I just love this photo. At first glance it looks so wrong, however, it displays the joy and innocence of the Tibetan Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (1939-1987) while he tries to make a very important point. He escaped Tibet in 1959 and came to the United States. Here he established the Naropa Institute, which later became Naropa University, in Boulder, Colorado. Naropa was the first accredited Buddhist university in North America. Trungpa hired Allen Ginsberg to teach poetry and William Burroughs to teach literature. This book, CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA – the whole shootin’ gallery, is a 106 pages poem inspired solely by the photograph of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche with the gun pointed at his head. The poems are formed as haikus by the author, Gabriel Rosenstock, who kindly has allowed me to post the work here. The book is in Irish, English, and Japanese. Download the free PDF e-book here:
Trungpa The Whole Shootin Gallery
Delighted to have a work on a site which has afforded me many a holy dip!
The word ‘Irish’ appears in the introductory note as ‘Iris’. Well, yes, it is a flower and may a thousand flowers bloom!
(We live in an age during which a language dies every fortnight and Irish, my literary medium of choice,is an endangered language.)
There is no plural form in Japanese and, so, the English plural ‘haikus’ is rarely if ever used: ‘haiku’ will do fine, as plural and
singular form. By the way, I penned another book of haiku inspired by a photograph of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. It is called ‘Antlered Stag of Dawn’ (The Onslaught Press) and was inspired by a photo of the Tibetan teacher dressed in Highland Regalia. Celtic Buddhism is a movement that remembers Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s fascination with Gaelic and Celtic culture.