Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche – Allen’s Tibetan Buddhist teacher and lama, master and holder of both the Kagyu and Nyingma lineages of Tibetan Buddhism, founder of Naropa (thus overseer of the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics) was born on this day, March 5, 1939, in the province of Kham in Eastern Tibet.
Allen and Trungpa
Legend has it that their first meeting was hailing a taxi cab on the streets of New York City. Vying for the same cab, as Allen was rushing his father to the hospital (or, as Gesar Mukpo has it here, coming back from a poetry reading)
Famously Allen asks Trunpa if he can share his vehicle (his father would have loved that – the perfect Buddhist pun!)
Here’s his son Gesar Mukpo‘s delightful cartoon evocation of that moment
(here’s the rest of his cartoon celebration)
but, it turns out, that was not strictly correct
Years later this photo (see above) surfaced in Allen’s collection.
Gary Snyder had snapped it in India, way back in 1962, and, after some discussion, it was determined that that was indeed Chogyam Trungpa huddling there with Peter, that they had, in fact,”met”, without either of them knowing it, all those many years before!
(“Vidyadhara” here, incidentally, in Allen’s caption, is a title often given to Trungpa)
For more on Trungpa – see The Chögyam Trungpa Institute, at Naropa University and The Chronicles of Trungpa Rinpoche as well as his Shambhala biography – here
and several more postings on the Allen Ginsberg Project – see here, here, here and here