Recalling Chogyam Trungpa

Preface

FABRICE MIDAL

THIS PROJECT ORIGINATED from the proposal of Éditions de l’Herne to devote a volume in its prestigious Cahier series to Chögyam Trungpa—prestigious, since principal figures of world thought are the subject of each volume: Heidegger, Pound, Rimbaud, Guénon, Thoreau, Joyce. . . . Each volume brings together numerous selections, many of them published for the first time, as well as photographs.

Shambhala Publications welcomed the idea of publishing an anthology in commemoration of Chögyam Trungpa. However, it was not possible to replicate the work done in France for a specialized readership, which would have been an unusually long work. Shambhala has, in effect, produced a different project.

A selection of texts was made, excluding, not without difficulty and regret, a number of entries that will appear in the French edition. Extracts from texts or interviews were chosen for a chapter titled Testimony and Reminiscence in order to allow a few more authors to participate in this homage.

An effort was made to represent French thought—which is particularly active in examining the work of Chögyam Trungpa—and four texts, translated here, are the result.

The authors presented here are diverse, representing the wide range of Chögyam Trungpa’s readers today. Sometimes they were friends, companions on the journey, or students of Chögyam Trungpa, but sometimes, as in my case, they never even met him. There are Buddhists involved in various traditions, whether Theravada, Zen, or Tibetan Buddhism, including teachers responsible for transmitting the dharma; there are also those who are not especially concerned with this tradition. Their presence is indicative of how Trungpa Rinpoche’s work as an artist or a visionary thinker has influenced fields beyond Buddhism.

I would like to thank all the authors and photographers, whether included or not in this American edition, for having accepted the invitation to participate in this adventure with such enthusiasm and grace.

I would especially like to thank His Holiness the Dalai Lama for his encouragement toward this project and the alacrity with which he responded to the invitation to contribute the opening message.

Such a book could not be possible without the constant efforts of Carolyn Rose Gimian, who has continuously accompanied me in this enterprise. Beyond even the personal debt that I owe her, it is important to emphasize what any study of the work of Trungpa owes to her. As the head of the archives that she founded and for a long time directed, she preserved a considerable collection of documents, without which no serious study could be imagined. Her edition of The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa is a historic event and an incomparable reference.

Also crucial was the involvement of Kendra Crossen Burroughs, an editor at Shambhala Publications, whose work in giving this volume its own coherence was done with an exemplary discipline and seriousness. Her attention to the work of Chögyam Trungpa, whose books have been placed in her editorial care at Shambhala Publications for a number of years, is extremely precious and of the highest level of refinement, and I could rely on it with confidence.

I am well aware that the greatness of the work of Chögyam Trungpa, the richness of interpretation that it can sustain, makes this undertaking quite limited. A number of important authors could not be invited to participate here because of the lack of space, and many aspects of the work of Chögyam Trungpa could not be approached. May many other projects be successfully undertaken in order to allow the depth of this work to be plumbed, this work that inspires a new way of thinking about the spiritual—a way of thinking that speaks to the destiny of our times.

I would also like to thank the following people for their help and their loyalty, without which I could not have been involved in this adventure, which has taken over three years: Françoise Dufayet, Lucie Clair, Douglas Penick, Martha Bonzi, Steve Brooks, Fabien Ouaki, and Greg Seton.

On his horse, Drala, 1980. Photograph by Marvin Moore. Used with permission.

Introduction

FABRICE MIDAL

OF THOSE WHO introduced Buddhism to the West, Chögyam Trungpa had a genius for understanding how to cross those cultural, historical, and ideological barriers that make the transmission of any genuine spiritual tradition so difficult today. His efforts to find a living language that would be faithful to the origins of the Buddhist tradition led him to an unusually piercing analysis of the modern world—that world which has, for better or worse, become the only horizon open to us. In this world, language has become insignificant and deprived of its own resonance ¹ for various reasons, primarily the triumph of advertising.

A number of spiritual masters illuminated the twentieth century, but few departed from the religious context in which they were raised. Although this in no way prevents us from drawing on their wisdom and compassion, their language does not enrich our culture. It no longer communicates with us. It may move or inspire us, but without initiating or helping to provoke the collapse of those long-standing barriers that keep our world stagnant.

One point should be made at the outset, to avoid any misunderstanding: the true focus of this volume is not primarily Chögyam Trungpa’s advanced spiritual accomplishment, but his effort to find a form of language that would correspond to that experience and thus reveal (in the words of René Char) "l’espoir du grand lointain informulé (le vivant inespéré)—the hope of the great unformulated beyond (unhoped-for being)."² His language is audacious, striking a blow at all our conceptions, especially those born of sentimentality and naiveté, or cynicism and artifice, or else words adopted for the moment that do not actually apply to anything in particular, that don’t address anyone and leave no return address, that succeed in blunting or even terminating the salutary adventure that they should be revealing to us.

Religious discourse is particularly in crisis. It has lost its tongue. When it speaks, the words it utters are worn out and often stillborn.

The modern art introduced by Cézanne or Rimbaud provides one path that can be followed, because it confronts this crisis: it faces up to the death of the Academy by trying to invent a more complete relationship to tradition, by looking afresh with fertile attentiveness at each aspect of our experience. These artists are the great witnesses of our time, and Chögyam Trungpa walked in their footsteps. He presents us with the utterly individual face of a spiritual master who became an artist and thinker or, better, a human being in dialogue with art and thought.

Living Language

Chögyam Trungpa’s immense work ranges over the most varied fields. His teachings have led to the publication of a large number of books—nearly a hundred in English—and a great many transcripts remain to be edited and published. His work covers art, contemplative psychology, cinema, various aspects of the Buddhist path, a presentation of the path of chivalry (or, as he called it, warriorship), a detailed exposition on meditation and its meaning for the West, and many other topics. Chögyam Trungpa also wrote plays and an impressive body of lyric poetry, in Tibetan and English. He translated a vast array of liturgies and traditional Tibetan texts. He was a painter, calligrapher and photographer, and sought to revitalize the meaning of art exhibitions through the installations that he organized at various museums. A body of texts he wrote in Tibet, totaling nearly a thousand pages, which was believed lost, has also recently been rediscovered.

As vast and disparate as this work is, it is not an encyclopedic attempt to grasp the whole of reality, nor is it the production of an unusually talented dilettante. Chögyam Trungpa’s ambition was entirely different. His approach is an adventure that firmly takes the initiative, going to the heart of the unexpected and unimagined—the space where all transformation takes place—leaving nothing unscathed. In a crisis, when language is no longer naturally alive but instead becomes the vehicle for arbitrary concepts and for the habits of mechanical and moribund thought, the salutary importance of such a challenge is clear.

The meaning of this book will not be immediately clear to anyone who has not observed the wretched banality of current spiritual discourse, or who has not been overwhelmed by the mass of volumes published every year which are full of either nice sentiments or pointlessly erudite discussions.

But some of us struggle under the yoke of such empty words that no longer say anything, that spin in empty space and whose discourse is meaningless and fails to engage us; and such people cannot fail to be dazzled by what Chögyam Trungpa attempted. In being so insightfully demanding, he was the brother of Martin Heidegger, William Carlos Williams, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Paul Celan, or William Faulkner, each of whom, in his way, sought to discover a new and living language that would enable us to grow, develop, and elevate our condition.

Seen in this way, the work of Chögyam Trungpa does not belong to the world of conformity that has been set before us, as created by Hollywood, fast food, instant communication, and the drive for profit. His was one of the great acts of open resistance to our era. Furthermore, at a time when sociologists are describing the reception of Buddhism, and the way it is being experienced, as one of the best examples of a new postmodern orthodoxy, aimed at well-being and calling for a vague, comfortable humanism, the work of Chögyam Trungpa is a matchless resource, even an antidote.

For him, Buddhism is neither a fixed body of work to be recited by heart, nor a promise of happiness, nor an appeal to a natural moral order, but an adventure that leads to a way of thinking far from any well-trodden path. In this sense, his work is truly hermeneutical; in other words, it displays an understanding of how the perception of an object’s mode of existence also depends on the way this understanding is received.

This approach is unquestionably what makes his work so staggering. Chögyam Trungpa detached himself from everything he had learned. He took a step backward in order to obtain an overview of his spiritual heritage and assess its relevance, as well as the various forms it had assumed over the course of the centuries. It is especially difficult to take this kind of step since our heritage—the place where we live, our mother tongue—is so close to us that generally we cannot see it. It is what constitutes us. But Chögyam Trungpa passed through such a trial, renewing the history of Buddhism and the experience that we can have of it.

When we look at the heroic but tragic life of Chögyam Trungpa we see that, in a sense, he sacrificed everything to his task—comfort, health, honors—and we comprehend how he was able to make such a leap beyond the familiar. One does not become truly free without paying a heavy price.

His upbringing in Tibet provided him with an exceptional traditional education, which is practically impossible to receive today, for obvious reasons. From a very young age, he was surrounded by extremely demanding tutors who left him not a moment’s respite. He did not give himself up wholeheartedly to the discipline that was imposed on him until he met his true teacher, the great Jamgön Kongtrül of Shechen, and was finally able to recognize the greatness of the path. He was then faithful to it, even to the point of rising above all the conventions that were destroying Tibet from within.

At the age of nineteen, already recognized as a peerless master, he escaped to India and quickly became known as one of the great hopes for the future of a Tibet that was now in mortal danger.

Several years later he became a brilliant student at Oxford, displaying an astonishing curiosity about the society he encountered there. He studied philosophy and comparative religion with an ardor and an open-mindedness that very few Buddhist masters could achieve. Contrary to the popular opinion that sees him as an American author, he always considered himself to be English and remained a British citizen all his life, proud of his Oxford education.

In the United States, he came into contact with the mainstream intellectual currents of the time, which allowed him to enter into an extraordinary dialogue with America—a dialogue whose depth remains misunderstood, because its full scope has not yet been studied.

No study of the composition of his work, its different stages, and the coherence of its vision has yet been made. I should also emphasize here that in all of the four phases of his life, he displayed a unique genius without ever accepting the slightest compromise of the sort that transforms a human being into a cowardly, soulless pen-pusher. He paid the price for it. But the spiritual truth declared by the Buddha remained a recourse for him which nothing could take away; to his mind, it meant being ready to destroy any convention that would stifle the possibility of a direct, nonhierarchical view of the world we in which we live.

The subtle paradox of Chögyam Trungpa’s thought is that his rejection of any authority that has become arbitrary was never unilateral. He denounced institutions while endlessly creating new ones himself. He sought to go beyond the strict framework of Buddhism in order to better celebrate human existence in its universality, even as he offered an introduction to a tradition of unequaled profundity. He was a master in the crazy wisdom school who nevertheless devoted himself to anchoring the strictest form of the monastic tradition in the West. He was truly free.

The absence of any sort of naiveté was particularly characteristic of him, giving his work that singular power of resistance that was a source of constant irritation to those who remain mired in self-satisfaction. It allowed him to stay as far from the cynicism of political realism as from the euphoria of a pseudo-revolution with its inexorable descent into criminal insanity.

An Author’s Purgatory

Following his death in April 1987, Chögyam Trungpa went through a kind of purgatory that now seems to be nearing its end, as the publication of works such as this one attests. By purgatory I mean a period in which, after the death of an author, his work passes into obscurity, while for various reasons, sometimes even contradictory ones, his life moves into the foreground, creating a veritable obstacle, a screen that actually blocks access to the work.

This is a twofold phenomenon. First of all, a legend composed of a host of clichés prevents readers from seeing for themselves. The brainwashing concerning first Nietzsche’s madness, and then secondly his responsibility for the rise of Nazism, carried on for some time. The mechanism works like this: in defiance of any real analysis, indeed countering any possibility of serious investigation, a catch phrase is repeated often enough to become deafening. It works like a rumor. No one tests the validity of the accusation any longer; it is simply parroted. After all, there must be something in it. And so people end up believing it. In a similar way, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz was turned into a Swiss regionalist author, even though he was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Very few people grasped the importance of his work; but Céline thought him the greatest stylist of the French language of his time, after Proust. The attempt to turn Chögyam Trungpa into an eccentric master whose behavior was bizarre—he consumed huge quantities of alcohol and acted in a highly unorthodox manner—is part of the same phenomenon. When presented in this way, his personal characteristics are trees that hide the forest. One cannot understand his significance without making an effort to enter into the meaning of his work. So long as you stare through the wrong end of the telescope, you cannot see anything.

Otherwise—and this is the second phenomenon—an author can enter literary purgatory because his work depended so much on his actual presence as a living person. Chögyam Trungpa’s aura so impressed his contemporaries that it immediately opened a channel of attention. So in the end, the writings didn’t matter much; it seemed to be enough just to see such a being. When he was there before you, the strength that emanated from him was such that the importance of his ideas was immediately clear, while the inevitable misinterpretations they would create were of little consequence. No misunderstandings could possibly appear on the Richter scale next to the seismic ripples set off by his speech, his look, his gestures.

The death of Chögyam Trungpa poses a decisive question: without his presence, can his work sustain itself and maintain its capacity to provide a fresh look at reality? This does not seem at all inevitable, especially in the eyes of many people who knew him. For them, it is difficult to get past the conviction that nothing can replace the experience of being close to a man who was so charismatic, so capable of conquering the unconquerable.

For those who did not know him, it is easy to regret this absence or, on the contrary, to feel horrified at the idea of a man who was so radically immoderate.

In this sense, what I have termed purgatory is the inevitable period of mourning. One aspect of Chögyam Trungpa is dead. Is there something of him that remains alive?

The only way to find the answer is to go back to his work and attempt a rigorous investigation of the content that keeps it in motion. This is of course the sort of approach and effort that did not really need to be undertaken while he was alive. The ambition of the present book is to step onto this path.

In extending this invitation to analyze and study Chögyam Trungpa’s work, the aim is to avoid taking the dead-end street of superficial admiration: in other words, not religiously repeating the work itself. Great authors who try to open up a new relationship with the real, which is freed from the dross of habits, are often cast in stone after death and their work becomes a pretext for a new dogmatism. To appreciate the risk involved, one only has to see how the provocative works of Arthur Rimbaud or René Char are now quoted and emptied of their meaning in the most conservative contexts, or to consider how the teachings of Friedrich Nietzsche or Jacques Lacan are so often caricatured and reduced to abstruse jargon.

It is not necessary to turn Chögyam Trungpa into a mummy or a piously celebrated icon in the history of Buddhism. There could be no worse insult to his memory. Analysis of his work from a critical perspective is undoubtedly the only way to avoid this risk. Or, to put it another way, it is time to stop speaking about Chögyam Trungpa and to be true to him by taking him as a starting point, and thus undertake a true effort of thought.

It must be recognized that such a stance is not generally encouraged, because the conventions of spirituality do not invite questioning of this sort; rather, everyone is invited to cultivate the virtues of trust and blind faith which, particularly in our time, lead to plain ignorance and folly.

The state of purgatory in which Chögyam Trungpa’s work finds itself can be related to the place spirituality has in the public sphere. The only discussion that now seems to be accepted is one that toes a party line and eliminates the possibility of reflection and intelligence. A large number of books appear every day full of well-chosen personal examples, practical advice, calls for transcending the material world, and a preoccupation with the details of experience, which is merely a way to become utterly devoid of character. They seek to satisfy our need to reassure ourselves and forget the difficulties and pain in an epoch that prescribes submission to the consolation of authority. They try to deny, to cover up, even to erase, the experience of anguish or fear, but only the endurance of such experiences allows greatness to come to light. The distress that darkens our world, social destitution, the exhaustion that pervades everything, seem to leave such a discussion inert. In this context, Buddhism is reduced to an appeal for personal happiness, a friendly call for soft-heartedness, which is basically a naive and even somewhat narcissistic posture. Meanwhile, scholars dissect the objects of their study and lose themselves in the irrelevant quarrels of the specialist.

Chögyam Trungpa exposed these deceptions while he was alive, and his mere presence created awareness and comprehension of another way, which would allow us to come closer to the unknown, to a vaster world. But how can we rediscover this path of heart and mind today? The influence that Chögyam Trungpa exerted brought him readers and listeners, and he did not have to fit into the categories of our networks of information. His work was neither religious, political, nor artistic, and yet belonged in part to all three of these fields, renewing and illuminating them, while turning each one into a setting for genuine encounters. To relegate Chögyam Trungpa to the department of spirituality—though he never tired of exposing the narrowness, not to say imposture, of that realm of study—is to refuse him a truly resonant space; but perhaps such a petition can no longer be understood today.

Anyone who begins to work seriously on Chögyam Trungpa’s writings can easily be daunted by the impression of what is still a virgin territory: there is so much left to do!

The preservation of his teaching remains in delicate balance, and the editing of his work is far from complete. Several dozen volumes still await publication, and hundreds of hours of teachings have to be transcribed, all of which will open new perspectives, because Chögyam Trungpa never repeated himself, and each of his talks provided a unique experience.

Above all, a labor of thought, which would allow his work to find a new resonance and to refresh our understanding of the problems that confront our world, remains to be undertaken. But the enthusiasm that the present anthology has aroused in those authors whose contributions have been included demonstrates that there are still people who, in the depths of their hearts, long to connect with the mystery of their own being.

NOTES

1.  As Martin Heidegger remarked: Since everything today is valid or invalid only as determined by the dictatorship of ‘publicness,’ which is a function of technology, it may be impossible for centuries to come for what is essential and original simply to allow itself to unfold. Letter of March 21, 1948, to Elisabeth Blochmann, in Martin Heidegger and Elisabeth Blochmann, Briefwechsel, 1918–1989, ed. Joachim W. Storck (Marbach: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1989).

2.  René Char, Feuillets d’hypnos no. 174, Fureur et mystère (Paris: Édition Gallimard, 1967), p. 132.

Near Boulder. Photograph by Hudson Shotwell. Used with permission.

Genuine Water

The Legacy of Chögyam Trungpa

THE DZOGCHEN PONLOP RINPOCHE

IN 1980, I TRAVELED with His Holiness the sixteenth Karmapa to the United States. During this visit, I had the great fortune to meet Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and experience his sharp presence and kind and gentle heart. I was fortunate to also hear him translate some of His Holiness Karmapa’s short teachings.

It was a great opportunity for me to witness Trungpa Rinpoche’s impeccable devotion to the lineage and to His Holiness Karmapa, which in itself is a valuable teaching for vajrayana students. I saw him attempt to prostrate to His Holiness Karmapa every time they met, although His Holiness used to tell Rinpoche not to put himself through such a struggle, as he was physically unwell. However, he would not listen to this and each time did his three prostrations, while looking at Karmapa’s face with such great delight and devotion. This taught me the meaning of devotion, which became the basis of my vajrayana journey. So I am happy and feel honored to have this opportunity to write a short tribute to Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, with whom I share the lineage and gurus.

Buddhism in the West

The light of buddhadharma started to dawn in the Western Hemisphere approximately one hundred and fifty years ago, when in 1852 the Lotus Sutra was translated into German, and in 1853 a Mahayana temple was established in San Francisco. Subsequently, many masters traveled from the East to Europe and North America, bringing with them particular streams of dharma and establishing places for study and practice, such as the Buddhist Society of Great Britain, founded in 1907. These events presaged the beginning of the establishment of Buddhism in the West. However, the real sun of dharma began to shine on Western soil with the arrival of one master in 1963—the Very Venerable Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

Now, because of the timely ripening of his aspiration and dedication, as well as the openness, confidence, and genuine interest of many Western students, buddhadharma in the West is beginning to see the possibility of enjoying the fruition of the complete inheritance of the Buddhist wisdom tradition.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche was a master genuinely confident of his mission and realization. He demonstrated a sharpness of intellect that cut through all delusion and doubt, a calmness of mind unmoved by neurotic chaos, and a total fearlessness of all threat of egocentricity. Meeting such a master makes your dualistic head spin and go beyond time and space—you may not know where, or with whom, you actually are—perhaps you are in the company of an ancient Indian Buddhist saint, or a modern, avant-garde Japanese-type saint, or just a completely crazy Tibetan man!

Genuine Water

The essence of Buddhism is like pure water; it is wisdom that is transparent and fluid. Like pure water, it is without any inherent shape or color of its own. Yet at the same time it is capable of adopting any shape and reflecting all the colors of the container into which it is poured. It is a science of mind and a philosophy of life that addresses the emotions as well as the intellect and offers a basis for understanding the meaning of life and the nature of the world.

Historically, as Buddhism traveled from its homeland of India to other lands—to Tibet, China, Sri Lanka, Japan, and so on—this pure water, the genuine wisdom of Buddha, took on the shape of its different containers and reflected the languages and social forms of each country.

This is the water Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche began pouring from his Tibetan container into the vessel of Western culture, to quench the thirst of beings overwhelmed by poverty mentality and spiritual materialism. Thus, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche played a very important role in bringing the complete buddhadharma to the West.

When the great wisdom of the East met with this completely open-minded vessel of the West, both found a new home, a new heart, and a fresh meaning to life. Trungpa Rinpoche leaped right into this meeting place to explore and deepen his connection to the West and Western students, as well as to ponder the right vessel for the wisdom that benefits all beings. As he wrote in Born in Tibet, there remained some hesitation as to how to throw myself completely into proclaiming the dharma to the Western world, uprooting spiritual materialism, and developing further compassion and affection. With great courage and love, he engaged fully in Western culture, language, and tradition, and dedicated the rest of his life to transplanting on the spot the lineage teachings of Buddhism.

Dharma without Borders

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche was a pioneer in bringing the Buddhist teachings to the West and one of the most dynamic masters of Tibetan Buddhism in the twentieth century. He was a great scholar, meditation master, artist, and poet. He became renowned for his unique ability to present the essence of the highest Buddhist teachings using forms that made them accessible to his Western students.

There are many stories telling of his skillful means in transmitting the essence of dharma to his students. In order to meet the minds and hearts of his Western students, he sometimes stepped beyond the bounds of conventional propriety and into the realm of the outrageous. Whenever someone does not abide by the mundane rules of the social hierarchy, that person becomes the subject of controversy and rumor. Like many masters in the past, he became a controversial, almost mythical, teacher, with many versions of his activity still perpetuated today.

Looking back, we can see and appreciate the depth of his contemplations as he faced the task of establishing a genuine Western sangha—students who shared his commitment and could follow his insightful and sometimes daring approach to introducing the buddhadharma to the Western world. He made it possible for many Western students to understand dharma by teaching in English, relating to Western psychology, and using examples of everyday Western culture.

His approach to planting dharma in the Western soil was a traditional as well as a radical and creative one. It was traditional in the sense that he always returned to the roots of Buddhism, to the original Indian Buddhism of Shakyamuni Buddha and the lineage of the Tibetan masters. It was radical in the sense that he experimented broadly with form, dropping altogether many of the Eastern cultural forms or mixing Tibetan forms with Japanese, British, and American elements. It also was creative in the sense of not allowing itself to be determined by the immediate past of the Eastern traditions and cultures.

At the same time, he introduced many Tibetan cultural practices through the Shambhala teachings, such as the lhasang (purification ceremony), along with practices associated with drala and werma (deities). He saw the task for Western Buddhists to be the creation of a new Buddhist culture—one with its own forms that, while being genuinely Buddhist, would speak the language of Western culture. This underscores the importance of the container—the cultural expressions of language, custom, and symbol through which people make use of and benefit from the water that is contained within it.

Trungpa Rinpoche introduced many important Buddhist concepts into the English language and psyche in a fresh and unique way. He was one of the first Buddhist masters to introduce the notion of spiritual materialism, the tendency of ego to enhance itself through appropriating the spiritual path and creating a more subtle spiritual ego as the basis for one’s clinging and rationalization for remaining in a state of self-deception. In his groundbreaking book, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, he spoke directly of the potential dangers and distortions that could occur when walking the spiritual path, as well as the means of transforming these experiences by cutting through our confusion, spiritual pride, and concepts, and uncovering the awakened state. The timely appearance of Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism benefited not only the new Tibetan Buddhists in the West, but also the practitioners of many other Buddhist traditions.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche later introduced the Shambhala teachings, which were his mind terma, and the culture of the Great Eastern Sun. This cycle of teachings, presented from a more secular perspective, proclaims the message of human dignity and basic goodness. It offers a vision of enlightened society based on unwavering gentleness and an appreciation of oneself and the natural sacredness of the world. From this perspective, the bravest warrior is the one who is most open to others and most sensitive to the tenderness and sadness of his or her own heart. The wisdom of the Great Eastern Sun, which illuminates every aspect of our human experience, says, Cheer up, sweetheart, as Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche often expressed it.

Some of his students have described to me how they began to assimilate the message of this new transmission, based on the principles of warriorship found in many ancient cultures. More than anything, they understood the qualities of dignity, gentleness, and fearlessness by simply observing Trungpa Rinpoche. His very being, one said to me, was a full-blown manifestation of celebration and confidence. This kind of confidence and bravery transforms situations; it is an antidote to aggression and depression. It makes our world and our minds workable.

Who Was Chögyam Trungpa?

Chökyi Gyamtso—Chögyam in its shortened form—Trungpa Rinpoche (1939–1987) was recognized by the sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa as the eleventh descendent in the line of Trungpa incarnations, an important teacher of the Kagyü lineage, one of the four main schools of Buddhism of Tibet. In addition to being a key master within the Kagyü lineage, Chögyam Trungpa also received training and transmissions of the Nyingma school, the oldest of the four schools, and was an adherent of the Ri-me (nonsectarian) ecumenical movement within Tibetan Buddhism. From this we can see that the penetrating wisdom inherited by Trungpa Rinpoche came from the Kagyü and Nyingma lineages of Tibetan Buddhism. He studied with many great masters of these two lineages, and his principal teachers were Shechen Kongtrül and Khenpo Gangshar Rinpoche.

The origin of the special lineage of Trungpa Rinpoche traces back to the most renowned Indian mahasiddha, Tilopa. A great Kagyü yogi in fourteenth-century Tibet named Trung Ma-se, or Ma-se Tokden, held the ear-whispered lineage of the Nine Cycles of the Formless Dakinis, a cycle of teachings that came directly from Tilopa. Trung Ma-se received these secret teachings from the fifth Karmapa, Deshin Shekpa, and he passed this lineage down to Kunga Gyaltsen, later to be known as the first Trungpa Tülku.

As prophesied by the fifth Karmapa, Ma-se established the first monastery, which came to be known as the Surmang Namgyal Tse, and later his student Trungpa established the Surmang Dütsi Tel Monastery. The ear-whispered lineage of the dakinis is to be passed to only one student at a time, and this lineage continues until this day. It is now known as the ear-whispered lineage of the Surmang.

Successive incarnations of the Trungpa Tülkus continued to be remarkable masters of the Kagyü lineage, and through continuing this wisdom tradition, they benefited many people in this world. The tenth Trungpa, Chökyi Nyinche, became one of the principal disciples of Jamgön Kongtrul the Great, who was the cofounder of the nonsectarian movement in Tibet. Through this and other sources, Trungpa Rinpoche became the holder of various other traditions, especially the Dzogchen lineage of the Nyingma school.

As taught in the Buddhist scriptures, there are nine qualities of a perfect master of buddhadharma. The eleventh Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche possessed all nine of these. He first went through the rigorous trainings of studying the dharma, contemplating its meanings, and finally engaging in meditation to attain the complete realization of what the Buddha taught as the true nature of the world. He also accomplished the three inner qualities of tantric discipline, was well versed in Buddhist scholarship, and possessed the tender heart of compassion. For the benefit of others, he was fully equipped with the ocean of wisdom to teach and show the genuine path, to cut through wrong views and doubts with great skill, and to compose many treatises.

Contemporary Activities

The eleventh Trungpa Tülku, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, was forced into exile by the communist Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959, and he made the perilous journey over the Himalayas to India on horseback and on foot. In the early 1960s, Trungpa Rinpoche served as the spiritual adviser for the Young Lamas Home School in Dalhousie, India, as appointed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

It was with the encouragement of His Holiness Karmapa that Trungpa Rinpoche began his travels in the West. In 1963, he moved to England to study comparative religion, philosophy, and fine arts under a Spaulding Fellowship at Oxford University. During this time, he founded meditation groups in England and established in Scotland one of the first Tibetan Buddhist meditation centers in the West. He became the first Tibetan teacher to lecture in English.

Shortly after his move to England, a deeper contemplation on how to truly plant the dharma in the modern-day world and benefit the greatest number of students led Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche to the decision to give up his monastic robes and serve as a lay teacher. In 1970, he married Diana Pybus. This moment of decision is clearly expressed by Trungpa Rinpoche himself in Born in Tibet: With a sense of further involving myself with the sangha, I determined to give up my monastic vows. More than ever I felt given over to serving the cause of Buddhism.

He moved to the United States, through Canada, and founded his first North American meditation center, Tail of the Tiger (now known as Karmê Chöling) in Barnet, Vermont. The ancient Buddhist wisdom and practical instructions that Trungpa Rinpoche brought with him found an enthusiastic audience in the America of the 1970s. During this period, he traveled and taught throughout North America. These early seminars, which introduced students to his extraordinarily clear, precise and to-the-point naked wisdom teachings, were later compiled into books, such as Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism and The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation. Throughout his life, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche sought to bring the teachings he had received from the most renowned masters of the East to the largest possible audience in the world. His teachings became one the largest bodies of published works by a single author on Buddhism in English.

In a period of less than two decades, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche made great strides toward accomplishing his goal of establishing a genuine Buddhist tradition in the West. In 1973, he founded Vajradhatu, the umbrella organization for many meditation centers throughout the world; soon after, in 1974, he founded Naropa Institute (now Naropa University), which became the first fully accredited Buddhist-inspired university in North America. He taught thirteen three-month Vajradhatu Seminaries, at which he presented a vast body of three-yana teachings within an intensive meditation practice atmosphere. He also invited great Tibetan Buddhist masters, such as His Holiness the sixteenth Gyalwang Karmapa, to come to the West and offer teachings.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche passed away in 1987 in Nova Scotia, Canada, and his sacred body was cremated at Karmê-Chöling. However, his legacy of teachings and his lineage continue. Ösel Tendzin (formerly Thomas Rich, 1943–1990), became heir to his Buddhist lineage, having been appointed Vajra Regent in 1976. He was the first Westerner to be acknowledged as a holder of the Kagyü lineage. Sawang Ösel Rangdrol Mukpo (now known as Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche), his eldest son, became heir to the Shambhala teachings. In addition to the training received from his father, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche received training from many other Kagyü and Nyingma masters. He is currently head of Shambhala International and leads his students and centers with wisdom and compassion.

The present incarnation of the Trungpa lineage, Chökyi Sengay (Lion of Dharma), lives at Surmang Dütsi Tel Monastery in eastern Tibet. He is currently receiving the traditional training in Buddhist studies and meditation practices. He has yet to visit the West.

Based on "The Legacy of Chögyam Trungpa: A Review of The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa" by The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, originally published in Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly (summer 2004), www.thebuddhadharma.com.

Holding the Banner of the Dharma

Celebrating Chögyam Trungpa

JACK KORNFIELD

THE T IBETAN LAMA and dharma teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche was a beloved friend of mine, a benefactor, and a deeply respected person in my life. When he died in April, 1987, he was the leader of one of the largest Buddhist communities in America. In July 1974, he had founded Naropa Institute along with many of us who taught there. He had thousands of students connected with the main meditation centers he founded in Colorado, Nova Scotia, and rural Vermont. He established centers in almost one hundred cities and small towns across North America, as well as throughout Europe. When he died at the age of forty-eight, he not only had a large following but had also brought the dharma to life in the West in a remarkable new way.

The Life of a Bodhisattva

Chögyam Trungpa’s life reminds me of a beautiful sutra in the mahayana teachings of Buddhism, called the Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra. Vimalakirti, the subject of the sutra, was a great bodhisattva and teacher who, rather than appearing as a monk or a priest, decided to incarnate as a layman and to go among the peoples of the world to teach in a language or a way that could be understood by every person he met. In this sutra, Vimalakirti appears in different guises. At one point, he’s married and he has a whole flock of children. In this way he could show the merit of family life and the possibilities it offers for surrender, awakening, and practice. Later in the sutra, he works in a wine shop and teaches the dharma to those who come for drinks, enlightening them in the process. In another part of the sutra, Vimalakirti makes himself sick to give the healers and others around him an opportunity to serve him, so that they can learn caring and compassion in ways that are appropriate to their situation. He goes through all of these different guises, entering into the very thick of life with a tremendous sense of joy and ease, demonstrating that each situation in life is workable as a part of one’s practice.

In some ways, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche was closer to Vimalakirti than anyone I’ve ever met on my travels in the dharma. He escaped from Tibet in 1959, around the same time that the Dalai Lama and many other great teachers also escaped. In Born in Tibet, a very harrowing and compelling account of his early life and departure, Trungpa Rinpoche describes the whole process of escape over the Himalayan mountains. He went first to India and in 1963 to England, where he studied at Oxford University. In 1967 he founded Samye-Ling in Scotland, one of the first major Tibetan centers in the West.

Chögyam Trungpa has been a tremendous supporter of the vipassana community in America. Trungpa Rinpoche got Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, me, and a number of others to join together to teach in the first year of Naropa Institute in 1974, and after collaborating there we all began to teach vipassana in large retreats across the country. My first personal talk with Rinpoche was in 1973 at a cocktail party in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when he was thinking about starting Naropa. It was a group from Harvard University, with professors and dharma practitioners. We were drinking cocktails and chatting, and he was interested in the training that I’d had as a monk and about my experiences in monasteries in Asia. Rinpoche asked a lot of interesting questions about my training. Then he said, I think you should join us and teach at this Buddhist university we’re going to establish, Naropa Institute. I was reluctant. I had had some training in teaching while I was in Asia, and I had done a bit of teaching on a very small scale while I was in graduate school. I don’t know if I’m ready to teach at that level, I told him. He was quite pleased with that, actually. He said, Then it’s clear you should be teaching. Come on, I’ll sign you up, and you’ll be our teacher of Theravada Buddhism. So I went. I had met Joseph Goldstein briefly before that, but it was that summer at Naropa that he and Sharon Salzberg and I really struck up a deep friendship and began to teach together, and we have led our community since then.

Besides being a supporter in those early days, over many years Chögyam Trungpa was a great supporter of the vipassana practice. When the great Burmese master Mahasi Sayadaw came to teach at our American centers in 1979, Rinpoche was in Europe, but he telephoned and tried to arrange a flight to come back just to pay his respects to Mahasi Sayadaw.

Trungpa was a follower of the path of the bodhisattva, the path of opening one’s heart and one’s life to all circumstances and all beings. His way combined discipline and openness in a remarkable fashion. I hope that describing some of the qualities that I’ve learned from him will help to inform and inspire the practice of dharma for all of us.

The Quality of Brightness

The first of the key elements in his teachings that I want to honor is the tremendous quality of brightness. Over many years, at Naropa and elsewhere, I must have heard almost one hundred dharma talks by Rinpoche. Although he might arrive late for a lecture and was sometimes in a somewhat inebriated state, there was still an amazing quality of brightness and clarity to his mind. Lama Govinda once spoke to me about Trungpa Rinpoche. While Lama Govinda was living in Almora in the Himalayas of India in the 1950s and early 1960s, many people escaping from Tibet came through his household, and many of the lamas would stay with him. He said that of all the young tülkus, the young incarnate lamas, to leave Tibet, there was none so bright as Trungpa Rinpoche. He meant bright in the sense of the field of his being and his energy. Lama Govinda told me this at a point when he wasn’t very happy with the way Trungpa Rinpoche was behaving. He said, I still have to admit that there was no one who walked across the Himalayas and came out of Tibet who had that light more than Trungpa.

This quality of brightness in his teachings relates to what Rinpoche called the Lion’s Roar. In the Pali texts, there is a very famous discourse of the Buddha, called the Lion’s Roar Sutra, where someone asks, How do you know about all the things that you claim to know about? Have you really practiced? Have you really done it yourself? In his reply, the Buddha says, If there is any ascetic practice that has ever been done on the continent of India in all of the thousands of eons of world systems, I have tried it. I’ve fasted; I lay on beds of nails; I went down to eating one grain of rice, one sesame seed, a day. When I put my hand on my belly, I touched my backbone. He said, I sat up with my eyes open to the moon. I sat with my eyes open to the sun. He said, Whatever practice you could name, I did. And finally, after all of those austerities and all of those practices, I discovered that self-torture wasn’t the point. The point wasn’t to torture the body, nor was it to indulge it. But I discovered that the secret of the middle path, of the way of being free in the midst of every experience with clarity and simplicity, is that which brings one to liberation. It’s a very powerful sutra. You get a tremendous sense of the strength of the Buddha just in reading it. Trungpa Rinpoche also spoke of the teachings as the Lion’s Roar. He said:

The Lion’s Roar is the fearless proclamation that any state of mind, any circumstance, any part of ourselves, including the most difficult emotions, is a workable situation, a reminder in the practice of meditation. We can realize that the chaotic situations must not be rejected, nor must we regard them as regressive, as a return to our confusion. We must sit and respect whatever happens to our state of mind. Even chaos should be regarded as extremely good news. . . . We can learn to accept our states as part of the patterns of mind, without question, without reference back to the scriptures, without help from credentials, directly acknowledging that they are so, and that these things are here and are true. . . . That is the lion’s roar, that whatever occurs in the samsaric mind (the mind of cycles) is regarded itself as the path: everything is workable.¹

This openness is an amazing quality to bring to one’s practice. In 1977, while I was still teaching at the summer session of Naropa Institute, my book Living Buddhist Masters was published. I exchanged books with Trungpa Rinpoche. I gave him a copy of my book, and he gave me an autographed copy of Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. As an inscription, he wrote, Dear Jack, Welcome back, which I took to mean something like Welcome back to the West. Then the inscription continued, Can you hold the banner of the dharma? Let us celebrate! This inscription was written in great big letters. To me, it’s been a very meaningful inscription. Can I, can all of us, hold the banner of the dharma, and can we proclaim the lion’s roar?

Trungpa Rinpoche not only taught Buddhism, but he also started a secular system to present the practice of meditation, called Shambhala Training, which taught people meditation without all of the Tibetan and Buddhist framework around it. When Shambhala Training is presented, the hall where people practice is hung with beautiful banners, depicting some of the symbols of what he called the state of mind of the rising sun, the Great Eastern Sun. He said that you can look at the sun and see it as either rising or setting. You see it as setting when you’re depressed and feeling sad, because everything changes and it’s all impermanent; there’s nothing to hold on to, and it’s such a shame. Or you can see everything that arises as an opportunity. The whole spirit of Shambhala is to see what arises as an opportunity in practice.

Trungpa Rinpoche had a very droll sense of humor. He could be very, very funny, but his jokes were usually short one-liners rather than long stories. I remember one evening when he was talking about how the practice of meditation was to not remove oneself, not to shield or armor oneself, from experience, not to hide in a box or a cave or inside our fancy car or whatever. He used all kinds of metaphors for hiding from our experience, such as being inside our house and turning up the heat or the air conditioning and closing the curtains to try to make ourselves feel safe. He said the way of the warrior, or the bodhisattva, was to have no distance between ourselves and our experience. After he finished speaking, someone raised his hand and said, No distance? No distance? Then the questioner asked, Well, what if there are circumstances where things are fearful or difficult or dangerous? The questioner went on for a long time. And Trungpa looked back and said, very simply, No distance. Then he picked up his glass and raised it to the questioner, and he said, Good luck, sir. And everyone laughed. That was an ending line he often used: Good luck, madam. Good luck, sir. So the quality of brilliance in Rinpoche’s teaching was this quality of radiating freedom like the rising sun, which illuminates a path for us. In his teachings, there was this encouragement to proceed—not out of self-confirmation, not to make ourselves into some bigger, stronger ego, but rather to be willing to stay with our experience as it presents itself, to see whatever arises as practice, and to move forward.

Showing the Way of Openness

This leads into the second quality that Chögyam Trungpa manifested in his life, which is available to all of us, as much as when he was alive. This is the quality of openness, or showing the open way, a quality of fearlessness in practice. In the 1970s, Rinpoche wrote about dharmas without blame, dharmas not meaning only the law or the teachings, but also as a term for all the elements of body and mind that make up experience. He says that all the dharmas or the elements that arise

are without blame because there was no manufacturer of dharmas. Dharmas are simply what is. Blame comes from an attitude of security, identifying with certain reservations as to how things are. Having this attitude, if a spiritual teaching does not supply us with enough patches we are in trouble. The Buddhist teaching not only does not supply us with any patches, it destroys them.

As ego’s patches are destroyed, there comes a point where relating to the teaching means the continual death of ego. . . . Therefore the teaching of dharmas without blame should be regarded as good news. It seems that it is good news, utterly good news, because there is no choice. When you see it clearly, there is no choice whatsoever. Even praise and blame, fear and difficulty, are the conditioned experiences of a beautiful patchwork.²

Then, in the same spirit, he goes on to talk about buddhadharma without credentials, not getting a Ph.D., not making oneself into a professional meditator, not turning spiritual practice