In the books I loaned Ryan I had found much to consider.

I was still intrigued by the Tibetan path that for thirty years my friend Billy had traveled. I had just read Dragon Thunder, the memoir by Diana Mukpo, Trungpa's widow. Trungpa's marital infidelity and sexual conduct are legend; but his widow writes that Trungpa remained indifferent to her own occasional casual affairs only until she fell in love.

"Rinpoche may have been a mahasiddha but he was also a man," she explains, "and like some men he seemed to have a double standard about extramarital affairs…[and he] sometimes worried that he was losing me."

Jealousy.

Fear.

Mukpo never completed the preliminary practices normally demanded by the Vajrayana path and on one occasion, "conflicted" by Trungpa being "both husband and guru," she abandoned a yoga practice that required her to visualize him as her teacher.

She objected.

"He screamed at me," she writes, "and started pounding his hand."

"Go back," he insisted.

She did.

I was familiar with Trungpa's infidelity, his use of illicit drugs, his alcoholism, his addiction to tobacco, his unpredictable behavior in general, but it felt important to me to learn from his wife also of his jealousy, his worry, his depression, his anger, his infatuation with celebrity, wealth, ceremony, excess, and pomp, and his neglect of his wife and children.

Mukpo:

I felt vulnerable and exhausted. I needed desperately to rest at night. With people coming in all night long and the baby waking up all the time, I finally freaked out completely and started screaming at Rinpoche. We had a huge fight. Rinpoche started screaming back at me and chased me around the bedroom until I finally barricaded myself in the bathroom with the baby.

Not long before his final illness and his death Mukpo told her husband that their situation was "terrible," "really awful," that he was getting "completely crazy," "out of control," that he was a drunk, and that by his drinking he was killing himself.

"With that," she writes, "he tried to hit me but he missed."

Failure.

Mukpo witnessed her husband kill a scorpion he discovered in his son's room. She says but for that single exception his commitment to nonviolence never wavered and she cites a talk her husband delivered on the subject of self-deception.

Trungpa:

You cannot by any means for any religious reasons or for any spiritual or metaphysical reasons step on an ant or kill your mosquitoes—at all…. You cannot destroy life. We have to respect everybody. You cannot make a random judgment on that at all…. You can't act on your desires alone. You have to think, contemplate….

"That is Buddhism," declared Trungpa. "That is the rule."

Yes.