The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Seven (11 page)

Working with Rinpoche . . . on dharma art is still very vivid in my mind and indeed in my heart as well. . . . Rinpoche and I discussed art the first time we met when he first arrived in Boulder. We found that we both admired the Japanese esthetic. Rinpoche was later to comment, when founding the Naropa Art Department, that an ideal work of art might encompass the Western sense of daring, the Tibetan appreciation of color, and the Japanese understanding of space.

A few months after we met, Rinpoche called me to find some branches for him in the mountains when he wanted to do an ikebana arrangement. . . . I was called upon to personally assist Rinpoche in this way with his flower arranging after that time. I was to serve him in this capacity, joyfully, for the rest of his life.

[In the early 1970s] I invited Rinpoche to do a project with my art students at the University of Colorado in Denver. After some discussions of the unfeasibility of finding enough flower-arranging equipment for everyone, we came up with the idea of “object arrangements” instead of using flowers. This idea worked so well that it later became the main exercise of the Dharma Art seminars.

Around 1973, I arranged for a show at the Museum of Fine Arts Gallery at CU Boulder. Rinpoche did his first really large flower arrangement, and my students and I did smaller free-form arrangements of objects and flowers.
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Another exhibit was arranged around 1975 for Rinpoche at the Emmanuel Gallery on the CU Denver campus. This was the first of the “environmental installations” which Rinpoche was to do in subsequent years several times in Boulder, again in Denver, and also in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The environmental aspect of these shows had to do with the fact that that whole gallery environment was considered as a unique space for the flower arrangements, working together, to articulate. Later, this idea was to be formalized into an entrance room, a kitchen, study, tenno room,
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Buddha room, warrior room,
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and other spaces.

As the scope of this new project began to emerge, it became abundantly clear that one or two assistants working with Rinpoche, as in the past, would no longer be sufficient. So Rinpoche asked me to put together a group—“The Explorers of the Richness of the Phenomenal World”—to assist in this exhibit. Then came months of planning, design, and preparations. Mats, containers, and unique branch holders in many sizes were experimented with and built. Rocks, branches, vases, flower sources, etc., were researched. The Explorers were organized into departments and teams. Thus a framework emerged which was to serve as the basis of the skillful means not only for this but also for all subsequent shows. It was all very adventurous and exciting.

The Denver exhibit was the first time Rinpoche’s artistic work was publicized to the general public. Although seemingly a bit shy when the show first opened its doors, Rinpoche showed great delight when a number of flower arrangers and artists came to the opening and wanted to meet the artist and chat. He and we thought that it was a splendid show.

[In 1974] Rinpoche held his first art seminar at Padma Jong in California, and there seems to have used the phrase “dharma art” for the first time publicly to describe his unique vision for an open-hearted and genuine art based on appreciation and nonaggression.
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After this, the two separate events—the environmental flower installation and the dharma art seminar—were combined into one and presented together in well-publicized and well-attended weekend events in Boulder, Denver, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The events were organized and put together by a combination of the Boulder Explorers as well as new Explorer recruits from the Dharma center where the seminar and exhibit were being held.

The regular format for these three-day seminars consisted of talks (usually with slides) by Rinpoche, meditation practice, discussion groups, and hands-on workshops involving object arranging and related exercises. The meditation sessions, discussion groups, and workshops were conducted by senior students (Allen Ginsberg once presented a poetry workshop utilizing the principles of heaven, earth, and man) after they received instructions and demonstrations from Rinpoche himself. These were certainly marathon events for Rinpoche as well as for those of us who assisted him. But he seemed to relish being involved in it all, and his energy never flagged. Working with him and watching him was an extraordinary one-taste experience of exhaustion, letting go, and pure joy.

These seminars were attended by professional artists, filmmakers, musicians, and poets as well as people just interested in the arts, or simply by the person of Rinpoche himself. The grand finale of these events was the opening of the Installation with Rinpoche in attendance.
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This vivid memoir allows us to appreciate how Rinpoche’s exhibitions developed from modest displays to great undertakings—in a way that seemed characteristic of so many things he was involved in.
Expansive
and
all-inclusive
are words that come to mind to describe his passion to include the environment and other sentient beings in his work with dharma art.

Volume Seven of
The Collected Works
includes the only formal talk on ikebana that Rinpoche is known to have given. At the end of 1982, Rinpoche and some of his students decided to form a society for the practice and appreciation of flower arranging. He named the group “Kalapa Ikebana,” Kalapa being the name of the capital of the Kingdom of Shambhala. Students in the group studied flower arranging with various teachers of ikebana. Rinpoche was not their primary instructor, but he met from time to time with the group, demonstrating arrangements and critiquing student work. In 1983, the group started the
Kalapa Ikebana Newsletter,
a quarterly that was published for a number of years.
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“Perception and the Appreciation of Reality,” Chögyam Trungpa’s first and only public address on the subject of ikebana, appeared in the Winter 1984 issue.

At this point in the discussion of Rinpoche’s ideas about art, it should hardly seem surprising that he opened his talk by saying that the topic was “perception and the appreciation of reality.” He then spoke about some obstacles to creating a work of art, specifically thinking that one lacks talent or that one’s upbringing hasn’t prepared one to make an artistic statement. Rinpoche challenges the idea that an unusual talent is needed in order to create art. He says that “everyone who possesses the appreciation of sight, smell, sound, feelings, is capable of communicating with the rest of the world.” This is the basis for artistic discipline, including the discipline of flower arranging. Turning more specifically to the particular school of flower arranging in which he was trained, Rinpoche comments that the Sogetsu School in Japan “does not only pay attention to flower arranging, but also it pays attention to sculpture and to creating an environment out of a variety of things.” This gives us a clue as to how the discipline of ikebana itself contained the seed of the larger dharma art installations that Rinpoche undertook.

Volume Seven also includes two interviews conducted in connection with a major dharma art installation that took place in 1980 at the LAICA Gallery in Los Angeles. This installation was called “Discovering Elegance.” Similar to what Ludwik Turzanski described above, the exhibit consisted of a number of rooms created and arranged by Rinpoche and his assistants, containing flower arrangements and calligraphies done for the installation. In these two interviews, Trungpa Rinpoche also expands the definition of dharma art. He describes it as “the principal way we are trying to create enlightened society.” He also talks about working with chaos as a means of discovering harmony. Here, we begin to see how all of Trungpa Rinpoche’s activities as an artist come together with his role in proclaiming the buddhadharma and the Shambhala teachings in the West. The way or path of the artist and the way of the bodhisattva and the warrior once again seem to converge in the same broad highway of wakefulness and working for the benefit of others.

Also included in Volume Seven, “Art and Education” is another article that echoes this theme. It is based on a public talk at the Naropa Institute in 1979. Here, Rinpoche describes how many of the principles of art that he articulated were reflected in and applied to the overall approach at Naropa. Here he says, “Art is environment. Education is the mind which relates with that environment.” He says that art has to do with creating a bigger world: “The kind of art we are talking about tonight is big art.”

Without photographs or access to the exhibits themselves, it is difficult to visualize the spaces that Rinpoche created in the dharma art installations. One wishes an illustrated catalogue had been prepared for at least one of them. The Shambhala Archives does have extensive photographic documentation of some of the exhibits, especially the installation at the LAICA Gallery, and the documentary film
Discovering Elegance,
referred to above in Baird Bryant’s description of his work with Chögyam Trungpa, shows us the process of creating that installation, along with discussion of the principles of dharma art. None of these materials, however, form part of
The Collected Works,
so much must be left to the imagination of the reader.

V
ISUAL
D
HARMA

In addition to its main focus—Chögyam Trungpa’s activities as an artist and poet—Volume Seven features three essays in which Chögyam Trungpa comments and reflects on Buddhist iconography and art, not as inspiration for Western art, but as traditional disciplines in their own right.
Visual Dharma: The Buddhist Art of Tibet
presents his long introductory essay to a catalogue that accompanied an exhibit of Tibetan Buddhist art at the Hayden Gallery at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975. (The illustrations from the catalogue and the commentary on the specific items pictured are not included here.) Here Rinpoche discusses traditional elements in Tibetan Buddhist iconography and how they are expressed in Tibetan Buddhist thangka paintings and rupas, or religious sculptures of important teachers and deities. “Empowerment” is taken from the liner notes to an album presenting recordings of Tibetan sadhanas, or religious liturgies, performed by His Holiness the sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa during his first visit to America in 1974. Rinpoche talks about the significance of the ceremonies themselves as well as about the ritual instruments and music that are an integral part of the ceremonies. “Disciples of the Buddha” is an in-depth interview with Rinpoche, conducted by Robert Newman and included in Newman’s recent book by that title.
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Rinpoche discusses the meditative realization that can be seen in the I-chou lohans, Chinese statues of the disciples of the Buddha, which Rinpoche felt were powerful expressions of the meditative state of mind. He arranged to have a silk-screened banner made of a photograph of one of the lohans, to be used as an example and inspiration to students practicing meditation in the Shambhala Training meditation program.

Jean Thies, a longtime student of Rinpoche’s, provided recollections on how the Visual Dharma exhibition came about and her experiences working on the exhibit:

Sometime in 1973 a bunch of us were crowded into Rinpoche’s bedroom at Tail of the Tiger [now Karmê Chöling]. Rinpoche said that he had been asked to do an exhibition at the Hayden Gallery at MIT and asked who might be interested in working on it. I jumped at the invitation.

In the Spring of 1974, after some research, we made a list of possible lenders. Rinpoche came to the East Coast and we went on a trip. We went to Doris Wiener’s gallery, the Newark Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Purchase College, Jacques Marchais, William Wolfe, and Yale. We saw many possibilities and started to assemble lists of what could be used. We also saw Jane Werner’s collection in New York City. Karl Springer saw John Gilmore Ford in Baltimore and contacted some others. I had other sources as well, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

By the early fall of 1974, a list of thangkas and rupas had been made, and we narrowed it down to what would be appropriate. Photos were acquired, we got the necessary permissions, etc.

A number of us assembled at the 1974 Vajradhatu Seminary that fall. During the last part of the seminary our group spent part of each day with Rinpoche at his house. A slide would be projected, and Rinpoche would talk about it. Karl Springer, Sherab Chodzin Kohn, Larry Mermelstein, and I were there—and others who escape my memory.

Rinpoche used the text of Lodrö Thaye’s
Treasury of Knowledge,
which has a chapter on Tibetan art: styles, methods, etc., which he referred to. The catalogue was created along with his marvelous introduction. Basically, the catalogue was written by Sherab with the lenders providing the measurements of the pieces, as well as me measuring some with a ruler. We also made a wonderful poster of a White Tara thangka from the Southampton, N.Y., museum for the exhibition.

To say the least, this was the richest and most wonderful time with Rinpoche. We worked every day. When it was over, and Karl and I were going out the door of Rinpoche’s house, Karl said, “It will never be this good again.” It was a precious time for us.