Summary
According to the Buddha, no one can attain basic sanity or enlightenment without practicing meditation. The teachings given here on the outlook and technique of meditation provide the foundation that every practitioner needs to awaken as the Buddha did. Trungpa teaches us to let go of the urge to make meditation serve our ambition; thus we can relax into openness. We are shown how the deliberate practice of mindfulness develops into contrived awareness, and we discover the world of insight that awareness reveals. We learn of a subtle psychological stage set that we carry with us everywhere and unwittingly use to structure all our experience--and we find that meditation gradually carries us beyond this and beyond ego altogether to the experience of unconditioned freedom.
Chogyam Trungpa (February 29, 1939 -- April 4, 1987) was one of the most visibly active of the Tibetan Buddhist refugees to come to the West and to lay the foundation in Europe and North America for the study of the Tibetan traditions. Born the son of a farmer and considered the eleventh incarnation of Trungpa Tulku, he was given a traditional training in religious philosophy but in his teens had to be hidden from the invading Chinese.
Fleeing in 1959 when the Communists invaded Tibet, he ultimately moved to Great Britain, where he studied comparative religion at Oxford University and established a Tibetan meditation center in Scotland. He moved to the United States in 1970 and established the Buddhist university, Naropa, in Colorado. Naropa became the center for seminars, many of which he cotaught with prominent American artists, scholars, and scientists. Among his contributions are the translation of numerous Tibetan texts.
On September 28, 1986, he suffered cardiac arrest, requiring intensive care at the hospital, then at his home and finally, in mid-March 1987, back at the hospital, where he died on April 4, 1987.
(Bowker Author Biography)