The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Seven (10 page)

Chögyam Trungpa and students encounter one another in a newspaper maze in 1973. Mudra Theater Conference in Boulder, Colorado.

PHOTOGRAPHER UNKNOWN. FROM THE COLLECTION OF SHAMBHALA ARCHIVES.

In some of his earliest talks introducing the Mudra Space Awareness exercises, Rinpoche also spoke about how they related to particular vajrayana or tantric teachings: “A lot of the exercises are sort of maha ati yoga practices. They are related to the Four Torches. Actually, the maha ati [practice I’m talking about here] doesn’t talk about space; it talks about wind or air. The first one, the wind of karma, is related with muscles, and intensification of limbs. So, in other words, your limbs are related to as kind of tools to grab things with, which is connected with karma’s volitional action. If you relate with the wind of karma, which is that creation of space within your muscles, you relate with the space or the air which is contained within the muscles. The second one is related with creating space through the eyes and has to do with the wind of emotions or kleshas. The third one is the wind of body. It is connected to the earth and the four elements. The last one is called inner luminosity. It is connected with brain and heart together, which is something very subtle.”
⁵²

Altogether, there is a great deal of subtlety and profundity in the theater work that Chögyam Trungpa introduced. Little has been written about this work, and for this reason, this introduction to Volume Seven has gone into considerable detail to provide information about the events that form the background to the few theater-related publications that are included in
The Collected Works.
Chögyam Trungpa’s work in this area put him in touch with the leading figures in the American avant-garde theater and show yet another way in which he brought together teachings from the vajrayana tradition of Buddhism in Tibet with the most modern developments in an artistic field. One hopes that in the near future more information on this fascinating aspect of his work will be published.

In 2001, Naropa University published a book on Lee Worley’s theater work,
Coming from Nothing,
which includes an introduction to some of the principles of Mudra Space Awareness. Lee is planning to edit a book of Chögyam Trungpa’s plays and some of his talks on space awareness, accompanied by interviews or reflections by theater people who have been influenced by Rinpoche’s work. Joanna Rotte, a playwright and director who teaches at the Villanova University, is also interested in working on the book. Joanna never met Trungpa Rinpoche, but in the last ten years she has become familiar with his plays, and in the summer of 2000, she adapted one of Rinpoche’s best-known dramas,
Prajna,
for the Philadelphia Fringe Festival.

Volume Seven of
The Collected Works
includes the original version of
Prajna,
which was performed for the first time during the summer session at the Naropa Institute in 1974. Subsequently, the play was published in
Loka: A Magazine of the Naropa Institute.
⁵³
Andy Karr, who directed
Prajna
when it was performed at Naropa, wrote an introduction in
Loka
to the play. He explains that it “is based on the
Heart Sutra,
a distillation of the voluminous
Prajnaparamita
(Perfection of Wisdom) literature, which is central to Mahayana Buddhism.”

The other play included in Volume Seven is
Proclamation,
which was performed by the Mudra Theater Group at a Midsummer’s Day festival in 1980. This play combines elements from both the Buddhist and the Shambhala teachings. Interestingly, both
Prajna
and
Proclamation
—one of the last plays that Rinpoche wrote—include recitations of the
Heart Sutra,
an intriguing hint that his theater work may have had an ongoing connection to exploring the interaction between form and emptiness, which is so central to the Prajnaparamita teachings of the mahayana. It would seem that Rinpoche was not primarily interested in exploring characters or their stories in his plays, but much more interested in exploring the space in which dramas arise.

Volume Seven, as mentioned earlier, also includes an article that appeared in 1980 in the
Vajradhatu Sun,
excerpted from a talk given by Rinpoche in 1973 about his view of theater. The article, “Basic Sanity in Theater,” may well have been given in connection with the 1973 theater conference itself. Here, Chögyam Trungpa says that “in order to perform, we have to relate to reality.” He talks about learning to coordinate speech and body and discusses combining “the bodhisattva and yogic practices in our theater work.” He also mentions an idea to create a school to pursue this training in theater, which he says would be “another kind of retreat practice, in fact.”

After the theater conference in 1973, it does not appear that Chögyam Trungpa had a great deal of ongoing contact with the American avant-garde theater world. Jean-Claude van Itallie did arrange a meeting between Chögyam Trungpa and Peter Brook, which took place at Shantigar, Van Itallie’s country residence near Charlemont, Massachusetts. Rinpoche’s relationship with Van Itallie was an enduring one; in 1977, Rinpoche spent most of a year on retreat at Van Itallie’s house. There was a second theater conference in 1974, but Rinpoche and his Mudra theater students conducted this event as an in-house training, without the avant-garde guests. Some of the “guest” performers in 1973 had, in any case, become Rinpoche’s students, Lee Worley being one of the most prominent examples.
⁵⁴

There were also a number of theatrical elements, or what might more properly be called pageantry, in the many ceremonies that Trungpa Rinpoche developed over the years, particularly in connection with his presentation of the Shambhala teachings in the last ten years of his life. Perhaps this is why he did not write plays during those years—he had other outlets for structuring the interplay of space and form within the context of presenting his work. In a sense, he was choreographing culture and society.

C
ALLIGRAPHY
, F
LOWER
A
RRANGING, AND
D
HARMA
A
RT
I
NSTALLATIONS

We come now to the consideration of Chögyam Trungpa’s work in the areas of calligraphy and flower arranging and how he eventually combined these elements with his overall interest in design, resulting in the dharma art installations that he created. Although Rinpoche had begun creating calligraphies and brush and ink paintings while he was still in England, there is no information on when he first took up this discipline as art or whether he received any formal instruction in it. Throughout his seventeen years in America, he created many hundreds if not several thousands of calligraphies. As David Rome mentions in his excellent introduction to
The Art of Calligraphy: Joining Heaven and Earth,
“Rinpoche’s calligraphies were almost always done for some specific purpose.” He often created a calligraphy as a birthday or wedding gift. Many calligraphies were done to hang on the walls of his meditation centers, or dharmadhatus, and he personally calligraphed the names given to students when they took the Buddhist refuge and bodhisattva vows. In Tibet, he would have studied handwriting as part of his education. There, calligraphy was done with a bamboo pen. In the West, Rinpoche adopted the use of Japanese brushes and sumi ink. Brush and ink, as David Rome notes, gave him more fluidity and play in his art. Surely, too, Rinpoche’s interest in brush painting was a reflection of his personal encounters with Japanese calligraphers. In 1970/71 when he first met Suzuki Roshi, Rinpoche also was introduced to Kobun Chino Sensei, a master of Japanese calligraphy as well as a master of Zen. Later, Rinpoche shared interests in dharma and calligraphy with Taizan Maezumi Roshi, the founder of the Los Angeles Zen Center and a master calligrapher. In the 1980s, Rinpoche became a great friend of Shibata Kanjuro Sensei, a Japanese master of kyudo, or archery, who is also an accomplished calligrapher. Rinpoche encouraged his students to study kyudo with Sensei and included him in many Shambhala gatherings, where Rinpoche presented advanced teachings and invited Sensei to teach as well.

The majority of Rinpoche’s calligraphies are of Tibetan and Sanskrit letters, words, and phrases. He also studied the kanji, or Chinese ideograms, and he did a number of calligraphies of kanji in the 1980s, particularly when he calligraphed terms connected with the Shambhala teachings, such as the phrase “Great Eastern Sun.” He also did a few calligraphies of English words and some abstract brush and ink paintings. David Rome reflects on how Rinpoche’s calligraphy evolved:

Just as his poetic voice, which at first was imitative of both Tibetan and British traditional modes, released into something much freer and more idiosyncratic after his arrival in North America, so Rinpoche’s use of brush and ink became progressively bolder and more original. (
Introduction to The Art of Calligraphy
)

As time went on, Rinpoche began to incorporate demonstrations of calligraphy into the dharma art seminars that he taught. Volume Seven of
The Collected Works
includes a series of these calligraphies, done using an overhead projector at a seminar in 1978, which were reproduced and published in the
Shambhala Sun
in 1992 with a commentary on heaven, earth, and man.
The Art of Calligraphy
contains beautiful reproductions of some of Rinpoche’s finest calligraphies. Volume Seven includes the introductory material from the book, an essay by Rinpoche on heaven, earth, and man, some of the back matter from the book, and a selection of the calligraphies.

The essay from
The Art of Calligraphy
is a major statement of how Trungpa Rinpoche applied the principles of heaven, earth, and man to the creation of art and also how he incorporated the principles of the four karmas into his artistic work. Volume Six includes material on the four karmas presented in an early public seminar. In Volume Seven, the discussion of the four karmas is, at least for this reader, somewhat mysterious in terms of their application to art, but the discussion of the four principles in and of themselves is quite down-to-earth and helpful. Rinpoche describes the first karma, pacifying, as “the cooling off of neurosis . . . gentleness and freedom from neurosis . . . pure and cool.” He describes enriching as “the absence of arrogance and aggression”; magnetizing as “overcoming poverty”; and destroying as “destruction of laziness.” He uses the four karmas to establish the ground, or the basic space, of the diagrams he creates, and then places the heaven, earth, and man principles within that ground. He also discusses how the principles of heaven, earth, and man apply to the development of discipline in art—and in life. He presents discipline here as an outgrowth of the artist’s understanding of space and its relationship to the artist’s point of view. He introduces another principle fundamental to his presentation of dharma art: that genuine art arises out of and encourages the synchronization of body and mind. The principle of harmony within oneself as the ground of art leads in the final section of the essay to the discussion of how harmony can manifest in society, as Great Eastern Sun vision, based on the rising sun of wakefulness rather than the setting sun of ignorance and indulgence.

As explained earlier, Chögyam Trungpa was a student of flower arranging in England in the 1960s, and in learning this discipline he would have worked directly with the principles of heaven, earth, and man, which is used to describe the different aspects of Japanese flower arrangements. During his years in the United States, Trungpa Rinpoche continued to practice ikebana, incorporating into his arrangements the principles of the five buddha families as time went on. He was particularly fond of using pine branches and chrysanthemums to make massive arrangements. Over the years, he had a number of exhibits of his arrangements and gave demonstrations of his work as part of dharma art seminars and in other contexts. Eventually, he moved from isolated arrangements to the creation of dharma art installations that transformed the entire space in the gallery in which his flower arrangements were placed. In “Art of Simplicity: ‘Discovering Elegance,’” an interview in connection with an installation he did in Los Angeles at the LAICA Gallery in 1980, he said “Art should have its own environment altogether, its own entire world altogether, which beautifies the world, basically speaking.” The evolution of Rinpoche’s work with ikebana, from isolated enterprise to enlightened culture, is discussed in the following comments sent to me by Ludwik Turzanski, who worked with Rinpoche in Colorado. Turzanski was a professor in the art department of the University of Colorado from the early 1970s until Rinpoche’s death in 1987. Ludwik Turzanski writes: