55 pages • 1 hour read
Pema ChödrönWhen Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Author Pema Chödrön
Content warning: This section of the guide briefly mentions allegations of sexual assault.
Pema Chödrön began life in 1936 in New York City as Deirdre Blomfield-Brown. Raised a Catholic, she received a bachelor’s degree in literature from Sarah Lawrence College and a master’s in education at UC Berkeley. Thus armed with high-level abilities to write and teach, in the 1970s she began to study with esteemed Tibetan masters in London and the United States. In 1981, Chödrön became the first fully ordained American nun in Vajrayana Buddhism, taking the name Pema Chödrön (“Lotus Dharma Lamp”). During the 1980s, one of her teachers, Trungpa Rinpoche, appointed her director of his new Shambhala center in Colorado. She later became founding director of his monastery in eastern Canada, Gampo Abbey. However, Chödrön resigned from her role as a Shambhala teacher and representative in 2020, citing the organization’s “unwise direction” in the aftermath of sexual misconduct allegations against its leader, the son of founder Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.
Together with Trungpa Rinpoche, Chödrön has inspired many in the West to explore Tibetan Buddhism. Chödrön published her first book, The Wisdom of No Escape, in 1991, and has since published nearly 20 others, including the bestsellers Taking the Leap and Don’t Bite the Hook. The mindfulness meditation movement in America traces its origin, in part, to Chödrön’s writing.
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Born in 1939, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (“Precious-Jewel Attendant of Enlightenment”) inherited the leadership of two of the four varieties of Tibetan Buddhism. Considered a reincarnation of previous high teachers, or lamas, Trungpa Rinpoche escaped from the 1959 Chinese invasion of Tibet and found his way to North America, where he founded Shambhala, a more secular version of Tibetan Buddhist traditions, as an outreach to Westerners. He founded Shambhala University in Colorado and the Gampo Abbey Buddhist monastery in Nova Scotia, Canada. He also became a teacher and mentor to Chödrön. He acquired the honorific of Rinpoche, used in addressing prominent Tibetan religious teachers. Trungpa Rinpoche had an alcohol addiction and diabetes, and he died in 1987 from liver damage.
Shambhala
The Shambhala sect of Tibetan Buddhism began in the 1970s in America and Canada under the direction of Trungpa Rinpoche, the latest in a long line of Tibetan lamas. Trungpa Rinpoche wanted to make Buddhism more accessible to Westerners, and Vajrayana Buddhism, the form practiced in Tibet, includes several techniques that the non-religious can use. In the West, these are often referred to as Tantra and range from yoga to sexual practices. Vajrayana also includes mindfulness meditation techniques, which have become popular in the US and other Western societies. The Shambhala sect is central to the popularity of Tibetan Buddhism in Western societies.
