Recalling Chögyam Trungpa by Fabrice Midal

Author:Fabrice Midal [Fabrice Midal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780834821620
Publisher: Shambhala

The Establishment of a Pure Monastic Tradition in the West

PEMA CHÖDRÖN

MY TEACHER, THE Vidyadhara, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, is known as one of the pivotal figures in presenting the buddhadharma in the West. Often, when people speak of him, he is recalled as a very unconventional teacher of Buddhism. There are stories of his unconventional behavior and his willingness to present the teachings in a fresh and directly relevant manner to the situation he found himself in. What is not so commonly known, however, is that he is also the founder of a monastic tradition, and people might be quite surprised to hear how traditional he was in his views about monastic life.

Trungpa Rinpoche was raised in a monastic tradition. Identified at an early age as a reincarnation of the tenth Trungpa, he was taken from his family and brought to the Surmang monasteries for training. Having grown up in a monastery, he remained a monk when the Chinese invaded Tibet, forcing him to flee to India. He continued to wear his monk’s robes until 1969, after a car crash in England, when he came to the realization that his robes were an obstacle to people’s hearing the true dharma. He gave up his robes and began to dress like a Westerner. In 1970 he arrived in the United States, where he began to teach in his characteristic style, presenting the dharma in an unconventional and fresh manner.

I understand from some of his early students in North America that he first talked about his wish to develop a monastery as early as the early 1970s, when he arrived in North America. I myself had been ordained at Samye Ling in England, by the sixteenth Karmapa, before becoming a student of Trungpa Rinpoche’s. Following my ordination, I returned to the United States and started to study with Trungpa Rinpoche and finally requested permission to become his student. We had our first discussion on the setting up of a monastery in North America during the 1981 Seminary (an intensive three-month period of practice and study of the Buddhist teachings). He was sitting there looking very, very happy, and he said it gave him such pleasure to be in a place where everybody was completely committed and one-pointedly engaged in meditation and the study of Buddhist teachings. He said that this was the closest we have to a monastery, and if one day we could have such a situation on a permanent basis, that would be like a dream come true.

In the early 1980s, Tsultrim Tondrup, one of Trungpa Rinpoche’s students who was also a monk, supplicated the Vidyadhara to establish a monastery. The Vidyadhara responded that that would be wonderful and that Tsultrim should look for a suitable place on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. Tsultrim set out on the search, and in the meantime, Trungpa Rinpoche started to talk to me, initiated sometimes by me, sometimes by him, about what he would like the monastery to be.

Transmitting a View of Western

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