[Main ROKPA Homepage]

The aims of our charitable Trusts. How we started.
Kagy Samye Ling and Kagyu Samye Dzong centres in Europe and Africa
Resident and visiting lamas. Other lineage teachers and dharma helpers.
HH the 17th Gyalwa Karma, Urgyen Tinley Dorje. The illustrious Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism.
A useful collection of Buddhist teachings - theory and meditation.

The principal holders of the Karma Kagyu lineage of Tibetan BuddhismLamas visiting the Kagyu Samye Ling and Samye Dzong centres This sectionAbbot of Kagyu Samye Ling and Director of Holy Island

Dr Akong Tulku Rinpoche
- ROKPA's founder

Part Three: Early Days in Scotland

Part One  Part Two  This section   

The next 25 years (1963-1988) were spent introducing the West to Tibetan religion and some aspects of its culture. This served a double purpose: it began to make available to the world at large a wealth of material from one of Asia's finest and most extraordinary civilisations.

 

By so doing, it also ensured its survival and perpetuation as living tradition.  This work was centred around the development of the Kagyu Samye Ling Tibetan Centre, in Scotland; the first Tibetan Buddhist Centre in the West, developed jointly by Dr Akong Tulku Rinpoche and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche in its first few years and thereafter by Dr Akong. Visited by people from all over the world, he made it first and foremost a place of peace and spirituality, with a strong accent on active, selfless compassion, open to anyone of any faith.

 In response to a growing demand for specific teachings from the Kagyu traditions, he invited its greatest living scholars and meditation masters to Scotland, (list of teachers and teachings 1967-88) where they taught its main meditation practices and philosophical texts. The ground was laid for the proper development of these teachings in the West when the Supreme Head of the Kagyu Lineage, HH the 16th Gyalwa Karmapa visited Samye Ling in 1975 and 1977. Dr Akong Tulku was then asked by the Karmapa to be the organisor of his 1977 6-month tour of Europe.

Press button 4 to continue