The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Eight (4 page)

If practice is not regarded as your own genuine practice connected with your own upbringing, you are bound to fail, because there is superficiality involved. When you begin to regard the whole Kasung experience as part of your upbringing, part of your heart’s blood, part of your general demeanor altogether, then your Kasung discipline will be the same as monastic discipline. . . . The tradition of the Kasung, the protector of the command, is the same as the monastic tradition. You should be honored to be a part of this, and I am tremendously honored that you are with us.
¹⁰

After His Holiness’s departure, rather than disbanding, the Guards continued. They provided service to Trungpa Rinpoche and other teachers, and they also provided basic security for the Buddhist and Shambhala communities and created the proper environment by setting a tone at community functions. Even in this “outer” realm of their activity, there was always a practice element to the Kasung:

As Vajra Guards we shouldn’t think of ourselves as convenient busboys, who pick people up from the airport and do our duty at a servant level. . . . Your duty is much greater than that. Your duty is to uplift and to expand the vision of the atmosphere that is created in a proper teaching situation. . . . The real role of the Dorje Kasung is to provide tremendous accommodation and hospitality and to create the atmosphere for the teachings to be presented. If we don’t have the Kasung, we can’t teach dharma properly because there’s no atmosphere created. . . . When the dharma is presented, there is always a gatekeeper to ward people off or invite them in, bring them in. That has always been the tradition. So what we are doing is not a modern version of anything at all. What we are doing is actualizing that tradition. . . . During Milarepa’s time, when
he
taught the dharma, people came in properly. They were invited in, and there was a ring of protection around them all the time. Then the dharma could be presented properly. If someone wanted to come in, they had to prostrate and then sit at the fringe of the protection ring. If they didn’t want to hear the teachings, if they weren’t listening, they were asked to leave. That’s very traditional, absolutely traditional.
¹¹

Trungpa Rinpoche found that the practice of Kasungship was excellent practical training in warriorship. At his birthday party sponsored by the Dorje Kasung in 1983, Rinpoche said:

Thank you very much to the Dorje Kasung. We are not acting. . . . We are actualizing the warrior tradition, so that it can be continued. . . . Obviously, you must know that continuing to practice and promote warriorship does not mean continuing warfare. In order to subjugate confusion and continue the tradition of the warrior lineage, we have to continue to protect the dharma. So you have to continue as Kasung.
Ka
means “command,” command in the sense of tradition and faith and a sense of worshiping the lineage, the tradition and the practice of the lineage altogether.
Sung
means “protection,” or protecting that particular endeavor, that particular connection and commitment to the lineage. Protection also means that one has to stop being an egomaniac; one must learn to destroy ego’s endeavor to conquer the whole world.
¹²

In spite of its roots in the practice of meditation and the Shambhala training of the warrior, the Dorje Kasung was one of the most controversial parts of Chögyam Trungpa’s teaching, in part because the Kasung adopted uniforms and other aspects of military discipline, such as saluting and drill practice. There was a great deal of misunderstanding of the role and training of the guards. In fact, the training is focused on how to overcome obstacles with gentleness and confidence rather than with aggression. It’s only now that some of the teachings that Rinpoche gave to this group are being edited into a book, for distribution within the Shambhala community. This is the two-volume compendium that has been quoted above in the discussion of the Vajra Guard.
True Command: The Teachings of the Dorje Kasung,
the first volume of this work, is due out in 2004. The talk on the Kalapa Court quoted earlier is also from that volume. Hopefully, a book of these teachings will eventually be edited and published for a broad audience. Especially for the difficult times we live in, where obstacles abound and where bravery and overcoming fear are more than metaphors for how to live, these teachings seem helpful advice on how to conduct oneself as a warrior without anger.

In the fall of 1978, Chögyam Trungpa convened the first Kalapa Assembly for his most senior students. Between October 7 and November 2, 1978, approximately one hundred students from North America and Europe attended one of two two-week sessions that made up the first assembly. In this environment, Rinpoche presented many new Shambhala teachings, and students came together to practice and study the Shambhala teachings and also to create a good Shambhala society, in a dignified and elegant environment. During this brief period, Rinpoche presented sixteen lectures, which contain some of his most profound and poignant teachings on the way of the warrior. Just weeks prior to the beginning of the Assembly, Rinpoche received a third terma text,
The Letter of the Golden Key,
and he lectured on the themes from this text as well as many other points from the Shambhala teachings. Excerpts from a few of his talks at the Kalapa Assembly were edited for inclusion in
Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior
. Many more of them are studied in advanced levels of the Shambhala Training program.

Both the Magyal Pomra Encampment and the Kalapa Assembly became annual affairs that have continued up to the present day. They have remained important training grounds in the presentation of the Shambhala teachings. Throughout the remainder of his life, Chögyam Trungpa used both of these gatherings as places where he introduced important and seminal teachings on the conduct of warriorship and the creation of enlightened society.

The last section of
Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior
is entitled “Authentic Presence.” It begins by quoting the following lines from a Shambhala text: “For the dignified Shambhala person / An unwaning authentic presence dawns.” Trungpa Rinpoche says, “When you meet a person who has inner authentic presence, you find he has an overwhelming genuineness, which might be somewhat frightening because it is so true and honest and real. You experience a sense of command radiating from the person of inner authentic presence. . . . The person with inner authentic presence has worked on himself and made a thorough and proper journey. He has earned authentic presence by letting go, and by giving up personal comfort and fixed mind” (chapter 20).

This description certainly provides a portrait of Chögyam Trungpa himself. To a large extent it also describes, at times, the heightened environment and experience of being at the Kalapa Assembly. In the introduction to Volume Three of
The Collected Works,
I sought to evoke the scene that surrounded a talk by Chögyam Trungpa in the early 1970s. The contrast is quite great between that display of joyous hippiedom, long hair, and paisley, and the formal atmosphere at an evening gathering at the Kalapa Assembly less than a decade later. Formal and ceremonial occasions at the assemblies and other Shambhala gatherings often provoked a great deal of brilliance and power radiating from the environment—so much so that it could be overwhelming. This was in large part because Rinpoche himself was radiating so powerfully in those environments, lighting up whatever was around him.

I remember arriving a few days late to the second assembly, which was held at a hotel in Big Sky, Montana. Almost from the moment I set foot there, I began hearing about the extraordinary talk that Rinpoche had given the night before, titled “Nowness.”
¹³
That evening there was a party to celebrate the birthday of Diana Mukpo. I rushed to my room and changed out of my casual traveling clothes into a long dress, added white gloves and my nicest earrings and necklace, found my best shoes, put up my hair, and headed downstairs to the reception. Everyone was arriving dressed in their best formal wear: ladies in ballgowns, men in tuxedos, Dorje Kasung in dress uniforms. After a time of milling around, there was a formal entrance parade into the huge and brilliantly lit ballroom, headed up by Rinpoche and members of his family. Rinpoche was in his black dress uniform with gold braid, peaked cap, and medals adorning his sash and chest. Diana Mukpo wore a long turquoise evening gown, a gorgeous gold necklace designed by her husband, and a small tiara inset with diamonds. She also had a sash with several gold and enamel medals on it. Rinpoche and his wife took their places on the stage, and then senior teachers and officials paraded in, presenting a bow to Rinpoche and his family. In the background Handel’s
Water Music
filled the air as each of the guests came forward to present themselves with a bow or a curtsy. If one can imagine an event that combines a formal array at the English or French court with the great courts of China or Japan, one might have a visualization of the scene. The walls were hung with Shambhala banners designed by Rinpoche, and on either side of the platform where he and Diana Mukpo were seated, Shambhala flags were held in place by members of the Kasung in their uniforms. Indeed, it seemed that we were in the Kingdom of Shambhala itself.

As the evening progressed, there was music and waltzing, as well as the cutting of a birthday cake decorated with the Shambhala emblems for the four dignities of the warrior—the tiger, lion, garuda, and dragon. Champagne toasts were made, and Rinpoche himself made impassioned birthday remarks dedicated to Diana and to his students, punctuated by his opening and snapping shut a Japanese white fan with a large red dot in its center.

I remember that, at one point, standing along the side of the dance floor watching couples whirl past, I became quite faint and had to find my seat. I spoke with a number of others who had the same experience. The atmosphere was so strong, so brilliant, with no hidden corners, no place to rest one’s mind except in a very big and luminous space. That would be the only way I can think to describe it. If I had to explain what was really going on, I would say that it had little to do with the bourgeois or extravagant celebration of a birthday. The description of the outer trappings doesn’t do justice to what one felt in that environment. Yet this occasion had everything to do with dressing up to show one’s authentic self to the world, presenting oneself to the center of the mandala, dancing in the space created by someone who exemplified authentic and splendid presence. Other gatherings at the Kalapa Assembly—particularly when people gathered to practice in the shrine room or to hear a talk—sometimes felt like great samurai or other warrior clans convening: the room vibrated with power and a sense of enormous dignity.

This was in spite of the fact that all of us were largely rather unprocessed people, not “realized” or fully accomplished warriors at all. But Chögyam Trungpa had the extraordinary gift to be able to bring people into a mythic dimension of their lives, for moments at least. You didn’t ever feel that you were living a fantasy with him; but sometimes you felt that reality was so sparkling and remarkable that it was hard to bear and impossible to verbalize. This, I think, was often the case in the gatherings of the Shambhala warrior students that he conducted at the Magyal Pomra Encampments and at the Kalapa Assemblies, and at many smaller gatherings at the Kalapa Court. This feeling of overwhelming brilliance and genuineness also characterized the atmosphere when Rinpoche presented Shambhala Training to relatively new practitioners in Level Five.
¹⁴
It was at Level Five, the culmination of the Sacred Path program in Shambhala Training, that many students first met Chögyam Trungpa.
¹⁵
In all of these situations, Chögyam Trungpa was trying to show us—any sentient beings who were willing to look—what an enlightened society, a truly enlightened society, might
feel
like, imprinting that feeling in our hearts, in our bones, in our minds, so that years and generations after he was gone—if we remembered and if we passed on what we were given—that imprint could be summoned up to guide those in the future searching for a real and genuine existence in the midst of a degraded and dark time.

From this fruitional viewpoint, we turn now to look more closely at the teachings themselves that are presented in Volume Eight of
The Collected Works
. The other side of this potential glorious existence that Chögyam Trungpa showed so many people was his insistence on discipline and the
path
of warriorship, not just its fruition. This was certainly part of the message in the letter he sent to his students from retreat in 1977. It was also a message that he proclaimed over and over again whenever he taught. He made it clear that it’s not possible to fake the attainment of these teachings and that glorifying or inflating one’s ego is not the point of the teachings—whether Buddhist or Shambhala. As Rinpoche himself said in “Basic Goodness,” which was the first public talk ever given in Shambhala Training: “The good news of Shambhala is very fantastic, extraordinary—while the good news of myself, Chögyam Trungpa, being here in Boulder, Colorado, is not all that fantastic. Chögyam Trungpa is just another guy. So what Trungpa has to say is more important than who Trungpa is.”

Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior
was Chögyam Trungpa’s first major presentation of the Shambhala teachings to the reading public and the only book on the Shambhala path issued during his lifetime.
Shambhala
was published in 1984. For some time, Rinpoche postponed the editing and publication of a book of his own teachings on Shambhala. He was asked to write such a book many times, beginning in 1978, but he said that he wanted to wait until one of his students had written an introductory book on the Shambhala path for the general public. There were several attempts, but none succeeded, and finally, in 1982, I asked Rinpoche if he would reconsider.
¹⁶
Somewhat reluctantly he did, and I spent the next eighteen months working with him on the manuscript. Rinpoche gave me some specific guidelines for selecting and editing material for the book. He said a number of times that the approach should be “pithy,” and he suggested that I review all of the Shambhala Training talks he had given, as well as a long seminar that he taught on the Shambhala teachings at Naropa Institute in the summer of 1979.
¹⁷
In the end, the book largely was based on these materials as well as on various advanced seminars that Chögyam Trungpa offered to his senior Buddhist and Shambhala students. As the manuscript progressed, Rinpoche reviewed it a number of times, but in between our meetings he gave me a great deal of space and freedom to choose material. I remember spending an entire afternoon reviewing the final manuscript with him. I read most of it aloud to him. In general, he was pleased with the final product. However, he made some changes as well. I remember in particular that he questioned a reference to the
I Ching,
or
Book of Changes,
as an example of the heaven, earth, and man principles. He asked me, “Did I say that?” To which I replied, “No, sir, I added that example.” He then told me to take it out and replace it with something else. “We can’t be too eclectic,” he commented.