About Rinpoche

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche was one of the first to bring the precious Bön teachings to the West. In 1988 he was invited by the dzogchen master Chögyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche to teach in Italy, which brought him additional opportunities to teach in other locations throughout Western Europe. In 1991 Tenzin Rinpoche was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship at Rice University in Houston, Texas, where he continued his research into early Bön tantric deities and their relationship to Buddhist traditions in early Buddhist Tibet. He was awarded a second Rockefeller Fellowship in 1993 when Rice University invited him back to teach during the spring semester.

Since that time Tenzin Rinpoche has chosen to remain in the West to teach the ancient Bön traditions to Western students. In March 1992 Rinpoche founded Ligmincha Institute in Charlottesville, Va., a non-profit organization whose purpose is to preserve for future generations the ancient teachings, arts, sciences, language and literature of Tibet and Zhang Zhung.

In 1994 he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to pursue research on the logical and philosophical aspects of the Bön tradition. The fruits of that research came with the 2006 publication of the scholarly text Unbounded Wholeness: Dzogchen, Bön and the Logic of the Nonconceptual (Oxford University Press, 2006), written in collaboration with Anne Carolyn Klein, chair of religious studies at Rice. Also in 1994 Tenzin Rinpoche appeared on the Discovery Channel, where he explained the principles involved in Tibetan dream yoga practice as one segment of a three-part series entitled "The Power of Dreams."

In 1998 Rinpoche established the Serenity Ridge Retreat Center amid the mountains of Nelson County, Va., 30 minutes south of Charlottesville.