The Special Connection
with the XVIth Gyalwang Karmapa: 8

Akong Rinpoché and the XVIth Gyalwang's Passing Away

“I myself had the opportunity to serve him until his passing away in Chicago
and there are many Kagyu rinpochés but somehow my role was important
for the last few years of his life.”

The XVIth Gyalwang Karmapa spent his last weeks in a hospital in Sion, Illinois, and passed away there. Akong Rinpoché was in attendance for much of the time, along with the Karmapa’s four “heart-sons”, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoché and other visiting rinpochés. He shared many intimate moments during the times alone or almost alone with the Karmapa, as the various rinpochés took shifts to serve him and be by his side.

The teams, interestingly, were the following pairs: Akong Rinpoché and the Tai Situpa; Kongtrul Rinpoché and Bardor Tulku; the Kunzik Shamarpa and Tendzin Namgyal. Several important moments and stories emerge from this time in hospital.

The first was that at one point His Holiness called for Akong Rinpoché and Trungpa Rinpoché to join him. He took their hands and placed them together, saying they should reconcile any differences they had as much as possible; such was his wish.

The second moment is a fascinating story. The Karmapa needed regular blood transfusions and insisted on it coming only from those in his close circle of suitable blood type. Akong Rinpoché was one of the donors. At one point, one of the members of the medical team responsible for the transfusion obviously thought that as long as the blood was of the right type it mattered little from whom it came and, ignoring the Karmapa's wish, set up a bag of blood from their bank that was not blood donated by the rinpochés. As soon as it started flowing, reported Akong Rinpoché who was there, the Karmapa looked very wrathful and physically took the drip needle out of his arm saying,

“This is not the rinpochés’ blood but that of an american, an African-American.”

Not of course that there is anything wrong with being American or African-American but simply to point out that the Karmapa knew immediately whose blood it was, just by the “feel” of it or through his “clear knowledge” siddhis. This of course surprised the nursing staff and embarrassed them. They returned with one of the bags specially given and stored for him. As the blood started to flow, he smiled and said, “Ah, this is the blood of my guru!” When checked, it was a bag of blood donated by the Tai Situpa. The previous Situ had been that Karmapa’s guru and the present one, attending him, was to be the guru of his next incarnation.

A third point is that a major three-day public event for January 1981 had been planned (a long time previously) by Akong Rinpoché—in Brussels for the Kunzik Shamarpa. The Shamarpa and Akong Rinpoché were excused from attending the Karmapa in order to allow them to travel to Europe for this event, which the Karmapa wanted to go ahead. However it was during the event that His Holiness’s condition worsened and he passed away. Before leaving, in a private moment with the Karmapa, whose death was now obviously simply a question of time, Akong Rinpoché had asked him to leave word that he (Akong Rinpoché) could have one of his teeth as a relic after his passing. The Karmapa agreed but never had the actual opportunity later to tell his attendants about the "tooth bequest". As Akong Rinpoché himself had not mentioned this to anyone else, he let the matter drop. In the 1990s, during one of his visits to the XVIth Karmapa, the young reincarnation asked him to stay overnight—something difficult for Rinpoché due to the extra altitude of Tsurphu. He normally returned to Lhasa at nights. He stayed, of course, and the next morning the Karmapa gave him one of his milk teeth, that had come out overnight, saying: “I made you a promise before but was unable to keep it. Here it is now.”

Akong Rinpoché told the author that he had never once doubted that Urgyen Trinley was the authentic Karmapa but that this incident astounded even him, with his rock-solid faith.

“Only the Sixteenth Karmapa and myself knew about that,” he told me, “And even I was surprised because it helped me realise that even my own faith could be shocked into something deeper when I thought it was as deep as it could be.”

Another major thing that happened during this final chapter of the Gyalwang Karmapa’s life was that, when all the heart-sons, Akong Rinpoché and Trungpa Rinpoché were present, the Karmapa made it clear that after his passing the four heart-sons should be his regents on an equal footing, probably through a rotating regency, and that the heart-sons should turn to the Very Venerable Kalu Rinpoché for guidance, as he was rich in experience and wisdom and a true holder of the lineage. Although that never happened, exactly like that, the presence of Akong Rinpoché in the Sion hospital at that time when the Karmapa made his own intention clear helps us understand Rinpoché’s efforts in the early 1990s to move the whole succession story forward (see dedicated page).

The body of the Karmapa was flown back to Sikkim from the USA. Special arrangements were made for a stop-over at Heathrow so that Akong Rinpoché and key European followers of the Karmapa could pay homage to the coffin. Rinpoché subsequently attended the formal cremation ceremonies held at Rumtek monastery.

......continue to the next part of the story: Rinpoché's role in the Karmapa succession