About Chögyam Trungpa and His Collected Works:
Chögyam Trungpa (1939 - 1987), a Tibetan meditation master, teacher, and artist is widely known as one of the pioneers in bringing Buddhism to the West. He was born in eastern Tibet and was identified as the eleventh descendent in the line of Trungpa tulkus (incarnations of teachers). At age 18, this scholar was Supreme Abbot of the Surmang Monasteries. He fled to India when the Chinese invaded his homeland in 1959. In 1963, Chögyam Trungpa traveled to England where he attended Oxford University as a Spaulding Fellow, studying Western philosophy, religion, art, and language. He established the first Tibetan Buddhist center in Scotland in 1967.
In 1970, he was invited to teach in the United States; he settled down in Boulder, Colorado. Over the years, he established over 100 meditation centers in America, Canada, and Europe. Trungpa Rinpoche set up Shambhala International in 1973 to coordinate the activities of these centers. He also founded Naropa Institute (now Naropa University), an innovative college that combines contemplative studies with a liberal arts curriculum. A secular program for meditation called Shambhala Training was established in 1976. In 1986, Trungpa Rinpoche moved the center of his activities from Boulder to Halifax, Canada, where he died the following year.
Carolyn Rose Gimian, editor of The Essential Chögyam Trungpa (1999), is the compiler and editor of The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa. In each of these eight volumes, she provides an overview of the material.
About This Volume:
Volume Two focuses on this Tibetan teacher's insights on psychology. The overarching theme is the link between meditation, mind, and the development of compassion and awareness. In The Path Is the Goal: A Basic Handbook of Buddhist Meditation (1995), he explores how mindfulness leads to openness, insight and freedom. Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness (1993) is a very practical work explaining the 59 slogans used by Tibetan Buddhists for centuries as a lauchpad for compassionate living in everyday life. Three other books revolve around human consciousness, emptiness, and spirituality as a discipline. Among the many fascinating selected writings in this volume are "The Lion's Roar" on emotions, "Relating with Death" on being with a dying person, and five articles from Choögyam Trungpa's participation in Christian-Buddhist Meditation conferences at Naropa in the 1980s.
