Notions of kingship.
It is very common to have this backwards. It is quite a challenge – in the case of Trungpa to Shambhala, but even better, that life offers to every king or queen.
The apparent tendency – some may call the relativistic view, or small-mind or small-minded, is to perceive the as king being ‘the center of the mandala,’ or the center of the court in the sense of the one who reaps the benefits from the kingdom. Working from the gross to the subtle:
Gross ego in this sense is understanding the king to have preferential treatment. Puts himself first; riding the wave of the kingdom, using its resources to push himself up and up and up.
Subtle ego in this sense is the determination to be the best at providing for the kingdom, and progressing it forward
Non-ego in this sense is making the decisions based purely on what’s best for your kingdom and progressing it forward.
It is hard to think of a situation where gross ego is better than subtle ego, and non-ego will always lead to the best outcomes – by definition. As always, there are a multitude of factors that make this the case, the strongest dynamic being that the vast majority of behaviours occurring within society are relative to each other – people learn from and model after each other. Going through maxim thinking exercises as recommended by Kant, and mothers immemorial, how would it be if everyone acted that way? Acting based purely out of ego encourages others to do the same and we quickly create the climate of competition that humanity has been so famous for throughout history. Acting out of non-ego just as quickly encourages others to do the same and we quickly create that climate of cooperation that humanity has equally been famous for. It is easy to see the progress we have made in this regard over time, on a societal level, which in many respects is the average of individual relationships.
The point being: Trungpa talked of everyone being kings of their own court, of being universal monarchs. Many people understood the decentralizing nature of this perspective, yet carried into it very ego-driven conceptions of kingship and monarchy. The goal of the monarch is not to rule, the ruling is a necessary condition to achieve the goal, which is expansion and stabilization of the kingdom. Note – not HIS kingdom. The kingdom. Important distinction. Trungpa also talked about the realm of the monarch – vast, limitless space.
So, it is common to grasp the one side of it; yes, we are all our own masters; we take responsibility for ourselves and our actions, we become as monarchs. But then we have these funny social hierarchies, where we find ourselves deferring to someone else, and very often we willingly give our power over very quickly. Learning, as we will see in our reflection on lineage, is not one person imparting knowledge to another. It is creating appropriate conditions within yourself. But this is a subtle point; the more obvious understanding is that learning is one person imparting knowledge to another, and with that comes relativity and creates more conditions for considerations focusing around ego to arise – the thought ‘oh, this person has taught me so much, they’ve imparted so much wisdom to me, I would be foolish to question them’ reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how transmission works. We are quick to give up our sense of taking ownership of and having responsibility for the vast, limitless space, giving it over to another, thinking we will content ourselves by working only within the boundaries of our own self – in many ways, giving up this vast, limitless space – this borderless notion of practice, invites us to further entertain and dwell upon our selves, which can lead to more neuroticism and lower the quality of our practice. But of course, no one wants to feel foolish, and we can quickly find ourselves deferring our power to another on the basis of our own misperceptions. The fallout of this can be fairly benign if we are with someone truly and consistently acting out of non-ego, but can be absolutely disastrous when we are deferring, and thereby concentrating our power into an individual motivated solely by gross ego. Again, history is replete with examples.
Memorizing a set of specialized concepts is easy, even if there are 100,000 of them. It is mastering their application that contains the crux of it; for outside of practice there is nothing – practice being form, teachings being emptiness, in this case. Form and emptiness are truly beautiful in their interplay, yet expression can feel so bulky and inadequate.
A little fourfold logic when it comes to teachings and practice:
Teachings being form in the sense of the described practices and understandings, both written, verbal and non-verbal – the form of how these are communicated; the medium of the message
Teachings being emptiness in the sense that when you understand the teachings you have the realization of how to best act in all situations; possessing prajnaparamita, which is by necessity formless. You can’t fit all containers if you have a form yourself, like water.
Teachings being both form and emptiness – the teachings are both of these things
Teachings being neither form nor emptiness – even the teachings have the ability to not transmit realization; reading the books or hearing the talks doesn’t guarantee the appropriate realization; it is easy to pick up the wrong message. And thinking we realizing the best way to act in a situation certainly doesn’t necessarily translate into realizing the best way to act.
Practice being form in the sense of the various forms of practices we take, whether it be confession, meditation, prayer, yoga, lying, cheating, stealing, reading.
Practice being emptiness in the sense of its quality; perhaps you have high quality forms in the sense of holding physical postures, but this is in terms of upaya; or skillful means – meaning ability to bring about realization, and move both yourself and others towards prajnaparamita, in traditional Buddhist terms, regardless of the form it takes. This is how there will often be mention of the craftiness of a teacher’s upaya in awakening their students (also could be phrased as ‘in helping their students realize’) – it is important to know when the form is serving you and when it is holding you back, but takes great skill to recognize this properly in ourselves – much easier to see it in others – funnily enough, a source of great difficulty)
What is legacy? What is lineage?
Such a funny thing to fully thresh out. And by funny, I should have said difficult, but it’s nice to take joy in challenges. Contrasting relative and absolute, or from the view of the ego vs non-ego –
here’s an aside to jump in to this distinction because it’s important to talk about our language: ego being from the point of view of the immediate individual – thinking of that individual’s feelings, wants, needs, perspective, associations etc. Very zoomed in on one person, or a relational dynamic between people. Non-ego taking a zoomed out view; holistic. Thinking of what benefits the whole, rather than what only benefits the person. An eventual nuance here being that what is conceived of as ‘good for the whole’ is almost always good for the person as well. This leads to more stable relational dynamics and frameworks, whereas models or frameworks where the good for the person comes at the expense of the good of the whole lack sustainability. But, time can also be a funny thing – again, difficult – in that what is ultimately a very short-term view and very unsustainable in the long run can, to all those participating, appear to be a very long term view, that extends well beyond lifetimes, but ultimately acts as a cap to potential – such that very often we find ourselves thinking us wise to take the short view.
Picking up where we left off – from one view, Trungpa’s legacy consists of the personalized impact he had on people. The immediate positive and negative effects that his actions, speech, writings, have had on people. Language starts to fail me a bit here; he ranks very high in this view, in terms of the legacy being all about him; his relationships; his character.
The other view of legacy is how he influenced the spread of realization; teachings; dharma. In this case, he, his character, matter much less. We are observing something larger than him, the man himself; he is not the central element of it. He is its facilitator or cultivator. If he does a good job, and leaves a strong legacy, realization grows. Lineage histories are replete with stories of teachers not always acting how we expect. Breaking conceptions is an essential part of penetrating through the clouds of misperception in order to clear out room for growth.
Talking of lineage – it is very easy to understand this in terms of ego, and we often do – literally just tracing the names of teachers. Gross ego in this sense would be the ostentatious person, who thinks studying under some famous lineage glorifies him or herself – the one who seeks out the person most renowned to be wise due to a combination of how it feels to say ‘I was taught by so and so’ and the need to feel like they have the best.
Ego becomes more subtle when we think of lineage as a chain from old to new; this person taught that person who taught that person who taught that person who taught me – whether it is two or two hundred generations of names. That is not how ‘transmission’ works. We can point things out to each other, but ultimately realization arises from within. In traditional texts, transmission is spoken of a simultaneous arising between two minds. Understanding causality in Buddhist terms typically talks of conditions being ripe for arising, or in another way: the only way something can happen is for the necessary conditions to be present; if they are not present, it will not manifest. If they are, it will. For transmission to occur, conditions must be present. Practice is how those conditions are put into place – transmission is not just conceptual understanding – you can’t learn by studying alone. Without understanding the practice – how what you are studying actually arises and occurs and looks and feels like in an experiential sense, transmission is impossible. In a very simple sense, it is impossible for me to transmit to you what strawberries taste like, unless we sit and eat strawberries together. The point is, the teacher who is introducing the strawberries, the teachings, does not taste them for the student. The student experiences the taste directly, at the same time, on their own accord. That is transmission.
This is how statements like ‘the understanding of (first lineage holder) is the same as the (current lineage holder)’ – because there is this unbroken transmission of realization. Thich Nhat Hanh offers the image of one candles lighting another, lighting another. In some sense the fire is the same, in another sense it’s different. But in the case of each candle lit, the conditions for the fire arising are present therein – namely, in this example, the wick. Lineage understood from a less ego-oriented view is like this; a multitude of candles helping like the path to realization for the world. Yes, it is good in many ways to be able to chart the geneology of the teachings we seek to learn. But that is not the point. Yes, it is essential to have high quality teachings to work with. But it is their ability to light the way for others, primarily through using ourselves, that make & determine their ultimate quality. This is an important point, and often lost in the marketplace.
We will make more progress by spending our energy being monarchs of vast limitless space and working tirelessly for the benefit of that space, not looking to others to play that role for us.