stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

A WILD AND CRAZY WISDOM GUY 105
In Trungpa’s same tradition, a tulku is “someone who reincarnates
with the memories and values of previous lives intact”
(Butterfield, 1994). Of an earlier, fourth incarnation of that same
Trungpa Tulku (Trungpa Künga-gyaltzen) in the late fourteenth
century, it has been asserted:
[H]e was looked upon as an incarnation of Maitreya Bodhisattva,
destined to be the Buddha of the next World Cycle,
also of Dombhipa a great Buddhist siddha (adept) and of Milarepa
(Trungpa, 1977).
Having been enthroned in Tibet as heir to the lineages of Milarepa
and Padmasambhava, Trungpa left the country for India in
1959, fleeing the Chinese Communist takeover. There, by appointment
of the Dalai Lama, he served as the spiritual advisor for the
Young Lamas Home School in Dalhousie, until 1963 (Shambhala,
2003).
From India Chögyam went to England, studying comparative
religion and psychology at Oxford University. (A later student of
Trungpa’s, Al Santoli, “suggests that the CIA may have had a hand
in getting the eleventh Trungpa into Oxford” [Clark, 1980].) He
further caused quite a stir in clashing with another tulku adversary
(Akong) of his who, like Trungpa himself, had designs on leading
their lineage in the West.
To the amazement of a small circle of local helpers and to the
gross embarrassment of the powers that sent them to England,
the two honorable tulkus entered into heated arguments
and publicly exchanged hateful invectives. In an early
edition of his book, Born in Tibet, Trungpa called Akong paranoid
and scheming (Lehnert, 1998).
In any case, Trungpa and Akong went on to found the first
Western-hemisphere Tibetan Buddhist meditation center, in Scotland,
which community was visited by the American poet Robert
Bly in 1971.
It was, Trungpa remembers, “a forward step. Nevertheless, it
was not entirely satisfying, for the scale of activity was
small, and the people who did come to participate seemed to
be slightly missing the point” (Fields, 1992).