Illusion’s Game
The Life and Teaching of Naropa
By Chögyam Trungpa
In Illusion’s Game, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
presents the view of Vajrayana through a discussion of Naropa’s encounter with his Lama, Tilopa. This is an
important text because the essence of Vajrayana is contained
in this seminal encounter. For the same reason, it is a difficult
book to read – because the subject matter itself is so easy to
misunderstand.
Naropa’s twelve visions encapsulate his process of
disillusionment with Samsara. Because intellectual
accomplishment was both his greatest dualistic hang-up and his
greatest asset in deconstructing duality, Naropa’s
experience exemplifies the method of the Mahasiddhas. Trungpa
Rinpoche skilfully portrays the psychological experience of
Naropa’s visions without reducing them either to spiritual materialistic fantasies or to
clinically-dissected ‘symbolism’. The result is a text in
which a sense of non-dual play permeates the
precision underlying lucid explanation.
Like many of Trungpa Rinpoche’s books, Illusion’s
Game is the transcription of a pair of seminars. The included
‘Question and Answer’ sections are particularly apt
because the manner in which Naropa’s confusion was reflected,
intensified, and eroded by his experience of Tilopa is evidently
mirrored (to varying degrees) in the experience of Trungpa
Rinpoche’s students. It is commonplace to consign the
extraordinary highlights of Vajrayana to realms of the mythic past,
but this direct and personal presentation makes clear that such
experiences are necessarily available even now, because they represent
the fundamental nature of Vajrayana.
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Teachings 
