The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two (3 page)

The next eight articles all present further teachings (as contrasted with the
application
of the teachings, which comes later) on the topics of mind, meditation, and mahayana—which are the primary topics of the material in this volume. Four articles present topics from the abhidharma on the constituents of mind and how these come together in the situational patterns we experience in life. “The Spiritual Battlefield,” reprinted from the
Shambhala Sun
, is based on a talk given at Naropa Institute in 1974 about how meditation works with the five skandhas, the building blocks or formative processes of ego, and with sem, lodrö, and rikpa, which are particular aspects of mind and intellect. “The Birth of Ego,” reprinted from the
Halifax Shambhala Center Banner
, is based on a talk given in 1980 as part of a seminar titled “Conquering the Four Maras.” The maras are enemies of or obstacles to egolessness, and one of them is itself called skandha mara. Since it is the five skandhas that make up ego, it is quite understandable that a seminar on the maras would deal with the birth and development of ego and how the confusion of neurosis can be transformed or conquered.

“The Wheel of Life: Illusion’s Game” is another early article, from
Garuda II
.
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This is the only published teaching in which Trungpa Rinpoche gives an in-depth description of the twelve nidanas, which he calls “the evolutionary stages of suffering.” Therefore, even though this piece has some confusing passages and questionable editorial interpretations, it is included in
The Collected Works
for its graphic descriptions of the different phases of human experience. Many of the articles from
Garuda I
and
II
were reworked for inclusion in other publications, so that the final versions that appeared in print were free of the editorial errors they contained in their original versions. Two chapters of
Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
, for example, were based on material in the early
Garudas
. The original pieces were admirable in terms of their breadth and the energy behind the articles, but they contained substantive misinterpretations, perhaps reflecting a lack of training or experience on the part of some of the editors who worked on these early publications.

“Seven Characteristics of a Dharmic Person” is reprinted from the
Vajradhatu Sun
, the community newspaper that predated the
Shambhala Sun
magazine. This article originally appeared as a chapter in the 1979
Hinayana-Mahayana Transcripts
of the Vajradhatu Seminary, published by Vajradhatu Publications. While the four previous articles look at the constituent parts of our psychology, here there is a view of the whole person who is practicing the buddhadharma and of the qualities one can develop to lead a dharmic life. As Trungpa Rinpoche says, “When someone’s mind is mixed with dharma, properly and fully, when a person becomes a dharmic person, you can actually see the difference . . . that is a fundamental point: we are trying to be genuine. We are trying to do everything properly, precisely the way the Buddha taught.”
⁶

The next two articles, “Dharmas without Blame” and “Buddhadharma without Credentials,” are both from
Garuda III: Dharmas without Blame
. They are, one might say, a proclamation of basic sanity that does not need reference points. They are also a scathing condemnation of spiritual materialism and what Chögyam Trungpa refers to as “counterfeiting the teachings.” He says that dharmas are without blame because “there was no manufacturer of dharmas. Dharmas are simply what is. Blame comes from an attitude of security, identifying with certain reservations as to how things are. Having this attitude, if a spiritual teaching does not supply us with enough patches, we are in trouble. The Buddhist teaching not only does not supply us with any patches, it destroys them.” These two evocative pieces begin to move us from the ground of hinayana, where we are intimately examining the various aspects of our psychology and practicing a narrow discipline, toward the open way of the mahayana and the appreciation of shunyata, or emptiness, as well as the Madhyamika teachings which refute any adherence to ego’s territory. The next article, “Compassion,” reprinted from the
Vajradhatu Sun
, presents one of the talks on mind training that was used as the basis for
Training the Mind
. It is interesting to read one of the original talks and be privy to the dialogue between the teacher and his students, which is included here. Next is “The Lion’s Roar,” originally published in the
Shambhala Sun
. It is about the workability of the emotions and of every situation we come across in life. (Some of the material included in this article also appeared in a chapter by the same name in
The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation
.) The discussion of working with depression is particularly potent; Rinpoche takes the view that, when related to fully, depression becomes a walkway rather than a dead end.

“The Lion’s Roar” and the following article, “Aggression,” provide a bridge to the next group of writings, which present a discussion of Buddhism and Western psychology. In “Aggression,” Trungpa Rinpoche talks about how a basic emotional stance, deep-seated anger and resentment, can prevent us from knowing ourselves and from identifying with the dharma, or the teaching of “what is.”

From his earliest days in the West, Chögyam Trungpa seemed to sense that, in communicating fully with Westerners, the language of psychology would be more appropriate than the language of religion. Thus, he translated the Sanskrit
atman
as “ego,” whereas previously it had often been translated as “soul.” As mentioned in the introduction to Volume One of
The Collected Works
, his use of the word
egolessness
merited a mention in the second edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary
. Chögyam Trungpa often talked about the achievement of egolessness rather than stressing nirvana, which could be confused with the Western concept of heaven. He talked about such themes as doubt, trust, depression, anxiety, and neurosis—all highly unconventional for Buddhism at this point in time. His use of psychological terminology and themes may well be viewed, in the long run, as one of his major contributions to the development of Buddhism in the West. Psychological vocabulary as a vehicle to express the deepest truths of Buddhism is now commonplace, taken for granted by readers and practitioners. But it was anything but the norm at the time that Rinpoche went to England and then journeyed on to America.

Students were often attracted to him and his presentation of the Buddhist teachings in part because of the language that he used. By using a psychological vocabulary, he did attract therapists and psychologists, to be sure, but he also drew many readers and listeners who were simply interested in psychology or may themselves have been in therapy when they met him or at some previous time. For many, it was easier to relate to him than to other Buddhist teachers because he was using a language that was more the currency of their culture: they more easily saw the world in psychological rather than religious terms. That constituency was quite broad, and a very different group from those attracted to Buddhism primarily as a religion. He (along with Tarthang Tulku in California)was one of the first Tibetan Buddhist teachers to reach that group, although it was by no means his only audience. Beyond that, his use of psychological terminology helped Westerners in general to realize that Buddhist meditation was not a religious discipline as such, having nothing to do with God, and that the Buddhist teachings were concerned with
human
experience, not the relationship between human beings and the divine. Emma McCloy Layman reports that when she asked him in a 1972 interview about the future of Buddhism in America, he replied that “It is scientific and practical, so is ideal for the Western mind. If it becomes a Church it will be a failure; if it is spiritual practice it will have strong influence in all areas—art, music and psychology.”
⁷

Chögyam Trungpa was also interested in the practice of therapeutic disciplines. In 1970 he and Shunryu Suzuki Roshi met and talked about the future of Buddhism in America, a relationship cut painfully short by Roshi’s death in late 1971. During a meeting in May 1971, they talked about establishing a therapeutic community and a practice to work with the mentally ill. They both agreed that Buddhism in America, at least in the early days, was going to attract many individuals who would need such help.
⁸

As early as 1971, Chögyam Trungpa began to put together plans for a therapeutic community to work with disturbed individuals. Judith Lief reports that when she moved to Boulder in 1972, “there were two basic ‘clubs’ one could join [among Trungpa Rinpoche’s students]: the psychology group (Maitri group) and the theatre group (Mudra group).”
⁹
The psychology group, she says, studied the transcripts and tapes from two seminars on the bardos, or states of mind associated with the six realms of being, which Mrs. Lief edited into
Transcending Madness
in 1992. That book is included in Volume Six of
The Collected Works
. In that volume, readers will also find
Orderly Chaos
, which is based on two seminars on the mandala principle. Mrs. Lief reports that this was also study material for the psychology group, along with material on the five buddha families, or five styles of neurotic behavior (as well as of enlightenment in vajrayana Buddhism), which are discussed in
Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
(see Volume Three of
The Collected Works
) and in
Journey without Goal
(Volume Four). The Maitri group also “studied therapies such as Japan’s Morita therapy and the therapeutic models of people like Maxwell Jones.”
¹⁰

Mrs. Lief describes the other training that the group received from Trungpa Rinpoche, as well as the formation of the Maitri community:

Rinpoche taught us a method of scanning people to diagnose their main buddha families, based on energy coming from various parts of their bodies. He taught us to distinguish this energy from heat. (We were not that great at this.) I remember we also practiced this technique for diagnosis of pain. . . . There was also much discussion of creating a Zen-like therapeutic community based on living simply and basically and practicing together. About that time, George Marshall donated a house in Upstate New York near Elizabethtown for the purpose of starting the initial community.

Then, the summer of 1973, there were two major conferences in Boulder: the Psychology Conference and the Theater Conference. It was at the Psychology Conference that Rinpoche presented the idea of postures and rooms [connected with the five buddha families] . . . which became Maitri Space Awareness. It was quite shocking at the time. . . . As we explored this new practice, we began to see that the five postures and rooms of Maitri Space Awareness provided us with a powerful methodology for deepening our understanding of the five buddha family mandala, and other aspects of Buddhist psychology that we had been studying for many years.

The Maitri project was put under the direction of Narayana [later the Vajra Regent Ösel Tendzin] at first, and later under Chuck Lief. The original staff went out to Elizabethtown in 1973. . . . The basic set-up was to have one or two “clients” at a time and about eight to ten staff. Not all clients were Buddhists; in fact most were not. Supposedly (and this is one of the problems), clients were screened before coming to Maitri to ensure that they were borderline disturbed rather than psychotic. It seems that this screening did not always work. . . . When someone arrived, we would scan them [based on the training received from Rinpoche] and diagnose them in order to determine which [Maitri Space Awareness] posture they should do. The staff would meditate before wake-up. . . . The clients did two sessions of postures a day and apart from that shared in general household chores. At the same time, we were constructing the first set of Maitri rooms, working on the house, etc. There was very little money . . . it was very basic.

After some months of working with mentally ill clients at Maitri, the staff concluded that they weren’t ready to cope with this degree of neurotic upheaval and that they needed more training themselves. As Mrs. Lief reports:

One client, described to us as mildly disturbed, in fact had not talked to anyone for almost a year. When we diagnosed him . . . and had him begin the posture, in less than two days, he started talking and did not stop. He got more and more riled up, rather violent, and eventually we had to send him home. That was one of the cases that led us to think we might need to focus on staff training more than treatment for a while.

In 1974, Lex Hixon donated a beautiful piece of property on the New York-Connecticut border near Wingdale, New York. . . . So we all got ready to move down there. We took the nearly completed Maitri rooms apart piece by piece so that we could reconstruct them when we got to Wingdale. When we first moved to Wingdale we still had a client, but soon after reconstructing the new building, which was visited and blessed by His Holiness the Karmapa himself, the decision was made to run training programs for psychologists and meditators, instead of maintaining Maitri as a therapeutic community. This went on for several years. Eventually, in 1978, this property was sold and the proceeds were designated to Naropa Institute.
¹¹