Chögyam Trungpa

Chögyam Trungpa: His Life and Vision by Fabrice Midal (Shambhala) Master of meditation, artist, poet, social visionary—Chögyam Trungpa was all these and more. Yet "Who was Chögyam Trungpa?" is a slippery question, for how can we can nail down the personality of a man who seemed to be a different person to different people at different times and on different occasions? Fabrice Midal, by steering his way between conventional Western biography and traditional Tibetan hagiography, has succeeded in painting a detailed portrait of this unconventional Tibetan lama, who is regarded as one of the most influential forces in spreading Buddhism in the West.

From his first years of teaching in Britain and the United States, Trungpa began making friends with his students in a completely free style, with few Buddhist references, adapting his teaching to the language and understanding of young Westerners. Yet his radical emphasis was on the traditional source of Buddhism: the root practice of sitting meditation.

In his oral teachings, Trungpa surprised his audiences by making no concession to their expectations, speaking directly from his heart to their hearts, without alluding to techniques and philosophy.

His work was unique in its emphasis on a secular rather than religious approach to spirituality. Among the practices that he encouraged his students to undertake were calligraphy, flower arranging, Japanese archery, tea ceremony, dance, theater, health care, psychotherapy, poetry, elocution, and translation. His establishment

of centers, communities, and innovative educational institutions was also part of the flowering of a new culture of Buddhism in the West. He founded Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado; Shambhala Training; and Vajradhatu, an inter-national association of meditation centers (now called Shambhala International).

This biography presents a wealth of anecdotes from Trungpa's life, excerpts from unpublished talks, reminiscences by those closest to him, and facts from the archive that preserves his legacy—all making the book a treasure chest of insights not found in any other book published so far.

Fabrice Midal is a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris. A practicing Buddhist in the tradition of Chögyam Trungpa, he is well known in Buddhist circles in France and has published books on religious topics with major French publishers, among them several titles on Tibetan Buddhism.

Chögyam Trungpa was a Buddhist teacher who was born in Tibet in 1940 and died in Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1987. He was one of the first to teach Westerners, even living with them and sharing their lives.

Excerpt: There are numerous gurus who are known to be true heirs of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. But there is something unique about Chögyam Trungpa. It is difficult to define what is so singular about him, but this book offers an approach.

It is important to note that no other Tibetan guru has so distanced himself from his original culture. A commonly held belief is that spiritual practice is inseparable from its cultural context.

For many years, Zen masters considered that it was impossible to teach Buddhism to Westerners. So their first European disciples took up a Japanese lifestyle.

Chögyam Trungpa never wanted his students to become Tibetan. He believed that when Buddhism is transmitted to the West, it should give rise to a Western Buddhism, and this could only occur after profound reflection about the language and the culture in which the dharma could be established. Such was the huge task that Chögyam Trungpa undertook by immersing himself in the Western world. As he himself explained, be-coming a Buddhist is not a matter of trying to live up to what you would like to be, but an attempt to be what you are: "This possibility is connected with seeing our confusion, or misery and pain, but not making these discoveries into an answer. Instead we explore further and further and further without looking for an answer. It is a process of working with ourselves, with our lives, with our psychology, without looking for an answer but seeing things as they are—seeing what goes on in our heads directly and simply, absolutely literally. If we can undertake a process like that, then there is a tremendous possibility that our confusion—the chaos and neurosis that goes on in our minds—might become a further basis for investigation:"

With this in mind, Chögyam Trungpa paid constant attention to education. He set up several schools and a university; he organized interreligious meetings at a time when they were scarce (while showing a profound interest in Christianity and Judaism, as well as other schools of Buddhism that were little known in Tibet); he was extremely sensitive to the role played by artists, poets, painters, and musicians with whom he regularly worked. He met numerous members of the avant-garde of the time; he analyzed the West's economic situation and how he could make a significant contribution to it; he gave thought to medicine and how to assuage the ills of the body as well as the mind; he became passionate about politics as a means of living in community and thought deeply about ecology and our relationship with our environment.

In many ways, Chögyam Trungpa is reminiscent of those stained-glass windows, made of a large number of facets, that decorate Gothic cathedrals. Like them, he dazzles you. The only inappropriate aspect of this 1 analogy is that while such prolific richness can seem dazzling, such brilliance can also provoke the greatest terror when it exposes the depth of our own imbecility.

The word imbecile comes from the Latin imbecillus, which means "not having a stick." An imbecile is someone with no leaning post. Caught in the web of thought's changing fashions and habits, he has been lost in obscurity. This is just what Buddhism means by samsara, an endless circle spun by our beliefs and opinions, without the slightest attention to what really is.

The basis of Buddhism, like all authentic practices, is the affirmation that it is possible to find a genuine stick to lean on, that a real world does exist beyond the one we build for ourselves and try to adhere to, come what may.

In a period marked by cynicism, there is a good deal of provocation in the idea that there is a path that can reveal the possibility of living otherwise—in other words, that the aim of life is not to become a good consumer or producer.

In reality, such an idea is often downplayed. Most of the press, books, and seminars devoted to spirituality set about doing so, for various reasons. Buddhism is often presented as being an atheistic—or at best agnostic—teaching, which is scientific and rational, which can be diluted into the "values" of modern society. It is also presented as a form of psychological therapy leading to a better existence, or else as a bulwark providing cheap and easy protection against the stress of modern life.

When Buddhism is mingled with the West in such a way, not much of it is left.

But if more attention is paid to how Buddhism can be introduced into the West without being watered down by the media machine and the world of show business, then the work of Chögyam Trungpa becomes vital, because he was the first to warn us with prophetic clarity against the swamp we are sinking into ever deeper.

Chögyam Trungpa presented Buddhism in such a way that it can take root anywhere. He wanted its teachings to become part of everybody's daily life and meaningful in our society.

Buddhism is not a religion, as he frequently explained; it is a way of life. Spirituality must not be a specific field, excluded from the social and secular world.

A presentation of Chögyam Trungpa cannot be limited to the work of the man, no matter how exceptional he was. It also entails examining a fly historic event: a completely novel meeting between the East and the West. Beyond Buddhism, Chögyam Trungpa decided to become an intrinsic part of our destiny so as to transform it—in other words, to liber-ate its dignity and greatness.

In writing this book, I considered several possible ways of presenting Chögyam Trungpa. I immediately excluded the idea of writing a biography, because such a psychological approach seemed both reductive and inappropriate to the very notion of egolessness as explained in Buddhist teaching.

Furthermore, who can pretend to know what Chögyam Trungpa thought?

Walter Fordham lived with him for a long time and organized his domestic life. When I interviewed him, he told me that every time Chögyam Trungpa came back from a trip, Walter felt as though he didn't know him anymore. He had changed so much that he seemed like a stranger. When you thought you knew who Chögyam Trungpa was, when you believed you had grasped your relationship with him, he broke down all your convictions. He never stayed still. As Walter told me: "I never knew who he was; he'll always be a mystery for me. The trap some of his students fell into was to believe they had a personal relationship with him. No one was ever at ease with him. His relationship with us was more intimate than that. He completely saw through all of us, but at the same time the whole situation was so light. He was so passionate about who you were, while at the same time it didn't matter." This is why it seemed to me that describing Chögyam Trungpa's personal experience would be impossible. No book could ever pretend to "grasp" such a man.

There was another possible approach: to produce a namthar, a traditional tale describing the life and teachings of a guru, written by his disciples. Such a project would imply a realization of his teachings, which is beyond my powers. Furthermore, it could not become truly meaningful in our modern world without being adapted and transformed, and thus disfigured.

Instead, I decided to sketch a series of portraits that would serve as a series of entrances into the world of Chögyam Trungpa.

Chögyam Trungpa is not a historical figure belonging to the past. He remains present in his works and continually offers us new ways to touch our hearts here and now.

Each chapter has been conceived as a facet of this work, capable of revealing a sacred vision—the capacity to see the beauty and space of all experience. The entirety of Chögyam Trungpa's life and work was devoted to transmitting the spirit of enlightenment, and no encounter with him is ever superficial. This is why, wherever he went, people were waiting for him, lining up to greet him. This should not be seen as the expression of fanaticism or mere protocol, but instead as the burning desire to enter into contact with that space.

The life of Chögyam Trungpa surpasses all comparison. As we shall see, it shocked many people and continues to disturb others.

Great spiritual masters abandon all conventions and require no recognition. They are ready to take any number of risks in order to communicate enlightenment to their disciples: The master "constantly challenges his students to step beyond themselves, to step out into the vast and brilliant world of reality in which he abides. The challenge that he provides is not so much that he is always setting hurdles or egging them on. Rather, his authentic presence is a constant challenge to be genuine and true."

But such excess cannot become meaningful only in the context that produced it. Certain surprising things he did can seem shocking today, and may also have seemed brutal or crazy at the time, but thanks to them the persons they were aimed at were able to open fully. It is thus difficult to judge them now. But any attempt to conceal his more disconcerting side would also water down the character of Chögyam Trungpa. I have tried to find a happy medium between this and the essential message of his work, while constantly examining the question of how Chögyam Trungpa had the power, and still has the power today, to enlighten us.

The exceptionally well produced and edited Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa gives this reviewer an opportunity to revisit his youth and some of the formative moments in his life. Quite simply as a young adult, I experienced an intellectual conversion that the purpose of life, at least my life, was to love selflessly all life. The way to reach this goal was to know myself, not in the argumentative way of a Socrates, but in the transcendental way of the Buddha. I had some smattering exposure to mahamudra and the Yoga of the Great Liberation. So in the late 1960s I set out to become a yogi and eventually a Buddhist practitioner. After some time in a Hindu Ashram practicing the classic meditations of Patanjali’s yoga. I found Buddhist meditation to be more agreeable, especially some tantric forms.

When Born in Tibet became a bestseller among new Buddhists I avidly read it and then stumbled upon the wonderful little volume Mudra, now collected in volume one of this wonderful collection. Chögyam Trungpa' Mudra for me expressed pithy insights that became pillars of my everyday meditation practice. Guidepost through the every intricate net-maze of the mind ensnaring me in suffering as I struggled to cultivate a deep universal and particularly immediate compassion.

I had the fortune to interview Chögyam Trungpa in the late 1970s after his University Naropa was off and running. Though never considering myself his "student" I did learn from him. And even considered his anti-exemplar "crazy wisdom" an important challenge to seekers who tend to abandon some behavioral and ethical norms in order to "learn the higher wisdom"

Later Chögyam Trungpa's Cutting through Spiritual Materialism (in volume 3 of this collection) spoke to the strong and unquestioning commoditization and "spiritual-experience consumerism" that Americans brought to their quest for spiritual authenticity without the ability to engage in self-reflexive critique or deep integrated practice.

The editors of the Collected Works stress how innovative is Chögyam Trungpa's development of an American idiom for complex Buddhist thought and. though I believe this is a work still in progress, the strides made by Chögyam Trungpa and so well in evidence in these volumes definitely calls for close attention both for subtle misunderstandings and for dynamic shifts in con notational meaning.

Except for the first volume which includes Chögyam Trungpa's earliest English publications, the volumes are arranged thematically with the editor providing detailed biographical and historical context in her introductions to each volume and writings. These volumes are a virtual treasure trove of Mahayana and Vajrayana teachings, including Chögyam Trungpa's own innovative practice adaptation to American ethos in the Shambhala teachings. I will refrain from further comment on the volumes now until I see the last installment which includes the completion of Chögyam Trungpa's Mahayana and Vajrayana teachings as well as his aesthetic forays...
The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa brings together in eight volumes the writings of one of the first and most influential and inspirational Tibetan teachers to present Buddhism in the West. Organized by theme, the collection includes full-length books as well as articles, seminar transcripts, poems, plays, and inter-views, many of which have never before been available in book form. From memoirs of his escape from Chinese-occupied Tibet to insightful discussions of psychology, mind, and meditation; from original verse and calligraphy to the esoteric lore of tantric Buddhism—the impressive range of Trungpa's vision, talents, and teachings is showcased in this landmark series.

The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa, Volume 1 : Born in Tibet - Meditation in Action - Mudra - Selected Writings by Chögyam Trungpa, edited by Carolyn Gimian (Shambhala Publications) Review

The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume One contains Trungpa's early writings in Great Britain, including Born in Tibet (1966), the memoir of his youth and training; Meditation in Action (1969), a classic on the practice of meditation; and Mudra, (1972), a collection of verse. Among the selected articles from the 1960s and '70S are early teachings on compassion and the bodhisattva path. Other articles contain unique information on the history of Buddhism in Tibet; an exposition of teachings of dzogchen with the earliest meditation instruction by Trungpa Rinpoche ever to appear in print; and an intriguing discussion of society and politics, which may be the first recorded germ of the Shambhala teachings.

The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa, Volume 2 : The Path Is the Goal - Training the Mind - Glimpses of Abhidharma -Glimpses of Shunyata - Glimpses of Mahayana - Selected Writings by Chögyam Trungpa, edited by Carolyn Gimian (Shambhala Publications) Review

The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Two examines meditation, mind, and mahayana, the "great vehicle" for the development of compassion and the means to help others. Chögyam Trungpa introduced a new psychological language and way of looking at the Buddhist teachings in the West. His teachings on human psychology and the human mind are included in this volume.

The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa, Volume 3 : Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism - The Myth of Freedom -The Heart of the Buddha - Selected Writings by Chögyam Trungpa, edited by Carolyn Gimian (Shambhala Publications) Review

The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Three captures the distinctive voice that Chögyam Trungpa developed in North America in the 1970s and reflects the preoccupations among Western students of that era. It includes Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism and The Myth of Freedom, the two books that put Chögyam Trungpa on the map of the American spiritual scene. The Heart of the Buddha and sixteen articles and forewords complete the volume.

The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa, Volume 4 : Journey Without Goal - The Lion's Roar - The Dawn of Tantra -An Interview with Chögyam Trungpa by Chögyam Trungpa, edited by Carolyn Gimian (Shambhala Publications) Review

The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Four presents introductory writings on the vajrayana tantric teachings, clearing up Western misconceptions about Buddhist tantra. It includes three full-length books and a 1976 interview in which Chögyam Trungpa offers penetrating comments on the challenge of bringing the vajrayana teachings to America . Review

The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa, Volume 8 : Great Eastern Sun - Shambhala - Selected Writings by Chögyam Trungpa, edited by Carolyn Gimian (Shambhala Publications) Review

Part 2

TRUNGPA

The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa brings together in eight volumes the writings of one of the first and most influential and inspirational Tibetan teachers to present Buddhism in the West. Organized by theme, the collection includes full-length books as well as articles, seminar transcripts, poems, plays, and inter-views, many of which have never before been available in book form. From memoirs of his escape from Chinese-occupied Tibet to insightful discussions of psychology, mind, and meditation; from original verse and calligraphy to the esoteric lore of tantric Buddhism—the impressive range of Trungpa's vision, talents, and teachings is showcased in this landmark series.

The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa, Volume 1 : Born in Tibet - Meditation in Action - Mudra - Selected Writings by Chögyam Trungpa, edited by Carolyn Gimian (Shambhala Publications)

The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa brings together in eight volumes the writings of one of the first and most influential Tibetan teachers to present Buddhism in the West. From his arrival in England in 1963 until his death in Halifax , Nova Scotia , Canada , Chögyam Trungpa (1939—1987)' was the author of thirteen books. Of these, ten appear in full in this collection. His translations of major Buddhist texts (The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Rain of Wisdom, and The Life of Marpa) have been omitted, but his introductions and other unique contributions to those publications are included.

Since his death, another thirteen books have been compiled from his lectures and poetry and published by Shambhala Publications. All of them appear in this compendium, although some illustrative material has of necessity been omitted. Vajradhatu Publications, the small press started by Chögyam Trungpa's Buddhist organization, has published four books for a general audience, which will also be found in The Collected Works. (That press has also produced several dozen edited transcripts and a number of limited editions, which are not reprinted in this series.) Additionally, more than seventy articles from many sources are included, along with poetry published by two small Canadian presses, Trident Publications and Windhorse, as well as several published inter-views and forewords, prefaces, and introductions to books by other authors.

This extensive body of work illustrates that Trungpa Rinpoche was a remarkably prolific teacher whose writings continue to attract great interest. With plans being made for many more publications based on the recordings and transcripts of his many hundreds of seminars, as well as on his poetry and writings, it seems that his prodigious activity in bringing the buddhadharma, the teachings of the Buddha, to the West will continue to flourish for many years to come.

In arranging the material for the eight volumes of The Collected Works, a decision was made to arrange the volumes thematically rather than chronologically. In part, this was because of the diverse nature of Chögyam Trungpa's literary endeavors. In addition to his books on the practice of meditation and the Buddhist path, five volumes and several broadsides of his poetry have been published, as well as three books on art and the artistic process. Two books on the Shambhala path of enlightened warriorship have also been produced. He also wrote a number of articles on Western psychology, along with short pieces on themes such as feminine energy and spiritual gardening. If all of these writings were organized in The Collected Works purely by year of publication, some rather strange juxtapositions would result. Moreover, the fecund connections among works on a similar theme would be much less apparent.

Another reason for the thematic organization is that Trungpa Rinpoche's posthumous volumes contain material from both very early seminars in North America and much later lectures. So chronology of publication would be a misleading organizing principle.

That said, Volume One, which contains his early writings in Great Britain , is the exception to the rule. The style of those works differs radically from the voice that emerged when he began to teach, and to be published, in North America . It thus seemed both useful and appropriate to group together the writings from England .

Chögyam Trungpa's first book, Born in Tibet, was published byGeorge Allen & Unwin in 1966, approximately three years after he came from India to Oxford on a Spalding scholarship. There are no known writings of his from India , evidently because no writings were produced, saved, or passed on to Western students. He was twenty years old when he arrived in India in January of 196o, having traveled on foot and horse-back over the Himalayas from eastern Tibet to escape the communist Chinese, a journey that lasted ten months. That odyssey is in part the subject matter of Born in Tibet .

In India he began his study of the English language, learning a great deal from Freda Bedi, an Englishwoman who later became a Buddhist nun under the name Sister Kenchog Palmo. Mrs. Bedi was very active in helping the Tibetan refugees and had started the Young Lamas Home School in Delhi , assisted by Trungpa Rinpoche, who was appointed spiritual adviser to the school. While in India , he was also tutored in English by John Driver, who later was of great assistance in his studies of West-ern literature, religion, and philosophy at Oxford . Trungpa Rinpoche had been first exposed to Western poetry in India , initially through a chance encounter with a Japanese haiku translated in a magazine he was reading to improve his English, and later by hearing the work of T. S. Eliot and other English poets at a reading sponsored by an American women's club in New Delhi . Rinpoche had also made the acquaintance of the American poets Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky in India when they visited the Young Lamas Home School .

Although he was an avid student of the language, Chögyam Trungpa's English was still rudimentary when he sailed for England . More than that, his understanding of Western thought and culture was limited. He went to England because he wanted to teach Buddhism in the West, but in order to do so, he first needed to educate himself in Western ways.

Indeed, no amount of formal education or study of the English language was going to make him an insider. He might get a front-row seat by working hard at his studies, but he was never going to be one of the players on the stage. More and more he came to realize this, and more and more he stepped outside the polite bounds of both Tibetan and English proper society in order to have real contact with the hearts and minds of the people he encountered. In many of his early talks, both in England and in the first few years in America , he spoke about the value and meaning of communication. It was not an abstract topic for him. He spent much of his effort during his early years in the West finding a genuine way to open to others and to invite them to open up to him. At the same time that he was working to overcome their tendencies to hold back, he had to work against his own.

He spoke a number of times about the crisis that he reached in this endeavor. In Volume One of The Collected Works, this discussion is found in Born in Tibet in both the 1971 epilogue to the Penguin edition and the 1977 epilogue, "Planting Dharma in the West," which Trungpa Rinpoche composed for the Shambhala Publications edition of the book, which appeared ten years after its first publication. This spiritual crisis came to a head over several years. Rinpoche describes a kind of mental "break-through" that occurred in 1968 when he undertook a retreat at Taktsang in Bhutan , a cave where Padmasambhava, the great teacher who helped to bring the buddhadharma to Tibet , had manifested in a powerful, wrathful form. During his retreat, Chögyam Trungpa composed—or, more accurately, received—The Sadhana. of Mahamudra, a text concerned with overcoming the obstacles of physical, psychological, and spiritual materialism that plague the modern world. This text is considered "mind terma," a "treasure" text planted by Padmasambhava in the realm of space, from which it could be awakened or retrieved as a kind of revelation or vision many generations later, and thus passed on directly to practitioners in the future dark age. The text is concerned with how individuals can free themselves from the knots of materialism to connect with the power of genuine wisdom. It is a guide to individual liberation, which can then be harnessed to help a greater world. For its author, or its "discoverer," it was certainly a personal awakening. As he writes in the 1977 epilogue, "The message that I had received from my supplication was that one must try to expose spiritual materialism and all its trappings, otherwise true spirituality could not develop. I began to realize that I would have to take daring steps in my life" (p. 264).

He returned from Bhutan to Great Britain , where in spite of the inner discoveries he had made, he found that outwardly he was still hesitant to jump in fully. A few months later, in early 1969, he was severely injured in a car accident, from which he emerged paralyzed on the left side. However, he took the accident as good news, a breakthrough: "In spite of the pain, my mind was very clear; there was a strong sense of communication—finally the real message had got through—and I felt a sense of relief and even humor. . . . I realized that I could no longer attempt to preserve any privacy for myself, any special identity or legitimacy. I should not hide behind the robes of a monk, creating an impression of inscrutability, which, for me, turned out to be only an obstacle. With a sense of further involving myself with the sangha, I determined to give up my monastic vows. More than ever, I felt myself given over to serving the cause of Buddhism" (pp. 264-65).

In "Things Get Very Clear When You're Cornered," a 1976 interview in The Laughing Man magazine, Chögyam Trungpa talks about the dilemmas faced by Tibetan teachers and his own personal challenge in teaching in the West, as well as the message of his accident…

Tibetans generally have to break through the cultural fascinations and mechanized world of the twentieth century. Many Tibetans either hold back completely or try to be extraordinarily cautious, not communicating anything at all. Sometimes they just pay lip-service to the modern world, making an ingratiating diplomatic approach to the West. The other temptation is to regard the new culture as a big joke and to play the game in terms of a conception of Western eccentricities. So we have to break through all of that. I found within myself a need for more compassion for Western students. We don't need to create impossible images but to speak to them directly, to present the teachings in eye-level situations. I was doing the same kind of thing that I just described, and a very strong message got through to me [after my accident]: `You have to come down from your high horse and live with them as individuals!' So the first step is to talk with people. After we make friends with students they can begin to appreciate our existence and the quality of the teachings.'

A few months after having renounced his monastic vows, in an even more radical move, on January 3, 1970 , Trungpa Rinpoche married. His bride, Diana Judith Pybus, was a young woman of sixteen at the time. Three months after they married and within a year of his accident, he and Diana left England for North America .

These events of 1968 to 1970 show an enormous shift in Chögyam Trungpa's outer manifestation. The writings that make up Volume One of The Collected Works are a window into the inner world of this extraordinary man, both before and during this transformation. For his manifestation after these changes, we have another seven volumes to peruse!

Diana Mukpo, the author's wife, remarked on how much his outer being changed following his accident. She first met him during a seminar he was giving in London at the Buddhist Society in early 1969. Trungpa Rinpoche had just recently returned from Bhutan , where he had received the sadhana. It was before the accident. Diana requested a personal interview with him, which she describes as follows: "During the interview, Rinpoche was incredibly sweet.... To me he seemed to be a very pure being: so kind, so pure, so sharp. During the interview, I had the sense that he was touching my mind with his. There was absolutely no barrier in our communication. Whomever he worked with, he was in love with the other person's mind. I felt that he had no personal agenda except to be kind and helpful."

The next time she saw him was in the fall of 1969, when she hitch-hiked to Samye Ling, Rinpoche's meditation center in Scotland . She writes:

The first evening I was at Samye-Ling, Rinpoche came by to have dinner with the other Tibetans who lived at Samye-Ling. After dinner, as he was leaving . . . I saw him outside getting ready to depart. He was no longer wearing monk's robes, but instead he had on a layman's chuba, or robe, and he was walking slowly in a laboured way with the aid of a walker. I realized that he was quite crippled from the accident. I managed to get close to him. . . . Although I only saw Rinpoche that evening for a few minutes, in that short period of time, I realized that he was a completely different person than he had been before his accident. Of course, he looked quite different physically because he was paralysed on one side and had obviously been through a l0t. But that wasn't it. It wasn't just his physical being that had changed. He had a very different manifestation now, which I found fascinating. Before the accident, he had been a youthful Tibetan monk, so pure and light. Now he was much more heavy and solid, and there was a sort of old dog or well-processed feeling about him. He seemed much older, and he had an unfathomable quality that I hadn't experienced before. He was transformed."

That purity and lightness, which others who knew Trungpa Rinpoche during this time have also noted, are reflected in the quality and style of Born in Tibet , as well as in the articles published in The Middle Way. This light touch is also apparent in Chögyam Trungpa's first book on the Buddhist path, Meditation in Action, which was based on talks he gave at Samye-Ling beginning in 1967. There are indeed a sweetness and a gentleness that pervade these early works. While not abandoned later, these qualities became colored by a deeper range of emotions and a different vocabulary in America .

The third book that is included in Volume One, Mudra, was not in fact published until 1972, several years after Chögyam Trungpa came to North America . However, it has been included in Volume One because the core writings in Mudra are poems composed in England in the 1960s. (The translation of a poem that the author wrote in the Valley of Mystery in Tibet in 1959 also appears here.) There are several poems from 1965, in a section called "Songs"; the remaining verses are all from 1969, several from before the author's accident, the remainder following it. Together they give us another picture of this period: the voice of the poet, which for Trungpa Rinpoche was always a highly personal voice, much more so than the tone of his lectures.

Up to this point, the discussion has been of how one can read these early works for signs of the author's personal growth and development. In many schools of Buddhism, the teacher's life is taken as an important object of study and contemplation. For it is assumed that the life of a great teacher is a life that contains many lessons. A teacher's life is teaching by example.

However, The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa is not the author's spiritual biography, and in general it is not the editor's intent to discuss themes from Rinpoche's personal life in the introduction to each of the volumes. Yet it seemed that for this first volume it was worth making an exception and including in this commentary some important biographical themes, especially since the author's only autobiography, Born in Tibet , is included here. However, the teachings from this early period can primarily be enjoyed as good reading and for the good dharma that they expound.

When Born in Tibet was published in 1966, it was among the very earliest Tibetan autobiographies and accounts of life in Tibet told by a Tibetan in English. It was also one of the first descriptions of the communist occupation of that country recounted firsthand by a Tibetan. There are few works, even today, from which one can learn as much about the traditional upbringing and training of an incarnate teacher in Tibet . It owes its genesis very much to its English editor, Esme Cramer Roberts. Chögyam Trungpa and Mrs. Roberts were introduced through mutual acquaintances at the Buddhist Society in Oxford . In his foreword to the book, Marco Pallis thanks Mrs. Roberts for "her encouragement in the first place," without which, he notes, "the work might never have been begun." Mrs. Roberts and Trungpa Rinpoche worked on the book together for more than two years.

Born in Tibet was written at a time when Chögyam Trungpa's command of English was still very much a work in progress. Understandably, the language and the style employed in the book were heavily influenced by Mrs. Roberts's own skills with the English language. It is fortunate for the reader that she was such a sensitive editor; much of the charm of the phraseology of Born in Tibet , as well as its literacy, were undoubtedly her contributions.

Marco Pallis also notes that Mrs. Roberts tried very hard to preserve the flavor of the author's thoughts. As he puts it, "she wisely did not try and tamper with a characteristically Tibetan mode of expression." With-out knowing exactly what he meant by this, it is still clear that Chögyam Trungpa himself, not his editor, determined the basic content and structure of the book. Mrs. Roberts was the first of many book editors he worked with. And while all of these made their imprint on his printed words, none of them—starting with this first venture—overrode the strength of his vision and his ability to communicate that.

There is some evidence that Mrs. Roberts sometimes did not under-stand all the details of the stories Trungpa Rinpoche told her. A number of years later, when he gave several seminars on the lineage of the Trungpa tulkus (incarnate lamas) and on his teacher Jamgon Kongtrul, there were small but notable discrepancies in his description of various events. That said, Born in Tibet is a book that he was proud of, and he was immensely grateful to Esme Cramer Roberts for having helped him to write it.

Born in Tibet was also significant because, for a very long time, it appeared to be the only available record of Trungpa Rinpoche's early life and his teachings in Tibet . It is now known that he composed over a thousand pages of writings while in Tibet and that, as a young tulku, he had already found several important termas. These were left behind when he fled the country, as was the history of the kingdom of Shambhala that he was writing during his escape. According to one story, he left it hidden near a high pass in the Himalayas . Until recently, all of these materials were believed to have been lost, destroyed during the communist Chinese invasion of the country.

Although he received occasional letters and news from Tibet , Trungpa Rinpoche was never able to return there. It was only after his death that a connection to Surmang Dutsi Tel, his main monastery, was reestablished by the Western sangha. One of Trungpa Rinpoche's students, Lee Weingrad, traveled to the monastery in September 1987, five months after Rinpoche's death, and has led many groups of Westerners there in subsequent years. Rinpoche's eldest son, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, then led an official delegation to Surmang in the summer of 2001. During his visit, the Sakyong was given nearly four hundred pages of texts that Trungpa Rinpoche composed before leaving Tibet . Mipham Rinpoche received this material from Trungpa Rinpoche's nephew, Karma Senge Rinpoche—who, in the aftermath of the communist occupation, traveled around the Surmang area gathering everything he could find of Trungpa Rinpoche's writings to preserve these texts for future practitioners. In time, much of this material will be translated and made available to English-language readers.

The second volume that is included in Volume One of The Collected Works is Meditation in Action, which was published in 1969 by Vincent Stuart and John M. Watkins. The material in the book dates from talks given at Samye Ling Meditation Center in Eskdalemuir , Scotland , by Rinpoche in 1967 and 1968, before his transformative vision at Taktsang. There is a simplicity and a purity of thought that have made this little book an enduring classic on meditation and the path of the bodhisattva. This is the first book based on transcripts of audio recordings of the author's lectures. The great majority of his subsequent publications have been based on transcripts of lectures, his poetry being of course the major exception. That he—and other important Buddhist lineage holders—came to the West at a time when the technology existed to easily record the human voice was an accident, but an extremely fortuitous coincidence. The teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha were remembered and written down by his major disciples, and that tradition of students passing on the words of their teachers from memory was a main vehicle for the transmission of the Buddhist teachings for many centuries. At the time that the historical Buddha lived, the culture was much more attuned to that kind of oral transmission. Had the preservation of Chögyam Trungpa's dharma teachings relied purely on the memory of his Western students, I think it is fair to say that a great number of the teachings would have been lost or strangely altered. So we can be grateful that the arrival in the West of so many great Buddhist masters coincided with a technology uniquely suited to preserve their words.

For the transcription and editing of Meditation in Action, thanks are due to its editor Richard Arthure and other English students of Rinpoche's who worked on the manuscript. Richard was with Rinpoche when he composed The Sadhana of Mahamudra at Takstang in Bhutan and worked closely with Rinpoche on the translation of that text." Of the genesis of Meditation in Action, Richard tells us:

The idea of putting together a book, based on talks given by Rinpoche mostly in 1967, arose in conversation between the Vidyadhara and myself, probably early in 1968. I thought it would help in making more people aware of what an extraordinary teacher Rinpoche was and, in particular, that it would draw more people to the Dharma and to Samye-Ling. I selected the material and set about transcribing and editing the talks that I thought would hang together to make up a book. It was solitary and labor-intensive work. For transcribing, I had an old reel-to-reel tape recorder and the first draft was written out by hand and then typed double-spaced on a Hermes typewriter. The challenge was to transform Rinpoche's spoken words into clear and elegant English prose. Even then, he had a fairly extensive and ever-growing vocabulary in English, but his sentence construction and grammar were rather sketchy and unorthodox...

I worked on the book for about four months in the Spring of 1968 in between bouts of intensive ngondro practice. I wanted to finish both before Rinpoche and I left for India and Bhutan , which was late June or early July of 1968. I had no idea what the title of the book would be until after the manuscript was finished. I remember there was some discussion as to whether it should be Meditation and Action or Meditation in Action. In retrospect, it seems self-evident that Meditation in Action is a much better title, but it wasn't quite so obvious then as it is now with hindsight. Robert Bly happened to be visiting Samye-Ling at the time that I was putting together the final type-script. He very kindly reviewed it and suggested a handful of minor changes, mostly in the matter of punctuation. . . . The corrected proofs were sent to Stuart and Watkins only days before [Rinpoche and I departed] ... for India , and so it happened that the book came out in England when both of us were thousands of miles away.

Although Meditation in Action differs from most of Trungpa Rinpoche's later works in its style, being from the period before he met the energy of Padmasambhava, "the Great Wrathful One," in Bhutan , it already demonstrates a particular gift that made him uniquely suited to present the buddhadharma in the West. In an early unpublished diary, which he wrote in England in 1966 to 1968, he himself delineates this quality: "In particular, my own situation is due to the fact that no one [else] could understand everything all together—both worldly and spiritual views and how to live one's life. This is not to say that I am more skilled, more learned, and more experienced in the dharma. There are many people who are more learned than I and more elevated in their wisdom. However, I have never made a separation between the spiritual and the worldly. If you understand the ultimate aspect of the dharma, this is the ultimate aspect of the world. And if you should cultivate the ultimate aspect of the world, this should be in harmony with the dharma. I am alone in presenting the tradition of thinking this way.'

This ability to seamlessly bring together spiritual and temporal experiences and to point to the sacredness in our experiences in everyday life is one of the aspects of Chögyam Trungpa's exposition of the dharma that made him so accessible and so helpful to Western practitioners. Meditation in Action already shows this understanding to be well developed, which is one reason that it has remained popular more than thirty years after it was published.

Another auspicious juncture that coincided with the appearance of Meditation in Action was that, through the book's publication, Trungpa Rinpoche made the acquaintance of Samuel Bercholz and Shambhala Publications. Vincent Stuart, of Stuart and Watkins who published the book in England , was, in addition to being an English publisher of some note, a student of the teachings of Gurdjieff. He and Sam Bercholz got to know each other through mutual interests in things literary and spiritual, and through Vincent, Sam came into contact with the work of Chögyam Trungpa. In 1969 Sam, then in his early twenties, and a friend, Michael Fagan, decided to start a company dedicated to publishing works on spirituality from the world's great religious traditions. Their first acquisition was the rights to Meditation in Action for the American market. As Sam Bercholz tells us: "Meditation in Action was originated by Vincent Stuart at Stuart and Watkins, and co-published simultaneously in the United States by Shambhala as its first published title. Shambhala took a 1,000-copy run-on of the British edition of 1,000 copies."

Sam was familiar with some of the stories about an enlightened kingdom called Shambhala, hidden away in the Himalayas , and he was attracted to the ideals of this enlightened society, so he decided to name his company Shambhala Publications. When Trungpa Rinpoche found out the name of the American company that had acquired the rights to his book, he was intrigued. He himself had a strong connection to the Buddhist teachings connected with Shambhala and had, as noted above, been writing a spiritual history of this kingdom when he was traveling out of Tibet. When he arrived in North America in 1970, among the first people he contacted were Sam Bercholz and his wife, Hazel, who along with Michael and Joann Fagan helped host his first teaching tour in California . All four of them became Rinpoche's students. Michael left the publishing company several years later; Sam remains the Editor-in-Chief of Shambhala Publications, which has been the main publisher for the writings of Chögyam Trungpa in the United States for more than thirty years now. He became one of Rinpoche's close disciples and has continued, not only to publish his work, but to propagate his teachings through his own lectures and seminars.

Mudra, the third book in Volume One, was the first book by Chögyam Trungpa for which Shambhala Publications was the original publisher. It was also the first of his books edited by Michael H. Kohn, also known as Sherab Chodzin, who has worked on many books by Chögyam Trungpa since that time. In addition to the poetry mentioned above, there are two translations of texts on the practice of dzogchen, or maha ati, as Trungpa Rinpoche preferred to call it. Richard Arthure worked on shaping the English versions of these two texts. An essay on the Buddhist path entitled "The Way of the Buddha" is also included in Mudra. It was first published in Garuda I, a small in-house magazine started by Rinpoche's American students. (A version of the same article appeared in the magazine Chakra: A Journal of Tantra and Yoga.) There are several accounts of the history of this article. According to Richard Arthure: "It's my recollection, though I can't be one hundred percent sure, that the first time Rinpoche presented an outline of the path in terms of the nine yanas [stages] was in April 1971 at a month-long retreat in a log cabin near Phelps, Wisconsin. Tania [Leontov] and I attended this retreat with Trungpa Rinpoche. There were no other visitors... . During this retreat Rinpoche dictated a fairly long and detailed account of the entire nine-yana path, and `The Way of the Buddha' essay may have been a condensed version of that." John Baker separately informed me that Rinpoche dictated "The Way of the Buddha" to him and Marvin Casper, in connection with their work as editors on Garuda I. John writes:

I'll mention one other major piece of editing that I participated in: the first Garuda, and especially the article "The Way of the Buddha," which I have always felt is quite amazing. Rinpoche had not been teaching the Vajrayana yet when he dictated this article to us, sitting at a kitchen table in his house in Four Mile Canyon in Boulder . He was battling spiritual materialism in America , with the emphasis on cynicism, not going on "trips," [and the development of] the proper relationship with the teacher and toward the teachings. So when he dictated this extraordinary article (he spoke, I wrote down his words, Marvin and I questioning and editing as he went), I was somewhat stunned and asked him if it was all right, did he really want suddenly to start giving out information on tantra, especially such shocking and esoteric information. He giggled and said that, if people read it and were seduced into coming to him hoping for exotic and magical teachings, it would be all right because we would just make them sit. I can see him laughing about it at the Formica table, looking at me.

One other extraordinary moment which occurred during the creation of that piece: after he had finished, he said of Maha Ati that the experience of the end of the path, the last evolution of enlightenment, is lonely, "like a lone wolf, standing on a ridge in the moon-light, howling at the moon." That image for the end of the path has stayed with me all these years.

These two accounts may complement each other. It is possible that Rinpoche began shaping the ideas while in retreat, that he then dictated the article for inclusion in Garuda, and that from there it was reedited for inclusion in Mudra.

Finally, ink paintings by Tomikichiro Tokuriki, of the Ox-Herding Pictures—a well-known Zen representation of mind training—are reproduced in Mudra with Chögyam Trungpa's commentary, which John Baker also had a hand in preparing. Rinpoche also relates these drawings to the nine yanas in Tibetan Buddhism. Trungpa Rinpoche concludes that "the final realization of Zen automatically leads to the wisdom of Maha Ati," which is the highest achievement on the path according to Tibetan tradition.

Already, in Mudra, his modest entrance into American book publishing, Rinpoche stands out as both an ecumenical figure and an iconoclast. Surely, he is the first Buddhist teacher to correlate Zen and Tibetan Buddhism in this way. In June 1970 when he visited California , Rinpoche made a very pivotal connection with the founder of Zen Center San Francisco, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. The two teachers, by all accounts, had a profound meeting of minds. Rinpoche and Roshi started making great plans to do things together, but these did not mature, as Roshi was diagnosed with liver cancer soon after they met and died in December 1971." Nevertheless, Rinpoche's respect for the Zen tradition was immense. Some of the emphasis that he put on the sitting practice of meditation, which became one of the trademarks of his teaching in America , grew out of his respect for the practice environment created by Suzuki Roshi. During Rinpoche's lifetime, Roshi's picture was always on the Buddhist shrines in Rinpoche's Buddhist centers.

There is one other notable fact about Mudra: Chögyam Trungpa's use of the term "egolessness" on page 411 is noted in the second edition of The Oxford English Dictionary, under the entry for the word ego. Trungpa Rinpoche, one can be sure, would have been delighted that he was quoted in the OED, a book that he treated with the greatest respect and regarded as the authority on the English language. Beyond that, this mention in the OED is an indication of the great and groundbreaking effect he had on the terminology adopted by Buddhism in the West in the twentieth century, of which there will be more said in the introductions to other volumes of The Collected Works.

Of the articles originally published in The Middle Way that are included in Volume One, a little has been said above, about how they show the development of Trungpa Rinpoche's grasp of Western language and thought. They include many teachings on compassion and the practice of the bodhisattva path, including a discussion of the six paramitas, the subject that also forms the foundation of Meditation in Action. Two articles on the history of Buddhism in Tibet contain unique information not duplicated in any other writings by Chögyam Trungpa.

Additionally, three other articles are included in Volume One of The Collected Works. "The Way of Maha Ati" is an exposition of some of the teachings of dzogchen or atiyoga, the most advanced stage of practice in the nine yanas of Tibetan Buddhism. The article contains the earliest meditation instruction by Trunpga Rinpoche ever to appear in print. It is notable that this instruction is similar to the meditation instructions that he gave to his beginning, as well as advanced, students in North America , throughout most of his seventeen years teaching there. Michael Hookham, the editor of this piece (who now uses his dharma name, Rigdzin Shikpo), provided the following information on the genesis of this article and the confusion that arose with its original publication:

Trungpa Rinpoche gave the Maha-Ati teachings in this text directly to me from his personal inspiration; they weren't translated from Tibetan, but emerged from his insight, based, I'm sure, on traditional Dzogchen upadesa [instruction or teaching]. I wrote them down over a period of time with Rinpoche's guidance and encouragement, linking them together using his terminology. The text was probably completed in 1968 at Biddulph Old Hall, shortly before Rinpoche left for India . Some time later the text was translated into Tibetan so that Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche could check what was said; as far as I know he approved. Thus there seems to have been a textual translation involved, but remarkably it was from English into Tibetan!

After Rinpoche left Britain , some copies of the text found their way into hands other than those of his students. It was published in part by Dr. John Crook in his The Yogins of Ladakh and more completely in Chime Yungdung's magazine Vajra. This latter version was photocopied and circulated within Vajradhatu [the main organization founded by Trungpa Rinpoche in the United States ]. Unfortunately the text was incorrectly described in Vajra as a translation made by Rinpoche and me; there was also confusion in places between the main text and the interleaved commentary and the title was changed to "Maha-Ati."

Alone this might not have mattered too much, but in the Shambhala Sun of September 1998 and subsequently in the Shambhala Sun website up to the present day, a new version of the text appeared, full of arbitrary, idiosyncratic editorial changes. The Vajra version with its errors was used as the basis for this . . . revision.

Rinpoche referred to the original text as self-secret, so it's probably suitable for a wider distribution than most Vajrayana texts, but I feel it's important to keep to Rinpoche's intention as closely as wecan.... It may help matters if the original text is published, so I have attached it to this e-mail.''

For The Collected Works Rigdzin Shikpo has provided the authoritative and original edition of this text. Its editor continues to live in Oxford , where he and Rinpoche originally met. He was one of Trungpa Rinpoche's early students in England and continued to study with him until Rinpoche's death. He was one of the first truly scholarly students that Rinpoche worked with, and he took voluminous notes on their conversations about many aspects of Buddhist doctrine and practice, particularly focused on the ati teachings. With encouragement from his teachers, he later founded the Longchen Foundation as a vehicle to further the study and practice of this tradition, and he continues to teach in England . Another article that he and Chögyam Trungpa worked on together, on teachings related to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, appears in Volume Six of The Collected Works.

The next offering in Volume One is "The Meditation of Guru Rinpoche," which was published in Chakra: A Journal of Tantra and Yoga in 1971. This short practice text is identified in Chakra as a translation of a Tibetan sadhana by "Ven. Lama Trungpa Tulku." Rigdzin Shikpo, the editor of "The Way of Maha Ati," has also shed some light on the probable history of this text: ". . . the book Diamond Light contained the first version of the text Rinpoche called the Guru Sadhana (an Ati Guru Yoga of Guru Rinpoche). As far as I can tell, this must be the text you mean. Rinpoche created it from two Tibetan texts that he said were from the Longchen Nyingthik. I searched the Longchen Nyingthik for them, but with no success. It may be that the texts came from the Nyingthik Yabzhi. In any case, Rinpoche weaved the two texts together and translated the result into English in Oxford in 1965 or 1966, with the help of John Blackwood, a resident of Oxford who died in Egypt some years ago. In 1967 or 1968, probably at Biddulph Old Hall, Rinpoche and I retranslated the text into English with more Sanskrit and Dharma terminology and Rinpoche created a commentary for it." Apparently, the short text that appears in Volume One of The Collected Works is part of a much larger undertaking.

An article entitled "The New Age," which first appeared in the Inter-national Times (IT) magazine in 1969, completes Volume One. IT was, according to Richard Arthure, "a popular underground paper in the '60s and '70S ... published weekly in London ." The article contains many intriguing ideas about society and politics, topics that continued to interest Chögyam Trungpa throughout his life. "The New Age" may be the first recorded germ of the Shambhala teachings, in English, that he concentrated on so much in the last ten years of his life.

Altogether, Volume One of The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa contains a varied and vibrant group of teachings. The pace of change in modern society is such that something written thirty years ago now may seem already almost archaic. These early writings of Chögyam Trungpa, however, are not just of interest as historical artifacts, for they convey timeless, always up-to-date wisdom. There is much to recommend the writings from these early years, and this editor hopes that they will continue to enlighten readers for many generations. At the same time, the contents of Volume One set the stage for the extraordinary pageant of dharma that lies ahead in future volumes.

The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa, Volume 2 : The Path Is the Goal - Training the Mind - Glimpses of Abhidharma -Glimpses of Shunyata - Glimpses of Mahayana - Selected Writings by Chögyam Trungpa , edited by Carolyn Gimian (Shambhala Publications)

Excerpt: Volume Two of The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa comprises five books and thirty-four articles that, loosely speaking, concern themselves with the themes of meditation, mind, and mahayana, the "great vehicle" for the development of compassion and the means to help others. The books and the first thirteen articles provide the formal or doctrinal presentation of these topics. Then follow articles that show how these concepts can be applied in specific disciplines or situations of working with Others, in dialogue with other spiritual communities, and in the juicy and varied situations that life presents. There are eight articles on psychology and working with others as a psychotherapist or health professional; six articles based on a dialogue with Christian contemplatives at the Christian-Buddhist Meditation Conferences held between 1981 and 1985 in Boulder, Colorado; an article on spiritual farming; another on work; one on sex; and four on the educational philosophy of Naropa Institute (now Naropa University), a liberal arts college founded by Trungpa Rinpoche.

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 Kagyu, is known as the Practicing Lineage.' 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 pro-gram 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 writ-ten 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 Chodzin 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 Nalanda Translation Committee? 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

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 (tenth-el 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 seethe 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."'

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 Karme Choling, a rural practicecenter 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 col-leagues, 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 re-printed 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.

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," re-printed 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, lodro, 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. 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 every-thing properly, precisely the way the Buddha taught."

The next two articles, "Dharmas without Blame" and "Buddha-dharma 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."

The next group of articles is based on Trungpa Rinpoche's participation in the Christian-Buddhist Meditation conferences held at Naropa in the 1980s. Four excerpts are from Speaking of Silence: Christians and Buddhists on the Contemplative Way , edited by Susan Szpakowski. The fifth was a dialogue titled "Comparing the Heart" with the Right Reverend Thomas Keating, a Trappist abbot now living in Snowmass , Colorado . It appeared originally in the Naropa Magazine, also edited by Mrs. Szpakowski. These articles show us how a contemplative approach to meditation and mind is shared by practitioners in both the Buddhist and Christian traditions and how the similarities and differences between the traditions can stimulate authentic communication.

Trungpa Rinpoche greatly admired the Christian contemplative tradition. He immersed himself in the study of Christianity at Oxford University in the 1960s, and he never lost his respect for the depth and majesty Of that spiritual tradition. While at Oxford , he wanted to take Holy Communion in the Church of England, in order to experience the inner spirituality of Christianity. However, since he wasn't a candidate for conversion, it was not possible. He was genuinely disappointed.

Taken as a whole, Volume Two demonstrates that the simplicity of meditation also encompasses the myriad facets of mind and leads us to a more open path, the mahayana, which values working with others as much as working on oneself. The subtleties of mind and meditation are many. This volume shows us Chögyam Trungpa's unique ability to pre-sent a many-faceted view of these topics. It also expresses how seamlessly he was able to join together spiritual development with work in the world.

Excerpt: With volume three of The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa, we come to a collection of writings that are quintessentially American. The volume opens with the two books that put Chögyam Trungpa on the map of the American spiritual scene: Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism and The Myth of Freedom. The third book included in this volume, The Heart of the Buddha, was published posthumously. However, a number of the core writings that make up that book were originally published in the early 1970s. Many of them appeared in the Garuda magazines put together as in-house publications by Trungpa Rinpoche's senior students. Following The Heart of the Buddha are a number of articles and inter-views. Several of these are also based on or taken directly from Garudas I and II, while others are from early talks given by Trungpa Rinpoche about the path of Tibetan Buddhism, the problems of spiritual material-ism, and the means for overcoming these problems through meditation. There are also three excerpts from Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche at Lama Foundation, discussions published after a visit the author made in 1973 to a New Age spiritual community in northern New Mexico . These capture the eclectic spiritual flavor of the early seventies. Other preoccupations of the era are addressed in two interviews with Chögyam Trungpa con-ducted in the 1970s: "Freedom Is a Kind of Gyp," an interview in East West Journal, includes Rinpoche's thoughts on natural foods, ecology, and EST (Erhard Sensitivity Training); and "The Myth of Don Juan," an interview in the Shambhala Codex, deals with the fascination with Carlos Castaneda's books on the Yaqui Indian shaman Don Juan. Finally, seven forewords to works by other authors complete this volume…

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 under-standing 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 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.

When Cutting Through was published in 1973, it was an almost over-night success. It was the book to be reading, at least in certain circles. Following its publication, lectures by Trungpa Rinpoche, which might previously have drawn an audience of a hundred, now might draw an audience of a thousand in a major American city. Since his arrival in America in 1970, he had crisscrossed the continent many times, developing a following in many cities, including Boston , New York , Washington , D.C. , Toronto , Montreal , Chicago , Boulder , Los Angeles , San Francisco , and Vancouver . By 1973, he had students in these and other locales who helped host his visits to their area. They set up lectures—and sometimes "dharma festivals" or other special events—in large venues that would accommodate all those who wanted to hear him speak.

While he talked about serious topics and warned listeners of the many pitfalls of spiritual endeavors, he did so with warmth and unconventional humor, in a way that generally charmed the audience. The atmosphere surrounding his public appearances was sometimes more like a happening than a lecture. I can remember young women dancing and a band of Hare Krishnas chanting, with much audience participation, as we waited for Chögyam Trungpa to arrive and speak at a lecture hall in San Francisco around 1972. After the main part of his address, he was always patiently and delightedly open to questions and audience participation. He loved to be challenged and seemed to draw energy from the interaction with the crowd.

To be sure, there was a more serious side to all this. Public lectures almost always were a prelude to weekend, sometimes longer, seminars, which generally were attended by fifty to one hundred participants. Here students sat and practiced meditation, had private interviews, and heard in-depth talks on topics from "Mahamudra" to "Buddhism and American Karma."

Although not published until 1976, The Myth of Freedom was largely drawn from public talks and seminars that Trungpa Rinpoche gave in many parts of the country between 1971 and 1973. While in some ways it is a continuation of the themes articulated in Cutting Through, The Myth of Freedom is also a departure. Rather than painting a detailed picture on a vast canvas, which was the style of the first book, here Chögyam Trungpa's approach is to provide many snapshots of the steps on the path. The chapters are short and pithy and largely self-sufficient; one can start almost anywhere in this book, read a chapter or two, and feel that one has gained something valuable, something that stands on its own merits.

In the intervening years between the publication of Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism and The Myth of Freedom, several events occurred in Trungpa Rinpoche's world that affected The Myth of Freedom. In 1973, the first Vajradhatu Seminary was held. It was the training ground for introducing vajrayana practice to Rinpoche's senior students. Before that time, all of his students were solely practitioners of sitting meditation.' By 1976, he had more than three hundred students engaged in ngondro,or the foundation practices, to prepare them to receive empowerment, or initiation, in the practice of tantric sadhanas. In 1974, the first session of Naropa Institute (now Naropa University ), the first Buddhist-inspired university in North America , drew eighteen hundred students to Boulder , much to the shock of Rinpoche's students who had been organizing the institute on his behalf. They had been expecting a maximum of five hundred participants. Although there were a number of reasons that people came to Naropa that summer, the success of Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism and interest in its author were major contributing causes. Also in 1974, the head of Trungpa Rinpoche's lineage, His Holiness the sixteenth Gyalwang Karmapa, visited the United States for the first time and gave his blessing to Rinpoche's work, noting his great accomplishments in transmitting the vajrayana teachings in the West. His Holiness proclaimed Chögyam Trungpa "a Vajra Holder and Possessor of the Victory Banner of the Practice Lineage of the Karma Kagyu."

All of these events had an impact on The Myth of Freedom. First, the success of Naropa Institute and Rinpoche's general celebrity encouraged him and his editors to undertake a second popular volume of his teachings. Second, in The Myth of Freedom, he chose to acknowledge and honor His Holiness Karmapa: the only photograph in the book is a portrait of the Karmapa, accompanied by one of Rinpoche's poems, entitled "Enthronement." This lends a sense of lineage and heritage to the book—not a lineage in the distant past but a lineage right at hand. Finally, although all of the talks in The Myth of Freedom were given to public audiences, there is much vajrayana or tantric content, including the translation of a short but important tantric text, "Mahamudra Upadesa," at the end of the volume. This was, in part, simply the natural outgrowth of the fact that Rinpoche's students—and his editors—were themselves becoming familiarized with and steeped in vajrayana. John Baker commented on this and other aspects of the editing of The Myth of Freedom:

With regard to Myth of Freedom, I never liked it quite as much as Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, felt it t00 much a synthesis from t00 many seminars, that it was overedited and had lost punch, lost some of the sound of his voice. Nevertheless, it has its moments, for sure, as for in-stance, the chapter on love. At some point I realized that it was pure Anu Yoga [an advanced stage on the tantric path]. I went to Rinpoche and asked him if he really wanted it in the book as it was, if it wasn't revealing teachings he only wanted to present to students intimately, at [the Vajradhatu] Seminary. He laughed and said it was all right, that no one would "get it" anyhow. However, with regard to Tilopa's "Mahamudra Upadesa," the poem Rinpoche translated for the conclusion of the book, he did edit out the references to tantric sexual yoga, deeming them too precious and esoteric for this venue.'

The year 1976, when The Myth of Freedom was published, was a turning point in Chögyam Trungpa's Buddhist community. With the coming of the Karmapa in 1974, Rinpoche's students had discovered that they were part of a large family. Having already found religion, in His Holiness Karmapa's connection to the community they found tradition. And with tradition came responsibility. The end of the party was in sight. Although there were certainly further celebrations to come, the careless freedom and sometimes wild atmosphere that characterized the earliest years began to fade after the Karmapa's visit. Similarly, although the first summer at Naropa Institute seemed like one huge happening, it also had implications. By 1975, what might have seemed like a lark just a year before now clearly held the potential to build an enduring and important institution of higher learning. There were departments to build, pro-grams to plan, degrees to offer. And as Rinpoche's students began their ngondro, entering the vajrayana path in earnest, they felt more person-ally the preciousness of the teachings they were receiving, and they discovered firsthand how much discipline and devotion were vital parts of their training. Also in 1976, Chögyam Trungpa appointed an American student, Osel Tendzin (Thomas Rich) as his dharma successor, or Vajra Regent. Tradition was now an intensely personal affair for Rinpoche's students: it was theirs to carry on. As if to underscore this point, Rinpoche announced that he would be taking a year's retreat in 1977, leaving the administration of his world to his Vajra Regent and all his other students.

That things began to settle down and take shape for the future was all for the good, for otherwise the community might have been marooned in the seventies. Still, there was an unfettered exuberant quality that was difficult to leave behind, and indeed some students left around that time, unable to make the transition from emptiness to form. It wasa bit like the change from adolescence to maturity—necessary but poignant. The changes in the community also made room for many others to explore their interest in Buddhism and meditation, for there were many who were not attracted to the formlessness of the early years. While some had found it liberating, for others it had appeared merely messy and chaotic.

If one reads The Myth of Freedom now, most of this surrounding cultural history is invisible—happily so. The book speaks to readers today who have no relationship to the era from which it sprang. The directness of the prose is hard-hitting, and the fact that the chapters are short makes the book almost more digestible for current readers than it was for its original audience.

The Heart of the Buddha, edited by Judith L. Lief and published in 1991, is a collection of fourteen articles, sixteen if one counts the appendices. "The Four Foundations of Mindfulness," "Taking Refuge," and "The Bodhisattva Vow" all appeared first in issues 4 and 5 of the Garuda magazine. Although Garuda was originally published by Vajradhatu, Chögyam Trungpa's main Buddhist organization, the last three issues were co-published by Shambhala Publications, with limited sales to the general public. These three articles are meaty, in-depth discussions of the topics, and they deserve the wider audience they enjoy by being incorporated into The Heart of the Buddha. The same is true for the chapter "Devotion," which was edited from one of Trungpa Rinpoche's seminars, "The True Meaning of Devotion," to be the main text in Empowerment, a beautiful, slim book with many photographs, commemorating the first visit of His Holiness Karmapa in 1974. "Devotion" and the three articles previously mentioned each give a comprehensive view of their topic. Each incorporates material from many of Rinpoche's talks on the same subject. Both "Taking Refuge" and "The Bodhisattva Vow" are based on talks that he gave when he presented Refuge and Bodhisattva Vows, committing his students to formally becoming Buddhists and then to treading the mahayana path of selfless compassion for all beings. These articles thus have a very personal and direct quality to them.

"Sacred Outlook: The Practice of Vajrayogini" was an article that I edited for inclusion in a catalog for the exhibit "The Silk Route and the Diamond Path: Esoteric Buddhist Art on the Trans-Himalayan Trade Routes." This exhibit, which opened at the UCLA art gallery in November of 1982 and then traveled to Asia Society in New York and to the

National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian in Washington , D.C. , in 1983, was curated by one of Trungpa Rinpoche's students, Deborah E. Klimburg-Salter. For the exhibit, Rinpoche supervised the design and construction of an actual shrine setup for the practice of the Vajrayogini Sadhana, displayed with all its attendant ritual objects. Some of the material in the article was dictated by Rinpoche; some of it was taken from earlier talks he had given. It is material that is not available in any of his other published writings.

The other articles in The Heart of the Buddha cover a wide range of topics, including "Relationship," "Intellect and Intuition," and "Dharma Poetics." "Acknowledging Death," another article included here, was originally edited as a contribution to a book on healing. A later version also appeared in the Naropa Institute Journal of Psychology. Although health professionals have found it extremely helpful, it is not just aimed at professional caretakers but speaks to anyone dealing with sickness—their own or that of others. "Alcohol as Medicine or Poison" is a penetrating discussion of the positive and negative aspects of relating to drink, written by a man well known to have been a serious drinker. While he acknowledges the problems that can arise with the use of alcohol, Rinpoche expresses not a moral but a spiritual viewpoint of the subject. Altogether The Heart of the Buddha brings together important and pro-vocative articles by Trungpa Rinpoche on a broad range of topics.

The other articles in Volume Three of The Collected Works are gathered from many sources. "The Wisdom of Tibetan Teachings," published in the American Theosophist in 1972, is a pithy piece on both the history of Buddhism in Tibet and the three yanas of Tibetan Buddhism. Part of the article is based on "The Meditative Tradition of Tibet," which appeared in Garuda I. The next article, "Transcending Materialism," is reprinted here directly from Garuda I. It describes the "three lords of materialism" in a unique context, relating their conquest to the communist takeover of Tibet , forcing many great Tibetan teachers to leave the country in order to preserve the wisdom of their culture. Out of these dire circumstances, some good sprang, Rinpoche tells us, for the Tibetan wisdom subsequently found its way to the West, where there was genuine interest in Eastern spirituality along with many misconceptions about its practice. "Cutting Through," the next article in Volume Three, was originally published in 1972 in Garuda II. It looks at the early history of American interest in non-Western spirituality and some of its roots,including Theosophy, the influence of Anagarika Dharmapala on the translation of Pali texts into English and Gendiin Chophel's attempts to translate Pali sutras back into Tibetan, as well as Aleister Crowley's fascination with the magic and mystery of Tibet and Egypt. Then Trungpa Rinpoche relates all of this to the modern fascinations with and sidetracks of spirituality. This article is like nothing else written by Chögyam Trungpa that I know of. It covers interesting territory that he rarely discussed.

The next article, "The Tibetan Buddhist Teachings and Their Application," first appeared in the inaugural issue of The Laughing Man magazine. The version reproduced here is based mainly on a later version, which appeared in an in-house Vajradhatu periodical called Buddha-dharma. The questions and answers are based on the earlier version published in The Laughing Man. Trungpa Rinpoche talks once again about the problems of spiritual materialism, overcoming self-deception through the practice of meditation, and meditation as making friends with one-self.

This is followed by a short piece, "The Three-Yana Principle in Tibetan Buddhism," which was published in another in-house organ, Sangha, in 1974. It does, in fact, give a brief synopsis of the three major yanas, or stages of the Buddhist path: the hinayana, mahayana, and vajrayana. Next there is the talk "Cynicism and Warmth," which first appeared in The Vajradhatu Sun in 1989. Given by Rinpoche at Tail of the Tiger in 1971, it is about cynicism as a tool for recognizing and cutting through spiritual materialism, and warmth as a tool for cutting through the obstacles of doubt and skepticism produced by the cynical approach. It is practice-oriented and powerful teaching.

"Dome Darshan," "Tower House Discussions I and II," and "Report from Outside the Closet" are all reprinted from Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche at Lama Foundation, published in 1974. This publication is a record of a dialogue between Rinpoche, the representative of the Buddhist tradition, and the students at Lama Foundation, the inhabitants of a hippie commune in northern New Mexico . In some ways the audience at Lama was not that different from an audience of Rinpoche's own students at the time. In fact, soon after his visit to Lama, a number of residents from that community left to study with him. Lama was a melting pot for the new American spirituality, hosting seminars by teachers from many different traditions. For example, Ram Dass, a former Harvard psychology professor (born Richard Alpert) who had become a teacher of Hindu spirituality, helped to found Lama and was a resident teacher there in the 1970s. After making Trungpa Rinpoche's acquaintance there, he came to Naropa Institute for the first summer session in 1974 as one of the main teachers.

Though the group at Lama may have been similar to Rinpoche's students, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche at Lama Foundation is not like any of his books. Since these talks and discussions took place in the Lama Foundation environment, rather than in one of Rinpoche's practice centers, and since the people from Lama were responsible for the editing and publishing of the material, there is a distinct flavor to the book they produced. After all, the people at Lama were the editors of Ram Dass's best-selling Be Here Now, which presents quite a different approach from Rinpoche's view of the spiritual path, to say the least. Nevertheless, the people at Lama produced Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche at Lama Foundation with Trungpa Rinpoche's blessing, and it does not mask his basic message: beware of spiritual materialism. At Lama, he was presenting meditation in what was a respectful but rather vague and eclectic spiritual environment. Rinpoche chose to talk about developing a cynical or critical attitude as an important part of the genuine spiritual path. Discussions of the Hindu experience of bhakti and the dialogue about Christianity and Teilhard de Chardin are interesting highlights in these articles. Readers will have to make what they will of "Report from Outside the Closet," which is a sort of short story or parable, which Trungpa Rinpoche wrote for the Lama Foundation publication. Joshua Zim, one of the residents at Lama who became a close student of Chögyam Trungpa's, was fond of writing rather cryptic short stories, a volume of which were later published as Empty Heart. "Report from Outside the Closet" may have been Rinpoche's way of communicating, or playing, with Zim.

"Freedom Is a Kind of Gyp" is an interview conducted and published by East West Journal (now Natural Health) in 1975. The interview wasdone during the Nalanda Festival in Boston, which was a kind of mini–Naropa Institute on the road, featuring poetry readings, Buddhist talks, music, and other cultural activities, including the opening of an exhibit of Tibetan art at the Hayden Gallery at M.I.T., for which Rinpoche wrote the catalog (see "Visual Dharma" in Volume Seven of The Collected Works).9 In 1974, a Dharma Festival organized by Rinpoche's students in the Bay Area in California had created the model for the festival that took place in Boston. The interview itself covers a wide range of topics, including Rinpoche's thoughts on EST and ecology. He is critical of Er-hard Sensitivity Training, yet points out that Werner Erhard, its founder, is a "friend of ours." Participants in Erhard's training program attended specially EST-sponsored Vajra Crown ceremonies conducted by His Holiness Karmapa in 1976, so there was some genuine interest there in Kagyu spirituality. Trungpa Rinpoche was suspicious of Erhard's approach but also, typically for him, saw the potential of what Erhard was doing with EST.

Next there is an interview with Chögyam Trungpa conducted by Karl Ray on behalf of Codex Shambhala. The Codex was a small journal started by Shambhala Publications in 1971 as a forum for discussion of its books and as a showcase for its authors. The interview reprinted in Volume Three, "The Myth of Don Juan," appeared in 1975. Karl Ray, then a long-time Shambhala employee, had just assumed the editorship of the magazine, a position that he held throughout the remaining years of its publication. Later in 1975, the Codex became The Shambhala Review of Books and Ideas. It ceased publication altogether in 1976.10 There were interesting reviews and excerpts from Shambhala's new books in the magazine; but to my mind, the best of the Codex/Review were the original interviews.

In "The Myth of Don Juan," Trungpa Rinpoche criticizes Carlos Castaneda for making something of a personality cult out of the figure of Don Juan, rather than emphasizing the teachings themselves—although Rinpoche remains unconvinced that Don Juan actually exists. There is a discussion of the problems with trying to use drugs to shortcut genuine spiritual discipline. Finally, Trungpa Rinpoche contrasts shamanistic teachings—as well as other religious traditions that are based on identifying with the magic contained in particular physical locations—with the approach of both Christianity and Buddhism, which he suggests are both fundamentally based on a mendicant or homeless approach. This, he suggests, is part of their universal appeal.

Volume Three concludes with a group of forewords written by Chögyam Trungpa over the years. They are arranged here chronologically. Two are forewords to translations of important Tibetan Buddhist texts. The first, The Jewel Ornament of Liberation, is Gampopa's great work on the stages of the Buddhist path, which was translated by Herbert V. Guenther and published originally in 1959. Rinpoche wrote a foreword to the edition that Shambhala Publications brought out in 1971, and through this made the acquaintance of Dr. Guenther." Trungpa Rinpoche greatly admired this classic text and had studied it thoroughly as part of his own education. One of the first seminars he taught in America was a series of seventeen lectures on the Jewel Ornament, which regrettably has not yet been edited for publication. The other text for which he wrote the foreword, Mahamudra: The Quintessence of Mind and Meditation by Takpo Tashi Namgyal, was published in 1986, the year before Rinpoche died. He was very happy that this book was being published in translation; his foreword was one of the last things he ever dictated, just a few months before he became quite ill. He used this text as his own study material—in Tibetan, of course—for many of his talks on the Shambhala tradition of warriorship. This may be startling to some readers, since one does not popularly think of his Shambhala teachings as having a direct correlation to the advanced tantric teachings of mahamudra. Rinpoche also used this text in the preparation of many of his Buddhist lectures and seminars. This translation, by Lobsang P. Lhalungpa, was a valiant effort. It is quite a difficult work, and the translation is noteasygoing. The book is now out of print, and one hopes that this text will once again be available in English in the not too distant future.

There are also three forewords included here that Trungpa Rinpoche contributed to books about other Buddhist teachers. The first is Jack Kornfield's Living Dharma: Teachings of Twelve Buddhist Masters, published in 1975. Next is The History of the Sixteen Karmapas of Tibet, which was published in 1980 by Prajna Press. The third is Tsultrim Allione's Women of Wisdom, first published in 1984 by Routledge & Kegan Paul. Undoubtedly Trungpa Rinpoche was delighted to introduce these books, which would broaden the public's knowledge of the history and lineages of Buddhism. It was probably his personal connection to the authors that led them to ask him to contribute a foreword and that led him to comply. Karma Thinley, the author of the book on the Karmapas, was a Tibetan Buddhist teacher in Toronto whom Rinpoche met when Karma Thinley visited Samye Ling in Scotland . Trungpa Rinpoche was very grateful for the hospitality Karma Thinley extended to him and his wife, and also respected him very much as a dharma teacher. As well, several of Trungpa Rinpoche's close students had originally studied with Karma Thinley. Tsultrim Allione was also a student of Rinpoche's in the early 1970s, and he had tremendous fondness for her. Jack Kornfield had been a colleague of Rinpoche's at Naropa Institute; both he and his fellow teacher of insight meditation Joseph Goldstein taught at Naropa in 1974, when they were largely unknown. Rinpoche respected them both for their dedication to the Buddhist teachings. Also included in Volume Three is the brief foreword that Trungpa Rinpoche contributed to Jose and Miriam Arguelles's '70s classic Mandala. Both Jose and Miriam were early students of Rinpoche's in California . (See John Baker's comments earlier in this introduction.) The Arguelleses extended much personal hospitality to Rinpoche and Diana Mukpo in the early years, and he was grateful for both their friendship and their commitment to the Buddhist path.

Finally, Volume Three includes the foreword that Chögyam Trungpa wrote to Buddha in the Palm of Your Hand, by his Vajra Regent, Osel Tendzin. Trungpa Rinpoche was delighted that Osel Tendzin produced a book edited from his own lectures, talks he gave between 1976 and 1980, the first four years after he was confirmed as Trungpa Rinpoche's dharma heir. Rinpoche tells us that these are not "self-proclaimed wisdom" but that Osel Tendzin "reflects here only the study and training he has gone through with my personal guidance." I had the opportunity to work with the Vajra Regent and his editor, Donna Holm, on the preliminary selection of material and some of the editing of this book. I remember how diligently the Regent worked on these talks and how carefully he and Donna Holm scrutinized each word that went into the manuscript.

Trungpa Rinpoche also used his foreword to reflect on the importance of his decision to appoint an American student as his dharma heir: "Many Oriental advisors have said to me, `Do not make an Occidental your successor; they are not trustworthy.' With the blessings of His Holiness the sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa, and through working with Osel Tendzin as my Regent, I have come to the conclusion that anybody who possesses tathagatagarbha [buddha nature] is worthy of experiencing enlightenment. . . . I have worked arduously in training him [the Regent] as my best student and foremost leader.' It is now fifteen years since Chögyam Trungpa's death and more than ten years since the death of the Vajra Regent in 1990. Yet Trungpa Rinpoche's belief that buddha-dharma can fully take root in America remains alive, untarnished by all doubts and difficulties. There is no doubt that he bequeathed the stain-less, pure tradition of awakened mind to the West, and it seems doubt-less that it will be carried forward. There will be twists and turns, but the ultimate truth is fearless. This was the motto that Chögyam Trungpa gave to Vajradhatu, the main Buddhist organization that he founded. Readers who never met him can still be touched and transformed by what he taught. In that lies great promise.

VOLUME FOUR OF The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa is the first of three volumes that present the tantric, or vajrayana, teachings of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Volume Four is path-oriented, Volume Five is organized around the themes of lineage and devotion, and Volume Six deals with what one might call tantric states of mind or tantric experience. Not every item included in each volume conforms exactly to this structure, but I have attempted to group material with some affinity together.

From some point of view, Trungpa Rinpoche's approach was altogether tantric, or grounded in vajrayana, especially in the teachings that he gave after coming to North America . However, for the purposes of The Collected Works, the published material that was particularly focused on vajrayana teachings has been gathered together in Volumes Four to Six. Interestingly, the majority of these books have been published posthumously.

Even when presenting the most overtly tantric material, Trungpa Rinpoche guarded the integrity of the vajrayana teachings, being very careful not to introduce material prematurely to his students and not to cater to public fascination with tantra. There was certainly plenty of such fascination when he came to America in the early 1970s, which made him even more conservative in his approach. In many of his early talks, he focused on what tantra was not, dispelling preconceptions of wild behavior, indulgence in "tantric sex," and bizarre surges of energy. His teachings on the dangers of spiritual materialism were, in part, designed to cut through naive misinterpretations of tantra, which he saw as potentially very harmful to young American spiritual seekers.

He was also quite well aware that the misunderstanding of Buddhist tantra had a history in the West that was not particularly easy to over-come. There had long been misconceptions about Tibetan Buddhism, which went back to opinions primarily formed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as in earlier times. Travelers to Tibet , including Christian missionaries, and scholars reading Tibetan Buddhist texts with minimal understanding of the language—and less of its meaning—often misinterpreted the symbolism. Tibetan Buddhism was some-times referred to as "Lamaism," a generally disrespectful epithet that implied that Buddhism in Tibet was a distortion, some strange sort of primitive sect controlled by its priests, or lamas. Interestingly enough, the communist Chinese still use this term pejoratively to describe Tibetan Buddhism. It is as misguided now as it was historically.

There were notable exceptions to the closed-mindedness of Western scholars. W. Y. Evans-Wentz, Herbert Guenther, Marco Pallis, and David Snellgrove, among others, all had a very positive view of Tibetan Buddhism and had made considerable contributions to opening up the understanding of vajrayana, through their translations of major Tibetan tantric texts into English and their explication of the history of Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism. Nevertheless, in the popular arena, there remained many misconceptions. In addition to the negativity about vajrayana, there was an equally problematic romanticism and a view of tantra as wild abandonment to sense pleasures. Chögyam Trungpa was well aware of both extremes, and in his characteristic way, he charted a course that addressed both concerns while pandering to neither.

In Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism and The Myth of Freedom, his most popular books published in the 1970s (which appear in Volume Three of The Collected Works), he included material on the vajrayana, but only after properly laying the ground and only after many dire warnings about the dangers of trying to practice tantra without a grounding in the hinayana and mahayana teachings. He talked extensively about the teacher-student relationship, particularly in Cutting Through. There were other aspects of the tantric view, such as the five buddha families that describe five styles of human perception and experience, which he talked about quite freely. In addition to introducing the five buddha families in Cutting Through, he presented them in seminars on dharma art as well as in developing an approach to Buddhist psychology, which he called Maitri Space Awareness. He seemed to feel that it was a helpful way forstudents to understand the varieties of human experience and to develop their creativity. There is no doubt that a vajrayana sensibility affected much of what he taught.

In 1975 he made a particularly bold move, in terms of presenting tantra, with the publication of the translation of and commentary on The Tibetan Book of the Dead. This was a joint effort with Francesca Fremantle, an English scholar and a student of Rinpoche's. She produced the groundbreaking translation with his input, and she also put together the commentary—which was eye-opening for most readers—based on Rinpoche's teachings, mainly those given during a seminar on the Tibetan Book of the Dead in 1971. The style and language of the translation were a significant departure from earlier renditions. The English was evocative, elegant, and direct, and the book was very well received. The commentary from The Tibetan Book of the Dead appears in Volume Six of The Collected Works. Remarks by Francesca Fremantle on her work with Trungpa Rinpoche are also included there.

The first book that appears in Volume Four is Journey without Goal: The Tantric Wisdom of the Buddha. It was published in 1981 by Prajna Press, a scholarly press with limited distribution established by Shambhala Publications in the late 1970s. When Prajna ceased publication, the book became a title under the Shambhala imprint.

Journey without Goal is based on a seminar given in 1974, during the first summer session at the Naropa Institute. The talks on which the book is based were recorded on video, along with all the other events at Naropa that year, so it's possible to see, outwardly at least, exactly to whom Rinpoche was talking. It was a large and varied audience of perhaps five or six hundred people, a young audience, the majority in their twenties, most of whom look like hippies, although some audience members distinguished themselves with more conservative hairdos and attire.

In his introduction to Journey without Goal, Rinpoche focused not on appearance but on the motivation and background of the students: "The audience was a very interesting mixture. There were many people whom we might call `spiritual shoppers,' people sampling tantra as one more interesting spiritual `trip.' There were also a number of people who were innocent and open. They happened onto this class by various coincidences and had very little idea of what tantra, or spirituality at all, might be. As well, there were a number of committed students who had been practicing meditation for some time."' He then points out the advice and the warnings he gave to everyone: "For all of these people, it was necessary to stress again and again the importance of meditation as the foundation of all Buddhist practice and the danger of ignoring this prescription."' The book itself is filled with warnings: "Working with the energy of vajrayana is like dealing with a live electric wire." "Tantric discipline does not cooperate with any deception at all." "Every book written on tantra ... begins with that warning: `Be careful; think twice; pay respect; don't just take this carelessly.— It might seem amazing that anyone stayed through the whole course! In fact, the membership grew rather than decreasing over the weeks.

Rinpoche lectured several times a week during the second summer session. (During the first summer session, he presented a course on meditation and a fourteen-talk overview of the Tibetan Buddhist path.) In the material that makes up Journey without Goal, he shows an extraordinary ability to speak on a number of levels at the same time, so that he is illuminating things for one group of listeners or readers while obscuring the material for another component of the audience. If you connect with what Chögyam Trungpa is talking about, Journey without Goal is an amazing book. Even if you stumble upon this book with no previous background, you can pick up on the energy and the enthusiasm of the material, although many of the details remain somewhat fuzzy. Al-though you might not understand everything, the book might still make you feel that you'd really like to know more about what the author is talking about. Rinpoche had a way of drawing people in without giving the goods away, even when he was giving away secrets. He wasn't interested in creating some secretive tantric society that excluded people in what he would have termed a "self-snug" style. (That was a phrase he coined, which combined smugness with being snug as a bug in a rug.) He was also not interested in selling tantric secrets, the heart secrets of his lineage, on the street corner or in the lecture halls of Naropa. So he gave one talk that spoke very differently to different people in the audience.

Some of those attending his lectures were students who had graduated from the first Vajradhatu Seminary in the fall of 1973, where theyhad received "transmission" to enter the vajrayana path and to begin their ngondro, the foundation practices that eventually lead to full initiation into vajrayana sadhana practice.' Outside of the Naropa environment, these students held weekly meetings, called tantra groups, where they talked about the teachings they had received, the practice of prostrations they were embarking on, and how vajrayana was affecting their lives. From time to time, Rinpoche met with them, answering questions or giving them new food for thought. Ask any one of those people, and they would probably tell you that Rinpoche's talks were mind-blowing and that he spoke directly to them in the tantra seminar at Naropa that summer, addressing core issues in their vajrayana practice.

At the same time, these talks were not easy, for anyone. For some, especially his committed and more mature students, they were a challenge and an invitation. For others, they were intriguing but confusing; for a few, they were a closed door, a turn-off. Rinpoche would have had it no other way. He was happy to invite those with commitment, happy to intrigue those with an open mind, and delighted to shut the door on spiritual shoppers.

Journey without Goal begins with a number of chapters that describe different principles or components of the tantric path. The first chapter is on the nature of tantra and the tantric practitioner. It is about both continuity and egolessness. There are several excellent chapters on the nature of transmission in the vajrayana and on the relationship between student and teacher, who at this level is a vajra master. The extraordinary demands placed on both in the vajrayana are detailed here, as well as some idea of the extraordinary rewards that are possible. Reward is perhaps an odd word to use, since what is discussed here is complete surrender and letting go. Beyond that, through a combination of devotion, discipline, and supreme effort, it is possible that one will gain entry into the vajra world, in which the continued demands become the exercise of delight. Chapters toward the end of Journey without Goal discuss the different yanas, or stages, on the path. The final chapter, entitled "Maha Ati," is beautiful and surprising, as well as profoundly simple. I don't think you can read this book without being moved. If it's not for you, you simply won't make it to the end!

Judith L. Lief began the editing of the book while she was editor in chief of Vajradhatu Publications. When she left to become the dean of the Naropa Institute in 1980, in spite of a great deal of work on her part, the book remained unfinished. I took over the last stages of pre-paring the book for publication, assisted by Sarah Coleman, as well as by Helen Berliner and Barbara Blouin. Although the book had a number of editors, it has a unified voice, I think, and quite a penetrating voice. Trungpa Rinpoche wrote the introduction when the manuscript was completed and ready to go to the publisher.

The next book that appears in Volume Four, The Lion's Roar: An Introduction to Tantra, edited by Sherab Chodzin Kohn, is based on two seminars given by Chögyam Trungpa in 1973. The book itself was published in 1992 in the Dharma Ocean Series. This series grew out of a meeting that Samuel Bercholz had with Chögyam Trungpa in 1985, about two years before Rinpoche's death. They decided to inaugurate a series that would eventually consist of I08 volumes of Rinpoche's teachings. The intent of the Dharma Ocean Series was "to allow readers to encounter this rich array of teachings simply and directly rather than in an overly systematized or condensed form." At its completion, it was meant to "serve as the literary archive of the major works of this renowned Tibetan Buddhist teacher." Judith L. Lief was asked to serve as the series editor. Since 1987, she and Sherab Chodzin Kohn have been the two editors for the series. All together, eight volumes in the Dharma Ocean Series have been published, which leaves only 102 more to come! This seems like an enormous number of books, but given Chögyam Trungpa's prolific activity as a dharma teacher, it is not at all out of the question. He gave several thousand talks that were recorded and archived during his seventeen years in North America , no two of which are the same. There is more than enough material in this collection to complete the volumes in the Dharma Ocean Series.

Although it was subtitled "An Introduction to Tantra," The Lion's Roar is quite a difficult book. It would be very slow-going for anyone not already acquainted with vajrayana Buddhism and unfamiliar with Trungpa Rinpoche's general approach and some of his other writings. That said, it is a valuable book, which provides an overview and quite a lot of detail—from the tantric perspective—of the nine yanas. It contains material that will not be found in any of his other writings. The two seminars on which The Lion's Roar is based took place in San Francisco in May of 1973 and in Boulder , Colorado , in December of the same year. As the editor tells us in his foreword, "Here, the complete teachings of buddhadharma are presented fresh and raw.... They are the mighty roaring of a great lion of dharma."

In The Lion's Roar, Sherab Chodzin Kohn has reversed the order of the original presentations, starting with the shorter Boulder seminar. The San Francisco talks were given a few months before the first Vajradhatu Seminary, the Boulder talks just after the completion of that event. At the Seminary, Rinpoche introduced the formal study of tantra to one hundred of his most senior students, who would begin their vajrayana practice within a few months of completing the Seminary. It's not purely coincidental that these two public seminars sandwich the presentation of vajrayana at the Seminary. Indeed, many of the themes and the view that he presented in that advanced program are previewed and echoed in The Lion's Roar. Larry Mermelstein, director of the Nalandã Translation Committee, recalls Trungpa Rinpoche's own comments on the significance of the first seminar in San Francisco : "I remember vividly the Vidyadhara Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche returning home to Boulder after this seminar. He commented, quite excitedly, `We finally did it—presented vajrayana for the first time in America !' He regarded this as a landmark event."

The third book included in Volume Four is The Dawn of Tantra, a slim text, by Herbert V. Guenther and Chögyam Trungpa. This book was also edited by Sherab Chodzin Kohn, who at that time went by his West-ern name, Michael H. Kohn. Dr. Guenther is a Buddhist scholar and translator whose many important translations include The Jewel Ornament of Liberation, The Life and Teaching of Naropa, and Kindly Bent to Ease Us—works from both the Kagyu and Nyingma lineages of Tibetan Buddhism. As Sherab Chodzin Kohn said of him in the introduction to The Dawn of Tantra, "He has become one of the few Westerners to penetrate to a deeper understanding of Tibetan tantric texts. His books . . . bring us nearly the only accurate translations and commentaries from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition." Dr. Guenther has been criticized for using abstruse English philosophical terminology in his translations. Currently, there are simpler and perhaps more direct translations available, to be sure, but nevertheless his early renditions of Tibetan texts into English were,

if not easy to understand, yet faithful to the original, and his attitude toward the tradition was deeply respectful, based on genuine feeling for the material and a thorough and penetrating scholarship. Trungpa Rinpoche had the greatest admiration for Dr. Guenther. These two gentle-men were brought together by Shambhala Publications, who published works by both authors. Together, they conducted a weekend seminar on the basic principles and practice of tantra, alternating talks, and this book is the outcome of that meeting.

Dawn of Tantra reflects both Dr. Guenther's scholarly approach and the more immediate, popular approach that was Trungpa Rinpoche's hallmark. It would seem that each man came closer to the other in this situation: Dr. Guenther's presentations are more accessible and personal; Chögyam Trungpa's contributions are more scholastic. In addition to the talks from the weekend seminar, Dawn of Tantra includes a chapter titled "Visualization" that was based on a talk by Trungpa Rinpoche at the 1973 seminar that became part of The Lion's Roar. The chapter "Empowerment and Initiation" was edited from a talk by Dr. Guenther in Boulder in 1973. There is a great deal of detailed material on the philosophy and practice of tantra in this little book. Its inclusion in The Collected Works as well as its recent reissue in Shambhala Dragon Editions make it available to a new generation of readers.

Volume Four closes with "Things Get Very Clear When You're Cornered," an interview with Chögyam Trungpa that appeared in The Laughing Man magazine in 1976. In addition to personal and penetrating comments by Trungpa Rinpoche on the significance of his accident in England in 1969, the interview focused on the challenge of bringing the vajrayana teachings to America . It's a very candid exchange. Trungpa Rinpoche talks about creating a language "specifically to translate Buddhist ideas into English in a way that makes sense to people." He also expresses his conviction that the vajrayana will take root and be fully transmitted in America . He ends the interview with this prediction: "Not only that. Eventually Americans can go back to Tibet and teach Buddhism in that country. . . . anything is possible!" On that cheerful note, we conclude Volume Four.

The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa, Volume 5 : Crazy Wisdom-Illusion's Game-The Life of Marpa the Translator (excerpts)-TheRain of Wisdom (excerpts)-The Sadhana of Mahamudra (excerpts)-Selected Writings by Chögyam Trungpa, edited by Carolyn Gimian (Shambhala Publications) Volume Five focuses on the lineages of great teachers who have transmitted the Tibetan Buddhist teachings and on the practice of devotion to the spiritual teacher. It includes inspirational commentaries by Chögyam Trungpa on the lives of famous masters such as Padmasambhava, Naropa, Milarepa, Marpa, and Tilopa, as well as an excerpt from The Sadhana of Mahamudra, a tantric text that Chögyam Trungpa received as terma in 1968. Among the selected writings are "Explanation of the Vajra Guru Mantra," an article never before published, which deals with the mantra that invokes Guru Rinpoche; seminar talks available in book form for the first time; and previously unpublished articles on Milarepa.

Excerpt: Volume five brings us to a series of writings that concern themselves with the themes of lineage and devotion in the context of vajrayana Buddhism and Chögyam Trungpa's transmission of dharma to America . The first two offerings in this volume, Crazy Wisdom and Illusion's Game: The Life and Teaching of Naropa, are commentaries by Chögyam Trungpa on the significance of the lives of two great lineage holders: Padmasambhava, or Guru Rinpoche, who introduced Buddhism to Tibet in the eighth century; and Naropa, the Indian guru who gave the root teachings of the Kagyu lineage to his Tibetan disciple Marpa in the eleventh century. Marpa is known as the father of the Kagyu lineage in Tibet , and it is his life and teachings that are the subject of the next two selections in Volume Five. In this case, The Collected Works includes Chögyam Trungpa's preface and his translator's colophon to The Life of Marpa the Translator, which was translated by Trungpa Rinpoche and the Nalanda Translation Committee (NTC) and first published in 1982. Since translations in general are beyond the scope of The Collected Works, only the preface and the colophon are included. Likewise, The Collected Works includes Chögyam Trungpa's foreword and colophon to The Rain of Wisdom, another translation undertaken by the NTC under Rinpoche's direction. Rinpoche's own songs, or religious poetry, that are part of the English edition of The Rain of Wisdom are also presented.

The next selection is an excerpt from The Sadhana of Mahamudra, the tantric text that Chögyam Trungpa received as terma in Bhutan in 1968. This is followed by "Joining Energy and Space," an article based on some 0f the teachings that he subsequently gave to his students about the

significance of the sadhana. The Sadhana of Mahamudra brings together the ultimate teachings from two great Tibetan spiritual lineages: the dzogchen, or maha ati, teachings of the Nyingma and the mahamudra teachings of the Kagyu.

Next are two short articles that present the vajrayana practice of mantra, which uses the repetition of sacred syllables to invoke the wisdom and energy of egolessness in the form of various herukas,' or non-theistic deities. The first article, "Hum: An Approach to Mantra," is a general explanation of the basic usage of mantra as well as a specific discussion of the mantra HUM, which is the seed, or root, syllable for all of the herukas. The next article, "Explanation of the Vajra Guru Mantra," also presents general guidelines for understanding the practice of mantra. However, the main body of this piece is an explanation of this mantra and its association with invoking the power and presence of Padmasambhava.

Next is an interview with Chögyam Trungpa on the ngöndro practices, or the four foundations, which are the entrance into the formal practice of vajrayana. This interview was part of the introduction to the English translation of The Torch of Certainty, a classic Tibetan text on ngöndro composed by Jamgön Kongtrül the Great and translated by Judith Hanson. Trungpa Rinpoche's foreword from this book is also included.

"The Practicing Lineage" and "The Mishap Lineage" discuss the origins of Trungpa Rinpoche's own spiritual lineage, the line of the Trungpas. Then there is the short piece "Teachings on the Tulku Principle" and finally three articles on Milarepa , Tibet 's most famous Buddhist yogi.

Lineage, one of the main topics of this volume, means the continuity and transmission of the awakened state of mind, which is passed down in an unbroken, direct line from teacher to disciple, beginning with the Buddha—or a buddha—and continuing up to the present day. There are many branches of transmission. Some of them trace back directly to Gautama Buddha, the buddha of this age or world realm who appeared in human form. Other lineages trace back to a transmission from one or more of the buddhas who exist on a celestial plane, such as Vajradhara or Samantabhadra, who manifest in a transcendental or dharmakaya aspect. This is often the case in the Tibetan lineages.

As mentioned earlier, the teachings presented here concern them-selves with two major branches within Tibetan Buddhism, both of which were part of Chögyam Trungpa's direct heritage: the teachings of the Nyingma, or "ancient," lineage of Padmasambhava; and those of the Kagyü, the "oral" or "command" lineage, which originated with the Indian guru Tilopa, who received the ultimate teachings directly from the dharmakaya buddha Vajradhara.

Chögyam Trungpa's primary intent was not to present a historical or scholarly approach to these lineages of transmission. As he says in Crazy Wisdom, "Our approach here, as far as chronology and such things are unconcerned, is entirely unscholastic. For those of you who are concerned with dates and other such historical facts and figures, I am afraid I will be unable to furnish accurate data. Nevertheless, the inspiration of Padmasambhava, however old or young he may be, goes on" (page 65). In his talks on the forefathers of the Tibetan Buddhist teachings, he drew on events from their spiritual biographies, which are stories of complete liberation, or namthars, composed in order to bring to life the journey that each of these great practitioners made. He shows us the enormous commitment to sanity that they made and the extraordinary difficulties that they endured in order to become holders of the wisdom of buddhadharma and to transmit that wisdom to others. Above all, he presents their lives as examples to guide us in awakening our own sanity as we tread on the path of dharma.

Devotion, the other main theme of this volume, is the emotional attitude and experience of the student that make transmission and realization possible. Devotion is the water that flows through the teachings and maintains them as a living transmission. Devotion is the human element of lineage, the bond between teacher and student that brings vajrayana to life. If one approaches the vajrayana teachings purely with the intellect, it is like trying to use physics to fathom outer space. The physics of space may be extremely subtle and profound, but studying those principles and equations does not bring any genuine experience of space. In fact, it may make it seem that direct personal experience of something so far-reaching and profound would be impossible.

What makes the impossible possible is, first, meeting a genuine teacher, someone who is the embodiment of what one is seeking. Second, one has to make friends with outer space as presented in this human form. That is the role of devotion in one's relationship with the teacher. It involves surrendering one's egotism and selfishness unconditionally in order to gain a vast perspective. It seems that there is really only one thing that allows us to sacrifice ourselves completely, and that is love. We have to begin with love—completely giving ourselves to one person, the teacher, before we can surrender properly to the whole world. Without a personal connection, devotion is too abstract and, paradoxically, too limited. You might say that it's not important to surrender to a teacher per se: you could give yourself to anyone. However, devotion is about unconditional surrender, not about creating further ego-oriented entanglements. In the student's "love affair" with the teacher, you give yourself to space; you give yourself to someone who speaks for space. That someone is the teacher, and that surrender, or abandonment of oneself, is the experience of devotion.

In many respects, this is even more difficult to talk about now than it was when Chögyam Trungpa first gave these talks and translated the devotional texts that are excerpted or referred to here. Throughout his years of teaching in America , Chogyam Trungpa warned against the dangers of charlatan gurus. As he said in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, `Because America is so fertile, seeking spirituality, it is possible for America to inspire charlatans. . . . Because America is looking so hard for spirituality, religion becomes an easy way to make money and achieve fame." He advised people to be careful, to think twice, and to use their intelligence to seek out and connect with a genuine teacher. However, there is an entirely different approach that has become more popular in the last few years, which is to do away with the absolute nature of the student-teacher relationship altogether, so that the student goes it on his or her own, accepting advice where it is helpful but never surrendering beyond a certain point.

That is certainly one way to avoid a disastrous relationship with a fraudulent teacher. Rather than accepting a "pseudo" guru, it is preferable to keep one's own counsel. There is much that can be accomplished on one's own or with a teacher as adviser rather than as the ultimate reference point. To learn to meditate and practice loving-kindness—one could do far worse than that! For most of us, to accomplish just that is a lifetime's work.

But to deny the possibility of attaining stainless, pure enlightenmentand to deny the possibility of the means—to deny the value of genuine devotion and the existence of genuine teachers—seems to be dosing off one of the greatest opportunities that human beings have: the opportunity to be fully awake. Awakening is not achieved easily or comfortably, and the journey is not without dangers and extremes, but that makes it no less real or precious. In this volume are the wonderful stories of some of the outrageous and fully awakened gurus of the Buddhist lineage. What an inspiration they are! At the same time, it is almost unthinkable that these are stories about real people, not just mythical figures in the past. Yet part of Chögyam Trungpa's genius was his ability to personally introduce you to this cast of characters, as though they were sitting in front of you, as though they might walk in the front door anytime. As though one of them might be your teacher .. .

In Crazy Wisdom—which is made up of talks edited from two seminars that Chögyam Trungpa gave in December 1972—we are introduced to some of the main themes in the life of Padmasambhava. An Indian teacher, he brought the Buddhist teachings to Tibet in the eighth century at the invitation of King Trisong Detsen. Thus, he is regarded as the father of Buddhism in Tibet and is revered by all Tibetan lineages and by the Tibetan people. Often, biographies of a teacher present the story of how that person became a student of the buddhadharma, met his or her guru, underwent extensive trials and training, and finally became en-lightened, or realized. Such stories provide inspiration and many helpful lessons to students entering the path. In this case, however, Padmasambhava is considered to have been primordially enlightened. That is, he was born fully enlightened, it is said, as an eight-year-old child seated on a lotus flower in the middle of a lake. It is a highly improbable story. As Chögyam Trungpa says, "For an infant to be born in such a wild, desolate place in the middle of a lake on a lotus is beyond the grasp of conceptual mind.... Such a birth is impossible. But, then, impossible things happen, things beyond our imagination.” Rather than trying to explain or defend this tale, Trungpa Rinpoche accepts the story of Padmasambhava's birth as the ground to discuss primordial innocence. As he says, "It is possible for us to discover our own innocence and childlike beauty, the princelike quality in us . . . it is a fresh discovery of perception, a new discovery of a sense of things as they are.” Through-out this book, he is describing not so much the life of a Buddhist saint who lived over a thousand years ago, but the aspects of our own journey and our own lives that might connect with this timeless and extraordinary energy.

Sherab Chödzin Kohn, the editor of Crazy Wisdom, has rendered this material artfully, with love and fidelity to the original talks. In reading this book, one has the opportunity to plumb the depths of what crazy wisdom actually is—which is both crazier and wiser than one could possibly imagine!

"Crazy wisdom" was one of a number of terms that Chögyam Trungpa coined in English. It has caught on and has come to be used to de-scribe a variety of styles of behavior, some of them more crazy than wise. In his original meaning of the term, which is a translation of the Tibetan yeshe chölwa, it describes the state of being of someone who has gone beyond the limitations of conventional mind and is thus "crazy" from the limited reference point of conceptual thinking; yet such a per-son is also existing or dwelling in a state of spontaneous wisdom, free from thought in the conventional sense, free from the preoccupations of hope and fear. Crazy wisdom is sometimes referred to as "wisdom gone beyond." The outrageousness of crazy wisdom is that it will do whatever needs to be done to help sentient beings: it subdues whatever needs to be subdued and cares for whatever needs its care. It will also destroy what needs to be destroyed. Padmasambhava was the embodiment of crazy wisdom; hence the title of the book. This topic is particularly alive and juicy in the hands of Chögyam Trungpa because he was a guru in the lineage of crazy wisdom. It is in part his own fearless wisdom that he communicates in this book.

Sherab Chödzin Kohn also edited the next book in Volume Five, Illusion's Game: The Life and Teaching of Naropa, a commentary on the biography of the great Indian teacher. Naropa's biography takes the more traditional approach of Tibetan spiritual biography: it is the inspired tale of Naropa's arduous search for his guru and his experiences while studying with the Indian master Tilopa. Illusion's Game is based on two seminars in which Trungpa Rinpoche reflected on the meaning of events in Naropa's life, using the biography translated by Herbert V. Guenther as his main reference point. Most of the students who attended the seminars had read Dr. Guenther's book. In Illusion's Game, excerpts from Dr. Guenther's translation are included to help readers understand the con-text of the discussion, and in his editor's introduction, Sherab Chödzin also provides an excellent summary of the salient events in the biography.

Naropa was the abbot of Nalanda University . One day while he was studying, an ugly old woman suddenly appeared and asked him if he understood the words or the sense of the Buddhist teachings he was reading. She was very happy when he told her that he understood the words, but she became very angry when he said that he also understood the sense. He asked her to tell him who, then, knew the real meaning, and she answered that he should seek her brother Tilopa. Inspired by this encounter, Naropa left the university, much to the dismay of his colleagues and students, and set out to find his guru Tilopa.

On the way, he encountered one horrific illusion after another. Each situation was a test by Tilopa of his prospective disciple's understanding, and on each occasion Naropa missed the point, so that he had to keep searching on and on. Eventually, he found Tilopa eating fish entrails by the side of a lake. This was just the beginning. Naropa had to undergo many trials, over many years, until finally he became fully realized. As Sherab Chödzin Kohn tells us in the introduction of the book, "Tilopa required him [Naropa] to leap from the roof of a tall temple building. Naropa's body was crushed. He suffered immense pain. Tilopa healed him with a touch of his hand, then gave him instructions. This pattern was repeated eleven more times. Eleven more times Tilopa remained either motionless or aloof for a year; then Naropa prostrated and asked for teaching. Tilopa caused him to throw himself into a fire, ... be beaten nearly to death, have his blood sucked out by leeches, be pricked with flaming splinters ... ," and on the story goes. It is difficult to know what to make of such a tale. We could dismiss it as craziness or treat it as symbolism. But could we imagine that such things actually took place and that such people could actually exist?

Trungpa Rinpoche published a poem in First Thought Best Thought titled "Meetings with Remarkable People." After describing encounters with three very strange beings, who are actually vajrayana deities, he says:

Can you imagine seeing such people and receiving and talking to them?
Ordinarily, if you told such stories to anybody, they would think you were a nut case;
But, in this case, I have to insist that I am not a nut case;
..............................
Don't you think meeting such sweet friends is worthwhile and rewarding?
..............................
I would say meeting them is meeting with remarkable men and women:
Let us believe that such things do exist.

In that spirit, it may be valuable to explore the life of Naropa and how it might apply personally to oneself. Not only does Trungpa Rinpoche present the outrageous qualities of Naropa's life, but he also draws analogies to our own experience. Of Naropa's trials, he writes, "these twelve experiences that Naropa went through were a continuous unlearning process. To begin with, he had to unlearn, to undo the cultural facade. Then he had to undo the philosophical and emotional facade. Then he had to step out and become free altogether. This whole process was a very painful and very deliberate operation. This does not apply to Naropa and his time alone. This could also be something very up-to-date. This operation is applicable as long as we have conflicting emotions and erroneous beliefs about reality.” From that point of view, the story makes good sense. However, on another level, it remains utterly outrageous. If we look at most of the stories about the lives of the Tibetan lineage holders—Padmasambhava, Tilopa, Naropa, Marpa, Milarepa, and others—we see that these were people who did not exclude anything from their experience. They could, in fact, be quite terrifying in their fearlessness.

In the article "Milarepa: A Warrior's Life," which appears in Volume Five, Trungpa Rinpoche includes the last instructions given by the yogi Milarepa to his students, as he lay on his deathbed: "Reject all that in-creases ego-clinging, or inner poison, even if it appears good. Practice all that benefits others, even if it appears bad. This is the true way of dharma. . . . Act wisely and courageously according to your innate in-sight, even at the cost of your life." The great forefathers of the lineage were willing to work with whatever might come up. In fact, they de-lighted in embodying the most extreme aspects of human experience, if in doing so they could help others. From their point of view, they were not striving to be outrageous or even helpful; their behavior was just the natural expression of what is.

This is the training that Chögyam Trungpa had himself received. A story from his early life illustrates how he put this training into effect, in extreme as well as ordinary circumstances. When Tibet was invaded by the communist Chinese, he had to flee the country over the Himalayas to avoid imprisonment and probable death. Before he set out on his journey to India , he heard of people being tortured and killed; his monastery was sacked; there was a price on his head. The journey out of Tibet lasted ten months—an almost unimaginably long time to be trekking on foot over the Himalayas (without modern mountain gear, jeeps, or thermal underwear, one might add), constantly in fear of being discovered by the Chinese, while facing extraordinary physical difficulties, crossing one high pass after another, fording roaring rivers in the dead of winter, reduced in the end to boiling saddlebags for food. When Trungpa Rinpoche and his party reached the Brahmaputra River , close to the end of the journey, they had to make their crossing at night in somewhat unstable boats made of leather. Someone in a nearby town had alerted the Chinese that a group of Tibetans was going across that night, and the Chinese ambushed Rinpoche's party. Out of more than two hundred traveling together, fewer than two dozen made it across. Trungpa Rinpoche luckily was one of those who did. Reaching the other side while hearing gunshots in the background, he and most of the remaining band hid in some holly trees until the next night. In Born in Tibet , he wrote,

"We dared not open our food pack and there was no water. We could only moisten our lips with the hoar frost." While they were hiding, hoping to reconnect with some of the rest of the party who they thought had escaped capture, they could hear and sometimes see the Chinese searching for them. Their clothes had been soaked during the crossing, and the weather was so cold that their clothing became frozen to their skin, so it crackled when they moved. Later that day, as it became dark, they climbed for five hours to reach shelter in some fir trees above the village. Hiding in the cover of the trees, after everything they had been through, Rinpoche and his attendant quietly discussed whether or not their experiences were a test of their meditation and how their meditative equanimity would fare if they were captured the next day by the Chinese. Several members of the party made jokes about doing the yoga of inner heat to try to keep warm. Rinpoche and others found quite a lot of humor in this dire situation.

This is not exactly a crazy wisdom story, except that it is almost in-conceivable that, faced with the loss of family and friends, with the prospect of capture and possible torture or death, Chögyam Trungpa and his companions—many of whom were also highly trained practitioners—approached their experience with evenhandedness and humor and seemingly very little fear. That in itself is rather crazy but also seems quite wise, and it does remind one of the lineage forefathers and their outrageous journeys to freedom.

When the going gets tough, these are people you might want to have on your team. In that vein, it is worth looking twice at what Chögyam Trungpa has to say about the life of these great Buddhist adepts. It is indeed applicable to things we may face today—or tomorrow. Their compassion was compassion for the toughest times. It may be just what the world needs now.

Both Crazy Wisdom and Illusion's Game are the work of a great story-teller. In his first five or six years in North America , Chögyam Trungpa taught more than forty seminars on the life and teachings of the Kagyü forefathers. (The life of Padmasambhava was a less common topic. In addition to the two seminars that were edited for Crazy Wisdom, he presented one other seminar specifically on the life and teachings of Padmasambhava.) He also gave several seminars on his own teacher, Jamgön Kongtrul, and on the lineage of the Trungpa tulkus. In seminars on other topics, Rinpoche often would bring up a story about Tilopa, Naropa, Marpa, Milarepa, or Gampopa to illustrate a point he was making. These stories are included in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism and other popular books. When he told these tales, you felt that he knew these people; he definitely seemed to be on a first-name basis with them. And like any good father telling his children about their grandparents and great-grandparents, one point of his storytelling was to make the younger generation feel close to the ancestors and the ancestral wisdom. He never failed to make those in the audience feel that they were part of or just about to join this lineage of awakened mind.

The Life of Marpa the Translator continues the theme of perilous journeys and extreme trials on the path to realization. Marpa was the chief disciple of the Indian guru Naropa, whose search for enlightenment is the subject of Illusion's Game. Marpa was born and lived in southeastern Tibet . He made three journeys to India , filled with obstacles and difficult tests of his understanding and devotion. In India , Marpa obtained the teachings that form the core of the Kagyü tradition, and he translated many of these Indian teachings into the Tibetan language. Marpa's life-style has some parallels to those of modern students, in that he was a married householder with a number of children. He owned and operated a farm and outwardly led a rather ordinary and quite secular life. Superficially, at least, it may be easier to connect with Marpa's approach than with the more austere lifestyles of some of the other lineage holders. Nevertheless, his understanding of and dedication to the dharma were anything but ordinary.

In his preface and colophon to The Life of Marpa, Trungpa Rinpoche pays homage to Marpa as the founder of the Kagyü lineage in Tibet . Rinpoche also talks about the process of translating this book and the kinship that he feels with Marpa as one translator to another. Indeed, the translation process that Chogyam Trungpa organized and which continues to this day, more than fifteen years after his death, has proven very successful in furthering the translation of many Tibetan texts into English. The Nalanda Translation Committee, the group of Rinpoche's students who collaborated with him on the translation of The Life of Marpa the Translator, as well as on The Rain of Wisdom, is to be congratulated for its excellent work on these and many other projects.

The Nalanda Translation Committee's first major project for general publication was The Rain of Wisdom, a translation of the Kagyü Gurtso, songs of the forefathers and lineage holders of the Karma Kagyü lineage. Chögyam Trungpa very much wanted to bring these wonderful songs of devotion and spiritual liberation into the English language. First compiled and edited in the sixteenth century by the eighth Karmapa, Mikyö Dorje, the Kagyü Gurtso (literally "The Ocean of Songs of the Kagyü") was intended to be "the liturgy for a chanting service that would invoke the blessings of the entire Karma Kagyu lineage. With the same aim in mind, successive editions of the Kagyü Gurtso have added songs by holders of the Karma Kagyü lineage born after the time of Mikyö Dorje. (In keeping with tradition, the English edition of The Rain of Wisdom includes songs by a current lineage holder, Chögyam Trungpa himself.)

In the foreword, Rinpoche talks about how he read the Kagyü Gurtso as a child and how it made him weep with longing and devotion. This magnificent collection of poetry, with many accompanying stories, still has the power to evoke joy and sadness and the inspiration to practice the heart teachings of the buddhadharma. Trungpa Rinpoche advises readers of this book to "reflect on the value and wisdom which exist in these songs of the lineage in the following ways. First there are the life examples of our forefathers to inspire our devotion. There are songs which help us understand the cause and effect of karma and so illuminate the path to liberation. There are songs which give instruction in relative bodhichitta, so that we can realize the immediacy of our connection to the dharma. Some are songs of mahamudra and transmit how we can actually join together bliss and emptiness through the profound methods of coemergence, melting, and bliss. Other songs show the realization of Buddha in the palm of our hand. . . . Reading these songs or even glancing at a paragraph of this literature always brings timely messages of how to conduct oneself, how to discipline oneself" (p. 287).

Once again, the stories and wisdom of past teachers are not just of historical interest but are presented to inspire our own journey on the path. The courage, majesty, and conviction of the Kagyu gurus are overwhelming. Just reading Trungpa Rinpoche's introduction and his few songs, one gains a sense of the grandeur and the heartfelt depth of realization contained in The Rain of Wisdom.

In what may have been purely a fortuitous coincidence, the translation of the Kagyü Gurtso was published in 1980, when students of Chögyam Trungpa were celebrating the tenth anniversary of his arrival in North America . The publication of this important text in the English language seems a fitting testament to all that he had accomplished in ten short years. In addition to having produced a brilliant translation, the members of the Nalanda Translation Committee must be acknowledged for the excellent afterword they contributed to the text, as well as for the extensive notes and glossary.

In 1976, one of Chögyam Trungpa's teachers from Tibet , an elder statesman and revered guru of the Nyingma lineage, His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, made his first visit to America , at Trungpa Rinpoche's invitation. He was accompanied by two attendants, Lama Yön-ten Gyamtso (who had been an attendant of Trungpa Rinpoche's at Surmang Monastery, accompanying him on his escape from Tibet ) and Lama Ugyen Shenpen, a student of Khyentse Rinpoche's for many years. With Khyentse Rinpoche's blessing, Lama Ugyen stayed on in America to work with the Nalanda Translation Committee after His Holiness de-parted. His extensive understanding of Tibetan literature and vajrayana teachings, as well as his growing grasp of English, made it possible for the NTC to make great strides in their translation work. His input was instrumental to the successful translation of both The Rain of Wisdom and The Life of Marpa. Lama Ugyen worked with the NTC until his death in 1994.

Next in Volume Five are the excerpt from The Sadhana of Mahamudra and an article about the meaning of the text. The sadhana, which Trungpa Rinpoche "discovered" in Bhutan in 1968, is a particular kind of text or teaching called terma. In Tibet , Chögyam Trungpa had already been recognized as a tertön, a teacher who "finds" or reveals terma, which are the teachings that Padmasambhava concealed in physical locations throughout Tibet and in the realm of mind and space. As Trungpa Rinpoche describes in Crazy Wisdom, "He [Padmasambhava] had various writings of his put in gold and silver containers like capsules and buried in certain appropriate places in the different parts of Tibet so that people of the future would rediscover them. . . . This process of rediscovering the treasures has been happening all along, and a lot of sacred teachings have been revealed. One example is the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Another approach to preserving treasures of wisdom is the style of the thought lineage. Teachings have been rediscovered by certain appropriate teachers who have had memories of them and written them down from memory. This is another kind of hidden treasure". The Sadhana of Mahamudra is such a mind terma.

This text is particularly important to our discussion here because of how it joins together the teachings of both the Nyingma and Kagyu lineages. As Chögyam Trungpa says in the accompanying article, "Joining Energy and Space," "The lineage of The Sadhana of Mahamudra is the two traditions of immense crazy wisdom and immense dedication and devotion put together. The Kagyü, or mahamudra tradition, is the devotion lineage. The Nyingma, or ati tradition, is the lineage of crazy wisdom. The sadhana brings these two traditions together as a prototype of how emotion and wisdom, energy and space, can work together" (p. 312). Additionally, the sadhana contains a vivid description of the obstacles presented by physical, psychological, and spiritual materialism in the modern age and prescribes unwavering devotion to wakefulness as the antidote to the materialistic outlook.

While in England , Chögyam Trungpa had been tutoring the crown prince (now the king) of Bhutan , Jigme Singye Wangchuk, while the prince was studying at Ascot . At the invitation of the queen of Bhutan , Trungpa Rinpoche journeyed to Bhutan in 1968. Rinpoche was accompanied to Asia by one of his young English students, Richard Arthure (who worked with Rinpoche on the translation of the sadhana and was also the editor of Meditation in Action). In preparation for the publication of The Collected Works, Richard kindly contributed information about their journey and the circumstances under which the sadhana was received:

It would be a sad thing if The Collected Works were published without including at least an excerpt from The Sadhana of Mahamudra. Along with the Shambhala teachings, it seems to be the quintessential expression of his [Trungpa Rinpoche's] enlightened mind and was openly recognized as such by both Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche and H. H. Dilgo Khyentse. The Vidyadhara [Chögyam Trungpa] himself wanted it to be propagated and practiced widely and without restriction, and he gladly shared it even with acquaintances, such as Thomas Merton, who were not Buddhist.

Before going into retreat at Taktsang, Trungpa Rinpoche and I traveled with Khyentse Rinpoche by jeep from Bhutan to Sikkim in order to spend some time with H. H. the sixteenth Karmapa. At [Trungpa] Rinpoche's request, the Karmapa performed the Karma Pakshi empowerment for us. Immediately, the Vidyadhara, with my assistance, set to work to prepare an English language translation of the Karma Pakshi sadhana." (There exists a photograph—tactfully suppressed for general purposes—of the two of us sitting side by side in the guest house at Rumtek smoking cigarettes and working on this translation.) It was to be my daily practice at Taktsang. It is unlikely that this translation has survived.

On our return to Bhutan, we received the Dorje Trolö [the wrathful aspect of Guru Rinpoche, in which he manifested at Taktsang before entering Tibet] empowerment from Dilgo Khyentse in a very informal setting, with just a handful of people present in Khyentse Rinpoche's tiny bedroom. Then we went up to Taktsang, traveling on horseback and then on foot up the steep trail, to begin our retreat. Once there, my morning practice was the Karma Pakshi sadhana. At noon I would go to Trungpa Rinpoche's room and we would have lunch together. In the afternoon I would sit with Rinpoche in the main shrine room while he performed a Dorje Trolö feast practice, tormas and butter lamps having been prepared by a Bhutanese monk and a Tibetan yogi who were students of Dilgo Khyentse. We would share a light meal in the early evening and generally stay up late talking. A principal t0pic of our wide-ranging discussions was how to create an enlightened s0ciety, what form it would take, etc., Rinpoche favoring a combination of democracy and enlightened monarchy. The idea of the delek system was first proposed during these discussions. A young Australian woman traveler, Lorraine , showed up with a c0py of Erich Fromm's The Sane Society in her backpack. We devoured it. Rinpoche had me write a synopsis of the main ideas in it to add fuel to our discussions.

Towards the end of our retreat, The Sadhana of Mahamudra arose in Rinpoche's mind, and the main part of it was written d0wn very quickly, in one or two days. Several more days were spent in refining and polishing. We began translating it into English almost immediately, although most 0f the work was done after we had come down the mountain from Taktsang and were staying in a guest house belonging to the Queen's mother on the outskirts of Thimphu . Here's how the process worked, more or less (and you should understand that I don’t speak 0r read Tibetan): Word by word and phrase by phrase Rinpoche would explain the meaning to me, as far as his vocabulary allowed. From th0se basic building blocks of meaning, it became possible to construct the English language version of the sadhana. I tried to create something that would transmit the dharma in a powerful and poetic way, utilizing the natural cadences and rhythms of spoken English. For example, Rinpoche would say some-thing like: "All ... namthok is thoughts . . . disappear. . . . Shunyata ... like a bird in the sky, doesn't make, how would you say, footprints?—not like a horse or man walking in snow, but same idea." And this, after a few tries, would give rise to: "All thoughts vanish into emptiness, like the imprint of a bird in the sky." Later, I saw that same simile translated as "like the traceless path of a bird in the sky," which I think is pretty good. I chose the word imprint because it gives the echo or faint suggestion of footprint, so carries the resonance of that image into the dimension of space.

Perhaps the Dakinis inspired our work together. Rinpoche seemed to think they were taking an active interest, at least. While we were staying in that guest house, tremendous rainstorms and floods caused landslides and destroyed roads and bridges so that we were unable to travel. Rinpoche commented: "This is the action of the Dakinis, making sure we don't leave until the translation is finished."

Richard's commentary provides quite a lot of new information about the circumstances surrounding the "discovery" of The Sadhana of Mahamudra. It has previously not been widely known that Chögyam Trungpa received both the Karma Pakshi and Dorje Trolö empowerments prior to entering retreat at Taktsang. He undoubtedly would have received these abhishekas earlier, while studying in Tibet , but having them "refreshed" in his mind may have had some influence on what occurred at Taktsang. These two gurus, visualized as yidams or vajrayana nontheistic deities, are combined as one central figure in The Sadhana of Mahamudra, thus unifying the energies of their respective lineages, the Kagyü and the Nyingma. We also see in Richard's reminiscences that Trungpa Rinpoche's facility with the English language was still limited in 1968. It is, therefore, remarkable both how accurately the translation of the sadhana captured the spirit and meaning of the original Tibetan (the translation used today is virtually the same as the original) and also how fast Rinpoche's grasp of the language developed after 1968. We have recordings of him teaching in America as early as 1970, and his sentence structure and vocabulary are nothing like the fragmentary approach that Richard reports less than two years earlier. His remarks complement Trungpa Rinpoche's own description of the retreat, which appears in "Joining Energy and Space." Richard sets the outer scene for us; Rinpoche describes more of the inner experiences he had, empty at the beginning, charged with energy and power at the end.

Although this article and the attendant excerpt are brief, they deserve significant commentary, because The Sadhana of Mahamudra had such a huge impact on Trungpa Rinpoche's development as a teacher and on the whole thrust of his teaching in the West. In a sense, the most articulate presentation of spiritual materialism and the most profound under-standing of how to vanquish it are presented in this sadhana. In this, as well as other areas of his teaching, Trungpa Rinpoche first had the main realization, full and complete within itself, received almost in an instant. He then spent years sharing that understanding with others. This was also true with his propagation of the Shambhala teachings, which were heralded by his receiving another terma text, The Golden Sun of the Great East, well before he began to lecture publicly on the Shambhala path of warriorship. This approach is, in fact, quite orthodox. The Buddha first became enlightened; only some weeks later did he begin to teach. Similarly, Chögyam Trungpa discovered the heart teachings of his lineage—the ecumenical tradition of Ri-me—in Taktsang in 1968. He spent the next two decades sharing that realization with sentient beings.

As Richard also points out in his letter, after discovering and translating The Sadhana of Mahamudra, Trungpa Rinpoche was delighted to share this practice with anyone who might be interested. When he returned to England , his students there took up the practice of the sadhana immediately. In an unpublished memoir, Rinpoche's wife, Diana Mukpo, de-scribes the practice of the sadhana at Samye Ling, Rinpoche's meditation center in Scotland : "When I was visiting Samye Ling with my mother in 1969, Rinpoche had only recently returned from this trip to Bhutan . Now, in addition to traditional Tibetan practices, students at Samye Ling chanted an English translation of The Sadhana of Mahamudra, crudely printed on coloured paper."

Once he arrived in America in 1970, in spite of his insistence on the sitting practice of meditation as the main discipline, Trungpa Rinpoche encouraged students to gather together and read the sadhana on the new and full moon. This practice continues to the present day. During Trungpa Rinpoche's lifetime, he conferred the formal empowerment, or abhisheka, for this sadhana twice that we know of. in India in 1968 and slightly later in England . In 1982, His Holiness Khyentse Rinpoche requested that Trungpa Rinpoche write down the abhisheka text, which he had spontaneously composed when he gave the transmissions years before. He did not accomplish this before he died, but Khyentse Rinpoche, who had a very close connection to Trungpa Rinpoche and to his students, completed both the abhisheka and the feast liturgy in 1990. Rinpoche's eldestson, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, who inherited the leadership of the Shambhala Buddhist community in 1990, has conferred this abhisheka in a number of ceremonies, beginning in 1993. Several thousand students, both senior students and recent meditators, have taken part in these events. Carried out of a lonely retreat in a cave in Bhutan , the lineage of transmission has traveled far and grown quite large in less than three decades.

In The Sadhana of Mahamudra, the seed syllable HUM plays a major role in invoking the power of sanity to overcome the forces of materialism in the world. The next offering in Volume Five is "HUM: An Approach to Mantra," a short article on the mantra HUM, which was originally published in 1972 in Garuda II: Working with Negativity. As he so often does, Chögyam Trungpa begins his discussion by dispelling preconceptions. That is, he first tells the reader what mantra practice is not. It is not, he informs us, "a magical spell used in order to gain psychic powers for selfish purposes, such as accumulation of wealth, power over others, and destruction of enemies." He explains that the genuine usage of mantra arises from an understanding of the teachings of the Buddha on the four marks of existence: impermanence, suffering, emptiness, and egolessness. Mantra is the invocation of egoless or nontheistic energies of wisdom and insight. He also distinguishes the Buddhist understanding of mantra from its usage in Hindu tantra, explaining that the divinities invoked in Buddhist tantra are not external but rather represent "aspects of the awakened state of mind." Trungpa Rinpoche then describes a number of ways in which the mantra HUM has been used. It was employed by Guru Padmasambhava "to subdue the force of the negative environment created by minds poisoned with passion, aggression, and ignorance." For beginning meditators, he suggests that chanting the sacred music of HUM can quiet the mind and ease the force of irritating thoughts. For advanced meditators, he states that the syllable HUM is a means of developing the wisdom of the five buddha families, innate wisdoms arising from emptiness, which one finds within oneself, not some-where in the external world. He also describes HUM as the "sonorous sound of silence" and as "that state of meditation when awareness breaks out of the limits of ego." Finally, he describes the relationship of the mantra HUM to the Vajrakilaya Mandala, in which the power of egolessness is visualized as a dagger that pierces through the seductions of ego.

When this article was reviewed for inclusion in The Collected Works, an early, unpublished version was uncovered. In most respects, it was very similar to the final form in which the article appeared in Garuda II. However, the closing paragraph of the original was omitted when it was published. Here, Trungpa Rinpoche suggests that those who practice The Sadhana of Mahamudra would benefit from studying this essay on the mantra HUM. This paragraph has been restored in the version that appears here.

Next in Volume Five we have "Explanation of the Vajra Guru Mantra," an article never before published, which deals with the mantra that invokes Guru Rinpoche, or Padmasambhava. Here, Chögyam Trungpa describes mantra as creating "a living environment of energy." This article was probably written while Chögyam Trungpa was still in England or shortly after he arrived in the United States . He translates each syllable of the mantra (if it is translatable) and then discusses the meaning of each syllable in some detail. There is a very pithy but penetrating discussion of the guru principle, which presents three aspects of one's devotion and relationship to the teacher. First, one sees the guru as the superior teacher to whom one opens and surrenders oneself completely. Second, the guru manifests as the spiritual friend, because—as Rinpoche points out—"you must be able not only to surrender but to communicate." Trungpa Rinpoche relates this aspect of devotion to the meeting of two minds: "Your mind is open to the open space and the guru's mind is open to the open space. In this way, your mind becomes one with that of the teacher—both are inseparable from unconditioned space." Finally, Rinpoche talks about the guru as environment, which is seeing occurrences in life as the manifestation of the energy of the teacher. One learns to appreciate the wisdom of the phenomenal world and to see life situations as messages that embody wisdom. If the practitioner ignores the meaning of experiences, then a stronger message, in the form of chaos, will provide the feedback that one has lost touch with "the life situation as teacher." Recognizing this affords the student an opportunity for further opening and communication. The result is that one develops compassion, the genuine ability to communicate with and help others, as well as the power of siddhi, which is sometimes translated as "magical power" or the ability to perform miracles. Here, Trungpa Rinpoche suggests that siddhi is a situation that develops unexpectedly, a sudden unforeseen coming together of circumstances. He ends the article with the suggestion that the real miracle is the "power of compassion, ultimate communication."

The next offering is Rinpoche's foreword to The Torch of Certainty and the interview with Chögyam Trungpa that appeared in the introduction to the book. The foundation practices that are discussed here are often referred to as the four extraordinary or special preliminaries. They are a practitioner's first formal introduction to visualization practice and other distinctly tantric aspects of Buddhist yoga and are prerequisites for more advanced meditation practices in the vajrayana. The foundations include 108,000 repetitions of the refuge formula combined with 108,000 prostrations, 108,000 repetitions of the Vajrasattva mantra, and 108,000 mandala offerings, concluding with a guru yoga recitation. These ngöndro practices are a process of surrendering, purifying, offering, and identifying with the lineage by developing longing for the teacher and the teachings.

For a student who has connected with the preceding teachings on lineage and devotion, the ngöndro practices offer the way to actually embark on the path. Although sometimes they are given to students with no other formal background, Trungpa Rinpoche makes it clear that, from his point of view, these practices are only appropriate or helpful for students who have experience in taming and training the mind, which are accomplished through the sitting practice of meditation.

The next two articles, "The Practicing Lineage" and "The Mishap Lineage" are edited versions of the first two talks in "The Line of the Trungpas," a seminar taught by Chögyam Trungpa at Karme Chöling meditation center in Vermont in 1975. Both of these talks present an introduction to the Kagyu lineage. It was only in the later talks from the seminar, which remain unpublished, that Rinpoche talked more specifically about the teachers in his particular lineage. In "The Practicing Lineage" he talks about the literal meaning of Kagyü as "the lineage of the sacred word," but he focuses on the lineage as drubgyü, or "the practicing lineage," as it became known during the time of Milarepa. The importance of having a teacher and the necessity of transcending spiritual materialism and ego-clinging are stressed: "The practicing lineage teaches us that we have to get rid of those ego-centered conceptualized notions of the grandiosity of our development. If we are truly involved with spirltuhty, we are willing to let go of trying to witness our own enlightenment." In "The Mishap Lineage," Trungpa Rinpoche talks about how the Kagyu have always loved desolate mountain peaks and practicing in wild and sometimes haunted places. This, he suggests, has made them adept at conquering extreme, foreign territory of all kinds, and thus they have long been known for spreading the dharma in foreign lands. That love of harsh extremes is combined in the Kagyu lineage with profound gentleness and devotion. He also describes how constant mishaps are welcomed by the Kagyu practitioner as further fuel to spark awareness. This also harks back to the story of Rinpoche's escape from the Chinese at the Brahmaputra River .

"Teachings on the Tulku Principle" is a brief article on the history and meaning of reincarnation and the Tibetan practice of realized teachers taking rebirth in successive incarnations. Such a teacher is called a tulku, which literally means "emanation body." The first Karmapa, the head of the Karma Kagyu lineage to which Chögyam Trungpa belonged, was in fact the first tulku to be recognized in Tibet . "Teachings on the Tulku Principle" clarifies that a tulku does not represent the continuation of ego or self, but rather expresses the continuity of awake mind, generated by compassion, from one incarnation to the next.

The final group of articles in Volume Five presents three quite distinct discussions of the life of Milarepa. As is the case with his lectures on the life and teachings of Marpa, Trungpa Rinpoche's seminars on Milarepa have not yet been edited for publication. One of the first teachings he gave in America was a sixteen-talk seminar on the significance of Milarepa's life. Over the next ten years, he gave many other teachings on Milarepa, including a long seminar titled "The Yogic Songs of Milarepa" at the Naropa Institute in the mid-1970s. We can hope that this material will eventually be made available. For now, the three articles included in The Collected Works give us a good indication of the richness of Rinpoche's insights into Jetsun Milarepa's teachings.

Milarepa is undoubtedly the most famous and beloved yogi of Tibet . Students from all lineages study his spiritual songs. Trungpa Rinpoche pays tribute to both the rugged quality of Milarepa's realization and its simplicity. Milarepa's austere life in mountain caves and his deep devotion to his guru, Marpa, epitomize the qualities that Trungpa Rinpoche points to in "The Mishap Lineage" as the core of the Kagyu sensibility.

"Milarepa: A Warrior's Life" is a previously unpublished article that was prepared in 1978 as a text to accompany a calendar of reproductions of Tibetan thangkas, or scroll paintings, that depicted scenes from Milarepa's life. The calendar was never published, so the article was filedaway. It was one of the first articles that I worked on with Rinpoche. I uncovered it tucked away in some files in the Shambhala Archives while I was in the process of searching for material for inclusion in The Collected Works. It presents the basic events in Milarepa's life story, with commentary on their significance, making the other two articles easier to follow for readers unfamiliar with the story. The careful reader will notice that each of the three articles differs in some small respects in presenting the details of Milarepa's life. There are a number of versions of his namthar, or spiritual biography, and quite probably Chögyam Trungpa consulted different texts at different times. In working with me on "Milarepa: A Warrior's Life," Rinpoche suggested that I consult Lobsang Lhalungpa's translation of The Life of Milarepa.

The second article is simply called "Milarepa: A Synopsis." It too emerged from the files when I was searching for material for The Collected Works and has never been published before. It presents a series of scenes from Milarepa's life, with little commentary on their significance. The writing is quite vivid, however. Excerpts from a number of Milarepa's songs are included, based on the translation of The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa by Garma C. C. Chang. Although it was impossible to definitively confirm this, it is likely that this article is actually an early treatment prepared by Chögyam Trungpa for a movie on the life of Milarepa, which he began filming in the early 1970s. He and several of his students, including two filmmakers from Los Angeles Johanna Demetrakas and Baird Bryant—traveled to Sweden to film some exquisite thangkas of the life of Milarepa, which were to be featured in the movie. More information about the film itself—which was also to be an exploration of the qualities of the five buddha families—appears in the introduction to Volume Seven, which presents Rinpoche's teachings on art and the artistic process.

Volume Five closes with "The Art of Milarepa," which originally appeared in Garuda II. The title is somewhat misleading in that the article has little to do with Milarepa's artistic expression—his songs—in and of themselves and more to do with his art of life. The opening part of the article is a discussion of how the secret practice of Buddhist yoga evolved in India , especially in the ninth century in the great universities of Nalanda and Vikramashila. The connection that Marpa (Milarepa's main teacher) had to this tradition is also discussed. In this article, one sees Trungpa Rinpoche's brilliant insight into Milarepa's journey through life, the obstacles he encountered, and his final attainment. Throughout, Rinpoche brings together immense appreciation for Milarepa as a highly developed person on the one hand, with a down-to-earth insight into the humanness and ordinary quality of his practice on the other.

After he met his guru, Milarepa lived an austere, ascetic life and spent many years in solitary retreat in caves in the wilderness of Tibet . His lifestyle might seem distant from that of most people, especially in this modern age. Yet Trungpa Rinpoche makes Milarepa's experience accessible by demystifying it, while maintaining his tremendous appreciation for the attainment of his forefather. He tells us that Milarepa remained an ascetic simply because "that physical situation had become part of his makeup. Since he was true to himself, he had no relative concept of other living styles and did not compare himself to others. Although he taught people with many different lifestyles, he had no desire to convert them." Milarepa's asceticism is treated here as an ordinary but very sacred experience, one that really does not have much to do with embracing austerity per se. As Rinpoche concludes, "Simplicity is applicable to the situation of transcending neurotic mind by using domestic language. It becomes profound without pretense, and this naturally provokes the actual practice of meditation."

It seems fitting that Volume Five should end with these three articles celebrating the life of Milarepa. Although outwardly his was a life marked by the trappings of a secular existence, Chögyam Trungpa, like Milarepa, gave up everything familiar and cozy to bring the dharma of his lineage from Tibet to North America . He, like his forefathers, was rugged and direct, yet supremely sweet and gentle, and marked by an almost unbearable sadness, which became the expression of bliss. As he says in "The Doha of Sadness," one of his songs in The Rain of Wisdom:

You, my only father guru, have gone far away,
My vajra brothers and sisters have wandered to the ends of the earth.
Only I, Chögyam, the little child, am left.
Still, for the teachings of the profound and brilliant practice lineage,
I am willing to surrender my life in sadness.

In many thangkas, Milarepa is shown holding his hand up to his right ear. It is often said that he is listening to himself singing his own songsof realization. But I wonder if he is not listening to hear who will pick up the song of dharma that Trungpa Rinpoche sang in the West. Who will carry forward that melody? The Kagyu gurus are waiting to hear that song sung completely in a foreign tongue, echoing the same wisdom they have guarded with their lives for so many, many years. Let us aspire to join them in their song!

The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa, Volume 6 : Glimpses of Space-Orderly Chaos-Secret Beyond Thought-The Tibetan Book of theDead: Commentary-Transcending Madness-Selected Writings by Chögyam Trungpa, edited by Carolyn Gimian (Shambhala Publications) Volume Six contains advanced teachings on the nature of mind and tantric experiences. Chögyam Trungpa's commentary on the Tibetan Book of the Dead explains what this classic text teaches about human psychology. Transcending Madness presents a unique view of the Tibetan concept of bardo. Orderly Chaos explains the inner meaning of the mandala. Secret Beyond Thought presents teachings on the five chakras and the four karmas. Glimpses of Space consists of two seminars: "The Feminine Principle" and "Evam." In the article "Femininity," the author presents a playful look at the role of feminine energy in Buddhist teachings. "The Bardo," based on teachings given in England in the 1960s, has not been avail-able in published form for many years.

Excerpt: Volume six of The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa brings together thoroughly tantric, or vajrayana, material on the nature of mind and space and their interaction. These are teachings that are productive to study and worthwhile to pursue, yet they include much advanced material, which can at times be frustrating and perplexing to our "normal" ways of thinking. All of these teachings were given during Trungpa Rinpoche's early years in the West. "The Bardo" is based on teachings given by Rinpoche in England in the 1960s. The remainder is from lectures in North America , the earliest from 1971, the latest from 1976. Yet, while these teachings were presented early on, most of them were not published until after his death in 1987, the exceptions being "The Bardo," the "Foreword" and "Commentary" from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and "Femininity."

Much of this material is genuinely esoteric and difficult to under-stand. Nevertheless, Trungpa Rinpoche presented this material in public seminars, for the most part. With the exception of one seminar that forms part of Glimpses of Space, he did not restrict access to these teachings, unlike his approach to much of the vajrayana material he presented to his advanced students. What makes these teachings hard to under-stand is not that they require a great deal of prior study of the Buddhist teachings. Based on the way that he presented the material, it is not necessary to know very much about Buddhism to grasp what he is saying. Rather, it is necessary to know something about mind or, more accurately, to be open to one's own innate or instinctual relationship with space, mind, and awareness. If one approaches these teachings with a genuinely "open" mind, they are not much more perplexing to the neophyte than they are to the initiated.

Transcending Madness, the material from The Tibetan Book of the Dead (the translation of the text itself is not included), and "The Bardo" all present teachings on the bardos. Next in Volume Six, Orderly Chaos presents teachings on the principle of mandala. Glimpses of Space explores the principles of space and feminine energy. The little volume Secret Beyond Thought presents teachings on the five chakras and the four karmas. The final article in this volume, "Femininity," is a popular treatment of the feminine principle.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche presented the two seminars that make up Transcending Madness in 1971. The first took place in Allenspark , Colorado , about an hour outside of Boulder , and the second at Karme Chöling, the first practice center he established in the United States , located in rural Vermont . He had barely been in North America for a year when these teachings were presented. In the introduction to Volume Three of The Collected Works, there is some description of the tenor of that first year, in particular relative to the chaotic but cheerful environment that surrounded Trungpa Rinpoche's life and teaching in Boulder . The first seminars that Rinpoche gave in Boulder were edited to become Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. It was only a little while after presenting the "Cutting Through" seminars that he gave the Allenspark material, "The Six States of Bardo." It was attended by most of his students from Boulder …

The final material on the bardo states in Volume Six is an article entitled "The Bardo," which was published originally under the title "The Nyingma Teachings on the Intermediate State " in England in the late 1960s or early 1970s in the journal Creative Space. Rigdzin Shikpo, who worked with Rinpoche on this material in England in the '60s, reports that the article is "edited from various others I worked on with Rinpoche: these include `The Way of Maha Ati,' another on breaking away from the primordial ground, another on Maha Ati terminology, yet an-other on the yangti dark retreat, something on the bardo itself, how to meditate in relation to it, etc." He has also described it, in an earlier e-mail, as "a bringing together of two other texts, `Emergence from the Alaya,' and `Bardo and the Alaya.' " It contains some material similar to the commentary to The Tibetan Book of the Dead but with a slightly different emphasis. It expands the understanding of bardo as a practice that one can do in the here and now, and relates the bardo states very directly to how we create ego and confusion on the spot in every moment of existence. This article has not been available in published form for many years; its inclusion here will be welcomed by many readers. For its publication in The Collected Works, Rigdzin Shikpo kindly went over his original notes from his work with Trungpa Rinpoche and prepared a definitive and new version of the material.

The next book included in Volume Six is Orderly Chaos: The Mandala Principle. This too is based on early material presented by Trungpa Rinpoche, in this case during two seminars at Karme Chöling in 1972 and 1974. Rinpoche established this rural center as an intensive practice environment for his students. Students living on the East Coast traveled frequently to Tail of the Tiger, as it was called in the early days, to attend Rinpoche's seminars there. Many students came to Karme Chöling for a week or a month of intensive practice, and there were also facilities for solitary retreats. In the early days, seminars in the summer took place in a tent outside the main house. In the winter, small seminars were held in the original small farmhouse on the land; larger gatherings took place in a rented hall in Barnet, the nearest town. A major renovation in 1975 and '76 added additional living quarters and several shrine rooms, including a main shrine hall—also used for lectures—that can accommodate several hundred people. However, when the seminars that make up Orderly Chaos took place, these facilities did not yet exist.

In addition to the "city people" who came to Karme Chöling, there was a core of students in residence. In many respects, it was the closest thing to a monastery within the Buddhist community that Rinpoche established. It was not monastic in the sense that people wore robes or took vows of poverty, abstinence, or silence. Rather it provided a very tight and intense container in which people lived, practiced, and studied. The environment was not particularly seductive; it was in fact a claustrophobic situation, yet people became processed and tamed by living and practicing there, often in a much shorter time than in most ordinary living situations.

Each place that Rinpoche taught had its particular quality, which flavored his teaching there. When he taught at Karme Chöling, he had a "captive" audience. There was a quality of attentiveness on the audience's part and a sense of mutual communication, almost on an instinctual level. People seemed to grasp what he was saying faster and more directly, noticeably "clicking" to what he was talking about. The seminars that he gave at Karme Chöling were often more in-depth and reflective. In the questions and answers in Orderly Chaos, he and the audience members often seemed to finish one another's sentences, as though they were very much on the same wavelength.

In both Orderly Chaos and Transcending Madness, Trungpa Rinpoche seems to embody the material when he presents it. There is a way in which both of these books defy attempts to logically understand the material in an ordinary, sequential fashion. In Transcending Madness one feels oneself going through highlights of the bardos and the realms as one progresses through the book. Judith Lief reported to me that the tendency of this particular material to embody itself was very hard on her family while she was editing the book! In Orderly Chaos, one finds oneself in a world with no straight lines to connect things. Understanding and insight are possible, but only if one drops the reference points usually applied to "studying" or "reading" a book. This quality may frustrate some readers, but for others it will provide an experiential glimpse of the material that is being discussed.

Mandala is a Sanskrit word with many meanings. Literally, it refers to anything circular, a globe, or a wheel, and it also means a collection, group, society, or organization. Commonly, when people think of a mandala, they think of a circular drawing or a diagram that shows the arrangement of various deities, symbols, or energies. Many thangka paintings depict the mandalas, the palaces or environments, of vajrayana deities. There are also three-dimensional mandalas, or models. Both thangkas and three-dimensional mandalas show the details of a particular vajrayana deity's palace and iconography as an aid to visualization. In addition to its association with the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the term mandala has also been applied to similar representations in other spiritual traditions. The usage of mandalas in the Hindu religion is quite ancient, and undoubtedly predates their use in tantric Buddhism. Mandala-like representations are also found within various Native American traditions. The term has also been applied to some abstract and semi-abstract modem paintings. Many of these paintings were an outgrowth of the psychedelic movement in the 1960s and '70s, after people first came into contact with Hindu and Tibetan Buddhist mandalas and thought that they were visions or artistic expressions, failing to understand their relationship to Hindu tantra or the practice of vajrayana Buddhism. Trungpa Rinpoche distinguishes between any of these approaches to mandala as symbolism and the understanding of mandala as the principle of orderly chaos. It is the latter that is the focus of Orderly Chaos.

Mandala principle is about how both confusion and wisdom manifest in a pattern. The pattern of orderly chaos describes both the patterns of confused, or samsaric, existence and the patterns of enlightened awareness. More fundamentally, it is about the space that underlies all experience and how it operates in terms of energy and form. The first seminar in Orderly Chaos was originally entitled "The Mandala of Unconditioned Being." Here, Rinpoche approaches the subject of mandala from the point of view of the mandala of samsara, or the mandala of confused existence. As he says, "We should discuss the idea of orderly chaos, which is the mandala principle. It is orderly, because it comes in a pat-tern; it is chaos, because it is confusing to work with that order. The mandala principle includes the mandala of samsara and the mandala of nirvana, which are equal and reciprocal. If we do not understand the samsaric aspect of mandala, there is no nirvanic aspect of mandala at all.” It is only in the last two talks of the seminar, chapters 6 and 7, that he introduces the buddha mandala, or the principle of the mandala of enlightenment.

In the second seminar, originally titled "Mandala of the Five Buddha Families," Rinpoche talks about the principle of mandala in terms of the energy that arises from the basic ground of unconditioned space, taking the form of the five buddha families or five buddha principles. These have both a confused and an awake aspect. He describes them as "aspects of the basic totality that accommodates things and allows them to happen. So it is not so much a matter of five separate buddha qualities; rather there are five aspects of the totality. We are talking about one situation from five different angles" (p. 358). The five families are buddha, vajra, ratna, padma, and karma. There is an excellent discussion in Journey without Goal' of the quality, symbolism, and significance of all five families, which are basically different qualities of energy, emotion, and wisdom that arise within oneself and can also be experienced in our perception of the world. Here, in Orderly Chaos, Rinpoche presumes the reader's basic familiarity with the buddha families. In discussing the buddha mandala, he describes how they are related to the five skandhas, not so much in terms of the skandhas as the constituents or building blocks of ego but from the perspective of confusion transmuted into the wisdom of the five buddhas.

Glimpses of Space: The Feminine Principle and EVAM, edited by Judith L. Lief, was published in 1999 by Vajradhatu Publications. It consists of two seminars given by Chögyam Trungpa in 1975 and 1976. As the subtitle implies, the first seminar is on the feminine principle, the second on the principle of EVAM. In the Tibetan Buddhist teachings, space is understood as the feminine principle. Understanding what is meant by space altogether is part of the reader's challenge in reading this book. Again, as with Transcending Madness and Orderly Chaos, the material is not entirely linear. At times, it seems as though space itself is speaking or presenting itself, which is highly disconcerting. Trungpa Rinpoche tells us: "We are not talking about outer space. We are talking about that which is—that which isn't, at the same time." Various aspects of the feminine principle are presented: space as the mother principle; the feminine attributes of space as unborn, unceasing, with a nature like sky; and finally, the femi nine manifested in the dakini principle, or prajnaparamita, the principle of space as a playful consort who gives birth to wisdom and to all the buddhas.

The second seminar presents both the feminine and the masculineprinciples and how they come together in the nondual experiences of bliss and wisdom. This is not a gender study. Rather, the book is an investigation of masculine and feminine qualities or principles that exist in all experience. The title of the second seminar, "EVAM," is a Sanskrit word that means "thus." The beginning of every sutra, or discourse by the Buddha, begins with the phrase "evam maya shrutam," which means "Thus I have heard." In Vajrayana Buddhism, EVAM represents the union of the feminine and masculine principles, the container (E) and what is contained (VAM). A monogram of the word evam is employed as one of the seals of the Trungpa tulkus (see illustration on page 466). It had a very personal meaning for Chögyam Trungpa, the eleventh incarnation of the Trungpa lineage. He always wore a signet ring with the symbol evam on it, and a gold-leafed carving of the evam symbol hung above his head when he taught from a traditional Tibetan throne in the main shrine hall in Boulder , Colorado .

Next we have Secret Beyond Thought: The Five Chakras and the Four Karmas, a small volume published by Vajradhatu Publications in 1991. This contains two talks on the principles of the chakras and the karmas, which are teachings from the tantric tradition of Buddhism. Chakra is a Sanskrit word that means "wheel." In the practice of both Hindu and Buddhist tantra, the chakras refer to psychophysical centers of energy in the body. While acknowledging this understanding of the chakras, Trungpa Rinpoche suggests that we can relate the chakras to both everyday life and "to their essence in the universe, the cosmos." The second talk discusses the four karmas, or enlightened actions, that are associated with yogic activity. These are actions that are appropriate to situations, rather than imposed on them. They are pacifying, enriching, magnetizing, and destroying. Rinpoche also discusses the obstacles, or maras, that arise in connection with realizing each of the four karmas. Karma here, which simply means "action," is quite distinct from the usual under-Standing of karma as the chain of cause and effect. As Rinpoche says, "there are two types of karma, which could be called greater karma and lesser karma. Greater karma is these four types of karma, which are de-liberate, which do not involve chain reactions any more, because the whole purpose of greater karma is to break the chain reaction. It is applied to action in the moment, on the spot. The other karma is the chain reaction process, or lesser karma.” As always, he recommends die sitting practice of meditation as the starting point for working with these teachings. The seminar on which this book was based was given in Boston , Massachusetts , in February 1971, another example of the advanced level of teaching he was presenting to the public in his earliest days in North America .

Volume Six ends with the article "Femininity," which originally appeared in Woman: Maitreya 4, published by Shambhala Publications in 1973. By far the most accessible piece in this entire volume, it is a rather lighthearted and playful article about feminine energy and its role in the Buddhist teaching. Trungpa Rinpoche pays homage to the feminine principle as the mother and consort of the buddhas, as the source of inspiration, and as a playful but very powerful maiden. He touches on the limitations of the cultural attitudes toward women in the early development of Buddhism, and ends with the statement that "as long as you respect your manhood or your womanhood, your masculinity and femininity will be an integral part of your being on the spiritual path."

With the end of Volume Six, we also come to the end of the presentation of the strictly Buddhist teachings in The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa. The remaining two volumes take us into the realms of dharma art and the Shambhala path of warriorship, not unrelated to Buddhism but presenting distinct areas of his work. In these six volumes, we have seen Trungpa Rinpoche already in many guises: In Volume One he is a biographer of his own life, in Boni in Tibet ; a humble Buddhist teacher, in Meditation in Action; and a yogi poet in Mudra. In Volume Two he manifests as meditation master and teacher of compassion, in The Path Is the Goal and in Training the Mind, and as psychologist, educator, and ecumenical pastor, among his many roles in the articles included in that volume. Volume Three shows us Trungpa Rinpoche the pioneer, bringing a new view of the Buddhist teachings and a new language of Buddhism to the West, through his best-selling volumes Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism and The Myth of Freedom. In Volume Four we see him once again mapping out new territory and establishing the ground to present the tantric journey in Journey without Goal, The Dawn of Tantra, and The Lion's Roar. In Volume Five we see him as devoted child of the lineage, bringing the stories of his ancestors and heritage to Western practitioners, in Crazy Wisdom, Illusion's Game, The Life of Marpa the Translator and The Rain of Wisdom. In this volume, we will see him as master of space and as master of the teachings that join life and death in nondual awareness.

There is much more to come, not only in the remaining volumes of this series but in the many volumes that will be produced in years to come. As far as the Buddhist aspect of his teachings is concerned, it will be many generations before we have the complete teachings of Chögyam Trungpa.

By this merit, may all attain omniscience.
May it defeat the enemy, wrongdoing.
From the stormy waves of birth, old age, sickness, and death,
From the ocean of samsara, may we free all beings.

The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa, Volume 7 : The Art of Calligraphy (excerpts)-Dharma Art-Visual Dharma (excerpts)-SelectedPoems-Selected Writings by Chögyam Trungpa, edited by Carolyn Gimian (Shambhala Publications) Volume Seven features the work of Chögyam Trungpa as a poet, playwright, and visual artist and his teachings on art and the creative process, which are among the most innovative and provocative aspects of his activities in the West. While it includes material in which Trungpa Rinpoche shares his knowledge of the symbolism and iconography of traditional Buddhist arts (in Visual Dharma), this richly varied volume primarily focuses on his own, often radical creative expressions. The Art of Calligraphy is a wonderful showcase for his calligraphy, and Dharma Art brings together his ideas on art, the artistic process, and aesthetics. Tibetan poetics, filmmaking, theater, and art and education are among the topics of the selected writings.

Excerpt: Volume seven of The Collected Works brings together Chögyam Trungpa's work as a poet, playwright, and visual artist and the teachings on art and the creative process that he gave during his seventeen years in North America , from 1970 until his death in 1987. Chögyam Trungpa's appreciation for and involvement with art are among the most innovative and provocative parts of his teaching in the West. There is also material in Volume Seven that one might call "art history," in which Trungpa Rinpoche shares his knowledge of the symbolism and iconography of traditional Buddhist art and music. All of this produces a rich tapestry of color, form, and sound, which enlivens and deepens our appreciation of this highly creative and prolific human being.

Rinpoche's artistic orientation was something of a departure from the traditional view of the place of art in Tibetan Buddhism. In the Buddhist traditions of Tibet , art is largely connected with monastic life. Formal poetry was composed for Tibetan liturgies, and dohas, or spontaneous poems and songs of spiritual realization, were very much respected. Thangkas, or scroll paintings, and rupas, sculptures, were created to depict vajrayana deities and gurus, as aids to tantric visualization. They were created in an environment of sacredness, and painters and sculptors often performed a sadhana, or ritual practice, to begin their work. Music was also involved in many liturgies, and dance was an important part of some tantric rituals. So the monastic culture was not without poetry, music, and art...

Rinpoche's ideas about the relationship between art and spirituality came out of his direct involvement with the arts. He had been practicing calligraphy and flower arranging and writing poetry for a number of years before he had much to say about those disciplines. Many of Rinpoche's talks on art and the artist have been gathered together and presented in Dharma Art, edited by Judith L. Lief and published in 1996. The book is based on material presented by Chögyam Trungpa over nearly ten years, from 1972 through 1981. Interestingly enough, the editorial approach in Dharma Art is itself rather artistic—in some ways more like a painting than the usual systematic presentation made in a book. The volume presents a number of themes as highlights that overlay one another to create a complex and interconnected fabric. It begins with a letter written by Rinpoche on the occasion of the Naropa Institute's first summer program in July 1974. The remaining chapters are, with few exceptions, based on talks given by Rinpoche in courses at Naropa and in dharma art seminars and other gatherings with artists held in many locations around the United States . About half of the material is based on talks given at Naropa, many of these taken from a seminar called "The Iconography of Buddhist Tantra," held in the summer of 1975, in which Chögyam Trungpa articulated not only his first systematic take on dharma art itself but also a view of how human perception operates and how it is refined through the development of meditative awareness. Such awareness, both panoramic and detailed, can then be applied to any artistic enterprise as well as to the general conduct of "Art in Every-day Life," the title of one chapter of the book. There is also a consideration of symbolism, not just as it applies to art but as a component of all human experience.

Rinpoche also used the principle of heaven, earth, and man (in the sense of humanity) in his development of the principles of dharma art. This threefold principle comes from the Chinese tradition and was also integrated and developed further in Korea and Japan . Rinpoche would have known this threefold view of the world from his studies in Tibet , and he would also have applied this concept in his studies of flower arranging, or ikebana, where it is commonly used to describe the elements of an arrangement. Beginning around the time that he began to focus on the Shambhala teachings, Rinpoche chose to apply this schema in dharma art presentations. He treated the topic in a number of different ways. Relative to the discussion of first thought, the heaven, earth, and man material in his essay in The Art of Calligraphy: Joining Heaven and Earth is particularly germane. In the section of his essay entitled "Creation," heaven is presented as the first step or stage in creating a work of art. Here, he connects heaven with vision, or nonthought. The experience of heaven is like standing in front of your huge blank canvas, holding your brush, ready to paint:

At that point you become frightened, you want to chicken out and you do not know what to do. . . . [Or] you might have blank sheets of paper and a pen sitting on your desk, and you are about to write poetry. You begin to pick up your pen with a deep sigh—you have nothing to say. . . . That first space is heaven, and it is the best one. It is not regarded as regression, particularly; it is just basic space in which you have no idea what it is going to do or what you are going to do about it or put into it. This initial fear of inadequacy may be regarded as heaven, basic space, complete space.

Rinpoche goes on to talk about how first thought arises in that space:

Then as you look at your canvas or your notepad, you come up with a first thought of some kind, which you timidly try out. You begin to mix your paints with your brush, 0r to scribble timidly on your note-pad. The slogan "first thought is best thought!" is an expression of that second principle, which is earth.

Finally, he says, you have the man principle, which is the confirmation of both the panic of heaven and the first thought of the earth principle. "At that point there is a sense of joy and a slight smile at the corners of your mouth, a slight sense of humor. You can actually say something about what you are trying to create.”

A brief essay included in Volume Seven, "Heaven, Earth, and Man," is accompanied by calligraphies that illustrate this principle. Here, Chögyam Trungpa connects this threefold approach with the Buddhist principle of the three kayas, which he describes as "an old Buddhist tradition of perception based on threefold logic." He goes on to describe the kayas in relationship to art: "The tantric art of Tibetan Buddhism uses the element of dharmakaya as the background of manifestation, sambhogakaya as the potential of manifestation, and nirmanakaya as the final manifestation." The calligraphies that accompany the text, along with Trungpa Rinpoche's commentary on each one, give us a playful view of the heaven, earth, and man principles and how they can spark one's creative expression in open and unexpected ways.

In terms of understanding how we perceive the world, as the basis for the creation of art, Trungpa Rinpoche also talked about another concept: seeing and looking. In the "State of Mind " chapter of Dharma Art he talks about seeing as the first principle: cutting your thoughts, projecting your mind, and seeing things as they are. Then it is possible to look at the details or explore further. Confoundingly enough, in his essay in The Art of Calligraphy, he states just the opposite, that the artist's inquisitiveness begins by looking, the starting point that then allows one to see. He says here that looking represents prajna, or discriminating awareness, while seeing is the expression of jnana, or wisdom. Both approaches seem to make sense. Switching the order of seeing and looking seems contradictory only if one fails to recognize that Chögyam Trungpa was not primarily interested in creating a philosophy of art or a systematization of artistic theory. He was struggling to communicate the nuances of human perception: how intelligence arises in space, how it communicates with and grasps the sensory world, and how a human being can provoke that fresh perception through artistic creation...

When Chögyam Trungpa arrived in America in 1970, he had been writing p0etry for many years. In "Tibetan Poetics," a 1975 conversation with Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman, which was published in 1976 in Loka II: A Journal from the Naropa Institute, Rinpoche talks at length about the classical style of Tibetan poetry in which he was trained and how it used very formal language, metaphors, and set line lengths. He compares the classical poetry with the more colloquial style employed by Milarepa and other great spiritual teachers to convey what Rinpoche calls "songs of their own experience." He also describes his own approach to writing poetry in Tibetan in the West, in which he continued to employ classical line lengths, as well as some use of rhyme and puns. He contrasts his Tibetan poems with the approach he adopted to writing in English: "I just regard the poems that I write in English as finger painting, in my mind." The vast majority of the poems he wrote in America were writ-ten in English in this free style, influenced more by the poets he met in America than by the classical training of his upbringing.

Rinpoche encountered the American poetry scene soon after he arrived in the United States . He and Allen Ginsberg ran across one another in New York in 1970. Rinpoche and Ginsberg encountered one another as they were both trying to hail the same taxicab in Manhattan. Ginsberg was introduced to Rinpoche by one of Rinpoche's companions, while they were standing on the street, and upon learning who Rinpoche was, Ginsberg spoke the Vajra Guru mantra of Padmasambhava, "OM VAJRA GURU PADMA SIDDHI HUM," and clasped his hands in a traditional bow or salutation. Rinpoche, who was with his wife, Diana, and their companion invited Ginsberg and his ailing father to share the cab. After dropping Ginsberg's father at his apartment, they continued on to Allen's place, where they stayed up into the night talking, writing poetry, and becoming friends. When later they knew each other better, Ginsberg asked Rinpoche what he thought of being greeted by this mantra, and Rinpoche replied that he wondered whether Allen had known what he was talking about."

This chance meeting led to an enduring friendship, collaboration, and a teacher-student relationship. On the Buddhist front, Rinpoche was the teacher, Ginsberg the student; on the poetry front, Rinpoche acknowledged how much he had learned from Ginsberg, and Ginsberg also credited Trungpa Rinpoche with considerable influence on his poetry.

Ginsberg introduced Chögyam Trungpa to many other poets, some of whom became longtime friends and students. Rinpoche's interactions with the poets were sometimes explosive affairs. In 1972, a poetry reading was organized in Boulder , with Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Robert Bly, and Nanao Sasaki sharing the stage with Chögyam Trungpa. While Bly was reading, Trungpa Rinpoche put a huge gong over his own head and hammed it up so that the audience dissolved into laughter rather than paying attention to Bly's reading. Bly and Snyder were furious, attributing Rinpoche's behavior to alcohol. They left and were never again part of any poetry scene that had anything to do with Rinpoche. Rinpoche himself later said that his actions were meant to cut through the self-righteous and self-serious attitude displayed by some of the poets at this reading."

In 1974, Rinpoche invited Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman to teach at the first summer session of the Naropa Institute. The Jack Kerouac School of Poetics (originally "of Disembodied Poetics") became a founding department at Naropa. Ginsberg remained affiliated with Naropa until his death in 1997; Anne Waldman, though now based in New York , continues her affiliation with Naropa and travels to Boulder to teach in the summers and several times throughout the year. In its first two summers, Naropa attracted an impressive group of writers who collaborated, read, and taught there. "Poets' Colloquium," from a gathering in 1975,originally published in Loka II, shows the freewheeling and spirited discussion among Rinpoche, Ginsberg, Waldman, William Burroughs, W. S. Merwin, Philip Whalen, David Rome, and Joshua Zim. The discussion ranges over a variety of topics: why and how the poets write poetry, whether to take a typewriter into retreat with you, whether a poet writes for an audience, and whether a conscious death is possible. Ginsberg and Whalen compose poems on the spot; Merwin remembers one to share. In the fall of 1975 at the Vajradhatu Seminary, Merwin and Rinpoche had a huge falling out, which drew considerable negative publicity…

The Collected Works includes material based on talks given by Chögyam Trungpa at the Milarepa Film Seminar in several forms. Two chapters of Dharma Art, "Five Styles of Creative Expression" and "Endless Richness," are based on the seminar. To underscore the more universal appeal of the material, the specific connection to the film project has been edited out. However, because the original talks are of such interest for anyone involved in making films, and because they contain such de-tailed information on different aspects of filmmaking, the Chicago Review article mentioned above is also included in Volume Seven, with Rinpoche's diagram of the five buddha families reproduced from the Filmmaker's Newsletter.

Chögyam Trungpa was involved with several other film projects. In 1974 a film called Empowerment was made to celebrate the first visit to America of His Holiness the sixteenth Karmapa. A second film on the Karmapa, The Lion's Roar, was made following His Holiness's death in 1981 and incorporated much of the footage from Empowerment. Rinpoche worked on both of these films, more as an adviser than in the screen-writer or director role. A film about Trungpa Rinpoche's work as an artist, Discovering Elegance, was made in connection with one of the art installations he created in California at the LAICA Gallery in Los Angeles . He was very involved in how that film was shot, and he had specific ideas about the editing of the footage. His ideas were not all adopted, but one of the film's producers and cameramen, James Hoag-land, kept the notes on Rinpoche's ideas for the editing and has talked about reediting the film based on his intentions. Baird Bryant worked on many of these film shoots and has supplied some comments on the work that he did with Chögyam Trungpa:

Along the way, however, between the Milarepa Seminar and the shoot in Sweden , there are some events which are notable. . . . It was at Rocky Mountain Dharma Center that at One point we went out with the camera to make some shots. Rinpoche said, "Zoom On the top of that ridge and pan along with the telephoto." He watched me make the shot, not very smoothly, and then said, "You're getting a picture of your nerves."

"How did you know?" I replied. These are the kind 0f things that will stay with me forever.

Then came the visit of His Holiness, the sixteenth Karmapa, and body? Pull your muscles as if space is crowding in on you. Clench your teeth and your toes. . . . Very strange to say, in order to learn how to relax you have to develop really solid tenseness. You can breathe out and breathe in but don't rest your breath, just develop complete intensification. Then you begin to feel that space is closing in on you. In order to relate with space you have to relate with tension."

In some of his earliest talks introducing the Mudra Space Awareness exercises, Rinpoche also spoke about how they related to particular vajrayana or tantric teachings: "A lot of the exercises are sort of Omaha anti yoga practices. They are related to the Four Torches. Actually, the Omaha anti [practice I'm talking about here] doesn't talk about space; it talks about wind or air. The first one, the wind of karma, is related with muscles, and intensification of limbs. So, in other words, your limbs are related to as kind of tools to grab things with, which is connected with karma's volitional action. If you relate with the wind of karma, which is that creation of space within your muscles, you relate with the space or the air which is contained within the muscles. The second one is related with creating space through the eyes and has to do with the wind of emotions or kieshas. The third one is the wind of body. It is connected to the earth and the four elements. The last one is called inner luminosity. It is connected with brain and heart together, which is something very subtle."

Altogether, there is a great deal of subtlety and profundity in the theater work that Chögyam Trungpa introduced. Little has been written about this work, and for this reason, this introduction to Volume Seven has gone into considerable detail to provide information about the events that form the background to the few theater-related publications that are included in The Collected Works. Chögyam Trungpa's work in this area put him in touch with the leading figures in the American avant-garde theater and show yet another way in which he brought together teachings from the vajrayana tradition of Buddhism in Tibet with the most modern developments in an artistic field. One hopes that in the near future more information on this fascinating aspect of his work will be published.

In 2001, Naropa University published a book on Lee Worley's theater work, Coming from Nothing, which includes an introduction to some of the principles of Mudra Space Awareness. Lee is planning to edit a book of Chögyam Trungpa's plays and some of his talks on space awareness, accompanied by interviews or reflections by theater people who have been influenced by Rinpoche's work. Joanna Rotte, a playwright and di-rector who teaches at the Villanova University , is also interested in working on the book. Joanna never met Trungpa Rinpoche, but in the last ten years she has become familiar with his plays, and in the summer of 2000, she adapted one of Rinpoche's best-known dramas, Prajna, for the Philadelphia Fringe Festival.

Volume Seven of The Collected Works includes the original version of Prajna, which was performed for the first time during the summer session at the Naropa Institute in 1974. Subsequently, the play was published in Loka: A Magazine of the Naropa Institute. Andy Karr, who directed Prajna when it was performed at Naropa, wrote an introduction in Loka to the play. He explains that it "is based on the Heart Sutra, a distillation of the voluminous Prajnaparamita (Perfection of Wisdom) literature, which is central to Mahayana Buddhism."

The other play included in Volume Seven is Proclamation, which was performed by the Mudra Theater Group at a Midsummer's Day festival in 1980. This play combines elements from both the Buddhist and the Shambhala teachings. Interestingly, both Prajna and Proclamation—one of the last plays that Rinpoche wrote—include recitations of the Heart Sutra, an intriguing hint that his theater work may have had an ongoing connection to exploring the interaction between form and emptiness, which is so central to the Prajnaparamita teachings of the mahayana.

It would seem that Rinpoche was not primarily interested in exploring characters or their stories in his plays, but much more interested in exploring the space in which dramas arise.

Volume Seven, as mentioned earlier, also includes an article that appeared in 1980 in the Vajradhatu Sun, excerpted from a talk given by Rinpoche in 1973 about his view of theater. The article, "Basic Sanity in Theater," may well have been given in connection with the 1973 theater conference itself. Here, Chögyam Trungpa says that "in order to per-form, we have to relate to reality." He talks about learning to coordinate speech and body and discusses combining "the bodhisattva and yogic practices in our theater work." He also mentions an idea to create a school to pursue this training in theater, which he says would be "an-other kind of retreat practice, in fact."

Volume Seven of The Collected Works includes the only formal talk on ikebana that Rinpoche is known to have given. At the end of 1982, Rinpoche and some of his students decided to form a society for the practice and appreciation of flower arranging. He named the group "Kalapa Ikebana," Kalapa being the name of the capital of the Kingdom of Shambhala . Students in the group studied flower arranging with various teachers of ikebana. Rinpoche was not their primary instructor, but he met from time to time with the group, demonstrating arrangements and critiquing student work. In 1983, the group started the Kalapa Ikebana Newsletter, a quarterly that was published for a number of years. "Perception and the Appreciation of Reality," Chögyam Trungpa's first and only public address on the subject of ikebana, appeared in the Winter 1984 issue.

At this point in the discussion of Rinpoche's ideas about art, it should hardly seem surprising that he opened his talk by saying that the topic was "perception and the appreciation of reality." He then spoke about some obstacles to creating a work of art, specifically thinking that one lacks talent or that one's upbringing hasn't prepared one to make an artistic statement. Rinpoche challenges the idea that an unusual talent is needed in order to create art. He says that "everyone who possesses the appreciation of sight, smell, sound, feelings, is capable of communicating with the rest of the world." This is the basis for artistic discipline, including the discipline of flower arranging. Turning more specifically to the particular school of flower arranging in which he was trained, Rinpoche comments that the Sogetsu School in Japan "does not only pay attention to flower arranging, but also it pays attention to sculpture and to creating an environment out of a variety of things." This gives us a clue as to how the discipline of ikebana itself contained the seed of the larger dharma art installations that Rinpoche undertook.

Volume Seven also includes two interviews conducted in connection with a major dharma art installation that took place in 1980 at the LAICA Gallery in Los Angeles . This installation was called "Discovering Elegance." Similar to what Ludwik Turzanski described above, the exhibit consisted of a number of rooms created and arranged by Rinpoche and his assistants, containing flower arrangements and calligraphies done for the installation. In these two interviews, Trungpa Rinpoche also expands the definition of dharma art. He describes it as "the principal way we are trying to create enlightened society." He also talks about working with chaos as a means of discovering harmony. Here, we begin to see how all of Trungpa Rinpoche's activities as an artist come together with his role in proclaiming the buddhadharma and the Shambhala teachings in the West. The way or path of the artist and the way of the bodhisattva and the warrior once again seem to converge in the same broad highway of wakefulness and working for the benefit of others.

Also included in Volume Seven, "Art and Education" is another article that echoes this theme. It is based on a public talk at the Naropa Institute in 1979. Here, Rinpoche describes how many of the principles of art that he articulated were reflected in and applied to the overall approach at Naropa. Here he says, "Art is environment. Education is the mind which relates with that environment." He says that art has to do with creating a bigger world: "The kind of art we are talking about to-night is big art."

Without photographs or access to the exhibits themselves, it is difficult to visualize the spaces that Rinpoche created in the dharma art installations. One wishes an illustrated catalogue had been prepared for at least one of them. The Shambhala Archives does have extensive photo-graphic documentation of some of the exhibits, especially the installation at the LAICA Gallery, and the documentary film Discovering Elegance, referred to above in Baird Bryant's description of his work with Chögyam Trungpa, shows us the process of creating that installation, along with discussion of the principles of dharma art. None of these materials, how-ever, form part of The Collected Works, so much must be left to the imagination of the reader.

In addition to its main focus—Chögyam Trungpa's activities as an artis and poet—Volume Seven features three essays in which Chögyan Trungpa comments and reflects on Buddhist iconography and art, not as inspiration for Western art, but as traditional disciplines in their own right. Visual Dharma: The Buddhist Art of Tibet presents his long introductory essay to a catalogue that accompanied an exhibit of Tibetan Buddhist art at the Hayden Gallery at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975. (The illustrations from the catalogue and the commentary on the specific items pictured are not included here.) Here Rinpoche discusses traditional elements in Tibetan Buddhist iconography and how they are expressed in Tibetan Buddhist thangka paintings and rupas, or religious sculptures of important teachers and deities. "Empowerment" is taken from the liner notes to an album presenting recordings of Tibetan sadhanas, or religious liturgies, performed by His Holiness the sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa during his first visit to America in 1974. Rinpoche talks about the significance of the ceremonies them-selves as well as about the ritual instruments and music that are an integral part of the ceremonies. "Disciples of the Buddha" is an in-depth interview with Rinpoche, conducted by Robert Newman and included in Newsman's recent book by that title. Rinpoche discusses the meditative realization that can be seen in the I-chou Lohans, Chinese statues of the disciples of the Buddha, which Rinpoche felt were powerful expressions of the meditative state of mind. He arranged to have a silkscreened banner made of a photograph of one of the lohans, to be used as an example and inspiration to students practicing meditation in the Shambhala Training meditation program.

As we conclude Volume Seven, dealing with art and artistic process, and move to Volume Eight, which presents Chögyam Trungpa's teachings on the Shambhala path of warriorship, we will also see a progression in Rinpoche's life and thought, as he became more and more interested in linking art with culture and society. One can easily see this in the movement from creating individual works of art, such as calligraphies and flower arrangements, to the interest in creating larger environmental installations. Beyond that, however, Rinpoche was interested in a much bigger project: he was interested in dharma art as a force in the creation of culture and society—and not just any society but an enlightened society. In a sense, he was taking the Japanese idea of do, or art as a way, beyond even its understanding in Japanese culture. He was essentially saying that art can create a world.

I think of Volume Seven as a beacon, drawing people to an appreciation of Rinpoche as an artist. Many people who know him as a Buddhist teacher have no idea that he was involved in the arts at all. Yet this is a singularly important part of his contribution to dharma in America . The Art of Calligraphy is a wonderful showcase for his calligraphy, and Dharma Art brings together his ideas on art, artistic process, and aesthetics, but there is as yet no publication or other vehicle that fully captures and conveys the visual power and full expanse of his artistry. A coffee table book with full-color reproductions of his design work and dharma art installations would be a great step, along with quality color reproductions of his photographs. The completion of a film based on the principles of the Milarepa Film Project would also convey much more about Chögyam the artist, and further exhibits of his work and dharma art installations would both inform and provoke us to look further, not just at his work but more deeply into our own perception. For it is not purely to honor Rinpoche or to enshrine him as a great artist that additional offerings are called for. Rather, his work was intended to challenge us, to cheer us up, and to enliven our path through the world. It would be a great gift to many to see that his work is fully documented, so that it can be passed on, appreciated, and practiced in the future. In this regard, the work of his students is also extremely important. Those who studied closely with him need to be encouraged to discuss and show in greater depth what they learned from him and how they are now applying this in their own work.

In a sense, Chögyam Trungpa's work as an artist was among the most revolutionary parts of his teaching. He truly believed that art can change the world. In this belief, he was focused not on the content of art but on how art can alter perception. If you can change the way people see the world, he taught, then they will change the world they live in. In essence, this is the premise of enlightened society…

The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa, Volume 8 : Great Eastern Sun - Shambhala - Selected Writings by Chögyam Trungpa, edited by Carolyn Gimian (Shambhala Publications) Volume Eight covers matters of culture, state, and society. The two complete books reprinted here—Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior and Great Eastern Sun: The Wisdom of Shambhala—explore the vision of an ancient legendary kingdom in Central Asia that is viewed as a model for enlightened society and as the ground of wakefulness and sanity that exists as a potential within every human being. The selected writings include discussions of political consciousness, the martial arts, and the true meaning of warriorship. Two previously unpublished articles are "The Martial Arts and the Art of War," on the place of warriorship in the Buddhist teachings, and "The Seven Treasures of the Universal Monarch," a little gem describing the world of the Shambhala monarch.

Excerpt: The Concise Oxford Dictionary lists as one of the primary definitions of a statesman, a "sagacious, far-sighted, practical politician." While Chögyam Trungpa would probably not have been pleased to be called a politician, I believe that he would have been proud to be seen as a sagacious, far-sighted, and practical statesman. It is to those teachings in which he addresses himself to great matters of state, matters of culture and society, that we turn in Volume Eight. Many of these teachings fall under the broad umbrella of Shambhala vision or the Shambhala teachings, on which he focused from 1976 until his death in 1987. However, several earlier discussions of politics and political consciousness are also included here, as well as a very early and unusual article on warriorship and the martial arts.

In referring to matters of state, which is my use of the phrase, not his, the reference is to teachings that connect individual development or realization with the betterment of society as a whole. The Shambhala teachings are not nationalistic in that they do not promote the primacy of any particular nation-state. They are, instead, based on promoting the vision and the wisdom of the Kingdom of Shambhala , a society—perhaps mythical—in Central Asia , which is viewed as a model for enlightened society. The Shambhala tradition is associated with the Kalachakra Tantra, which Shakyamuni Buddha is said to have proclaimed in Shambhala. The Kingdom of Shambhala , according to some legends, ascended into a higher realm at some point in the past. Since the entire populace was enlightened, there was no further reason for the kingdom to exist on earth. However, it is said that Shambhala might reappear on the earth at a time when its wisdom is needed. Chögyam Trungpa himself often emphasized a more symbolic, psychological and spiritual interpretation of the story, saying that "there has long been a tradition that regards the Kingdom of Shambhala, not as an external place, but as the ground or root of wakefulness and sanity that exists as a potential within every human being." In both Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior and Great Eastern Sun: The Wisdom of Shambhala, his major books on the Shambhala teachings, he makes the point that it is unnecessary to deter-mine whether Shambhala actually existed. The point, he says, is to "appreciate and emulate the ideal of an enlightened society that it represents" (ibid.). In the introduction to Shambhala, Rinpoche says that his presentation of the Shambhala teachings "does not reveal any of the secrets from the Buddhist tantric tradition of Shambhala teachings, nor does it present the philosophy of the Kalacakra." Rather, he says, "this book shows how to refine one's life and how to propagate the true meaning of warriorship."

Returning to 1976, having launched the Kalapa Court and the beginning of the Shambhala era, Rinpoche, never one to stand still for long, left Boulder a few months later, early in 1977, and went into a year's retreat in Charlemont , Massachusetts . He kept in touch with what was going on in Boulder and his other centers, but he stayed out of the day-to-day business. He left his newly appointed Regent at the center of the Shambhala mandala, living in the Kalapa Court , and left his students to figure out what all this meant in his absence. While he was away, he worked on revising a commentary to the first Shambhala text he had received, he wrote another book on Shambhala principles, and he de-signed many elements of the Shambhala world, including flags, banners, and medals for exemplary service.

While in retreat, Rinpoche also asked a group of about fifty senior students to initiate Shambhala Training, a program to present the Shambhala teachings on warriorship and to introduce meditation to a large, nonsectarian audience. A few years ago, I was asked to write a short memoir about this period. These were my reminiscences of this time:

Our teacher decided to make 1977 his year of retreat, to see how we would do in his absence. While he was away on retreat, living in an old farmhouse in Charlemont, Massachusetts, and receiving frequent updates . . . he asked a group of students to initiate Shambhala Training, a secular approach to meditation designed t0 bring the Shambhala teachings—which he had begun presenting to us in 1976—on warriorship, basic goodness, and Great Eastern Sun vision to a whole

new audience. In essence, he challenged us to present what we had learned from him and from the practice of meditation in a fresh and dynamic fashion. He was also challenging us to let go of some of our Buddhist chauvinism and to reach beyond our comfortable reference points in order to help others.

At that time, a lot of Buddhist and vajrayana jargon had caught on with Rinpoche's Buddhist students. We talked about becoming bodhisattvas, developing maitri and karuna, practicing shamatha and vipashyana, experiencing mahamudra, maha ati, sampannakrama, and you-name-it Sanskritisms. If we were asked why we practiced or what Buddhism was about, a stream of foreign words often issued forth from our lips. And we were full of ourselves, sure that we were the best of the best of the new American breed of Buddhists. In some ways, we were! We were riding on the coattails of a man who cut a powerful swath through the American continent. He spoke amazing English; we mimicked and often spoke pidgin Sanskrit or fractured phrases that we didn't fully understand. He exuded brilliant confidence; we puffed up and often exuded hot air. I'm poking fun here, but I don't mean to belittle the students—rather I'm trying to clarify why it was so helpful and powerful to us for Rinpoche to introduce Shambhala Training, forcing us to speak English and to speak it from the heart.

About fifty of us living in Boulder , Colorado , were selected as potential directors for Shambhala Training. Twice a week we met to rehearse talks and discuss strategy. We were told by our fellow student-leaders to be as overwhelming as possible and t0 belt out the reasons why the Shambhala teachings would be great for everyone to embrace. We talked a lot about confidence and dignity, and dignity and confidence . . . at a fevered loud pitch. Then, after weeks of practicing, . . . we launched actual weekend programs.

Rinpoche got reports. They were not good. After a few months of floundering and bluster, punctuated by occasional brilliance and true heart, we received a letter from retreat. To my mind, it still contains some of the best advice on teaching—and on being—that I've ever received. He punctured us and left us soft and vulnerable, ready to hear the authentic Shambhala teachings. In my experience, this letter marked the real beginning of the Shambhala training. He wrote:

... People have been told to create Shambhala Training but in-stead they are just groping about and mimicking Shambhala

Training.... As we know, the term "confidence" doesn't mean anything if we can't be sane in accordance with the buddhist doctrine. . . . We should pause for a moment and think about how fortunate we are to have the opportunity to bring about the Great Eastern Sun vision. We shouldn't constantly worry about our presentation of Shambhala Training. First we should appreciate how fortunate we ourselves are; then we will have something to say, some message to proclaim to the world... .

Shambhala Training can become a very powerful landmark in history only if we have a message to proclaim—and so far we don't have any message. All that we have said is that we are going to be secular rather than spiritual. This is a weak point which will cause us to cultivate jerks, artificial people who don't want to sit, who instead want to proclaim their personalities and say that they have ultimate confidence because their ambition to be powerful and sybaritic people is accommodated by their pseudo-spirituality. ... Buddhism going secular is the best possible news for those people who just want to indulge themselves... .

We have to develop wholesomeness in the Shambhala Training administration, and our people have to be genuine—otherwise there will be no possibility of creating an enlightened society. Genuine means being without deception and without aggression. Genuine individuals do not build up their own personality cults, but are purely dedicated to their own mutual sanity.'

Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior was Chögyam Trungpa's first major presentation of the Shambhala teachings to the reading public and the only book on the Shambhala path issued during his lifetime. Shambhala was published in 1984. For some time, Rinpoche postponed the editing and publication of a book of his own teachings on Shambhala. He was asked to write such a book many times, beginning in 1978, but he said that he wanted to wait until one of his students had written an introductory book on the Shambhala path for the general public. There were several attempts, but none succeeded, and finally, in 1982, I asked Rinpoche if he would reconsider. Somewhat reluctantly he did, and I spent the next eighteen months working with him on the manuscript. Rinpoche gave me some specific guidelines for selecting and editing material for the book. He said a number of times that the approach should be "pithy," and he suggested that I review all of the Shambhala Training talks he had given, as well as a long seminar that he taught on the Shambhala teachings at Naropa Institute in the summer of 1979." In the end, the book largely was based on these materials as well as on various advanced seminars that Chögyam Trungpa offered to his senior Buddhist and Shambhala students. As the manuscript progressed, Rinpoche reviewed it a number of times, but in between our meetings he gave me a great deal of space and freedom to choose material. I remember spending an entire afternoon reviewing the final manuscript with him. I read most of it aloud to him. In general, he was pleased with the final product. However, he made some changes as well. I remember in particular that he questioned a reference to the I Ching, or Book of Changes, as an example of the heaven, earth, and man principles. He asked me, "Did I say that?" To which I replied, "No, sir, I added that example." He then told me to take it out and replace it with something else. "We can't be too eclectic," he commented.

Unlike some of his other books that follow the logic of specific seminars he taught, the structure of Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior was based on the logic of the Shambhala Training levels, as well as on the logics of the Shambhala teachings that were presented to the directors of Shambhala Training and at Kalapa Assembly. This was in keeping with the instructions that Rinpoche gave me about how to put the book together from his talks. Most of the logic of the book was developed before specific material was selected and independent of the existing material. Generally, I found that Rinpoche had already given the talks that were needed for different sections of the book, although in many cases, I combined a number of talks to make one chapter of the book.

Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior is divided into three sections. In the first, "How to Be a Warrior," Chögyam Trungpa laid out many of the themes and the principles of the Shambhala teachings, which also guided and inspired his later presentations in other contexts, such as dharma art. The contrast between Great Eastern Sun vision and setting-sun vision is a fundamental theme. The setting sun represents the de-pressed and degraded aspects of human existence, which lead to an aggressive and materialistic outlook. This is contrasted with the vision of the Great Eastern Sun, which is based on human wakefulness and the celebration of life, rather than on the fear of death that dominates the setting-sun outlook. The basis of the Shambhala view is recognizing the inherent goodness of human beings, the goodness of our experience and of the world around us. Such goodness is unconditioned and undiluted. It is like the all-pervasive light of the sun, which can be temporarily covered by clouds but never fundamentally dimmed. The way of the warrior is based on connecting with the ground of basic goodness. This is accomplished through the sitting practice of meditation, as well as by paying attention to the details of one's life, through training in mindfulness and awareness. The practice of meditation and the application of mindful delight lead to the synchronization of the warrior's body and mind, which gives rise to a relaxed confidence. A kind of joyful sadness is the warrior's constant companion. He or she recognizes that aloneness is a friend and that fear is the starting point for fearlessness. The quality of all these teachings is that they are direct, heartfelt, and authentic.

The second section of the book, "Sacredness: The Warrior's World," helps to connect the individual path of warriorship with the larger view of how to transform one's world, how to help others, and ultimately how to contribute to an enlightened society. Rinpoche speaks of magic here, by which he means the utter aliveness of ordinary perception that can connect us to the inherent sacredness of our experience. He speaks of natural hierarchy, exemplified by the four seasons, as the basis for understanding how to rule our world and how to connect with genuine leadership. The final section of the book, "Authentic Presence," which I have already touched on, gives us a view of the Shambhala lineage—in its most primordial as well as human forms—and introduces us to the universal monarch. Here, in contrast to the conventional view, the monarch is a human being so tender and stripped of pretense that it is as though he or she is utterly naked, even without skin.

As I have said, Shambhala found a wide readership. The talks on which it is based were given with such simplicity, such directness, and so much love that it would be hard to imagine they would not have reached a broad audience. Even today, almost twenty years after its publication, the book remains a classic, one that continues to inspire.

Great Eastern Sun: The Wisdom of Shambhala, published posthumously in 1999, on the cusp of the millennium, covers much of the same ground, with the addition of a playful primordial dot—or focal point of wakefulness—that pops up throughout the book, presenting the possibility of a first fresh thought at any moment. Great Eastern Sun, based almost entirely on the Level Five talks given by Trungpa Rinpoche within Shambhala Training, is organized around three fundamental themes from the Shambhala teachings: trust, renunciation, and letting go, which are inter-woven in the many chapters of the book. Trust here is trusting in oneself and also trust in the unconditional nature of goodness. Renunciation involves giving up self-centered notions of privacy and learning how to step beyond our depression. Letting go is about the principle of daring, letting go of self-deception and discovering how to invoke uplifted energy. Great Eastern Sun celebrates and invokes the sense of genuine being that underlies all experience. At the same time that it provokes us to action, it encourages us to relax, especially in this speedy world of ours, and to give ourselves a break, give ourselves time to be, without agendas. Overall, the Shambhala teachings present a view of life as sacred existence. They show Chögyam Trungpa's brilliance in joining together the biggest and the smallest moments in life: showing us how the transformation of society is related to the kitchen sink.

The articles appended in Volume Eight both echo and embellish the themes presented in these two books. "Basic Goodness" gives us the first good dot of Chögyam Trungpa's presentation of the Shambhala teachings. It is an edited version of the first public talk that he gave on Shambhala warriorship. It evokes and explains the meaning of basic goodness, and it exhorts us to pay attention to how we live each moment, so that it becomes the expression of warriorship. "Fully Human: Introduction to the Principles of Shambhala Vision" is based on the first talk of the long seminar at Naropa in the summer of 1979, given in tandem with the Vajra Regent Osel Tendzin. As mentioned above, many of these talks were edited for inclusion in Shambhala. In this article, Rinpoche gives us a detailed explanation of both Great Eastern Sun and setting-sun vision.

"The Shambhala World," the next article in Volume Eight, is a lightly edited version of a public talk given in San Francisco in 1982. Here Trungpa Rinpoche states his emphatic belief that nuclear holocaust is not going to take place. He predicts that human life will continue for at least one thousand years more and advises people that "I'm afraid that we're going to have to lead lives which are very boring." He also reiterates the concepts of basic goodness and the bravery of the warrior, and connects the meaning of enlightened society with realizing our basic goodness and applying it to help others.

Next are three articles that deal with the principles of warriorship, fear, and fearlessness. "Conquering Fear" was edited from a three-talk seminar to directors in the Shambhala Training program presented in 1979. It contains provocative material on how to work with real enemies in the world outside and also discusses the discipline of warriorship in terms of its ground, path, and fruition, and how, at every stage, the warrior is working with the interplay of fear and fearlessness, cowardice and bravery. This article was published in the Shambhala Sun magazine in 2002. Next is Chögyam Trungpa's foreword to Alexandra David-Neel's book The Superhuman Life of Gesar of Ling, which presents epic stories of the great Tibetan warrior king. Both Shambhala and Great Eastern Sun are dedicated to Gesar, who represents the ideal of fearless and gentle warriorship that can conquer the world. In his essay, Rinpoche presents the principles of warriorship that are reflected in Gesar's life. "The Martial Arts and the Art of War" is a previously unpublished article, written by Rinpoche in England in the 1960s, which emerged from the files in the Shambhala Archives while I was gathering material for The Collected Works. It connects the development of fearlessness and warriorship with overcoming ego, understanding nonviolence as the principle of the martial arts, and the application of that mentality in the Tibetan monastic discipline of debate. It is one of the earliest presentations of Trungpa Rinpoche's thinking on the place of warriorship in the Buddhist teachings.

An excerpt from another early writing, "Political Consciousness," is a translation of a fragment of a treatise on politics that Rinpoche began writing in Tibetan while on a month-long retreat in 1972. The manuscript was never completed. This excerpt shows how Chögyam Trungpa was working to connect the worldly aspect of politics with spiritual awareness and development. As he says, "If one asks what politics is, it would be correct to say that it is the ability of all reflections of political situations to arise in the mirror of discriminating awareness at once. It could be described as the ability to look joyfully in the mirror of mind with a relaxed mind free from fearful projections and doubt." "A Buddhist Approach to Politics" is an interview conducted in 1976 by the staff of the Shambhala Review of Books and Ideas, a little magazine produced for a number of years by Shambhala Publications. Here, just months before the Shambhala teachings exploded onto the scene, Rinpoche talks about the importance of taking more responsibility for what is happening in society: "People involved with a spiritual discipline have a tendency to want nothing to do with their ordinary life; they regard politics as some-thing secular and undesirable, dirty or something. So, to begin with, if a person came with a sense of responsibility to society, that would be a Buddhist approach to politics and also to the social side of life, which is the same, in a sense." Rinpoche's discussion of politics here is down to earth and practical, dealing with such questions as whether a Buddhist should vote in the presidential elections. This is followed by "Pragmatism and Practice," an interview with Chögyam Trungpa conducted on May 7, 1985 , one of the last interviews that he ever gave. Rinpoche talks about some of the issues that he worked with and thought about during a year-long retreat in 1984. During this time, he was in part concerned with how the principles of Shambhala vision could pragmatically mani fest in the various activities within the Buddhist community and more fundamentally in the world at large.

As Chögyam Trungpa looked into the future, he saw that the world was in need of tremendous help. Did he wonder: Will Buddhism have a home? Will spirituality have a home? Will sanity have a home? Might we wonder those things ourselves?

In the opening chapter of Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, he wrote: "Within our lifetime there will be great problems in the world, but let us make sure that within our lifetime no disasters happen. We can prevent them. It is up to us. We can save the world from destruction, to begin with. That is why Shambhala vision exists. It is a centuries-old idea: by serving the world, we can save it. But saving the world is not enough. We have to work to build an enlightened human society as well.”

That aspiration remains as up to date and applicable now as the moment it was first said. In his role within the Shambhala world, Chögyam Trungpa was also known as the vajra (indestructible) warrior, the Dorje Dradul. By some standards, he was an outrageous human being. He was at times unreasonable, occasionally wrathful, and always unbelievably stubborn in his adherence to promoting true wakefulness. He was, in that regard, traditional: like the Wrathful Wild Guru, Padmasambhava, who brought Buddhism to Tibet ; like the Zen Patriarch, Dharma Bodhi, who brought Buddhism to Japan . It took his "wild" energy to bring the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism into the forefront of consciousness on the American continent. It will take the efforts of many thou-sands of us to ensure that this legacy is not wasted or diluted.

From The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa one can see just how fathomless Trungpa Rinpoche's mind was and how vast was his vision. Yet he always believed that the largest truths in life, the most vast and profound insights, came down to a single point, a single breath, a single moment of sanity in the conduct of everyday life. With that in mind, it is not so difficult to take up the challenge that he left us.

Rinpoche carried the wisdom of his tradition out of Tibet . He brought with him the victory banner of the Buddhist teachings, from the high plains and mountains of his homeland. As he wrote in Great Eastern Sun:

Tibet is a lost country, at this point. The Chinese have occupied my country, and they are torturing my people. It is quite horrific.... We Tibetans were unable to avoid that situation. Nonetheless, the Tibetan wisdom has escaped. It has been brought out of Tibet . It has something to say, something to offer. It gives us dignity as Tibetans.

When Chögyam Trungpa proclaimed that wisdom in the West, he was unfurling the banner of victory on a new continent. When we our-selves proclaim that wisdom, we are planting this banner firmly in our soil. Yet simultaneously, we honor the birthplace of such profound wisdom, its roots in the Asian continent. As we shout the warrior's cry, Ki Ki So So, we help to bring the world full circle, uniting us all, East and West. For sanity is the birthright of human beings, the primordial inheritance of all. The Shambhala teachings are Trungpa Rinpoche's precious gift to this generation and to the future of the world. May they guide, inspire, and protect us. May they help us to promote enlightened society by following the sacred path of the warrior, for the benefit of all sentient beings.

Part 3

A BIOGRAPHY OF CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA

THE VENERABLE Chögyam TRUNGPA was born in the province of Kham in eastern Tibet in 1939. 'When he was just thirteen months old, Chögyam Trungpa was recognized as a major tulku, or incarnate teacher. According to Tibetan tradition, an enlightened teacher is capable, based on his or her vow of compassion, of reincarnating in human form over a succession of generations. Before dying, such a teacher may leave a letter or other clues to the whereabouts of the next incarnation. Later, students and other realized teachers look through these clues and, based on those plus a careful examination of dreams and visions, conduct searches to discover and recognize the successor. Thus, particular lines of teaching are formed, in some cases extending over many centuries. Chögyam Trungpa was the eleventh in the teaching lineage known as the Trungpa Tulkus.

Once young tulkus are recognized, they enter a period of intensive training in the theory and practice of the Buddhist teachings. Trungpa Rinpoche, after being enthroned as supreme abbot of Surmang Monastery and governor of Surmang District, began a period of training that would last eighteen years, until his departure from Tibet in 1959. As a Kagyu tulku, his training was based on the systematic practice of meditation and on refined theoretical understanding of Buddhist philosophy. One of the four great lineages of Tibet , the Kagyu is known as the practicing (or practice) lineage.

At the age of eight, Trungpa Rinpoche received ordination as a novice monk. Following this, he engaged in intensive study and practice of the traditional monastic disciplines, including traditional Tibetan poetry and monastic dance. His primary teachers were Jamgon Kongtrul of Sechen and Khenpo Gangshar—leading teachers in the Nyingma and Kagyu lineages. In 1958, at the age of eighteen, Trungpa Rinpoche completed his studies, receiving the degrees of kyorpon (doctor of divinity) and khenpo (master of studies). He also received full monastic ordination.

The late 1950s were a time of great upheaval in Tibet . As it became clear that the Chinese communists intended to take over the country by force, many people, both monastic and lay, fled the country. Trungpa Rinpoche spent many harrowing months trekking over the Himalayas (described later in his book Born in Tibet ). After narrowly escaping capture by the Chinese, he at last reached India in 1959. While in India , Trungpa Rinpoche was appointed to serve as spiritual adviser to the Young Lamas Home School in Delhi , India . He served in this capacity from 1959 to 1963.

Trungpa Rinpoche's opportunity to emigrate to the West came when he received a Spalding sponsorship to attend Oxford University . At Ox-ford he studied comparative religion, philosophy, history, and fine arts. He also studied Japanese flower arranging, receiving a degree from the Sogetsu School . While in England , Trungpa Rinpoche began to instruct Western students in the dharma, and in 1967 he founded the Samye Ling Meditation Center in Dumfriesshire , Scotland . During this period, he also published his first two books, both in English: Born in Tibet (1966) and Meditation in Action (1969).

In 1968 Trungpa Rinpoche traveled to Bhutan , where he entered into a solitary meditation retreat. While on retreat, Rinpoche received' a pivotal text for all of his teaching in the West, "The Sadhana of Mahamudra," a text that documents the spiritual degeneration of modern times and its antidote, genuine spirituality that leads to the experience of naked and luminous mind. This retreat marked a pivotal change in his approach to teaching. Soon after returning to England , he became a layperson, putting aside his monastic robes and dressing in ordinary Western attire. In 1970 he married a young Englishwoman, Diana Pybus, and together they left Scotland and moved to North America . Many of his early students and his Tibetan colleagues found these changes shocking and upsetting. However, he expressed a conviction that in order for the dharma to take root in the West, it needed to be taught free from cultural trappings and religious fascination.

During the seventies, America was in a period of political and cultural ferment. It was a time of fascination with the East. Nevertheless, almost from the moment he arrived in America , Trungpa Rinpoche drew many students to him who were seriously interested in the Buddhist teachings and the practice of meditation. However, he severely criticized the materialistic approach to spirituality that was also quite prevalent, describing it as a "spiritual supermarket." In his lectures, and in his books Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (1973) and The Myth of Freedom (1976), he pointed to the simplicity and directness of the practice of sitting meditation as the way to cut through such distortions of the spiritual journey.

During his seventeen years of teaching in North America , Trungpa Rinpoche developed a reputation as a dynamic and controversial teacher. He was a pioneer, one of the first Tibetan Buddhist teachers in North America , preceding by some years and indeed facilitating the later visits by His Holiness the Karmapa, His Holiness Khyentse Rinpoche, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and many others. In the United States , he found a spiritual kinship with many Zen masters, who were already presenting Buddhist meditation. In the very early days, he particularly connected with Suzuki Roshi, the founder of Zen Center in San Francisco . In later years he was close with Kobun Chino Roshi and Bill Kwong Roshi in Northern California; with Maezumi Roshi, the founder of the Los Angeles Zen Center; and with Eido Roshi, abbot of the New York Zendo Shoboji.

Fluent in the English language, Chögyam Trungpa was one of the first Tibetan Buddhist teachers who could speak to Western students directly, without the aid of a translator. Traveling extensively throughout North America and Europe , he gave thousands of talks and hundred of seminars. He established major centers in Vermont , Colorado , and Nova Scotia , as well as many smaller meditation and study centers in cities throughout North America and Europe . Vajradhatu was formed in 1973 as the central administrative body of this network.

In 1974 Trungpa Rinpoche founded the Naropa Institute (now Naropa University ), which became the first and only accredited Buddhist-inspired university in North America . He lectured extensively at the institute, and his book Journey without Goal (1981) is based on a course he taught there. In 1976 he established the Shambhala Training program, a series of seminars that present a nonsectarian path of spiritual warrior-ship grounded in the practice of sitting meditation. His book Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior (1984) gives an overview of the Shambhala teachings.

In 1976 Trungpa Rinpoche appointed Osel Tendzin (Thomas F. Rich) as his Vajra Regent, or dharma heir. Osel Tendzin worked closely with Trungpa Rinpoche in the administration of Vajradhatu and Shambhala Training. He taught extensively from 1976 until his death in 1990 and is the author of Buddha in the Palm of Your Hand.

Trungpa Rinpoche was also active in the field of translation. Working with Francesca Fremantle, he rendered a new translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which was published in 1975. Later he formed the Nalanda Translation Committee in order to translate texts and liturgies for his own students as well as to make important texts available publicly.

In 1979 Trungpa Rinpoche conducted a ceremony empowering his eldest son, Osel Rangdrol Mukpo, as his successor in the Shambhala lineage. At that time he gave him the title of Sawang ("Earth Lord").

Trungpa Rinpoche was also known for his interest in the arts and particularly for his insights into the relationship between contemplative discipline and the artistic process. Two books published since his death—The Art of Calligraphy (1994) and Dharma. Art (1996)—present this aspect of his work. His own artwork included calligraphy, painting, flower arranging, poetry, playwriting, and environmental installations. In addition, at the Naropa Institute he created an educational atmosphere that attracted many leading artists and poets. The exploration of the creative process in light of contemplative training continues there as a provocative dialogue. Trungpa Rinpoche also published two books of poetry: Mudra (1972) and First Thought Best Thought (1983). In 1998 a retrospective compilation of his poetry, Timely Rain, was published.

Shortly before his death, in a meeting with Samuel Bercholz, the publisher of Shambhala Publications, Chögyam Trungpa expressed his interest in publishing 108 volumes of his teachings, to be called the Dharma Ocean Series. " Dharma Ocean " is the translation of Chögyam Trungpa's

Tibetan teaching name, Chokyi Gyatso. The Dharma Ocean Series was to consist primarily of material edited to allow readers to encounter this rich array of teachings simply and directly rather than in an overly systematized or condensed form. In 1991 the first posthumous volume in the series, Crazy Wisdom, was published, and since then another seven volumes have appeared.

Trungpa Rinpoche's published books represent only a fraction of the rich legacy of his teachings. During his seventeen years of teaching in North America , he crafted the structures necessary to provide his students with thorough, systematic training in the dharma. From introductory talks and courses to advanced group retreat practices, these programs emphasized a balance of study and practice, of intellect and intuition. Trungpa by Fabrice Midal, a French biography (forthcoming in English translation under the title Chögyam Trungpa), details the many forms of training that Chögyam Trungpa developed. Since Trungpa Rinpoche's death, there have been significant changes in the training offered by the organizations he founded. However, many of the original structures remain in place, and students can pursue their interest in meditation and the Buddhist path through these many forms of training. Senior students of Trungpa Rinpoche continue to be involved in both teaching and meditation instruction in such programs.

In addition to his extensive teachings in the Buddhist tradition, Trungpa Rinpoche also placed great emphasis on the Shambhala teachings, which stress the importance of meditation in action, synchronizing mind and body, and training oneself to approach obstacles or challenges in everyday life with the courageous attitude of a warrior, without anger. The goal of creating an enlightened society is fundamental to the Shambhala teachings. According to the Shambhala approach, the realization of an enlightened society comes not purely through outer activity, such as community or political involvement, but from appreciation of the senses and the sacred dimension of day-to-day life. A second volume of these teachings, entitled Great Eastern Sun, was published in 1999.

Chögyam Trungpa died in 1987, at the age of forty-seven. By the time of his death, he was known not only as Rinpoche ("Precious Jewel") but also as Vajracharya ("Vajra Holder") and as Vidyadhara ("Wisdom Holder") for his role as a master of the vajrayana, or tantric teachings of Buddhism. As a holder of the Shambhala teachings, he had also received the titles of Dorje Dradul ("Indestructible Warrior") and Sakyong

("Earth Protector"). He is survived by his wife, Diana Judith Mukpo, and five sons. His eldest son, the Sawang Osel Rangdrol Mukpo, succeeds him as the spiritual head of Vajradhatu. Acknowledging the importance of the Shambhala teachings to his father's work, the Sawang changed the name of the umbrella organization to Shambhala, with Vajradhatu remaining one of its major divisions. In 1995 the Sawang received the Shambhala title of Sakyong like his father before him and was also confirmed as an incarnation of the great ecumenical teacher Mipham Rinpoche.

Trungpa Rinpoche is widely acknowledged as a pivotal figure in introducing the buddhadharma to the Western world. He joined his great appreciation for Western culture with his deep understanding of his own tradition. This led to a revolutionary approach to teaching the dharma, in which the most ancient and profound teachings were presented in a thoroughly contemporary way. Trungpa Rinpoche was known for his fearless proclamation of the dharma: free from hesitation, true to the purity of the tradition, and utterly fresh. May these teachings take root and flourish for the benefit of all sentient beings.

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Buddhisms

Review Essays of Academic, Professional & Technical Books in the Humanities & Sciences

Part 2

TRUNGPA

Part 3

A BIOGRAPHY OF CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA

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Wordtrade.com Buddhisms

Review Essays of Academic, Professional & Technical Books in the Humanities & Sciences

Part 2

TRUNGPA

Part 3

A BIOGRAPHY OF CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA

Special Contents

Wordtrade.com
Buddhisms