The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa: Volume One (5 page)

Although he received occasional letters and news from Tibet, Trungpa Rinpoche was never able to return there. It was only after his death that a connection to Surmang Dütsi Tel, his main monastery, was reestablished by the Western sangha. One of Trungpa Rinpoche’s students, Lee Weingrad, traveled to the monastery in September 1987, five months after Rinpoche’s death, and has led many groups of Westerners there in subsequent years. Rinpoche’s eldest son, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, then led an official delegation to Surmang in the summer of 2001. During his visit, the Sakyong was given nearly four hundred pages of texts that Trungpa Rinpoche composed before leaving Tibet. Mipham Rinpoche received this material from Trungpa Rinpoche’s nephew, Karma Senge Rinpoche—who, in the aftermath of the communist occupation, traveled around the Surmang area gathering everything he could find of Trungpa Rinpoche’s writings to preserve these texts for future practitioners. In time, much of this material will be translated and made available to English-language readers.

The second volume that is included in Volume One of
The Collected Works
is
Meditation in Action
, which was published in 1969 by Vincent Stuart and John M. Watkins. The material in the book dates from talks given at Samye Ling Meditation Center in Eskdalemuir, Scotland, by Rinpoche in 1967 and 1968, before his transformative vision at Taktsang. There is a simplicity and a purity of thought that have made this little book an enduring classic on meditation and the path of the bodhisattva. This is the first book based on transcripts of audio recordings of the author’s lectures. The great majority of his subsequent publications have been based on transcripts of lectures, his poetry being of course the major exception. That he—and other important Buddhist lineage holders—came to the West at a time when the technology existed to easily record the human voice was an accident, but an extremely fortuitous coincidence. The teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha were remembered and written down by his major disciples, and that tradition of students passing on the words of their teachers from memory was a main vehicle for the transmission of the Buddhist teachings for many centuries. At the time that the historical Buddha lived, the culture was much more attuned to that kind of oral transmission. Had the preservation of Chögyam Trungpa’s dharma teachings relied purely on the memory of his Western students, I think it is fair to say that a great number of the teachings would have been lost or strangely altered. So we can be grateful that the arrival in the West of so many great Buddhist masters coincided with a technology uniquely suited to preserve their words.

For the transcription and editing of
Meditation in Action
, thanks are due to its editor Richard Arthure and other English students of Rinpoche’s who worked on the manuscript. Richard was with Rinpoche when he composed
The Sadhana of Mahamudra
at Takstang in Bhutan and worked closely with Rinpoche on the translation of that text.
¹¹
Of the genesis of
Meditation in Action
, Richard tells us:

The idea of putting together a book, based on talks given by Rinpoche mostly in 1967, arose in conversation between the Vidyadhara and myself, probably early in 1968. I thought it would help in making more people aware of what an extraordinary teacher Rinpoche was and, in particular, that it would draw more people to the Dharma and to Samye-Ling. I selected the material and set about transcribing and editing the talks that I thought would hang together to make up a book. It was solitary and labor-intensive work. For transcribing, I had an old reel-to-reel tape recorder and the first draft was written out by hand and then typed double-spaced on a Hermes typewriter. The challenge was to transform Rinpoche’s spoken words into clear and elegant English prose. Even then, he had a fairly extensive and ever-growing vocabulary in English, but his sentence construction and grammar were rather sketchy and unorthodox. . . .

I worked on the book for about four months in the Spring of 1968 in between bouts of intensive ngöndro practice.
¹²
I wanted to finish both before Rinpoche and I left for India and Bhutan, which was late June or early July of 1968. I had no idea what the title of the book would be until after the manuscript was finished. I remember there was some discussion as to whether it should be
Meditation and Action
or
Meditation in Action
. In retrospect, it seems self-evident that
Meditation in Action
is a much better title, but it wasn’t quite so obvious then as it is now with hindsight. Robert Bly happened to be visiting Samye-Ling at the time that I was putting together the final typescript. He very kindly reviewed it and suggested a handful of minor changes, mostly in the matter of punctuation. . . . The corrected proofs were sent to Stuart and Watkins only days before [Rinpoche and I departed] . . . for India, and so it happened that the book came out in England when both of us were thousands of miles away.
¹³

Although
Meditation in Action
differs from most of Trungpa Rinpoche’s later works in its style, being from the period before he met the energy of Padmasambhava, “the Great Wrathful One,” in Bhutan, it already demonstrates a particular gift that made him uniquely suited to present the buddhadharma in the West. In an early unpublished diary, which he wrote in England in 1966 to 1968, he himself delineates this quality: “In particular, my own situation is due to the fact that no one [else] could understand everything all together—both worldly and spiritual views and how to live one’s life. This is not to say that I am more skilled, more learned, and more experienced in the dharma. There are many people who are more learned than I and more elevated in their wisdom. However, I have never made a separation between the spiritual and the worldly. If you understand the ultimate aspect of the dharma, this is the ultimate aspect of the world. And if you should cultivate the ultimate aspect of the world, this should be in harmony with the dharma. I am alone in presenting the tradition of thinking this way.”
¹⁴

This ability to seamlessly bring together spiritual and temporal experiences and to point to the sacredness in our experiences in everyday life is one of the aspects of Chögyam Trungpa’s exposition of the dharma that made him so accessible and so helpful to Western practitioners.
Meditation in Action
already shows this understanding to be well developed, which is one reason that it has remained popular more than thirty years after it was published.

Another auspicious juncture that coincided with the appearance of
Meditation in Action
was that, through the book’s publication, Trungpa Rinpoche made the acquaintance of Samuel Bercholz and Shambhala Publications. Vincent Stuart, of Stuart and Watkins who published the book in England, was, in addition to being an English publisher of some note, a student of the teachings of Gurdjieff. He and Sam Bercholz got to know each other through mutual interests in things literary and spiritual, and through Vincent, Sam came into contact with the work of Chögyam Trungpa. In 1969 Sam, then in his early twenties, and a friend, Michael Fagan, decided to start a company dedicated to publishing works on spirituality from the world’s great religious traditions. Their first acquisition was the rights to
Meditation in Action
for the American market. As Sam Bercholz tells us: “
Meditation in Action
was originated by Vincent Stuart at Stuart and Watkins, and co-published simultaneously in the United States by Shambhala as its first published title. Shambhala took a 1,000-copy run-on of the British edition of 1,000 copies.”
¹⁵

Sam was familiar with some of the stories about an enlightened kingdom called Shambhala, hidden away in the Himalayas, and he was attracted to the ideals of this enlightened society, so he decided to name his company Shambhala Publications. When Trungpa Rinpoche found out the name of the American company that had acquired the rights to his book, he was intrigued. He himself had a strong connection to the Buddhist teachings connected with Shambhala and had, as noted above, been writing a spiritual history of this kingdom when he was traveling out of Tibet. When he arrived in North America in 1970, among the first people he contacted were Sam Bercholz and his wife, Hazel, who along with Michael and Joann Fagan helped host his first teaching tour in California. All four of them became Rinpoche’s students. Michael left the publishing company several years later; Sam remains the Editor-in-Chief of Shambhala Publications, which has been the main publisher for the writings of Chögyam Trungpa in the United States for more than thirty years now. He became one of Rinpoche’s close disciples and has continued, not only to publish his work, but to propagate his teachings through his own lectures and seminars.

Mudra
, the third book in Volume One, was the first book by Chögyam Trungpa for which Shambhala Publications was the original publisher. It was also the first of his books edited by Michael H. Kohn, also known as Sherab Chödzin, who has worked on many books by Chögyam Trungpa since that time. In addition to the poetry mentioned above, there are two translations of texts on the practice of dzogchen, or maha ati, as Trungpa Rinpoche preferred to call it. Richard Arthure worked on shaping the English versions of these two texts. An essay on the Buddhist path entitled “The Way of the Buddha” is also included in
Mudra
. It was first published in
Garuda I
, a small in-house magazine started by Rinpoche’s American students. (A version of the same article appeared in the magazine
Chakra: A Journal of Tantra and Yoga
.) There are several accounts of the history of this article. According to Richard Arthure: “It’s my recollection, though I can’t be one hundred percent sure, that the first time Rinpoche presented an outline of the path in terms of the nine yanas [stages] was in April 1971 at a month-long retreat in a log cabin near Phelps, Wisconsin. Tania [Leontov] and I attended this retreat with Trungpa Rinpoche. There were no other visitors. . . . During this retreat Rinpoche dictated a fairly long and detailed account of the entire nine-yana path, and ‘The Way of the Buddha’ essay may have been a condensed version of that.” John Baker separately informed me that Rinpoche dictated “The Way of the Buddha” to him and Marvin Casper, in connection with their work as editors on
Garuda I
. John writes:

I’ll mention one other major piece of editing that I participated in: the first
Garuda
, and especially the article “The Way of the Buddha,” which I have always felt is quite amazing. Rinpoche had not been teaching the Vajrayana yet when he dictated this article to us, sitting at a kitchen table in his house in Four Mile Canyon in Boulder. He was battling spiritual materialism in America, with the emphasis on cynicism, not going on “trips,” [and the development of] the proper relationship with the teacher and toward the teachings. So when he dictated this extraordinary article (he spoke, I wrote down his words, Marvin and I questioning and editing as he went), I was somewhat stunned and asked him if it was all right, did he really want suddenly to start giving out information on tantra, especially such shocking and esoteric information. He giggled and said that, if people read it and were seduced into coming to him hoping for exotic and magical teachings, it would be all right because we would just make them sit. I can see him laughing about it at the Formica table, looking at me.

One other extraordinary moment which occurred during the creation of that piece: after he had finished, he said of Maha Ati that the experience of the end of the path, the last evolution of enlightenment, is lonely, “like a lone wolf, standing on a ridge in the moonlight, howling at the moon.” That image for the end of the path has stayed with me all these years.
¹⁶

These two accounts may complement each other. It is possible that Rinpoche began shaping the ideas while in retreat, that he then dictated the article for inclusion in
Garuda
, and that from there it was reedited for inclusion in
Mudra
.

Finally, ink paintings by Tomikichiro Tokuriki, of the Ox-Herding Pictures—a well-known Zen representation of mind training—are reproduced in
Mudra
with Chögyam Trungpa’s commentary, which John Baker also had a hand in preparing. Rinpoche also relates these drawings to the nine yanas in Tibetan Buddhism. Trungpa Rinpoche concludes that “the final realization of Zen automatically leads to the wisdom of Maha Ati,” which is the highest achievement on the path according to Tibetan tradition.

Already, in
Mudra
, his modest entrance into American book publishing, Rinpoche stands out as both an ecumenical figure and an iconoclast. Surely, he is the first Buddhist teacher to correlate Zen and Tibetan Buddhism in this way. In June 1970 when he visited California, Rinpoche made a very pivotal connection with the founder of Zen Center San Francisco, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. The two teachers, by all accounts, had a profound meeting of minds. Rinpoche and Roshi started making great plans to do things together, but these did not mature, as Roshi was diagnosed with liver cancer soon after they met and died in December 1971.
¹⁷
Nevertheless, Rinpoche’s respect for the Zen tradition was immense. Some of the emphasis that he put on the sitting practice of meditation, which became one of the trademarks of his teaching in America, grew out of his respect for the practice environment created by Suzuki Roshi. During Rinpoche’s lifetime, Roshi’s picture was always on the Buddhist shrines in Rinpoche’s Buddhist centers.