The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Seven (17 page)

In the early days of the Western world, Great Eastern Sun artwork was happening constantly. Great Eastern Sun vision appeared not only in a lot of art, but in the lifestyle as well. Then people began to lose the sense of Great Eastern Sun vision, because their dignity was being questioned. Dignity was regarded as purely something to be cultivated, something belonging to the rich and above the heads of the peasants. The noble families had more food to eat than the peasants, and that kind of economic situation led to the Industrial Revolution. Then of course, the notion of democracy came along, saying that all men are equal. This meant that no hierarchy could take place.

Nowadays, on the whole I think that some modern artists are good and sane and have a tremendous sense of Great Eastern Sun vision, but they are extremely rare. There are only a few of them—very few. It is up to you to figure out who. Otherwise, we will be discriminating between good and bad, happy and sad. I think there is a definite trend of Great Eastern Sun vision; it is beginning to pick up. It did pick up in the sixties, though in the early seventies nothing happened at all. Everybody leaned toward setting-sun drama. But now people are beginning to come around and to pick up on it. During the twenties in America, a lot of interesting things began to happen. People didn’t know what they were doing, but there were good feelings and real things took place: people actually knew how to conduct their lives and how to produce works of art. Unfortunately, art has now become an economic investment, which is a great obstacle to the artist. It doesn’t leave us with very much to work on.

There is also a lot of setting-sun vision in the Japanese tradition. The flower-arranging school I came from is very much a setting-sun school, which I somewhat regret and respect at the same time. You see, the whole point is that we have to develop ourselves first, before we engage in anything else. We can’t do very much other than that. We have to develop some understanding of Great Eastern Sun vision first, and then we can go out and study with teachers according to that particular principle. That seems to be the only way. We can’t find any holy land of flower arrangers, or another art form we want to do. We have to find it within ourselves.

In developing Great Eastern Sun vision, I think we have to emphasize the Western tradition as well as the Eastern. In order to inspire American students, I’ve been working with them in all kinds of ways. I’ve been telling them how to buy a good tie, a good suit, cuff links, shoes, how to say “Yes, sir” and “Please, may I?” I’ve been training them to behave as good human beings. And it’s the same with art. We have to have some understanding of Buddhist Oriental composure, but at the same time we should also have the vision of the Western world, which in itself is quite remarkable. Tremendous things have happened here, but lately everybody has been trying to ignore that and make an amusement piece out of the whole tradition, to cut it down and make it all into a Coca-Cola world. When we do that, we run into problems. But as long as we don’t give up our Occidental vision and dignity, I don’t think there’s any problem. And actually, there is such a thing as the Occidental Great Eastern Sun. That is a linguistic contradiction, like saying that the sun rises in the west, which is a silly thing to say. But the West is west, and therefore the sun also rises in the West, something like that. I myself have been inspired by great artists, painters, and musicians of the West. Therefore I’m here: I’m living in the Western world, and I appreciate my world tremendously.

Basic Goodness

Basic goodness is like a flower arrangement, which has its own contrast and its own togetherness. It is completely together, at the same time both inviting and fearless. There is no premeditation; it just comes along on the spot—basic goodness
.

T
HE
G
REAT
E
ASTERN
S
UN
represents the notion of awake and also the notions of energy, luminosity, and brilliance. Basically, those qualities represent the fundamental state of mind an artist should have. He or she should have that kind of vision and that state of being; otherwise, there are a lot of problems and difficulties. At the beginning, Great Eastern Sun vision is very black and white. When the sun shines, it is white; when the sun doesn’t shine, it is black. We have to cut through our ideas of indulging or lounging in the possibility that something might occur simply out of our experience. Obviously, there is room for open-mindedness in Great Eastern Sun vision, since it is basically a state of mind in which wakefulness, enlightenment, and open-mindedness are all involved. But in order to be open-minded, you have to open your eyes much wider, not just glance around, looking at things with half-closed eyes.

This is a very important issue: if you have a completely open mind and open eyes, you can discriminate further, and you can judge the situation accordingly. You are able to say yes to certain things and no to certain things. In fact, quite possibly you could open yourself further by presenting yourself and acting on the situation. In that way, as long as you know their dangers and their merits, even questionable subjects could be included. So it is very important for the artist to have that first mind, or artistic mind, which from the Great Eastern Sun point of view is awake rather than half asleep. If you are awake and on the spot, then you can juggle things around. That is basic healthiness and openness.

Having seen the vision of the Great Eastern Sun from a fully awake point of view, we can begin to develop nonaggression. Usually, we are trying to take advantage of our world—to milk our world or to slaughter it. We have precisely the same attitude toward our world that we have toward cows. We take away their baby calves and milk the mothers to make butter and cheese—if they last long enough. And if they don’t produce anything, or even if it only looks like they won’t produce anything, we slaughter them and eat them up. That is an expression of aggression, which is the setting-sun version of how we view our world—and how we view our art as well. If a work of art is fun and productive, we go on; but if it is not, we give up on it and get into an entirely different subject. So nonaggression seems to be very important.

What makes us blind? Aggression makes us blind, so we can’t create visual dharma. What makes us deaf? Aggression creates deafness, therefore, auditory dharma cannot be produced. And because of aggression, dharma touch, dharma smell, or dharma taste also cannot be produced. To use an American idiom, when we are uptight, we are being aggressive. We are so dissatisfied with ourselves, our world, and our work that we begin to feel that everything is worthless. Or at the least, we feel that some things are worthless, while other things might have some worth. We pay more attention and take things so personally that when any negativity occurs in our lives, we get aggressive and uptight. On the whole, we could say quite confidently that aggression makes us blind and deaf, so we cannot produce a work of art, let alone anything else. We cannot run our lives. Aggression makes us dumb mutes, so we become like vegetables. Aggression might produce a so-called extraordinary work of art, but art produced in such a way pollutes the world, rather than producing something refreshing and healthful.

The purpose of dharma art is to try to overcome aggression. According to the Buddhist vajrayana tradition, if your mind is preoccupied with aggression, you cannot function properly. On the other hand, if your mind is preoccupied with passion, there are possibilities. In fact, artistic talent is somewhat related to the level of passion, or heightened interest in the intriguing qualities of things. Inquisitiveness is precisely the opposite of aggression. You experience inquisitiveness when there’s a sense of wanting to explore every corner and discover every possibility of the situation. You are so intrigued by what you’ve experienced, what you’ve seen, and what you’ve heard that you begin to forget your aggression. At once, your mind is at ease, seduced into greater passion.

When you are in a passionate state, you begin to like the world, and you begin to be attracted to certain things—which is good. Obviously, such attraction also entails possessiveness and some sense of territoriality, which comes later. But straightforward, pure passion—without ice, without water, without soda—is good. It is drinkable; it is also food; you can live on it. It’s quite marvelous that we have passion, that we are not made purely out of aggression. It’s some kind of saving grace that we possess, which is fantastic. We should be thankful to the Great Eastern Sun vision. Without passion, nothing can be experienced; nothing can be worked on. With aggression, we have bad feelings about ourselves: either we feel tremendously righteous, that we are the only ones who are right, or we feel pissed off that somebody is destroying us. That is pathetic. It prevents us from seeing the basic goodness.

Basic goodness is like a flower arrangement, which has its own contrast and its own togetherness. It is completely together, at the same time both inviting and fearless. Such a flower arrangement is a product of basic goodness, if I may say so. It hangs together. There is no premeditation; it just comes along on the spot—basic goodness. For instance, I went up to the mountains today to collect some branches and this tree was there, just waiting to be collected. When I saw it I said, “Ah! That will do.” We had to work on the tree a little bit in order to transport it, but that is also an expression of basic goodness, of how things hang together. Basic goodness combines the qualities of heaven, earth, and man: basic goodness of heaven, basic goodness of man, and basic goodness of earth are all involved at once. Basic goodness includes generosity and bravery. There is also a notion that all things are round. It is like the mandala principle, in that every single thing is working together with all the other elements, which is why the whole thing hangs together so well. And we begin to feel that way ourselves, that basic goodness exists in us. Therefore, we are not afraid of our world, and we are not depressed about our world. We feel so good.

We feel good about the particular artwork we are doing, and we begin to have further ideas. Some people try to squeeze ideas out as if they were constipated, sitting on a toilet seat, glancing occasionally at the toilet tissue, wishing something would come through. When artists do that, the result is very meek and very technical. They always refer back to technicalities and try to produce something out of that—but they don’t really feel good about the whole thing at all. What we are talking about here is the opposite of that. It is not exactly like developing diarrhea, but there is some kind of free flow, in which you have the confidence that you can actually produce ideas. You may not have any ideas at the beginning, but you might get some ideas halfway through. If you don’t have any ideas halfway through, or you feel that you have run out of ideas altogether, then you take a short break, almost at the level of giving up. Then the Great Eastern Sun rises in your mind. That is not just an idea—it is something that actually occurs in your state of mind.

Basic goodness is connected with generosity and with a sense of trust in oneself. When that sense of trust comes through, we develop what is known as harmony. If there is no trust, there will be no harmony. It is all very well to say that everything is in harmony and that we should work with that; but that is just paying lip service, saying that something should be done, while nobody actually does it. It reminds me of certain religious conferences I have attended. The first one I experienced was a harmony conference, held in New Delhi while I was living in India. Then there were little harmony conferences that took place in California. They invited rabbis, bhikshus, priests, the whole gang. Everybody was talking about harmony, but they didn’t find any harmony on the spot. Although they were talking about harmony, there were no results at all. Nothing at all happened, absolutely nothing! People came to the conference and left the conference the same way. But they went back saying, “We took part in a conference on harmony; therefore, our organization is greater now.” But how could that be? That’s very sad. It verges on setting sun, and it is not even sophisticated but primitive setting sun.

Harmony has to be related to some sense of lusciousness or richness. That is one aspect of harmony. The other aspect is a sense of spaciousness and openness. The lusciousness almost has the qualities of a Jewish mother: it is plentiful, rich, and there is lots of stuff on the table, so to speak. The openness and spaciousness are like a Japanese home, where things are very sparse. There is no big furniture, no Victorian stuffed sofa, just mats. When you sleep, you sleep with a block of wood or even a stone as a pillow. So true harmony is the Jewish home and the Japanese home put together quite conveniently. Technically, we could call that a Shambhala home, or Great Eastern Sun home. And the same kind of harmony could be true of your artwork as well.

When such harmony takes place properly and fully, there is also joy—for the very reason that you are not struggling to create the harmony. In that way, you are also creating enlightened society, which can only exist with that sense of harmony and inquisitiveness and all the other things we’ve been discussing. It is our duty to create an enlightened society through works of art and through our sanity. And obviously, meditation practice is very important. So in the name of heaven, earth, and man, I bow down.

Meditation

Awareness is very important. We are here, nowhere else. Since we
are
here, why not
be
here?

A
CCORDING TO
B
UDDHISM
, art is something produced by a student rather than by an isolated person. You might think that sounds very stuffy; however, it is true. Art is produced by a student with an interest not only in his own creation, but in the basic necessity of expression—that is, what needs to be shown to others. Beyond that, the Buddhist approach to art is anti-garbage. You don’t keep churning out scruffy things; they go into the garbage and are burned.