Hong’s Stories: Heretics and Bandits of Hope (excerpts from Crazy Wisdom)
“This world does need your help so badly, very badly. And so on behalf of this world, I would like to request that you come and do something about it.”
Chogyam Trungpa
Amituofu friends, I kind of went nuts here transcribing all of Chogyam Trungpa's quotes along with some from his disciples from the documentary Crazy Wisdom. I highly recommend the documentary, though this Chinese sub-titled version on YouTube (surprise, surprise) has edited out the entire section of the movie discussing when he was almost killed and had to flee during the Chinese invasion of Tibet.
Nonetheless, there is a lot to chew on here which is what inspired me to spend a solid morning picking out the passages.
More chi! Train harder!
Hong
Brief Background
Chogyam was recognized as a reincarnated Tibetan Buddhist master at the age of 18 months. At that time he was given the title of Rimpoche which means “precious jewel”. He fled Tibet during the Chinese invasion in 1957 as one of the last generation of native masters. Chogyam eventually came to the US and founded Shambhala.
In his own words:
“My work is dedicated to presenting the notion of enlightenment to the west. The world is not going to be saved purely by religion alone, but the world can be saved also by secular enlightenment.”
Chogyam died in 1987 in Canada at the age of forty-seven.
Watch the movie and use this as a reference. Then go look for more of his talks, read his books, and most importantly find your path.
More chi! Train harder!
Hong
What follows are transcribed quotes in the order in which they appear in the documentary film Crazy Wisdom, and are either from Chogyam himself or his disciples.
Chogyam:
Although I live in the slime and muck of the dark age, although I stumble in the thick black fog of materialism, the tradition of meditation is waning and we are drunk with spiritual pride, this is the time of hell on earth, sadness is always with us and unceasing depression fills our mind, the heretics and bandits of hope and fear are transformed into crazy wisdom.
My work is dedicated to presenting the notion of enlightenment to the west. The world is not going to be saved purely by religion alone, but the world can be saved also by secular enlightenment.
This world does need your help so badly, very badly. And so on behalf of this world, I would like to request that you come and do something about it.
The basic point seems to be about this life, not to be cowed, afraid to look at things, afraid to be decent, afraid to smile, afraid to acknowledge that we are basically good, or as Americans call it chickening out.
Disciple
His injunction to me always was that the major change must always be internal and that without meditation there is no progress.
Chogyam
The dharma is used for personal gain, and the river of materialism has burst its banks. The materialistic outlook dominates everywhere.
Disciple
When the Sanda arrived in his mind, it was a realization. And that's what was written down, the whole idea of a dark age. Spiritual values have been lost. We can see how much we damage we have done to the planet due to materialism. And the hypocrisy is awesome.
People would get very upset because he wasn't teaching. People wanted the teacher to satisfy their own spiritual greed, so they could say they were a disciple of CT and he was doing this to lead me on the path to liberation. And then they would find actually he wasn't doing anything. He was just drunk or trying to seduce their girlfriend or acting in some outrageous way.
Chogyam
My main point is to be able to teach wholly with the ordinary western world. And also there is a generally a sense of fascination on the peoples part and when you talk to them with the robes on they don't listen to you but they look at the robe.
Disciple
He abandoned the monastic persona and the rest is history.
It didn't feel like I was committing my life to him. I loved being with him. He’s gone but he was a good friend. There was no commitment there. It came naturally.
He took out his mirror, his metal mirror he had around his neck. This mirror was his way to prophesize by looking in the mirror. He started looking in this mirror and started describing Shambhala. “Its as if I was there and I can see it.” And that was the only clue he gave that he was going to America to find Shambhala.
I really didn’t think of him as a Buddhist. I wasn’t really looking for Buddhism or any particular religious path. I just thought he was someone who spoke the truth. In fact, I think I thought he just made it up. He just happened to be someone so insightful he could point out the nature of reality.
Chogyam
When we are talking about the tantric tradition, we are not talking about purely playing with sex or aggression or colors, the phenomenal world. We are not talking about those areas yet. We have to be very very concerned with the fundamentals of the whole thing, rather than the whole thing is ok and groovy. If you don't worry everything will be ok. Let's bounce together. Let's drink together. Let’s drink honey and milk. It doesn't work.
Disciple
At one point I was concerned about whether you needed to be celibate on the path. Just as I was getting to that question and it was his lady wearing a bath towel. He kissed her and said, “I will come to bed soon sweetie.” I didn’t ask the question.
He taught by being a human being. He never said follow me, imitate me. He said I am completely who I am, and I want to help you understand how to be completely who you are. And he said just study the dharma which is the truth of trusting who you are, discovering your own fundamental goodness, discovering your natural wisdom, and discovering the importance of being compassionate. That has nothing to do with religion.
How he often would work most of the time it would be a quarter turn of the screw. It wasn’t a big thing.
There is a legend of the Buddha wherever he stepped love as flowers bloomed. Almost wherever CT stepped in America Tibetan Buddhist centers sprang up.
Chogyam
Of course, the automatic answer is I will become Buddha, the enlightened one. You are about to become an egomaniac. You are becoming an egomaniac. Not only about to. You are thinking you can become the Buddha himself.
Disciple
He liked the poets. He liked the artists. He liked the misfits. He never seemed to want to reign in the energy in terms of setting up an institution like Naropa (the Buddhist university in Boulder, CO that CT founded). He kept talking about sparks flying.
What we were doing was bringing together east and west, and that was the creation of a new hybrid. Normally people think of creating some kind of diplomatic relationship between the east and west, but what he really wanted was not to do that at all, but instead to maintain the integrity of each tradition and let them come up against each other so sparks would fly.
Chogyam
If we are going to discuss spirituality at this point in this particular class, I feel very nervous myself and so should you, that we are not building mutual deceptions between each other. We have coined this word Spiritual materialism which is dedicated to pursuing the self, ego, that you use mantras, chanting, meditations, all kinds to become a greater and more powerful person.
Disciple
He did not give a talk in the first eight years without reminding people how foolish their grappling after spirituality to save themselves was. He was cruel from the point of view of relentlessly dismantling whatever you could use to cling on to some constructed version of ego.
Chogyam
Let us mock the ego, but let us build our spirit. Spirit in this case as a sense of inquisitiveness, that something might have happened, there’s a possibility that something has taken place, but ego’s approach is that is that going to be good for me, should I do it, shouldn’t I do it, if I did it how is it’s money’s worth so to speak”
It is absolutely important to make the practice of meditation as the source of your strength, source of your basic intelligence. Think about that. You know there is such a possibility you could sit and do nothing for twenty minutes, ten minutes. Just sit and do nothing. You can think about why you are sitting. You shouldn’t be too embarrassed to tell that message to your parents, relatives, your friends. That you have learned a very valuable message, that you can actually survive by doing nothing.
We always have a problem taming ourselves. that is why we have to resort to religion basically. Taming, simply being decent, no ups and downs, some sense of equilibrium, a natural state of existence.
Chogyam
Student: Where do purpose and motivation come in in the enlightened mind that is free from desire and striving? Where do his purposes come from?
Chogyam: Well, purposes come from having a sense of trust in oneself, a sense of uprightness, sense of loyalty, sense of appreciation of one’s family, and of one’s immediate world around you, there is a cloud in the sky and the sky is blue, and the sun rises beautifully in the east, and snowflakes have their beauty falling on the ground.
Student: And everything is perfect?
Chogyam: Pretty much
We don’t want to really be fully sane. That seems to be our problem usually. That we can’t handle sanity and we would like to have a little corner of neurosis somewhere. Even in our pockets. Just a little puff here and there. So if we find too much sanity, we say boy it was heavy.
The crazy wisdom person which is a direct translation from Tibetan, wisdom gone wild, so in this case, it’s craziness gone wisdom.
Its just basic craziness which is fearlessness. Not giving up anything seems to be the basic point, being willing to work with what is there on the basis of its primordial wakeful quality, that seems to be the definition of crazy wisdom.
Disciple
He really found the way Americans spoke English to be sloppy, and he thought it reflected that if you didn’t work with how you spoke that there was a way in which body and mind were not joined. So speech is one of the things that can really join those, so that you have everything sort of lined up, you have synchronized your body speech and mind. Ultimately he was trying to demonstrate how sound had a sacred element.
He said that in order to create an enlightened society, you have to change the culture, and in order to change the culture you have to change the art, and in order to change the art you have to change the principals that art is based on, and those principals should be the principals of dharma art
Chogyam
The basic notion of art at all means how to relate oneself and how to relate with one's phenomenal world gracefully.
When there is enough sense of space then we can afford to relax more and we begin to find what is known as the sacred world, that any artistic endeavor is regarded as sacred. When that happens, there is no struggle
Disciple
The idea in dharma art is to receive images. It is not an ego trip. All you did was see it and bring it to the surface. You caught the fish. You didn’t create the fish.
Chogyam
Things are sacred not in a sense of religious means but sacred in the sense that there is a natural dignity in the way we view our world.
Disciple
He was sitting up on the altar of this church smoking cigarettes and someone asked him a question to talk about aggression in America and he said, “I want to talk about the aggression in this room.”
Chogyam Trungpa believed that every aspect of society had to be explored. Every single aspect. And so he created theatre groups, and he created commerce groups, he created educational institutions, and he also created a Buddhist version of the military. Everyone had a hard time with it. But he would say over and over again, “Until we reach into the heart of aggression of society and we transmute that very same energy to be the forces of peace we can't really change the way things work.”
Chogyam
The Shambalah principal is what is known as the path of the warrior. Here again, it does not mean the creator of a wall but a warrior in terms of braveness, of being brave.”
Question: Why are you doing this military thing?
Chogyam: Someday people will see our army marching down a street and it will cause them to feel like they want to smile. And at that point, we will actually have changed something at the core of modern society of the problem as it was.
Disciple
It took us ten years to figure out that he was teaching traditional Buddhism. We didn’t know that because if you ever read traditional Buddhism you go “Huh?” But his incredible ability with language to translate that into our language so that he was able to touch your heart and he was also able to make your mind inquisitive so your constant feeling was that your journey was truly what is traditionally described as the path is going underneath you and you are just continually opening up to whatever you are encountering.
He didn't hide anything. He didn't hide his drinking. He didn't hide his sexuality.
As related by his wife upon learning of his infidelity: It’s not that I don’t love you. Our relationship is much much stronger and more powerful than sexual fidelity so to speak. I am never going to be able to be a conventional husband. But you can always completely 100% rely on our relationship and our love for each other. But it’s just not going to be conventional.
Sexual activity, what there was, it was about liberating desire rather than creating more desire. So you take that place of desire where its the most which is in the sexual activity and you apply some kind of wakefulness where you are actually present all the way through, so it’s a very potent place to work from. Sometimes I would sit with him for three for hours in silence for hours. Sometimes it was really lonely.
Calling it a relationship is even tricky. Because there wasn’t that kind of solidity to it. We are not talking about the person CT but we are talking about the manifestation of that mind which sees reality as it is and is able to wake people up, but only because you share that mind.
In the west, it is easy to misunderstand devotion in the Tibetan tradition. It looks from the outside as if there is this great, great person and these little people following at the great person’s feet. But in fact, the tradition itself is very clear that the teacher has nothing more than the student, that the wisdom exists already, we are born with it, we die with it, we can't get rid of it we can't get more of it. The teacher points that out, and the student gradually comes to that understanding and the minds meet.
When I Ride a Horse
by Chogyam Trungpa
When I ride a horse I hold my seat
When I play with snakes I snap them on my wrist
When I play with dangerous maidens
I let them talk first
Crazy wisdom as I understand it means not planting your foot firmly either in the material world or the spiritual world. When we have the spiritual worldview then we are bounded by this so-called spiritual view, and when we are materialistic, we are bounded by this so-called materialistic view but if you go beyond that, if you take this extra leap, then that is the crazy wisdom leap its like taking a leap into the abyss but its not the abyss of nothingness, its the abyss of reality
Chogyam
How much have we tried to connect to our own heart? And how much of that particular attempt to connect with our own heart has been repelled because you might discover something terrible in you?
When we want really to connect with our heart…What are you? Who are you? Where is your heart? If you just put your hand through your ribcage and feel your heart there is a tenderness. It feels sore and soft, and it hurts. And you want to spill your heart to relate with the others. That type of tenderness does bring a notion of fearlessness, fearlessness that you have possibilities that the world around you can tickle your heart, your raw heart.
Disciple
It was his way of saying its a form of strength. When you feel that tenderness in you, you become stronger.
Even in a film like this if the message were to be conveyed that he was about being defined or framed in any way whatsoever, that would defy the whole purpose of his life which was to allow ourselves to be unframed and fluid and to allow others to come forth in their basic goodness.
