The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Eight (42 page)

PHOTO BY U.S. CAPITOL POLICE. FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE SHAMBHALA ARCHIVES.

NINE

How to Cultivate the Great Eastern Sun

Whether you have a good time or a bad time, you should feel sad and delighted at once. That is how to be a real, decent human being, and it is also connected with the Buddhist principle of longing, or devotion. Longing is the hunger for sacredness. When you begin to feel you’re too much in the secular world, you long for a sacred world. Therefore, you feel sad, and you open yourself up that way. When you feel so sad and tender, that also brings ideas for how to uplift the rest of the world. Joining sadness and joy is the only mechanism that brings the vision of the Great Eastern Sun.

T
O
SUMMARIZE OUR DISCUSSION SO FAR:
developing the ground of basic goodness is based on the idea of trust. Trust brings patience, freedom from laziness, and faith, which automatically lead to renunciation. At that point, we become quite clear as to what to accept and what to reject in order to care for others, and we begin to realize the merit of the sitting practice of meditation. Developing discrimination about what to accept and what to reject results in gentleness and also in realizing that the king of basic goodness joins heaven and earth together. Therefore, we find ourselves able to work with synchronizing mind and body together.

The fruition that we have now reached is connected with
know-how
—knowing how to go about practicing all of these lofty principles. We have to know how to act or manifest fully. We are not going to spend unnecessary time philosophizing or legitimizing the Shambhala principles. Time is short, and the situation is urgent. So we don’t have time to discuss metaphysics, but we do have time to discuss know-how, how to do it. I would like to share that particular wisdom with all of you. In fact, I’m delighted to do so.

Working with yourself always involves a journey. As part of the journey, every one of us has to go through our own garbage. Some of it is real garbage, which should be discarded, and some of it is organic garbage, which can be recycled. One important point is that, when you’re going through your garbage and sorting things out, you have to admit to yourself that you are not being a 100 percent ideal student. You improvise, you stick with your own neurosis sometimes, and you are cheating yourself, somewhat. As long as that is acknowledged, it is not regarded as absolutely evil at all. How much of the journey is genuine and how much of it is hypocritical is very hard to sort out. As long as you just keep doing it, it’s fine. It only becomes problematic if you try to philosophize or rationalize the whole thing.

As far as the Shambhala principles are concerned, we don’t believe in original sin. You are not fundamentally condemned. In fact, quite the opposite. Fundamentally, you are good. In spite of your hypocrisy, you are capable of being good, and what you express will be good as well. It will work out fine.

In discussing know-how, our larger theme is letting go: knowing how to let go, what to let go, and how to relax in our world. In many cases, you’ve been given guidelines for how to relate with yourself and how to relate with others, but you haven’t been given any guidelines for how to experience freedom. The expression of freedom has to come from you. Letting go is not being purely carefree in a sloppy style. You have to evaluate what portion of discipline should be maintained in the name of integrity and what portion of discipline should be relaxed. So letting go is still a training process. At the same time, it contains fruition-level logic.

The moment that we find ourselves as human beings—which takes place in the second after our birth—we realize we can cry and we can breathe because we are free from our mother’s womb. From that time onward, we constantly exercise our individuality. We are no longer personally attached to our mother’s umbilical cord, although there may still be emotional attachment, an emotional umbilical cord that still ties us to our mother. Nonetheless, as we grow, passing through our infancy, our teenage years, our youth, through middle age, and slowly into old age, we see ourselves stepping further and further away from our parents, further and further away from that kind of attachment. We are made into adult human beings purely because we are free from mother and father. We are made into individuals who can function independently. At the same time, we’re encouraged to have a decent attitude toward others. All human beings share having a mother, a father, brothers and sisters. We should have a decent relationship with humanity.

The Shambhala society is very much concerned with what happens when we depart from the womb and regroup into the products of the womb, so to speak. We are asking people to remain clan-oriented, family-oriented. On the other hand, we’re asking you
not
to hang on to the neurosis or the impetus that exists in being the child-of-somebody. We have to separate ourselves; at the same time, we have to come together in comradeship, working with human society. That is contradictory in itself, but it is at the same time full of wisdom.

If we look at the organization of society in the past—particularly among such ethnic groups as the Indian society, Jewish society, Polish society, Chinese society, Japanese society, and Tibetan society—we find that food was very important. The stove was very important. Cooking these days is too modernized. In the old days, people sat around the fire watching the pot boil, or watching the stove and putting firewood in it, sitting around in the kitchen. The stove is a very important part of civilization, a main sanctuary, actually. A lot of Americans probably have no idea about this, but we, as ethnic groups, understand.

How to be a family person, how to be a domestic person, how to relate with the wisdom of ancestral society, and how to worship it are not a product of neurosis or a lack of sophisticated modernization. People don’t hang around the kitchen stove purely because their society is not modernized enough. Once you have electricity, you don’t have to hang around the kitchen to keep warm or stoke the stove. Once you have central heating and air-conditioning, you don’t have any central reference point anymore. It’s interesting that the focus of family and livelihood has shifted so much. In the early days, that focus was based on the pretense of survival, but it was more than that. People developed their national family shrine around their mama and papa. The sacredness and the traditions that developed were handed down by your grandmother and grandfather. You received know-how from them; they taught you how to take care of yourself.

In the old days, before there were hospitals, naturally the grandmother came along and helped deliver the babies—knowing exactly what to do at every step. Then, after that, medical research incorporated the grandmother’s wisdom, and hospitals and maternity wards developed. Grandmothers are no longer necessary, and they are probably parked in an old-age home. They don’t have any role to play. The only thing for them to do is to come along and see that their grandchildren have been born and how nice they look. So the social system has changed that way.

When we talk about letting go, we are not talking about letting go of tradition. We are talking about letting go of the modern trappings that work against ideal human society. I am not particularly suggesting that we should develop the medieval old-fashioned style all over again, but I am talking about how things could be done better with some kind of effort, energy, and wisdom. One of the key points is to look at how people conduct themselves in traditional societies, such as the classical Jewish tradition, the classical Chinese tradition, and the classical Indian tradition. People in those societies have learned very simply how to choose a pot, how to cook in it, how to wash it, and how to put it away. It is the same principle as in the tradition of the Japanese tea ceremony. You might ask, “What’s the big deal about learning how to use a pot, how to boil water in it, how to control the temperature of the fire, how to clean up after yourself? It’s not going to change the presidential elections or anything like that.” On the one hand, paying attention to those kinds of details is not particularly an earthshaking experience. On the other hand, it
might
be the key to the presidential elections.

Knowing how to relate with things simply—knowing how to handle a utensil, how to relate with water and fire, how to relate with vegetables—is normally regarded as something anybody can pick up on. But in today’s society, people have a very difficult time knowing how to be natural and how to be precise. How to use an object properly and fully is complex. It’s not necessarily complex on a scientific level. We’re talking about the commonsense level, but common sense implies a lot of subtleties and sophistication as well.

M
INDFULNESS AND
A
WARENESS

According to the Buddhist tradition, how you work with details is a twofold process. The first part is
the mindfulness of things as they are
. You have a pot or a teacup—whatever object you have. Mindfulness is how to work properly with those things. The second aspect is
awareness,
which is the totality of the situation. It is how your mindfulness is reflected in what you’ve done. Together, mindfulness and awareness are the first category or principle of letting go.

This may seem like a very simple, ordinary issue. Nonetheless, as far as the Shambhala wisdom is concerned, it is a very big issue: it is how to be a person, how to be a fully human being. Mindfulness first and awareness afterward bring what is known as
decency
. If you have mindfulness and awareness, you will be a decent person. Letting go does not mean getting wild or being a freak who can “let go” of everything. Rather, we are saying that, if you let yourself go fully and acknowledge your existence as you are, as a human being, then you will find yourself paying more attention to details, to the fullest extent possible. So from mindfulness and awareness, you become a decent person who knows how to relate with things as they are. That is the first category of letting go.

W
INDHORSE

The second category is quite an interesting one. Having experienced letting go and having achieved a decent household, or a decent living situation, and a decent relationship with each other, we find that there is an uplifted quality that automatically exists in our lives. You could call it sacred existence, which is automatically created because of your mindfulness and awareness. We pay attention to details: we wash the dishes, we clean our room, we press our shirts, and we fold the sheets. When we pay attention to everything around us, the overall effect is upliftedness. The Shambhalian term for that is
windhorse
. The wind principle is very airy and powerful.
Horse
means that the energy is ridable. That particular airy and sophisticated energy, so clean and full of decency, can be ridden. You don’t just have a bird flying by itself in the sky, but you have something to ride on. Such energy is fresh and exuberant but, at the same time, ridable. Therefore, it is known as windhorse.

Windhorse is also the idea of harnessing or riding on basic goodness. The wind of goodness is fresh and free from obstructions. Therefore, you can ride on it. So another term for riding on basic goodness is
riding on windhorse
. The experience of windhorse is that, because everything is so decent, so real, and so proper, therefore, it is workable. One begins to actually
experience
basic goodness, not on a philosophical level, but on a physical level. You begin to see how you as a human being can create basic goodness on the spot, fully, ideally.

Arising from that, we develop ideal heart. When we talk about “having heart,” it usually refers to a military concept of bravery or gallantry, or it refers to a loving attitude within your family or domestic situation. But the Shambhala concept of having a heart is that, because you are able to ride on windhorse, everything is a projection of that uplifted decency. Having witnessed the full expression of basic goodness, we develop a real heart of genuineness.

J
OINING
T
OGETHER
S
ADNESS AND
J
OY TO
B
RING THE
G
REAT
E
ASTERN
S
UN

The third category of letting go is
sadness and joy joined together
. Ordinarily, when you talk about feeling sad, it means that you are so hurt; you feel so bad. When you talk about feeling joyous, it means that you feel so excited and uplifted. Here you develop sadness and joy at once. You begin to feel tender—extremely tender and sad. When you fall in love for the first time, thinking about your lover, you have delightful ideas, but at the same time, you feel somewhat sad. It’s not purely that your lover can’t be with you or that your lover is long distant, but you feel tender even when you’re together. On the spot, sharing the same room or the same bed, when you look at your lover, it feels wonderful. At the same time, it feels very touchy and sad. It is
wonderful
—in fact, it is ideal—that human emotions are expressed that way. When you feel sad, therefore, you feel great. Hot and cold, sweet and sour, at once, take place.

According to the Shambhala principles, you should feel that way with
everything
you do. Whether you have a good time or a bad time, you should feel sad and delighted at once. That is how to be a real, decent human being, and it is also connected with the Buddhist principle of longing, or devotion. Longing is the hunger for sacredness. When you begin to feel you’re too much in the secular world, you long for a sacred world. Therefore, you feel sad, and you open yourself up that way. When you feel so sad and tender, that also brings ideas for how to uplift the rest of the world. Joining sadness and joy is the only mechanism that brings the vision of the Great Eastern Sun.