Chögyam Trungpa Born March 5th in 1939
(from an article written in 2021)
The Crazy Wisdom Rinpoche
Some teachers of Buddhism are destined to stand out from the rest but get labelled ‘crazy’ so their achievements can unfortunately be easily dismissed. Also born a Pisces, on March 5th 1939 was Chögyam Trungpa, a Tibetan Buddhist monk who studied English at Oxford and gained status as a spiritual meditation teacher and master for all those in the counter culture of the late sixties and early seventies. He was lauded even by poet Allen Ginsberg who had the Moon and Ascendant in Pisces and who was his friend.
Trungpa had Sun conjunct Jupiter in Pisces so did everything on a grand scale, by way of largesse, all the while beaming from a moon-like face. He made many gnomic pronouncements like the one about the sky being like a blue pancake falling on your head. He talked of being aware of the space in between objects as sometimes more important than the objects themselves. He used a little metal mirror to prophesy the future. He saw in that mirror that he would go to the USA and become immersed in western culture, even to become more hippie than the hippies. And he accomplished all that seemingly with ease.
Yet he was sharp as a razor, super articulate and challenging as the 'so-called' crazy-wisdom guru. People approaching him could be terrified as he would peel away the layers of people's false self. He said as soon as you name or claim enlightenment then you have already lost it to egomania. Also, he said that to follow your own intelligence was the way, to not rely on anyone or anything external including him. And to allow a bit of craziness into your life.
The craziness in his chart is Uranus marking his Ascendant on his South Node, so eccentricity came naturally as well as being matter of fact about unconventional married life- even his wife called him ‘unfathomable’ after many years of knowing him. Trungpa loved misfits, the marginalized, artists and creatives of all types. He loved jokes and could make people laugh to ‘shock’ people into awareness of their neurotic tendencies. For a guru he was the iconoclast.
Crazy wisdom as a concept comes from the words yeshe and chölwa ཡེ་ཤེས་འཆོལ་བ, which equates to ‘wisdom gone wild’. But what he meant by it was to be ‘fresh, sparkling and completely awake’ and to allow situations themselves to be the guru that guides you. If he was alcoholic then gulps of whisky didn’t affect his ability to teach and that in itself defied labels. He expressed even more of this Piscean nature: he loved Handel’s Water Music and taught dharma art which was to not actively create but to ‘receive’ images and treat every single step in the processes of life as sacred. He was an accomplished poet, calligrapher, photographer and a flower arranger, Japanese style. He said neuroses are like manure enriching the soil of the self; and he spoke of tenderness and compassion as strengths not weaknesses. He was often late but died way too soon aged 47, so his time was brief.
“The realm of cults is fuzziness" according to cult analyst Hassan-but astrologers already knew this, which is like hearing Neptune speak; the boundaries become unclear; where one thing ends and the other begins. Wherever the hierarchy of guru and worshipful students exists there is potential for abuse. But it is also true that if you happen to be a guru you are held to a higher standard. What everyone else does without thinking, the guru will be maligned for it- like smoke, drink and have sex. Gurus are not allowed to be human- seems also you can be condemned for not wearing the official Tibetan robes as if the costume itself carried the wisdom. Trungpa wore a suit instead to deconstruct that impression. For a guru to drink, smoke and have sex becomes a stain on their assumed perfection- even if they renounced their monk’s vows as Trungpa did.
He never hid anything according to his friends, except perhaps the cocaine use. While revered as a Tulku (living incarnation) in Tibet, Chögyam Trungpa used the conventions of Western social life to make his point. He was said to drink whisky and even gave lectures drunk. Perhaps the words flowed better? The ultimate spiritual wateriness is the norm for a Pisces as they have few boundaries- that might include the boundary between teacher and student. Did anybody notice Dionysus, god of the grape, talking through him and how many times have we done this in the pub? The archetype of Dionysus is linked to Pisces.
But if you claim a lineage from Tibet, a strand of Buddhist practice then the chain of Bodhisattvas has its reputation tarnished. Not much can be fully confirmed but his close friends said he had a cocaine habit.
Joni Mitchell even wrote a song about her meeting with Chögyam Trungpa:
"I pulled off into a forest, crickets clicking in the ferns
Like a wheel of fortune I heard my fate turn, turn turn
And I went running down a white sand road
I was running like a white-assed deer
Running to lose the blues
To the innocence in here
These are the clouds of Michelangelo
Muscular with gods and sungold
Shine on your witness in the refuge of the roads”
Joni Mitchell
It is interesting that Michaelangelo gets in there as he was also a Pisces born on March 6th. Mitchell claims that she kicked her own cocaine addiction because of Trungpa Rinpoche.
If you include the North Node Trungpa’s chart actually has a ‘Mystic’ Rectangle. Some might say this is not so important as the North Node is not a planet, or at the very least they would take out the word ‘mystic’ but it’s a tight rectangle configuration said to confer harmony among the planetary energies involved. But I’d say in the chart of a reincarnated ‘Tulku’ a rectangle is just that- mystical -especially in a Pisces native. It would heighten the spiritual impact of receiving downloads from the universe and hinting at a continuous 'chain' of being.
A mystic rectangle appears in the chart of Krishnamurti on the day of his enlightenment under a Pepper tree. There's something about transcendence here. The rectangle links four points in the chart two sextiles and two trines, creating two crossed oppositions. So here we have Jupiter is sextile to Uranus and the Moon is sextile the North Node. Uranus is trine the Moon and the North node is trine to Jupiter/the Sun. This blesses the chart with a radiance and originality of being and feeling. Most who came into contact with him declared they felt this energy immediately-some spiritual aura -where love and compassion were present and directly felt by those around. This happened especially as a young man where his qualities were recognized by his elders. He always had time for people and would give advice freely to much older people.
What this rectangle might hint at is an exceptional inner harmony to render the challenges of the oppositions at least manageable by some inner gifts tied to these energies. The only issue with the rectangle formation is that it tends to lock the energies into that particular circuit. It ties together the Water and Earth elements. But to have the Sun, Jupiter, Uranus and the Moon working together would be a boost to his charisma, popularity, fresh approaches and perhaps a tendency to excess that might need to be reigned in and he would have been aware of that as he experimented a lot and said that "Knowledge must be burned, hammered and beaten like pure gold. Then one can wear it as an ornament."
Trungpa died of cirrhosis of the liver on April 4th 1987. He was in Halifax, Nova Scotia, not caring much about his physical health. On the day of his cremation on May 27th, in Vermont, followers noted happily that strange lights appeared in the sky like fragments of a broken rainbow. There was a halo in the sky. The sun, the moon were conjunct Vesta- the sacred flame, along with Chariklo. Chiron was just ten degrees away, all in Gemini. There was actually a rectangle formation as well with Venus sextile Mars, and Neptune sextile Pluto. Mars was opposed to Neptune and Venus was opposed Pluto. Tibetan lamas are known to choose dates according to astrology so this was not coincidence though I'm aware this makes it sound like hagiography, not astrological observation. But synchronicities like this do occur.
Rainbows and milk had apparently also appeared at his birth and the impression he left was one of a miraculous presence mingled with a prowling hungry tiger, which even if it was too much to handle, could not be erased from the memory. While Pasolini and Trungpa are very different creatures, in worlds alien to each other, they both identified ‘materialism’ as the core problem just in different ways.
© Kieron Devlin, Proteus Astrology, March 5th, 2021.
