The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Seven (4 page)

By practicing . . . you develop the capability to bring about
the
first thought. Sometimes your so-called first thought is filled with aggression, resentment, or some other habitual pattern. At that point, you’re experiencing second thought rather than the real first thought. It’s not fresh. It’s like wearing a shirt for the second time. . . . That is like missing the first thought. First thought is fresh thought. By practicing . . . you bring about the fresh first thought.
⁸

However, it was in the realm of art that Rinpoche first used the phrase “first thought best thought.” This is a good example of how art influenced dharma in his presentations—not just the other way around. In the chapter “State of Mind,” in
Dharma Art,
Chögyam Trungpa talks about first thought as a “sense of vision taking place in one’s state of mind. Such vision comes from a state of mind that has no beginning and no end. It is very present, on the spot. . . . First thought does not come from subconscious gossip; it comes from before you think anything. In other words, there’s always the possibility of freshness.”

In many of his presentations of the Buddhist teachings, Trungpa Rinpoche was pointing out that essential nature of mind which is free from doubt, fear, or concept. It comes back over and over again in his teachings on art. He also demonstrated or evoked that state of mind through various displays. He was able to create a flower arrangement, a logo, a calligraphy, a photograph, or a jewelry design that stopped your mind in its tracks. A friend of mine once showed me a ring she was wearing that had been designed by Chögyam Trungpa. When I looked at it, it took my breath away and I burst into tears—for no reason at all. I had the same experience looking at the paintings of Monet. Isn’t this an essential quality of art—that it does not allow us to rest in the comfortable world of our subconscious gossip but evokes a fresh and immediate experience?

Gina Etra Stick, an architect and designer who worked with Trungpa Rinpoche for many years on various design projects and was instrumental in organizing the education component of the dharma art programs taught by him, commented on how first thought came into their design work together:

As with most things with the Vidyadhara, design work happened in profoundly simple ways. A design session would go something like this. We would sit down, and he would say, “We have to do a logo” for such-and-such business. We would hang there for a few minutes, space pregnant. Each of us would try to sense the essence of the particular business involved. We would try to find what I call the seed syllable: the most basic energy underlying that particular activity. In our Shambhala world, all activities, institutions, or businesses begin with the logo, the pin, the seed syllable. This is the basic utterance out of which all of the multitude of details of a business venture arise. Rinpoche would then say, “What do you think?” I might say, “Seems like red to me.” He might say, “Ya, red with purple undertones.” Or, “Actually, I was thinking green.” We would communicate that way, not saying much, to the point where our minds would meet. This was very intimate, personal, playful, and fun. The Vidyadhara loved to design. In fact, later in his life, the only two things he never delegated were the hiring of key personnel in the organization, and design.

Sometimes we would dance around with “first thought best thought” as our modus operandi or design methodology. In this design process, one relaxes to allow a gap, then relaxes more to allow the first thought, the first inspiration that arises, to express itself. The first thought or inspiration is considered the best, because it is the freshest, occurring
before
thought. This design process requires a lot of bravery to stick with your first thought and not rely on convention, concept, or something safe. This type of design often provokes an abrupt shift in the viewer as it provokes in turn their return to original or first mind. So you can see that the design process as well as the result were ways of mind training. For me, these sessions directly wired me into the Vidyadhara’s way of thinking, and his spectacular way of not thinking.
⁹

Gina Stick also sent me some comments on the work that she did with Chögyam Trungpa on the design of the
Garuda
magazines, which were annual or semiannual publications between 1971 and 1977. Shortly after his arrival in North America, Trungpa Rinpoche began putting together the first
Garuda,
which presented articles on themes connected with meditation and Buddhism, many penned by himself but by others as well. (Many of the original articles from the
Garuda
magazines are included in
The Collected Works.)
There was also news about what was happening in the Buddhist community in each issue of
Garuda.
There were five issues of
Garuda
published in total. The first two issues were large format, 8½ by 11 inches; the last three were in an unusual format of approximately 8½ by 9 inches. The
Garudas
were also uniquely designed, so that the visual presentation of the material was as important and powerful as the written content. Of the design work on
Garuda,
Gina Stick commented:

The Vidyadhara designed the
Garudas
with a methodology called “first thought, best thought.” . . . First thought, best thought refers to our first inspiration arising from original or first mind. Designs created in this way in turn provoke a glimpse of original mind in the viewer.

In contrast to traditional book design where page layouts usually adhere to a standardized format, here the idea was that each two-page spread would be new, reading provoking a sort of shock, a gap, and a new realization. These books hang together with a different kind of logic: a dharmic logic, a continuity and rhythm of change. Turning the page, you are turning the mind, back, to original mind, and forward, in nowness. Design is not decorative: it is a vehicle of practice, teaching, and awakening. So each page is fresh, with each page the reader is fresh, able to see the image and logos directly.
¹⁰

Toward the end of his life, Trungpa Rinpoche was fond of hiding behind doorways and jumping out to surprise an unsuspecting passerby with a huge exclamation that was close to the ghostly “Boo!” He was particularly delighted if he could make someone shriek or jump into the air. At times, he incorporated the “Boo! transmission” into his dharma talks, startling whole audiences into wakefulness at the most unexpected moments. The ability to bring things to one extraordinary point from the midst of silence and spaciousness was a fundamental gift that he had and which he gave to his students, in many different ways. In part, this was the teaching of first thought best thought.

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, or to scribble timidly on your notepad. 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” (ibid.).

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.

In brief, then, the principles of first thought best thought; heaven, earth, and man; and looking and seeing were ways in which Chögyam Trungpa elaborated on the application of meditative awareness to perception and more specifically to the creation of dharma art. The second part of his dharma art letter in 1974 was the definition of dharma art as the activity of nonaggression. This is a theme that runs throughout all of his presentations on art and the artistic process. He was very critical of art that arises from an aggressive or violent state of mind. In this regard, he criticized artistic eccentricity purely for its own sake and self-centered art that glorified the artist’s ego. He felt that violent art was quite dangerous. As he wrote in the chapter “Meditation” in
Dharma Art,
when you create violent artwork:

You are creating black magic, which harms people rather than helps them. . . . Creating a work of art is not a harmless thing. It always is a powerful medium. . . . It challenges people’s lives. So there are two choices: either you create black magic to turn people’s heads, or you create some kind of basic sanity. Those are the two possibilities, so you should be very, very careful.

If, on the one hand, Chögyam Trungpa advocated dharma or meditation as a prerequisite for genuine art, he also emphatically taught the importance of artfulness and the application of awareness in the conduct of one’s life. Well before he began presenting the Shambhala teachings, which introduced the ideas of cultivating self-respect, elegance, and fundamental richness in one’s environment, he introduced this idea of art in everyday life—the extension of artfulness in one’s day-to-day conduct of life and one’s moment-to-moment relationship with the world.

At the 1973 Vajradhatu Seminary for his advanced students, he gave an extraordinary talk entitled “Art in Everyday Life,” which makes up the chapter by that name in
Dharma Art.
Here he brought together both sides of the equation—art equals awareness equals art—in a discussion of how awareness practice, or vipashyana, relates both to everyday conduct and to the actual creation of art. He talked here about awareness as overcoming “fundamental, phenomenological clumsiness and crudeness.” In that sense, awareness is the antidote to aggression. Or, put another way, practicing mindfulness and awareness gives one the ability to develop a nonaggressive relationship with one’s perceptions and one’s world. In “Art in Everyday Life,” Rinpoche also discussed how art itself “in the transcendental sense” becomes “the real practice of awareness, or vipashyana.” At this level, he said, the artist becomes a bodhisattva, someone completely dedicated to helping others, “which is the highest, most supreme society person,” which can be understood here as the person engaged in society or engaged in their culture. This was the germ of the articulation of art as
do,
a
way
of awakening, not just an isolated activity.