Dragon Thunder: My Life with Chogyam Trungpa by Diana Mukpo



Postby admin » Tue Aug 06, 2019 4:44 am


My mother never again complained about my marriage to Rinpoche. He very quickly gave her a sense of position and belonging within the Shambhala world that he was creating. In some sense, it fulfilled her long-held desire to be an important person in society, although not in the society in which she had tried for so long to be accepted. She became very fond of her grandchildren, and seemingly forgot that they were less than lily white. Within a year, she closed up her household in England and moved to Boulder. She remained there until a few years after Rinpoche's death, when she returned to England to receive health care during her final years. Although she and I remained somewhat cool to one another, outwardly we had a fairly good mother-daughter relationship. It was amazing what a complete transformation she underwent. She became a beloved adviser and mentor to many people in the Buddhist community, who looked to her for advice on everything from etiquette to conducting their romantic relationships.

While she was still in Boulder, following her conversion experience over Christmas, Rinpoche invited her to attend the first Shambhala empowerment ceremony that he conducted. This took place at the Kalapa Court on January 1, 1977. Rinpoche wanted to create a complete court situation, or mandala, and to place his most trusted students in positions of authority within the Shambhala world, not just to hold the seat of the ruler himself. His first court appointment was installing David Rome as the Dorje Kasung, the "indestructible command protector" of Shainbhala. I believe that, in making this and other Shambhala appointments, Rinpoche was trying to formulate and put into effect the principles that are important in governing one's life and a society as a whole. The principle of command protector has to do with maintaining order. David used to joke that he was the Sakyong's "top cop." (David used this phrase quite humorously, in a way that made it sound like something from Gilbert and Sullivan.) In his presentation of the Shambhala teachings, Rinpoche said that law and order have to do with the natural hierarchy that exists in the world. He used the four seasons as a good example of this nonvertical sense of order and predictability in life. Rinpoche felt that society should have a similar sense of orderly flow. David's real role was, I think, to point out how to live one's life in accordance with that fundamental order, rather than to police our Shambhala society.

The ceremony was held in the dining room of the Court, which had been completely emptied of its usual furniture. A shrine was set up along one wall of the room and there were meditation cushions on the floor to accommodate the fifty or so guests who were invited to witness the ceremony. Rinpoche and I sat in chairs on either side of the shrine, while David kneeled on a cushion facing us and the shrine. David was asked questions about his understanding of the teachings contained in the Golden Sun of the Great East text. Then, as part of the ceremony, he was asked to perform the stroke of Ashe on the spot. As he made the calligraphy stroke, all of those assembled loudly chanted the warrior's victory cry: KI KI SO SO ASHE LHA GYAL LO TAK SENG KHYUNG DRUK DI YAR KYE. This chant invokes the energy of Shambhala and the supreme confidence of the warrior. As part of the ceremony, Rinpoche appointed David to the Order of the Dragon of Shambhala, which Rinpoche created on the spot. The Shambhala text that he was teaching from at this time talks a great deal about the enlightened qualities of the warrior in terms of the tiger, the lion, the garuda (a mythical bird like the phoenix), and the dragon. Later, Rinpoche also wrote about these aspects of the Shambhala teachings in Shambhala:The Sacred Path of the Warrior. The dragon is associated with inscrutability, which in the Shambhala teachings refers to mind beyond mind, mind that is completely fearless, open, and fathomless rather than the normal connotation of some kind of reticence or sneakiness. Around David's neck, during the ceremony Rinpoche placed a medal he himself was given many years previously, when he received the Order of Bhutan from the Bhutanese royal family. It was not a permanent gift to David. Rinpoche used it during the ceremony in place of the real Order of the Dragon medal that did not yet exist. Rinpoche expected to design and have many Shambhala medals executed in the future. (In fact, some were designed during his retreat in the coming year, and a few were manufactured in England. He designed others that were never actually crafted, including the Order of the Dragon.)

Around this time, Rinpoche had also asked David Rome to assume the leadership of the vajra guards. I believe that he chose David for this role in part because he was such a thoroughly gentle person. David abhorred pretense and violence, so I think that Rinpoche felt that David would safeguard the Dorje Kasung situation and ensure that it did not become some sort of paramilitary joke. On the contrary,. Rinpoche wanted it to be a vehicle to conquer aggression. I think David was quite challenged by being asked to take on a leadership role in this aspect of Rinpoche's world. But he really did have the strength of mind to be a great general, and he was well respected for his integrity and honesty. In one of several poems that Rinpoche composed to mark this occasion, he wrote:

Dorje Kasung is genuine general
He respects the grand lady and her husband
In brief, Dorje Kasung is the razor knife
With rubber handle
Because he is tough and soft at once
May such Dorje Kasungship expand in our kingdom ....
Long live the Order of the Dragon,

On January 3, 1977, we celebrated our seventh wedding anniversary. It seemed that so much had happened in such a short span of years! That day, Rinpoche conducted another ceremony, this one from the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition. The first group of about forty. students had completed all of the ngondro, the preliminary practices first introduced following the 1973 seminary. This represented about one-third of the students who had attended the first seminary. It was quite impressive that such a high percentage of the students finished in this period of time. Following the completion of these preliminaries, a student may request that the teacher enter him or her into the practice and the mandala, or the world, of a Vajrayana deity, or yidam. In this case, a yidam represents binding one's mind to the Vajrayana practice and understanding of wakefulness. It has nothing to do with an outside entity. If the teacher accepts the student, he or she receives abhisheka, a Sanskrit word that translates as "initiation" or "empowerment." The word in Tibetan, wangkur, literally means a "field of power." On this day, Rinpoche gave the Vajrayogini abhisheka to these students plus a few other senior students, including David Rome and the Vajra Regent, who hadn't finished the preliminaries but whom he decided to include anyway. (I did not receive this empowerment until 1984.)

The principle of Vajrayogini is depicted as a sixteen-year-old, very beautiful, and somewhat threatening, maiden. She is red in color and represents, among other things, the wisdom of complete non-thought, or wisdom that cuts through all conceptions. She is often the first yidam that is given to students, and I think that Rinpoche felt that the simplicity and power of the practice would be particularly appropriate for Western students. The abhisheka is quite a long and involved ceremony, taking most of a day to complete. Rinpoche had been working for several years on the translation of the text, or the sadhana, that students would practice after receiving this empowerment. He felt that it was absolutely necessary that students practice this liturgy in English so they would know what they were chanting, what they were visualizing, and why. The group that worked with him on this translation, the Nalanda Translation Committee, has continued on -- having completed many important translation projects. Rinpoche always enjoyed his meetings with the translators, and he put a great deal of time into working with them.

Altogether, it felt like a great achievement to reach this stage in the presentation of Vajrayana in America. During Rinpoche's lifetime, he conducted this abhisheka ten times, and more than one thousand students received this initiation from him. From small gestures in Rinpoche's life, big things would often come!

Shortly after he finished the abhisheka program, which included not only the ceremony itself but also a number of training sessions, Rinpoche jumped right back into furthering the Shambhala world. This time, he held a joint ceremony for the Vajra Regent Osel Tendzin and myself. He appointed Osel Tendzin as the Katham Sikyong or the "keeper of the command seal of Shambhala," which was equivalent, according to Rinpoche, to being the Lord Chancellor of Shambhala. His role was to take the visionary aspect of the Shambhala teachings, as presented by Rinpoche, and to communicate it and execute its vision in terms of practicality. It was also to be his role to understand the needs and wishes of community members and communicate those to Rinpoche, so that there would be a sense of heaven -- the Sakyong's vision -- and earth -- the needs of the people -- being joined.

I was formally appointed as the Sakyong Wangmo during this ceremony. In some ways, my role as described by Rinpoche was similar to the Regent's, in that he saw it as my responsibility to encourage communication in all forms within the Shambhala world. He also talked about the Sakyong Wangmo principle in terms of creating harmony and a sense of elegance.

The Regent received the Order of the Great Eastern Sun, and I was given the Order of the Rigden. Again, these awards were created on the spot.

a person who is at hand whenever needed.
"he appears to have become the financial Johnny-on-the-spot for Mr. Meese"

-- Oxford English Dictionary

Rinpoche did not say a great deal about the meaning of our awards, but I believe that the Order of the Great Eastern Sun has to do with connecting with the overall brilliance and wakefulness of Shambhala, while the Order of the Rigden was given to me to signify my connection to the principle of rulers hip within Shambhala. The setting was similar to the ceremony for David Rome: the guests assembled in the dining room on cushions; the Regent and I were seated facing Rinpoche and the shrine. We were questioned on our understanding of Shambhala principles, and we performed the stroke of Ashe. To seal our appointments, we took an oath, which David had also taken, in which we offered our eyes, tongue, and heart -- symbolically -- to furthering the sanity of the kingdom of Shambhala. This is very similar to the Vajrayana oaths that students take. Essentially, because the energies are so powerful and somewhat dangerous, the commitment that is required is also very heavy. It is not so much that someone is going to come and throw you in jail if you violate your oath or your position; the idea is more that you will destroy yourself if you become an egomaniac rather than becoming more gentle and exposed. Of course, there is a lot of middle ground -- but the idea is that one should not take on this kind of commitment casually. In fact, it felt as though we were assuming quite a serious responsibility to assist in safeguarding and furthering the sanity and wakefulness of the Shambhala world.

When I look back, I think that Rinpoche's decision to give the two of us this Shambhala empowerment together was quite a deliberate, strategic move. In part, I think that Rinpoche saw our roles as complementary, and he always hoped that we would see that commonality of purpose and find ways to work together. But I also think that Rinpoche was trying to address the interpersonal tension between Osel Tendzin and me by putting us together for this empowerment.

You see, from the time the Regent moved into the Court, he and I did. not get along too well. From this time onward, although I tried to connect with the Regent, the chemistry between us was not very compatible. In the beginning, the very early years, I was quite fond of him. Later, when he lived with us, I had a harder time with him. I felt that he ignored other people's feelings to a certain extent and that there was a certain lack of identification with others. Rinpoche was raised almost from birth in a position of responsibility and rulership. His teachers in Tibet had hammered into him the need to behave properly, with gentleness, and not to mistake his position as an opportunity to lord it over others. But for the Regent, and all of us in the West, we were entering into uncharted territory and assuming leadership positions with no prior experience and few sane reference points. We were walking into a minefield where our lack of training and our insecurities were liable to explode into arrogance.

None of us were angels at that point. We all had our own neuroses, which were quite full blown in that era. Nevertheless, I perceived a lack of empathy in the Regent that used to trouble me. I always could connect with Lila a lot more. I felt that she had more sympathy for other people. It used to scare me sometimes how the Regent treated people because it was so different from how Rinpoche treated people. I had a basic mistrust of the Regent for a long time. I know this bothered Rinpoche, and he periodically tried to push me together with the Regent. He wanted the communication to be more workable between us. In the end, though, the Regent had very little respect for me, and I had not very much for him. I objected to his ostentatious, slightly Americanized style. I also questioned his personal discipline. He seemed self-indulgent, and he could get really carried away with himself. On the other hand, I'm sure he was struggling with who and what he was supposed to be as the Regent. I was young and quite unreasonable at times too. We just didn't hit it off.

After our joint Shambhala empowerment, Rinpoche wrote poems about each of us, in which he talked about our neurotic and our enlightened qualities. He also said in each poem something to the effect that Diana was the Regent and the Regent was Diana. I think that he was hoping that we would find a mutual working basis, a meeting of minds, and that we would come to appreciate one another. I'm afraid that in the long run it didn't do much to affect our relationship. We both tried over the years, but we were never overly fond of one another.

These poems, which appear at the end of this chapter, reveal how Rinpoche saw his students' potential. The working basis that he had with all of us was rooted in acknowledging the diversity and complexity of our basic being. He always saw both the potentially enlightened aspect of someone as well as the confused, neurotic side. Given the problems that developed later with Osel Tendzin, people have often asked both why Rinpoche chose Osel Tendzin to be his Regent and whether Rinpoche made a fundamental mistake in doing so. I don't think so. I believe that he perceived genuine brilliance in his dharma heir, which all of us could see, as well as the Regent's potential for compassion and for greatly benefiting others.

Rinpoche also saw the other side: all the issues that could become problematic in the future. However, he did not believe that some people are good and others bad. He thought that everyone was workable and that the raw material of ego could be hammered into the gold of genuine spiritual realization. So here, in these poems, Rinpoche is pointing out all the qualities in the Regent and in myself that could lead to problems, and at the same time, he was saying: you are actually Tiger; you are actually Lion; you are actually Garuda; you are actually Dragon -- you are actually the embodiment of the sanity or the potential achievements of the Shambhala world. Click into that. Be that. Rinpoche was astute. He knew, with both of us and with all of his students, that there was the potential to miss the point completely. I think we -- the Regent, myself, and Rinpoche's students in general -- understood that the greater the responsibility that we accepted in his world, the greater the potential for failure -- as well as for success -- and the greater the penalties for failing.

Rinpoche's approach was always twofold: first, seeing and believing in the inseparability of neurosis and sanity, samsara and nirvana, and second, applying the skillful means to bring that potential to fruition and thus to produce realization in one lifetime for a human being. That is the unique insight of the Vajrayana teachings altogether and a hallmark of Rinpoche's teaching in the West. I think this is something that distinguishes him from other teachers and has made his teaching the basis of genuine dharma taking root in the West. He actually applied this insight in his work with his students. It wasn't just theoretical. He trusted that realization was possible, intensification of one's path was required, and he put people into situations that would cause that to happen.

Toward the end of January, His Holiness the Karmapa arrived for his second visit in North America. There were thousands of people in North America who wanted to meet His Holiness and receive his blessings. In Boulder a large white mansion on Mapleton Hill, about six blocks from our house, was rented for him. We nicknamed it the Wedding Cake House because it had so many columns and the exterior was so ornate. Once again, there were armies of attendants, drivers, cooks, and members of the Dorje Kasung to help with the visit. Rinpoche was to depart for Charlemont to begin his retreat in late February, but before his departure, he took time to travel to San Francisco with the Karmapa as well as to receive him in Boulder.

In San Francisco, His Holiness performed the Vajra Crown ceremony for several thousand followers of EST, or Erhard Seminar Training, which was popular in this era. EST was started by Werner Erhard, who was quite enamored of His Holiness and asked him to do the Vajra Crown ceremony for his students. Rinpoche thought that Erhard was something of a charlatan, although he also seemed to find him interesting, or perhaps amusing would be a better word. Before the Vajra Crown ceremony itself, His Holiness asked Rinpoche to make remarks to the assembled students explaining what would happen. Rinpoche told the crowd to keep their shirts on -- metaphorically speaking. It was a bit cryptic, but it seemed to be addressing their tendency to bliss out, or indulge in the energy.

While he was in San Francisco, Rinpoche also celebrated the Shambhala New Year with His Holiness. (The celebration of the new year in Tibet is based on the lunar calendar and usually occurs in late January or February.) Rinpoche arranged for these celebrations to take place at the Karmapa's mansion in San Francisco. The day included three banquets: an Indian breakfast, a Tibetan lunch, and a Chinese dinner. Rinpoche had invited my mother to go along on this trip. She was completely overwhelmed by the Karmapa. Apparently, when my mother had an audience with him, she proposed marriage to him. She said to him, "This would be very convenient. It would be all in the family. My daughter is married to Trungpa Rinpoche so maybe you should marry me." His Holiness was very kind to her. He said that, if he were the marrying sort of person, he would definitely consider marrying her. Since he was the Karmapa, however, he had to remain a monk and unfortunately couldn't accept her proposal.

So our family journey and the larger journey continued. At the end of February, Rinpoche was off to Charlemont for what I hoped would be a much-needed rest for him. Little did I know that Rinpoche's idea of "retreat" was what most people would consider formulating a campaign.

Buddhism in common with most religions had its hermits who retired like John the Baptist into the wilderness. And such periodical retirement for a time, corresponding to the Buddhist Lent (the rainy season of India, or Varsha, colloq. "barsat"), when travelling was difficult and unhealthy, was an essential part of the routine of the Indian Buddhist. Tson K'apa enforced the observance of this practice, but it has now fallen much into abeyance. Probably the booths which are erected for the head Lamas in Sikhim during their visits to villages in the autumn, are vestiges of this ancient practice of retirement to the forest.

Theoretically it is part of the training of every young Lama to spend in hermitage a period of three years, three months, and three days, in order to accustom himself to ascetic rites. But this practice is very rarely observed for any period, and when it is observed, a period of three months and three days is considered sufficient.


I was soon to be off to Europe to continue my training in dressage. From rebellious English teenager, to young mother, to Queen of Shambhala -- the transformations were somewhat overwhelming. Essentially, I felt that I was just a young woman embarking on my life, with so much to learn. I still did not fully understand what it meant to be the guru's wife, let alone to be a king's consort! And really it was only beginning.

Katham Sikyong: Lord Chancellor and Keeper of the Command Seal, Prodigy of the Sakyong

He is called after my son's name
He is a funny man because he is almost lady dragon
He is obviously inscrutable; he possesses many faces
He was a Hindu rat; he was a stapling machine; he was a sandal
Before I met him he was a creep; when I met him he was decent
When I told him he cried
He is a very intriguing young gentleman
He is nobody, somebody
I was shocked when he shaved his beard because he looked too ingratiating
Then he was a director administrator fighter commander
For the first time he was a tiger cub: He learned to lick himself and clean up just like a cat
Then he was a jaguar: He began to eat raw meat
When he began to suck my own milk from my tit, the Vajra Master amrita potion, he began to become dangerously dangerous: he wouldn't smile
He still didn't have good posture, however
He was willing to fight the heretics with claw and teeth
He met his grandfather, he learned how to behave, then he began to see the Great Eastern Sun: he became chic
He was being molded by the Kingdom; finally he became civilized
My Lord Chancellor, today you have assumed the second-generation project
Now you are vajra and ghanta with Ashe on it
O Lord Chancellor, please sit on Shambhala rug
However, the Lord Chancellor's tree had a tractor, telephone, machine gun, central heating in the oriental sneak
You are protection cord, you are band-aid, you are aspirin, you are Dettol, you are Marmite
You are Mercedes, you are Rolls Royce
You are actually Diana Judith
You are actually Tiger, you are actually Lion, you are actually Garuda, you are actually Dragon
You are what you are in the name of the Great Eastern Sun
In brief: you are the genuine Kiku Masamune of the Discoverer's Selection
Glory be to the Holder of the Order of the Great Eastern Sun.2

Sakyong Wangmo: The Grand Lady of the Realm, the Lady of the Razor Knife

She she she she: She is the she
She is the first lady of she, the youngest oldest lady of she
When she is she, she is ideal Ashe: Tough lady good lady gentle lady but nevertheless she is she
When she begins to become her we have problems
However, when her becomes she, she is majestically the Grand Lady of the Realm
She is thread, she is threat, she is beautiful, she is confusing, she is genuine, she is red, she is purple
She is Vajrayogini
She deceives us sometimes: She pretends to be the occidental sun
She is a brook, she is a river, she is a confidante, she is the ocean
When she is her: Hers is very expensive, hers spends a lot of money, hers is impulsive, hers is not so good
Hers is a bad cook, hers is a bad driver, hers is a bad society lady
However, hers is she
When she realizes she is the lady, she is no longer her
She loves me, she loves her world, she loves a horse
She loves the Chancellor, she loves she, she loves the Grand Duchess
She is inscrutable, she is meek, she is perky, she is outrageous
When she is not her, she is glorious
When her is her, wretched
When she is she: such power and dignity in her
She is truly what she is
She certainly does make love to the first dot of Ashe when she is she
She is black lady of black and gold
She is tiger lady, manifestations of all facets in her
She is garuda lady, she flies high and low
She is lion lady, she dives in the ocean of snow
She is dragon lady, she proclaims the dragon's roar
She is sometimes also the Chancellor, she shares her vision, she is Thomas Rich
She joins family affair: She is all.3
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Postby admin » Thu Aug 08, 2019 3:38 am


The Pybus family, Thorney Court, London, circa 1962. (Diana is seated on the rug.) Photographer unknown.

Chogyam Trungpa (center front) at Samye Ling Meditation Center in Scotland, circa 1967. Shown here with Akong Rinpoche (right), Sherab Palden Beru (lift), and a number of early Western students. Photographer unknown.

News clipping from the Sunday Mirror, January 4, 1970.

Rinpoche and Diana, soon after their arrival in the United States. Photographer unknown.

Rinpoche meditating with students in the living room at Four Mile Canyon, 1971. Photographer unknown.

Rinpoche and Diana with Taggie as a newborn, 1971. Photographer unknown.

Diana, Gesar, and Khyentse Rinpoche during Gesar's enthronement as Jamgon Kongtrul. Berkeley, California, 1976. Photo by George Holmes. Private collection.

Khyentse Rinpoche and Trungpa Rinpoche, 1976. Photograph by Ray Ellis.

Left to right: The Vajra Regent Osel Tendzin; the Vidyadhara the Venerable Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche; His Holiness the Sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa; and His Eminence Jamgon Kongtrul Rinpoche. Japan Center, San Francisco, January 1977. Photograph by Tharpa Chotron.

Reception at the first Kalapa Court, Boulder, circa 1978. Elizabeth Pybus with Rinpoche and Diana. The family dog, Ganesh, is at their feet. Photographer unknown.

Diana at the Spanish Riding School, 1979. Reprinted by permission of the Spanish Riding School.

Rinpoche on his horse, Drala, at the Magyel Pomra Encampment, 1980. Photo by Andrea Roth.

Rinpoche and Diana lead the procession on horseback at a Midsummer's Day Celebration outside of Boulder, 1981. Photo by Andrea Roth.

The Mukpo Family at the Kalapa Court, Boulder, 1982. Front row: Rinpoche, Diana, and baby Ashoka (on Diana's lap). Back row, left to right: Osel, Taggie, and Gesar. An enlarged reproduction of the Order of Ashe hangs on the wall behind them. Photo by Blair Hansen and George Holmes.

[i] The funeral procession at the cremation ceremony for Rinpoche, May 1987, at Karme Choling. Photo by Andrea Roth.

Mukpo family portrait, Tibet, Summer 2002. Standing, left to right: Rolpe Dorje Rinpoche, Tulku A, Karma Senge Rinpoche, Khenpo Tsering, Gesar Mukpo, Diana Mukpo, Ashoka Mukpo, Surmang Garwang Rinpoche, Mitchell Levy. Kneeling: Chandali Mukpo and David Mukpo. Photo by Jane Carpenter.

Diana Mukpo, Khamnyon Rinpoche (Ashoka), and Sechen Kongtrul Rinpoche (Gesar) giving blessings at Sechen Monastery, Tibet, 2002. Photo by Jane Carpenter.

Diana and Mitchell, New York, 2002. Photo by Gracie Atherton.
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Postby admin » Thu Aug 08, 2019 4:53 am


In the months before Rinpoche left for retreat, I was making my own plans for the coming year. I began to turn my mind to going to Europe to further my dressage training. Since Rinpoche and I had been deeply impressed with the Spanish Riding School when we visited Vienna in 1975, it was natural to think about studying with someone from the Spanish as the next step in my education. At that time, I did not think it would actually be possible for me to study in the school itself; it was an all-male institution, and, as far as I knew, they only accepted Austrian nationals as riders in the school.

When we watched the performance there, one rider in particular had impressed me, Ernst Bachinger. I wrote a letter to him in early 1977 telling him that I would like to come and study with him. He replied that he had just left the school and was in a time of personal transition, so he was not accepting new students. He recommended that I train with Arthur Kottas, who had his own training facility near Vienna. I wrote to Kottas and asked him if he would accept me as a student.

Within a month, he wrote back saying that I could come that summer. Rinpoche was tremendously supportive of my going to Vienna, much more so than he had been about California. He felt that the classical tradition practiced in Austria was the real McCoy, so to speak. When I received the letter of acceptance from Kottas, we were both overjoyed.

Mter Rinpoche left for Charlemont, I stayed on in Boulder for several months, preparing for my trip. I took German lessons from the Berlitz Institute in Denver so I would be able to communicate a little bit in German with my teachers and fellow riders. I also sold Vajra Dance before leaving. I knew that I would need a better horse in Vienna.

Rinpoche had been thinking for some time about establishing Vajradhatu in Europe. There was already a meditation group in England, but he felt it was time to start something on the continent. He also wanted me to have support, being a bit worried about me going over to Vienna alone. He asked one of his close students, Michael Kohn, if he and his family would move to Vienna to start the Vienna dharmadhatu, to get things rolling in Europe. Michael was to be the Vajradhatu ambassador to Europe. Michael was a very literate person who had worked on a number of Rinpoche's early books and other editorial projects, and he had a facility with foreign languages. He was very devoted to Rinpoche and had been trained by him as a meditation instructor and teacher, and for all these reasons Rinpoche thought he would be an excellent person for the job. The plan was that Michael would be based in Vienna and would travel and teach in a number of locations throughout western Europe. Michael, his wife Judy, and their daughter (a second child was born in Europe ) relocated to Vienna around the same time that I did. The Vienna dharmadhatu has continued to this day, although after I left, Michael and his family relocated to Amsterdam and then finally established the headquarters of Vajradhatu Europe in Marburg, Germany.

Rinpoche also wanted me to have someone to help out at the house, and this was the beginning, really, of my having personal attendants. Rinpoche asked Jeanine Wieder, a French woman in the sangha, if she would accompany me. During this era, Rinpoche was trying to include the family and me much more as part of the environment of the teachings that should be respected. I think that he may have realized that there was a problem with the large discrepancy in how students treated him -- almost like a god -- and how we were treated -- often like unwelcome interlopers in his life. With the emphasis on a Court mandala in his presentation of the Shambhala teachings, it made sense that the entire household had to be included and regarded as part of the sacredness of his world. As well, the message he Was trying to communicate to all of his students was that every part of one's life is part of one's practice. You don't just meditate in the midst of your dirty pots and pans, ignoring your spouse and children. Given the hippie roots of many of his students, there was sometimes this tendency to ignore the basic details and fabric of everyday life. In fact, this was one reason that some of Rinpoche's students were resistant to his presentation of the Shambhala teachings. They didn't want to have to clean up their act. They liked the smelly nest, which Rinpoche referred to in his Shambhala presentations as "the cocoon."

My mother wrote an amusing letter to Rinpoche during the first month of his retreat, March 1977, about her view of hippie society in Boulder and why Rinpoche would want to get away from it for awhile. She wrote, "I can understand that you might want to escape the trivia that populate Boulder with its various cares and stores. Most of these people appear to lack all idea of personal grooming and one cannot begin to imagine whether anything exists within the cerebral cranium. It is a horrifying aspect of an ignorance bordering on barbarity."1 Rinpoche I think shared her view that people looked worse than unkempt on the outside, but he saw the intelligence behind the "barbarous" exterior.

At this time, Rinpoche was beginning to work much more with promoting feminine energy, not just in the abstract -- which is certainly an important part of the Vajrayana Buddhist teachings -- but the energy of women in the community. I think it's interesting that this coincided with his presentation of the Vajrayogini abhisheka. Vajrayogini is the personification of wisdom and represents the feminine principle. But interestingly, at the same time that he started giving this practice to people, he also began to appoint many more women to important leadership roles, and he suggested that I should also have such a role within the Shambhala world. Rinpoche's contact with and understanding of Western women had been growing exponentially since he came to North America and since we married. I think he got to know "woman" on an intimate, day-to-day basis in part through our marriage, as well as through other relationships with Western women students. Just as he broke through so many other cultural divides, his chauvinism began to wear out in a fundamental way, and he started to feel that women could play very important roles. Here again, we take these things for granted now, but in that era, leadership was not as open for women as it is now.

In any case, during this period, one of the changes that he instituted involved elevating my status, which was often uncomfortable for me. I don't think I always handled it well, especially in the beginning. At the seminary the previous fall, Rinpoche had floated his idea with some senior students that perhaps I should now be addressed as Her Highness Lady Diana Mukpo. He said that he wanted me to have a tide that was commensurate with him being referred to as the Vajracharya or the Sakyong. David Rome, among others, tried to talk him out of this, as did I initially, but he would not be dissuaded, no matter how ridiculous people told him it was. I reluctantly came to the conclusion that, if we were going to live in a Shambhala Court, it would not be completely inappropriate for me to be a lady. Within a few months, I became used to people calling me "Your Highness" within the Buddhist community. I still found it awkward when this tide was used in the larger world by well-intentioned but -- from my point of view -- naive community members.

I think that one reason that students were willing to "attend" me was because of all this energy that Rinpoche was putting into expanding the Shambhala world and extending that into our home. Jeanine referred to me at home as "Lady Diana." Unfortunately, she also called me that frequently when I was riding at Kottas's barn, no matter how many times I asked her to just call me Diana when we were there. On some level, I didn't find it that bizarre, but I was trying to keep these two worlds separate. When Jeanine called me Lady. Diana at the barn, I cringed. I wanted to be ordinary in that situation, get my work done, and focus purely on my riding.

For my first day at Kottas's school, I drove through the Vienna Woods and turned off onto a small driveway that led to his barn. The barn was in a large clearing, and there were about twenty-five horses stabled there. There was a well-appointed indoor arena, as well as paths on the property where you could ride your horse through the forest.

I was dressed in my best riding clothes, and I was quite excited. I thought I was pretty hot stuff, and I imagined that I would impress Herr Kottas. He greeted me and told me that he had a nice horse for me to ride. He said, "Let me see what you can do." The horse was the current Austrian champion. I realized almost immediately that I was in trouble. I couldn't make the horse do anything. Obviously, the way I had been trained to ride in the. United States was completely different from what they expected in Vienna. I felt humiliated. Afterward, I went out for coffee with Kottas, and he said to me, "If you don't improve greatly within the next three months, you'll have to leave. I'm represented by my students. If you don't get better, you'll go. That's that."

He told me that if! wanted to stay and train with him, first I would have to go to his barn every morning while he was away riding at the Spanish. I would report to his assistant, and she would longe me. Longeing is a means to teach the rider to sit correctly on the horse. The instructor has the horse on a long line called a longe line. You sit on the horse without reins or stirrups,. and you learn how to balance and keep your body in exactly the correct position. Kottas wanted me to return to this absolutely basic training before going any further.

I agreed to his terms, and starting the next day, I reported every morning to his assistant, a German woman named Jutta. Every morning, I was given the same horse to be longed on, a seventeen-hand Bavarian warmblood by the name of Donald. Donald had a terrible habit of bucking, and he bucked me off almost every day. It was a good day if I hadn't fallen off him. I spent my first three months sitting on this horse and ending up in the dirt on an ongoing basis. Fortunately, I was never seriously hurt, hut it wasn't a pleasant experience. When I fell off, Jutta would say to me, "Get up. Get back on." She never said, "Are you okay?" The custom at the barn was that you were expected to buy a liter of wine for people every time you fell off a horse. At one point, I bought eighteen liters of wine. I invited everyone; I put the wine out for them and said "Drink up!" It was a miserable time.

After about a month of this, I became discouraged and convinced that I was never going to make any progress. I felt ready to pack up and go back to the United States. I missed everyone terribly, especially Gesar, and I thought that at the end of the year I would go home. I called Rinpoche a number of times to discuss all this. I was looking for understanding and sympathy somewhere in my life. Altogether, I felt discouraged and inadequate.

In mid-September Rinpoche wrote me a letter. To me, it exemplifies how he worked with all of his students. He was immensely kind and loving, but he expected a lot from everyone -- especially his wife, as I realized when I read what he had written. It was somewhat shocking, because he was so honest and unguarded and offered such direct advice. He wrote:

My darling,

Isn't it magnificent that I am writing a letter to you? We have never communicated with each other in this way before. Usually we use a telephone or mutual mind contact. But I hope that what I have to say in this letter won't shock you too much.

I have never met a human being like you. You are so extraordinary, outrageous, and intrinsically good. I miss you a lot, but sometimes I feel for your future. I want you to be the world's most outstanding dressage rider. This is not just because I am going along with your schemes or your plans, but I want you really to become a truly good equestrian. Therefore I would like to push you in your discipline.

Thank you, by the way, for your letter and your phone calls. I understand how you feel about all of this, the riding and your disappointment in the Spanish Court Riding School. But I would like to encourage you as your husband and your good friend. I do not want you to chicken out. I want you to know that my pride is not purely invested in you as my famous wife. But I certainly do feel that it is my role and my delightful duty to push you to become the top rider in the dressage world. Therefore I would like you to stay longer with Kottas and study with him. Any financial or moral support, whatever is needed, I obviously volunteer. Of course, it is my duty.

Sometimes you feel disappointed because of your impatience. Sometimes you feel disappointed because of what you expected' from the best system of dressage in the world. If you could stay beyond Christmas and at least spend next year with Kottas, I would feel more proud of you. You might find it strange that my urge to push you becomes greater. As far as I am concerned, it is my pride in you and in me. I hope you will never give up all this. Please consider: patience is great .... I want you to stay with the discipline of the Spanish Court Riding School. If this seems unreasonable, let us talk about it when we are together -- but I want you to stay in this school.

You said the European championship was so materialistic. Sometimes it is necessary to give in to people's trips; otherwise there is no working basis. As long as you are not hypocritical to yourself, that is the key to remaining genuine.

There is something to the Spanish Court Riding School. It is internationally acceptable, and moreover it has a great lineage which has been handed down from generation to generation. You can't find that kind of inspiration from individual practice alone. I know that; I have done it myself. If you try to do your own trip and practice riding by yourself independent of any tradition, you are going to become the Ram Dass of the dressage tradition.

You might want to do it on your own terms, but self-styled disciplines are dubious. Only the Americans do things that way because they don't like the discipline of the forefathers of whatever lineage they might have belonged to. Instead, they prefer to give up any pain they feel and try to insert their own pleasure by manufacturing their own discipline. Darling, I don't want you to become Americanized. It is silly and ridiculous.

Sweetheart, I don't want to push you, but I feel if you trust me, my judgment is right. I know it is painful and uncomfortable not being with our people, but our people will appreciate you more if you come back victorious and good. I really insist on this, you know. Please think it over. We can discuss it when we are together.

The main point is that you realize that no discipline will come along with hospitality. Exertion and diligence beyond physical discomfort are the key.

Your most loving Sakyong and husband writes this letter remembering you with tremendous love and longing. Sweetheart, I remain your most obedient husband, the Sakyong ....

I love you CT2

I couldn't ignore a message like this. It was really the heart advice that I would have given myself, had I been able to transcend my own doubt and see things from a bigger perspective. Rinpoche told me things that at some level I already knew and believed. I had to admit that he was right. From that point on, my attitude changed. I gave up any thought of leaving, and I started to work really hard. Between that and my change of attitude, I made quite a lot of progress.

In his letter, when Rinpoche told me that he didn't want me to become "Americanized" in my approach to riding, he was appealing to my English chauvinism. From the time we arrived in the United States, although we both appreciated the fresh, unbridled quality of the American spirit, we were also both aware of what we perceived as a lack of discipline and a rejection of tradition. As much as I rebelled against my upbringing, there was much that I appreciated about the British mentality. It was part of me. There was a stuffiness and close-mindedness that I reacted against, but I also learned about genuine discipline from growing up in England. I also appreciated that Rinpoche had this connection to discipline from his own education and upbringing, so I knew that he spoke from firsthand experience.

In terms of my education as a rider, before coming over to Europe, I had realized that there was something missing in my training in America. I had seemed to make extremely rapid progress there, but the foundation of the discipline was not well established, and a certain attention to the basics was missing. Having to start over from the ground up was not just helpful but essential to my progress as a rider.

In dressage, the first objective for the rider should be to learn to follow the horse's movements and to be able to stay in balance with the horse, without hanging onto the reins or squeezing with your legs. First, you have to learn to harmonize with the horse's movement, and this process can take a long time. If riders don't have correct training on the seat position early on, it's going to show up later in their riding because there will be always be some degree of inability to harmonize with the horse. And if the rider can't harmonize with the horse, then the horse's movements can't be graceful or beautiful.

When dressage is performed at the highest levels, with a skilled rider and a well-trained horse, the communication between the horse and the rider should be almost indiscernible. This certainly doesn't mean that the rider is not doing anything. The rider may be doing quite a bit, giving the horse various aids or instructions. This is done through leg movements, how you hold the reins, and how you sit in the saddle, but all of this should be so extremely well-timed and subtle that the casual observer may notice nothing but the unity of horse and rider. It takes a minimum of five years to train a dressage horse to the highest level. Throughout that process you refine the aids. When you see a completely finished horse, when you watch him going through all the highest movements of dressage, the rider's influence should be almost imperceptible. Horse and rider should look as if they're moving as one.

It was this basic connection to the horse that I was gaining through my work on the longe line. Rinpoche was absolutely correct about the training in Europe. Especially in Vienna, where they follow this classical approach, training is not based on immediate gratification. New riders always spend a long time on the longe line. When you longe a horse, it is controlled by the instructor on the ground, and the horse walks, trots, and canters on command, in a circle around the instructor. The student's only objective is to learn how to sit, and how to synchronize and to follow along with the horse's movements. I was told that in the Spanish Riding School, the young apprentices would often longe for six months before they're ever given the stirrups or the reins. In the end, I was grateful to have had a similar experience.

Several weeks after he sent me the letter, Rinpoche came over to Vienna. I guess you could say that he took a kind of vacation from his retreat! He traveled with a group of his students to see me and to check in on how Michael Kohn was doing setting up the European branch of Vajradhatu. I was delighted to see him.

Kottas's training facility was near a small village called Tulbingerkogel. There was a very nice hotel in the village, the Berghotel Tulbingerkogel, a few minutes up the road, owned by the Blauel family. Rinpoche and his party stayed there. (Interestingly enough, one of the sons in the Blauel family later became a member of the Buddhist community.) John Perks accompanied Rinpoche, as did Sam Bercholz. The party also included Jim Gimian, who Rinpoche was about to appoint to an important post within the vajra guards. Jim's rank was to be just below David Rome. Rinpoche had decided to create two divisions within the guards. Jim was to be the dapon, or chief, of the kasung division providing the outer protection for Rinpoche and his world, while John Perks was being appointed as the dapon of the kusung division, which included the personal attendants, or the inner service, to Rinpoche, myself, the Regent, and a few others. Jim, a very warm man with a great sense of humor, was also the associate publisher at Shambhala Publications.



In short, she was a very elegant woman, and she was one of Rinpoche's close friends, girlfriends, at the time. Several famous Italian and French designers had loaned Sara evening gowns to wear on this tour of Europe. Every evening, she would appear for dinner in yet another extraordinary outfit. I was by this time in our married life quite accustomed to Rinpoche having relationships with other women. In general, for whatever reasons, I did not find them threatening or degrading. Many of these women were my friends. We shared the appreciation of Rinpoche as an extraordinary human being, someone who no one person could possess in the traditional sense. I did find it difficult if a woman spending time with Rinpoche did not have some respect for my position as his wife. This was rare, luckily. In Sara's case, we were old friends, and I was happy to see her.

Rinpoche, as I mentioned earlier, had always made an effort to celebrate my birthday with me, and this year was no exception. I turned twenty-four while he was in Vienna. Throughout the visit, John Perks shaved his moustache to look "Hitlerian," and Rinpoche kept saying "Fetus" to people instead of ''AufWiedersehen,'' which means good-bye in German. No one seemed to notice. I'm sure they just thought he couldn't speak the language. Rinpoche and John were often making fun of Austria's Nazi past in the most tasteless fashion. (Rinpoche could make fun of almost anything.)

For my birthday, Rinpoche reserved a private room at the hotel and ordered a whole wild boar to be roasted and served at the table. It cheered me up a lot to have him and his crazy, loving world there for a few days. During his visit, we ate a lot of Sacher torte for dessert, which Rinpoche was very fond of.

While he was there, Rinpoche and I talked further about my riding. I told him that I was going to stick it out and also that I had heard that the Spanish Riding School was now accepting a few foreign students. It was my extraordinary good fortune to be there during this era. I told Rinpoche that it was my greatest desire to work hard and progress so that I would be able to apply. I understood at this point that it was only by following the approach he was suggesting that I would ever master the discipline to the point that I might be accepted.

Rinpoche came out to Kottas's barn to meet him and to see me ride, and he really loved it there. He had ridden in Tibet, and from that he had a great appreciation for riding, as well as an intuitive feeling for it. I also took him and his party to the Spanish Riding School. Since I was now studying under one of the riders at the school, I was able to arrange for Rinpoche and his party to watch the morning lessons and to have a private tour of the facilities, rather than having to attend a performance with a huge crowd of people. I was so sad to see him leave, but altogether, his visit gave me the further encouragement I needed.

For the next year, I continued my training with Arthur Kottas. At the end of Rinpoche's retreat, December 1977, I traveled back to Boulder to spend time with him. Throughout 1978, I made several visits to the United States to participate in various activities in the Buddhist community, but for most of this time I was based in Vienna.

A few months after I settled in Vienna, Taggie came through on his way to His Holiness's monastery in Rumtek, Sikkim, chaperoned by Karl Springer. When His Holiness had made his second visit to America, he saw Taggie at Karme Choling. He strongly suggested to Rinpoche and me that we allow Taggie to go to Rumtek, where he would be formally enthroned as Tenga Rinpoche. His Holiness thought this might help Taggie. I had visited my son at Karme Choling several times, and during that period I continued to hold out hope that he was going to somehow become a more normal child. When I saw him in Vienna, however, it was absolutely clear that he was not normal, and I began to give up any expectation. At this point, although he was my child and always will be, I became more disconnected from him. I didn't know what else to do. His life was out of my control now. Rinpoche had agreed with His Holiness and made the decision to send Taggie to Rumtek. I couldn't care for him. When he came through, it was very difficult for me because I felt our connection dissolving. I felt the hopelessness of it all. I remained skeptical that Taggie's condition was tulku disease.

Perhaps in part in reaction to the pain of seeing Taggie, I threw myself even more into my riding after his visit. At a certain point, when I began to feel that I was making adequate progress, and taking to heart Rinpoche's offer of financial support, I decided to purchase a horse for myself.

I wanted a horse that was already trained to the medium level in Europe. (This is roughly the equivalent of the fourth, or highest, national level in the United States. After that there are four international levels, which are the same throughout the world.) Kottas was kind enough to accompany me to Munich to look at a Hungarian horse that was owned by a woman by the name of Katrina Hilger Henkel (of the Henkel family who produces a popular sparkling wine in Germany). Her stable was near Munich, where she had competed him through the medium level of dressage. When I rode the horse, I instantly felt a connection and felt he suited me well. He was a chestnut horse, maybe sixteen one hands, not very big, but very pleasant to ride.

There are certain guidelines one uses in picking a horse for dressage. When you evaluate a young untrained horse as a dressage prospect, you are looking for a very sensitive horse. When he's young, he might misbehave sometimes, but you want that sort of hot temperament, because that shows you that he's sensitive and energetic. If a dressage horse were a person, he would not be a couch potato. Dressage becomes very taxing physiologically as the training goes on, so you need a horse that is a natural athlete. That's one thing to look for: the athletic ability of the horses, as well as their desire to do the work. You want a horse with plenty of energy when it's young.

Male horses are generally better for dressage. There are very few mares in competition, although there are some very good ones at the top of our sport. At the Spanish Riding School, only stallions are used. However, the vast majority of dressage horses in competition are geldings, castrated males. The problem with the stallions is that they often have other things on their mind than dressage and therefore need a very experienced rider.

When I was at the Henkel barn, I saw another horse that absolutely wowed me. He was my ideal of a dressage horse at the time, a sixteen two hand liver chestnut Hanoverian who exhibited tremendous energy and supple movements. I asked Katrina Hilger Henkel if that horse was for sale, but she was not willing to sell him. We ended up buying the Hungarian. I brought him back to Vienna and named him Shambhala. Two weeks later, I got a phone call from Katrina, telling me that the other horse was now available. Without much hesitation, I agreed to buy him as well, much to the understandable consternation of the financial people in Vajradhatu to whom Rinpoche turned to finance the purchase. In Vienna, I was surrounded by wealthy people, many of whom had a number of expensive horses, and I think I lost my perspective a bit.

There was one person within Vajradhatu in charge of our family finances, Chuck Lief, a student of Rinpoche's since 1970. Chuck was quite upset, and I don't really blame him; I had just gone ahead without thinking, saying, "Fine, we'll have the second horse as well" -- and they certainly were not inexpensive. Over the years, Chuck had a lot of handwringing to do in connection with my dressage horses.

Nevertheless, both purchases went ahead, and within a few weeks, I ended up with two very interesting horses to ride and compete. I named the second horse Warrior. In 1978, I began competing Shambhala in Austria. The first year, I didn't do dismally, but I was not tremendously successful. However, by the second year, I did very well with Shambhala, winning a number of tests at the medium level. Toward the end of my time in Vienna, I started competing both horses in the first international level, the Prix St. Georges.

Studying with Arthur Kottas, I was learning how to be a good rider. Kottas's approach was very demanding; it was very tough training for me, but it was necessary to go through this process. I was also beginning to learn how to train my horses. I began to realize that, as a rider, you are like the personal trainer of the horse. It's very much a mutual relationship; the rider also has to learn to listen to the horse. If you're a really good rider, you're going to discover how your horse wants to be ridden. You have to learn to adjust to the needs of each horse. Every horse is different, and the hallmark of a good rider is that he can get on many different horses and quickly figure out where the problems are. To begin with, the horse always has to be obedient to the rider and has to follow the direction of the rider. On the other hand, the rider has to be able to communicate to the horse in a precise manner what he wants the horse to do. So dressage involves two-way communication.

If you look at dressage training in terms of the alphabet, when you ride a very young horse, you only teach him the letters A and B. A is that he must go forward, and B is that he has to stop. Ultimately, when your horse is at the Grand Prix level, he should know all twenty-six letters, so to speak, and you should be able to make words with them. How does the communication take place? It has to be accomplished through subtle movements, by closing your leg, by bracing your back, by putting pressure on your seat bones or closing your fist on the reins. As a result of training, all those little things mean something to the horse, and eventually the different combinations of those aids will also mean something to him.

Dressage is a bit like ballet. In the early training, you concentrate on basic movements. The basic elements eventually are put together into complex movements that look somewhat like dance. On the other hand , it's quite different than becoming a dancer in that you are trying to train not just your own mind and body, but also the mind and body of another being, a huge, twelve-hundred-pound animal. You are trying to harness and direct the energy of this being, and beyond that, you are trying to connect with the animal in the most fundamental way, so that at times, there is no division between you and the horse. You feel that you are completely in sync, physically, mentally, and one might almost say spiritually, or at least energetically.

In the Shambhala teachings that Rinpoche began presenting in this era, there is extensive discussion of the principle of windhorse, or lungta in Tibetan. This term refers to raising or harnessing your energy. Rinpoche described lungta as follows:

When we pay attention to every thing around us, the overall effect is upliftedness. The Shambhalian term for that is windhorse. The wind principle is very airy and powerful. Horse means that the energy is ridable. That particular airy and sophisticated energy, so clean and full of decency, can be ridden. You don't just have a bird flying by itself in the sky, but you have something to ride on. Such energy is fresh and exuberant but, at the same time, ridable. Therefore, it is known as windhorse.3

Lamas sending Paper-horses to Travellers.


Chinese Long-Horse. Or Horse-Dragon, "Long-ma."

The prayer-flags are used by the Lamas as luck-commanding talismans; and the commonest of them, the so-called "Airy horse," seems to me to be clearly based upon and also bearing the same name as "The Horse-dragon" of the Chinese.

This Horse-dragon or "Long-horse" is one of the four great mythic animals of China, and it is the symbol for grandeur. It is represented, as in the figure on the opposite page, as a dragon-headed horse, carrying on its back the civilizing Book of the Law.

The Tibetan Lung-Horse.

Now this is practically the same figure as "The Lung-horse" (literally "Wind-horse") of the Lamaist flag, which also is used for the expressed purpose of increasing the grandeur of the votary; indeed, this is the sole purpose for which the flag is used by the Tibetan laity, with whom these flags are extremely popular.

And the conversion of "The Horse-dragon" of the Chinese into the Wind-horse of the Tibetans is easily accounted for by a confusion of homonyms. The Chinese word for "Horse-dragon" is Long-ma,59 of which Long = Dragon, and ma = Horse. In Tibet, where Chinese is practically unknown, Long, being the radical word, would tend to be retained for a time, while the qualifying word, ma, translated into Tibetan, becomes "rta." Hence we get the form "Long-rta." But as the foreign word Long was unintelligible in Tibet, and the symbolic animal is used almost solely for fluttering in the wind, the "Long" would naturally become changed after a time into Lung or "wind," in order to give it some meaning, hence, so it seems to me, arose the word Lung- rta,60 or "Wind-horse."

In appearance the Tibetan "Lung-horse" so closely resembles its evident prototype the "Horse-dragon," that it could easily be mistaken for it. On the animal's back, in place of the Chinese civilizing Book of the Law, the Lamas have substituted the Buddhist emblem of the civilizing Three Gems, which include the Buddhist Law. But the Tibetans, in their usual sordid way, view these objects as the material gems and wealth of good luck which this horse will bring to its votaries. The symbol is avowedly a luck-commanding talisman for enhancing the grandeur61 of the votary.

Indian myth also lends itself to the association of the horse with luck; for the Jewel-horse of the universal monarch, such as Buddha was to have been had he cared for worldly grandeur, carries its rider, Pegasus-like, through the air in whatever direction wished for, and thus it would become associated with the idea of realization of material wishes, and especially wealth and jewels. This horse also forms the throne-support of the mythical celestial Buddha named Ratna-sambhava, or "the Jewel-born One," who is often represented symbolically by a jewel. And we find in many of these luck-flags that the picture of a jewel takes the place of the horse. It is also notable that the mythical people of the northern continent, subject to the god of wealth, Kuvera, or Vaisravana, are "horse-faced."

-- The Buddhism of Tibet, or Lamaism With Its Mystic Cults, Symbolism and Mythology, and in its Relation to Indian Buddhism, by Luarence Austine Waddell, M.B., F.L.S., F.R.G.S.

This is parallel to what you are doing in dressage. I found that the Shambhala teachings altogether were often applicable to my experience as a dressage rider. In the Shambhala teachings, one of the factors in raising windhorse is that the uplifted quality of lungta arises from applying mindfulness and awareness in everyday life. This lofty quality rests on the foundation of paying attention to every aspect of your life. That is exactly the same as in dressage, and that is what I was learning in such great detail during that early phase in Vienna. I already had some intuitive sense of the possible grandeur and magnificence and power of dressage, but I needed to concentrate on the essentials.


-- Rembrandt as Educator (1890), by Julius Langbehn

It's beyond the scope of this book to go into detail about every aspect of dressage, but I would like to explain some basic principles, which are relevant to training in other disciplines as well. All the movements in dressage are natural movements of the horse. You just harness them. Everything that you see someone do on a dressage horse, with perhaps one exception, the horse will naturally do in the field. For example, horses in a field outdoors will canter a lot and change which leg they are leading with. When you train a horse, you are putting the natural movement in a context, while building up the horse's strength and his ability to understand and move in unity with the rider. If you train your horse incorrectly, which means using undue force, the horse may cease to enjoy his work. He has to be a willing partner. As soon as the horse stops enjoying what he's doing, it becomes very evident: the movement is no longer beautiful. So there's a real psychological aspect to this work. You work with your horse so that his body's fit for what he's doing and also so that he feels good in his mind about it. When those things work together, then you can have a beautiful and harmonious picture. This is, in fact, similar to the principles that one applies in meditation. Meditation works with the natural qualities and habits of mind, gradually building on the student's natural capacity for wakefulness.

In dressage, one of the key principles that you work on developing is collection. Collection is when the horse's energy is gradually controlled without being reduced. A young horse will trot and canter forward with very long strides, and his balance will be a little bit on his forelegs. When you train the horse, you teach him to take more weight on the hindquarters, and the center of gravity will gradually shift backward. Over years, this allows him to have what we call lightness of the forehand. You gradually teach the horse to channel the energy upward and his movement becomes more elevated.

Midway through my training with Kottas, His Holiness the Karmapa visited Vienna. He came to the dharmadhatu to perform the Vajra Crown ceremony while he was in Europe. It was a big to-do. I had a white Mercedes at the time, which I loaned to the dharmadhatu for His Holiness's use during the visit. While His Holiness was visiting, I arranged for him to attend a performance at the Spanish Riding School. I was able to get seats for his party in the Royal Box, which is reserved for special guests. Located underneath the portrait of the Austrian emperor, the Royal Box has upholstered chairs and is the only heated part of the arena. Among all of us in the dharmadhatu, we only had one decent car, the Mercedes, so His Holiness and I both rode in it. Generally, he never rode in a car with a woman because of his monastic vows. However, because I was Rinpoche's wife, he made an exception. (I had already ridden with him in Boulder once before, as he may have remembered.)

I had a mink stole that I was very proud of, and I wore it to the Spanish with an evening gown. We sat together in the Royal Box and watched the performance, which never failed to move me. At one point, His Holiness pointed at my stole and, through his translator, said to me, "So many rabbits died to make that!" I turned to the translator and I said, "Please tell His Holiness, actually it was so many minks." Then His Holiness wanted to know how much it would cost to buy one of the Lipizzaners, the rare breed of horse ridden at the Spanish. I told him it would be about $100,000, and he was somewhat shocked by that.

He enjoyed watching the performance for awhile, but then toward the end, he realized it was time to do his evening meditation, which included a number of chants. It was cold in the box, even with the heat, so he decided that he would also do a meditation practice called tummo, which among other things generates warmth in your body. I was paralyzed with embarrassment as he started to· do his evening practice right there during the performance. Everyone in the arena could hear him chanting. Later, Rinpoche told me I could have told the Karmapa that the program would be over soon and that he could go home and do his practice there. Instead I just sat there, quietly freaking out. At one point, when he was doing his tummo practice, he held my hand for a moment, and his body really was hot, which was kind of amazing. Once again, it was strange to see these worlds of mine coming together, but I survived and in the end, I was delighted that His Holiness had come to the Spanish.
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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.

SOMEHOW DURING THIS WINTER of the retreat year my handle on what I thought of as reality was becoming a little insecure. Out of seemingly nowhere I started having panic attacks, rapid heart­beat, and hyperventilation. I was sure I was going to die on the spot and I was certain there was a ghost following me around the house. So I asked Rinpoche if he had seen any ghosts in the house.

"Only two," he replied.

I almost fainted.

One night I had a dream of talking to a woman in her late thirties. She was wearing a long dress and holding my out­stretched hand. She was talking about building the farmhouse where we were staying. "When were you born?" I asked.

"May, 1853," she said.

I did the math in my dreaming mind, pulled my hand away and sat up in the bed, awake, with my heart racing.

When I was physically with Rinpoche I did not have panic attacks but I was certain that he was somehow the cause of it all.


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.

Rinpoche could see my progress in practicing Buddhism and he started to bother me about hunting. He wanted me to take him hunting. "I want to kill something," he said. "I have never killed anything. I've just been a Buddhist monk all my life."

I would always refuse. "It would not be right for you to kill something, Sir."

Seeing Rinpoche in a slaughterhouse or even hunting didn't seem right to me. It didn't fit my concept of a holy man. The hunting queries continued for some time until one morning a flock of snowbirds gathered on the frozen lawn where I had thrown some old bread. Rinpoche picked up the .22 rifle from the kitchen corner. He walked toward the window and said, "Right, Johnny? We're going to shoot some birds."

I protested. "Sir, we've been through this a million times. Please hand me back the gun."

Rinpoche, always one to enjoy himself, began to leap around the room in his kimono singing, ''I'm going to kill. I'm going to kill." I didn't like the way it sounded at all. I took the gun from him and loaded it. But I also moved the rear sight out of line. I opened the kitchen window.

"Here you are, Sir," I said as I handed the gun to Rinpoche. "It's all ready to fire."

Rinpoche took aim at the birds and fired the single-shot rifle into the morning air. The birds flew off and not one was left dead. I threw more bread out and Rinpoche fired and again no birds were killed. We both laughed. I wasn't surprised, as he probably couldn't have hit the barn with those readjusted sights.

Rinpoche looked directly at me and said, "Oh, you're just an English gentleman, you couldn't kill a bird either." It was a challenge and I took the bait.

"Oh?" I said, accepting the wager.

So I took the gun and aimed, using only the front sights on the rifle and picturing the rear sights in my mind. I killed a bird, much to my own delight and Rinpoche's surprise. I walked out, picked up the bird's carcass, and waved it to Rinpoche and Max.


"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....

I ground my teeth all the way home....


-- 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.














"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.







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.



-- 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.


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 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 their behinds,
That No is fantastic thighs, not fat or thin but taut in their strength, Loveable or leaveable.
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 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 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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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.


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.

-- Buddha's Not Smiling: Uncovering Corruption at the Heart of Tibetan Buddhism Today, by Erik D. Curren

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.




"More," he said.

"More sake, Sir?" I asked.

"No. More sleeping pills."

"Well, Sir, Mike said ..."

"More," he commanded.





"Sir," I hissed under my breath.







"Can I help you, sir?"

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


"Yes," I lied.










"Here, have some coffee," said Carl.
























"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.


"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....



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



-- 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.


"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.


-- Werma, by Chinese Buddhist Encyclopedia

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


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





-- 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.








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



Johnny: "Why?"


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!







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.


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.





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.


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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Postby admin » Wed Aug 14, 2019 10:21 pm








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Why so?
Cheerful birthday once again.
Nonetheless, we haven't been together for a while.
Remembering your smile and your face relieves my pain.
This letter was written with a combination of sadness and joy.

However, these days, many people are insane.
The Vajrayana teaching is the highest of all.
It is the greatest magic that Buddha has ever taught.
This is not just thought up by somebody.
It is 2,500 years of wisdom.
They are like a horse and saddlery.

Obviously, everyone would agree that the sky is blue.
There might be, but mathematics must begin with zero.
They never take root in the air upside down.
But in any case, one is not buying somebody's view.
There are things with view and opinions.
Vajrayogini herself represents nonthought.
I would like to invite you into this enlightened world.

With profound love and thanks,
From your best friend,


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.

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





















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