1. Encounter with Hippie America

This person called Mr. Mukpo here is a very ordinary person. He has simply escaped out of Tibet because of the Chinese communist suppression. He is looking for possible ways to relate with the world outside of that Tibetan world and trying to share with people how he feels about his own practice, and his own feelings about what he has studied, what he has learned. That’s simply what we’re doing right here.1

—CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA

1. Encounter with Hippie America

Chögyam Trungpa meets the hippie generation

In March 1970, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche moved to the United States after seven years’ residence in England.2 The hippie movement was in full swing. An entire generation had made its mark with its distinctive lifestyle, spirit of spontaneity, and rejection of the Establishment. Young people were questioning and protesting their elders’ way of life. The result was a unique moment in Western culture. Inspired by writers of the Beat Generation, such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs, the hippies ridiculed narrow-minded middle-class conformity and advocated the use of “mind-expanding” drugs such as marijuana and LSD as keys to freedom. The hippie lifestyle varied from “back to the land” communes or communal city “pads” to nomadic wanderings across the United States. Many were “flower children” who engaged in antiwar demonstrations under the sign of peace and love. Hippies were involved in a variety of experimental practices ranging from psychedelics and free love to art and mysticism, all in a spirit of highly undisciplined curiosity. Among the spiritually inclined, Hindu chanting, yoga, and Zen became popular as counterculture alternatives to conventional religious teachings and practices.

No matter how naive these young people were in their desire for a world of “peace and love,” their open-mindedness—and even their confusion—created a fertile ground for the arrival of Buddhism. It was in just this context that Rinpoche (Chögyam Trungpa’s honorific title, meaning “precious jewel” in Tibetan) succeeded in setting up one of the first-ever communities of practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism in the West, which is still among the most important ones today. His achievements were prodigious: he introduced the Buddhist tradition in all its depth and trained one of his Western followers to become his successor and regent; founded a university (Naropa Institute, now called Naropa University), schools for children, and a program of secular education (Shambhala Training); started a new tradition of contemplative psychology (Maitri Space Awareness) and a theater school (Mudra Space Awareness); and published many books and collections of poetry as well as creating artworks as a calligrapher and photographer.

But all of this is not purely the work of one isolated individual; it is rather the result of a meeting between a man and a generation, whose deepest aspirations he was able to embody. In entering into direct contact with the hippie movement, Chögyam Trungpa responded to the quest for authenticity and freedom that the hippies had expressed in such a confused way.

As early as 1970, Chögyam Trungpa was speaking the same language as the young; he dressed in the same casual attire as they, and partook of the alcohol and drugs they favored. He ate the same food and slept in houses with them, sometimes on a bare floor. Chögyam Trungpa did not want to be seen as a distant master to be placed on a pedestal, but rather as someone with whom it was possible to have a frank, direct relationship. Moreover, at the time, Tibetan Buddhism was practically unknown in the West, and so it made sense to abandon the exotic trappings of a lama and meet people on their own ground.

True communication beyond hypocrisy

Diana Pybus Mukpo, whom Chögyam Trungpa had just married in Scotland,3 recalls an encounter that illustrates her husband’s manner at the time. They had not been in the States for very long when, one day, a young American hippie dressed as an East Indian came to their house. He went upstairs, saw Chögyam Trungpa, and asked, “I’ve come a long way to see the guru. Where is he? I need to see him!” Chögyam Trungpa replied that he didn’t know and that the young man must have been given the wrong address. The American went back downstairs, disappointed. Diana advised him to go back up and take a second look.

To be sure, it was hard to imagine that this man, then aged thirtyone, wearing jeans and sometimes a rather loud cowboy shirt left unbuttoned at the top, was a guru. He even smoked and drank whiskey. His very appearance upset conventional ideas of what constituted a spiritual master.

In his early years in the United States, Chögyam Trungpa thus presented himself very simply. He met people in the most direct manner possible. Being an honest person, he did not hide the fact that he was not bound by ordinary conventions, whether they were what Westerners typically expected of him or the conventions acquired during his upbringing. As a young tülku (incarnate lama) in Tibet, he had been waited on by servants and had learned to sit still on an elevated throne while his visitors treated him with the respect due to his rank. Westerners had a very narrow vision of how the wisdom of Oriental sages was supposed to present itself. The commonly held opinion was, and still is, that wisdom manifests itself as disembodied calm in every circumstance.

But nothing could be farther from the true wisdom that Chögyam Trungpa taught and displayed. According to him, wisdom derives from a “complete experience”4—no matter what that experience may be.5 The purpose of the spiritual path is not, as young people then imagined, to attain to some ethereal existence in which the passions of life are replaced with a superior detachment, but is instead a way of being fully human: “Spirituality, from a superficial point of view, is based on the idea of making things harmonious. But somehow . . . that approach does not apply. The idea is not so much to make things harmonious and less active, but to relate with what is happening, with whatever struggles and upheavals are going on—trying to survive, to earn more dollars, get more food, more room, a roof over our heads, and so on.”6

Before moving to the United States, Chögyam Trungpa had been teaching in England, but without attracting more than a few serious students; few, it seems, were able to appreciate what he had to offer. People expected him to behave like the stereotypical “Oriental sage,” and he found this horribly hypocritical. Their desire for him to play a role implied their avoidance of any real contact with what he was saying. He described the period in England as “the first time I had been the object of that fascination which is noncommunicative and nonrelating, being seen as an example of a species rather than as an individual: ‘Let’s go see the lamas at Oxford.’”7 Throughout his life, Chögyam Trungpa refused to conform to common social clichés.

In India and Tibet, generations of practitioners had dedicated their lives to perpetuating what the Buddha taught. In the West, should such efforts result in their spiritual heir becoming an exotic figure invited to perform for a few exclusive circles of “right-thinking” people? Was it for this that the Buddha taught? In Chögyam Trungpa’s mind, the answer was clearly no.

Chögyam Trungpa could have had many disciples in England, been greatly respected, and led a comfortable life, as some of his fellow exiles did. But that was not what he wanted. His aspiration was to introduce the Buddha’s teachings in all their authenticity, holding back nothing of what he himself had learned. For this, he was ready to give up everything. He was incapable of deception. He thus decided to play down his religious status so as to be able to communicate directly with the people he met. He thus entered the everyday lives of his students. As one early student, Chuck Lief, recalls, when Chögyam Trungpa stayed at his home in Boston, he washed the dishes and helped with the household chores.

For anyone who knows the formality and ceremony that surround many Tibetan masters, this is rather surprising. Chögyam Trungpa had sacrificed his thrones, servants, and all the ceremony that traditionally surrounds a master. When he realized that these aspects of his culture were meaningless in his new American context, he dropped them.

Buddhist teachings insist on the importance of total renunciation. Such abandonment is a precondition of freedom. Chögyam Trungpa did not simply teach this basic precept; he was one of its most striking exemplars. He cast off his culture, his Tibetan background and habits, in order to touch people’s hearts more easily.

In his early years in the United States, one major activity in addition to his teaching of seminars consisted in entering into direct contact with all those who wanted to see him. It was an intense round of interviews, dinners, parties, and encounters. At the time, Chögyam Trungpa used to stop people in the street and ask them if they had heard of meditation or Buddhism. If they asked him questions, he would answer at once, offer them meditation instruction, and give them a copy of his book Meditation in Action, which he often carried with him.

He kept abreast of the country’s political and social life and questioned all sorts of people with great curiosity. He paid close attention to everyone’s life and asked his students to correct his English. He became their friend.

A challenge to inauthenticity

During that period, while Chögyam Trungpa displayed an extraordinary openness to those who wanted to meet him and study with him, he was implacable when confronted with arrogance and hypocrisy. One day, he was invited to a gala reception with several VIPs in attendance.8 There, he met an art collector who owned a large body of Tibetan work, from which Trungpa wanted to borrow for an exhibition he was planning. The collector came over to Chögyam Trungpa and said in an offhand way: “So, how is life treating you?” Chögyam Trungpa ignored him and went rapidly around the room before returning to where he had been standing. He looked the collector straight in the eye and said, “Life doesn’t treat me, I treat her, and I’d say that I treat her quite well.” And he left the room. Chögyam Trungpa refused to corrupt his vision, even if this meant alienating certain intellectuals and wealthy people who might have helped him.

On another occasion, in late 1970, he was invited to give a lecture on Tibetan art and iconography at the prestigious Asia Society in New York. Some of his students told him that this was a good opportunity for him to get to know some wealthy people who were at least interested in the culture of Tibet, even if they were not drawn to its religion. Many invitations were sent out. At the appointed time, the hall filled with smart, welloff, middle-aged New Yorkers, all apparently curious to find out what this brilliant young Buddhist master, who spoke such excellent English, would have to say about this exotic art form. The time for the lecture arrived, but Rinpoche was not there. Time passed. The audience grew restless, and people began to walk out.

Downstairs, Chögyam Trungpa, who had arrived on time, was seated in his car. He asked the student who had come with him to drive around the block. The exodus upstairs continued until Rinpoche finally made his appearance, all smiles, over an hour late. He sat down and started to talk about the practice of meditation, without mentioning the announced topic. An irritated member of the audience in the front row loudly opened his program to demonstrate his annoyance. People continued to leave. Finally, when there was just a smattering of people left in the hall (most of whom were his students), Rinpoche smiled and said, “Well, yes, some of you here may well be interested in Tibetan art and iconography, and in what the images mean. But I can assure you that this is pointless without practicing meditation. If your aim is just to collect antiques, then you will probably become one yourself.”

Whatever the circumstances, Chögyam Trungpa was unyielding. He refused to flatter people. He never set out to deceive, and he promised nothing. True dharma cannot be presented by wrapping it up in cultural exoticism.

He never hesitated to tell the truth, even if this meant provoking the audience. At a talk in San Francisco in the fall of 1970, he began by saying: “It’s a pity you came here. You’re so aggressive.”

According to Jerry Granelli, who was in charge of organizing many of Chögyam Trungpa’s early visits to the West Coast, as soon as the audience for a lecture had taken their seats, Jerry would go and hide the box office takings in his car. He knew that some of the audience would be furious and demand a refund. Chögyam Trungpa would often arrive very late or speak only for a few minutes, as at the Dharma Art Festival lecture he gave in 1974, for which the audience of over fifteen hundred had paid five dollars each. People wanted answers, but Chögyam Trungpa refused to cater to their expectations. His purpose was to unravel the tangle of beliefs in which they had ensnared themselves. He thus exposed as purely artificial the hidden foundation on which most people’s experience is based.

When teaching, instead of reassuring those present, he often warned them: “Be careful; if you start practicing, there’s no going back.” He presented the spiritual journey as no pleasant stroll, but rather a painful process of exposure: “The Buddhist path is ruthless, absolutely ruthless, almost to the point of being uncompassionate. What we could say is that we are not looking for pleasure. The journey is not geared for finding pleasure; it’s not a pleasure trip.”9

His desire to communicate freely and intensely and his efforts to break through hypocrisy are two sides of the same coin, because hypocrisy makes any real heart-to-heart relationship impossible. During the seventeen years he taught in the United States, and regardless of the changing forms his teachings took, Chögyam Trungpa never hesitated to take risks or overturn convention if this could help people to understand themselves. He thus allowed them to experience his world directly and completely. He did not present himself in a polished way; he was willing to be shocking, incredible, strange, unexpected, or disturbing—for such was the nature of the teachings with which he was entrusted.

But though some people were put off, many were attracted to him, and the more Chögyam Trungpa came across as irascible, the more they were won over by the open, direct contact they had with him and the more eager they were to study with him and learn to develop the dignity he had unveiled within them.

2. His Following Increases

Chögyam Trungpa’s Meditation in Action, first published in London in 1969, was at the time one of the few books about the practice of Buddhist meditation available in the West. It had rapidly become a work of reference for anyone wanting to study Buddhism. In it, Chögyam Trungpa presents a surprising approach to “spirituality.” The way of the Buddha is described with disarming simplicity. As he explains: “As far as the teaching is concerned, it is always open; so open in fact, so ordinary and so simple, that it is contained within the character of that particular person [who seeks to awaken]. He may be habitually drunk, or habitually violent, but that character is his potentiality.”10 Chögyam Trungpa does not present the spiritual path in terms of the acquisition of some precise, external wisdom, but as the capacity to face our true selves as directly as possible, leaving aside social or moral conventions.

Tail of the Tiger

The first place where Chögyam Trungpa lived in the United States was a 400-acre farm in Vermont, found by four of his students who had met him at Samye Ling, the center he had set up in Scotland. They moved to the farm in March 1970 to prepare for his coming. With Chögyam Trungpa’s blessing they named the place Tail of the Tiger, after an oracle drawn from the I Ching: The Book of Changes. Chögyam Trungpa himself arrived in May of 1970.

Tania Leontov, who had studied with him in Britain and taken the Buddhist name Kesang Tönma, was then his secretary. She was an American and knew lots of people in New York, whom she invited to Tail of the Tiger. In July, Chögyam Trungpa gave his first seminar at Tail. His manner was extremely mild and humble. Chuck Lief first met him at this time and remembers how gracious he was. He was even rather shy, surprised and pleased to see so many unfamiliar faces that had come to meet him.

After a few months, about twenty permanent residents were living at Tail of the Tiger. Almost a thousand visitors had been there, attended seminars, received instruction in meditation, gone into retreat, or shared the community life there. The atmosphere that prevailed at Tail of the Tiger was a cross between a hippie community and a Buddhist monastery and practice center, even if, at the time, the first element was still dominant.

Colorado and the lack of a private life

After his stay in Vermont, a tour in California, and visits to several American cities, Chögyam Trungpa went to Colorado in the early fall of 1970. He was delighted by the little house his students had chosen for him in the mountains. In December, he moved to another house, in Four Mile Canyon near Boulder.

He had been invited to Boulder by several people at the University of Colorado, including Karl Usow, who had written to him in England about it. There were other offers, but Diana Mukpo remembers that her husband accepted this invitation because he liked the mountains pictured on the postcard. They reminded him of Tibet.

In Rinpoche’s house, people came and went and sometimes even moved in. One day, he and Diana quarreled over whether people should be required to knock on their bedroom door before entering. Visitors who had nowhere else to go would stay in the house and sleep wherever they could, sometimes just outside the room where Chögyam Trungpa and his wife slept. Chögyam Trungpa had no private life. At Tail of the Tiger, things went so far that occasionally someone would even follow him into the bathroom and sit down on the floor beside him to carry on asking him questions.

In December 1970, some of his students decided to settle together in Boulder in a house that Chögyam Trungpa called Anitya Bhavan, “House of Impermanence.” His first seminar in Colorado was held there, but neighbors complained so much about the noise that they had to finish the program in Rinpoche’s house. (A series of talks beginning at this time and concluding in the spring of 1971 was to become the basis for the book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, published in 1973.) In September 1971, Karma Dzong—a center for meditation and Buddhist studies—was founded at 1111 Pearl Street.

Rocky Mountain Dharma Center

In 1971, a decision was made to buy a large piece of land in order to found a rural residential center. After an initial search, the site the students showed to Chögyam Trungpa greatly appealed to him. The contract was signed on September 16, and the site was named Rocky Mountain Dharma Center (RMDC).

A group of hippies living in a community in Boulder, known as the Pygmies, became Rinpoche’s disciples very soon after meeting him. They adopted the motto “We’re bodhisattvas and we live on East Arapahoe.” (Bodhisattva is a Sanskrit term for an enlightened being whose life is dedicated to the benefit of others.) Despite an early heavy snow, at Chögyam Trungpa’s invitation the Pygmies moved to RMDC on September 20, to live on the land. Many of them built their own houses there. The meditation room was the sitting room of one of the houses. When it was time to meditate, they simply covered the television with a piece of cloth. To earn a living, the Pygmies made buttons from deer antlers that they found on the land. They also made looms to spin cloth. In 1971, at least a dozen people were living at RMDC.

A rapid expansion

Just after the purchase of Rocky Mountain Dharma Center, the Buddhist community was given another property. A couple, Roger and Louise Randolph, presented Chögyam Trungpa with some land in the mountains of southern Colorado. They wanted this site to be preserved and not disfigured with buildings. It was called Dorje Kyung Dzong (Vajra Garuda Fortress). Small huts were constructed there for individual retreats.

At Jackson Hole in Wyoming, another group of followers took over a hotel, the Snow Lion Inn.11 From 1972 to 1974, when the hotel was closed during the off season, Chögyam Trungpa taught there. In 1972 he taught a seminar on Crazy Wisdom and in 1973, the first Vajradhatu Seminary was held there.

The activities of the community were thus taking various directions. Chögyam Trungpa taught constantly, conducting endless discussion groups and seminars,12 without the slightest attention to his own health or well-being. He took so little time off that he seemed to defy common sense. He appeared to be beyond the measure of a normal human being.

Study and meditation centers were set up in major cities of the United States and Canada where Chögyam Trungpa had taught: New York, Boston, and San Francisco, then shortly afterward Chicago, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Denver, Montreal, and Toronto.

People practiced little in 1970 and did more or less what they felt like. There was no format or procedure for receiving and guiding new arrivals. Chögyam Trungpa received each student individually.13 When he invited a group of Zen practitioners from the San Francisco Zen Center to organize a nyinthün (an entire day of meditation) at Tail of the Tiger, everyone was amazed by the realization that it was possible to stay sitting during an entire weekend.

In 1971, Trungpa asked that each student meditate for at least an hour a day, and that those present at Rocky Mountain Dharma Center not kill animals such as the deer they found there. Slowly, without even realizing it, his students were becoming Buddhists. By the end of 1972, the discipline was becoming more precise. As with other aspects of his work, the process was gradual. He worked with the situation and took his time. For example, one day, during a community meeting at Tail of the Tiger, someone suggested that it might be good idea to set a time limit on the evening discussions, which sometimes lasted through to the next morning. Chögyam Trungpa agreed. He did likewise when it was proposed that alcohol should be drunk only at the end of the day. On another occasion, someone suggested that the group draw up a daily schedule and allot a specific time for practice. Chögyam Trungpa always encouraged these efforts to build a genuine Buddhist community, while leaving the initiative to his students. But sometimes he went further and surprised everyone. One day, someone asked if they should limit the amount of time they could listen to music. Chögyam Trungpa replied: “Just one evening a week!”

3. Teaching Buddhism: From a Seminar on The Jewel Ornament of Liberation to “Work, Sex, and Money”

The first seminar Chögyam Trungpa gave after arriving in the United States lasted one week. It was a commentary on a text by Gampopa, one of the great masters of the past, entitled The Jewel Ornament of Liberation—one of the classic texts used by masters to guide beginners on the Buddhist path. Such texts are known as lamrim, the Tibetan term for a group of texts that offer a full presentation of the different steps on the spiritual path.

Chögyam Trungpa gave twice-daily talks that sometimes lasted as long as three hours. Teachings flowed from him like water from a fountain. What is striking is how different the teaching style was from the one he would adopt a few weeks later. During this brief period, Trungpa adhered closely to the Tibetan practice of offering many teachings but few instructions for concrete practice. In the Tibetan tradition, teaching usually consists of presenting a text, then explaining it line by line. In general, a basic work is used, such as The Jewel Ornament of Liberation by Gampopa, or The Great Perfection by Paltrül Rinpoche, or one of the lamrim gathered by Tsongkhapa. Such teaching, which dwells principally on the existence of suffering (the Buddha’s “first noble truth”) and the need to develop compassion, is addressed to all levels of understanding. It is thus assured that the teaching is appropriate to the situation.

But soon Chögyam Trungpa began to teach far more freely. A few months later, in Boston, he presented a program entitled “Work, Sex, and Money,” which marked a profound change in approach compared with the earlier seminar on Gampopa. Now he no longer made explicit references to Buddhist doctrine14 but instead tried to deal directly with the most burning issues of the day. His concern was to show that the Buddha’s teachings were not aimed at a particular sort of person at a particular time, but at all of us, here and now. He had discovered his voice, characterized by a relaxed, free tone, plenty of humor, and a deep desire to share his own experiences. Instead of simply repeating acquired knowledge, he directly communicated his own state of being. He had an extraordinary capacity to address an audience and answer people’s questions directly, in such a way that a genuine encounter took place. His teaching was an extremely powerful evocation of everybody’s experiences. Chögyam Trungpa was so clear and accurate that he was like a hook that caught his students’ hearts.

Several influences explain the revolution he was to bring about, which would leave an indelible mark on the way Buddhism is taught in the West, even while his own style remained inimitable. First, one of his masters, Khenpo Gangshar, taught him to compose poems and speeches spontaneously. This apprenticeship offset the more scholarly nature of the education he had received. Chögyam Trungpa was also profoundly interested in the seminars given in the Theravada school, the Buddhism of Southeast Asia. There, monks give teachings on various subjects in return for the food they receive. Chögyam Trungpa was struck by the way his spiritual friend the Zen meditation master Shunryu Suzuki gave seminars in a free, spontaneous way. Finally, his education in Oxford from 1963 to 1966 provided him with an example of teaching methods that are extremely different from those used in Tibet.

It is difficult to determine which of these various influences was most important in the development of the distinctly personal style that Chögyam Trungpa now adopted. His simplicity and closeness to his students were striking for the period, even more so than the content of the teachings themselves. People felt the warmth he had for them all and were deeply affected. For the first time in their lives, they discovered what being loved really meant. Chögyam Trungpa manifested a love that, without asking anything in return, recognizes and welcomes the person we are deep down. It was the force of this love that allowed him to break through everything that makes genuine encounters impossible. He identified these obstacles as “spiritual materialism.” This notion has become so closely bound with his teaching that the two are often identified as one. We must now try to set it in its context.

4. Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

The retreat in Bhutan and the realization of the universality of spiritual materialism

A retreat that Chögyam Trungpa took in Bhutan in 1968 was a decisive moment in his life. For years, in Tibet, India, and then Britain, he had experienced intense frustration at the widespread corruption of true spirituality and at his own inability to reveal Buddhism in all its authenticity.

This is the darkest hour of the dark ages. Disease, famine, and warfare are raging like the fierce north wind. The Buddha’s teaching has waned in strength. The various schools of the sangha are fighting amongst themselves with sectarian bitterness;15 and although the Buddha’s teaching was perfectly expounded and there have been many reliable teachings since then from other great gurus, yet they pursue intellectual speculations. The sacred mantra has strayed into Pön [Bön], and 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. On the whole, no one acts according to the highest code of discipline, meditation, and wisdom. The jewel-like teaching of insight is fading day by day. The Buddha’s teaching is used merely for political purposes and to draw people together socially. As a result, the blessings of spiritual energy are being lost. Even those with great devotion are beginning to lose heart. If the buddhas of the three times and the great teachers were to comment, they would surely express their disappointment.16

Chögyam Trungpa’s attempts to confront this distressing situation can be seen throughout his work. At the beginning of his retreat, everything seemed ordinary. But Chögyam Trungpa felt increasingly frustrated because he was searching for spiritual inspiration, and nothing seemed to be happening. He had no idea what to do to arouse energy. Then suddenly, one night, he experienced a profound spiritual inspiration and started writing The Sadhana of Mahamudra Which Quells the Mighty Warring of the Three Lords of Materialism, whose introduction has just been quoted. This retreat altered him profoundly. He could now face up to the distressing trend of our times, which he had seen at work in both the East and the West without being able to name it or deal with it. The obstacle that had constantly stopped him from being able to present Buddhism correctly was spiritual materialism.

Many observers have, with good reason, denounced the materialism of our times. For example, the French metaphysician René Guénon, in The Crisis of the Modern World (1927), stated that in our day everyone’s preoccupation has turned toward the material.17 In his definition, to be materialistic was to be consciously centered on the material world and related preoccupations: “Modern civilization is truly what might be termed a quantitative civilization, which is another way of saying that it is a material civilization,” Guénon wrote. “If one wants to be further convinced of this truth, then it is sufficient to examine the immense importance the world of economics has in the existence of both peoples and individuals: industry, commerce, finances; it would seem that they alone matter, which confirms my earlier point that the sole social distinction that remains is based on material wealth.”18

Chögyam Trungpa knew that it was necessary to root out materialism in its more subtle and dangerous forms than those based purely on material comfort.

The Three Lords of Materialism

In his book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, published in 1973, Chögyam Trungpa distinguishes three aspects of materialism, called the Three Lords of Materialism. We are constantly being deceived by the Lord of Form, the Lord of Speech, and the Lord of Mind. These three figures are metaphors for our relationship with the world.

The Lord of Form corresponds to all our efforts to gain comfort and security. It involves “manipulating physical surroundings so as to shield ourselves from the irritations of the raw, rugged, unpredictable aspects of life. Push-button elevators, prepackaged meat, air conditioning, flush toilets, private funerals, retirement programs, mass production, weather satellites, bulldozers, fluorescent lighting, nine-to-five jobs, television—all are attempts to create a manageable, safe, predictable, pleasurable world.”19 Such efforts are expressed in the constant pursuit of wealth. But extreme asceticism is also a manifestation of this aspect of materialism: you can deprive yourself of many things and impose an extremely harsh lifestyle on yourself without necessarily renouncing egocentrism, and with the sole aim of acquiring greater comfort. Such materialism is based on the desire to control the world and to avoid all possible sources of irritation in our physical environment.

The Lord of Speech is the use of intellect to control our universe better. We adopt concepts as if they were levers we could use to control phenomena. We see the world only through them. They become filters that block any direct perception of reality. In order to maintain a world in which we feel secure, we seek to understand everything. With this intention, any ideology or doctrinal system can become materialistic: nationalism, communism, existentialism, Catholicism, Buddhism. All these “isms,” when seen as panaceas for our ills, become the instruments of this Lord.

But the most sophisticated Lord, the Lord of Mind, does not restrict himself to the rather flagrant maneuvers of the previous two. He perverts the spiritual desire to become more conscious and aware. Many forms of meditation and spiritual practices in general are used with the sole aim of reaching a state of pleasure or happiness, in the attempt to “live up to what we would like to be.”20 On the contrary, genuine spirituality is based on a realistic approach to oneself and to the world.

Analysis of these three Lords shows that everything can be used in the service of materialism, and that it is not so simple as “the reign of quantity,” to use Guénon’s term characterizing our degenerate age. The desire for a certain material comfort, the intellectual effort to understand the world or a spiritual experience, are not intrinsic problems. They only become problematic if what motivates us is the desire to make ourselves invulnerable and to avoid fear or insecurity. Materialism consists in thinking that our existence should be improved. We ask ourselves how we can let go of ego and open up, but “the first obstacle is the question itself: ‘How?’ If you don’t question yourself, don’t watch yourself, then you just do it.”21

The three forms of materialism derive from the effort the ego makes to reassure itself of its own existence. In Buddhism, the word ego does not have the same meaning as it does in Western psychology. It is an illusion that sets out to prove the solidity of its existence. In this sense, the ego is not a true entity, but instead an accumulation of habits and confusions, a set of hopes, fears, and dreams. Our entire relationship with the world thus passes through this filter, which checks out whether what is going on is advantageous to us or not. In such a perspective, undertaking a spiritual quest is merely the personal desire to gratify our ego, whereas it should, on the contrary, open us ever more deeply to what truly exists and provide “a way of subjugating or shedding our ego.”22

One of Buddhism’s most basic teachings shows the pointlessness of all the efforts we make to satisfy the Three Lords. As Pema Chödrön, one of Chögyam Trungpa’s students, put it: “There’s a common misunderstanding among all the human beings who have ever been born on the earth that the best way to live is to try to avoid pain and just try to get comfortable.”23 Being honest and recognizing the reality of our suffering is the only way to break with the process. The spiritual way can then turn into personal experience.

The catastrophe of our time is that it has become difficult to distinguish between authentic spirituality and materialism. The confusion between them is a sign of the times.

The persistence of spiritual materialism

Spiritual materialism is an obstacle to any authentic spiritual path: “There are numerous sidetracks which lead to a distorted, ego-centered version of spirituality; we can deceive ourselves into thinking we are developing spiritually when instead we are strengthening our egocentricity through spiritual techniques.”24

Such criticism is not aimed uniquely at the West. Many Tibetans and Westerners have presented an idyllic image of Tibet, where so many people were supposed to be following the path of enlightenment. But Chögyam Trungpa, while remaining profoundly attached to his native land, often spoke of the corruption that was rife there. In 1975, in a seminar devoted to The Sadhana of Mahamudra entitled “The Embodiment of All the Siddhas,”25 he explained: “We definitely had a lot of spiritual problems in my country. People just conducted their little spiritual business affairs: they conducted marriage ceremonies; they conducted funeral ceremonies; they conducted ceremonies for the sick; they conducted ceremonies for the unfortunate. But there was no real practice going on; it was a big racket.”26 Materialism, especially in its spiritual form, is just as present in the East as in the West.

In the United States, the situation in the 1970s was like a huge supermarket where you could go in and pick whatever captured your fancy: watered-down versions of authentic traditions, drugs, fake gurus and other assorted charlatans, a taste of Zen or Hinduism, even Tibetan Buddhism, freshly delivered. Many masters of the time, particularly those from India, followed this trend. They thus established their own territory and confirmed that of their disciples. To their followers, they promised ultimate well-being. They thus formed a mutual conspiracy that was denounced by Chögyam Trungpa. As he put it on arriving in the United States: “Spiritual interest is coming out more strongly in people now because of the character of this century; the river of materialism has overrun its banks. Not only are there endless gadgets and machines, but there is pervasive spiritual materialism under which the great traditions have become just so much milk in the marketplace. The twentieth century is the age of ego.”27

Chögyam Trungpa felt that many of the spiritual masters who had come to the United States did not offer a true discipline that would allow us to rid ourselves of our constant egocentricity. Their approach was incomplete. He even denounced those who claimed to exemplify a discipline by, for example, wearing white robes, being vegetarian, or speaking softly. All of these approaches could easily be just a means to conceal spiritual arrogance.

Chögyam Trungpa thus undertook a campaign that deeply marked the first years of his teaching. As early as the first issue of his magazine Garuda,28 which came out in 1971, he devoted an important article to this subject, entitled “Transcending Materialism.” Whatever the circumstances, he never hesitated to attack materialism. When answering a questionnaire sent to him through the mail about what he thought of the “Age of Aquarius,” he said, “I have heard this expression, but I don’t think that it has any particular significance. It would be presumptuous to predict the future, but it seems that what is happening is that this New Age will develop a height of supermaterialism and that during this time, man’s search will continue beyond that state.”29

Everywhere, he cut through the mystification he witnessed. Once, over dinner, an extremely elegant lady was foolhardy enough to ask him: “Rinpoche, my guru has taught me the practice of White Tara, but he hasn’t explained what it is. What is White Tara?” Chögyam Trungpa replied: “It’s cottage cheese.” Then, after a few moments of silence, he pointed at another dish in front of him and added: “And Green Tara is spinach.”

5. From Cynicism to Gentleness

No more “trips”

With ruthless accuracy, Chögyam Trungpa cut through everyone’s “trip.” This expression is typical of the hippie culture of the time. It suggests that we leave on a trip each time we depart from reality with a sensation of “spacing out.” The aim of his teaching, Chögyam Trungpa explained, was to shatter these trips and bring the student back face to face with reality—which can be a painful process, especially for those who mistake their trips for reality. Without any hesitation, but not without humor, Chögyam Trungpa destroyed people’s illusions. During a visit from a student who had already met several Tibetan gurus and who, following Tibetan custom, bowed down before him, Trungpa looked at the floor and asked, “Have you lost something?” On another occasion, during a lecture in New York, a student who seemed to be on drugs stood up and started asking an extremely long, intellectually convoluted, and clearly meaningless question. While the student was still speaking, Trungpa bent toward the microphone and blew a long ffff into it. Rather surprised, the student stopped. Then he took a breath and started up again. So Chögyam Trungpa interrupted him again with another even longer fffff, which, this time, finally brought the student to silence.

Chögyam Trungpa opened people’s minds. He made fun of anything that was too serious, pinpointing the precise spot where it most hurt.

In his teachings, he explained that those who think they have found a spiritual path and are on the side of truth have simply fallen into the huge trap of looking for a savior and thus fleeing their own experience: “It’s not so much that the doctrine has converted you, but that you have converted the doctrine into your own ego.”30 The aim of the teachings is for us not to learn to be “right,” but instead to be ever more open to what is.

Meditation

Confronted as we are with the rampant spiritual materialism all around us, the practice of meditation is the only weapon we possess. This practice consists in looking at who we really are, thus providing us with a naked experience of our state of mind, but without trying to reach any particular goal. Meditation is not a religious practice: “The practice of meditation is based not on how we would like things to be, but on what is.”31 Given that the characteristic of the ego is to view everything in a competitive, aggressive manner, it is starved to death by meditation, which aims at nothing.

In other words, the sole alternative to the confusion created by spiritual materialism is to face up to our own experience in the present, in what Chögyam Trungpa termed “nowness.” To achieve this, the only advice he gave was to practice regularly. He often repeated: “Everybody who is interested in any kind of pursuit of spiritual discipline should sit and meditate first.”32

Embacing the situation that he found on arriving in the United States, Chögyam Trungpa did not ask anyone to become vegetarian, take monastic vows, or adopt any particular beliefs. It was simply necessary to meditate and learn to be here, just as we are.

The second phase: open your heart

Within two years, Chögyam Trungpa had created a genuine community of practicing Buddhists, both at Tail of the Tiger and in Boulder. He had also established a close relationship with each of his students. He had learned to appreciate them. The complete trust that he had in them is one of the most striking aspects of his approach. He adapted himself to their energies, their difficulties, and their personalities. He did not set out to transform them; instead he encouraged them to develop themselves and become what they really were. During one of the seminars he regularly held in the community, he told the participants: “I am sorry to be so crude, so emotional, but I feel I would like to make love to everybody in the community, and I feel that you can understand what I’m trying to say. . . . I am putting my trust in you.”33

On June 16, 1972, Chögyam Trungpa gave a seminar entitled “Phase Two.” He remarked that the initial step of his teaching had been marked by a growing cynicism, based on the refusal to accept anything without close scrutiny. Cynicism, he explained, is a way to unmask everything that is preordained or doctrinal, everything that is imposed from the outside, such as the set of habitual mental reflexes we have developed ourselves, our own “school of thought” in which we are locked. His students were indeed ready to question everything that was explained to them and believe nothing. Together, they had put together a series of critiques on the various spiritual approaches then present in the United States so as to expose their materialism and hypocrisy.

However, too much cynicism means we turn self-destructive. So it was now time to start the second stage of implanting Buddhism in the West and thus create the possibility of establishing honest relationships among people. Mutual help was required: “we have to develop a kind of romanticism. This is equally important as the cynical approach we have been taking up till now.”34

This was hard to swallow for the hard-boiled cynics that many of Chögyam Trungpa’s students had become, and there was much debate. But he pressed his point on numerous occasions: the students had to develop more compassion. While cynicism is the means to destroy the beliefs of the ego, Chögyam Trungpa showed how compassion could also destroy ego by cutting through our arrogance. In a seminar entitled “Cynicism and Devotion,” he explained the importance of discovering the fresh continent of mystic experience, which had hitherto been a taboo subject: “Mystical experience in this case has nothing to do with astral traveling or conjuring up ritual objects in your hand or turning the ceiling into the floor. Mystical experience in this case is discovering a hidden warmth—the larger version of home.”35

Chögyam Trungpa brought about the destruction of spiritual materialism and cut through to the heart of the sardonic game that ego plays with itself in order to create “a sense of beauty, and even of love and light.”36 This deepening of his teaching inaugurated a new phase, the first in a long series of changes. Year after year, Chögyam Trungpa cast doubt on what had previously seemed to be the core of the teaching, while always finding new ways to enter the heart of the truth.

1. Chögyam Trungpa, “Speaking to the Sangha on His Birthday,” February 1979, unpublished.

2. Chögyam Trungpa arrived with his wife, Diana Pybus Mukpo, in Toronto, Canada, in January. They then had to wait a few months in Canada until they obtained visas. Chögyam Trungpa taught in Montreal before going to Barnet, Vermont, where his students had bought the property that was to become the first Kagyü Buddhist meditation center in the United States.

3. They were married on January 3, 1970. Diana Pybus was then only sixteen years old. A recent law had authorized marriage at that age in Scotland, without parental consent.

4. Transcending Madness, p. 294. Wisdom, jnana in Sanskrit and yeshe in Tibetan, is not at all a matter of no longer being troubled but is instead a relationship with “pure emotion, which is the original flash of instantaneous experience.” Journey without Goal, p. 122.

5. Chögyam Trungpa gave this description of the fundamental idea we generally have of enlightenment: “An enlightened person is supposed to be more or less an old-wise-man type: not quite like an old professor, but perhaps an old father who can supply sound advice on how to handle all of life’s problems. . . . That seems to be the current fantasy that exists in our culture concerning enlightened beings. They are old and wise, grown-up and solid.” Crazy Wisdom, p. 25.

6. Orderly Chaos, p. 16.

7. “Epilogue to the 1971 Edition” of Born in Tibet, in The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa, vol. 1 (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2003), p. 280.

8. At the Dharma Art Festival in 1974.

9. The Lion’s Roar, p. 6.

10. Meditation in Action, p. 18.

11. The Snow Lion was named after the animal that is the emblem of Tibet. It was here that in 1972 the “Crazy Wisdom” seminar was held (later published as a book with the same title), then the first Seminary presenting the three yanas in 1973, which brought together sixty people for three months.

12. To give an idea of his activities, here is an approximate list of what he taught in 1971. At Boulder he gave the talk “Dealing with Emotions,” and at Tail of the Tiger several talks were given to the community: “Community Energies,” “Crazy Wisdom,” “Negativity,” and a seminar titled “Practice of Meditation.”

At the University of Colorado in Boulder he taught a series of six courses. In Boulder, he also gave several talks: “Battle of Ego,” “Surrendering: Taking Refuge,” “The Guru Scene,” “Initiation,” “The Hard Way,” “Self-Deception,” “The Open Way,” “Sense of Humor,” “The Marriage of Wisdom and Compassion,” and “Mandala.”

In New York he taught “Awareness,” then in Boston in February, “The Six Chakras” and “The Four Karmas,” now published as Secret Beyond Thought (Halifax: Vajradhatu Publications, 1991.)

Back in Boulder, he gave a seminar “Milarepa Film Workshop,” devoted to what was to be his unfinished film about Milarepa.

In April he went into retreat with two of his older students in Wisconsin. From May 9 to 29, he toured California, where he taught in San Francisco, Berkeley, Davis, and Los Angeles as well as giving a seminar on the houseboat of the Zen popularizer Alan Watts. During this time he presented “The Nature of Mind,” “Sense of Humor,” and a longer seminar, “Meditation,” “Ambition to Learn,” “Battle of Ego,” “Meditation and Shunyata,” and “The Open Way.”

In Allenspark, Colorado, he gave a seminar “The Six Bardos.” It was the first time a residence was rented where several people could stay for the seminar.

In August and September he gave seminars at Tail of the Tiger, including: “How to Tell a Charlatan,” “Explanation of Om Ah Hum Vajra Guru Mantra,” and “Dialogue with Ego,” as well as a detailed presentation of the abhidharma and the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Between October and November he toured North America: in New York he presented “Approach to the Spiritual Path: Examining What’s Here First”; in Boston, “The Mandala of the Five Buddha Families,” “The Theory and Practice of Tibetan Buddhism,” and “The Growth of Spiritual Energy in the U.S.” ; in Montreal, “Passion and Aggression”; in Toronto, “Searching for Spirituality” and “Meditation in Action”; in Washington, “The Three Marks of Existence”; and finally he went to Chicago.

Between mid-November and mid-December he gave another seminar of nine talks, entitled “Tibetan Buddhism and American Karma,” at Karma Dzong, Boulder, before leaving for Estes Park, Colorado, and then San Francisco, where he presented “The Eightfold Path.” Finally he returned to Tail of the Tiger, where he gave three talks on the Maitri Project before giving a seminar of seven talks titled “The Six Realms of Existence.”

The diversity of the subject matter is impressive. It must be stressed that when he presented the same theme several times, each talk was totally different. For example, he gave three seminars called “The Six Realms of Existence,” one in Colorado and two in Vermont. Two have been published in Transcending Madness. The first, given at Allenspark, associates each realm with a specific bardo. In this case, the worlds are described as islands, while the bardos are culminating points that reveal each island. However, the seminar given at Tail of the Tiger emphasizes the process through which we continue to pass. In this perspective, each world contains the full cycle of bardos, which helps it reinforce and maintain its power.

13. In 1971, at Tail of the Tiger, there were just five instructors capable of presenting the practice of meditation when Rinpoche was not there, and none at all at Boulder.

14. Even if we can now recognize in it a classic Buddhist presentation of the three poisons: aggression, passion, and ignorance.

15. In reply to a student’s question, Chögyam Trungpa specified that he was not just talking about conflicts between Tibetan schools of Buddhism but among all schools: “The Theravadins were at odds with the Sarvastivadins; the Burmese were quarreling with the Sinhalese.”

16. Chögyam Trungpa, The Sadhana of Mahamudra Which Quells the Mighty Warring of the Three Lords of Materialism and Brings Realization of the Ocean of Siddhas of the Practice Lineage, trans. Nālandā Translation Committee (Halifax, 1990), p. 5. Those familiar with Tibetan Buddhism will be interested to know that this text was received by Chögyam Trungpa as a terma (“treasure”), a teaching that is concealed by a great teacher of the past for the benefit of a future generation, to be discovered by a qualified person when the time is right.

17. René Guénon, La crise du monde moderne (The Crisis of the Modern World) (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), p. 146.

18. Ibid., p. 153.

19. Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (1973), p. 6.

20. Crazy Wisdom, p. 6. The first chapter of this book is devoted to spiritual materialism. The author explains how the ego, in its spiritual quest, leads to “the transcendental unknown,” a marvelous expression used to describe a pole where we project all our desires, a “something about the world or the cosmos that corresponds to this ‘something’ that we are” but which we have never made the effort to confront honestly.

21. Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (1973), p. 49.

22. Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness (1993), p. 148.

23. Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of Loving-Kindness (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1991), p. 3.

24. Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (1973), p. 3.

25. Chögyam Trungpa, “The Embodiment of All the Siddhas,” Karmê Chöling, September 1975, unpublished.

26. Chögyam Trungpa, Sadhana of Mahamudra Sourcebook (Boulder: Vajradhatu Publications, 1979), p. 7.

27. Chögyam Trungpa, “The Common Heart,” Centre Monchanin, Montreal, December 4, 1970, unpublished.

28. Garuda is the name of a mythical animal, a sort of heavenly eagle. It symbolizes enlightenment because it hatches fully developed from its egg.

29. Chögyam Trungpa, answer to a questionnaire on The Voice of Aquarius, a television show, September 7, 1970, unpublished.

30. Chögyam Trungpa, Selected Community Talks (Boulder: Vajradhatu Publications, 1978), p. 37.

31. Chögyam Trungpa, “An Approach to Meditation,” unpublished lecture, Association for Humanistic Psychology, Washington, D.C., September 1971.

32. Chögyam Trungpa, “Buddhism and the Spiritual Energy of America,” Boston, April 6, 1976, unpublished. These were the closing words of the seminar, after the replies to questions.

33. Chögyam Trungpa, “Trust Run Wild,” July 10, 1972, in Selected Community Talks, p. 28.

34. “Crazy Wisdom” seminar, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, December 1972. See Crazy Wisdom, p. 64.

35. Chögyam Trungpa, Selected Community Talks, p. 39.

36. Crazy Wisdom, p. 65.