Reginald Ray

Reginald "Reggie" Ray (born 1942) is an American Buddhist academic and teacher. He is the spiritual director of the Dharma Ocean Foundation, a non-profit organization that he co-founded in 2005 "dedicated to the practice, study and preservation of the teachings of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche." Ray, a student of Tibetan Buddhist teacher Trungpa Rinpoche, was a faculty member at Naropa University from 1974 until 2009 and teacher-in-residence at Shambhala Mountain Center from 1996–2004.

Ray has a BA in religion from Williams College (1965), and received an M.A. (1967) and Ph.D. (1973) in History of Religions from the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he focused on Buddhism and Indian religions. Among his mentors at Chicago was Mircea Eliade, a Romanian historian of religion.

Ray first encountered his main Buddhist teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, in 1970, and studied with him until Rinpoche’s death in 1987. In 1974, at the invitation of Trungpa Rinpoche, Ray left a tenure-track position at Indiana University and relocated to Boulder, Colorado—then the center of Trungpa Rinpoche’s community–to become the first full-time faculty member and chair of the Buddhist Studies Department at Naropa University, where he taught until his retirement in July 2009. Ray also served on the Nalanda Translation Committee and held a half-time appointment in the Religious studies department at the University of Colorado.

From 1997 to 2004, Ray was teacher-in-residence at the Rocky Mountain Dharma Center (now called Shambhala Mountain Center).

In 2005, Ray and his then wife, Lee Ray (he left his wife in 2006 due to "fundamental problems in the relationship that just wouldn't go away"), founded the Dharma Ocean Foundation, a nonprofit organization with an educational charter. From 2004 through 2007, Dharma Ocean held meditation programs at the White Eagle Village facility in Crestone, Colorado; in 2008, Dharma Ocean completed construction of the Blazing Mountain Retreat Center, also in Crestone, and began holding meditation retreats there.

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