Dragon Thunder: My Life with Chogyam Trungpa »

Diana J. Mukpo was born in England in 1953. She attended the prestigious Benenden School until she left at the age of sixteen to marry the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Mrs. Mukpo moved to the United States in 1970, where she remained with Trungpa Rinpoche until his death in 1987. During their marriage, she pursued intensive study of dressage. She is now the owner and director of Windhorse Dressage, and she travels and teaches dressage clinics throughout the United States and Canada.

“It was not always easy to be the guru’s wife,” writes Diana Mukpo. “But I must say, it was rarely boring.” At the age of sixteen, Diana Mukpo left school and broke with her upper-class English family to marry Chögyam Trungpa, a young Tibetan lama who would go on to become a major figure in the transmission of Buddhism to the West. In a memoir that is at turns magical, troubling, humorous, and totally out of the ordinary, Diana takes us into her intimate life with one of the most influential and dynamic Buddhist teachers of our time.

Diana led an extraordinary and unusual life as the "first lady" of a burgeoning Buddhist community in the American 1970s and '80s. She gave birth to four sons, three of whom were recognized as reincarnations of high Tibetan lamas. It is not a simple matter to be a modern Western woman married to a Tibetan Buddhist master, let alone to a public figure who is sought out and adored by thousands of eager students. Surprising events and colorful people fill the narrative as Diana seeks to understand the dynamic, puzzling, and larger-than-life man she married—and to find a place for herself in his unusual world.

Rich in ambiguity, Dragon Thunder is the story of an uncommon marriage and also a stirring evocation of the poignancy of life and of relationships—from a woman who has lived boldly and with originality.

Publishers Weekly

The wife of the late Tibetan Buddhist teacher Trungpa Rinpoche tells a lot (but probably not all) in this memoir of her 17-year marriage to a man known for his "crazy wisdom" style of teaching. That crazy wisdom manifested itself in a highly unconventional life that Mukpo shared for virtually all of her husband's time in the West until his untimely death in 1987. Rinpoche drank prodigiously and had numerous lovers. He was also greatly gifted as an imaginative interpreter of Tibetan Buddhism, with its many esoteric practices, to the West. The couple was unconventional from the get-go. An upper-class Briton educated at an exclusive girls' school, Mukpo was just 16 when she married the Tibetan lama, who she recalls couldn't remember her name when he broke the news of their marriage to a friend. Such anecdotes form a series of revealing private snapshots of the influential Buddhist teacher. Mukpo makes sense out of his craziness and also builds a good case for his brilliance. She is better at domesticity than discipleship, however, so the value of this book is to open household doors and tell a page-turning family story by which the controversial guru can be better understood. (Oct. 3) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.