The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa: Volume Three: 3 (2 page)

On the one hand, material for this volume was selected because it represents Chögyam Trungpa’s exposition of spiritual materialism as a primary obstacle for Westerners seeking a spiritual path. On the other hand, much of the same material provides an overview of the Tibetan Buddhist path. In a way that was characteristic of much of his teaching, the problem here is also the promise: a view of all the possible sidetracks to genuine spirituality also provides the opportunity to lay out the real path of awakening, in remarkable depth and with considerable subtlety.

Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
is based on lectures given by Chögyam Trungpa in Boulder, Colorado, during the first year after he arrived there. With the establishment of his seat in Boulder, the axis of his teaching activity shifted westward. When he arrived in the United States in May of 1970 after a brief stay in Canada, he was first based at Tail of the Tiger in Barnet, Vermont. (This center was renamed Karmê-Chöling, the Dharma Place of the Karma Kagyü, by His Holiness Karmapa in 1974.) A number of his students from England had preceded him to Tail, as it was fondly called, in preparation for his arrival. In the 1977 epilogue to
Born in Tibet,
he wrote: “At Tail of the Tiger we [Rinpoche and his wife, Diana Mukpo] found an undisciplined atmosphere combining the flavours of New York City and hippies. Here too people still seemed to miss the point of Dharma, though not in the same way as in Britain, but in American free-thinking style.” Nevertheless, according to his wife, Rinpoche was delighted by the freshness of the American students he encountered, and he was tremendously cheered up by their openness and genuine interest in the dharma.
¹

Tail was his home base for the first few months, but within weeks of coming to America, he set out on his first teaching tour across the country. It took him all the way to California, where he met the founder of Zen Center San Francisco, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. This meeting had a powerful impact on the content and style of his teachings. Seeing how Roshi worked with his students and the importance he placed on sitting meditation, Trungpa Rinpoche began to put a great deal more emphasis on the sitting practice of meditation, especially group practice, which was rare in Tibet. The importance of sitting meditation for all of his students, at whatever level of practice, became a constant theme in his teachings. While in California, he also made the acquaintance of his American publisher, Samuel Bercholz of Shambhala Publications, which was the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship.
²

While still in England, Trungpa Rinpoche had received a postcard from a group at the University of Colorado, inviting him to teach there, and he was attracted—he said later—by the beauty of the Flatirons, mountains outside of Boulder that were shown on the card. They reminded him of the mountains of Tibet. His wife encouraged him to visit there, and she wrote back on his behalf, saying that they would visit when they arrived in America. In the fall of 1970, Rinpoche traveled to Boulder for the first time. He was first put up in a rustic cabin in the mountains, but within a few weeks he moved to a larger house in Four Mile Canyon, closer to town.

Rinpoche’s home soon became the center of a beehive of activity. He held personal interviews there, sometimes in his bedroom or on the deck outside the house. Students meditated in his living room in the evenings, and some of them lived on the top floor of the house, above the quarters for Rinpoche and his family. Several people lived in trailers on the property. Rinpoche and his wife sometimes woke up to find that a student was meditating in their bedroom while they slept—she wanted to experience the guru’s body, speech, and mind at close range, he said. Diana Mukpo reports that there were always lots of people around, “from the day that we moved to Four Mile Canyon. The whole sangha, at that point, would come over to the house, and I would often cook dinner for people. We used to make big roasts and curries and things. Visitors would never go home; people would never go to bed. They would hang out with Rinpoche, and then he wouldn’t come to bed, and you know it just went on and on. Sometimes I got so claustrophobic, although he never seemed to. Once, it was Easter Day, and I told everybody that we were going to have an Easter egg hunt in the garden. They all went out to look for the eggs, and I locked all the doors and windows. I was finally alone with him and I said, ‘You’re mine now!’ He found it quite amusing.”
³

Boulder became Trungpa Rinpoche’s home for the next sixteen years. Perhaps it is partially the feeling of settling down and becoming established that communicates itself in
Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism,
which is based on talks that he gave to new students in Boulder during 1970 and 1971. He gave many of these talks in the evenings in a rented hall in a recently built Christian church in Boulder. He sat on a raised stage behind which was a large stained-glass backdrop, modern in design, which looked a bit as though the open mouth of a large bird had been filled with colored glass. The audience—the long-haired, barefoot or sandal-clad, paisley-garbed, and beaded youth of the era—sat on the floor at his feet. I attended one of these early talks. Rinpoche seemed utterly at home in this atmosphere.
Cutting Through
is, to my mind, one of the most relaxed and spacious books ever written by Chögyam Trungpa. It is written as though the author had all the time in the world to tell us about the spiritual path, which was very much the flavor of the original talks. It is an energetic book, to be sure, filled with the enthusiasm of its times. Yet in addition to being penetrating, it is also thorough and gentle, reminiscent of a painting by Monet, perhaps, which shows all the details of light, color, and shading that make up a scene. It is as though Chögyam Trungpa had finally arrived; he had found the place where he could settle down and spread out. From that expansive seat, he tells us about the intricacies of the student-teacher relationship and lays out the path that lies ahead if one is game to undertake the journey.

In England, he had difficulty finding students, or they had difficulty finding him. A fair number of people were interested in hearing him lecture, but not so many of them were ready to become his students. In America, he began to attract many students who came, listened, and stayed. It was due partially to the era, partially to the social and political climate, but something about Chögyam Trungpa really connected with the spiritual scene in America at that time, and something about that scene really connected with him.
Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
reflects part of what drew the audience to him: the intimacy that Chögyam Trungpa conveyed in his talks. In
Cutting Through,
he speaks very directly to the reader, often about surprising topics, considering that this is a book on the Buddhist path. Topics such as self-deception and sense of humor were hardly the standard fare of religious discourse at that time, but they were chapter titles in his new book.

It would seem that Chögyam Trungpa had indeed found his voice: a truly American voice, at home not just in the English language but in the American idiom, a voice ready to mold the language to express the teachings of Buddhism, ready to share a subtle experience and understanding of the Buddhist path, ready to tell stories and share secrets, ready to play, ready to rock. It was this voice that drew Hindu sannyasins, Zen monks, Jewish radical intellectuals, New York actors, Beat poets, California experimental druggies, Buddhologists looking for meditation instruction, and so many others.

Chögyam Trungpa had a poet’s sensibility; in fact, he was a poet—mostly in the English language, which was not his native tongue. He used that poetic sensibility in crafting the language to describe the Buddhist teachings. He had a real feeling for the right word, the
mot juste. Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
is the first place that one can truly see that genius—starting with the title.

There is no exact equivalent for “spiritual materialism” in the Buddhist teachings, no comparable Sanskrit or Tibetan term. Yet it precisely defines a tendency to pervert spiritual teachings to support or maintain one’s ego-oriented view of reality. Defining this tendency is immensely helpful to students setting out on the path. The idea of
cutting through
spiritual materialism points out exactly what the challenge to the meditator is and why surrendering one’s arrogance and unmasking one’s self-deception are essential to any genuine experience or progress on the path. In coining this term, Chögyam Trungpa took one of the first steps in creating a truly American Buddhism, a Buddhism that is completely true to its origin and heritage yet completely fresh and up-to-date.

Yet at the same time that he coined new terminology and used good English words to describe ancient techniques of meditation and stages on the Buddhist path, he also respected the integrity of terms for which no English equivalent existed. In
Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism,
one finds that more of these Sanskrit terms are used in chapter titles toward the end of the book, whether that was coincidental or planned. In the first eleven chapters of the book, the only foreign term to appear in the chapter titles is the word
guru,
which certainly needs no translation today and probably didn’t even in 1973 when the book appeared. (Since
guru
is a term now laden with connotations, not all of them positive, the chapter was retitled “The Teacher” when it was reprinted in the year 2000 in
The Essential Chögyam Trungpa.
) The last four chapter titles of
Cutting Through
all feature Sanskrit words: “The Bodhisattva Path,” “Shunyata,” “Prajna and Compassion,” and finally “Tantra.” Not all of those terms are yet, nor may ever be, common parlance in America.

When a term was best left in Sanskrit, in Sanskrit it remained. When he used a foreign term, Trungpa Rinpoche preferred to use Sanskrit rather than Tibetan—although there are some important exceptions, such as his adoption of the Tibetan
yidam
rather than the Sanskrit
ishtadevata
as the term for vajrayana deities. Again, he had a real intuition for how the West would best be won. Although it may not have seemed so obvious at the time, it seems almost self-evident in hindsight that Sanskrit was the better choice. That may be because many English and Sanskrit words share a common Indo-European root. But, from a simple perspective, Sanskrit is generally, although not always, a much easier language for Americans to pronounce; it sounds not nearly so foreign to our ears. For example, the Sanskrit
tantra
trips more easily off the tongue than the Tibetan
gyü
.
⁴

Almost thirty years after its publication,
Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
continues to be a standard text in introductory university courses on Buddhism and Eastern religion, and still finds its way into the hands of many inquiring readers. It suffers a bit from its reputation as a classic of the ’70s. Not that it didn’t earn that reputation—it brought thousands to the study and practice of Buddhism in that day. But aside from a few dated references and passages, it remains applicable and upto-date. There are few places where one can find Chögyam Trungpa so expansive, so open, and so relaxed in print. One must pay tribute to the book’s editors, John Baker and Marvin Casper, who also edited
The Myth of Freedom
. They had not known Chögyam Trungpa in England, so they had been studying with him for no more than a year or two when they undertook to edit the first book. In
Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism,
they produced a real classic, a text that is elegant and intimate at the same time.

John Baker has kindly supplied information on the editing of
Cutting Through,
which also gives a further portrait of the times, including Rinpoche’s relationship with Alan Watts and a meeting with one of Ram Dass’s gurus:

Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
was based mostly on a seminar Rinpoche gave in early 1971, which I think was called the Battle of Ego. There was a second seminar used as well, but I am no longer sure which it was: it might have been “Mandala” or perhaps “American Karma,” both given at a church called the Wesley Foundation out on 28th Street [in Boulder, Colorado].

Some of Rinpoche’s students (including Henry Schaeffer, my brother Steve, and Polly Wellenbach, née Monner) had rented a house in Boulder at the corner of Alpine and 9th Street. It was the first community house in Boulder, and Rinpoche named it Anitya Bhavan, which means “House of Impermanence.” I guess he figured it wouldn’t last long, and it didn’t (maybe a year). It belonged to a yoga instructress, a very blond, fit woman of maybe forty who had converted the garage into a yoga studio. It was perfect for the first Boulder seminar, which was attended by thirty to forty people.

These were the hippy-dippy days, and I remember penniless youths frequently offering banana bread in payment for their seminar fees and complaining that Christ never charged for
his
teachings. That first seminar lasted about seven or eight nights, and Marvin Casper and I agreed that we could turn it into a book.

I had met Marvin at Tail where I had decided that he was not my type at all and then had become so close with him in Colorado that six-year-old Jesse Usow thought us one person, calling us interchangeably “John-Marvin.” So you see, I can’t remember whose idea the book was, but only that we both worked on it pretty much equally. Marvin and I were completely blown away by devoted to in love with amazed at Rinpoche. . . . I think I can speak for both of us on that point. . . . As you might expect, . . . the transcripts were quite difficult to understand. . . . None of us knew much about Buddhism, which also made the transcripts challenging, to say the least. So Marvin and I vetted absolutely everything we did with Rinpoche. We would read him the transcripts, asking questions until we felt we understood that talk under discussion fully. Then we would do an edit which, depending on the particular talk, might involve more or less rewriting. Then we would read him the edit, eliciting his comments, and do a re-edit. We did this until we were all satisfied with the result, a process which usually required several iterations.