Editing Shambhala Training (section)

=== The Syncretism of Rime and Jamgon Ju Mipham Gyatso ===

The nineteenth century lamas of the [[Rime movement|Rime]] movement, particularly the great scholar [[Ju Mipham]], began to "create a systematic interweaving of native shamanism, oral epic, and Buddhist tantra, alchemical Taoism, Dzogchen, and the strange, vast ''Kalachakra tantra'',"<ref>Kornman, Robin. "The Influence of the Epic of King Gesar on Chögyam Trungpa," in ''Recalling Chögyam Trungpa'', edit. Fabrice Midal. pgs 369-370</ref> and the folk traditions were increasingly given Buddhist connotations and used in Buddhist contexts.
Mipham's edition of the ''Epic of Gesar'', which Robin Kornman, a Tibetan Buddhist scholar and student of Chögyam Trungpa, saw as the cornerstone of Trungpa's Shambhala teachings, "was a hybrid of Buddhist and local idea. He made sure it would be read this manner by writing a parallel set of Gesar chants that mix religions in the same way."<ref>Kornman, Robin. "The Influence of the Epic of King Gesar on Chögyam Trungpa," in ''Recalling Chögyam Trungpa'', edit. Fabrice Midal. pgs 365</ref> As Kornman writes, one such typical chant is "a careful combination of Buddhism according to the Nyingma sect with local religion."<ref>Kornman, Robin. "The Influence of the Epic of King Gesar on Chögyam Trungpa," in ''Recalling Chögyam Trungpa'', edit. Fabrice Midal. pgs 366</ref> According to Kornman, "In the Na volume of Mipham's collected works one finds numerous very short supplications to Gesar ...Trungpa Rinpoche lifted the above supplications from Mipham's Gesar cycle and gave them to his advanced students to chant."<ref>Kornman, Robin. "The Influence of the Epic of King Gesar on Chögyam Trungpa," in ''Recalling Chögyam Trungpa'', edit. Fabrice Midal. pgs 367</ref>

Kornman asserts that Trungpa "wrote his ''Epic of Lha'' <nowiki>[</nowiki>his first Shambhala tradition text<nowiki>]</nowiki> within this tradition, conscious of the synthesis his gurus had effected. He became in effect the chief spokesman in the West for this syncretic system."<ref>Kornman, Robin. "The Influence of the Epic of King Gesar on Chögyam Trungpa," in ''Recalling Chögyam Trungpa'', edit. Fabrice Midal. pgs 370</ref> The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, a younger colleague of Trungpa Rinpoche, notes that Trungpa "introduced many Tibetan cultural practices through the Shambhala teachings, such as the lhasang (purification ceremony), along with practices associated with drala and werma (deities)."<ref>Genuine Water," in ''Recalling Chögyam Trungpa'', edit. Fabrice Midal. pg 14</ref>

Kornman summaries Trungpa's use of antecedent traditions in the creation of his Shambhala teachings as follows:

<blockquote>The philosopher king and the political leadership of his idealized society were people who ruled by virtue of private mystical realizations. The one who sees the phenomenal world as mere appearance and reality as a transcendent other, rules the country and introduces the citizens to his private mystical world. To use tantric terminology, the leader expands the boundaries of the mandala, the private society of his personal students who share the initiatory mysteries, to the entire nation.</blockquote>
<blockquote>This was the theory of the relationship between religion and society that Trungpa Rinpoche elaborated in the West. Its metaphysics was based on the philosophical syncretism of the Eclectic <nowiki>[</nowiki>Rime<nowiki>]</nowiki> movement, which evolved an almost Neoplatonic emanational version of Buddhist mysticism. The mythological machinery, the cosmology of his system, was based on the most complex of all of the Buddhist tantras, the Kalachakra (Wheel of Time) Tantra. But textually it was based on the Tibetan oral epic of King Gesar of Ling, which deployed a non-Buddhist divine machinery based on native Inner Asian shamanistic and animistic religion. The “back text” of Trungpa’s socioreligious system was the Gesar epic. This meant that his model for the relationship between religion and society was what he saw in his region of Tibet, the Sino-Tibetan marches of Kham (Eastern Tibet) and Amdo/Qinghai. In particular, he pointed to the Goloks, nomadic pastoralist warriors, who made the mystery religion of Dzogchen, the great perfection, their public religion through, among other things, the propagation of the oral epic.<ref>Kornman, Robin. "The Influence of the Epic of King Gesar on Chögyam Trungpa," in ''Recalling Chögyam Trungpa'', edit. Fabrice Midal. pg 355</ref></blockquote>