Chapter 5Naropa Institute, founded in Boulder in 1974, became that component.
The Institute was formed by Chogyam Trungpa as a non-profit educational institution, subsidiary to the Nalanda Foundation, a "secular wing" of Vajradhatu. While legally distinct, Naropa and Vajradhatu maintained common officers and boards of directors.Trungpa's directors and officers included several men with excellent minds for law and business. The careful division of Trungpa's holdings into separate corporate entities served at least two important purposes. Tax money could be saved, and the reputation of Naropa as a Civilian institution could be protected by "the water-tight compartment argument" -- an appeal to the original corporate legal divisions.
Trungpa's own stated plan for Naropa makes it clear the school was never meant to be "secular" at all. "The purpose of Naropa," he proclaimed, "is, first of all, to provide a vessel for the development of Bodhisattva activity."
(Loyalists in the administration -- who make up the whole administration -- have in recent years argued with Naropa faculty over whether to require Buddhist "sitting" discipline in the new degree programs; the outcome of this struggle is still in doubt, but the fact that it's even going on invalidates Naropa's claims to "secular" status. Daily sitting meditation, says the current Naropa catalog, is "highly encouraged" for all students; "six credits of study in a meditative discipline" is a B.A. requirement.) A Naropa student once interrupted Trungpa during a crazy-wisdom lecture called "The Blue Pancake," which is about having the sky fall on your head. "What's so hot about having a pancake fall on your head?" the student asked. "Well," replied Trungpa, laughing, I think it is a big joke, a big message."
Crazy-wisdom-wise, Naropa has always been a big joke, like Trungpa's blue pancake. Before looking into the circumstances of its founding, let us first briefly consider two prior episodes that occurred on the "Trungpa scene" in Boulder. They will help us understand Trungpa better.
The first was a benefit poetry reading for Trungpa's Karma Dzong Meditation Center, held at Macky Auditorium on the University of Colorado campus, May 6, 1972. Poets on hand included Ginsberg, Robert Bly, and Gary Snyder. Trungpa, acting as self-appointed emcee, was in his cups. During the reading, he upstaged the poets with his humorous antics, and at the end, he "apologized" for the poets in a muddled, patronizing speech ("I'm sure they don't mean what they said.") The evening ended with Trungpa drunk and truculent, yelling and beating on a big gong.
"If you think I'm doing this because I'm drunk," Trungpa told Ginsberg during the evening, "you're making a big mistake."Ginsberg, already a great admirer of the young Tibetan master, was genuinely puzzled. "Is this just you," he asked, "or is this a traditional manner, or what?"
"I come from a long line of eccentric Buddhists," the eleventh Trungpa explained.
Ginsberg subsequently defended Trungpa for taking over the poetry reading.
But Gary Snyder, a longtime student of Zen, and Robert Bly, once a crazy-wisdom disciple at Samye-Ling, were offended by Trungpa's behavior -- Bly, as it was to turn out, quite seriously.
Earlier that year, Allen had invited several poets to Boulder for a poetry reading. Gary Snyder, Robert Bly, and Nanao Sasaki were invited to read poetry with Allen Ginsberg and Rinpoche. In addition to his own poetry, Allen read some of Rinpoche's poems from a recently published book, Mudra, which included many of the early poems Rinpoche had written, in England in the sixties. The evening ended rather disastrously after Rinpoche put a large Japanese gong over his head while Robert Bly was reading a serious and significant poem. Rinpoche did a number of things to disrupt Bly's reading, actually. Gary Snyder and Robert Bly interpreted Rinpoche's behavior as rude and drunken. I guess it was, but from his point of view, their behavior was arrogant and bombastic, and he felt that humor was needed to lighten up the space. Allen took this controversy remarkably in stride, and managed to remain friends with all involved. Snyder and Bly, however, wanted nothing further to do with Rinpoche, and as far as I know, he had no regrets on his side.
-- Dragon Thunder: My Life with Chogyam Trungpa, by Diana J. Mukpo with Carolyn Rose Gimian
The Macky Auditorium incident adduces the tension that already existed between Trungpa, the spiritual king, and those secular artists he envisaged as his laureates. Of this more later.
By this time, Trungpa's claim to authority over his students' personal lives had increased dramatically. "Privacy," when applied to the students, had become a dirty word, like "ego." The guru warned them that by themselves they could never wash "the sticky glue of Karma" out of their hair. "Let me mind your business for you," he advised. Rumors of the eleventh Trungpa doing just that, sometimes on a very intimate level, began to circulate around Boulder.One of these students, who calls herself Floy Van Den Berg, attended the guru's 34th birthday party (February, 1973), and received there a "telepathic transmission of thoughts" from him which indicated to her that she should allow a certain man from the Buddhist community to impregnate her. Ignoring the guru's drunken state, she quickly followed his "order." Shortly thereafter, the father-to-be obtained an interview with Trungpa, who instructed him to leave for Canada. Floy was told to go on welfare.
Before the father of her child left for Canada, Floy, in a fit of rage, dumped a bottle of glue in his hair, to symbolize "the sticky glue of Karma." She was subsequently ostracized by the Boulder Buddhist community, beaten up by several women of the community, and left to shift for herself and her out-of-wedlock child, she claims.
In her final confrontation with Trungpa, she told him she was leaving his community, but that she would continue to honor the teachings of the Buddha.
"They will be of no help to you," Trungpa told her emphatically. "The lions will come to devour you."
His ferocity made Floy break down in tears.
"No one has been able to hold their own with him," Floy muses today -- years after her departure from Trungpa's "scene." "People have shown very little ability to think critically or act in a reasonable manner towards the man. They seem to lose the sense of themselves that is capable of functioning at a critical level, and they become emotionally blown-out."
Floy Van Den Berg appears to feel that this is what happened to her -- and that she has not yet recovered.
Floy also charges, from personal evidence, that Trungpa became a "spiritual stud" soon after coming to the U.S. "I personally found that I was punished when I didn't want to go to bed with Trungpa after he asked me to," she says. The "punishment," apparently, comes in the from of psychological rejection. A number of other women students of Trungpa have echoed Floy's testimony on this point. (Trungpa's wife, however, told a reporter this year that Trungpa has been a loyal and supportive husband throughout their 10 years of marriage.)One middle-period Trungpa, remembered by a Boulder citizen, was "a guy in a lumberjack shirt who showed up at parties with a shit-eating grin on his face. Nobody knew who he was. I thought he was some drunken Filipino."
With time came changes. As Trungpa grew more and more powerful and recognizable, the crazy-wisdom guru began to dress in expensive business suits, to ride around in the back of a chauffeur-driven Mercedes, attended at all times by a personal
"vajra guard" composed of young, muscular Buddhist students in blue blazers. He guzzled sake and Rainier Ale ("green death," they call it), and chain-smoked American cigarettes. His wife, Diana, who had given birth to three sons between 1969 and 1973, had lately renewed an early interest in riding, and was becoming one of Boulder's premier female equestrians. (
She was later to become the first woman from America to attend the famous Spanish Riding School of Vienna.)
While we were in France, I convinced Rinpoche that we should go to Vienna so that I could visit the Spanish Riding School. Now that I was riding regularly again, I had started to develop a great interest in the discipline of dressage, a classic form of horsemanship whose pinnacle was achieved at the school.We visited a number of places in Vienna, including Schonbrunn Palace. Rinpoche liked to spend long hours in the restaurants in Vienna, and Taggie was very difficult to manage throughout all of this.
Luckily, we were able to obtain tickets for one of the dressage performances at the Spanish Riding School, known as "the Spanish." The day of the performance, we stood outside the Winter Palace in Vienna, where the Spanish is located. We waited in line a long time to get m to see the performance. When they finally opened the doors, people started pushing and shoving all around us. We finally made our way through the crowd and into the building. To get to our seats, we had to walk up a narrow flight of wooden stairs to the balcony overlooking the arena. The hall is magnificent, with enormous crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. The arena can hold several thousand spectators. It's an extraordinary environment.
We settled ourselves in our seats, and then classical music began to play over the speakers, signaling the beginning of the performance. In rode the most majestic white horses in formation, their bridles inlaid with gold and the saddle pads trimmed in gold braid. The riders rode impeccably in their brown uniforms and become hats. It was like watching a completely synchronized ballet performed by horses and riders. Five or ten minutes into the performance, Rinpoche started sobbing. I couldn't imagine why, and I said to him, "What's the matter with you? Is something wrong?" He answered, "There's nothing wrong. It's so beautiful. It's a magnificent expression of windhorse." (Windhorse is the uplifted expression of dignity that is described in the Shambhala teachings.) Rinpoche wept throughout the performance. I also was moved by this display of horse and rider so nobly joined in the art of dressage.
Afterward, when we discussed our experience, I told Rinpoche that the fulfillment of my dreams as a rider would be to study the classical approach to dressage with one of the teachers from the Spanish Riding School. Although I was still very new to this discipline, Rinpoche took me quite seriously. He said to me, "You know, it's too soon right now, but I would imagine that within a couple of years you're going to find a way to come here and study."-- Dragon Thunder: My Life with Chogyam Trungpa, by Diana J. Mukpo with Carolyn Rose Gimian
The Trungpa who founded the Naropa Institute had gone a long way beyond what his old colleague Akong Tulku had regarded as "the limits of familiarity" with Occidentals and Occidental ways.
He expected 800 students to attend his first Naropa summer session in 1974. Himself aside, the big attraction of the eleventh Trungpa's show was
Richard Alpert, aka Ram Dass. The staged guru-shootout between Trungpa and Ram Dass ("delightfully humorous," Trungpa later called it) attracted nearly two thousand spiritual-journey fans from all parts of the country.
Then in the summer of 1974 I was at Naropa Institute teaching a course in the Bhagavad Gita, a course for which I felt Maharaj-ji was giving his blessings. There at Naropa I was part of a whole other scene, because Trungpa Rinpoche represents a different lineage. I found myself floundering a little bit because my own tradition was so amorphous compared to the tightness of the Tibetan tradition. Trungpa and I did a few television shows together. We did one about lineages and I felt bankrupt. I had Maharaj-ji's transmission of love and service but I knew nothing about his history. I didn't know how to talk about what came through me in terms of a formal lineage. I was also getting caught in more worldly play, and I felt more and more depressed and hypocritical. So by the end of the summer I decided to return to India. I didn't know what I'd find, but I'd go anyway. I knew I was different than I was ten years before, but I was still not cooked, and what we owe each other is to get cooked.
-- Grist for the Mill, by Ram Dass
The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics was founded under Naropa auspices in that same wild summer of 74 by Ginsberg and Anne Waldman, who were invited by Trungpa to read and give workshops.
Sharing an apartment in Boulder, Ginsberg and Waldman tossed around ideas for the name of their new Buddhist-American poetry school. Waldman wanted to call it the Gertrude Stein School. 
"And when she saw it was she who said what it was she had seen she was filled with a feeling.
A feeling a rose within her when she saw what it was she had seen.
What she had seen was a rose and what she felt was a feeling.
And when she saw what it was she was feeling she was filled with sadness.
What she had seen was a rose and what she had felt was a feeling.
A rose and her feelings for a rose."
-- "Waiting for the Moon," directed by Jill Godmilow
Ginsberg preferred the Zen-hipster-poetic associations of "Kerouac." His preference won out. (Why
"Disembodied"? "It was just a flash," explains Michael Brownstein, another Naropa poet.)
Allen Ginsberg happens to subscribe to the star system of eternity. Allen has long believed there are certain immortal heroes of art and thought whose genius ought to be religiously revered. He has made a quite literal point of kissing such personages' feet on first meeting. Suddenly there is a hush. The rinpoche is carried in by a couple of robust bodyguards. Years ago he got paralyzed after a car accident, so he walks with great difficulty. His body is misshapen, but on top of that is a genuine smiling Buddha head. They put him in a high seat and his guards remain standing behind him. Ginsberg introduces us to Trungpa one by one. Two of the Dutch writers refuse to shake hands with the Tibetan, as they consider the guru a dangerous fraud.
When my turn comes, we exchange a few superficial remarks about India, where I've spent the past winters. He has a high, almost whistling voice and I must bend my knee to come close enough to his face to hear him. I think he whistles into my ear "we will not sink," which I happily agree with. But it's quite possible he said, "we will not think," or even "stink."
In the background I hear the Dutch writer Remco Campert cry out: "It's a shame Plomp,
you are kneeling for the mafia!"...
Ginsberg plays a key role in
the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, which Lawrence Ferlinghetti scornfully refers to as "an institute for Buddhist Roman Catholics." "They are doing nothing for poetry," he says, "...'cause poetry can't be taught." This may be true, but I think the school is doing a lot for the Embodied Poets, creating teaching jobs for them and various other poetic activities, such as our grand reception.
As the masters are daubing, sounds of dissent come from a group of guests who acclaim Campert's attack on the "spiritual mafia." Ed Dorn and Michael Brownstein, both teachers at the School of Disembodied Poets, disagree with the Buddhist influence and jeer at the devotees: "Come on people, try to be spontaneous!" "I think those bodyguards are carrying guns under their armpits!" Campert shouts.-- Milk, Volume One, by Hans Plomp
He has done this, for example, with (or to?) Lester Young, Indian swamis, Andrei Vosznesensky, Basil Bunting. (A story comes to mind of Christopher Isherwood recoiling in horror from the prospect of Allen groveling around his shoes.)
Such a disposition to submissive reverence was just what the spiritual doctor of Boulder ordered. By 1975, Allen was sitting, performing prostrations, and receiving direct spiritual counseling from Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. Along with Allen, into the mainstream of crazy wisdom swam a whole poetic school.
"Chogyam Trungpa said to me, 'Why are you always wearing black shirts?''' Ginsberg recalls.
"I said, 'Well, they're easier to wash, and I travel a lot.'
"'Why don't you try some white shirts and see how they feel,'" suggested the eleventh Trungpa.
"So I went to the Salvation Army and bought about 20 white shirts for 15 or 30 cents each," remembers the author of Howl. "And I noticed that people actually were less scared of me. Less anxiety. Then I got a whole bunch of suits, tuxedos and everything ... "
The back-to-society movement Trungpa was fostering hit Ginsberg hard. Trungpa now taught that it was escapism to oppose the basic materialism of American society. He inculcated in his followers good business principles, and aided them in business endeavors where possible. Although certain ventures of doubtful legitimacy allegedly initiated by his followers -- like the smuggling of hot gems from Asia -- can't be directly connected with Trungpa,
it's clear he never advocated the extinction of the profit motive in any context. One of the most impressive of his disciples' publications is The Community Yellow Pages, a full-scale business and skills directory representing every sphere of economic activity in Boulder, including eight real estate agencies.
Along with Allen, Trungpa was to discover, would come many poets who would prove far less pliable in behavior, and far less respectful of the teachings.
Unlike other Naropa faculty members, many Kerouac School poets have showed resentment when their paychecks were "loaned" back to the Institute without their having been asked.
In 1978, Ginsberg's pal, Gregory Corso, took out his resentment against the conservative Naropa administration by trashing his faculty apartment at the end of the summer session. This demonstration of Corso's own brand of crazy wisdom proved to be too much for the administration, which hasn't invited him back.But since 1975, the Kerouac School has been a prime attraction, annually drawing hundreds of students to the Institute. For this reason alone have its excesses and irregularities been tolerated by Trungpa and his executive officers.
The Kerouac School was a prominent feature of the Naropa curriculum in the summer of 1975. Along with co-founders Ginsberg and Waldman, there were at least a half dozen well-known poets on hand, including National Book Award-winner W.S. Merwin.
Merwin, like Ginsberg and many other poets, was a spiritual yearner, who had spent a good deal of time looking for the true way -- in his case, in
Catholic socialism rather than in the disciplines of the East.
After the 1975 summer session, Merwin requested permission to attend Trungpa's annual fall "Vajra" seminary for advanced students.
Those who had attended the two previous seminaries had brought back harrowing reports. The only poets to have attended were Ginsberg and his companion, Peter Orlovsky, both of whom had practiced meditation previously.
Merwin had no experience in the teaching style of tantric Buddhist masters. He asked to bring along his attractive Hawaiian girlfriend, who was equally inexperienced.
Going through the Tantric teachings, Trungpa has said, is like riding a burning razor. Why then would he admit a pair of uncommitted novices?
For reasons that his administrative officers and board of directors still can't explain, Trungpa said yes.
William Merwin and Dana Naone paid the $550 fee and joined the seminary group assembling at a remote ski lodge in Snowmass, high in the Colorado Rockies.
