Dragon Thunder: My Life with Chögyam Trungpa [Hardcover]

I really wanted to like this book. I am a practicing Tibetan Buddhist of the Drikung Kagyu lineage, and I really wanted to come away from this book with a better understanding of Chogyam Trungpa. I wanted to be able to stop thinking of him as a womanizing drunk.

Unfortunately, this book didn't help me. The author spends a great deal of time explaining away Trungpa's behavior by stating that he just wasn't like other people and that the normal rules didn't apply to him. It felt like someone who is abused making excuses for her abuser. I didn't gain any clearer dharmic understanding of Trungpa's outrageous actions or his reasons for having affair after affair after affair, drinking to excess, or taking drugs.

Brilliant teacher he may have been, but from what I read in this book, he doesn't strike me as any sort of a dharmic role model or a spiritual friend on whom I could rely.

In addition to not feeling like I gained any sort of higher understanding of the main character, I feel that the book dragged on and on and on. It read at times like a list of dates and places, overly specific and uninteresting. The author seemed to be trying to account for every event in her and Trungpa's lives and explain how and why it showed Trungpa's brilliance. It got boring long before the book concluded.

I give this book three stars because some of it is very interesting, and it gives a decent account of how Shambhala Buddhism came to be, but it doesn't offer any sort of scintillating window into who Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche was.

I found this book to be heartbreaking. I was initially interested since I have so admired and loved the work of Ani Pema Chodron who has impacted my life with such illumination over the years. Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche was her core teacher. I was not shocked by the drinking and "affectional" involvement with the students (there have never been reports of any students having felt used or coerced), rather by the excesses in hierarchy so common to cults of that era: how to separate the medium from the message? At least, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche offered great wisdom and enlightenment, and created a base of wisdom teachings from which many have prospered. But Diana Mukpo seems in the book almost wholly without insight, accepting that which comes her way without compunction or hesitation. Houses in Europe! Horses to own and ride! Being crowned queen with a tiara of diamonds. Receiving a title, and the subordination of footmen, butlers, chefs, chauffeurs and servants. Mink stoles and upset over her new shoes from Saks Fifth Avenue being ruined during a Buddhist Ceremony. She accepts all of this as though her due, when both finances and labour are provided by devotees of her husband (who did seem like a tireless worker in this tome) gratis. I do not see any difference between this group and the other cultish excesses of the time: the Rajneeshpurams, the followers of other charismatic leaders. I was grateful to the book for having brought out all of my "shenpa" with which to practise (I was "hooked" on nearly every page!), but it had me questioning everything? Am I right to follow Pema Chodron and Sakyong Mipham? Are these excesses sanctioned in Tibetan Buddhism? My disillusionment was extreme: I had thought of Tibetan Buddhism as enlightened and kind. Her passages about dressage were the most interesting to me, otherwise I found nearly no evolution in her person or character. Needing her husband to be right and godlike, I suppose, to justify the luxury in which they lived, the royalty they conferred upon themselves, and relating with little understanding towards those around her (her mother, for example) while incensed at any perceived mistreatment she received. I am trying to work with the energy of disillusionment as a path to wisdom with this book, but I found it heartbreaking, self-aggrandising, and painful in the extreme. If the blindness is mine, I would appreciate illumination or clarification from anyone who differs.....I can only think that perhaps Trungpa Rinpoche created a hierarchical royal setting to demonstrate the examples of the inherent royalty within us all. But even if this is so....how to justify its reification on the backs of the labour of others. I am really perplexed and confused....

"Enlightened Master"
"Egomaniac"
"Genius"
"Fraud"
"Compassionate"
"Cruel"

It is difficult to imagine one person attracting so many different sobriquets.

Yet Chögyam Trungpa gathered all of these and many more.

A recognized reincarnation of the Tenth Trungpa, he came to India after the Chinese invasion of Tibet and faced enormous hardships. He eventually came to Britain and met and married the sixteen-year-old Diana Probus, who took the name Diana Mukpo, and finally wrote this extraordinary memoir, almost twenty years after his death. They were married for a tumultuous period of seventeen years during which he established meditation centers throughout Europe and North America, attracted a large number of students and founded Naropa in Boulder, Colorado, the first Buddhist-inspired University in the United States.

Chögyam Trungpa was a key figure in the dissemination of Tibetan Buddhism in the West, and apart from the testimony of his personal students, he has left a substantial body of written works, many of which are widely recognized to be spiritual masterpieces. He was always controversial and heavy alcohol abuse contributed to his early demise.

I never met Chögyam, but I well remember many of my Buddhist friends being scandalized by his behavior. Most of them had acquired an extraordinarily ascetic view of Buddhism that many still hold today. The idea that an Enlightened Master may smoke, drink and have sex is anathema. They have an idea of the way that a spiritual being should behave, and if he or she does not, well that simply proves that they are not enlightened! I have known so many people who never realized that this view of spirituality is a projection based on just one spiritual current. There are many others, and it is a sad reality that rather than practicing tolerance, many of the different spiritual schools and traditions really dislike each other.

This book paints an intimate portrait of a master of "crazy wisdom." It is particularly fascinating to see the juxtaposition of the early life of someone born into a life of privilege in England, with a man born in poverty half a world away. And what an unusual and complex man he was, with a colorful and powerful personality. Not only was he someone who transmitted teachings, he was also believed to be someone who found and uncovered lost poetic and philosophical treasures.

This is a very personal book, but it is not a rose-colored one. Diana was not only Rinpoche's wife she was also his student, and he did many things that must have been very hard on her. There was evidently a clash of cultures and even though she was very young when they got married, she was concerned about some of the questionable decisions that were being made. Though at the end of it all, she says that she has "no regrets." The book gives some extraordinary insights into the inner workings of Tibetan Buddhism during its early encounter with the West. Though not designed to be a book of teachings, it contains a great many acute observations about the Buddhist path.

This is a book that will be of interest not only to Buddhists, but also to anyone who would like to learn more about the development of meditation and spirituality in the West.

Richard G. Petty, MD, author of Healing, Meaning and Purpose: The Magical Power of the Emerging Laws of Life

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