Remembering Thrangu Rinpoche - with gratitude

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 relating the stories about its door lock and its distributor) I was pleased to be told, "you got it"!

Other teachings followed occasionally - Chenrezi, Dorje Sempa and White Tara empowerments again in the 1980s, and I recall talking to him in his rooms at the top of his monastery in Kathmandu in the early '90s. In those days you could just rock up to the monastery at the right time and ask if you might see the Rinpoche, to be told, "Sure, he's upstairs - I'll show you the way."

My last personal experience was again a Chenrezi empowerment in 2017 in Kathmandu. That was a fun moment at the culmination of a week (or more?) of mass recitation of the Mani mantra. I was not amongst the great and good,  so sat outside in a marquee with a couple of hundred others, mostly Tibetans with a scattering of long-nosed whiteys like myself. Why was it fun? Because the marqee nearly collapsed, only rescued by mghty efforts from more than a few muscular young men. Thank you, young men - without you there would have been plenty of injuries and a few likely deaths! 

On that trip to Nepal I visited the monastery/centre he founded at Namo Buddha, one of the most beautiful places I know. You can of course Google for pictures of the centre, but here is a view of the (famous) stupas in the village below the monastery. A wedding was underway, so it was a day of both worldly and spiritual happiness! 

My own library includes 14 of his books, but there are something like 80 to his name in English. And that brings me to my main reason for this post. I recently spent out on a collecton of all those English works as e-books, obtainable from Namo Buddha Publications for... USD 30! How's that for not being money-grubbing?