Exile

“In the history of Communism, Tibet was the first place where workers have rebelled against the regime. The Tibetan peasants were not all that aggravated or pissed off by their situation before the Communists; they were well off in their own way. They had lots of space for farming. Maybe they were hard up in terms of comfort and things like that, but our people are very tough. They can handle the hard winters; they appreciate the snow and the rain. They appreciate simple ways of traveling; they don’t need helicopters or motorcars to journey back and forth with. They are very strong and sturdy; they have huge lungs in order to breathe at a high altitude. We’re tough people! The peasants took pride in those things, obviously. Their faith and their security and their pride was based on some kind of trust in the teachings and in the church, which was slightly crumbling but which still remained. So for about nine months new energy was kindled, and the peasants rose up against the Communists. That was the first time in the history of Communism that such a thing took place.

After I was forced to leave my country, people from my monastery sent me a message: “Come back. We would like to establish an underground monastery.” I wrote to them, saying, “Give up. It would be suicidal. I’m going to leave India in order to do my work elsewhere.” So that was that. Hopefully they received my message; hopefully they left my country.

My journey out of Tibet, my walk across the country is described in Born in Tibet. I appreciated enormously the beauty of that country, although we saw only mountain range after mountain range after mountain range. We could not go down to the villages because there might be Communist spies there to capture anybody who was trying to escape. So we saw fantastic mountain ranges in the middle of winter, fantastic lakes on top of plateaus. There was a good deal of snow, and it was biting cold, which was very refreshing-fantastic!

I finally crossed the border into India, and took my first plane trip-in a cargo plane provided for us by the Indian army. I was excited to fly for the first time, and it was a good trip. A lot of my colleagues got sick; a few were very nauseated. But I was very interested in getting to a new world. We arrived in the refugee camp, where I spent about three months. I could talk on and on about that life, which was very interesting to me because I was having a chance to explore what it was like outside of our world.

India was very exciting to me: in Tibet we had read all about India in our books. We studied all about it, particularly about the Brahmins and the cotton cloth that they wrap around themselves. We talked about Brahministic ceremonies, and all kinds of things. It was very interesting that finally history was coming to life for me. It was good to be in India, fantastic to be in India.

Then one day I was invited to go to Europe, and I managed to do so. I traveled by ship, on what is called the Oriental Lines, or something like that. It was interesting to be with people who were mostly Occidentals. They had a fancy dancing party, and they had a race on board. In fact, they had lots of parties; every night there was entertainment of some kind, which was interesting. [Laughter] That was the first time I actually tasted English beer, which is bitter. I thought it was a terrible taste; I couldn’t imagine why people liked the stuff. [Laughter]

When we got to England, there was a certain amount of hassle with customs, but everything turned out to be okay. My stay at Oxford University was also interesting because there was a lot of chance to communicate and work with people from Christendom. They were soaked in Christianity and in Englishness to the marrow of their bones, and they were still wise, which is a very mind-blowing experience. Such dignified people! Very good people there. But at the same time, you can’t ruffle their sharp edges; if you make the wrong move, you’re afraid that they are going to freeze to death or else that they’re going to strike you dead.

At Oxford, I heard lectures on comparative religion, Christian contemplation, philosophy and psychology. I had to struggle to understand those lectures. I had to study the English language: I was constantly going to evening classes organized by the city for foreign students. I was trying to study their language at the same time that I was trying to understand those talks on philosophy, which was very difficult, very challenging. The lectures were highly specialized: they didn’t build from the basic ground of anything, particularly. They presumed that you already knew the basic ground, so they just talked about certain highlights. It was very interesting and very confusing. If I was lucky, I might be able to pick up one or two points at each lecture.

I was continuing with that situation, nevertheless, but I was looking for some way to work with potential students of Buddhism. I made contact with the London Buddhist Society, which is an elderly organization more concerned with its form than with its function as Buddhists. Quite a lovable setup! Then I was invited to visit a group of people who had a community in Scotland. They asked me to teach and to give meditation instruction. It was very nice there, a fantastic place! Rolling hills, somewhat damp and cold, but beautiful. It was acceptable. I spent a long time with them, commuting back and forth between Oxford and Scotland. Finally they asked me to take over the trusteeship of their place, and offered their place as up to me to work with. The whole environment there was completely alien, completely untapped as far as I was concerned. But at the same time, there was some kind of potential for enlightenment in that world. It was very strange, a mixture of sweet and sour.

I stayed there and worked there for several years; I said goodbye to my friends and tutors in Oxford. Great people there! But I was glad to leave Oxford for a while. When I visited Oxford again, it looked much better than it had for the very reason that I didn’t have to live there. The situation in Scotland turned out to be somewhat stagnant and stuffy: there was no room for expansion except for my once-a-month visits to the Buddhist Society, which was filled with old ladies and old gentlemen. They weren’t interested in discussion, and the longest they could sit was twenty minutes. They thought that they were very heroic if they could sit for twenty minutes. We wouldn’t be able to mention anything about nyinthüns to them [laughter]; they’d completely freak out. From their point of view, being good Buddhists was like being good Anglicans-the Church of England. That problem still continues, up to the present.

At some point, I planned to make a visit to India. I thought it would be appropriate to check it out again, so to speak. I also wanted to visit His Holiness Karmapa at Rumtek. I was also invited by the queen of Bhutan, Ashi Kesang, to visit her country. She was very gracious, and also somewhat frustrated that she couldn’t speak proper Tibetan. She was hoping that her English was much better than her Tibetan, so that I could teach her in English about Buddhist practice. I tried to do so, but she was a rather lazy student and didn’t want to sit too long. But she had good intentions. She is now the royal mother of the king of Bhutan.

I took my retreat at Taktsang, which is outside of Paro, the second capital of Bhutan. Taktsang is the place where Padmasambhava meditated and manifested as Dorje Trolö. Being at Taktsang was very ordinary at first. Nothing happened; it looked just like any other mountain range. It was not particularly impressive at all, at the beginning. I didn’t get any sudden feedback, any sudden jerk at all. It was very basic and very ordinary. It was simply another part of Bhutan. Since we were guests of the queen, our needs were provided for by the local people. They brought us eggs and firewood and meat as part of their tax payment; they were very happy to give their tax payment to a holy lama. They liked to fulfill their function that way rather than give it to the administration. They were very kind and very nice, and we were provided with servants and with everything we needed.

The first few days were rather disappointing. “What is this place?” I wondered. “It’s supposed to be great; what’s happening here? Maybe this is the wrong place; maybe there is another Taktsang somewhere else, the real Taktsang.” But as I spent more time in that area-something like a week or ten days-things began to come up. The place had a very powerful nature; you had a feeling of empty-heartedness once you began to click into the atmosphere. It wasn’t a particularly full or confirming experience; you just felt very empty-hearted, as if there was nothing inside your body, as if you didn’t exist. You felt completely vacant, without feeling. As that feeling continued, you began to pick up little sharp points: the blade of the phurba, the rough edges of the vajra. You began to pick all that up. You felt that behind the whole thing there was a huge conspiracy: something was very alive...

The geko and the kunyer, the temple-keeper, asked me every morning, “Did you have a nice dream? Did you have any revelatory dreams? What do you think of this place? Did we do anything terrible to this place?” “Well,” I said, “It seems like everything is okay, thank you.”

The Kagyü tradition and the Nyingma tradition are brought together very powerfully at Taktsang; the influence of the practicing lineage is very strong there. There is a feeling at Taktsang of austerity and pride and some sense of wildness, which goes beyond the practicing lineage alone... something was coming from behind the whole thing; there was immense energy and power...

The first line of the sadhana came into my head about five days before I wrote the sadhana itself. The taking of refuge at the beginning kept coming back to my mind with a ringing sound: “Earth, water, fire and all the elements…” That passage began to come through. I decided to write it down; it took me altogether about five hours to write the whole thing. During the writing of the sadhana, I didn’t particularly have to think of the next line or what to say about the whole thing; everything just came through very simply and very naturally. I felt as if I had already memorized the whole thing. If you are in such a situation, you can’t manufacture something, but if the inspiration comes to you, you can record it.

That difference between spontaneous creation and something manufactured is connected with a little poem that I composed after the sadhana was already written. The spontaneousness was gone, but I thought that I had to say thank you. Somehow I had to write a poem for the end, so I wrote it deliberately. You can feel the difference between the rhythm and feeling of the sadhana and that of the poem, which was very deliberate. The poem is something of a platitude, but the rest of the sadhana was a spontaneous inspiration that came through me.

In the copper-mountain cave of Taktsang,
The mandala created by the guru,
Padma’s blessing entered in my heart.
I am the happy young man from Tibet!
I see the dawn of mahamudra
And awaken into true devotion:
The guru’s smiling face is ever present.
On the pregnant dakini-tigress
Takes place the crazy-wisdom dance
Of Karma Pakshi Padmakara,
Uttering the sacred sound of HUM.
His flow of thunder-energy is impressive.
The dorje and phurba are the weapons of self-liberation:
With penetrating accuracy they pierce
Through the heart of spiritual pride.
One’s faults are so skillfully exposeda
That no mask can hide the ego
And one can no longer conceal
The antidharma which pretends to be dharma.
Through all my lives may I continue
To be the messenger of dharma
And listen to the song of the king of yanas.
May I lead the life of a bodhisattva.

I feel that this poem has a lot of platitudes because it was just some personal acknowledgement of my own stuff. I think that in the future people will relate with this sadhana as a source of inspiration as well as a potential way of continuing their journey. Inspiration from that point of view means awakening yourself from the deepest of deepest confusion and chaos and self-punishment; it means being able to get into a higher level and being able to celebrate within that... ”

~ Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Historical Comments on The Sadhana of Mahamudra (from an audio recording)