Thrangu Rinpoche at A Glance

Kenchen Trangu Rinpoche is the ninth incarnation of the Kagyu school or lineage of which Sherap Gyaltsen was the first.  Trangu was born in 1933 in Kham, Tibet.  He was recognized as a Tulku at the age of 4.  He entered Thrangu Monestary at the age of seven and stayed until age 16, when he did a long retreat.  At 23 he received full ordination from the Karmapa.  When the communists invaded Rinpoche was 27 and he left Tibet for India.  At 35 he became a Geshe.  Then he became the Abbot of Rumtek Monestary in Sikkim.   He later built Tara Abbey in Kathmandu.  In October 1999 he consecrated the college at Sarnath, which accepts students from all the different traditions of Buddhism and is open to Western students as well.    Thrangu Rinpoche is a recognized master of Mahamudra meditation and has taught it in over twenty-five countries.  Recently, because of his knowledge of the dharma, he was appointed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama to be the personal tutor for the recently escaped Seventeenth Karmapa.

Selected Thrangu Rinpoche Quote:

Question: Would you talk about nyams in relationship to non-conceptual wisdom?

Rinpoche: The sorts of temporary experiences or nyams in Tibetan are not faults, they are good qualities in the sense that they come about through experience in meditation. However, if one becomes attached to such experiences, then they lead to bondage and in that way they become faults. There are three types of temporary experiences: a temporary experience of happiness, a temporary experience of clarity and a temporary experience of non-conceptuality. As for the first, happiness, there is happiness in body and happiness in mind. As for clarity, it means feeling that one's meditation is going extremely well, becoming very bright and clear. As for non-conceptuality, it is the sense that the stream of conceptuality has been severed or cut and that thoughts have just stopped. The problem is that one becomes attached to such experiences and if one becomes attached to them, then the force of one's meditation decreases. So from that point of view, it is important to abandon attachment to temporary experiences.

The above was excerpted from Maitreya's Distinguishing Dharma and Dharmata by Kenchen Thrangu Rinpoche

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