Elephant Magazine, Winter 2006
Dr. Reggie Ray is one of the first examples of an historical synthesis: the wisdom of the East and the technological know-how of the West. That’s not just hype: until 1959, when the Reds rolled through Tibet, Buddhism was something you read about in National Geographic. Then, suddenly, in a diaspora equal to the genocide that caused it, 2,500 years of Buddhist wisdom found itself forcibly exported across the snowy Himalayas. Chögyam Trungpa was perhaps foremost among these Tibetan gurus—leaving behind his monk’s robes for suits & sake, he put his ancient tradition into terms accessible and relevant to a new America. Among his first students was a young, precocious scholar by the name of Reggie Ray. 30 years later, Dr. Ray is an Acharya—an honorific similar to ‘Master’ or ‘Roshi’—and, with Pema Chödron, one of the best in the West at communicating the everyday profundity of the East.
