The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Eight (6 page)

Next are three articles that deal with the principles of warriorship, fear, and fearlessness. “Conquering Fear” was edited from a three-talk seminar to directors in the Shambhala Training program presented in 1979. It contains provocative material on how to work with real enemies in the world outside and also discusses the discipline of warriorship in terms of its ground, path, and fruition, and how, at every stage, the warrior is working with the interplay of fear and fearlessness, cowardice and bravery. This article was published in the
Shambhala Sun
magazine in 2002. Next is Chögyam Trungpa’s foreword to Alexandra David-Néel’s book
The Superhuman Life of Gesar of Ling,
which presents epic stories of the great Tibetan warrior king. Both
Shambhala
and
Great Eastern Sun
are dedicated to Gesar, who represents the ideal of fearless and gentle warriorship that can conquer the world. In his essay, Rinpoche presents the principles of warriorship that are reflected in Gesar’s life. “The Martial Arts and the Art of War” is a previously unpublished article, written by Rinpoche in England in the 1960s, which emerged from the files in the Shambhala Archives while I was gathering material for
The Collected Works
. It connects the development of fearlessness and warriorship with overcoming ego, understanding nonviolence as the principle of the martial arts, and the application of that mentality in the Tibetan monastic discipline of debate. It is one of the earliest presentations of Trungpa Rinpoche’s thinking on the place of warriorship in the Buddhist teachings.

An excerpt from another early writing, “Political Consciousness,” is a translation of a fragment of a treatise on politics that Rinpoche began writing in Tibetan while on a month-long retreat in 1972. The manuscript was never completed. This excerpt shows how Chögyam Trungpa was working to connect the worldly aspect of politics with spiritual awareness and development. As he says, “If one asks what politics is, it would be correct to say that it is the ability of all reflections of political situations to arise in the mirror of discriminating awareness at once. It could be described as the ability to look joyfully in the mirror of mind with a relaxed mind free from fearful projections and doubt.” “A Buddhist Approach to Politics” is an interview conducted in 1976 by the staff of the
Shambhala Review of Books and Ideas,
a little magazine produced for a number of years by Shambhala Publications. Here, just months before the Shambhala teachings exploded onto the scene, Rinpoche talks about the importance of taking more responsibility for what is happening in society: “People involved with a spiritual discipline have a tendency to want nothing to do with their ordinary life; they regard politics as something secular and undesirable, dirty or something. So, to begin with, if a person came with a sense of responsibility to society, that would be a Buddhist approach to politics and also to the social side of life, which is the same, in a sense.” Rinpoche’s discussion of politics here is down to earth and practical, dealing with such questions as whether a Buddhist should vote in the presidential elections. This is followed by “Pragmatism and Practice,” an interview with Chögyam Trungpa conducted on May 7, 1985, one of the last interviews that he ever gave. Rinpoche talks about some of the issues that he worked with and thought about during a year-long retreat in 1984. During this time, he was in part concerned with how the principles of Shambhala vision could pragmatically manifest in the various activities within the Buddhist community and more fundamentally in the world at large.

From his earliest years in the West, political awareness was part of Chögyam Trungpa’s sensibilities. Volume One of
The Collected Works
includes “The New Age,” an article published in 1969 in the English publication
International Times
. Here Rinpoche focuses on the need for genuine communication among people, as a means to begin to work with the alienation that has arisen in modern society as a result of mechanization and modernization. As he writes:

. . . with the structure of all countries being Americanized, with things developing as they are—vast machinery, vast organization which transcends the individual mind so that they can only be grasped in terms of computers—the whole thing has grown so big that to some people it is very frightening. . . . Living in such a world, we really have to be practical, for we cannot afford to divide society up into those who practice meditation and those who are workers, those who work in the factories and those who are intellectuals. . . . We can’t afford to anymore—the world is too small. . . . We have arrived in an age where the study of the great wisdom of the world, religion, and tradition, however important they are, is not enough. There is one more urgent thing we have to do. We must create a structure which allows a real communication. . . . We have to see that the answer is not one of spirituality alone any more than it is one of politics alone.

Once again, it seems that his understanding of the forces at work within society was quite advanced and that he anticipated many of the conundrums of the current era. He had the ability, from those early times, to connect individual experience with larger realities, without naively reducing social and political forces to a lowest common denominator in which there is a simplistic answer to everything, such as solving all the world’s problems through meditation or prayer. Rinpoche’s approach to politics, while affirming the individual’s duty to society, was a much more sophisticated approach.

Rinpoche conducted the first Vajradhatu Seminary in 1973. At the conclusion of this three-month advanced training session, students were eligible to request transmission to begin the intensive practice of vajrayana or tantric Buddhism. So this was a very important program for senior students to attend, if they wished to go forward in their practice and study of Buddhism. During the study sections of each seminary, Chögyam Trungpa would give a lecture almost every evening. During the day, students took a number of other courses and had time to practice meditation and study. Starting with the second seminary in 1974, Rinpoche invited a close senior student at each seminary to teach a required course entitled “Vajra Politics.” Rinpoche generally worked closely with the instructor on the material to be presented. The course was based on the premise that human goodness is the ground of a vajra approach to politics. From that view, the course turned to a consideration of how change in culture and society can be brought about without aggression. Beginning with the 1979 Seminary, the vajra politics course was replaced by a course on Shambhala culture, which likewise was required for all students.
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Trungpa Rinpoche also used the administrative aspect of running his meditation centers and other enterprises as an opportunity to work with building political consciousness and sophistication in his students. As time went on, in connection with the development of the Shambhala teachings, he began to organize Vajradhatu, the umbrella organization for all the meditation centers he established, more like a government than a church or a nonprofit corporation. For example, he appointed senior students to run the major centers outside of Boulder. These people were referred to as Ambassadors (for larger centers) and Emissaries (for smaller groups), and in many respects he approached working with them like having career diplomats in a foreign service. The directors of Vajradhatu were each responsible for a department, and among these departments were the Department of External Affairs and the Department of Internal Affairs, names more reminiscent of government than religion or business. In fact, in later years, Rinpoche referred to the Board of Directors as the Cabinet. Some might think that he simply had delusions of grandeur. In fact, he transformed the normally pedestrian conduct of administration, sparking his students’ interest in working with the much larger and more potent arenas of governance and politics.

He also saw the visits of spiritual teachers, beginning with the visit of His Holiness the Karmapa in 1974, as a training ground for working with political situations in the world outside. In 1980, during his third visit to North America, His Holiness toured the U.S. Capitol and was hosted as a dignitary at a luncheon with Senators and Representatives, which Rinpoche also attended. Over the years, he worked very closely with his students to be sure they learned about protocol and how to conduct themselves in situations like this. In 1979, when His Holiness the Dalai Lama made his first visit to the United States, members of the Dorje Kasung provided security for the tour, and members of the External Affairs Department of Vajradhatu traveled with His Holiness’s party, helping to arrange his schedule and various appointments, talks, and meetings. The Dorje Kasung worked with the mayors’ offices and the police departments in all the major cities in the United States that His Holiness visited, and the members of External Affairs worked with officials on a number of levels of government, including officials from the State Department, in planning the visit. The visits of many other Tibetan Buddhist teachers to America were handled by the Dorje Kasung and External Affairs working together, and the two also began to coordinate some of Trungpa Rinpoche’s visits, both within North America and beyond, when he traveled to Europe and Asia.

In the last few years of his life, Chögyam Trungpa worked with the director of External Affairs, Karl Springer, on several projects that took this interest in politics to a new level. For example, there were plans for Vajradhatu to work with the Nepalese government and the United Nations on the restoration of Lumbini, the Buddha’s birthplace in Nepal. The Lumbini Project was never completed, and political involvement on that level faded as a major focus of the organization after Rinpoche’s death. However, many students trained in this area have applied the skills they learned from this work in their subsequent endeavors outside of the organization proper.

In the next two articles included in Volume Eight, “Natural Hierarchy” and “Conquering Comfort,” Rinpoche talks further about the intimate relationship between the individual realization of sanity and its manifestation in the structure of our world. Beyond that, he looks at the principle of rulership, or leadership, both as it relates to individual command and to conquering obstacles. Finally, he talks about what it is like to have the king’s view of reality—which is not just being in the presence of a great ruler but means unlocking the power of one’s own primordial sanity:

. . . Entering into a king’s domain, you also sense that there are no thoughts. There is no subconscious gossip. . . . Your mind is completely cut, short-circuited . . . you have nothing to say, which is the mark that the ayatanas [sense consciousness] are controlled in the presence of a king, an enlightened ruler. Sometimes the question is answered by itself. The question is the answer automatically. We are talking about that kind of sacred world.

When the four maras are conquered, either by practice or by being in the presence of sacred world, then you develop sacred outlook automatically and you discover what is known as nirvana, freedom, liberation.

Everything is back to square one, which is basic goodness. (“Conquering Comfort”)

The notion of the king’s view and the importance of ruling your life comes up many times in the Shambhala teachings. It is one of the teachings that relates to the extraordinary environments that Chögyam Trungpa was able to create for people, as exemplified by the overwhelming richness and sacredness, described earlier in this introduction, that vibrated in the ballrooms and meditation halls of the Kalapa Assembly. Eido Roshi, in “True Man without Rank,” an article in
Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly,
suggests that

Trungpa Rinpoche . . . was a man who was born like a king. It was natural for him. When he would hold out his hand, someone would immediately come and offer a cigarette. If I were him, I would say, “Oh, thank you.” I am not a king, so I would say, “Oh, thank you very much.” For him, another would come with a light, another with an ashtray. He made others happy by allowing them to serve him.
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Indeed, Roshi is correct in saying that many of Rinpoche’s students found it fulfilling to serve him—not in the sense of humbling themselves, but actually in the sense of fulfilling themselves through service and experiencing an expanded sense of awareness and space. This is because Chögyam Trungpa did not hoard the king’s view. Instead, he shared this sacred view with everyone in his environment. Around him, you could feel the space of vastness. However, in the Shambhala teachings, king’s view is not just or even primarily a description of your experience of someone else’s mind. It applies to oneself personally. In that regard, it is one of the main metaphors that Rinpoche used to describe the quality of command that first arises in the student warrior’s practice of meditation and then is extended to situations throughout life.

Rinpoche believed that all beings had the potential to be the kings and queens of their own existence. This sense of rulership is not marked by pleasure, particularly, but rather by duty and by a tremendous connection with and empathy for all beings. As he writes in
Shambhala:

When you walk into this world of reality, the greater or cosmic world, you will find the way to rule your world—but at the same time, you will also find a deep sense of aloneness. It is possible that this world could become a palace of a kingdom to you, but as its king or queen, you will be a monarch with a broken heart. . . . It is the way to be a decent human being—and beyond that, a glorious human being who can help others. (chapter 18)