Cutting through ego

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... such a narcissistic project! 

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Trungpa at Oxford University? Really?

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  Trungpa studied at Oxford University, did he? Well now we know. One of the main pillars of Trungpa’s story as told by his followers is that he was extraordinarily brilliant – "flawed but nevertheless brilliant". One of the main pillars of that notion is that he “got himself into Oxford” (see, for example, 2 minutes into the trailer for “Crazy Wisdom”, a filmic eulogy to Trungpa, watchable at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80jGSadccmY ). In the light of his background as a refugee from mysterious Tibet, this appears particularly impressive. The claim has been woven so deeply into the story told by his followers, and repeated so often, that many observers will take its truth for granted. The glamour of being “an Oxford man” was encouraged by Trungpa himself, as witness the elocution lessons he gave to his followers in “how to speak properly”, which is to say to imitate what he thought of as his Oxford accent. Yet on close examination it appears to be a fable. The trut...
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It is not yet a quite a year since Thrangu Rinpoche passed on, just short of his 90th birthday. And while it could not remotely be said that I was any kind of "close" student of his, I would claim that he was very important to me. I first met him in 1979 in what I recall as an up-market apartment in Compayne  Gardens, London, where he gave a White Tars empowerment and teachings to the packed assembly, and a few weeks later when he gave the Karma Pakshi empowerment in Edgbaston, Birmingham. At that time, all I knew was that he was an important teacher in the Karma Kagyu scheme of things, but I had no idea quite how important. We sat around casually in the back room of Karma Ling in Carlyle Road, chatting. IIRC Peter Roberts interpreted. I do remember we students struggling to grasp the shape of a "chöjung", and fashioning one from carboard cut from a breakfast cereal box. Sprayed with red paint (I had a rusty old red car parked outside, but I'll refrain from rela...
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