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.