The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Eight (41 page)

When you are able to overcome crude dissatisfaction and anxiety, then you don’t need to look for any further extraordinary revelations. You can actually launch yourself in working with others right away. Working with other people has two facets: It’s not just helping somebody else, but it has an effect on you as well. By working with others, you learn how to pull yourself together at the same time. To do so, you have to be genuine. You have to have been working on yourself for some time, so that others will have trust in working with you. When they express their frustrations to you, you don’t completely freak out or try to avoid them. You have to be patient and understanding, which only comes from being somewhat soaked in working with yourself. I think that applies in any kind of educational system anywhere.

K
NOWING
W
HAT TO
A
CCEPT AND
R
EJECT

Daring to work with others brings insightfulness, or intelligence, which leads to the second principle of renunciation: knowing what to accept and what to reject for the benefit of others. Caring for others doesn’t mean that your open, kind heart is willing to let any diseases in existence come into you. You have to be very healthy at the same time. To maintain that type of healthiness, we have to know what to do and what not to do. But we can’t be hard-nosed about it; we don’t become aggressive or paranoid people or, for that matter, hypochondriacs. We can’t do everything that’s available, nor should we do nothing. We have to choose. Acceptance and rejection, in this case, are not an expression of your partiality toward one thing or another; they are much more unconditional than that, and they are a mark of intelligence. Our intelligence provides a way of sorting out what to do, what not to do. Out of that comes
gentleness
. We know what to accept for the benefit of others and what to reject for the benefit of others. Therefore, our entire life, our entire existence, including our out- and in-breath, is dedicated to others.

T
HE
K
ING OF
B
ASIC
G
OODNESS

The third principle of renunciation is quite interesting. Because we know what to accept and what to reject, therefore, we are ready to fully join the world of basic goodness. That particular world is ruled and managed by a king or queen, who is capable of joining heaven and earth together. When we talk about a monarch here, we are talking about that which rules the world in the form of basic goodness. From this point of view, we regard basic goodness as the king or queen. It is almost an entity in itself, not just a metaphysical concept or an abstract theory of natural order.

Another way of putting this is that what joins heaven and earth together is the king or queen, and therefore, it is basic goodness. In other words, if there is natural law and order, the principle of royalty, or the principle of the monarch, already exists. Because the principle of the universal monarch joins heaven, earth, and human beings together, therefore, we can join our body and mind together as well. We can synchronize mind and body together in order to manifest as Shambhala warriors.

The conventional idea of a monarch is based purely on the heaven principle. In the West, when the industrial revolution happened, it was regarded as the utterance of the earth. In that situation, earth is completely opposed to heaven, so there shouldn’t be any monarch. The logic goes that, if you want people to be happy and have good salaries, if the workers are to be treated well, there shouldn’t be any heaven. There should be purely earth. In the Shambhala tradition, however, as well as the traditions of imperial China, Japan, and India, it is necessary to have a king or queen in order to join heaven and earth together. The Chinese character for the king is three horizontal strokes with one vertical slash in the middle, which represents heaven, earth, and human beings joined together. When people have lofty ideas that they aspire to, they do not fall into the depressions of practicality alone. At the same time, to avoid purely having lofty idealism, you need the working basis of earth.

Communism has suffered a lot from not being able to join heaven and earth. The communists started out being earthy people. “Workers of the world unite!” However, when the communist empire developed—as in Russia, for instance—the communists could not help creating heaven: a
vision
of communism. Subsequently, the only way they have found to bring heaven and earth together into a balanced situation is to copy capitalism. It’s not quite heaven, exactly, but to them, it might be the closest thing. Capitalists believe in religion, and capitalists have more decorations on their military uniforms, more flags. In the beginning, the communists regarded those things as absurd. Later, they began to have all kinds of ribbons, bars, and uniforms. Look at what Mother Russia has produced. So coming to the point, they don’t really know what they’re doing!

On this planet earth, there has been a problem of joining heaven and earth, which produces tremendous chaos. Moreover, there is a problem joining mind and body together. Synchronizing mind and body together is a
very
big deal in the Shambhala tradition. I recommend kyudo, the Japanese art of archery; the tea ceremony; and flower arranging as Eastern disciplines to help synchronize mind and body together properly. From the Western tradition, I would recommend the discipline of horseback riding in the dressage style as a practice to synchronize body and mind. Dressage is a unique discipline, very sane and enlightened, that trains you in how to synchronize mind and body together. I’m sure there are a number of other Western disciplines that can help to join mind and body together.

In summary, the three principles of renunciation are (1) having a kind attitude toward others, free from doubt, brings daringness; (2) realizing what to accept and what to reject brings gentleness; (3) realizing that the monarch joins heaven and earth; therefore, our body and mind are synchronized together.

The Chinese and Tibetan characters for “imperial.” The middle character, three horizontal lines joined by one vertical line, is the character for “king.”

CALLIGRAPHY BY CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA.

In the study of Shambhala principles, the king principle, the principle of royalty or monarchy, is shown at its best, before it’s been corrupted. Royalty in the Shambhala world is not based on creating a Shambhala elite or a class system. In that case, I wouldn’t share the Shambhala vision with everybody. I wouldn’t be telling you about this at all. I would probably have selected ten or twenty people to hear about the universal monarch who joins heaven and earth rather than discussing this openly. Why should I tell you these things? One of our topics, gentleness and opening up, has something to do with it. Every one of you can join heaven and earth. You could be a king or queen—every one of you. That’s the switcheroo, the great switcheroo. That’s why the entire vision is shared with everyone. That is a very important point. I feel neither apologetic nor arrogant about sharing the ideal concept of the kingdom with you. It seems quite natural: everybody should know how the trees and plants grow and how they experience hierarchy in the four seasons. You can all see how the ultimate ruler conquers the universe—which is something more than a medieval king or a temporal king.

We don’t have many kings and queens left on earth these days, and many of those we do have seem to be on their way to becoming private citizens, anyway. Nonetheless, in any business and any organization, including educational or social ones, human beings have found that they still need a manager or a director of some kind. Hierarchy develops out of that. If you want to set up a restaurant, you need a manager, who is the king or queen. Then you can have waitresses and waiters and other employees as the ministers of the realm. Then you have the king’s workers, which is the public. If you own a business, your investors might be regarded as the ministers, and you are the king or queen. At a bank, the king or queen principle is the bank manager, and then you have all the various other parts of the court represented by various positions. Organizational systems always work that way, but we are shy of pointing it out. The approach of Shambhala vision is to acknowledge hierarchy but to insist that people throughout the hierarchy—high, medium, or low—learn to conduct themselves in the Shambhala style. The highest in rank do not exert their power from arrogance but from a sense of humbleness, genuineness, and sympathy. It goes right on down the line that way.

Hierarchy is already there. Whether you are in a completely democratic or a communist system, you still cannot help having a manager in your restaurant. Wherever you go in the world, they always have those systems, which human beings have found to be the best working basis. You always have a Chairman Mao or a Castro in the communist world, and you have a president of the United States, in spite of democracy. A democracy still has a president. If a country were truly democratic, there wouldn’t be any leaders at all—which can’t happen. A country can’t run that way. An organization can’t run that way. There is always hierarchy.

But hierarchy has been mismanaged and misused. The ambition of Shambhala vision is to rectify that situation, not to make the situation more autocratic or dictatorial. Leaders should be more humble, and workers should be more proud, more arrogant maybe. By the leaders’ having humbleness and the workers’ having more arrogance, there will be a meeting point somewhere. Enlightened society can function that way, in the juxtaposition of the two, in generations to come.

Often, the workers do not have enough arrogance. They feel bad because they don’t have enough money and possessions. The leaders have too much of both. Even in many democracies, the leaders are arrogant and proud—and sometimes deaf and dumb. In 1980, members of the United States Congress hosted a luncheon for the head of my lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, His Holiness the sixteenth Karmapa. I was invited to accompany him to the Capitol, where I met a number of representatives and senators, including a senator who was supposed to be announcing his candidacy for the presidency soon.

These people were completely deaf and dumb, completely gone cuckoo! During the luncheon, they kept running out to vote on the floor of the House or the Senate. Whenever a button would light up on the wall, they had to run out and vote. I was quite
amazed
that they could keep track of
anything,
because
they weren’t there
. It was amazing. You could actually tell who was the highest and who was the lowest on the totem pole by how crazy they were. The higher they were, the crazier. What does that say about people in positions of power? The more power they get, the crazier they become.

At lower levels of government, in my experience, it’s quite different. I also accompanied His Holiness when he visited the city council of Boulder, Colorado, and those people were quite smart and remarkable. If the council members met the members of Congress, I wonder how they could communicate with each other. The congressmen were
quite
amazing. And judging from that, imagine what a president would be like!

That seems to be the setting-sun idea of hierarchy. As you go higher, you don’t even have to think. You just go bananas. By contrast, that should give you some idea of how to join heaven and earth. I would like to encourage the sitting practice of meditation, because I would like to see that what
we
do in the Shambhala world is definitely genuine. That genuineness has to come from you. I might present something genuine, but you might switch it into something else. Through the practice of meditation, you can make sure that the high standards of genuineness are kept properly and fully. At the same time, please enjoy yourselves.

A luncheon at the U.S. Capitol in 1980 in honor of His Holiness the Sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa. Senator Charles Percy is being introduced to His Eminence Jamgön Kongtrül Rinpoche by the Karmapa. Chögyam Trungpa is shown to His Holiness’s left, and the Tibetan translator is standing to His Holiness’s right. The logo of the Karmapa can be seen on the banner behind them
.