A Spiritual Leader's Farewell

by Gregory Jaynes, Time, 6/22/87

One has to create the situation around one, so that one does not have to say ,'I am the Awakened person.' If one had to say such a thing and demonstrate it verbally, one would not be Awakened.

— Chogyam Trungpa, Meditation in Action

"The night of my conception," wrote Chogyam Trungpa, who would be cremated in a Vermont mountain meadow before a sizable audience in the spring of this year, "my mother had a very significant dream that a being had entered her body with a flash of light; that year flowers bloomed in the neighborhood although it was still winter."

In his autobiography, Born in Tibet, Trungpa went on to say he was delivered in a cattle byre in February 1939, and that on that day a rainbow was seen and a water pail was found unaccountably full of milk. When he died in Halifax, Nova Scotia, last April 4, leaving eleven published books, five sons and a widow, Trungpa, who was called Rinpoche (a Tibetan honorific meaning precious one) by thousands of his Buddhist students, a remarkable odyssey came to a close — at least in this life. The journey actually began months before Rinpoche's birth, when a holy man died. "The monks of Surmang were feeling lost without their abbot." Rinpoche wrote, "And were eager that his reincarnation should be found without delay." After a vision and a sign or two, the Rinpoche baby was found and rather swiftly proclaimed the chosen one. The peasant infant became the spiritual boy king.

It was a quiet life until 1959, when Rinpoche, like the Dalai Lama, fled the country in the face of Chinese takeover. Rinpoche spent two years in India, then four in England at Oxford University, then moved on to Scotland to found a meditation center. In 1969, he relinquished his monastic vows. The next year he married a 16-year-old English woman, Diana Judith Pybus. The nuptial move drew criticism from lama quarters.

Now it came to pass that in America in 1970 there was a generation of young people who were in the habit of attending loosely programmed outdoor chapel meetings known here and there as love-ins, be-ins or demonstrations and punctuated, more or less, with the admonition, "Peace and love, pass it on." That was the year that Rinpoche came to these shores, taking off like a Roman candle lit at both ends. He traveled and taught indefatigably, setting up scores of urban meditation and study centers, the two most prominent in Boulder and in Barnet, VT. He had tapped a vein. A section of what used to be called the counterculture desired a guru, and here he was in the flesh. Bu 1975, after the establishment in Boulder of the Naropa Institute, a liberal arts college, his imprimatur was everywhere. One could stick pins in a map, connect the dots and, with apologies to Amtrak, call it the Angst Express. The confused came to be made sound.

Some of these people would have fallen for a shaman, any fool who claimed, say, he could bend spoons with his mind. But Rinpoche was not a charlatan. By all accounts, he was brilliant, he was the real thing. The easiest conclusion to draw, looking from the outside in, is that he was an astute businessman. His devotees ran to the upper middle class, white, with impressive academic credentials. They dressed like Dharma bums in the beginning, but soon the teacher had them shaved, suited and cravated. If they did not exactly turn their pockets inside out for their teacher — and some did — they made good fund raisers. Moreover, he encouraged them to be all they could be, in their professions as well as their heads. Successful executives, lawyers, doctors, dentists, shrinks, anthropologists, poets (Allen Ginsberg), novelists (William Burroughs) and composers (John Cage) dog-eared his card in their Rolodexes. Even the selection of Boulder as a center was a commercial brainstorm; it is a mecca for vagabond children with trust funds. He lived as ostentatiously as a televangelist —though not as tastelessly.

His teachings are harder to get a bead on, from the outside looking in. Cerebral, for one thing, which explains the attraction to an educated crowd. Pressed for specifics, his students tend to develop a moist eye, a bemused grin, an air of higher enlightenment and a condescending kiss-off; "Really too complicated to go into in depth." Certain words get great play: compassion, creativity, generosity, grace, humor, kindness, love, sanity, scholarship. It is, say religious scholars, more of a method than a religion. The relationship between teacher and student is similar to that between psychiatrist and patient, goes one definition. There has to be full trust, otherwise nothing is accomplished. "It's a particular type of religious devotion," says a former student of Rinpoche's, "Where you surrender all your critical faculties to a guru." Whatever it is, initiates have a tendency to tell uninitiates, it is inexplicable unless one is an initiate. This is when Frank Sinatra used to come in with a line like "Hey, whatever gets you through the night."

In any event, years passed, the Rinpoche influence spread, and a new headquarters was established in Nova Scotia. Now and then there was bad press. A party in in Colorado got rough. Rinpoche forced a coupe to disrobe. Everyone later disrobed. No charges were brought. No one denied the published reports. One of the Buddhist there said it was a a preparation for giving up privacy, learning to cut through ego clinging and fixation. Rinpoche said essentially it was no big deal. He drank a prodigious amount of alcohol, bedded many women, never denied either. It was "enlightened drinking," "enlightened sex." There was never a PTL-style scandal. It was simply The Way. In the end, the official Buddhist-reported cause of death was cardiac arrest and respiratory failure; the unofficial version was cirrhosis. There was no autopsy. Some, nay, many, said he drank a gallon of sake a day. They placed the body in the meditative position, packed it in salt and flew it to Vermont in a chartered Canadian Pacific Boeing 737. Until May 26, students meditated with the corpse.

"He was one of the most important Buddhist teachers of our generation," said David I. Rome, president of Schocken Books Inc., a New York City publishing company, and for many years secretary to Rinpoche, "because of the transitional role he played in transplanting this 2,600-year-old religion to the West—without compromising the religion, the depth of the religion." And yes, said Rome, "we definitely expect him to come back and beseech him to come back, but just as in his life he did things in unexpected ways, we cannot expect him to mind a timetable."

There was ground fog the morning they carried the body up the mountain, following a bagpiper in Erskine tartan and Tibetans blowing horns as long as young pines and scarlet-berobed monks, to a meadow quilted with dandelions and buttercups and 3,000 or so of the American middle class, their babies in Kreeger & Son slings on their backs. Behind the corpse, which was borne in a wood-frame box wrapped in silk, came visiting lamas, borne in big cars, or lamasines, as one wag had it. "Our understanding," one after another in the crowd said, and happily so, "is that though the body of the teacher has died and will be consumed by the flames, his mind still exists and will pervade all of space."

They placed the body in an ornate 25-ft.-high kiln, so to speak, made of firebrick. The body was wrapped with gauze and covered with ghee, or clarified butter. All around the people were not exactly somber—"It is primarily a sad event," a spokesman had said, "But it is also a celebration for our teacher"—but there was no undue hilarity, no dope, no booze, no Woodstock feel, though everybody said the vibes were good. The weather was spectacular, warm and caressing. Children gamboled in the wildflowers.

They touched off a cannon about noon and fired the crematorium, sending dark smoke into the clean blue sky, "He would have loved this," said one of the directors from Halfax. When the flames burned low, there were rainbows round the sun, and the clouds the smoke had formed were multicolored. A student said she wouldn't be surprised if they had put chemicals on the fire.

"For a holy man, he was utterly unpredictable," said Rome. "If he were here, he would do something unexpected. He was that spontaneous."

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