Born in Tibet

by Marco Pallis

  Before moving to the United States, Chögyam Trungpa had been teaching in England, but without attracting more than a few serious students; few, it seems, were able to appreciate what he had to offer. People expected him to behave like the stereotypical “Oriental sage,” and he found this horribly hypocritical. Their desire for him to play a role implied their avoidance of any real contact with what he was saying. He described the period in England as “the first time I had been the object of that fascination which is noncommunicative and nonrelating, being seen as an example of a species rather than as an individual: ‘Let’s go see the lamas at Oxford.’”7 Throughout his life, Chögyam Trungpa refused to conform to common social clichés.

  In India and Tibet, generations of practitioners had dedicated their lives to perpetuating what the Buddha taught. In the West, should such efforts result in their spiritual heir becoming an exotic figure invited to perform for a few exclusive circles of “right-thinking” people? Was it for this that the Buddha taught? In Chögyam Trungpa’s mind, the answer was clearly no.

  Chögyam Trungpa could have had many disciples in England, been greatly respected, and led a comfortable life, as some of his fellow exiles did. But that was not what he wanted. His aspiration was to introduce the Buddha’s teachings in all their authenticity, holding back nothing of what he himself had learned. For this, he was ready to give up everything. He was incapable of deception. He thus decided to play down his religious status so as to be able to communicate directly with the people he met. He thus entered the everyday lives of his students. As one early student, Chuck Lief, recalls, when Chögyam Trungpa stayed at his home in Boston, he washed the dishes and helped with the household chores.

  For anyone who knows the formality and ceremony that surround many Tibetan masters, this is rather surprising. Chögyam Trungpa had sacrificed his thrones, servants, and all the ceremony that traditionally surrounds a master. When he realized that these aspects of his culture were meaningless in his new American context, he dropped them.

  Buddhist teachings insist on the importance of total renunciation. Such abandonment is a precondition of freedom. Chögyam Trungpa did not simply teach this basic precept; he was one of its most striking exemplars. He cast off his culture, his Tibetan background and habits, in order to touch people’s hearts more easily.

  In his early years in the United States, one major activity in addition to his teaching of seminars consisted in entering into direct contact with all those who wanted to see him. It was an intense round of interviews, dinners, parties, and encounters. At the time, Chögyam Trungpa used to stop people in the street and ask them if they had heard of meditation or Buddhism. If they asked him questions, he would answer at once, offer them meditation instruction, and give them a copy of his book Meditation in Action, which he often carried with him.

  He kept abreast of the country’s political and social life and questioned all sorts of people with great curiosity. He paid close attention to everyone’s life and asked his students to correct his English. He became their friend.

  A challenge to inauthenticity

  During that period, while Chögyam Trungpa displayed an extraordinary openness to those who wanted to meet him and study with him, he was implacable when confronted with arrogance and hypocrisy. One day, he was invited to a gala reception with several VIPs in attendance.8 There, he met an art collector who owned a large body of Tibetan work, from which Trungpa wanted to borrow for an exhibition he was planning. The collector came over to Chögyam Trungpa and said in an offhand way: “So, how is life treating you?” Chögyam Trungpa ignored him and went rapidly around the room before returning to where he had been standing. He looked the collector straight in the eye and said, “Life doesn’t treat me, I treat her, and I’d say that I treat her quite well.” And he left the room. Chögyam Trungpa refused to corrupt his vision, even if this meant alienating certain intellectuals and wealthy people who might have helped him.

  On another occasion, in late 1970, he was invited to give a lecture on Tibetan art and iconography at the prestigious Asia Society in New York. Some of his students told him that this was a good opportunity for him to get to know some wealthy people who were at least interested in the culture of Tibet, even if they were not drawn to its religion. Many invitations were sent out. At the appointed time, the hall filled with smart, well-off, middle-aged New Yorkers, all apparently curious to find out what this brilliant young Buddhist master, who spoke such excellent English, would have to say about this exotic art form. The time for the lecture arrived, but Rinpoche was not there. Time passed. The audience grew restless, and people began to walk out.

  Downstairs, Chögyam Trungpa, who had arrived on time, was seated in his car. He asked the student who had come with him to drive around the block. The exodus upstairs continued until Rinpoche finally made his appearance, all smiles, over an hour late. He sat down and started to talk about the practice of meditation, without mentioning the announced topic. An irritated member of the audience in the front row loudly opened his program to demonstrate his annoyance. People continued to leave. Finally, when there was just a smattering of people left in the hall (most of whom were his students), Rinpoche smiled and said, “Well, yes, some of you here may well be interested in Tibetan art and iconography, and in what the images mean. But I can assure you that this is pointless without practicing meditation. If your aim is just to collect antiques, then you will probably become one yourself.”

  Whatever the circumstances, Chögyam Trungpa was unyielding. He refused to flatter people. He never set out to deceive, and he promised nothing. True dharma cannot be presented by wrapping it up in cultural exoticism.

  He never hesitated to tell the truth, even if this meant provoking the audience. At a talk in San Francisco in the fall of 1970, he began by saying: “It’s a pity you came here. You’re so aggressive.”

  According to Jerry Granelli, who was in charge of organizing many of Chögyam Trungpa’s early visits to the West Coast, as soon as the audience for a lecture had taken their seats, Jerry would go and hide the box office takings in his car. He knew that some of the audience would be furious and demand a refund. Chögyam Trungpa would often arrive very late or speak only for a few minutes, as at the Dharma Art Festival lecture he gave in 1974, for which the audience of over fifteen hundred had paid five dollars each. People wanted answers, but Chögyam Trungpa refused to cater to their expectations. His purpose was to unravel the tangle of beliefs in which they had ensnared themselves. He thus exposed as purely artificial the hidden foundation on which most people’s experience is based.

  When teaching, instead of reassuring those present, he often warned them: “Be careful; if you start practicing, there’s no going back.” He presented the spiritual journey as no pleasant stroll, but rather a painful process of exposure: “The Buddhist path is ruthless, absolutely ruthless, almost to the point of being uncompassionate. What we could say is that we are not looking for pleasure. The journey is not geared for finding pleasure; it’s not a pleasure trip.”9

  His desire to communicate freely and intensely and his efforts to break through hypocrisy are two sides of the same coin, because hypocrisy makes any real heart-to-heart relationship impossible. During the seventeen years he taught in the United States, and regardless of the changing forms his teachings took, Chögyam Trungpa never hesitated to take risks or overturn convention if this could help people to understand themselves. He thus allowed them to experience his world directly and completely. He did not present himself in a polished way; he was willing to be shocking, incredible, strange, unexpected, or disturbing—for such was the nature of the teachings with which he was entrusted.

  But though some people were put off, many were attracted to him, and the more Chögyam Trungpa came across as irascible, the more they were won over by the open, direct contact they had with him and the more eager they were to study with him and learn to develop the dignity he had unveiled within them.

  2. His Fol
lowing Increases

  Chögyam Trungpa’s Meditation in Action, first published in London in 1969, was at the time one of the few books about the practice of Buddhist meditation available in the West. It had rapidly become a work of reference for anyone wanting to study Buddhism. In it, Chögyam Trungpa presents a surprising approach to “spirituality.” The way of the Buddha is described with disarming simplicity. As he explains: “As far as the teaching is concerned, it is always open; so open in fact, so ordinary and so simple, that it is contained within the character of that particular person [who seeks to awaken]. He may be habitually drunk, or habitually violent, but that character is his potentiality.”10 Chögyam Trungpa does not present the spiritual path in terms of the acquisition of some precise, external wisdom, but as the capacity to face our true selves as directly as possible, leaving aside social or moral conventions.

  Tail of the Tiger

  The first place where Chögyam Trungpa lived in the United States was a 400-acre farm in Vermont, found by four of his students who had met him at Samye Ling, the center he had set up in Scotland. They moved to the farm in March 1970 to prepare for his coming. With Chögyam Trungpa’s blessing they named the place Tail of the Tiger, after an oracle drawn from the I Ching: The Book of Changes. Chögyam Trungpa himself arrived in May of 1970.

  Tania Leontov, who had studied with him in Britain and taken the Buddhist name Kesang Tönma, was then his secretary. She was an American and knew lots of people in New York, whom she invited to Tail of the Tiger. In July, Chögyam Trungpa gave his first seminar at Tail. His manner was extremely mild and humble. Chuck Lief first met him at this time and remembers how gracious he was. He was even rather shy, surprised and pleased to see so many unfamiliar faces that had come to meet him.

  After a few months, about twenty permanent residents were living at Tail of the Tiger. Almost a thousand visitors had been there, attended seminars, received instruction in meditation, gone into retreat, or shared the community life there. The atmosphere that prevailed at Tail of the Tiger was a cross between a hippie community and a Buddhist monastery and practice center, even if, at the time, the first element was still dominant.

  Colorado and the lack of a private life

  After his stay in Vermont, a tour in California, and visits to several American cities, Chögyam Trungpa went to Colorado in the early fall of 1970. He was delighted by the little house his students had chosen for him in the mountains. In December, he moved to another house, in Four Mile Canyon near Boulder.

  He had been invited to Boulder by several people at the University of Colorado, including Karl Usow, who had written to him in England about it. There were other offers, but Diana Mukpo remembers that her husband accepted this invitation because he liked the mountains pictured on the postcard. They reminded him of Tibet.

  In Rinpoche’s house, people came and went and sometimes even moved in. One day, he and Diana quarreled over whether people should be required to knock on their bedroom door before entering. Visitors who had nowhere else to go would stay in the house and sleep wherever they could, sometimes just outside the room where Chögyam Trungpa and his wife slept. Chögyam Trungpa had no private life. At Tail of the Tiger, things went so far that occasionally someone would even follow him into the bathroom and sit down on the floor beside him to carry on asking him questions.

  In December 1970, some of his students decided to settle together in Boulder in a house that Chögyam Trungpa called Anitya Bhavan, “House of Impermanence.” His first seminar in Colorado was held there, but neighbors complained so much about the noise that they had to finish the program in Rinpoche’s house. (A series of talks beginning at this time and concluding in the spring of 1971 was to become the basis for the book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, published in 1973.) In September 1971, Karma Dzong—a center for meditation and Buddhist studies—was founded at 1111 Pearl Street.

  Rocky Mountain Dharma Center

  In 1971, a decision was made to buy a large piece of land in order to found a rural residential center. After an initial search, the site the students showed to Chögyam Trungpa greatly appealed to him. The contract was signed on September 16, and the site was named Rocky Mountain Dharma Center (RMDC).

  A group of hippies living in a community in Boulder, known as the Pygmies, became Rinpoche’s disciples very soon after meeting him. They adopted the motto “We’re bodhisattvas and we live on East Arapahoe.” (Bodhisattva is a Sanskrit term for an enlightened being whose life is dedicated to the benefit of others.) Despite an early heavy snow, at Chögyam Trungpa’s invitation the Pygmies moved to RMDC on September 20, to live on the land. Many of them built their own houses there. The meditation room was the sitting room of one of the houses. When it was time to meditate, they simply covered the television with a piece of cloth. To earn a living, the Pygmies made buttons from deer antlers that they found on the land. They also made looms to spin cloth. In 1971, at least a dozen people were living at RMDC.

  A rapid expansion

  Just after the purchase of Rocky Mountain Dharma Center, the Buddhist community was given another property. A couple, Roger and Louise Randolph, presented Chögyam Trungpa with some land in the mountains of southern Colorado. They wanted this site to be preserved and not disfigured with buildings. It was called Dorje Kyung Dzong (Vajra Garuda Fortress). Small huts were constructed there for individual retreats.

  At Jackson Hole in Wyoming, another group of followers took over a hotel, the Snow Lion Inn.11 From 1972 to 1974, when the hotel was closed during the off season, Chögyam Trungpa taught there. In 1972 he taught a seminar on Crazy Wisdom and in 1973, the first Vajradhatu Seminary was held there.

  The activities of the community were thus taking various directions. Chögyam Trungpa taught constantly, conducting endless discussion groups and seminars,12 without the slightest attention to his own health or well-being. He took so little time off that he seemed to defy common sense. He appeared to be beyond the measure of a normal human being.

  Study and meditation centers were set up in major cities of the United States and Canada where Chögyam Trungpa had taught: New York, Boston, and San Francisco, then shortly afterward Chicago, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Denver, Montreal, and Toronto.

  People practiced little in 1970 and did more or less what they felt like.There was no format or procedure for receiving and guiding new arrivals. Chögyam Trungpa received each student individually.13 When he invited a group of Zen practitioners from the San Francisco Zen Center to organize a nyinthün (an entire day of meditation) at Tail of the Tiger, everyone was amazed by the realization that it was possible to stay sitting during an entire weekend.

  In 1971, Trungpa asked that each student meditate for at least an hour a day, and that those present at Rocky Mountain Dharma Center not kill animals such as the deer they found there. Slowly, without even realizing it, his students were becoming Buddhists. By the end of 1972, the discipline was becoming more precise. As with other aspects of his work, the process was gradual. He worked with the situation and took his time. For example, one day, during a community meeting at Tail of the Tiger, someone suggested that it might be good idea to set a time limit on the evening discussions, which sometimes lasted through to the next morning. Chögyam Trungpa agreed. He did likewise when it was proposed that alcohol should be drunk only at the end of the day. On another occasion, someone suggested that the group draw up a daily schedule and allot a specific time for practice. Chögyam Trungpa always encouraged these efforts to build a genuine Buddhist community, while leaving the initiative to his students. But sometimes he went further and surprised everyone. One day, someone asked if they should limit the amount of time they could listen to music. Chögyam Trungpa replied: “Just one evening a week!”

  3. Teaching Buddhism: From a Seminar on The Jewel Ornament of Liberation to “Work, Sex, and Money”

  The first seminar Chögyam Trungpa gave after arriving in the United States lasted one week. It was a commentary on a text by G
ampopa, one of the great masters of the past, entitled The Jewel Ornament of Liberation—one of the classic texts used by masters to guide beginners on the Buddhist path. Such texts are known as lamrim, the Tibetan term for a group of texts that offer a full presentation of the different steps on the spiritual path.

  Chögyam Trungpa gave twice-daily talks that sometimes lasted as long as three hours. Teachings flowed from him like water from a fountain. What is striking is how different the teaching style was from the one he would adopt a few weeks later. During this brief period, Trungpa adhered closely to the Tibetan practice of offering many teachings but few instructions for concrete practice. In the Tibetan tradition, teaching usually consists of presenting a text, then explaining it line by line. In general, a basic work is used, such as The Jewel Ornament of Liberation by Gampopa, or The Great Perfection by Paltrül Rinpoche, or one of the lamrim gathered by Tsongkhapa. Such teaching, which dwells principally on the existence of suffering (the Buddha’s “first noble truth”) and the need to develop compassion, is addressed to all levels of understanding. It is thus assured that the teaching is appropriate to the situation.

  But soon Chögyam Trungpa began to teach far more freely. A few months later, in Boston, he presented a program entitled “Work, Sex, and Money,” which marked a profound change in approach compared with the earlier seminar on Gampopa. Now he no longer made explicit references to Buddhist doctrine14 but instead tried to deal directly with the most burning issues of the day. His concern was to show that the Buddha’s teachings were not aimed at a particular sort of person at a particular time, but at all of us, here and now. He had discovered his voice, characterized by a relaxed, free tone, plenty of humor, and a deep desire to share his own experiences. Instead of simply repeating acquired knowledge, he directly communicated his own state of being. He had an extraordinary capacity to address an audience and answer people’s questions directly, in such a way that a genuine encounter took place. His teaching was an extremely powerful evocation of everybody’s experiences. Chögyam Trungpa was so clear and accurate that he was like a hook that caught his students’ hearts.