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Lobsang Phuntshok Lhalungpa Biography
Lobsang Phuntshok LhalungpaLobsang Phuntsok Lhalungpa was born in Lhasa on January 5, 1926.
His father was Lhalungpa Gyaltsen Tharchin, a kuten (medium) of the oracle of Nechung1. When Lobsang was six years old his mother died in childbirth and thereafter his father remarried.
The family grew to include an additional eight half-siblings, along with four children from his father's first marriage.
In 1934 Lhalungpa and his brother Jampa became preliminary ordained at Drepung Loseling College and after that returned home to attend a private school in Lhasa.
Few years later they started private tutoring with a scholar monk from Tashi Lhunpo Monastery2 and studied sutra and tantra.
From 1940 to 1952, he was a civil servant monk in the service of the 14th Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government, while continuing his studies with teachers from different traditions.
From Trijang Lobsang Yeshe he received Lamrim3 teachings and Lojong4. He received initiations into the three main tantras of the Geluk tradition: Guhyasamāja, Cakrasaṃvara, and Vajrabhairava, then went into retreats.
Lhalungpa traveled to Shugsheb monastery, a large nunnery, and achieved insights with help of Nyingma abbess Shugsheb Jetsunma Chönyi Zangmo, the most well-known of the yoginis in the 1900s, who was considered an incarnation of Machig Lapdron.5
From 1947 to 1951, he was the cultural representative of the Tibetan government in New Delhi. He moved to India and taught Tibetan language, history and culture in several educational institutions.
In 1949, Lhalungpa attended the World Buddhist Conference in Bodhgaya as a representative of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. In the same year he renounced his monastic vows and married Diki Lhamo Dorji, of Bhutanese and Tibetan descent. They had four sons; the first died in infancy.
After the Chinese invasion of Tibet, he chose to remain in India, which meant losing the connection to the Tibetan government and his employment.
By 1954 Lhalungpa learned English and established a school named Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Cultural Institute (ITBCI) with Dardo Rinpoche. The school was successful and attracted local Tibetan children who learned Tibetan language and customs.
Lhalungpa along with Tharchin Babu, the publisher of the newspaper Tibet Mirror, printed stories in Tibetan highlighting the Tibet issue.
While living in Kalimpong, Lhalungpa met David Snellgrove, whom he taught spoken Tibetan and collaborated on a translation of “Words of My Perfect Teacher” of Patrul Rinpoche.
With George Roerich worked on annotations of Tsongkhapa's “Great Treatise on Tantra” and translation into English of the Dunhuang Annals.6 They also co-authored the “Textbook of Colloquial Tibetan,” which was first published in 1957 by the government of West Bengal.
In 1956 Lhalungpa moved to New Delhi and conducted the first Tibetan language program of All India Radio. His wife worked as an announcer on the broadcasts.
In 1968 he met Thomas Merton, a Jesuit priest, proponent of interfaith understanding, and interested in exploring Eastern religions and meditation. Merton asked him if he would be interested in participating as an advisor and translator. Lhalungpa agreed as he had already been thinking about relocating to North America.
In 1971, Lhalungpa emigrated to Canada, and took a position at the University of British Columbia to teach Buddhist philosophy and helped Tibetan refugees settle in Canada. After few years he moved to United States.
In 1973 he was among the speakers at The International Colloquium for World Religions, held in Houston, Texas. He also gave lectures at Esalen center, in California.
Beginning in 1976, with permission by the Sixteenth Karmapa, Lhalungpa started to translate “Moonbeams of Mahāmudrā,” by Dakpo Tashi Namgyal. The final work, “Mahamudra, the Moonlight, Quintessence of Mind and Meditation,” was published in 1986 by Shambhala, and revised and reprinted in 2006 by Wisdom Publications.
Lobsang Lhalungpa with the 14th Dalai Lama at the Library of Congress in 1979.During this period, Lhalungpa divorced Diki Lhamo Dorji, who remained in Canada. In 1980, he married Gisele Minke, a flight attendant for Pan American Airlines.
In 1982 he travelled to Tibet and was able to visit his former home and meet his family.
In 1989 Lhalungpa moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 1991, when the Fourteenth Dalai Lama visited Santa Fe, he acted as his translator. He also started to teach Tibetan Buddhism and meditation in the local community.
Lobsang Phuntsok Lhalungpa died on April 29, 2008 as a result of internal injuries sustained in a car accident. The funeral took place on May 1. A group of monks from Drepung Loseling Monastery led a memorial service, attended by people from the Tibetan communities of Sante Fe and Albuquerque.
Works
• Tibet: The Sacred Realm, Photographs 1880-1950 , Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1983.
• The Life of Gampopa with Jampa Mackenzie Stewart
• Life Story of Milarepa: Tibet's Poet Saint with Ken Albertsen
• The Life of Milarepa: A New Translation from the Tibetan
• Ancient Wisdom, Living Tradition: The Tibetan Spirit in the Himalayas with Marcia Keegan
• Mahamudra: The Moonlight the Quintessence of Mind and Meditation by Dakpo Tashi Namgyal
Sources
• https://treasuryoflives.org/biographies/view/Lobsang-Phuntsok-Lhalungpa/P1KG10060
• https://tibet.net/obituary-lobsang-p-lhalungpa/
• https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobsang_Phuntshok_Lhalungpa
• https://tibetanwhoswho.wordpress.com/2018/12/07/lobsang-p-lhalungpa/
Footnotes
1. The Nechung Oracle is the State Oracle of Tibet. The medium of the State Oracle currently resides with the current Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India. Prior to the Himalayan diaspora resulting from the annexation of Tibet by the People's Republic of China, the Nechung Oracle was the designated head of the Nechung monastery in Tibet.
2. Tashi Lhunpo Monastery, founded in 1447 by the 1st Dalai Lama, is the traditional monastic seat of the Panchen Lama, and historically and culturally an important monastery in Shigatse, the second-largest city in Tibet.
3. Lamrim (stages of the path) is a Tibetan Buddhist textual form for presenting the stages in the complete path to enlightenment as taught by Buddha. In Tibetan Buddhist history there have been many different versions of lamrim, presented by different teachers of the Nyingma, Kagyu and Gelug schools. However, all versions of the lamrim are elaborations of Atiśa's 11th-century root text A Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment (Bodhipathapradīpa).
4. Lojong is a mind training practice in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition based on a set of aphorisms formulated in Tibet in the 12th century by Chekawa Yeshe Dorje. The practice involves refining and purifying one's motivations and attitudes. The fifty-nine or so slogans that form the root text of the mind training practice are designed as a set of antidotes to undesired mental habits that cause suffering. They contain both methods to expand one's viewpoint towards absolute bodhicitta, such as "Find the consciousness you had before you were born" and "Treat everything you perceive as a dream", and methods for relating to the world in a more constructive way with relative bodhicitta, such as "Be grateful to everyone" and "When everything goes wrong, treat disaster as a way to wake up."
5. Machig Labdrön, sometimes referred to as Ahdrön Chödron, or "Singular Mother Torch from Lab", (1055-1149) was a reincarnation of Yeshe Tsogyal, and the renowned 11th-century Tibetan tantric Buddhist master and yogini that originated several Tibetan lineages of the Vajrayana practice of Chöd.
6. The Tibetan Annals, or Old Tibetan Annals, are composed of two manuscripts written in Old Tibetan language found in the early 20th century in the "hidden library", the Mogao Grottoes near Dunhuang in northwestern Gansu province, Western China, which is believed to have been sealed in the 11th century CE. They form Tibet's earliest extant history.
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