Meditation in Action
Chogyam Trungpa wrote Meditation in Action, first published in 1969, when he was thirty years old. The only other book he’d written at that point, published three years prior, was an autobiography about his escape from Tibet. Recognized both by Tibetan Buddhists and by other spiritual practitioners and scholars as a preeminent teacher of Tibetan Buddhism, Trungpa was a major figure in the dissemination of Buddhism in the West. He was a teacher, a poet, and an artist who presented Tibetan Buddhism in radically new ways, which included the myth of Shambhala as an enlightened society that was later called Shambhala Buddhism. He established the Shambhala Training method and in 1974 he founded Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Naropa was the first accredited Buddhist university in North America. Trungpa hired Allen Ginsberg to teach poetry and William Burroughs to teach literature. The school is still alive and thriving today (though Ginsburg and Burroughs are not).
Trungpa was born on March 5th, 1939, in the Nangchen region of Tibet, eleventh in the line of Trungpa Tülkus, important figures in the Kagyu lineage, which is one of the four main schools of Tibetan Buddhism. He was recognized as a tülku when he was just 13 months old. At the age of 8, he was ordained as a novice monk. He then engaged in intensive study and practice of traditional monastic disciplines, until at the age of 18 he received the degrees of kyorpön (doctor of divinity) and Khenpo (master of studies), as well as full monastic ordination.
On April 23, 1959, the twenty-year-old Trungpa embarked on a nine-month escape from Tibet, due to its being occupied by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Trungpa started with a small party of monastics, but as they traveled, people asked to join the group until they eventually numbered 300, including elderly and mothers with babies. Forced to abandon their animals, much of the journey was on foot, through untracked mountain wilderness to avoid the PLA. Trungpa, the monastics and about 70 refugees managed to cross the Brahmaputra River under heavy gunfire, after which they had to eat their leather belts and bags to survive the 19,000-feet climb over the Himalayas. The surviving party finally reached the safety of India on January 24, 1960.
In exile in India, Trungpa began his study of English, and he co-founded the Young Lamas Home School and was appointed its spiritual head. In 1963, Trungpa received a Spalding sponsorship to study comparative religion at St Antony's College, Oxford University. In 1967, he was invited by the Johnstone House Trust in Scotland to co-direct a meditation center, which then became Samye Ling, the first Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the West. David Bowie was one of Trungpa’s meditation students there. During this period he also wrote his first two books, Born in Tibet, and Meditation in Action.
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Shortly after his move to Scotland, Trungpa was in a car accident (some say he was drunk) that left him partially paralyzed on the left side of his body. This and other experiences led him to give up his monastic vows and work as a lay teacher. He made that decision principally to mitigate students' becoming distracted by exotic cultures and dress and to undercut their preconceptions of how a guru should behave. He drank—a lot—smoked, slept with students, and often kept them waiting for hours before giving teachings. Perhaps it was around this time that he coined the term crazy wisdom, referring to unconventional, outrageous, unexpected, or unpredictable behavior linked to religious or spiritual pursuits.
Trungpa moved to the United States in 1970, and traveled throughout North America, gaining renown for his ability to present the essence of the highest Buddhist teachings in a form readily understandable to Westerners. But his methods and way of life were highly controversial. According to one first-hand account, he drank “big glasses of gin first thing in the morning.” Sometimes he could give profound, crystal-clear lectures while totally inebriated, while at others he’d have to be carried because he couldn’t walk. Apparently cocaine was also an issue; one source reported that Trungpa spent over $40,000 a year on the drug. But then Joni Mitchell said that Trungpa cured her of her cocaine addiction during a meeting with him in 1976.
Joni told her biographer, David Yaffe, author of the book Restless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell, that she snorted a bump of cocaine in front of Trungpa within minutes of sitting down with him—part of her response to him asking her if she believed in God. “This is my god and this is my prayer,” she said before taking a hit. And then at some point Trungpa started doing a breathing exercise that Joni described as “emanating grace waves,” and those waves obliterated her ego and she left in an awakened state. Oh—they also shared a “delicious” laugh that “went on and on” and “got better and better”—the result of his answer to her question, “What is the meaning of life?”
Joni went on to refer Trungpa’s unorthodox characteristics in the first verse of “Refuge of the Roads,” the last track of her album 1976 album, Hejira.
In 1973, Trungpa established Vajradhatu, the central administrative body of the various meditation and study centers he’d founded in cities throughout North America and Europe. In 1974, he founded the Naropa Institute, which later became Naropa University, which I mentioned earlier. Trungpa visited Nova Scotia for the first time in 1977. In 1983 he established Gampo Abbey, a monastery in Cape Breton, and in 1986 he moved his home and the Vajradhatu headquarters to Halifax. On September 28 of that year he suffered cardiac arrest, after which his already failing health deteriorated, requiring intensive care at the hospital, then at his home and finally, in mid-March 1987, back at the hospital, where he died on April 4, 1987, at the age of 48.
According to Trungpa’s doctor, the cause of death was “chronic liver disease related to his alcohol intake over many years.” One of Trungpa's attendants reported that he suffered in his last months from classic symptoms of terminal alcoholism and cirrhosis, yet continued drinking heavily. She added, "At the same time there was a power about him and an equanimity to his presence that was phenomenal, that I don't know how to explain.”
It’s an interesting question posed by many a complicated spiritual leader: Can a person be enlightened and also deeply flawed? And in the case of Trungpa (Alan Watts comes to mind, too), can that flaw be alcoholism? I’m inclined to think that an enlightened being wouldn’t be addicted to any substances, especially one that affects the mind like alcohol does, but I myself am not an enlightened being and therefore don’t consider myself equipped to answer this question. I never met Trungpa or experienced how it felt to be in his presence. But I can say that his written words—or at least those in the book Meditation in Action—seem to possess the clarity, intelligence, and spiritual depth of a master.
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The first chapter, “The Life and Example of Buddha,” emphasizes, as Buddha’s own trajectory did, the important role that firsthand experience plays in the process of learning anything. The Buddha is well-known for basically saying, “Don’t take my word for it. Go and see for yourself.” Any teacher or therapist—two professions I have some experience in—will tell you that you can read all the books and take all the classes you want on theories of education and psychoanalysis, but until you’re standing in front of a classroom or sitting across from a patient, you really don’t know anything. Same goes for meditation. But of course the irony is that Trungpa and so many other spiritual masters who would agree with him on this whole notion of firsthand experience, wrote about and lectured on the very topic of meditation, essentially saying, “Here’s a book about something you should just learn about by practicing yourself.”
In the first chapter of Meditation in Action, he describes the practice as a very simple one of examining oneself. He says that if we approach meditation as a means of becoming one with God, then we’re embarking on a fool’s errand, because our concept of God is just that—a concept. Again I’m reminded of Alan Watts, who talks a lot about the ineffable nature of God, asserting that anyone who talks about God with words does not know what God is at all. In fact we can’t know what God is, because God is unlike anything we’ve ever known. I think Trungpa would agree, and his solution to this seemingly unsolvable problem is to return again and again to examining oneself. He stresses the necessity of engaging in this process with discipline and perseverance, accepting that there are no shortcuts and no excuses for giving up without having thoroughly “digested” the experience, as opposed to just getting a little taste of it. He compares a consistent, regular meditation practice to making a journey on foot (something his escape from Tibet taught him a lot about), as opposed to driving. In the latter approach we cannot really take in our surroundings and internalize the route, whereas if we walk somewhere we “know the way perfectly.”
If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard someone say, “Meditation is hard for me. I’m just not good at it”…I’d have a lot of nickels! Nobody is good at meditation, are they? At least at first? Unless maybe they’re one in a line of tülkus? It’s definitely something you have to be disciplined about, definitely an example of having to “trust the process.” I’d say the same thing goes for hatha yoga—that’s the yoga most people think of when they hear the word “yoga,” the one with all the poses. I practice it every day myself, with only the rarest exception, and have been doing since 2016, and I’m still discovering things about myself in doing so. Indeed I think anything that we practice with great regularity, regardless (for the most part) of how we’re feeling, has this gift to offer. It could be walking, or baking bread, or writing, knitting, painting, singing, playing an instrument, building houses… It’s the repetition that reveals the infinite depths we all contain. But meditation reveals these depths in its own distinct way. I’d say it’s the purest activity a person could do. Just meeting yourself right where you are, again and again and again. And with enough practice, you can start to meet others right where you are, too. According to Trungpa, that’s precisely what Buddha did, and that’s why he was such a powerful teacher. What he actually said didn’t matter nearly as much as the situation he created by “simply being true—just as any of us could be.”
But we must know what our truth is—by which I mean how it feels to “be true”—in order to then be true. And meditation give us access to that knowledge.
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The second chapter of Meditation in Action is titled “The Manure of Experience and the Field of Bodhi.” This chapter becomes especially fascinating when you know a bit about Trungpa’s lifestyle, i.e. that he was a very heavy drinker and has been described as a womanizer. He even forced the poet W.S. Merwin, along with Merwin’s girlfriend, to strip naked in a roomful of people. So there’s that, too.
The fascination lies in what Trungpa has to say about the character of a person, or the particular quality that they might possess. Each of us has a certain quality that informs our character, and Trungpa says that we should never classify the quality, whatever it might be, as bad. Instead, we should view that quality—be it laziness or even violence—or in his own case, perhaps, alcoholic-ness—as the seed of bodhi in that person. Bodhi is Sanskrit for “awakening” or “enlightenment.” Trungpa says that we must accept the character of a person and use it as a vehicle to that person’s full potentiality for enlightenment. Everyone has that potential inside. Via this train of thought, then, we can see any and every character trait as something positive, even as something wonderful, precisely because it is an aspect of samsara, or the cycle of death and rebirth and therefore suffering, and one cannot achieve nirvana—an awakened state of mind, the end of samsara—without first experiencing samsara.
It sounds so incredibly obvious when I say it out loud: you can’t have nirvana without samsara. Just like you can’t have sound without silence, and vice versa. You can’t have darkness without light. Alan Watts talks about meeting a woman who’d been born blind and therefore had no concept of what darkness was. Similarly, how could we know what nirvana was if we’d never experienced samsara?
Trungpa uses the metaphor of manure to illustrate how we can use our own “rubbish”—including our character traits, various theories, and anything else characteristic of samsara—to fertilize our own bodhi field. We should do this instead of following the usual temptation to discard of our own rubbish and buy manure from other farmers—which brings us back to the notion of learning from our own experience, what Trungpa calls the manure of experience. That manure is rich in vitamins and minerals that will enliven the soil of our potential awakening. It might be gross, and it might smell bad, but it’s the absolute best manure for our particular garden. In other words, we shouldn’t try to get rid of samsara and focus only on achieving nirvana. It simply doesn’t work that way. Nothing would grow.
Applied to the practice of meditation, this notion could look like contemplating a weakness or character flaw that we possess. Rather than try to push those thoughts away in an effort to empty the mind completely, we give them our full attention. And in doing so we might discover something new and valuable. We try to understand the weakness or character flaw in question, rather than pretend it doesn’t exist. Trungpa says that you are your own best friend; of all the people who might keep you company, you are the best person for the job. So you may as well lean into that role and get to know yourself as well as you can. He recommends studying all the way back to your childhood.
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The next chapter I’d like to explore is about generosity. Called dana in Sanskrit, generosity is one of the six paramitas, or transcendent actions. The other five are morality or discipline (that’s spontaneous discipline, acting according to the true law), patience, energy, concentration, and clarity. These paramitas are the actions of the bodhisattva, or someone who is on the way to an awakened state or has already achieved it—a state largely characterized by compassion and love. Generosity, which Trungpa also calls charity, is essential to developing the “selfless warmth” of a bodhisattva. While such generosity can refer to helping or giving to others, it does not entail doing so for one’s own psychological benefit, or doing so in order to feel helpful or seem helpful to others, to be virtuous or overcome a certain sin. This generosity is not conceived of in terms of good or bad, right or wrong. Rather, it transcends this kind of conditioning and is simply a response to the “true, present moment.”
And yet again I’m reminded of Alan Watts, who said that Zen monks never put things off for later. A need presents itself in their environment, and they act in such a way to meet that need, right then and there. And I’d say there’s a certain generosity to this way of being. We do not act in order to receive some kind of award, and therefore we are not acting from a place of possessiveness. We have transcended that kind of continual wanting. So the generosity Trungpa is describing is essentially a generosity toward our own selves if you think about it, because it implies that we have enough love and warmth within ourselves that we don’t need it to come from without by somehow manipulating the world into providing it for us—which it can’t do, anyway.
Trungpa tells an old Tibetan story about two brothers and their yaks, the moral of which is this: a person with many possessions wants more, while a person with few is prepared to give. Maybe you saw the video that went viral a few years ago, in which a man, being filmed by his friend, approached various people who were eating in public spaces—I think most of them were in the food court at the mall—and asked if they could spare some of the food they were eating, as he was quite hungry and had no money (which wasn’t true, but social experiments are often built on such lies). All of them, despite the shopping bags full of new clothes and gadgets and who knows what else at their sides, said no. Then the man approached a homeless man in the park who was eating a basic meal from McDonald’s or somewhere—a meal he’d just received from the man’s friend/cameraman, without knowing they were in cahoots—and asked him if he could spare some food. The homeless man did not hesitate. He shared his burger and fries. And hopefully we can assume that the well-meaning tricksters later bought the blessed soul at least one other meal that maybe he wouldn’t have to share. Then again, maybe it genuinely felt good to him to share like that and he didn’t feel a need to be compensated for having done so unnecessarily, so these other two guys could make a point.
This whole idea of being able to give more when you have less to give also seems connected, at least in my brain, to what Catholic mystic Meister Eckhart talks about in his Book of Divine Consolations, which I explored in a previous blog post. He said that a person has to have less of himself in the mix if there’s to be any room for God to fill him. And that’s the ultimate in going-without, isn’t it, to empty oneself of ego, of all that we’ve been conditioned to identify with? But according to Eckhart, one gains everything by thusly “killing” oneself, and therefore one has everything to give.
Trungpa would maybe call this “opening oneself” instead of emptying oneself. He applies this aspect of generosity to our typical way of thinking. Our thoughts are constantly coming and going, being replaced by yet more thoughts before we have any time to really process them. There are no gaps between the thoughts. And so often these thoughts are demanding something of us—that we create or acquire something. Meditation is a way to create more gaps, so that something can actually take place in the mind rather than be ceaselessly overlapped by something else and something else, with nothing ever really blossoming, you might say. In this way, meditation is an act of generosity toward oneself.
I have personally found it helpful to approach meditation as an opportunity to lengthen the gaps between the thoughts, as opposed to trying to eliminate thoughts altogether. Because that, of course, would be wasting perfectly good manure.
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I’ve now made my way up to the chapter titled “Patience.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines patience as “the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset.” Trungpa defines it as the practice of “not expecting anything and not trying to change the situation outside oneself.” He adds that this is “the only way to create peace in the world.” I love this, because it makes perfect sense. If we were all more skilled at accepting or tolerating delay, trouble or suffering, and not expecting anything or trying to change the situation outside ourselves, I do believe there would be a lot more peace in the world. With more such patience, people wouldn’t have taken to the Raleigh streets last year in protest of mask mandates and the lockdown in general because it was preventing them from getting a haircut. And for a more current example, if people can maybe just accept that some people are not going to get the COVID vaccine, there could be a lot less conflict around it, and maybe if those anti-vaccine or vaccine-hesitant people don’t have anything to push back against and build up more ego-based resistance around, they can better sit with their own thoughts and feelings about it and come around on their own to getting vaccinated. And if they still decide to remain unvaxxed we would have at least skipped all the obnoxious fighting along the way.
In order to practice patience, Trungpa says we must cultivate the ability to see a given situation for what it is, in the present moment, free of any past influences or fears about the future. He calls it a “panoramic, all-pervading awareness” of “the very moment of now.” This kind of seeing brings with it a great energy and strength, both of which are necessary for practicing patience.
And what better way to develop one’s capacity for seeing things as they really are, than meditation? Which brings us to the book’s penultimate chapter of the same name. The kind of meditation Trungpa describes is essentially nothing more than a disciplined attempt to see what is, right here and right now, within one’s own self. We do not sit down on our meditation cushion—or chair, if that’s our preference—with the aim to achieve anything but this simple act of seeing. We are not striving to attain some higher state of consciousness or to become a different version of ourselves, or even to free ourselves from anything. All we’re trying to do is identify with the here and now, and we do that by concentrating on the breath, because each breath is a pure and unique expression of here-ness, of now-ness.
And again, we’re not trying to push anything aside when meditating. To borrow a concept from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (which is based on a lot of Buddhist ideas), everybody must be welcome to the party—including the ego and any thoughts or feelings we might judge as bad or negative. Trungpa says that to deny any aspect of ourselves when meditating is to attempt perfection, which is entirely beside the point. He says that when we try to become perfect in this “one-sided way,” then the “same amount of imperfection is building up on the other side.” This is a concept that Marion Woodman explores in her book Addiction to Perfection, which I’m going to discuss in my next blog post.
Along this same vein, Trungpa also emphasizes the importance of not assuming a solemn attitude when meditating. This need not—and maybe even should not—be some sacred ritual, but a super-simple identification with breath, free of ideas and analyzing. “One should feel quite natural and spontaneous.” Pema Chodron, a former student of Trungpa’s, says the same thing. I think I read it in her little—literally—book, The Pocket Pema Chodron. She says there’s no need to prepare for meditation, that you can just drop in without a moment’s notice, no fuss. And I recall that she recommends focusing mostly on the exhale, for what that’s worth.
I think J. Krishnamurti would also agree with Trungpa in what he says about ignorance, or not knowing. To realize that we don’t really know what meditation is, for example, is the absolutely essential first step toward discovering wisdom. And actually, it is wisdom. As Krishnamurti would say, the beginning is the end—or the end is in the beginning—or something like that. In accepting our own ignorance—and everything else for that matter—we drop all struggle and discrimination. “There should be no deliberate effort,” Trungpa says, "no attempt to control and no attempt to be peaceful. This is why breathing is used.”
And you know why else the breath is such a powerful tool? Because it’s an involuntary biological process that can also be voluntary—well, up to a point, of course, but you know what I mean. We can hold our breath, or speed it up, or slow it down. We can give our attention directly to it, and in so doing, change it. And yet when we don’t give our attention to it, it continues doing its thing. Some say that instead of breathing, we are being breathed. Alan Watts (there he is again) actually proposes the notion that we—each and every one of us, as individuals—are making our heart pump, and our blood flow through our veins, and our stomach digest our food, and all the rest of it. “You’re doing that,” he says. It is a fascinating perspective to consider! And it seems an especially appropriate thing to contemplate in regards to the breath, while meditating.
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The final chapter of Meditation in Action is titled “Wisdom,” which in Tibet is called sherab, which literally means “ultimate knowledge.” And of course having knowledge in this “ultimate” form is not the same as having knowledge about things, but is rather what Trungpa calls “knowingness.” It means that we know, basically, the situation at hand, right here in this moment, which is all there is. We are on very intimate terms with it. We know it inside and out.
The three methods for cultivating sherab, or wisdom, are (again in Tibet) töpa (meaning study) sampa (meaning contemplation), and gompa (meaning meditation). The method of study generally refers to the less-than-ultimate knowledge of things—especially, in this case, scripture and other texts. It should come as no surprise that Trungpa (1) warned against relying too heavily on books, as they can become our way of escaping what is and shirking the responsibility to look closely at things on our own, and (2) he also acknowledged the important role that books can play in the beginning of a given learning process. He allows that books can be of great benefit; namely, they can provide “inspiration and self-confidence” to the reader. Once they have indeed provided that, though, the reader should stop reading, and go forth inspired and confident to see what he can see for himself.
I myself have a hard time with this one. If I didn’t, I doubt this blog would exist. As I said in the very first post, I possess an insatiable appetite for books about the human condition, especially those with a spiritual bent to them. I admit to thinking, with each book I crack open for the first time, that maybe this one will…somehow…make my knowledge complete. Maybe Trungpa would say I’m hoping to be made wise by the books I read. And he would kindly point out the folly in that, and also recognize it as an essential element of my particular manure of experience. This endless seeking, he might say, is the seed of bodhi in me. So why fight it?
Moving on. Sampa, the second method for cultivating wisdom, is what Trungpa calls “reflective meditation,” which I take to mean contemplation, and more specifically, contemplation of something. For example, if I am reading and come upon an idea or concept that really knocks my socks off and makes me want to shout it from the rooftops, I should, according to Trungpa, “calm down after the initial excitement of discovery” and find a way of relating my newly acquired knowledge to myself on a practical level. It certainly is easy to get abstract about things when it comes to spirituality. Quite recently I had the epiphany: “I am love. Nothing can hurt me.” It was one of the more empowering moments of my life. All fear vanished as I really felt what I was really made of. But what happens to my conviction when I contemplate losing something dear to me, or being in actual, physical pain, or on the verge of death or even of apologizing for something I’m ashamed of? What happens then, indeed!
So while sampa is the method of contemplating what we’ve learned or discovered, gompa is meditation, in the sense of samadhi, which is the eighth and final stage of ashtanga, or the eight limbs of yoga that Patanjali delineated in his yoga sutras. In samadhi, the meditator becomes one with his or her point of focus and transcends the Self altogether. Trungpa says that the way to begin this kind of meditation is to ask yourself, “Who am I?” And since you don’t know who you are—remember the importance of accepting your own ignorance?—then you won’t be starting from a place of “I” at all. You’ll be starting from a place of “is.” The “I” wants to strive and achieve, and the “I” expects to be rewarded for its efforts. But the “is” never strives for anything or expects anything. In this way, true meditation “is not conditioned by any of our normal ways of dealing with situations.” It happens beyond conditioning, which you might recall is one of my favorite definitions of spirituality in general: getting beyond conditioning.
But did Chogyam Trungpa himself get beyond conditioning? Did he walk through life without all the expectations characteristic of “I”? Did he achieve true wisdom in that way? He certainly never transcended his body’s conditioned need for large quantities of booze every day. That’s a hard one to get past. But it doesn’t mean that his message loses any value—at least not for me. Like Thoreau says in Walden, and I’m paraphrasing, the flaws I possess do not detract from the truth I speak. And Trungpa probably wouldn’t call them flaws in the first place, but the seeds of our potential for enlightenment. Near the end of Meditation in Action, he says that “one can in fact be at the end result at the same time that one is traveling along the path.” There’s that Krishnamurti idea again, of the beginning containing the end. It’s like the Zen saying that goes “Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”
