ANNE CAROLYN KLEIN/LAMA RIGZIN DROLMA
is Professor and Former Chair of Religious Studies, Rice University, where she developed a contemplative studies concentration for graduate students in the Department of Religious Studies. She is also a Founding Director and Resident Lama of Dawn Mountain Tibetan Temple and Dawn Mountain Community Center & Research Institute. In connection with this work she was named a Dorje Lopon by her teacher Ad.Zom Rinpoche in 2009.Her translation work encompasses both Tibetan texts and oral commentary on them. Her books include Knowledge and Liberation on Buddhist distinctions between intellectual knowing and direct experience; Path to the Middle: The Spoken Scholarship of Khensur Yeshe Thupten, on preparing to meet the ultimate; Meeting the Great Bliss Queen, contrasting Buddhist and feminist understandings of self; and, with Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Unbounded Wholeness, which translates and discusses a Dzogchen text from the Bon –Buddhist tradition.
Her most recent publication is Heart Essence of the Vast Expanse: A Story of Transmission, a Chantable English translation of Jigme Lingpa’s Foundational Practices and a condensation of this by Ad. Zom Rinpoche. It includes a CD of chanting in English and Tibetan. She is currently completing Strand of Jewels, a synthesis of essential Dzogchen instructions from his heart teachers by Khetsun Sangpo Rinpoche, and closing in on a book on Jigme Lingpa offering several of his Wisdom Chats and other works for the first time. She has been a plenary speaker at the Summer Mind and Life Institute in Garrison, NY and also at major public programs of Mind and Life with His Holiness the Dalai Lama.In all of these endeavors, her central thematic interest is the embodied interaction between head and heart as illustrated across a spectrum of Buddhist descriptions of the many varieties of human consciousness. She has studied deeply in three of the five Tibetan traditions, her scholarly work and community teaching-retreats draw from all of these, with special emphasis on Nyingma and Heart Essence traditions in Dharma contexts, or reframing its principles to strengthen life-skills for those seeking to enrich their lives thru contemplative practice.
She brings her 40 years of study and practice in Heart Essence Dzogchen traditions to her teaching at Dawn Mountain and, especially, to the Dzogchen Cycles program, where committed students receive full transmission of Heart Essence practices, including, uniquely a broad spectrum of recent Revealed Treasures by one of one of very great Dzogchen masters in Tibet today.