volumes of writing, the chief of which concerned his principal practice, the TamdrinPagmo cycle. Other volumes treated the Kadampa School, bodhisattvahood, the Nyingma tantras, and Maflju~ri, demonstrating the wide purview of his scholarship. Shabkar’s rounded personality is evinced also by his meritorious works: the gift of a solid-gold butter lamp to the great monastery of Samye; the gilding of the superstructure of the Boudhanath Stupa in Kathmandu; the construction of numerous monasteries and temples in his own Arndo homelands. No antisocial, cantankerous hermit, he had the bodhisattva’s ability to transform himself into a receptacle of offerings that he used for the good of all sentient beings.

Shabkar passed away in 1851 at the age of seventy-one. On the completion of a long discourse to his disciples, his spirit lefthis body while he still sat upright in lotus posture. So passed the carefree spirit of the “little anchorite” who, in many ways, both by example and in words, did more to feed the faith and support the spiritual needs of the common people than a multitude of tulkus on brocaded thrones. His spirit returned to inhabit another body, but it did so in the obscurity in which the original Shabkar spent much of his hfe. His lineage, however, proliferated. Trulshik Rinpoche of Thubten Choling in Solu, Nepal, is the principal contemporary practitioner of his lineage.

That, then, is the Shabkar Tsogdrug Rangdrol who wrote and sang The Flight of the Garuda. In his own judgment he was a simple, perspicacious mendicant without a care in the world. The