The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa: Volume One (4 page)

He returned from Bhutan to Great Britain, where in spite of the inner discoveries he had made, he found that outwardly he was still hesitant to jump in fully. A few months later, in early 1969, he was severely injured in a car accident, from which he emerged paralyzed on the left side. However, he took the accident as good news, a breakthrough: “In spite of the pain, my mind was very clear; there was a strong sense of communication—finally the real message had got through—and I felt a sense of relief and even humor. . . . I realized that I could no longer attempt to preserve any privacy for myself, any special identity or legitimacy. I should not hide behind the robes of a monk, creating an impression of inscrutability, which, for me, turned out to be only an obstacle. With a sense of further involving myself with the sangha, I determined to give up my monastic vows. More than ever, I felt myself given over to serving the cause of Buddhism” (Born in Tibet, “Epilogue to the 1977 Edition”).

In “Things Get Very Clear When You’re Cornered,” a 1976 interview in
The Laughing Man
magazine, Chögyam Trungpa talks about the dilemmas faced by Tibetan teachers and his own personal challenge in teaching in the West, as well as the message of his accident:

Tibetans generally have to break through the cultural fascinations and mechanized world of the twentieth century. Many Tibetans either hold back completely or try to be extraordinarily cautious, not communicating anything at all. Sometimes they just pay lip-service to the modern world, making an ingratiating diplomatic approach to the West. The other temptation is to regard the new culture as a big joke and to play the game in terms of a conception of Western eccentricities. So we have to break through all of that. I found within myself a need for more compassion for Western students. We don’t need to create impossible images but to speak to them directly, to present the teachings in eye-level situations. I was doing the same kind of thing that I just described, and a very strong message got through to me [after my accident]: “You have to come down from your high horse and live with them as individuals!” So the first step is to talk with people. After we make friends with students they can begin to appreciate our existence and the quality of the teachings.
⁷

A few months after having renounced his monastic vows, in an even more radical move, on January 3, 1970, Trungpa Rinpoche married. His bride, Diana Judith Pybus, was a young woman of sixteen at the time. Three months after they married and within a year of his accident, he and Diana left England for North America.

These events of 1968 to 1970 show an enormous shift in Chögyam Trungpa’s outer manifestation. The writings that make up Volume One of
The Collected Works
are a window into the inner world of this extraordinary man, both before and during this transformation. For his manifestation after these changes, we have another seven volumes to peruse!

Diana Mukpo, the author’s wife, remarked on how much his outer being changed following his accident. She first met him during a seminar he was giving in London at the Buddhist Society in early 1969. Trungpa Rinpoche had just recently returned from Bhutan, where he had received the sadhana. It was before the accident. Diana requested a personal interview with him, which she describes as follows: “During the interview, Rinpoche was incredibly sweet. . . . To me he seemed to be a very pure being: so kind, so pure, so sharp. During the interview, I had the sense that he was touching my mind with his. There was absolutely no barrier in our communication. Whomever he worked with, he was in love with the other person’s mind. I felt that he had no personal agenda except to be kind and helpful.”
⁸

The next time she saw him was in the fall of 1969, when she hitchhiked to Samye Ling, Rinpoche’s meditation center in Scotland. She writes:

The first evening I was at Samye-Ling, Rinpoche came by to have dinner with the other Tibetans who lived at Samye-Ling. After dinner, as he was leaving . . . I saw him outside getting ready to depart. He was no longer wearing monk’s robes, but instead he had on a layman’s chuba, or robe, and he was walking slowly in a laboured way with the aid of a walker. I realized that he was quite crippled from the accident. I managed to get close to him. . . . Although I only saw Rinpoche that evening for a few minutes, in that short period of time, I realized that he was a completely different person than he had been before his accident. Of course, he looked quite different physically because he was paralysed on one side and had obviously been through a lot. But that wasn’t it. It wasn’t just his physical being that had changed. He had a very different manifestation now, which I found fascinating. Before the accident, he had been a youthful Tibetan monk, so pure and light. Now he was much more heavy and solid, and there was a sort of old dog or well-processed feeling about him. He seemed much older, and he had an unfathomable quality that I hadn’t experienced before. He was transformed.”
⁹

That purity and lightness, which others who knew Trungpa Rinpoche during this time have also noted, are reflected in the quality and style of
Born in Tibet
, as well as in the articles published in
The Middle Way
. This light touch is also apparent in Chögyam Trungpa’s first book on the Buddhist path,
Meditation in Action
, which was based on talks he gave at Samye-Ling beginning in 1967. There are indeed a sweetness and a gentleness that pervade these early works. While not abandoned later, these qualities became colored by a deeper range of emotions and a different vocabulary in America.

The third book that is included in Volume One,
Mudra
, was not in fact published until 1972, several years after Chögyam Trungpa came to North America. However, it has been included in Volume One because the core writings in
Mudra
are poems composed in England in the 1960s. (The translation of a poem that the author wrote in the Valley of Mystery in Tibet in 1959 also appears here.) There are several poems from 1965, in a section called “Songs”; the remaining verses are all from 1969, several from before the author’s accident, the remainder following it. Together they give us another picture of this period: the voice of the poet, which for Trungpa Rinpoche was always a highly personal voice, much more so than the tone of his lectures.

Up to this point, the discussion has been of how one can read these early works for signs of the author’s personal growth and development. In many schools of Buddhism, the teacher’s life is taken as an important object of study and contemplation. For it is assumed that the life of a great teacher is a life that contains many lessons. A teacher’s life is teaching by example.

However,
The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa
is not the author’s spiritual biography, and in general it is not the editor’s intent to discuss themes from Rinpoche’s personal life in the introduction to each of the volumes. Yet it seemed that for this first volume it was worth making an exception and including in this commentary some important biographical themes, especially since the author’s only
auto
biography,
Born in Tibet
, is included here. However, the teachings from this early period can primarily be enjoyed as good reading and for the good dharma that they expound.

When
Born in Tibet
was published in 1966, it was among the very earliest Tibetan autobiographies and accounts of life in Tibet told by a Tibetan in English. It was also one of the first descriptions of the communist occupation of that country recounted firsthand by a Tibetan. There are few works, even today, from which one can learn as much about the traditional upbringing and training of an incarnate teacher in Tibet. It owes its genesis very much to its English editor, Esmé Cramer Roberts. Chögyam Trungpa and Mrs. Roberts were introduced through mutual acquaintances at the Buddhist Society in Oxford. In his foreword to the book, Marco Pallis thanks Mrs. Roberts for “her encouragement in the first place,” without which, he notes, “the work might never have been begun.” Mrs. Roberts and Trungpa Rinpoche worked on the book together for more than two years.

Born in Tibet
was written at a time when Chögyam Trungpa’s command of English was still very much a work in progress. Understandably, the language and the style employed in the book were heavily influenced by Mrs. Roberts’s own skills with the English language. It is fortunate for the reader that she was such a sensitive editor; much of the charm of the phraseology of
Born in Tibet
, as well as its literacy, were undoubtedly her contributions.

Marco Pallis also notes that Mrs. Roberts tried very hard to preserve the flavor of the author’s thoughts. As he puts it, “she wisely did not try and tamper with a characteristically Tibetan mode of expression.” Without knowing exactly what he meant by this, it is still clear that Chögyam Trungpa himself, not his editor, determined the basic content and structure of the book. Mrs. Roberts was the first of many book editors he worked with. And while all of these made their imprint on his printed words, none of them—starting with this first venture—overrode the strength of his vision and his ability to communicate that.

There is some evidence that Mrs. Roberts sometimes did not understand all the details of the stories Trungpa Rinpoche told her. A number of years later, when he gave several seminars on the lineage of the Trungpa tulkus (incarnate lamas) and on his teacher Jamgön Kongtrül, there were small but notable discrepancies in his description of various events. That said,
Born in Tibet
is a book that he was proud of, and he was immensely grateful to Esmé Cramer Roberts for having helped him to write it.

Richard Arthure, the editor of
Meditation in Action
, shared the following information about Mrs. Roberts:

I never met Mrs. Cramer Roberts, to whom the Vidyadhara [Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche] dictated the accounts of his early life that are recorded in
Born in Tibet
. But Rinpoche did tell me a couple of things about working with her. . . . He used to go over to her house in Oxford for afternoon tea and recount the stories of his life in Tibet, which she would write down. With a certain amusement, Rinpoche commented that Mrs. Cramer Roberts was an elderly and rather genteel English lady and that she completely omitted from the book certain episodes that she considered improper and not suitable for publication. She died shortly after the book appeared and, according to Rinpoche, such was her fascination with Tibet and Tibetans that she took rebirth in the Tibetan exile community in India.”
¹⁰

In 1977 Chögyam Trungpa added the epilogue “Planting the Dharma in the West” to
Born in Tibet
. It described his life from the time he arrived in India in 1960 until 1976, when he wrote the epilogue in Land O’Lakes, Wisconsin, at the Vajradhatu Seminary. The epilogue was edited by David I. Rome, Rinpoche’s private secretary and the editor of
First Thought Best Thought
and
Timely Rain
. In 1985 Rinpoche began work on a second epilogue to the book, which I was asked to edit. In preparation for our editorial meetings on this project, I put together a chronology of events from 1976 to 1985 to be included in the second epilogue and met several times with Trungpa Rinpoche to begin working with him on this project. However, he decided to postpone our work, and the final epilogue to
Born in Tibet
was never completed.

At the time that
Born in Tibet
was published, it may have struck most of its readers as an exotic tale of a faraway land, a fascinating story but one with little direct application to their lives. In a way that was characteristic of how he taught altogether, its author saw his audience for this book in the broadest possible terms. He wrote
Born in Tibet
, not just for the reading public in the 1960s, but for those of us who read it now and will read it for years to come. In 1966 in England there were probably only a handful or two of people practicing the more advanced aspects of Tibetan Buddhism, and most of those had only a marginal idea of what they were doing. Yet he included detailed information about many aspects of Tibetan Buddhism that were esoteric at the time but which are now well understood by Western practitioners.

Beyond that, as far as the communist occupation and his escape are concerned, the author narrated the outer events in
Born in Tibet
in such a way that the reader can enter very directly into this time of uncertainty and chaos and can experience what it was like not to know if your world was about to be destroyed; not to know if you should go or stay; not to know if the invaders were friends, neutral, or enemies; not to know if one should take the left or the right fork in the road, one of which would lead to freedom, the other to capture—not to know but to have to choose over and over again. The drama and the tension in
Born in Tibet
make this compelling to read; it still speaks to the ambiguity of human experience, in which the choices we make may be of great consequence, even when the way ahead is murky.

Born in Tibet
was also significant because, for a very long time, it appeared to be the only available record of Trungpa Rinpoche’s early life and his teachings in Tibet. It is now known that he composed over a thousand pages of writings while in Tibet and that, as a young tulku, he had already found several important termas. These were left behind when he fled the country, as was the history of the kingdom of Shambhala that he was writing during his escape. According to one story, he left it hidden near a high pass in the Himalayas. Until recently, all of these materials were believed to have been lost, destroyed during the communist Chinese invasion of the country.