The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Eight (37 page)

Through the sitting practice of meditation, a person becomes well trained in day-to-day mindfulness and awareness. You become very sharp and precise, naturally alert, and very inquisitive and powerful. You develop a clear understanding of the neurosis of the setting sun. Its falsity is seen through, but you do not develop resentment of setting-sun people. There is no one-upmanship. Rather, you develop an understanding of the setting-sun world and a willingness to work with it. In working with others and with yourself, you must be willing to get your fingers dirty. You are willing to taste the situation fully. It’s like being a doctor. As a doctor, you don’t have to get your patients’ diseases in order to help them. But at the same time, a doctor is willing to look at you from the inside out, to go inside you to find your sickness and try to cure you.

There could be dangers, of course. You don’t adopt the setting-sun vision or become involved in its indulgence. But on the other hand, you don’t become arrogant. You can’t say, “We are the Great Eastern Sun people, and we will never touch you.” Seeing how arrogance might develop while you’re working with others brings a sense of humility. Humility, very simply, is the absence of arrogance. When there is no arrogance, you relate with your world as an eye-level situation, without one-upmanship. Because of that, there can be a genuine interchange. Nobody is using their message to put anybody else down, and nobody has to come down or up to the other person’s level. Everything is eye-level.

Humility in the Shambhala tradition also involves some kind of playfulness, which is a sense of humor. At the beginning, communicating with somebody may be somewhat flat, but the sense of humor in the relationship is always lurking around the corner. Instead of approaching things flatly, you may have to scan around to the right and the left, to see whether there are any sparky areas where you can communicate. So humility here is slightly different than in the Catholic tradition. In most religious traditions, you feel humble because of a fear of punishment, pain, and sin. In the Shambhala world, you feel full of it. You feel healthy and good. In fact, you feel proud. Therefore, you feel humility. That’s one of the Shambhala contradictions or, we could say, dichotomies.

Real humility is genuineness. It’s not even honesty. Honesty implies a twist of punishment or negativity—that you have drawn the card for deception, put it in your pocket, and now you’ll draw another card for honesty. But there’s only one genuineness, which is being oneself to the fullest level. The willingness to work with others is what is known as
discriminating awareness,
or prajna in the Buddhist tradition. It is the basic idea of sharpness.
Discriminating
in this case does not mean accepting the good and rejecting the bad. It is seeing light and dark, the disciplined and the undisciplined states of existence, very clearly. Because of that, one knows what to accept and what to reject in one’s personal existence. For instance, one would not indulge in the setting-sun style. One would avoid that. One would take up the Great Eastern Sun style of warriorship. But the discipline of acceptance and rejection is not the product of love and hate.

Renunciation provides a tremendous open space for us. It shows us how to handle ourselves and how to relate with dichotomy and paradox. On the one hand, there is one taste: We have to jump into the world and work with people, sacrificing ourselves as much as we can. On the other hand, we have to stay pure. There is no fundamental contradiction at all, as long as our approach, or first thought, is in contact with the primordial dot. Through the manifestation of the dot in the way of the warrior, we gain the natural discipline of how to stay awake, clear, and elegant. We receive tremendous courage, which we call fearlessness. Then we are able to work with others and handle the world of the setting sun.

There is no such thing as a failed warrior. Either you’re a warrior, or you’re a coward. When the warrior fails, he becomes more and more petrified by his surroundings, and he ceases to be a warrior. He is even afraid of his own sword. On the other hand, not succeeding is the warrior’s staircase to discovering further bravery. Cowardice provides all sorts of challenges. When you become a warrior, fearlessness is your first discovery. Then, the next discovery is the gigantic roadblock of cowardice. You feel petrified, and you want to run away. At that point, the warrior should realize the nature of fearlessness in himself or herself and step on that problem. Rather than frightening you away, cowardice becomes a staircase. That is how a warrior is made out of a coward.

Realizing that the Shambhala wisdom is not purely the product of human concept gives rise to further humility. The Shambhala world is discovered by tuning in to the law of nature. We may complain about the hotness of the summer and the coldness of winter. Nonetheless, in the back of our minds, we accept that there has to be summer, winter, autumn, and spring. In the same way, there is natural hierarchy. Leadership is part of the principle of hierarchy. We are grateful that wisdom is available to us. We feel so fortunate to be students of the Shambhala discipline, to have a student-teacher relationship, and to discover human hierarchy as well. We can participate in the Shambhala world; we can discipline ourselves; we can receive teachings that are being offered by a particular teacher. Such a situation of natural hierarchy almost feels as if it were organized by the four seasons.

After we have had an entire winter, then comes spring. Things begin to thaw, and we can appreciate the little warm breezes of the season. Then, as the plants and flowers begin to blossom, we begin to appreciate the warm summer, with its rain and thundershowers. Then, if we indulge too much, there is autumn, which restricts our summer indulgence. We have to harvest the grain to survive for the rest of the year. Then, having worked hard to harvest our crops in autumn, the last heat of summer turns again into the cold of winter. Sometimes it may be too cold. Still, it is helpful to see icicles and snowflakes and deep snow. They make us think twice about our life. Nonetheless, we are not eternally imprisoned by winter. Spring comes again, and then summer, autumn, and winter return all over again.

The four seasons have a natural hierarchy of restriction, openness, celebration, practicality—and then restriction again. We could talk about the functioning of governments or any organization, in fact, in the same way. Organizations have to have the restriction of a winterlike situation. In our Shambhala organization, for example, when we sit on our zafus, our meditation cushions, it might be painful for our legs and back. There is some kind of harsh winter taking place there on the cushion, but we come along anyway. Then, after we sit, we might gather together for a group discussion, and we begin to thaw out. We have spring there, thawing out the stiffness in our back and the pain in our legs. Then we have a summer celebration: sharing our wisdom, working together on projects. After the celebration of summer, we review what we have done and how we have conducted ourselves, which is the fruition level of autumn. We become very busy with our evaluations, and we feel so good, until finally, we are back to our zafu of winter.
¹

There is a time for restriction. There is a time for opening. There is a time for celebrating. There is a time to be practical and productive. Basic natural hierarchy operates that way, and the vision of the Shambhala Kingdom is based on those principles. In contrast, a democratic society would vote out winter if it could. Some political systems might want to have nothing but winter or, for that matter, spring, summer, or autumn. Obviously, they are not literally changing the seasons, which is the saving grace. But whole societies have been organized with no thought given to natural order or law, and the result is complete chaos. The early forms of communism tried to maintain the winter of restriction the whole year round, put together with the productivity of autumn. When those societies began to produce more material goods, then the communists wanted to have summer year-round. Capitalistic countries such as the American world want to have the celebration of summer all the time, with a touch of autumn’s productivity. Other liberal political systems, which are partially left or right, may want to have the thawing-out process of spring all the time. In that situation, the society takes care of everything, so there is a hint of a coming summer celebration, but basically the reference point is derived from getting away from the harshness of winter. At certain times, any of those systems work, just as each of the four seasons works at a certain time of year. But none of those systems works for a whole decade, not even for a whole year.

The hierarchy of natural order is that human beings should enjoy what they have and be given what they deserve. At the same time, you are encouraged to grow up. You cannot be an infant or a teenager for the rest of your life. So natural hierarchy is also connected with renunciation, in that one has to
yield
to some system of discipline. We also have to work with the four seasons, quite literally. Some people think it is a great idea, if they like summer weather, to fly around to wherever the summer is. When it gets too cold in the north, they go south for the winter. When it gets too hot in the south, they return north. That is a dilettante and nouveau riche approach. According to the Shambhala principles, we have to be deeply rooted in the land: We stay where we are and work with what we have.

In connection with discriminating awareness wisdom, in the Shambhala tradition, we value our trade or profession. It expresses our unique capability. It is our source of economy, or livelihood, and our means of working with those around us. So we don’t change professions constantly, but we stick with what we do best. If you are an author, you remain an author. If you are a jeweler, you remain a jeweler. If you are an actor, you remain an actor. We take pride in our individual resources, which come from the primordial dot. We have been given certain abilities and ways to express ourselves. We were born or woke up with certain particular abilities, and we stick with them.

In some sense, this calls for tremendous renunciation. It is so tempting to change your occupation now and then. Five years of this, six years of that, ten years of this, three years of that, this and that, that and this. If you pursue that mentality to the nth degree, you can end up living out of a suitcase, going everywhere, back and forth, not accomplishing anything, meeting lots of people and writing back to them later, after they’ve even forgotten your name. You become a wanderer in the wrong sense, not like a monastic wanderer or a mendicant. Rather, you have lost your ground, and you have no real trade of any kind.

The setting-sun world encourages that. You bump into a business opportunity, and with a certain amount of good luck, you can make millions of dollars in a few years. You get thoroughly spoiled by that. Then you experience tremendous depression when the economy changes, and the market for your product is gone, switched into something else. Or somebody else comes up with a better idea than yours, and your millions of dollars are gone. You’re penniless, and your morale is gone. Your warriorship is gone. Now you’re back to square one, trying to come up with another good idea. You’re so spoiled. If you keep going that way, you become nothing but a hungry ghost in the degraded world.

Of course, you may be able to keep on successfully reproducing your world, becoming richer and richer. But at the same time, you are losing your dignity. You have no self-respect; you don’t value sacredness; and you sink further into the ground, hour by hour, month by month. You age very quickly from the strain and the depression of being too rich. We should realize and recognize those setting-sun tendencies. If we respect natural hierarchy, we will find that there is order and a kind of self-government that allows us to neither indulge nor not indulge, but to open ourselves and jump into situations and discipline ourselves thoroughly.

Student:
I was wondering if the government of Shambhala would have a constitution?

Dorje Dradül of Mukpo:
Certainly, there is a constitution. If you study the four seasons, they have a very complicated constitution. If you study the human mind, it has a constitution. Buddhist psychology, or the
abhidharma,
²
provides a very complicated description of how the human mind works and what remedies can be applied at particular levels of the human mind. But in the Shambhala world, the constitution doesn’t seem to be the main point. The main point is the natural organicness of the situation.

Student:
So, then, the situation determines the form rather than trying to lay a form onto a society?

Dorje Dradül of Mukpo:
That’s right. Yes, very much so. For example, we needed to have the lights switched on here tonight. If we didn’t switch them on, it would be too dark to have a talk. But we don’t all go over to the light switch together. We designate somebody to switch the lights on. We all agree that it’s nighttime, it’s too dark to have a talk in this hall, and we need light. Then somebody is appointed to go over to the switch and turn on the lights. That is constitution for you.

1
. The author is describing how a typical program at a Shambhala practice center might include these different aspects of the four seasons. He could be describing Shambhala Training or other programs sponsored by the Shambhala organization. However, these principles can be applied to the functioning of any organization or government, as he goes on to point out.

2
. The abhidharma—literally, the “special teaching”—represents the earliest compilation of Buddhist philosophy and psychology. It is a codification and an interpretation of the concepts that appear in the discourses of the Buddha and his major disciples.

SIX

Mirrorlike Wisdom

Coming to the Western world, I encountered the makers of the clocks, big and small, and the makers of other machines that do wondrous things—such as airplanes and motorcars. It turned out that there was not so much wisdom in the West, but there was lots of knowledge.