The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Eight (38 page)

O
UR BASIC THEME
is still the primordial dot. From that dot, the open sky dawns, which is to say, great vision arises and expands. Trust arises out of that, and from that trust arises the need for renunciation. Because of renunciation, we can be
daring,
which is the principle of letting go.

In the ordinary sense,
letting go
means being carefree and giving up any discipline. It means to hang loose or to stop being square. It can have the connotation of going against the societal norms you were brought up with, whether it be the Protestant ethic or Orthodox Jewish ethics. In modern-day Catholicism, some of the monastic traditions are becoming more informal. For instance, a priest may not use the confessional box to hear confession. Instead of wearing a habit, monks and nuns might dress in lay clothes, maybe even jeans. Instead of saying mass on the sanctified altar, priests might conduct the ceremony in the middle of the church. Instead of speaking or praying in Latin, they now use the colloquialism of their national tongue. Instead of having organ music, the church might invite jazz musicians to present their own songs as prayers.

The Shambhala approach to letting go is more like having an excellent running conversation in Latin or Sanskrit. Or it is how to speak the English language properly, with tremendous feeling. Letting go is the eloquent expression of speech, the expression of dignified existence. With body loose and available, it is highly controlled awareness joined with inquisitive and open mind. Those are the expressions of letting go.

This is not
my
version of letting go at all. I do not take personal credit for it, nor should I. It is purely my upbringing as a Shambhala person. As a child in the monastery in Tibet, I was brought up very strictly. At the age of five, I began to study and learn to read, write, and think. While I was learning the alphabet, I was taught to sit up properly. I was told that it is bad for you to hunch or lean over when you are memorizing the alphabet. I was told that my handwriting would be like my posture, so I shouldn’t hunch over. I was warned that my pronunciation would also be bad if I didn’t sit up straight. I was told, “Sit upright, read with upright posture, and write with upright posture.”

I was never allowed even the shortest break of any kind. All preoccupations or excuses were completely undercut. I had a private tutor, so I was the only person in the schoolroom. There were no other students to compare notes with or to have as a reference point at all. In this country, I suppose, if you were put in such a situation, you would think it was a torture chamber. But starting from the age of five, I went along with my life and my surroundings. I was not intimidated by the sternness of my tutor, and somewhere in the back of my mind, I realized that there was something right about this stern education and training of a young boy of five years old.

My tutor was like my parent. He attended me constantly: He helped me dress, and he served me food. He even escorted me to the toilet, which was somewhat claustrophobic—because you’re hoping to take
some
time off. Twenty-four hours a day of discipline. My tutor slept in the same room with me. If I had a bad cough and I woke up in the middle of the night, he would also be alert. He was always ready to serve tea, water, or anything I needed. So he was a good servant, as well as a very unreasonable teacher. He was usually very stern, with occasional affectionate remarks.

Such an education is very rare these days. The closest thing in the Western world, I suppose, would be the British public school system, but even there, nowadays, they have relaxed the system enormously. In any case, that approach is somewhat insensitive and Victorian in style. In this country, such a system of educating a child is nonexistent.

The parents of the fifties and sixties felt that their strict table manners and discipline had failed. Many of their children rejected them and became revolutionaries or hippies or did all sorts of strange things. The parents took this on themselves and thought they had done a bad job of raising their children. Moreover, they felt out of date and too old-fashioned to fit into the modern world. Some of the children reformed, if I may use that word lightly, and they reconnected with their parents, so the older generation felt somewhat better because the children became more reasonable or conventional than they used to be. But the parents still felt they had done a bad job. So some of them, in turn, loosened up in the wrong sense. They gave up the dignity of their earlier days, and they, too, learned to dress sloppily. They rejected their silver chandeliers and sold their crystal glasses at garage sales, and they purchased a plastic kitchen set, unbreakable.

While I was growing up in Tibet, I was so attracted to the American way of life and the Western style of doing things. I thought that Westerners must have a very subtle wisdom and etiquette. They knew how to build airplanes, complex machines, and fantastic wonders of scientific technology. With such wisdom in the gadgetry world, I thought that the makers of the gadgets must have a similar personal discipline.

I was given my first watch when I was fourteen years old. It was from England, and I couldn’t resist opening it up to see how it worked. I took it completely apart. I tried to put it back together, but it no longer worked. Then I was given a clock that chimed. It was a gift from another Tibetan teacher, another rinpoche, who incidentally was the brother of one of my main teachers in Tibet: His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. Everything worked perfectly inside this clock, so I decided to take
it
apart. I wanted to compare the parts of the clock with all the mechanical parts that I had previously disconnected in my wristwatch. I laid the parts from both timepieces side by side and tried to figure out how these machines worked, how they actually hung together.

When I took the clock apart, I could see the mistakes I had made with the watch, and I was able to put the clock back together. In fact, I got both of them back together, I cleaned them, and they worked better than before. I was quite proud of that. I thought that the Western world must have
such
discipline, minute precision, profound detail, and patience, based on all those little screws that had to be screwed in. I thought somebody had made each little piece with his or her own hands. Naturally, I had no concept of factories at that point. I was very impressed, and I had a great deal of respect.

Then, 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. Moreover, everything seemed to be based on the notion of a warning system. People were afraid of getting hurt, afraid to even go outside without wearing a coat and hat, in case they might catch a chill. Englishmen in particular always go out with their umbrellas, whether there is rain or not.

My first exposure to the Western world was in Britain, where I went to university at Oxford. I’m afraid my respect for Western daringness thinned out a little bit, but I retained tremendous respect for the accuracy I encountered. I met many scholars in Oxford and elsewhere in Britain. I found that they wanted to be very accurate in their understanding of Sanskrit or Buddhism or their own traditions. I took a course in comparative religion and also a course in contemplative practice in Christianity while I was at Oxford. I found the presentations to be somewhat technically oriented rather than wisdom-oriented. The only wisdom-oriented Christians I met were some Jesuits, who were very interesting. One of their main purposes is to convert non-Christians to Christianity. The particular Jesuits I met were interested in converting
me
to Catholicism. Many of them had been to Sri Lanka, India, or other parts of Asia.

The first Jesuit emissary to Tibet was sent by the pope in the eighteenth century. This Jesuit priest was told first to study the language and then to have a debate and win the Tibetans over. He actually wrote a book about his experiences. After the debate, nobody was converted. The reason nothing happened was because of his exposition of the resurrection of Christ from the dead. In the Tibetan tradition, there is a term for somebody who rises from the dead. It refers to a ghoul. Unfortunately, that’s the term the priest used. So when he was explaining how Christ rose from the grave, the Tibetans thought he was talking about worshiping a ghost, which horrified people.

Coming back to the point, our Shambhala training has actually come from the older generation’s wisdom, from an even older generation than the parents of the fifties. Our current upbringing and educational systems might be obstacles to daringness. Obviously, it is impossible for you to uneducate or de-educate yourself completely. You don’t have to, but your system of thinking has to be changed into the Shambhalian point of view. That is to say, you should not be afraid of ignorance or stupidity.

When we discussed renunciation, we talked about not being afraid of setting-sun people. This is similar. The first point of daringness is to take pride in yourself. Even if you forget what you’ve learned, due to not being mindful, you don’t panic. You will recover what you’ve forgotten if there is a sense of self-respect. Suppose you forget the name of your best friend who saved your life forty years ago. You are telling your life story to someone, and suddenly you go blank. You don’t remember the name of the person who saved your entire life. You don’t panic because of your knee-jerk stupidity and ignorance. That person’s name is bound to come back to you, sooner or later, unless you don’t let go. If you keep trying to think of that person’s name, you might forget it eternally.

So we shouldn’t be afraid of our own forgetfulness. When you are frightened by something, you have to relate with fear, explore why you are frightened, and develop some sense of conviction. You can actually look at fear. Then fear ceases to be the dominant situation that is going to defeat you. Fear can be conquered. You can be free from fear if you realize that fear is not the ogre. You can step on fear, and therefore, you can attain what is known as fearlessness. But that requires that, when you see fear, you smile.

The Tibetan word for a warrior is
pawo,
which means “a brave person.” If you don’t work with a situation properly, you might hurt someone, which is the mark of cowardice and impatience. People kill an enemy on the spot because they feel they can’t be bothered, which is a mark of laziness; because they hate someone so much they want to see them die, which is a mark of ignorance; or because they would like to strike the person dead, which is a mark of aggression. The warrior, pawo, would never do that. Challenges are the working basis. That is why we have a world. If you slaughter everybody in the whole world, you have nothing left to work with—including your lover. There’s nobody left to play with or dance with.

I don’t want to sound arrogant, but I do feel that the training I’ve gone through is very worthwhile. I’m so grateful to all of my teachers and my tutors. I’m utterly grateful to them—at least at
this
point! By creating the Shambhala Training, I’m trying to provide each of you with a similar training, as much as possible. Obviously, you don’t each have an assigned tutor to follow after you. It would be somewhat difficult to provide that. Instead, you are expected to be your own tutor and to be extremely watchful—not by looking out for danger but by being open and disciplined.

The final topic is wisdom, which is connected with an appreciation of hierarchy. Once you have discovered hierarchy or a sense of universal order, you have to tune yourself in to that. You have to make yourself available and attune yourself to that situation. That is very important. Tuning yourself in to the hierarchy of the Shambhala world means that you are willing to fight or create obstacles or at least to reform the setting-sun political systems, using whatever capabilities you have. We are not talking about having marches or anything like that. But in your own life situation, you have to realize and resist the setting-sun demands to have winter throughout the year, summer throughout the year, autumn throughout the year, or spring throughout the year. You have to recognize the problem of being one-dimensional or cultivating only one season in your life, and then you have to allow some system of wisdom to enter into your state of existence.

We are talking about how to work with very simple situations, such as talking to your landlord or landlady about the rent, consulting with your bank manager about taking out another loan, depositing money in your checking account, buying another house, doing your grocery shopping at the supermarket, or dealing with your dry cleaner. Whatever situations you are working with, you have to be aware that every step you take is very precious. You cannot change this world into the Great Eastern Sun world with a snap of your fingers. It can only change stitch by stitch. What thread you use, what kind of needles you use, and how you sew the fabrics together—that is purely up to you.

You might feel that this is such a small-minded approach that it will have almost no effect at all. Particularly if you are gung ho on Shambhala vision, you might be so impatient, thinking that this is taking too much time and won’t have any effect. But that is not the case. We must go step-by-step, starting from square one. Pay attention to your environment, to your relations with your landlady, your landlord, your grocery store, your bus, every place you go, everything you do habitually. Look at them twice, thrice. How you deal with the cockroaches in your apartment, how you vacuum your floor, even how you flush the toilet: Any dealings that you have with the outside world, so to speak, have to be witnessed thoroughly and watched very carefully. You do not need a tutor like I had. You have hundreds of tutors around you. All those situations are your tutors, and they will give you the message.

Wisdom is not purely the product of intelligence. You have to work on things personally. It’s not exactly hard work, but it’s taxing in some sense, because you have to be constantly alert, all the time. The notion of wisdom is the same as prajna, or the discriminating awareness that we discussed earlier in the context of renunciation. I am using the word
wisdom
here because what you are being given is something that can only be taught to you in the form of a hint. Having been given the hint, you pick up the message spontaneously. That is wisdom.