Chögyam Trungpa: The Founder and the Allegations

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 24 September 2026

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Chögyam Trungpa (1939–1987) was the eleventh Trungpa Tulku of the Kagyu lineage, a Tibetan refugee who founded the Naropa Institute and the Shambhala Training programme and is, in Lion’s Roar’s words, “recognized for playing a pivotal role in the transmission of genuine Buddhadharma to the West”. He is also the subject of serious, documented allegations about his conduct. Both records are real, and this page carries both, with names, dates, and who found what.

What he held, and what he gave up

His own institution’s biography records that he was born in Kham in eastern Tibet, and that at thirteen months “he was recognized as a major tulku, or incarnate teacher in the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism.” (His dates are unsettled: his institute and EBSCO give 1939, Lion’s Roar and his community’s own Chronicles 1940. This page follows his institute.) He was enthroned as abbot of Surmang Dudtsi-tel Monastery and governor of Surmang District, ordained a novice monk at eight, and in 1958, at eighteen, completed his studies, “receiving the degrees of kyorpön (doctor of divinity) and khenpo (master of studies)” and full monastic ordination.

Those glosses are his community’s renderings of Tibetan monastic degrees, not Western academic qualifications. He attended Oxford on a Spalding sponsorship, and no source read for this page records a Western university degree, chair or academic post for him — he should not be given one.

He was never head of the Kagyu school or of any Tibetan school: in 1974 his organisation hosted the Sixteenth Gyalwang Karmapa, which is the opposite relation. Nor are the titles around his name all his — Vajra Regent was Thomas Rich’s, conferred by Trungpa in 1976; Sakyong is his son’s; Rinpoche and the Vidyadhara are honorifics from his community’s own writing, not offices he was given. His tulku line is Kagyu, and his institute describes his two principal teachers, Jamgön Kongtrül of Sechen and Khenpo Gangshar, as “leading teachers in the Nyingma and Kagyü lineages,” so his training drew on both (see the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism). Shambhala is not a school of Tibetan Buddhism: his institute calls Shambhala Training “a non-sectarian path of spiritual warriorship grounded in the practice of sitting meditation.”

One credential he gave up, and it changes how he should be described: he ceased to be a monk. EBSCO states that “In 1969, Trungpa surrendered the vows he took as a monk”; his institute says he “became a layperson, putting aside his monastic robes.” He married in 1970 and was a married layman for the whole of his teaching career in the West.

From Tibet to Samye Ling, and the crash

He left Tibet in 1959, after what his institute calls “many harrowing months trekking over the Himalayas,” described in his first book, Born in Tibet (1966). He advised the Young Lamas Home School in Delhi from 1959 to 1963; the Spalding sponsorship then took him to England, where in 1967 he founded the Samye Ling Meditation Center in Dumfriesshire, Scotland. In 1968 he went into solitary retreat in Bhutan, and shortly after returning to Britain he blacked out at the wheel of his car and crashed, leaving him partially paralysed on his left side for the rest of his life. His community’s Chronicles calls it “a profound turning point” that led him to see that “his robes and monastic vows formed a veil that blocked direct communication.” Katy Butler’s reporting describes the same crash as happening while he was “drunk and speeding,” and EBSCO records that during his recovery he “began drinking alcohol regularly, which violated his vows as a monk.”

In 1970 he married Diana Pybus. She was sixteen; he was thirty. This is not an allegation — it is reported as fact by EBSCO and by the Daily Camera, which in 2024 quoted her own memoir of the marriage, Dragon Thunder: My Life with Chögyam Trungpa: “when we were first married, Rinpoche told me that it was normal for Tibetan men to beat their wives” — given as the newspaper quoted it, this page not having read the book. EBSCO records that he was no longer welcome at Samye Ling, and left for North America.

What he built in North America

He arrived in 1970 and taught for seventeen years, founding Vajradhatu in 1973 as his community’s umbrella organisation, the Naropa Institute — now Naropa University — in 1974, and Shambhala Training in 1976, by his institute’s dating. He later moved his court and Vajradhatu’s headquarters from Boulder, Colorado, to Nova Scotia, and found what his institute calls a spiritual kinship with the Zen teachers already in America, Shunryu Suzuki above all.

Butler records what his students actually did: wary of importing Tibetan cultural forms, he “first taught his American students a simple, Zen-based sitting meditation,” then “gradually introduced the elaborate Tantric disciplines” — including 100,000 prostrations and a three-month seminary in the mountains, the setting of the 1975 episode below. The scale of it is why he matters to Buddhism in the West. Butler counts among his students the poets Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman, the Shambhala Publications publisher Sam Bercholz, and Rick Fields, “author of a respected history of American Buddhism,” who edited the community’s newspaper, the Vajradhatu Sun. The American nun Pema Chödrön was his student from 1974 until his death, and Jack Kornfield wrote that “through the founding of Naropa Institute in 1974, he provided the opportunity for Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg and myself to begin teaching on a large scale in this country.”

The books, and where to start

His best-known target was spiritual materialism — practice used to furnish the ego rather than see through it, a “spiritual supermarket” in his phrase. Three books carry most of his reach, and the order is ours, not any source’s: Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (Shambhala, 1973) is the entry point; The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation (Shambhala, 1976) carries that argument into the path itself; Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior (1984) assumes no Buddhism at all and, by his institute’s account, “gives an overview of the Shambhala teachings.” With Francesca Fremantle he produced a new English translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, published in 1975, and our page on tonglen traces how that practice reached Western readers through him and through Pema Chödrön.

From Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, in the passage Kornfield quotes on the warrior’s tender heart:

Crazy wisdom, the term everything turns on

He had a name for the approach, and it is the hinge of every argument about him. Butler gives it plainly: he “taught that every aspect of human existence — neurosis, passion, desire, alcohol, the dark and the light — was to be embraced and transmuted. He called his wild approach ‘crazy wisdom,’ referring to a small but genuine tradition of revered, eccentric Tibetan yogis — most of whom worked intimately with one or two students.” That last clause is the difficulty in one line: the lineage he invoked had worked one student at a time, and he applied it to a community of thousands. Kornfield records the claim as it stood in his lifetime — “In his own tradition he was known as a crazy wisdom master” — and, as the section on his son records, some of that son’s former attendants said the term was still being used to justify conduct thirty years later.

The drinking

Butler’s Common Boundary essay of May/June 1990 is the fullest reported account, and it names its sources. It states that he “openly slept with students” and that in Boulder “he lectured brilliantly, yet sometimes so drunk that he had to be carried off-stage or held upright in his chair.” Jules Levinson, a Tibetan scholar then a PhD candidate at the University of Virginia, told her the stories “were very upsetting — that he drank a lot, that he slept around,” and in the same breath called him “the most compassionate person I have ever known.” She also reports the rationale students were given: “because he had Vajra nature … he was immune to the normal physiological effects of alcohol.” On his final illness, a member of his household staff with nursing experience spoke on the record:

He died on 4 April 1987 in Nova Scotia. EBSCO gives the cause as heart failure and the age as forty-seven; the Daily Camera, citing his New York Times obituary, gives cardiac arrest and respiratory failure, also at forty-seven, which is the age Kornfield’s tribute gives too. Writing in Buddhadharma, the scholars Ann Gleig and Amy Langenberg differ on both counts: he “died of alcohol-related complications at age forty-eight.” Butler goes further than any of them, writing that as he lay dying “only an inner circle knew the symptoms of his final illness” and that “few could bear to acknowledge that their beloved and brilliant teacher was dying of terminal alcoholism” — among those symptoms esophageal varices, “a swelling of veins in the esophagus caused almost exclusively by cirrhosis of the liver.” Her subject is the denial around him rather than any diagnosis made at the time, and she dates that scene to 1986 where every other source here dates the death to April 1987. These are different registers of evidence, and this page sets them side by side.

Kornfield, writing a celebration of his friend months after the death, did not treat any of it as a secret: “He also drank and was a womanizer. And yet, he was very open… . There was nothing hidden about him.” His institute’s biography, by contrast, mentions alcohol nowhere, and his community’s Chronicles has the Vajra Regent serving “until his tragic death in 1990” with no mention of the December 1988 disclosure at all.

The 1975 seminary, and the wider allegations

The best-documented single episode is Halloween 1975, at a Vajradhatu Seminary in Snowmass, Colorado. The account rests on the 1977 report of Naropa’s investigative poetry class under Ed Sanders, Peter Marin’s account for Harper’s, and the written accounts of the two people it happened to — the poets W. S. Merwin and Dana Naone — all quoted by Literary Hub in 2020. It should have been limited to his dedicated students, by Literary Hub’s account; by Sanders’ report 125 to 130 people attended, selected from 450 to 600 applicants — but the final admissions were approved by Trungpa himself, and Merwin attended.

The pair had gone to bed; sent for, they looked in on the party and went back upstairs. On Trungpa’s orders the door was then broken down; Merwin, as he had warned he would, held it with a broken beer bottle and, in Sanders’ words, “cuts some faces” — faces that later required stitches — then put the bottle down when he saw the blood. Brought downstairs, they were lectured by Trungpa, who — in Literary Hub’s words — “reportedly lobbied racist accusations against Naone, who is Hawaiian”: “You’re oriental; you’re smarter than this. You might be playing slave to this white man” — which she wrote she felt was “a seductive argument to divide William and me.” He then told them to strip; they refused, and he ordered his guards to strip them by force in front of the assembly. Marin’s account records Naone asking the onlookers for help: “‘Someone call the police,’ she says. Nobody intervenes.” The next morning Trungpa left a letter in every seminarian’s mailbox offering a justification and no apology: “I have come to the conclusion that we need to break the ice of our personal concealment.” They stayed on for the teachings they had come for, after a meeting that, by Merwin’s account, brought no apology but a promise that nothing like it would happen again.

Merwin set out his own settled view afterwards:

Beyond that episode the record thins into accusation. Reporting on Naropa’s fiftieth anniversary in February 2024, the Daily Camera wrote that Trungpa “was accused of physically beating and sexually assaulting women and girls, having sex with his students and abusing substances including alcohol, tobacco and cocaine.” Naropa’s president at the time, Charles Lief, answered on the record that “because the allegations did not involve conduct that fell under the purview of the university, and there were no official law enforcement investigations, we have no basis to determine whether the allegations are true or false,” adding that all such allegations should nonetheless be taken seriously. That is where they stand: reported in 2024, unadjudicated by any body, and, on Lief’s account, never the subject of an official law-enforcement investigation. That is a different kind of fact from an episode with many first-person witnesses, and it is not treated here as the same.

After he died: three people, three separate stories

Ösel Tendzin, the Vajra Regent (1987–1990)

Trungpa empowered his American student Thomas Rich as Vajra Regent Ösel Tendzin in 1976, eleven years before his own death, and Tendzin led Vajradhatu from April 1987. In December 1988, Butler reports, Vajradhatu’s administrators told members that the Regent “had been infected with the AIDS virus for nearly three years”; the board “conceded that, except for some months of celibacy, he had neither protected his many sexual partners nor told them the truth.” Two people were infected: one of the Regent’s partners, whom Butler identifies as “the son of long-term students”, and — through that man, not through the Regent — a young woman. Two members of the board had known of the infection for more than two years “and chose to do nothing”. In words Butler reports him telling a community meeting in Berkeley in mid-December: “Thinking I had some extraordinary means of protection, I went ahead with my business as if something would take care of it for me.” The Vajradhatu Sun’s editor Rick Fields was forbidden to report the crisis, then fired. Butler’s essay, published that May/June, ends with the Regent still in post; his own community’s timeline records only that he “served as head of the organizations the Vidyadhara founded until his tragic death in 1990.”

Butler also states flatly that “Trungpa Rinpoche had also known about it before his death” — her reporting, found in no other source read in full for this page, and repeated here as her claim rather than as established fact.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, his son (2018–2022)

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche is Trungpa’s eldest son, empowered as Shambhala heir in 1979 but leader of the organisation only from 1990, after Tendzin’s death. He did not directly succeed his father, and the allegations against him are his own, thirty years later. After the advocacy group Buddhist Project Sunshine released three reports beginning in February 2018 — the second of them focused on allegations against the Sakyong — he stepped back in July 2018 pending a third-party investigation, and Shambhala’s governing Kalapa Council announced it would resign en masse; the Canadian Press noted the allegations were unproven in court and that no charges had been laid. On 3 February 2019 Shambhala released the report it had commissioned from the law firm Wickwire Holm, whose investigator Selina Bath found it “more than likely” that he had committed sexual misconduct in two cases, and described “frequent sexual contact with women who were his students” in the 1990s and up to 2005. Of the accounts given about the Sakyong himself the report recorded that “no one reported criminal behavior,” and the investigator did not find evidence for accusations that he had had sex with teenage girls at Shambhala Mountain Center. The investigation separately received twenty reports of sexual misconduct by other leaders in the organisation. Later that month six of his former attendants sent an open letter to Tricycle, which reported it on 19 February 2019; it covered time spans between 1994 and 2018, and some of the signatories traced the “crazy wisdom” justification for his conduct back to his father’s example. He left Shambhala permanently in 2022.

The son’s findings are not the father’s. The organisation’s name is unsettled in the sources too: his own community’s timeline calls what he founded in 1973 Vajradhatu, the name this page uses for his lifetime, while later sources call the same body Shambhala International, which the Daily Camera in 2024 describes as “founded in Boulder by Trungpa in the early 1970s.” Shambhala Publications, the press behind many of the books named here, is a different organisation again.

Pema Chödrön’s resignation (2020)

On 14 January 2020, after the Sakyong announced he would resume teaching, Pema Chödrön — Trungpa’s student from 1974 until his death in 1987 — released a letter stepping down as an acharya of Shambhala, as did the senior teacher David Schneider.

What to make of him

Serious people who know the facts have landed in opposite places, and the honest thing is to report the disagreement. Kornfield’s 1987 tribute celebrates him without hiding anything; Merwin kept his admiration and would not send anyone to him. At Naropa in 2024 a student told the Daily Camera what a teacher who had known Trungpa had answered: “I knew him and he was really kind. He was a really kind person, and I don’t think he would do anything like that.” The student set that against the many witnesses who described the same thing happening on the 1975 retreat; another said that knowing “this person’s portrait is up in our gallery, and his seat is in our meditation hall” could be “really discombobulating.” Lief called the legacy “complex, nuanced,” and said Naropa’s origin is “tied to a controversial person who made significant contributions to the academy and larger society but also faced significant allegations.”

Butler’s essay does not end in blame: its argument is that the roots of these crises “lie not in individual villainy, but in cultural misunderstandings and hidden emotional wounds.” She quotes the Dalai Lama, at a conference in Newport Beach, California, which she places in the year before her May/June 1990 essay:

If you are looking for a teacher now, read how to find a Buddhist teacher and what Buddhist ethics asks of both sides of that relationship; for the tradition rather than the man, start with Tibetan Buddhism. For the wider story, see our survey of the most influential Buddhist teachers and the best Buddhist books.