What is Buddhahood? What is enlightenment? Are they just nothing, or are they something? Well, I am afraid I am really no authority to answer this. I am merely one of the travellers, like everyone else. But from my own experience–and my knowledge is, as the scripture describes it, “like a single grain of sand in the Ganges,”–I would say that when we talk of “higher” things we tend to think in terms of our own point of view, a bigger version of ourselves.

When we speak of God, we tend to think in terms of our own image, only greater, colossal, a kind of expansion of ourselves. It is like looking at ourselves in a magnifying mirror. We still think in terms of duality. I am here. He is there. And the only way to communicate is by trying to ask His help.

We may feel we are making contact at certain times, but somehow we can never really communicate in this way. We can never achieve union with God, because there is a fixed concept, a prefabricated conclusion, which we have already accepted, and we are merely trying to put that great thing into a small container. However, one cannot drive a camel through the eye of a needle. So we have to find some other means. And the only way to find our way is to come back to the sheer simplicity of examining ourselves.

From “The Life and Example of the Buddha,” in Meditation in Action, page 9.

Visit the Chogyam Trungpa Digital Library to access close to 400 audio and video recordings.

Chogyam Trungpa, Late 1960s.