Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche

Tibetan lama of the Nyingma school (1930–2002), born Padma Gargyi Wangchuk in the Tromtar region of Kham and recognised at the age of three as the sixteenth Chagdud tulku. His mother, Dawa Drolma, was held to be an emanation of Tara. He entered a three-year retreat at eleven, left Tibet after the Chinese occupation, and from 1979 built the Chagdud Gonpa Foundation in the West. In 1994 he moved to Brazil and founded Khadro Ling in Rio Grande do Sul, where he died in 2002. He was a sculptor, a painter and a physician as well as a teacher, and wrote the autobiography Lord of the Dance.