The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa: Volume One (2 page)

In some respects, Chögyam Trungpa’s style as a teacher was unorthodox. He dressed in Western clothes and led a life that outwardly was quite secular. He presented the teachings in English and used many colloquial phrases and contemporary examples in his presentation of the dharma. This was very unusual for his time. His life seemed to be a major departure from his monastic upbringing in Tibet. However, interestingly enough, when I traveled back to Surmang Dütsi Tel, his monastery in Tibet, for the first time last summer, it was apparent to me that essentially what he was presenting was very traditional. I felt that there was no fundamental difference in how Buddhism was practiced in Tibet and how it is practiced in the West, in terms of people living their lives according to the dharma and taking the principles of buddhadharma to heart.

Of course, we have a much more complicated and complex society in the West, so the teachings here need to be presented in a different way. My husband understood this. One of the very important ways that he adapted to the West was in his presentation of the Shambhala teachings and his discussion of the concept of creating an enlightened society. These days, most of us don’t have the option of going into seclusion in a monastery to practice Buddhism. For most people, these principles have to be applied and effective in our day-to-day lives, how we live our lives each day. Therefore, Rinpoche brought forth the ideas that had been practiced and studied in a monastic context in Tibet and started to show how they can be manifested in society. He developed a broad spectrum of ways to apply the teachings to society in North America. Therefore, while Rinpoche appeared to teach in a nontraditional way, fundamentally the pith of what he taught was very traditional.

One of the hallmarks of Rinpoche’s way of teaching was to ask students to think for themselves and not to follow anything or anyone with blind faith. The end product was a group of practitioners and students who had tremendous confidence in themselves and in their understanding of the teachings. Rinpoche tried to develop people’s own qualities, rather than asking for blind devotion. He firmly believed that Westerners were capable of practicing and understanding the dharma fully and completely. The irony was that his close students had tremendous devotion to him. Because he never tried to make people purely submit to his will and because he wanted people to develop themselves, they also ended up developing great love and respect for him and immense gratitude for his influence on their lives.

From the time that he was a young boy in Tibet, Trungpa Rinpoche was recognized as a tertön, a teacher who finds terma, which are the hidden teachings and treasures left by Padmasambhava for the people of future dark ages. The idea is that particular terma teachings will be found at the time that they are most helpful to people and when people can practice these teachings. They are found by realized teachers who have a karmic connection both with Guru Rinpoche and with the practitioners who receive the teachings. Some of these teachings are physically concealed in rocks or lakes or other places in Tibet, and some of them are called “mind terma,” because the tertön finds them hidden in the realm of space, or the mind.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
is a well-known terma text.

Rinpoche found a number of physical terma in Tibet, but perhaps the most important terma that he uncovered were the mind terma that he found after his escape. First he found “The Sadhana of Mahamudra” in Bhutan, when he did a retreat there after he had been living in England for several years. And then in North America, he discovered a number of important Shambhala terma, texts that have to do with how Western students can manifest the teachings, how they can overcome obstacles through manifesting the bravery and confidence of the warrior. Rinpoche’s discovery of these teachings is a further confirmation of the deep connection that he had with Westerners and the importance of his role in bringing both the Shambhala and the Buddhist teachings to the West. They are also a sign of his deep faith in Western students to practice and protect the precious holy dharma.

Soon after his arrival in America, my husband began to make plans to bring great Tibetan lineage holders to teach in the West. In that way, he worked to bring together his tradition with the contemporary Western world. He was instrumental in bringing His Holiness the sixteenth Gyalwang Karmapa, Rangjung Rigpe Dorje, to America, and the Buddhist communities established by Rinpoche—along with some of His Holiness’s other students—hosted three visits by the Karmapa to America. Trungpa Rinpoche and his students also helped to host the first two visits of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to the United States, as well as a number of visits by His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche and other revered spiritual teachers. During the Karmapa’s first visit, he proclaimed Chögyam Trungpa as a vajra holder of the practice lineage of the Karma Kagyü. Clearly, whatever unconventional means Rinpoche applied to bringing the dharma to the West, the great teachers of the lineage understood the purity of his intention and the purity of the teachings that he proclaimed.

On behalf of the Mukpo family, I am very happy to see the publication of
The Collected Works
. It has been more than fifteen years since Rinpoche’s death. I know that he would be very pleased by the publication of this collection of his work. More than that, however, he would be pleased to see that his students have continued to practice the teachings that they received from him and that many, many people continue to be introduced to the Buddhist and Shambhala teachings that were so close to his heart. I hope that the future will bring many more beings to the path of dharma and that people will continue to be inspired by the profound teachings that my husband left for all of us to contemplate and practice.

D
IANA
J
UDITH
M
UKPO

December 22, 2002

Providence, Rhode Island

PUBLISHER’S FOREWORD

by
S
AMUEL
B
ERCHOLZ

N
AMO
G
URAVE

Homage to the glorious All-Good, the space of absolute awareness!

Homage to Vajradhara, fearless indestructible lord of life and death!

Homage to Padmasambhava, embodiment of the wisdom of all the Buddhas!

I prostrate at the feet of the great master, Chökyi Gyatso, who through his extraordinary kindness has shown the way of dharma to numberless beings!

N
EAR THE END
of his long career, when the famed British historian Arnold J. Toynbee was asked by a reporter what he thought the greatest event of the twentieth century was, he immediately answered, “It is the introduction of Buddhism into the West.” And it’s likely that the most influential teacher to have introduced Buddhism to the West was the Tibetan master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Like his eighth-century predecessor Padmasambhava, the great Indian master and progenitor of Buddhism in Tibet, Trungpa Rinpoche was able to skillfully transmit Buddhist teachings and Buddhist culture from Tibet to the Western world.

I first ran across Trungpa Rinpoche’s work while I was a university student in 1967. Browsing through the library, I found his autobiography,
Born in Tibet
, which had just been published in the United States by Helen and Kurt Wolff. Reading it made me quite interested in learning more about Tibetan Buddhism, especially as I also happened to be reading
The Life and Teachings of Naropa
, a biography of one of the forefathers in Trungpa Rinpoche’s lineage.

In the spring of 1969 I traveled to Great Britain, hoping to meet Trungpa Rinpoche at Samye Ling Tibetan Meditation Centre in southern Scotland. But due to a rail strike, it was impossible to get there. Vincent Stuart, a publisher in London, gave me the short manuscript of Rinpoche’s entitled
Meditation in Action
.

That manuscript had an extraordinary effect. Its presentation of basic Buddhism was so immediately present; it spoke in a clear and natural language I’d never encountered before. It was as if the author were speaking straight to me. I’d been thinking of starting out as a publisher for a while now, and it seemed more than auspicious that this book would become the first title.

Mr. Stuart printed one thousand copies by letterpress for a North American edition, published in the autumn of 1969 to coincide with his British edition. And over time, in the more than thirty years since its first appearance, many scores of thousands have found that Trungpa Rinpoche’s iteration of Buddhism spoke to them in their language too.

Trungpa Rinpoche was surprised when he received the first copy of the North American edition of his book. He looked at the spine and saw: Trungpa
Meditation in Action
Shambhala. He later told me that at first it looked like a hallucination to him, so he had to put it down and look again. By auspicious coincidence, the name that was chosen for the publishing company was the same as a tradition of which Rinpoche was a principal lineage holder. The Shambhala teachings were revealed by the Buddha at the request of the king of the ancient kingdom of Shambhala, as documented in the
Kalachakra Tantra
. During Trungpa Rinpoche’s escape from the Chinese occupation of Tibet, he was writing a book,
The Annals of the Empire of Shambhala
, which was unfortunately lost during a river crossing just before he entered India. Occasionally in later years, when Shambhala was mentioned, he would refer to it as “our little secret.”

In the spring of 1970, I received a phone call from one of Trungpa Rinpoche’s students on the East Coast, telling me that Rinpoche had just arrived in North America. She asked if Shambhala Publications would be interested in arranging a couple of talks for Rinpoche in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Shambhala Publications was located at the time. I said yes, and a few weeks later met Trungpa Rinpoche at the San Francisco Airport. To my surprise, the exotic lama from Tibet that I had expected turned out to be a gentleman in a Western business suit, walking with a cane and leg brace, who spoke the Queen’s English brilliantly. He was extremely cheerful and extremely playful with his use of language. We immediately became good friends, and began making plans to publish more of his works in the future. (As it turned out, Shambhala became the publisher for all of his writings for the general public.) Then our relationship changed dramatically sometime in 1972, after a famous poetry reading at the University of Colorado. Rinpoche was reading some poems from
Mudra
, sharing the stage with four other poets, Robert Bly, Allen Ginsberg, Nanao Sakaki, and Gary Snyder. During their readings, Rinpoche acted quite outrageously, laughing at their seriousness, making faces, and at one point holding a meditation gong over his head. After the reading, the poets retired to a small apartment in Boulder. They were quite angry and complained to Rinpoche about his behavior; they accused him of being like Jack Kerouac, brilliant but a rude drunk. My perceptual phenomenon must have been quite different from theirs, however poetic; that night I saw Trungpa Rinpoche as the Buddha, a completely enlightened being, and I could do nothing other than request to be accepted as his full vajrayana disciple, and to serve him.

In addition to being a sublime teacher of the Buddhist teachings, Trungpa Rinpoche had a great gift with language. In fact, I believe that he singlehandedly began the transformation of the English language into a medium that could serve as a dharma language to convey the subtle meanings of Buddhist philosophy and practice. Trungpa Rinpoche was a great writer and poet. The style of his writing has a lightness and gravity that is inseparable from his speaking style. There is a playfulness and amazing precision in his style that accentuate his boundless skillful means in transmitting the Buddha’s teachings on the perfect frequency for Western minds.

The publication of this multivolume
Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa
is the fruit of Rinpoche’s great kindness in providing a complete roadmap for anyone who would like to enter into the Buddhist path. Also included are his public writings on the Shambhala teachings, which are important in helping to provide a social and cultural basis for the wisdom of the Buddha’s teaching in the context of modern Western society. “Our little secret” was revealed to me and other of Trungpa Rinpoche’s students when he presented the talks that later became the basis for his
Shambhala: Sacred Path of the Warrior
, and the “secret” is now available to all who would like to study it. It is one of his most important contributions to this world.

The only major part of Trungpa Rinpoche’s teachings not included in this first edition of his
Collected Works
are the teachings that Trungpa Rinpoche gave at various Buddhist three-month seminaries that he taught from 1973 to 1986. He wanted an edited version of these talks to be published in a three-volume series. The teachings imparted at these seminaries were his most compendious presentation of the Buddhist teachings. When these works have been fully edited and published, I will be pleased that my job as Trungpa Rinpoche’s publisher and as his Kalon Yigdzö (Minister of the Treasury of Dharma) has been fulfilled for this lifetime. It is my most sincere aspiration that I will be able to follow his example and to also be of service to him and his precious lineages of Kagyü, Nyingma, and Shambhala not only in this lifetime but also in all future lifetimes.

S
AMUEL
B
ERCHOLZ

December 1, 2002