TRUNGPA

That winter was thick, frozen and bleak.  We spent long nights at the main house huddled around the woodstove, drinking sake and singing Scottish sea shanties.  The students would trade broken-hearted stories of a teacher whose passing, nine months prior, was still fresh in their hearts.  A man of outrageous warmth and brilliance, Trungpa, Rinpoche shot through their lives like a meteor; there without warning, then gone too soon.  Afraid to leave the fire, and brave the cold walk home, we’d sit till the early hours, forestalling the inevitable with deeper incursions into the heart.  When the sake finally transmuted loneliness into aloneness, and only solitude seemed appropriate, we’d wrap up and venture out past still shadowed deer, into the frozen beds of cabins silhouetted against blue-lit moonscape.

There was a picture of him holding a calligraphy brush on my dresser.  I would light a stick of incense and place it before the picture with a perfunctory wish for goodness to descend on the world. That would be followed by a more immediate yearning to meet his mind through his teaching.  Then I would have a drink of what would be ice cold sake in his honor. Cheers!

———–

The first night I dreamt of him he appeared as a mountaineer named Phil Hillary. I came across him on a narrow Himalayan mountain ridge that descended on both sides into steep valleys.  He wore a dark green flannel Trilby hat with a feather in its band and lederhosen suspenders.  The expanse of the Himalayas opened behind him.  An off-panel personage introduced us and said, “He’ll show you the way”.  He tilted his head and looking above horn rimmed glasses, smiled.  His eyes, like the eyes in the pictures I had seen, were dark, empty and seemingly endless.

———-

Joan was curled on her couch on twelfth street.  She let out a groan, looking up from a Village Voice.  I was cooking.  As it was a New York apartment, the stove was about three feet away from the living room. It was April fourth, 1987. “A famous Lama was just cremated in Vermont.  They can’t let the poor guy rest.  They’re complaining that he drank and slept around. What the hell do they want?  Its Buddhism.  They don’t have saints.  They have people.  Why is our culture scared of real people?”  I was intrigued.  I had been reading Dharma Bums and Chuang Tsu and wanted to meet people who dared to be real.  I wanted to travel the world and meet people no one would ever know, or have ever heard of, but lived their lives for themselves without apology.  People who knew that “finding oneself” was a noun, that seekers need not find, and that sitting still, alone on the floor, was a very good way to travel.

Throwing down the magazine, she lit a cigarette.  Dinner’s ready, I reminded her, indicating the smoke.  Ignoring me, she said, “Allen wrote a nice piece on him.  You should read it.” Allen Ginsberg, the de facto poet laureate of a generation, lived on our block.  We used to see him having brunch at Odessa with William Burrows, Iggy Pop or any number of young men looking into his great grey beard for confirmation of their burgeoning talents.  In public, Allen often spoke of his teacher.  In one such story, he mentioned that on retreat he would write lines in his notebook during meditation.  He felt sitting opened him to a new level of writing.   At one point, Trungpa had asked him to put the notebook away.  Who knows what treasures were denied world literature, but letting go of those potentially great lines opened his heart, mind and poetry to something he hadn’t seen before.  That simple sacrifice opened a new level of creativity.

My nighttime day job was cooking at a burger joint in Greenwich Village. They had a club downstairs where I managed comedy evenings a few times a week.  I was lucky to meet many up and coming would be, wanna be, used to be stars, reiterating brilliant jokes on their way to private bowling lanes in Jersey mansions.  Or, Malibu. Or, wherever. In a world where truth is suffering, I yearned for something real.

———

I ended up in the kitchen of a retreat center in Colorado, with the bravest, most open group of people I had ever known. It was a magical time.  A time of sadness and delight. A time of endless sorrow and great joy.  I understood, in time, that sadness and joy were not opposites, but both sides of one point.  Nowness, he called it.  In nowness, we are complete with a full range of present experience–not needing to avoid, grab or define anything.  Nowness is without occupation, other than full participation in the moment.  In this way, these moments connect us to a life beyond the limitations of judgment and speculation. It was maddening to think that a vibrant, awake and present world lay just beyond the glass ceiling of self-importance. I could see it, but not contact it.

So, I dedicated myself to the work of understanding. I learned more about this man who loved authenticity above all.  I read the books that opened my mind like the vast winter sky, inspired me like the endless summer sun and ignited my soul like forest fires that encircled the community each fall.  He was inseparable from the environment.  And, walking on the land at Rocky Mountain Dharma Center, I came in contact with his presence.  He was the mountains, the steams, the sky, of this community that slowly pulled itself together in his wake.  It is said that when a great guru dies, his spirit rises and invites blessings to descend from the sky.  Blessings like sparks from bonfires rising to meet the endless stars as we’d search each other’s shadowed faces until an older student told us stores of the teacher and brought him down to life among us.  More than stories, this was transmitted experience. We were there together with this great, harrowing, exasperating and brilliant man.  They would effortlessly morph into his peculiar speech, which was part Tibetan, Indian and Oxford educated.  His voice was extremely high pitched, filtered through constrained vocal chords due to paralysis from a car accident.  The students would imitate his singing, in that shrieking improbable voice, completely off-key and unabashed.  He had no embarrassment.  So, we learned to have no embarrassment.

He was crippled, overweight, nearsighted, and unafraid. He was open to anyone, anywhere at all times of the day and would flirt with his world openly and without apology. The left half his body was paralyzed when he missed a turn and drove into a joke shop. At that point, he was wearing monk’s robes as a Lama in Scotland, but otherwise living a very secular life. His contemporary monks and colleagues urged him to see this as a wake up call and reconsider his actions. So, he did just that. He removed his robes.

I wanted to be with this man, but his time was gone. I yearned for a teacher. Even as I immersed myself in his mind mandala, all of his teachings, and indeed Tantric teachings in general, bespoke the need for a real living teacher. I had found my teacher, and he was telling me to find a teacher.  A few months later, I met Trungpa’s son, Osel Rangdrol Mukpo, then referred to as the Sawang, or Earth Lord,who had yet to change his name to Sakyong Mipham.  He had a powerful grace, humbleness and presence.  I knew he had the stillness to become a reference for my spinning. I became his student, without hesitation.

———–

I had a dream. I was at a large table in the dining room of a well appointed home. Beyond an arch, the rest of the house sat in darkness from which here was laughter and music and people talking. I couldn’t see them. I just sat there and eventually stood up and wandered toward the arch. A man came in and asked me to sit back down and wait. It seemed I waited for ages. Just sitting there as everyone had fun in the rooms above. Then I turned and Trungpa, Rinpoche was sitting beside me, sans the mountain Trilby. He tilted toward me and looked above his glasses. “This is the transmission”, he said. And his eyes seemed to be endless pools of black, blacker than black and as deep as an ocean. I awoke and lay in darkness in my cabin.

———–

Later that month, I got a call from the Sawang’s personal service, inviting me to cook for him on a month long retreat. I accepted, again without hesitation. Afterwards, I was amazed to find that there was only he, myself and one other guest. I was the primary attendant. I spent a lot of time in the kitchen.

During that time, my mind moved beyond itself, losing its nowness and looking for attainment, satisfaction, solace. I became immersed in the indignity of cleaning, washing, sweeping. I had visions of what time with the guru would be, but it turned out to be time with my own mind instead. And that mind was decidedly unhappy.  Time that might have been with the teacher was blocked by my mind. There is a great cognitive dissonance between what we think a thing will be and what it is. A teacher shows us what is.

I would feel cut off and dejected. Maybe this wasn’t my teacher, after all.  I fell inside myself, just as I had at the comedy club, thinking that truth was someplace else.

So, I had Trungpa’s books to curl up to in my cabin at night.  I was taken by the fact that his surname was a Tibetan lineage name that meant “one who serves”.  I read about him as though he were an action hero: his daring escape from Tibet, his trials coming to America and building a community.  His wife, Diana, had written that he was depressed after leaving the British Isles, because he hadn’t yet created his community. He was meant to teach and to serve.  Yet, even after he found that community and created a great world around him, that sadness remained.  There was still much to teach. There was still the world to serve.

And then I understood.  This was my opportunity to be part of that noble lineage, a lineage of those who served. And, who better to serve than this man, who had dedicated himself to shaping his father’s tremendous vision into a practical reality?

That night he called me into his room before he slept.  We sat talking about Alexander the Great.  He asked me questions, as though I was the teacher.  He wanted to know how people of my social background felt about leaders, kings and loyalty.  I told him we were skeptical.   I went on further about my theories on social needs and structures, gleaned mostly from what other people said.  I wanted to be well-regarded by him, of course. So, I was trying to impress him. At some point, I realized that he was just sitting there, in silence.  I looked up to him. He turned and looked right into me.  His eyes had that endless black depth that seemed to invite passage to the universe. I don’t know if it was a family thing, or a guru thing, but it shut me right up. I sat there and the silence seemed to ring through the room.

Then he smiled and said, “How about a big breakfast of eggs, sausage and greens tomorrow?”  Of course, I said.  And then he nodded in that way of dismissing me for the night.  I bowed deeply and left.

Back in the kitchen, I prepared his table and the things I needed for the morning.  Then, I turned to the shrine, to offer my closing chants for the day.  On the shrine was a picture of his father, looking straight out at me.  Reflexively, I stood at attention.  In that moment, I was connected to nowness, and to the lineage of those who serve.

 

April 4, 2015