A Cosmic Oversight
Sincere homage to the Guru, the Deva, the Dakini, and a satiric bow to all patrons who cherish shaping the sacred.
The year was 2483 (Modern Chronology) since the Buddha's Parinirvana, a distinctive Buddhist reckoning of time, which renders stories recent enough to be documented but distant enough to be left to misunderstand. Into the proximity of that year and out of the cosmic oversight, Karma was born in a valley southeast of Jomolangma, where mountains touch the heavens without effort and livelihoods only touch the abysses. The valley surely had beauty in excess, but opportunity awfully in scarce.
His father, an accidental Tibetan refugee and an intentional opportunist, having received the gift of citizenship from the Dharma Raja Abhiya Vajra Shvara of the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon, departed early into samsara, into another valley, or simply into the void. The departure was complete enough to become formative.
His mother, albeit Bhutanese by birth from a nomadic family that had quietly mastered survival, chose a narrower path: one her Buddhist relatives called sort of renunciation and authorities called purely an administrative inconvenience. Between these physical and material absences, Karma learned early that permanence was an unreliable companion.
The Way of Necessity
By 1994, his grandparents also having slipped from this tara planet in close succession, he had become what institutions classify as an orphan and what life recognizes as a student of necessity. While every other child in the village seemed to experience the warmth of parental affection, all Karma had was a curious mind that drifted toward a somber wonder: perhaps he had been born from seasonal moisture, one of the forms of birth Buddhism mentions.
Yet, just as his trajectory seemed fixed toward a life of seasonal subsistence, the karmic ledger shifted. In 1996, he entered the Druk Khamsum Wangdue Choekyi Phodrang Monastic School in western Bhutan, an entry he recognized as the first crucial step of a thousand-mile journey. To a timid orphan boy, the monastic disciplines were deeply intimidating. Even the monastic name felt longer than some Himalayan winters, sending shivers down his spine whenever he tried to glance at it. Yet, knowing this was the only place he could truly carve out a life, he adapted quickly.
There, two things were observed immediately: first, Karma learned quickly; second, he worked without complaint. He lifted stones, hauled firewood, and memorized texts with equal discipline. When he witnessed other young monks being embraced by their loved ones, thoughts of his own origin continued to linger. Whether his tireless effort reflected devotion, determination, or simply a lack of alternatives was never conclusively determined.
In 1998, he was transferred to Chungoen Dongak Dargay Ling (present-day Rinchenling Shedra), where he studied basic ritual arts, grammar, sutra, and philosophy while participating in the ancient monastic tradition of constructing temples for future generations to renovate. Under his first master, Lopen Yeshey Rinchen, Karma spent four years balancing textual rigor with physical labor, discovering that the doctrine of impermanence applies most consistently to structures built with optimism.
Then came a blessing disguised as a tragic displacement. Karma was transferred to Riwo Druzing Nyipa (present-day Lekshed Jungney), where his second teacher, Lopen Lekshed Jamtsho, appeared briefly but decisively. Under his guidance, something shifted. Grammar ceased to feel mechanical. Sutras stopped resisting interpretation. Philosophy revealed itself not as an abstraction, but as disciplined clarity. Karma's aptitude sharpened, not theatrically, but unmistakably. Under this Manjushri-like teacher, whose singular teaching had the power to unlock a thousand lines, Karma's inner vision opened.
The Root Guru and the Silent Valley
In 2002, he arrived at Namgyelchoeling Monastery and met Khenpo Namkar Donkuen Drubpa, an 81-year-old renunciate and a devoted disciple of Ven. Rahor Chodrak, who was the "heart son" of the Rimé Master Zhenphen Choekyi Nangwa. Karma came seeking an audience around dusk, just as Khenpo was about to brew tea as a serkyim chang (liquor offering) substitute, his stores reduced to a few days' rations.
After prostrations and an offering of three bottles of Ara (Bhutanese moonshine) and fifteen kilos of rice, Khenpo looked up and smiled: "We either have a good karmic connection or my dharma protectors summoned you to deliver the supplies I was running short of; either way, I accept your offering." With that affectionate gesture, Khenpo became his root guru. Instruction here was neither indulgent nor performative. The Longchen Nyingtik teachings were transmitted without embellishment, and Karma absorbed them with the gravity of someone who understood that precision mattered.
After a few years with his root guru came the retreat.
Retreat, as described in brochures, offers a controlled encounter with the mind. In practice, it provides an unsupervised audit. Karma retreated to Bayul Langdrak Ney, the Hidden Valley of Misty Towers, a location chosen for its silence and distance from distraction. Despite the enduring silence, his mind didn't cooperate.
That same stillness was breached one evening by a radio, played openly, without pretension, by an elderly practitioner nearby. Though the music itself was not that remarkably enchanting, its effect was powerful. A sudden jolt of clarity accomplished what months of solitude had not within minutes: it exposed the fragility of a resolve built on containment rather than genuine insight. Karma remained in retreat physically, but mentally, he had already departed; or perhaps he was never truly present in the first place.
One evening, as was his routine, he stood outside the hermitage gazing at the sunset while reciting the first chapter of the Bodhicaryavatara and the Dharmadhatu Ratna Kosa. Staring down into the valley, he asked himself a question less poetic than honest: was this genuine renunciation, or simply a different form of avoidance? The radio had done its work. Within a week, he descended, not disillusioned with Dharma, but curious about everything the monastery had protected him from: music without liturgical purpose, entertainment without merit, life chosen rather than inherited.
External Legitimacies and Changing Faiths
In the capital city of the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon, Karma encountered another system of doctrine: institutional legitimacy. Despite fluency in Dzongkha, years of classical training, and comprehensive textual mastery, he discovered that knowledge required external validation to circulate freely. Instead of finding the employment he was seeking, he discovered that even enlightenment, absent certification, was considered non-transferable in a land that seems like Agartha to a fortunate few.
Grounded with the insight that institutions value clarity, provided it arrives in the correct format, backed by the patronage of the privileged, he began to gather what he lacked, seeking to replace the dysfunctional equipment he had been given. English, science, and Western literature were devoured as if by one newly awoken from a state of torpor, all while gripped by temporary hustle, relentless exhaustion, chronic hunger, and a rapidly fading hope. Perchance all his effort would come to nothing, either by failing to reach its intended fruition or by being overtaken by age and other factors first.
In 2006, worn thin rather than broken, Karma entered a Christian community that asked fewer preliminary questions. He was welcomed, fed, and trusted with responsibility before credentials. The warmth was genuine. The structure was simple. In 2010, he became a Baptist preacher, starting in Tashiyangtse, then moving to Thimphu, then to the West eventually. He relentlessly improved his devotional and sermonal logic to the point it could dismantle mountains of doubt, and remained within this faith for nearly fifteen years: long enough to be shaped, challenged, entangled, and ultimately transformed.
He credits this chapter of faith, and the grace he found within it, for the flowering of his later life in the West: his sharpened linguistic range, his immersion in Western literature, and his eventual encounter with modern science. What he carried into that tradition may have been a contemplative discipline honed in monastery cells; but what he carried out was something harder to name: a deepened understanding that the sincerity of the practice and the sincerity of the institution are rarely the same thing, a distinction that, in time, he recognized as applying equally to every tradition he had ever entered.
After losing everything he cherished to a catastrophic goring, he crossed continents, accumulated books, and made his first American home in the Green Mountain State along the 45th parallel. He then drifted gradually southward to the Big Apple—a city he would tenderly call Ardam Dragrong in later chapters of his life—which served as his base for a decade. This life-altering migration was not a path he had sought. When his social work efforts to improve outcomes for those who shared a fate similar to his own childhood were interpreted negatively, he realized that patrons, regardless of loyalty, rarely welcome unsanctioned reform, leaving him no choice but to exit.
The Summoning
In 2020, Karma nearly died. Twice. Not because of the global pandemic, but because of a more intimate summons by the universe, or perhaps the Dharma itself. Despite a life of unbroken sobriety, he was visited by an ominous onset of acute pancreatitis: misdiagnosed the first time, which nearly returned him to dust as the Bible defines it, and diagnosed with precision the second, though the experience left a lingering sense of uneasiness. What medicine classified as a terminal crisis, Karma received as a blessing poorly wrapped, a physical dismantling that mirrored, with uncomfortable accuracy, his spiritual necessity.
For decades, facing the challenges and hard oppositions shoveled in his face by almost everyone he relied, Karma began treating his life's wild deviations as a path of perpetual reinvention. The proximity of death clarified matters considerably, and the pandemic, arriving in that same season, rendered sudden demise less an exception than a climate. Spiritual brethren were lost across the Green Mountain, Empire, and Magnolia States, each absence echoing an identical uneasiness: a reminder of how far the lived fact of death sits from its doctrinal description.
The seminars continued; the fellowships did not lapse. While the Lord's grace lacked nothing, and both spiritual fulfillment and worldly stability had arrived in abundance, the shadow of the valley of death remained. The experience awakened a metaphysical question that Christianity had helped him live with, but that Dharma would later address more directly. Yet neither could loosen the fixation, and Karma found himself returning, again and again, to the raw nearness of his own end. The identities he had collected, or at least attempted to collect (monk, scholar, convert, social worker, migrant) all proved administratively irrelevant. There were no forms to complete, no doctrinal checkpoints to pass, and no patrons to appease. There was only clarity, arriving without ceremony.
Being that close to death changed him in ways the monasteries and churches never had. That, perhaps, was the revitalization of the teaching.
The Edge of No Man's Land
In 2021, after many inward battles, he returned to the Dharma. What had lain dormant for so long now required a complete reawakening: a commitment to pure practice over performance. He sought forgiveness with regret, reliance, remedy, and resolve. He renewed his vows of refuge with utmost sincerity. He made contributions to non-sectarian monasteries without expectation. He revisited sutras without wavering.
What gradually followed, however, was not serenity. It was something considerably more bleak, and considerably more disturbing.
In the silence that bloomed after the crisis, Karma drifted. He moved not toward distraction, but toward its philosophical opposite: a vast, featureless detachment where nothing carried weight, nothing demanded a response, and existence itself began to resemble an administrative error. His newly reinvented identity felt almost Zarathustrian: he had returned from the mountain carrying the conviction that he had become someone new.
His return to spirituality felt like descending from that mountain, while restarting his dharma activities felt like discovering the forest hermit within himself. But when he finally entered the marketplace, he encountered something far less serene: the unruly assembly of his own conflicting beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and emotions, none of which recognized his authority.
He discovered that he could no longer inhabit either world, neither the solitude of the mountain nor the noise of the marketplace. So the isolation deepened. And at the edges of his carefully reconstructed reality, the paper began to tear, thinly and silently, until he could see the abyss beneath.
He recognized the territory only later: he had been navigating, without a map, into the proximity of Nihilism. This was not the elegant emptiness of Sunyata, which Nagarjuna described as the very condition of interdependence and compassionate engagement, but its corruption: the misreading Nagarjuna himself warned against most severely. It was emptiness mistaken for the absence of effect, and detachment mistaken for the dissolution of cause; the view that, because all things are empty of inherent existence, nothing ultimately matters.
He had spent years learning to loosen the grip of the self. He had not noticed when loosening became letting go entirely, and letting go became, quietly, a form of self-abandonment.
The recognition arrived not through dramatic revelation but through a single clarifying thought: to abandon a life adorned with rich dharma elegance today is not only wasting a precious human life, but also the accumulated wisdom that took several perpetual transformations to attain. That is not humility; that is a failure of the Bodhisattva vows. Whether one has taken them formally or not, a Vajrayana practitioner is inherently a crowned Bodhisattva, at least a miniature one. The vow does not ask one to be significant. It asks one to remain available.
So Karma retreated from the edge of no man's land. He reestablished measured contact with the world: limited, careful, never performative. Thus, he laid the foundation for what came next. He maintained distance not as rejection but as discernment: present enough to be useful, withdrawn enough to remain honest.
The Closing Circle
Karma had known three teachers: Lopen Yeshey Rinchen, Lopen Lekshed Jamtsho, and Root Guru Namkar Donkuen Drubpa.
Lopen Lekshed Jamtsho and Guru Namkar Donkuen Drubpa had already passed beyond before Karma returned from his prodigal trip. But his first teacher, Lopen Yeshey Rinchen, still walked among the living until 2024. Once more, before Lopen's passing, Karma found his way to him, and a circle closed that required no interpretation.
When the last of his teachers passed away, though he was living in a city of 8.5 million people, a momentary sense of being absolutely alone on the entire planet gripped him. Since then, the teachings have become less dramatic and more practical. He began to understand that the Dharma was not meant to replace life, but to move through it, with or without the adornment of robes.
So Karma began unraveling texts, commentaries, and philosophy—physics, too. He wasn't chasing an ego trip; he just knew that genuine inquiry respects no academic borders. Stripped of convenient slogans, the world grew increasingly coherent. He wrote poetry for a tiny audience, often just himself. Reading Dzogchen texts alongside modern science wasn't meant to impress anyone; it was about building a personal sense of clarity, a formidable guardrail keeping him well clear of the swamp of pseudoscience.
He guides a few like-minded tutees who assume this is preparation for something more public; in reality, Karma plays the ultimate alchemist, slipping away before they can attach themselves to him. The game was never about reaching some destined point, unearthing hidden treasures, or becoming something. The treasure was already there. The real work was staying grounded enough to unbecome it all.
Like a vajra dagger out of its league, unable to dance in the crevices of a lava-walled demonic realm, Karma remains withdrawn from public view. It is not modesty. It is fatigue with symbolic architecture, and a private resolve to keep his motherland from added embarrassment on the world stage, as Karma still carries the scar from the goring of the political boar, his reform efforts labeled duplication by men whose power depended on stasis.
Deconstructing the Circus
Through the static of these cynical times, a thought worth reflecting upon surfaces. Karma holds an undiminished gratitude for the institutions and the figures that personify the continuation of the Buddha Dharma. He recognizes, from close observation, that the vessel and the Dharma it carries are rarely identical, yet they are seldom entirely separable either. Thus, in essence, he reveres everyone who adorns the robes, and deeply appreciates those who do so without clinging to the performance of it.
The irony is unmistakable: in religious circles, the pursuit of selflessness has a way of becoming its own competition for status, perhaps for sustenance, perhaps for pure clinging. So, Karma took up the efforts to reject the whole enterprise (the business of religion, the social ladder-climbing, the boot-licking of patrons) in favor of something genuinely unbothered, existing in irrelevance as pure yoga, and therefore available. Otherwise, at any point, Karma won't stop seeing everything he does as a performance, including the very act of rejection. He is acutely reminded of that line so often attributed to Franz Kafka:
"I was ashamed of myself when I realized life was a costume party, and I attended with my real face."
Now, the mask slips backward: he sees that this endless cycle of shedding and becoming was merely a sequence of costumes worn to navigate a broader theater. Social, religious, and political dynamics are not separate domains of truth; they are parts of a grand, inescapable circus. In this light, compiling an elaborate "about me" page is not an exercise in transparency, but simply masking up as a clown to sit among the other performers, unbothered by a desire for attention, yet trapped in the carnival all the same.
No doubt, writing this unnecessary content, necessitated by an unnecessary blog, bears a dangerous resemblance to the very objects of his cynicism. This page could face the hammer of the Norse god of thunder should a moment of greater clarity, pure epiphany, or plain bewilderment shoot forth from the churning currents of inspiration, aspiration, and apprehension. If something of that magnitude were to occur, the act itself would serve as a testament to deconstructing the deconstruction. Let the entire exercise of writing, deleting, and “deconstructing the deconstruction” serve not as liberation, but as a mirror in which others might recognize their own entanglement.
Fragmented continuity
Now, to conclude this trilogy, which, by the way, is part personal confession, part mythical farce, and part nuclear riddle, your patience in reading this magnificent conceptual architecture of Mr. Unbecoming is appreciated, with the understanding that the appreciation itself is not a performance, of course.
Anyways, Karma remains: an unyielding curvature written into Einstein’s field equations, a curvature that refuses to straighten, or perhaps a sudden clarity shining through Longchenpa’s vision of the Kun Gzhi. Perchance, as Beckett had it, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
What remains after that is not a person, and at last, no one is left to fail. If nothing else, let this offer some small measure of peace to those dissecting every fiber of his quiet pilgrimage, whether the wanderer himself or the nemesis that pursues him.