Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and the 14th Dalai Lama meeting at the Spirituality and Education Conference at the Naropa Institute in 1997. Photo by Dona Laurita, used courtesy of the Reb Zalman Legacy Project.
From its inaugural summer session in 1974, the Naropa Institute stressed experiential engagement over dispassionate observation, introducing students to the idea of the scholar-practitioner in all disciplines. Students of poetry would learn from active poets like Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman, spiritual aspirants from spiritual teachers like Ram Dass and Jack Kornfield, dancers and musicians from Barbara Dilley and John Cage.
The previous summer, John Baker and Marvin Casper had approached their teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist master of the Kagyü School, with the idea for a college founded on the Buddhist principles of “wisdom, compassion, and enlightened action.” Hearing their idea, Trungpa Rinpoche quickly lifted his hand, as if shooting a pistol, saying, “I’m pulling the trigger on the Naropa Institute.”[1]
Or at least that is how the story is usually told. According to Thomas Hast, another of Naropa’s founders, a small group of Trungpa Rinpoche’s students had gathered prior to this conversation to talk about the idea of creating a college. It was after the first Vajradhatu Seminary in the inspiring summer of 1973. The college they agreed was to be based on “ecumenical principles,” and not simply “Buddhist principles.” It was the 70s, after all, and there was a feeling that it was time for the religions to come together. The college would be the kind of place where that could happen. By the next summer, John Baker, Marvin Casper, Thomas Hast and others, with the blessing of Trungpa Rinpoche, had created the first summer institute.[2]
In his opening talk to the more than 1,500 attendees of the institute’s first session, Trungpa Rinpoche called Naropa a place “where East meets West and sparks will fly.”[3] It was clear that Trungpa Rinpoche’s vision for the Naropa Institute was also to create a place where all the world’s wisdom traditions might be preserved and taught in their integrity. Playfully, he called it “The Yogi School.”[4]
When Dr. Judith Simmer-Brown first joined the new full-time faculty in January of 1978,[5] Trungpa Rinpoche asked the staff to apply for a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, desiring that Naropa become a host and connecting-hub for a number of small contemplative communities from different traditions—Hindu Yogis, Muslim Sufis, Hasidic Jews, and Contemplative Christians.[6] According to Simmer-Brown, it was to be a place “where authentic contemplative traditions could be taught and practiced in an environment of dialogue, respect, mentoring, and community.”[7]
Dr. Reginald Ray, another original faculty member, recalled the hesitancy of some of the faculty at Trungpa Rinpoche’s suggestion that the institute initiate a program of interreligious “contemplative studies” . . .
As Buddhists just beginning to find our way around Buddhism, we thought we had left Christianity and Judaism behind for good. As is typical of new converts, we shared a resistance and lack of curiosity toward other religions, and especially toward those with which we had grown up.[8]
Tessa Bielecki remembers her initial 'Catholic shock' on entering the Shrine Room, and her later fondness for some of its features.... My politically incorrect response at the time was, 'Oh my gosh, this is like a cross between a Chinese restaurant and a pagan temple!'
Although many of the new converts might not yet have understood it as such, it was actually a Buddhist-inspired vision; for Trungpa Rinpoche was part of a Tibetan Buddhist ecumenical movement begun in the 19th-century called Ri-mé—‘nonsectarian’ or ‘without bias.’ In a time of sectarian rivalry in Tibet, the Ri-mé masters—an alliance of meditation masters from various Buddhist schools—were committed to gathering the teachings and practices of all lineages and schools into vast collections and seeking authentic transmissions to preserve them. They taught respect for one another’s traditions and created supportive environments for their mastery. Thus, in proposing that the Naropa Institute become a “Yogi School” for contemplatives of all traditions, Trungpa Rinpoche was really only extending the ecumenical Ri-mé model to include other religions.[9]
The Buddhist-Christian Dialogues
The first major public expression of this Ri-mé impulse took the form of a unique series of Buddhist-Christian dialogues sponsored by the Naropa Institute. In 1968, Trungpa Rinpoche had met the famous Christian monk Thomas Merton in Calcutta and formed an immediate bond.[10] In Merton, he found a genuine Christian contemplative and, according to Judith Simmer-Brown, “a kindred spirit who had Ri-mé sensibilities and interests.”[11] The two even discussed the possibility of working on a book “containing selections from the sacred writings of Christianity and Buddhism.”[12] Thus, it is perhaps not surprising that Trungpa Rinpoche dedicated the inaugural Buddhist-Christian Dialogues at Naropa in 1981 to the latter, expressing a wish that they might spark the kind of genuine dialogue between Buddhist and Christian contemplatives that he had experienced with Merton.[13]
Nevertheless, that was not Trungpa Rinpoche’s only motive. According to Tessa Bielecki, a Carmelite Christian invited to speak at the first dialogues, Trungpa Rinpoche knew that his newly minted Buddhist students could not mature in their understanding and practice of Buddhism if they remained in youthful rebellion and reaction-formation against the Christianity of their childhoods.[14] And this became a difficult part of the dialogues for some Christian participants like Bielecki, a young Mother Abbess, who was then new to both Buddhism and dialogue . . .
Not only was I among the youngest dialoguers present, I was also one of the only women![15] There were many difficulties in that first dialogue for me. I didn’t understand it at the time, but I began to understand it better as the years passed. The Buddhist participants had been born into Buddhism and had been practicing it from an early age; but the majority of the attendees were former Christians who had become Buddhists later, having had negative experiences of Christianity. The major problem for me was that the former Christians had left the Christian tradition by and large at the level of ‘Sunday School,’ and then at Naropa, or in their Buddhist practice, were being exposed to very sophisticated contemplative Buddhism and comparing it to a Sunday School level of Christianity. In dialogue, you either have to compare a children’s level of Buddhism with your ‘Sunday School’ Christianity, or a high contemplative level of Buddhism to a high contemplative level of Christianity.[16]
The latter was eventually accomplished among the Buddhist and Christian representatives; for the dialogues, which ran from 1981 to 1988, brought together some of the best Buddhist and Christian teachers of that time, their dialogues memorialized in the book Speaking of Silence: Christians and Buddhists in Dialogue, an edited selection of the forty individual presentations and sixteen panel discussions which took place over eight years.[17]
The first dialogue was held in the Shrine Room of Karma Dzong at 1345 Spruce Street, downtown Boulder, Colorado. Tessa Bielecki remembers her initial “Catholic shock” on entering the Shrine Room, and her later fondness for some of its features . . .
I’m just going to be honest here; my politically incorrect response at the time was, “Oh my gosh, this is like a cross between a Chinese restaurant and a pagan temple!” I wouldn’t use those words today, but that was my visceral response then. The first thing I saw was a fierce Kali-like image in a corner. It was super scary to me. I had never seen such an image before! Then there was a huge thanka of what I now know was Vajradhara, a blue figure that was the focus of the whole shrine room! I immediately freaked out and thought—What have I gotten myself into? But I soon realized that everybody was nervous and uncomfortable, Buddhist and Christian alike; this was a new situation for almost all of us [. . .] But after years of sitting in meditation in front of that blue thanka of Vajradhara, which was initially so foreign to me, I later found I had a profoundly intimate relationship with it, and ended up calling it my “Blue Christ”![18]
Having passed through the intensity of those early dialogues, over forty years later, Bielecki said . . .
I could name maybe six pivotal moments of my life, and the Christian-Buddhist dialogues are definitely one of those moments for me. Saint Teresa of Avila talks about transformation by fire. It is one of my favorite passages from her; she says the soul goes into the crucible and comes out of it like gold, refined and purified. That was really my experience of those Christian-Buddhist dialogues.[19]
Nor was Bielecki alone in her assessment. To this day, the Buddhist-Christian dialogues at the Naropa Institute are remembered as being of landmark significance. As Daniel J. O’Hanlan, a Jesuit priest, wrote of that first dialogue in 1981 on “Prayer and Meditation in Buddhism and Christianity” . . .
Two hundred or so of us from all over the country were waiting for the first session to begin at a historic conference on Christian and Buddhist meditation sponsored by the Naropa Institute. Convinced that this could be the most important Christian-Buddhist meeting yet to be held in the United States, I made the three-day drive to Boulder all the way from Berkeley, California.
I was not sorry I had gone, for the speakers, representing a variety of Christian and Buddhist traditions, were all competent and articulate, and the dialogue was very open. The set topic for the conference was meditation, and that was in fact its central concern, but the issue of sexuality and celibacy became an important issue, as did the question of God, as one might expect in a serious Christian-Buddhist dialogue. Some lesser issues, or issues, at least, which took up less of the conference’s time, were “original sin,” adaptation of the tradition, corporateness and community, reincarnation, self and no-self (anatta), and creation. [. . .] All in all, my expectations for the conference were met, and I went away feeling that it was perhaps the most significant conference of this kind so far in the history of this country.[20]
At Naropa, the radical teacher of Jewish mysticism could teach whatever he wished—“Judaism as a Civilization,” “The Hasidic Masters,” “Lineages in Upheaval,” “Issues in Spiritual Direction,” or “Rituals for People Helpers,” to name just a few of his courses.
The Buddhist-Christian dialogues at Naropa also gave birth, albeit unintentionally, to an equally significant ecumenical encounter, the famous Snowmass Dialogues.
In 1983, Father Thomas Keating, a former Cistercian abbot and co-founder of the Centering Prayer movement, noticed something interesting while participating in the Buddhist-Christian dialogues at Naropa . . .
I noticed that we, the dialoguers, weren’t speaking to one another so much as we were addressing the audience. But, on the two occasions when the conveners succeeded in bringing us together a day before the conference, we got on very well and actually got to talk to one another as peers, albeit all too briefly. So I asked myself, what would happen if the whole point was just to get together and talk, without an audience? And what if it was broader than just a Buddhist–Christian dialogue?[21]
Thus, in 1984, Keating issued special invitations to a private retreat for a small group of spiritual teachers from the world’s great religious traditions. Among them were: Pema Chödrön, Douglas Steere, Srimata Gayatri Devi, Grandfather Gerald Red Elk, Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Bernie Glassman Sensei, and Imam Bilal Hyde. It was as impressive a roster as any public interreligious dialogue had ever been able to claim, except that this dialogue was to take place far from any cameras or eager spectators, in an isolated little monastery in the Rocky Mountains. These teachers (and a few others) would be the attendees of the first Snowmass Conference at St. Benedict’s Monastery.
The Snowmass Dialogues became one of the longest-running and most unique interreligious dialogues in existence, running from 1984 to the present and inviting diverse teachers from around the world into private retreat together.[22]
The World Wisdom Chair
After the death of Trungpa Rinpoche, its founder, in 1987, there was a sense that a spiritual pillar that upheld the structure of the Naropa Institute was gone. Now who would the Naropa community look to for spiritual inspiration in his absence?
>>Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, the 1st World Wisdom Chair Holder
Just over a year later, while traveling in Nepal, Dr. Judith Simmer-Brown ran into the twenty-five year old Jigme Namgyel, the second Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, a lineage-holder in the Longchen Nyingtik and Khen-Kong-Chok-Sum traditions of the Nyingma Lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. Born in 1964 in the Northern Indian province of Himachel Pradesh into a Tibetan refugee family, he was the son of Neten Chokling Rinpoche and Mayum Tsewang Paldun. He was recognized as an incarnation of Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Thaye, a great Ri-mé master of 19th-century Tibet, and grew up in a monastic environment, receiving extensive training in all aspects of Buddhist philosophy and practice.[23]
At the time of his meeting with Simmer-Brown, he had recently married and had a son, and was thinking about how he would make a living in the future.[24] Aware of the opportunity, Simmer-Brown asked him if he would consider teaching at the Naropa Institute. He was hesitant, but she urged him to think about it. Coming back to Boulder, she approached Naropa’s second president, Barbara Dilley, who soon conceived the idea of the “World Wisdom Chair,” with the intention of inviting Dzigar Kongtrul to be its first occupant.[25] The holder of this chair was intended to be “a person who, in his or her life and work, has demonstrated great achievement and realization in one of the world’s great spiritual traditions.”[26]
Dzigar Kongtrul moved to the United States with his family in 1989 and formally took up the World Wisdom Chair at the Naropa Institute in 1990.[27] While there, his American-born wife, Elizabeth Mattis-Nyamgel, would get her Master’s in Buddhist Studies at Naropa, and he would establish his community Mangala Shri Bhuti in the mountains above Boulder. Dzigar Kongtrul would hold the post for five years, leaving it in 1995 to concentrate his energies on Mangala Shri Bhuti’s long-term retreat center in Crestone, Colorado, and on his work as an abstract expressionist painter.[28]
>>Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the 2nd World Wisdom Chair Holder
But it was Naropa’s second World Wisdom Chair holder who would truly set a mark on the school and influence its ecumenical legacy. Born in 1924, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi was a Polish-Austrian Holocaust survivor who had traveled from the traditional worlds of Hasidism and Kabbalah in Judaism to become one of the pioneers of interreligious dialogue and a major voice in world spirituality.
After coming to the United States in 1943, Schachter-Shalomi was ordained a rabbi in the Habad-Lubavitch lineage of Hasidism in 1947. He later studied Pastoral Psychology at Boston University, where he learned with the Reverend Dr. Howard Thurman, and earned his Doctor of Hebrew Letters at Hebrew Union College in 1968, writing his dissertation on counseling and psychology in Hasidism.
At the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, Schachter-Shalomi was a professor of Judaic Studies and, at the same time, a Hillel Director working with young Jewish students, introducing them to the psychological underpinnings of spiritual practice and retreat. He also brought them into contact with an amazing array of teachers, Jewish and non-Jewish, including Elie Wiesel, Sam Keen, Alan Watts, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Howard Thurman. Later, he would take up a position as Professor of Jewish Mysticism and Psychology of Religion at Temple University in Philadelphia, his home for the next two decades.
From Philadelphia, Schachter-Shalomi would found the hugely influential Jewish Renewal movement, which would change the face of Jewish practice in America, and begin his work in ‘Spiritual Eldering.’
In 1990, Schachter-Shalomi was part of a small delegation of Jews invited to Dharamsala by the Dalai Lama to talk to Tibetans about how Jews had survived in exile for 2,000 years. The dialogue was electric and became the basis of the best-selling book by Rodger Kamenetz, The Jew in the Lotus. By 1994, Schachter-Shalomi had retired from Temple University, and after years of giving everything to create a new movement in Judaism, he was exhausted and struggling to find what was next for him.[29]
One day, Rabbi David Cooper, a friend of Naropa Trustee Thomas Hast, said to Dr. Judith Simmer-Brown, “They’re eating Zalman alive in Philadelphia; why don’t you invite him to Naropa?”[30] It was an inspired idea. After the dialogues with the Dalai Lama, Schachter-Shalomi seemed the ideal Jewish emissary to come to the Buddhist-inspired institute and was soon formally invited to be the next World Wisdom Chair occupant by Naropa’s third president, John Whitehouse Cobb, in 1995.[31]
Actually, it would be a return to Naropa. Schachter-Shalomi had taught at the 1975 summer session of the Naropa Institute before taking up a post at Temple University. During the summer of 1975, a public meeting was arranged between the fifty year old Hasidic master and thirty-six year old Trungpa Rinpoche, which some conceived of as a kind of ‘Torah vs. Dharma,’ ‘God vs. No-God’ debate. Trungpa Rinpoche played along, baiting Schachter-Shalomi by telling a story of how his son had recently asked him, “Daddy, is there a God?” Repeating his response, he answered question “No” while looking Schachter-Shalomi right in the eyes. Without missing a beat, Schachter-Shalomi said, “Rinpoche, the God you don’t believe in, I don’t believe in either.”[32] With this out of the way, the two began to talk in earnest.
But far more important, Schachter-Shalomi later recalled, was what happened at Naropa after the passing of his father that summer . . .
In 1975, I was in Boulder, Colorado, teaching at the Naropa Institute (then in its second year) when I got the news that my father, of blessed memory, had died. They had taken the body to Israel, so there was no point in me ‘sitting shiva,’ doing my mourning, anywhere but Boulder. Before long, the news got around, and all the Buddhists of Jewish families from Naropa came out of the woodwork and helped me to make a minyan, so that I could say Kaddish for my father. Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kornfield were among them. And before I said the first Kaddish, remembering Allen’s poem of the same name—a poignant work for me—I asked him to read Psalm 49. He then read what you read in the house of a mourner, “What can you do about death? A brother cannot save you; how could a stranger save you? Everyone, in the end, ‘drops the body’ and goes into the grave; recognize that what you share with animals is this life and death.” It is a stark psalm, and he read it as if he had written it himself. It was very powerful.
Then, I said my first Kaddish and got into the Aleinu prayer. In the usual translation, a part of this prayer reads, “It is our task to give thanks to the creator of all, to ascribe greatness to the lord of creation, who has not made us like the other nations of the earth, and has not set us up like the families of humankind. God has not put our portion with them, nor our lot with all their masses—for they bow down to emptiness and void, and we bow down to the sovereign of sovereigns, the blessed and holy one.”
But, just then, as I was saying this prayer after the Kaddish, I saw two tunnels before me. With one eye, I saw a tunnel going out into the universe where “they bow down to emptiness and void,” in a Buddhist context, with the Buddhist definition of emptiness, shunyata. The prayer was no longer saying that they bow down to ‘vain foolishness,’ narishkeiten, to ‘stupid things,’ but to emptiness in the Buddhist sense. “And we bow down to the sovereign of sovereigns, the blessed and holy one.” Then, for a moment, these two became one vision for me, and once again took me back to the center of knowing—It is there. It is not there. It is there. It is not there. I was ‘out’ then and could not go on with the prayers for a while.
When I recovered, I finished the prayers with a new understanding, “On that day, our sustainer will be one, and God’s name will be one.”[33]
Nearly twenty years later, on January 7, 1995, Schachter-Shalomi arrived in Boulder, Colorado, to begin the next chapter in his life.[34] His wife, Eve Ilsen, recalled the winter trip across the country—“Zalman had accidentally poured hot coffee into a slipper scalding himself badly just before leaving. So we made the entire trip with him laying in the back of the car, selecting music and making sandwiches for us as I drove through a snowstorm to Boulder, Colorado!”[35]
At Naropa, the radical teacher of Jewish mysticism could teach whatever he wished—“Judaism as a Civilization,” “The Hasidic Masters,” “Lineages in Upheaval,” “Issues in Spiritual Direction,” or “Rituals for People Helpers,” to name just a few of his courses. He also regularly gave public talks—“Noontime Lectures”—for the larger Naropa community. These popular lectures often took place in Shambhala Hall, where it was standing room only. Later, these talks required the Performing Arts Center or Nalanda Events Center to accommodate the crowds of 300-400 that came from all over Boulder.
>>Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi, the 3rd World Wisdom Chair Holder
In January of 2002, it was announced that Schachter-Shalomi would join the faculty of Religious Studies[36] and relinquish the World Wisdom Chair to Japanese Soto Zen master, Kobun Chino Roshi.[37]
Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi was born into a family of temple priests in Niigata Prefecture in Japan in 1938. Orphaned early, in a Japan devastated by war, he was ordained a Buddhist monk at twelve and adopted by Hozan Koei Chino Roshi, who trained the boy to be his successor as abbot of Kotaiji Temple.
After attending Komazawa University in Kyoto, he continued his formal Buddhist training at Eiheiji monastery, where he was later put in charge of training new monks. In 1967, at 29 years old, he was invited by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi to come to America to help him create a Zen monastery at Tassajara in Carmel, California.
Later, after a short return to see his master in Japan, he returned to the United States to become the abbot of Haiku Zendo in California where he continued teaching in the pattern of Suzuki Roshi, with Wednesday evening Dharma talks, Thursday morning breakfast and informal discussion, and Monday morning study. However, he preferred to be called “Kobun,” and resisted the titles sensei or roshi. Sometime in the early 1970s he apparently became acquainted with Trungpa Rinpoche through Suzuki Roshi . . .
During this time, too, Kobun became a very close personal friend of Chögyam Trungpa Rinopoche, who made a pact with Suzuki Roshi to establish a Buddhist university. After Suzuki Roshi passed away, Trungpa Rinpoche asked Kobun’s help to establish this vision and to help instruct his students in Zazen, drumming, bowing, oryoki and calligraphy. Kobun introduced Rinpoche to Shibata Sensei, which relationship became the source of kyudo practice in the Shambhala tradition, still led by Shibata Sensei today. Kobun taught first at Trungpa’s request at the inaugural summer session of Naropa in 1974. He returned to what is now Shambhala Mountain Center and Naropa University every year since 1974, to teach and lead Sesshins.[38]
Thus, in January of 2002, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi formally passed the World Wisdom Chair to Kobun Chino Roshi in a ceremony at Naropa University.[39] As his housing in Boulder was not yet ready, Kobun Chino Roshi and his young family were temporarily housed at the Shambhala Mountain Center in Red Feather Lakes, Colorado, in a medium-sized 25-year-old trailer with one tiny bedroom and a combination living room, dining area, and kitchen. Soon after, Naropa professor Dr. Reginald Ray drove up from Boulder to visit Chino Roshi at the trailer, expecting to find the family of five living on top of one another among all their furnishing, as well as Chino Roshi’s books and family shrine . . .
But when I went to visit Kobun for the first time, I entered a scene that was nothing like what I had imagined. Then and every time I went to see him, which was every two or three weeks, I had the feeling I was stepping out of the rather mundane and restricted outdoor world into a realm of huge inner space. The walls of the trailer always seemed to be moving away from you, and the ceiling, though low, seemed somehow to stretch high above. It was a space you wanted to be in. Suddenly you felt more present and alive just being there. I found it so enjoyable to come to see Kobun, to walk in the door of the trailer and feel all of that space—my mind could finally open out and relax completely![40]
Sadly, Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi, who was supposed to occupy the World Wisdom Chair for three years, would occupy it for less than seven months. On July 26th, 2002, he died in a tragic accident in Switzerland attempting to save his daughter from drowning.[41] Nevertheless, Kobun Chino Roshi left his mark on the Boulder community. Through his longtime student and friend, Martin (Hakubai Zenji) Mosko, a landscape architect and garden designer based in Boulder, Hakubai Temple, a Zen center and garden, was consecrated in Boulder by Kobun Chino Roshi in 2001.[42]
Though never formally re-installed as the World Wisdom Chair, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi presided in the role for the rest of his tenure at Naropa, often functioning as the university’s spiritual elder at important events.
In August of 1998, I came to the Naropa Institute as a 26 year-old student, hoping to meet the legendary master, while also pursuing my master’s degree in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. It was inspiring to see the smiling sage pull up in his Silver Montero and stride across the campus with his heavy canvas bags. I was reminded of the Hasidic anecdote of Reb Leib Sarah’s, who once famously said, “I didn’t come to hear the master teach; I came to see how he ties his shoelaces!”[43] This it seemed was the point of the World Wisdom Chair in those years, not only to give us, as students, the opportunity to hear such a teacher lecture, but to interact with them and to see how they lived their spirituality.
Desiring to bring students and staff into relationship with genuine wisdom holders from all the world’s wisdom traditions, the Keating-Schachter Center for Interspirituality was founded in 2023 to keep the tradition of contemplative education and interreligious engagement alive at Naropa.
Schachter-Shalomi, or “Reb Zalman,” as we called him, had his office in the Lincoln (“Schoolhouse”) Building, in a suite of offices that belonged to Religious Studies. We would wait outside the office he shared with a young Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche (also resident at Naropa at the time), sitting on a pea green couch until he invited us in. In time, I became a close personal student and served as his teaching assistant after graduation.
In 2003, Schachter-Shalomi announced that he would retire from teaching in 2004, but arranged to give a “swan song” of talks before retiring, a 13-part “World Wisdom Lecture Series” in Shambhala Hall on some of his favorite subjects over a period of a year.[44]
Nevertheless, Schachter-Shalomi stayed connected to Naropa, often coming back to speak at large public events. On April 9, 2014, Schachter-Shalomi was invited by President Charles Lief to give a talk for Naropa’s 40th anniversary on Naropa’s legacy and possibility. It was one of his last public talks. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi died on July 3rd, 2014. The entire Naropa community mourned.
Schachter-Shalomi understood the profound significance of the World Wisdom Chair, and was pushing for diversity in the selection of its future occupants as he prepared to retire, feeling that there would be a tendency to fall back on Buddhist teachers exclusively, or in general. After 9/11, Muslims were viewed with suspicion in the United States and faced a severe public backlash; thus, Schachter-Shalomi wished the next occupant of the World Wisdom Chair to be a Muslim Sufi, at the time suggesting Imam Bilal Hyde, who then lived in the Bay Area. If not a Muslim, then a Christian, like his friend Father Thomas Keating, so that Naropa students would continue to come to terms with Christianity and learn something of its depths.[45]
Sadly, with various changes in administration, the World Wisdom Chair would not continue after Schachter-Shalomi’s retirement in 2004.
World Wisdom and Wisdom Traditions
Dr. Judith Simmer-Brown, who served as the director, organizer, and moderator for the Buddhist-Christian dialogues from 1981-1988, and who was a founding member of the Religious Studies department at Naropa, would be a pillar within the department until her retirement in 2020. The woman who admittedly came to dialogue at her teacher’s urging “kicking and screaming” would go on to become an important figure in interreligious dialogue. Over time, she said: “I began to see how important this was for my own spiritual development. Because, for me, dialogue has been essential to keep from being a provincial Buddhist.”[46]
In 2005, Simmer-Brown created a graduate course in “Interreligious Dialogue,” wanting to transmit the hard-won skills of good dialogue to a new generation of students, knowing that “interreligious dialogue was at the heart of our university’s mission from the time of its founder, and that promoting dialogue would encourage community at Naropa University.”[47] It was among the first courses of its kind in the United States, taking a skills-based approach to interreligious dialogue.[48] Today, this course continues as “Interspiritual Dialogue,” addressing the issues of complex religious identities and complex interrelations between religions in the world.
Desiring to bring students and staff into relationship with genuine wisdom holders from all the world’s wisdom traditions, The Keating-Schachter Center for Interspirituality at Naropa University (named after former World Wisdom Chair occupant, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, and Father Thomas Keating, one of the most significant of the Buddhist-Christian dialoguers) was founded in 2023[49] to keep the tradition of contemplative education and interreligious engagement alive at Naropa.[50]
And yet, nowhere else is Naropa’s commitment to contemplative education more in evidence than in the Department of Wisdom Traditions,[51] which holds the knowledge of the school’s practice traditions and non-sectarian Ri-mé values. It has encompassed various programs through the years, including Religious Studies, Buddhist Studies, Yoga Studies, Traditional Eastern Arts, and Master’s of Divinity program. It has also taught Sanskrit, Hebrew, and Tibetan to scores of students who have gone on to become important translators.
The ideal of ‘The Yogi School’ is a promise as yet unfulfilled, sometimes seeming on the cusp of realization, and sometimes fading almost to the point of non-existence. And yet, the ideal is always there at Naropa, asking for fulfillment and raising the bar at one of the few institutions where it could actually exist.
References
Stephen Foehr, “Naropa University: Where East Meets West and Sparks Fly.” Lion’s Roar: Buddhist Wisdom for Our Time, January 1, 2000. Accessed: July 23, 2023 from https://www.lionsroar.com/naropa-university-where-east-meets-west-and-sparks-fly/.
Mother Tessa Bielecki was the only Christian woman in the early dialogues. Among Buddhists, Judith Simmer-Brown served as organizer and moderator, and Judy Lief was an occasional participant.
Ibid.
Today, they are known as the Charis Snowmass Dialogues, run by Charis Foundation for New Monasticism and Interspirituality.
Ibid.
“The Reb Zalman Fund,” a 1996 fundraising narrative document produced by Friends of Reb Zalman in the author’s possession.
Personal conversations with Thomas Hast and Judith Simmer-Brown over the years.
John Whitehouse Cobb. “Lineage and Innovation: Reflections on the Presidency, 1993-2003.” (Private publication Boulder, CO: Naropa University, 2003): 26.
Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Bernie Glassman, “Torah and Dharma: Torah Hyphen Dharma,” Spectrum: A Journal of Renewal Spirituality, Vol. 2: No. 1 (Winter-Spring, 2006) 62-63. Also found in Rose and Miles-Yépez, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, 2020: 192-94. In his April 9, 2014 talk at Naropa University, Schachter-Shalomi adds that Trungpa Rinpoche performed a small ritual for his father’s passing.
“The Reb Zalman Fund,” a 1996 fundraising narrative document produced by Friends of Reb Zalman in the author’s possession.
Personal conversations with Schachter-Shalomi’s widow, Eve Ilsen.
Schachter-Shalomi also seems to have been named “Director of the Center for Engaged Spirituality,” though it is unclear whether this ever came to fruition.
Angie Boissevain, “Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi,” Accessed: July 23, 2023 from http://www.kobun.jikoji.org/dbio.html.
The Naropa Institute formally became Naropa University in 1999.
Reginald Ray, “Kobun Chino’s Trailer,” Lion’s Roar: Buddhist Wisdom for Our Time. January 1, 2000. Accessed: July 23, 2023 from https://www.lionsroar.com/kobun-chinos-trailer/.
Boissevain, “Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi.”
A commonly repeated Hasidic anecdote.
This popular lecture series was recorded and later released to the public.
Personal conversations with Schachter-Shalomi in that period.
Simmer-Brown, guest talk on the Naropa tradition of dialogue in Interspiritual Dialogue, Naropa University, October 5, 2022.
Ibid.
The Keating-Schachter Center for Interspirituality at Naropa university was established as a cooperative relationship between Naropa University and Charis Foundation for New Monasticism and Interspirituality, with the generous help of Naropa president Charles Lief and Michelle Scheidt of the Fetzer Institute.
The idea of “contemplative education” has been most notably championed in academia by Dr. Judith Simmer-Brown of Naropa University and Dr. Harold Roth of Brown University.
The Department of Wisdom Traditions was formed 2016/2017 to bring Religious Studies and Traditional Eastern Arts together in a single department.
