the great eastern sun:
a childhood recollection
Monty McKeever
Photo: © 2011 Lee Weingrad. All rights reserved
On the day I was born Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche came to see me. He held my little baby body and playfully exclaimed, “I didn’t expect to see YOU here!” He then softly said the word bodhichitta, the Sanskit term for “mind of awakening,” and gave me the birth name “Sharchen,” which means “Great East.”
Being less than a day old, I don’t remember this first encounter at all, but I do remember Trungpa vividly. I remember the sound of his voice as he spoke, somewhat high pitched with what I would later learn was a Tibetan accent as well as the slightest hints of British inflection, proper and precise. More so, I remember his laughter—a sound that sticks with me to this day as what I can only describe as a frequency of pure authentic joy. I remember, very clearly, him making funny faces at me, big wide-mouth smiles and bright bursting eyes. I also recall him speaking more seriously, images of his face and movements, as he sat in a chair giving talks that my young mind couldn’t comprehend to audiences that appeared to my tiny form as an endless ocean of giant humans amidst the brilliant red and gold of a packed Shambhala shrine room.
Yet, while these recollections are clear, they are the distant memories of a child who is now grown. Today they feel more like dreams than anything else, and I guess from a certain point of view, they are.
My father, Norbu, known back then as Bill, was a student of Trungpa since the early 70’s and is now an Acharya [senior teacher] in the Shambhala tradition. He recalls Trungpa like this,
Trungpa Rinpoche was an amazing teacher. What made him so amazing was how he expressed the timeless wisdom of Tibetan Buddhism through the warmth and brilliance of unconditional love for his students. Despite our various neuroses, he had this joyful, kind, unshakeable confidence in our inherent wakefulness, in the basic goodness of all human beings. The power of this love transformed our lives. It inspired confidence in us that no matter what difficulties we face, sanity, kindness, humor, and love are always available. The “Great Eastern Sun” was what he called this constant source of radiance and brilliance. Great because we are all bigger than our habitual pettiness. East in the sense that the eastern sun is always rising; there is always forward vision available to us, an ever present resource. Sun because this inherent wisdom illuminates the darkness of ignorance, warms up the cold, cowardly, lonely heart. This wasn’t theory. It was not abstract. This was what it felt like being in his presence, being a student of his.
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