Recorded Books Inc. - First Thought Best Thought

ABOUT THE BOOK Here is a unique contribution to the field of poetry: a new collection of works by Americas foremost Buddhist meditation master, Chgyam Trungpa. These poems and songsmost of which were written since his arrival in the United States in 1970combine a background in classical Tibetan poetry with Trungpas intuitive insight into the spirit of America, a spirit that is powerfully evoked in his use of colloquial metaphor and contemporary imagery. Most of the poems were originally written in Englishclearly the result of the authors own perceptions of new forms and media offered to him by a different culture. Each poem has its own insight and power, which come from a skillful blend of traditional Asian subtlety and precision combined with a thoroughly modern vernacular. Several of the authors calligraphies accompany the collection. CHGYAM TRUNGPA (19401987)meditation master, teacher, and artistfounded Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, the first Buddhist-inspired university in North America; the Shambhala Training program; and an international association of meditation centers known as Shambhala International.

He is the author of numerous books, including Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, and The Myth of Freedom. Sign up to receive inspirational quotes by Chgyam Trungpa and special offers from Shambhala Publications. Or visit us online to sign up at shambhala.com/eoceanofdharma. CHGYAM TRUNGPA First ThoughtBest Thought108 Poems Edited by David I. Rome Introduction by Allen Ginsberg SHAMBHALA Boulder & London 2010 S HAMBHALA P UBLICATIONS , I NC . Horticultural Hall 300 Massachusetts Avenue Boston, Massachusetts 02115 www.shambhala.com 1983 by Chgyam Trungpa All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Trungpa, Chgyam, 1939 First thought, best thought. eISBN 978-0-8348-2133-0 ISBN 0-57062-610-3 ISBN 0-394-73269-3 1. Buddhist poetry, American. I. Title.

PS3570.R84F5 1983 83-42806 811.54 BVG 01 This book is dedicated to Milarepa, the poet-yogi of the Kagy lineage, who has inspired me since my childhood.INTRODUCTION A S LINEAGE HOLDER in Ear-whispered Kagy transmission of Tibetan Buddhist practice of Wakefulness, Chgyam Trungpa is Rinpoche or Precious Jewel of millenial practical information on attitudes and practices of mind speech & body that Western Poets over the same millenia have explored, individually, fitfully, as far as they were ablesearching thru cities, scenes, seasons, manuscripts, libraries, backalleys, whorehouses, churches, drawing rooms, revolutionary cells, opium dens, merchants rooms in Harrar, salons in Lissadell. Rimbaud, drawing on the Magician Eliphas Levi & hashishien backalleys of Paris, rediscovered Alchemy of the Verb and other Western magics including home-made Colors of Vowels & long reasoned derangement of all the senses as part of his scheme to arrive at the Unknown as Poet-seer. His conception of Poet as Visionary Savant is unbeatable ambition no Western poet can bypass, tho as in the lives of Rimbaud & Kerouac, mature suffering, the First Noble Truth of existence, may be the destined end of ambitious magic. Some Reality is arrived at: Charity is that keyThis inspiration proves that I have dreamed!... I who called myself angel or seer, exempt from all morality, I am returned to the soil with a duty to seek and rough reality to embrace! Peasant! Rimbaud, still a model of the Beautiful Poet, concluded his lifes last year with the following letters: In the long run our life is a horror, an endless horror! What are we alive for?... My life is over, all I am now is a motionless stump.

Generations later poets are still trying to change Reality with the Revolution of the Word, a XX Century preoccupation drawing on Western gnostic sources. Some compromise with Absolute Truth had to be made in XX Century poetics: W.C. Williams thru Kerouac, poets were willing to work with relative truth, the sight at hand, accurate perception of appearance, accurate reportage of consciousnessalthough Hart Crane & some Rock Poets continued to force the issue of Self-Immolation as means of becoming One with phenomena. As part of the aesthetics of working with relative truth, an American idiom developed (born out of the spacious pragmatism of Whitman in dealing with his own Ego): The acceptance of actual poetic (poesis: making) behavior of the mind as model, subject, & measure of literary form and content. Mind is shapely, Art is shapely. Gertrude Steins style thus merges literary artifact with present consciousness during the time of composition.

Put another way: the sequence of events of poets mind, accidents of mind, provide the highlights, jumps & Plot of Poetry. As to the Muse, Shes there, installed amid the kitchenware as Whitman celebrated the change from Absolute Heroic to Relative Honesty in poetic method. Thus we inherited our world of poetry in XX Century. Thirst for some Absolute Truth still lurks behind this shift, thus Bullfighting, Drugs, God, Communism, Realpolitik or Revolution, Drink, Suburb or Bohemia, Sex, grassroots communalism, ecology or Amerindian ground, blasts of Eternal Vision, Deaths Skull, even various Apocalypses or Extraterrestrial Paranoias & delights recur as our preoccupation, and have been epicd. Brave energies of fear, joy or anomia, not much certainty; yet theres been honest effort to display what can be seen of naked mind, and thats led to an amazingly open style of Poetry which includes snow-blinding Sierras and rain-diamonded traffic lights, as minds-eye does. An international style, based on facts, has emerged, perhaps the most relaxed poetic mode ever.

Still, no certainty emerges but ultimate suffering, accelerating change, and perhaps some vast glimpse of universal soullessness. Has the poetic Seer failed? Or perhaps succeeded at arriving at a place of beat bleakness where the ego of Poetry is annihilated? At last! To the Rescue! Carrying the panoply of 25 centuries of wakened mind-consciousness where glorious radiant Howdahs/are being carried by elephants/through groves of flowing milk/past paradises of Waterfall/into the valley of bright gems/be rubying an antique ocean/floor of undiscovered splendor/in the heart of un happiness. And Whozat? The poet of absolute Sanity and resolution, having drunk the hot blood of the ego. The author is a reincarnated Tibetan Lama trained from age 2 in various ancient practices aimed at concentrating attention, focusing perception, minding thought-forms to transparency, profounding awareness, vasting consciousness, annihilating ego, & immolating ego-mind in phenomena: a wizard in control of day-dream, conscious visualization & thought projection, vocal sound vibration, outward application of insight, practice of natural virtues, and a very admiral of oceanic scholarship thereof. The dramatic situation of someone who has realized the World as pure mind, & gone beyond attachment to ego to return to the world & work with universal ignorance, confront the spiritual-materialist daydream of Western worldand tell it in modernist poetryprovides the historic excitement this book puts in our laps. To focus on one aspect of the drama, consider the progression of style, from early poems adapted out of Tibetan formal-classic modes, to the free-wheeling Personism improvisations of the poems of 1975, which reflect Guru minds wily means of adapting techniques of Imagism, post-surrealist humor, modernist slang, subjective frankness & egoism, hip fingerpainting, & tenderhearted spontaneities as adornments of tantric statement.