The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Seven (8 page)

The Collected Works
includes material based on talks given by Chögyam Trungpa at the Milarepa Film Seminar in several forms. Two chapters of
Dharma Art,
“Five Styles of Creative Expression” and “Endless Richness,” are based on the seminar. To underscore the more universal appeal of the material, the specific connection to the film project has been edited out. However, because the original talks are of such interest for anyone involved in making films, and because they contain such detailed information on different aspects of filmmaking, the
Chicago Review
article mentioned above is also included in Volume Seven, with Rinpoche’s diagram of the five buddha families reproduced from the
Filmmaker’s Newsletter.

Chögyam Trungpa was involved with several other film projects. In 1974 a film called
Empowerment
was made to celebrate the first visit to America of His Holiness the sixteenth Karmapa. A second film on the Karmapa,
The Lion’s Roar,
was made following His Holiness’s death in 1981 and incorporated much of the footage from
Empowerment.
Rinpoche worked on both of these films, more as an adviser than in the screenwriter or director role. A film about Trungpa Rinpoche’s work as an artist,
Discovering Elegance,
was made in connection with one of the art installations he created in California at the LAICA Gallery in Los Angeles. He was very involved in how that film was shot, and he had specific ideas about the editing of the footage. His ideas were not all adopted, but one of the film’s producers and cameramen, James Hoagland, kept the notes on Rinpoche’s ideas for the editing and has talked about reediting the film based on his intentions. Baird Bryant worked on many of these film shoots and has supplied some comments on the work that he did with Chögyam Trungpa:

Along the way, however, between the Milarepa Seminar and the shoot in Sweden, there are some events which are notable. . . . It was at Rocky Mountain Dharma Center that at one point we went out with the camera to make some shots. Rinpoche said, “Zoom on the top of that ridge and pan along with the telephoto.” He watched me make the shot, not very smoothly, and then said, “You’re getting a picture of your nerves.”

“How did you know?” I replied. These are the kind of things that will stay with me forever.

Then came the visit of His Holiness, the sixteenth Karmapa, and shooting for
The Lion’s Roar
.
³⁵
First, the Black Hat ceremony on the pier in San Francisco. Shopping, playing Pong at the amusement pier, going to the zoo where the animals all became very excited by the vibes of this Dharma King. I remember the shift in my consciousness about Rinpoche. Until that time he was always somehow fundamentally, it seemed, a Lama who had taken off his robes and dressed in western clothes . . . a powerful being, yes with all kinds of esoteric knowledge, but still, one of the boys who liked to drink, smoke cigarettes, and get it on with the ladies . . . my kind of guru.

But then, when His Holiness arrived, suddenly there he was in all his glory, in magnificent brocades, probably the uniform of a Tibetan general, with the whole weight of the lineage stacked on his head like a hundred Buddhas and Boddhisattvas one on top of the other. The glory of it left you no choice but to bow as deeply as you could before such splendor.

[Later] the shooting of
Discovering Elegance
was like old times back in the museum. We understood each other perfectly. “Draw back wider and wider, then hit!!” I would be zooming back on the entire arrangement (they were all fabulous), then going in as quickly as possible on one flower at the edge of the arrangement. Each one called for a different shot, and one after the other, we covered all the rooms: the anteroom, the study with those exotic fold-out books, the kitchen (if you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen, John Steinbeck III remarked on seeing the charred limbs of one display), and finally, the Drum room with its massive Tibetan drum as the centerpiece.
³⁶

Altogether, Chögyam Trungpa’s involvement with film seems to have been an amazingly fertile time. The stories from this period enable us to see just how intimate and vibrant his involvement was with American avant-garde art and artists in the early 1970s. This creative interaction continued in other aspects of his artistic work as well.

T
HEATER

In America, Chögyam Trungpa developed an intense interest in theater, and in the 1970s and early ’80s he wrote seven plays.
³⁷
In 1968, Rinpoche had met the American playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie at Samye Ling, Rinpoche’s meditation center in Scotland. For
The Collected Works,
Jean-Claude provided me with excerpts from his memoirs concerning his first meeting with Rinpoche in England, as well as with detailed comments on the genesis of his relationship with Trungpa Rinpoche and the theater work they did together. The record of the first meeting in Scotland and what led up to it, largely excerpted from Jean-Claude’s memoirs, is a window into Chögyam Trungpa’s first encounter with theater work in the West. Jean-Claude writes:

In Eskdalemuir [in 1968] I was visiting Tania Leontov, aka Kesang Tonma, my old high school friend. She’d accompanied me to London in 1967 when my play
America Hurrah
opened at the Royal Court.

At that time, because of my interest in Buddhism, Joe [Chaikin, director and founder of the Open Theater] introduces Tania and me to the pair of Vietnamese monks who worked on Peter Brook’s
US
. Later, when Tania stays on in London after I leave, the Vietnamese monks alert her to the opening of a new Tibetan Buddhist Center, Samye Ling, in Scotland, founded by a young Oxford-educated lama named Trungpa Rinpoche. Tania goes to Scotland and becomes Trungpa’s secretary.

1968, June 1–7 (approx.)—Eskdalemuir, Scotland:

At Samye Ling I’m standing in the kitchen with Tania when a short Tibetan in burgundy monk’s robes appears. He seems to materialize next to the refrigerator. Tania says to me, “This is Trungpa Rinpoche.” He looks young and has soft brown eyes. I don’t fully understand until Tania tells me again later that this monk is the founder of the center.

A couple of days later I’m granted a formal audience with Rinpoche. I wait nervously by the house in a barren field with sheep grazing. Tania comes out to get me, giving me Rinpoche’s mail to hand to him. Rinpoche sits cross-legged on a cushion. With some stiffness I sit in the same way facing him.

Rinpoche is gracious and gentle. He asks me questions about the theater. I describe Grotowski’s work. I ask Rinpoche if, as I believe, there’s a connection between our preoccupations in off-off-Broadway theater and Eastern spirituality. I tell him, “From the work we’re doing, I’m learning the importance of being a participant in—rather than a spectator of—my life.”

Rinpoche suggests, “Why not see yourself as an emperor in the center of the world allowing everything to happen around you without getting too involved?”

During our conversation, Rinpoche asks several times, “Where are you going?” Each time he asks, “Where are you going?” I recite part of my itinerary: “I’m taking the train to London on Wednesday, then I’m flying to Boston. . . .”

At the end of the interview Rinpoche asks again: “Where are you going?” My crossed legs have fallen asleep. I can hardly get up. We both laugh.

Later I use this interview as the basis of the Call Girl’s interview with a guru in
King of the United States
.
³⁸

In the early 1970s in America, Chögyam Trungpa started a theater group called Mudra Theater, which performed a number of his plays and worked with exercises that Rinpoche developed, based on the principles of what came to be called “Mudra Space Awareness.” Most of this work took place in Boulder. During the 1970s, Rinpoche gave several dozen talks on theater work and Mudra Space Awareness, which were transcribed and edited for the use of members of the Mudra Theater group but have never been published, except for a fragment from one talk that appeared in the
Vajradhatu Sun
magazine, reproduced in this volume. The exercises he developed seem to have been related, at least in part, to insights that Trungpa Rinpoche gained from his practice and study of both mahamudra and the dzogchen teachings, or maha ati, as well as his training in monastic dance in Tibet. He once described Mudra Space Awareness thus: “Having been born, so to speak, now we can try to stand, and then we’ll begin to walk, and then we’ll introduce the monastic dance which I studied in Tibet.”
³⁹

The earliest exercises that Rinpoche developed worked with the interplay between sound and silence. They were called “Sound Cycles,” and David Rome included a number of them in the appendix to the poetry collection
Timely Rain.
Rinpoche described them as “a means of relating to the space in which your vocal projection takes place.”
⁴⁰
David Rome reported to me that “there were other [early] exercises as well that are now unfortunately lost, especially some fascinating ones applying the five sense perceptions—but not literally—to working with objects.”
⁴¹

In 1973, a theater conference took place in Boulder. The conference was organized and attended by Rinpoche’s students, with much of the primary work being done by Jean-Claude van Itallie, who found funding for the conference and arranged for many prominent avant-garde theater people to attend. Because of Jean-Claude’s efforts, Robert Wilson and many actors from his theater company, the Byrd Hoffmann School of Byrds, attended the conference, as well as actors, playwrights, and directors from the Open Theater, the Manhattan Project, the Magic Theater, the Iowa Theater Lab, and the Provisional Open Theater.

The idea for the conference arose in a conversation over dinner between Trungpa Rinpoche, Jean-Claude van Itallie, and some other students. Jean-Claude writes:

I’m having dinner in a restaurant with Rinpoche, Tania [Leontov], and others near Barnet, Vermont, when the idea comes up to have a theater-and-meditators conference in Boulder. The idea emerges from the conversations that Rinpoche and I often have about the kind of theater I’m involved with and its relationship to meditation. Rinpoche is enthusiastic about the idea. I’m a vegetarian at the time, but Rinpoche puts steak on my plate from his plate, saying, “Eat this. You’ll need the strength to put the conference together.” Of course, because he asked me to, I eat the piece of steak. And I put together the conference.

At the time I’m on the Board of Theater Communications Group and I’m on the Theater Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts. Both these groups give me money to put together the conference, which costs a total of something a little over $10,000. It’s to their credit that they funded something which was purely for the benefit of the participants—not to include a public performance. It was to be an “Eastern meditation meets Western avant-garde theater” conference. I apply to the International Theater Institute too, and while they have no money to give me, they give me help including an assistant, Maurice McClellan, who works at ITI. I invite the most exciting people I know in the theater. The avant-garde theater community is not huge at the time. We all know each other. Of those who say they’ll come, there’s Robert Wilson and members of his company. I’d given Bob his first job in the theater—designing the dolls for
Motel
in
America Hurrah.
Andre Gregory (whom you might have seen in
My Dinner with Andre)
came. He’d been a couple of years ahead of me at Harvard. Lee Worley came. She was at the time living in Santa Fe but I had met her in 1963 at the beginning of the Open Theater where she was an actress. That was Lee’s first contact with Rinpoche. Other friends came—the actor Nancy Cooperstein, the playwright Maria Irene Fornes, the critic Gordon Rogoff the director John Lion, the photographer and designer Kozuko Oshima. . . . Some people did not come. The Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, for whom I had translated from the French on his first trips to NYC, refused saying, “One guru at a conference is enough.” The British director Peter Brook could not make it. The American director Joseph Chaikin didn’t care to come, saying, “I don’t like organized religion.”

It’s my first visit to Boulder. I stay at the Boulderado Hotel with a view of the mountains. Rinpoche has named this conference
The Mudra Workshop.
We rented a fraternity house on Broadway near Baseline for the proceedings. Some of us gave workshops. I gave a playwriting workshop. The theater artists perform for the meditators who are gratifyingly shocked by the lack of conventional theater form. Robert Wilson stages a special performance. I write something quickly which both theater artists and meditators perform. There are panels and classes. I give one in playwriting which Irene Fornes takes. Rinpoche gives several talks and appears in a theater happening on the last day as a fortuneteller at the center of a maze created with newspaper walls. . . .