A Living Tradition of the Buddhist West
In 1992, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher named Sogyal Rinpoche published a book about how to die. It was not the first Buddhist book about death available in English, and the tradition it drew on — the Nyingma school's teachings on the bardos, the intermediate states between death and rebirth — had already been made famous by W.Y. Evans-Wentz's 1927 translation of the Bardo Thodol, retitled for Western audiences as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. But Sogyal Rinpoche's book was different. It was not a translation. It was not a scholarly edition. It was a teaching — Dzogchen instruction integrated with contemporary death-and-dying pedagogy, the ancient framework of bardo navigation translated into a language that would make sense to a hospice nurse in Minnesota, a physician in London, a grieving daughter in São Paulo who had never encountered any form of Buddhism. By the time Sogyal Rinpoche died in Thailand in August 2019 — the year after an independent investigation confirmed in detail that he had spent decades abusing the students in his care — The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying had sold more than three million copies in more than thirty languages and been adopted by medical schools, nursing programs, and palliative care training curricula around the world. It remains in print.
Rigpa International is the organization that both produced that book and concealed what produced it. To study Rigpa is to study, with unusual clarity, the paradox at the center of the guru-devotion model of transmission: the possibility that what is transmitted can be genuine, and so can the harm.
I. The Founder — A Life Between Worlds
Sogyal Lakar was born in Kham, the eastern region of Tibet, in 1947. As a small child he was recognized as the reincarnation of Lerab Lingpa Tertön Sogyal — a tertön, a discoverer of concealed Tibetan Buddhist treasures, who had served as personal teacher to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. This recognition was made by Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö (1893–1959), one of the preeminent Nyingma masters of the twentieth century and a major figure in the Rimé movement — the Tibetan Buddhist nonsectarian revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chökyi Lodrö raised Sogyal in his own household and personally supervised his early formation.
The destruction of Tibetan monastic civilization following the Chinese occupation and the 1959 uprising ended that formation abruptly. Sogyal went into exile with the Tibetan refugee community and eventually came to study at the feet of the two major Nyingma masters of his generation in exile: Dudjom Rinpoche (Jigdrel Yeshe Dorje, 1904–1987), Supreme Head of the Nyingma school, for whom he served as English translator for six to seven years; and Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche (1910–1991), widely regarded as one of the greatest Dzogchen masters of the century. He also received teachings from Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche (1932–1999), a primary lineage holder of the Longchenpa-Jigme Lingpa tradition.
This was a transmission of the highest order. The teachers who formed Sogyal Rinpoche were not peripheral figures: they were the masters whose authority the broader Tibetan tradition itself recognized. This matters for understanding what came later. The lineage was real. The questions about what Sogyal Rinpoche did with what was given to him are not questions about whether something genuine was transmitted; they are questions about what a human being, receiving a genuine transmission, can still fail to embody.
Sogyal studied Comparative Religion at Cambridge University — an unusual bridge between the traditional Tibetan training and the Western intellectual context he was about to enter. He arrived in England in the early 1970s and began teaching. In 1979, he established his first center — Dzogchen Orgyen Chö Ling, in north-west London — and adopted the name Rigpa for his emerging organization. The Tibetan word rigpa (རིག་པ་) names the fundamental nature of mind: pristine awareness, luminous and empty, the innermost core of Dzogchen practice. The organization took its name from its central teaching.
II. The Organization — Structure and Spread
From the London base, Rigpa expanded steadily through the 1980s across the United Kingdom, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, and the United States. By the time of the 2017 crisis, the network comprised centers and groups in 41 countries.
Two retreat centers serve as the anchors of the international organization:
Lerab Ling (Roqueredonde, Occitanie, southern France, established 1992) is the principal international center — a large retreat complex in the hills of the Languedoc with a traditional Tibetan-style temple, accommodation for hundreds of students, and the infrastructure for intensive retreats and teachings. The Fourteenth Dalai Lama visited Lerab Ling in 2008 and gave public teachings, providing a significant mark of recognition from the broader Tibetan Buddhist world. The French government recognized Lerab Ling as a protected cultural site in 2011. Dzogchen Beara (the Beara Peninsula, southwest Ireland, established in the early 1990s) is the western retreat center, set on the Atlantic coast; it houses a meditation center, hermitage, and a Celtic Christian contemplative space.
The Rigpa Shedra — a structured program of Buddhist study, roughly comparable to a dharma college — was established at Lerab Ling in 2001, offering intensive annual programs in Tibetan language, Buddhist philosophy, and Dzogchen teaching for committed students. National organizations in each country hold their own charitable or nonprofit status, linked through Rigpa's international coordination structure.
At its height the network embodied what the Aquarian moment most often hopes to produce: a bridge between the depths of an ancient contemplative tradition and the circumstances of contemporary Western lives, operating across national boundaries with a common language and a shared practice.
III. Dzogchen — The Heart Teaching
The theology of Rigpa International is the theology of Dzogchen — the Great Perfection (rdzogs chen in Tibetan), the summit teaching of the Nyingma school and one of the two most advanced transmissions in all of Tibetan Buddhism (the other being Mahamudra, the Kagyu parallel).
Dzogchen's central claim is both simple and radical: the nature of mind is already what the spiritual path is seeking. It is not potential to be developed, or virtue to be cultivated, or a state to be achieved through meditation. It is what is always and already present — primordially pure, luminous, and empty. The word rigpa names this quality: the fundamental awareness of mind, not the ordinary cognitive awareness that notices objects, but the deeper ground of noticing itself, which has never been obscured, never been lost, and cannot be damaged or improved.
This teaching distinguishes Dzogchen sharply from the more effortful presentations of Buddhist practice. The path in most Buddhist frameworks is a gradual training — in ethics, concentration, and wisdom — that progressively purifies the mind until realization is possible. In Dzogchen, the realization is not at the end of the path; it is pointed at directly, from the beginning, through what the tradition calls direct introduction: the teacher directly demonstrates the nature of mind, and the student, under the right conditions, recognizes what was always already there. What follows is not the achievement of a new state but the stabilization of a recognition.
The companion framework to Dzogchen in Rigpa's teaching is the bardo cosmology — the doctrine of the intermediate states. Between death and rebirth, according to the Nyingma teaching, consciousness passes through a sequence of experiences: the clear light at the moment of death, the peaceful and wrathful visions of the chönyid bardo, the karmic wind that carries consciousness toward rebirth. The Bardo Thodol (Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo) is a guidebook to these states, meant to be read aloud to the dying and the dead to assist recognition and liberation. The practice of phowa — the transference of consciousness at the moment of death — is central to Rigpa's death-and-dying work.
Dzogchen also maps onto Mahamudra, the Kagyu tradition's parallel approach to recognizing the nature of mind. Rigpa's teaching drew on both, inviting teachers from both the Nyingma and Kagyu schools and presenting the convergence as evidence of a shared realization that underlies all authentic transmission.
IV. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
The organization's most consequential contribution to the Aquarian moment is neither its centers nor its retreats but a book.
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying was published in 1992 by HarperSanFrancisco (now HarperOne/HarperCollins). It was co-edited by Patrick Gaffney and Andrew Harvey — both long-term Rigpa students with scholarly backgrounds — who shaped Sogyal Rinpoche's oral teachings and draft materials into the finished text. The Dalai Lama contributed a foreword. It received substantial positive attention from the medical and psychotherapeutic communities as well as from Buddhist practitioners.
The book is not a translation of the Bardo Thodol. It is something more ambitious: a synthetic presentation of Dzogchen and bardo teaching integrated with the Western death-and-dying movement, drawing explicitly on the work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (whose On Death and Dying, 1969, had transformed how Western medicine thought about the dying process) and addressing the Western reader's specific experience of death, grief, and the absence of contemplative support at the end of life. It moves between the ancient Tibetan framework — bardos, phowa, the luminous nature of mind — and the everyday circumstances of a hospital room in a secular culture.
The reach of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying is difficult to overstate:
- More than 3 million copies sold worldwide — a figure that places it among the most widely read Buddhist texts published in the West in the twentieth century, comparable in reach to Thich Nhat Hanh's The Miracle of Mindfulness or Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.
- More than 30 languages and 56 countries. The translation list encompasses not only the major European languages but Korean, Thai, Tamil, Romanian, Hebrew, and Czech, among others.
- Adoption in healthcare training: the book has been formally integrated into nursing school curricula, medical school electives, chaplaincy training programs, hospice volunteer training, and palliative care professional education. A Buddhist teacher's instruction on how to die became, quietly, part of how Western medicine learns to accompany the dying.
- Endorsed by the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, by Kübler-Ross, and by numerous physicians, psychologists, and contemplative practitioners.
The book's significance for the archive is not its copyright status (it is fully copyrighted by Sogyal Rinpoche's estate and HarperCollins; it is not archivable), but its reach: The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying is the primary vector through which the Dzogchen tradition — the most advanced contemplative teaching of Tibetan Buddhism — entered Western popular awareness. More people encountered Dzogchen through this book than through any other single pathway.
V. The 2017–2018 Crisis — The Open Letter and Its Aftermath
What follows is not extraneous to a profile of Rigpa International. It is constitutive of what Rigpa is, what it demonstrated about the Aquarian moment, and what it chose to become in response.
The Open Letter
On July 14, 2017, eight current and former long-term members of Rigpa — individuals who had been in the community between fourteen and thirty-three years, some of whom held positions of significant organizational responsibility — sent an open letter directly to Sogyal Rinpoche, with copies distributed publicly. The signatories were not disgruntled outsiders; they were people who had given substantial portions of their adult lives to the community and who, in most cases, continued to value the teachings.
The letter documented four categories of serious harm:
Physical abuse: Repeated striking of students — slapping, punching, kicking, pulling ears, hitting with back-scratchers, wooden hangers, phones, cups, and other objects. At least one student had been knocked unconscious. Monks and nuns had been left bleeding. At least one incident resulted in permanent physical scarring. The letter stated explicitly that these actions, if documented under applicable law, constituted criminal assault.
Sexual abuse: Use of the teacher-student relationship to access women; coercion, intimidation, and manipulation into sexual acts; decades of sexual relationships with students, including contact with minors; photographing attendants in states of undress; compelling other attendants to participate in related circumstances.
Psychological and emotional abuse: Systematic intimidation, exploitation of the devotional teacher-student relationship, manipulation of students' understanding of samaya (the Vajrayana bond of commitment between teacher and student) to compel silence and compliance.
Misuse of resources: Use of donations and organizational funds to support personal lifestyle excesses inconsistent with the role of a Buddhist teacher or the fiduciary expectations of a charitable organization.
Sogyal Rinpoche's response invoked the concept of upāya — "skillful means" — and the related tradition of "wrathful compassion" in Vajrayana Buddhism: the teacher's apparently harsh or unconventional behavior may be a deliberate pedagogical intervention, aimed at breaking through the student's ego defenses in a way that gentler methods would not achieve. This is a recognized category in Tibetan Buddhist teaching, with genuine examples in the tradition's literature.
Senior students and academic scholars of Tibetan Buddhism responded with a distinction that matters: authentic "wrathful compassion" requires genuine wisdom and compassion at its root. In its absence, the invocation of upāya is not a teaching; it is a rationalization. The framework of crazy wisdom, divorced from the wisdom it claims to embody, becomes the most sophisticated possible license for harm. The Dzogchen teaching itself — that rigpa is the nature of mind and cannot be reduced to ego's projects — is precisely what makes the abuse of the teacher-devotion relationship in a Dzogchen context so structurally dangerous: the student has been taught to interpret the teacher's actions, however confusing, as expressions of enlightened mind.
The Lewis Silkin Investigation
In response to the open letter and the public attention that followed, Rigpa commissioned an independent investigation by the British law firm Lewis Silkin LLP. The resulting report, published on September 5, 2018, ran to fifty pages.
The findings confirmed the central allegations of the open letter:
- Physical, sexual, and emotional abuse of students in Sogyal Rinpoche's inner circle was confirmed.
- Institutional awareness of these patterns was confirmed: senior individuals within the organization knew, over extended periods, and chose silence, leaving other students at risk.
- The investigators concluded that Sogyal Rinpoche should not participate in any future Rigpa events and that the organization should formally disassociate from him.
- Structural recommendations were made for organizational reform and safeguarding procedures.
The UK Charity Commission opened an inquiry into Rigpa Fellowship as a direct consequence of the report.
In August 2018, Sogyal Rinpoche formally stepped down from his role as Spiritual Director and retired from public teaching.
Sogyal Rinpoche's Death
Sogyal Rinpoche died on August 28, 2019, in Thailand, where he had been receiving treatment for colorectal cancer. The immediate cause of death was pulmonary embolism. He was seventy-two years old.
He died having neither been exonerated nor criminally prosecuted. The Lewis Silkin report was public. Its findings were confirmed. The organization he had founded had formally disassociated from him. He died outside the institution he had built.
The Structural Parallel with Shambhala
The Rigpa crisis (2017–2018) and the Shambhala crisis (2018) are companion cases — the two most thoroughly documented abuse crises in Western Tibetan Buddhism, occurring within a year of each other, both connected to the broader post-#MeToo moment in which institutional abuses across domains became speakable in a new way.
The parallels are structural: both organizations were built around a single charismatic teacher's authority; both teachers invoked "crazy wisdom" or wrathful compassion frameworks to explain behavior that, absent those frameworks, would be immediately recognized as harmful; both organizations had developed institutional cultures in which the costs of raising concerns internally were prohibitively high; both situations involved long-term insiders — people with decades of commitment, organizational knowledge, and genuine respect for the teachings — who chose, at significant personal cost, to speak publicly.
The key difference is this: in Shambhala, the founding teacher (Chögyam Trungpa) had died in 1987, and the abuser was the second-generation inheritor (Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche). In Rigpa, the founding teacher was the abuser. There was no inherited institution to preserve; there was only what Sogyal Rinpoche had built. The organizational survival task, therefore, was simultaneously more urgent (no continuity aside from the institution itself) and in some ways simpler (there was no question of whether to support or remove the teacher; removal was the only responsible course).
VI. Organizational Reform and Current Status
Rigpa survived the crisis. This requires acknowledgment, because many guru-centered organizations do not survive the documented removal of the guru, particularly when that removal is accompanied by confirmed findings of institutional failure. The survival is attributable in large part to a deliberate and consequential structural decision: Rigpa did not appoint a successor.
In August 2021, the organization formally introduced a model of distributed leadership — a collective of Senior Teachers and Practice Holders who collectively serve as primary teaching guides, without any single individual assuming the authority that Sogyal Rinpoche had held. A Vision Board was established with a structure requiring that at least 50 percent of its members be Senior Teachers or Practice Holders, operating under a consensus governance model. The Vision Board's structure was revised in January 2023 to strengthen these provisions.
Spiritual Advisors to the organization include three recognized senior teachers: Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche (a major Nyingma/Sakya figure with close historical ties to Rigpa), Mindrolling Jetsün Khandro Rinpoche, and Khenchen Namdrol Rinpoche. These figures provide lineage continuity and external legitimacy without assuming organizational control.
As of March 2026, the network remains active in 41 countries. The two major retreat centers — Lerab Ling and Dzogchen Beara — continue to operate. The Rigpa Shedra continues at Lerab Ling with annual intensive programs. National organizations maintain their charitable status. The Rigpa Wiki (rigpawiki.org) continues as a reference resource for Nyingma and Dzogchen teaching.
What Rigpa has not done is pretend that the crisis did not happen, or that recovery is complete. The organizational communications since 2018 have been, relative to the standard institutional response, unusually direct about what occurred and what was done in response. The distributed leadership model is explicitly framed as a response to the structural conditions that allowed the crisis to occur.
VII. Aquarian Significance
Rigpa International holds an unusual position in the archive of Living Traditions: it is simultaneously one of the most consequential and one of the most honestly cautionary.
The organization was, for four decades, the primary institutional vehicle through which the Nyingma Dzogchen tradition — the summit teaching of Tibetan Buddhism — reached Western practitioners. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying is one of the handful of books that most shaped how secular Western culture thinks about death, dying, and the mind. The integration of Tibetan death-and-dying pedagogy into healthcare training is Rigpa's most lasting and least contested contribution.
The 2017–2018 crisis is the most thoroughly documented institutional abuse case in the history of Western Buddhism. The Lewis Silkin report is public, detailed, and confirmatory. The eight signatories of the July 2017 letter — who signed their names, knew the cost, and sent it anyway — demonstrated, in a specific institutional context, the same wager on which the archive is built: the truth is more important than the institution it might damage.
The aftermath demonstrates something less often visible: that an Aquarian community can choose, under catastrophic pressure, to become structurally different rather than reverting. The distributed leadership model is not a panacea. It is a genuine organizational response to a genuine diagnosis. What it has produced — an organization that continues to transmit a genuine contemplative tradition while explicitly rejecting the authority structure that produced the harm — is worth documenting with care.
Rigpa's story is, in the language of the Introduction to Aquarian Thought, the story of what happens when the Aquarian impulse — direct transmission, universal accessibility, stripping of institutional containers — produces both its best and its worst outcomes in the same organization, at the same time. The direct transmission was real. So was the harm.
Colophon
This ethnographic introduction to Rigpa International was researched and written for the Good Work Library as part of the Living Traditions series — a documentation project covering significant Aquarian communities in the global religious landscape since the nineteenth century.
Key sources: Wikipedia (Sogyal Rinpoche; Rigpa organization; The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying; Lerab Ling; Dzogchen Beara; Nyingma school; Bardo Thodol; Dzogchen; Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö); rigpa.org; rigpawiki.org; Lewis Silkin Report (September 5, 2018); Lion's Roar; Tricycle Magazine; Buddhistdoor Global; How Did It Happen (howdidithappen.org); Beyond the Temple (beyondthetemple.com); Religion 55:4 (2025); Ann Gleig, American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity (Yale UP, 2019).
Compiled and formatted for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
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