by Marco Pallis
This was hard to swallow for the hard-boiled cynics that many of Chögyam Trungpa’s students had become, and there was much debate. But he pressed his point on numerous occasions: the students had to develop more compassion. While cynicism is the means to destroy the beliefs of the ego, Chögyam Trungpa showed how compassion could also destroy ego by cutting through our arrogance. In a seminar entitled “Cynicism and Devotion,” he explained the importance of discovering the fresh continent of mystic experience, which had hitherto been a taboo subject: “Mystical experience in this case has nothing to do with astral traveling or conjuring up ritual objects in your hand or turning the ceiling into the floor. Mystical experience in this case is discovering a hidden warmth—the larger version of home.”35
Chögyam Trungpa brought about the destruction of spiritual materialism and cut through to the heart of the sardonic game that ego plays with itself in order to create “a sense of beauty, and even of love and light.”36 This deepening of his teaching inaugurated a new phase, the first in a long series of changes. Year after year, Chögyam Trungpa cast doubt on what had previously seemed to be the core of the teaching, while always finding new ways to enter the heart of the truth.
1. Chögyam Trungpa, “Speaking to the Sangha on His Birthday,” February 1979, unpublished.
2. Chögyam Trungpa arrived with his wife, Diana Pybus Mukpo, in Toronto, Canada, in January. They then had to wait a few months in Canada until they obtained visas. Chögyam Trungpa taught in Montreal before going to Barnet, Vermont, where his students had bought the property that was to become the first Kagyü Buddhist meditation center in the United States.
3. They were married on January 3, 1970. Diana Pybus was then only sixteen years old. A recent law had authorized marriage at that age in Scotland, without parental consent.
4. Transcending Madness, p. 294. Wisdom, jnana in Sanskrit and yeshe in Tibetan, is not at all a matter of no longer being troubled but is instead a relationship with “pure emotion, which is the original flash of instantaneous experience.” Journey without Goal, p. 122.
5. Chögyam Trungpa gave this description of the fundamental idea we generally have of enlightenment: “An enlightened person is supposed to be more or less an old-wise-man type: not quite like an old professor, but perhaps an old father who can supply sound advice on how to handle all of life’s problems. . . . That seems to be the current fantasy that exists in our culture concerning enlightened beings. They are old and wise, grown up and solid.” Crazy Wisdom, p. 25.
6. Orderly Chaos, p. 16.
7. “Epilogue to the 1971 Edition” of Born in Tibet, in The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa, vol. 1 (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2003), p. 280.
8. At the Dharma Art Festival in 1974.
9. The Lion’s Roar, p. 6.
10. Meditation in Action, p. 18.
11. The Snow Lion was named after the animal that is the emblem of Tibet. It was here that in 1972 the “Crazy Wisdom” seminar was held (later published as a book with the same title), then the first Seminary presenting the three yanas in 1973, which brought together sixty people for three months.
12. To give an idea of his activities, here is an approximate list of what he taught in 1971. At Boulder he gave the talk “Dealing with Emotions,” and at Tail of the Tiger several talks were given to the community: “Community Energies,” “Crazy Wisdom,” “Negativity,” and a seminar titled “Practice of Meditation.”
At the University of Colorado in Boulder he taught a series of six courses. In Boulder, he also gave several talks: “Battle of Ego,” “Surrendering: Taking Refuge,” “The Guru Scene,” “Initiation,” “The Hard Way,” “Self-Deception,” “The Open Way,” “Sense of Humor,” “The Marriage of Wisdom and Compassion,” and “Mandala.”
In New York he taught “Awareness,” then in Boston in February, “The Six Chakras” and “The Four Karmas,” now published as Secret Beyond Thought (Halifax: Vajradhatu Publications, 1991.)
Back in Boulder, he gave a seminar “Milarepa Film Workshop,” devoted to what was to be his unfinished film about Milarepa.
In April he went into retreat with two of his older students in Wisconsin. From May 9 to 29, he toured California, where he taught in San Francisco, Berkeley, Davis, and Los Angeles as well as giving a seminar on the houseboat of the Zen popularizer Alan Watts. During this time he presented “The Nature of Mind,” “Sense of Humor,” and a longer seminar, “Meditation,” “Ambition to Learn,” “Battle of Ego,” “Meditation and Shunyata,” and “The Open Way.”
In Allenspark, Colorado, he gave a seminar “The Six Bardos.” It was the first time a residence was rented where several people could stay for the seminar.
In August and September he gave seminars at Tail of the Tiger, including: “How to Tell a Charlatan,” “Explanation of Om Ah Hum Vajra Guru Mantra,” and “Dialogue with Ego,” as well as a detailed presentation of the abhidharma and the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Between October and November he toured North America: in New York he presented “Approach to the Spiritual Path: Examining What’s Here First”; in Boston, “The Mandala of the Five Buddha Families,” “The Theory and Practice of Tibetan Buddhism,” and “The Growth of Spiritual Energy in the U.S.”; in Montreal, “Passion and Aggression”; in Toronto, “Searching for Spirituality” and “Meditation in Action”; in Washington, “The Three Marks of Existence”; and finally he went to Chicago.
Between mid-November and mid-December he gave another seminar of nine talks, entitled “Tibetan Buddhism and American Karma,” at Karma Dzong, Boulder, before leaving for Estes Park, Colorado, and then San Francisco, where he presented “The Eightfold Path.” Finally he returned to Tail of the Tiger, where he gave three talks on the Maitri Project before giving a seminar of seven talks titled “The Six Realms of Existence.”
The diversity of the subject matter is impressive. It must be stressed that when he presented the same theme several times, each talk was totally different. For example, he gave three seminars called “The Six Realms of Existence,” one in Colorado and two in Vermont. Two have been published in Transcending Madness. The first, given at Allenspark, associates each realm with a specific bardo. In this case, the worlds are described as islands, while the bardos are culminating points that reveal each island. However, the seminar given at Tail of the Tiger emphasizes the process through which we continue to pass. In this perspective, each world contains the full cycle of bardos, which helps it reinforce and maintain its power.
13. In 1971, at Tail of the Tiger, there were just five instructors capable of presenting the practice of meditation when Rinpoche was not there, and none at all at Boulder.
14. Even if we can now recognize in it a classic Buddhist presentation of the three poisons: aggression, passion, and ignorance.
15. In reply to a student’s question, Chögyam Trungpa specified that he was not just talking about conflicts between Tibetan schools of Buddhism but among all schools: “The Theravadins were at odds with the Sarvastivadins; the Burmese were quarreling with the Sinhalese.”
16. Chögyam Trungpa, The Sadhana of Mahamudra Which Quells the Mighty Warring of the Three Lords of Materialism and Brings Realization of the Ocean of Siddhas of the Practice Lineage, trans. Nālandā Translation Committee (Halifax, 1990), p. 5. Those familiar with Tibetan Buddhism will be interested to know that this text was received by Chögyam Trungpa as a terma (“treasure”), a teaching that is concealed by a great teacher of the past for the benefit of a future generation, to be discovered by a qualified person when the time is right.
17. René Guénon, La crise du monde moderne (The Crisis of the Modern World) (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), p. 146.
18. Ibid., p. 153.
19. Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (1973), p. 6.
20. Crazy Wisdom, p. 6. The first chapter of this book is devoted to spiritual materialism. The author explains how the ego, in its spiritual quest, leads to “the transcendental unknown,” a marvelou
s expression used to describe a pole where we project all our desires, a “something about the world or the cosmos that corresponds to this ‘something’ that we are” but which we have never made the effort to confront honestly.
21. Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (1973), p. 49.
22. Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness (1993), p. 148.
23. Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of Loving-Kindness (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1991), p. 3.
24. Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (1973), p. 3.
25. Chögyam Trungpa, “The Embodiment of All the Siddhas,” Karmê Chöling, September 1975, unpublished.
26. Chögyam Trungpa, Sadhana of Mahamudra Sourcebook (Boulder: Vajradhatu Publications, 1979), p. 7.
27. Chögyam Trungpa, “The Common Heart,” Centre Monchanin, Montreal, December 4, 1970, unpublished.
28. Garuda is the name of a mythical animal, a sort of heavenly eagle. It symbolizes enlightenment because it hatches fully developed from its egg.
29. Chögyam Trungpa, answer to a questionnaire on The Voice of Aquarius, a television show, September 7, 1970, unpublished.
30. Chögyam Trungpa, Selected Community Talks (Boulder: Vajradhatu Publications, 1978), p. 37.
31. Chögyam Trungpa, “An Approach to Meditation,” unpublished lecture, Association for Humanistic Psychology, Washington, D.C., September 1971.
32. Chögyam Trungpa, “Buddhism and the Spiritual Energy of America,” Boston, April 6, 1976, unpublished. These were the closing words of the seminar, after the replies to questions.
33. Chögyam Trungpa, “Trust Run Wild,” July 10, 1972, in Selected Community Talks, p. 28.
34. “Crazy Wisdom” seminar, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, December 1972. See Crazy Wisdom, p. 64.
35. Chögyam Trungpa, Selected Community Talks, p. 39.
36. Crazy Wisdom, p. 65.
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