In Vermont: A Spiritual Leader's Farewell

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"The night of my conception," wrote Chogyam Trungpa, who would be cremated in a Vermont mountain meadow before a sizable audience in the spring of this year, "my mother had a very significant dream that a being had entered her body with a flash of light; that year flowers bloomed in the neighborhood although it was still winter."

In his autobiography, Born in Tibet, Trungpa went on to say he was delivered in a cattle byre in February 1939, and that on that day a rainbow was seen and a water pail was found unaccountably full of milk. When he died in Halifax, Nova Scotia, last April 4, leaving eleven published books, five sons and a widow, Trungpa, who was called Rinpoche (a Tibetan honorific meaning precious one) by thousands of his Buddhist students, a remarkable odyssey came to a close -- at least in this life. The journey actually began months before Rinpoche's birth, when a holy man died. "The monks of Surmang were feeling lost without their abbot," Rinpoche wrote, "and were eager that his reincarnation should be found without delay." After a vision and a sign or two, the Rinpoche baby was found and rather swiftly proclaimed the chosen one. The peasant infant became the spiritual boy king.

It was a quiet life until 1959, when Rinpoche, like the Dalai Lama, fled the country in the face of Chinese takeover. Rinpoche spent two years in India, then four in England at Oxford University, then moved on to Scotland to found a meditation center. In 1969, he relinquished his monastic vows. The next year, he married a 16-year-old Englishwoman, Diana Judith Pybus. The nuptial move drew criticism from lama quarters.

Now it came to pass that in America in 1970 there was a generation of young people who were in the habit of attending loosely programmed outdoor chapel meetings known here and there as love-ins, be-ins or demonstrations and punctuated, more or less, with the admonition, "Peace and love, pass it on." That was the year that Rinpoche came to these shores, taking off like a Roman candle lit at both ends. He traveled and taught indefatigably, setting up scores of urban meditation and study centers, the two most prominent in Boulder and in Barnet, Vt. He had tapped a vein. A section of what used to be called the counterculture desired a guru, and here he was in the flesh. By 1975, after the establishment in Boulder of the Naropa Institute, a liberal arts college, his imprimatur was everywhere. One could stick pins in a map, connect the dots and, with apologies to Amtrak, call it the Angst Express. The confused came to be made sound.