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In late 1971 or early 1972, I heard that a Tibetan teacher named Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche was going to be interviewed by Allen Ginsberg on channel thirteen. I had read his book Meditation in Action, and in my arrogance, thought he was a "bright young fellow." A group of friends arranged to come over to my apartment to watch the program. I was, at the time, looking for some kind of spiritual practice. My brother and his wife were disciples of Swami Muktananda and I had taken to listening to a tape of Baba chanting the Guru Gita. He said that anyone who played this tape in his home would turn it into a temple. I had established a routine of waiting until my family was asleep, smoking a bowl of hashish, playing the Guru Gita, doing yoga, and meditating. The evening before the broadcast I filled the bowl of my bong with hash and lit a match. As the hash caught fire, it turned into a face that terrified me. I snuffed out the burning hashish. Years later, when I first saw a picture of the Mahakala, I recognized it as the glowing face I had seen in the bowl. The next evening my friends gathered, we turned on channel thirteen and watched the interview. In the upper left-hand part of the screen, Allen stood facing the camera. In the lower right-hand part of the screen was Trungpa Rinpoche, with his back to the camera. When Allen had finished his introductory interaction with Rinpoche, the camera switched and Rinpoche's head and upper body filled the screen. Looking into his eyes, I saw in them, like looking through a pair of windows, the head, the eyes, the sky, the clouds, and the sunset color I had seen as a child in Brooklyn. Rinpoche raised his hand, held it palm forward, and said "Stop." The world dissolved in a shower of colored particles. Not long after that evening, hoping to meet Rinpoche, I went to Tail of the Tiger for a seminar on Shunyata. It was tough to get an interview with him. I spoke to everyone who seemed to have any sort of official position. They all said the same thing: "Rinpoche is too busy. He's not giving interviews." Finally, Bill MeKeever, apparently feeling the urgency and depth of my desire, agreed to get me an interview. I was then, and am now, profoundly grateful to him. I was bursting with questions about my life, family, profession, relationships, and my spiritual path. Rinpoche sat in a wooden armchair. The impression I flashed on was, as I described earlier, that of an enormous mountain of flesh. His bare feet were thick and massive looking. He wore a chino shirt with the arms torn or roughly cut off at the shoulders and a pair of chino shorts cut from full-length slacks. After a few introductory exchanges, he said: "You're doing your meditation practice incorrectly (I had been practicing for about two years with Eido Roshi). Do it this way instead." Suddenly I was inside the sky I had seen as a child—the entire space had become Rinpoche's head. The meditation instruction itself was transformative—a radical shift in my perspective. Master psychologist or mind-reader. How could he possibly have known how I was practicing? Although I'm not going to detail the "how" of it, the instruction he gave me introduced a viewpoint that was the answer to all of the questions with which I had come to the interview. Thirty-five years later, it is the instruction I practice and aspire to fathom. As I reached out to shake his hand, the knock on the door announcing the end of the interview time came. Rinpoche took my hand and said with a smile, "Good timing. Come and see me again." Later in 1972, at Tail of the Tiger, I told Rinpoche that I would like to write about the relationship between Buddhist and Western psychology. He said, "Bernie, Buddhist psychology has been evolving for more than 2000 years. You should give yourself some time to understand it." For thirty-five years I have followed his advice. Every time I reread one of his books or one of his talks, I am amazed to find that what I have newly come to understand was already there. I just hadn't been ready to see it. My appreciation of the vastness and profundity of his grasp of the dharma grows with the evolution of my own understanding. At the same time, human beings are progressively more astonishing to me. Early in 1973, Rinpoche told me that it was urgent I do a solitary retreat. He said that at least a month was necessary. When I objected and told him that it was not financially feasible, he said, "What would you say if your appendix burst? It's important for you to do this." In May I did a month-long solitary retreat at Tail of the Tiger. Addressing my fears of being alone in a tent in the forest, another student told me that after a terrified first night on solitary retreat, he came back down from the mountain and told Rinpoche that he was too frightened to go back. Rinpoche told him to go back and at nightfall to move his cushion outside the tent. He was to spend the night outside conjuring up the most frightening scenarios he could imagine. He did as Rinpoche instructed, and it was the end of his fear of the dark. In the second week of my retreat, I was sitting on my cushion, outside my tent. I realized that I was bent over my feet tearing at my toenails with my fingernails. I jerked upright and choicelessly faced reality. I acknowledged that I was deeply depressed—in utter despair. Suddenly in the sky in front of me, Rinpoche appeared, seated on a cushion and floating in space. "What's going on?" he asked. I answered, "No matter how I examine my mind, I can't find anything about myself that isn't loathsome. Oh, I pretend pretty well, and I probably have some people conned into thinking I'm a decent person, but it's a pile of shit." "That's good enough soil in which to plant a garden," Rinpoche said, and dissolved. By the end of the retreat my confidence in the dharma had evolved considerably. In late 1973, after almost two years of unimpeded access to Rinpoche, I was unable to get in to see him. I pushed, pleaded and prodded, to no avail. Finally, after a public talk, I approached him and asked what was going on. He said. "Bernie, the honeymoon is over. You're hooked. We need a long separation from one another." As shocking and painful as this was to hear, I felt that it was what I needed—the challenge seemed a vote of confidence. In 1974, teaching in the summer session that launched Naropa University, I was finally allowed to have an interview with Rinpoche. I was feeling hurt and angry—a rejected lover. When I sat down, he said, "You're doing much better." I was shocked. I couldn't believe that he had any memory of our last encounter. I asked, "What do you mean, sir?" He answered by referring to our encounter after the public talk and the state of mind with which I had approached him. I remember that moment with wonder.
At seminary, feeling very unhappy, I complained to him that I was having a difficult time. He said, "I know. When I think of you, I feel as though I am being stuck with pins and needles." When I asked if he could help me, he said that he could, but that what he would need to do to help me would have to be very severe. I said that I understood. I said, "I know I need a swift kick in the ass sir." He then said, "You know I wouldn't do this if I didn't care about you very much." I said, "I understand that sir." He said, "Then, with your permission?" and asked with his eyes. I said, "Yes sir. Please sir." This conversation took place at about 11:00 p.m., after a public talk. He asked me to wait where I was. About an hour later, someone came to get me and took me to Rinpoche's dining room, where I was to spend about an hour being questioned by three of Rinpoche's close students. When I sat down I reached into my pocket for a cigarette but found I didn't have any. I asked one of them for a cigarette. He refused. I asked if I could take a moment and get a pack. I was told that I couldn't. One of them asked if any of us would like some water. We all said we would. When he came back he was carrying a tray with three glasses of water. He gave one glass to each of my inquisitors and placed a single edged razor blade on the table before me. He then took a pitcher of water from the tray and poured a little onto the razor. He said, "Rinpoche invites you to cut your throat." In the way I answered their questions, that was what I proceeded to do to myself. I could find only negative, denigrating, and sarcastic things to say about myself. Finally Rinpoche joined us, and the drama climaxed. After listening to my answers to several questions, Rinpoche observed, "You really need love, don't you?" I thought I would die from the pain of the humiliation I felt. "I guess so sir," I said with a bitter voice. He said, "You're using the dharma as a weapon against yourself. This is hopeless." He turned his sake glass over, spilling its contents on the table, stood up, and walked out. It was an agonizing, healing, and still another life altering experience for me. I left the dining room feeling, literally, like a speck of dust in infinite space. All was lost: my guru had abandoned me. Then, I suddenly realized, "I'm still here. He didn't kick me out. Nothing happened." It was about 3:00 a.m., and walking through the dimly lit corridors of the motel we had rented in Land 'O Lakes, Wisconsin, I saw light under the door of a friend's room. I knocked, went in, and found several of my friends waiting up for me. That morning, in that room, I joined the sangha. Several years later, walking down Broadway on the upper west side of Manhattan, I met one of my inquisitors. She asked me if I knew what had happened after I left Rinpoche's dining room that evening. She told me that Rinpoche had asked her and the other two to come to his quarters. There he put them through the same kind of inquisition to which they had subjected me. He told them it was important for them to know what they had put me through. In 1987, on the day the Vidyadhara died, I was sitting with the sangha in the New York Dharmadhatu shrine room. The space was quite suddenly filled with his presence. I felt a shock surge through me, and I thought, "He's died." The next moment someone came into the shrine room and made the announcement—he had in fact just died. I was terrified. Now I could no longer project my sense of shame on the face of my teacher, on photographs of him on my shrine, or in person, looking at me. Up until this moment I had leaned on his willingness to accept me even while knowing the awful truth of what I thought and felt—I had seen in his eyes the painful truth of who I was—I had used him to avoid my most intimate feelings about my relationship to the dharma. By imagining his disapproving view of me, I avoided knowing my deepest feelings about myself. Now I was alone with my crazy mind and had to rely on my own intelligence. Of course there are many more stories that I might tell about this extraordinary human being. I've chosen these few with the hope that something of Rinpoche's magical presence and genius as a teacher might communicate itself to those of you who've joined our community too late to have met him. He told me that our meditation centers are his true body. I invite you to open your hearts and minds to that instruction the next time you are at one of our centers. For me it has become reality—when I come into one of our centers, I enter his mind. © 2006 Bernard Weitzman Bernard Weitzman is a retired professor of psychology, and a psychotherapist in private practice living in New York City. He became a student of the Vidyadhara Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche in 1972. He has taught at Shambhala Centers and at Karme Choling. | |||||
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