The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Eight (54 page)

Please enjoy this book just as you would enjoy sitting outside early in the morning, soaking up the warm rays of the Great Eastern Sun.

T
HE
S
AKYONG,
J
AMGÖN
M
IPHAM
R
INPOCHE

1
.
Parinirvana
(Skt.): Roughly synonymous with
nirvana
,
parinirvana
refers to a state of complete liberation, enlightenment, or freedom. Parinirvana is often equated with liberation after death, but it may also refer to liberation during life. The term is sometimes used to refer to the death of a monk or nun.

Afterword

S
HAMBHALA:
The Sacred Path of the Warrior
was first published in 1984. Although its author, Chögyam Trungpa, was one of the best-known Tibetan Buddhist teachers in the West,
Shambhala
is not a book about Buddhism. While drawing on the heritage of Buddhist meditation practice, it presents a unique path for awakening based on the Shambhala teachings of warriorship.

Chögyam Trungpa, Dorje Dradül of Mukpo, died on April 4, 1987, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Between his death and this writing, more than a dozen books by him on various aspects of the Buddhist path have been published, using the audiotapes of his lectures as source material. However, this is the first new book by him on the Shambhala teachings.
Great Eastern Sun: The Wisdom of Shambhala
was the Dorje Dradül’s provisional title for his first book on the Shambhala teachings, but it was later changed. However, it was the perfect title for the present volume. A friend of mine, Rick Fields, once said that Chögyam Trungpa was the master of the delayed punch line. This is certainly one of those times.

Although
Great Eastern Sun
is not primarily a book about Buddhism, its author was, as noted above, one of the great Tibetan Buddhist teachers of the twentieth century. For readers unfamiliar with his life and work, some biographical information may be helpful.

B
ACKGROUND

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche was born in 1939 in a cowshed on a high plateau in eastern Tibet, in a region where many people have never seen a tree. While still a babe in arms, he was recognized as an incarnate lama, or tulku. With his parents’ blessings, he was taken to the Surmang monasteries, where he was enthroned as the abbot and the eleventh Trungpa Tulku, or the eleventh incarnation of the Trungpa lineage. Trungpa Rinpoche’s enthronement was conducted by His Holiness the sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa, the head of the Karma Kagyü lineage, who figures prominently in this book.
¹
At a later date, he was given the name
Chögyam,
which means “Dharma Ocean” or “Ocean of Teachings.”
Rinpoche
is an honorific title, which means “precious jewel.”

Trungpa Rinpoche’s root guru, or main teacher, was a great ecumenical scholar and teacher, Jamgön Kongtrül of Sechen. Among Trungpa Rinpoche’s spiritual mentors, two other figures were of particular importance: Khenpo Gangshar and His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, who also receives mention in this volume.
²
Like many of the great lamas of his generation, Chögyam Trungpa was forced by the invasion of the Chinese to flee Tibet in 1959. He tells the story of his escape in
Born in Tibet,
his first book, published in 1966. Upon successfully reaching India, he was appointed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama to be the spiritual adviser to the Young Lamas School in Dalhousie, and he remained in India until 1963.

In 1963, Trungpa Rinpoche traveled to England, where he became the first Tibetan to study at Oxford University, in St. Anthony’s College. He also was quite proud to be the first Tibetan ever to become a British subject. He studied the English language in Oxford; attended courses on philosophy, history, and religion; took up flower arranging; began to write poetry; and attracted his first Western disciples. In 1966, he was given a center for the practice and study of meditation in Scotland, which he named Samye Ling, or Samye Place, Samye having been the first monastery established in Tibet. Although many Westerners came to study with him there and he was able to present an exposition of the Buddhist teachings, he felt a growing dissatisfaction with the spiritual climate that surrounded him.

In 1968, he visited the Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan, at the invitation of the queen. While there, he conducted a ten-day retreat at Tagtsang—the holy cave where the founder of Buddhism in Tibet, Guru Rinpoche (or Padmasambhava), meditated before entering Tibet. After several days in retreat, Trungpa Rinpoche had a vision of Guru Rinpoche and received
³
a sacred practice text,
The Sadhana of Mahamudra,
which is connected with overcoming spiritual, psychological, and physical materialism—the three lords of materialism who rule Western society in this dark age.

Soon after returning to England, while behind the wheel of a car, Trungpa Rinpoche blacked out and crashed into a building. He survived but was paralyzed on his left side. He remarked on this event as a pivotal occurrence in his life. It woke him to the dangers of self-deception and convinced him to remove his monastic robes and become a lay practitioner—thus removing a layer of distance between himself and Western students.

Shortly after this, he proposed to Diana Judith Pybus, a young woman of sixteen who became his wife, much to the consternation of both her family and Trungpa Rinpoche’s Tibetan colleagues. Life was extremely difficult for Trungpa Rinpoche and Diana at Samye Ling. There was anger and confusion, not only about the marriage but about the general direction in which Trungpa Rinpoche was headed. Some did not like the intimacy that Trungpa Rinpoche was establishing with Westerners and felt, I imagine, bewilderment and concern that he was heading into dangerous and uncharted territory. Students at Samye Ling took sides in the conflict, and it ended very badly, with Trungpa Rinpoche and Diana leaving for North America, somewhat at her urging. Without her support during this period, it is hard to imagine that Rinpoche would have survived the ordeal.

After a brief stay in Montreal, Chögyam and Diana Mukpo were admitted to the United States and went to live at a rural meditation center in Vermont, to which Rinpoche and his students gave the name Tail of the Tiger.
⁴
From there, his buddha activity fanned out across the continent, at a dizzying pace. Between 1970, when he arrived in North America, and April 4, 1987, when he died in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Trungpa Rinpoche gave more than five thousand recorded talks (to audiences that together number in the hundreds of thousands); founded innumerable organizations, including more than one hundred Buddhist centers for the practice and study of meditation; and attracted more than three thousand committed Western students who became advanced practitioners of the vajrayana, or tantric, teachings of Tibetan Buddhism. He taught many thousands of people to meditate, and his books have sold in the millions of copies in more than a dozen languages.

He was a pioneer, one of the first Tibetan Buddhist teachers in North America, preceding by some years, and indeed facilitating, the later visits by His Holiness the Karmapa, His Holiness Khyentse Rinpoche, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and many others. In the United States, he found a spiritual kinship with many of the Zen masters who were already presenting Buddhist meditation. In the very early days, he particularly connected with Suzuki Roshi, the founder of the Zen Center in San Francisco. In later years, he was close with Kobun Chino Roshi and Bill Kwong Roshi in northern California, with Maezumi Roshi, the founder of the Los Angeles Zen Center, and with Eido Roshi in New York.

Trungpa Rinpoche was also an ecumenical leader. In 1974, he founded the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. The institute attracted religious and spiritual teachers from numerous disciplines. For example, the first summer at Naropa, Rinpoche invited Ram Dass, a very popular exponent of Hindu spirituality, to teach there. His book,
Be Here Now,
was all the rage in the early seventies. Buddhist teachers of many traditions and lineages lectured at Naropa, and Trungpa Rinpoche also initiated a Christian-Buddhist conference through Naropa that brought together contemplative practitioners from both of these great world religions.

Chögyam Trungpa’s ecumenicism was cultural as well as religious. He attracted poets, playwrights, dancers, musicians, photographers, painters—artists of all sorts, some famous, some obscure, many very talented. His legacy is visible in the programs that showcase the arts at Naropa.

Early black-and-white videotapes of Trungpa Rinpoche’s lectures at Naropa provide us with a window of sorts back in time. In the early to mid-1970s, many of Chögyam Trungpa’s Buddhist students and probably a majority of those interested in alternative approaches to spirituality were young, unkempt, longhaired hippies who had rejected the mainstream of American society. Many had radical political ideas and were Vietnam War protesters or aspiring Hindu yogis with long, matted hair and malas, or rosaries, around their necks chanting
OM.
If you view tapes from this era, Trungpa Rinpoche looks quite normal. While not sporting a suit and tie, he was dressed in attractive and colorful silk and cotton shirts that today would be quite elegant. In contrast, shots that pan the audience reveal a crowd of twenty-something flower children—a notable contrast to today’s staid yet trendy, well-heeled, and often middle-aged meditators. Some of the emphasis in the Shambhala teachings presented here on proprieties of dress, the importance of a clean-cut approach, the value of personal discipline, and acceptance of basic hierarchy can partly be ascribed to the “raw” material that the author was working with and the tenor of the times.

T
HE
O
RIGINS OF THE
S
HAMBHALA
T
RAINING

Given all that he had already done—in just six years in North America—it was certainly enterprising and rather surprising when, in 1977, Chögyam Trungpa launched a completely new program, Shambhala Training, to present the practice of meditation to a broad audience with diverse spiritual and religious affiliations. The Shambhala teachings and the creation of the Shambhala world were his deep and abiding passion for the last ten years of his life.

His interest in Shambhala did not arise suddenly. His connection dated from his training in Tibet, where he studied various texts related to this tradition. In fact, when he was fleeing the Chinese across the Himalayas, he was working on a manuscript about Shambhala, which was lost during the escape. However, not much was said about Shambhala during his early years in North America. Then, in 1976, it burst onto the scene: he began receiving texts
⁵
related to the Shambhala teachings and began to introduce his senior students to this path. From that grew the idea of an expansive program of practice and study to be presented to a Western audience on a large scale.

With the help of many of his senior Buddhist students, Chögyam Trungpa presented the Shambhala teachings through a series of weekend programs, the five levels of the Shambhala Training program. The first four levels were taught by Trungpa Rinpoche’s students, with his chief student and Western dharma heir, the Vajra Regent Ösel Tendzin, presenting the fourth level. The early levels introduced the practice of meditation and the fundamental teachings of Shambhala warriorship. For the first six years, Trungpa Rinpoche taught the fifth and final level himself, and it is these talks that form the body of this book.

The exposition of the Shambhala teachings also led Chögyam Trungpa to Nova Scotia, one of the Maritime provinces on the east coast of Canada. He found a seat for his Buddhist work in Boulder, Colorado, where he established the Naropa Institute and Vajradhatu, the international headquarters for the network of Buddhist centers he founded. But with the introduction of the Shambhala teachings, he began to look for a new seat and, I think, a place where the Shambhala world would flourish. He found that spot in this unlikely corner of the continent. One of the last great projects of his life was to move his home and the seat of his work to Halifax, the capital of Nova Scotia. Today, Nova Scotia is the headquarters of Shambhala International, the umbrella organization for both Vajradhatu and Shambhala Training, the Buddhist and the Shambhala containers for his teachings.

C
ONTROVERSY AND
G
ENUINENESS

In this brief exposition of his life’s work, it would be an oversight not to mention that Chögyam Trungpa’s life was also controversial. Tremendous movement characterized Trungpa Rinpoche’s life; tremendous energy infused his teaching. As well, his own life was an example of the blending of religious and secular activity that he taught. He was known for his love of drink and women, and the progress of his life was characterized by a number of powerful explosions. The communist Chinese invasion of his country exploded him—and many others—out of Tibet. His accident was another eruption, exploding him out of his robes. Troubles at Samye Ling exploded him out of Britain and brought him to North America. Finally, controversy was linked to Trungpa Rinpoche even after death, due to tragic circumstances surrounding the death of the Vajra Regent Ösel Tendzin.

Certainly, during his lifetime, controversy did not bother Chögyam Trungpa. In fact, he welcomed it. His sense of integrity did not come from outside judgments, and he always felt it was better to let things come out into the open. He was not trying to hide anything.

Unconventional behavior by presumably enlightened teachers is sometimes defended as the teachers’ way of communicating with the samsaric, or confused, world of the students with whom they work. This might be said of Trungpa Rinpoche. I don’t think, however, that he would have used such an argument to explain his behavior. I remember his interchange with a reporter from the
Boulder Daily Camera,
who, in an interview around 1983, asked him about his alleged sexual promiscuity. He replied that, regardless of his personal relationships, he had a love affair with all of his students. He had an extraordinary passion for human beings and a rather outrageous capability to see us from the inside out. He never preached from afar. This was one of his greatest strengths.