Reincarnated Buddhist leader to passion for Liberia: American with Ebola took unusual path

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Passion for Liberia and the plight of its people drove Ashoka Mukpo to work there, first to aid relief efforts and then as a TV cameraman to tell the country's story. But Mukpo has an unusual story of his own: As an infant, he was identified as a reincarnated Tibetan lama — a role he chose not to pursue.

Mukpo, 33, was diagnosed Thursday with Ebola and was being cared for at a treatment center in the capital of Monrovia. He was expected to return to the United States this weekend.

Mukpo's mother, Diana, came from an upper-class aristocratic family in Great Britain. At age 16, she left boarding school in Scotland and married Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist leader, according to an interview she gave to the magazine Shambhala Sun. She was one of several wives.

They moved to Boulder, Colorado, in the 1970s and set up a Buddhist center, where notables such as Allen Ginsburg, Joni Mitchell and William Burroughs studied, and where Trungpa would advocate the benefits of tantric sex.

After starting a family with Trungpa, Diana connected with another of her husband's followers, Dr. Mitchell Levy.

Levy was a "New York Jew" and Mukpo's biological father, Mukpo said in an interview with the Dorje Shugden Buddhist website.

Trungpa raised and accepted Mukpo as his own son. When Mukpo was just a few months old, he was recognized as the ninth Khamnyon Tulku, or reincarnated lama, a spiritual leader.

After Trungpa's death in 1987, Diana and Levy married and moved to Providence, Rhode Island. Levy is a medical director of the intensive care unit at Rhode Island Hospital and a professor and chief of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Brown University's medical school. Diana Mukpo is a horse trainer who owns a stable outside Boston.

Ashoka attended Moses Brown, a Quaker day school in Providence. He went on to receive degrees from Georgetown University and the London School of Economics, according to online biographies.

His more traditional life in Rhode Island sometimes caused consternation.

"When you're 15, you can't say, 'Dude, I'm a reincarnated spiritual master from the hills of Tibet, and my father was this womanizing, drinking, Tibetan-crazy-wisdom genius,' without people thinking you're weird," he said in the Dorje Shugden interview.

In 2002, he traveled to Tibet with his parents to visit the monastery that is his family's spiritual home, according to a foundation co-founded by his mother.

"Someone put a sick baby in front of my face and asked me to blow on it. I did. I'm not going to be the guy who says, 'This whole thing doesn't make sense for me, sorry!'" he said in the interview. "Sometimes I do feel like it wasn't my decision to take this title on, but now I feel like someone put me in the position of abandoning it."

Ashoka ultimately decided that wearing robes and being a teacher was not for him but said in a 2009 documentary made by his brother that he hoped to find other ways to help people.

"That's, I think, what being a Buddhist is about," he said.

He has worked at Human Rights Watch. He also had been doing nonprofit development work in Liberia before the Ebola outbreak, said Philip Marcelo, a Boston-based Associated Press reporter who met Ashoka Mukpo last year while on assignment in Liberia for The Providence Journal.

Mukpo at that time was working as a researcher for the Sustainable Development Institute, a Liberia-based nonprofit shining light on concerns of workers in mining camps outside Monrovia.

"He was out there in the community," Marcelo said. "He had been to different parts of the country, not just the capital. ... He was out in the bush. He spent time in villages where there was nobody who looked like him."

Mukpo seemed comfortable in Liberia, Marcelo said, easily navigating the rugged, muddy roads outside Monrovia.

"He really was into the culture," Marcelo said. "He seemed to have a lot of passion for it."

In addition to NBC, Mukpo has also been working for Vice News and other media outlets. In an opinion piece in Al Jazeera America on Sept. 17, Mukpo wrote that in the last few weeks he had seen young children close to death turned away from treatment centers and heard stories of people waiting days to be picked up by ambulances.

He called the American response to the crisis underwhelming and slow.

"The most critical element of all is time," he wrote. "Every life saved matters."

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Associated Press writer Denise Lavoie contributed to this report from Boston