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

As far as we [my wife and I] are concerned, even when we are at home, we don’t take time off at all. We are constantly working. From the moment when we wake up to when we go to sleep, there is always a working basis, working with others, being involved in working with you people, working with the community at large, and working with ourselves. We don’t regard this place [the Kalapa Court] as a place to flop or relax. As far as we are concerned, being at home is also discipline for us. . . .

The traditional concept of a palace or court, from a fairy tale point of view, is that everything is heavenly; everything is sweet, wonderful, and rich. There are always beautiful things on display, sweet music is always heard, there are nice, sweet things to eat, and in this comfortable environment the kings and queens indulge themselves. The real evidence of the past and the present is that court situations are not like that. Even if there was such a situation, it was short lived. When the ruling people, kings or queens, begin to indulge in their pleasure, the result is quite obvious. They begin to neglect their subjects, the rulers feel stupid and uninspired, and many of them get very bored.

We are trying to create a different kind of court situation altogether, which is very important. To make that possible, your participation is wonderful, and your help is needed very much. It is a question of helping each other: us helping you and you helping us. So it’s teamwork, in that way. The purpose of the Court is to manifest and realize the notion of enlightened society. Obviously there will be a lot of challenges for you. You need a good attention span, good memory, a good eye for details, and coordination of mind and body together. These qualities are not foreign to you, since you are Buddhist practitioners. We emphasize mindfulness in situations, and awareness follows naturally in what we are doing.
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The change in Rinpoche’s lifestyle signaled a marked transition within the community altogether. As the early Buddhist era gave way to the Shambhala era, which spanned the last ten years of his life (1976-1987), not only did Rinpoche change the way that he lived, but his students also made radical changes in their appearance and lifestyle. Longhaired, counterculture dishevelment gave way to business suits and chic professional dress. Many students changed their occupations, going into business or becoming professionals, whether in medicine, psychology, education, art, administration, or one of many other fields. People settled down and had families, bought homes, and became involved in community service.

On one hand, the changes in the community were simply a reflection of what was happening on a larger scale in American society: the counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s was reintegrating with the mainstream. In many respects, Rinpoche was attuned to these larger patterns in American society and merely pushed the point a little earlier with his students. Most of them donned their first suit or conservative dress for the first visit of His Holiness the Karmapa in 1974, and after that, the suit and dress or pantsuit became the fashion of choice for Rinpoche’s lectures and for weddings, parties, and other social events. But changes in how one lived were about more than conformity with the dominant milieu within the society. Rinpoche was training his students to be awake. The reference points for how to wake up changed over the years, but the goal and his intense dedication to it never faltered. When an environment became too comfortable for people and they could take it for granted, the rug was sure to be pulled out soon. When Rinpoche came to America in the early ’70s, there was an aliveness and an edge to the counterculture he entered, which he thrived on. When that culture was losing its vibrancy and was becoming a caricature of itself—a kind of hippie establishment or some kind of comfortable counterculture nest—he introduced a new culture: the Shambhala world. Within that world, waking up, not comfort, was still the point. In his last years, he shook things up again, by inviting his students to move to Nova Scotia, where he thought that both the Buddhist and Shambhala teachings would thrive. He relocated the headquarters of Vajradhatu, his international organization, there, and he himself made the move just months before his death. In the years following, hundreds of his students left the stability and familiarity of their lives elsewhere to start over in Nova Scotia.

Returning to 1976, having launched the Kalapa Court and the beginning of the Shambhala era, Rinpoche, never one to stand still for long, left Boulder a few months later, early in 1977, and went into a year’s retreat in Charlemont, Massachusetts. He kept in touch with what was going on in Boulder and his other centers, but he stayed out of the day-to-day business. He left his newly appointed Regent at the center of the Shambhala mandala, living in the Kalapa Court, and left his students to figure out what all this meant in his absence. While he was away, he worked on revising a commentary to the first Shambhala text he had received, he wrote another book on Shambhala principles, and he designed many elements of the Shambhala world, including flags, banners, and medals for exemplary service.

While in retreat, Rinpoche also asked a group of about fifty senior students to initiate Shambhala Training, a program to present the Shambhala teachings on warriorship and to introduce meditation to a large, nonsectarian audience. A few years ago, I was asked to write a short memoir about this period. These were my reminiscences of this time:

Our teacher decided to make 1977 his year of retreat, to see how we would do in his absence. While he was away on retreat, living in an old farmhouse in Charlemont, Massachusetts, and receiving frequent updates . . . he asked a group of students to initiate Shambhala Training, a secular approach to meditation designed to bring the Shambhala teachings—which he had begun presenting to us in 1976—on warriorship, basic goodness, and Great Eastern Sun vision to a whole new audience. In essence, he challenged us to present what we had learned from him and from the practice of meditation in a fresh and dynamic fashion. He was also challenging us to let go of some of our Buddhist chauvinism and to reach beyond our comfortable reference points in order to help others.

At that time, a lot of Buddhist and vajrayana jargon had caught on with Rinpoche’s Buddhist students. We talked about becoming bodhisattvas, developing maitri and karuna, practicing shamatha and vipashyana, experiencing mahamudra, maha ati, sampannakrama, and you-name-it Sanskritisms. If we were asked why we practiced or what Buddhism was about, a stream of foreign words often issued forth from our lips. And we were full of ourselves, sure that we were the best of the best of the new American breed of Buddhists. In some ways, we were! We were riding on the coattails of a man who cut a powerful swath through the American continent. He spoke amazing English; we mimicked and often spoke pidgin Sanskrit or fractured phrases that we didn’t fully understand. He exuded brilliant confidence; we puffed up and often exuded hot air. I’m poking fun here, but I don’t mean to belittle the students—rather I’m trying to clarify why it was so helpful and powerful
to us
for Rinpoche to introduce Shambhala Training, forcing us to speak English and to speak it from the heart.

About fifty of us living in Boulder, Colorado, were selected as potential directors for Shambhala Training. Twice a week we met to rehearse talks and discuss strategy. We were told by our fellow student-leaders to be as overwhelming as possible and to belt out the reasons why the Shambhala teachings would be great for everyone to embrace. We talked a lot about confidence and dignity, and dignity and confidence . . . at a fevered loud pitch. Then, after weeks of practicing, . . . we launched actual weekend programs.

Rinpoche got reports. They were not good. After a few months of floundering and bluster, punctuated by occasional brilliance and true heart, we received a letter from retreat. To my mind, it still contains some of the best advice on teaching—and on being—that I’ve ever received. He punctured us and left us soft and vulnerable, ready to hear the authentic Shambhala teachings. In my experience, this letter marked the
real
beginning of the Shambhala training. He wrote:

. . . People have been told to create Shambhala Training but instead they are just groping about and mimicking Shambhala Training. . . . As we know, the term “confidence” doesn’t mean anything if we can’t be sane in accordance with the buddhist doctrine. . . . We should pause for a moment and think about how fortunate we are to have the opportunity to bring about the Great Eastern Sun vision. We shouldn’t constantly worry about our presentation of Shambhala Training. First we should appreciate how fortunate we ourselves are; then we will have something to say, some message to proclaim to the world. . . .

Shambhala Training can become a very powerful landmark in history only if we have a message to proclaim—and so far we don’t have any message. All that we have said is that we are going to be secular rather than spiritual. This is a weak point which will cause us to cultivate jerks, artificial people who don’t want to sit, who instead want to proclaim their personalities and say that they have ultimate confidence because their ambition to be powerful and sybaritic people is accommodated by their pseudo-spirituality. . . . Buddhism going secular is the best possible news for those people who just want to indulge themselves. . . .

We have to develop wholesomeness in the Shambhala Training administration, and our people have to be genuine—otherwise there will be no possibility of creating an enlightened society. Genuine means being without deception and without aggression. Genuine individuals do not build up their own personality cults, but are purely dedicated to their own mutual sanity.
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It seemed particularly appropriate to include an excerpt in the introduction to Volume Eight from something written in such a frank manner by Chögyam Trungpa. In the introduction to the last volume, I mentioned that Trungpa Rinpoche loved the smile of reality, and that beyond that, he showed that this smile has teeth. One cannot miss this quality in the excerpt from his letter concerning the early problems with Shambhala Training. He meant business; with Shambhala Training he wanted to do something genuine and far-reaching, and not something superficial, puffed up—or timid. Obviously, these words were written to have a big effect. They stopped people in their tracks and made them think twice about what they were doing. He created a huge gap in people’s minds, which provided the space, when he returned from retreat, to proclaim further teachings and to demonstrate the approach that he wanted his students to take when they themselves taught.

Although there were significant problems with how the programs were conducted in his absence, quite a lot of groundwork had been accomplished during Rinpoche’s retreat, in terms of the form and format of the Shambhala Training program. The structure of Shambhala Training had been established as a five-level program that explored the principles of warriorship and Shambhala vision within the context of weekend meditation intensives. The structure of each weekend mixed the practice of meditation with talks by a director, discussion groups, and individual interviews. This structure remains the foundation of Shambhala Training today.

When Rinpoche came out of retreat in late 1977, he began working closely with the program and the student-directors, giving a series of talks to the directors that demonstrated the genuineness that he found lacking in their efforts during his absence. People were soft and receptive to these teachings, having been somewhat shocked, in a positive sense, by his communication from retreat. Trungpa Rinpoche worked with the chief administrators and senior teachers in Shambhala Training to develop a threefold logic for each weekend of the program. These logics for levels One through Five, which Chögyam Trungpa set forth in early 1978, have remained intact and virtually unchanged for the last twenty-five years. There have been occasional movements to revamp the curriculum, but none of them have succeeded in dislodging the threefold logics that make up the core of the Shambhala Training curriculum.
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In addition to the five levels, Rinpoche also developed a program of more advanced study for his own instructors and later for students who completed the core curriculum. In the summers of 1978 and ’79, he invited directors of Shambhala Training from around North America to come to Boulder for conferences in which he presented further talks on the Shambhala teachings and how to present them to others.
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In the year following his retreat, Rinpoche took many bold steps. A few months after returning, he received the second Shambhala terma text,
The Letter of the Black Ashe,
parts of which are quoted in
Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior
. In the summer of 1978, he convened the first Magyal Pomra Encampment at Rocky Mountain Dharma Center, a gathering of members of the Dorje Kasung, or Vajra Command Protectors, known in the early days as the Vajra Guards. This group came into existence in 1974 to provide security and service for the visit of His Holiness the sixteenth Gyalwang Karmapa to America. The Vajra Guards did provide excellent service to His Holiness, but even from the inception of this organization, the point of it was not purely to provide a convenient service to VIPs. Rather, it was established by Chögyam Trungpa to provide another vehicle for meditation-in-action practice among his students. As he said in an address to the Vajra Guards: