The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Seven (89 page)

A chance encounter between Ven. Trungpa Rinpoche and Allen Ginsberg on a Manhattan street in 1970 (Ginsberg “stole” Trungpa’s taxicab for his fatigued father) was the origin of a lasting and significant poetic colleagueship that grew to include encounters and friendships with many other American poets, and which found institutional expression in the creation in 1974 of the Jack Kerouac School of Poetics as a founding department of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Nineteen seventy-four also marked the first of three historic visits to North America by the “dharma king,” His Holiness the sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa, head of the Karma Kagyü lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. Each of these visits, as well as the untimely death of the Karmapa in November 1981, occasioned poems in this volume.

A milestone in Ven. Trungpa Rinpoche’s work of propagating buddhadharma in the West was his appointment in 1976 of an American-born disciple, Ösel Tendzin (Thomas Frederick Rich), as his Vajra Regent or dharma heir. A number of the poems celebrate, counsel, or admonish this spiritual son. Others are addressed to the poet’s blood son, Ösel Mukpo, or to students, friends, admirers, or detractors. Ven. Trungpa Rinpoche makes regular use of the “occasional” poem, and this traditional and now much neglected form is well-represented in the present volume.

Many of the poems, even when not explicitly occasional, draw inspiration from events in the life of the two major institutions founded by Ven. Trungpa Rinpoche since his arrival in North America: Vajradhatu—an association of Buddhist meditation centers; and The Nālandā Foundation—a nonsectarian nonprofit educational foundation that includes the Naropa Institute. These events include the annual three-month Vajradhatu Seminary for seasoned Buddhist practitioners; the international Dharmadhatu Conferences at which executive committee members from the numerous local practice centers in North America and Europe convene; Naropa Institute seminars and graduation ceremonies; and many others.

A prominent source of imagery for the poems—as for much of Ven. Trungpa Rinpoche’s teaching—is the tradition of the Kingdom of Shambhala, a Buddhist-inspired but also secular vision of enlightened society that underlies the Shambhala Training Program.

The poems composed in Tibetan are in traditional meters, consisting mostly of seven- or nine-syllable lines. Also traditional is the interweaving of prose and poetry, similar to the Japanese technique used by Bashō and others. As for the poems composed directly in English, they were in almost every case dictated to a secretary, most of them to this editor. A short description of the process involved may serve to illuminate the context of the poems and to give some indication of their place in Ven. Trungpa Rinpoche’s overall work:

At the end of a long day of scheduled business—administrative meetings, individual or group audiences, perhaps a visit to a fledgling business venture, followed in the evening by a public talk or a community ceremony—late into the evening or even in the early hours of morning, Ven. Trungpa Rinpoche, just when his loyal but weary attendants think they are about to be released, declares, “Let’s write a poem.” Pen and paper are made ready. Then, perhaps with a few moments of silent thought, more likely with no pause at all, he commences to dictate. The dictation is unhesitating, at a rate as fast and upon occasion faster (alas!) than the scribe can record. At the conclusion of dictation, Rinpoche asks, “Are there any problems?” This leads to a quick review of any unclear or grammatically inconsistent passages. Perhaps a few changes, such as bringing persons or tenses into agreement, are made, rarely anything of substance—though in the process Rinpoche himself may be inspired to interject a new couplet or stanza. Then a title—often a title and subtitle—are supplied by the poet, and the scribe is called upon to read the newborn poem, in a strong voice and with good enunciation, to the small audience which typically is present on these occasions. More often than not, further poems reiterating this sequence of events will follow over the course of another hour or two, or three.

In compiling the present volume, Ven. Trungpa Rinpoche has guided the overall shape and contents. The editors’ work has consisted primarily of rectifying punctuation and line structure; decisions in these matters have necessarily been somewhat arbitrary on the editors’ parts, but based on guidelines put forward over the years by the author.

Tibetan calligraphy for the facing-page bilingual selections was executed by Ven. Karma Thinley Rinpoche and by Lama Ugyen Shenpen, and their contribution is hereby gratefully acknowledged. The Vajra Regent Ösel Tendzin took time out of his busy schedule for a complete reading of the penultimate version of the manuscript, and his guidance is acknowledged with gratitude. A continuing and crucial contribution has been made by the Editorial Department of Vajradhatu, consisting of Carolyn Gimian, Editor-in-Chief; Sarah Levy; and Richard Roth. Mr. Roth in particular was instrumental in the later stages of the project. Of the numerous others who have worked over the years in recording, typing, editing, and preserving the poems, only a portion can be acknowledged here: Beverley H. Webster, Connie Berman, Berkley McKeever, Donna Holm, Emily Hilburn, Helen Green, Sherab Kohn, Marvin Casper, and John Baker. Particular recognition is also due to the Nālandā Translation Committee, and especially to its executive director Larry Mermelstein, for their work in translating or revising earlier translations of the Tibetan selections. The author in his own preface has already acknowledged Allen Ginsberg, without whose persistent encouragement and generosity neither the poems themselves nor this volume would have taken form as here presented. Finally, I would like to thank publisher Samuel Bercholz equally for his patience and his impatience in fostering and forwarding this undertaking.

The unique and precious opportunity provided to me, as to others, of working intimately with Ven. Trungpa Rinpoche is an incalculable gift and beyond the poor power of our gratitude to acknowledge. Through the blessings of his transcendent wisdom and compassion, may our slight efforts be transmuted into benefit for all beings.

D
AVID
I. R
OME

EDITOR’S AFTERWORD TO

Timely Rain

Looking into the world

I see alone a chrysanthemum,

Lonely loneliness,

And death approaches.

Abandoned by guru and friend,

I stand like the lonely juniper

Which grows among rocks,

Hardened and tough.

Loneliness is my habit—

I grew up in loneliness.

Like a rhinoceros

Loneliness is my companion—

I converse with myself.

[Looking into the World]

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche wrote these lines in Scotland in November of 1969. He was thirty years old and at the nadir of his career. It had been ten years since he fled his homeland in the face of materialist, totalitarian armies bent on destroying the age-old culture that had blessed him with its profoundest wisdom and highest privilege, training him to serve as a spiritual prince. A few months earlier he had “blacked out” at the wheel of his car (drunk, we may guess) and suffered a near-fatal crash that left him permanently paralyzed on his left side. He took this as a message. His response: to abandon his Buddhist monk’s robes and his monastic persona and to elope with a beautiful English teenager. Such behavior outraged and alienated Western patrons as well as friends and colleagues in the Tibetan community. It was a bleak time. And, as he had done several times already in his young life, Trungpa was preparing to leave behind everything familiar, except for his sixteen-year-old bride, and cross the great water to an unknown continent.

It was a nadir from which he would rise during the next ten years to become one of the most original and influential figures in the transfusion of Eastern influences into Western life that made the 1970s a defining cultural moment. By 1976, from his headquarters in Colorado, Trungpa was writing:

Glorious year for my work.

Glorious diamond for my business.

Glorious gurus visited me.

What could go wrong, Chögyie?

[Aurora 7 (#1)]

Yet despite the triumphs and the recognition and the very real accomplishments, the rhinoceros of loneliness was never far from Trungpa’s door. It was the existential ground to which he returned again and again. Nowhere is this more clear than in his poetry. Loneliness is the touchstone at the back of all the masks or personae that Trungpa puts on over the years as he continually reinvents himself, from “stray dog” to “wild duck” to “hailstorm,” “sharp bamboo dagger,” “general,” “king,” “ship sailing through icebergs,” “tiger,” “flaming vajra,” to the poignant image of an aging king taking his medications “as prescribed by the physicians,” and reviewing past successes and failures from his porcelain throne as he observes “that yellow dye sitting on white paper / As it flushes down the efficient American plumbing system.”

Trungpa Rinpoche was remarkable in his total lack of need for solitude; indeed there was virtually not a moment, asleep or awake, when there were not others in his immediate presence—students, attendants, lovers, administrators. His tolerance for the constant proximity of others with their hungers and “colorful trips” was perhaps a product of his training in the close quarters of the monastery, as well as of his vocation as a bodhisattva. Behind it, though, one sensed that he had early on learned how to be “alone with others,” that indeed he never departed from his own essential aloneness. This was why he could do the most private things in the presence of others, such as composing out loud the intimate utterances of his poems, with no sense of inhibition or interruption.

From a Western point of view, we may suppose that Trungpa’s loneliness began at birth when his father abandoned the family, though Trungpa himself regarded this as a normal feature of the nomadic peasant culture into which he was born (and another father soon appeared). A more drastic severing of natural human bonds (again, from a modern perspective) was his removal from his native place and his mother’s daily care at the age of two to be raised in the male cloister of the monastery. In any case, at age nineteen he was violently ejected from the matrix of a basically medieval society and began a journey into adulthood, not without friends and supporters along the way, but fundamentally alone in the challenges he faced and embraced to alchemize a coherent worldview from the elements of radically divergent cultures.

In one of his most triumphant poems Trungpa asserts:

There is a significant proclamation:

Chögyam was born as peasant’s kid

But he is willing to die as the universal monarch.

[Aurora
7
(
#
1)]

This is perhaps the ultimate expression of loneliness, transformed from total deprivation to total self-possession. The transformation is akin to Yeats’:

When such as I cast out remorse

So great a sweetness flows into the breast . . .

We are blest by everything

Everything we look upon is blest.

Trungpa elsewhere describes what he calls the “king’s view,” the sense of elevation that permits one to survey all of space and time and feel sovereign of one’s own life and its possibilities. In much of Trungpa’s poetry we feel him being the artist-king, vividly imagining, “finger painting” as he liked to say, an ideal world and his own ideal presence in it. A supreme if rather shocking example of such imagining, mixing myth, memory, and desire, is the poem addressed to his horse, “Maestoso Drala.”

Yet poetry is also a refuge for Trungpa, perhaps the only place where he is able to step out of all the roles and self-inventions and speak truthfully from—and to—his own heart:

Wounded son—

How sad.

Never expected this.

[Wait and Think]

Through his poems he gives voice to vulnerabilities, pain, disappointment, and anger. This emotional honesty is the “open secret” of Trungpa’s poetry that will especially reward his many devotees, I think, if they will grant Rinpoche his loneliness and his personal struggles and listen to the poems with an ear free from preconceived idealizations. By way of example, look at a snippet from the intensely devotional poem called (revealingly) “Expose,” in which—in the same breath—Trungpa both doubts himself and one-ups the normally sacrosanct forefathers of his teaching lineage:

At least look at us the way we are,

Which may not be the most you expect of us,

But we have the greatest devotion,

Beyond your preconceptions.

These are sentiments one would have looked long and hard to find expressed elsewhere, not only in Trungpa’s formal teachings but even in his intimate conversation. That they can be found in his poetry constitutes a revelation, and a gift of his essential humanity from a leader who over the years progressively diminished his availability for simple human exchange and elevated his persona into the realm of the superhuman.