Drikung kyabgon chetsang rinpoche biography template

The Biography of His Holiness the Drikung Kyabgön Chetsang, From the Heart of Tibet, is now available.

Elmar R. Gruber recounts the fascinating story of the Drikung Kyabgön Chetsang in an eloquent manner and in great detail against the backdrop of the political, religious, and social developments, thus unfolding a marvelous cultural history.

Gruber describes the search and identification of the new reincarnation of the Drikung Kyabgön Chetsang, his early childhood in the Lhasa mansion of his aristocratic family, his enthronement at four years of age and his subsequent life in the main Drikung monasteries.

He paints a vivid tableau of the transition of traditional Tibetan culture during the troubled years of Chinese Communist occupation, when his family members fled the country in the wake of Chinese oppression together with the Dalai Lama and many high-ranking Lamas, aristocrats and common people. The young Chetsang Rinpoche was compelled to remain behind in Tibet upon orders of the Drikung officials and thus had to endure many hardships in the ensuing years. The author’s account of the Drikung Kyabgön Chetsang’s experiences during the precarious and desperate period of the Cultural Revolution is brilliant yet disconcerting, replete with many lesser-known aspects of the state of civil society.

Soon thereafter Tibet underwent a great upheaval. In the wake of the Tibetan uprising of 1959, as many Tibetans fled the country, among them the Dalai Lama, the cabinet ministers and a host of spiritual dignitaries, several attempts were launched to bring Chetsang Rinpoche and Chungtsang Rinpoche out of Tibet into safety. These attempts failed because of the inexorable resistance of the monastery manager. Rinpoche’s family had already fled to India in 1956.

The monks in the Drikung monastery were put under house arrest, and Chetsang Rinpoche had to endure with them for months Communist indoctrinations. After some month Tritsab Gyabra, who had left the monastery some years before, took Rinpoche to live with him in Lhasa under rather dismal conditions. In 1960, the Drikung Kyabgön Chetsang was admitted into an elementary school in Lhasa. In very short time he mastered the subject matters of several classes, being able to finish the six years of education in only three years. Thereafter he was admitted to the Jerag Lingka middle school. The subjects there included Chinese, natural sciences, history, and biology. Chetsang Rinpoche excelled in his studies, especially in Chinese. He also became a keen athlete and a passionate and brilliant soccer player.

When the Red Guards infiltrated the schools at the onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Chetsang Rinpoche found himself caught up in the midst of the factional fighting of two opposing groups of Red Guards. Classes and business came to a halt. Many aristocrats and Rinpoches had to undergo brutal “people’s tribunals” known as struggle sessions. Chetsang Rinpoche could no longer stay with Tritsab Gyabra, who had fallen from grace. He lived at the school, where he cooked for the few remaining schoolmates and studied the books he found in the school’s library. Lhasa sank into chaos. In this atmosphere of anarchy Rinpoche several times was saved by a fraction from certain death.

In 196

• by Elmar R. Gruber
• Shambhala Publications, 2010
• 318 pages, 9” X 6”, paperback
• printed on recycled paper

From the Dalai Lama’s foreword to this book: “The story of Drikung Chetsang Rinpoche’s life encompasses a remarkably broad range of Tibetan experience spanning the past fifty years. Born into a prominent aristocratic family and then recognized as an important reincarnate lama, he might have been expected to live a life of privilege and esteem, in addition to the responsibilities he had to bear. However, the changes that overwhelmed Tibet in the middle of the twentieth century affected everyone.”

“Chetsang Rinpoche is one of the highest incarnate lamas, the head of a tradition. But he also experienced the life of an ordinary American. This is unlike any other biography—one sees how a neighborhood boy can become a great spiritual master.”—Gelek Rimpoche, author of Good Life, Good Death

“This is a fascinating, terrifying, moving, and exalting account of a truly great being’s success in rising above adversity and making an outstanding contribution to a part of humanity under extreme pressure. I warmly recommend it to anyone who might like to discover a magnificent chest of treasures.”—Professor Robert Thurman, author, with the Dalai Lama, of Infinite Life

Elmar R. Gruber, PhD, was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1955. He is the author of twenty books that have been published in fifteen languages throughout the world. A longtime practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, he is a student of Drikung Chetsang Rinpoche.