Lee Weingrad

The Surmang Foundation

Lee Weingrad was born in New York City and is a product of a middle class Jewish family and suburban New York City public schools. He graduated from Bucknell University with a Bachelor's degree. Lee later attended graduate school in Political Science at the University of Iowa during the turbulent late 60's. He was active in campus politics, serving as the candidate for student body president on an anti-war platform.

Lee later taught at the Navajo Community College, in Many Farms, Arizona.

Several years later he received an MA in Psychology from California State University, Sonoma.

In 1972 he met Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and has been a student of his ever since.

In 1986 he took his first trip to abroad: to Tibet, journeying overland from the Nepal border. After a frustrating month in Lhasa, failing to find a way to travel to Kham (E. Tibet) and Surmang (Qinghai), he returned to the US. In 1987, following the death of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (XIth), he returned to China in an attempt to visit Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche's native Surmang Monasteries.

Among the many difficulties Lee experience on his return to China and Tibet, perhaps the most daunting was studying Tibetan language at the Minorities University, since his textbooks were all written in Chinese. And so his teacher introduced him to a young scholar, an MA candidate who had two years before finished a 4-year stint as an English teacher in Lhasa. Her name was Wang Wenjing.

About a month later he met HH Penor Rinpoche in Chengdu, Sichuan. Rinpoche helped arrange a once-in-a-lifetime ride that would take him across the breadth of the Tibetan Plateau, from Sichuan to Lhasa, with a stop at Surmang Dutsi Til Monastery. Because the local Surmang Khampas hadn't seen their Abbot in almost 30 years, Lee's arrival was a kind of heartbreaking reunion, as he brought photos and videos of their former Abbot.

Meeting Trungpa Rinpoche's eldest son, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, in Kathmandu, the two decided to form Friends of Surmang, to bring some help to Surmang Tibetans in the form of clinics, hospitals and other kinds of community development.

In 1990, Lee received a letter from the Minorities Affairs Commission of Chinese Government inviting him to discuss these plans. The challenge of doing such a project in Tibet required him to live in China and so he has. In 1992 Lee and Miss Wang were married and, in 1995, Wang Wenjing gave birth to their first child, Iana Cybelle. In 1996 Lee was named Senior Project Director of Project HOPE in China. In 1997 they returned to the US for a two-year stint, where their second child, Joseph Chogyam was born.

Lee, Wenjing, Iana and Jospeh currently make their home in Beijing. Lee has transitioned away from English teaching to concentrate on the Foundation's work fulltime. His wife, Wenjing, is the director of Chinese Studies at the Western Academy of Beijing, an international school, where both of their children currently attend school.