Tarthang Tulku is one of the last remaining Tibetan lamas (teachers) to have received a complete education in Tibet prior to the 1959 Chinese invasion of that country. He was born in 1934 at Archung in the Golok region of Amdo, and educated at Tarthang, a branch monastery of Palyul. At the age of seventeen, he traveled to Shechen Monastery to study with Shechen Kongtrul Rinpoche. In 1953, he began two years of training at the Dzongsar Monastery with his principal guru, Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö. Tarthang Rinpoche writes that he received numerous transmissions and empowerments from Chökyi Lodrö and that:
since he himself was such a great bodhisattva, these transmissions and blessings were very powerful. If my books and other works have had a beneficial influence, helping others move closer to the truth of the Buddha’s teachings, I firmly believe it is due to the power of the bodhicitta lineage that he graciously bestowed upon me.[1]
In 1955, Chökyi Lodrö sent Tarthang Rinpoche to study with the great Mahayoga teacher Adzom Gyalse Gyurme Dorje near Lithang. In 1958, Rinpoche departed from Tibet, traveling through Bhutan into Sikkim following in the footsteps of Chökyi Lodrö. He devoted the next several years to pilgrimage and retreat at holy places in India. In 1963, he was appointed by Dudjom Rinpoche as the representative of the Nyingma tradition and given the position of research fellow at Sanskrit University in Benares. In that same year, he set up one of the first Tibetan printing presses in exile and began his life’s work of preserving sacred art and texts. After six years at Sanskrit University and some twenty publications, Rinpoche decided that this was not enough, and he departed for America to bring Dharma to the West.
Tarthang Rinpoche arrived in the United States in late 1968 and settled in Berkeley California with his wife, the poet Nazli Nour. He founded the Tibetan Nyingmapa Meditation Center, the Tibetan Nyingma Relief Foundation, Dharma Publishing (USA) and the Nyingma Institute within the first four years of his arrival.
Wolff’s correspondence with Rinpoche begins about three years after the Buddhist scholar’s emigration, and their correspondence makes it clear that they were introduced by Fred and Erma Pounds. Wolff offers the Rinpoche land for the building of a Tibetan monastery and retreat quarters for aspirants of Buddhism and the two teachers arrange to meet in January 1972 at Wolff's home in Lone Pine, Calif. After an exchange letters, and Tarthang Rinpoche tells Wolff that he has found some property in Sonoma County, Calif. on which to build the Odiyan Buddhist Retreat Center. The two continue to exchange gifts and letters, as well as invitations to visit one another; in several letters Wolff suggests lines of scholarly inquiry that he would like to explore with Rinpoche. Rinpoche invites Wolff to teach a class at the Nyingma Institute’s graduate school, but Wolff’s age would not allow him to do so. Their correspondence ends in December 1978 with a holiday sent by Tarthang Tulku to Wolff. (28 pages)
[1] Tarthang Tulku, Copper Mountain Mandala (Berkeley: Dharma Publishing, 1985).
