Directly following Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s death, Jack offers perspectives on the life and dharma of one of spirituality’s most impactful and controversial figures.
“Lama Govinda said that of all the young tulkus, of all the young incarnate lamas to leave Tibet, there was none as bright as Trungpa Rinpoche—bright in the sense of his field of his being and his energy. Lama Govinda, even at a point when he wasn’t very happy with the way Trungpa Rinpoche was behaving, said that he still had to admit there was no one who walked across the Himalayas and came out who had that light more than Trungpa.” – Jack Kornfield
In this episode, Jack dives into:
- A celebration of the life, teachings, and impact of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
- The Vimalakīrti Sutra, and how certain Bodhisattvas teach as householders so that their message can be best understood by the world
- How Jack being invited to teach alongside Ram Dass, Sharon Salzberg, and Joseph Goldstein on the faculty of Trungpa’s Naropa University in Boulder, CO sparked their teaching careers in the West
- Lama Govinda’s view on Trungpa’s innate radiant brightness and his “lion’s roar”
- The traditions, trainings, and spirit of Shambala through the metaphor of the rising sun
- Meeting our life and practice with an openness and fearlessness
- Buddhist personality types and their unique seeds of awakening
- Trungpa’s discipline for practice, and his deep devotion for his teachers and dharma lineage
- Ping-ponging between Ram Dass’s and Trungpa Rinpoche’s dueling Bhakti and Buddhism sessions the opening summer at Naropa
“Trungpa Rinpoche gave himself as fully to the West as any Buddhist teacher that I know that has come. And in a more remarkable way, he absorbed our culture, our language, our customs, who we are, into himself and said, ‘Alright, let’s play! Let’s take the seed of the Dharma and really make it sparkle and alive in the West.’” – Jack Kornfield
