Sogyal Rinpoche

Sogyal Rinpoche was born in Trehor, Kham, in eastern Tibet in 1947 and founded Rigpa, an international network of Buddhist centres. His The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, assembled with editors Patrick Gaffney and Andrew Harvey and published in 1992, became a global bestseller — more than three million copies in dozens of languages — and carried this sentence to a very large readership under Rilke’s name. He stepped back from Rigpa in 2017 after former senior students alleged abuse, and died in Bangkok in 2019.