Cheogyam Trungpa - The Future Is Open: Good Karma, Bad Karma, and Beyond Karma

In recent decades, the word karma, which comes from both the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, has become a commonplace term in the English language. According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, karma is in the top 10 percent of frequently used words in the English language. What goes around, comes around, as they say.

In The Future Is Open: Good Karma, Bad Karma, and Beyond Karma, Chgyam Trungpa explores the popular views of karma and challenges fundamental misconceptions in our understanding of the Buddhist doctrines of karma and rebirth. However, his purpose is not primarily to set the record straight from a doctrinal point of view. Rather, as in all his books and teachings, he is interested in presenting a view of the Buddhist path and the practice of meditation that can actually help people to wake up.

It seems quite timely that this book is appearing now, in 2018, given what might be called the karmic upheavals taking place in America and around the world. A lot of people in the United States are asking themselves about the state of political chaos: Why now? Why is this happening to us? Or How did this happen to us? And What can we do about this?

The unique contribution that Chgyam Trungpa makes to the understanding of karma is to talk about it as a path of awakening, if we link it with meditation. He identifies meditation practice as a way in which we can actually step outside of the wheel of karmic bondage and, for moments at least, stop creating future karma, whether good or bad. The past may be determined by our previous actions, but the next momentthe futureis always uncharted territory. In fact, the future is open.

From his earliest days in India, Europe, and North America, Chgyam Trungpa pondered the differences between Asian and Western thought. He studied the history of Western thought, both at Oxford University and on his own. He explored and contemplated Western society and the Western mind and how the Buddhist teachings could enter the West as living teaching. He was very aware of the secular nature of Western society and saw the West, and indeed the world, as becoming more and more materialistic. Thus his teachings address that orientation, without distorting the fundamental understandings from the Buddhist tradition.

When Trungpa Rinpoche taught in the West, he always presented the Buddhist teachings very much as a pathin the present. Unlike most other Tibetan Buddhist teachers, he often didnt identify what text or Tibetan or Indian school of thought he was drawing his material from. He talked about dharma as living teachingfresh, original, and applicable to the Westthat people need now.

Chgyam Trungpa did not emphasize the more deterministic aspect of karmathat our current life circumstances are a reflection of our deeds in past lives. Instead, he often talked about rebirth in terms of the death of each moment. Thus, how we work with each present moment affects the next, which is the immediate future. Again, that future is always openit hasnt happened yet. Despite excellent training and a thorough education in a traditional view, he understood that Westerners were not going to easily embrace the idea that people are born with physical problems and other life challenges purely because of something they did in a past life. For Western democratic societies, this smacks of elitism and reads as an attempt to keep people in their place. It can also get distorted into the view that people who are poor or sick or needy deserve what they get in life and dont necessarily deserve help.

In the research that I did for this book, I listened to the audiotape of a talk on karma that Rinpoche gave during his first year in America in a seminar on Gampopas Jewel Ornament of Liberation. At that time, his relationship with his students, who numbered then only in the hundreds, was both intimate and somewhat casual. They were all in love with him, from some point of view, but they hadnt yet developed much of the respectful distance and devotion that would mark later eras. As a result, he was able to solicit and receive brutally honest appraisals of his presentations of the buddhadharma, something that would serve him well in his formulations of Buddhist teachings for Westerners. When he started presenting Gampopas traditional teachings on such things as the hell realms, his students rejected the traditional depictions of torture and torment, dismissing them as fantasies and fearmongering. The closest and most senior students led the revolt. They werent having any of it. I think that experiences such as this one were an education of sorts for Rinpoche in how Westerners think and also how they behavepoorly at times. I do think it gave him pause. He never backed away from the truth, but such encounters may have helped to shape a more psychological approach to the truth of realms and karma, one that would speak more effectively to Western audiences.

In The Future Is Open, Chgyam Trungpa treats the impact of the past on the present in a matter-of-fact way. He doesnt avoid or gloss this over, but what really interests him is not how or why youve arrived at this point, but how you go forward: how you work with what youre presented in your life.

He also doesnt avoid or sugarcoat the devastating ways in which we create suffering through our thoughts and actions. He very much believed that people must take responsibility for their actions and their circumstances in life. However, he isnt trying to reform people as much as he is trying to get them to step out of the whole thing, to get off the treadmill of habitual action and reaction.