his care.

Gesar had a turbulent adolescence, and we went through a period when communication between us was difficult. We are now extremely close. I have been delighted to see him mature and to take on many of his father's qualities. He is tremendously intelligent and has exceptional artistic talent, which I believe he will develop more over time. After Rinpoche's death, Gesar studied with Dzongsar Khytenste Rinpoche and spent time in India, where he received teachings from His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. Later, he traveled to his predecessor's monastery, Sechen, in Tibet, when it was very difficult to do so, and he also joined the family when we visited Tibet in 2002.

Gesar was already on his own when we moved to Hawaii, but he did join us there for several months. He spent a number of years in California, where he attended community college, played football, and worked on several Hollywood films. Gesar moved back to Nova Scotia in 2003, where he married Anna De Nicola, the daughter of longtime sangha members. In 2004, their daughter Chokyi Sofia Mukpo was born. I am a proud grandmother. Chokyi is a very special little girl.

Ashoka graduated from Georgetown University with a B.A. in political science in 2004.
In 2005 he attended the seminary at the Shambhala Mountain Center. Earlier, in 2002, he was enthroned in Tibet as Khamnyon Rinpoche during our family's trip to visit the Surmang monasteries that Rinpoche came from. Hundreds of Tibetans mobbed our hotel in Jyekundo, the last town before Surmang, to see Ashoka and receive his blessing when we arrived there.

From time to time, we get phone calls in the middle of the night from Ashoka's monasteries in Nepal or Tibet. I pick up the phone at 3 A.M. and someone says loudly into the line on the other end, "Khamnyon Rinpoche?" I respond, "Sleeping." They continue repeating Ashoka's name until I get him to the phone.

Within the next few years, Mitchell and I plan to travel with Ashoka to his monastery in Tibet. It is located in the Tibetan Autonomous Region. Ashoka made a deeper connection to the Tibetan world when we traveled there in 2002. He was initially extremely skeptical about assuming any position as a teacher. Through the course of our trip, he began to realize the suffering of people there and how he could help them in his role as a teacher. He particularly was taken, not just with the poverty of the people, but also by the treatment of dogs and other domestic animals in Tibet. He made strong pronouncements to people there that they needed to stop mistreating their animals. Later, we said that this was his first dharma talk.

He has just become engaged to be married to Bianca Velez, whom he met at Georgetown. They both plan to attend graduate school within the next few years, and Ashoka hopes to have a career in the field of human rights. Rinpoche talked about Ashoka having the potential to be a great statesman. It has been interesting to see his interest in political science, and I feel that great things lie ahead for him.

David graduated from high school in 2003. He also attended the seminary in 2005. Currently, he is traveling for a year with his brother, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, in the role of an attache and kusung. This will be excellent training for him, whatever direction his life takes. He plans to attend university in 2006. David has shown a great connection to the Dorje Kasung since he was a small boy. He is constantly cheerful, empathetic with others, and a delight to me.

Altogether I am very proud of my boys, especially as I see more and more that they feel a connection to Rinpoche and to his teachings. They feel a responsibility to help care for Rinpoche's legacy and to continue the work that he began. This makes me especially pleased.

Rinpoche and I had always wanted a daughter, and we wanted to name her Chandali, but we were never blessed by one. He even wrote a poem to Chandali Mukpo. In 1988, Mitchell and I heard about an eight-year-old Tibetan girl who was in quite dreadful circumstances. She had been adopted by a woman in North America who mistreated her and had placed her for awhile in foster care. We decided to adopt her. So Chandali Mukpo joined our family at that time. Chandali is currently in nursing school in Providence, Rhode Island: She is a beautiful, gentle young woman. Altogether I am pleased that we are a closely knit family.

My mother, Elizabeth Pybus, died in Chatterwood Nursing Home in Hampshire, England, on September 8, 1998. She was eighty-eight. Recently, our family suffered a tragedy when my sister, Tessa, passed away. She was diagnosed in 2001 with hepatitis C. Tessa worked very hard to help raise funds for a Shambhala center in Providence in the years prior to her death. In the spring of 2006 she received a liver transplant but she did not recover, and she died on the evening of March 28, surrounded by members of our family. I was reading to her from the Tibetan Book if the Dead when she died. She had a peaceful and luminous death. I miss her profoundly.

While in Hawaii, I started riding again, and found that my passion for it returned with a vengeance! While we were living there, I was able to arrange for Rinpoche's horse, Drala, to be flown over. I found a place where he could spend his last days on the island of Hawaii. The woman who took him used to feed him strawberries in the field. When he finally died, around the age of twenty-five, they discovered that the mare with whom he'd been pastured was pregnant. I attempted to buy the foal, but it was not for sale.

After a few years in Hawaii, both Mitchell and I felt ready to move back to the mainland. I moved the family to Seattle ahead of Mitchell while he was investigating work possibilities. There, I connected with a wonderful group of people interested in dressage. Within a very short period of time, I developed quite a good teaching and training business, and I continue to travel regularly to Seattle to teach. However, Mitchell did not find a good position there, and after about a year, we moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where we have remained. Mitchell became a professor in the division of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Brown University.

Although my life may have been unconventional, I have had two marriages in which there's been a tremendous amount of love. I feel that I've had very good fortune in my life in terms of the men I've been married to. For me, my marriage to Mitchell is in fact a continuation of my relationship with Rinpoche, in that Mitchell and I both have a commitment to bringing the Shambhala vision into our lives. We have supported each other in developing ourselves and our lives as Rinpoche encouraged us to do.

During Rinpoche's lifetime, Mitchell and Rinpoche worked together on creating an organization called Amara to explore how to treat sickness from the Buddhist perspective. After Rinpoche died, Mitchell threw himself into his career 100 percent. He is now one of the foremost physicians in critical care in the United States, and in 2009 he becomes the president of the Society of Critical Care Medicine. He has been instrumental in bringing into the mainstream of Western medicine the compassionate care of the dying and providing support for their families.

For my part, I have been very actively involved in my dressage career for the last ten years or more. Currently, I spend about six months a year in Florida, teaching and training horses.
I have had many horses over the course of my career. Currently, I have excellent horses to ride. There are many vicissitudes of life and of horses, but I find that I take more and more delight in the day-to-day discipline of dressage.

When Rinpoche and I first came to America, I tried to keep the dressage world and the dharmic kingdom separate. Over the last ten years, I've noticed a change, so that many of my friends who are interested in dressage are now also interested in spirituality. I have great respect for the people I meet who have taken their discipline to its pinnacle. To do so, one must go through a process of working with one's own state of mind. I know many people who are extraordinarily open-minded Shambhalian people in their own right. For me, the situation becomes more and more comfortable, so that I no longer have to keep the two worlds apart.

Khyentse Rinpoche was helpful to our community in every way. After Rinpoche's death, he gave advanced Vajrayana teachings at Karme Choling and then traveled to Halifax and to Boulder to give the same empowerments. These were teachings that Rinpoche had always hoped could be transmitted to his students. As he had promised, His Holiness took a role in the education of my two sons who were old enough to study with him. His advice and loving kindness were invaluable to everyone during the difficulties surrounding the Vajra Regent's illness and death. Following the Regent's death, His Holiness counseled everyone to remember the preciousness of Rinpoche's teachings and to work together. He left letters to that effect that still continue to guide us. His Holiness died in Bhutan in September 1991, and the Sawang led a large delegation to His Holiness's funeral.

In 2001, the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya That Liberates upon Seeing, dedicated to Rinpoche's life and Buddha activity, was consecrated at RMDC, now renamed the Shambhala Mountain Center. Khyentse Rinpoche gave that name to this monument. It is the largest stupa in North America. More than a thousand of his students attended the consecration ceremonies. The stupa is an exquisite and very powerful expression of the devotion of his students, and represents an outpouring of generosity from many people. A small stupa was consecrated that same year at the monastery that Rinpoche started in Nova Scotia, Gampo Abbey, in Pleasant Bay on Cape Breton Island.

At the time of the consecration of the stupa, I had begun to feel that it was very important for me to travel to Tibet and visit Surmang, Rinpoche's monastery there. I wanted to take the children with me, except for Taggie, of course, and Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche -- who had already gone the year before, leading an official delegation from Shambhala. In the summer of 2002, Mitchell and I journeyed there with Gesar, Ashoka, David, and Chandali. It was extraordinary to see the place that Rinpoche came from and to meet so many people there who were still so dedicated to him. We spent quite a lot of time with the Twelfth Trungpa, who is now a teenager. We also met a number of members of Rinpoche's family, including his nephew Karma Senge Rinpoche, who had traveled all over Tibet collecting the teachings that Rinpoche had written and transmitted to people before leaving there in 1959. Karma Senge has now made two trips to North America. Rinpoche's brother, Damchod Rinpoche, was also at Surmang when we were there, and he and Karma Senge will be coming this summer to Halifax for Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche's wedding.

When we first arrived at Surmang, it was two or three o'clock in the morning. The monks greeted us wearing wrathful mahakala masks and playing Tibetan horns, drums, and cymbals, which make an unearthly music. I was profoundly affected by the primordial feeling. In the morning, we were able to see the state of Surmang, and it was heartbreaking and somewhat shocking to realize that the monastery had not been rebuilt, and that people were living in extreme poverty.

I was very moved throughout our visit, not only by the physical hardship people had endured, but also by the knowledge that they had also suffered from losing Rinpoche so early in his life. We got so much from him; they gave up so much. Since that visit, I have been spearheading the work on a number of projects to rebuild Surmang Dutsi Tel. We have started the Konchok Foundation as the umbrella organization for this work. Currently, the monastic school, or shedra, is being rebuilt, and we have also been raising funds for the education of the Twelfth Trungpa. I am particularly interested in providing education for the laypeople as well as for monastics, and I would like to work on sustainable economic ventures for Surmang. For one thing, I want to donate 100 dris, female yaks, to help establish the dairy business there.

Before Rinpoche died, he had received letters from Surmang asking him to return. He had written back, saying that he was not well enough to travel there by jeep or horse, but that he might try to helicopter in. That never happened. In the years after Rinpoche's death, when much of Tibet opened up to Westerners, for various reasons, our community neglected the rebuilding of Surmang. However, now we are striving to make up for lost time. I am very pleased the project is moving forward. In the end, I hope that Surmang will become a place where our students can go to practice, and also that we can send people there to share the teachings that Rinpoche gave us. While I was there, for example, I gave the transmission of the Werma Sadhana to several hundred people.

During Rinpoche's lifetime, he wrote more than a dozen books. Since his death, more than two dozen additional books of his teachings have been published based on his lectures, which are preserved by the Shambhala Archives in Halifax. In 2004, an eight-volume, three-thousand-page collection of The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa was published. There are plans to publish many more volumes of his teachings. We are particularly looking forward to the publication of several volumes based on the teachings that Rinpoche gave at the seminaries, a project that is being headed up by Judith Lief. There is certainly no dearth of material overall. When we added up all of the talks he had given in North America, we discovered that there were more than two thousand of them! Between now and the twentieth anniversary of his death, the Archives is digitizing all of the audiotapes on which his lectures were recorded, and centers around the world will have digital libraries of this material.

We are now in the initial stages of planning a Chogyam Trungpa Foundation and Institute that will help to ensure that the publication of his work will continue and that generations of students can continue to study what he taught.

Every year on April 4, the anniversary of Rinpoche's death, students around the world gather to practice together and to share with one another stories of his life and teachings that he gave. Rinpoche planted the seeds for the teachings to flourish in the West. Because of the depth of his intention and his actions, and because what he gave us was absolutely unadulterated, I know that Buddhism will firmly take root in the Western world, as another link in the chain that began with the Buddha. When Padmasambhava brought the teachings of Buddhism to Tibet, he was able to present their essence, transmuting them into the Tibetan culture. Similarly, Buddhism is taking root here in a uniquely Western way; based on Western sanity and wisdom, independent of the crutch of other cultures. This is due, in part, to the purity and the intensity of Rinpoche's efforts. I have no doubt that he will be with us for a long time, and that my grandchildren, as well as their children, will come to know him.
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