In 1983 I was in Boulder editing the film The Lion’s Roar. At a private interview with Rinpoche, he asked me to make a “Shambhala film.” Frankly, I didn’t know what a Shambhala film would or could be, but I said yes. Four years later, he was gone. I directed the filming of his cremation and made a short edit from the sixteen-millimeter footage, but there was no funding to develop a proper film. Years went by, during which I taught a lot of Shambhala training. Then one day I woke up and realized what my Shambhala film had to be.

All dharmas are forms of emptiness, not born, not destroyed, not stained, not pure, without loss, without gain. Bodhisattvas benefit living beings, but do not see any living beings. This is indeed a difficult and yet exquisite point; one cannot grasp it.

—Nagarjuna

How remarkable it must have been to be one of Buddha’s direct students. But surely it was no walk in the park. The first followers of the Buddha were a tiny minority within their society. Although there may have been an acceptance of contemplative and ascetic practice in India, the Buddha and his students were doing something radical and unique.

Kyabje Thinley Norbu Rinpoche was fond of quoting Omniscient Longchenpa’s Treasury of the Dharmadhatu and in particular the following verse:

Everything is Samantabhadra; the Ever-Excellent;
there is nothing that is not excellent.
Without good or bad there is only the oneness of
the Ever-Excellent; Samantabhadra.

So it is.

On a sunny day in the Paro Valley of Bhutan, the air was crisp and clean, flags of the five colors were snapping in the wind, and hundreds of yogis and yoginis were chanting and playing their chod drums, bells, and thigh-bone trumpets— the Dudjom Tersar Throma practice—as an offering to the kudung (the deceased physical form) of Thinley Norbu Rinpoche. His cremation was a fortnight away.