Quick Answer
A Tibetan lama's attempt to give the modern world a path that needs no religion: sit, discover that you are basically good, stop being afraid of your own experience, and be gentle because you are brave enough to be. The book is warm, direct and unusually free of doctrine, and its vocabulary, basic goodness, the setting sun, windhorse, the cheerful sadness of an open heart, has entered the language through Trungpa's students. The man who wrote it drank himself to death and the organisation built on it collapsed in scandal. Both facts belong in a review, and neither makes the book less true.
Key Takeaways
- Basic goodness is the foundation, and it is offered as an experience rather than a belief.
- The warrior's enemy is cowardice, and the weapon is gentleness.
- Setting sun and Great Eastern Sun: two ways of facing a day.
- A secular path, drawn from Tibetan warrior culture rather than Buddhist doctrine.
- The history is part of the review, and the book survives it.
17 min read
What This Book Is
Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior was published by Shambhala Publications in 1984, edited by Carolyn Rose Gimian from lectures Trungpa gave between 1976 and 1983 as the Shambhala Training programme. It is around two hundred pages in three parts.
Part one, How to Be a Warrior, sets out basic goodness, the discovery of it through sitting, the nature of fear and the meaning of warriorship. Part two, Sacredness: The Warrior's World, describes the world as it appears to someone who has stopped hiding from it, and introduces the setting sun and Great Eastern Sun, discipline, and the sacred. Part three, Authentic Presence, teaches the invocation of drala, the raising of windhorse, and the qualities of a warrior who has matured, closing with the vision of an enlightened society.
The book is short, plain and untechnical. It has been translated into many languages and is the text through which Trungpa's teaching reached the largest audience.
The two Trungpas. Readers who know Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism should expect a different voice. That book is a scalpel: it exposes the ways the ego uses spirituality for its own ends, and it spares no one. This book is an open hand. It assumes the reader is basically good and wants to help them find it. The two are the same teacher at different tasks, and the second is not naive about what the first diagnosed.
Who Chögyam Trungpa Was
Chögyam Trungpa was born in eastern Tibet in 1939, recognised as the eleventh Trungpa tulku, and enthroned as abbot of the Surmang monasteries as a child. He received the full training of a Kagyu and Nyingma lama, and in 1959, at twenty, led a party of monks and laypeople on a ten-month escape over the Himalayas to India, which he later described in Born in Tibet.
In 1963 he went to Oxford on a scholarship, studied comparative religion and Western philosophy, and founded a meditation centre in Scotland. In 1969 he was badly injured in a car crash, gave up his monastic vows, married a sixteen-year-old English student, and moved to North America, where over the next seventeen years he founded Naropa Institute in Boulder, a network of meditation centres called Vajradhatu, and the Shambhala Training programme. He taught constantly, wrote or dictated dozens of books, and drew a following that included poets, artists and thousands of ordinary practitioners.
He also drank heavily from the late 1960s onward, had sexual relationships with many students, and adopted a style of crazy wisdom that his followers defended and his critics deplored. He died in 1987 at forty-seven, of complications of alcoholism.
A Secular Path
The book's premise, and what made it different.
Trungpa believed that the world was in crisis, that the spiritual traditions were not reaching most people, and that what was needed was a path of training that anyone could follow without adopting a religion. He drew it from what he called the Shambhala tradition: the warrior culture of Tibet and Central Asia, the legend of the enlightened kingdom, the epic of Gesar of Ling, and the disciplines of bravery, dignity and uprightness that he saw in warrior cultures from Japan to the Native American peoples.
The result is a book that never mentions the four noble truths, never uses the word Buddha except in passing, and presents its teaching as human wisdom rather than religious doctrine. Whether a Tibetan Buddhist master could really produce a non-Buddhist path is a question the book invites. The meditation is Buddhist sitting practice, the psychology is the Buddhist analysis of ego and fear, and the goal is recognisably enlightenment. What is left out is the framework, and Trungpa's wager was that the framework was what kept people away.
The Kingdom of Shambhala
The image the book is named for.
Shambhala, in Tibetan tradition, is a hidden kingdom in Central Asia where an enlightened society flourishes under a line of kings, from which the Kalachakra teachings came and from which, at the end of a dark age, an army will ride out to restore the world. It appears in Buddhist texts from the tenth century and in a long tradition of guidebooks describing the route there.
Trungpa uses the kingdom as a picture of what a society of warriors would be, and says plainly that it need not be taken as a place. It is a state of mind available to anyone, and a vision of what human community could look like if it were built on basic goodness rather than fear. The book's last part returns to it, and the organisation he founded took its name from it.
Basic Goodness
The foundation, stated in the first chapter and assumed in every one after.
Human beings, Trungpa says, are basically good. Good here means worthy, whole, awake, rather than good as opposed to bad in a moral sense: the way a morning is good, or a clear sky. Beneath the confusion, aggression and self-protection that fill most of experience, there is a nature that is open and intelligent, and it can be touched directly, in any moment of simple attention, without any belief about it.
He describes the touching: a moment of seeing a colour, hearing a sound, feeling the air, in which the mind is not commenting and the heart is not defending, and in which one feels, briefly, that being alive is enough. That is basic goodness, experienced. The whole path is the extension of that moment.
The doctrine is close to the Buddhist teaching of Buddha nature and to the Tibetan idea of primordial purity, but Trungpa offers it as an observation rather than a tenet, and asks the reader to check it against their own experience rather than to accept it.
The Genuine Heart of Sadness
The book's most distinctive idea, and the one that separates it from positive thinking.
When a person touches basic goodness, Trungpa says, what they feel is tenderness rather than triumph. The heart, exposed to the world without protection, is sad: soft, raw, moved by things, which is a different condition from depressed. He calls it the genuine heart of sadness, and he says it is the mark of a warrior, since only someone brave enough to leave the heart unprotected can feel it.
The sadness needs no solving. It is the feeling of being alive and awake, and it is inseparable from joy. Trungpa's word for the combination is cheerful, and he uses it constantly: the warrior is cheerful because they have nothing to defend.
The passage on the sad and tender heart is the reason many readers keep the book. Most spiritual writing promises relief from vulnerability. Trungpa says that vulnerability is the destination: that the warrior's heart is raw, that it can be touched by a leaf or a stranger's face, and that this rawness is what the armour was hiding and what the armour was for. A reader who has ever felt suddenly and inexplicably moved by something ordinary has had the experience he is describing, and the book's whole claim is that the moment can be lived from rather than merely visited.
Fear and Fearlessness
The obstacle, analysed with care.
Fear, for Trungpa, is the fear of one's own experience: of the rawness just described, of the sadness, of the openness that basic goodness exposes. People build cocoons against it, and the cocoons are the whole apparatus of habit, distraction, ambition and self-justification that fills a life. Fearlessness, in his account, is the willingness to go through fear, which differs from having none: to acknowledge the fear, to feel it, and to find that on the other side is the tenderness one was afraid of.
He insists that fearlessness begins with acknowledging fear, and that a person who claims to feel none is simply better armoured. The warrior is afraid and goes forward anyway, and that forward movement is what turns the fear into something else.
The Warrior
The central figure, and what the word means here.
Pawo, the Tibetan word Trungpa translates as warrior, means one who is brave. The Shambhala warrior conquers nothing outside themselves. The enemy is cowardice, the refusal to feel one's own life, and the weapon is gentleness, since only a gentle person can afford to be undefended. Trungpa draws the image from the epic of Gesar, from the samurai, from the Native American warrior, and from the ideal of the dignified, upright human being that he found in every traditional culture.
The chapters on warriorship describe its qualities: gentleness, which is strength without aggression; fearlessness, which is the willingness to be seen; and a particular kind of humour, which is the ability to be cheerful about one's own confusion. The warrior sits upright, meets the eyes of others, and does not apologise for existing. It is a bearing before it is a doctrine, and the book teaches it as one.
Synchronising Body and Mind
The practice, described in one chapter and assumed throughout.
The method of discovering basic goodness is sitting meditation: upright posture, attention on the breath, thoughts acknowledged and released. Trungpa describes it as the synchronisation of body and mind, the state in which one is fully in the body and fully attentive at once, and he says that this synchronisation is the ground of all the qualities the book describes. Without it, the teaching is ideas.
He gives the reasoning and the outline and leaves the detail to the training programme, which the book was written to accompany. Readers who want full instruction will need another source; readers who want to know why a book about warriorship keeps returning to a cushion will find the answer here.
The Setting Sun and the Great Eastern Sun
The book's governing contrast, and its most memorable image.
The setting-sun world is Trungpa's name for a life organised around fear: the outlook of someone who is always defending, always grasping, always afraid of what comes next, and whose world is therefore dim, tired and slightly depressed. He sees it in consumer culture, in entertainment as anaesthetic, in the pursuit of comfort, and in the assumption that existence is a problem to be managed.
The Great Eastern Sun is the opposite outlook: facing forward, awake, cheerful, with the sense that the day is beginning and one is fit to meet it. It differs from looking on the bright side, since the warrior does not expect things to go well; it is the willingness to be present for whatever comes, from a ground of basic goodness.
Neither sun is a place or a type of person. Both are states any person moves between, and the book's project is to teach the reader to notice which one they are living in.
The Cocoon
An image from the first part, worth its own note.
The cocoon is the environment of habit a person builds to avoid feeling their own life: the routines, the distractions, the comfortable stories, the dimming of attention that makes everything bearable and nothing vivid. Trungpa describes it without contempt, as a place that feels safe and is in fact a kind of death, and he describes leaving it as stepping out into fresh air that is at first uncomfortable.
The image is close to the Buddhist analysis of ego and to the therapeutic idea of defences, and Trungpa's contribution is the plainness with which he names the cocoon's comforts and the cheerfulness with which he recommends leaving them.
Discipline and Daily Life
The middle chapters, on how the warrior lives.
Trungpa treats the details of ordinary life as the warrior's training ground: how one dresses, eats, keeps a room, speaks, holds the body. Discipline, in his sense, means care rather than restriction: the care that comes from respecting oneself and one's world. A warrior's room is clean because the warrior is awake in it. A warrior speaks precisely because the warrior means what they say.
The chapters have a slightly formal, even aristocratic tone that some readers find bracing and some find dated, and they reflect Trungpa's own taste for ceremony and elegance in his organisation. The underlying point survives the tone: attention is expressed in conduct, and conduct is where attention is trained.
Drala
The third part's central idea, and the book's most Tibetan.
Drala is a Tibetan word Trungpa translates as energy beyond aggression, or as the elemental magic of the world. It is what one perceives when the cocoon is set aside: the vividness of a colour, the presence of a mountain, the aliveness of a room, experienced as something more than the self's projection. The warrior invokes drala by paying attention, by caring for the environment, by moving with dignity, and the world responds by becoming sacred.
He is careful to say that drala is a quality of perception rather than a spirit or a god, and the chapters on it are the book's account of what the tradition calls sacred outlook. They are also where Trungpa's Tibetan inheritance shows most plainly through the secular frame, since the drala principle comes from the pre-Buddhist and tantric traditions of his homeland.
Windhorse and Authentic Presence
The energy of the path, and its fruit.
Windhorse, lungta, is the Tibetan term for the energy of basic goodness raised in a person: felt as uplift, confidence, a quickening, the sense of being carried. Trungpa teaches its raising as a practice, a moment of gathering oneself and stepping forward, and describes it as the antidote to the setting-sun heaviness. The prayer flags of Tibet carry the windhorse image, and the book explains why.
Authentic presence is what a warrior who has raised windhorse over years comes to have: a bearing that others feel, a dignity that is not performed, the quality Trungpa saw in the teachers of his youth and hoped to bring out in his students. The closing chapters describe it and its dangers, since presence can become pride, and Trungpa knew the danger from inside.
Enlightened Society
The book's last vision, and its most ambitious.
Trungpa did not think the path was for individuals only. He thought a society of warriors was possible, that it would be governed by gentleness and dignity rather than fear and aggression, and that building it was the task of anyone who had glimpsed basic goodness. The Shambhala kingdom was the image, and his organisation was meant to be the seed.
The vision is generous and it is where the book's history is hardest to hold beside its text. The society he built did not become what the book describes, and the reasons are discussed below.
The Organisation and Its Collapse
A reader should know this.
Trungpa's drinking and his sexual relationships with students were known in his community and defended as crazy wisdom, the unconventional conduct of a realised master. After his death in 1987 his chosen successor, Thomas Rich, known as the Vajra Regent, was found to have concealed that he had HIV while continuing to have unprotected sex with students, one of whom died. The scandal split the community. Trungpa's son, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, later took over and rebuilt Shambhala International into a global organisation.
In 2018 a series of reports, beginning with those of the Buddhist Project Sunshine, alleged that the Sakyong had sexually assaulted students and that the organisation had covered it up. An independent investigation found the allegations credible. The Sakyong stepped down, the leadership resigned, membership collapsed, and the organisation that carried the book's name and vision was, by most accounts, broken.
None of this is in the book, which was published in 1984, and all of it is the context in which the book is now read.
Reading the Book After the History
How to hold both.
Three responses are available and each has its advocates. One is that the history discredits the book: a teaching of basic goodness and warrior dignity, produced by an alcoholic who exploited students and inherited by a man who assaulted them, is refuted by its fruits. A second is that the teaching and the teacher are separable, that the book is true regardless of who wrote it, and that its readers should take what is good and leave the rest. A third, which this review holds, is that the book is true and that its truth was not enough, that the vision of basic goodness did not protect the people who held it from the harm done by the people who taught it, and that the book should be read with that knowledge as part of its meaning.
Trungpa himself wrote, in Cutting Through, that spirituality is the ego's most sophisticated hiding place. The history of his organisation is that diagnosis confirmed. A reader who takes this book seriously should take that one seriously too, and should hold basic goodness alongside the knowledge that its most eloquent teachers were not exempt from what it opposes.
The Objections
Four.
The history. Already stated.
Secular in name only. The path is Buddhist meditation with the doctrine removed, and a reader who wants a real non-religious ethic may find the removal cosmetic.
The tone. The aristocratic, ceremonial register of the discipline chapters belongs to Trungpa's court culture and has not aged well.
The hopeful premise. Basic goodness is asserted from experience and the book has no account of why, if people are basically good, they build the setting-sun world with such energy.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you want a path of training that does not require you to believe anything, and are willing to sit.
Read it if you know Pema Chödrön, whose teacher Trungpa was and whose language of the soft spot and the open heart comes from this book.
Read it with Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, which is the warning the vision needed and did not heed.
Read it knowing the history, and decide for yourself what the history does to the text. That decision is part of reading it now.
The book's lasting gift is the sad and tender heart. It reverses the usual promise. Most paths offer protection from vulnerability; this one says vulnerability is the goal, that the raw heart is the awake heart, and that bravery is the willingness to leave it exposed. The history that followed is a terrible commentary on the teaching, since it shows people who taught openness using it to harm those who trusted them. And the teaching stands anyway, because what it describes does not depend on them: a moment anyone can have, looking at a leaf or a face, in which the armour drops and one is simply, sadly, cheerfully here. That moment is not discredited by anything, and the book describes it better than almost any other.
Basic goodness, the warrior's gentleness, and the Great Eastern Sun, from the teacher who named them.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our account of the author's conduct and the organisation's collapse is set out above and was not softened for the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior about?
A secular path of training based on the conviction that human beings are basically good, that fear is the obstacle to living from that goodness, and that a warrior is someone who is brave enough to be gentle. It is presented without Buddhist doctrine for anyone of any belief.
Who was Chögyam Trungpa?
A Tibetan lama, 1939 to 1987, abbot of a Kagyu monastery at eighteen, who fled Tibet in 1959, studied at Oxford, gave up his robes, and founded Naropa University and a network of centres in North America that became Shambhala International.
What is basic goodness?
The book's foundation: the claim that beneath confusion and aggression, every person's nature is awake, worthy and good, and that this can be experienced directly, in a moment of open attention, without belief. Trungpa calls the moment a cheerful sadness.
Why warrior?
The Tibetan pawo means one who is brave. The warrior in this book conquers nothing external; the enemy is one's own cowardice, and the weapon is gentleness. Trungpa draws on the Tibetan epic of Gesar and on Japanese and other warrior traditions.
What is the setting sun?
Trungpa's name for a world of fear, depression and grasping, in which people protect themselves from their own experience. The Great Eastern Sun is its opposite: the outlook of someone who is awake and facing forward. The contrast runs through the book.
Is it Buddhist?
By design, no. Trungpa presented Shambhala as a path available to people of any religion or none, drawing on Tibetan warrior culture rather than Buddhist doctrine, though the meditation practice and the psychology are recognisably his Buddhist teaching in secular dress.
What is the kingdom of Shambhala?
A legendary enlightened society of Central Asian tradition, associated with the Kalachakra teachings. Trungpa uses it as an image of what a society of warriors would be, and says it can be understood as a state of mind rather than a place.
What are drala and windhorse?
Drala is the energy or magic present in the world when it is perceived directly, without the fog of self-concern. Windhorse is the energy of basic goodness raised in oneself, felt as confidence and uplift. The later chapters teach how to invoke both.
Does it teach meditation?
Yes, in outline: sitting practice with attention on the breath as the means of discovering basic goodness and synchronising body and mind. It gives the reasoning rather than detailed instruction.
What about the controversies?
Trungpa's drinking, his sexual relationships with students and his crazy wisdom conduct were known in his lifetime. After his death his successor's concealment of his HIV status, and in 2018 allegations of sexual misconduct against Trungpa's son and heir, led to the organisation's collapse. The review addresses this.
How does it relate to Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism?
That book, from 1973, is Trungpa's Buddhist teaching for Western seekers, sharp and diagnostic. Shambhala, from 1984, is his secular teaching for society, warm and aspirational. They are the two poles of his work.
Who should read it?
Anyone who wants a path of training that does not require Buddhist belief, readers of Pema Chödrön who want the source of her teacher's language, and anyone willing to read a good book by a compromised author with both facts in view.
Notice which sun
Trungpa's most usable idea needs no belief and no cushion. At some point today, stop and ask which sun you are living under: whether you are facing forward, awake, with the sense that the day is yours to meet, or defending, dimming, managing, waiting for it to be over. The question has an immediate answer and the answer can change in the asking. He thought that the noticing was the beginning of warriorship, and that a person who noticed often enough would find, underneath the setting-sun tiredness, something basically good. Test it. It costs a moment.
Sources & References
- Trungpa, Chögyam. Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, ed. Carolyn Rose Gimian, Shambhala Publications.
- Trungpa, Chögyam. Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism and Born in Tibet.
- Midal, Fabrice. Chögyam Trungpa: His Life and Vision.
- Hayes, Shambhala. The Great Eastern Sun: The Wisdom of Shambhala, the companion volume of Trungpa's later Shambhala talks.
- Wickwire Holm. Independent Investigation Report to Shambhala International, 2019.
- Butler, Katy. "Encountering the Shadow in Buddhist America", Common Boundary, 1990, on the Regent scandal.