Chogyam Trungpa by Midal Fabrice

Author:Midal, Fabrice [Midal, Fabrice]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
Published: 2010-10-05T03:00:00+00:00

With his new girlfriend—

Like a general inspecting the troops.15

Encounters with Allen Ginsberg

In 1970, while Chögyam Trungpa, Diana Mukpo, and Kunga, one of his students, were getting into a taxi, a man came up to them and said, “My father is ill—may I take your cab?” Kunga recognized the man as Allen Ginsberg, the famous Beat poet and emblem of American counterculture. He introduced him to Chögyam Trungpa.

In fact, Allen Ginsberg had already met Chögyam Trungpa in India, while the latter was at the Young Lamas School, but neither of them remembered that encounter. It was only after Chögyam Trungpa’s death that Allen Ginsberg found a photo of himself with a young monk who had shown him the region around the school, and realized that the monk was none other than Chögyam Trungpa.

In any case, after this second meeting in New York, a sincere friendship began between the two. While Chögyam Trungpa introduced Allen Ginsberg to the Buddhist discipline of meditation, Ginsberg introduced him to the poetry of the Beat Generation, such as Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues. He also explained the very idea behind modern poetry since Rimbaud and Apollinaire: poets had adopted a very free attitude toward language, as in the famous line of William Carlos Williams: “No ideas but in things,”16 which is an invitation to pay attention above all to the words themselves. From this viewpoint, Ginsberg criticized certain turns of phrase in Chögyam Trungpa’s poetry, such as the use of conventional metaphors like “galloping on a white horse.” He explained that without concrete reality, it was merely an image. Symbolism should be more lively and anchored in an experience of the power of words themselves. Rinpoche started to introduce these more contemporary ideas into his poetry and to pay more attention to the poetic dimension itself. This change is particularly striking between Mudra, published in 1972, and the collection First Thought Best Thought, which appeared eleven years later.

Here is an excerpt from a poem written in 1959:

The yogin who lives only in the hour

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