The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Seven (85 page)

With that logic, we regard our institute as somewhat secular. In our vocabulary, the word “secular” means “without dogma.” We can relate with our bread-and-butter situation, with our breakfast, lunch, and dinner, fully and thoroughly. In fact, breakfast, lunch, and dinner are sacred.

That sacredness is where the concept of art comes from. It is a double-edged sword: it is spiritual but not necessarily religious.

The integrity of Naropa Institute remains completely intact and clean-cut at this point. We have never made any modification in order to fit Naropa Institute to the materialistic socket of the Western world. On the other hand, we are not trying to claim any kind of superiority. The integrity of Naropa Institute has not been compromised as far as I know. We are decent, reasonable, and highly disciplined, and we take pride in that.

A
RT

Art is environment. Education is the mind which relates with that environment. That’s how we see the functioning of Naropa Institute. Art is environment because whatever we do in the course of our life—depositing money in the bank, cashing a check, making business deals, cooking breakfast, preparing a party for our friends, buying a new hat, mending our clothes, stopping at the gas station to fill up our car—any activity that is part of the spectrum of our life is art, very much art. We are capable of doing all those things properly.

However, many of you couldn’t care less about that; you just do all those things randomly; your attitude is just to do them and get rid of them. But sacredness is your capability for doing all those things. You have the capability of eating breakfast, you have the capability of mending your clothes, you have the capability of putting your clothes in the washing machine and your dishes in the dishwasher. You have all those capabilities, and you don’t mix things up.

You have a general kind of intelligence that allows you to be here, as all of you are here tonight. Obviously you are here because you know what you’re doing—somewhat. I don’t think anybody is here by mistake. Nobody is here because he thought this was a gas station; nobody is here because he thought this was a restaurant. That logic seems to be very small and very naive, but it makes sense. You managed to be at this particular place at this particular time. You are wearing certain clothes and you are sitting on a certain seat; you are listening and trying to understand.

All your activities are regarded as expressions of basic intelligence or basic goodness. You possess the discriminating-awareness wisdom that allows you to do what you want, which is in itself a work of art. It is an expression of what in the buddhist tradition we call
prajna
, which means “the best of knowledge.” Basic integrity means knowing what you’re doing. That notion, along with some sense of your basic goodness, takes place very powerfully. Everybody is good; everybody possesses basic goodness—for the very reason that you are here and you are capable of being here, for the very reason that your intelligence and your intellect led you here. You are willing to share this feast of intelligence and sanity with us, and that is astounding and extraordinary. On the other hand, it is very ordinary.

We have an expression called “ordinary mind,” and we have an expression called “the best of mind,” or “the greatest insight.” Both mean exactly the same thing. They both come to the one conclusion: whatever you do is an expression of basic goodness in you. All of you look healthy. Maybe some of you are quite skeptical, but still you are sort of tickled in your hearts and open and wondering. The whole point is that you possess that kind of presence, which you project—all of you. That means that you have something going which in simple, ordinary language we call “basic goodness.” It makes you feel good. [
Baby crying in audience
] The baby cries, but he cries very wholeheartedly. [
Laughter
]

Art is not merely being able to do your music or your painting or your little arrangements of this and that. The kind of art we are talking about tonight is big art; it is that we have basic goodness in an environment like this, which is in itself a work of art. It is really worth cheering up tremendously. Sometimes if you try too hard to understand something you find yourself deaf and dumb on the spot, so I wouldn’t try too hard to understand tonight. Just relax and catch the edge of the words. It is more important to listen to the punctuation than to the words themselves.

E
DUCATION

Education is our second topic for tonight. In the environment that we have created here tonight, the principle of education is discipline. That says a lot. In fact, that applies not only while you’re here, but after you leave tonight, when you go back to your homes, when you fall asleep and wake up tomorrow morning as well. According to the philosophy of Naropa Institute, education is like a yeast infection. It grows on you. [
Laughter
] As it grows on you, it becomes still more infectious. It goes beyond and beyond and beyond. What you are hearing probably doesn’t mean anything when you first hear it, but you will continue to cherish it in your mind. You sleep on it; you have breakfast with it; you have lunch with it; you have dinner with it; you keep it with you all the time, which is both ordinary and special at the same time. It begins to haunt you, and you begin to have second thoughts, third thoughts, fourth thoughts, fifth thoughts, sixth thoughts, and on and on—until, when you have had a hundred thoughts, it begins to become real. It begins to make sense. That is the yeast concept.

In the traditional system of education which is Victorian style, you either learn on the spot or you don’t learn. If you don’t learn, you get hit; if you do learn, you are treated well. In fact, there have been students at Naropa Institute who have asked for some way of being rewarded if they do good work. But we do not believe in the reward system or in the punishment system. We believe in the yeast system. We educate you so that you can produce your own yeast. When we plant our yeast in you, you already have the basic goodies. You are an awake person and you have that kind of sacredness and artfulness in you already. Therefore we could develop something beyond that. Your basic artfulness allows you to be approached; you are yeastable already. So once the yeast is planted in your system, your yeastability begins to take effect and something begins to grow and develop. We put art and education together, they begin to work on each other. By putting the two of them together, people can relate with them and understand them.

We have never presented anything that no one can relate with. In fact, you’ll be surprised to learn that there is nothing that a human being cannot relate with. Everything that we present and everything that your life presents is always workable. We never cut anything out, we never edit anything out. In fact, to our surprise, when we went through the list of what is not possible, what is not yeastable, we couldn’t find anything. So we have art—the martial arts, psychology, Buddhist studies, and so on. We would like to add even more things, as many as we can, so that the whole situation can become much richer. What we are saying is that we can’t find anything that we should exclude from our lives, from animal husbandry to the attainment of enlightenment. Everything is included in our education. If we could do enough fundraising, then we could actually perpetuate that kind of education. We feel that we can handle everything—absolutely everything. We also feel that students can handle everything. Therefore the spirit of Naropa Institute is that vast mind—mind that is both vast and deep.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I don’t think I should say too much. I don’t want to confuse you further. We could have a good discussion, if anybody would like to ask any questions or make any comments.

Question:
It seems to me that art is mind and education is environment, and I really wonder why all these people are here.

Vajracharya:
Well, I think that art is environment, if I may contradict you. I would like to use Buddhist logic, if I may. The concept of art is like the traditional abhidharma analysis of the six organs of the body: sight, smell, touch, hearing, and so on. Arising from those sense organs you have the sense of vision, the sense of hearing, the sense of smell, the sense of touch, and some kind of emotion in your heart and in your brain. So it’s all very much a mind situation, because you see things and you hear things, when you see things it begins to become art. You can rearrange or not rearrange whatever you see or whatever you hear—it’s mind’s world. Education is also, interestingly, environmental. Education is largely a matter of following a schedule and working with a particular discipline. You could say that this room is an educational room because it is an environment. Everybody possesses two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth, and a body. So everybody is an educatee, someone who responds to educational situations. We have a container and that which is contained put together, which makes Naropa Institute.

Q:
Rinpoche, a couple of years ago you said that people who made egotistical works of art were only adding to the world’s pollution. You said, “How long can people go on creating more junk in the world?” After I heard that I went into a creative block that lasted about a year and a half [
Laughter
] and my feeling was that it would be wrong to try to work as an artist until I had achieved some kind of semienlightenment, or some kind of clarity and lack of confusion. I wonder how that concept applies to what you’re saying now.

V:
I think it’s very simple. The production of junk art is the result either of trying to prove yourself or trying to find out who will buy your trip. That is very ugly: it’s individualistic and homemade in the worst sense. Finally you begin to smell your personal fart and your personal sneeze and your hiccups and your vomit which permeate your work of art. That kind of art is not very elegant, and it’s not very helpful to anybody. Who would like to go downhill with you and join your depression and mingle with your odor?

Q:
Well it seems that if you are creating spontaneously, anything is liable to surface.

V:
You see I don’t regard that kind of art as spontaneous. It is somewhat calculated.

Q:
I think that in my own case it’s very calculated in some way.

V:
It’s that way with everybody. Artists are often very calculating. They’re so smart that they have already researched the business world. They have already looked into who will buy their works of art, which is too bad and a great shame, a tremendous shame. We could do better than that. Once upon a time, in the sixties or maybe the forties, a heavy display of neurosis and insanity was very fashionable. People thought it was extraordinary when somebody could come up with the greatest neurosis yet, the greatest hell yet. Fortunately, that time is past. People began to realize the aftereffects of that approach, which is that a lot of people were hurt by that and suffered. Therefore they didn’t want to jump on their own razor blade again. So this situation is very opportune: a work of art could be presented very sanely and very well. We have a tremendous opportunity in this era. We could learn a negative lesson from the previous era, and along with that we could also project the good we have learned.

Q:
The only thing that still confuses me is how the artist can draw his own conclusion about the purity or the honesty of what he’s doing.

V:
He can simply relate to his own wakefulness, his basic goodness. He can do that. Nobody here is all that extreme anyway: everybody here is very decent and that says a lot actually. You can do it. I feel very encouraged.

Q:
I am too. Thank you.

V:
Thank you very much. Please relax tonight. Don’t discuss all this too much: just forget it altogether. [
Laughter
] Have a good sleep, and see what happens tomorrow morning.

A public talk given at Naropa Institute by Vajracharya the Venerable Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche on June 24, 1979.

Empowerment

T
HE LITURGY OF
tantric empowerment heard on the record
Empowerment
was recorded in 1974 during the remarkable visit to the United States of the Tibetan spiritual king, His Holiness the sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa. On that occasion, accompanied by a number of his monks, the Gyalwa Karmapa traveled through the country, visiting and blessing, and performing rites of empowerment for large, and in many cases specially prepared, groups of people. The selections presented are highlights of those rites, some of them recorded live and some under the more favorable recording conditions of a studio.

Through the Ceremony of the Vajra Crown, His Holiness the sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa communicates the power and blessing of the Kagyü lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, of which he is the head. The ceremony begins with a prolonged supplication to His Holiness requesting him to assume his transcendental form as Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. In response, he begins to chant the mantra
OM MANI PADME HUM.
While repeating the mantra, His Holiness places the Vajra Crown on his head, completing the link with his transcendental aspect and also with the audience. Radiating compassion, His Holiness transmits the energy and intelligence of the awakened state of mind to all who are prepared to receive it. His Holiness then removes the Crown and the monks pray for the benefit of all sentient beings and that the mind of the patron who sponsored the ceremony be attuned to the dharma.

In Buddhism, religious chanting developed out of reading and memorizing sutras or Buddhist texts in order to provide a kind of continual recollection of the teachings. As you read aloud, the words of the Buddha reflect in your mind. So in general, chanting is not regarded as particularly devotional or invocational—you simply read aloud so you can hear yourself. And as you read, a natural rhythm develops without any deliberate attempt to chant a particular tune. This is the kind of chanting heard in the Ceremony of the Vajra Crown and in other rituals when the visualization is described.