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Comings and Goings

Remarks on the Outer Life of Khenpo Tsültrim Gyamtso Rinpoche

Khenpo Tsültrim Gyamtso Rinpoche is a Buddhist master, renowned for possessing the intellect and knowledge of a scholar and the realization, humor, and creativity of a yogi. He is a teacher of H. H. the Seventeenth Gyalwang Karmapa and other high-ranking lamas of the Kagyu lineage. Yet people all over the world appreciate him for his willingness to share the most profound teachings of Buddhism with lamas and laypeople, women and men, and practitioners old and new alike.

Khenpo Rinpoche was born in 1934 to a nomad family in Eastern Tibet. When he was two years old, his father died suddenly. Thereafter, his mother devoted herself full-time to Dharma practice. As her youngest child, Rinpoche accompanied her on pilgrimages and to Dharma teachings, even staying by her side when she undertook extended retreats. By nature and nurture drawn to spiritual practice, Rinpoche left home at an early age to train with yogis who lived and practiced in the remote monasteries and caves of Eastern and Central Tibet.

After completing this early training, Rinpoche embraced the life of a yogi-ascetic. For years he wandered throughout Eastern and Central Tibet, undertaking solitary retreats in caves and charnel grounds to realize directly the teachings he had received.

While in such a retreat in 1959, a group of twenty-one nuns asked Rinpoche for protection from the Communist Chinese invaders. When they told him that H. H. the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and H. H. the Sixteenth Gyalwang Karmapa had already left Tibet, Rinpoche replied, “Then we are going, too!” Rinpoche led the nuns and other refugees over the Himalayas to safety in Bhutan.

Rinpoche spent the next nine years at a scholastic monastery for Tibetan refugees on the grounds of an old prison yard in Buxa Duar, India. There he studied intensively, mastering the teachings of all four schools of Tibetan Buddhism. He became renowned as a teacher of texts and meditation, and received a Geshe Lharampa degree from H. H. the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. He lived, practiced, and taught in Bhutan from 1968 until 1977.

At the request of H. H. the Sixteenth Gyalwang Karmapa, in 1977 Rinpoche began teaching Dharma and classical Tibetan Dharma language abroad. For thirty years, Rinpoche traveled and taught extensively in Europe, North America, South America, Asia, Africa, and Australia. Rinpoche was a pioneer in giving careful, long-term training to Buddhist translators. During this time, Rinpoche also spent several months a year training a new generation of Kagyu khenpos at the Karmapa’s Nalanda Institute in Sikkim, India.

Rinpoche is committed to providing nuns with the same opportunities for study and practice that monks traditionally have. To that end, he established one nunnery in Nepal and one in Bhutan. The women at these nunneries study and practice the profound view and meditation, and sing and dance to the profound songs of realization.

For the years Rinpoche spent teaching worldwide, when asked, “Where do you live?” he usually replied, “On the planet Earth.” At this time in his life, however, Rinpoche has retired from traveling and teaching publicly, and spends his time between his nunneries in Bhutan and Nepal.

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