The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Seven (6 page)

David Rome was my mentor when I was first learning to edit Chögyam Trungpa’s work. I assisted him with the editing of the 1977 Epilogue to
Born in Tibet
and worked with him for several years on other projects. At one point, I asked Trungpa Rinpoche if I could edit in my own style, based on what I was learning from David Rome, or whether I should learn to edit exactly as he did. Rinpoche was very definite: “You should learn to edit just like David.” I doubt that Rinpoche believed I would be able to do this, since no two people would approach their work in exactly the same way. In fact, I think the point was that I would learn more from David if I paid very close attention, which indeed I did after this discussion. I have always been grateful for what I gleaned from my apprenticeship. For
The Collected Works
David Rome kindly sent me some comments on his editorial work with Chögyam Trungpa, particularly the editing of Rinpoche’s poetry. David Rome writes:

Rinpoche basically trusted me to edit appropriately and didn’t intervene much. Being true to his meaning was always my highest priority and I would check my editing by reading back to him whenever possible.

He wanted his voice to sound correct in English, and it was a challenge in editing the poetry sometimes to not change too much—to leave some of the oddness in because it was so much his voice and his mind, while rectifying other things like disagreement in tenses or persons or dropped articles, etc., where those only distracted from the sense. My habit at first with the poems was to make each phrase its own line—basically starting a new line whenever there was a pause in the dictation. Rinpoche often had lists in his poems—“jackal, peacock, limping ostrich, baboon with hiccups” (made-up example!)—and I would give each item its own line. At some point Rinpoche noticed this on the page and said, make the lines longer.

One funny anecdote—but it’s more about me than him—concerns the famous poem “Victory Chatter.” There was a line that talked about “well-cared-for bows and wrestling armor.” So it appeared in
First Thought Best Thought
and elsewhere for years. Neither I nor anyone else questioned the odd notion of “wrestling armor.” Only much later did it dawn on me that he must have said “rustling” armor—not only did that make more sense, but it was clear from an earlier line in the poem “Rustling of armor takes place constantly.” What other slips of the secretarial (or transcriborial) ear may lie on the page still undetected? Alas!
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Although the introduction to Volume Seven has focused primarily on the classical Tibetan influences and the influence of contemporary American poets on the work of Chögyam Trungpa, there were many factors that affected his poetry. It would be remiss to leave the discussion of Chögyam Trungpa’s poetry without mentioning once again the Japanese influence on his work. The beginning of the introduction to Volume Seven quotes Rinpoche’s story about encountering a haiku in a magazine while he was still in India. There is little evidence of Japanese influence on the poetry he wrote in England, but there are many signs of it in his American poetry. His interest in Zen and Japanese aesthetics was undoubtedly reawakened by his meetings in the early 1970s with Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, the founder of Zen Center San Francisco. Particularly in later years of his life, especially in 1983 and 1984, Rinpoche wrote many haiku-like three-line poems. During this era, he also instructed many of his students in how to recite spontaneous haiku and would mercilessly put them on the spot, asking them without warning to compose short poems—frequently about the four seasons. He usually would compose poetry in tandem with a student: first his spring haiku, then the student’s, and so on.
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I remember a session in 1983 where he asked a student very learned in the Buddhist doctrine to recite poems about the seasons and insisted Buddhist terminology be eliminated from the compositions. Rinpoche rejected several efforts until a suitable “nonsectarian” haiku was forthcoming. Like everything in his life, poetry was not just a means of self-expression, but a way to work with others, to train them, and to wake them up. In the “Poets’ Colloquium” Rinpoche says that the audience “might pick up some kind of spark. . . . So what I expect out of my work is that people will pay attention and they will think twice.” Readers may find that advice applicable as they peruse his poems.

In
Timely Rain,
in addition to Chögyam Trungpa’s poems, David Rome included other compositions, which he calls “Sacred Songs.” These are related to Rinpoche’s poetry, but they were composed in Tibetan as part of a number of tantric and Shambhala liturgies, including several received as terma texts. They are not included in
The Collected Works.
The Sound Cycles that Rinpoche used in his early Mudra Theatre work, which were included in the appendix to
Timely Rain,
are reproduced in Volume Seven; they are discussed below, in the section on theater. In the appendix, David Rome has also included several examples of elocution exercises that Rinpoche wrote in the 1980s.
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They too appear in Volume Seven.

It seems that a brief discussion of elocution would be helpful to the readers of
The Collected Works,
given that it’s a rather unknown part of Chögyam Trungpa’s work and not a common discipline practiced in this day and age. The method of elocution that Trungpa Rinpoche developed was to have his North American students read aloud, with an Oxonian accent, exercises that he had written. He would usually read the exercise to demonstrate the correct pronunciation and then would ask the student to read slowly and carefully through the text. The irony of a Tibetan gentleman teaching Americans to pronounce English was not lost on him. He generally enjoyed these sessions immensely. He would correct the student’s pronunciation and ask them to repeat particular words or phrases many times, until he was satisfied with their elocution. Rinpoche’s experiment with elocution began in 1983, but for some years before that, he had noted that he felt that many Americans had a particular speech neurosis, which manifested in swallowing and mumbling their words with a lack of attention to how they were speaking. Given Rinpoche’s appreciation of contemporary American poetry and the way in which he embraced the freedom of expression in the West, it might seem contradictory that he adopted a method based on the upper-class received pronunciation of British English, certainly among the most formal approaches to speaking the English language. Rinpoche often referred to his approach to elocution as a form of “speech therapy.” I think that what he found troubling about many Americans’ speech was the lack of mind-body coordination and the lack of mindfulness and awareness in relating to communication. I don’t think his use of Oxonian had anything to do with a class prejudice, nor was it based on lack of appreciation for American English. Rather, he was trying to address the casual aspect of American speech by contrasting it with a very formal approach that was sufficiently difficult for his American students to mimic that it caught their attention and held it while they were practicing elocution. Additionally, he was interested in conveying the onomatopoeia that he felt was inherent in language. The pronunciation of a word and its meaning should be indivisible, he felt. He sometimes said that when a word was properly pronounced it should feel very concrete, like holding a potato in your hand. In that sense, he was trying to bring his students to a poetic appreciation of language and to help them to have a more alive relationship with their own language. Here are some unpublished remarks that Chögyam Trungpa made at an evening gathering where elocution was the focus:

Language is very special. It distinguishes between animals and human beings. Relating to language is also a Buddhist technique, such as the practice of mantra. Language is like the two wings of a bird. One wing is the vowels and the other is the consonants. The vowels and consonants are regarded as two feet walking together, two arms, two eyes, two ears, two nostrils: they have to go hand in hand. The Oxonian way of pronouncing words is a special way of accentuating human communication. It’s much better than barking dogs! . . . The elocution exercises are not regarded as poetry. They are regarded as
exercises.
My final and last remark to the readers tonight is that you shouldn’t torture yourself. As far as the readers are concerned, it will be very interesting to hear the ways that people from different parts of the United States speak and how they relate with language. In reading these exercises, one has to have delight in saying these words. Language is also onomatopoetic.
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One of Chögyam Trungpa’s elocution exercises is entitled “Playing with the English Language.” This was a man who was fascinated by the English language, who embraced it, chewed on it, used it, swallowed it, and offered it up for all of us to celebrate. He was indeed a great player of the language, almost in the way that a musician plays music. One hopes that the readers of
The Collected Works
will find much to enjoy and ponder in Chögyam Trungpa’s poetry and his artful play with and on words.

F
ILM

Within a very short time after Rinpoche came to the United States, he became involved in an undertaking referred to as the Milarepa Film Project, whose purpose was to make a film about the life of Milarepa, Tibet’s great poet-saint. In 1972, Rinpoche hosted a Milarepa Film Seminar in Boulder to explore this idea further. It’s likely that Trungpa Rinpoche saw his first movies in India, although there is no record of this, and he undoubtedly attended the cinema in England. He was already interested in photography, as mentioned earlier in the introduction, and quite possibly his interest in making movies grew out of his efforts as a still photographer. He traveled to Los Angeles during his very early teaching tours in the United States in 1970 and ’71, and there he met filmmakers Johanna Demetrakas and Baird Bryant, who worked on the Milarepa Film Project as well as on later films with which Rinpoche was involved. Johanna Demetrakas reports:

Before the Milarepa Film Seminar, Rinpoche had been in L.A. He asked Baird and me to do a little homework. He asked us to shoot (we worked in 16mm then) shots that manifested each of the five buddha families. I believe he suggested outdoor, nature shots. Baird and I lived in Malibu then, and I remember hiking up the cliffs and shooting through grasses and wildflowers, with the ocean in the background. He encouraged us to compose our shots with a foreground, middleground and background. Of course this gave each shot a lot of depth and dramatic energy. We did the assignment and headed for Boulder.
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Baird Bryant also commented on the work that he and Johanna did with the five buddha families:

The Milarepa Film Seminar, which took place in Barry Corbett’s living room in Boulder, was the beginning of many episodes regarding Dharma and Film Practice. . . . There were maybe 12 to 16 students here, most of whom had recently been introduced to the idea of the five buddha families, which remained the foundation of film thought, and the totality of Dharma Art to follow. Johanna and I, in preparation for the seminar, had gone out with my 16mm camera and shot scenes which, in our limited understanding at the time, represented the different families, or facets of the teachings on ego, etc. I thought that a shot of a tangled, dried thicket of twisted branches was a good representation of the ego tied in knots. I also shot the side of a hill wherein I saw a face drawn in the stone. When I told Rinpoche what I saw there, he said, a bit condescendingly, “That’s very American.” I remember thinking, so Tibetans see it differently, and how come? I know that, since that time, I have never been able to see a rotten log lying in the forest without thinking, there’s the symbol of the Ratna Family. Likewise green buds bursting into fresh leaves say Karma Family in my head. The deep blue sky speaks of Buddha, graceful seductive curves in whatever medium represent Padma, and in contemplating the physical world I see it as the great Mudra of the spiritual universe: the complete Vajra Family, and in my world Trungpa Rinpoche is enthroned therein.
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Already in 1971, Chögyam Trungpa had begun talking about the five buddha families and their application to art. Earlier volumes of
The Collected Works
show how Rinpoche introduced the five buddha families in the discussion of psychology and vajrayana Buddhism. Interestingly, their application to artistic creation seems to have been among his earliest introductions of this material. These principles, which describe styles of or approaches to perception, are based on Buddhist tantric teachings. The buddha families represent both qualities of innate wisdom and of confused perception that can be transformed into wisdom. In vajrayana Buddhism they are associated with descriptions of deities, the buddhas of the five families who represent wisdom and meditative states of mind.

A major feature of the Milarepa Film Seminar was Rinpoche’s introduction of the five buddha families in relationship to filmmaking. In that context, he never said anything about where they came from in the Buddhist teachings. He introduced them in this way:

We are trying to get at some basic understanding of seeing things in their absolute essence, their own innate nature. We can use this knowledge with regard to painting or poetry or arranging flowers or making films or composing music. It is also connected with the relationships between people. These five buddha principles seem to cover a whole area of new dimension of perception. They are very important at all levels and in all creative situations. We won’t go through the philosophy; we’ll start with the functional qualities of these five principles. It seems they are associated with a sense of composition. (Selected Writings, “Visual Dharma”)