His Eminence Garchen Rinpoche is a Drikung Kagyu Buddhist teacher whose home monastery is in Tibet and whose working base is in Chino Valley, Arizona. He has taught all over the world. There are thousands of us fortunate enough to have met him and become his students in Asia, North America, Latin America, Europe, Ukraine, Russia, and the Middle East. His living presence has guided my life these last 23 years.
He is an astute, deep, wise, loving person, remarkably open to many different kinds of people and cultures. Born in 1936 in Kham, Eastern Tibet, home of rugged frontier people and the Kagyu lineage of experiential wisdom meditation, his life has spanned many changes – for himself, his country, and the world.
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Rinpoche celebrated his 90th birthday this spring at The Garchen Buddhist Institute. Now he is very sick with a viral infection. All of us students are praying for his good health and long life. It feels like an important moment to share some of who he is. He has a different face for each of us. What I’ll write here is a small fractal in the much larger picture of His Eminence Garchen Rinpoche.
Dalai Lama and Garchen Rinpoche
The Buddha is the mind of love
Recognized at 7 as the reincarnation of the 8th Garchen Rinpoche, he journeyed by horse with his companions to Nangchen Gar Monastery. From the time he set out until the moment they reached their destination, he recalls that a compassionate dark figure travelled with him. This person was by his side throughout the journey. Yet when they arrived, the fellow traveler vanished. The person had not been a person at all; it was Mahakala, the Vajrayana Buddhist protector deity. Through out Rinpoche’s life the unseen world and the seen ones have moved in and out of one another. He has introduced us, his students, to this possibility.
Once many years ago at the Garchen Buddhist Institute (GBI), Rinpoche was giving a Chod teaching. As he sang, I could feel the many dis-embodied spirits of the Southwest land come, to receive the teachings and participate in the practice. It was a profound experience.
Afterwards there was a Q and A. I raised my hand to ask, What if someone died elsewhere, far from here? Could they still be a part of this practice? I had been a student of Rinpoche’s for a while at that time, and the look he gave me said it all. While loving as always, it was also one of total disgust, like, have you learned nothing at all about non-locality and the union of all experience?? The look was my answer. With his words he simply responded, Yes.
Whatever you do, think, may this benefit sentient beings
Rinpoche has opened us all to wider worlds, most especially the practice of bodhicitta. Bodhicitta is loving unconditionally, without grasping to an outcome, for the benefit of everyone. Over and over he has come back to this point. This life will end. You will not be able to take anything with you – not your relationships, possessions, power, or roles. The only thing you have that moves with you from life to life is your bodhicitta. Guard it with your life.
Once we understand the nature of afflictions, they can transform into timeless awareness
Once long ago Rinpoche posed a question to us in a story, something he had had to face in actuality. It was along the lines of If someone asked you to teach them, and later they tried to kill you, what would you do? This question bewilders me still, in its blending of past, present, and future realities. Yet given the world in which Garchen Rinpoche lived, this was a real possibility.
Garchen Rinpoche as young man in a flowery meadow in Tibet. While it is very blurry, you can get a sense of him as a determined meditator.
He completed a 2 ½ year retreat in his early twenties in the late 1950’s, as Mao’s armies invaded, to “liberate” his country .Rinpoche became a freedom fighter for Tibet. The documentary For the Benefit of All Beings depicts these times. The technology of war is a brutal one, with conquerors often possessing far more advanced methods of destruction than those they are attacking. Faced with Chinese fighter planes overhead, Rinpoche and his fellow Tibetan fighters would lie flat on the ground and cover themselves with leaves to escape detection. When no water was available, they drank their own urine.
(The novel The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste describes similar heart-wrenching war scenes in 1935 in Africa, as Mussolini’s Italian planes spew mustard gas on Ethiopian warriors, men and women. Most recently we can see the brutal outcome of AI technology use in warfare, when the US bombed a girl’s school in Iran, killing many children this year.)
Garchen Rinpoche’s experience was that the deity White Tara saved him multiple times from death in the war.
Captured by the Chinese, he spent the next twenty years of his life in a work prison camp. There were 800 people there, half of them monastics (monks and nuns). He met his root lama Khenpo Munsel there and studied secretly at night with a small group of fellow monastics. People who knew him said he would give away his own food to others who were starving. Less than 100 of his companions in this Chinese prison camp were alive a decade ago.
Released in early 1980, Rinpoche set out to restore what he could of his home Gargon Monastery, which had been destroyed. Many of the people close to him now in Arizona as he experiences this life-threatening illness were with him then, as young people. He told us a story once of finding two kids tussling in the rubble of the monastery at that time. They were later to become his two closest attendants, travelling the world with him.
Wisdom is being free from the thoughts which obscure our nature
These young people are now spiritual teachers themselves, like the Venerable Lama Thubten Nima of Los Angeles Rinchen Choling, Drupon Rinchen Dorje of Chicago Ratna Shri, Lama Zopa Gyamptso of Drikung Seattle, Lama Bunima, and the Venerable Khenpo Samdup, holding with Garchen Rinpoche in Arizona. Some like Khenpo Tenzin or the Venerable Drupon Palkyi, are much younger yet have been steadfastly with Rinpoche in his later years. Lopon Barbara Du Bois, Khenpo Tsultrim and others share his compassionate wisdom. Others, like our teacher the Venerable Traga Rinpoche hold with him from inside Tibet.
Love is the cause of happiness, protect it with patience
Many of us Westerners were not so young when we first encountered Garchen Rinpoche. Invited to the States in the late 1990s by Paljor and Tsering of Project Tibet here in Santa Fe, his early students were often older than him. At this time he was 67, He radiated the joy and openness that attracted so many of us to his teachings.
For me and many others, there was the shock of being recognized by Rinpoche. He looked at me like, of course I know you. Inside I knew he was right; there was a deep connection that went back to – when? Who knows how long?
Rinpoche actively practiced with us for decades. There are fine writers among the sangha, may they write their own experiences.
The difference between samsara and nirvana is the presence or absence of self-clinging
Rinpoche has referred to developments in science and technology as mundane wisdom. While some can destroy so much so quickly, other technologies have been used to spread bodhicitta. With the help of devoted adept artists and technicians, including Christiana Lundberg, director of GBI, the Garchen Institute’s You Tube channel spreads teachings quickly.
Garchen Rinpoche’s original Drikung Kagyu teacher, the founder of the order, Jigten Sumgon, 800 plus years ago attracted thousands by word of mouth. They would pitch their tents on the hillsides around Drikung Thil Monastery to receive summer teachings with the master. Many of us also found his disciple, the current Garchen Rinpoche through word of mouth. Thanks to the mundane wisdom of Internet technology, thousands more can see a teaching within a day of its being given, and they do. Garchen Rinpoche’s recent teachings are all available there.
Love is the sunlight of the mind.
Yet it is with supramundane wisdom that one wakes up, resting in the nature of mind as it is. (Garchen Rinpoche, the Commentary on the Essential Meaning of the Thirty-Seven Practices of Bodhisattvas, p. 87) This has been Rinpoche’s purpose, supporting us all in waking up. May we hold with him in love now.
When you become free of self grasping, your mind becomes one with the Guru’s mind.
8/3/26 Update: Rinpoche has asked that his students, anyone wanting to support this process, contemplate the 4 Applications of Mindfulness from the Buddha. There is an excellent teaching on this here from Khenpo Tenzin. This practice is traditionally a great way to spread benefit and wake up.
If you want to do a mantra practice, Rinpoche has asked us to do Amitabha with visualization. Find out about this here.
You can find updates about Dharma practice and Garchen Rinpoche’s progress here.
Photos: thanks to GBI and sangha members
Bolded Header quotes from HE Garchen Rinpoche, GBI
Bio: I’m a student of His Eminence Garchen Rinpoche, as well as a writer, Ayurveda health educator and Polarity Therapist in Santa Fe, NM. Any and all errors here are my own.
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