I think this gap was good to have, and to be in. And it continues in the question of what RFS, the Radio Free Shambhala website and community, is about, and of how it manifests that intention day by day, activity by activity.

Decorum

One area to consider is the tone of articles and comments, which really is a matter of decorum. As the late Beverley Webster, who compiled the Shambhala Decorum Manual, says:

Shambhala Decorum is not to be regarded as a rigid set of rules or fixed code of behaviour, but as a flexible system of signs, symbols and signals, ceremonies and social gestures, in a continual process of adapting itself to the evolving needs of our evolving society.

Comments

There are two problem areas with comments:

Both of these problem areas call for us to manifest, moment by moment and in detail, the “enlightened society” we talk about. The medium really is the message: if we don’t talk about such a society in a sane and considerate manner, there’s little likelihood of actually manifesting it.

Critical Articles and Forward-Looking Articles

There will probably always be a need for critical, discriminating articles, such as regarding the setup of Shambhala International and its relationship to Chögyam Trungpa’s Shambhala Vision and to the greater Chögyam Trungpa sangha. However, what we are about is manifesting this vision, which includes supporting the emergence, community, practice, and study of the Vidyadhara’s sangha.

So this is one focus area for RFS: to provide resources on practice and study, meditation instructors and teachers, and sangha and programs.

We will tighten the commenting guidelines and software regarding length and frequency of commenting, and also explore moderating comments. Moderation basically means that comments go into a queue, and are only actually published when okayed by a moderator. This has upsides, but also significant downsides, including the time commitments required of moderators. It also calls for more explicit “right speech” guidelines that both commenters and moderators can refer to.

As part of a site redesign and refocus, we will be adding some new functionality, including groups and discussion forums. Joining groups and discussions will require registering with the site, and providing a verified email address.

Comments on this article are welcome: respect the floor as you take it.

Several more articles will appear in the next little while. We are particularly interested in contributions regarding study and practice resources, and ways that the Shambhala vision of Chögyam Trungpa can be found and shared in this world.

Commentary by Damchö

1) I came to Trungpa Rinpoche’s first Shambhala book after I’d read nearly all of his published Buddhist teachings. Most of the book made a tremendous impression on me, particularly the first main part–”How To Be a Warrior”. The monarchical and Confucian political vision which emerged later in the book, however: this I had to hold in my mind in “negative capability”. I recognized it as a provocative challenge to my inherited Western skepticism about kingship. And indeed it created some real cognitive dissonance. After all, I would say to myself, this man is clearly pretty realized, and I clearly am not, so who am I to disagree? And yet…

Few around me within the sangha seemed to have much in the way of qualms. I remember conversations at retreat centre dinner tables about this topic. Some of the contributors were 20-years-old yet already confidently proclaiming democracy to be lame, an idealistic but naive illusion. Anyone can see monarchy is the only mature, wise choice of government, I would hear…

My personal difficulty with idealizing monarchy stems from an inability to point to any idealized example of it, one which–as far as I am able to see–has ushered in anything close to enlightened society. The chants mention Ashoka, “Emperors of China and Japan and so forth,” but when I read history–history rather than hagiography or wishful thinking–I really don’t find what I would call enlightened kingship anywhere. Very possibly I am missing something. But I would also venture to guess that everything the average Shambhalian knows about Ashoka, for example, could fit inside a (small) paragraph. And how much of even that, after all, can we be truly certain of? Journalists disagree about what happened yesterday, despite transcripts and video footage! Here we are talking about ancient history, where pretty much everything is up for interpretive grabs. And yet, in my experience not only is there little questioning of this view, it seems to have become a new dogma–something unquestionable.

Of course certain reigns have been more humane (or at least less inhumane) than others. Still, mostly what I see in trying to evaluate the ways in which we humans have ruled over each other are the grubby, “human all-too- human” realities of power and the will to power. I see all the manifold pathways unchecked power opens up to corruption, ie simple human grasping and aversion–from subtle through flagrant all the way up to genocidal. And I see the stoking of spiritual materialism and theistic king / emperor worship. I am left with a strong conviction that the various functions of power need to balance each other and have some measure of genuine independence in order for a society or community to be healthy.

2) My last experiences at a centre–after a break of a number of years–heightened all of this considerably. There, I saw the current head of Shambhala treated as not all that short of a god. And saw the effects of this kind of culture on those in positions of authority and newcomers alike. Over time I have noticed less and less disagreement being expressed at centres, more and more uniformity of thought and even style. At a certain point I began to feel I’d entered a realm of True Believers.

All of this crystallized one Parinirvana Day, when I’d been living at one of the land centres. Nothing new happened, particularly; nothing I hadn’t noticed before and pondered. Still, that day everything came together in a concentrated way and I found myself thinking along more definite channels about the state of things.

Simply put, that was the day I began to feel that Shambhala had become a little too much concerned about itself, in relation to the dharma. More about triumphing than simply trying to manifest the teachings, more about self- perpetuation and growth than service. Again, nothing was especially different that day. True, there were more people in kasung uniform than usual so the military vibe was heavier, and the kasung energy, at that time and place at least, was fairly cold, punitive / superegoic in style, not terribly reminiscent of the broken-hearted practitioner. There were more toasts than usual, but not a ton more. Depth of pride in the lineage was very much on display that day, but naturally enough after all.

Still, sitting in the shrine room that evening, listening to the toasts I’d heard innumerable times each in the preceding year and (about four times that day) the Shambhala Anthem; hearing too much news about the three separate weddings Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche and the Sakyong Wangmo were about to have, a few too many assertions about how special the Mukpo family is; hearing a triumphalist “proclamation” read that had just been issued, offering help at governance to the town of Halifax (or was it the whole province of Nova Scotia?); gazing frequently up at the new shrine which now contained only representatives of the Mukpo family, just Sakyong Mipham and his father; seeing a little too much uniformity of taste, opinion, expression, even individual vocabulary … in the midst of all this a sense of claustrophobia which had been creeping up on me for a number of weeks, getting stronger and stronger, finally forced me to pay proper attention to it. I pronounced to myself the word which is always made a joke of at Shambhala centres. Yes, I wondered why the whole experience that day felt so unspacious, indeed suffocating. Why it felt rather like being in a cult.

That was around the time I first heard SMR referred to as His Majesty, and the place he would stay always referred to as The Court, as if there were a kind of superstition against even occasionally saying “so-and-so’s house” or “such-and-such hotel”. It was around the time I attended a server’s meeting at which someone described how something had once been spilled on the floor in the Sakyong’s presence and he actually helped the server clean it up! I put this phrase in italics because it indicates how the story was told, as something truly extraordinary, indicative of superhuman love on the part of the Sakyong. It was also around the time a friend of mine–who’d just come back from serving the Sakyong on a book-writing retreat–told me in hushed tones that he’d seen SMR with his own eyes follow through on a speaking engagement despite being sick to his stomach just beforehand. He described this, again, as if it were another instance of something incredibly exceptional. Yet all I could think of at that moment was the singer (was it Joan Baez?) who in an interview spoke of having to go through nausea and vomiting before literally every concert. Or for that matter all those who get up and go to work every day pretty much however they are feeling. More to the point, it was around the time I began to notice the Sakyong being spoken of like this all the time.

3) As with James Elliott, who has written eloquently here about this topic, my reflections on and around that Parinirvana Day came after observing abuse of power–undealt with by Shambhala hierarchy. And also as in his case this was the catalyst for trying to understand the current environment within the sangha better, focusing on questions about power and how it is dispersed and related to within Shambhala International. Abuse of power in and of itself is maybe not all that remarkable. But a culture which downplays it, looks the other way, or even fails to see it in the first place is another matter entirely.

All these thoughts raise two core issues for me, with which I will conclude:

a) Samaya, theocracy, and inclusiveness

Samaya is unique, unlike any other relationship we could think of. Samaya is the utterly intimate, mind-to- mind relationship that exists between a student and the Lama she has freely chosen. It exists at the level of spiritual practice and not for any kind of collective, political purpose.

When the aspect of obedient submission within samaya moves outside of that relationship and begins to characterize the larger political structure of an organization, we have theocracy, and one to a very pure degree. It is a primordial temptation, an ancient dream, that we might bypass ordinary checks and balances and leap directly to the revolutionary goal: dutifully acknowledging the (generally catastrophic) failings of such movements in the past, yet insisting that now things are, for the first time, different.

The dharma is very clear in pointing out how ever-resourceful and clever is ego, how manifold its tendencies toward self-deception. And Trungpa Rinpoche saw fit to present as his first main teaching in America the sobering truth of spiritual materialism: that not merely even within religion, but especially within religion, can we find the temptations to cut corners and assume ourselves–or more to the point our Church or sect–pretty much entirely on the side of the angels.

I find it a thought very much in keeping with the dharma that the more centralized is political power and the fewer checks and balances upon it, the greater the temptation to abuse such power in the name of the ideal. It does not contradict the reality of basic goodness to assert the need for skepticism in assessing motivation in ourselves and our leaders, of course; it simply follows on from the illusions of ego and ego’s perhaps cleverest creation–spiritual materialism.

Within Shambhala I find a samaya-like quality operating at the level of the collective along with a lack of balance of power between executive, legislative, and judicial functions. In fact I would be hard-pressed to point to any actual distinction of such functions: acharyas traverse all three, and each has pledged a form of absolute loyalty to the Sakyong; the kasung likewise pledge loyalty to SMR and implicitly to his senior teachers as representatives; and everyone else is encouraged to follow the curriculum to its end, a path which involves ever- more-binding pledges of loyalty. A tight and intricate setup of obedience is thus in place, creating various issues of accountability and exclusion which have been aired often in this forum and elsewhere.

The admonishment to evaluate a potential teacher for a full twelve years before entering into samaya came from within a culture far removed from the democratic expectations of our own. And yet within Shambhala today many have pledged even more than samaya long before that span: they have also committed themselves to a King and a hierarchy, a political philosophy and political movement, and an increasingly independent lineage. At the same time Shambhala continues to represent itself as a non-partisan, inclusive umbrella under which all genuine spiritual practitioners from whatever tradition may feel at home. There is a serious discrepancy here.

b) Agenda, ambition, and spiritual materialism

Theocratic tendencies and insufficient checks and balances are concern enough. Along with this is another: that Agenda may become too powerful. That the goal may, too much, become the path.

To some this may seem a contrived question, but still I ask myself: is not the dharma / truth more important than Shambhala? More specifically, are not the teachings of Shambhala more important than Shambhala? I do suspect this distinction is one many within SI would not even be able to make. But it is worth pondering, I feel. Is it not our practice to devote our lives and labour to the creation of greater sanity, dignity, humanity, love, and awakeness in the world? If so then the size or power of our particular community should not be too great a concern to us. Who cares where the good influences are coming from, so long as we are doing our own thing as well as we can and supporting all individuals and groups who are manifesting basic goodness each in their own way, with their own emphases and styles.

This is obviously not to say we shouldn’t work at protecting, enriching, and offering our own precious inheritance. But the trend within Shambhala has been towards ever greater separation from the larger Buddhist community. And here’s the point: I don’t believe Shambhala is going to save the world. I don’t think Buddhism as a whole is going to save the world. If human community is going to survive and evolve, we will have to relinquish possession of the truth, as well as messianic mentality–a mentality that, here, would have to neglect its own teachings on the thoroughgoing interdependence of phenomena and non-duality of self and other.

The trouble is that even the very best of our motivations can turn into ambition and agenda, all the harder to spot because of how much evident goodness is there. This is why Chögyam Trungpa emphasized the perils of spiritual materialism so much. They represent a potential blind spot for all practitioners and spiritual communities. Agenda marks the point at which personally prevailing becomes more important than working with everyone else and simply doing one’s best, unconcerned with the status or size of our group.

I am concerned that Shambhala has been sliding down this path for some time, unawares. Removing Trungpa Rinpoche’s own beloved Kagyu- and Nyingma-lineage holding teachers from the shrine represents one important sign of this. Centralizing new practices which literally only one person in the world–the Sakyong–is allowed to bestow is another. Restricting approved teachers more and more to only those within the Shambhala system itself (and furthermore only those on-board with whatever changes occur, now or in the future) is a third. A little too much self-congratulation at the expense of humility, and difficulty in absorbing critical input from the “lower ranks” and especially from dissenters, is a fourth. And, as worrying as any of these, seeing dynamics of silence and exclusion in operation when criticisms are voiced. For a wise, healthy, and generous community need never fear its good-hearted critics–quite the contrary.

For me personally it has been a wrenchingly sad time. When organizations lack certain kinds of flexibility and correction mechanisms at the same time as they are utterly convinced of their own rightness (I don’t speak of basic View here, but of all the more down-to-earth and day-to-day aspects of direction and relationship), then I would say we are simply begging blind spots to appear and deepen. When we go even further and solidify our beautiful yearnings for enlightened society, peace, and a truly humane world into the figure of a Vajra Guru King who practically speaking is not acknowledged as capable of mistake: at this point, we are no longer learning from the past. Something has closed down. Something is unrecognizable.

We also note that Karmapa XVII had to cancel his trip to Europe, due to the Government of India not providing the appropriate permissions. Europe meanwhile is in the aftershock of the Polish airplane tragedy, with its echoes of the 1940 Katyn massacre of the leadership of a nation. And now that great zipper of volcanic mountains running up the spine of the Atlantic opens a bit in Iceland, shutting down air travel.

Milarepa and the Origins of the Kagyu Lineage is an incredible, brilliant talk by Trungpa Rinpoche, from the Message of Milarepa seminar, July, 1973 at Karme-Chöling. The Q&A draws out a concise exposition of crazy wisdom. Audio available thanks to the Chronicles, Shambhala Archives, and the Chögyam Trungpa Legacy Project. Everything in just 34 minutes.

Loyalty is an essential topic these days, worthy of probably more than one article. One correspondent sends this link to Loyalty is Paramount in Woods’s Inner Circle.

Another key topic is Drala, and Bill Scheffel’s westernmountain.org is a living resource. He has also started a blog, The Drala Principle. He writes:

I will introduce a new subject each week, often with accompanying video. Subjects will include:

• The Drala Principle.
• The legacy of Chögyam Trungpa.
• Cambodia and a sustainable future.

This site will be adding a discussion forum, so that off-article-topic discussion can find a home and take place without overwhelming article comments.

If you have ideas for articles and related forms and contributions, contact editors@radiofreeshambhala.org.

The Chronicles site has posted an Editorial by Ellen Mains: On Shambhala and the Samaya Connection, initiating its Vajra Dog series.

Ellen begins:

Not long ago I heard someone say that people who disagreed with decisions made by the Sakyong or Shambhala International were people who didn’t practice and therefore, we shouldn’t pay attention to them. As I stepped into the shower the next morning, I found myself being gradually drenched with thoughts and reflections in response to that statement. Although the shower ended, the other deluge continued for the next couple of hours and I realized I needed to write the ideas down, if only for myself. They reflect some of the heartfelt feelings, reflections and struggle of an older student of the Vidyadhara.

Read more… and discuss here.

Written 7-9 June, 2009

Introduction: The following reflections on the Shambhala teachings of Chögyam Trungpa (whom I refer to throughout the article as “Lord Mukpo”, his family name and the name he often used when teaching Shambhala Training) were derived from extended periods of time I spent in Cambodia between 2004 and 2007. This essay, in part a travel writing, is also a homage to the people and land of Cambodia. – Bill Scheffel

The Kingdom of Shambhala refers to a semi-mythical society that once existed in the Himalaya region of central Asia, an “enlightened society” that was based and organized on the principle of awake – that society could encourage and support the spiritual realization of every individual within it. Not that everyone was or would become enlightened or that the society was perfect, but that its constitution, so to speak, held this aim.

In the last decade of his life, Lord Mukpo sought to establish “The Kingdom of Shambhala” in Nova Scotia, Canada. This kingdom was often referred to simply as K.O.S. Lord Mukpo encouraged those students who could, to move there, which he eventually did himself, shortly before he died. This northerly, maritime province, agriculturally based with a long winter, and all too brief summer and a fairly depressed and less globalized economy was hardly a destination of choice for his largely American students.

The aims of this contemporary K.O.S. were to found a spiritually based but also spiritually inclusive society, one that would be a seat or home for the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition, but founded on “Shambhala” principles which would make it a potential home for other spiritual traditions as well. Lord Mukpo’s keen enthusiasm for meeting, respecting, understanding and supporting the “contemplative” heart of all human spirituality was demonstrated in every aspect of his life trajectory, in his friendship with, say, Tomas Merton (and the many other contemplative Christians he had the opportunity to meet especially during his time in England) and his founding of Naropa University. In Nova Scotia, Lord Mukpo would be delighted to imagine Christian and Buddhist monasteries side-by-side, as well as Shinto shrines and, no doubt, mosques and centers of Islamic study.

K.O.S. as blueprint or reality has an urgent imperative. Global materialism threatens not only our environment and the countless species we share the earth with, but it threatens our human lineages of spirituality and culture. The erosion and outright destruction of so many traditional cultural containers and ways of life makes conservation of our spiritual traditions a real and urgent necessity. Tibetan Buddhism is one obvious example. Countless native or indigenous communities – each with their own unique and uniquely beautiful spiritual expression – are already lost forever. In Lord Mukpo’s vision, K.O.S. was intended to be a safe, fertile and welcoming ground for preserving our spiritual traditions.

Lord Mukpo also spoke fervently about our relationship to environment and how people would need to live in Nova Scotia. So much so, that K.O.S might be considered as much an ecology as a society. The “setting sun world” – as he called it – is based on consumerism, its chimera, its endless seeking of entertainment, of distraction. A necessary underpinning of consumerism, is convenience, where every effort is made to make life merely comfortable and easy. He called this “warding off death”, a methodology of a thousand invented needs. Attenuated as consumerism-convenience have become, we exist in a vortex of speed, fundamentally aggressive and thoughtless. It is a literal disconnect from the earth.

Life in Nova Scotia, he told us, could not be this way. “As far as KOS goes,” he taught, “we all have to work on the earth, literally and properly.”

Since medieval times, the process of conquering the world has been based on conquering the earth instead of touching ground, touching soil properly. And the latest stage is designed to avoid altogether any possibilities of touching the earth. We are no longer allowed to drink raw milk or eat raw meat… You might think we are about to create a genteel world of people who never have to watch blood bleeding or experience a genuine, bad nightmare. That is wrong, ladies and gentlemen. These principles are not particularly geared so that we could avoid earth. Without earth we cannot have heaven, and then we can’t have our kingdom at all… Luxury is experiencing reality, ladies and gentlemen. [1]
. . . . .

I never was never able move to Nova Scotia, or even spend much time there (curiously, my grandparents on my mother’s side are from Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island). In spite of being part of the K.O.S. vision or idea from its inception, and my deep identification with it, perhaps I took, or was led to, a route elsewhere – but with a similar destination, or at least the glimpse of a similar vision. Between 2005 and 2007, I took five trips to Cambodia, staying there for two to five months at a time. Much to my surprise, I discovered the Kingdom of Shambhala in Cambodia. If not an entire kingdom, something, at least for me, of its flavor, intent and latency – something I called “K.O.S energy.”

For virtually each of the more than four-hundred and twenty days I spent in Cambodia I was on “retreat”, in that my day was centered around meditation practice, but also writing. So it was a meditation-artist’s retreat. Or, I could say, I was the experiment of my meditation and art. We become the experiment or our spiritual practice, with no guarantee it will turn out successfully, though perhaps the more willing the surrender of our ingredients the more likely the experiment will succeed. I saw myself as an “experiment” of the drala principle and both meditation and writing were essential in the laboratory.

I began each day with a long session of meditation followed by writing (typically I would meditate at the end of the day as well). I would practice in my guest house room, leaving it to take breakfast and lunch at simple street-side restaurants. Only by mid-afternoon would I be ready to take up my other practice, “aimless wandering” which took the form of long walks through Phnom Penh (or the other towns and cities I stayed in). As foreigner, stranger and other these walks remained as pristine, remarkable and informative as, say, walking through an old-growth redwood forest or the Galapagos Islands might be. Every encounter was unexpected and all my learning was anecdotal and immediate (for I had no guides, no companions and read no books).

In the so-called poverty of Cambodia I discovered many riches and contrasts. In a country with still only a couple of supermarkets, with not even grocery stores as we know them, it was the street markets that provided the most vivid encounter with the “luxury of experiencing reality” as Lord Mukpo put it. To encounter the blood and nightmare of the food chain on a semi-tropical street without refrigeration amid the smells of six types of freshly caught fish next to a dozen types of fruit I’d never seen or tasted before was the best way to wake up before breakfast. The added luxury of my meditation and writing practice kept me an alert and open-minded experiment of my walks. Gradually, things made tremendous sense because they were simple, understandable and functional. Such as the squat toilet I came to so love:

I adore the squat toilet, even as I’ve come to understand it. A hole in the floor and beside it water stored in a plastic bucket or pot, some kind of reservoir. And each reservoir has a ladle or bucket inside it. To scoop up the water and pour it down the hole (which is s-curved, a simple hydraulic that siphons itself) is almost a sacrament, serving water as is serves you. This restaurant has a cement reservoir next to the squat toilet. The reservoir is shared by the kitchen and divided in half by the bathroom wall. Inside it are fish, eighteen or twenty inches in length, swimming in confinement until they are ordered for lunch. Multiple needs are being met in the few cubic yards of this water-conserving intimacy.

There was a time in Sihanoukville, shortly after I’d entered Cambodia on my second trip, that became my one of my strongest registering of what I began to call K.O.S. energy. Sihanoukville, a coastal town, became my first opportunity to really wander, and in that relaxation became the less self-conscious tourist.

One day, I met two boys on a path through the rice-fields. The older, maybe ten, could speak some English. “This path leads to a village, Sir. Would you like to go?” he asked. He was the kind of child whose head and face suggested a grown man, even an old one. He was dark, handsome, a man of great politeness and enthusiasm inside a very small body. “How would I get there?” I replied and waited for his answer, half wondering if their was conman-ship at work, perhaps a fee to see the village. “You would walk!” he laughed, saying it with a certainly and carefree amusement than made him even more enthused. He and his smaller companion, silent and smiling, walked on.

A few days later, I was up early, showered, and stood on the second floor porch of the $4 a night guest house I was staying in. Two large beetles lay dead on the cement floor, casualties of the incandescent light and picked at by ants. I walked down the stairs and out to a patch of leveled ground, red dirt waiting for a new building, someday. In the cool morning air, with a breeze moving the palm trees and the clothes-lines, with the sky filled with high clouds that would soon dissipate but were then variegated in blues and indigoes, with the discothèque still blaring karaoke music in the distance, I expelled stale air and began the twelve lujong, or Tibetan yoga, postures I did each morning. Chickens rooted around me and in that moment I realized this is the Kingdom of Shambhala.

Of course, I could also have had this realization on a ranch in Idaho or even a park bench in New York City. What counted, for me, was the force of the realization. A complete inner conviction that one thing the Kingdom of Shambhala meant, quite simply, was a return to a more elemental way of life. This vision of Shambhala is more than a nostalgia, which can remain as daydream, or become conservative and reactionary. The “return” to simplicity is a return to the future, the necessary bend in the cycle, a returning to sustainability.

I use the word “sustainable” also in this way: even the way we walk is not sustainable. It was through walking for a long time among people who walked at a very different pace than I did that made it clear to me that we no longer even know how to walk. The “ordinary” Cambodian” lives of life of intense nowness, doing simple work that is difficult and often grueling, is seldom if every rushing. Without haste, speed, anxiety, no yet severed from the “earth’s rhythm” – the way people walked impressed me most of all. They could work all day, walk all day – and a human being’s normal, languid and sometimes insouciant walk is a tremendous healthiness and joy.

. . . . .

Besides this elemental or earth-based sighting of the Kingdom of Shambhala, the K.O.S energy came to me in another way, with complimentary but differing implications. In presenting the Shambhala teaching, Lord Mukpo put great stress on the difference between “conventional mind” or experience and “unconditioned” experience. An unconditioned experience is the essence of basic goodness as well as the drala principle itself. When the world or our own being is glimpsed in the first moment – the “first thought” – before conceptual mediation and comment, we have an unconditioned experience, an experience of things as they are. To cut the rings of an onion with a sharp knife or hear a dragonfly before we see it – these, and all, perceptions, are first thought. In fact, everything we experience is first thought, but our conceptual, commenting process takes over so quickly we seldom realize it. Through a process of long, dedicated development, though both gentleness and courage, a person can come to live entirely in first thought or first moment. This is a fully realized warrior.

Someone who seeks unconditional experience or realization, which is to be fully human, must relinquish conventional mind. This does not mean becoming overtly unconventional (another form of convention) but moving beyond any and all of the ways we secure ourselves – i.e., our conventions. Convention exists to give us a structure, such as a highchair for a baby to eat. Convention is natural and at its best, necessary for that time or station. Each convention is also a highchair we must one day set aside. Crucial to understanding convention is to see that all conventions are relative. Cultures that eat on the floor do not need a highchair. Conventions are relative inventions and are passed on to us. We thus acquire our conditioning – from parents, society, school, church, etc. – and behave accordingly. To the extent we are governed by hope and fear, our acquired conditioning becomes habitual – a cocoon or even a prison we are reluctant to leave simply because we know it.

The Shambhala path is based on decreasing, or refraining from, unnecessary, obsolete, inappropriate (and eventually all) acquired conditioning. What is to be nourished, restored or cultivated is our unconditioned basic goodness, our essential nature – which each spiritual tradition has its own names for.

. . . . .

One of the most remarkable aspects of my time in Cambodia, indeed of all of the traveling I did, was that I never felt closer to Lord Mukpo and my own spirituality and confidence. Farther, and for much longer periods of time, from my family, friends and spiritual community and institutions than I’d ever been, I felt far closer to them and to myself than I ever had. The sense of being able to continually touch my own human and spiritual strength and feel my teacher’s presence [the drala’s presence] in this simultaneity was a constant and striking phenomena.

Part of being alone as a wanderer meant I seldom if ever had conversations where I “explained myself,” the kind of conversations we share with our friends as a matter of course; talking about ourselves, our relationship issues, our job issues, our aspirations, neurosis, spiritual insights, and giving our opinion on a thousand topics. The conversation I had, in the little Cambodian I leaned to speak, or the minimal English those around me might speak, meant I could only converse in simple and immediate ways; simply hello or how-are-you, names of the food I was served, jokes about the weather. I found these simple, minimal conversations delightful. I also found that I didn’t miss “talking about myself” at all.

I began to experience more fully how we continually reinforce our acquired conditioning through our conversations, even those seemingly most sincere and of the best intent. It was a kind of “deconstruction” not to do this, which greatly reinforced and supported “being on retreat.” Without the usual reinforcements of speech I become more open to the sights and phenomena around me, more reflective of my life and true direction. Less in the grip of anxiety. Perhaps more useful than being completely solitary and silent, I was with people each day – amidst thousands of them – without really saying much.

. . . . .

The combination of being alone, being largely silent, being without reference points enhanced my meditation, my writing and my sense of perspective. In the thinning ozone-layer of my own conceptual mind, the Shambhala teachings, long my cherished central source of study and practice began to appear differently, larger in implication and scope. I began to see the meaning of Shambhala anew. Though I’d always sensed or believed in these implications and scope, now I was not so much my thinking this as feeling it – it was the “K.O.S energy” communicating its atmosphere.

I felt or sensed two things. First, a conviction in the reality of “Shambhala” as embracing countless traditions, or expressing itself in countless ways and that somehow these traditions and ways – and in particular the dralas connected to them – were “longing to meet each other.” That Shambhala is a kind of universal curiosity seeking to awake and interested in creating bridges, dialogues, communications and mutually supportive relationships between the myriad methods and traditions of awake. In the sense that dralas are agents of non-duality, of awake, Shambhala also represents dralas wanting to meet other dralas!

The drala principle is participatory and human beings are necessary participants. We not only must invoke drala in order to meet the dralas ourselves, but we have the potential, if we courageously follow the unknown auspicious coincidence of our own heart, to blaze paths where “dralas can meet dralas.” If the drala principle is activated through the dynamic participation of human beings, creative and concrete benefit takes place – as it always has. The expression of this is through wisdom traditions meeting and mutually enhancing each other (even if each is represented by a single individual), or as one society exchanging with one another, opening both material and spiritual “trade routes” where cultural enrichment and healing could take place. Times of cultural flourishing or renaissance have always been times of such exchange (and invocation of drala). Is it too farfetched to infer that efforts to, say, reduce Middle East violence, mitigate global water crises, heal genocidal legacies or end the conscription of child soldiers could all be supported through dralas meeting dralas?

At the root of this sensibility – the reality of Shambhala as embracing (and thereby continually expressing) many traditions – is that Shambhala, by definition, cannot be owned, is not proprietary, is not the property of anyone or any one group. Shambhala is a quality, not a quantity. To say that one is “Shambhalian”- as we often do in the organizations founded by Lord Mukpo – should not imply membership but attitude – an attitude that is open-minded and curious to begin with, and also eventually daring and sophisticated.

In this very distinct, non-proprietary “K.O.S. energy” a basic principle of all “absolute” teachings became clearer, even obvious. “Absolute” is another word for unconditional truth, which by definition is fundamentally ineffable, beyond relativity, reference point and any conditions or conventions. Shambhala is such a teaching. The “relative truth” is the putting of this experience into language, into teachings, and the forms that develop to support the teaching and the experience the teachings are meant to foster.

For example, in the very beginning of the Shambhala Training program, which was intended to be “secular”, we rented hotel convention rooms or other public spaces to hold the weekends in. We needed an environment without shines and the other Buddhist trappings that were part of the Dharmadhatus (the name of Shambhala meditation centers at the time). Even so, these convention rooms needed to be made functional and elegant; symbols and symbolism – relative truth – were a necessity. So we removed the chairs and tables, put down zafus and zabutans, flower arrangements and a speaker’s chair and side-table. Finally we hung banners, large ones that hung from nearly ceiling to floor. One was the “Great Easter Sun”, a gold circle with striped bands across the top. This one went in the front of the room, behind the director. The other was an arhat, an equally large banner with a silkscreened photograph of a statue from the Minneapolis Art Museum. The arhat, in meditation posture, somewhat stern, looking down in earnest and sincere diligence, was a Buddhist image, but it served simple to express the universal posture and potential of sitting meditation. For breakfast on Saturday and Sunday morning we served coffee with bagels, the latter being cheap, popular and easy to prepare.

These conventions worked well, worked beautifully. Through the personal instruction of Lord Mukpo, Osel Tendzin, the co-founder of Shambhala Training, and the others of us who become Shambhala directors, people began to sit in meditation and study the teachings derived from the terma Lord Mukpo received. For many years, this motif is what Shambhala meant to many people, and what it meant to be a “Shambhala person,” including having the arhat banner hanging in the back of the room and eating bagels on Saturday.

The non-existent dividing line between absolute and relative truth, between the unconditional and conventions is never very clear in the beginning of one’s training. Later on, the confusion might become even greater, when the form becomes too aggressively insisted on, held on to – or even changed. In Shambhala Training we no longer hang the arhat banner, though we frequently still eat bagels, the former being long-forgotten, the latter a stubborn or endearing custom, depending on what one thinks of bagels. After thirty years of being taught, studied and practiced, as well as organizationally defined in varies and evolving ways, Shambhala means, most centrally of all, what it has come to mean in the experience of each individual, but also has come to mean all the ways in which we talk about is, agree or disagree on it, and so on.

If we go to the root of Shambhala Training and all that we call Shambhala, we find the terma Lord Mukpo received and the body of teaching he gave us to explain the terma. The terma, prophetic or revealed teachings, is the most direct expression of absolute truth (one could also say K.O.S energy), each word precise, potent with potential meaning and a durable ground of all future study. But even this terma is a relative expression of the absolute or unconditional truth it attempts to express. How much more so all the other forms and conventions that help developed around them. This is not necessarily to imply that even a single one of these forms is unnecessary or obsolete, but only that they are forms. In other places, in other times, myriad differing and diverse forms could have or will occur. This is only to make one point and raise one question. What we yet know of the Shambhala or K.O.S energy may only be a small part of it. And in this knowing, might we not easily misinterpret the little we do know, as the blind men did with the elephant?

These now seem to me crucial points, to continually contemplate how little we might actually know about Shambhala vision. For instance, a person is reading Shambhala: Sacred Path of the Warrior for the first time (as I saw a man in the café I frequent seemingly doing this just last week). The book may be awaking things in the man that are unique to him, to his capacity. Perhaps a stunning awakening or metamorphosis is taking place in him that will also lead to great realization or accomplishment on his part – and that he might never study or experience anything further of Shambhala. His experience of Shambhala, occurring in relationship to the book, could be as profound, creative or far-reaching as my own or anyone else’s – and just from the single encounter with the book. In this sense, even if exaggerated, Shambhala is an “organism” of everyone who has encountered Lord Mukpo’s teaching, even if “only” through reading, even if only through a dream. This organism will be far larger and look quite differently than any “organization” that might call itself Shambhala. My point is not to diminish the importance of organizations and institutions, but to illustrate that an organization is only part of the organism, the latter being ever-growing and impossible to measure.

. . . . .

Bill Scheffel‘s website is www.westernmountain.org.

It seems that our situation in general begins with our daily life situation, which is connected with farming, if I may say so. When you get up in the morning, what is the first thing you do?… We have ignored a lot of things in the process of getting up… you find out what kind of water system you have in your bathroom. We are talking about a farming situation, how we are going to experience the land properly, the real land. It is very important that our first incense is either cow manure or horse manure. We have to go back and experience how the earth works. As far as KOS goes, we all have to work on the earth, literally and properly. That is the best way to wake ourselves up. So many devices are presented to us. ten thousand types of gloves and a hundred thousand pair of shoes and millions of masks to ward off animals in the real world… All developed,,, because we don’t want to feel anything out. That is the purpose of the setting sun people, to ward off the world altogether.



Please comment and contribute to discussion and understanding of the issues presented, either on the Chronicles site or here on Radio Free Shambhala.

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Imagine – a civilization, a culture, a country or countries, where the sacred is acknowledged in every aspect of personal, family, and community life, as well as in the details of business, finance, and government. Imagine, not “no religion too“, but “your religion too“, so that such a society would respect equally the genuine practice traditions of the many faiths of its citizens. This is what I hear the 21st century, and the millenium we’re entering, calling for. This call is also the real source – terma, actually – of the Shambhala vision of Chögyam Trungpa.

I will explore two aspects of this here, very briefly: secular/sacred, and drala.

Secular/Sacred

A new balance, or indivisibility, of secular and sacred seems to be needed, in which the sacred is fully acknowledged in all the institutions of government and society, but in which they are not tied to any one religious faith. The founding fathers of the United States made a very conscious and brilliant effort in this direction, basing the state on fundamental natural principles while separating state from church, but as we can see in today’s American society this is not the final word –  a more complete synthesis is necessary. The sacred has become the preserve of official religions and of fundamentalisms, while the secular has been left to be terrorized by market darwinism and peculiar beliefs such as that good trickles down from attachment and greed.

Looking beyond the shores of North America, we see that much of the world does not buy into McGlobalization, and is suggesting that other outlooks are equally or more valid: an Islamic example is that of a Caliphate, with formally integrated calls to prayer throughout the day, as a better way to be for human beings. I think there is great accuracy in this latter aspiration, and it finds echoes in the lifestyles of Hasidic Judaism, in life as sadhana for Hindus and Buddhists, etc. But how can it be realized in a manner that can be shared by adherents of more than one religious practice?

In my understanding and experience this is exactly the question and the need from which the Shambhala vision of Chögyam Trungpa was extracted, and it is this that the Shambhala project – experiment – in creating a secular expression of the sacred is seeking to address. Its motivation is not an attempt to find “who we are”, but rather, what kind of radically open space, in which the sacred presents, can we uncover, manifest and share – for us and others?

Drala

The divorce of the efficient instruments of economy, business, finance, and law from the sacred – evident in mantras such as “business is business” and in notions such as that the bottom line can be expressed as a number – have led to devastating exploitation and destruction of our environment, and of the entire fabric of life within which we arise. Drala is the Shambhala term for the understanding, relationship, and practice which brings experience of the sacred together with the world of appearances, resources, and perceptions. Drala is finding the cosmic mirror in a blade of grass, in a sheaf of wheat, in a kitchen utensil. It is drala that calls for an explicit role in the very guts of our systems of sustainability and care, in the DNA of our financial and engineering systems – and we need to find language and forms to express that. Drala also offers a way to bring together the sometimes more abstract notions of emptiness and nature of mind with the textures of the living world, and more and more vocabulary for it is emerging within science itself.

The Source is in Front

On a personal note, this is why Shambhala Vision feels ever more relevant: it is a genuine attempt to go from but also beyond one’s personal practice into the open space of others, and it offers some useful language and practice to bring such aspiration down to earth. This is also something not unique: I am finding that the more I look out and interact genuinely with people, the more I meet such vivid openness. It is not of my making, or my belonging, but through mutual letting go the space feels held, and common language, understandings, and forms emerge. It’s possible for people to meet in no-man’s land, and to learn to be there with integrity, decisiveness and confidence – then it turns out to be pure gold, drala’s home, and warrior’s way.

More than that, it’s necessary for our world to be so, and for us to develop such ways of being, along with the forms, culture and institutions to actually embody these. Sustainability needs sustained drala practice, for example. This is a radical project, to create a new secular vocabulary of the sacred, which includes explicit personal and communal recognition of drala in our food, clothing, land, and homes – where we live. That space and its yearning is where our legacy comes from.

Over the centuries, there have been many who have sought the ultimate good and have tried to share it with their fellow human beings. To realize it requires immaculate discipline and unflinching conviction. Those who have been fearless in their search and fearless in their proclamation belong to the lineage of master warriors, whatever their religion, philosophy, or creed. What distinguishes such leaders of humanity and guardians of human wisdom is their fearless expression of gentleness and genuineness – on behalf of all sentient beings. We should venerate their example and acknowledge the path that they have laid for us. They are the fathers and mothers of Shambhala, who make it possible, in the midst of this degraded age, to contemplate enlightened society.

- The Shambhala Lineage, the final chapter in Shambhala The Sacred Path of the Warrior

The Coast, Halifax’s what’s-happening-around-town free weekly, just published a short article on Radio Free Shambhala. In paper it was titled Sham. dissent (probably for width reasons), while on the web it’s Dissent in the Shambhala Community.

Here’s the text of the article.

On-line discussions on the Radio Free Shambhala web site and various listservs have been pointing out that there are students of Trungpa Rinpoche who are continuing along the path he set out for them, and who don’t feel welcome within the current-day Shambhala community. It no longer feels like “home” to them. Sometimes they are disparaged by community members who cite their “lack of loyalty” to the current Sakyong.

Andrew Safer of Radio Free Shambhala recently had the opportunity to ask Richard Reoch, President of Shambhala, to comment on this state of affairs.

Radio Free Shambhala: As you know, there has been tension and disagreement between some of Trungpa Rinpoche’s senior students and some of the students of the Sakyong, regarding changes to the practice path and differences of view. Many of these senior students do not feel that there is room for them within the Shambhala mandala.

Richard Reoch: It’s true that some of the long-term students of the Vidyadhara feel like they’re not supported. I and others have been in conversation with some of the long-term acharyas to see what is the practice support that is needed that would continue to nurture their path, and not make them feel excluded.

RFS: Sometimes the samaya of these senior students has been questioned.

Richard Reoch: That’s not what I feel Shambhala vision is about. I do not believe we should be commenting on or having the presumption to comment on another practitioner’s samaya. We all have a common, deep karmic connection. Probably most of us can’t even fathom it. We are all in this extraordinary lineage stream. We have a deep shared vision, at least about what Shambhala means, in an archetypal sense, in our subconscious.

To regard someone who is maintaining samaya within the Shambhala lineage as a dissenter is a mistaken view. It is not helpful to comment on the legitimacy of another person’s practice of samaya. Perhaps this happens because we don’t have the ground for the perpetuation of lineage in this culture. If you think several generations ahead, are we going to say that the students of the next Sakyong are dissenters because they’re following the teachings of Mipham? This is a fundamental misunderstanding of lineage.

One problem with the transplantation of egoless devotion from a culture like Tibet to a culture like we have in the West is we don’t have a tradition of lineage in modern form. We don’t have the cultural roots to support that. We are all grappling with how to understand this profound teaching.

I try to use the office I hold (as President), and the authority that goes with it to deal with this issue. When members of our community are described as “border tribes”—when they write me or meet with me—I devote a lot of time and try to learn from them. I think there has been a kind of polarization in which extreme language is used. We genuinely have to go deeper, beneath this level of argument, to find the commonality. I’m definitely doing that, person to person.

Maybe now that the current orientation of the path is getting clearer, we need to have a conversation with the senior acharyas about precisely what could be the support that can be provided for people who started on a particular element of the path of Shambhala and that needs to continue and be supported?

Five Sakyongs down the road, there will be people who say “I make a personal connection by reading the works of the Vidyadhara.” Others will day “How fortunate it was for Shambhala that Mipham the Great reincarnated as the Sakyong.” Eventually, it’s not just about tolerating differences; it’s about appreciating the incredible richness that’s available in our kingdom.

RFS: The real question is: how are the teaching stream and legacy of Trungpa Rinpoche going to continue?

Richard Reoch: I’ve been in discussions with Carolyn Gimian since the beginning of the Chögyam Trungpa Legacy Project about the importance of that initiative. The analogy we have used is that the Legacy Project is like a presidential library, so things don’t end up moldering and being lost. I’ve had some initial conversations with some of the longer-term students and acharyas about how to create an identifiable and helpful framework so no one is seen as being on one track or the other, or as renegades which is antithetical to the long-term survival of the lineage.

RFS: Many people who are devoted to Trungpa Rinpoche and who don’t consider the Sakyong to be their teacher don’t feel welcomed by the community, and they’re afraid to speak up.

Richard Reoch: One of the earliest statements issued by the Mandala Governing Council created after the first Shambhala Congress was a statement on the commitment to openness. I asked members of that council to list the issues that people are afraid to speak up about. We seemed to have inherited an incredible atmosphere of fear, and I did not understand that. I had no idea the extent to which this community was traumatized. When I asked what issues were not being addressed, people were afraid to name the issues.  I think we all realized, ‘Wow, we can’t even talk about what we can’t talk about!’ Opening up that discussion was like Glasnost and Perestroika in Shambhala.

I talked to Larry Mermelstein, and asked, “Is there anything we can do to reduce this climate of fear?” Some people were experiencing this fear in a very palpable way. If we can’t create a social framework in which we understand that people will have different points of view, then all the notions of fearlessness and openheartedness—everything we’re so proud of about the Shambhala inheritance—absolutely won’t take root. We can’t build an enlightened society on a basis of fear.

Wherever I go, I invite people to talk to me about this so I can find out more about it. Sometimes, because someone has said something extremely abusive, we feel like we’re going to lose membership. There are people hiding out, as if they’re the old Chi Kung masters at the height of the Cultural Revolution hoping they’re not noticed by the Red Guards. It’s a slow process of personal conversation, trying to address these tendencies of people persecuting each other.

When Radio Free Shambhala was established, people contacted me as if this was the end of the world. “No, just think ahead,” I said. “If we think about the new golden age of Shambhala, there will be countless Web sites and social networking opportunities where people express their experience of the dharma and of different teachers, including what others might disagree with. If there’s one thing that prevents establishing the kingdom of Shambhala, it’s called fascism, and I‘m not having anything to do with that.”

Reporting and commentary by Barbara Blouin.

It was in 2000 that Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche first announced that Buddhism (according to the Kagyü and Nyingma traditions taught by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche) and the Shambhala teachings of Chögyam Trungpa were no longer separate or distinct, but were “inseparable.” Trungpa Rinpoche also spoke of the Buddhist and Shambhala teachings as inseparable, but he also said that Shambhala had its own independent basis. By creating what is now called “Shambhala Buddhism,”  the Sakyong has undermined that independent basis.  Since he first spoke of “Shambhala Buddhism,” various changes have occurred in the way the Buddhist path and the Shambhala teachings have been presented and organized. It is significant that the name of the organization founded by Chögyam Trungpa – Vajradhatu – was changed to Shambhala International, and, more recently, to Shambhala. 

The Sakyong’s underlying purpose of bringing together Buddhism and Shambhala is to create a “unified path.” 

By asking our students to move through a unified path, they will be exposed to a range of skillful means that best represents a complete expression of our mandala as a whole. The view of a unified path is not to blend the Buddhist and Shambhala language until it is indistinguishable. The view is to allow the singular power of both expressions to nourish, challenge, and deepen our students. The Shambhala teachings and the various practices and views of the Buddhadharma each have their own distinct purposes and we must understand their differences.

[This] path does not necessarily lead to seminary or advanced Vajrayana practices. Instead, a person struggling in the darkness and fear of the setting sun could be sufficiently inspired, roused, processed, and softened by these stages to find themselves living a healthier and more dignified life. People of all faiths and backgrounds can walk this path; no Buddhist commitment is requested until entering Vajrayana seminary. 

Source: The Way of Shambhala Overview in the Shambhala Training Manual

Before “Shambhala Buddhism” came into being, there were the Buddhist teachings and there were the Shambhala teachings of Chögyam Trungpa. How could Shambhala Buddhism join these traditions without changing both of them profoundly? I thought that 1 + 1 = 2. But here, 1 + 1 = 1, -or so it seems. 

My attempt to understand what “Shambhala Buddhism” means eventually led to learning as much as I could about what is being called “the new curriculum.” Although this is only one part of major changes the Sakyong has made in the way both the Shambhala and Buddhist teachings are presented, I decided not to try to do too much – to only chew on what I might be able to digest. My first step was to contact Carolyn Mandelker, who is Director of the Shambhala Office of Practice and Education. We met in Carolyn’s office at the Halifax Shambhala Centre and talked for close to an hour. That meeting with Carolyn was useful, but I also felt that what I learned was not much more than a road map: This is what happens first, and next …. and next … Such-and-such programs have or haven’t been changed. Carolyn repeatedly told me: “This is a work in progress.” It became clear to me that this was a much bigger subject than we could explore in any depth in the time we had together.

My next step was to send an e-mail to Acharya Adam Lobel to ask for an interview. It was Acharya Lobel, together with Carolyn Mandelker and Acharya Christie Cashman, who worked together intensively to create this curriculum, under the guidance of the Sakyong. In April I spoke with Acharya Lobel by phone; we talked for close to two hours. An edited and abridged version of that interview is the basis for this article. 

1. What is the new curriculum? 

Somewhere between one and two years ago,  Shambhala International began to  introduce “the new curriculum.”  Currently, this curriculum is being piloted in 16 Shambhala Centres – eleven in the United States; three in Canada; and two in western Europe. These sixteen pilot programs are distributed among small, medium, and large centers, including one practice center: Dorje Denma Ling in Nova Scotia. Other centres continue to offer Shambhala Training without the classes. 

The new curriculum is a key component of The Way of  Shambhala. Following Shambhala Training Level I, now a briefer one-evening-and-one-day program, participants may choose to continue with a series of six evening classes called Meditation in Everyday Life, which is not a part of the new curriculum. 

The new curriculum begins after Level II. During Level II, participants are encouraged, but not required, to register for the Tiger series of six weekly evening classes. Tiger and the rest of the new curriculum – Lion, Garuda, and Dragon – can also be taken independently of  Shambhala Training. In the centers where the new curriculum is offered, it alternates with the Shambhala Training levels. Dragon, the final series, happens after Level V.  Students also have the option of following the Shambhala Training levels without the classes.

2. Interview with Acharya Adam Lobel  

Adam: The basic process of creating what we’ve been calling “the new curriculum” was initiated in 2005. The Sakyong arranged a conference call with Carolyn Mandelker and Acharyas John Rockwell, Christie Cashman, Jeremy Hayward, and myself. We were the people who the Sakyong gathered to say: let’s look at our curriculum overall. After that we went through a series of meetings and retreats. We spent five days together at to Dorje Denma Ling, practicing the Werma sadhana and thinking about what the Sakyong was asking us to do, as well as how to respond to the needs of centers.

The intensive, on-the-ground portion of our work has been carried out by myself, Carolyn Mandelker, and Christie Cashman. A lot of this new curriculum has been based on the requests and the needs of centers that we’ve been hearing from for the last maybe twenty years. The Sakyong has been talking about this curriculum from a lha, or heaven, perspective, but he also wanted us to connect with earth. A lot of our work has been trying to look at our huge, diverse community with a wide range of different needs. There are large centers with many teachers, and small centers with no teachers. We have centers where people can only do programs on weekends, and we have centers where people can’t do weekend programs. And we worked hard to offer programs that will be skillful in these different contexts.

Question: How, exactly, have Buddhism, in the Kagyu/Nyingma tradition of Chögyam Trungpa, and the Shambhala teachings been brought together in the new curriculum? From what I’ve seen so far, two things seem to be going on: Buddhist and Shambhala teachings are presented side by side; and in at least one instance that I know of, Buddhist and Shambhala teachings are mixed together, in such a way that new students would be unable to distinguish which is which. For example, the Four Immeasurables chant that appears on a handout for Lion, which ends with the last line of a Shambhala chant. That bothers me.

Adam: Why does it bother you?

Q: Because it’s the joining of a traditional Buddhist chant, and a Shambhala chant that was created by Chögyam Trungpa. I don’t know how often this kind of thorough mixing takes place.

Adam: As far as I can recall, I don’t think there are other examples quite like that. The way the Sakyong guided us, and most of our intentions throughout developing this curriculum, was to try to think of the student, and to ask: What would be of benefit to students at this stage in their journey, in terms of the incredibly vast range of teachings that we have in this tradition? What are some of the kinds of key words, teachings, practices, and ideas that will really touch a person at this stage in their journey, someone who is trying to understand what we’re all about? Along the way, we would often present something to the Sakyong. Then he would say something, and we would give that some form. He’d often say things like: “Stop thinking about the categories that you have in your mind, that you think students should know, and start thinking about what really would be of benefit.”

Q:  I said that it seemed like Shambhala and Buddhist teachings are being presented side by side. Would you agree that that’s an accurate statement?

Adam: It’s definitely an accurate statement. The language that the Sakyong has been using, and that we’ve been using, is a “unified curriculum.” It’s trying to draw on the richness of all of Trungpa Rinpoche’s teachings, and put them together in an accessible, inviting, experiential, and transformative way. When we talk about the the new curriculum, which is part of The Way of Shambhala I, it is one portion of a pre-seminary curriculum for people who are headed in the direction of Seminary.

There are three main components to the new curriculum. The first is the outermost stage of offerings. The outermost offerings are programs that have no prerequisites, and they are open to anyone. Shambhala Training Level I is in this outermost category, but it also can be envisioned as part of the Way of Shambhala.

The next part is what most people refer to as the new curriculum: the series of the classes on the four Dignities, called Tiger, Lion, Garuda, and Dragon. That’s what we have really worked through. There has been a tremendous amount of work and all sorts of failures and mistakes and re-envisionings, and going back to the drawing boards. We’re still revising the curriculum. 

The final phase of the pre-seminary curriculum includes the Sacred Path material, as well as a deeper study of Buddhist teachings such as abhidharma and lojong. There will also be a public introduction to the vajrayana, including a Sadhana of Mahamudra weekend. 

The basic approach to The Way of Shambhala is to map out an experiential journey. The first part of that journey is to develop basic mindfulness and a relationship with basic goodness and a sense of gentleness. 

Q: Using the Tiger series as an example: in the first class, are students introduced to the qualities exemplified by Meek?

Adam: Yes, and these qualities also seem to have a resonance with some of the qualities of an arhat, a dharmic person—the way Trungpa Rinpoche describes the Buddha and the dharmic person, who move with grace and gentleness and a kind of composure. The emphasis in the first class is to give students a sense of the basic quality that they’ll be practicing and studying and contemplating. The analogy for Meek is the tiger: moving carefully and with mindfulness, incredibly aware, senses awake and attuned, with discipline and gentleness and humility. 

Q: It seems, from looking at the schedule that Carolyn gave to me, that some qualities of each of the Dignities are presented in each of the levels, but not all of them. For example, the quality for Tiger here is contentment, but the other qualities to be cultivated are not named. Does the teacher talk about those other qualities as well?

Adam: In a sense we are emphasizing a central quality – “contentment” here. One way to translate the Tibetan word for contentment is “meek.” And we felt that, with guidance from the Sakyong, contentment was a kind of seed syllable for what we’re trying to communicate to students and give them an experience of. What comes with that, of course, is the relationship of contentment with the absence of arrogance.

We always explore what the Dignity refrains from. I think it’s one way to understand how Buddhism and Shambhala support each other. We look at the obstacle of arrogance, for example, for the Dignity of Meek. And then after exploring it, we look personally, experientially at our own arrogance. And we have an opportunity to study Trungpa Rinpoche’s teachings on  the three kinds of suffering, in order to give students another language, another angle to understand where obstacles arise. I do not believe that we have exhausted the entire principle of Meek, but, rather, given one experience of it. Nor, of course, have we exhausted the teachings on the hinayana, by any means. We’re trying to give students an experiential taste that actually sticks with them in their body and their experience.

Q: I noticed some new words in the schedule for the Tiger classes – and one that is not in either the Buddhist or Shambhala vocabulary: “stress.” That was a surprise to me, and I’m not comfortable with it.

Adam: Trungpa Rinpoche used to talk about speediness all the time. I think it’s interesting to use the word “stress” because there is so much stress and  speed, and overall chaos, that so many people are experiencing in our world. And that’s precisely why the ground of this journey is a kind of mindfulness and gentleness.

Q: The schedule I’ve been talking about displays a basic logic: The first two classes are ground; the next three are path; and the last is fruition. There is also a clear pattern in each series, which is always the same: The first class is  … hmm, what? It’s not shown on the chart. The chart only says “Introduction.” Is the first class Shambhala and Buddhist? Classes two and three present Shambhala teachings, and classes four and five are Buddhist. The sixth class is Shambhala. Would you comment on this use of logic? 

Adam: I’ve stopped thinking about it in terms of which is Shambhala content and which is Buddhist content. There are elements of both trying to support each other. They offer a different language and perspectives, but they are not essentially different. For example, one student might connect with the teachings on the experience of the cocoon, and another student might feel supported by the clarity of the presentation of the five skandhas. 

Q: One aspect of my discomfort with this approach is that Trungpa Rinpoche clearly and repeatedly said that Shambhala is a secular path, and its purpose is to create enlightened society. And Buddhism, even though it’s nontheistic, is classified as a religion. There’s a priesthood, et cetera. So when you bring the two together, what happens to the secular teaching? I know there’s a lot of discomfort about that in our sangha. Have you heard that?

Adam: Sure. Speaking for myself, Carolyn, and the other acharyas I’ve been working with, we’ve all had our questions about Shambhala Buddhism, and we’ve  questioned the Sakyong and each other. We’re trying to understand what it means when those two words are uttered at the same time. In terms of the secular question – what do we mean by “secular”? And how did the Dorje Dradul use that word? And what was he trying to get at?

Q: Well, for one thing, Shambhala was something that anybody could learn and practice. Trungpa Rinpoche said that very specifically. You could be a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim. Or you could be an atheist. So it was secular and it did not lead to Buddhism. However, in the “old days,”  the Shambhala population was 99% Buddhist. In later years participants were less likely to be Buddhist; probably the majority of the nonBuddhists were Christian. I’m speaking from my own experience here in Halifax. 

Of course, it is true that Buddhism and the Shambhala teachings are compatible, but to the uninitiated, the Buddhist part was invisible. Some of those Christian Shambhalians were quite committed. (I am using the past tense, because I think they have “dropped out.”) They were considered sangha – by themselves as well as by the Buddhist sangha. Some of them were quite distressed when the Shambhala teachings became “Shambhala Buddhism.”

Adam: The vision hasn’t changed at all. This path is open to people of any religion, and the new curriculum is explicit about that. There’s no requirement to take refuge and become a Buddhist—unless someone wants to go to Vajrayana Seminary. So that means that people can go all the way through the new curriculum, including Sutrayana Seminary and Warrior’s Assembly, without being Buddhists. And that’s not just a bureaucratic point; it has to do with our view, which is the view of basic goodness, which is not based on religious affiliation. The whole point of enlightened society, and the whole point of our efforts to teach and to practice together, is because of trust in basic goodness, and extending that to the world. The Sakyong is encouraging us to move beyond the idea of giving students a choice before they have even been exposed to any real depth of experience or learning a practice, where we would say: “Are you a religious type? Do you want to be a Buddhist? Or are you a nonreligious type and want to be a Shambhalian?” Somebody at a Shambhala Center where I was working described it this way: she was standing on two logs in a river. One log is Shambhala and one is Buddhist. She felt that the two logs were getting further and further apart, and her legs stretched into a kind of split. And one of the things she appreciated about the new curriculum is that the two were together, and that offered her a stronger stance.

Q: Does it matter whether some, or maybe many, of the students going through this curriculum aren’t really able to discriminate which of the teachings are Buddhist, and which are Shambhala? You’ve been talking about that anyway – saying that the point isn’t to see which is which, but whether it works. For some people, it’s a big issue. Non-Buddhists no longer have the opportunity to explore the inseparability of Shambhala vision and their traditions: the deepest parts of Shambhala vision are marked with Buddhist language, imagery, and tradition.

Adam: I think it’s very personal. There are some students for whom that kind of analysis and understanding is very important, and there are others for whom it isn’t important. If a student asks me, “Is this Shambhala or is this Buddhist?” I would try to give as clear an answer as possible about the source of a given teaching.

I have spent a lot of time studying the Shambhala terma teachings, and I kept asking myself: What is different here? And what is the same? I’m happy and honoured to be able to spend my life exploring those questions. There’s so much richness condensed into this language of the terma that we are just beginning to unpack. Take anything – the Golden Key text, let’s say. What an incredible poetic masterful work. It’s amazing! To me, that’s what Shambhala Buddhism and this new path are all about: realizing that we are the ones who inherited this stream of teachings from Trungpa Rinpoche, and there’s no one else on the planet who is in that situation. And it’s our job to dive into it and to understand it and to unpack it – and then pass it on.

3. Finally …

My root guru and heart teacher has been dead for twenty-two years,  but his teachings continue to live in me and in so many others – through his books, through audio and video recordings, through the memories and personal testimonies of those who knew him, and through the devotion of an increasing number of those who never knew him during his lifetime.

We know that Chögyam Trungpa, from whose vast mind the Shambhala teachings arose, considered the purity of the Buddha’s teachings to be of the highest importance. In 1983, on the occasion of the installation of the Kangyur in the shrine room in Boulder, Rinpoche referred to other editions of the Kangyur (see a little background on the Kangyur) in Tibet or in China, that had been heavily edited by other sects. Those who altered these texts, he said, had inserted their own ideas and beliefs into the original teachings. He described the edition of the Kangyur that was being installed as pure and straight and unaltered. 

What he said that day in Boulder might be a clue for us, but we will never really know what the Dorje Dradul would have thought of the mixing-together of the Shambhala and Buddhist teachings, or of the new moniker “Shambhala Buddhism.” The only thing we can do is to connect with our own hearts and ask ourselves what we think about those changes, and how we feel. 

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche always insisted that his students not accept as givens what they were taught, but closely and critically examine everything they read and heard – and only then would they be ready to make up their own minds. In this matter he was always absolutely uncompromising and fierce. 

In working on this article I have done my best to present “Shambhala Buddhism” as it was presented to me by two students of Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche. I must admit that this process of asking questions and listening carefully to the responses that were given has not been easy for me. Although I have usually been able to follow the Sakyong’s logic, as it was offered to me through the filter of Acharya Lobel’s admirably clear intellect, in my not-so-secret heart, what I learned just didn’t feel right. It still doesn’t.

The way I see it, as Radio Free Shambhala has evolved, what is most interesting of all, and most vital and important, are comments from readers. I am eagerly looking forward to what you who are “out there” have to say, both the old dogs and the new pups – and especially those who disagree. I am also particularly interested in hearing from newer students who have started coming to Shambhala Centers since the advent of the “Shambhala Buddhist path.” 

May all beings enjoy happiness and the root of happiness.
May they be free from suffering and the root of suffering.
May they not be separated from the great happiness, devoid of suffering.
May they dwell in great equanimity, free from passion, aggression, and ignorance.
May all beings enjoy profound, brilliant glory.