Jack Convery Sensei passed away in Tokyo on Thursday, October 15th, 2026. He was a devoted student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Following VCTR’s advice, Jack wholeheartedly studied chado and later opened the Shotoku Akademie in Tokyo. With his wife Hiromi, he contributed to reviving the genuine traditional practice of chado for many japanese people. Please send compassion, love, merits, for him, and warm support to Hiromi-san.
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“In a 100-year-old machiya in Nishijin, Kyoto’s historic weaving district, Jack Convery and his wife Hiromi have devoted more than four decades to chanoyu, the ceremonial practice of offering tea.
‘First you build the space,’ he says, ‘and then you invite people. The intention is to create a place for the joy of making and drinking tea.’
Read more about Jack and Hiromi’s tea room here.
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Post a Tribute to Jack below
For Hiromi
Looking at photos of the tea house you and Jack shared,
the beautiful emptiness of the spaces without you two,
yet you both are there in the beauty and placement of
just-so-ness of the wood, the art, the plants, the rocks
outside, as if it too was living, breathing, waiting for
both of you to appear.
Love, John
Coda for Jack
I kept thinking of Jack all day.
I wanted to...he was in my mind
and I wanted to keep him there.
Two things happed yesterday,
before I heard about Jack, were
different.
One was that I cleaned my kitchen,
a rarity.
I'm pretty wabi-sabi about my life.
I don't mind a little filth, since I was
a plumber, and it never bothered me.
When I woke and saw the kitchen clean,
I thought of Jack.
The other was an old stone wall across
from where I habitually sit, have coffee,
and write, fell down.
It had wanted to do that for a long time.
The phenomenal world is poetry.
Jack's life is poetry.
Usually, I'm the one that writes the poem.
In these instances, Jack wrote one for me.
Ode For Jack
When I got to Kyoto, you honored me with a feast,
and the Maiko, apprentice geisha, who danced for
us in a way so that you could sense hundreds
of years embedded in the display, ancientness
present in the moment, the tears and joys of a
civilization condensed into movement that was
simple yet conveyed genuine vastness and wisdom.
It was your world I found myself in those days,
your Shambhala household of ordinary magic,
which it undeniably was, vivid, splendid and yet
mundane, as if every day could be heaven on earth.
That’s what I saw and knew when I was there, the
true meaning of being a warrior, not to conquer or
control, simply to be open and brave enough
to see things as they are and act accordingly with
kindness knowing we are all together in this
floating world we share for an ephemeral spark
of time.
Jack passed away Thursday, (today, the 15 of October) after a brief illness. He was a loyal Shambhalian and loved the Vidyadhara very much. He lived at Karme Choling when I lived there with my wife, Nancy. That was where I got to know him. Later, he invited me to Gampo Abby where I worked with him for ten weeks on part of the first expansion project. He subsequently moved to Japan, which he had visited when he accompanied the Vidyadhara during his trip there. He became a chado student, then an instructor, in the Urasenke School of Chado in Kyoto. He took an old, Japanese home/building, and converted it into a traditional Japanese tea house. This was such unusual a thing to do, that he was written up in periodicals and newspapers, and afterwards, his chado school bumped up his rank to a somewhat high degree. There are many types of tea ceremonies, from simply sharing a cup of tea to a formal feast that could take hours with many dishes of food specially prepared. I had the great fortune to attend two such feasts with Jack, one in Boulder at Rinpoche’s tea house, and one in Kyoto, when I was visiting Jack for some weeks. They were the greatest and exactly the most splendid Shambhala feasts I attended in my life. The dralas were in attendance, as was the presence of adishthana. I can’t say I will miss Jack, since I feel we have known and will know each other for many lifetimes. As the punchline to one of Rinpoche’s favorite jokes goes: What’s time to a pig?
