Wes Nisker, a Buddhist teacher, award-winning broadcaster, comedian, counterculture figure, founding coeditor of Inquiring Mind, and author has died. He was 80 years old. 

Nisker was born in 1942 in Nebraska to Jewish immigrant parents. He attended the University of Minnesota and has said he first became interested in Buddhism after seeing Alan Watts speak there in 1965. He arrived in San Francisco in the 1960s, as he said in an interview with SF Gate in 2003, “too late” to join the beatniks—he was particularly inspired by Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder—so he was “assigned to the hippies instead.” “To this day, I consider myself a kind of mongrel bohemian, with a beatnik head and a hippie heart,” Nisker said in that interview. 

In the late 1960s and in the 70s, Nisker was heard on the San Francisco radio stations KSAN and later KFOG. It was on the former station that he coined a phrase that he is often remembered for: “If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.” His broadcasts combined news, commentary, music, and remixed audio; Nisker once said his news show was the only one you could dance to. Nisker was also known for his vox pop, or person on the street, interviews in the years leading up to television’s media takeover.

Nisker earned the moniker “Scoop” from activist Abbie Hoffman when Nisker was covering the Chicago Seven trial, when  a group of men were charged by the US government with conspiracy to incite a riot during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago 1968. 

Nisker studied with Asian and Western Buddhist teachers for years, and eventually started teaching too; he was a teacher at Spirit Rock, among other places. In 1971, Nisker attended S.N. Goenka’s first 10-day Vipassana retreat in Bodhgaya, India. Also in attendance were Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, and Ram Dass. In 1984, following the encouragement of Insight Meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, Nisker cofounded and coedited Inquiring Mind with Barbara Gates. The semiannual journal, “dedicated to the creative transmission of Buddhadharma to the West,” continued publishing articles, essays, poetry, and more until 2015. The full digital archive, with a regular column by Nisker, has been completed and is housed by the Sati Center for Buddhist Studies online. The journal remains available online, and in the days following Nisker’s death, the homepage included his poem, “Why I Meditate (After Allen Ginsberg).”

Gates, recalling her longtime friend and collaborator, said: “Wes was a wonderful interviewer. He liked to do interviews as a team with me and other dharma friends. His favorite interviewees included Gary Snyder, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Joanna Macy and Ram Dass, to name a few. He also loved poetry. He delighted in selecting poems for each issue of the Mind for a section we called “Poems and Not Poems.” April Fools Day was his favorite holiday. He was a playful punster.” 

In the early 2000s, Nisker performed as what he believed was the “world’s first Buddhist stand-up comedian.” A 2005 interview between Nisker and Andrew Cooper, Tricycle’s features editor, on the topic of being Buddhist and Jewish contains a number of zingers:

Which Jewish writer would you rather have as a dharma student, Marcel Proust or Franz Kafka? Oh, without hesitation I’ll take Kafka. You certainly wouldn’t have to explain the First Noble Truth to him, and furthermore, he already knows that he is part cockroach, something most Buddhists don’t understand until after many years of practice.

Following Nisker’s death, Cooper shared a memory of Nisker via email: “I remember once years ago walking around SF with him as we tried to have a conversation but every few steps someone who was obviously a good friend from somewhere would stop us to catch up a little. It was a little like walking with someone famous, but not really because there was in each stop something meaningful exchanged. I was at first frustrated by what I viewed as interruptions but eventually it clicked that I was watching something really cool in itself, one little bit of beauty after another.”

Nisker authored numerous books, including Buddha’s Nature: A Practical Guide to Enlightenment; The Essential Crazy Wisdom; If You Don’t Like the News … Go Out and Make Some of Your Own; The Big Bang, the Buddha, and the Baby Boom; Being Nature: A Down-to-Earth Guide to the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, and more.   

In 2016, Nisker was inducted into the 11th Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame.

Last winter, Spirit Rock celebrated Nisker’s 80th birthday, according to a remembrance disseminated by Jack Kornfield. “When one of your best friends and spiritual brothers dies, it’s hard to put into words all that it means. Sad and tender, hard to fathom and also a loving relief for his release from a deteriorating body,” Kornfield wrote. “He loved to invite awe of the cosmos, he opened windows into the ecological mysteries, he smiled at the absurdity of human society, and carried a playful endless enormous creativity and deep Dharma vision. And here’s one of the best things…..Wes was alway kind. What a beautiful thing to say of someone’s life!”

Tricycle published an excerpt from his last book, entitled “Making Friends with Death: A meditation for new beginnings” in the spring 2023 magazine. 

In an undated post on his website, called “The Practice of Geezing,” Nisker humorously and sincerely reflected on his body and mind growing older.

Wandering the hills of Northern California, I carry the realization that I will someday be leaving this place I love, forever. Never again will I see the great pines waving through the in-flowing fog, or the gnarled sculpture of the oaks standing firm; or smell the vibrant decay of the woods punctuated with the tang of fennel and eucalyptus—all of it will vanish, along with my senses themselves.

Nisker, who had been living with Lewy body dementia, was surrounded by friends when he died. Condolences continue to roll in on his Facebook page. Details on a service to follow.

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Now in its 18th year, the biannual Sakyadhita International Conference took place in Seoul, South Korea this year, from June 23 to 27. Hosted by the Korean Bhiksuni Association and Sakyadhita Korea, three thousand women came together from all over the world to listen to talks, attend diverse workshops, meditate, chant, and think together. As participants and media alike have already expressed, the conference was brilliantly organized, with many moments to savor and enjoy. 

It was, however, the size of the gathering that really impressed me. Sakyadhita has never been so big, so vivaciously ambitious. Three thousand women is unprecedented in the conference’s history. When I first walked into the venue, I felt like I was in a stadium (not the feeling Sakyadhita normally generates). The opening ceremony included strobe lights no less!

But once settled in, I realized I was wholly engulfed in a sea of boisterous, joyful Buddhist women, and what was strange quickly felt familiar. Perhaps even ancestral. I felt as though I had become part of the kind of  gathering that has been happening since the beginning of time.

It was not just the size of this event that mesmerized me, but how it was organized and cared for. The Korean contingent prepared meals for the entire assembly three times a day. For three thousand of us. While a huge community of women talked, learned, and studied together, others were brewing giant pots of beautiful vegetarian food—noodles and rice, kimchi (so much delicious kimchi!), salads and soups, and so much more. Women chopped, sliced, spiced, and stirred, working with busy hands in the heavy summer heat so that other women could sit together and explore.

We lined up in organized rows when a meal was ready. Volunteers greeted us and handed us plates, chopsticks, and smiles. Others heaped piles of food onto our empty plates. “I have enough!” I would try to say, but I would be met with maternal nudging—“Take some more,” “Try some of this,” “Make sure to have dessert.” Three times a day, for three thousand of us, they made sure we ate well. 

So much happened at this meeting, so many memories are competing in my mind, but I cannot help but return to the food that we (the great womanly masses that we were) feasted on. And to the women who coordinated almost seamlessly (or so it seemed to me) to ensure everyone was adequately cared for and fed. Food was sometimes put directly into my mouth, so unstoppable was the enthusiasm. There is nothing like food to bring people together. There is something ancestral about that, too. 

I have attended many Sakyadhita meetings over the years, and it is always a special gift. The magnitude of this one, though, the sheer size of it, made this meeting feel like a tidal wave. No longer a few hundred hopefuls under a tent, Sakyadhita had become a force. The glass ceiling has no chance of remaining intact when so many women are pushing up against it. 

One afternoon, I was having lunch with the abbess of a nunnery from Northern India. It was her first Sakyadhita experience, and she was utterly overwhelmed by all that she saw. I asked her what she hoped to bring back to her nunnery. 

“I won’t bring anything back,” she replied. 

I lay down my chopsticks. “What do you mean?”

She looked at me carefully for a moment. Then she looked around at the many monastic women from around the world, sitting together at folding tables, eating as a community.

“I can never explain what I have seen here,” she said. “My nuns won’t understand. So I will make sure they come next time, so they can see this for themselves.”

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Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, a Tibetan scholar, Vajrayana master, and author of hundreds of books and commentaries on the dharma, died on June 4 at Thrangu Tashi Yangtse Monastery in Nepal. He was 91.

According to a statement on Thrangu Rinpoche’s website:

On June 4, the full moon day of the fourth Tibetan month, Saga Dawa—the sacred anniversary of the Buddha Shakyamuni, our incomparably kind teacher, passing into parinirvana—Rinpoche decided that he had completed his activity for this life. At 1:30 pm, he lay down in the same posture as the Buddha Shakyamuni had lain in when passing into parinirvana and then displayed the appearance of his mind dissolving into the undefiled, luminous dharma expanse and passing into peace. Immediately, Kyabje Lodrö Nyima Rinpoche offered Rinpoche a reminder of the tukdam meditation. 

Thrangu Rinpoche, whose full title is The Very Venerable Ninth Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, was one of the highest lamas in the Karma Kagyu tradition, one of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism, headed by the 17th Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje (one of two claimants to the title). His legacy includes establishing monasteries, nunneries, and other Buddhist organizations throughout the East and West, as well as preserving key Tibetan texts following China’s invasion of Tibet. He also served as the 17th Karmapa’s personal tutor.

Born in Ralungda, a small village in eastern Tibet, in 1933, Thrangu Rinpoche was identified as a tulku, or the reincarnation of an enlightened teacher, when he was 2 years old. At the age of 5 he went to live at Thrangu Monastery. His studies at the then newly established monastic college focused on the writings of Mikyö Dorje, the 8th Karmapa, and other masters in the Karma Kagyu lineage, according to a biography published by Thrangu Rinpoche’s publishing house, Namo Buddha Publications. 

In 1958, Thrangu Rinpoche fled Tibet, fearing persecution from the People’s Republic of China, which had been occupying the area since the beginning of the decade and repressing Tibetans’ freedom, religion, and other ways of life. Thrangu Rinpoche’s group, which included Khenpo Karthar, Traleg Rinpoche, Zuru Tulku, and other monks from Thrangu Monastery, survived a treacherous, monthslong journey on horseback toward Lhasa, often going hungry and eating snow to stay hydrated. In March 1959, they continued traveling toward India, and spent more than a month at the Bhutanese border before being granted permission to cross into India. Thrangu Rinpoche was just one of an estimated 80,000 Tibetans who fled to India in the late fifties and early sixties.  

In the 1960s, Thrangu Rinpoche passed his geshe exams. (The geshe degree is often equated as a monastic doctorate degree, and training for these exams can take some two decades of study.) Following the successful completion of his exams, Thrangu Rinpoche was named abbot of Rumtek Monastery in the Indian state of Sikkim, and also the Nalanda Institute for Higher Buddhist Studies. 

In the mid-seventies, Thrangu Rinpoche began teaching in the West, and eventually founded monasteries, nunneries, and dharma centers in Tibet, Nepal, India, Bhutan, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Canada, and throughout the United States and Europe. Notable projects include building a monastery, and later monastic college, at Namo Buddha in Nepal (Thrangu Tashi Yangtse Monastery); a nunnery near Swayambhunath, Nepal (Thrangu Tara Abbey); and the Vajra Vidya Institute in Sarnath, India, close to the site where the Buddha gave his first sermon, at Deer Park. There are nearly 1,000 monks and nuns in Thrangu Rinpoche’s sangha who are offered equal opportunities to study, according to his website. (Women were first allowed to take the geshema, or doctorate, exams in 2012.) Thrangu Rinpoche established Thrangu Monastery Canada in Richmond, British Columbia, in 2010, which is his North American seat, and Crestone, Colorado’s Vajra Vidya Retreat Center in 2001. 

He also worked to rebuild Thrangu Monastery, where he spent his early years before fleeing Tibet, first following its destruction in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and then following a massive earthquake in 2010 that destroyed the complex again and killed dozens of monks.

Thrangu Rinpoche was known for making complex teachings accessible for students and preserving Tibetan texts nearly lost during the Chinese invasion. He published extensively, authoring hundreds of commentaries. His books include The Mahamudra Lineage Prayer: A Guide to Practice; Advice from a Yogi: An Explanation of a Tibetan Classic on What Is Most Important (read an excerpt here); Tilopa’s Wisdom: His Life and Teachings on the Ganges Mahamudra; Naropa’s Wisdom: His Life and Teachings on Mahamudra; and Vivid Awareness: The Mind Instructions of Khenpo Gangshar.

Thrangu Rinpoche’s humanitarian projects include the building of a boarding school for 500 students from remote Himalayan villages in Kathmandu. In 2021, as Nepalese people suffered from COVID-19, as well as  floods and landslides, monks and volunteers from Thrangu Monastery donated 200 oxygen concentrators to the Nepalese government and distributed nonperishable food packages to families in need in Kathmandu’s slums and other areas.

Thrangu Media’s Facebook page contains details about ceremonies honoring Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche. 

As is traditional, there will be forty-nine days of practice, and His Holiness the 17th Gyalwang Karmapa has instructed us to begin with the Akshobya practice. A mandala of the Buddha Akshobhya has been arranged in the main shrine hall of Namo Buddha’s Thrangu Tashi Yangtse Monastery with many offerings and pictures of our precious guru, and over four hundred monastics are practicing the puja, headed by the Venerable Zuri Rinpoche, Venerable Lodro Nyima Rinpoche, Choje Lama Wangchuk, and Venerable Tulku Damcho Rinpoche.

In addition, on the evening of June 8th, monks and students gathered online and in person with His Holiness the 17th Gyalwang Karmapa and the Gyalwang Drukpa to recite aspirations, including the “The Short Vajradhara Prayer,” “Calling the Guru from Afar,” and prayers for Rinpoche’s swift rebirth. This puja will continue daily until the forty-ninth day after Rinpoche’s parinirvana.

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Legendary soul singer Tina Turner, known for her electrifying live performances, died in her home in Küsnacht, Switzerland, on Wednesday, May 24. She was 83 years old. 

“With her, the world loses a music legend and a role model,” said Bernard Doherty, Turner’s publicist, who did not share a cause of death. According to the New York Times, Turner suffered a stroke and was also battling other illnesses, including kidney disease, in recent years. 

Born Anna Mae Bullock in 1939 in Brownsville, Tennessee, Turner first took the stage at a club in East St. Louis where she used to go to hear Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm. Drummer Eugene Washington invited her to sing one night, and the rest is history. The band became the Ike and Tina Turner Revue in 1960 and Ike and Tina romantic partners until they later divorced in 1978. After a few years out of the spotlight, Turner soared in popularity with the 1984 hit album Private Dancer, and she became one of the most successful solo artists of all time.

Turner was also a practitioner of Nichiren Buddhism, which she says  changed her life when she started practicing in 1973. As former senior editor at Tricycle and the editor of the Tricycle Haiku Challenge Clark Strand wrote in an interview with Turner in 2020, “Tina has overcome domestic abuse, discrimination, professional setbacks, life-threatening illness, and devastating personal loss. Throughout it all, she has credited her practice of Nichiren Buddhism as the source of her hope for a better world and her determination to overcome every obstacle in her life.”

Speaking about how chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo helped her during a time of personal crisis, Turner said, “Not long after I started chanting, I began to see that the power I needed to change my life was already within me.” In her interview with Strand, Turner also spoke about why, as a musician, she was drawn to chanting; how she still holds on to the Baptist influences of her childhood; and how to approach the divisiveness of our times. 

“Buddhism has taught me that hidden inside of our challenges are the lessons we must learn in order to break through to a better life. As hard as that might be to grasp in the midst of difficult times, when we can see our problems from that perspective, things naturally change. Then even the impossible becomes possible.” 

Read Tricycle’s full interview with Tina Turner here.

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Jules Shuzen Harris Roshi, a Soto Zen priest who founded the Soji Zen Center in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, died on May 8 at his home in Lansdowne, near Philadelphia. He was 83 and had suffered from “a prolonged period of complicated health issues,” according to a statement by John Ango Gruber Sensei, his dharma heir. A dharma successor of Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara, abbot of the Village Zendo in New York City, Shuzen Roshi was a member of the White Plum Asanga established by Taizan Maezumi Roshi and part of the Zen Peacemakers sangha founded by Bernie Tetsugen Glassman Roshi, as well as a member of the Soto Zen Buddhist Association and American Zen Teachers Association. He had been a Zen Buddhist practitioner for more than 40 years. 

A dedicated and much-loved dharma teacher, Shuzen Roshi had, despite ill health, continued “showing up, week after week, to sit with us, chant with us, see students in interviews, and offer the teachings of the Dharma in both his words and his example,” Ango Sensei said. 

“How did he do it?” Roshi Enkyo mused. In a message to Tricycle, she wrote:

Shuzen Roshi embodied the intimate teachings of Zen practice. He just naturally expressed the spirit and wisdom of Zen. We sat together, laughed together, and always, the Dharma emerged from his being. He manifested the joy of forms in Zen practice, as well as a longtime devotion to the disciplines of Japanese fencing and sword.

As a longtime psychotherapist and educator, Shuzen Roshi brought contemporary skills to his many years of Zen study. He dedicated his life to teaching Zen, to serving those who practiced with him, using all the tools he had honed in his many years of a life that truly expressed the compassion and wisdom of contemporary Zen practice. We will miss his intelligence and compassion—and his great heart!

Shuzen Roshi was born Jules Harris on December 6, 1939 in Chester, Pennsylvania. In a piece on gratitude posted on Tricycle’s website, he reflected on his family: 

I am ever grateful to my paternal grandmother who taught me discipline and the meaning of hard work. I am filled with deep admiration for my father who became wiser as I grew older. I still hear his voice saying, “Watch what people do, not what they say.” His homily informs me daily that Zen is a verb.

Harris earned a doctorate in education from Columbia University, with a concentration in applied human development. As a psychotherapist, he “found creative ways to synthesize Western psychology and Zen to achieve dramatic results with his patients,” a biography on the Soji Center website states. As a black belt in Kendo (Japanese fencing) and a fourth-degree black belt in Iaido (drawing and cutting with a Samurai sword), he focused on the relationship between Zen and the martial arts, and founded swordsmanship schools in Albany, New York and Salt Lake City, Utah. 

Shuzen Roshi had circled around Buddhism until he met Maezumi Roshi at a retreat in Vermont. Maezumi sent him to Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper, New York, where he practiced under John Daido Loori Roshi. In 1998, he moved to Salt Lake City to study with Dennis Genpo Merzel Roshi, abbot of the Kanzeon Zen Center, receiving denkai (transmission of the precepts) from Genpo Roshi in May 2002. 

After moving back East in 2004, Shuzen Roshi founded the Soji Zen Center in 2005 as a place, he said, “where people can go to slow down, meditate, and learn about the healing qualities of the mind. We all agree that training the body through exercise and diet is beneficial, but rarely in Western society do we focus on awakening the healing energies in our brain.” In the White Plum tradition, Soji combines elements of both Soto and Rinzai Zen, incorporating Soto meditation and Rinzai koan study. 

In August 2006, Shuzen Roshi received hoshi—the rank of dharma holder—from Roshi Enkyo in a ceremony at the Grail, the Village Zendo’s summer retreat center in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York. In 2007, he received shiho—full ordination as a sensei—from Roshi Enkyo. Then, in December 2019, he received inka (dharma transmission) from her, becoming a roshi and Roshi Enkyo’s second dharma heir. 

In his book Zen Beyond Mindfulness: Using Buddhist and Modern Psychology for Transformational Practice, published in 2019, Shuzen Roshi outlined what he saw as the two main challenges facing American Buddhists today. One is “‘spiritual bypassing”—using what he called “pretend enlightenment”—to avoid dealing with psychological issues. The other is “settling for secularized forms of Buddhism or mindfulness that have lost touch with the deeper philosophical and ethical underpinnings” of the tradition. The solution he proposed blends rigorous meditation practice, intense study of Buddhist psychology, and a psychotherapeutic technique called “Mind-Body Bridging.” In an article for Tricycle, Shuzen Roshi explained why meditation practice alone could not resolve anger and psychological insight also was needed: “Meditation enables us to see the transparency of our anger, and this is a good start, but we can still remain blinded to the mechanics of our anger.”

Shuzen Roshi’s syncretic approach drew praise from Buddhists and mental health experts alike. “Dr. Harris clearly has a love affair with truth and the potentiality of human individual evolution,” observed Conrad Fischer, MD, program director of the Brookdale Hospital Medical Center. Gerry Shishin Wick Roshi, abbot of Great Mountain Zen Center in Berthoud, Colorado, called Zen Beyond Mindfulness “a significant contribution” to the dialogue between Buddhism and Western psychology that could help Zen students “dissolve emotional and psychological barriers to deepening their meditation practice.” Roshi Enkyo, in her foreword to the book, wrote, “I can’t think of a more qualified and appropriate person to take on the task of developing a contemporary technique for using mindfulness as a path of self-discovery and peace.” Publishers Weekly, an authoritative voice in the book world, called Zen Beyond Mindfulness “a refreshing alternative to the profusion of mindfulness literature.” 

Roshi Shuzen was among the small group of Black Zen teachers in America today and one of the only roshis—a responsibility he took very seriously. He was a tireless worker and even as his health waned, he insisted on maintaining a full schedule. The day before he died, he held private meetings with thirteen students. “He never gave up,” Brenda Jinshin Waters, a member of the Soji board of directors, recalled. “He wanted to make the dharma available to everyone, regardless of race, color of skin, or socio-economic status.”

♦

For a look at Jules Shuzen Harris’s daily routine, see “A Day in the Dharma” in the Spring 2019 issue of Tricycle.

Correction: This article originally said that Jules Shuzen Harris moved to Salt Lake City in 1999, but he actually moved in 1998.

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Rigdzin Shikpo, a Tibetan Buddhist master in the Nyingma tradition and the head of the Longchen Foundation lineage, an international community of teachers and practitioners in the Mahayana Dzogchen (Maha Ati) tradition, died on April 28, 2023, at his home in Oxford, UK, where he lived with his partner, Sally Sheldrake. He was 88. At his death, Rigdzin Shikpo had practiced Buddhism for more than sixty years. 

A statement issued by the Longchen Foundation said that Rigdzin Shikpo had “worked tirelessly for the good of others and with enormous care painstakingly crafted a system of teachings and practices unique to the Longchen Foundation yet authentically rooted in the great Tibetan lineages he received from his many teachers.” A “meditator’s meditator,” he was admired as a brilliant scholar and scintillating teacher whose direct approach was well suited to Western students.

Born Michael Hookham on April 10, 1935, Rigdzin Shikpo grew up in Dalston, East London. He was interested in Buddhism from a young age, and later, while working as a physicist and mathematician, studied with Theravada monks for nine years and was closely associated with the Buddhist Society in London. In 1965, he met the Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who became his root teacher. At the time Trungpa Rinpoche, who had fled Tibet during the Chinese takeover in 1959, was studying at Oxford University. 

Trungpa Rinpoche entrusted Rigdzin Shikpo with some of the highest Nyingma teachings, and together they translated key Dzogchen texts and Mahayana sutras from Tibetan into English. Meanwhile, Rigdzin Shikpo also studied with Chögyam Trungpa’s teacher, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, a celebrated meditation master and scholar who was a lineage holder in the Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya, and Gelugpa traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. 

In 1965, Khyentse Rinpoche and Chögyam Trungpa established the Longchen Foundation to train practitioners in Dzogchen and appointed Rigdzin Shikpo as director. Longchen, named after the great Nyingma master Longchen Rabjam, integrates Mahayana and Dzogchen teachings in a path of training for Westerners. 

After Chögyam Trungpa moved to the United States to teach in 1970, Rigdzin Shikpo continued to study with him, making periodic trips to America. At Khyentse Rinpoche’s direction, he also took further instruction in Dzogchen from Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche, one of Khyentse Rinpoche’s students. (Following the deaths of Trungpa Rinpoche in 1987 and Khyentse Rinpoche in 1991, Khenpo Rinpoche became Rigdzin Shikpo’s main teacher.)

In 1990, Rigdzin Shikpo began a traditional three-year retreat under the guidance of Khenpo Rinpoche. Upon its conclusion, he was given his dharma name: Rigdzin (“awareness holder”) and Shikpo (“beyond concepts”). 

Though Rigdzin Shikpo was a lineage heir to Chögyam Trungpa and they had a strong teacher-student relationship, he was not part of the Shambhala community. In her book Luminous Emptiness, Francesca Fremantle, a teacher in the Longchen mandala (community), wrote of Rigdzin Shikpo:

With a deep knowledge of Buddhism he has an extraordinary gift for expressing it in vivid and poetic ways and for creating links to many aspects of Western culture. Above all, he has an attitude of complete devotion, so that his mind has become one with the guru. Listening to him talk about dharma, I often feel as though Trungpa Rinpoche is speaking through his voice. Without him I would never have gained the experience or the confidence to write about these profound teachings . . . [Rigdzin Shikpo] answered my innumerable questions with endless patience and interest.

Rigdzin Shikpo frequently taught in Oxford and traveled once or twice a year to Germany to teach. He also had a small center on the Llyn Peninsula in northwest Wales for senior students. The Longchen Foundation has local groups in London, Bristol, and Oxford run by Rigdzin Shikpo’s students and virtual groups that reach sangha members in Europe, Canada, Mexico, India, and the US. Among the teachers and meditation leaders is Sally Sheldrake, Rigdzin Shipo’s partner, known as the “Mother” of the Longchen mandala. The Longchen, or “Indestructible Heart Essence,” path of training developed by Rigdzin Shikpo takes students through a progression of “gates” from the foundational Path of Freedom and the Lion’s Roar program, which introduces formless meditation, to advanced training in Dzogchen. 

Well-versed in Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana Buddhism, as well as Dzogchen, Rigdzin Shikpo translated scholarly works and also wrote books for a wider audience. His best-known book is Never Turn Away: The Buddhist Path Beyond Hope and Fear, which encourages readers to embrace all life experiences and not shirk possibilities—an approach, he said, that might be called “the path of embarrassment.” 

In her editor’s preface to his book Openness Clarity Sensitivity, Lama Shenpen Hookham (née Susan Kathryn Rowan), spiritual director of the Awakened Heart Sangha in North Wales, summed up his teaching style: 

Rigdzin Shikpo has found a way of talking us through our self-doubt and hesitations, opening the way for us to relate properly to the teachings of the great Dzogchen Gurus of the Kagyu-Nyingma Tibetan Buddhist tradition. . . . [He] concentrates on helping us to connect to the immediacy of our ordinary experience. Every now and then, however, he makes a sudden leap and we catch a tantalizing glimpse of some vaster vision, a sense that we are being led on a profound and even perhaps a shocking new perspective on reality.

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Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche, a revered Tibetan Buddhist teacher, scholar, and beloved meditation master widely known as the cofounder and spiritual director of the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT), died Thursday, April 13, at 9:30 a.m. Nepal time, at Karuna Hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal. He was 76.

A public notice posted on the FPMT website just after his death announced:

Rinpoche had been up in the mountains in the Tsum Valley since Monday and had to be brought down urgently as [he] was experiencing altitude sickness.

On arrival back in Kathmandu this morning, Rinpoche stopped breathing. The main doctor at Karuna Hospital tried for some time to revive Rinpoche but that was not successful. 

The notice further stated that following his death, Lama Zopa had returned to Kopan Monastery in Kathmandu, where prayers and pujas were being offered for him. Along with FPMT, Kopan was cofounded by Lama Zopa and his close teacher and collaborator Lama Thubten Yeshe. 

Established in 1975 by Lama Zopa and Lama Thubten Yeshe, FPMT is described on its website as “an organization devoted to preserving and spreading Mahayana Buddhism worldwide by creating opportunities to listen, reflect, meditate, practice, and actualize the unmistaken teachings of the Buddha and based on that experience spreading the Dharma to sentient beings.” A vast international network, FPMT includes dharma centers, humanitarian and educational services, and myriad projects ranging from food banks, hospitals, senior centers, schools, and animal liberation efforts to dharma programs and text translation. 

Lama Zopa was born Dawa Chotar in the Mount Everest region of Thangme, Nepal, in 1946. His father died when he was very young, and his mother struggled to provide for the boy and his siblings. Though he became a distinguished member of the Gelugpa school, when he was 3 or 4 years old—sources vary—he was recognized as a tulku, the reincarnation of a prominent Nyingma yogi, the Lawudo Lama Kunsang Yeshe, who had meditated for twenty years in a cave near Lama Zopa’s birthplace. 

At age 4, Lama Zopa was sent to Rolwaling Monastery, close to Nepal’s border with Tibet. In an autobiography posted in the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive, Lama Zopa described his early life and said, “I was very naughty at that time and only wanted to play, so I wouldn’t stay in the monastery.” Stay he did, however. And when he was 7 or 8, after reading the life story of the Buddhist saint Milarepa, he felt “a strong desire in [his] heart to be a really good practitioner by finding an infallible guru like Marpa, just as Milarepa had.”

At age 10, Lama Zopa was taken by his uncles on a pilgrimage to Tibet. He refused to return home, saying he wanted to study the dharma, and he remained at the monastery of a Gelugpa tulku, Domo Geshe Rinpoche. He described those years in a memoir, The Door to Satisfaction. 

When the Chinese occupied Tibet in 1959 and “the threat of torture was imminent,” he later wrote, Lama Zopa fled to Bhutan and then to a Tibetan refugee camp in Buxa Duar, in West Bengal, India. A British concentration camp in World War II, the Indian government had allowed the Tibetan Government-in-Exile to use it to house monks from the Sera, Ganden, and Drepung Monasteries in Tibet who wanted to continue their studies. After six months in which he went to Delhi, contracted tuberculosis and smallpox, and studied English at Freda Bedi’s school for incarnate tulkus, Lama Zopa returned to Buxa, where he studied meditation with Geshe Rabten Rinpoche and found his root guru, Kyabje Trijang Rinpoche. It was at Buxa that Lama Zopa met his teacher and collaborator Lama Yeshe. Thereafter their lives were intertwined until the elder lama’s death in 1984. 

During a visit to Ghoom Monastery in Darjeerling, India, in 1967, Lama Zopa and Lama Yeshe met their first Western student, Zina Rachevsky. Rachevsky—variously described as a Russian-American-French socialite and sometime actress—had mistakenly thought Lama Zopa was Domo Geshe Rinpoche, whom she had come to see. Nonetheless, she and Lama Zopa became fast friends, and, at Rachevsky’s request, he and Lama Yeshe spent nearly a year teaching a small group at her home. After a visit to Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama ordained Rachevsky as a novice nun, the three went to Kathmandu, where they established Kopan Monastery. In 1971, Lama Zopa held the first of what became his famous annual lamrim (“stages of the path”) course, still offered every November at Kopan. 

The following year, Lama Zopa and Lama Yeshe founded the Mount Everest Center for Buddhist Studies in Lawudo, Nepal, and in India, they opened the Tushita Meditation Centre in Dharamsala. Initially intended as a retreat center for advanced students, it was later opened up to practitioners at any level, and the ten-day Introduction to Buddhism course instituted by Lama Zopa remains a popular offering.

In 1974, Lama Zopa and Lama Yeshe began traveling internationally to establish dharma centers, and there are now more than 140 FPMT affiliates in thirty-four countries. Upon Lama Yeshe’s death in 1984, Lama Zopa assumed spiritual direction of FPMT. Until his death, he was actively involved in executing his “vast visions” for FPMT, which grew out of a series of ideas he jotted on colored Post-it notes during a retreat in May 2007. 

Despite his non-stop schedule, Lama Zopa found time to write thirteen books. With titles like Patience, How to Be Happy, The Door to Satisfaction, Transforming Problems into Happiness, and The Four Noble Truths: A Guide to Everyday Life, his most popular books are notable for their accessibility, translating traditional Buddhist teachings into practical wisdom for day-to-day living. One of those books is, appropriately, How to Face Death Without Fear, a guide to the process of dying and after-death spiritual care. These and Lama Zopa’s other books and commentaries published by Wisdom Publications, an affiliate of FPMT, are used by practitioners worldwide.

For thousands of followers, Lama Zopa was not just a dharma teacher but also a trusted advisor. Even those with little connection to Buddhism were beneficiaries of his down-to-earth advice. “It is a blessing that we still have a vast collection of his recommendations, carefully preserved by the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive in the Online Advice Book,” said Michael Lobsang Tenpa, a longtime student and former monk, who translated Lama Zopa’s teachings into Russian. “In addition to public teachings, he gave personal practice advice, including prescribing personalized lists of practices for people to follow, depending on their inclinations.”

Lama Zopa’s boundless energy was well known, hardly slowed by a stroke in 2011. Khandro Kunga Bhuma , a teacher and one of the oracles serving the Central Tibetan Administration, who frequently traveled and taught with Lama Zopa, noted that he was extremely skillful in resting in the mind of clear light while at the same time performing the vast activities of a bodhisattva 24/7. His generosity was legendary. “He would never travel without several suitcases containing scriptures and sacred objects meant to bless all beings his plane would fly over,” Lobsang Tenpa said. “Even just weeks before his passing, Rinpoche would go to the Boudhanath Stupa in Kathmandu late in the evening to do circumambulations, blessing all he met and generously sharing teachings with everyone who was willing to listen.”

It’s hard to imagine the magnitude of Lama Zopa’s impact on tens of thousands of people around the world, Robyn Brentano, a longtime student, said. She defined his charisma this way: “The source of Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s spiritual power is his boundless compassion for all living beings, integrated with his profound knowledge of the Dharma and skill in teaching ways to transform our hearts and minds. He is a great yogi who lived in a continual state of bliss, and he induced that sense of joy and connection in all who came into his presence. He was so attuned to the needs and aspirations of individual students that his advice always hit home and opened pathways to inner development and liberation.”

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Clinical psychologist Jack Engler, PhD, widely acknowledged for his seminal work in linking Buddhist practice and Western psychology, died on March 12 in Framingham, Massachusetts. He was 83. 

Armed with a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Chicago and intense study with the Theravada Buddhist masters Anagarika Munindra and Dipa Ma, Engler had a long and storied career as a psychotherapist in private practice and an instructor at Harvard Medical School, as well as a Vipassana practitioner and occasional meditation teacher with strong ties to the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) and the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, both in Barre, Massachusetts. In bridging the worlds of Western psychodynamic thinking and Buddhist practice, Engler will forever be remembered for his pithy summation of the development of the self and its relinquishment: “You have to be somebody before you can be nobody.” 

No mere throwaway line, it emerged from his clinical work as a therapist and his experience teaching Buddhist psychology and Vipassana meditation. He first included that observation on self and non-self in an article published in The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology in 1984. After the article was reprinted two years later in Transformations of Consciousness: Conventional and Contemplative Perspectives on Development, a book Engler co-authored with Ken Wilber and Daniel P. Brown, the “epithet,” as he later called it, became a trope. His thesis on what he saw as “two great arcs of human development”—one leading to the individuated self, the other to a contemplative or transpersonal stage beyond it—garnered “a fair amount of criticism and notoriety from friends and colleagues for its developmental position,” he later acknowledged. His response to his critics and an effort to clarify his meaning was “Being Somebody and Being Nobody: A Re-examination of the Understanding of Self in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism,” a chapter in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism, edited by Jeffrey D. Safran and published in 2003.

Born June 19, 1939 in Boston, Engler was raised Catholic in Tenafly, New Jersey. His lifelong spiritual quest began in his undergraduate years at the University of Notre Dame, when he and fellow students spent Christmas vacations at Thomas Merton’s Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. “The mystique grew on me—the shield of being in the monastery,” Engler later said in an interview for a documentary about IMS. “By the time I graduated in 1972, I was certain I wanted to become a monk.”

He spent the summer after graduation visiting monasteries in Europe to decide what order to join. After meeting Dom John Eudes, then Merton’s director of vocation, in Belgium, he chose the Trappists: “because,” he said, “of my perfectionist, gotta do the hardest, most challenging, most rigorous thing. If I didn’t do that, I would never know if I was capable of what I thought I was capable of.”

Despite his determination, his time as a Trappist monk was short. When Merton told him “You don’t belong here,” “it was probably the worst moment in my life,” Engler recalled. Merton steered him to the Oratory, an order in Pittsburgh founded by “a remarkable Christian saint.” Sent to Europe for theological study, Engler did a novitiate year in England and then spent four and a half “miserable” years in Germany. After finishing his degree at Oxford, he returned to the US where he taught at several universities. 

Teaching psychology and Buddhism at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was a turning point. “I didn’t know anything about Buddhism,” Engler said. But this first brush with the dharma opened his mind, and he enrolled in the University of Chicago for a PhD in clinical psychology. He was searching for a thesis topic when another life-changing event occurred. One night in South Chicago, his car suddenly swerved off the street, and he found himself in the parking lot of the Vivekananda bookstore. He knew nothing about Vivekananda but bought one of the few titles in the store in English—The Heart of Buddhist Meditation by the German-born Theravada scholar-monk Nyanaponika Thera. After reading it that night, he told his then-fiancée, “This is it! This is what I’ve been looking for, for twenty years!” She had just returned from a junior year in India and persuaded him to spend a year there. 

Awarded a Fulbright to study in India, Engler stopped first at Naropa in Boulder, Colorado, where he met Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, and Sharon Salzberg, who had just founded IMS. Joseph encouraged Engler to take their first three-month course. Joseph, Jack, and Sharon talked so much about their Vipassana teachers, Munindra and Dipa Ma, that Engler arranged to study with Munindra in India. After an arduous journey to Bodh Gaya, he finally met Munindra. “I’ve come a long way,” Engler told him, “and I’m completely, one-hundred percent in on this practice. Tell me what to do.” Munindra’s response: “How are your bowel movements?” His father was an ayurvedic doctor, and Munindra was knowledgeable about such matters. Still, “the first three or four weeks that’s all we talked about,” Engler recalled. 

He found in Munindra a warm and loving teacher—very accepting, very gentle, and yet sharp. “I did not want someone who was as uptight and strict and punitive with himself as I was,” Engler said. One day as they were walking together, Engler begged, “Tell me about the dharma, please. I’ve been waiting.” “The dharma?” Munindra said. “You want to know about the dharma? The dharma means living the life fully.” 

Engler’s field work for his PhD—studying the effects of meditation on practitioners—involved administering standard projective psychological tests like the Rorschach. Munindra and Dipa Ma agreed to be subjects. But as psychiatrist and author Mark Epstein recalled, “They just used [the tests] as teaching opportunities, turning the Rorschach into a description of the clinging self and its evolution through the dharma. They couldn’t stop themselves.” 

Jack Kornfield related an exchange between Engler and Dipa Ma in which he told her that “getting rid of” greed, anger, and ignorance sounded “very grey.” “Where’s the juice?” Engler asked. “Oh, you don’t understand!” Dipa Ma said, laughing. “There is so much sameness in ordinary life. We’re always experiencing everything through the same set of lenses.” Without greed, anger, and delusion, however, “every moment is new. Life was dull before. Now, every day, every moment is full of taste and zeal.” (Excerpts from more of Engler’s conversations with Dipa Ma appeared in the Spring 2004 issue of Tricycle.)

After he returned to the US, Engler was invited to become a board member at IMS. He remained active there and at the Barre Center for many years. He was particularly supportive of the structure at IMS, which unlike many meditation centers, is collaborative, with the teachers on an equal footing and no guru at the top of a hierarchy. “That gave the institution an integrity in facing issues that would come up in the future,” Engler said.  

In Boston, Engler opened a private practice that he maintained for many years, and he served as a supervising psychologist and instructor at the Harvard Medical School. Well known for his approach to depth psychology that drew on both Western psychoanalytic and Buddhist concepts, he published papers in journals, contributed chapters to books, and co-authored The Consumer’s Guide to Psychotherapy with Daniel Goleman. In 1989 he was invited to sit on a panel on “Transformations of Consciousness” with His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

“What made Jack special,” Mark Epstein said, “was that he was very sophisticated in Western psychodynamic thinking, not superficial at all. Very thoughtful but also deeply experientially involved in Buddhism. He was really wrestling with the questions that come up.”

Engler’s results were often surprising. In his study of the effects of Vipassana meditation on beginners, average meditators, and advanced practitioners, he found that even in the advanced meditators, practice led to no diminution of inner conflict. The difference was that the advanced meditators were more willing to acknowledge it. “To have that documented was very important,” Epstein said.

An accomplished sailor and passionate golfer, Engler is also remembered for his sense of humor and gift for storytelling. He was “funny in an inspiring sense,” said Ed Hauben, a close friend and dharma brother for forty years. They served on the IMS board together, and Hauben recalled a visit to IMS from Dipa Ma in which she told board members their service was fortuitous and would assure them a place in the heavenly realms. “With his bodhisattva nature, I’m sure Jack’s there,” Hauben said, “taking care of everyone.”

Engler is survived by his wife, Renée DeYoe; his daughter, Gaelen; son, Ian; son-in-law Gerben Scherpbier; and son-in-law Jake Frerk.

♦

For Tricycle Editor-in-Chief James Shaheen’s interview with Jack Engler, click here.

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Samu Sunim, a Korean Seon (Zen) Buddhist master who established temples throughout North America and in Mexico, died on August 6, 2022 at his temple in Toronto. Samu Sunim (“venerable monk”) had been living with Parkinson’s disease, and was surrounded by several of his students when he died, according to the Buddhist Society for Compassionate Wisdom. He is survived by two children: Maji Raphael Kim and Micheline Kim.

His cremation was held on August 11 in Milton, Ontario. “We chanted and gave Sunim a final farewell as the smoke blended with the radiant summer sky,” the temple reported. 

Born as Sam-Woo Kim on March 3, 1941 in Chinju, South Korea, Samu Sunim became an orphan at the age of 10. He spent several years homeless, begging and working temporary jobs in Seoul, before becoming a Buddhist monk in the Jogye Order, first at Namjang-sa Monastery and later at Pomo-sa Monastery, where he ordained with Tongsan Sunim (1890–1965) and studied Zen with Solbong Sunim (1890–1969). 

Samu Sunim first left for Japan and then the West after being drafted into military service (despite being a Buddhist monk). He recalled: “After I left Solbong Sunim and the country, I became constantly subject to the ups and downs of life. Like a piece of driftwood, I drifted along unprotected in the wide world of conflicts. Sometimes different social forces and currents that tossed me around were so strong and swift that I submerged and suffered loss. Other times, I observed and enjoyed different scenery and the changing faces of life situations. All along, I was making a journey which had no set purpose aside from my being one with it wherever it took me.”  

In 1967, Samu Sunim founded the Zen Lotus Society in New York City.  Zen students found Samu Sunim through hand-drawn posters in Greenwich Village; he is said to have spent time meditating with “whomever showed up” before leaving to work the night shift at United Parcel Service (UPS). 

Samu Sunim started his formal teaching career following a three-year solo retreat in Toronto, teaching meditation to the Korean-Canadian community from a basement apartment that flooded when it rained too much, according to his biography. In 1979, Samu Sunim moved into his organization’s first temple: a “former flophouse” in the Parkdale neighborhood that he and his students purchased after fundraising and living frugally for several years. The community significantly renovated the building themselves, a tradition of work-practice that would continue when Zen Buddhist Temple opened centers in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Chicago, New York, and Mexico City, and a farm in upstate New York. 

Samu Sunim’s community also applied its “cottage industry” mentality to publishing, starting the Spring Wind newsletter and magazines after buying a printing press for $100 in the early eighties. The international magazine was published until 1986 and later revived from 2002–2005. The Seon master also organized the 1986 Conference on Zen Buddhism in North America and the 1987 Conference on World Buddhism in North America, both held at the Zen Buddhist Temple in Ann Arbor. In July of 1990, Samu Sunim organized the Conference on Buddhism in Canada, which was sponsored by various Buddhist temples and organizations in Toronto and marked the “first time in history Buddhists from across Canada came together.”   

In an interview with Tricycle published in 1995, Samu Sunim talked to editor Clark Strand about what he saw as a disconnect between “high” and “folk” Buddhism. He called upon Asian monastics to go beyond their preoccupation with “looking inward” to serve their own communities, and to create an inclusive sangha beyond the white and intellectual converts.   

“Right now, Buddhism in the West is helping people who can come to Zen centers or Buddhist groups—people who can help themselves. We lack the organization, the funds, and the manpower to provide other kinds of aid,” Samu Sunim said at the time. 

“In monastic Buddhism, the main thing is to imitate Shakyamuni Buddha—to imitate the six years of ascetic practice he did after he renounced the world. That’s the whole monastic career. But I don’t think we can repeat that here, and there is no need to repeat it. I think the focus should be on Shakyamuni Buddha after he attained enlightenment. The first thing he said was, ‘Lo and behold, every being, without exception, without discrimination, is endowed with the buddhanature.’ We ought to imitate what Buddha did for the last forty-five years of his life: ministry Buddhism.”

Samu Sunim retired in the summer of 2019, giving his dharma staff to Toan José Castelão Sunim, his dharma heir. His later years were “simple and peaceful,” according to the Buddhist Society for Compassionate Wisdom, and spent at the New York farm and temples in Mexico City and Toronto. 

The post In Remembrance: Samu Sunim appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

According to New York State Supreme Court documents, in October 2022, former Buddhist nun Vikki Hui Xin Han voluntarily opted to discontinue what is known as a pre-action petition related to a potential civil case against Karma Triyana Dharmachakra Monastery, the North American home of the 17th Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje, and the Karma Kagyu Institute. Han had previously alleged that the Karmapa, one of two claimants to the title of the 17th Karmapa in the Karma Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism, had raped and impregnated her.

A civil case may be discontinued for a number of reasons, including a financial settlement between the parties. But the cause for the discontinuation of this action is not public, and it is not clear whether Han might later file a civil lawsuit. 

Dr. Ann Olivarius, who represented Han in the proceedings, said in an email that she was “ethically barred” from commenting on the case or providing further information about the reason the action was withdrawn. Michael Murphy of Barclay Damon law firm, who represented Karma Triyana Dharmachakra Monastery, said in an email “we will not make any comment or respond to any questions on the matter.”   

In June 2022, Han filed a petition saying she intended to seek damages and was trying to determine who was financially responsible or liable for physical injuries and emotional distress resulting from the Karmapa’s alleged assault. In response, the Karmapa’s lawyers filed with the court a list of the legal names of KTD’s board of directors and primary address. The voluntary dissolution of Han’s pre-action petition in October occurred several months after this exchange.

Han first filed a lawsuit against the Karmapa in May 2021 in Canadian court. Tricycle previously reported that Han alleges the Karmapa raped her while she was a nun on retreat at Karme Ling Retreat Center in Delhi, New York, in 2017. Han said she became pregnant during the nonconsensual encounter in her bedroom. At a private audience a month later, Han told the Karmapa she was pregnant, and though he denied responsibility, he gave her his phone number and email address, and Han said the two continued to communicate as a couple in a relationship until January 2019. 

In the New York State proceedings, Han’s petition, filed in March 2022, alleges that Han was raped while on a 39-month monastic retreat at Karme Ling, and that the forcible act took place in the women’s quarters, where men are not allowed. The petition noted that the Karmapa “functioned outside these rules,” and that “staff, trainee nuns, and attendees in the women’s quarters would likely have seen him enter” Han’s room. 

In an affidavit included in the court file, Lama Lodro Lhamo, KTD’s president and the monastery’s retreat master, wrote, “the Petitioner has made many false, defamatory, and damaging statements about KTD, its mission, and its operations. These claims seek to jeopardize the important work and mission of KTD.”

Documents filed by Han’s attorneys also show large deposits in her bank account in 2018 totalling approximately $800,000. According to Canadian court documents, Han gave birth to a girl in June 2018, and Han told the court she had received a total of $770,000 (Canadian) for the delivery and postpartum care, the first year of the child’s life, a wedding ring for Han, and a home. 

The Karmapa has not publicly addressed the accusations by Han. His office did not respond to a request for comment. 

***

In the same month that the action was withdrawn, a new initiative, called Healing Our Sanghas, launched to address the “allegations of misconduct by the Karmapa and the silence surrounding it.” The site includes a timeline of allegations against the Karmapa and a function where practitioners can share their personal experiences, which are then mapped. The site currently includes accounts from anonymous users from around the world, including North America, Europe, southeast Asia, and Australia. 

The project was initiated by a group of anonymous Karma Kagyu practitioners who partnered with Dr. Ann Gleig and Dr. Amy Langenberg, Buddhist scholars who are associated with the Religion and Sexual Abuse Project.

Gleig and Langenberg told Tricycle in a recent interview that they were approached by the group and decided to partner with them because their research “supports the aims of the project” and finds that the voices of those in embattled communities need to be amplified as a way to prevent further harm and trauma. 

“We also spent a lot of time with this group of practitioners,” Langenberg said. “We did our due diligence on their motivations; it wasn’t like we just had one email exchange … we put a lot of thought and care into this.”

Gleig said that their advocacy of the project adds legitimacy to those who don’t want to be in the public eye, and also aligns with a feminist, post-colonial orientation in which “ethnographers give back to the communities they’re working with.”

Gleig and Langenberg said there are a number of initiatives connected to Healing Our Sanghas, including a forthcoming academic book and multidisciplinary workshops on abuse in religious communities. 

Pointing to the Han case, Gleig and Langenberg said that they often hear testimonies from Karma Kagyu practitioners that allegations aren’t discussed openly in the sangha because of the idea that the “truth will come out when the court investigates it.”

“But when a case is settled out of court, under nondisclosure as a part of that, the truth doesn’t come out. That’s a problem,” Gleig said. 

Though Healing Our Sanghas was specifically created for the Karma Kagyu community, Gleig and Langenberg said the organizers designed the website and project in a way that could be adapted by other religious communities.

“Ideally there would be structures in place on the community level, and people wouldn’t need to create anonymous websites,” Gleig said. “But right now, that’s just the sad reality of where we’re at.” 

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