The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Five (3 page)

Can you imagine seeing such people and receiving and talking to them?

Ordinarily, if you told such stories to anybody, they would think you were a nut case;

But, in this case, I have to insist that I am not a nut case;

Don’t you think meeting such sweet friends is worthwhile and rewarding?

I would say meeting them is meeting with remarkable men and women:

Let us believe that such things do exist.
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In that spirit, it may be valuable to explore the life of Naropa and how it might apply personally to oneself. Not only does Trungpa Rinpoche present the outrageous qualities of Naropa’s life, but he also draws analogies to our own experience. Of Naropa’s trials, he writes, “these twelve experiences that Naropa went through were a continuous unlearning process. To begin with, he had to unlearn, to undo the cultural facade. Then he had to undo the philosophical and emotional facade. Then he had to step out and become free altogether. This whole process was a very painful and very deliberate operation. This does not apply to Naropa and his time alone. This could also be something very up-to-date. This operation is applicable as long as we have conflicting emotions and erroneous beliefs about reality” (Life of Naropa Seminar I, chapter 3). From that point of view, the story makes good sense. However, on another level, it remains utterly outrageous. If we look at most of the stories about the lives of the Tibetan lineage holders—Padmasambhava, Tilopa, Naropa, Marpa, Milarepa, and others—we see that these were people who did not exclude
anything
from their experience. They could, in fact, be quite terrifying in their fearlessness.

In the article “Milarepa: A Warrior’s Life,” which appears in Volume Five, Trungpa Rinpoche includes the last instructions given by the yogi Milarepa to his students, as he lay on his deathbed: “Reject all that increases ego-clinging, or inner poison, even if it appears good. Practice all that benefits others, even if it appears bad. This is the true way of dharma. . . . Act wisely and courageously according to your innate insight, even at the cost of your life.” The great forefathers of the lineage were willing to work with whatever might come up. In fact, they delighted in embodying the most extreme aspects of human experience, if in doing so they could help others. From their point of view, they were not striving to be outrageous or even helpful; their behavior was just the natural expression of what is.

This is the training that Chögyam Trungpa had himself received. A story from his early life illustrates how he put this training into effect, in extreme as well as ordinary circumstances. When Tibet was invaded by the communist Chinese, he had to flee the country over the Himalayas to avoid imprisonment and probable death. Before he set out on his journey to India, he heard of people being tortured and killed; his monastery was sacked; there was a price on his head. The journey out of Tibet lasted ten months—an almost unimaginably long time to be trekking on foot over the Himalayas (without modern mountain gear, jeeps, or thermal underwear, one might add), constantly in fear of being discovered by the Chinese, while facing extraordinary physical difficulties, crossing one high pass after another, fording roaring rivers in the dead of winter, reduced in the end to boiling saddlebags for food.
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When Trungpa Rinpoche and his party reached the Brahmaputra River, close to the end of the journey, they had to make their crossing at night in somewhat unstable boats made of leather. Someone in a nearby town had alerted the Chinese that a group of Tibetans was going across that night, and the Chinese ambushed Rinpoche’s party. Out of more than two hundred traveling together, fewer than two dozen made it across. Trungpa Rinpoche luckily was one of those who did. Reaching the other side while hearing gunshots in the background, he and most of the remaining band hid in some holly trees until the next night. In
Born in Tibet
, he wrote, “We dared not open our food pack and there was no water. We could only moisten our lips with the hoar frost.”
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While they were hiding, hoping to reconnect with some of the rest of the party who they thought had escaped capture, they could hear and sometimes see the Chinese searching for them. Their clothes had been soaked during the crossing, and the weather was so cold that their clothing became frozen to their skin, so it crackled when they moved. Later that day, as it became dark, they climbed for five hours to reach shelter in some fir trees above the village. Hiding in the cover of the trees, after everything they had been through, Rinpoche and his attendant quietly discussed whether or not their experiences were a test of their meditation and how their meditative equanimity would fare if they were captured the next day by the Chinese. Several members of the party made jokes about doing the yoga of inner heat to try to keep warm. Rinpoche and others found quite a lot of humor in this dire situation.

This is not exactly a crazy wisdom story, except that it is almost inconceivable that, faced with the loss of family and friends, with the prospect of capture and possible torture or death, Chögyam Trungpa and his companions—many of whom were also highly trained practitioners—approached their experience with evenhandedness and humor and seemingly very little fear. That in itself is rather crazy but also seems quite wise, and it does remind one of the lineage forefathers and their outrageous journeys to freedom.

When the going gets tough, these are people you might want to have on your team. In that vein, it is worth looking twice at what Chögyam Trungpa has to say about the life of these great Buddhist adepts. It is indeed applicable to things we may face today—or tomorrow. Their compassion was compassion for the toughest times. It may be just what the world needs now.

Both
Crazy Wisdom
and
Illusion’s Game
are the work of a great storyteller. In his first five or six years in North America, Chögyam Trungpa taught more than forty seminars on the life and teachings of the Kagyü forefathers. (The life of Padmasambhava was a less common topic. In addition to the two seminars that were edited for
Crazy Wisdom
, he presented one other seminar specifically on the life and teachings of Padmasambhava.) He also gave several seminars on his own teacher, Jamgön Kongtrül, and on the lineage of the Trungpa tulkus. In seminars on other topics, Rinpoche often would bring up a story about Tilopa, Naropa, Marpa, Milarepa, or Gampopa to illustrate a point he was making. These stories are included in
Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
and other popular books. When he told these tales, you felt that he knew these people; he definitely seemed to be on a first-name basis with them. And like any good father telling his children about their grandparents and great-grandparents, one point of his storytelling was to make the younger generation feel close to the ancestors and the ancestral wisdom. He never failed to make those in the audience feel that they were part of or just about to join this lineage of awakened mind.

The Life of Marpa the Translator
continues the theme of perilous journeys and extreme trials on the path to realization. Marpa was the chief disciple of the Indian guru Naropa, whose search for enlightenment is the subject of
Illusion’s Game.
Marpa was born and lived in southeastern Tibet. He made three journeys to India, filled with obstacles and difficult tests of his understanding and devotion. In India, Marpa obtained the teachings that form the core of the Kagyü tradition, and he translated many of these Indian teachings into the Tibetan language. Marpa’s lifestyle has some parallels to those of modern students, in that he was a married householder with a number of children. He owned and operated a farm and outwardly led a rather ordinary and quite secular life. Superficially, at least, it may be easier to connect with Marpa’s approach than with the more austere lifestyles of some of the other lineage holders. Nevertheless, his understanding of and dedication to the dharma were anything but ordinary.

In his preface and colophon to
The Life of Marpa,
Trungpa Rinpoche pays homage to Marpa as the founder of the Kagyü lineage in Tibet. Rinpoche also talks about the process of translating this book and the kinship that he feels with Marpa as one translator to another. Indeed, the translation process that Chögyam Trungpa organized and which continues to this day, more than fifteen years after his death, has proven very successful in furthering the translation of many Tibetan texts into English. The Nālandā Translation Committee, the group of Rinpoche’s students who collaborated with him on the translation of
The Life of Marpa the Translator
, as well as on
The Rain of Wisdom,
is to be congratulated for its excellent work on these and many other projects.

The Nālandā Translation Committee’s first major project for general publication was
The Rain of Wisdom
, a translation of the
Kagyü Gurtso
, songs of the forefathers and lineage holders of the Karma Kagyü lineage. Chögyam Trungpa very much wanted to bring these wonderful songs of devotion and spiritual liberation into the English language. First compiled and edited in the sixteenth century by the eighth Karmapa, Mikyö Dorje, the
Kagyü Gurtso
(literally “The Ocean of Songs of the Kagyü”) was intended to be “the liturgy for a chanting service that would invoke the blessings of the entire Karma Kagyü lineage. With the same aim in mind, successive editions of the
Kagyü Gurtso
have added songs by holders of the Karma Kagyü lineage born after the time of Mikyö Dorje.”
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(In keeping with tradition, the English edition of
The Rain of Wisdom
includes songs by a current lineage holder, Chögyam Trungpa himself.)

In the foreword, Rinpoche talks about how he read the
kagyü Gurtso
as a child and how it made him weep with longing and devotion. This magnificent collection of poetry, with many accompanying stories, still has the power to evoke joy and sadness and the inspiration to practice the heart teachings of the buddhadharma. Trungpa Rinpoche advises readers of this book to “reflect on the value and wisdom which exist in these songs of the lineage in the following ways. First there are the life examples of our forefathers to inspire our devotion. There are songs which help us understand the cause and effect of karma and so illuminate the path to liberation. There are songs which give instruction in relative bodhichitta, so that we can realize the immediacy of our connection to the dharma. Some are songs of mahamudra and transmit how we can actually join together bliss and emptiness through the profound methods of coemergence, melting, and bliss. Other songs show the realization of Buddha in the palm of our hand. . . . Reading these songs or even glancing at a paragraph of this literature always brings timely messages of how to conduct oneself, how to discipline oneself” (Foreword).

Once again, the stories and wisdom of past teachers are not just of historical interest but are presented to inspire our own journey on the path. The courage, majesty, and conviction of the Kagyü gurus are overwhelming. Just reading Trungpa Rinpoche’s introduction and his few songs, one gains a sense of the grandeur and the heartfelt depth of realization contained in
The Rain of Wisdom.

In what may have been purely a fortuitous coincidence, the translation of the
Kagyü Gurtso
was published in 1980, when students of Chögyam Trungpa were celebrating the tenth anniversary of his arrival in North America. The publication of this important text in the English language seems a fitting testament to all that he had accomplished in ten short years. In addition to having produced a brilliant translation, the members of the Nālandā Translation Committee must be acknowledged for the excellent afterword they contributed to the text, as well as for the extensive notes and glossary.