An Interview with Alan Ginsberg
February, 1979
"What Trungpa finally said to me about the Merwin thing was, 'This is an opportunity to turn poison into nectar.'"
-- A.G.
Allen Ginsberg was interviewed in his Mapleton Street apartment by Boulder Monthly writer Tom Clark in February, 1979. The subject of the interview was Ed Sanders' report on the Merwin incident. Present were several of Ginsberg's students and poet Ed Dorn who asked three or four of the questions.
Q. What's been the effect of the Harpers article, Peter Marin's "Spiritual Obedience", on you and on the Buddhist community?
A. Universal paranoia, I think. And also some clarification of complexities that everybody feels, within the Buddhist community. It brings up to the surface a lot of thoughts that people have had anyway and discussed among themselves, but just didn't discuss publicly: fear of Buddhist fascism, paranoia about submission to a guru, the apparent incomprehensibility of the Merwin thing. So it raises all of the fears, doubts, paranoias that were otherwise in the community, and puts them solidified in public form. It's like reading your marriage troubles in the newspaper.
Q. You mentioned when we spoke earlier that you thought this might fit into the historical context of Buddhism as an opportunity for reaction in some kind of intelligent way that would be positive. I wondered if anything like that was being generated. When you say clarification, do you mean honesty?
A. It may take decades. The whole thing is like a very long historical situation. You know, it's right here and now in America. But it goes back for centuries and millenia, as far as the structure of Vajrayana goes, and how it works out, and what's the relation between student and teacher.
Q. The incident that generates this whole thing, and that's at the center of the Sanders report, is a weird kind of litmus test. Because it's a political metaphor.
A. If you interpret it as such. You can interpret it as another kind of metaphor, a marriage metaphor. Or you can interpret it as a metaphor for social paranoia in the barbarous Western mind.
Q. Well, let's say it's been taken as a political metaphor because of the whole question of individual rights -- which you've said before really didn't apply in that seminary situation.
A. It doesn't apply on that occasion, as in a sense it doesn't apply in a marriage. Individual rights don't apply there, in the sense that in a marriage you give up some privacy. In some marriages you do. Or in the sense that with a psychiatrist you give up some privacy. Or in the sense that with a guru, very definitely, you make a compact to give up your privacy. That's the purpose of making that relationship, to get rid of privacy. If privacy is defined as egocentricity, selfishness or psychological secrecy. It's really complicated.
Q. You're not talking about just at the seminary?
A. Well, the seminary is a situation where the whole idea is introduced. That idea of privacy, and that idea of relationship between the pupil and the guru, is introduced in a formal way. The way it's done is an old historical technique which is well known, when seen from a distance, but when actually practiced seems monstrously strange theater, to an American mind. Particularly to an American individualistic mind. I know that, but I'm frightened to say it and make it sound even more monstrous.
Q. But this power to abrogate privacy, does it exist over persons who don't confer it? I mean, it takes two to tango. If you don't grant this fief of obedience to someone, and then they take it --
A. I hate to discuss it in public, is the problem. Because it's really a private shot. That's the real delicacy. Oh, you can discuss it in public, to a certain extent. But the very nature of it is personal relations. So if it's discussed, it's got to be done really delicately. And here, I feel too defensive. Like a fairy being asked if he's a fairy. It's right on that level, almost. You know, you're talking about my love life. My extremely delicate love life, my relations with my teacher. It's really complicated. And as all love lives, it's shot through with strange emotions, and self questionings, and paranoias, and impulses. So to reduce it to discussion with reference to cultural artifacts like the Bill of Rights ...
Q. That's just it. You're talking about your religious feelings. I'm talking about politics, frankly.
A. Yes!
Q. And that's why I take an interest in this affair.
A. It's the separation of Church and State--
Q. But that's what I want to talk about--
A. Well, we'll talk about it.
Q. Do you think Dana and Merwin knew what they were getting into when they decided to go to the seminary?
A. I don't know to what extent they knew what they were getting into, and to what extent, if they knew, they understood it in their hearts. Or to what extent Trungpa knew what he was getting into. Whether his vanity was appealed to, to have them there --- or their vanity was appealed to, to go there. I don't know whose vanity it was.
Q. Robert Duncan has proposed that the central image here, of the stripped heterosexual couple, is a common image of resistance to authority. To the state, or--
A. Or God. Or Jehovah.
Q. Duncan wasn't just saying "Adam and Eve," because the implication seemed wider than that. And possibly inside this story there are a whole lot of other reverberating metaphors that aren't accusative of anybody as much as they are illustrative of something inside American culture. Now maybe this is an event inside the history of Buddhism as well, but that's something different.
A. Right. It has a lot to do with American culture, I admit.
Q. And Sanders' whole interest in it, it seems to me, is along the lines of a phenomenon occurring within American culture. Something is being studied, rather than any one person being accused. Because if you turn this around and say it takes two to make a master, you're not necessarily saying that one side or the other's culpable.
A. I feel culpable. It's my paranoia that I'm expressing.
Q. I don't think that you personally were ever accused by anybody of anything in this regard.
A. I accuse myself all the time, of seducing the entire poetry scene and Merwin into this impossible submission to some spiritual dictatorship which they'll never get out of again and which will ruin American culture forever. Anything might happen. We might get taken over and eaten by the Tibetan monsters. All the monsters of the Tibetan Book of the Dead might come out and get everybody to take L.S.D.! Actually that's what's happening. All the horrific hallucinations of the Tibetan Book of the Dead are going to come true now. Right in Boulder! And the face of one of them is Merwin -- you see the face and it goes, graahr! That's one level on which you see what's happening, and I think it's actually true.
Q. Is that right?
A. On a poetic level, yes.
Q. You're talking about apocalyptic hallucinations?
A. No, no, not apocalyptic. The Pandora's Box of the Bardo Thodol has been opened by the arrival in America of one of the masters of the secrets of the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Q. And those secrets are his best recruiting tools.
A. See, it's funny. Always poets have had the claim or the ambition of being spiritual. I as a poet have. You know, mysticism, in one refined form or another has always attracted poets -- even T.S. Eliot. So all of a sudden poets are now confronted by the guys who've got the secrets of the Himalayas! Before, the poets used to deal with Madame Blavatsky, and the Society of the Golden Dawn, and William Butler Yeats, and swami so-and-so who comes over from India. But now the guys who come over are the lamas themselves. This kind of wisdom was always supposed to be hidden in the monasteries, it was all supposed to be secret. Nobody was supposed to know about it except the gurus and masters of the world, who were ruling everything from the top of the Himalayas. Madame David-Neel and so on. And now it s all right here to be confronted. The Tibetan diaspora has opened up all that legendary or mythic information, and made it available. And in Boulder now there are probably more people doing advanced Tantric meditation than anywhere on the planet -- anywhere in the last century or two.
Q. Getting back to this report, the suggestion is that Merwin wasn't really far enough advanced in Buddhist practices to be at the Vajrayana Seminary In the first place. He didn't have the knowledge.
A. Vajrayana is not an intellectual thing. It's something you don't get into until you've known your teacher for a long, long time.
Q. So then for Merwin to be at the seminary without that long relation with his teacher, he's automatically an intruder?
A. No, not quite. I think Trungpa's thing here is he wanted to work with Merwin, and thought there was the possibility of working with him: Trungpa's putting himself out to the extreme, here, and taking enormous risks: and throwing himself out on the line, throwing his body down for Merwin to walk over.
Q. That was his risk?
A. Yeah. For Merwin to walk over him. And then Merwin could reject him.
Q. And that was the risk he took.
A. So Trungpa's situation was risky. Just as Merwin was taking a risk by going there. Putting himself in that situation. Which is risky in the sense that I don't know how much Merwin knew in advance what the psychological situation was supposed to be when he got there. But what goes on in those seminaries is there's a three month period: one month exposition in detail of Hinayana Buddhism, one month exposition of Mahayana Buddhism, and then the third month exposition of Vajrayana Buddhism. And in the entry period into the third month of practice and teaching, everybody who doesn't want to enter into Vajrayana has to leave.
Q. So this episode occurred at that junction?
A. Yes.
Q. You'd been there for the seminary the previous year?
A. No, but I've been there other years. We'd been there the first year the whole thing ever happened, in 1973.
Q. Was there any similar crisis when you were there?
A. Yes. Exactly the same, with everybody, except internally. Naturally. This episode with Merwin just externalizes the paranoia, the dilemma, the interesting situation that everybody has all the time. You just work through it. It's part of the whole thing.
Q. So maybe everybody else passed through this difficult period vicariously, through what happened to Merwin?
A. No. Most people had gone through it before. They'd gone through the same psychological violence, but within themselves.
Q. But there's a certain way in which these two people seem to have been selected out by the group as transference figures, or targets. It looks like a lot was loaded on them.
A. This is exactly the area that I think -- I wasn't at the seminary, nor were you. What we have is, a composite account from gossip, and also a written account of Sanders' from testimony of people who were around. Written by Sanders and the students in his Naropa class -- who weren't there either, who've never been involved in that situation. Most of whom don't sit to begin with. And many of whom are pissed off at and resentful of the entire Buddhist bureaucracy, hierarchy, and so forth. And that's their interpretation of the whole scene. We have a time-track from Sanders of what happened. But having been to the seminary before and after -- see, Peter and I also went the next year -- I don't think it's really necessary to think they were singled out. You see, at the seminary there are certain ritual poems that are recited en masse, some of which relate to horrific protective deities just like in the Book of the Dead. Which are very un-American, to say the least. From the point of view of anybody who hasn't been a poet, or something, they're really off the wall.
Q. And to somebody like Merwin, who's been a pacifist all of his life--
A. Yeah, well, I mean they're poems to these blood-drinking deities!
Q. Did that ever bug you?
A. Oh, sure. It bugs everybody. Bugs everybody! It's supposed to; that's what it's there for. To bug you, and make you examine exactly that fear. Precisely. To make you examine that paranoia, which is universal. So, when Merwin went there, apparently he didn't want to recite those things. Which means that from the very beginning there must have been some problem. Because I haven't ever heard of anybody going there who didn't want to recite those poems. But I still don't want to criticize Merwin, because I wasn't there, I don't know what he was going through. It might have been a big mistake by Trungpa, to have him there at all.
Q. Granted the layers of possible inaccuracy in the transfer of the evidence down through various channels, it does seem that these two people were put in a special position -- by his resistance to or refusal to perform these chants and certain other forms of devotion. Where he just said, "Hey, hold it, I can't cross that line, I grew up a different way."
A. Does that mean that they put him in a funny position, or that he set up a situation.
Q. No, this is his problem, let's say. He individuated himself in that way, and secondly, by his insistence on a type of sexual exclusivity which was apparently resented. At least the testimony was that it seemed to be resented by the group. And possibly by Rinpoche. The implication is--
A. You're getting too speedy now. It's too delicate for you to be this speedy.
Q. What I'm trying to pursue--
A. It's not an argument, there's nothing to pursue. You can't pursue an argument here in this situation.
Q. Okay, I'm trying to refer to, in fact, this moment that we talked about yesterday. Where you have Rinpoche himself, in conversation with Dana, suggesting that he himself has motives in her regard. If so, it would indicate that Merwin and she weren't paranoid. That in fact not only the other people there, but Rinpoche himself, had motives toward them that individuated them.
A. This reduces it all to stereotype.
Q. I'm just reading the document, like you're reading your Blake to the students in your Naropa class. I'm reading this text as someone will a hundred years from now, if there's a world. It's part of literature too. So I'm just looking at it as objectively as I can.
A. Don't you see that you have the problem here of being like Harold Bloom. Sure, you can do it. You can do it, you can be Harold Bloom if you want. And you can take any interpretation you want. In fact the difficulty with the situation, the Buddhists say, is that anybody can interpret it any way they want. The Buddhists on the inside can interpret it one way, the people on the outside can interpret it another way, the people on the inside can also interpret it the way the people on the outside do ... any way they want to do it.
Q. I like to think, though--
A. That there's a reality and there's a--
Q. --that there's a real world!
A. Well, that is the whole point! Maybe you can't. See, that's the whole point. Maybe you can't. However, you might ask Merwin and Dana, if possible, what their interpretation would be, too, instead of assuming an ordinary newspaper interpretation. Which I would say to some extent you're doing. Freudian. Rose Franzblau. I mean, it's strictly Rose Franzblau. You think Trungpa hasn't got enough girls to lay? He just likes to lay people who don't want to lay him? Pretty Oriental girls who don't want to lay him?
Q. Trungpa said to you that in this racial conversation with Dana he was referring to her, uh, roots?
A. Well, see, I haven't gone over it with him detail by detail, blow by blow, phrase by phrase, through the whole report, much less talked to the people who were there, to get their version. For a lot of reasons. Partly out of fear -- I don't want to find out what happened. Partly straight out of fear -- I don't want to open up some horrible yaargh -- I don't want to know about Trungpa. That's one reason. You know, just like you don't want to ask your father about the night he fucked your mother and made you. Something like that. And there's also another element of, "it's an endless morass." And there's also another element of, "Oh God, somebody's going to do it sooner or later." Which is Sanders' noble motive. But I'll probably have to be the one sooner or later to go into the middle of the whole fucking thing and find out what who said, who did what -- "but he said, you said, he said, the Sanders report said this, but Dana said that ... " So that's the last thing I want to do. But I'm the head of the Poetics Department, so that's going to be my role. And I've been avoiding it for years. I hoped Sanders would take care of it. So okay, that's that.
"You Oriental slick cunt, 'why are you hanging around with this honky?"
But I don't actually know, precisely, what happened. But the other day I got so paranoid that I went in to see Trungpa and asked him specifically about the thing that stuck in most people's minds. It didn't bother me too much, but apparently it bugged a lot of other people. Because it sounded like Burroughs talking, actually. "You Oriental slick cunt, 'why are you hanging around with this honky?" So I was looking at it sort of as Burroughs-type humor, rather than anything else. Or something in that line, whereas everybody else was, you know, getting very self-righteous about it -- "how dare he approach her sexually!" Or for him to say that she's hanging around with this white guy -- but still, that's the common libertarian view. You're not supposed to say things like that. Even if you're supposed to be posing as a Vajrayana teacher, breaking down all privacy and breaking every possible icon in every mental form, and acting like a poet, no less. I mean, you're supposed to out-Gregory Corso Gregory Corso and out-Burroughs Burroughs, if you're a Vajrayana teacher. But everybody's objecting at great length to this. "He's gone too far again!" Okay, he's gone too far. They say, "You've gone too far. You made some sexual suggestion to her which involved racism?"
So, okay. What I said to him was, "You made some sexual statement to her, about how she shouldn't be hanging around with this honky or something? Or about why was she going on being supportive of him when she should be abandoning him?"
So his answer to me was actually kind of funny, and reminded me of the traditional Buddhist image of the snake and the rope.
Q. Where you think you see a snake coiled in a barrel--
A. And you look real close and it turns out to be a rope! In fact this entire thing is somewhat like that. As the entire world is, the entire world of illusion. So his explanation was -- and I don't know if I should be telling his explanation on paper in the Boulder Monthly. But he was saying to her -- the situation was, he'd asked everybody to get naked. The situation was Halloween, the beginning of Vajrayana teachings. Everybody's supposed to blow their top and get rid of all constraints. There's traditionally a wild party where everybody gets totally bombed. But at the same time, everybody gets totally bombed in a tradition that's conscious-making. This is probably something I shouldn't talk about. I feel at this point that these are professional matters, so I don't know where I should stop. I don't know what's--
Q. Classified?
A. I don't know how much is classified, from the point of view of people saying, "Oh, I'm going to do conscious drinking, because now I know the secrets of the East." See, there's a certain kind of immunity to drinking you can develop. I mean, when you realize -- you've done a lot of sitting for years, so you're conscious of your fullness. At the point where you begin to realize you're getting too drunk to drink more, you stop drinking heavily and you sip very, very slowly. At the Vajrayana banquets and feasts this is what's done. It's very similar to what you read in the books about the Kama Sutra. Not coming, things like that.
So now all the training you've had is applied to banqueting. A symposium, a Platonic symposium -- the banquet is supposed to be something like that. It's not just a big dumb slob banquet as such. It's got several thousand years of tradition behind it, and it's got rules and regulations.
Q. So, what was Trungpa's reply to your question, anyway?
A. What Trungpa told me he was saying to her was this. He was telling her, "Look, I've become very far out in working with the American style. I've scandalized a lot of my fellow lamas by being so open to the Americans." He said, "I've come very far into the American style, and it's made me realize my own roots and appreciate my own culture." If you notice in Trungpa's autobiography, Born in Tibet, he says there that he had to do that with his teacher, take off all his clothes. So he told her about that, how in Tibet it's much more shocking and scandalous to take off all your clothes. Here in America you have naked beaches, and so on. In Tibet, if you take off your clothes, you're violating all sorts of taboos. Here, it's just playful. So he tried to explain that to her, and to explain to her that she should respect her roots by taking part in a classical experience of the Orient, which she does come from.
Q. By taking off her clothes, she'd respect her roots?
A. Just as I have begun to appreciate my own roots, as a Jew, or just as an American Indian respects his.
Q. Trungpa's claim is that he had no sexual motive at all?
A. He said he was just talking to her about roots. "That's what I was addressing myself to," he said. His view of what he was saying was something dignified.
Q. Not seductive.
A. According to him it had nothing to do with sex. And I doubt if it did have very much to do with sex. Actually I think probably very little. I think that was a paranoiac interpretation put on it later. As far as I can gather, what Trungpa was trying to do was give her a very reasonable common-sense explanation that what was going on here was a traditional Buddhist practice applied in America in as gentle a way as possible. And as funny a way as possible, without even the horrific shock that it might have been in Tibet. An enormous cultural heritage is being brought here, and laid out before them, and opened up.
Now whether he had sexual innuendo, I wasn't there, I don't know. I think that may possibly be the entire Sanders mind-bias, right there. Or the students'. Or Merwin and Dana's. I don't know, I have no idea, I wasn't there. And I haven't seen the Sanders report lately, or re-read it. I thought I better go back finally and get a blow-by-blow account from Trungpa. So I said to him, you realize what's happening, everybody's interpreting this in every projected way they want, whatever way their mind goes. And nobody's ever had any concrete explanation, nobody who was there's been able to, nobody's really had the time or wanted to go into this.
Q. But again, as inaccurate as this report might be--
A. It may not be inaccurate. It may be perfectly accurate.
Q. Whether it is or not, you're being given this sort of Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending A Staircase series of angles on the thing which accumulate to suggest--
A. Like Rashomon--
Q. Yeah, like Rashomon. You're getting so much information on this thing that it all accumulates to form a phenomenological sense of reality. This or that detail might be wrong, but the whole thing feels pretty actual. And if you separate the events there from poetry, and from us really, and try to apply this story to what it's like to be alive now inside this country -- some of the things that are going on in there seem to reverberate socially in the country at large. After Jonestown, it's natural to consider this. Particularly the feeling we get that this one large group of people here was condoning what appears to be the subjection to a lot of discomfort of these other two people. And appeals were made to the group by this woman, to the other women there--
A. "Call the police!"
Q. Right. That kind of thing.
A. In the middle of that scene, to yell "call the police" -- do you realize how vulgar that was? The Wisdom of the East was being unveiled, and she's going, "call the police!" I mean, shit! Fuck that shit! Strip 'em naked, break down the door! Anything-symbolically. I mentioned privacy before -- the entrance into Vajrayana is the abandonment of all privacy. And the entry onto the Bodhisattva path is totally -- you're saying, "I no longer have any privacy ever again."
Q. But you only make that sacrifice if you want to.
A. Only if you want to.
Q. What if they didn't want to?
A. Then what were they doing at this Vajrayana seminary?
Q. Okay, but what if he says, "I don't want to go to the party tonight, I've got a cold."
A. He didn't say, "I've got a cold." He said, "I don't like this slobbish drunken orgy. I didn't want to go to it with my girlfriend."
Q. And I have a cold.
A. Oh, and I have a cold. But that's not it. What if Trungpa said, "I've got a cold, I don't want to teach tonight?"
Q. But you do say things like that if you don't want to do something. You know, "I've got a headache, I don't want to go."
A. Then Trungpa could say, "Oh, well, I won't teach them tonight, even though it's Halloween and this is the inauguration of the Vajrayana that I've grown up since I was two years old just to teach."
Halloween or Hallowe'en (a contraction of Hallows' Even or Hallows' Evening), also known as Allhalloween, All Hallows' Eve, or All Saints' Eve, is a celebration observed in several countries on 31 October, the eve of the Western Christian feast of All Hallows' Day. It begins the three-day observance of Allhallowtide, the time in the liturgical year dedicated to remembering the dead, including saints (hallows), martyrs, and all the faithful departed.
It is widely believed that many Halloween traditions originated from ancient Celtic harvest festivals, particularly the Gaelic festival Samhain; that such festivals may have had pagan roots; and that Samhain itself was Christianized as Halloween by the early Church. Some believe, however, that Halloween began solely as a Christian holiday, separate from ancient festivals like Samhain.
Halloween activities include trick-or-treating (or the related guising and souling), attending Halloween costume parties, carving pumpkins into jack-o'-lanterns, lighting bonfires, apple bobbing, divination games, playing pranks, visiting haunted attractions, telling scary stories, as well as watching horror films. In many parts of the world, the Christian religious observances of All Hallows' Eve, including attending church services and lighting candles on the graves of the dead, remain popular, although elsewhere it is a more commercial and secular celebration. Some Christians historically abstained from meat on All Hallows' Eve, a tradition reflected in the eating of certain vegetarian foods on this vigil day, including apples, potato pancakes, and soul cakes.
-- Halloween, by Wikipedia
Q. In other words you're saying, once you're in Vajrayana seminary, you can't quit. It's just like being at Parris Island in the Marines. Merwin couldn't say, "Hey, I want to see my mama, I'm going home."
A. Oh, he can quit, he can quit. Or he could just leave, or whatever. Or on the other hand, Trungpa could make a decision -- "Well, I better just turn off." You know, "No, I can't teach you now." I once asked him what made him go through all this with Merwin. I thought, "This is ridiculous." He said, well, the problem with Merwin -- this was several years ago -- he said, I wanted to deal with him by opening myself up to him completely, by putting aside all barriers. "It was a gamble," he said. So I said, was it a mistake? He said, "Nope." So then I thought, if it was a gamble that didn't work, why wasn't it a mistake? Well, now all the students have to think about it -- so it serves as an example, and a terror. But then I said, "What if the outside world hears about this, won't there be a big scandal?" And Trungpa said, "Well, don't be amazed to find that actually the whole teaching is simply emptiness and meekness."
Q. Emptiness and meekness?
A. That's what he said. So you see, it's really complicated.
Q. Getting back to the question of the group being so passive during this episode, what Ed Sanders said to me in a conversation recently was something like this. What blows my mind, he said, was that you have this group of a hundred people, and in any other similar scene -- I don't care, Synanon, Scientology -- these two people are singled out, and they say, "Hey, colleagues, come to our aid. We're being harassed here, these guards, they're pushing us around."
A. Fellow students, not guards.
Q. Fellow students, guards, whatever. No one responds. So Sanders said, even in Scientology, someone would have got up. He said, that's what blows my mind about this. These people are so very obedient. And what I'm wondering is, how and why? How do you get that power? Is it magic, or what is it? Personal vibrations?
A. "Personal vibrations," that's a very vulgar way of speaking about someone's relationship with his teacher.
Q. I thought that's what you've been saying.
A. It's vulgar. "Personal vibrations with your wife" -- is that nice?
Q. Well, what is it then?
A. What it boils down to is whether or not you respect your teacher.
Q. If it was Steve Gaskin, somebody would have got up.
A. But Steve Gaskin doesn't come from Tibet. He hasn't gone through this same teaching himself. He hasn't worked through this whole group of fears. It's very complicated, very complicated. In order to do what Trungpa did, he had to have the approval and backing of his boss, Karmapa Lama, the head of the Karmapa order, the 16th Karmapa in the succession, who lives in Sinkiang. The power of any guru is conferred on him by other lamas -- you have to understand the lineage. Chogyam Trungpa was taught by the fourth Tenzing Rinpoche, who is a descendant of this lineage.
Q. How was he picked out to be taught?
A. Well, it's complicated. There's an old myth ...
Q. Somebody walks into the hut when he's two years old, and says, "You're it"?
A. No, what they do is, they walk into the hut. Suppose they're trying to find Ginsberg the Second. So they show the baby a picture of me, and if he goes, yaagh I -- then they know he's not it. They find a kid who doesn't shit at the sight of the old guy's robes and beads and appurtenances, and takes to them pleasurably, and gets along with them.
Q. So how would they know to go to this particular hut to look?
A. You go to Paterson, New Jersey, the East Side, near the Passaic River, and you find a school teacher who's got a one-and-a-half year old baby, and you show him Howl and Kaddish and give him my pants and my shoes. If he takes a friendly attitude, check out his I.Q. and see if his parents are willing and if he's got all his teeth and all of his hair and all of his bones. And if he hasn't got six toes or anything, you just try him out.
Q. And then he's taken away from home and specially trained?
A. From two years old he's educated and trained.
Q. Doesn't each guru have a special emblem, some special teaching he develops?
A. Trungpa's image is crazy wisdom. Traditional crazy wisdom -- outrageous behavior, outrageous activity. Total iconoclasm. And there has to be a consensus of lamas to decide the other lamas aren't abusing their scene. With one bad lama, or one fuck-up -- particularly from someone like Trungpa, who's so open -- it could really fuck up their whole scene. Just like, you know, Guyana.
Q. According to some of his critics, Trungpa's already doing that. Al Santoli, who was formerly a disciple of his, has a lot to say about this.
A. Al Santoli, being one of the most active persons in the preparing of the Sanders report. Al's basic view now is that Vajrayana is so horrible, and so un-American that it should never be taught in America, and that Trungpa is the example of how bad it is, and how totalitarian and undemocratic and creepy it is. And that it is a big cosmic important thing that it be stopped. Before it's too late, and it takes over. Or something like that -- I'm just quoting him.
Q. You've said recently that there's been a great trembling and gnashing of teeth among the disciples over this report. Do you mean around here?
A. Right here. Oh, they're all discussing it.
Q. Really?
A. Oh yeah, they're all discussing it. They've all got their own versions of it.
Q. In the last month or so? Or going back for years?
A. For years. It's like a Koan, in Zen.
Q. So it's been bubbling along all this time?
A. Oh, yeah. It's haunted everyone, certainly.
Q. You mean the validity of the teaching method's been discussed?
A. Oh, sure! A lot.
Q. With some division of opinion?
A. Well, some. I'm generally one of the most rambunctious.
Q. Do you get in trouble for that?
A. Well, I could make enough rambunctiousness that I could say, "I don't want to listen to any more teaching. I don't want to hear your story any more."
Q. But you don't feel that way, obviously.
A. No. You know, it depends what you -- I think Trungpa is a better poet than Merwin, for one thing. On the simplest level. But that's sort of like my own. . . If you want to know what I think, way back in my closet, well, I wouldn't want to say. I just don't want to -- I want privacy in my belief. But I think Trungpa's ten times more interesting than Merwin. Than Merwin's idea of what he was supposed to be doing there at the seminary. However that's not anything that's my business.
Q. But it wasn't really a contest, exactly, as to who's a better poet.
A. Well, I don't know what the whole story was. See, I don't want to talk for Merwin. This is Trungpa's version I've been talking about, but I don't really want to talk for him either.
Q. Well, he won't talk for himself.
A. Well, then turn the tape off. He's got his right to privacy, he's a teacher.
Q. You read for us some of the poems to the aggressive deities, the ones Merwin didn't like. They had lines like, "as night falls, you cut the aorta of the perverter of the teachings," and "you enjoy drinking the hot blood of the ego."
A. Right. So he didn't like "drink the hot blood of the ego."
Q. Or, "cut the aorta of the perverter of the teachings"?
A. That would be Chogyam Trungpa if he was perverting the teachings.
Q. Trungpa would get his aorta cut?
A. Well, the aorta's the life-blood.
Q. So that's just metaphorical?
A. Oh, I suppose so. You might take it literally. Who knows. If I were Burroughs I would say, "of course it's literal."
Q. Are those poems chanted in Tibetan?
A. No, English.
Q. You've compared Merwin to an anthropologist, saying he should have taken part in these ceremonies simply because he was there.
A. I was making a parallel. I think it's understood by democratic liberal radical minds that in order to take part in shamanistic ceremonies, the new breed of anthropologist takes part, rather than just appearing.
Q. That of course assumes that Merwin's position was that of an anthropologist.
A. Well no, I'm saying that the difficulty from the point of view of the practitioner or the teacher is that it's like an anthropologist who doesn't want to participate. He may be a little uneasy about going through their ritual, or whatever.
Q. You've said you've lately been pretty upset over this whole issue. Did you go to see Trungpa specifically because of this?
A. Well, I was blowing my top a few weeks ago, so I went to see him. I said, "What happens if you ask me to kill Merwin?" That was my idea.
Q. You shouldn't put ideas in his head.
A. It was in my head, so why shouldn't I? I mean, the whole point is that that's precisely what you should consider.
Q. If you make a test out of it--
A. Ah.
Q. Was he reassuring?
A. Yeah. Well, he was somewhat reassuring. He was sitting there really sweet, actually. I'd gone to see this monster.
Q. This what?
A. Well, I'd built up this monster in my head. And he explained what -- "I was just talking about my roots, with Dana." But I'd built up this monster. That was my paranoia, the kind that builds up in precisely this kind of situation.
Q. So rather than dispel that situation by making a clear statement on it to his disciples, he feels that they should just work their way through it by themselves?
A. No. When I went to see him I asked him exactly that question. You see, the nature of the teaching and the teaching methods is such that it's very hard. How do you talk about Vajrayana teachings in public? It's very hard to do. And it's made even more difficult by the American situation, where everything is slowly coming out anyway.
Q. Undoubtedly all this is coming out.
A. The point I guess that most struck me was -- you see, Merwin was free to leave or free to stay. Trungpa encouraged him to stay, and went out of his way to put himself in danger, in a sense. So I don't know what the rights and wrongs of it are, but I find more and more my consideration of it is not so much that Trungpa was wrong, but that he was indiscreet. So I say to myself, he was indiscreet. And then I realize what a shitty viewpoint that is. You know, that's a political viewpoint. And you know, the worst charge I have against him is he was indiscreet, and put me in a situation where I have to be here and explain it and go through all of this scandal. As if I haven't had enough with L.S.D. and enough with fag liberation, now I've got to go through Vajrayana, and pretty soon they're going to have articles in Harpers by idiotic poets that I never hired to begin with! About Merwin whose poetry I don't care about anyway! With Ed Sanders freaking out and saying it's another Manson case! Because Ed's paranoia, actually -- Ed has a large quotient of paranoia too. Anything that reminds him of secrecy -- he's been all his life studying black magic and Aleister Crowley and playing around with all that on the sidelines. I mean, getting into the Manson thing, and then getting into Vajrayana and Trungpa and Merwin, is just sort of made for Ed Sanders. And all of Ed's paranoia. And it's made for my paranoia, because half the time I think, "maybe Trungpa's the C.I.A., and he's taking over my mind." Much less all the poets, who want the supreme egotism of poetry -- that poetry should be the supreme individualistic reference point, that nobody should be above the poets, and that if anybody is they'll get the American Civil liberties Union after them! The poets have a right to shit on anybody they want to. You know, the poets have got the divine right of poetry. They go around, you know, commit suicide. Burroughs commits murder, Gregory Corso borrows money from everybody and shoots up drugs for twenty years, but he's "divine Gregory." But poor old Trungpa, who's been suffering since he was two years old to teach the dharma, isn't allowed to wave his frankfurter! And if he does, the poets get real mad that their territory is being invaded!
And then I'm supposed to be like the diplomat poet, defending poetry against those horrible alien gooks with their weird Himalayan practices. And American culture! "How dare you criticize American culture!" Everybody's been criticizing it for twenty years, prophesizing the doom of America, how rotten America is. And Burroughs is talking about, "democracy, shit! What we need is a new Hitler." Democracy, nothing! They exploded the atom bomb without asking us. Everybody's defending American democracy. American democracy's this thing, this Oothoon. The last civilized refuge of the world -- after twenty years of denouncing it as the pits! You know, so now it's the 1970's, everyone wants to go back and say, "Oh, no, we've got it comfortable. Here are these people invading us with their mind control."
And particularly, most particularly, people who suck up to Castro and Mao Tse-Tung. That's the funniest part. All the people, even myself who'd had all sorts of hideous experiences with Marxism. Or who put up with Leroi Jones. It's never questioned, you'd never publicly question that -- write an article about Leroi Jones in Harpers! You know, pointing out the contradictions in his democratic thought. Or anybody's, for that matter.
So, yes, it is true that Trungpa is questioning the very foundations of American democracy. Absolutely. And pointing out that the whole -- for one thing, he's an atheist. So he's pointing out that "In God we trust" is printed on the money. And that "we were endowed with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." That Merwin has been endowed by his creator with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Trungpa is asking if there's any deeper axiomatic basis than some creator coming along and guaranteeing his rights.
Because one of the interesting things that the Buddhists point out is that there's always a sneaking God around somewhere, putting down these inalienable rights. Urizen is around somewhere. And they're having to deal not only with the Communists, and the fascists, and the capitalists, they also have to deal with the whole notion of God, which is built right into the Bill of Rights. The whole foundation of American democracy is built on that, and it's as full of holes as Swiss cheese.
Q. Well, Trungpa himself claims inalienable rights, doesn't he?
A. But the Vajrayana thing wouldn't have the shadow of trying to justify. It's like action painting -- without casting a shadow. And one of the things the Buddhists would feel would be an imperfection would be the need to justify. From that particular point of view in Dostoevsky, where ego is egotism trying to make a shadow of itself, trying to excuse its presence. So that makes it even more ambiguous, because here there's no attempt to justify. There's no attempt to justify it out of guilt, or out of hyprocrisy. They're not being very equivocal about the absolutism of the Vajra teacher. The fact is there's a mythological claim that the Vajrayana master can't make any mistakes. So for years everybody's been saying, "what if he made a mistake, then how could he be a Vajra master?"
Q. Don't Catholics say that about the Pope, too, that he can't make mistakes?
A. Yes, but the Pope gets his thing from the divine, from God. But Trungpa doesn't get it from God. He just asserts it. On his own. He takes responsibility for the assertion.
Q. Not bad!
A. Not bad, as long as you take the consequences. When Sanders was here doing his class, that was the big argument. It's sort of like papal infallibility. How could people be perfect? If the Vajra master can't make any mistakes, how could he have made this big mistake?
Q. Therefore it can't be a mistake?
A. Yeah, therefore it can't be a mistake. Or therefore he's not a real Vajra master. He's a charlatan, or -- you know, the regents sit around in New York, and Osel Tendzin says, "Sure, we made a mistake to invite Merwin to the seminary." However, at the point of ultimate marriage of mind, or transmission of mind between Vajra master and pupil, if anybody makes a mistake, the pupil could kill the Vajra master. Or the Vajra master could go nuts. Or, you know, it could be fatal to both. When they get that far advanced, after many, many years together, when there's been a sort of final mind-schlup -- if an ego mistake is made there, with any kind of attachment, any passion, any grasping, then it can be very dangerous. As indicated by this very low level beginner's situation with Merwin. If somebody thinks that the guru is an ego trying to take over his mind, you can get paranoid -- you know, you feel it's a threat to the universe. Because the whole point is that the Vajra master has to work with, precisely, paranoia. Which is the ultimate, ultimate sort of consciousness-defense. If there is such a thing as dissolution of the ego. Maybe there is just a slow, gradual wearing-away, which is more like it, actually. A slow, gradual wearing-away until it becomes boring. The last defense would be paranoia, and a fear of invasion from alien forces taking over your mind, like the horrors you sometimes sink into when you get on an acid trip. Sometimes it's justified. And in the real world, as we know from Guyana, it could be completely justified. Some big guru makes a big mistake, and turns out to have been mad all along.
On the way home Allen says the bodyguards don't carry guns, but they are trained in tai-chi and art of flower arrangement. "They are experts," he says, "but their jobs are very complicated. Trungpa is gravely, maybe fatally ill, he's an alcoholic megalomaniac and he can't keep his hands off the girls. Some time ago we invited a Tibetan lama to check out Trungpa and give us his opinion about the state he is in. The lama concluded that wisdom might still reside in him, but that his body is sick and polluted. Indeed, we sometimes see a glimpse of his enlightened being, but mostly he's a pain in the ass. His guards are very tense, because he's so unpredictable and does weird things. A few months ago, he suddenly threw himself backward down the stairs, to test if the guards were alert. They were not and Trungpa had a heavy concussion. We try to restrict his obsessions as much as possible, but it's a heavy task. After all, what do you do when the king has gone mad? You shield him off from the outside world, praying for a rapid and worthy demise."
It's good to hear Allen talk so openly about this. He says he doesn't feel insulted by Campert's remarks about the mafia. "There are more poets at Naropa who feel that way and I think it's all right. Crazy wisdom wants no followers."
-- Milk, Volume One, by Hans Plomp