My Life with Chögyam Trungpa Diana J. Mukpo
The Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa married Diana Judith Pybus when she was sixteen years old. The day after the wedding, a friend called to ask him who she was. Trungpa turned to her and said, "Excuse me, sweetheart, but what's your name?"
Shortly after, when Diana caught him in an embrace with another student, he told her "it was only because he had such trust in our relationship that he felt it would be possible for him to have these other relationships."
Reading about him puts one in mind of a heady mix of Win Big With People in Business and in Life, The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova and Under the Volcano. Rinproche seemed to have an enormous capacity for work and organization, but an even greater capacity for fiddling around and for heavy drink. Mukpo believes the latter probably killed him.
When drunk, Trungpa could turn quite fearsome: once, in a snit at his long-time associate Akong, he destroyed his shrine with his walking stick and then "urinated all over the top of the stairwell, after which he lay down and passed out." Diana comes off as what the AA people refer to as an enabler, telling us that getting pissed was all part of his holy prankster nature.
Despite his diabetes, he favored tomato and Spam sandwiches on french bread. When he lived in Boulder, Colorado, his blood pressure was such that he had to take medication every night. He would swallow the pill in front of his students, then writhe about, fall on the floor, roll up his eyes, and pretend to have died. Diana says it was very funny to watch.
The poet W. S. Merwin appeared at a seminar Rinproche gave in Snowmass, Colorado. The guru told everyone to get nekkid. Merwin didn't want to, and so he went back to his hotel room with his girlfriend. Rinproche's students went up and dragged them down to the ballroom where they were forced to strip. It was all in good fun, but Merwin didn't quite get the humor of it, bleeding badly from the broken glass where the students had stormed his room. There's a hell of a lot of preening going on in Dragon Thunder. The Naropa institute started out as a simple operation, but after a few years, Rinproche demanded that the students get fancy. There were butlers and ladies-in-waiting, cocktail dresses and high heels. The master and Diana spent a great deal of time flying around the country or taking vacations. Their children --- one who had a learning disability, another suffering from autism --- got passed around to others when it came time to take off for Nice or the Bahamas.
For fans of Tibetan Buddhism, there is no end of detail here on the Bodhidharma, meditation, Shambhala, tulkus, and abhishekas. But there is also too much drinking, too many scandals, and too much silk. Diana gets her claws into quite a few people on her way to the top of the dharma ladder, including her mother. Her passion for something called dressage can get tedious unless you are into horses doing a formal dance.
The most interesting parts of Dragon Thunder turn up in the first hundred pages, the details of her first meetings with Rinproche and the pain of high-class English education. In one school, they simply stuck the kids in bed at 6 P.M. That was it for the day. At another, Benenden, she was encouraged to do sports: "I managed to do an over pass and hit the teacher on the head with a lacross stick."
Once, in the midst of what one might think of as a sordid life together, Rinproche called her "a punk." She got right back at him. "I said, 'I may be a punk, but I'm not drunk.' With that, he tried to hit me, but he missed."
She won out at the end, though. He was having "severe blood-clotting problems" in the hospital. As he lay dying, "I went down to New York to attend a trade fair because I was opening a children's clothing store in Halifax.
