SIDDHA VYADHALIPA IS CUTTING THE THROATS OF MODEL BIRDS; SAVARIPA SHOOTS AN ARROW; KUKKURIPA PATS THE BITCH'S HEAD. WHO IS TRUNGPA RINPOCHE?
The motorcar stood on the black tarmac road, its rubber feet fat with air bulging into the granite curbstones. The autumn leaves were thick upon the sidewalk, piled like overlapping, dry snake scales crunching under foot. The death of leaves-it was that time of year hated by my mother in her Celtic Wicca gloom for its feeling and smell of a muddy river bottom or the ring around a bathtub. The life had gone out of summer but I was alive, full of joy, expectant, smelling the air of adventure. A journey was commencing to what I understood as the undiscovered country of enlightenment. The car stood there waiting for me, its innards stuffed to the gills with supplies: food, clothing, Buddhist paraphernalia, alcohol, books, pens, paper dips, cooking pots, guns, swords, and pictures. In short, everything we would need -- I would need -- on my journey.
I was the Chosen One. I was going to become enlightened! Glorious sun. Son of sun. Magnificent. Stupendous. Pregnant with the hope of spring in the death of summer. I was in love with my teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and he had chosen me to be his attendant for a year of retreat in the western mountains of Massachusetts. Just me and him. Well, almost; there would also be Max; the cook. But everyone knew I was in charge. After all, I was English and Max was Chinese. Look at the facts. What more was there to say? He was a lickspit, the less perfectly formed twin of a double monster. I was already Rinpoche's butler and I had the black coat and pinstriped pants to prove it. Again the hope of enlightenment rose in me like the rising sun.. Oblivious to the sadness of the others around me, who were losing their teacher for a year, the Joseph coat fit me like a glove and I was blissful in its multicoloredness.
The plan was simple enough. One of Rinpoche's students, Jean-Claude Van Itallie, had a farmhouse in Charlemont, Massachusetts. I, Rinpoche, Max, and their respective dogs, Ganesh and Myson, would stay on retreat at the farm for about nine or ten months. I was to be Rinpoche's attendant, which meant his secretary, his dresser, his doctor, his nurse, his brother, his driver, his entertainment, his spiritual other, his bodyguard, and essentially his Enkidu or constant companion. Max would cook.
Enlightenment was certain.
I went ahead to organize the farmhouse before Rinpoche's arrival. For two weeks I worked hard cleaning and organizing the farmhouse. The last task was to put away Rinpoche's clothes, which had arrived from Karme Choling [10] that very afternoon. I took them up to his bedroom and opened the closet to hang them up. A shower of rice sprayed down upon me. I stood there stunned until it stopped. Then my startled mind grasped the answer. Mice! Mice had stashed rice up in the attic and it had fallen through the closet ceiling when I had opened the door. I turned on the closet light and checked the ceiling for cracks. It was seamless and without any cracks, so I checked the freshly painted walls. No cracks. I ran my hands over them and tapped them with my knuckle. Nothing. Not even a hairline crack in the plaster. "Someone is playing a trick on me," I thought. "Perhaps a plastic bag full of rice was taped to the ceiling so that when I opened the door rice fell out on me." I checked the door, the floor, the walls, the ceiling. I ran up to the attic. Nothing. No bag, no tape, no string, nothing. My mind began to panic. Better have a cup of tea.
I went down to the kitchen and asked myself if I was alone in the house. I made the tea, drank it, and then ran back up to the bedroom closet to double-check every theory I could think of. There was nothing. Nothing! There was just the rice on the floor. About two cupfuls. I listened. Maybe someone was hiding in the house. I checked every room. It was getting dark outside. I had only one more night alone. Rinpoche and Max would be driving down from Karme Choling the next day.
Calling up my Coldstream Guard's [11] mind, I had a glass of sake and marched bravely up to the bedroom, cleaned up the rice, and finally put away Rinpoche's clothes. I returned to the kitchen to make myself a bowl of soup and sat at the table eating it. The house started to move. It creaked and groaned in the wind. Then it whistled and moaned. I ran up to my room and took out my thirty-eight caliber revolver from the bedside table. Hurriedly I loaded it and stuck it in my belt. Since I had recently become a Buddhist I also picked up my mala beads from the small shrine table and hung them around my neck for good luck. I had more faith in my revolver at the time, however.
Going downstairs to the living room I put a record on the phonograph, a recording of the trooping of the colour from the Queen's Guard. The sergeant major shouted out orders. The troops stamped to attention. The massed bands burst into military marches. I drank sake and waited steadfast in line for the demons of the unknown to attack. I turned on every light in the house and burned incense. The music, smell, and light drowned out the moaning, moving house and its unseen world. I stood guard all night waiting for Rinpoche to come with the rising sun. When Rinpoche arrived with Max and the two dogs I could finally relax.
For the first few weeks Max and I organized our daily routine. We had breakfast at 8 a.m., lunch at noon, and supper around 7 p.m. But gradually Rinpoche started to stay up later into the evening and then get up later during the day. At first Max and I took turns staying up with him, but he insisted that we both stay awake with him. We all sat around in the same small sitting room, sometimes listening to the recording of "The Trooping of the Colour" over and over again, other times in silence. Our bedtime got later and later -- 1 a.m., 2 a.m., 3, 4, 5, 6 a.m. We were staying up all night and going to bed at dawn or later. The problem was that with this schedule neither Max nor I could do any shopping, as the stores would be closed be ore we got out of bed at 7 p.m. I explained this to Rinpoche, hoping he would allow me to go to bed early so I could shop in the morning. I was dearly hoping I would be sent to town for the shopping and then have an opportunity to find some other entertainment. Instead he said, "Okay, we'll send Max," condemning me to perpetual, timeless, inactive Colour Trooping.
During one of our long nights I brought up the mystery of the rice in the closet. He said, "Think of it as gap." What the hell was that supposed to mean? Gap? How could one think of something as gap? There was no thing in a gap. A gap was empty. I started to panic again and I asked Max about it.
"Oh," said Max, "It must have been a blessing."
"You know," he went on, "rice falling on your head is a blessing." I liked the explanation better than "gap." Nevertheless the idea of gap remained a small, glowing panic ember in my mind -- the fear of nothingness.
During one of my sleeping times, which had an equal chance of being night or day, I had a dream about the house being attacked by demons of all kinds. I told Rinpoche about this dream.
"Oh," he said. ''Why don't you sleep with your gun in your hand next time and you can shoot them."
I thought that this was a good idea. So the next afternoon when I went to bed, I loaded my .38-caliber pistol and lay down to sleep with it clenched in my fist. As I lay drifting off it suddenly occurred to me that I might wake up and accidentally shoot someone, so I took the bullets out and went to sleep with the unloaded gun in my hand. Needless to say, the demons showed up in my dream, and although I had the gun in my hand I could not find the bullets for it. In the dream the demons chased me all over the house while I desperately searched for the bullets. Rinpoche laughed for a long time after I recounted the dream to him.
The autumn days slipped by in our numbing routine, so it was some relief when Rinpoche announced that we would have some visitors. Three other students, Duncan, Jane, and Nick, would be visiting for a long weekend. Nick showed up with some LSD and we decided to take a "trip" with Rinpoche. I had never taken acid before, so I was both excited and nervous about the prospect. Max organized the food, as tripping could make you very hungry. He put a pot roast in a slow cooker that would be ready about six in the morning, although I had my doubts that I would be that hungry at daybreak. The six of us sat in the living room and Nick passed around the acid on a small piece of white cardboard. It looked like fish scales. We all took one hit. Rinpoche took what was left, about six fish scales. I drank some sake and we all chatted.
I was a bit disappointed as nothing much was happening and I went upstairs to the bathroom to sit on the toilet. Bending forward, I looked down at my feet. They melted into the floor like running jelly. Somewhat surprised, I looked at the walls. They were running with blood! I pulled up my pants and ran down the disappearing stairs and threw myself on the couch. My startled eyes were wide open and my teeth were grinding. ''Are you okay, Johnny?" Rinpoche asked gently.
I was pissed off and totally paranoid. Why the hell was he asking me that? Was he into some kind of Asian mind training? Perhaps he was an outer-space alien.
Looking across at him I hissed resentfully, "Yes, I'm fine."
"Let's play 'Trooping of the Colour Guard,'" he said.
What was the space alien saying now, I said to myself, 'Trooping of the Colour Guard. "What the fuck is that?
Somehow I went over to the phonograph and put on the record and sat back on the couch. Something shouted, "By the left, quick march,'' and a band struck up with British Grenadiers. I looked across the room at a big Chinese doll that occasionally melted into Max, who was smiling like an idiot. Duncan next to me had his head in his hands, so I went back to grinding my teeth and staring into nothingness. From a long way off I heard Rinpoche's voice. "Johnny, speak to Duncan."
What was a Duncan -- a dung can? I started to laugh. Duncan was full of shit.
There was Rinpoche again. "Johnny, speak to Duncan."
I turned my head and looked at Duncan. His head was still in his hands.
"You okay?" I grunted. Nothing. "Hey, how you doing?" I nudged him with my elbow. He moaned and sat back with his head on the couch, staring at the ceiling.
Rinpoche pushed a newspaper into my hands.
"Read to him," he said.
I managed to stop the letters from floating all over the page long enough to read to Duncan. There was a picture of an old sailing ship and I read out loud from the column about "Old Ironsides," the Constitution. During the upcoming 1976 Bicentennial celebration she was to be sailed into Boston Harbor where she would be turned around and sailed out again.
"That's it," shouted Rinpoche. "I want you to tell Duncan a story and the punch line will be 'the Great Turnaround."'
I started slowly, with the first story being about the Three Bears. Duncan listened, laughing at the story. Then I hit him with, "Then Goldilocks did the Great Turnaround."
"Oh shit," he moaned. Something clicked. I had a mission. I was relentless. I attached myself to Duncan's mind and punched out story after story with the finale "The Great Turnaround."
Duncan said, "Wow!" "Holy smoke!" "Fuck!" every time I hit him with the phrase that he had let himself be lured into. Cunningly I hunted him each time and led him into my trap of the Great Turnaround which I shouted out at the end of each presentation of images. We must have gone on for hours because the darkness outside began to turn into gray dawn.
Rinpoche motioned me to sit across the room by the window, opposite Duncan on the couch. Rinpoche started to ask people questions about their lives, prompting them on into an open display of their aspects. I was fascinated. It was like watching a group of actors putting on a self-stylized interactive play. Rinpoche, who had not asked me anything, looked across at me.
"Is it always like this?" I asked.
''Always," he answered, and he went back to playing with the play. Finally he said, "Let's eat."
I was famished. We dug into the pot roast with great relish. Duncan said to me, "Thanks for helping me. I was really stuck."
I laughed, because I thought I was the one who was stuck and Rinpoche had helped me out of it by having me interact with Duncan. As the sun rose in the blue emptiness I helped Rinpoche up the narrow stairs to the bedroom. We played the falling-down-the-stairs game. The object of this game was for him to crush me beneath his weight by falling on top of me -- the greater the height of the fall, the better. As I rolled him into bed he was still giggling.
I had decided to make a sacred object out of Rinpoche. In order to do that I would be very formal in a British way. Now Max, who was more laid-back, California-style, would greet Rinpoche in the morning by saying, "Hi, Rinpoche, I suppose you want breakfast." Max would not even get up out of his chair, but would continue to read the newspaper. This pissed the hell out of me. The more formally British I got, the more relaxed Max seemed to get.
This got to the point where I really wanted to throttle Max for not behaving correctly as I thought he should, and I told Rinpoche I was ready to knock some sense into him.
"Well, we can't do that," he said. "Let's play some tricks on him."
Max was a speed freak whenever he got up, whether it was morning or evening. He would throw on his kimono and jump into his slippers, which he kept outside his bedroom door. He would just slide his feet into the slippers and take off down the hall. One night Rinpoche sent the grateful Max off to bed early.
"You look tired, Max; better go to bed," he said.
We waited about an hour or two and then we went upstairs and securely glued Max's slippers to the floor. Rinpoche was rolling around stifling his laughter. The next morning we were up before Max, sitting in the kitchen having tea. The kitchen was right under Max's room. We heard him get up, rush out his door, and then, bang! He hit hard on the upstairs floor. Down he came to the kitchen.
"Say, Rinpoche," he exclaimed, "someone glued my slippers to the floor." I burst out laughing.
Rinpoche looked at him and said, "Perhaps it was an illusion." Then he started to chuckle.
The following week was passing in an unusually quiet and peaceful manner when Rinpoche said to me, "Johnny, can you put something that will smell in Max's room."
"You mean like scent, Sir?" I asked, not really understanding his intent.
"No, no," he looked at me like I was crazy. "Something that will stink."
We were eating fish, so I said, "Well, Sir, I could nail a piece of fish up under his bed."
"Great," he said, nodding his head.
So I put a large piece of halibut into a net bag and nailed it to the underside of Max's bed. When I opened my bedroom door the next morning the entire hallway smelled like Fulton's fish market. Max said nothing and both Rinpoche and I were quite surprised. We thought that he must have twigged it but the next day the whole house smelled of rotten fish. Max came downstairs and said, "John, I think there is a dead mouse in the wall in my room. Could you take a look? I'm going to move to another room."
That same day, believe it or not, I found a dead mouse on the lawn. As Max was moving over to the new room I went upstairs and chipped away at part of the wall and pretended to find the dead mouse.
"Here it is, Max, you were right." I showed him the dead mouse.
After Max moved everything into his new room, I nailed the dead fish to the bottom of his new bed. When Max complained about the smell again, Rinpoche said, "Your smell must be following you around."
I HAD ALWAYS BEEN a hunter. It was part of my self-sufficient trip of taking care of myself in the wilderness -- not just of the forest but of the world. Now that I was a Buddhist I reacted in horror to killing, although playing with guns for purely self-defense was something I was sure that the Buddha would have agreed with. In any case, hunting seemed more humane than a slaughterhouse.
When I was a young farmhand I had never been to a state-registered slaughterhouse. I had no more idea of the procedure than did the black-and-white cow we were taking there. The inside was stainless steel and white tile with a cement floor. An electric hoist with a hook on it ran down the center of the room. The place reeked of Pine-Sol. The smell made the atmosphere even more surrealistic. We had to coerce the cow into the room by twisting her tail. She was wide-eyed with terror. One of the fellows attached chain cuffs to her rear legs and ran the chain up the hook on the electric hoist. He pressed the red button on the wall and the hoist slowly gathered in the chain and lifted the animal. The cow's body hung in the air only inches above the floor. A pair of pliers attached to a rope was put into the cow's flaring nostrils. I was told to pull the rope so that the cow's neck was stretched tight. The other fellow took a large butcher's knife and with a swift swing he struck the cow's stretched neck. The cow's blood burst out across the room with great force. I was so shocked I let go of the rope. The head of the cow was only half severed. The cow, swinging slightly, convulsed while it hung suspended in the center of the room. Blood spewed out of her severed neck in all directions. Her mouth opened and closed in silent bellows as air rushed in and out of her exposed windpipe.
One of the fellows, enjoying my shock, took a cup and filled it with blood from the cow's streaming jugular vein. He offered the steaming cup to me. "Want some? It puts lead in your pencil." Now, thoroughly amused by my repulsion, he laughed loudly and drank the hot blood, leaving red stains on his lips. Within an hour the cow was skinned, disemboweled, cut into sections, and hung in the cooler. I decided I liked hunting-it was more romantic.
In order to be a successful hunter you had to first understand and appreciate the hunted animal. You had to know its lifestyle, its nature, its habitat. You had to actually enter its world. You had to realize that like yourself, an animal and its world are alive, and that life and death, being alive, have a quality of magic-a sacredness.
I had a holy concept of sacredness, regarding some things as holy and others as untouchable. My shrine in my Buddhist practice was like something out of House & Garden magazine -- flowers, candles and incense, and beautiful Tibetan pictures. I was on my way to becoming a real holy man.
Rinpoche could see my progress in practicing Buddhism and he started to bother me about hunting. He wanted me to take him hunting. "I want to kill something," he said. "I have never killed anything. I've just been a Buddhist monk all my life."
I would always refuse. "It would not be right for you to kill something, Sir."
Seeing Rinpoche in a slaughterhouse or even hunting didn't seem right to me. It didn't fit my concept of a holy man. The hunting queries continued for some time until one morning a flock of snowbirds gathered on the frozen lawn where I had thrown some old bread. Rinpoche picked up the .22 rifle from the kitchen corner. He walked toward the window and said, "Right, Johnny? We're going to shoot some birds."
I protested. "Sir, we've been through this a million times. Please hand me back the gun."
Rinpoche, always one to enjoy himself, began to leap around the room in his kimono singing, ''I'm going to kill. I'm going to kill." I didn't like the way it sounded at all. I took the gun from him and loaded it. But I also moved the rear sight out of line. I opened the kitchen window.
"Here you are, Sir," I said as I handed the gun to Rinpoche. "It's all ready to fire."
Rinpoche took aim at the birds and fired the single-shot rifle into the morning air. The birds flew off and not one was left dead. I threw more bread out and Rinpoche fired and again no birds were killed. We both laughed. I wasn't surprised, as he probably couldn't have hit the barn with those readjusted sights.
Rinpoche looked directly at me and said, "Oh, you're just an English gentleman, you couldn't kill a bird either." It was a challenge and I took the bait.
"Oh?" I said, accepting the wager.
So I took the gun and aimed, using only the front sights on the rifle and picturing the rear sights in my mind. I killed a bird, much to my own delight and Rinpoche's surprise. I walked out, picked up the bird's carcass, and waved it to Rinpoche and Max.
As I helped Rinpoche up the stairs to bed that night he said, "Johnny, do you know what killing that bird means?"
"No, Sir." I said.
"It means you will get married and your first child will be a boy who will be a tulku. [12] Also it will cause a slight interruption in our living situation."
I was dumbfounded. I had no idea what relationship there was between the events of that morning and my having a son. Rinpoche didn't expand on it, so I let it go and silently put him to bed.
Two days later Rinpoche and Max were in town shopping and got stuck in a heavy snowstorm. They had to stay overnight at an inn. Rinpoche called and told me with a chuckle, "We've been held up by a snowbird." A slight interruption. Interestingly, I have not killed anything since. Later I did get married and our first child was a daughter whom we called Sophie. Rinpoche announced that she was a reincarnation of G. I. Gurdjieff.
"But Gurdjieff was a man," I said.
"Yes," said Rinpoche, "that's Gurdjieff's joke on us."
SOMEHOW DURING THIS WINTER of the retreat year my handle on what I thought of as reality was becoming a little insecure. Out of seemingly nowhere I started having panic attacks, rapid heartbeat, and hyperventilation. I was sure I was going to die on the spot and I was certain there was a ghost following me around the house. So I asked Rinpoche if he had seen any ghosts in the house.
"Only two," he replied.
I almost fainted.
One night I had a dream of talking to a woman in her late thirties. She was wearing a long dress and holding my outstretched hand. She was talking about building the farmhouse where we were staying. "When were you born?" I asked.
"May, 1853," she said.
I did the math in my dreaming mind, pulled my hand away and sat up in the bed, awake, with my heart racing.
When I was physically with Rinpoche I did not have panic attacks but I was certain that he was somehow the cause of it all. It did not occur to me that Buddha's message, "Nothing whatsoever should be clung to," applied to me. My Britishness was part of "me." I had made my living by being British and if I gave that up what would I become? American, French, Italian? I mean, you can't just become nothing. But the fear was growing in me that Rinpoche was somehow nothing -- a gap. How could "I" act as nothing? Where do you start? After all, the Path of Accumulation was the Path of Accumulating, not the Path of Nothingness. The Path of Accumulation meant that I was going to get something. Here I was being invited to jump into empty nothingness. Not even invited, I was being pushed-caught between a rock and a hard place. My memories of war became a welcome and safe distraction. I felt that if I could keep these away from Rinpoche I could hang on to some semblance of sanity. Every time the world would start melting around him I would take refuge in the only thing left in my thinking mind, my memories.
Rinpoche said he would like to target shoot. I had my .38 revolver, which I had purchased to protect Rinpoche (some joke), and a .22-caliber single-shot rifle. Now I went out and purchased a Rugar .223-caliber semiautomatic with a thirty-round dip. I set up a target area in the garden that resembled World War II in miniature, with plastic soldiers, tanks, and trucks. Rinpoche, Max, and I would go out and blast them. Rinpoche called them the Mara Army. "You could be victorious over the troops of Mara, Johnny," he said. That sounded good but what the hell did it mean? I looked up Mara in the encyclopedia and it said "Mara is the Lord of the Sixth Heaven of the Desire Realm and is often depicted with a hundred arms and riding on an elephant."
Oh, I thought, mythology. I felt better. It's not real. But just in case, I started to look for an elephant rifle. Perhaps a Winchester .375 H and H Magnum might do the trick.
One evening Rinpoche and I were sitting in the kitchen. Max rushed in from shopping in town. Now, the closet and basement doors were next to each other and both doors looked the same. The basement stairs were very steep and ran down about twelve feet. Max was distractedly talking to us as he took off his coat, opened the wrong door, and, not looking, reached in to ha g it up. Rinpoche yelled, "Shunyata,"13 as Max and his coat fell into the basement. Unhurt except for a few scrapes, Max climbed out.
"Rinpoche," said Max, "You should have yelled to stop me."
"Why?" replied Rinpoche. "You could have gotten enlightened."
That night we went out to dinner at the local inn. Rinpoche had me purchase some cigars and secretly put some gunpowder in one of them for Max. The three of us sat in the inn casually smoking our stogies, two of us waiting in anticipation for the other one to explode. This went on for some time until Max, with the cigar still in his mouth, took a big puff and the cigar let out a big whoosh rather than an explosion. Flaming sparks and smoke shot out across the room from the cigar. Max remained pretty cool and said, "Your idea, I expect, Rinpoche." The three of us laughed.
However, the truth was that Max was a nervous wreck, and beneath my dignified British facade so was I. Finally, Max asked Rinpoche if he could go back to Boulder for a few weeks. Rinpoche gave his okay and Max departed, leaving Rinpoche and me alone in a house surrounded by deep snow. By necessity Max left his dog, Myson, with us. One night after supper Rinpoche said, "Get Myson and bring him in here." I dragged the shaking dog into the kitchen and following Rinpoche's instructions I sat him on the floor and covered his eyes with a blindfold. I set up stands with lighted candles by either side of his head. Myson couldn't move his head without being burned. Rinpoche took a potato and hit Myson on the head with it. When the dog moved, the fur on his ear would catch on fire. I put out the flames. Now and then Rinpoche would scrape is his chair across the tiled floor and whack him again on the head with a potato.
"Sir," I began hesitantly, trying to stop him.
"Shut up," snapped Rinpoche, "and hand me another potato."
I started to empathize with the dog. In fact, I became the dog. I was blindfolded and was banged on the head with a spud and if I turned my head my ears would burn and there was the squealing sound of the chair on the floor. Pissing in my pants I was that dog not being able to move, feeling terrified and at the same time excited. Finally, the scraping chair and the potato throwing stopped and we released the shaking dog, who ran upstairs to Max's empty room.
"That's how you train students," Rinpoche calmly stated to me.
"Jesus," I thought, "that's pretty barbaric."
In addition to all the other activities in the house, we sometimes had parties, some of which got pretty wild. I think that Rinpoche found it interesting to socialize with people in this way. During this period, Rinpoche was on a steep learning curve. It was often a wild ride for him and everyone else. He liked to get right out on the edge with people and see what would happen. It was a very creative space for him. I think he regarded it as a kind of research. Although the whole scene may sometimes have seemed merely chaotic and totally unplanned, Rinpoche was not just hanging out with people in a random fashion. As he said later,On my arrival in the United States of America, I was met by lots of psychologists and students of psychology, ex-Hindus, ex-Christians and ex-Americans of all kinds .... At the beginning, when I first arrived in the U.S.A., I was trying to find students' so-called trips and trying to push a little bit of salt and pepper into their lives and see how they handled that. They handled that little dash of salt and pepper okay. They understood it, but they would still maintain their particular trips. So then I put more of a dash of salt and pepper into their lives and further spice ... experimenting with how to bring up so-called American students. It's quite interesting, almost scientific. You bring up your rat in your cage, and you feed it with corn or rice or oats and you give it a little bit of drugs and maybe occasionally you inject it and see how it reacts, how it works with it. I'm sorry, maybe this is not the best way of describing this -- but it was some kind of experimentation as to how those particular animals called Americans and this particular animal called a Tibetan Buddhist can actually work together. And it worked fine; it worked beautifully.
-- Dragon Thunder: My Life with Chogyam Trungpa, by Diana J. Mukpo with Carolyn Rose Gimian
Rinpoche had me change the telephone number so that Max could not call us before he came back. He arrived, bags in hand, concerned that he had not been able to reach us. Before he could say much else Myson rushed in and jumped all over him in exuberant delight. Rinpoche deliberately scraped the kitchen chair across the tiled floor. The terrified dog shot out of the house and fled across the field. Max was shocked and pointedly asked, "Rinpoche, what did you do to my dog?"
"I don't see any dog," he replied, looking at me.
"I got it!" I said, with the realization of being blindfolded and having three things happen to you at once, knowing the scraping and the disappearance of the dog were both somehow illusion. In fact, it was all illusion. Everything was illusion, but real. Rinpoche smiled and warmly greeted Max.
Did I get it? Not then.
“It was summer of 1985. I "married" Rinpoche on June 12th of that year. I met him around May 31st at a wedding of Jackie Rushforth and Bakes Mitchell in the back yard of Marlow and Michael Root's home. That year, we had our wedding at RMDC a few days before Assembly, then we had Seminary and Encampment happened during Seminary.
That was the year he spoke of limited bloodshed and taking over the city of Halifax and the Provence of Nova Scotia. We were in the middle of the Mahayana portion of seminary teachings. For weeks, CTR (Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche) had been asking everyone he saw if they had seen a cat. He asked the head cook, the shrine master, and all of his servants if they'd seen one. We returned to our cabin late one night after a talk and there was this beautiful tabby cat sitting on the porch. I said, "Here kitty, kitty" and it came right over to me, purring and rubbing against my legs. I picked it up and said: "Here, Sweetie. Here's the cat you've been wanting."
I can't remember exactly which guard was on duty, but I think it was Jim Gimian, and of course Mitchell Levy. Someone took the cat from me and Rinpoche ordered them to tie him to the table on the porch. He instructed them to make a tight noose out of a rope so the cat didn't get away. He stood over his guards to examine the knots and make sure they were secure. I was curious at this point, wondering what this enlightened master had in mind for the cat. I knew there were serious rodent problems on the land and I assumed he wanted to use the cat for this problem.
Then, he instructed the guard to bring him some logs from the fire pit that was in front of the porch, down a slight slope. We took our seats. Rinpoche was seated to my right and there was a table between us for his drinks. He ordered a sake. The logs were on his right side, so he could use his good arm. (His left side was paralyzed due to a car accident that happened in his late twenties.)
The cat was still tied by a noose to the table. Rinpoche picked up a log and hurled it at the cat, which jumped off the table and hung from the noose. It was making a terrible gurgling sound. He finally got some footing on the edge of the deck and made it back onto the porch. Rinpoche hurled another log, making contact and the cat let out a horrible scream as the air was knocked out of him.
I said: "Sweetie, stop! What are you doing? Why are you doing this?" He said something about hating cats because they played with their food and didn't cry at the Buddha’s funeral. He continued to torture the poor animal. I was crying and begging him to stop.
I said, "I gave you the cat. Please stop it!" I'll never forget his response. He looked at me and said: "You are responsible for this karma" and he giggled. I got up to try and stop him and he firmly told me to sit down. One of the guards stepped closer to me and stood in a threatening manner to keep me in my place.
The torture went on for what seemed like hours, until finally the poor cat made a run for his life with the patio table bouncing after him. It was clear he had a broken back leg. I'm sure that cat died. I looked for him or the table for the rest of Seminary and never found either. I imagined him fleeing up the mountain and the table catching on something and strangling him.
I was completely traumatized by the event, but it was never spoken of again. Rinpoche told me the "karma" from this event was good. I was dumbfounded. A common feeling I had when around Rinpoche was that there were things going on that I simply could not understand. It seemed like other people, with a knowing nod of their heads, understood things on a deeper level than I. I was in fear of exposing my ignorance, so i learned not to question and to go with the crowd around him. They didn't appear to have any problems with what he did. Such was the depth of their devotion. I just needed to generate more devotion to Rinpoche and one day I might understand.”
-- About the Time Chogyam Trungpa's Wife Gave Him a Kitty and He Tortured it to Death in Front of Her, by Leslie Hays [The Wife of Chogyam Trungpa]
It was during this retreat in Massachusetts that Rinpoche started envisioning and developing the Kingdom of Shambhala.14 The Kalapa Court would be Rinpoche's home and it was to be in my charge. Instead of being Rinpoche's butler I would soon be Master of the House. I would become a Dapon in charge of the Court Kusung, or servant guards -- in Buddhist terms, Bodhisattva Guardians. Molly, one of Rinpoche's students, came down from Karme Choling. She was an illustration artist and she and Rinpoche together designed the Shambhala flag -- a white ground with blue, red, white, and orange stripes on the; leading edge and the yellow sun in the white field. Rinpoche designed and drew the Shambhala arms of the tiger, lion, garuda, and dragon, which are seen on the cover of Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior (published by Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1984.)
I was excited about this creative time. This was going to be a real kingdom with its location in Nova Scotia, Canada. I would be safe within that reality, or so I thought. One day Rinpoche said to me, "Well, you know, Johnny, someone has to ask me."
''Ask you what?" I said.
''Ask me to become Earth Holder, the Monarch of Shambhala."
"Well, I'll ask you," I replied.
"Great!" said Rinpoche. We planned the event for the Tibetan New Year. I cut a tree for a flagpole and Max planned a dinner. Then at sunrise on the New Year the three of us got up and dressed in our best attire. As the sun rose in the eastern sky I asked Rinpoche formally if he would become Sakyong15. for the benefit of all beings.
He replied, "Yes."
I fired off a twenty-one shot salute from my pistol and Max ran the Shambhala flag up the pole. We saluted and shouted "Hip, hip, hurray!" then followed up by singing the Shambhala anthem. Max and went into the dining room and feasted with the new Sakyong. I was joyful and excited but underneath, my uneasiness continued to alternately swell and subside. Somehow the reality of the "gap" was still lurking below my world of this-and-that. On an intellectual level that was still fairly primitive I had some understanding of Buddhism. I knew what it was supposed to look like-peaceful, calm, wise, compassionate. I knew enough to say, "Yes, I got it," but at the same time it was not in my gut on a visceral level. I thought perhaps I should do a retreat, since it would give me a chance to get away, relax, and get myself together before things went too far.
I could see myself robed, sitting under a pine tree in meditation posture with the sunlight playing on my shoulders and the wind in the pines. "Yes, that's it," I concluded, so I asked Rinpoche.
"Not a chance," he growled.
"But, Sir, I could finish my prostrations and do the other practices ... take the Vajrayogini abhisheka16 with David and the Regent and ... "
"No hope of that," he snapped.
Shit. I was trapped again, stuck in the life of a servant bursting with resentment. Then he gave me one of those smiles that light up the whole dark universe. It penetrated into my murk and dissolved it and I was better and worse simultaneously.
"One day you will be Sir John Perks," he said.
Wow, I thought. Sir John Perks of the Kingdom of Shambhala. I was full of hope again. Aloneness, when it hit, ruined my hopes and expectations. I was walking to the car in Greenfield, having done the shopping, when it struck. I was suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of total aloneness and stopped dead in my tracks. There was no John Perks. There was nothing to be alone. Had "nothing" been a mental concept, it would have been something to hold onto. Then I panicked.
Only now, looking back, can I say that it was an overwhelming realization of nonexistence. The only way that I can convey what the experience was like is to ask the reader to imagine that all you think you are is totally fabricated. What you are is totally manipulated and conditioned by your own mind. Had I completely realized this at the time I would have died on the spot from a heart attack. For what was under assault was my thinking mind, its solid reality, what and who I thought I was. That which I thought was reality was, in fact, totally empty. This was the great "switcheroo," or turnaround.
Desperately trying to get back to what I still thought was my solidity I staggered to the car, trying not to hyperventilate. I managed to drive to the Howard Johnson's Motel bar. I ordered a double gin and tonic and drank it down like a glass of water.
"Are you okay?" asked the bartender. Where had I heard that phrase before?
"Fine, fine," I said and ordered another double. Sir John Perks had better get a suit of armor, I thought wryly.
But the attacks became more frequent. Then I had a realization. Sex! If I felt so alone why not have a partner? I asked Rinpoche if I could have a lady friend up on some weekends. To my surprise he said yes. So I invited a friend from Boston to visit. But it gave me no relief. In fact, it made the aloneness sharper and I felt as if I were going to die any second. One day at breakfast Rinpoche said to me, "Johnny, isn't it strange how orgasm and death feel the same?"
I blocked his words for the moment and panicked later.
Relief came several days later when he said, "Johnny, let's take a trip to London."
I pretended not to be excited, and to make sure, I asked, "To London, England, Sir?"
"Yes," he answered matter-of-factly. "We need to get some Shambhala medals made there and we could get some military uniforms." I brightened up. Trooping of the Colors meets Sir John Perks. I had a mission.
"Let's stay at the Winston Churchill Hotel," he suggested.
National pride swelled in my chest. Shambhala was going to be British after all. As a safety procedure I went to the local doctor and got prescriptions of Librium and Tagamet for my panic and stomach pain. Sam, the publisher of Shambhala Publications, was to meet us in London where he had an office. On the aircraft Rinpoche and I sat together. He was quite upbeat and talked about all the things we would do in London: restaurants, nightclubs, theater, and clothing stores. The air stewardess asked what we would like to drink. Rinpoche ordered his usual. "Ginandtonicus," pronounced as the name of the Roman general from the Asterisk Comic Books.
"You could teach people etiquette, Johnny," said Rinpoche. He went on talking about military uniforms, tuxedos, evening dress, balls, dancing, and formal dinners. Excitedly I joined in with further ideas. Rinpoche said, "Yes! Yes! Yes! Let's do it. We will grow old together." Bliss and joy returned, drowning out the emptiness.
And so it came to pass. In London we stayed at the Winston Churchill. We took the designs of the Shambhala medals to the jewelers to be made. We ordered uniforms at Grieves and Hawks on Savile Row -- a general's uniform for Rinpoche, a major's uniform for me. Rinpoche used his family name on the order form, Mr. C. T. Mukpo. I used my original birth name, John Andrews. The clerk looked at Rinpoche's form in a quizzical way and asked, "Who is Mr. C. T. Mukpo?"
I hesitated, my mind searching for a realistic answer. Finally I said the first true thing I had ever said in my life.
"I have absolutely no idea."
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Notes:
10 Formerly Tail of the Tiger, renamed Karme Choling; Rinpoche's Buddhist Center in Barnet, Vermont.
11 British military regiment
12 Tulku -- In Tibetan Buddhism, a person who is recognized as a reincarnation of a previously deceased teacher.
13 Shunyata -- Sanskrit meaning emptiness or void; the negation of believing in the false idea of how things exist. This cannot be explained verbally, but can be experienced.
14 Shambhala: Sanskrit; a mythical kingdom somewhat like Brigadoon or Camelot; considered by some to be located in northeast India. It is the place where Kalachakra teachings originated, and is the kingdom from which a savior is predicted to arise when the world is on the brink of destruction.
15 Sakyong -- Earth Holder, the monarch of Shambhala, head of the Shambhala lineage.
16 Vajrayogini -- the diamond yogini. A meditative practice deity; the nature of one's basic being, or state of mind. Abhisheka, Sanskrit for anointment; a ceremony in which the Vajra master empowers the student into the meditative practice of a particular deity. The energy of the deity is manifested during the ceremony, and there is a joining of the minds of the teacher and the student, which arises because of the student's intense devotion.