The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Seven (2 page)

V
OLUME
S
EVEN OF
The Collected Works
brings together Chögyam Trungpa’s work as a poet, playwright, and visual artist and the teachings on art and the creative process that he gave during his seventeen years in North America, from 1970 until his death in 1987. Chögyam Trungpa’s appreciation for and involvement with art are among the most innovative and provocative parts of his teaching in the West. There is also material in Volume Seven that one might call “art history,” in which Trungpa Rinpoche shares his knowledge of the symbolism and iconography of traditional Buddhist art and music. All of this produces a rich tapestry of color, form, and sound, which enlivens and deepens our appreciation of this highly creative and prolific human being.

Rinpoche’s artistic orientation was something of a departure from the traditional view of the place of art in Tibetan Buddhism. In the Buddhist traditions of Tibet, art is largely connected with monastic life. Formal poetry was composed for Tibetan liturgies, and dohas, or spontaneous poems and songs of spiritual realization, were very much respected. Thangkas, or scroll paintings, and rupas, sculptures, were created to depict vajrayana deities and gurus, as aids to tantric visualization. They were created in an environment of sacredness, and painters and sculptors often performed a sadhana, or ritual practice, to begin their work. Music was also involved in many liturgies, and dance was an important part of some tantric rituals. So the monastic culture was not without poetry, music, and art. In contrast, there was relatively little secular art or literature within the Tibetan culture as a whole, with the notable exception of the great epic of Gesar of Ling and some folk art, literature, dances, and songs. In some respects, the relationship of art and religion in Tibet was similar to that of medieval Europe, where so much of the music and fine arts was religious in nature. Obviously, there are important distinctions between the two, because Buddhism is a nontheistic religion. The deity in Buddhist art has a very different function, since it is viewed as a quality of emotion and energy discovered within the practitioner’s own mind. In some respects, however, art, music, and dance in the Middle Ages in Europe appear to have been less dominated by a religious outlook than they were in Tibet. There were court dances and musicians, as well as landscape and portrait artists. This does not seem to have been the case to any great extent in Tibetan culture.

The reason for raising this point is not so much for the sake of historical or anthropological argument, but rather to highlight how radical it was for Chögyam Trungpa to have developed the relationship he had with the arts in the West. His view and practice of artistic disciplines were much more closely allied with the approach taken to the arts by Buddhism in Japan. In
Dharma Art,
a collection of his talks on art and the artistic process, he himself says: “The cultural attitude is that there is no secular art in Tibet. If you’re going to paint even a free-style thangka, the subject has to be a religious one: different gurus, different deities, and different protectors. So in Tibet you can’t have too much of a free hand; whereas in the Zen tradition of China and Japan, often people depict secular art in the language of Zen” (“Art in Everyday Life”).

Trungpa Rinpoche’s own monastic training in Tibet did include an exposure to many of the religious arts practiced there. He pursued a rigorous study of monastic dance but had to leave the country before he completed his training. His root guru, Jamgön Kongtrül, trained him in the composition of dohas, and Trungpa Rinpoche spent many hours reading and studying the sacred poetry of the Kagyü and Nyingma lineages of Tibetan Buddhism. He had a particular love for the songs of realization composed by the great Tibetan yogi Milarepa, and the Nyingma master Jigme Lingpa was perhaps his favorite poet.
¹

As a small child, Rinpoche was fascinated by the work of craftsmen at his monastery. His secretary and bursar at Surmang Dütsi Tel Monastery arranged for the renovation of the apartment of the tenth Trungpa (Chögyam Trungpa was the eleventh), who had been a very austere man with simple tastes. Sixteen wood carvers and painters were hired to redecorate the quarters. In
Born in Tibet,
Rinpoche reports how he was enthralled by their work and how he and one of the workers’ sons “liberated” some paints to make pictures of their own. Later in
Born in Tibet,
Rinpoche talks about a visit he made to the Karma Monastery, which had been the seat of one of the Karmapas and was renowned for its thangka paintings. He admired the paintings greatly but also noticed a decline in the quality of more recent works and hoped “that it might be possible for me to do something to revive Tibetan art, but Communist oppression was soon to put an end to any such dreams.”
²It does appear, however, that Rinpoche received some training in the discipline of Tibetan thangka painting, although this editor has been unable to find any description of it. In the 1960s in India, he created a few very beautiful thangkas, which combined traditional elements and technique with his own unique vision.
³

Rinpoche arrived in India in 1960, having made a ten-month journey through the Himalayas on foot to escape the communist Chinese. His first contact with Western literature came in India. In the preface to
First Thought Best Thought,
a book of his poems, he describes his wonder at encountering the contemporary Western approach to poetry at a poetry reading sponsored by the American women’s club: “I was very struck by the reading, which I recall included works by T. S. Eliot. This was not hymn, chant, mantra, or prayer, but just natural language used as poetry.” In the same preface, he recounts his excitement at running across a “simple and beautiful haiku” in a magazine he was reading one day in New Delhi. He was just in the early stages of learning the English language at that time, and he reports, “It may have been an advertisement for some Japanese merchandise or it may have been a piece of Zen literature, but I was impressed and encouraged that the simplicity of its thought could be expressed in the English language.”

Rinpoche apparently had other artistic interests in India. Ato Rinpoche, a colleague of Trungpa Rinpoche’s there, has reported that Chögyam Trungpa made small dharma art-like arrangements of rocks and greenery in terrariums while in India.
⁴

In late 1963, Rinpoche traveled to England on a Spaulding Scholarship at Oxford University. There, he was immersed in the Western literary and artistic traditions, which made a huge impression on him. In the preface to
First Thought Best Thought,
he describes the impact of an encounter with Western music:

Poetry, linguistic expression, and music are identical as far as I am concerned. Once I was taken to the college chapel by my dear friend Mr. John Driver to hear the
St. Matthew Passion.
This was such a great discovery, experiencing the tremendous heroism and spiritual passion in that atmosphere of sanctity, that I felt as though the occasion were my private feast. From the beauty of the music I gained further appreciation of the Western legacy. A Tibetan friend who also attended felt nothing of the kind. His reaction was that “we had three boring hours listening to the noise of tin cans, pigeons, and chickens getting their necks wrung.” I felt so energized as we came out into the chill of the English night that my friend panicked and thought I was in danger of being converted to Christianity!

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