Illustration by Kim Scafuro

Sometimes a teacher will come into our lives at just the right time, regardless of whether we’re looking for one or even know we need one. Two years ago this happened to me, quite unexpectedly, when I met Simba. My teacher wasn’t a Zen master, or a lama at the local Buddhist center. He was a dog.

Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche was inspired to teach Western students by his own teacher, the Sixteenth Karmapa. “He told me many times that you’ve got to teach whoever is interested in the dharma,” says Chokyi Nyima, “and Westerners are really hungry.”

The firstborn son of Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, Chokyi Nyima was twenty-five when he became the abbot of Ka-Nying Shedrub Ling Monastery in Boudhanath, Nepal, in 1976. He soon began to give weekend teachings to Western travelers, but thought it was important to offer nonmonastics (Western and otherwise) a more comprehensive Buddhist education.

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.

Open Heart, Open Mind (Harmony Books 2012) by Tsoknyi Rinpoche

Dogen: Textual and Historical Studies (Oxford 2012)

Nothing and Everything (North Atlantic Books 2012) by Ellen Pearlman

To Dispel the Misery of the World (Wisdom 2012) by Ga Rabjampa

The Magic of Awareness (Snow Lion 2012) by Anam Thubten

Living by Vow (Wisdom 2012) by Shohaku Okumura

Dreaming Yourself Awake (Shambhala 2012) by Alan Wallace

Speaking for Buddhas (Columbia 2011) by Richard Nance

Photo Courtesy of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology and the Regents of the University of California

White Lama:The Life of Tantric Yogi Theos Bernard, Tibet’s Lost Emissary to the New World
By Douglas Veenhof
Harmony Books, 2011
$27.50; 446 pages

Reviewed by Michael J. Sweet

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.