Originally posted by David Suppan here on March 6th, 2024:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/455779734896061/posts/1798094073997947
Chogyam Trungpa Chogyam Trungpa’s excessive drinking became a type of hagiographic deception that his students didn’t really examine until many of them became alcoholic themselves. At that point, it was difficult to have a clear perspective on what was happening with so much drinking going on in the halls of Vajradhatu International. Chogyam Trungpa’s academic credentials was also a deception that was not examined or else completely ignored and even promulgated as an earned accomplishment between the years of 1963 and 1968 of a newly crowned mahasiddha from the exotic land of Tibet.
When several people investigated whether Trungpa actually attended Oxford University, it was discovered that he neither studied nor attended St Antony College nor received a degree from Oxford. When several people recently inquired through the registrar’s office, it was confirmed that he never matriculated as a student at Oxford. Every academic institution has to take their creditability seriously because their entire existence really depends on having sterling credentials and trust and that students the learning institution has graduated, have actually received their certificates of graduation.
Apparently, Judith Simmer-Brown who is regarded as a distinguished professor at Naropa University that Trungpa founded in 1974, never gave a second thought to the implication of Trungpa receiving a scholarship or fellowship at Oxford or even just studying comparative religion at St Antony College. St Antony College doesn’t teach comparative religion nor ever has, but instead teaches political science. The whole episode that begins Trungpa’s career as an abusing teacher of buddhism and for whom everybody excused because they saw him as a high Tibetan lama living in exile, was somehow lost in the conflation of his pretend academic credentials at Oxford University.
The Spalding Sponsorship that Chogyam Trungpa actually did receive was not a scholarship nor a fellowship, nor did he matriculate at St Antony College or any other college at Oxford University. By conflating the sponsorship with the idea that Trungpa went to Oxford University was attempted by sharing a few pictures of Akong Rinpoche and Trungpa with an assortment of other people from different cultures around the world. All these people in the pictures look at least 30 years old and not 21 year old graduate students attending college. There is no evidence of him attending any class, submitting any white papers that would indicate he was actually a student even if he took a course for non-credit. The Spalding Sponsorship consisted of a small amount of money given to him from a small private trust that was designed to facilitate cultural exchange for certain people who had some knowledge about their culture to offer to this particular college event. The event was apparently sponsored by a conservative group of people politically motivated to erase any vestiges of communist leanings in England’s coterie of fascist hopefuls. It is repeated often by his hagiographers that Trungpa had studied comparative religion, flower arranging and other assorted bits and pieces of western education at Oxford. It has been confirmed by Oxford that he did none of that except for maybe flower arranging, but through a teacher independent of Oxford University. He did continue his long avocation of drinking and philandering to excess that began back when he was a young tulku in Old Tibet before his escape to exile in 1959. His excessive drinking resulted in a lifelong debilitating paralysis from a driving accident on May 6,1969 when he drove drunk into a joke shop in London. His wife Diana didn’t want to admit that he may have been drunk or that he was probably drunk because he drank most of the time. In the biopic about her husband called Crazy Wisdom, Diana Mukpo left the possibility open that he may not have been drunk because it wasn’t confirmed and perhaps also to leave the impression for other investigators who may have found out that there was another woman in the car that sustained injuries in the accident. Like his assumed academic credentials, the facts of that accident was also covered up to create, protect and develop a sterling public academic image. To escape this scandal and the scandalous marriage to his new 16 year old English wife Diana, he left England 9 months later in January 1970 for a new home in the United States. For the next 17 years, Trungpa had continued to create scandal on a daily basis for the whole of his teaching career in North America. Creating scandal and the inevitable traumas from those scandals seemed to be wired in to Trungpa’s DNA.
Chogyam Trungpa had made a point in his teachings that credentials were not to be relied upon because he thought that the ego attaches itself to them as a way to be academically authoritative and truthful. “Chogie” made sure with the help of people working in the shadows of his ascendent rise as a newly minted buddhist teacher from the exotic East, that he would be given the appearance of having earned some excellent credentials from none other than the preeminent institution of higher learning in the Western hemisphere—Oxford University.
Some of Trungpa’s students really thought that their guru having sex with multiple students on a daily basis was an example of being open and honest about his way of life, or his way of teaching dharma. To my mind, it was more of a way for Trungpa to hide behind his own depravity. His new way of living reflected his new and scandalous way of teaching buddhism. The unethical behavior was designed to intimidate students so that they would accept and fear his dharma person as a viable buddhist teaching and teacher. The senior students who eventually found a way to be copacetic with this spiritual strongman strategy of Trungpa’s, saw the acceptance of his behavior necessary to establishing their own academic credentials and careers as buddhist teachers themselves. The ongoing shock from this successful strategy remained with many students who weren’t able to deal with the trauma for many years. By avoiding the discovery of what was wrong with the approach to Trungpa’s teaching and his view of dharma, the illusions created through the deceptions of his excessive drinking and false academic credentials created destabilizing mental health conditions among many in the sangha. There were many students in the Vajradhatu sangha who didn’t have a chance to properly examine these carefully crafted spiritual deceptions before damage to their mental health was done. Eventually, many sought recovery from these traumatizing events created by Trungpa who himself was probably still traumatized from his long journey out of Tibet in 1959 when 300 of his retinue had died in the ensuing escape. These spiritual deceptions that formed Chogyam Trungpa’s imprimatur were galvanized, supported and promulgated through his main publisher, Shambhala Publications.
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