Controversies
Chögyam Trungpa's style of teaching was often unconventional. In his own words, "When we talk about compassion, we talk in terms of being kind. But compassion is not so much being kind; it is being creative to wake a person up." He did not encourage his students to imitate his own behavior, and he was troubled by those who felt empowered by his example to do whatever they wanted and manipulate people. As the third Jamgön Kongtrül explained in a teaching given to students of Chögyam Trungpa, "You shouldn't imitate or judge the behavior of your teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, unless you can imitate his mind."
Trungpa's sexuality has been one of the sources of controversy, as he cultivated relations with a number of his female students. Tenzin Palmo, who met him in 1962 while he was still at Oxford, did not become one of his consorts. She mentions she refused his advances at the time because he had presented himself as "a pure monk." However, she said had she known that Trungpa began having sexual relations with women at age thirteen, she would not have declined, considering that in the higher stages of Tibetan Buddhist tantra, sexual relations (especially with tertöns) are a means of enhancing spiritual insights. Trungpa formally renounced his monastic vows in 1969.
Trungpa was also known for smoking tobacco and for his liberal use of alcohol; many who knew him characterized him as an alcoholic. He began drinking occasionally shortly after arriving in India. Before his coming to America, Trungpa drove a sports car into a joke shop in Dumfries, Scotland. While his companion was not seriously injured, Trungpa was left partially paralyzed. Later, he described this event as a pivotal moment which inspired the course of his teachings. Some accounts ascribe the accident to drinking. Others suggest he may have had a stroke. According to Trungpa himself, he blacked out.
He often combined drinking with teaching. David Chadwick recounts: "Suzuki asked Trungpa to give a talk to the students in the zendo the next night. Trungpa walked in tipsy and sat on the edge of the altar platform with his feet dangling. But he delivered a crystal-clear talk, which some felt had a quality – like Suzuki's talks – of not only being about the dharma but being itself the dharma." However, in some instances, he was too drunk to walk, and had to be carried. Also, according to the Steinbecks, on a couple of occasions his speech was unintelligible. One woman reported serving him "big glasses of gin first thing in the morning."
Two former students of Trungpa, John Steinbeck IV and his wife, wrote a sharply critical memoir of their lives with him in which they claim that, in addition to alcohol, Trungpa used $40,000 a year worth of cocaine, and used Seconal to come down from the cocaine. The cocaine use, say the Steinbecks, was kept secret from the wider Vajradhatu community.
An incident that became a cause célèbre among some poets and artists was the Halloween party at the Snowmass Colorado Seminary in the fall of 1975, held during a 3-month period of intensive meditation and study of the Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana vehicles of Tibetan Buddhism. The poet W. S. Merwin had arrived that summer at the Naropa Institute and been told by Allen Ginsberg that he ought to visit the seminary. Although he had not gone through the several years' worth of study and preparatory mind training required, Merwin was insistent he attend, and Trungpa eventually granted his request – along with his girlfriend as well. At seminary the couple stayed to themselves. At the Halloween party, after many, including Trungpa himself, had taken off their clothes, Merwin was asked to join the event, but refused. On Trungpa's orders, his Vajra Guard forced entry into the poet's locked and barricaded room; brought him and his girlfriend, Dana Naone, against their will, to the party; and eventually stripped them of all their clothes, with onlookers ignoring Naone's pleas for help and for someone to call the police. The next day Trungpa asked Merwin and Naone to remain at the Seminary as either students or guests. They agreed to stay for several more weeks to hear the Vajrayana teachings, with Trungpa's promise that "there would be no more incidents," and Merwin and Naone's assertion that "it would be with no guarantees of obedience, trust, or personal devotion to him." They left immediately after the last talk. In a 1977 letter to members of a Naropa class investigating the incident, Merwin concluded,
My feelings about Trungpa have been mixed from the start. Admiration, throughout, for his remarkable gifts; and reservations, which developed into profound misgivings, concerning some of his uses of them. I imagine, at least, that I've learned some things from him (though maybe not all of them were the things I was 'supposed' to learn) and some through him, and I'm grateful to him for those. I wouldn't encourage anyone to become a student of his. I wish him well.
Author Jeffery Paine commented on this incident that "eeing Merwin out of step with the rest, Trungpa could have asked him to leave, but decided it was kinder to shock him out of his aloofness." However, he also notes the outrage felt in particular by poets such as Robert Bly and Kenneth Rexroth, who began calling Trungpa a fascist.
Trungpa's choice of Westerner Ösel Tendzin as his dharma heir was controversial, as Tendzin would be the first Western Tibetan Buddhist lineage holder and Vajra Regent. This was exacerbated by Tendzin's own behavior as lineage holder. Tendzin, while knowingly carrying HIV, was sexually involved with students, one of whom became infected and died.
Rick Fields, historian of Buddhism in America, writes that Trungpa "caused more trouble, and did more good, than anyone I'll ever know."
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