Master Tibetan Buddhist artist fled to Scotland

Sherab Palden Beru was a Tibetan artist and monk living in exile in Scotland, where he played a leading role in building the first Tibetan monastery in the western world.
As a master artist at the Samye Ling centre in the village of Eskdalemuir (pop. 265) he strove to preserve the traditional religious art of Tibet. Somewhat incongruously installed about 20 miles north of Gretna, the centre became a base for Sherab Palden to work on his renowned Buddhist murals and scroll paintings, known as thangkas, which depict different aspects of the Buddhist pantheon, including mystic diagrams of Tibetan astrology, pharmacology and theology.
Used as a focus for meditation and prayer, at one time thangkas adorned every monastery and family shrine in Tibet. Sherab Palden’s painting was strongly influenced by the lucid, spacious and meditative Karma Gadri style from Eastern Tibet.
Sherab Palden Beru was born in 1911 into a nomadic family that had lived in the eastern Tibetan province of Kham since the mid-15th century. At the age of nine he entered the Namgyal Ling monastery, where his aptitude for drawing was quickly recognised.
His formal training as both a monk and an artist began at the age of 13 and he also attained high levels of skill in other disciplines, such as ritual music and cham dance. He completed his first thangka at the age of 23.
In 1956 Sherab Palden left for Lhasa, where he stayed for three years, until forced to flee to India following the invasion of Tibet by the Chinese. During his escape on horseback he was shot in his right arm, but the bullets passed through the flesh and caused no permanent damage.
Based for a while in Kalimpong, he began painting thangkas again, but was then asked by the senior lama, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, to teach at the Young Lamas’ Home School in Dalhousie.
Sherab Palden remained in India until the late 1960s, when Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and his fellow lama Akong Rinpoche asked him to help found the Samye Ling Centre (named after the first monastery to be built in Tibet during the 8th century) at Eskdalemuir in the Scottish borders.
The centre had originally been a hunting lodge on the banks of the River Esk, but in 1965 it had become the Johnstone House Contemplative Community, a retreat centre founded by the Canadian Buddhist Ananda Bodhi.
Ananda Bodhi had met Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Akong Rinpoche the previous year at Oxford, where they had been sent to study. In 1967 he arranged for the ownership of Johnstone House to be transferred to their Tibetan Karma Kagyu order and subsequently returned to Canada. Shortly afterwards the two Tibetans were joined by Sherab Palden.
The early years of the new monastery were overshadowed by negative publicity over the behaviour of Trungpa Rinpoche, who had taken a little too enthusiastically to the western lifestyle, acquiring a taste for alcohol and sex and causing consternation among the Samye Ling board of directors.
By the time Trungpa Rinpoche married one of his students, a former pupil at Benenden who was 15 at the time their relationship began, he had been divested of his position as an official representative of the Karma Kagyu lineage. In 1969 he left for America, where he acquired a large following as a “crazy wisdom guru” (his pupils included the poets Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman) and was eventually reinstated as a Kagyu lama.
Back in Scotland, Akong Rinpoche and Sherab Palden became the main driving force behind the creation of the Samye Ling monastery, overseeing the construction and decoration of an ornate gilded pagoda temple and accommodation for monks, nuns and guests.
Over 35 years Sherab Palden devoted himself to creating intricate murals and thangkas of outstanding quality to adorn the monastery and its offshoots in more than 20 countries. He set up an artists’ atelier, where he passed on his skills in all aspects of the arts and crafts to western students.
He also helped to retrieve, restore and preserve thangkas from Tibet, and later he was joined by his nephew, Gyamtso Tashi, in reviving these traditional skills in Nepal and northern India, where many new temples have been built in recent years.
Sherab Palden’s students and colleagues regarded him as a profound practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, an outstanding master artist and a gentle, kind and compassionate teacher.
Telegraph, London