A School Where East Meets West : Education: Degree programs range from Buddhist studies to gerontology at Colorado's Naropa Institute, founded by a Tibetan scholar.

L.A. Times Archives

Aug. 13, 1994 12 AM PT

From Associated Press

BOULDER, Colo. — In 1974, an exiled Tibetan scholar invited dozens of artists and spiritual leaders to the Colorado foothills to create a new kind of university, blending both Eastern and Western traditions.

Today, the Naropa Institute has 750 students studying everything from Buddhism to African drumming to t’ai chi ch’uan. The school offers 16 bachelor’s and master’s programs, including Buddhist studies, contemplative psychology, environmental studies and gerontology.

Modeled after Nalanda, an ancient Indian university that emphasized the merging of intellect and intuition, the private school continues to attract renowned Eastern scholars and Western artists.

Over the Fourth of July weekend, the Naropa Institute marked its 20th anniversary with a tribute to poet Allen Ginsberg, an emeritus director and co-founder of Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

Artists attending this year’s event included Anne Waldman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Marianne Faithfull, Ken Kesey, Gary Snyder, Philip Glass, and Meredith Monk.

Ginsberg, who now teaches at Brooklyn College, remembers the early days of the Naropa Institute as “energetic and outrageous.”

“It was about institutionalizing that American bohemia and Tibetan Buddhism, the crazy wisdom, not fenced in,” Ginsberg said.

Naropa was founded by Oxford-educated Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and fueled, in part, by the fascination with Eastern religions in America among Beat Generation poets and their counterculture peers.

“There was a lineage through the poets such as Gary Snyder, and certainly Jack Kerouac raved about Buddhism in some of his writings, so it was very much in the air for me,” said Anne Waldman, director of the writing and poetics program.

At the first session, Rinpoche announced Naropa would be a 100-year project, “where East meets West and sparks can fly.”

“Most of the other people that were around him at that time viewed it as, ‘OK, we’ll do it for the summer and see what happens,’ ” said President John Cobb. “Then 2,500 people showed up and they realized they had something going.”

The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics was founded by Ginsberg and Waldman the next year. The name was a conundrum, said Waldman, on the school’s lack of a building at that time and the spectral presence of its namesake, writer Jack Kerouac, who had long since died.

“So disembodied in the sense that people were no longer here and teaching in their bodies but there was a sense of this alive lineage,” she said.

In those first years, “Allen and I were rooming together . . . and we stayed up all night designing our academy of the future,” she said.

“It would be an international school and we would have poetic chairs . . . the Emily Dickinson school of silent scribbling.

“We’d have a chair of Arabic poetry but we’d fill it with a young Israeli poet. You know, some idea of really getting the world together.”

The writing program has since been franchised, with a sister school in Vienna, Die Schule fur Dichtung, with regular exchanges of both faculty and students.

Waldman recalls those early years, when a handful of loyal students met in classrooms without heat at a school without accreditation. The school was accredited in 1986 by the North-Central Assn. of Colleges and Schools.

Naropa faculty members are still paid less than at other schools, and most have outside work. Waldman says other struggles included the lack of fax machines, parking spaces and desks.

“So many of the faculty who work here do so out of inspiration, vision, and real commitment to this fledgling project, and you have to see it that way,” she said.

Waldman says the rewards include teaching in a tight community of thinkers and artists.

“A student coming in who expects, ‘I pay my money, I’m here and this is what I’m going to get’--that’s completely shattered from Day One,” she said. “They’re going to see our suffering, going to see our heartbreak, the despair that goes with being a creator.”

While Eastern thought permeates the Naropa atmosphere, Waldman says students aren’t pressured to convert.

“Naropa itself has cut ties with the church so to speak, so it’s basically a secular school with a contemplative backdrop,” Waldman said. “Students aren’t coming here to be Buddhist.”

The number of degree students has doubled in the past four years and Cobb, a former Boulder lawyer, says the desired peak is 1,000 students by the year 2000. Both the writing and psychology departments capped enrollment for the first time in the school’s history. Two-thirds of its students come from outside Colorado.

The school is largely tuition-dependent, but has been helped by federal money and anonymous endowments. And a recent Gap clothing chain ad featuring Ginsberg has created new scholarships.

Naropa’s new library is named after Ginsberg and includes audio- and videotape archives of poetry readings, as well as rare Eastern holdings.

Ginsberg is in residence all summer.

“Within the tradition of Buddhist structure, the lineage of one generation passing their wisdom to the next, the relation between the teacher and the student is very strong,” Ginsberg said.