Kalu Rinpoche

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Kalu Rinpoche was born in 1905 during the Female Wood Snake year of the Tibetan lunar calendar, in a remote district of Kham, Eastern Tibet. The year matters: it places his arrival in a world where Tibetan Buddhism was still practiced largely within its homeland, untouched by the upheavals that would come. By the time he died on the 10th of May 1989, he had carried those teachings across continents, founded centers in over a dozen countries, and trained students who had never set foot in Asia. How did a solitary yogi who spent fifteen years wandering the Khampa countryside become one of the first Tibetan masters to introduce these practices to the West? And what shadows fell across that remarkable life?

• 2. Yogi of Kham

  ›

  At fifteen, Kalu Rinpoche was sent to Palpung Monastery, the foremost center of the Karma Kagyu school. He stayed for more than a decade. During those years he worked through the philosophical foundations of Buddhist practice and completed two three-year retreats, the intensive solitary periods that define serious monastic formation in the Kagyu tradition.

  At around twenty-five, he walked away from Palpung entirely. He spent close to fifteen years living as a solitary yogi in the forests of the Khampa countryside. He moved through villages and among nomadic communities, and in those places he became known as a living representative of the Bodhisattva path. There were no institutions behind him, no title, no monastery. The reputation he built there rested entirely on his practice.

  He eventually returned to Palpung to receive a rare transmission from Drupon Norbu Dondrup: the teaching of the Shangpa Kagyu lineage. This transmission was uncommon even within the tradition, and Drupon Norbu Dondrup was its keeper. That transfer of teaching would become load-bearing for Kalu Rinpoche's later work in the West, where he established the first retreat center to bring the traditional three-year Shangpa and Karma Kagyu retreats to Western students.

• 3. Teacher to Regents and Karmapas

  ›

  Situ Rinpoche ordered Kalu Rinpoche to serve as Vajra Master of the great meditation hall at Palpung Monastery. He gave empowerments and teachings there for many years. In the 1940s, he traveled to central Tibet as part of Situ Rinpoche's party and taught extensively.

  Among his disciples in central Tibet was Reting Rinpoche, who served as regent of Tibet during the infancy of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. Back in Kham, Kalu Rinpoche took on an equally consequential role: he became the meditation teacher of the Sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa. He held that position until the political situation in Tibet forced him into exile.

  He left for Bhutan in 1955. A decade later, in 1965, he established a monastery in Sonada, in the Darjeeling district. The monastery sat near Rumtek, the seat of Rangjung Rigpe Dorje, the 16th Karmapa. That proximity was not incidental: the two men's paths had been intertwined since Kalu Rinpoche's years as the Karmapa's meditation teacher.

• 4. Carrying the Teachings West

  ›

  Western students began appearing at Kalu Rinpoche's monastery in India in the late 1960s. By the 1970s, he was teaching regularly in both the Americas and Europe. Over three visits to the West, he founded teaching centers in more than a dozen countries.

  In France, he established something with no Western precedent: a retreat center designed to give non-Tibetan students access to the traditional three-year retreats of the Shangpa and Karma Kagyu lineages. These retreats were not abbreviated or adapted programs. They were the same long formation that had defined Kagyu practice for generations, now offered to people who had grown up on the other side of the world from where the tradition originated.

  The work he did in those years positioned him as one of the first Tibetan masters to bring this level of practice to Western practitioners, not just as a visiting teacher but as the founder of permanent institutions.

• 5. The Abuse Accounts

  ›

  June Campbell, a feminist scholar and former nun in the Kagyu tradition, translated for Kalu Rinpoche for several years. In her book Traveller in Space: Gender, Identity and Tibetan Buddhism, she wrote that she had consented to what she later understood as an abusive sexual relationship with him. He had framed the relationship to her as tantric spiritual practice. She also discussed the experience in an interview with Tricycle magazine in 1996.

  After the book was published, Campbell reported receiving letters from women across the world describing similar and in some cases worse experiences with other teachers in the tradition. Her account was not presented as isolated: it appeared within a broader pattern she was documenting.

  The second dimension of this history came from Kalu Rinpoche's own reincarnation. In the fall of 2011, during a talk at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, a student asked the young Kalu Yangsi about sexual abuse and the sexualisation of children. He disclosed for the first time that he had been sexually abused at the age of twelve by older monks from the monastery he attended. He then posted a video on YouTube, saying directly that he wanted the account on record so it would not be dismissed as unsubstantiated gossip.

• 6. Reincarnation and Recognition

  ›

  Kalu Rinpoche died at 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday, the 10th of May 1989, at his monastery in Sonada. On the 17th of September 1990, a child was born in Darjeeling to Lama Gyaltsen and his wife Drolkar. Lama Gyaltsen had served as Kalu Rinpoche's secretary since his youth.

  The Tai Situpa Pema Tönyö Nyinje formally recognized this child as Kalu Rinpoche's yangsi, or young reincarnation, on the 25th of March 1992. He explained that he had received definite signs from Kalu Rinpoche himself. Situ Rinpoche then sent a letter of recognition through Lama Gyaltsen to the 14th Dalai Lama, who confirmed it immediately.

  On the 28th of February 1993, the child was enthroned at Samdrup Tarjayling. The Tai Situpa and Goshir Gyaltsap presided over the ceremony, with Kalu Rinpoche's heart-son, Bokar Tulku Rinpoche, in attendance. The Tai Situpa performed the hair-cutting ceremony and gave the young tulku the name Karma Ngedön Tenpay Gyaltsen, meaning Victory Banner of the Teachings of the True Meaning. He is known today as the Second Kalu Rinpoche, though the American Kagyu organization Karma Triyana Dharmachakra counts him as the third, listing the original Kalu Rinpoche as the second in the line.