The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Seven (27 page)

In a lot of art there is a tendency to try to capture a glimpse of one moment of experience and make it into a solid eternity. We have some brilliant idea and we try to make it into a piece of art. But that is captured art. We try to capture our artistic talent in a particular work of art—a piece of music, a painting, a poem. Until that work of art is forgotten or destroyed, it is stuck on a piece of paper or on a canvas or on a record that can be listened to over and over. It seems that such an attempt to solidify one’s work of art, instead of giving birth to artistic talent, creates death for artistic talent.

We could shift our allegiance from death to life. In that case, art becomes a living continuity and is seen as a perpetual process. First somebody has an idea. The idea is presented in a very embryonic stage at the beginning. It begins as a seed, but then that embryonic essence begins to sprout and to make shoots. As it continues to develop and grow, it makes little flower buds. That concept of art is based on the idea of living. The basic point is that there is a sense of continuity in your understanding of life.

If you know who you are, what you are, where you are, and you have something to say about that, you could share it with your fellow human beings. That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as you don’t want to publicize it. And even if you do want to publicize your embryonic discoveries, you don’t spell out the whole thing at once. It is very tempting to spell everything out, which proves one’s legitimacy, one’s wisdom, or one’s artistry. But according to the Buddhist tradition, in communicating with the world, particularly in the realm of art, the only thing you can do is hint, just give a basic headline. It depends on your attitude. If you want to demonstrate something very badly and you achieve that, then your work of art is a dead one. But if you present your work of art as a completely full message
without
spelling out every word of it, then you have just given the public a corner of what you might say. Therefore it is still fertile in people’s minds and there is room for it to unfold. It is living art.

If you expound more than is necessary, it becomes apologetic. And it is boring because the audience begins to follow the logic while you are still standing on it. And you begin to pounce on it at the same time. I think the problem is that people are afraid they might be ignored, they might become failures, so they end up explaining everything they know, all the reference points at once. That attitude of poverty or failure makes your theater dirt, your poetry dirt. Usually the sense of something unsaid but implied makes more sense to people. It is not particularly holding back the truth, it is being honest and at the same time festive about what you have to say. Then art is a living process.

Nonaggression doesn’t mean there is a regulation or cutting down of anything. Nonaggression is a product of awakened realization. You don’t usually feel a sense of inhibition when you awake during the day from sleep. You just go about your everyday life, because awake and asleep are different. And of course you don’t try to fall asleep in the middle of your activities during the day. But at the same time, you don’t feel that you are inhibited from anything because you are not sleeping. Nonaggression is an organic process rather than a discipline or moral binding. Nonaggression is seeing through the aggression and realizing there are more ways to be active and efficient than being aggressive; it is realizing a new angle of energy.

In the case of meditation practice, either we do it at the simple, matter-of-fact level or we do it with a very meaningful religious or philosophical undertone. That undertone automatically becomes dogma and belief, and that belief becomes a very definite belief. Because that belief is very definite, therefore you should defend that belief. And defending that belief becomes aggression. The quality of outrageousness is the opposite of that—or the extension of that act without aggression. The definition of outrageousness is basically a sense of humor. In this case, humor is not particularly making fun and mocking somebody or something. Instead, it is an appreciative gesture. That is, things don’t seem to be as heavy as we think they are, but they seem to be floating above the ground, and seemingly hilarious, funny, swift, and lucid.

At the same time, humor is not particularly casual or haphazard. The casual approach to life is often the result of being shy and feeling self-conscious and tense, so you would like to pass the buck or divert the attention to some other situation. But that also diverts the concentration of attitude and energy, so it is basically stupid rather than insightful. Humor is not like buying toys for your kids, which is somewhat lighthearted—unless the toy turns out to be extraordinarily expensive. And it is not at the level of the cheap world of plastics or teddy bears. It comes from delight and a sense of celebration. A sense of humor from that point of view is very transparent; at the same time, it is very definite. It has its own background and sanity.

Outrageousness is a question of being fearless in your celebration and your sense of humor. Sometimes it could be somewhat absurd and stubborn, but that seems to be the necessary eccentricity of this particular approach. Again, as long as it doesn’t contain aggression and an exhibitionistic outlook, it seems to be quite simple. A sense of conviction brings fearlessness, outrageousness, and a sense of humor. And that basic sense of groundlessness and nonexistence brings up the question of aggression in the practice of art.

In dealing with aggression, we can’t really separate ourselves into professional artists, amateur artists, and meditators. At the same time, somebody could be both a professional and an amateur artist and a meditator as well. Those areas are all related. Dharma art does not involve tricks or have to do with training artists in the Buddhist scheme. But our attitude toward art has to be expanded. This society in particular thrives on pigeonholing everybody’s style and discipline into categories, which becomes very clumsy and imprisoning.

You could try to continue your artwork and your meditation together, whatever you do in your life and whatever job you might have. I don’t think you learn dharma art, you discover it; and you do not teach dharma art, but you set up an environment so it can be discovered. It’s like preparing a nice meditation hall, with nice cushions to sit on, so it’s inviting for you to sit and take part in meditation practice. The makers of the meditation hall and the cushions can’t make you meditate, particularly—that’s what you can do. And that is dharma art, it seems to me.

Wise Fool

We have to allow ourselves to realize that we are complete fools; otherwise, we have nowhere to begin. We have to be willing to be a fool and not always try to be a wise guy. We could almost say that being willing to be a fool is one of the first wisdoms
.

I
N ORDER TO EXPERIENCE
some perspective on reality, we need to have a clear understanding, free from motivation, and also a sense of delight, or humor. Such an understanding of our perceptions only comes from a sense of nonterritoriality—that is to say, giving up ego’s clinging, aggression, grasping, and all the rest of it. So there is a need for immense openness without frivolity, immense inquisitiveness without aggression.

Before we can perceive and understand the subtleties of visual dharma, or any subtleties that exist in our life in general, we must prepare ourselves properly. If we are not properly prepared, it will be quite dangerous to play games with the energies of life. The danger comes from doing things wrong, or possibly from doing things seemingly right, but at the wrong time. If we are not actually trying to make a connection with reality—properly, generously, and gently—then every move we might make in our life is wrong. Whether we are trying to move to a new apartment, another city, another state; trying to take up a new career or job; trying to develop a new interest in this or that—all those moves we might make seem to be successive disasters. Everything goes wrong, one thing after another, all the time. Something wrong is happening, but whom should we blame? We could say, “I’m under some kind of spell, black magic. I made an enemy of somebody somewhere a long time ago, and that person is trying to throw a curse on me. That’s why things are going wrong.” But that’s not quite true. We would always like to have a scapegoat to blame for the phenomenal world, but by doing so, we only make ourselves more blind, more deaf, and more mute.

The phenomenal world is purely self-existing in nature; it does not take either praise or blame. It is self-existing, but if we fail to relate with the phenomenal world properly, something happens. Some kind of message comes to us which is not particularly organized by the people upstairs, but rather by the ground-floor people, ourselves. In other words, whatever direction we might take, we always need visual dharma. If we don’t have true perception of visual dharma, a lot of things can go wrong.

On the one hand, there’s the chicken-or-the-egg-first question. “In order to perceive visual dharma, don’t we have to have an ideal situation first? Shouldn’t something be done about that as well?” Seemingly there’s no end to doing things wrong, messing things up all the time. And since we don’t have a good starting point, nothing can go right. We are sort of trapped in that kind of negative “oy vey” situation. On the other hand, very interestingly, there is lots of room to make mistakes. That’s true, absolutely true. But such room for mistakes cannot be created unless there is surrendering, giving, some kind of opening. It cannot take place if there’s no basis for it. However, if there is some basis—if we can give away our aggression or attempt to give it away, if we attempt to open up and to strip away our territoriality and possessiveness—then there is lots of room for making mistakes. That doesn’t necessarily mean there is room for dramatic mistakes, but lots of little dribbles of mistakes can take place, which usually occur in any case—we can’t avoid it.

We have to allow ourselves to realize that we are complete fools; otherwise, we have nowhere to begin. We have to be willing to be a fool and not always try to be a wise guy. We could almost say that being willing to be a fool is one of the first wisdoms. So acknowledging foolishness is always a very important and powerful experience. The phenomenal world can be perceived and seen properly if we see it from the perspective of being a fool. There is very little distance between being a fool and being wise; they are extremely close. When we are really, truly fools, when we actually acknowledge our foolishness, then we are way ahead. We are not even in the process of becoming wise—we are already wise. Our journey generally takes place with that kind of shiftiness, in which everything overlaps. If we are taking the right direction in the present step, then we are not so afraid to get into the next step. And that means that we are actually well advanced on the next step already, maybe halfway through.

The perception of visual dharma plays an extremely important part in how we run our lives. It is not about becoming a famous art collector with a great understanding of Tibetan iconography, but it has to do with how we can “improve” our life, so to speak. Improving does not mean competitiveness, trying to get better so we can outsmart the other wise guys. Instead, it is taking some responsibility for our life. We are not just saying, “Wow! Isn’t that a nice full moon. Isn’t that a nice autumn tree. Fantastic!”—and thinking that is practicing visual dharma. Somehow, that doesn’t quite do it. It is too adolescent, we could almost say cheap. A lot of dignity is required. Such dignity comes from taking immense interest in the details of our life and from having a sense of appreciation that a lot of experiences are coming into our lives. That allows us to be solid, down to earth, and basically right. The visual perception of iconography and symbolism can occur without watching a slide show, without flipping through books, taking trips to museums, or buying and selling thangkas. If the Buddhist teaching makes sense, it should make sense on every level. Otherwise, it’s as you say, “bullshit,” and everything goes down the drain. How do we go about it so that it makes sense? Actually, we don’t go about it at all. Instead, we could just
be
, very simply, and watch ourselves.

The passion, aggression, and ignorance that go on in our mind are the first set of iconography ever presented in Buddhist doctrine. The wheel of life is just a simple chart of our ordinary, everyday life—our domestic world, emotional world, economic world, and political world. It shows how things work very basically. So before we realize or understand—or even become just about to understand—anything at all, we have to have some understanding of how things begin on the kitchensink level. We have to understand the ordinary, basic, very mundane, extremely mundane, and maybe too-secular level. We have to begin beyond so-called religion.

If we have an iconographic understanding of the redness of our desire, the blackness of our aggression, and the grayness of our ignorance, then at least we can begin to see some of the patterns in our life. We can begin to understand how all this visualization takes place in our life, in our world. Those patterns are not just made-up patterns, but pattern that exist in our heads, in our minds, in our hearts. From that, slowly and definitely, some kind of journey takes place. We are discovering and rediscovering and re-rediscovering ourselves all the time.

We might say, “What’s so good about rediscovering ourselves? We know ourselves already. We’re full of shit, not so good. We know that anyway.” But we don’t. That’s precisely the point. We think we are sick, but we have no idea how sick we are. That’s a problem. If we knew how sick we were, we would be on the way to advising the doctor as to what kind of treatment we should receive. Then some kind of positive step could be taken quite fearlessly and basically. It could be a gentle step. We don’t have to exhaust ourselves in a panic just because we are sick, or because these things happen every day as recurring situations, and life is quite a drag. We can take things step by step. We can reorganize our lives according to our situation, and do it slowly and precisely.