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Buddhist Renaissance. The heart of the institute, which fills the top floor of a 70-year-old red brick building, is a huge meditation room that doubles as a dance studio. Here, seated on red cushions, the students and the mainly Buddhist staff meditate for 26 hours weekly. "It is purely voluntary," explains Jeremy Hay ward, a Cambridge University physicist who is now Naropa's vice president. "But we nearly all do it. Meditation is the key." Otherwise there are few Eastern trappings: no beads, bells, robes, incense or even long hair. Says Ron Greathead, 33, a drama student: "We don't talk about Buddhism very much; we think it."
Behind Naropa is the master's dream of a "great Buddhist renaissance" in America. "Americans have the greatest amount of confusion and wealth in the world," says Chogyam, a short, plumpish man who giggles frequently and peers over his glasses with benign amusement. Meditation attracts troubled Americans, he feels, because it damps their ego and ambition. "People are very relieved when they learn that they are nothing, that they don't exist," he says. Chogyam offers no panacea to his followers. His basic message is: "Go and sit and think and find sanity."
"What is the goal of all this?" he asks. "The goal is to have no goal." But Chogyam, who lives in a comfortable Boulder mansion with his wife and three sons, also has an earthly goal: expanding Naropa into the Buddhist University of America, with a heavy emphasis on psychology. Naropa now operates on $600,000 annually, of which $136,000 comes through donations and the rest from student fees. But the school has no endowment and at present lacks the necessary funds to expand and gain college accreditation. Still, the staff and students seem certain that Naropa will eventually become a full-fledged university. The faithful will provide.