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Merlin Cox (London, England) first came across the writings of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche in 1977 and then encountered him in person during his 1981 teachings in London. He attended the 1988 Vajradhatu Seminary led by the Vajra Regent and is now a student of Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche. He served in various roles in the Dorje Kasing and the administration at the London Shambhala Centre, including a seven year period as director. A software engineer, he worked for Amnesty International for 15 years, and is now self-employed, living in London with his wife, adult son and guinea pig.
Sue Gilman (Atlanta, Georgia) began practicing and studying in Atlanta in the 80’s and has been a member of various Shambhala communities including Boston and New York. Sue was the first Director of Sky Lake Lodge and a Director of Development at Karme Chöling. She has been teaching in Shambhala for more than a decade. Back home in Atlanta, Sue has spent the last 5 years as the Executive Director of the Wren’s Nest, the oldest historic house museum in the city. She spearheaded major energy upgrades to the 145-year-old house and developed a program of community conversations around racial reconciliation. She continues to convene conversations on race, the environment and other subjects that impact our world, both at the Shambhala Center and in the broader Atlanta community.
Dhi Good (Denver, Colorado) began the Buddhist path in 1990 at the Denver Zen Center, and was ordained into the Lotus of the Flame Order in 1994. She joined the Shambhala sangha in 2005. As director of Shambhala Online, she works with a virtual team to support online studies in Shambhala. She holds a master’s degree in Future Studies and enjoys exploring change, technology and learning organizations.
Mariel Gomez (Vancouver, British Columbia) has been a student of Shambhala since 2002, and became a meditator instructor in 2006. She has worked in various capacities serving the Shambhala community in Santiago, Boulder and Vancouver. Mariel studied psychology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and received an M.A. in Early Childhood Education from the University of British Columbia, where she is presently also undertaking a PhD in Human Development and Learning. Through research, evaluation and intervention, her work has been aimed to support children’s learning in educational settings. Her current research focuses on the strengthening of preschool and school teachers’ education.
Ingrid Hoffellner (Vienna, Austria) started practicing in the Shambhala Community 1994 with Kyudo and has been a student of Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche since 1999. She works as an architect, focusing on the renovation of social housing. She has been a teacher in Shambhala since 2011 and is now studying the Scorpion Seal path. She is also engaged in Nalanda practices, including Miksang and Ikebana.
David Kahane (Edmonton, Alberta) is a student of Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche and a part of the Shambhala community since 2007, serving as Centre Director of the Edmonton Shambhala Centre from 2014-2017. He is a Professor of Political Theory at the University of Alberta specializing in democracy, citizen involvement, and systems change, and has won two national awards for his teaching. He is fascinated by questions of social action in Shambhala in light of teachings on basic goodness and enlightened society. He tends a permaculture food forest in downtown Edmonton and is father to young Solomon.
Antonín Machander MD (Jablonec, Czech Republic) has been a stomatologist (oral surgeon) since 1965, and a student of yoga since 1969. In 1989 he founded the Centrum of Psychosomatic disturbances with colleagues, where he works as a psychotherapist (Person-Centered Psychotherapy, family therapy.) While he considered himself a buddhist since the age of 18, he was not permitted contact with buddhist groups. In 1978 Antonín read the books of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and in 1980 began regular correspondences with MI’s in Boulder. In 1987, after 18 years, he was allowed to travel abroad, he took refuge vow with Ösel Tendzin and attended the Vajrajana seminary in 1990. He attended Kalapa Assembly in 2000 and completed Chakrasamvara practice 2004. He became an MI in 2006, and is practicing Scorpion Seal 9. He has translated more than ten books of Chögyam Trungpa and Sakyong Mipham. He is married for the second time with 5 children.
Elisa Marzuca (Santiago, Chile) encountered the Shambhala meditation path when she was 18 years old, while studying psychology. She has been part of the Santiago Meditation Center since 2000, where she has been Director of Practice and Education, an MI and teacher. She has taught yoga and meditation within the prison system and is founder of Padma, an institute where psychology, meditation and yoga find a space to complement and enrich one another.
Will Ryken (St. Petersburg, Florida) first connected to Chögyam Trungpa and the Buddhadharma in Boulder, Colorado in 1972 and that was it. While in Boulder, he became a Dorje Kasung in 1975, lived at Karme Chöling for two years and then was Director of Dorje Khyung Dzong for another two, returning to Boulder until moving to Florida in 2006. Mr. Ryken co-founded the Shambhala Sun Summer camp in 1984, and he is a Dapön in the Dorje Kasung. Mr. Ryken has been teaching in prisons for the past twenty years and is currently a mentor for a gentleman on death row in Angola state prison in Louisiana. He currently lives in Ruskin FL. with his wife Paula Bickford. They both teach and play at the St. Petersburg Shambhala Center as well as teaching and assistant directing Shambhala and Kasung Program around the world. Mr. Ryken is well known for his wisdom and humor.
Achim Schlage (Hamburg, Germany) joined the Shambhala Community in the early 1980’s and has served the Munich and Hamburg Shambhala Centers in various positions. In 2000 he co-initiated the European Donor Group, a group of sangha members dedicated to propagate generosity within the European mandala, and the Family Working Group in Europe. He served as Chagdzö for Shambhala Europe. He is practicing kyudo, has been teaching in Shambhala for 10 years and lives with his wife and three sons in Hamburg, Germany.
Joachim Sehrbrock (Vancouver, British Columbia) has been a student of Buddhism and a practitioner since 1996. He became part of the Shambhala community in 2000 while studying Contemplative Psychology at Naropa University. Joachim is passionate about Buddhist and Depth Psychologies and has published and taught widely on sexual and gender diversity. He has a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and has worked as a psychologist in clinical and academic settings since 2005. Joachim lives with his husband in Vancouver, BC.
Ruth Wallen (San Diego, California) has been a member of the Shambhala community since 1980, when she felt immediately at home attending a Level One at the Berkeley Dharmadhatu. After moving to San Diego she served as coordinator, and more recently has worked in various capacities to support the development of practice and study at their growing Shambhala Center. A practicing artist, whose work is dedicated to encouraging dialogue around ecology and social justice, she is a professor in the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts Program at Goddard College and also teaches at the University of California, San Diego. She lives in San Diego with her husband and teenage daughter.
Tessa Watt (London, UK) has been a member since 1992 and a teacher since 2012. She was Director of the Awake in the World festival (2013) celebrating 50 years since Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s arrival in the West. Tessa teaches mindfulness in the UK’s Houses of Parliament and a range of other workplaces. She was a leader of the Mindful Nation UK report (2015) launched by the All-party Parliamentary Group for Mindfulness. She is an Associate of the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, and co-founder of Being Mindful (
Denise Wuensch (Denver, Colorado) began practicing Buddhism in the lineage of Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, while living in her hometown of Houston in the mid-1970’s. She attended the first Vajrayana seminary offered by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche in 1992, and has served in the Kalapa Court, his personal residence, as Head of Household since 1994. She currently holds the title of Shabdo in that role. In her profession as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker she has a private practice in Denver, Colorado, specializing in Contemplative Psychotherapy and Trauma Recovery. In addition, she also works as a hospice social worker, providing support and counseling to families and patients at the end of life. She lives with her husband in Denver.
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Fifteen New Shastris
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Three New Acharyas
Appointments made this month in Europe
The Office of the Sakyong is delighted to announce that the Sakyong has appointed three new acharyas. On September 3, during the final ceremonies of Scorpion Seal Assembly 8 at Dechen Choling, the Sakyong personally blessed Acharya Beate Kirchhoff-Schlage, Acharya Daniele Bollini, and Acharya Arnd Riester.Beate Kirchhoff-Schlage of Hamburg, Germany, began practicing in Shambhala after her first child was born. A former theater worker and university teacher, she is now the mother of 3 sons. Beate served as Shambhala Center Director in Hamburg for 5 years. In 2010 she was appointed shastri for Hamburg and Berlin.
Daniele Bollini, of Ticino, Switzerland was born in 1965, and began his studies with the Druk Sakyong in 1981. He has been teaching in the Swiss Italian and Italian areas since the early 1990s and directed the Ticino Shambhala Center from 1990 until 2005. In 2011 he was appointed shastri for the Milano, Lucca and Ticino Shambhala Centers. Daniele is married and has a 15-year-old daughter. Since 1990 he has taught history, geography and Italian in a secondary school in Bellinzona, where for the past 10 years he is has also been involved in the training of new teachers.
Arnd Riester, of Cologne, Germany, has been practicing in Shambhala since 1991, and teaching since 1998. In 2010 he was appointed as a shastri. He lives with his wife and two children in Cologne, where he is a professional goldsmith. Arnd owns shops in Cologne and Bad Honnef where he presents his jewellery work with his business partners.Please join us in welcoming these acharyas to their posts. May the all beings enjoy Profound Brilliant Glory!
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The Third Mind Exhibition
New River – watercolor series 1981- by John Cage
Ellen Pearlman, New York -based writer and editor of the Brooklyn Rail who lives part time in China, writes about The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York responding to the influence of eastern thought on western art. The exhibition is an ambitious academic effort to document the global narrative unfolding in a contemporary context.
From January 30 to April 19, 2009, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City presented The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989, an exhibition on the dynamic and complex impact of Asian art, literature, music, and philosophical concepts on American art. It features 250 works by 100 artists in painting, sculpture, video art, installations, works on paper, film, live performance, and literary works, and draws from over 100 major museum and private collections in North America, Europe, and Japan.
The Third Mind proposes a new art-historical construct––one that challenges the widely accepted view that American modern art developed simply as a dialogue with Europe––by focusing on the myriad ways in which vanguard American artists’ engagement with Asian art, literature, music, and philosophical concepts inspired them to forge an independent artistic identity that would define the modern age and mind.
Editor’s Note: We are currently on hiatus from publishing new articles; in the meantime, please enjoy this classic item reprinted from our back issues.
These artists developed a new understanding of existence, nature, and consciousness through their prolonged engagement with Eastern religions (Hinduism, Tantric and Chan/Zen Buddhism, Taoism), classical Asian art forms, and living performance traditions. Japanese art and Zen Buddhism dominated in part because America’s political and economic ties with Japan were historically stronger than those with China or India, the other nations examined in this exhibition.
To truly understand China’s role requires a separate show focusing on the origins of Chinese influence in Japanese art and tracing it all the way to up through modern times. For most Western artists the initial pre-modern exposure they had to Chinese art was through reproductions or museum exhibitions which in North America meant visiting the first collection of Asian art assembled by the great curator Ernst Fellonosa, housed at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Beginning with the late nineteenth-century Aesthetic movement and the ideas promulgated in transcendentalist circles, The Third Mind looks at the Asian influences shaping abstract art, Conceptual art, Minimalism, and the neo-avant-garde as they unfolded in New York and on the West Coast. It also presents select developments in modern poetry, music, and dance-theater.
The title of the exhibition refers to Untitled (“Rub Out the Word”) from The Third Mind (ca. 1965), a “cut-ups” work by Beat writers William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, which combines and rearranges unrelated texts to create a new narrative.
The exhibition is organized chronologically and thematically into seven sections:
Whistler, Purple and Rose (1864)
Aestheticism and Japan: The Cult of the Orient
American artists’ fascination with the East began in the late 1850s and developed from intellectual circles radiating from Boston, especially the interlocking communities of Harvard University, the Unitarians, and the transcendentalists. In the wake of Commodore Matthew Perry’s opening of Japan in 1853–54, philosophies and artistic practices of “the Orient” and especially Japan as an alternative to European sources of cultural identity came into focus. This section shows works by John La Farge, James McNeill Whistler, Mary Cassatt, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Abbott Handerson Thayer, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens.
Arthur Wesley Dow, Rain in May (1907)
Landscapes of the Mind: New Conceptions of Nature
Artists of the early to mid-twentieth century championed modern and abstract art in America while invoking Asian aesthetics and philosophies that conceived of nature as a unity of matter and spirit, transcendentalism and Theosophy. There is the work of Arthur Wesley Dow, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and Arthur Dove; the Photo-Secessionists Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz; and the painters Marsden Hartley and Stanton Macdonald-Wright. It culminates with the Northwest school of painters that coalesced in the 1930s with Mark Tobey, Kenneth Callahan, Paul Horiuchi, and Morris Graves.
Ezra Pound, Cathay (1915)
Ezra Pound, Modern Poetry and Dance Theater
Ezra Pound rewrote American translations of Japanese No plays and classical Chinese poetry, including poems by Tang poet Li Bai (701-762), a project that provided life-long inspiration for the appropriation of Asian literature as the basis for his creative method and style. Cathay (1915) established Pound as the chief innovator of Chinese poetry in English. This section also includes works by influential writers Lafcadio Hearn and T. S. Eliot , as well as highlights the history of the Japanese dancer Itō Michio who performed William Butler Yeats’s No-inspired play, At The Hawks Well (ca. 1916), which later influenced the aesthetics of choreographer Martha Graham and sculptor Isamu Noguchi.
Robert Motherwell, Lyric Suite series (1965)
Abstract Art, Calligraphy, and Metaphysics
By 1955, the calligraphic brushstroke, was a fundamental approach to Abstract Expressionist painting that on the pure and spontaneous gesture of the artist’s hand. The rhetoric of Zen Buddhism, which promoted direct action, allowed artists to aspire to directly record their inner visions. Artists Franz Kline, Sam Francis, Philip Guston,, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, and David Smith, are included as are Natvar Bhavsar, Georgia O’Keeffe, Okada Kenzō, Gordon Onslow-Ford, Lee Mullican and Brice Marden.
New River – watercolor series 19881- by John Cage
Buddhism and the Neo-Avant-Garde
Zen and other forms of Mahayana Buddhism were philosophical influences in the American postwar neo-avant-garde. They include the activities of neo-Dada, Fluxus, and Happenings through the music of John Cage; the spontaneous writings of Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg.. There is a live projection of Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film (1964); work by Yoko Ono, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. Also featured are important publications by the Beat writers Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Michael McClure, a film by Harry Smith and work by Arakawa and Madeline Gins, William Anastasi, Toni Marioni and Paul Kos’s sculpture Sound of Ice Melting (1970).
Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting (1960-66)
Art of Perceptual Experience: Pure Abstraction and Ecstatic Minimalism
The American art of the 1960s included contemplation and perceptual experience aimed at the transformation of consciousness. It includes work by Ad Reinhardt, Agnes Martin, Anne Truitt, Dan Flavin, Robert Irwin, the experimental cinema of Jordan Belson, and Dream House by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela who present North Indian classical raga.
Bill Viola, Room for St. John of the Cross video sound installation (1983)
The final section presents video, installation, and live performance art of the 1970s through 1989 and reflects the growing popularity of Asian wisdom traditions in American culture. Work is shown by James Lee Byars, Linda Montano, Adrian Piper, Bill Viola, and Kim Jones. Performances are given by Gary Snyder, Alison Knowles, Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson, Ann Hamilton and Robert Wilson.
(All images appear courtesy of the Guggenheim Museum, New York)
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