SEEDS & SPROUTS 2
Cutting through Spiritual Materialism was the first Buddhist book I have ever read, about thirty years ago. I do not think, by that time, it was even clear to me that this was a Buddhist work, neither did I know what Tibetan Buddhism was. It was just a yellow book with a red-lettered intriguing title.
As a person who has grown up in a Christian Orthodox culture, all that I knew about Buddhism was from Mircea Eliade's book on the history of religions, or, rather ambiguous and mysterious things on the Japanese Zen. Yet, the book impressed me at that time. It was impressive enough that I still remember two significant concepts proposed by its author, the Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa, together with a funny expression: " the monkey mind".
Monkey, Meissen Manufactory German,1740
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, www.metmuseum.org.
The first concept is the one of spiritual materialism. How does Chogyam Trungpa define it?
It is an attitude towards spiritual quest and development that is modeled after the very Western one of materialism. As the book was written as a response to his Western students, it was supposed to fit their needs. This attitude asks for clear shortcuts and fast and rewarding accumulation of "spiritual assets", such as a certain number of ritual objects, empowerments, or even spiritual teachers. It is seen as a substitute for patient and subtle work that shows very slowly its transformative power. Most of us have it to some extent if we are engaged in a spiritual quest.
The second concept is the one of " basic goodness". To put it simply, this one refers to the fact that every being has a primordial aspect that is virtuous, without any evil stain. This is a quality that exists in each one of us, yet it exists beyond the common conceptual reference. This is the basis of what Chogyam Trungpa calls " the enlightened being".
His concept helped me later to understand to some extent the concept of Buddha-nature.
Because I cannot grasp properly what the Buddha nature is, I will return to the "monkey mind" concept , as Trungpa puts it. It refers to the unruly quality of our common people's minds. We tend to jump from one thing to another, clinging at whatever it is more shiny or perceived as most relevant at a moment or another. Though this might sound like a hopeless situation, the good news is that our "monkey mind" can be trained through meditation. By meditation, Trungpa means particularly the Tibetan form of meditation, not any practice that we can find lately in our Western world under the umbrella of this term.
Since the scope of this text is not to talk about different types of meditation, I will limit myself to say just that I have met a few of Chogyam Trungpa's students and have listened to stories about others, as well as about the Shamballa community he founded. Yet, fortunately or not fortunately, that direction was not my cup of tea ( not my path).
Still, I can say that I am indebted to some extent to Chogyam Trungpa's teachings and legacy. The occasion of encountering some of his wisdom was the discovery of another part of his teachings, those on dharma art. The term might be misleading for most people. If you search for its meaning, it is significant to not follow just your assumptions about what the term meant but to patiently discover bits and pieces from what Trungpa himself passed to his students.
Dharma art was seen by Trungpa as the activity of non-aggression. The artist is just a facilitator of creation that occurs almost by itself, almost like it would be without a creator. I will sumarise what I understood as being essential for the creative process from his point of view. One of the most crucial things in this method is to learn how to look deeply into the space, pretty much like the space around you would be a piece of blank paper. Then, you need to listen to what calls you from there and do your best to help that thing that wants to emerge, to show up into the world – sort of a midwife's job. The artist is just one of the conditions for some artwork to appear in the world, such as the rain being just one of the conditions for the mushrooms or other plants to grow up in the forest. Maybe, some may call it chance encounters, but I believe the process is more sophisticated than that.
However, is beyond the scope of this text to go into depth into Chogyam Trungpa's vision and method of dharma art. What I want to say now, are a couple of things for the reader who does not know yet anything about dharma art.First of all, it is not enough to read Chogyam Trungpa's book, Dharma art, or its more recent version named True Perception, to understand what he intended to do. He uses terms such as art or symbolism, in ways in which we do not usually use in the Western art world.
The book is highly poetical, and, based only on the text, it might be possible that you will misunderstand it.
To get a taste of dharma art method, you need to do some of the exercises that were designed for 'creating' dharma art. The method has some elusive quality, hard to classify based on our Western contemporary art strategies or practices. Moreover, I guess, it would be hard to pin down even according to any traditional Eastern rules of art-making.
What is dharma art?
Instead of trying to explain it, which would be too hard to do just in a few words, anyway, I would prefer to give some references of artists who knew about and most probably used in their working process at least some of Chogyam Trungpa's ideas, exercises, or insights. Some of the most famous were Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. They belonged to the School of Disembodied Poetics from the Naropa University, in Boulder, Colorado. (https://www.naropa.edu/)
Last but not least, regarding my work and effort, I am grateful to David Schneider and Arawana Hayashi, to have given me a taste of what dharma art can be. They were leading a workshop on dharma art in Koln ( in 2010 ) in which I participated. While working on my Ph.D. thesis on "The Crossroads of Contemporary Art with Buddhist Thought – Mindfulness and Selflessness ", I was highly interested to understand more about the possibilities of creating art based on the practices of awareness and mindfulness. That brought me to the dharma art seminar. Some of the assertions and investigations I wrote about in my thesis were based on the experience and insights I got during those days of practice. I could not have seen and interpreted the work of Meredith Monk, which I took as a case study in my research, the way I did, without that experience.
Afterward, I incorporated bits and pieces of mindfulness and awareness-based practices within my methods and strategies of art-making. They are usually not directly visible in any way in the final product, yet, without them, my creative process would not be complete.
David Schneider – former Zen monk and writer – taught me a method that highly influenced my way of writing poetry. Arawana Hayashi, invented, based on the awareness practices she learned from Chogyam Trungpa, as well as her dance training, a practice named Social Presencing Theater. This, very interesting awareness-based method that combines dance and movement with social action, is a method for embodied problem-solving. She is still teaching it in the seminars of the Presencing Institute, all over the world. ( Most probably, she is one of the founders or at least first members of the Presencing Institute, together with Otto Scharmer and Peter Senge, as far as I know)
Going back to my work process, the first two projects where I introduced awareness-based elements into the creative practice, were A Peculiar Tiny Drop and John Murphy Prefers White Wine to Black Pepper. I connected awareness and mindfulness with making images and objects, that further, were inserted within more common practices belonging to 20th century art. The ideas and insights that I had about ten years ago stayed with me and melted into my artistic practice.
https://www.mirelaivanciu.space/work/portfolio/johnmurphypreferswhitewinetoblackpepper
To conclude, it is not an easy task to blend in and work based on such a mixture of criteria and practices that have so different sources and traditions. It will become clearer in the future both why and how I did it , as well as if it is worthwhile to pursue such a difficult and delicate path.
Chogyam Trungpa
Photo was found on https://www.lionsroar.com/beyond-present-past-and-future-is-the-fourth-moment/
