The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two (5 page)

The last four offerings in Volume Two—“Hearty Discipline,” “Transpersonal Cooperation at Naropa,” “Sparks,” and “Education for an Enlightened Society”—are about the philosophy and practice of education at Naropa Institute, but more broadly they are about how we learn and how we teach in an environment of sanity and cooperation. Education was a topic that Trungpa Rinpoche felt passionately about—after all, his entire life was dedicated to teaching, which he also saw as a tremendous opportunity to learn. So it seems fitting that this volume, concerned with so many aspects of training oneself and developing genuine self-knowledge, should end with a consideration of the discipline of higher education.

Naropa Institute opened its doors in the summer of 1974, only one year after the idea of the institute was first discussed. It was not a very long period of planning preceding the start-up of a university! According to John Baker and Marvin Casper, the editors
of Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
and
The Myth of Freedom
, they presented “their idea for a college founded on the Buddhist principles of wisdom, compassion and enlightened action”
¹⁷
to Chögyam Trungpa in a meeting one afternoon in the summer of 1973. Like so many other important institutions and organizations that grew up around him, the initial idea arose in the minds of Rinpoche’s students, or so they remember, in much the same way that some of the great sutras, or teachings by the Buddha, are actually recorded as discourses given by one of the Buddha’s disciples, inspired into wisdom in his presence. As John Baker put it, “Marvin and I had this idea because we were inspired by and devoted to Trungpa Rinpoche . . . and he always set the context by teaching us.”
¹⁸
Rinpoche, in any case, was delighted by the prospect of starting a Buddhist-inspired university in North America, and told Baker and Casper, “I’m pulling the trigger on the Naropa Institute.”
¹⁹

Initially, Trungpa Rinpoche wanted to call the institution Nalanda University, based on the name of the greatest institution of higher learning in India in the twelfth century. Some of Rinpoche’s students suggested that it would be presumptuous to use the name Nalanda—it would be a lot to live up to and might bring derisive comments from some Buddhist scholars. Rinpoche reconsidered, choosing instead the name of the great Kagyü lineage holder Naropa, who was the abbot of Nalanda before he left to become a wandering mendicant, searching for his guru Tilopa and thus pursuing his spiritual quest.
²⁰

Chögyam Trungpa frequently talked about the educational model at Naropa as one that sought to bring together intellect and intuition. This point was the cornerstone of his remarks at the inaugural convocation of Naropa in the summer of 1974.
²¹
In this context, it was singularly appropriate to name the institute after the yogi Naropa, because Naropa’s search for his teacher was sparked by his desire to join his vast intellectual knowledge of the teachings with genuine intuitive insight and wisdom, which he realized he sorely lacked. More about the life and teachings of Naropa can be found in Volume Five of
The Collected Works
.
²²

When Rinpoche and his students were making plans to begin the Institute, they anticipated that Naropa might have enough going for it to draw several hundred students to the first summer session in 1974. Rinpoche’s first book based on teachings given in America,
Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
, had been published in the fall of 1973 and was already proving to be a best-seller, having gone into its second printing almost the day it was published.
²³
The organizers of Naropa planned to invite Alan Watts to teach during the first summer; John Baker delivered the invitation and Watts said that he would come. Unfortunately, he died suddenly and tragically of a heart attack in the winter of 1973.
²⁴
Ram Dass also accepted an invitation to teach, which was sure to attract a large number of students, since his book
Be Here Now
was a great counterculture hit of that time. So a few hundred students would surely come to Naropa.

Imagine the surprise when almost two thousand students enrolled for the summer program. It was a mad dash to find enough teachers, venues for talks with audiences of a thousand or more, and housing for all the unexpected pupils. The summer proved to be chaotic, to be sure, but Naropa was also a huge success. During the summer of 1974, the institute offered courses on many facets and schools of Buddhism, as well as other Eastern religions, with Chögyam Trungpa and Ram Dass the biggest draws. Trungpa Rinpoche taught three courses: one on the practice and understanding of meditation, a second on the stages of the Tibetan Buddhist path, and a third presenting the tenets and practice of tantra—which was later edited into
Journey without Goal
.
²⁵
The environment at his evening classes was more like a “happening” than a university course. A thousand or more people in every imaginable style of dress and hairdo, with hippie overtones predominating, gathered before his talks, some following the prescription to sit and meditate before the talk, but many simply “hanging out,” waiting for him to arrive. In the early days, the Buddhist community that grew up around Rinpoche was often referred to as “the Scene,” and a scene indeed it was.

Nevertheless, while few students may have recognized it, Chögyam Trungpa was quite serious about both practice and study at Naropa. His talks, while entertaining on the surface, were extraordinary expositions of the Buddhist path, and he saw to it that there was a meditation hall made available to all students on a daily basis—whether they used it regularly or not. From the beginning, he was not just starting a summer institute as a lark; he was establishing an institution of higher learner. While many of his students thought of Naropa in terms of a one-shot deal or at best in terms of planning for the next months or a year ahead, he saw the institute in terms of centuries to come.

Other Buddhist teachers who were to play a major role in the development of Buddhism in America were also at Naropa in 1974. For example, Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein were there, but at the time they were not well known. Beginning in 1974, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and many other important writers were in residence. By the second summer of Naropa, they had coalesced their activity into what they called the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Many other artists began teaching at Naropa from its infancy. Theater, dance, and music were all well represented.
²⁶
Courses in Buddhist and Western psychology were offered, as mentioned by Judith Lief in her remarks quoted earlier. Gregory Bateson, the eminent anthropologist, taught there in the early days. However, although many exciting courses were given, as the first director of Naropa Institute, Martin Janowitz, commented, “There were no programs, let alone degree-granting programs. There were simply offerings.”
²⁷

From its explosive beginning, Naropa has not really looked back. While it may lack some of the wild excitement and celebrity draw of its early days, it has gone on to become a respected year-round institution of higher learning, offering a unique educational approach. The institute became a fully accredited degree-granting institution in 1985. Now called Naropa University, it offers the Bachelor of Arts degree in Early Childhood Education, Environmental Studies, InterArts Studies (concentrations in Dance/Movement Studies, Music, and Theater), Interdisciplinary Studies, Contemplative Psychology, Religious Studies, Traditional Eastern Arts, Visual Arts, and Writing and Literature. Graduate degrees are offered in Theater, Contemplative Education, Gerontology, several aspects of contemplative and transpersonal psychology and counseling, and religious studies and divinity, as well as several fields of Buddhist studies. Its growth and continuity are a testament to the man who founded it in an era of protest against tradition and helped to take it from its counterculture roots to an established institution that may well survive centuries into the future.

For understanding the uniqueness of Naropa and the roots of its educational philosophy of contemplative education, Chögyam Trungpa’s four talks on education in Volume Two are particularly helpful and germane. In his talk at the first convocation, in addition to emphasizing the importance of combining intellect and intuition, Trungpa Rinpoche talked about the role of genuine discipline and appreciation for tradition at Naropa. In “Hearty Discipline,” he talks about distinguishing between a religious approach to education, which he says is not the goal of Naropa, and “bringing the inheritance of Buddhist methodology into our system of education.” By this, he explains, he means following the example of Nalanda University, Vikramashila, and other Buddhist centers of learning, where “the student, the practitioner, and the scholar concentrated one-pointedly, on the point. Education was a complete lifestyle.” He talks about developing a critical intelligence that is applied both to the subject matter you are studying and to yourself, the person who is being educated. In this model, education is not purely aimed at the intellect but is an education of the whole person, which promotes overall wakefulness and sanity.

In this regard, it is interesting to note that Naropa was, from its earliest days, never shy about mixing contemplative practice with academic study, a somewhat unusual emphasis for an educational institution. At Naropa, while many other spiritual approaches are welcomed, the foundation has always been the sitting practice of meditation, taken from the Buddhist tradition but offered in the most neutral and nonsectarian way: as a means of training the mind and a vehicle for joining one’s intellect and intuition into a unified experience. In his classes, Trungpa Rinpoche encouraged students to attend meditation sessions and requested that people sit and meditate while waiting for the talk to begin. In “Transpersonal Cooperation at Naropa,” he talked about the importance of “the insight derived from the Buddhist outlook and meditative approach,” which he said “provides the atmosphere of sanity which is beyond dogma, rather than establishing yet another dogma.” He also speaks in this article about the importance of meditation in overcoming ego and establishing a ground of nonaggression that makes genuine appreciation of other traditions possible. This, he says, is the meaning of “transpersonal cooperation,” which gives the article its name.

Naropa was such a happening phenomenon in 1974 that Anchor Books contracted with Rick Fields to edit a book based on the course offerings that summer. The result was
Loka: A Journal from Naropa Institute
, which was followed by
Loka 2
, which covered events of the summer of 1975. The contributions to the first
Loka
included “Tea and Tantra” by Milly Johnstone; “A Conversation with Gregory Bateson” by Rick Fields and Richard Greene; “How to Draw the Buddha” by L. Gyatso; “Tantra and Contemporary Man” by Herbert V. Guenther; “The First Six Days of the Bardo of Dharmata” by Francesca Fremantle; “Sadhana and Society” by Ram Dass; and poetry by Chögyam Trungpa and Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Diane di Prima, John Giorno, Rick Fields, Lewis Mac-Adams, and many others. Also published in
Loka
was the article “Sparks,” which appears in this volume of
The Collected Works
. It is a panel discussion with Trungpa Rinpoche, Ram Dass, Marvin Casper, and moderator Duncan Campbell. The discussion centers on what makes for true cross-cultural appreciation and whether Naropa is genuinely open to other traditions or purely trying to convert others to its unspoken Buddhist philosophy. Rinpoche describes the experience at Naropa as being more like fireworks than adding a spoonful of sugar to your lemonade to pacify your experience and smooth over the differences. He says that there is room for “enormous individualism, in terms of the doctrines and teachings that are presented. All of them are valid but at the same time there is a meeting point which takes place in a spark.” The discussion turns to what it really means to cut through traditional boundaries and expectations. In this context, Trungpa Rinpoche points out “how sparked this place [Naropa] is in everybody’s mind” and goes on to say that the point is “that we honor people’s experiences and their intellect so that they can conduct their own warfare within themselves while being sharp scholars in language studies or T’ai Chi, or whatever.” He ends the discussion by saying that, after tradition is seen through and its limiting qualities transcended, it can reemerge as an experience of sacredness and sacred space, such as one finds in a temple or a zendo.

In “Education for an Enlightened Society,” a talk given at Naropa in 1978, Rinpoche moves from energy that sparks to “energy sparkling.” He is speaking here of how education can “bring about the enlightenment of the whole world.” He clarifies that he is not speaking about a Utopian world but rather that his audience is the potential enlightened society. “You are the enlightened society, every one of you.” He ties enlightened society into the enlightened state of mind that is latent or embryonic within all human beings and then goes on to talk about how education can bring out and nurture that wakefulness. He speaks about the meeting of minds between a teacher and a student in any educational relationship and about the three aspects or levels of learning traditionally described in the Buddhist teachings. The first stage is listening and collecting information, or studying the teachings; the second stage is contemplating what one has studied; the third stage is meditating, which incorporates “an unconditional meditative state,” or being “
alert
on the spot,” into one’s learning process.