Kalu Rinpoche was born in 1905 in the Hor region of Kham, Eastern Tibet. When he was fifteen years old, he began his higher studies at the monastery of Palpung, the foremost centre of the Karma Kagyu school. He remained there for more than a decade, during which time he mastered the vast body of teachings that forms the philosophical basis of Buddhist practice, and completed two three-year retreats.
At about the age of 25, Kalu Rinpoche left Palpung to pursue the life of a solitary yogi in the woods of the Khampa countryside. For nearly 15 years, he strove to perfect his realisation of all aspects of the teachings and he became renowned in the villages and among the nomads as a representative of the bodhisattva path.
In the late 1960s Kalu Rinpoche began to attract Western disciples in India. By the 1970s, he was teaching extensively in the Americas and Europe, and during his three visits to the West he founded teaching centres in over a dozen countries. In France, he established the first retreat centre to teach the traditional three-year retreats of the Shangpa and Karma Kagyu lineages to Western students.
At 3:00pm on Wednesday May 10, 1989, Kalu Rinpoche died at his monastery in Sonada.
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