Film explores life of Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who lived life to the fullest

He sits in a small haze of smoke and gives the camera a wily smile and a wink. He could be a Thai sex trade worker, but this black and white photograph is of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, perhaps the most significant Buddhist teacher to sit down cross-legged and make a stand in North America.

One of the last teachers schooled and groomed in the thin air of Tibet, Trungpa led a group of several hundred monks across the Himalayas into India after the Chinese occupation began. He had no map, only a pair of powerful binoculars, but he and a handful of others eventually reached safety after trekking hundreds of kilometres at altitude.

Before long, he was studying at Oxford and fluent in the Queen's English. By the 1970s, Trungpa was in the United States - and that's where he first made an impression on filmmaker Johanna Demetrakas, a documentary filmmaker who was starting to question her own place in the universe.

"I was not a Buddhist. I was a fresh new mother and growing aware of life and death in a new way," she says. "I grew up Greek Orthodox. I think I always had philosophical questions, but Buddhism was fairly new. The Zen Buddhism had been around, but the prevalence of Buddhism was nothing like now. It's really found a foothold in North America - and that's in large part due to Trungpa."

After setting up his first institute in Scotland, Trungpa moved to the U.S. and founded a Buddhist university in Boulder, Colo.

It was there the young, and highly unorthodox, monk started to build a community of like-minded souls, as well as metaphysically inclined artists.

Allen Ginsberg was one such luminary, and he appears several times in Demetrakas's new documentary Crazy Wisdom: The Life and Times of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, screening today at the Vancouver International Film Festival.

Demetrakas says there was a veritable "guru grocery market" in the U.S. around the time she started to question the fundamentals, but when she "stumbled into" Trungpa's teachings, she was fascinated.

"He visited Los Angeles in his second year here, and I saw him speak. He talked about the battle of ego."

As a filmmaker living in the arid hills of the City of Angels, surrounded by faux meaning and empty-headed fameseekers, Demetrakas felt she had found someone who could show her the way to a new understanding of the world.

"He was so sharp and clear. And his language was so beautiful," she says. "He also loved film. Being with him was sort of like eating a chocolate bar. You do it because it's awfully good," she says.

What made Demetrakas's Buddhist voyage so surprising, for her as well as viewers who are not familiar with Trungpa, is the monk's refusal to deny the flesh.

As the program picture suggests, Trungpa was not your average Rinpoche: He smoked. He had sex. And perhaps most startling of all, he was a chronic drinker.

Demetrakas says these were not liabilities in her mind. They only made Trungpa more human and as such, more in tune with the frequency of the human heart.

"He could blast open your mind and allow you to get to the root questions. And he never made excuses. He accepted full responsibility for every part of him, and in looking at himself so closely, he made it easier for everyone to look inside."

Unlike many religious or spiritual leaders, Trungpa was never about amassing followers for the sake of his own ego, or validating his mission before a god. He did things for selfless reasons, but without fanfare or false humility.

It's all a fine line to tread, but Demetrakas finds the right threads all the way through her comprehensive portrait to give us unique insight into this modern prophet who taught nothing but big love.

"He was an example of living life to the fullest," says Demetrakas of the man who apparently flared his nostrils at Joni Mitchell, and changed her ego axis for three days.

"Joni told me she had no ego for three days after her encounter," says Demetrakas, who wanted to include the reclusive Canadian folk hero in her film but couldn't secure an on-camera interview.

"He appealed to non-conformists because he was a nonconformist. He was always urging people to wake up to what they were doing. He didn't believe in doing things, even prayer, by rote. You have to really believe and engage in everything you are doing."

Trungpa died in 1986 in Halifax, a place he felt very close to, according to Demetrakas. "He felt very strongly that Canada and Atlantic Canada were where Buddhism could really thrive. And it has."

Though the official cause of death is alcohol-related cardiac arrest, there were reports his body stayed warm after death before it was packed in ice and sent home to the high, high mountains.

"If you were around him, you could feel his presence. He had such an incredible effect on people that you can't really describe until you feel it. He really opened your eyes to the beauty that surrounds us - and it was effortless."

AT A GLANCE

Crazy Wisdom: the life and times of chogyam trungpa rinpoche

When: Today, 1:30 p.m.