what went wrong with chögyam trungpa

[click goofiest image ever of a Buddhist master]

I'm remembering a friend pitching a fit about Trungpa's supposed enlightenment and his death from alcoholism. I don't think I did such a good job of explaining it to him, but Trungpa most certainly did know what he was talking about, and his impulse to drop the trappings of Buddhism and speak to Westerners in terms we could understand was pristine.

I don't fault him for wanting to shock us, insult our prissy little ideas about what constitutes a master. I think he wasn't prepared enough for the culture shock when he embarked on this project. He was in Tibet until he was twenty, and we're talking during its complete removal from the rest of this world, before the Chinese invaded. Then he was in India for another four or five years... still in complete innocence of the perfidies of Western sophistication. Then people who want to wear exotic religions like designer clothes began fawning all over him, paving the way for him to become powerful here, before he even had a chance to get the lay of the land, so to speak. He found himself in charge, before he even knew what he was in charge of.

Then, too, I think he didn't know that many Asians have as much trouble with booze as indians do. This would have been no part of his intensive study in Tibet. And we are not speaking of something as easy as just stopping drinking. That is frequently lethal, and I'm thinking he well may have been determined to apply his spiritual mastery to the problem rather than plain old allopathic medicine.

In short, he was still heavily under the influence of the testosterone poisoning of young adulthood when he took us on, not completely clear of the hurdles, unable to know the dimensions of the hurdles he was not yet clear of, and too cocky to realize his errors until they owned him. By the time he may have been coming wise to the realities of these traps, and ergo the imperfect state of his own enlightenment, it was too late. Nevertheless, it is unwise to ignore his teaching because he fucked up in the end. It is apparent he'd had benefit of enlightened guidance, and that he'd understood. He knew what he was saying, even when drunk out of his skull.

[A number of hour-long lecture mp3's are linked here, but I do not recommend you listen to any of the others at the link, and I don't even think you can get much from the Trungpa lectures either. It seems to me that his best medium was print. I particularly recommend The Myth of Freedom for beginners. The second half of the book doesn't start making sense until you get much more deeply into it, but the first half is really very valuable to beginners.]