Untameable Beings

“In the late 1960s a group of friends from various parts of the country met in San Francisco and (when one of them happened to find a cheap farm for rent) moved to Boulder where they evolved into a communal family in the style of the day. By the time Rinpoche arrived in the fall of 1970, the Pygmies (as they became known) were well established in the hippy-American dream: They had a garden, made and sold leather goods, dabbled in yoga and meditation, and their numbers where growing. I found these rare photographs of the Pygmies in Michael McLellan’s photo album when I visited him at his home in Dedham, Massachusetts last week. [This picture was] taken at the Pygmy Farm east of Boulder in 1969 or 1970, before they met Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

Soon after he arrived in Boulder, Rinpoche accepted an invitation to dinner at the Pygmy Farm. He sat on the floor with the tribe as they all held hands and chanted OM (very loudly) before dinner. Most of the Pygmies became early students and Rinpoche put their youthful communal energy to good use. When they lost their lease on the farm, he helped them look for a new home — a search that ended with the purchase of a remote mountain valley, now known as Shambhala Mountain Center. How this land was found and settled, and how Rinpoche worked with the Pygmies to establish a practice and retreat center is a really interesting story that I’m looking forward to researching further.” ~ The Chronicles

“At the same time that my friends and I were seeking an LSD-inspired transformation of the black-and-white world of war and money to one of color and nonaggression, the twenty-nine-year-old monk Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche was sitting in a cave called Taktsang— Tiger’s Nest— high on a cliff in Bhutan with a sense of hauntedness, seeking the best way to communicate what he knew to others. The terma (hidden treasure) that he discovered at Taktsang— called The Embodiment of All the Siddhas, and later the Sadhana of Mahamudra— became a key component of his introduction to Buddhadharma to his early students in the West.

One of its “aspiration verses” reads like this: ’Living, as I do, in the dark age, I am calling upon you, because I am trapped In this prison, without refuge or protector. The age of the three poisons has dawned And the three lords of materialism have seized power.’

While the American hippies were rebelling against their version of materialism, this sadhana made it clear that it wasn’t just in the West that materialism was running rampant. The introduction to the Sadhana says: ’The Buddha’s teaching has waned in strength. . . . the yogis of tantra are losing the insight of meditation. They spend their whole time going through villages and performing little ceremonies for material gain.’

At The Embodiment of All the Siddhas seminar at Karme Chöling in September 1975, Rinpoche explained: ’What happened in Tibet did not happen in the name of deception; there were very honest and fantastic teachers, great teachers like Jamgön Kongtrül. But there were a lot of other people who were trying to make fifty cents into a dollar. It was a complex situation.’

By 1968, Rinpoche had been living in the United Kingdom for five years. Rinpoche, the eleventh incarnation of the Trungpa tülkus, was the abbot of the Surmang monasteries in Kham, in eastern Tibet. He had escaped the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959 by walking from Kham to India. Later, while living in a refugee camp in India, he received a scholarship to Oxford University in England. As part of his efforts to communicate with Westerners and teach dharma, he had studied fine arts, comparative religion, psychology, and Western culture. During that time, he sought appropriate ways to teach dharma to Westerners. Eventually he began teaching in London and later founded the Samye Ling Meditation Center in Scotland.

While living in London, Rinpoche began tutoring Jigme Singye Wangchuk— the crown prince of Bhutan, who would later become the king of Bhutan— while the prince was studying at Ascot near London. Then the Queen of Bhutan, Ashi Kesang, invited Rinpoche to visit. So Rinpoche went to India and Bhutan, accompanied by Richard Arthure (a.k.a. Kunga Dawa) and Dan Russell, two of his students. In Bhutan, Rinpoche received permission from the Queen to do a retreat at Taktsang, the cave where the great Guru Padmasambhava had meditated and manifested as Dorje Trolö, his “crazy wisdom” form. Crazy wisdom is wisdom gone wild; it has expanded beyond conventional intelligence and beyond the concepts of ordinary people.

Before going into retreat at Taktsang, two important empowerments set the stage for Rinpoche’s profound experience. The first occurred after Rinpoche and Kunga Dawa joined Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche— a major teacher in the Nyingma lineage of Tibetan Buddhism— and traveled by jeep from Bhutan to Sikkim in order to spend some time with His Holiness the sixteenth Karmapa, the head of the Karma Kagyü lineage. At Rinpoche’s request, the Karmapa performed the Karma Pakshi empowerment for them. Karma Pakshi was the second incarnation of the Karmapa. Then, after their return to Bhutan, Khyentse Rinpoche performed the second important empowerment for them— Dorje Trolö— in his bedroom. Dorje Trolö is a wrathful form of Padmasambhava.

To get to Taktsang and begin the retreat, Rinpoche, Kunga, and Dan traveled on horseback and then on foot up the steep trail to the ancient cave. While in retreat, Kunga recalls practicing the Karma Pakshi sadhana in the mornings and in the afternoons sitting in the main shrine room with Rinpoche, who would perform a Dorje Trolö feast practice. The ritual tormas and butter lamps were prepared by a Bhutanese monk and a Tibetan yogi who were students of Dilgo Khyentse. In the evening, they shared a light meal and generally stayed up late talking.

Rinpoche later said that his initial experience of this place was “extraordinarily casual.” He would just go back and forth between his room and Padmasambhava’s cave, which was a dark little dungeon that smelled of moss, rotten wood, and decaying offerings. But he felt that behind the empty feeling was a “huge conspiracy,” and he began to pick up “little sharp points: the blade of the phurba (a ritual dagger), the rough edges of the vajra (a ritual scepter).”

In the 1977 epilogue to his autobiographical Born in Tibet, Rinpoche wrote that during his retreat at Taktsang, he invoked Padmasambhava and the Kama Kagyü lineage for guidance on how to propagate the dharma in the West. He described this experience: ’For a few days nothing happened. Then there came a jolting experience of the need to develop more openness and greater energy. At the same time there arose a feeling of deep devotion to Karma Pakshi, the second Karmapa, and to Guru Rinpoche. I realized that in fact these two were one in the unified tradition of mahamudra and ati.

Filled with the vivid recognition of them and their oneness, I composed in two days the Sadhana of Mahamudra of twenty-four pages. Its purpose was to bring together the two great traditions of the Vajrayana, as well as to exorcise the materialism which seemed to pervade spiritual disciplines in the modern world. 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...

In addition to the coming together of the ultimate teaching of the two major schools of Tibetan Buddhism— the Nyingma maha ati and Kagyü mahamudra traditions— another significant event happened at Taktsang, according to Dan Russell. An Australian woman named Lorraine introduced them to Erich Fromm’s book The Sane Society. Kunga and Dan read it and discussed it with Rinpoche.

In the first chapter, titled “Are We Sane?” Fromm says that despite creating greater material wealth than any other society in the history of the human race, “we have managed to kill off millions of our population in an arrangement which we call war.” He went on to say that many of the most democratic, peaceful, and prosperous countries “show the most severe symptoms of mental disturbance.” Fromm asked whether there is something fundamentally wrong with our way of life and our aims. “Could it be . . . a drastic illustration . . . that man lives not by bread alone, and that . . . modern civilization fails to satisfy profound needs in man? If so, what are these needs?”

Kunga said that the Fromm book started the three of them talking about how to create an enlightened society. These sociopolitical discussions went on for days, and Kunga felt that they seemed to relate to the core of a new vision Rinpoche was developing. “This vision seemed in part to come out of the energy and insight that came along with the Sadhana of Mahamudra,” Kunga recalls. “This vision had an exciting revolutionary feel to it. It caught the spark of the flower-children’s revolution going on in the West and gave it root and meaning.”

This in fact was not a new idea to Rinpoche, who while still a teenager in Tibet had composed visionary texts on the legendary Kingdom of Shambhala, the Central Asian model of an enlightened society. Rinpoche knew that he would have to return to the West and present the Buddhist teachings. This retreat was a pivotal point in Rinpoche’s life, accelerating the shift from the traditional Eastern style of teaching to a more crazy wisdom approach that could transcend cultural boundaries. The following poem, the colophon to the Sadhana of Mahamudra, describes his experience in Bhutan.

“In the copper-mountain cave of Taktsang, The mandala created by the guru, Padma’s blessing entered 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 exposed 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.”[...]

In the early 1970s, Rinpoche visited Taos and gave some talks at the nearby Lama Foundation. Pema Chödrön was there and told her story to Walter Fordham for the Chronicles Project. She was teaching in a counterculture elementary school, and they had read Rinpoche’s Born in Tibet in class. Pema had the schoolchildren write letters to Rinpoche, inviting him to visit. John Baker, Rinpoche’s assistant, answered, saying that Rinpoche would be coming to the Lama Foundation to give teachings, and the children were invited to meet him.

Pema said: “I had all the children think of questions to ask. . . One child asked if Rinpoche was ever afraid of anything. Rinpoche said that his teachers had trained him to be fearless. And then he told this story about going to a monastery when he was still quite young. When they arrived, no one was there to meet them, which was unusual, and there was this enormous dog chained up outside. It was a mastiff with a big collar around its neck and it was very very vicious and Rinpoche and his attendants had to walk around this angry dog to get to the entrance to the monastery. The dog was frothing at the mouth, straining to get to them, and as they carefully made their way around the dog, the chain broke and it ran at them. Rinpoche said, ‘All my attendant monks ran away... and I ran right at the dog.’ The children were all just... their mouths were all open... Rinpoche paused for dramatic effect, and then he said, ‘And the dog was so shocked that it put its tail between its legs and ran away.’ So that was his fear story.”

~ Jim Lowrey, Taming Untameable Beings: Early Stories of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche with the Pygmies and Other Hippies

[Upon moving to the United States in 1970, Trungpa traveled around North America, gaining renown for his unique ability to present the essence of the highest Buddhist teachings in a form readily understandable to western students. During this period, he conducted thirteen Vajradhatu Seminaries, three-month residential programs at which he presented a vast body of Buddhist teachings in an atmosphere of intensive meditation practice. The seminaries also had the important function of training his students to become teachers themselves.]