Shar Khentrul Jamphel Lodrö Rinpoche

He spent the first twenty years of his life herding yaks and reciting mantras on the Tibetan plateau. He then took up monastic training and studied under more than twenty-five masters drawn from every Tibetan Buddhist tradition, which is unusual enough to have shaped everything since. He was identified as the reincarnation of the Kalachakra master Ngawang Chözin Gyatso, and was appointed khenpo at Tsangwa monastery in Dzamthang, one of the Jonang seats in Amdo. He gave up that position to practise.

Since 2014 he has taught in more than thirty countries, laying out the Kalachakra path in sequence rather than handing over the empowerment alone. That distinction is the whole point of his work. The empowerment is given widely across Tibetan Buddhism, sometimes to thousands at a time; the years of practice it opens onto are taught by very few, and almost never in English to people outside the tradition.

Dzokden, the organisation he founded, describes itself as a worldwide network of Kalachakra practitioners and works to preserve and transmit the Jonang teachings. His own approach is explicitly Rimé, the nineteenth-century non-sectarian current that encouraged study across the Tibetan schools rather than within one. Given that the Jonang were the school the Rimé movement did most to bring back into view, that is not a decoration.