The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Seven (3 page)

In England Rinpoche continued his study of the English language, which had begun in India. He took evening classes in English offered to foreign students by the town of Oxford. In later years, in describing his study of English pronunciation to his students, he often recounted how he was made to say the word
policeman
over and over. At Oxford itself, Rinpoche studied Western history, art, religion, thought, and culture. While in England, he also embarked on his own practice of Western artistic and literary disciplines. He wrote many poems in Tibetan and also penned his first verses in the English language, a number of which are included here in Volume Seven. Others were published in 1972 in
Mudra,
which appears in Volume One. They tended to be much more formal or orthodox than later poetic efforts, and it appears that they were written out rather than recited spontaneously, the method of composition for almost all of Rinpoche’s poetry written in the English language in America.

While living in England, Rinpoche wrote his autobiography,
Born in Tibet,
with an Englishwoman, Esmé Cramer Roberts, as his editor (see Volume One). It was his first book published in the West. Although it is not unusual for a Tibetan teacher to write an autobiographical account of his life, the style of
Born in Tibet
is nothing like a Tibetan account of a teacher’s life.

Chögyam Trungpa took his first photograph in Tibet; we know this because he brought it to the West with him. It is a powerful portrait of his root guru, Jamgön Kongtrül of Sechen.
⁵
During Rinpoche’s lifetime, it hung on the shrine in the meditation center he founded in Boulder, Colorado. When Rinpoche conferred the Vajrayogini abhisheka, he had a huge reproduction of this photograph placed on a throne in the shrine room. He kept a copy of the photo in his bedroom, and in the last years of his life he said that he saw a rainbow-colored light coming from the heart center of Jamgön Kongtrül. In India, Trungpa Rinpoche took some very small-format photographs that are kept now in the Shambhala Archives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They are pictures of sacred places in India, such as Bodhgaya, as well as pictures of other Tibetans, mainly lamas, who appear to have been Rinpoche’s friends or traveling companions.

Having taken these early “snapshots” in India, Rinpoche in England made his first photographic studies of landscapes, buildings, trees, and space, among other subjects. The Shambhala Archives has inherited a number of prints of Rinpoche’s photographs from England. One interesting collection shows a number of shots of two ruins in the English countryside, photographed in the spring when the rhododendrons were in bloom. There are pictures of each building taken from the perspective of the other; architectural details, wide pans, shots of flowers, and views of the sky in relationship to the forms. Clearly, he had discovered photography as art.
⁶

In England, Rinpoche made a much more direct connection with Zen and the arts. He studied flower arranging for several years with Stella Coe, a high-ranking teacher of the Sogetsu school of ikebana in England, who reported that he had a natural talent that did not really need to be trained.
⁷
It was a discipline he would continue throughout the remainder of his life. While still in England, he made his first brush and ink drawings inspired by Japanese brush painting. About ten years ago, I was shown copies of some of the drawings he did in England, and it was striking how accomplished his technique already seemed.

In Japan, Zen developed a very close relationship with the “fine” arts and beyond that with the practice of many other disciplines as “arts” in their own right. Even beyond art, the Japanese developed a sense of one’s activity or disciplines as a “way,” or
do:
c
hado,
the way of tea;
kyudo,
the way of archery;
kado,
the way of flowers, and so on. It is a common Buddhist understanding that ordinary activities can be a form of meditation in action; or, put another way, that one can bring mindfulness and awareness to bear on anything one does. But the idea of a
do
or way is that one’s conduct of secular, everyday activities can become the means to realizing a sacred outlook and can be a path to awakening, a path even to enlightenment. Whether or not Trungpa Rinpoche first encountered this idea in England, it is clear that he understood and embraced this approach later in life, as we shall see.

Somewhere in the course of his early encounters with Western art and literature, whether in England or when he first came to North America, Chögyam Trungpa also came to an understanding of the role of contemporary art in the West as a source and an expression of spiritual inspiration and sacred view. In his approach to translating Buddhist terms and concepts into the English language, as was discussed in the introductions to Volumes Two and Six, he found that the vocabulary and ideas used in Western psychology were better suited to the expression of Buddhism in the West than language with an overtly religious tone. Similarly, “secular” Western art, music, and literature have for more than a century communicated sacredness and an uplifted view—giving us access to beauty, profundity, and wisdom. Of course, one can still be moved by the religious music of Bach or Brahms, by the majesty of Chartres, or by medieval paintings of Christ and the saints. We have not lost touch with the inspiration evoked by such religious art, and many modern artists continue to create works of art with religious content. However, most contemporary art, while it may be deeply spiritual, is not confined or defined by religious themes, and contemporary artists frequently do not turn to overtly religious symbolism and themes to convey their deepest longings or their most direct experience of reality. However, although art has become largely disconnected from an overtly religious iconography, message, or subject matter, it has remained a deeply spiritual medium, often with a greater ability to move us and nurture our spirit than organized religion seems to possess. Chögyam Trungpa grasped this from early on in his tenure in the West.

While this secular evolution within art is not a particularly new or radical understanding for most of us in the West, for Chögyam Trungpa it must have required a considerable reorientation, given the tradition out of which he came. In his country, there were the equivalents of Michelangelos and Leonardos still painting the walls of monasteries. Yet the secularization of the arts in the West does not seem to have been a difficult or unpleasant discovery for him. He apparently embraced the freedom of Western art and beyond that the possibilities for using the arts as a vehicle to communicate a sacred view of everyday activity and to provoke inquisitiveness and wakefulness in his Western Buddhist students.

Rinpoche’s ideas about the relationship between art and spirituality came out of his direct involvement with the arts. He had been practicing calligraphy and flower arranging and writing poetry for a number of years before he had much to
say
about those disciplines. Many of Rinpoche’s talks on art and the artist have been gathered together and presented in
Dharma Art,
edited by Judith L. Lief and published in 1996. The book is based on material presented by Chögyam Trungpa over nearly ten years, from 1972 through 1981. Interestingly enough, the editorial approach in
Dharma Art
is itself rather artistic—in some ways more like a painting than the usual systematic presentation made in a book. The volume presents a number of themes as highlights that overlay one another to create a complex and interconnected fabric. It begins with a letter written by Rinpoche on the occasion of the Naropa Institute’s first summer program in July 1974. The remaining chapters are, with few exceptions, based on talks given by Rinpoche in courses at Naropa and in dharma art seminars and other gatherings with artists held in many locations around the United States. About half of the material is based on talks given at Naropa, many of these taken from a seminar called “The Iconography of Buddhist Tantra,” held in the summer of 1975, in which Chögyam Trungpa articulated not only his first systematic take on dharma art itself but also a view of how human perception operates and how it is refined through the development of meditative awareness. Such awareness, both panoramic and detailed, can then be applied to any artistic enterprise as well as to the general conduct of “Art in Everyday Life,” the title of one chapter of the book. There is also a consideration of symbolism, not just as it applies to art but as a component of all human experience.

The first chapter, “Dharma Art—Genuine Art,” defines dharma art for the reader. The opening paragraph gives us the first part of the definition:

The 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 unselfconsciousness in one’s creative work.

The last sentence of the letter, and of the chapter, gives us the second part of the definition of dharma art: “Genuine art—dharma art—is simply the activity of nonaggression.” These two components of dharma art are reflected throughout the talks that Chögyam Trungpa gave on art and the artistic process. The first aspect—that dharma art is a reflection of the meditative state of awareness—is expressed in many different ways throughout his work. Chögyam Trungpa did not articulate a series of principles that related to art as opposed to other activities in life or other aspects of his teaching. I think it would be more accurate to say that he applied principles of dharma—which refers both to basic truth and specifically to the buddhadharma, or the doctrines of Buddhism—to the understanding and execution of art. He also let the art speak directly for itself—and he used and refined the understandings that arose from his art to communicate with his students. He made use of his own artistic expressions to convey to his students how he saw the world. In his dharma art seminars, Rinpoche often gave demonstrations of calligraphy and flower arranging and had poetry read, or composed on the spot. Artistic expression was a means for him to demonstrate aspects of the immediacy and depth of perception that words fail to convey. This communication was not just aimed at other artists: art was a means of communicating with everyone in his life.

In May of 1979 I traveled throughout the province of Nova Scotia with Rinpoche and a group of his students. Rinpoche brought his camera with him and took pictures as we toured around. One afternoon while we were driving on the North Shore of the province, we took a dirt road down to a tiny fishing pier, which a battered sign proclaimed as “McDonald’s Cove.” It was a gray day, the water and the sky both appearing dull and dirty to me. We looked at the water and the lobster traps on the pier and talked with a few fishermen. Rinpoche casually snapped some photographs. A few weeks later, when I saw the slides from that afternoon, I was particularly struck by his shots of the water, by the luminous quality of these photographs and the nuances of color, form, and light that he had captured. I realized that he and I were seeing very differently when we looked at the same things. I could feel wonder, depth, and delight in his pictures, as compared with the monotony and dismal tones of my own memories of that day. Once, for a charity auction to raise funds for some good cause in the Buddhist community, Rinpoche contributed a pair of his glasses to be auctioned, so that the successful bidder, as he put it, “could share my vision.” When I saw his photographs of a fishing cove in Nova Scotia, I knew exactly why one would want to do that!

Although his art spoke for itself in these ways, he also used the
discussion
of dharma art to talk about how one might develop that perceptiveness in oneself. In part, he often conveyed a very simple message: you need to meditate if you want to understand or create dharma art. “Absolutely nobody can become a good craftsman or a good artist without relating with the practice of meditation” (Dharma Art, “Meditation”) That might sound like a limiting definition of art, leading one to ask, “Can only Buddhists become artists?” However, he follows up this statement with a clarification of what he means by meditation:

For instance, Beethoven, El Greco, or my most favorite person in music, Mozart—I think they all sat. They actually sat in the sense that their minds became blank before they did what they were doing. Otherwise, they couldn’t possibly do it. Just coming out of the market and plopping down at the dining-room table and writing a play—that’s impossible. Some kind of mind-less-ness in the Buddhist sense has to take place. (Dharma Art, “Meditation”)

Trungpa Rinpoche often talks about that open space of blank mind that precedes artistic creation, or is its first step, as “first thought best thought.” “First thought” is an evocative term for the primordial ground of disciplined spontaneity that he recommended as the best approach—in fact, the only genuine one—to writing poetry, executing a calligraphy, or embarking on any artistic project. He also developed this concept in early seminars on the Buddhist teachings, particularly in the exposition of the teachings of mahamudra from the tantric tradition, and later in many lectures on the Shambhala principles of warriorship and enlightened action. In
Great Eastern Sun: The Wisdom of Shambhala,
Rinpoche connects first thought with the discovery of a dot in space that wakes up the warrior:

Whether you are confused or in a neutral state of mind or your mind is full of subconscious gossip, in any case there is always space. The dot in space is what we call first thought, best thought. In the midst of preoccupations, in the middle of your shower, as you put your pants on, while you dry your hair, while you cook your food, in the midst of all sorts of neutral states of being, the dot is a sharp point that jerks you, shakes you. You are quite easily going through your life, quite naively, and suddenly there’s a jerk out of nowhere. First thought, best thought. . . .