Illusion's Game: The Life and Teaching of Naropa

Dharma Ocean

by Chögyam Trungpa

In what he calls a "200 percent potent" teaching, Chögyam Trungpa reveals how the spiritual path is a raw and rugged "unlearning" process that draws us away from the comfort of conventional expectations and conceptual attitudes toward a naked encounter with reality. The tantric paradigm for this process is the story of the Indian master Naropa (1016–1100), who is among the enlightened teachers of the Kagyu lineage of the Tibetan Buddhism. Naropa was the leading scholar at Nalanda, the Buddhist monastic university, when he embarked upon the lonely and arduous path to enlightenment. After a series of daunting trials, he was prepared to receive the direct transmission of the awakened state of mind from his guru, Tilopa. Teachings that he received, including those known as the six doctrines of Naropa, have been passed down in the lineages of Tibetan Buddhism for a millennium.

Trungpa's commentary shows the relevance of Naropa's extraordinary journey for today's practitioners who seek to follow the spiritual path. Naropa's story makes it possible to delineate in very concrete terms the various levels of spiritual development that lead to the student's readiness to meet the teacher's mind. Trungpa thus opens to Western students of Buddhism the path of devotion and surrender to the guru as the embodiment and representative of reality.

Genres: Buddhism, Spirituality, Religion, Nonfiction, Biography

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Vidyadhara Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (Tibetan: ཆོས་ རྒྱམ་ དྲུང་པ་ Wylie: Chos rgyam Drung pa; also known as Dorje Dradul of Mukpo, Surmang Trungpa, after his monastery, or Chökyi Gyatso, of which Chögyam is an abbreviation) was a Buddhist meditation master, scholar, teacher, poet, and artist. He was the 11th descendent in the line of Trungpa tulkus of the Kagyü school of Tibetan Buddhism. He was also trained in the Nyingma tradition, the oldest of the four schools, and was an adherent of the rimay or "non-sectarian" movement within Tibetan Buddhism, which aspired to bring together and make available all the valuable teachings of the different schools, free of sectarian rivalry.

Trungpa was a significant figure in the dissemination of Tibetan Buddhism to the West, founding Naropa University and establishing the Shambhala Training method, a presentation of the Buddhadharma largely devoid of ethnic trappings. In 1963, he moved to England to study comparative religion, philosophy, and fine arts at Oxford University. During this time, he also studied Japanese flower arranging and received an instructors degree from the Sogetsu school of ikebana. In 1967, he moved to Scotland, where he founded the Samye Ling meditation centre.

Shortly thereafter, a variety of experiences—including a car accident that left him partially paralyzed on the left side of his body—led him to give up his monastic vows and work as a lay teacher. In 1969, he published Meditation in Action , the first of fourteen books on the spiritual path published during his lifetime. The following year he married Diana Pybus and moved to the United States, where he established his first North American meditation centre, Tail of the Tiger (now known as Karmê-Chöling) in Barnet, Vermont.

In 1986, he moved to Nova Scotia, Canada, where hundreds of his students had settled. That Autumn, after years of heavy alcohol use, he had a cardiac arrest, and he died of heart failure the following Spring. His legacy is carried on by his son, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, under the banner of Shambhala International and the Nalanda Translation Committee.

Reviews

[Mara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a good introduction to Naropa and I found the presentation from Chogyam Trungpa's seminars particularly helpful to gain a general understanding with the question and answer sessions with the students shedding even further light on the topics. I couldn't fully connect with the depth of the messages but from a lay-person's standpoint, the concepts of prajna (knowledge), shunyata (choiceless awareness), and mahamudra (extraordinary clarity) as steps or levels along the path to enlightenment resonate from an emotional standpoint.

While each concept has multiple levels and there are many other aspects, the journey as a graudal "awakening" process is relatable to ordinary life full of conflicting emotions and wrong beliefs about reality, power of conceptual mind, pain, ego, creating shells or masks or veils, the unnameable, discriminating awareness, analytical and intellectual mind, relative and ordinary experience, resentment/anger, aloneness, confusion/chaos, appreciation, etc..

I especially like the ideas that "everybody represents themselves and everybody is a caricature of themselves" and that illusory body is like catching fragments of ourselves and assembling into a particular perception.

[Jan Morrison]

Reading anything by the Vidyadhara is like jumping into a mountain stream - shocking direct perception happens.

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

Illusion's Game - indeed

I love the story of Naropa and wanted to love this modern interpretation of it too, but found it instead to be just more of the same of Trungpa's view of things. This may be just fine if you like his approach or don't know any better, but with Trungpa I feel a bit like Dorothy after she's had Toto pull the curtain back from the manipulative little wizard's little booth.

Years ago as a beginning dharma student I was taken in and found Trungpa very helpful (his life story Born In Tibet is superb in its detail and telling, and Garuda V: Transcending Hesitation (v. 5), Glimpses of Abhidharma: From a Seminar on Buddhist Psychology and Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (Shambhala Dragon Editions) were all fundamental to my early understanding of buddhism and vajrayana), but after maturing in my own practice and discovering what really went on within his sangha it seems he really did use the model and archetype of the mahasiddhas of old to justify his own eccentricities (ie ego).

So, what is it about this particular book I don't like? As I said I really wanted to like it, but was immediately turned off by Trungpa's attitude towards his audience (at a series of talks in New York and Vermont in '72 and '73). He starts right off on the first page by saying, "I find it necessary to express my negativities about presenting such potent - 200% potent - teachings to the people of the continent of North America, or to the West altogether. Nobody here seems ready for this material at all. People are relating with the starting point of practice, and as far as we know, nobody in America has a complete understanding of even the hinayana level of Buddhism. People have hardly any understanding at all." Well, how is that for arrogant assumptions!?

This hyperbole could be seen merely as a teaching devise to prepare the listener's mind for the profound and exceptional teachings that follow... or it could be seen as an old tried and true technique to brainwash and manipulate the susceptible by insulting with one hand while praising with the other (the praise comes next with the presentation of the gift of exceptional teachings). Besides the obvious warning bells such attempts at manipulation set off for me, what do we make of the exaggerated and meaningless "200%" used to describe Trungpa's teaching? The point of the Buddha's dharma was to reveal the exact nature of reality, just as it is. To me that means 100%, no more, no less. This small point completely illustrates my criticism of Trungpa's approach...

This book does go on to present Naropa's interesting and illustrative spiritual path, but what could have simply and clearly been a teaching about this instead becomes mired in a rambling and disjointed psychological mish-mash. There is wisdom somewhere within all this but to the same extent that there is fruit within a smoothy! It really does make me think Trungpa had more trauma from his paralyzing brain injury than Westerners could at first discern. Fortunately since the '70 the quality of teachings (both the skill of the teachers and translators) has grown in leaps and bounds, as well as our understanding of both the cultural context of buddhism in Tibet, and the fallibility of "enlightened" teachers (and devoted students).

By halfway through the book I couldn't read any more, and so put it down for a year to get some distance and let it settle. When I recently picked it back up I could again only see Trungpa's ego riding on the wisdom waves of Naropa's mahamudra (and he wasn't even doing a very skillful job of surfing!). It may appear to be a subtle thing, but it's actually not. The dharma is very clear and simple, and of course it gets confused and muddled by mind, ignorance and ego, but a good teacher should cut through this. Alas, this teaching beguiles instead of enlightens. Fortunately we have many more authentic alternatives available today.

The point here is not how the dharma looks on paper, or sounds in a lecture hall, but how it feels when applied. Does it awaken recognition and unshakable familiarity with your own original face (like a clear mirror), or does it just excite, and shake you up (like an amusement ride)?

[Scott Ford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting discussion on the nature of reality. Details on different stages of awareness.

[Joseph Wickland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly valuable and grounded extrapolation of suffering in the spiritual path. Very useful

[Kitap Yakıcı · Rating 3 out of 5]

In my twenty-year involvement with all things Trungpa (from The Naropa Institute/Naropa University to Shambhala Training to The Myth of Freedom and Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism ), some aspects of his teaching strike home immediately, while others fall on (my) deaf ears, and yet others come across as little more than nigh meaningless "Trungpababble." However, as I return time and again to his books and teachings, with the passage of time and deepening of my own practice and experience, some once obscure meanings are made cleare and others, which once seemed self-evident or important, become more obscure or less relevant. So I suspect it shall be with Illusion's Game: The Life and Teaching of Naropa, to which my response is decidedly mixed.

Based on two seminars on the life of Naropa given by Trungpa in the early 1970s, which used Herbert V. Guenther's translation of the life and teachings of Naropa as their "textbook," this book provides a much less scholarly and far more intimate interpretation of Naropa's hagiography, with the intent of relating the content of those myths and philosophies to the states of mind of the practitioners. While not nearly as profound as the Guenther translation, at least in a philosophical sense, this work is more immediately meaningful (when it is meaningful, that is). Of particular value currently were Trungpa Rinpoche's insights into visualization on pp. 134 and 135.

As an aside, it was impossible for me to read this without recalling a story I heard while attending a dathün at Karmê Chöling in summer 1996. According to a student of the late Trungpa who was there at the time, some of the talks on which this book is based were delivered while Trungpa was shitfaced. He arrived several hours late to the seminar and drunkenly berated the students, wondering whether or not it was even worth it to try to teach a group so hopeless. It reminded me of the torments through which Tilopa put his student Naropa in order to prepare him to receive the meaning of the teachings, and it also made the book a little funnier to read than one might expect.

[Charlotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brilliant book. I want to read it again. It has an incredible, personal teachings from Trungpa Rinpoche's own experience of the student-master relationship.