The Perpetual Reinvention of Rigdzin Karma
Sincere homage to the Guru, the Deva, the Dakini—and a satiric bow to all patrons who shape the sacred.
The year was 2530 since the Buddha's Parinirvana—a distinctly Buddhist reckoning of time, which renders events recent enough to be documented yet distant enough to be misunderstood. Into this moment, Karma was born: in a valley southeast of Jomolangma, where mountains touch the heavens without effort and livelihoods embrace only the abyss. The valley had beauty in excess, but very little opportunity.
His father—an accidental Tibetan refugee and intentional opportunist, having received the gift of citizenship from the Dharma Raja Abhiya Vajra Shvara of the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon—departed early into samsara, into another valley, or simply into the void. The departure was complete enough to become formative.
His mother—Bhutanese by birth, from a nomadic family that had quietly mastered survival—chose a narrower path: one her relatives called renunciation and a tax collector termed an administrative inconvenience. Between these two absences—one physical, one material—Karma learned early that permanence was an unreliable companion.
The Way of Necessity
By 1994, he had become what institutions classify as an orphan and what life recognizes as a student of necessity. While every other child in the village seemed to experience the warmth of parental affection, all Karma had was a curious mind that drifted toward a somber wonder: perhaps he had been born from seasonal moisture—one of the forms of birth Buddhism mentions.
Yet, just as his trajectory seemed fixed toward a life of subsistence dictated by the seasons, the karmic ledger shifted. In 1996, he entered Druk Khamsum Wangdue Choekyi Phodrang Monastic School in western Bhutan, an entry he recognized as the first crucial step of a thousand-mile journey.
There, two things were observed immediately: first, Karma learned quickly; second, he worked without complaint. He lifted stones, hauled firewood, and memorized texts with equal discipline. When he witnessed other young monks being embraced by their loved ones, thoughts of his own origin continued to linger. Whether his tireless effort reflected devotion, determination, or simply a lack of alternatives was never conclusively determined.
In 1998, he advanced to Chungoen Dongak Dargay Ling (present-day Rinchenling Shedra), where he studied basic ritual arts, grammar, sutra, and philosophy while participating in the ancient monastic tradition of constructing temples for future generations to renovate. Under his first master, Lopen Yeshey Rinchen, Karma spent four years balancing textual rigor with physical labor, discovering that the doctrine of impermanence applies most consistently to structures built with optimism.
Then came a blessing disguised as a tragic displacement. Karma was transferred to Riwo Druzing Nyipa (present-day Lekshed Jungney), where his second teacher, Lopen Lekshed Jamtsho, appeared briefly but decisively. Under his guidance, something shifted. Grammar ceased to feel mechanical. Sutras stopped resisting interpretation. Philosophy revealed itself not as an abstraction, but as disciplined clarity. Karma's aptitude sharpened—not theatrically, but unmistakably. Under this Manjushri-like teacher—whose singular teaching had the power to unlock a thousand lines—Karma's inner vision opened.
The Root Guru and the Silent Valley
In 2002, he arrived at Namgyelchoeling Monastery and met Khenpo Namkar Donkuen Drubpa, an 81-year-old renunciate and a devoted disciple of Ven. Rahor Chodrak, who was the "heart son" of the Rimé master Zhenphen Chökyi Nangwa. Karma came seeking an audience around dusk, just as Khenpo was about to improvise a resupply for serkyim, his stores reduced to a few days' rations.
After prostrations and an offering of three bottles of Ara (Bhutanese moonshine) and fifteen kilos of rice, Khenpo looked up and smiled: "We either have a good karmic connection or my dharma protectors summoned you to deliver the supplies I was running short of; either way, I accept your offering." With that affectionate gesture, Khenpo became his root guru. Instruction here was neither indulgent nor performative. The Longchen Nyingtik teachings were transmitted without embellishment, and Karma absorbed them with the gravity of someone who understood that precision mattered.
After a few years with his root guru came the retreat.
Retreat, as described in brochures, offers a controlled encounter with the mind. In practice, it provides an unsupervised audit. Karma retreated to Bayul Langdrak Ney, the Hidden Valley of Misty Towers, a location chosen for its silence and distance from distraction. Despite the enduring silence, his mind didn't cooperate.
That same stillness was breached one evening by a radio—played, without pretension, by an elderly practitioner nearby. Though the music itself was unremarkable, its effect was powerful. Within minutes, it accomplished what months of solitude had not: it exposed the fragility of a resolve built on containment rather than genuine insight. Karma remained in retreat physically, but mentally, he had already departed—or perhaps he was never truly present in the first place.
One evening at sunset, as was his routine, he stood outside the hermitage reciting the first chapter of the Bodhicaryāvatāra and the Dharmadhātu Ratna Kośa. Staring down into the valley, he asked himself a question less poetic than honest: was this genuine renunciation, or simply a different form of avoidance? By morning, he descended.
External Legitimacies and Changing Faiths
In the capital city of the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon, Karma encountered another system of doctrine: institutional legitimacy. Despite fluency in Dzongkha, years of classical training, and comprehensive textual mastery, he discovered that knowledge required external validation to circulate freely. Instead of finding the employment he was seeking, he discovered that even enlightenment, absent certification, was considered non-transferable in a land that seems like Agartha to a fortunate few.
Armed with the knowledge that institutions value clarity—provided it arrives in the correct format—but also require the backing of patronage, he began to gather what he lacked, seeking to replace the dysfunctional equipment he had been given. English, science, and Western literature were devoured as if by one newly awoken from a state of torpor—all while gripped by the temporary hustle, relentless exhaustion, chronic hunger, and a rapidly fading hope. Perchance all his effort would come to nothing, either by failing to reach its intended fruition or by being overtaken by age and other factors first.
In 2006, worn thin rather than broken, Karma entered a Christian community that asked fewer preliminary questions. He was welcomed, fed, and trusted with responsibility before credentials. The warmth was genuine. The structure was simple. Soon he became a Baptist preacher—one whose logic could dismantle mountains of doubt—and remained within this faith for nearly fifteen years: long enough to be shaped, challenged, entangled, and ultimately transformed.
He credits this chapter of faith—and the grace he found within it—with the flowering of his later life in the West: his sharpened linguistic range, his immersion in Western literature, and his eventual encounter with modern science. What he carried into that tradition may have been a contemplative discipline honed in monastery cells; but what he carried out was something harder to name—a deepened understanding that the sincerity of the practice and the sincerity of the institution are rarely the same thing, a distinction that, in time, he recognized as applying equally to every tradition he had ever entered.
The departure, when it came, was not a rejection of faith. It was a recognition that no external structure, however well-built, could substitute for what he had initially sought when he descended from his Himalayan retreat. Since basking in the adulation of self-assurance is the quintessence of Karma's coping mechanism, he brushes off the details of his "middle faith" with a blissful, ecstatic wink, even as the scars of his life's tragedies remain freshly visible. He frames this choice as a matter of personal respect and gratitude—a careful effort to avoid crossing into territory that feels too doctrinal, or portraying himself as an ingrate apostate.
When his efforts to improve outcomes for others within his own domain were interpreted negatively, he realized that patrons, regardless of loyalty, rarely welcome unsanctioned reform. After losing everything he cherished to a catastrophic goring, he crossed continents, accumulated books, and made his first American home in the Green Mountain State along the 45th parallel—before drifting gradually southward to the Big Apple, a city he would tenderly call Ardam Dragrong, the Garden of Luminous Clarity, in later chapters of his life. It served as his base for a decade.
The Summoning
In 2020, Karma nearly died. Twice. Not because of the global pandemic, but because of a more intimate summons—by the universe, or perhaps the Dharma itself. Despite a life of unbroken sobriety, he was visited by an ominous onset of acute pancreatitis: misdiagnosed the first time—which nearly returned him to dust as the Bible defines it—and diagnosed with precision the second, though the experience left a lingering sense of uneasiness. What medicine classified as a terminal crisis, Karma received as a blessing poorly wrapped—a physical dismantling that mirrored, with uncomfortable accuracy, his spiritual necessity.
The proximity of death clarified matters considerably, and the pandemic—arriving in that same season—rendered sudden demise less an exception than a climate. Spiritual brethren were lost across the Green Mountain, Empire, and Magnolia States, each absence echoing an identical uneasiness: a reminder of how far the lived fact of death sits from its doctrinal description.
The seminars continued; the fellowships did not lapse. Yet neither could loosen the fixation, and Karma found himself returning, again and again, to the raw nearness of his own end. The identities he had collected—or at least attempted to collect—monk, scholar, convert, social worker, migrant—proved administratively irrelevant. There were no forms to complete. No doctrinal checkpoints to pass. No patrons to appease. Only clarity, arriving without ceremony.
Being that close to death changed him in ways the monasteries and churches never had. That, perhaps, was the revitalization of the teaching.
The Edge of No Man's Land
In 2021, after many inward battles, he returned to the Dharma. What had lain dormant for so long now required a complete reawakening—a commitment to pure practice over performance. He sought forgiveness with regret, reliance, remedy, and resolve. He renewed his vows of refuge with utmost sincerity. He made contributions to non-sectarian monasteries without expectation. He revisited sutras without wavering.
What gradually followed, however, was not serenity. It was something considerably more bleak—and considerably more honest.
In the silence that opened after the crisis, Karma found himself drifting. Not toward distraction, but toward its philosophical opposite: a vast, featureless detachment in which nothing carried weight, nothing demanded a response, and existence itself began to feel like an administrative error. As in Thus Spake Zarathustra, extreme isolation deepened and reality grew thin at the edges.
He recognized the territory only later: he had been navigating, without a map, into the proximity of Nihilism. Not the elegant emptiness of Śūnyatā—which Nāgārjuna described as the very condition of interdependence and compassionate engagement—but its corruption: the misreading Nāgārjuna himself warned against most severely. Emptiness mistaken for the absence of effect, detachment mistaken for the dissolution of cause. The view that, because all things are empty of inherent existence, nothing ultimately matters.
He had spent years learning to loosen the grip of the self. He had not noticed when loosening became letting go entirely—and letting go became, quietly, a form of self-abandonment.
The recognition arrived not through dramatic revelation but through a single clarifying thought: to abandon a life adorned with rich dharma elegance today is not only wasting a precious human life, but also the accumulated wisdom that took several transformations to attain—that is not humility. That is a failure of the Bodhisattva vows. Whether one has taken them formally or not, a Vajrayana practitioner is inherently a crowned Bodhisattva, at least a miniature one. The vow does not ask one to be significant. It asks one to remain available.
So Karma retreated from the edge of no man's land. He reestablished measured contact with the world: limited, careful, never performative. Thus, he laid the foundation for what came next. He maintained distance not as rejection but as discernment—present enough to be useful, withdrawn enough to remain honest.
The Closing Circle
Karma had known three teachers: Lopen Yeshey Rinchen, Lopen Lekshed Jamtsho, and Root Guru Namkar Donkuen Drubpa.
Lopen Lekshed Jamtsho and Khenpo Namkar Donkuen Drubpa had already passed beyond before Karma returned from his prodigal trip. But his first teacher, Lopen Yeshey Rinchen, still walked among the living until 2024. Once more, before Lopen's passing, Karma found his way to him—and a circle closed that required no interpretation.
When the last of his teachers passed away, though he was living in a city of 8.5 million people, a momentary sense of being absolutely alone on the entire planet gripped him. Since then, the teachings have become less dramatic and more practical. He began to understand that the Dharma was not meant to replace life, but to move through it—with or without the adornment of robes.
So Karma began unraveling texts, commentaries, and philosophy. Physics too—not for an egocentric goal, but because genuine inquiry respects no jurisdictional boundaries. The world grew increasingly coherent when stripped of its convenient slogans. He writes poetry for a very small audience, often just himself. He reads Dzogchen texts alongside quantum physics, not to impress anyone, but because the comparison gives him a private sense of coherence.
He guides a few like-minded tutees who assume this is preparation for something more public; in reality, Karma occasionally dresses up as the alchemist and attempts to ghost them—recognizing that the game was never about becoming something, but always about unbecoming everything.
Like a vajra dagger out of its league, unable to dance in the crevices of a lava-walled demonic realm, Karma remains withdrawn from public view. It is not modesty. It is fatigue with symbolic architecture, and a private resolve to keep his motherland from added embarrassment on the world stage, as Karma still carries the scar from the goring of the political boar—his reform efforts labeled duplication by men whose power depended on stasis.
Deconstructing the Circus
Through the static of these cynicalities, a thought worth reflecting upon surfaces. Karma holds an undiminished gratitude for the institutions and the embodiments that personify the continuation of Buddha Dharma. He recognizes, from close observation, that the vessel and the Dharma it carries are rarely identical, yet they are seldom entirely separable either.
The irony is unmistakable: in religious circles, the pursuit of selflessness has a way of becoming its own competition for status—perhaps for sustenance, perhaps for pure clinging. So, Karma took up the efforts to reject the whole enterprise—the business of religion, the social ladder-climbing, the boot-licking of lamas—in favor of something genuinely unbothered, lived as pure yoga. Otherwise, at any point, Karma won't stop seeing everything as a performance, including this very act of rejection. He is acutely reminded of Franz Kafka’s poignant confession:
"I was ashamed of myself when I realized life was a costume party; and I attended with my real face."
For decades, Karma treated his life's wild deviations as a path of genuine, perpetual reinvention. Now, the mask slips backward: he sees that this endless cycle of shedding and becoming was merely a sequence of costumes worn to navigate a broader theater. Social, religious, and political dynamics are not separate domains of truth; they are parts of a grand, inescapable circus. In this light, compiling an elaborate "about me" page is not an exercise in transparency, but simply masking up as a clown to sit among the other performers—unbothered by a desire for the attention, yet trapped in the carnival all the same.
No doubt, writing this page bears a dangerous resemblance to the very objects of his cynicism. He might delete this page in a moment of greater clarity, pure epiphany, or plain bewilderment born of churning inspiration, aspiration, and apprehension. If something of that magnitude were to occur, the act itself would be the testament to deconstructing the deconstruction. Let us hope that the entire writing, deleting, and "deconstructing the deconstruction" exercise served best not as liberation, but as a mirror in which others might recognize their own entanglement.
Now, to conclude this incessant yapping in the name of all things selfless, Karma endures as an undeniable curvature in Einstein's field equations and as a luminous clarity in Longchenpa's exposition of the Kun Gzhi. Perchance, as Beckett once whispered, the journey isn't about the arrival, but the stripping away—until one can finally fail better at being someone, and succeed, at last, at being no one. At the very least, this might offer a shred of satisfaction to those actively involved in deconstructing every fiber of his humble voyage—whether it be the man himself or a lingering nemesis.
May Akshobhya Bless All.