It was March, 1970, when Trungpa and his bride stepped off the metal bird in Canada. They spent the next six weeks obtaining U.S. visas, and finally entered this country in May.
In the mountains of Northern Vermont, an advance contingent of Trungpa's students had taken over a 500-acre farm, which they now called Tail of the Tiger. There Trungpa quickly established the first Tibetan Meditation Center on this continent. Tail of the Tiger was incorporated as a non-profit, tax-exempt church where disciples of Trungpa could meditate, study and reside.
The town clerk of the nearest village, Barnet, estimated the value of the farm and land at $350,000. Trungpa explained that the purchase price had been raised through dues and donations from the members of his church.
The construction of new buildings at Tail of the Tiger -- the name was later changed to Karme-Choling -- took six years. The Meditation Center was built almost entirely by students, one of whom estimates that a million dollars in labor costs were saved by avoiding outside contractors. Over $600,000 was spent on construction materials. That money was raised from dues, donations, and loans from students. (The practice of borrowing money from students has gone on to become a tradition in Trungpa's educational system.) Once the extent and seriousness of the project had been demonstrated, loans were also obtained from local banks.
The Center was completed in time for the December, 1976 visit to the U.S. of the sixteenth Gwalya Karmapa -- the man who'd conjured the eleventh Trungpa out of a yak-hair tent and into the lion throne of Surmang.
(In keeping with Trungpa's sense of the occasion, Karmapa was received as visiting royalty, with the maximum pomp and circumstance. He pulled up at Karme-Choling at the head of a caravan of snowmobiles containing his retinue of a dozen red-robed monks, plus personal appurtanances that included 50 singing canaries. A red carpet longer than several end-to-end football fields was unrolled to keep "His Holiness'" feet from touching the snow. Prostrate disciples lined both sides of the red carpet as the visiting holy man made his way to the Center, where he was regaled with a banquet fit for a king, in a setting of poinsettas and birds of paradise. Later, Karmapa continued on to Boulder, where the town's most impressive mansion was rented to provide him with a rest stop.)
But Trungpa's first set of students at Tail of the Tiger possessed neither the discipline of Tibet nor the decorum of Oxford, both of which he expected of them.
"You look silly," Trungpa told one student. "Get a haircut."
The student obediently did so; he also put on a suit. Today he is an executive director of Trungpa's Naropa Institute, where the administration always sports neat suits and fresh haircuts.
The brand of philosophy Trungpa dispensed at Tail of the Tiger and elsewhere was a weird blend of aristocratic decorum, monastic stringency and personal eccentricity. "Crazy wisdom" was a tradition in the Trungpa line. Depending on the time of day, it could include anything but the kitchen sink.
Trungpa soon established a name for himself on the East Coast. The poet Anne Waldman made a pilgrimage from New York to meet him in the fall of 1970. (The same week, she had been planning a trip to Cuba which fell through for financial reasons -- though Waldman later admitted she has "often thought Trungpa jinxed it.") Waldman told the guru she was exhausted by her work at the St. Marks Poetry Project. Should she give it all up?
"New York City is a holy city," Trungpa told her. "Go back to New York City and be a warrior."
Waldman, later to become an important soldier in Trungpa's American poetry army, has never forgotten the concept of spiritual warfare to which the Tibetan master introduced her in 1970. "What I like about the situation (at Naropa Institute)," she told an interviewer years later, "is everybody coming here specifically to be a warrior."
There was a search for orientation models for the construction of a pedagogy in which the values of the warrior caste stood in the foreground together with the subordination under the "leader". Japan proved to be a treasure house in this regard.
-- Karlfried Graf Dürckheim: A quarter Jew and Zen student serving the Nazi regime, by Victor & Victoria Trimondi
The idea of ongoing universal metaphysical combat is as ingrained in Trungpa's version of Tantric Buddhism as it was in Milton's vision of warring angels in Paradise Lost. It found early expression in his American teachings. His lectures of 1971-1973 overflow with images of battle, swords, crushing, cutting, decapitating ... uneasy symbolism, indeed, but apparently not totally unattractive to Trungpa's American disciples.
"In the Vajrayana (Tantric Buddhism)," he told them in one lecture, "war is regarded as an occupation. You need to learn from a master warrior." The crazy-wisdom guru, Trungpa explained, is like a "wild doctor or surgeon" -- the Great Warrior, whose function is to hack your ego into little pieces. "We do not want to trust a wild doctor or surgeon," Trungpa pointed out. "But we must."
"Cutting through" became a Trungpa touchstone. "Cutting through spiritual materialism" was his working slogan. He ridiculed his students to their faces: the wild doctor has to cut through all attachments. In a culture where a very popular song by The Crystals once carried the message "He hit me ... it felt like a kiss," it isn't totally surprising that religious students should take to the image of the wild doctor who "cuts you into pieces" and "throws darts at you." If Trungpa's description doesn't exactly make you want to bump into the crazy-wisdom guru on a dark night, then maybe you've got a lot of squeamishness to "cut through."
"Trungpa is like a doctor," Anne Waldman said in 1977. "The situation in this country is so sick, so neurotic-materialistic, spiritually materialistic, general insanity -- things are so out of hand that he is coming into a situation that needs doctoring."
Trungpa's crazy-wisdom doctor is at least a spiritual cousin of Dr. Benway, the apocalyptic junkie surgeon of William S. Burroughs. Dr. Benway enters the operating room raving and flings his scalpel into the patient from 15 paces.
Dr Benway Operates - William S Burroughs
In 1966, in the Massachusetts Supreme Court, poet Allen Ginsberg testified that Naked Lunch, the book in which Dr. Benway made his American debut, was not obscene. The book, said Ginsberg, was a serious work, treating the serious national problem of multiple addictions -- "addiction to materialistic goods and properties . . . and most of all, an addiction to power or addiction to controlling other people by having power over them ... throughout the book there are dramatic illustrations of people whose obsession or lust is for control over the minds and hearts and souls of other people."
Naked Lunch, said its creator, "treats a health problem."
Chogyam Trungpa, the wild doctor of Buddhism, was treating a national spiritual health problem in his new country. How else could you found a Shambhala Kingdom in a nation of neurotic materialists?
With a few drinks of sake under his belt, the gentle, playful "Rinpoche" became Dr. Benway.
"When in the mood to crack the whip," an ex-disciple later recalled, "the prince does so with heavy-lidded wrath, taking a minimum of shit, his retainers looking on with sneering awe. I remember a night in Vermont. It got ugly."
That fall while Rinpoche was away, after one particularly difficult week, I phoned him to ask again for his help. He was at the 1975 seminary in Snowmass, Colorado, a program that lasted three months, and wouldn't be back for at least another month. The seminary that year in Snowmass ended up being quite difficult in certain respects. Against his better judgment, Rinpoche had allowed the American poet W S. Merwin, who had spent the summer at Naropa, and his girlfriend, Dana, to attend the seminary, although they were extremely new to our community. As the Vajrayana section of the seminary approached, Bill (Merwin) and Dana remained isolated from the rest of the participants, and Rinpoche felt they weren't connecting with him or with what he was trying to teach.
On Halloween things turned ugly. There was a costume party that night, which Bill and Dana tried to duck out of. From what I heard, the situation got quite extreme. Rinpoche had suggested that rather than using costumes to disguise themselves, people should unmask and expose themselves. He told people that they should literally unmask by taking their clothes off. Everybody got naked. Rinpoche noticed that Bill and Dana weren't there. He insisted that they should come to the party too and sent students to rouse them from their room at the hotel. When they didn't answer the door, the messengers broke in through the balcony. Bill became alarmed and fearful, and he cut one of them with a jagged piece of broken glass. He and Dana were eventually brought down to the ballroom, where they were stripped of their clothing. It was pretty shocking.
A day or two later, Rinpoche told Merwin and Dana, as well as all the other participants, that they could leave the seminary or they could stay. They remained, but after the program ended, they left for good. The story filtered out of the seminary -- in fact, nobody was trying to hide what had happened. Investigating the incident actually became a class project in the poetics department at Naropa Institute a year or two later, and the story made its way into an article in Harper's magazine in 1979. Although I wasn't there when these events transpired, I was with Rinpoche in situations that were probably as extreme as that. If he felt that the elements of a situation were ripe to puncture delusion or self-deception, he never held back -- though I don't expect people to understand or accept this at face value.
-- Dragon Thunder: My Life with Chogyam Trungpa, by Diana J. Mukpo with Carolyn Rose Gimian
Trungpa did not take up permanent residence in Vermont. Instead, like an important lama making the rounds of his spiritual wards, he traveled quite a bit -- to Berkeley, where Shambhala Publications was bringing out his books, to Boulder, where his students were part of a considerable local religious ferment, and anywhere else the Buddhist free-dinner circuit took him.
On his first visit to Boulder in 1970, the nearby mountains stirred in the eleventh Trungpa's memory treasured scenes of his native land. He soon rented a house in the mountains,
When Rinpoche arrived in Colorado in the fall, his students rented a small cabin for him in the mountains above Boulder, near an old mining town called Gold Hill. It was quite spartan, almost what you would call a stone hut. There was no indoor plumbing, just an outhouse. Rinpoche hadn't lived in a place like this since he'd left Tibet more than ten years ago. People may have thought a Tibetan lama would be more comfortable in a simple mountain setting. This might have been more a reflection of his students' hippie aspirations than an accurate reading of who he was at this point. On the other hand, it was by no. means a hovel, and he told me that he enjoyed himself there. The house was on a beautiful piece of property, with a view of the Continental Divide in the distance. It was owned by a family that had spent years in the foreign service in Asia. This was their summerhouse, which they named Gunung Mas, which is Burmese, I believe.
-- Dragon Thunder: My Life with Chogyam Trungpa, by Diana J. Mukpo with Carolyn Rose Gimian
then later several buildings in town, including one that had housed the former Satchidananda Yoga Institute. In 1971, he established a formal meditation center, Karma Dzong, in a large older building downtown. Three floors of the building were eventually put to administrative use, with the fourth reserved for sitting meditation.
Working out of this building, a new corporate organization called Vajradhatu controlled a rapidly growing coast-to-coast network of "dharma centers," or Dharmadhatu. (There are now 50 such centers in American cities.)
Trungpa purchased 360 acres of land west of Fort Collins, to found the Rocky Mountain Dharma Center.
In the late 1960s a group of friends from various parts of the country met in San Francisco and (when one of them happened to find a cheap farm for rent) moved to Boulder where they evolved into a communal family in the style of the day. By the time Rinpoche arrived in the fall of 1970, the Pygmies (as they became known) were well established in the hippy-American dream: They had a garden, made and sold leather goods, dabbled in yoga and meditation, and their numbers where growing....
Soon after he arrived in Boulder, Rinpoche accepted an invitation to dinner at the Pygmy Farm. He sat on the floor with the tribe as they all held hands and chanted OM (very loudly) before dinner. Most of the Pygmies became early students and Rinpoche put their youthful communal energy to good use. When they lost their lease on the farm, he helped them look for a new home — a search that ended with the purchase of a remote mountain valley, now known as Shambhala Mountain Center.
-- The Pygmy Farm, by The Chronicles
He also bought land in Southern Colorado and in half a dozen other states. The Shambhala Kingdom, with landholdings approaching $1 million in value, was growing like Topsy.
During a 1971 visit to the Tassajara Zen retreat center south of San Francisco, Trungpa established an informal alliance with Suzuki-roshi, the West Coast's most respected Zen master. After Suzuki-roshi's death in December, 1971, many of his followers abandoned Zen practice and joined Trungpa.
Trungpa's avowed intention at the time was to establish not only a Tibetan Buddhist church but a Tibetan Buddhist culture in America. To this end, he held a conference on Tibetan dance in Boulder in 1973. Out of this developed the Mudra Theatre Group. Concurrently, the Maitri therapy project was formed, based on a 90-acre farm outside New York City.
Rinpoche was so moved by Roshi's life and example and so saddened by his death. I believe that it spurred him on to implement the plans that they had made. He pushed forward the Maitri Project, which involved starting a therapeutic community for people with mental problems. Maitri means "loving kindness" in Sanskrit. The Maitri facility opened in Elizabethtown, New York, in the fall of 1973, and moved to land in Wingdale, New York, donated by Lex and Sheila Hixon in early 1974. The Naropa Institute, based on another of their joint inspirations, was inaugurated in the summer of 1974.
-- Dragon Thunder: My Life with Chogyam Trungpa, by Diana J. Mukpo with Carolyn Rose Gimian
In 1973 Trungpa inaugurated his Vajradhatu seminary, an annual 3-month intensive retreat for selected advanced students. Seminaries since 1973 have taken place at resort centers of Tibetan-type beauty all across the northern part of the continent -- from Lake Louise to Snowmass to Land O' Lakes.
The first seminary was held in the shadow of the Grand Tetons at Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Among the eighty students Trungpa guided through the "three yanas" (hinayana, mahayana, vajrayana) was the famous poet Allen Ginsberg, already a meditation student of the master.
Freda was now free to concentrate on reestablishing the Young Lamas Home School in Dalhousie. With the Dalai Lama's permission, she put her spiritual son, Chogyam Trungpa, in charge of Spiritual Studies, and when he left, another eminent tulku, Ato Rinpoche (Dilgo Khyentse's nephew), took over. The school had about thirty pupils at any one time.
Freda, who was utterly nonsectarian in all religious paths, encouraged her pupils to stay true to their respective traditions, but she did want to introduce them to the formal studies of Geography, History, and the English language, through which, she envisioned, they would transmit the Buddha's message to the outside world. Certainly most of the young tulkus were not particularly interested in taking on such foreign subjects, and they approached their lessons in a somewhat desultory fashion. But Freda persisted.
In Dalhousie a colorful band of Westerners also encountered Freda (including the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg) as they made their way to the Young Lamas Home School to volunteer their services....
Following one Tara initiation she gave in America, Freda revealed that the Karmapa had told her she was named after an eighth-century nun in India, a Sister Palmo, who was associated with Tara and who was bestowed with exceptional caring skills. Freda had translated a text about this original Sister Palmo, which she now made available. One of the attendees read it out as a tribute to Freda:"One should imagine the form of a woman with yellow robe who lived in a hermitage, following the path of the yogi, dwelling in a forest, living a life of seclusion and meditation. Gelongma Palmo showed herself in her outer form as the bikshuni -- a fully ordained nun with an ushnisha mound on her head, like the Buddha. In her inner form she manifested as Tara, green in color, removing obstacles and hindrances (to enlightenment). Thinking of Gelongma Palmo in this form, we should recollect the very beautiful initiation of the Green Mother, which we experienced this morning."
The references and allusions were obvious. Freda clearly identified with the eight-century nun, and she wanted others to see her that way as well.
On her last trip to the United States, exhausted, she managed to find time for a solitary two-week meditation retreat at Mount Shasta. Eyewitnesses reported that she emerged quite radiant. The retreat coincided with her tenth anniversary as a nun, after which she was regaled with a large party, complete with cake, candles, and musicians. Allen Ginsberg and Lama Karma Thinley were among the guests.
-- The Revolutionary Life of Freda Bedi, by Vicki Mackenzie
By 1974, the eleventh Trungpa was one of the most prosperous of America's new religious leaders, with followers numbering in the thousands. The only major component missing from his American organization was a school of arts, letters and religious studies -- an institute that would not only educate but draw national attention and respect -- and even, why not, financial support -- to his burgeoning kingdom.