CHOGYAM TRUNGPA In the spiritual supermarket, I listened to Krishnamurti (an Indian intellectual), Muktananda (who was into chanting and zapping people with blessings), Pir Vilayat Khan (a Sufi, whirling gloriously), Satchidananda (practitioner of meditative yoga), and even our own Ram Dass (acid-guru-turned-Hindu). Chanting felt good, but then what? I couldn’t get into the Sufi whirling thing, and meditation was hard. And acid? Not a healthy lifetime practice as far as I could tell. Enter: Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Chogyam Trungpa continually blew my mind: from attending his first seminar in Los Angeles (titled “The Battle of Ego”) to filming his cremation on a cloudless but rainbow-filled day in Vermont. Being in his presence was like being suddenly aware of an oncoming truck—it put every cell in your brain—SMACK!— into the present moment. And in that moment you could be outraged, or moved to tears, or inspired—usually all at once. I had never met a Tibetan Buddhist high lama before—who had?— and I didn’t believe the Shangri La stuff about Tibet, but it did have a mysterious, even magical reputation. Now, here was the real thing.
“WHEN THE IRON BIRD FLIES IN THE SKY AND HORSES RUN ON WHEELS,THE TIBETAN PEOPLE WILL BE SCATTERED ACROSS THE EARTH,AND THE BUDDHA DHARMA WILL SPREAD TO THE LAND OF THE RED-FACED MAN.”
PHOTO: KAREN ROPER
Notice the date? 800AD. That tells you something about these Buddhists. They take the long view. Chogyam Trungpa was no exception. Raised in the rigorous monastic tradition of Tibet, Trungpa escaped the Chinese Communist invasion of his beloved country in 1959. He knew, as the highest level lama in his area, he would be killed on sight. He also knew, at the ripe age of 19, that Tibet—the great incubator for Buddhist thought and practice, which had produced so many brilliant teachers and such a profound canon of knowledge—was finished. After ten-months of dodging Chinese bullets through the brutal Himalayan mountain range, with only a pair of binoculars to guide him and his 300 followers, Trungpa made it to India. He wrote a book—Born In Tibet—about the harrowing escape. As soon as he could speak English, he headed for England, then from there to the United States. And he took with him an unwavering commitment to plant the seeds of Buddhism deeply enough in the west so that—just as there were variants of Buddhism in Japan, Korea, India, and Vietnam, all built on the same non-theistic practices of meditation and compassion—Tibetan Buddhism would enter the mainstream culture and eventually develop into American Buddhism. Right from the start, he defied categorization. He spoke English elegantly but with some Tibetan shortcuts like skipping over prepositions now and then. It took a few years before many of us realized there was a lot of drinking going on: the Colt 45s didn’t seem to affect the precise delivery or content of his talks.
- Padmasambhava, 800ADA originmagazine.com | 65