The First Accredited Buddhist University, and the Poets Who Joined It

When the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa founded Naropa Institute in Boulder in 1974, he built the first Buddhist inspired institution of higher learning to gain accreditation in North America, teaching meditation and contemplative practice alongside a conventional liberal arts curriculum. Trungpa did not build it alone. That same founding year, the poets Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman established the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics within Naropa, deliberately naming it for the Beat writer whose own interest in Buddhism had helped popularize it among an earlier American counterculture, and the school drew figures from that same literary circle to teach alongside Naropa's Buddhist faculty. The pairing of a serious Buddhist institution with Beat generation poetry was not incidental branding, both traditions shared a genealogy running through the same postwar countercultural interest in Asian religion that had drawn Ginsberg himself toward Buddhist practice decades earlier.

Naropa, now Naropa University, remains active in Boulder today, a short drive from Colorado Springs, where evangelical parachurch organizations earned the city the nickname the Evangelical Vatican, two poles of the state's religious geography that Pew's 2023-24 study situates within a Colorado where no single tradition dominates, Nothing in Particular leading at twenty two percent of adults.