A Short Biography of Chögyam Trungpa
From Mindfulness in Action Making Friends withYourself through Meditation and Everyday Awareness
By Chögyam Trungpa

Compiled, arranged, and edited by Carolyn Rose Gimian
Shambhala - Boston & London 2015

Chögyam Trungpa was a pioneer in bringing mindfulness meditation and the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism to North America. He taught extensively in the United States and Canada from early 1970 until his death in 1987.

He was born in a remote area of Tibet in 1940, where he became the head of an important monastery and the governor of his district o f Tibet. He was educated in the great meditative, scholarly, and contemplative traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. At the age of twenty, like many teachers from his generation, he left the country when the Communist Chinese took over the government. His journey to India, on foot, lasted more than ten months.

Even as a young man in Tibet, Chögyam Trungpa was quite drawn to the West, and after spending a few years in India, he was one of the first Tibetan teachers to travel to Europe. He studied for several years at Oxford University and then in 1967 established his first meditation center in Scotland. After an extensive study of English language, history, and philosophy at Oxford, he became one of the earliest Asian teachers to present meditation and the Buddhist teachings in English in the West.

In early 1970, Chögyam Trungpa married and moved to North America. Here, he connected with thousands of students who were interested in meditation. He crisscrossed the continent giving public talks and weekend seminars in both the United States and Canada. His command of the English language and his understanding of the Western mind made him one of the most important influences on the development of Buddhism in the West. Within a few short years, he and his students established centers for the practice of meditation throughout major North American cities as well as rural retreat centers in Vermont and Colorado. Boulder, Colorado, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, became the headquarters for Chögyam Trungpa’s work in North America. He also continued to travel and teach in Europe, where he established a European headquarters in Marburg, Germany, which later moved to Cologne. 

In 1974 he joined with others to establish Naropa University, which for more than forty years has offered a contemplative approach to higher education, offering certificate and degree programs in meditation, psychology, Buddhism and other spiritual traditions, art, philosophy, and other subject areas. A number of the leaders in the mindfulness movement taught at Naropa, especially in the early years, including Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, Mirabai Bush, Mark Epstein, and Daniel Goleman.

In 1977, Chögyam Trungpa established Shambhala Training, a program to present meditation and the Shambhala tradition of warriorship to a broad audience. The author of more than two dozen popular books on meditation and Buddhism, he was an ecumenical teacher who sought out the wisdom in other schools of Buddhism and in other religions. He also studied and promoted a contemplative awareness of the visual arts, design, poetry, theater, and other aspects of Western art and culture.

In the last ten years of his life, Chögyam Trungpa taught extensively on the problems in society and the need to address them through the development of mindfulness and awareness. He also spoke extensively about creating an enlightened society, a theme that he was passionate about.

Many of his books on meditation, Buddhism, and the role of meditative awareness in everyday life are classics that are still widely read. Through the efforts of the editors he trained, new books continue to appear almost every year that draw on his lectures, which are among the principal holdings of the Shambhala Archives. Mindfulness in Action: Making Friends with Yourself through Meditation and Everyday Awareness—based on never before-published archived materials— is the most recent such volume.