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

If one were asked to identify a single cornerstone in Chögyam Trungpa’s presentation of the Buddhist teachings, it would almost surely be the sitting practice of meditation. He was proud that his Tibetan lineage, the Kagyü, is known as the Practicing Lineage.
¹
The first book that he published on Buddhism in England (aside from
Born in Tibet
, the memoir of his early training and escape from Tibet) was called
Meditation in Action
. From the time he arrived in North America in 1970 until his death in 1987, he almost never gave a public talk or started a seminar without a discussion of the importance of sitting practice. In the early years in North America, when he was stressing cynicism toward spiritual “trips” and overcoming spiritual materialism, he recommended the sitting practice of meditation. Later, when he introduced more formal discipline and the importance of lineage and devotion, he still recommended the sitting practice of meditation. Even when he was conducting an advanced program like the Vajradhatu Seminary or giving an empowerment for his most senior students, events always began with an extended period of sitting meditation. In the later years, when he presented the Shambhala path of the warrior, the fundamental discipline that he recommended was the sitting practice of meditation.

Meditation is emphasized in many of Trungpa Rinpoche’s books written in the 1970s and ’80s, and some aspects of the technique are presented in various volumes published during his lifetime. In the early years in North America, he stressed the importance of personal instruction in meditation and deliberately did not provide all the details of the technique in writing. As time went on, he became more willing to write about the technique itself. However, until the publication of
The Path Is the Goal: A Basic Handbook of Buddhist Meditation
in 1995, there was no one book that focused solely on Chögyam Trungpa’s presentation of meditation, giving both an overview of teachings and techniques related to the practice as well as discussing in more depth the experiences that arise from it.
The Path Is the Goal
, the first book in Volume Two of
The Collected Works
, does a great service in filling this gap. It is helpful to beginning and continuing practitioners alike in its detailed discussion of both
shamatha
and
vipashyana
, or mindfulness and awareness, the two fundamental aspects of sitting meditation, indeed of all practice. The editor, Sherab Chödzin Kohn, was one of Rinpoche’s first editors in North America (the first book that he edited,
Mudra
, was published in 1972). Sherab’s command of his craft is evident in
The Path Is the Goal
, particularly in the skill with which he shapes Chögyam Trungpa’s words from raw transcript to finished book.

If meditation is the ground of Rinpoche’s teaching, then the development of compassion and helping others is the working basis, or the path. The next book in Volume Two is
Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness
, a practice-oriented manual for the nurturing of loving-kindness (maitri) as the ground for developing true compassion (karuna).
Training the Mind
is a commentary by Chögyam Trungpa on
The Root Text of the Seven Points of Training the Mind
by Chekawa Yeshe Dorje. Trungpa Rinpoche worked intimately on the translation of the text over a number of years, with a group of his students who make up the Nālandā Translation Committee.
²
Following his death, the translation committee reviewed and revised the text, putting it into its final form for the book’s publication.

The seven points of mind training consist of fifty-nine slogans that give us the practical means to understand both the view and the practice of mahayana Buddhism, or the bodhisattva’s way of compassion. They are to be used as a form of both contemplation and postmeditation practice. Key to this instruction is the formal practice of tonglen, or “sending and taking,” a meditation that works with the medium of breath, as does basic sitting meditation. The practice of tonglen is itself introduced as one of the slogans: “Sending and taking should be practiced alternately. These two should ride the breath.”

Although he arrived in North America in 1970, Trungpa Rinpoche did not present this approach to mind training until 1975. Then, when he did introduce this practice at the Vajradhatu Seminary, it was given only to senior students with extensive grounding in both sitting meditation and the study of the Buddhist teachings. Later, he began introducing tonglen and slogan practice at an earlier stage in students’ development, when they took the bodhisattva vow to commit themselves to working for the benefit of others. Eventually, tonglen practice was introduced into various training programs at Naropa Institute, primarily in the psychology program, and it was then made available to participants in the Christian-Buddhist contemplative conferences at Naropa. Tonglen has been used in a number of other contexts within the communities that Chögyam Trungpa founded, and it is studied and practiced in many other Buddhist communities. One of Rinpoche’s students, Pema Chödrön, has played a major role in popularizing these teachings through her own writings.

Slogan practice, and in particular the practice of tonglen, make up what is meant by mind training here. These teachings, which were brought to Tibet by the great Indian adept Atisha, came into the Kagyü lineage through Gampopa, who studied this school of Kadam teachings before he became a disciple of the great Tibetan yogi Milarepa. Chögyam Trungpa himself received these teachings from his root guru Jamgön Kongtrül of Sechen, whose predecessor Jamgön Kongtrül the Great wrote a famous commentary on these slogans, titled
The Great Path to Awakening
(referred to in footnote 2). As Judith L. Lief, the book’s editor, says in her foreword: “The study and practice of these slogans is a very practical and earthy way of reversing ego-clinging and of cultivating tenderness and compassion.” This practice literally stands ego on its head, reversing our normal tendency to ward off pain and draw in pleasure. The practice encourages us to take on the pain of others, as well as to accept our own, and to radiate wakefulness and kindness to others and into the environment in general. However, although the practice involves taking on pain, it is not at all masochistic; rather it is heroic, overcoming one’s own obstacles as well as those of others, transforming them by accepting them fully—yet treating them in a very ordinary or straightforward way.

Chögyam Trungpa presented these teachings over a number of years, primarily at the Vajradhatu Seminaries, annual three-month periods of advanced training and study for his senior students. Mrs. Lief, one of Trungpa Rinpoche’s senior editors and the director of the Dharma Ocean Series (a project aimed at compiling, editing, and publishing 108 volumes of the teachings of Chögyam Trungpa), took all the commentaries and condensed the material into
Training the Mind
. Another of Rinpoche’s editors, Sarah Coleman, had worked on the original draft of this material during the author’s lifetime and met with him several times to clarify and expand his commentary on particular slogans. Mrs. Lief reports that Trungpa Rinpoche “very much wanted this material out there and asked about it continually. It took years to complete. Crucial notes on some of the slogans disappeared and only by chance turned up in an obscure notebook at the bottom of a box hidden in my attic as the book was nearing completion.” She began working on the book in the 1970s, and it was finally published in 1993.

Judith Lief’s work with this material has not just been in the editorial realm. She was in charge of the practice and study departments at many of the seminaries where these teachings were presented, and often worked on this material there with the students and the teachers. She has herself taught many programs on these points of mind training. Her grasp shows both in the way the book flows and in her introductory remarks. Her intimacy with the material helps to bring both depth and accessibility to its presentation.

For many years, the Nālandā Translation Committee has made available a set of four- by six-inch cards
³
printed with the fifty-nine mind training slogans. Many of Trungpa Rinpoche’s students own a set, and the cards will often be found displayed somewhere in the practitioner’s house—in the room set aside for meditation practice, or perhaps in the kitchen or on a shelf in the living room or study. They offer pithy and perky advice, which catches your attention and makes you think twice: “Don’t be frivolous.” “Drive all blames into oneself.” “Don’t act with a twist.” One never knows where a slogan might pop up, a reminder that it is always possible to turn ego upside down, exchanging self-interest for concern for others. One can wholeheartedly recommend the use of this book—and the slogan cards—as a handbook for self-examination and a guide to applying wakeful kindness in everyday life.

The other three books included in Volume Two offer a glimpse of varied teachings on the Buddhist path. In fact, they are all part of what is called the “Glimpses” series:
Glimpses of Abhidharma, Glimpses of Shunyata
, and
Glimpses of Mahayana
. (The fourth in this series,
Glimpses of Space
, is found in Volume Six of
The Collected Works
.) Each volume is based on a single seminar taught by Chögyam Trungpa.
Glimpses of Abhidharma
is an examination of the five skandhas, or constituents of ego, and how we build up this illusory fortress of self in every moment of our existence. The abhidharma, literally the “special teaching,” represents a very early and seminal compilation of Buddhist philosophy and psychology. It is a codification and interpretation of the concepts that appear in the discourses of the Buddha and his major disciples.

In this brief look at some of the teachings from the abhidharma, Trungpa Rinpoche discusses the place of coincidence (
tendrel
in Tibetan;
pratitya-samutpada
in Sanskrit), which describes the karmic patterns that exist in our lives. He describes one’s discovery of karmic coincidence not as predestination but as an opportunity to discover the reality, not only of one’s karmic patterns, but also of freedom and the need to make a leap of faith in choosing the next moment that presents itself to us. The core material presented in
Glimpses of Abhidharma
is the investigation of the five skandhas, or constituents of ego. Trungpa Rinpoche takes a somewhat unusual approach to the discussion of the skandhas. Of his presentation of abhidharma, he himself says, “So our approach has been quite unique. . . . Looking at abhidharma this way, nothing is terribly abstract. . . . The psychology of one’s own being shows the operation of the five skandhas and the whole pattern that they are part of. Most studies of abhidharma tend to regard the five skandhas as separate entities. As we have seen, this is not the case; rather they constitute an overall pattern of natural growth or evolution. . . . The fundamental point of abhidharma is to see the overall psychological pattern rather than, necessarily, the five thises and the ten thats. This kind of primary insight can be achieved by combining the approaches of the scholar and the practitioner.”
⁴

Glimpses of Shunyata
(Vajradhatu Publications, 1993) and
Glimpses of Mahayana
(Vajradhatu Publications, 2001), both edited by Judith Lief, are good complements to
Training the Mind
, in that they present an overview of the basic teachings of mahayana, a view of the dharmic landscape in which the practice of mind training takes place.
Glimpses of Shunyata
is a very atmospheric presentation of lectures on shunyata, or emptiness, given by Trungpa Rinpoche in 1972 at Karmê-Chöling, a rural practice center in Vermont. Rinpoche doesn’t give his audience any ground in the discussion of shunyata, and this book conveys that groundlessness. In order to discover the ground, path, and fruition of shunyata, the reader has to give up territory, abandon hope, and take this journey without expectation.
Glimpses of Mahayana
, on the other hand, conveys the warmth and solid beingness of the mahayana. It makes you want to be a bodhisattva, a mahayana warrior treading the path of empty but luminous compassion, and it makes the mahayana path seem accessible. Buddha nature is right there, right here in this volume of teachings.

“An Approach to Meditation,” published in the
Journal of Transpersonal Psychology
in 1974, is the first article reprinted in Volume Two of
The Collected Works
. Trungpa Rinpoche had a close relationship with the group of therapists based in Palo Alto, California, that established this journal in 1969. The phrase “transpersonal psychology” first came into currency around the time the journal was launched. Guided by the work of psychologists Abraham Maslow and Anthony Sutich and their colleagues, this new field was founded on a commitment to open-ended inquiry, experiential and empirical validation, and a values-oriented approach to human experience. When he was teaching in California in the 1970s, Chögyam Trungpa often lectured to a group of these psychologists at their center, or some of them would attend his Buddhist seminars in the Bay Area. Rinpoche was especially close with and very fond of Tony Sutich and had great respect for his pioneering work in transpersonal psychology.

One of the founding editors of the journal, Sonja Margulies, edited “An Approach to Meditation,” which is based on a talk given by Rinpoche at the 1971 conference of the Association for Humanistic Psychology in Washington, D.C. It is among his most straightforward, thorough, and clear presentations of the ground of meditation, both theory and practice. A very different but equally well-crafted presentation is “Taming the Horse, Riding the Mind,” edited by Susan Szpakowski and reprinted from the first issue of the
Naropa Magazine
, published in 1984. Mrs. Szpakowski based the article on “Educating Oneself without Ego,” a seminar given by Trungpa Rinpoche at Naropa in the summer of 1983. The language and metaphors that Rinpoche employs here are rich and poetic, as is the practice he describes. The next article is a brief, delightful talk to young people, “How to Meditate,” given by Chögyam Trungpa in 1979 and reprinted from the
Shambhala Sun
magazine.