Remembering Chagdud Rinpoche

Chagdud Rinpoche (1930–2002), posing blissfully for Allen’s camera here, back in 1995,
on the occasion of his visit to the Naropa Boulder, Colorado campus, was a revered and
much admired Tibetan tulku, lama, teacher and practitioner of the Nyingma school of Vajrayana Tibetan Buddhism.

“Known and respected in the West”, as his student Betty Kaiser noted  “for his teachings, his melodic chanting voice, his artistry as a sculptor and painter, and his skill as a physician”,
he was a tireless and exuberant international disseminator of the dharma.

Joe McClellan wrote on him last year and presents a comprehensive and illuminating account for The Treasury of Lives series – see here

See also  Lisa Leghorn’s note, from back in 1994, for the Snow Lion newspaper 

See also his fairly extensive Wikipedia entry – here

Check out also the Chagdud Gonpa Foundation 

Exiled from his native Tibet to Nepal, and later India, in 1979 Chagdud Rinpoche fulfilled the aspirations of some Western students by traveling (at the request of the Dalai Lama)
to the United States.

From 1980 to 1989 he resided in Oregon and established in Cotton Grove, the Dechhen Ling Meditation Center, his first center in the West (which was the first part of an on-going network, Chagdud Gonpa, named after the name of his monastery in Tibet).

In 1995, at the age of 65, Rinpoche relocated to southern Brazil. There he developed a rural retreat center (Khadro Ling). Over the next seven years, he established more than twenty centers in Brazil, Uruguay, and Chile, while indefatigably traveling and teaching throughout the Southern Hemisphere, as well as still making regular pilgrimages to Asia, and, occasionally, the West.

Here (for a number of reasons), some extraordinary footage – Chagdud Rinpoche addressing a huge crowd at Planeta Atlântida, a Brazilian music festival, in 1999.

Remembering Chagdud Rinpoche.  Spreading the dharma.