The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Seven (90 page)

If loneliness is one touchstone of Rinpoche’s poetry and nature, passion is the other:

Let us dissolve in the realm of passion,

Which is feared by the theologians and lawmakers.

Pluck, pluck, pluck, pluck the wildflower.

[Off Beat]

Authentic presence in the space of our lives, Rinpoche instructs, is only achievable through a passionate contact, and a dissolving, with the raw energies of life—the brilliant, the irritating, the stuff that doesn’t conform to hope or expectation. Seamus Heaney speaks of “Big soft buffetings that come at the car sideways / And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.” In Rinpoche’s car, the buffetings are as likely to be acid as soft:

Glory be to the rain

That brought down

Concentrated pollution

On the roof of my car

In the parking lot.

[Glorious Bhagavad-Ghetto]

Pleasurable or painful, the point is to touch and be touched by what Trungpa sometimes called “the real reality”—

I appreciate the ruggedness and the beauty of the universe,

Which is sometimes cruel, developing sharp thorns of cactus,

And sometimes beautiful chrysanthemums of fantastic scent.

[Memorial in Verse]

In Trungpa’s world, loneliness and passion are intimately connected. There is a principle of transformation or transmutation by which the feeling of lack is alchemized into positive energy. This principle is embodied in the beautiful “Invoking the Rigden Father,” in which tears, heartbreak, thirst, jealousy, and intimidation are successively transformed into creativity, tenderness, courage, genuineness, and confidence. It is also especially vivid in the poem “I Miss You So Much,” in which Trungpa names his closest human connections—his favorite disciple, his son, his wife, his mistress—all of whom are absent as he composes the poem, and transforms the felt texture of his missing of each into a strength: clarity, energy, the power of speech, passion. He concludes:

The pain of the delight

Lights up the universe

Choicelessly I remain as flaming vajra.

[I Miss You So Much]

This “flaming vajra” is the essential, transmutable, and transmuting fire that animates the different guises by which Trungpa lived and manifested, infusing his passion into archetypal patterns as Teacher, Lover, Leader, Devotee, and all-purpose Sage and Cynic. All of these archetypes are summoned in his poetry. The organization of this book seeks to reflect or evoke these different energies. It is my hope that this quasi-thematic plan will assist readers, especially those with little previous acquaintance with Trungpa Rinpoche, in finding their way into the poems. Having said that, I must emphasize that the themes and the selections are entirely my own and are to a degree arbitrary, as the actual poems are living organisms that escape such editorial pigeonholing.

With minor exceptions—the initial three poems and in the final section, “Sacred Songs”—the poems in each section are arranged chronologically so the reader can gain insight into how Trungpa’s style and ways of seeing and responding evolved over time. All of the poems in the first six sections were composed in English, except for “The red flag flies above the Potala,” “Silk Road,” “Tibetan Pilgrim,” “Tibetan Lyrics,” and “RMDC, Route 1, Livermore,” which were first written in Tibetan. Most of the “Sacred Songs” were composed in Tibetan and translated by Trungpa Rinpoche with the assistance of the Nālandā Translation Committee (which he founded for the primary purpose of translating Buddhist texts and liturgy). The exceptions, composed directly in English, are “Purifying and Invoking the Four Directions,” “Invoking the Rigden Father,” and “Invoking the Mother Lineage.”

Trungpa was not a technician and his poems are roughed out, not highly polished. They offer little in the way of meter or rhyme. But they build on a sure sense of rhythm, a keen ear for sounds, and an inborn delight in words and the uses and misuses to which they can be put. Trained in the mantrayana, which employs pure sound as well as words as sacred instruments to evoke divine energies, Trungpa carried this method over into the secular realm. “Each word that we speak should be regarded as a gem. When we speak or talk, we should regard words as tangible rather than purely as sounds.” He spoke often of the need to appreciate “the vowels and the consonants.” He composed his “Sound Cycles,” which modulate from pure sounds to words and from Sanskrit to English, as training exercises for the theater group he directed in the early 1970s. Much later, toward the end of his life, with a mix of schoolmasterly discipline and impish humor, he drilled students on “proper pronounciation,” by which he meant the upper-class British accent (or his version of it) that he had acquired during his years studying at Oxford. He wrote a series of “Elocution Exercises” in the form of short verses emphasizing difficult (for Americans) sounds like the slighted British
r
in the phrase “the summer odor of raw earth.” A more potent example of the use of sounds and words in mantra-like fashion toward secular (and sexual) ends is the long, flutelike coda of the poem “When a cold knife is planted in your heart.”

Some will find Chögyam Trungpa’s verse too unpolished to qualify as great poetry. Be that as it may, I believe that attentive readers will discover that it is
real
poetry. By turns thorny and tender-hearted—like Trungpa Rinpoche himself—these poems are passionate transmutations of loneliness that invite us to taste the raw and real stuff of life:

Chögyie is going to be pain and pleasure for all of you, . . .

Here comes Chögyie,

Chögyie’s for all,

Take Chögyie as yours—

Chögyam says: Lots of love!

I’m yours!

[Aurora
7
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#
2)]

SOURCES

B
OOKS

The Art of Calligraphy: Joining Heaven & Earth
. Edited by Judith L. Lief. Boston & London: Shambhala Publications, 1994. © 1994 by Diana J. Mukpo.

Dharma Art
. Edited by Judith L. Lief. Boston & London: Shambhala Publications, 1996. © 1996 by Diana J. Mukpo.

Visual Dharma: The Buddhist Art of Tibet
. An exhibition organized by the MIT Office of Exhibitions and the Nalanda Foundation, Hayden Gallery, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 4 to May 7, 1975. Sponsored by the MIT Committee on the Visual Arts. Berkeley & London: Shambhala Publications, 1975. © 1975 by Chögyam Trungpa.

P
OETRY
S
OURCES

Following this list of major sources, each poem that appears in Volume Seven is listed with an indication of where it was published.

The Essential Chögyam Trungpa
. Edited by Carolyn Rose Gimian. Boston & London: Shambhala Publications, 1999. © 1999 By Diana J. Mukpo.

First Thought Best Thought: 108 Poems
. Edited by David I. Rome. Introduction by Allen Ginsberg. Boulder & London: Shambhala Publications, 1983. © 1983 by Diana J. Mukpo. (Abbreviated FT in references below.)

Garuda III: Dharmas without Blame
. Boulder & Berkeley: Vajradhatu, in association with Shambhala Publications, 1973. Copyright © 1973 by Diana J. Mukpo.

Garuda IV: The Foundations of Mindfulness
. Berkeley & London: Vajradhatu, in association with Shambhala Publications, 1976.

Garuda V: Transcending Hesitation
. Edited by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Associate Editor, Michael H. Kohn. Boulder: Shambhala Publications, in association with Vajradhatu, n.d.

Kalapa Ikebana Newsletter
8 (Summer/Fall 1985).

The Kalapa Journal
II (1999).

The Kalapa Journal
III (2000).

Loka: A Journal from Naropa Institute
. Edited by Rick Fields. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1975.

Loka II: A Journal from Naropa Institute
. Edited by Rick Fields. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1976, p. 155. © 1976 by Nalanda Foundation / Naropa Institute. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

Royal Songs
. Halifax: Trident Publications, 1995. © 1995 by Diana J. Mukpo. (Abbreviated RS in references below.)

The Shambhala Centre Banner
8, no. 5 (September 1994).

Timely Rain: Selected Poetry of Chögyam Trungpa
, Edited by David I. Rome. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1998. © 1972, 1983, 1998 by Diana J. Mukpo. (Abbreviated TR in references below.)

Vajradhatu Archives brochure, 1999.

Vajradhatu Sun
(April/May 1988). (Abbreviated VDH in references below.)

Warrior Songs
. Halifax: Trident Publications, 1991. © 1991 by Diana J. Mukpo. (Abbreviated WS in references below.)

Windhorse: Honouring the Tenth Anniversary of the Parinirvana of the Vidyadhara the Venerable Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
. Edited by John Castlebury. Yarmouth, Nova Scotia: Windhorse Broadside, April 1997. © 1997 by Samurai Press. (Abbreviated “Wind” in references below.)

S
ELECTED
P
OEMS

Titles in italics are first lines used as titles for untitled poems. The poetry is arranged chronologically, based on the year in which each poem was written. Abbreviations indicate the source:

FT =
First Thought Best Thought

TR =
Timely Rain

WS =
Warrior Songs

RS =
Royal Songs

Wind =
Windhorse

VDH =
Vajradhatu Sun