The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Seven (15 page)

Summers, Naropa hosted an extraordinary gathering of faculty and students and served as a catalytic meeting point for a number of prominent avant-garde artists and performers, including John Cage, Meredith Monk, Jean-Claude van Itallie, Colin Wolcott, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Robert Frank, Anne Waldman, and Diane DiPrima. The Vidyadhara wanted Naropa to be a spiritual center as well as an artistic center and to host leading contemplatives from the array of world spiritual and psychological traditions. This would provide the ground for what came to be known as contemplative education, in which the various fields of knowledge could be grounded in spiritual depth and creativity.

The Vidyadhara took a great interest in Western music and was especially fond of Mozart and Beethoven. But his musical interests were wide ranging and included the music of China, Japan, India, and Indonesia as well. He wrote a number of songs and often, at the end of programs, joined his students in singing sessions. He worked closely with one of his students, Robert Murchison, in designing and building a large traditional Tibetan drum.

The Vidyadhara’s interest in the arts flourished in the late seventies, when he presented a series of flower-arranging exhibits, environmental installations, art exhibits, and seminars on dharma art. He connected the stream of teaching on dharma art with the principles of the Shambhala tradition he was emphasizing at that time. In gathering materials for his installations, he worked with the principle of inherent richness, called yün in Tibetan. He trained his students to recognize this quality of richness and power, whether they were selecting the fine art or choosing a tie, and to appreciate the discipline of paying attention to detail.

The Vidyadhara himself paid meticulous attention to every detail of his environmental installations. He would go to the flower market before dawn to pick out the freshest, choicest flowers for his arrangements. He also had the uncanny ability to magnetize people to loan their priceless heirlooms for the installations. Once he came across an eight-foot statue of Yung-lo which he very much wanted to use in his exhibit. The statue was extremely valuable, and at first the owner was reluctant to part with it. But upon hearing of the Vidyadhara’s deep connection with the Yung-lo lineage of China, he agreed to loan it free of charge.

To help with his artwork, the Vidyadhara founded a group called the Explorers of the Richness of the Phenomenal World, with whom he worked closely to assist in his exhibits and installations, particularly in gathering materials for large flower arrangements. He also founded a school of flower arranging called Kalapa Ikebana. The Vidyadhara also continued to pursue photography and encouraged the development of a photographic society, called Miksang, by his Vajra Regent, Ösel Tendzin.

The dharma art seminars conducted at the Naropa Institute and elsewhere were a rich mix of lectures, discussions, meditation practice, art exhibits and demonstrations, and spontaneous compositions of calligraphy, poetry, and flower arrangement. To give students a simple intuitive exercise, embodying the principles underlying dharma art, the Vidyadhara introduced the practice of object arranging. In this practice, students worked with the placement of simple forms (usually three) in space (usually on a sheet of paper).

In 1980, the Vidyadhara began his association and friendship with Kanjuro Shibata Sensei, the twentieth-generation bowmaker (onyumishi) to the emperor of Japan. Through Shibata Sensei, the Vidyadhara introduced kyudo, or Japanese archery, to his students and, through Mrs. Kiyoko Shibata, the art of the Japanese tea ceremony as well. With Shibata Sensei he formed the Ryuko Kyudojo group (initially Jvalasara). In the early eighties, the Vidyadhara also formed Kalapa Cha, a society for the study and practice of the way of tea.

Another expression of the Vidyadhara’s artistry was the development of a series of festivals for the Shambhala community. In designing the Midsummer’s Day festival in particular, he tried to impart some of the pageantry and ritual splendor of traditional Tibetan folk festivals, with parades, banners, dancing, theater, music, and sporting events.

The Vidyadhara carried his artistry into his home, an idea very much stressed in his dharma art teachings. He took an interest in all the details of his household, including architectural and interior design, landscape design, furniture arrangements, cooking, cleaning, forms of etiquette, dress, and service.

It could be said that in his many teaching activities, Trungpa Rinpoche was always at heart an artist. For many of his students, the essence of what they learned was transmitted through gesture, environment, and artistic creativity. The Vidyadhara’s inquisitiveness and love of the great variety of artistic expressions, and his respect for the power of art to awaken and liberate, were unbounded. For that reason, he emphasized the teachings of dharma art for all his students—artists and nonartists alike.

This book is based on a selection of dharma art teachings—courses, seminars, public talks, and discussions—presented in a variety of settings throughout North America. The sources for each chapter are given in the back of the book. May this important stream of teachings awaken our appreciation for the richness of this colorful and challenging world and our compassion to awaken such appreciation in others.

Dharma Art—Genuine Art

A letter written on the occasion of the Naropa Institute’s first summer program, July 1974
.

T
HE TERM
dharma art
does not mean art depicting Buddhist symbols or ideas, such as the wheel of life or the story of Gautama Buddha. Rather, dharma art refers to art that springs from a certain state of mind on the part of the artist that could be called the meditative state. It is an attitude of directness and unself-consciousness in one’s creative work.

The basic problem in artistic endeavor is the tendency to split the artist from the audience and then try to send a message from one to the other. When this happens, art becomes exhibitionism. One person may get a tremendous flash of inspiration and rush to “put it down on paper” to impress or excite others, and a more deliberate artist may strategize each step of his work in order to produce certain effects on his viewers. But no matter how well-intentioned or technically accomplished such approaches may be, they inevitably become clumsy and aggressive toward others and toward oneself.

In meditative art, the artist embodies the viewer as well as the creator of the works. Vision is not separate from operation, and there is no fear of being clumsy or failing to achieve his aspiration. He or she simply makes a painting, poem, piece of music, or whatever. In that sense, a complete novice could pick up a brush and, with the right state of mind, produce a masterpiece. It is possible, but that is a very hit-and-miss approach. In art, as in life generally, we need to study our craft, develop our skills, and absorb the knowledge and insight passed down by tradition.

But whether we have the attitude of a student who could still become more proficient in handling his materials, or the attitude of an accomplished master, when we are actually creating a work of art there is a sense of total confidence. Our message is simply one of appreciating the nature of things as they are and expressing it without any struggle of thoughts and fears. We give up aggression, both toward ourselves, that we have to make a special effort to impress people, and toward others, that we can put something over on them.

Genuine art—dharma art—is simply the activity of nonaggression.

Discovering Elegance

We have to be honest, real, and very earthy; and we need to really appreciate things as they are. They are so beautiful and wonderful already, but in order to appreciate that, it takes time and discipline—so much discipline
.

W
HEN
I
WAS DISCOVERED
as a
tulku
, which is a Tibetan word meaning “reincarnation of a previous teacher,” at the age of seventeen months, I was enthroned as the abbot of the Surmang group of monasteries. At the age of sixteen, I was given the responsibility of governing Surmang district, which had about forty thousand people and covered a large area in Tibet, maybe the size of Vermont. Our province was quite happy and prosperous, and our basic way of maintaining the economy was by exporting timber to the highlands, where there were no trees. The altitude of our place was eighteen thousand feet high. Beyond that altitude there were no trees that could be used for building houses and so forth. There was only shrubbery, small bushes of tamarisk and rhododendrons, and so forth.

The way we led our province and survived our troubles was largely by maintaining farmhouses and the farming life. Everybody owned cattle or, in the English language, what you call yaks. But yak is actually only the masculine, or male cattle; the female is called a dri. So there is no such thing as yak’s milk. We exported a lot of butter, from nurturing dri and from large numbers of sheep, which were also regarded as tremendous resources.

We exported many different varieties of things, because our province happened to be on the threshold of the highlands and the lowlands. They were not exactly highlands and lowlands from a geographical point of view, since they were all about eighteen thousand feet high; but at the same time, there were mountains and valleys, meadows and plateaus, and high mountain grazing. We produced the best meat, and good cattle (dri and yak). Our particular part of Tibet supposedly produced among the best milk, yogurt, cheese, and butter. The cheese was not produced in the Western style but was just purely part of the milking situation: when there was an early lambing season, cheese was used as part of the diet. We had another type of cheese which was made from powdered tiny sweet potato–type things. We also used underripe grains that were still green and therefore very potent and fresh. It’s like the traditional concept of picking young green tea before it becomes fully grown, like some of the green tea from China and Japan. The English type of gunpowder tea is also collected before it is fully matured, so it’s fresh and adolescent. Therefore it is very tasty and good for your system. In our province we also had salt lakes. The salt lakes in the Surmang district were not regarded as having the highest-quality salt, but what was called red salt. Groups of people owned particular lakes, maybe a one-fifth-acre salt lake. They worked with the salt lake, scooping out the salt from the water and drying it and so forth. So we also exported salt. That’s how we lived in our province.

The monasteries survived on the basis of creating certain funds. Suppose you had a feast or ceremonial time, which might last for ten days—a fund for that particular festivity would be created. When that fund was created, people would be able to make offerings to the monks and to create shrine offerings at the same time. Such a fund might cost, for example, seventy-five sheep and maybe a several-mile-long field of barley and wheat. A person or group of people would manage such an event, and in that way the ceremony could happen. The propaganda that the Chinese Communists put out is not true, from that point of view. What has been said by the Communists is that we flogged our people and squeezed the peasants so that they had to come up with their offerings. That’s not particularly true. It’s very hard to express truth, I suppose, but as far as I remember myself, that is what we did. At the time there was also the creation of a continuous seminary in our monastery. I looked into the situation, trying to organize the funding part. A fund in that case didn’t mean lots of money in the bank or anything like that. Funding meant how many acres of ground that produce grain and how many heads of animals—how many animals to be used for milking and how many sheep for the creation of wool. So in that way, we maintained ourselves.

You may wonder why I’m telling you all these things about how we led our life in Tibet, but I think it has something to do with the situation of North Americans. In North America, people graduate from college and leave home—or sometimes leave home even before that. There’s no sense of home then. They begin to live out of a suitcase and get a job—secretarial, management, depending on their capabilities. People begin to develop an interesting relationship with reality in that way. You don’t see how things are produced, what things are made out of, how things have been done. You might see a silk-screened design and like it, so you buy it without knowing anything about the process of silk-screening. Or you might buy a carpet, not knowing the weavers or the carpetry world at all. And when things go wrong, usually we call a specialist.

Dharma art is not so much that you should be artistic, that you should paint a lot of pictures, compose music, or at least play music. And it is not that you should develop some fruition of beauty. That seems to be a problematic situation here, and it was exactly the same in Tibet. If I had not been made governor of my province, I probably also wouldn’t have known how things worked. I probably would have taken the same attitude that some of you might have. And I might have said, “Now we’re having this festival, so why is this food coming, what’s wrong with it?” I probably would have gotten pissed off. But in order to be a governor, and a practical person, I needed to know how successful and luscious and powerful such a ceremony could be, and how it was based on the economy and morale of the people, at the same time.

The question is: How are we going to organize our life so that we can afford to produce beautiful things, not at the expense or the suffering of others? That seems to be the basic point from a practical point of view. Then there is something beyond that, which is the concept of art altogether, or dharma art. It is a question of discovering elegance and dharma art, which may be two slightly different topics. Dharma art comes first; discovering elegance may come later. So dharma art is not showmanship, or having some talent that nobody had before, having an idea that nobody’s done before. Instead, the main point of dharma art is discovering elegance. And that is a question of state of mind, according to the Buddhist tradition.