Crazy Wisdom

or

Institutions and Intuitions:

The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics

Kate Linhardt
March 3, 2008
American Culture Senior Project
Supplementary Paper

1
 Table of Contents:

Part I: Why I Made the Film . . . 3

Part II: Origins . . . 12

Part III: The Incident . . . 20

Part IV: A New Generation . . . 25

2
 Part I: Why I Made the Film

Perhaps it would be best to start out by asking myself the question I usually

opened my interviews with: what drew you to Naropa? The summer of 2005 I shipped

myself off to Boulder, Colorado for a week to attend an intensive prose writing workshop

and attend lectures and panel discussions by some of the worlds most preeminent writers,

literary scholars, and intellectuals. I had poured over the catalogue in the weeks

beforehand, eyes agog at the mosaic of peripherally recognizable names, esoteric course

descriptions, and the schools overarching, experimental counter-poetic mission

statement. The schedule was punctuated by morning yoga, meditation workshops, and

panels about the radical media. I suppose I came for solidarity, the prospect of artistic

validation, and what was later frequently termed self-healing. Mostly I was there

because of a deep-seated need for professional evaluation; some way of gauging where I

stood in relation to the writers they were eagerly endorsing as the most revered and

diverse group of internationally renowned contemporary poets.1

I didnt really know what I was getting into. I spent the week in a dazed state of

perpetual fascination, awe, and nervousness. It was saturation. Each week of the month

long program has a different theme. Mine, week two, was called Lineages of the

Impossible American Dream and Beyond, and was intended as an exploration and

1
The instructor roster in the Summer of 2005 included Mary Burger, Norma Cole, Mark
DuCharme, Albert Glover, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Jack Hirschman, Vincent Katz, Jena
Osman, Michael Rothenberg, Sonia Sanchez, Juliana Spahr, Lewis Warsh, and Julia Seko
(printer). I came to be quite impressed by all of them at readings and panel discussions,
but without the money to buy their books beforehand, I had taken the catalogues claims
about their talent and prestige at face value. Upcoming artists for the 2008 Summer
session included Mei Mei Berssenbrugge, Joanna Howard, Carol Moldaw, Sue Salinger,
Rani Singh, Arthur Sze, Richard Tuttle, in addition to Naropas permanent faculty.

3
celebration of the lineage of the New American Poets as classified and identified by

Donald Allen in his now authoritative anthology, The New American Poets (1960). The

intensive workshop I enrolled in with the brooding poet Lewis Warsh, Fiction and

Memory, was a non-fiction prose class based on the work of Jack Kerouac, Marguerite

Duras, Peter Handke, and Lydia Davis. We would read each other our observations about

the world, share sob stories, and wonder aloud at the volatility and malleability of

memory. Nobody ever questioned the fact that we were all strangers; that was irrelevant.

In answer to my timid, probably ill-phrased question about whether or not the

crucible of the Summer Writing Program which the Jack Kerouac School was founded

around was really the most effective way of learning and improving as a writer, Steven

Taylor, Allen Ginsbergs former teaching assistant and a current teacher replied matter-

of-factly,

Nah, I think its life-changing. Its like a total immersion. Total immersion in
literary culture. Its like becoming a part of the world of writing, at the global
level, for a month, day and night. I think people mature. People burn out, people
revive, people get a second wind and its just life changing.

Every year, outrider poets, fiction writers, scholars, translators, performance artists,

Buddhist teachers, printers, editors, activists, and editors host and attend a continual

stream of readings, lectures, panel discussions, and performances, discussing their

disciplines and ideas with one another outside the corporate cultural mainstream

(www.naropa.edu). The schools unofficial motto, or mantra, is: writers teaching

writers, and while there are inevitably boundaries between teacher and student, they

are supposedly more fluid distinctions than might be found in a more traditional

academic setting (www.naropa.edu).

4
 Founded by Chgyam Trungpa Rinpoche in January,1974, Naropa Institute was

originally conceived as an almost utopian haven for artists, spiritual seekers, and

intellectuals. It became the third of three organizations established under Trungpas

Nalanda Foundation, which was inspired by Nalanda University, an Indian Mahayana

Buddhist academy from the 5th-12th centuries.2 Nalanda Universitys abbot in the 11th

century was named Naropa, and he had been particularly renowned for bringing together

scholarly wisdom with meditative insight (www.naropa.edu). Upon arriving in the

United States as an exile of Tibet, Trungpa purportedly asked, where are the poets? Take

me to your poets! After an adventitious encounter with Allen Ginsberg in a New York

City taxi, Ginsberg had become Rinpoches student, and decided to accompany him to

Boulder for the Naropa Institutes first session in June, 1974.

Naropa Institute was primarily funded by a different Buddhist meditation center,

Karma Dzong, which Trungpa had founded in Boulder in 1971 separately from the

Nalanda Foundation.3 Naropa was much more than just a writing school; there were

departments in religion, somatic psychology, Indo-Tibetan languages, and music. Yet, the

writing school cultivated the most interest from the press due to its unparalleled all-star

celebrity staff. The original faculty of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics

consisted of co-founders Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman, Gregory Corso, William S.

Burroughs, John Cage, Diane Di Prima, Jackson Mac Low, Timothy Leary, and countless

2
The two other divisions of the Nalanda Foundation were the Maitri Project, a mental
health training program, and Mudra Theater, an experimental theater group (Lloyd).
3
Charles Wartts, former director of Journalism at Webster College, recalled how in the
early 1970s, the Buddhists in Boulder would travel around in a red van together to
recruit people in Pizza Parlors and Beer Halls [. . .] People started testifying like in the
Baptist Church about what Buddhism had done for them (Reed 10).

5
others.4 Expecting between three and five hundred people to participate, organizers

scrambled to accommodate the 1,300 students who arrived that first summer of 1974; The

East-West Journal reported that year on the astonishing assortment of college students,

dropouts, scholars, scientists, artists, therapists, dancers, heads of departments, musicians,

housewives, who suddenly showed up, not knowing what to expect (qtd. at

www.naropa.edu). As Reed Bye, a current writing instructor explained, it had hit a little

nerve, or pulse at that time that was calling for people to get together. 5

Though it had, retrospectively, felt to me like some bizarre conflation of a rapid

weight loss program and a strange metaphysical trade fair, the Summer Writing Program

4
Waldman and Ginsberg were roommates that summer and stayed up late one night
discussing the writing school they would establish. Trungpa had envisioned it as a way
of teaching meditators about the golden mouth and educating poets about the golden
mind. Waldman later explained their rationale behind the name: Disembodied, because
so many of our faculty would be peripatetic, and also our inspiration was from many
writers long gone. Moreover, at the time we had no buildings, no desks, no blackboards,
no filing cabinets, no grades, no money only our mental commitment, our voices, our
scholarship, our practice. So in the beginning, the school was truly disembodied! (qtd. at
www.naropa.edu)
5
Naropas inception coincided with a much more wide-reaching shift in what might be
termed liberal education. The tumult of the 1960s had [collapsed] the universitys
claims to moral and intellectual legitimacy, but students subsequent demand for more
relevant courses often boiled down to a desire for an intellectually undemanding
curriculum, in which students could win academic credits for political activism, self-
expression, [and] transcendental meditation (Lasch 257-258). In The Culture of
Narcissism, Christopher Lasch goes on to criticize any number of other hollow liberal
platitudes and behaviors, which he feels contributed to the deterioration of American
society under the guise of an emerging, narcissistic radicalism. Eschewing the dogmatic,
reductive binary of conservative=bad and liberal=good, Lasch was troubled by the
consistent failure of liberals to enact real change: cultural radicalism has become so
fashionable, and so pernicious in the support it unwittingly provides for the status quo,
that any criticism of contemporary society that hopes to get beneath the surface has to
criticize, at the same time, much of what currently goes on under the name of radicalism
(Lasch 22-23).

6
was a phenomenon to reckon with. Granted, when I participated, my relative isolation

from my peers there, (who were uniformly much older or else low-residency graduate

students required to attend summer classes to fulfill their degree requirements), lent

everything the dramatized, cinematic veneer of a sociological experiment. The perennial

conversation that they all seemed to be having was about how to change the world;

how to expand minds and start believing in reality and creativity and personal agency

again. I took copious notes. At lectures and readings I watched all the creative people

around me listening and found great comfort in the knowledge that we were all listening

together. The first conceit was that we were all hurting as human beings; we were all

struggling with our egos and our ideas and our feelings about society. At Naropa, it was

easy to acknowledge how fragile we all were, and talk about it unselfconsciously in

rational, constructive terms.

Arriving a little early to Mary Burger, Sonia Sanchez, and Norma Coles poetry

reading, I took a seat in the front row and was leafing through my new copy of The

Angelhair Anthology, (a massive collection of short zines and writing from the St. Marks

school of the 1960s), when Anne Waldman took the seat next to me. The woman sitting

on the other side of me nudged me encouragingly nice work, she seemed to say.

Realizing that Waldman had co-edited the anthology with her ex-husband, my instructor

Lewis Warsh, I awkwardly shoved the book under my chair. She sat youthfully, cross-

legged on the foldout chair, rocking her head and bopping her toes to the words, (by far

the most enthusiastic audience member), and for the entire performance I struggled to

maintain normal-sounding breathing patterns. It was only that night that I realized that

my infatuation with these people had only grown deeper since Id physically been on the

7
campus. I suddenly began to question my motivation for coming there. I felt so ashamed

sometimeshad I come here for myself, or for them? Exactly how narcissistic and

privileged and indulgent was it of me to seek enlightenment or personal growth at this

obscure, countercultural mecca? What had convinced me? What had convinced everyone

else? What were we expecting, and what good would or ever had come of it? It takes an

incredible amount of trust faith, even to think that you can pay someone to teach you

how to be innovative or free.

The Beats had paved their own way thats what made them so tantalizing. They

had broken away from the New Critics literary dictatorship in the 1950s, developed new

forms and styles, betrayed conformity, gender norms, and literary conventions. Above all,

beyond any stylistic innovations they pioneered, it was their role in the context of a very

specific moment in American history which fueled their credibility. But that moment

could never be recreated, not even by the Beats themselves, let alone a bunch of crooning

fans devoting themselves to what they fancied a reasonable facsimile of that time called

Naropa. By accepting Ginsberg and Waldman as a new authoritative elite, and defining

myself in relation to them, I was only perpetuating a familiar cycle: innovation leads to

canonization leads to emulation. My experience there suddenly seemed tainted by this

contradictory notion that regardless of our lifestyles or our intentions, the Summer

Program students had all quite willingly enlisted, not to mention paid for, the

institutionalization of feelings and desires we felt we could not reconcile on our own; we

were paying for an induction into a strange counterfeit coterie made up of disembodied

beatniks and strangers, all under the esoteric aegis of Chgyam Trungpa Rinpoches

8
confusing notion of crazy wisdom. These were the kinds of thoughts that made it hard

for me to concentrate on my breath.

Philip Slater posits that there are three human desires that are deeply and

uniquely frustrated by American culture: community, engagement, and dependence. He

defines the desire for community as the wish to live in trust, cooperation, and friendship

with those around one, the desire for engagement as the wish to come directly to grips

with ones social and physical environment, and the desire for dependence as the wish

to share responsibility for the control of ones impulses and the direction of ones life. In

each case, we are consistently foiled by ourselves and the structures that we have

voluntarily created, and voluntarily maintain (Slater 9). There is an irreconcilable

inconsistency in our simultaneous desires for dependence and independence: the popular

pursuit of individualism produces uniformity. When we become disillusioned by the loud

creaking of Americas social machinery, as we often do, blaming it for all our

unhappiness or unrest, we act as if institutions and bureaucracies had nothing to do with

us as people as if we didnt support them with our own wishes, motives, and actions

(Slater 2). The truth is that we crave submission to something bigger than ourselves, be it

God or the registrars office, and, ironically, in the struggle to understand the origin of

that impulse, we end up seeking even more professional guidance.

Peter Marin, an instructor at Naropa in 1979, describes the white, middle-class

audience of a lecture about meditation in his essay, Spiritual Obedience. He is generous

towards his subjects in as far as he concedes that they were in all probability politically,

psychologically exhausted. However, he goes on to assert that the audiences real plight

was that

9
 they had been raised in various institutional settings that had simultaneously
taught them to be both responsible for their own behavior and to the expectations
of others and had also demanded from them (if they were to succeed) an almost
total submission to authority. As a result [. . .] their desire for spiritual submission
and thereby salvation, may have revealed less of a spiritual yearning than a
capacity for submission in general, or a yearning for anything that might relieve
them of their discomfort and locate them in the world (Marin 52).

The discomfort his describes is difficult to define, especially for me, as someone

personally embedded within it, but Im interested in it as a tendency that bridges

generations. From the 1970s to today, the exact same kind of spiritual submission has

been occurring at Naropa. The hope of transcending a consciousness defined solely by

class lives on, but it is still unresolved because the only methods and institutions that

could possibly deal with those issues are uniformly inadequate (Marin 81). Naropa is too

deliberately detached from reality, favoring instead abstract concepts of presence and

elegant thought process, to deal with critical considerations of its own position in

society as just one more elitist capitalist institution.

The desire for community and engagement is hardly American. What

differentiates us from most other cultures is our love of bigness, mostly because [we]

feel so small. By actively choosing to be subsumed by a pre-existing establishment or

ideal, we want to feel big, but in practice that bigness rips away [our] sense of

connectedness and place and makes [us] feel small. A vicious cycle (Slater 11). Naropa

University considers itself to be one of the biggest literary destinations in the second half

of the 20th century, and with a total enrollment of roughly 1000 students, the curriculum

is centered around the collective individualism of its participants. Slaters desires are

epitomized at the Jack Kerouac School, where students seek to find themselves by

integrating and depending on a community of engaged, like-minded artists. From my own

10
observation and through informal conversations with writing students, though, it seemed

to me that many of them felt more isolated as writers than they had been before theyd

enrolled; working off of a pre-existing template had helped them to get started, but they

needed a new destination.

Granted, one week at a schools summer program couldnt possibly provide more

than a superficial understanding of the their history, their educational philosophy, or their

administrative system, but for better or for worse, Naropa left an impression on me. To its

credit, it made me think deeply about my social class, my long-term goals, and my

fundamental conceptions of self and community. Since Naropas inception, the potency

of that first impression some mixture of novelty, hipness, mysticism, and spirituality

has often been assimilated and embraced by students without a thorough consideration of

the implications of those ingredients. What each one symbolizes is symptomatic of a

wider-reaching cultural phenomenon. The intersections between Naropas writing

program, its westernization of Buddhism, and its experimental, experiential, now

canonical Beatnik faculty are in some respects a microcosmic synecdoche for the

deterioration of contemporary liberal values. Founded on an exciting drama of power

struggles, politics, conspiracy, bureaucracy, spirituality, and art, Naropa was, and

continues to be, a living experiment in the institutionalization of personal salvation.

11
 Part II: Origins

A writers political and religious beliefs are not excrescences to be laughed away, but
something that will leave their mark even on the smallest details of his work.
George Orwell

Today Naropa University has, due to innumerable cultural and economic shifts,

inevitably metamorphosed into something that is in many ways quite foreign to the

raucous fledgling that had been Naropa Institute until 1986, but most people still seem to

take considerable pride in the history of the school. Thus, an investigation into the

circumstances which propelled the founding and development of The Jack Kerouac

School seems as relevant to its existence today as an examination of the Civil War would

be in a comprehensive understanding of the history of the United States.

Trungpa Rinpoches monastical, genealogical, and intellectual qualifications were

hardly bourgeois fabrications. In 1938, the year of his birth, he was proclaimed the

eleventh incarnation of Trungpa Tulku in the Kagyupa and Karmapa orders, and was

brought up in the Sumang monasteries of Eastern Tibet to be the Supreme Abbot. In

1959, due to the political unrest of the Chinese takeover, he emigrated to India, and

eventually Oxford to study psychology (Weinberger 28). A common defense of Naropa,

as well as Trungpas other Buddhist schools, was that the form of Tibetan Buddhism

Trungpa had brought and established under his larger organization, Vajhadratu, was in

itself a hierarchical, traditionally devout practice that Americans simply could not

understand an experiment in monarchy, as Allen Ginsberg put it (qtd. in Weinberger

40). Its detractors disgust and immediate rejection of this paradigm of faith was only

testament to the notorious, irresolvable schism between Eastern and Western ideas of

12
rationality and spirituality. Trungpa had his reservations about even attempting to bring

his two hundred percent potent Himalayan wisdom to the West (Trungpa 3).

At the end of the first summer program in 1974, Chgyam Trungpa clarified at a

panel discussion that the philosophy of the Naropa Institute was not to bring diverging

methodology and practices together like a spoon of sugar in your lemonade so that it

becomes more drinkable. It was a philosophy of explosive union, more like a

firework, not in its destructiveness but in its urgency and intensity. All of them are

valid but at the same time there is a meeting point which takes place in a spark, he

elaborated (Fields 308). But occasionally this beautiful balance of Eastern and Western

dispositions and educational models could turn on itself and end up collapsing into a

corruption of both. In fact, nearly all of the critical scholarly and even journalistic

writings about Naropa that Ive found, most of which were written in the mid-70s, have

had some fairly harsh words for the authenticity and the role of morality within the

institution as a spiritual and intellectual destination.

By the time the Naropa Institute was up and running in 1974, Trungpa had

already started colonies of Vajradhatu meditation centers in Scotland, Vermont,

Colorado, and a number of other states, amassing a small multi-million dollar empire. In

recruiting Ginsberg as the poster-child of his spiritual reformation, he monopolized the

entire alternative artistic community for which Ginsberg had already been serving as a

kind of guru.6 In Marins somewhat drastic opinion, Trungpas early connections with

the hippie or fringe community appear in retrospect to have been simply the easiest or

6
Quincy Troupe, a member of the New Black Poetry school remarked of Naropa that
Amiri Baraka and Allen Ginsbergs guruism was due their huge egos: poets fall
into a guru complex, Troupe said, because their traditional role in some cultures has
been that of mediator between heaven and earth (Reed 10).

13
only available way to build a foundation for his aristocratic program (Marin 60).

Publicity was key; David Meltzer, the author of The Two-Way Mirror, accused Trungpa

of adopting the slick merchandising techniques of a modern corporation with his

catalogue advertising campaign, which sold the experimentations of the writing

programs celebrity faculty like in sweaters in the Sears Roebuck (Reed 8). When writer

Bob Callahan, asked Rinpoche how he could charge $50 for a ticket to a poetry reading,

Rinpoche replied that they had to operate Buddhism like an American business (Reed

8). Rinpoche was probably right to a certain extent Naropa had enough financial

problems as it was, and while providing free arts and entertainment to the Boulder

community would have been ideal, it was probably unfeasible at that point. Furthermore,

nothing could be further from [Vajrayana Buddhists] sensibilities than the notion
of a free community of equals of a just society or the common good. In their eyes
justice is merely another delusion, and interest in it only proof of personal
confusion (Marin 59).

The exoticized western conception of eastern philosophy led many to naively conflate

Buddhism with communism or free-love, which was actually the furthest thing from

the truth. Tibetan Buddhism is literally a feudal system, which had been transplanted to

a modern capitalist setting through Trungpas entrepreneurial savvy and Ginsbergs

tireless self-promotion (Marin 58).

Ginsberg had been interested in Buddhism since the mid-1950s as a kind of

peripheral hobby, encouraged and substantiated by Kerouacs more devout philosophy.

The two became acquainted with Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder at The Six Gallery

readings held in San Francisco and immediately entered into a dialogue about spirituality

and Buddhism with them. Kerouac once wrote that he and Ginsberg were two strange

14
dissimilar monks on the same path Kerouac was hung up on the First Noble Truth of

Suffering, whereas Ginsberg resented and resisted the nothingness, and found himself

more attracted to the intellectual realm of Snyders Mahayana Zen (qtd. in Fields 215).

A troubled, schizophrenic attitude towards Eastern Spirituality or Zen had

been under skeptical scrutiny for many years by people like Alan Watts (Trungpa 3). In

1959, Ruth Fuller Sasaki, the mother of Watts wife Eleanor Everett, observed that Zen

had become the magic password at smart cocktail parties and bohemian get-togethers

alike, used to substantiate and broaden any discussion of the latest psychology, music, or

art (qtd. in Fields 205). Beat Zen as practiced by Ginsberg, Kerouac, Snyder, and

others during the San Francisco Renaissance, was more a prevalent attitude than a

religion. Coining the term Beat Zen in his essay, Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen,

Watts explored the rocky, sometimes contradictory terrain of these contemporary

appropriations of Taoism and Buddhism. Watts defined this Beat Zen as revolt that

does not aspire to change the pre-existing American Way of Life, but simply turns

away from it to find the significance of life in subjective experience rather than objective

achievement (Watts). Square Zen was about a quest for the right spiritual experience

[. . .] There will even be certificates to hang on the wall (Watts). But he was troubled by

the potential of both forms to encourage a lazy and self-serving reading of the classic

texts [. . .] to justify a very self-defensive Bohemianism (Heath & Potter, 263).

These already loose approximations, later coupled with the emergence of

psychedelic drug use in the 1960s, (championed by Timothy Leary as an abridged path to

enlightenment), proved how easily Zen could fall into the trappings of adolescentization

[. . .] devolv[ing] into just teenage surliness backed up with Asian exotic credibility

15
(Heath & Potter, 264). In 1965 Timothy Leary translated Lao Tsus Tao Te Ching from

English to psychedelic in the form of a book called Psychedelic Prayers which

conformed more neatly to his own, and the vaster counter-cultures social creed of do

your own thing or anything goes (Heath and Potter 264).

If Beat Zen was adolescence, Ginsbergs spiritual adulthood came to be defined

by Chgyam Trungpas Vajradhatu Tibetan Buddhism, which, for all its unconventional

westernizations, still entailed a great deal more structure and discipline. Trungpa believed

he had an absolute understanding of the entire Zen/Beatnik phenomenon, which he

attempted to relay to his charges with varying degrees of success. In a series of lectures

he gave in 1972 about the life and teachings of Naropa, he quite openly shared his

misgivings about a tendency endemic in aspiring American Buddhists to exoticize and

distort his teachings into some kind of real live pop art (Trungpa vii, 18).7 Trungpa

7
Chogyam Trungpa used the tale of Naropa, an Indian of the eleventh century and a
well-known figure in Tibetan Buddhism, as a foundational parable in his own teachings.
Trungpas lectures regarding Naropa stray considerably from the formal mahamudra and
tantric teachings which also don his name, namely the six Dharmas of Naropa teachings
(Tib. naro chdrunk), but his descriptions of Naropas psychic journey are said to catch
each [dharma] by its experiential essence, conveying in a few simple words an insight
that students might well seek in vain elsewhere through hundreds of pages of text or
many hours of oral teaching (Trungpa ix). While the story, in its entirety, is rather
complex, and chronicles Naropas transmissions with his spiritual guru, Tilopa, a brief
synopsis seems apt.
The royal prince Naropa leaves his wife of eight years to pursue his lifelong
dream of joining a monastery. He excels at the university of Nalanda (which is,
incidentally, also the name of the North campus in Boulder), and hurtles to the front of
his class, becoming as sought after and celebrated as the very best contemporary teachers
of Buddhism. But his intellect is called into question by a horrible vision of a very ugly
woman, who accuses him of understanding words and not their meanings: do you
understand the words or the sense? she asks. The only way for him to receive a real,
truthful education was by seeking out her brother, Tilopa, as his guru. Shaken, and to the
astonishment and protestations of Nalanda University, Naropa does just that: he goes to
seek a guru. (cont.)

16
prefaced the account of Naropas journey with his guru Tilopa with the disclaimer that

there is a problem in communicating [with] late-twentieth-century Americans. We have

an enormous problem there (Trungpa 17). Students were invested in his teachings as an

outlandish, fashionable way of engaging with the hipness of Tibetan Buddhist works

of art. Everything is regarded as fabulous, a fantastic display. It is so fantastic! It

matches what I saw in my acid trip! Trungpa chided his audience. At last I am able to

relate with those beautiful, colorful, groovy things that are in the Tibetan thankas [. . .]

Im becoming part of them (Trungpa 17-18). Unlike the somber, black turtleneck clad

beatniks of yore, the counterculture had evolved into a swarm of colorful idealists, and

the posters for popular rock bands and events, with their lush color and wavy flowing

lines, were right at home next to popular religious Hindu posters of blue-hued baby

Krishna standing on a glowing white lotus (Fields 249).

But for any redemption to be found in his critique of the adolescentization of

Beat Zen, it was Trungpa who incited the most vehement outrage and disappointment in

But in his quest to find Tilopa, Naropa instead encounters eleven hideous visions,
which so unravel and distress him that he is prepared to kill himself out of desperation
and defeat when the benevolent Tilopa arrives, and finally accepts him as his student.
Tilopa then proceeds to sit, motionless, for years at a time. Each year, Naropa finally
becomes so impatient that he ventures to ask for a teaching, and in response Tilopa
requires of him increasingly preposterous and grotesque displays of devotional acts.
Naropa is made to jump from the roof of a tall temple, shattering his body; he is heavily
beaten, drained by bloodsucking leeches, told to throw himself into a fire, etc. but after
each suffering, or act of repentance, Tilopa restores his health with the slightest touch
and rewards him with one of the six dharmas. It is Naropas utter abandonment of his ego
and worldly attachments, as exhibited through his total submission to Tilopa, which
ultimately releases him from the tyranny of his own pride. Trungpa likened the tour of
Naropas agony that he lead students on to Disneyland: you go through some tunnel,
and you come out [. . .] You see exciting things and you come out on the other end. But
in this case, it is related to psychological problems (Trungpa 7).

17
Naropas early critics.8 His counter-cultural followers (or warriors) fanatical, ecstatic

allegiance to him as an infallible, almost holy deity, lent itself to many serious

accusations that Naropa was a fascist, monarchical cult, operating on several levels of

exploitation (Weinberger 27). Trungpa was a patently ridiculous personage at the height

of his popularity in Boulder; he cruised through its sleepy streets in a Mercedes limo,

wearing a business suit and always accompanied by a retinue of guards, who called

him Your Highness (Weinberger 27). He encouraged alcoholism, sexual promiscuity,

and competitive devotion in his followers. His controversial, unapologetic vices

drinking and smoking - could not be challenged, even by his closest friends, because

whatever [he] did or said became part of the path. When confronted about his drinking

and smoking he replied that he felt it was important for people to see because it

demonstrated that no one could escape spiritual practice by thinking that they had to

become pure before they could begin (Fields 311).

His students were very conflicted people, who were being taught difficult and

often contradictory lessons. Many were emulating Ginsberg, who was trying to emulate

Trungpa the political revolution of the 1960s had dwindled down to a sharp point and it

must have felt, to Ginsberg as well as his followers, that the hippies stated mission to

overhaul conformity and conventional consciousness had to happen soon if it was going

to at all. People reached out to Buddhism or enlightenment as a way of learning to turn

inward and confront themselves to direct their own pent up energy and bewilderment

before they could feel ready to truly confront humanity. But everything was tangled up in

8
Rexroth once said that he felt Chgyam Trungpa had unquestionably done more harm
to Buddhism in the United States than any man living, and recommended deportation.
He joked that one Aleister Crowley was enough for the twentieth century (qtd. in
Weinberger 38).

18
a different, more pernicious kind of countercultural conformity, riddled with good

intentions and unrealistic spiritual expectations. This priority shift from activism to

spirituality was a departure from radical 60s politics, but it also followed a very logical

trajectory given that

even the radicalism of the sixties served, for many of those who embraced it for
personal rather than political reasons, not as a substitute religion but as a form of
therapy. Radical politics filled empty lives, provided a sense of meaning and
purpose (Lasch 33).9

Trungpa stressed in his teachings that meditative absorption is not the real truthWhen

we try to get into something, we expect a lot [. . .] an answer, reassurance, clarity. We

expect all kinds of things. By expecting clarity, we are confusing the whole issue; we are

producing confusion (Trungpa 18-19). Enlightenment or wisdom was derived from

an understanding that confusion and uncertainty are necessary constants, which can never

be overcome. When Trungpa would venture to discuss politics, it was always to devalue

it, to set it aside, the rationale supposedly being that politics were a distraction from the

experiential reality that could be embodied through meditative practice (Marin 60). Due

to his insistence on collective disengagement from society, and his inculcation of

paranoia and a profound skepticism and distrust of capitalistic infrastructures, his

students ultimately succeeded only in evading the world, not disassembling it.

9
Marin makes a similar point, but adds that though the forms of rebellion in the sixties
were raw and often childish [. . .] we must remember, it was often not generated from
within, but was itself called forth by the behavior of adults (Marin 79).

19
 Part III: The Incident

The most infamous and now legendary instance of Trungpas supposedly

anarchical, cruel, dictatorship lies in the story of the W.S. Merwin Incident. Written

about and obsessed over ad nauseum as a real-life parable for the hideous underbelly of

Naropa and the wider new-age movement, the story was crippling to the school, and

more importantly, to Trungpas reputation. In its condensed form, the story goes

something like this: in the fall of 1975, Trungpa held a session at his Vajradhatu

Seminary in Snowmass, Colorado. The poet W.S. Merwin, who had been teaching at the

summer program that year asked Trungpa if he and his girlfriend, a Hawaiian poet named

Dana Naone, could attend, even though they had just begun their Buddhist studies. The

most advanced students struggled to gain admittance to this particular Seminary session

but probably due, at least in part, to Merwins celebrity, Trungpa granted them

admission. Though the couple attended all the teachings and activities, they tended to

isolate themselves from the other participants in the evenings, a source of resentment in

a community devoted to the dissolution of self (Weinberger 30). The night before they

were all going to embark upon the powerful stuff (tantric teachings), Trungpa decided

to throw a Halloween party. The festivities were not unlike most of the other mad

celebrations that had been occurring during the Summer Writing Program at Naropa;

Trungpa got belligerently drunk, molested several female students, [left] teeth marks

on a disciples cheek, and proceeded to command his guards to assist him in humiliating

his pupils in various ways.10

10
Even the most diligent students, who had no desire to participate in these shenanigans,
were generally coerced. After leading a sitting meditation for an entire day, Trungpa
would eagerly instigate wild parties. Still, there was an understanding that no matter

20
 Upon noticing that Merwin and Doane were conspicuously absent, Trungpa

demanded that they be retrieved from their room and brought before him. His guards

obediently went off to the couples room to obey him, but Merwin had locked the door

and refused to be summoned in such a barbaric fashion. Apparently, whatever the guards

were doing was threatening enough that Merwin and Doane were compelled to barricade

their door with furniture, but undeterred, the guards snuck around a balcony and broke

through the sliding glass door. Merwin waved a broken beer bottle at them frantically,

badly injuring some of his attackers, but after much resistance they were eventually

dragged before Trungpa. He demanded that they be stripped naked and made several

racist remarks toward Doane. They screamed for help or even sympathy from the

hundreds of onlookers, (including Ginsberg), but only one man stepped forward to try to

help them. Trungpa swiftly punched him in the face and had him removed from the

premises (Weisberger 31).

The story itself was shocking, almost fantastical, and seemed to validate any and

all reservations one might potentially have had about the school at that time, but it is

more emblematic than definitive, and the response to it far more interesting than the

episode itself (Marin 30). Ginsberg, Waldman, and many others fought vigilantly to try

to prevent a local Boulder paper from printing an expos. Reactions were uniformly

inflammatory, but it took over three years for the general public to catch wind of what

had happened. The first widely read circulation of the event came in Marins 1979 essay

Spiritual Obedience for Harpers Magazine, followed by a compilation book of eye-

how outrageously some nights might end, the next morning everyone woke to the sound
of the conch, and it was back to the meditation hall, back to square one, as Trungpa put
it, the place where you actually were the morning after and not where you thought or
imagined you ought to be (Fields 310).

21
witness accounts called The Party put together by Ed Sanders Investigative Poetics

class as a means of systematically unpacking the details and contradictions of the incident

from within Naropa. The Party was distributed clandestinely by Ed Dorn, and it was later

revised and augmented by further analysis and criticisms in Tom Clarks The Great

Naropa Poetry Wars. When an excerpt of Clarks book was published in Boulder

Monthly, the hysterical Naropans were said to have formed squads and bought up

every copy (Weinberger 35). While it would be terribly redundant and perhaps even

counter-productive to harp on the details and implications of something that has already

undergone such excruciating documentation, suffice to say, something was stirred. For

some, the most disturbing element in the whole unsavory affair was Ginsbergs tireless

and fervent defense of Trungpa. Marin called Ginsbergs justifications for Trungpas

behavior in his interview with Clark the most depressing transcript in American letters

(40). 11

Ginsberg and Trungpa shared many common traits and interests, but more than

anything they were kindred souls as celebrities. Ginsberg had as much power over a

veritable army of aspiring poets and Beatniks as Trungpa had over any of his spiritual

seekers maybe more. In Weinbergers estimation, Trungpa must have felt on the one

11
The Dalai Lamas assessment of the Buddhist situation in America emphasized that
students simply needed to start becoming more discerning about what guru they chose: I
recommend never adopting the attitude toward ones spiritual master of seeing his or her
every action as divine or noble, he said. Too much obedience, devotion, and blind
acceptance spoils a teacher. The more significant point seemed to be that many of these
American spiritual masters, including Trungpa, lack[ed] the integrity to be immune to
that kind of vulnerability, and needed to start apologizing and accepting criticism for
their inappropriate behavior (370 Fields). On the Dalai Lamas first visit to the United
States in 1979, he cancelled a scheduled stop to Boulder at the last minute, probably due
to rumors circulating throughout the lama circuit about Trungpas alcoholism
(Weinberger 34).

22
hand, elation at having the all-stars on his team; on the other, what insiders would call his

scorn of the artists self-involvement, and outsiders might see as envy or fear of eclipse

(29). Yet, his control over Ginsberg, who perhaps actively sought to be controlled, must

have been some consolation. They were a power duo of epic proportions, using their

respective celebrity to sell a life-style, a philosophy, and the promise of community,

healing, and direction to thousands of eager lost youths. Beyond a desire to share the

ancient teachings of his people with Westerners, Trungpa was capitalizing on, and

effectively mass-marketing the Zen bug that had already been floating around for over

two decades. According to Weinberger, Marin, and Merwin, it is at this point that

fascism comes into question (Weinberger 37).

Its difficult, and perhaps above all extremely troubling to try to imagine how the

writing schools namesake, Jack Kerouac, might have felt about this community. He had

always been horrified by hippies, and as the flower children and far-out freaks of the

1960s began to dominate the social scene in San Francisco, he had recoiled and retreated.

Even his own fame terrified and confused him he was uneasy about being a role model

or a literary icon for a demented subculture he felt no kinship with. He slammed his

mothers door in the faces of a group of young people who showed up unexpectedly with

jackets that had Dharma Bums printed across the back. The sensitive, solitary cowboy

persona he had adopted as the narrator in his novels had become an archetype of cool he

no longer believed in. Ginsberg, on the other hand, had dived into fame head first, and

while it seems fair to say that Kerouac did not necessarily begrudge him for that, he

himself could not participate in good conscience. Big Sur (1962), was an account of his

last trip to San Francisco, and told the story of a nervous collapse, of a man looking into

23
the abyss of his success and seeing his friends poisoning the water in the stream he was

drinking from (Fields 248). Trungpa and Ginsbergs conception of Tibetan spirituality,

community, and exhibitionism seems to me completely at odds with Kerouacs unique

personal philosophy, making his titular involvement with the poetic school unfortunate if

not all together inappropriate.

24
 Part IV: A New Generation

In a recent New York Times article, Claire Dederer observed that hearing about

Naropas conceptual philosophy of giving students a critical perspective on their inner

lives is very different from seeing it in action. The article gently pokes fun at the

schools reputation in Boulder as expensively flakey, and the surprising seriousness

with which the Naropans conduct their wacky Buddhist curriculum. But ultimately she

applauds the school for being one of very few nondenominational, spiritual alternatives.

The university calls itself Buddhist-inspired rather than Buddhist; its goal from the very

beginning was to bring together elements of Eastern and Western philosophy [. . .]

[Chgyam Trungpa] used to use say, Let East meet West and watch the sparks fly

(Dederer). This brand of colorful, punchy rhetoric has always imbued all Naropas

catalogues and literature.

Indeed, the school has certainly received its fair share of playful scrutiny, not to

mention outright derision from those with uptight, utilitarian oriented Western

sensibilities. In the scheme of Newsweek or US News lists of the top 10 colleges, Naropa

is a novel prospect at best. Yet it is the alternative, relatively unassuming character of

Naropa that makes it so appealing; for 95% of the students it is their top choice. Junior

Burke, the program director of the Jack Kerouac School, told me that although the

University is evolving in many different directions, whatever happens he hopes that it

remains an alternative. Because I think theres just precious few of those right now.

Today, for $20,738 a year, this now accredited university directly inducts its

students into a lineage of some of the 20th centurys greatest thinkers and personalities

through a blend of writing workshops and contemplative education. Conveniently

25
enough, Naropas online catalogue provides a very useful key with which to identify the

diverse personalities that flourish there: The Artist, the Spiritual Seeker, The Activist,

The Caregiver, The Bookworm, the Environmentalist, and of course, The Poet. Editor of

the literary magazine in high school, he carries a small notebook in his back pocket so he

can jot down notes on life as it happens, reads the token Poets bio. He finds meaning

in words wherever they appear and envisions rearranging words on billboards to turn

corporate taglines into poetic ultimatums (www.naropa.edu). These cute, supposedly

relatable personalities are testament to Naropas categorization of individuality; they

would make an amazing satire if they werent so real. As advertising techniques, these

extremely specific, arbitrarily gendered profiles The Activist: A whiz with a protest

sign and encyclopedic in her knowledge of injustice in daily lifeThe Artist: Shes been

studying music since she got a guitar for her tenth birthdayThe Caregiver: His empathy

knows no bounds. all flatter the potential students sense of self-reliance. Rather than

simply identifying with the aforementioned personalities, they actually strive to become

them.

The Naropa Catalogue, both paper and online incarnations, has traditionally been

a huge selling point. Tom Peters describes pouring over his catalogue the way old

people used to look at cruise ship catalogues, imagining the classes that would be taught

to him by Peter Orlovsky, William Burroughs, and Anne Waldman. Marissa Gerson

describes a similar experience, having received a really cheesy brochure, with, like,

butterflies all over it, about changing the world in the mail after finishing her

undergraduate degree at Washington University and thinking, nows my chance to go to

the, like, hippie school! Instead of beats, she was excited by a butterfly, and the implicit,

26
(perhaps explicit) promise of safety, diversity, and sensitivity. Whereas catalogues in the

past relied on the appeal of their celebrity faculty, the marketing departments new

strategy is to appeal to the students own personality. The beat legacy, not to mention the

ghostly specter of Trungpa, are acknowledged in passing, but the school seems to be

making a conscious effort to divert their (until now) unflagging attention to these icons

and move on to newer models.

What is potentially radical about the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied

Poetics, is that they are still ostensibly teaching in an experimental, counterpoetic style

in the vein of Kerouacs spontaneous poetics and the inflammatory, hysterical

obscenity of Ginsbergs Howl or Burroughs Naked Lunch. The contradiction is, of

course, that in institutionalizing rebellion, you effectively normalize it. Even in the early

years, wasnt Corso, Ginsberg, and Waldmans so-called authoritative stance about what

constituted good writing contingent, consciously or not, upon how closely they felt it

was modeled it is after their own work? Even before Naropa had begun in 1974, the

Beats experiments had already been appropriated by everything from big-time

television to Schraffts Ice Cream (Reed 8). Added to the longstanding paradox of

simply teaching creative writing, is the enterprise of teaching, or sustaining, a Beatnik

lineage that also sustains innovation. And while that is a gross simplification of the

programs structure and ambitions, it seems safe to assume that some, if not many of the

writing student body enrolled with a conscious or unconscious expectation that they

would somehow be inducted into this club what Bobbie Louise Hawkins described to

me as the Poetry Mafia.

27
 Almost every writing teacher I interviewed had had no formal training in creative

writing their credibility came from their involvement with the artistic scene in the

1970s, or, for younger faculty, from the quality of their own published writings. Certainly

the fact that few of these teachers have had any formal training makes their knowledge

more elusive and uncanny. Obviously these writers had the innate sense to pursue their

passion head on, designing their own contemporary communities without the need for the

psychological validation a degree might offer.

During the production of Crazy Wisdom, I went through an enormous spectrum of

opinions about Naropa. Sometimes I thought everyone there was insane, other times I

respected them profoundly, and still other times I truly believed that they had reached

another psychic level from the rest of society, and I envied them for that. There is so

much value to what they do and discuss with one another, but depending on what context

you decide to filter those discussions through, they can sound either ingenious or

preposterous. It would be grossly unfair to judge the students that attend the school today

by the actions of Trunga Rinpoche or Allen Ginsberg many of them knew next to

nothing about what had happened in the 1970s, which, though it often troubled me a little

bit, only proved how little that history has to do with Naropa as it exists today. I could

probably recite, verbatim, all of the interviews I conducted, and as a result I can honestly

say that Ive thought very deeply about the things that were said to me maybe a little

too much. Its still incredible to me that they were so willing to discuss their lives and

answer my intrusive and probably somewhat accusatory question about their supposed

institutionalization of creativity. Their eloquence, hospitality, and spontaneity were

enough to show me that for me to make overarching judgments and draw conclusions

28
about current students and teachers lifestyles and beliefs based on some arbitrary

cultural critics contempt for Trungpa Rinpoche is not only ingenuous; its tactless.

Naropa continues to evolve and grow as current students and faculty are build a new

legacy for themselves. You have to write your own history, Steven Taylor recalled

Allen Ginsberg saying to him: no ones gonna do it for you.

29
Bibliography/Work Cited

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10, 2008.
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200&en=ba37b09a760380c7&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink>.

Fields, Rick. How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in
America. Third Edition. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1981.

Glass, Loren. Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880-1980.
New York: New York University Press, 2004.

Johnson, Ronna C. and Nancy M. Grace, eds. Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the
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Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing

Expectations. New York: Warner Books, 1979.

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Naropa University Website. 2008. February 15, 2008. <http://www.naropa.edu>.

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Reed, Ishmael. American Poetry: A Buddhist Take-over? Black American Literature

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Slater, Philip. The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point.
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Trungpa, Chgyam. Chdzin, Sherah, ed. Illusions Game: The Life and Teachings of
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Watts, Alan. Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen. 1967. Chicago Review. Vol. 42, No. 3-4,
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Weinberger, Eliot. The News from Naropa. Works on Paper: Essays by Eliot
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Weinreich, Regina. The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac: A Study of the Fiction.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.

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