How did Shambhala Buddhism start?
Shambhala Buddhism was started in the late 1970s by Chagyam Trungpa, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche’s father. Trungpa was born in Tibet in 1939, making him the eleventh descendent in the line of Trungpa tulkus. These were teachers of the Kagyu lineage, one of the four main schools of Tibetan Buddhism. In 1959, at the age of twenty — when Trungpa was the head of the Surmang monasteries in eastern Tibet — he was forced to flee the country. He escaped to India, where the Dalai Lama appointed him spiritual advisor for the Young Lama’s Home School in Dalhousie, India, a post he held from 1959 to 1963. He later moved to Europe, to study religion and philosophy at Oxford University. In 1967, Trungpa moved to Scotland, where he founded the Samye Ling meditation centre, the first Tibetan Buddhist practice centre in the Western world. But, he later gave up monastic life and decided to be a teacher. He then brought Tibetan Buddhism even further west, to North America. In 1970, he married a woman named D
