The Perpetual Reinvention of Rigdzin Karma
Sincere homage to the Guru, the Deva, the Dakini — and satiric bow to all patrons who shape the sacred.
The year was 2468 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, Rigdzin Karma was born: in a valley southeast of Jomolangma, where mountains rose without effort and livelihoods did not. Beauty was abundant. Opportunity remained conditional.
His father — a Tibetan refugee, no separatist but plainly an opportunist, having seized the gift of citizenship from the Dharma Raja of the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon — departed early into samsara, another valley, or simply into absence. 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 accountants termed an administrative inconvenience. Between these two absences — one physical, one material — Karma learned early that permanence was an unreliable companion.
By 1994, he had become what institutions classify as an orphan and what life recognizes as a student of necessity. While every child in the village experienced the warmth of parental affection, Karma's curious mind drifted toward a somber wonder: perhaps he had been born from seasonal moisture — the lowest form of birth mentioned in Buddhism. Yet, just as his trajectory seemed fixed toward a life of subsistence dictated by the seasons, the karmic ledger shifted. In 1996, he entered a monastic school whose name — Druk Khamsum Wangdue Choekyi Phodrang (འབྲུག་ཁམས་གསུམ་དབང་འདུས་ཆོས་ཀྱི་ཕོ་བྲང་།) — exceeded the length of some Himalayan winters.
The monks observed two things immediately: first, Karma learned quickly; second, he worked without complaint. He lifted stones, hauled timber, and memorized texts with equal discipline. As he witnessed other young monks 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, where he studied grammar, poetry, sutra, and philosophy while participating in the ancient monastic tradition of constructing buildings 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. ༼ཁྱུང་དགོན་མདོ་སྔགས་དར་རྒྱས་གླིང་།༽
Then came a blessing disguised as a tragic displacement. A second teacher, Lopen Lekshed Jamtsho, appeared briefly but decisively at Riwo Druzing Nyipa. ༼བདེ་བཤེགས་བཀའ་བརྒྱད་འདུས་གྲྭ་༽ Under his guidance, something shifted. Grammar ceased to feel mechanical. Sutras stopped resisting interpretation. Philosophy revealed itself not as abstraction but as disciplined clarity. Karma's aptitude sharpened — not theatrically, but unmistakably.
In 2002, he arrived at Dechenchoeling Monastery and met Khenpo Namkar Donkuen Drubpa, who would become 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. ༼བདེ་ཆེན་ཆོས་གླིང་༽ ༼མཁན་པོ་རྣམ་དཀར་དོན་ཀུན་གྲུབ་པ།༽
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. The silence endured. The mind did not cooperate. ༼སྦས་ཡུལ་གླང་བྲག་གནས་༽
That same stillness was breached one evening by a radio played by a less pretentious elderly practitioner nearby. The music itself was unremarkable. Its effect was not. Within minutes, it accomplished what months of solitude had not: it exposed the fragility of resolve built on containment rather than genuine insight. Karma remained in retreat physically. Mentally, he had already departed.
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.
In the capital city of the Kingdom of Agartha, 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. Enlightenment, absent certification, was considered non-transferable.
So he adapted. English, science, and Western literature became his tools — all while he was gripped by temporary employment, relentless exhaustion, chronic hunger, and a rapidly fading hope. He quickly learned that institutions value clarity — provided it arrives in the correct format.
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 firm. Soon he became a Baptist preacher — one whose logic could dismantle mountains of doubt — and remained within this faith for fifteen years: long enough to be shaped, challenged, entangled, and ultimately transformed.
He credited 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. Yet he remained an observer. What he carried into that tradition was a contemplative discipline honed in monastery cells; what he carried out was something harder to name — a deepened understanding that sincerity of practice and sincerity of institution are rarely the same thing, a distinction he recognized, in time, applied 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 descended from the Himalayan retreat to find. Since contradictions are quintessential to Karma, he adamantly insists on not going any deeper into his "middle faith," out of personal respect for it, and as a careful effort to avoid crossing into territory that feels too doctrinal — or like the self-portrayal of an ingrate.
When his efforts to improve outcomes for others were interpreted negatively, he realized institutions, regardless of theology, rarely welcome unsanctioned reform. And so 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, that city he had tenderly renamed Ardam Dragrong, the Garden of Luminous Clarity ༼ཨར་འདམ་བྲག་རོང་། འོད་གསལ་སྤྲིན་གྱི་སྐྱེད་ཚལ།༽ in later chapters of his life. It served as his base for a decade.
In 2020, Karma nearly died. Twice. Not as collateral to the global pandemic but summoned more intimately — 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 body-bagged him — diagnosed with precision the second, yet leaving a lingering sense of urgency. 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. The identities he had collected — or at least attempted to collect — monk, scholar, convert, social worker, migrant — proved administratively irrelevant in that moment. There were no forms to complete. No doctrinal checkpoints to pass. No patrons to appease for validation. Only clarity, arriving without ceremony.
What the body stripped away, no institution had managed to touch. That, perhaps, was the teaching.
After a fortnight of inward battle, he returned to the Dharma. What had lain dormant for so long now required complete reawakening — a commitment to pure practice over performance. He sought forgiveness without elaboration. He offered lamps without seeking their symbolism. He made contributions without expectation. He revisited sutras without wavering.
What followed, however, was not serenity. It was something considerably more dangerous — and considerably more honest.
In the silence that opened after crisis, Karma found himself drifting. Not toward distraction, but toward its philosophical opposite: a vast, featureless detachment in which nothing carried weight, nothing demanded response, and existence itself began to feel like an administrative error. Extreme isolation deepened. 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 self. He had not noticed when loosening became letting go entirely — and letting go became, quietly, a form of abandonment.
The recognition arrived not through dramatic revelation but through a single clarifying thought: if one died as if never having lived, having made no difference to anyone — that is not humility. That is a failure of the Bodhisattva vows. Whether one has taken them formally or not, a Vajrayana practitioner is systematically a crowned Bodhisattva in miniature. 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. He began writing again. He maintained distance not as rejection but as discernment — present enough to be of use, withdrawn enough to remain honest.
Karma had known two teachers and a master.
The second teacher and the master had already passed beyond. But his first teacher, Lopen Yeshi 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 all his teachers had passed beyond, instruction did not cease. It simply changed form. The message was direct, delivered without flourish: adopting Dharma to sustain life is malum in se; sustaining life to contemplate Dharma is only malum prohibitum.
So Karma triumphed with what seemed malum prohibitum. Texts, commentaries, philosophy. Physics too — not from novelty, but because genuine inquiry respects no jurisdictional boundaries. The world grew increasingly coherent when stripped of its convenient slogans. And yet the old analogy flashed: the human who feasts on a grandiose banquet and outputs only excrement — it maps eerily well onto studying fine subjects while breathing foul action.
Karma rapidly parallels his existence to Carl Sagan's dragon from The Demon-Haunted World, with an oversimplification he freely acknowledges. He writes poetry incredibly worthy of printing on a tissue roll. He interprets Dzogchen through the lens of quantum physics for a quick immune boost. He guides a few like-minded tutees who assume this is preparation for something more public; in reality, Karma occasionally attempts to ghost them — recognizing, perhaps, that the game was never about becoming somebody; it was always about becoming nobody.
Just as an out-of-league Vajra dragger cannot perform a ritual dance in the crevices of a lava-walled demonic realm, Karma became unpresentable for public viewing — not only out of false modesty, but out of a genuine disinterest in the architecture of everything symbolic.
He maintains undiminished gratitude and respect for the institutions and the embodiments that personify the continuation of Buddha Dharma, despite his critical view of them — knowing, from close observation, that the vessel and the Dharma it carries are rarely the same thing, yet rarely entirely separable either.
Over the years, without effort or announcement, Karma found that his existence was inconveniently proximate — particularly to narratives where divinity was being carefully assembled for public consumption. He makes no claim, issues no challenge, and seeks no validation. Yet his unsparing use of Lha Lama Yeshe Wo's lens to read between the lines renders his elusive existence an unwelcome variable in certain equations — especially those requiring unanimous silence to balance.
The irony is not lost on Karma: 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 attempts to reject the whole enterprise — the business of religion, the social ladder-climbing, the boot-licking of lamas — in favor of something genuinely uncluttered.
At some point, Karma began to see everything as a performance, including this very subject of rejection. To him, writing an "about me" page bore 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 bumfuzzlement, in an attempt to deconstruct the deconstruction itself — half-suspecting that the entire exercise served best not as liberation, but as a mirror in which others might recognize their own entanglement.
Perhaps it is human nature to answer the survival instinct's loud invitations to attend the personification ritual, but Karma's exit from the rat race is final. His retreat is uncharted — not geographically, but internally: uncluttered, and immune to certification. Radios cannot reach it. Committees cannot refute it. The Dharma, unmediated by institutions, remains intact. Nor need anyone fear his re-entry into any contest of validation — his appetite for elusiveness only deepens, perplexingly, the further he recedes.
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. So kindly spare his humble voyage. Even śūnyatā deserves a little room to breathe.
May Akshobhya Bless All.
Editorial Note:
Thank you for reading this story. If you have any question regarding its authenticity, know that it is as authentic as the brief congregation of organic molecules bending along the curvature of spacetime. In the end, any doubt or confidence, approval or rejection, acceptance or dismissal, love or hatred for this story and its subject, all fold back into a single vibrating loop. Then the universe, down to its last quark, is left utterly without remainder. Yet if you discover something refusing to dissolve at that juncture, that is the primordial state of Buddha-nature — in which case this story is also your story.