Timeless Rapture: Inspired Verse from the Shangpa Masters

Foreword by Lama Drubgyu Tenzin 19
meditation master of the Kagyu tradition, to travel to the West as his representative,
to determine if others in Europe and North America had serious
interest in Buddhist teachings.
Kalu Rinpoché and a small entourage left India in 1971. He stopped in
the Holy Land to pay his respects to the source of the Judeo-Christian traditions
and in Rome to meet the Pope, Paul VI. He proceeded to visit
Paris and Scotland, then traveled across North America. Before returning
to India he established his first Dharma Center in Vancouver, Canada in
April 1972. During his second trip to Vancouver in 1974, Kalu Rinpoché
hosted the first visit to Vancouver by the Sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa, and
at that time he met the great Sakya lama Dézhung Tulku, who was residing
in Seattle, Washington. Since the fall of 1972 Dézhung Rinpoché had
visited the Vancouver Dharma center a number of times to instruct and
encourage Kalu Rinpoché’s students and had expressed profound respect
for Kalu Rinpoché’s ability to inspire students to actually practice Buddhism.
A few months later, at Dézhung Rinpoché’s request, Kalu Rinpoché
imparted to him the full transmission of the Shangpa Kagyu’s
empowerments and teachings, the first time such a transmission had taken
place outside Asia. At that time he invited a handful of his senior Western
students to participate. By the time Kalu Rinpoché made his third trip to
the West in 1976, he had decided to establish the first-ever traditional
three-year retreat center for Occidental Buddhists. The three-year retreat
provides formal training of Drup-la (lama by virtue of contemplative training);
Rinpoché’s decision signified his honoring Western Buddhists with
complete training in the Shangpa Kagyu lineage’s teachings and meditations.
He thereby took an important step to assure the continuity of the
lineage. His example inspired other lineages’ masters to provide similar
opportunities to their senior Western students.
By the time Kalu Rinpoché left his body in 1989, he had established
some sixty Buddhist centers worldwide and at least half a dozen three-year
retreat complexes in Europe and North America. Throughout his life, he
focused on meditation practice, when possible in retreat settings. He completed
an initial three-year retreat at age nineteen. After some years engaged
in study, this committed yogi pursued solitary practice for twelve years in
caves and isolated mountain hermitages. He was then appointed retreat
master of the three-year retreat center at Tsadra Rinchen Drak, where his
own master Lama Norbu Döndrub had been retreat master and where
Kalu Rinpoché had completed his own three-year retreat. In his teaching