The Kunkhyab Thardo Ling Tibetan Centre in New York is sad to announce that on May 24, 2022, the founder of the centre, the outstanding Buddhist master Rato Khyongla Rinpoche, passed away peacefully in Dharamsala.

Rato Khyongla Rinpoche is an eminent Buddhist lama and scholar-philosopher of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism. He was born in 1923 in the province of Kham in south-eastern Tibet. In 1928, after appropriate divination, senior monks of the Gelug tradition declared a 5-year-old boy living in a remote area of ​​Tibet to be the reincarnation of the ninth Khyongla Rinpoche.
When the boy's sixth birthday came, the monks took him from his parents' house to the monastery, where he was enthroned as the spiritual head. Rato Khyongla Rinpoche devoted more than three decades to monasticism: he studied in the most famous monasteries of Tibet and received the highest academic degree of Geshe-Lharamba. In 1959, along with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and thousands of other monks, he fled through the Himalayas in search of refuge and ended up in a completely different life in India and then in the United States.