Mukpo - Dragon Thunder

The unorthodox love story at the heart of Dragon Thunder offers universal lessons in the transformative power of love and devotion.

Shambhala Sun

The value of this book is to open household doors and tell a page-turning family story by which the controversial guru Chgyam Trungpa can be better understood.

Publishers Weekly

Endows the reader with a sense of familiarity that refreshes and challenges our conception of diversity within tradition.

Tricycle

Gives readers a fresh yet intimate view of Trungpa and invites us to see the female strength that so often lies behind the man.

Inquiring Mind

A warts and all account of a most extraordinary marriage and the collision of Tibetan and Western cultures. An intimate and unflinching portrait, it contains many surprises and demonstrates Trungpas undoubted genius for creating very provoking teaching situations.

Middle Way

Diana Mukpo has written a deeply intimate, insightful, raw and moving account of her life with her late husband. I don't think it would be possible to capture the essence of Chgyam Trungpa more accurately and beautifully than she has done here.

Dzigar Kongtrl, author of Its Up to You: The Practice of Self-Reflection on the Buddhist Path

A delightful and unusual book. Diana Mukpo offers readers new understandings of the life and teachings of Chgyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a remarkable person and irreplaceable teacher.

Pema Chdrn, author of When Things Fall Apart

An intimate and frank telling of the life of one of the great spiritual teachers of the twentieth century. Diana Mukpos extraordinary story as wife, lover, and friend to Chgyam Trungpa reveals her to be a courageous, independent woman with a depth of understanding of her husbands life and teaching. More than just a history, it is a timeless illumination of the genuine Buddhist path.

Melvin McLeod, editor of The Best Buddhist Writing series

This candid and unsparing book offers up wisdom, courage, and compassion, but also engages the reader in a journey far beyond the normal frames of reference for what spiritual experience actually is. An extraordinary love story as well as a remarkable portrait of a great spiritual teacher.

Rudy Wurlitzer, novelist and author of numerous screenplays including The Little Buddha

Taking us into the heart of Chgyam Trungpas crazy wisdom, exposing us to his genius and the craziness which I at least was never sure was not his madness, Dragon Thunder is a wild and unfathomable story, as heartbreaking and irresistible as Don Quixote. As a dharma book, its mix of sadness and wisdom is so complete that reading it becomes a practice in itself.

Lawrence Shainberg, author of Ambivalent Zen: One Mans Adventures on the Dharma Path

ABOUT THE BOOK

It was not always easy to be the gurus wife, writes Diana Mukpo.

But I must say, it was rarely boring. At the age of sixteen, Diana Mukpo left school and broke with her upper-class English family to marry Chgyam Trungpa, a young Tibetan lama who would go on to become a major figure in the transmission of Buddhism to the West. In a memoir that is at turns magical, troubling, humorous, and totally out of the ordinary, Diana takes us into her intimate life with one of the most influential and dynamic Buddhist teachers of our time.

Diana led an extraordinary and unusual life as the first lady of a burgeoning Buddhist community in the American 1970s and 80s. She gave birth to four sons, three of whom were recognized as reincarnations of high Tibetan lamas. It is not a simple matter to be a modern Western woman married to a Tibetan Buddhist master, let alone to a public figure who is sought out and adored by thousands of eager students. Surprising events and colorful people fill the narrative as Diana seeks to understand the dynamic, puzzling, and larger-than-life man she marriedand to find a place for herself in his unusual world.

Rich in ambiguity, Dragon Thunder is the story of an uncommon marriage and also a stirring evocation of the poignancy of life and of relationshipsfrom a woman who has lived boldly and with originality.

DIANA J. MUKPO was born in England in 1953. She attended the prestigious Benenden School until she left at the age of sixteen to marry the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chgyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Mrs. Mukpo moved to the United States in 1970, where she remained with Trungpa Rinpoche until his death in 1987. During their marriage, she pursued intensive study of dressage. She is now the owner and director of Windhorse Dressage, and she travels and teaches dressage clinics throughout the United States and Canada.

The compiler and editor of The Collected Works of Chgyam Trungpa, CAROLYN ROSE GIMIAN has been editing the works of Chgyam Trungpa for more than twenty-five years. She is the founding director of the Shambhala Archives, the archival repository for Chgyam Trungpas work in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

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DRAGON

THUNDER

My Life with Chgyam Trungpa

Diana J. Mukpo

with Carolyn Rose Gimian

Shambhala

Boston & London

2010

SHAMBHALA PUBLICATIONS, INC.

Horticultural Hall

300 Massachusetts Avenue

Boston, Massachusetts 02115

www.shambhala.com

2006 by Diana J. Mukpo and Carolyn R. Gimian

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mukpo, Diana J.

Dragon thunder: my life with Chgyam Trungpa/Diana J. Mukpo; with

Carolyn Rose Gimian.1st ed.

p. cm.

eISBN 978-0-8348-2161-3

ISBN 978-1-59030-256-9

ISBN 1-59030-256-7

1. Trungpa, Chgyam, 19391987. 2. LamasBiography. 3. Mukpo, Diana J.

I. Gimian, Carolyn Rose. II. Title.

BQ990.R867M86 2006

2943923092dc22

[B]

2006013421

To my family

Bringing together sun and moon,

Dragon thunder proclaims

Let us rejoice in the name of the Great Eastern Sun.

CHGYAM TRUNGPA, FROM THE UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPT THE MEMOIRS OF SIR NYIMA SANGPO, W.O.D.S.

CONTENTS

ABOUT CHGYAM TRUNGPA AND DIANA MUKPO

C hgyam Trungpa (19401987) is widely considered one of the most important and influential Buddhist teachers of our time. Born in Tibet, he was forced to flee to India in 1959, during the Chinese invasion of his country. In 1963, he traveled to England to study at Oxford University. While in England, he published Meditation in Action (1969), a classic of twentieth-century spiritual literature that has introduced hundreds of thousands of Westerners to Buddhism. Chgyam Trungpa moved to the United States in 1970 and went on to publish more than a dozen books on Buddhism and the spiritual path, including two widely popular and highly influential works, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (1973) and Shambhala: Sacred Path of the Warrior (1984).

In 1970, while still in Britain, Chgyam Trungpa married a young English woman named Diana Pybus. In Dragon Thunder Diana shares the intriguing and poignant story of their life together. Over the course of their seventeen-year marriage, Chgyam Trungpa established meditation centers around the United States, Canada, and Europe. He also founded Naropa, the first Buddhist-inspired university in North America. In addition, he attracted students from around the world and became friend and mentor to some of the leading artists of the day, including the poet Allen Ginsberg. A bride at age sixteen, Dianas narrative is an unusual coming-of-age story, as well as a rare glimpse into the personal life of one of the most enigmatic Buddhist teachers to come to the West.