Ocean of Dharma: The Everyday Wisdom of Chogyam Trungpa PDF
Preview Ocean of Dharma: The Everyday Wisdom of Chogyam Trungpa
Ocean of Dharma 365 TEACHINGS ON LIVING LIFE WITH COURAGE AND COMPASSION • The Everyday Wisdom of Chogyam Trungpa OCEAN OF DHARMA of The Everyday Wisdom Chogyam Trungpa Compiled and Edited by Carolyn Rose Gimian * Shambhala Boston & London · zoo8 SHAMBHALA PUBLICATIONS, INc. Horticultural Hall 300 Massachusetts Avenue Boston, Massachusetts 02II5 www. shambhala. com J. © 2008 by Diana Mukpo All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. 987654321 FIRST EDITION Printed in the United States of America (§This edition is printed on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute Z39.48 Standard. Distributed in the United States by Random House, Inc., and in Canada by Random House of Canada Ltd Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Trungpa, Chogyam, 1939-1987. f Ocean of dharma: the everyday wisdom of Chogyam Trungpa Chogyam Trungpa; edited by Carolyn Rose Gimian. p. em. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-59030-536-2 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Buddhist meditations. I. Gimian, Carolyn Rose. II. Title. BQ5572.T78 2008 294.3 '4432-dc22 2007033814 CONTENTS Editor's Preface vii Editor's Acknowledgment~ xiii OCEAN OF DHARMA I The Practice of Meditation 367 Sources 371 Bibliography 389 Further Readings and Resources 393 About Chogyam Trungpa 397 EDITOR'S PREFACE THis BOOK CONTAINS 365 quotations from the teachings of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, one of the most influential Buddhist teachers of our time. Ocean of Dharma is the literal translation of "Chogyam," and it aptly describes the pro found and vast nature of the teachings he offered during the more than twenty years he spent teaching in the West. ("Rinpoche" is a title for realized. teachers in the Tibetan tra dition, which means "Precious One" or "Precious Jewel.") There are many ways to read this book: You can open it to any page and see what yo.u find. You can read a quote every morning or every night, or before or after your daily practice of meditation (or other contemplative disciplines). These quotes may stimulate your intellect and intuition, logical thought and feelings. They may confound. They may provide moments of "Aha!" How you engage this material is personal, and each reader's experience will be different. These quotations not only present ultimate wisdom but rela tive, immediate truth, the means to realize this wisdom, and advice on how to apply your understanding in everyday life. Chogyam Trungpa wrote that wisdom can only be taught in the form of a hint. Because of your own inherent wisdom, having received that hint, you can pick up the message spon taneously. Ocean of Dharma presents you with many hints about how to be and how to see: how to be a warrior without anger vii in this world, living with both tenderness and bravery; how to wake up and experience the brilliance and majesty oflife; and how to share that with others. All of this is based on the cour age to be realistic and genuine, and there are many quotes here that encourage the fearless acceptance of life as it is. There are a number of approaches to contemplating what you read. You may deliberately reflect on a quote, probing it, looking at it from every angle. Or you may savor it, like slowly dissolving a piece of chocolate in your mouth, tasting every nuance of its sweet and bitter flavor. Or you may read a quote and then forget about it, not trying to do anything deliberate with it at all. Later, it may arise spontaneously in your mind. Sometimes wisdom hits you full in the face, like turning on the light in a dark room and being shocked by what you encounter. Sometimes it works its way into your heart and mind, only emerging after a long period of gesta tion. Chogyam Trungpa described wisdom as a mirror, one which helps you to join heaven and earth. In this analogy, heaven is electricity or daylight; earth is your uncombed hair, your face, your unshaven beard. The mirror allows you to bring the two together so that you can see yourself, comb your hair, wash your face, and shave. In that sense, wisdom is both illuminating and practical-it lets you perceive your self and your world and it provides a means to do something about what you see. On the one hand, wisdom knows no master. It does not belong to anyone. On the other hand, its unique articulation is often what allows us to recognize it. Ocean of Dharma presents Vlll wisdom as viewed and expressed by a grand master of Bud dhism in America. Twenty years after his death, he is still one of the best-selling Buddhist authors in the West. Why so? Because his teachings are so penetrating and so applica ble to contemporary experience, yet they are also timeless. All of those qualities are manifest in these short quotations, as much as in the whole works from which they are drawn. There is something so unusual, uncanny, and personal about this man, and by reading his work, one is entering into a relationship with him, in a sense. I would be amazed if you could read this book from beginning to end without being deeply affected. Many quotes deal with experiences that are inspired by or arise from the practice of sitting meditation. Yet it is not necessary to be a meditator in order to appreciate and benefit from this book. In one of the selections, Chogyam Trungpa says that anyone who creates a work of art medi tates, whether they call the activity meditation or not. Wherever one finds a gap or a sense of space in life, what ever it is that one does that provides a feeling of ground, earth, or being-fundamentally, that is meditation. With that in mind, anyone could connect with the material in this book. For those curious about meditation but untutored in the technique, an introduction to t·he practice of meditation appears in the back matter, adapted from Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior. Anyone who wants to practice meditation would be well-advised to get personal instruction. Purely learning to meditate from a book is like learning to cook ix from a cookbook without ever having been in the kitchen before. This book evolved from an e-mail service I developed called Ocean of Dharma Quotes of the Week.* (To subscribe, go to www.oceanofdharma.com.) While most of the quo tations in this collection are from published sources (both well-known and obscure), some material appears in print here for the first time. My sources include unpublished tran scripts, sourcebooks that are not in wide distribution, as well as classic, best-selling works. The source of each quotation is identified at the end of the book. Many times while I was working on this manuscript, I found that the quotations and my life intersected in unex pected ways. For example, one afternoon I was having an argument with my husband. We parted in a huff and I went back to working on the book. To my surprise, the next quote I read was one on marriage and regarding communication with your partner as sacred. Many people who subscribe to Ocean of Dharma have reported similar experiences. The quote arrives in the e-mail just when they are working with the particular issue it addresses. This unplanned but often *I began the Ocean of Dharma e-mails on April9, 2003. A week after I "spontaneously" started this Listserv, an old friend of mine wrote to tell me that Trungpa Rinpoche had posted his only message to the Internet on April9, 1983, exactly twenty years earlier to the day. (Few people had access to the Internet then, but Rinpoche did through a group of his students who were working on developing it.) It seemed to be a very auspicious coincidence. X
The list of books you might like
