The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa: Volume Three: 3 (74 page)

Student:
On your trip, did you ever run out of food?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Well, we did—absolutely. Did you read about it in the book? Have you read
Born in Tibet?
You should read it. It’s some story. [
Laughter
.] We did run out of food. In the last month or so, we didn’t have much to eat. We had to cook our own leather bags. When we got to the lower elevations, we found bamboo and litchis and banana trees. But we passed right by the banana trees; we didn’t know they were edible. Nobody had ever seen banana trees before.

S:
When you were traveling, did you sit?

TR:
Yes, we did. We made a point of doing that. That is how we gained our strength, our energy. Otherwise we would have been destroyed. It was a ten-month journey altogether—very long.

Student:
Did any people die on your trip?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Three people died. They were too old to walk. Because our schedule was very tight, we had to walk from morning to evening. Their legs began to hurt and they just collapsed.

Student:
Were there any children with you?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Lots of them. It was difficult for mothers with babies, but the older children did fine. Actually, they were the best, because they began to get more and more energized. They gained strength.

Once we were crossing the Chinese highway. We had to time it so that the Chinese soldiers wouldn’t see us. Below us was the highway with troops on it. We had to wait on the side of the ridge until dark. We planned to cross all together, in one batch. Just as we were about to cross, a truck went by, and the infants started to cry at the top of their lungs. But the Chinese didn’t see us. After we had crossed, somebody swept the road with a broom so that the Chinese wouldn’t find our footprints.

Student:
How tall were the eight biggest men—the ones who used to lie down and make a path for the others through the snow?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Well, they were not particularly big. They were tough, that’s all.

S:
Are they still alive?

TR:
Yes—although we started with three hundred people, and a lot of them were captured. Only twenty-nine of us escaped.

Student:
Are the Chinese and the Tibetan Buddhists still at war, or is the war over? Are they still shooting at each other?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
No, not at this point. The Chinese destroyed or exiled most of the Buddhist leaders, so now they have no one left to fight.

Student:
Since you were meditating on the trip, you don’t feel very rebellious or angry at the Chinese, do you?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Well, not particularly. What happened with the Chinese was like a rainstorm: you can’t get angry at it. It was a timely situation. If the Chinese weren’t in Tibet, I wouldn’t be here.

Student:
Why do people look up to Christ? What is it in him that they like?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Well, he was very heroic. And he was inspired, as we know. He sacrificed his life for the sake of other people. Crowds gathered to hear him talk on Sunday morning. He was a gentle person, a good person. There were a lot of other good people apart from Christ. There was Muhammad, for example. Who else?

S:
King David.

TR:
Yes, and lots of other people who have done similar things.

Student:
On your trip, did the Chinese ever try to track you down?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Yes, they certainly did. I think they followed us all the way, but we outsmarted them. They are still supposed to be looking for me, actually. I have a friend who went to the Chinese embassy in London. He saw my photograph there with a price on my head.

Student:
What caused the war between the Chinese and the Buddhists?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Well, the communists don’t like meditation practice. They think it is a waste of time. They think that people should be working all the time. Meditation produces too much personal strength. The communists want to develop group strength, not personal strength. They do not believe in the basic goodness of the individual; they believe in the basic goodness of the group. That is why it is called communism; that’s it in a nutshell.

Well, maybe we should close at this point. Thank you, children, for being so patient and for not being restless. Your patience is quite remarkable. It must be due to your practice of meditation. Please keep sitting, okay? And study Buddhism more, and try to make friends with your parents—if you can. [
Laughter
.] Regard them as friends rather than as relatives. That is a very important point. Thank you.

Based on a 1978 seminar for children held in Boulder, Colorado.

TWELVE

Dharma Poetics

“When we talk about poets and poetics altogether, we are talking in terms of expressing ourselves so thoroughly, so precisely, that we don’t just mumble our words, mumble our minds, mumble our bodies. Being in the poetic world, we have something to wake up and excite ourselves. There is a sense of gallantry and there is a tremendous, definite attitude of no longer being afraid of threats of any kind. We begin to help ourselves to appreciate our world, which is already beautiful.”

I
N DISCUSSING POETICS,
we are not bound to the theme of written poetry. Poetics also includes one’s vision, hearing, and feeling, altogether. So, we are not talking about writing poetry alone; we are talking about a complete, comprehensive realization of the phenomenal world—seeing things as they are. We are talking in terms of the poetic way of eating one’s food and drinking one’s tea. We could call this approach dharma poetics. Dharma, as you know, is the teachings of the Buddha. Basically, the word
dharma
means “norm,” or some form of experiencing reality properly.

We could speak of three stages of poetics. The first is the rejection stage. We reject habitual patterns which are caused by ego-oriented situations, such as the desire to develop aggression, passion, and ignorance. We have to free ourselves from these patterns. For instance, if we do not wash a piece of cloth completely clean, we will be unable to dye it another color, such as bright red, bright green, or bright blue. The point is that we have to have a sense of purity and giving up before we can put the cloth that we have woven into the various dyes that we would like to use. We first have to wash it thoroughly.

It is similar with our minds and our bodies. We have to go through some sense of purification, natural purification. This process might include letting go of our personal trips, letting go of desires, and letting go of any philosophy that has been taught to us.

In the second stage, we can aspire to the basic meaning of poetics. There are two main kinds of poetics: rejuvenating poetics and growing-old poetics. Between the two, many other kinds of poetics could arise. We could appreciate the sun, the moon, the green grass, the flowers, the brooks, and the mountains. We could appreciate rainstorms; we could appreciate snowfalls; we could appreciate our father and mother. We could appreciate the whole world. Or, for that matter, we could mock them. Mocking is also acceptable—always acceptable. We could mock April’s snowfall; we could mock our father or mother treating us badly.

In general, poetics is based on the idea that first we see our universe very clearly, very precisely, and very thoroughly. We are not fooled by anybody. That seems to be the basic notion of poetics here.

I could give you one poem as an example; it is not memorized, but composed on the spot:

Father’s love is good.

Did I borrow from my mother?

Nonetheless, I still remain

chrysanthemum.

Student:
You said there are two kinds of poetics: rejuvenating and growing-old. What did you mean by that?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Well, either you have seen enough of the world already, or you’re about to see the world as it is growing up. It’s like the difference between a good spring and a good autumn.

S:
Or a young poet and an old poet?

TR:
That’s right. Very much so.

S:
What is it that the old poet knows that the young poet doesn’t?

TR:
Well, what you just said is in itself poetry. Ask yourself! You see, the trick is that I’m not going to help you particularly. You have to discover it for yourself.

S:
That’s helpful. [
Laughter
.]

TR:
Being less helpful is more helpful than being helpful.

Student:
I feel that there is some beauty in imperfection. If you did wash your cloth completely, and you dyed it a pure color, then your color would be pure, but it would only be one color.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It wouldn’t necessarily be only one color. You could dye your cloth lots of colors. And each time you did, a different kind of smile and a different delight would take place. We are not talking about completely totalitarian poetics; we are talking about poetics that can encompass multilateral situations—different types for different people. But at the beginning we have to clean up first. That is always the case. Having cleaned up, then lots of colors can come through. It is like a well-cleaned mirror: many things can be reflected in it.

Now, without delaying too much, I would like to continue to discuss the evolution from purification and a sense of longing for liberation, which we talked about earlier on, and add a third stage.

The three stages that we are discussing are actually connected with a basic sense of joy. Sometimes joy means having one’s individual way of not working genuinely with oneself and instead working toward a sense of indulgency. But here joy means
not
indulging oneself. That is the first stage, which we described earlier as purifying oneself and rejecting one’s habitual patterns.

In other words, joy means that our perception of the world can be clarified. The best poetic philosophy, in this case, is to have a sense of precision and accuracy in how we see the universe, how we actually perceive the universe, which is the second stage.

When we clarify our perception, we are not fooled by green, yellow, red, blue, pink, or orange. We are not fooled by them, and we are also not fooled by mountains, brooks, flowers, or bees. I leave it up to your imagination to come up with all sorts of things like that. We are not fooled by our father, our mother, our sisters, our brothers, or our lovers, either. All these things could create central themes for poetry, but at the same time, these things could create obstacles; they could create a blindfoldedness.

Perhaps there is more to say about joy here. Joy is something that we see, something that we experience properly, fully, and thoroughly in the universe, in our world. In other words, we do not pull long faces; we begin to appreciate this world that we’re living in. This world is a lovely world, a wonderful world. The Judeo-Christian tradition would say it’s a gift of God. In the Buddhist tradition it is said to be a result of our karmic magnificence. In any case, joy is always there.

The third stage is that we must be clear and pure in our speech and our minds. When we talk about poets and poetics altogether, we are talking in terms of expressing ourselves so thoroughly, so precisely, that we don’t just mumble our words, mumble our minds, mumble our bodies. Being in the poetic world, we have something to wake up and excite in ourselves. There is a sense of gallantry and there is a tremendous, definite attitude of no longer being afraid of threats of any kind. We begin to help ourselves to appreciate our world, which is already beautiful. So, I think that’s the point.

Student:
You talked about many things in our everyday experience that we shouldn’t be fooled by. What did you mean by that?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Well, I think it’s a question of simply just being on the dot. We shouldn’t let ourselves be used by somebody else as part of their trip—their egomania or philosophy. We should simply remain as what we are. Just on the dot. Philosophy in this case could be anything—religious, sociological, or political. The idea is that we should not let ourselves be subject to any experience, unless we experience it properly, thoroughly, by knowing what we’re doing.

S:
By knowing that we are laying our philosophy on the mountain or the brooks?

TR:
Well, you can praise the mountain, you can praise the sky; you can do those things. But any trips you lay on things, you have to let go of.

S:
And then there’s joy?

TR:
Yes. If you are unhappy—not joyful—then you buy a lot of trips. You still have a long face, but you always buy it when somebody presents some stuff to you. In this case we are saying that once you’re joyful and you feel gallantry—you feel who you are and you feel good—then you will automatically know who’s trying to fool you and who’s trying to help you.

S:
How much energy should you expend trying to figure out if someone’s fooling you or if you’re fooling yourself?

TR:
Well, that’s very complicated, you know, because sometimes you think you are the other and the other also thinks they are you. So I think the best approach there is to enjoy mountains, rivers, forests, snow, rain, and hailstorms by yourself. You will find some poetic way of saving yourself that way. Actually, I think that’s what mountains are for, originally. Brooks are there for you to do that—and trees and jungles as well. So be yourself by yourself. I’m sure you will compose magnificent poetry if you do that.