Geshe Ngawang Wangyal

Geshe Ngawang Wangyal (Tib. དགེ་བཤེས་ངག་དབང་དབང་རྒྱལ་, Wyl. dge bshes ngag dbang dbang rgyal) (1901-1983). A Kalmyk-Mongolian lama who was one of the first Tibetan Buddhist lamas to teach in the United States. He came to the U.S. in 1955, and established the Tibetan Buddhist Learning Center in New Jersey in 1958. This was the first Tibetan Buddhist Dharma center in the West.

Among his American students, many went on to become prominent scholars and translators. His students included Robert Thurman, Jeffrey Hopkins, Alexander Berzin, Anne C. Klein, Brian Cutillo, and others.

Alexander Berzin states:

Back in the 1960s, in the United States, there were very few opportunities to get to know Buddhism. There were a few books that were written, but they were more sensationalist and they did not really convey the authentic tradition. There were a few professors at universities who were teaching about Buddhism, but the approach at that time was that Buddhism, particularly Tibetan Buddhism, was a dead subject, and so it was taught like Ancient Egyptian studies. And so the professors had their original texts in the original languages and they taught language, primarily. It was almost like a grand puzzle that everybody was trying to figure out. What could this possibly mean? And in this atmosphere, Geshe Wangyal was a unique light, because he provided access to a living tradition. And a few of us had the great fortune to meet with him. A few of us actually lived with him and studied with him, like my colleagues Robert Thurman and Jeffrey Hopkins."

Robert Thurman states:

Geshe Wangyal was unlike anyone I had ever met. As a teenage monk he had nearly died of typhoid in the hot Black Sea summer. His mother heard that the monks had given him up for dead, so she came to the monastery and spent three days sucking the pus and phlegm out of his throat and lungs to keep him from suffocating. When he awoke, the first thing he was told was that she had succumbed to the disease she saved him from and died on the very day he recovered. He was appalled when he observed that though he felt grief at the news, another current in his mind would not let him think of anything else except his overwhelming thirst after his ten-day fever. Noting this dreadful degree of selfishness, he resolved then and there to give his last ounce to freeing himself and others from such involuntarily selfish impulses. I had never encountered such unconditional compassion directly in my entire life.

Publications

• Geshe Wangyal, The Door of Liberation: Essential Teachings of the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition (Wisdom Publications: 1973, republished in 1995)

External links

• Geshe Ngawang Wangyal, Rigpa Shedra Wiki
• Ngawang Wangyal, Wikipedia
• Geshe Wangyal, Tsadra Commons