ACI 14 «Лоджонг: развитие доброго сердца», занятие 4

Geshe Michael Roach
Course XIV: Lojong, Developing the Good Heart
Class Four: The Buddha’s Lojong.
June 1998
Tape 4
Transcribed by Angie Overy
<Tibetan edit 1: AD>



<time begin="01:00:02"/><clear/><br/>Okay, we finished a couple of lojongs
already. We’ve finished lojong Tsik-gye ma, famous 8 verses.

<time begin="01:00:11"/><clear/><br/>And then we finished Yang Gunpa,
Gyalwa Yang Gunpa’s famous Advices, and tonight, we are going to do, we are
going to start a lojong which Pabongka Rinpoche,

<time begin="01:00:25"/><clear/><br/>in his great Lam Rim, the {b: Lam Rim
Namdrel Lak Chan , ‘A Gift of Liberation’}. He calls it the greatest lojong ever
written, okay. So, it’s a very beautiful lojong. Very important lojong. The name
of it is {b:‘Lojong Dun Dunma’} Please say, {lojong}[repeat] {dun} [repeat]
{dunma} [repeat] {lojong}[repeat] {dun} [repeat] {dunma} [repeat] okay. I’ll
put that on the board for you. {blo sbyong don bdun ma}. lojong means, again, it’s
translated as mental training but again {lo}, means here, refers to,{jangchub kyi
sem,} bodhichitta; and {jong} means, trying to develop it. Like trying to develop a
good heart or something like that.
So, lojong means that; {dun} means points, important points and then {dun}
means seven; {dun ma}, as we’ve often seen with the {b: Heart Sutra}, books
about wisdom or knowledge have a feminine ending. So, {ma} is an ending. So it
means the 7-points on developing a good heart.
The lojong called: {b: The Seven Points on Developing the Good Heart}.I went
crazy trying to find out who wrote it, ok. It’s kind of strange considering this is
supposed to be the most famous lojong and the most important lojong. So, I’m
like, going crazy trying to find out who wrote it. You know in the computer we
have a lot of catalogues. We have 1000 pages of catalogues. So, one catalogue’s
says that Gyalsab Togme Sangbo wrote it; he lived in the 1200’s. Another
catalogue said, Serlingpa wrote it; he was Atisha’s teacher, one of his teachers.
Another catalogue said, Atisha wrote it, Lord Atisha wrote it. Another catalogue
says, Chekawa wrote it. There’s some lineage trees that we find in the computer
that say that {Tubwang} wrote it, ok. There’s {Tubwang}, you should write that,
ok. He’s the first person that’s credited with this. (thub dbang} Who’s {Tubwang}?
The Buddha Himself, all right. (laughs) So, you have a 1700 year spread to
choose from, seventeen centuries apart, okay. Now, who are we going to
believe? So I started studying it more and more. I started reading more and
more texts. I went to Khen Rinpoche, and said, who wrote the {b: lojong dun
dun ma}? I’m embarrassed because this is a famous lojong. He says, you know, I
don’t know. Maybe Chekawa wrote it, you know, this is a kadampa geshe. And
you know, he’s like, maybe Chekawa wrote it. So we’re studying it and reading
it and looking at it and ah, and I came across a very beautiful biography. It’s
called {b: Lamrim lama gyupay nam tar} which means the history of the lam rim
teachers. There’s a beautiful story about Geshe Chekawa, and I’ll give you his
name. There’s his full name. {bka’ gdams pa dge bshes mchad kha ba, ye shes rdo rje}
His dates, by the way, are 1101 to 1175. Say, {Kadampa} [repeat] {Geshe} [repeat]
{Chekawa} [repeat] {Yeshe} [repeat] {Dorje} [repeat]. {Kadampa}, you know,
refers to the early Buddhists of Tibet. You are the {kadampas} of America, okay.
And it’s not inappropriate that the group in England, you know in recognition of
the fact that they are the first western Buddhists, or we are among the first
western Buddhists, then they’re calling their group ‘The Kadampas’, which is
fine. That’s a good…very appropriate. If they hadn’t done it I probably would
have stolen it myself. Geshe is, in those days it was not a monastic title, it was…it
meant a kadampa who had studied a lot, someone who knew a lot and a
spiritual friend. It was sort of a title for an early Tibetan Buddhist who was very
learned. Okay.
Chekawa, I believe Chekawa is probably his place name. It’s like calling him ‘the
Virginian’ or ‘the New Yorker’. There’s a lot of different spellings of that. Some
people spell it ‘ awoo- cha’ {‘cha}; some people say ‘chekapa’. Different spellings
of his name. And then {Yeshe Dorje} is his full name. Okay, {Yeshe Dorje}.
Student: ‘What does {yeshe} mean? Diamond?
{Yeshe}, means wisdom; {dorje}, means diamond. Diamond Wisdom, right.
Then I start to read … they say it sort of started with the kadampa Geshe
Chekawa. So I start to read Chekawa’s life story to see if anywhere in there it
says he wrote {b: The Seven Point lojong}. And I read and I read and there’s this
beautiful thing, and I thought you’d like to hear some of it. He was a very great
scholar, very early in his life like from the time of seven or eight years old he
started studying. He knew a lot. He reached a point, before. You know he was in
his twenties, he had already memorized hundred major scriptures, by heart. He
could recite them and he understood the meaning of them. Then the text is very
interesting; I have it here. It says, and you know I’ll quote it, {tuk kyi dun nam
mepa den tsang gyal wa la chu shin chi yu yul gong de} which means, at the
bottom of his heart, after memorizing hundred scriptures, after studying all
these things in depth, he felt like he was missing something to reach
Buddhahood. You know like he was already a great scholar and a very
accomplished saint and at the bottom of his heart he felt something was missing.
{‘gong de tuk gyi den, mi de shing’} and he was troubled. He couldn’t sleep, he
couldn’t be happy, he felt like something in his life was missing. {‘To ma chu pa
shi na mang chu, de ne geshe nang chak shin pa la, lojong sik gye ma Seng’} and
then he had the good fortune to meet another geshe and study the Eight Verses,
{b: he Lojong in Eight Verses}. So that…after memorizing 100 major scriptures,
he gets this little eight verse thing, okay and he freaks out. That’s what I’ve been
waiting for. That’s what I need. And he’s like very, very excited. And these are
the days of the Kadampas, they were like ‘wild west’. People would go to India
and learn some scripture and come back to Tibet and then they would trade
notes. It was very, very exciting.It was like people going to India now and one
would study Vinaya and one would study Logic and one would study
Madhyamika and one would study Perfection of Wisdom, and they would
master it and then come home and they would teach it each other. If you try to
draw a lineage tree of the kadampas it looks like a tumbleweed. You know you
can get really confused trying to draw…it’s not like a nice org chart, it looks like
this because they were teaching each other. So he sets off to Lhasa, to find…
who? Diamond Lion, right? They’re contemporaries. So he’s off to Lhasa to try
and find Dorje Senge, Diamond Lion. He’s going to find the person who wrote
this book. He just freaked out about it. He’s going to give up everything. He
leaves his home and he goes to Lhasa, because he hears that Dorje Senge’s there,
Diamond Lion.
He gets to Lhasa, {‘de ne Langgri Tangpa la deney jal du chun de’}he gained
great faith in Langri Tangpa, which is another name for Diamond Lion, and he
went to meet him. {‘jun de, hlasa peb du’}he reached Lhasa, looked around for
him {‘Langri Tangpa dey selwa’} and people told him he’d already passed away,
he’s already dead, you know. He freaks out again, says now I can’t learn the
eight verses from the person who wrote it, okay. {‘drel wu na kun gyi shun na
top pa gang tor chi pey’}, and then he asked around and he says who of his
lineage, who, who of his students is still around that I could learn the eight verses
from. Who is there that I could get to know and maybe you know … who
among them is the most learned and understands the most? It boils down to
three different great Kadampa scholars. And then they tell him but there’s a
problem of those three in Lhasa, and it’s known to be an open problem between
them that they are all struggling to get {Densar}. {Densar} in those days meant
the position of the throne. Who’s going to be the number one man after
Diamond Lion has passed on. You know and he says, there’s some trouble going
on. There’s some kind of thing going on between the three. He hears about that
and gets all depressed. And he says, you know if these people are trying to
practice lojong and there’s a problem between the three main people, like who’s
going to be his next in line, you know, then I’ll go to {Langri Tang} itself. This is
this plain out in Amdo somewhere or something. It’s like going out to Utah or
something. And it’s like well, he’s all depressed and then he starts packing up
and getting ready to go and somebody comes and says why are you going. And
he says, I heard about the problem between the three guys, who wants to be the
next in line and these people aren’t practising lojong at all. He says, wait a
minute, wait a minute, you didn’t get the problem straight, you know
(laughter). You didn’t hear the problem. He says, they’re all struggling to give it
to the other guy. (laughs) (laughter) He says, they’re perfect Diamond Lion
followers. They say, {‘Langri Tangpa gi, shun je, je shu shu pa’} means, these are
perfect lojong practitioners. The struggle that is going on is that each one is
saying he’s too stupid to be the throne holder and that the other guys are more
intelligent and more wonderful and more talented and he’s just a schmuck, and
they should take the throne. And that’s the nature of the problem going on. So
then he’s all happy and he decides to stay in Lhasa. This is the story. Then he
meets a geshe, named {Sharawa}, and I’ll give you his name. {sha ra ba} Say,
{Sharawa} [repeat], {Sharawa} [repeat]. {Sharawa} appears to be a grandson of
Lord Atisha. There’s one great Lama, called {Potowa}, between Atisha and
{Sharawa}. So he’s the spiritual grandson of Lord Atisha. So he goes to Sharawa
and asks if he can teach him lojong, can he teach him Dharma. He teaches him
for twelve years and he teaches him all the great scriptures of India. All the great
philosophy books: Madhyamika, Prajnaparamita, Pramana, Vinaya, and Abhidharma.
And he becomes a master of those books. Then he learns all the Lam Rim. And
Sharawa is… for twelve years during that time, teaching lam rim in public
assemblies to the people and they’re going through lam rim all the time and
studying it. And then one day, apparently, Geshe Chekawa goes to Sharawa and
Sharawa says, ‘I’ve decided that you are worthy to hear the secret Dharma, the
real thing now’. Now you are worthy. And he taught him {b: The Lojong Dun
Dun Ma}. So up until the time of Geshe Chekawa this was a secret book. And
that’s why you can’t find out who wrote it. That’s why I went crazy trying to
find out who wrote it. Like there comes a time in their relationship when Geshe
Sharawa comes to Geshe Chekawa and says, okay now I think you’re ready for
the lojong. After all those years you know, you’re ready for lojong now. I’ll
teach you lojong. And he teaches him lojong and he becomes a lineage holder of
{b: The Lojong Dun Dun Ma}, okay. {b: The Seven-Point Lojong}. I thought you
would like to see, … the secret lineage has been written down. And I’ll show
you some of the major lamas who passed down the Seven Points. The Seven
Points, Geshe Chekawa wrote them down as seven points, but he organized
them into seven points, but they were being passed down secretly in groups of
two or three or less, from lama to student, from lama to student And it starts
with lord Buddha, okay. So we traced the lineage back to {Tub-Wang}; {Tub-
Wang} means, {Tubpe Wangpo}, means the king of all kings, or something like
that. King of the Able Buddhas, and that’s Lord Buddha. The next person in the
lineage, of this text that you’re going to study tonight is {Jampa}{byams pa}. He
looks pretty young but he’s been around (laughter) for a while. What’s the
Sanskrit for {Jampa}? Maitreya. So he was the next one to get it. In the time of
the Buddha, there was a bodhisattva named Maitreya. Next person in line to get
this teaching. Then it goes down to {Tokme Kuche}. {thogs med sku mched} Say,
{Tokme} [repeat] {Kuche}, [repeat] {Tokme} [repeat] Kuche [repeat]. In Sanskrit,
the negative is ‘a’, starts out a word like ‘agnostic’ comes from Sanskrit; ‘atheist’
comes from Sanskrit; ‘ignorance’ used to be an ‘a’, came from Sanskrit.
So, ‘me’ is ‘a’ and ‘tok’ means ‘sanga’. So the Sanskrit name is, Asanga, okay for
{Tokme
Kuche}, means the two brothers, okay. The Asanga brothers. So they’re really
referring to Asanga plus who? Master Vasubhandu. Masters, okay. They were
half brothers, okay. They lived about 350 AD. If you look at the great books,
Asian classics studied in the monasteries in Tibet, they wrote about half of them.
Between these two brothers they wrote: {b: The Abhidharmakosha}, {b: The
Abhisamayamkara} and many of the other books that were used. All of the Mind-
Only texts were written by Asanga, written down by Asanga, okay. Their
mother was the same, their fathers were different. Their mother was a nun and
she had a vision that if she were to bear children that they would become great
Buddhist saints, great scholars. And that she should have one child with a king
and one child with a Brahmin. She obeyed the vision, you know probably at
great personal cost. Probably people thought she was crazy, or like a crazy
woman, I don’t know. But anyway, these were her two sons. Vasubahndu, wrote
{b: The Abhidharmakosha} and other great works on Bodhisattva’s Life. And then
Asanga wrote, he helped Maitreya, the secretary for Maitreya’s five great books,
okay, including {b: The Abhisamayamkara}. We spend twelve years on that in
the monastery; we spend four years on {The Abhidharmakosha} Rinpoche taught it
for ten years. Turned out to be a pretty good deal, okay. {Serlingpa}. {gser gling
pa} {‘Ser’}, means gold; {‘ling’} means like {Rashi Gempil Ling}, means an ‘isle’, an
island. And the golden island … this is the lama of the golden island – {Serlingpa}.
That was Sumatra. And when Lord Atisha was looking around to find the
bodhisattva lineage, the lineage for the teachings on bodhichitta, he found out
about {Lama Serlingpa} and went to study with him. So, he’s… he’s the
grandfather of the bodhisattva traditions. They came to Tibet because of
Serlingpa. Serlingpa taught Lord Atisha and he passed it on to the Tibetans.
His other name is Dharmakirti and it’s not the same Dharmakirti as the logician
Dharmakirti, so be careful, you might see both. Next we have {Jowo Je}. {jo bo rje}
This should be an ‘o’. 982-1054
{Jowo Je} is another name for? Lord Atisha. Okay {‘Jowo’}, means ‘the lord’; ‘Je’
means ‘the lord’ (laughs) okay Lord Atisha.
[student: When did Serlingpa live?]
I don’t have dates for Serlingpa. There may be dates for Serlingpa, I couldn’t find
them easily but he taught Lord Atisha, so he must have overlapped … probably
he was active in the early ten hundred, thousand, okay. hen we come down to
Dromtonpa, Dromton Je. {‘brom ston pa} Lord Atisha’s most famous disciple. His
dates are, question mark. 1005? – 1064? {Dromtonpa} is Lord Atisha’s most
famous disciple. A lot of people say he was an emanation of a tantric deity. He
was, like, always showing up with the money at the right time; he was always
showing up with horses and donkeys and big bags of {tsampa}. And he never
became a monk. He was a {Genyen}, he was a Lifetime Layman’s vow holder.
And is… for our lineage, is the first and one of the greatest Tibetans that ever
passed the lineage on. So we owe a lot to him. He was the great facilitator of
Atisha’s mission to Tibet. Atisha couldn’t even speak Tibetan when he got to
Tibet and {Dromton Je} is helping him to spread, to start the Dharma in Tibet. So
we owe a lot to him. He had a student, named Potowa, {po to ba}. 1027-1105. who
was a geshe.
In the time of {Dromton Je}, {Drom}, with {Drom}, they start teaching {b: Lam
Rim} publicly but still lojong is secret. Lojong is still being passed on secretly
from teacher to student in groups no larger that two or three people. And only
very selectively. They study the students, they watch them for years and then
they decide they are worthy of learning the lojong, okay. And I you know, I
was curious why it was secret. It’s not tantra, ok. I mean it’s not a tantric
teaching. I was curious why it was secret until the time of … and then by the
way, Potowa taught it to Chekawa, Geshe Chekawa. So I was wondering, … I’m
sorry, Sharawa who taught to Chekawa, okay. So actually, it’s the great
grandson of Lord Atisha. And I’m like wondering, what is it about the lojong
that they felt that it had to be secret, you see. And up to the time of Geshe
Chekawa. So it means from 500 BC until 1100 AD, this is sixteen hundred years,
somebody is feeling that lojong shouldn’t be taught publicly to normal people.
And it was … I finally found there was a text that talked about it, and talked
about why it was kept secret all that time. And it’s kind of interesting. It says, it
quotes Shantideva, Master Shantideva’s book and says, most people are not
ready for the idea of exchanging themselves and others. He said, the students,
they couldn’t find enough students who were ready for the idea that you should
spend your whole life concentrating on what will help other people, rather than
concentrating on what will help yourself, okay. The whole idea of devoting
every minute of your day, and every resource you have, every thought that you
take, devoting it to other people, making sure other people get what they want
or what they need, was too deep for people to be…to have it taught publicly.
And they would ‘dis’ it, you know. I mean, either verbally they would ‘dis’ it, or
worse. Mentally they would say this is a stupid idea, you know what I mean.
Because the currency of the world is to watch out for number one. The instinct of
human kind is to take care of yourself first and to make sure you have what you
want and the things that you need. And the idea, the concept of taking care of
other people, devoting your whole life to other people, is so Einstein, you know,
is beyond most people. And they will disrespect that concept if you try to teach a
group of people, then a certain percentage of people in that room will say, that’s
crazy, that’s stupid. Why should you do that? You know. I mean, not so many
people will go home and say, Oh we had a lojong class tonight and he was
talking about I should help everybody else’. I mean in America, you just say,
well…you pay it lip service, right. You say, it sounds nice, it’s very noble, I’d like
to be able to do that, that’s a nice idea, and then you just forget about it. Which
means in the bottom of your heart, you don’t really consider it something that
you should start doing tonight. That every thing you do during the day, from
the time you wake up to the time you fall asleep, should all be motivated at
giving other people what they need especially Dharma. That your whole reason
for being, and your whole reason for staying on this planet is to give other
people what they need in this continual outflow of stuff from you. And no
thought about what they can give you or what you can get out of it or
something like that. That it was too profound and it shouldn’t be taught in
public because the public wasn’t ready for it. And then Geshe Chekawa, …it’s
hard to understand his thoughts on it, but it seems to be that he felt … it seems
to me almost self-deprecating at that point, because he says, who am I to guess
who might be ready, you see what I mean? He felt like maybe they’d be 10
people in this room that are ready but I couldn’t judge it properly. I’m too much
of a schmuck to keep it secret any more. I might make the wrong judgement
and then some holy person or some holy being who needs this teaching might
be deprived of it. So I’d rather teach it to a bunch of wrong people than miss a
couple of important people, so I’m going to start teaching it publicly. And that’s
when the {b: Lojong Dun Dun Ma}, broke out into public. And that’s why it’s so
hard to figure out who wrote it, okay. He was the first person to teach it
publicly. And then it comes down through a very beautiful lineage and it
branches out into all of the lineages of Tibet. Like the {Kagyus} study this text
very deeply and many other traditions. There’s {Gyalsab Togme Sangbo},
around late twelve hundreds, who is so much connected with this teaching, that
in some of the catalogues I was reading, he is credited as the author of it, he’s the
person who wrote it down. {Ngulchu Dharmabhadra}, who’s very dear to our
Vajrayogini lineage and very dear to the … the regular students here have been
fed a lot of {Ngulchu Dharmabhadra}, and his student Yangchen Lodro, who’s
very important for Sera Je monastery, I’m sorry, different one … Anyway,
you’ve been getting a lot of {Ngulchu Dharmabhadra}. He is one of the main
holders of this lojong. This lojong is very powerful going through {Ngulchu
Dharmabhadra}. Then it comes down to Pabongka Rinppoche who, if you read
his lam rim, spent many, many pages on explaining it. And finally down to
Trijang Rinpoche, Kyabje Trijang Rinpoche, who is Khen Rinpoche’s main lama,
and the main lama of the current Dalai Lama. So it’s very much our lineage. It’s
very much a strong tradition in our lineage. I can’t spend more than two classes
on it which is … you can’t do much in two classes. We’ll go through the seven
points, and I thought we would concentrate on the hard parts, okay. I mean,
there’s about twelve or fifteen verses worth of stuff. I’d say four or five of them
are so difficult that if I just give you the reading and you go home with it, you
might pass it on wrong, okay. So I’m going to concentrate on the hard parts
tonight. We’ll just gonna do…we’ll do the first two or three or four points. We’ll
be focussing on the verses that are difficult and the ones that are sort of, you
know like very mystical and could be misunderstood. And we don’t want them
passed on in a misunderstood way. If you just read them it might be confusing
and you might teach other people the wrong thing. And I, and I fear that in
some, in some instances this teaching might be misunderstood. Might be passed
on in some sort of way which is not correct, especially with the emptiness part.
So I… we’re going to concentrate on the hard part, okay. This is very Gelugpa
and you don’t have to be shy about it. The lineage of the Dalai Lamas and Je
Tsongkapa, we like to concentrate on the hard stuff, okay. So here we go. I’m
going to first just give you the seven points one by one and then we’ll start
explaining them okay. This is the first of the seven points. 1) {sngon ‘gro rten gyi
chos bstan pa}. Say, {ngundro} [repeat], {ten gyi} [repeat], {chu} [repeat], {tenpa}
[repeat]. {ngundro} [repeat], {ten gyi} [repeat], {chu} [repeat], {tenpa} [repeat].
{ngun} means before, {dro} means to come. {Ngun-dro} means preliminaries.
And you’ve heard the word {ngun-dro} in many different contexts. Oftentimes it
refers to a set of spiritual practices like a hundred thousand mandala offerings, a
hundred thousand prostrations, etc. There’s a set of them that in some traditions
is very much emphasized as a method of softening yourself up to start your
Dharma studies, okay. This is not what it refers to here. I’ll go into what the
preliminaries are later.
{ten gyi chu} means foundation Dharma, okay. Foundation Dharma. These are
the Dharma thoughts or the attitudes, like all Dharmas, its attitudes and less
Dharma than attitudes (audience sneeze) whei! (laughter) Somebody asked
Rinpoche if there was a Tibetan ‘god bless you’ and he said, Oh we say, {“gyab
chik”} and he explained this to this guy who came to visit us one day. And then
later I asked him what does {“gyab chik”} mean. He says, well ‘gyab’ {sp.brgyab}
means ‘shut it’, (laughter) {chik} means ‘shut it’, anyway.(laughs) (laughter) {Ten
gyi chu tenpa}; {tenpa} means to teach them, okay. So it’s instructions on the
foundation dharmas, the foundation attitudes that you need before anything,
okay, preliminaries. And these are not so much practices as attitudes. They are
contemplations that you should do before you get to the main event. The main
event in Tibetan is called {ngushi}. {dngos gzhi byang chub kyi sems sbyong ba}. Say
{ngushi} [repeat], {jangchub kyi} [repeat], {sem}[repeat],         {jongwa}[repeat],
{Ngushi}, again is always opposed in Tibetan to two other things: {ngundro},
which means the warm up, {ngushi} which means the main event and then {je la}
or the conclusion. So {ngushi} means the main event, the main thing, the main
practice, okay. In the study of concentration or meditative states, it refers to a
certain kind of meditative state, meaning the main meditative state. There are
preliminary meditative states and then there are subsequent meditative states. In
the study of meditation it means a meditative state. But here it means the main
practice, okay. What is the main function of lojong in the lam rim structure?
Where does lojong fit in the lam rim structure? (You thought you weren’t
raising your hand, Oh you’re in big trouble … No, sorry. Never yawn at the
wrong time, okay.) Where is it? [student: “bodhichitta”] Developing bodhichitta.
But where? There’s two ways to develop bodhichitta, right; the seven step
practice and exchanging yourself and others. And this comes … lojong’s place in
the lam rim is exchanging yourself and others. So this is going to be the main
event. This is what … there’s another name for this book, which is learning how
to exchange yourself and others’ really’. How to really do it. That’s the alias,
that’s the a.k.a. also known as. Some of the catalogues say, Geshe Chekawa’s
SevenPoints on How to Exchange Yourself and Others. That’s going to be the
main event. Right.{Jangchub kyi sem} means bodhichitta. The decision to reach
absolute total bliss on behalf of others. Twist my arm, okay, all right. I mean
that’s all. The best way, the best thing you can do for others is to clean up your
own mind, make it pure, reach a total state of bliss where you’re surrounded by
holy tantric deities, and then go and teach other people how to do it. You know
it’s not like this obligation thing {Tre, tre yo mo re da} It’s not like some kind of
boring obligation that you have to do. It’s this exciting journey to total ecstasy in
this life so you can show other people how to do it. That’s all. That’s {jangchu kyi
sem}. It’s not like giving up the ‘Michael & Zois’ shakes for others. It’s like
learning how to get zillions of them and handing them out to everybody. And
there’s a big difference between those two. You’re not depriving yourself of
anything. You’re just getting to your ecstasy faster so you can help other people
get there also. {jongwa} means to practice or to develop that state of mind. This
is lojong, okay. Remember? We had it the first class. This {sem} is {lo}; this
{jong} is {jong}. That’s the lojong. How to develop the good heart, okay. And
again the first few times I heard ‘mental training’, I thought … I went to
Dharamsala. I was in a bus. I got to, where’s the golden temple? Amritsar. And
people told me Geshe Dhargye’s going to teach you mental training and I’m like,
Oh great, I’ll get my IQ increased, you know. It’s not like that. It’s how to
develop a good heart towards other people, okay. That’s going to be the main
event. By the way, those of you who are a little sophisticated about it, know that
there’s two versions of bodhichitta. The word {jangchub kyi sem} has two
absolutely different meanings: one is {kundzob} and one is {dundam}. One is
{kundzob} and one is {dundam}. {Kundzob} means the deceptive one, meaning
the normal everyday version of the wish for enlightenment, which means
wanting to reach your own enlightenment for the sake of others. That’s the
bodhichitta you’re usually hearing about. That’s version (a) of bodhichitta.
Version (b) is much deeper. What’s that? What’s {dundam janchchub kyi sem}
What’s the ultimate bodhichitta? Direct perception of emptiness.
Bodhichitta. Two different states of mind go by the name bodhichitta. Regular
bodhichitta is the wish to reach your own ecstasy so you can take other people
there. Ultimate bodhichitta is the direct perception of emptiness. Anybody who
wants to be a bodhisattva should have both. You gotta get to both. And this
{ngushi}, this main event, is going to cover both of them, okay. This one is…it’s
not restricted to the practice of loving others. It’s also seeing emptiness directly.
Both are going to come here. Number three. 3) {rkyen ngan byang chub kyi lam du
khyer ba} Say, {kyen ngen} [repeat], {jangchub }[repeat], {kyi lam du} [repeat],
{kyerwa}, [repeat]. {kyen} here means circumstances, normally it means a factor,
a secondary cause.        Here it means circumstances, okay.         {Kyen} means
circumstances here. {ngen} means lousy, bad, okay. {kyen ngen} means bad
things that happen to you, lousy things that happen to you, problems.
{jangchub} means Buddhahood, enlightenment. {lam du kyerwa} means to
transform them into the path for enlightenment. So if you want to translate this
into plain English … What’s the name of that great Lama Zopa’s book?
Transforming Problems into the Path of Buddhahood, or something like that,
okay. That’s exactly what he’s talking about; number three of the seven points.
Turning the problems of your life into a ticket to enlightenment, okay
We could all use that right (laughs) If you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em, right. If you
can’t stop the problems right away, well then at least learn to use them as a
vehicle to get enlightened. Okay. And how to transform them into a vehicle to
get enlightened, ok. {Lam du kyerwa} means turn them around into a path.
Rather than being an obstacle…, the obstacle becomes the path. The blockade
you use as a path. It’s a kind of a cool idea. It’s like skateboarding down the
thing that’s crossing the highway that … those guard things. It’s like getting up
and riding on it rather than braking to it, you know what I mean. And you turn
it into…you ride on it rather than try to bust through it. You use it, like that,
okay.
By the way, those of you that are studying the {dak kye}, when they say {ku sum
lam kyer} this is the expression. {lam du kyerwa} means to turn those three
events in your death into a {lam kyer} for a {ku sum}, the three bodies of a
Buddha. That’s where it comes from {lam du kyerwa}. Number four. 4) {tse gcig
gi nyams len dril nas bstan pa}. Say {tsechik gi} [repeat], {nyamlen} [repeat], {dril
ne} [repeat], {tenpa} [repeat]. {tsechik gi} [repeat], {nyamlen} [repeat], {dril ne}
[repeat], {tenpa} [repeat] {tsechik} means one human life, one lifetime, a whole
lifetime. You can say a whole lifetime, {tsechik}.{nyamlen} means spiritual
practice in the sense of practice as opposed to theory; {nyamlen} means putting it
into actual practice.      It’s always opposed in Tibetan to the theory of
enlightenment. {nyamlen} means ‘nuts and bolts’; {nyamlen} means actually
doing it. {dril ne tenpa} means instructions. {Dril ne} is a tough word that means
like all wrapped up into one, okay. Even when you wrap a package it’s called
{dril}. {gang du da dril gu re}, means I have to wrap the package. So it means
wrapped up into one. Step number four of the seven are these brief, tiny little
sentences, where you get a whole lifetime of practice expressed in a nutshell,
how’s that. {Dril ne tenpa} means in a nutshell, okay. 5) {blo ‘byongs pa’i tsad}. Say
{lojongpay} [repeat] {tse}[repeat] {lojongpay} [repeat] {tse}[repeat].         Is this
misspelled, isn’t lojong … those of you who are studying Tibetan, isn’t that how
you spell lojong {sbyong}, right. Is this misspelled? No, okay. It’s a verb here. It’s
a past tense, past tense. By the way, those of you who are studying Tibetan,
when there’s a secondary {sa} on a verb, almost always past, past, past, past
participle, like very past. {Lojongpay} means done developing the attitude;
finished developing the mind. Developed the good heart, okay. Done. And
that’s why it’s spelled differently here, okay. Done. Finished developing the
good heart. {tse}, {tse} is a very…in this case is a very idiomatic way of saying, at
what point can you say that a person has successfully developed this state of
mind. How do you know when you’ve got it? Okay. Like in the {b: Lam Rim}
{nyintsan kuntu tarpa don nyer lo jung na de tse nge jung kyepa lak} how do I
know when I have renunciation? {nyin tsan kuntu tarpa don nyer lo}, when you
are fixated night and day on getting out of this crap, you’ve got renunciation,
okay. That’s a {tse}; {tse} means how do you know that you’ve reached that
point? So point no.5 is really cool. He’s going to tell you; you reach this point,
you got it. {Lojong}ed. You {jong}ed your {lo} when you reached this point.
He’s going to tell you the {tse};{tse} means when you’ve reached that point. In
this case, that’s what it means, okay. 6) {blo sbyong gi dam tsig}. Say {lojong gi}
[repeat], {damtsik} [repeat]. {lojong gi} [repeat], {damtsik} [repeat]. Here {lojong}
means trying to develop a good heart. {damtsik}means pledges or promises you
have to make to yourself. Okay, I make the following resolutions or promises
or pledges. {Damtsik} means pledges, things you’ve decided to keep. It’s
defined as {dor du mi duwa} things you should never give up. Once you decide
to do it, never give it up. {Damtsik} means promises to yourself, which are the
hardest to keep, right. That’s a {damtsik}. {Lojong gi damtsik}. 7) {blo sbyong gi
bslab bya}. Say {lojong gi}[repeat], {labja} [repeat]. {lojong gi}[repeat], {labja}
[repeat]. Lojong again means the practice of developing the good heart. {labja}
means like, advice, okay. Like, certain kinds of advice about how to do it.
Oftentimes, in a teaching, for example when a monk takes ordination, at the
very end they say, by the way, okay you’re a monk now, the ceremony is over,
you sat here and sweated in those robes for three hours, here’s a few little tricks
to keeping your vows. That’s called {labja}. {Labja} means hey, between us
here’s a little few tricks of the spiritual trade. You know and then they go
through and they give you a few little short, cool advices about how to keep the
lojong, how to keep doing it. And that’s called {labja}, those things are called
{labja}.
By the way, those of you who are studying Tibetan, {labja}, can also mean the
rules, for example the bodhisattva vows are often called {labja}. Those vows are
called {‘labja’}. So you have to not mistranslate. When you see it written down
you have to know which one they’re talking about. We’re going to take a break.
I’d like each of you to get the reading. If you have a few minutes look through
the dark, the bold print and read through them. There’s only a few lines. And
look it through. You’re going to see some really weird ones; those are the ones
we’re going to talk about tonight, so look it over and come back in about ten
minutes, okay.
[The following section not shown on video]
[I think there was a couple of announcements I was supposed to make and I
don’t remember them, but I remember (laughs) I remember one of them. I
think I mentioned we have a sponsor, one of the sponsors of Godstow, came to
us and asked us if we… if they could throw a fundraiser for us and we didn’t
have to do anything. So I said well, I guess (laughter). And they have a… I think
they’re close to a… I think I mentioned it, a group of flamenco dancers that I
went and saw last year. They were really, really good, a group of us went.
They’re called Nochas Flamenco. Apparently they come every summer and do
their thing at St. Mark’s place… what’s that place called, I don’t know, it’s called
Eight, St. Mark’s. It’s a small theatre; it’s 160 people, and they sell out for 2
months and they've offered us one night of the proceeds. And they…but what
they’re going to do is charge $100 a ticket. I think the normal tickets are like $25
or something.
So…anyway, just to let you know. I asked them if they could do something
afterwards for us normal people and they said they’d think about it so I’ll have
some announcements on that. But if you….i mean there’s about three kinds of
students here: one is real broke, one is broke (laughter) and one still has room
on their credit card. So (laughter) if you’re the third kind please consider buying
a ticket. They initiated it and it would be nice if… I thought we could get twenty
or thirty people to go among the four thousand people on our mailing list. I
                                                        th
suppose that many people could do it. It’s July 8 , I think it’s a Wednesday
night.]
Okay. I hope you’ve had a few minutes to look over the dark print, the bold
print. I think I would like to talk about a few of the difficult points. Page three of
the reading, okay. The first line looks pretty easy. It says: Train Yourself First in
the Preliminaries, okay. And that’s all. The whole {b: Lojong Dun Dun Ma}. If
you want to be really smart, if you’re on a bus or a subway sometime and
someone says do you know {b: Lojong Dun Du Ma}? You say, yeah. Well
what’s the first one? You can say, train yourself in the preliminaries first and
that’s it. That’s the whole lojong. That’s the whole thing, all right. And as you
can see it’s not cleaning your room, putting out water bowels, anything like that.
It’s not that kind of preliminaries. These are much harder. First one is
recognizing the fact that you have a very wonderful short beautiful window of
opportunity to do something now and it will close quickly, you know. Like I’m
always … I’m going around, Khen Rinpoche’s around, Art’s around teaching
great stuff, these classes are going on. It’s easy to think it’s all permanent or
something. Forget it. It can end any day and it will end abruptly and then there
wouldn’t be anything like this going on. I find it kind of funny that I’m like,
could you please come to class, you know. It’s not like that. Very rare to have
classes. Very rare to have so many classes going on. Very rare to have so many
chances to study with good people. And the first one is to just recognize that
fact, that the window of opportunity is very short. Rinpoche hasn’t taught in
New York … the last time he gave regular teachings in New York was I think
1973, okay, something like that. It’s hard, it’s hard to find. And you’re healthy
and don’t think that’s permanent. You’re healthy now, you have a good mind,
you’re busy but you’re not too busy to get here, you see what I mean. You’re
busy but you still have time to meditate and practice and that can stop any time,
you know. One good car accident, you know, one good AIDS virus, you know it
can all end very, very quickly, very abruptly. Now’s the time, to think like that.
Second one. Meditating upon your death. I always tell people death and rebirth
is really easy to … it’s hard to think about unless you’ve studied emptiness,
unless you know that this world is you perception, that your own mind is
creating this world. Then death does not become … even if you tell people the
only thing between you and your death is if your nose gets blocked up for three
minutes you’re dead. It’s a miracle for this many years your nose didn’t get
blocked up. It’s a miracle that you could feed yourself for this many years. I’ve
got this old Chevrolet I’m trying to sell, it’s like…if anyone wants to buy it
(laughter) (laughs). It’s like thirty years old or something. It’s all broken down,
it’s made of steel and it’s all broken down. Here I am ten years older than that
poor thing and it’s amazing that I’m still here. It’s amazing that I’m still alive.
Same with you. It doesn’t even take that long to die. It takes about five, six
seconds for your mind to change. You see it’s not dying, it’s not like your body
has to die. It’s a change in your mental state and then you see yourself die. It’s
very easy to die. It’s too easy to die. And it can just go like that (snaps fingers)
and you have to keep that in mind. You have to do something now while you
can. Third thing. Meditate on the problems of … I found a good new word for
samsara, vicious circle of suffering, okay. Really. Vicious circle is what {korwa}
means. It keeps perpetuating itself, you cannot be happy here, nothing will go
right here until you learn Dharma, especially until you learn your vows. That
Pratimoksha morality, Bodhisattva morality and Tantric morality; until you learn
those three and until you keep your book well and sincerely. This is all going to
be miserable. Nothing can go right here. Don’t be amazed when things go
wrong here. You should be amazed when something goes right, okay. The
nature of this place is for things to go wrong. We are in a defective realm, you
know. I had a friend call me, he says, I just got out of jail. He’s crying on the
phone, he’s weeping on the phone. My mother had to put up bail, I’ve ruined
my life, I’ve made a boo-boo, I’ve hurt somebody, I’ve just got out of jail, I don’t
know what to do, you know, everyone hates me. I said, listen if you’re in the
desire realm and I’m in the desire realm, our mental states are just about the
same. The fact that your mental state is defective is proven by your presence in
this room, you see what I mean. If you’re in the desire realm you have all of the
mental traits that made Hitler famous and Mao Tse Tung and everybody else,
you know. You are a millimetre away from being those people if you are in this
realm. I said, you know he’s feeling like a bad person, he got caught doing
something bad. He was in jail. I said, don’t worry about it. Like we’re about a
millimetre away from you; we didn’t get caught yet, you know. But everybody
in this realm has some kind of problem. I mean that’s why you’re in this realm.
The day you see emptiness directly, you perceive the other two realms directly,
and then, you know you really are in a special realm. And it’s the worst one.
And you are here because your mind is like that. It’s your mind that is
producing this realm. So don’t think you’re much worse than anybody else here.
You’re not because their mind is producing the same realm. We’re all messed up
about 99% the same, you know. It really is a …defective realm. It doesn’t work
right. Nothing will ever work right here, you might as well just forget it. It can’t
work right here. You have to move to a different realm, you have to get out of
this realm. It’s like being in an insane asylum and you have to find the door as
soon as you can, because nothing is going to go right as long as you’re in … it
can’t. Don’t get frustrated trying to make things go right in this realm, it can’t. It
will never. You have to change it. And that’s keeping your vows, keeping your
three sets of vows.
But if you don’t realise you’re in an insane asylum, you can’t break out. I mean
it’s some kind of an achievement for a crazy person to realise they’re in an
insane asylum. And we’re trying to do that, you know. We are crazy people in
an insane asylum trying to figure out that we are here. And that’s the first step,
is to figure out that you are … this is a defective, this realm will never work
right. Just won’t. Forget having a good job, money, enough to eat, all that. You
can’t even…it won’t work. It’ll never work here, okay. You need to move out.
You have to get going. That’s the preparation, that state of mind. As you start
a… this is a meditation manual. This lojong is designed as a meditation manual.
The whole thing is meant to be a meditation practice. People come up to me all
the time, I need a meditation. Well here you go, okay. {b: Lojong Dun Du Ma},
it’s enough for a sweet meditation. You know, I like to change my main
meditation every three months or so. You know, I do {Tonglen} for three
months, then I do death meditation for three months. And I think you’ll find to
stop from getting stale it’s good to introduce a new meditation. You might want
to study this one. And it’d be a really nice one until the next series of classes.
The next series of classes is in October, so you might want to work on that. By
the way, we are planning some interim classes. Eric Columbel, who’s a good
Tibetan teacher, will be teaching intermediate Tibetan. Tupten Puntsok will have
the regular Wednesday meditation going on and maybe you can talk him into
doing a language class, but that’s your problem. We’re trying to get Rinchen
Dharma to teach colloquial Tibetan again. And Gene Smith, who’s a great
scholar, for those of you who have taken Vajrayogini initiation, he’s agreed to
teach us about the lineage which is not something that is normally taught. So
those of you who have that initiation, he’s agreed to give us an extended lecture
about the lineage,because he’s a Sakya scholar. He is a Sakya and our early
Vajrayogini lineage comes from the Sakyas. And in fact, we’re going to study
one of the most famous lojongs by one of the greatest – the greatest, I think,
Sakyas of all time. We’re doing it on Friday night. We’ll do it in this class later
on in the course, Drakpa Gyeltsen. Okay part two. Number two. As you’ll see
on page three at the bottom, that’s where you actually do the getting ready for
meditation. You do your refuge. Making supplication means you visualize your
lama and you ask for help, okay. Very simple, very beautiful. You do your
seven part practice. That’s the … if you’ve studied {b: Ganden Hlagyama}, that’s
{b: Ganden Hlagyama}, that’s the seven steps of getting ready for meditation
and then closing your meditation. If you don’t know what they are, come on
                                                                         th
Monday night, we’re covering them every Monday night, okay at 6 Street.
And then he talks about taking your meditation posture. Here the breathing
meditation is twenty-one breaths rather than ten. Ten is designed for us; twenty
we’ll probably never be able to do, okay.
Page four. The reason I wanted to go over the difficult lines is that this first verse
here, the four lines and the next one, I think this kind of stuff, I think this is why
they kept the {b: Lojong Dun Du Ma} secret. These five lines, to me, should
either be taught carefully or kept secret because this is the kind of teaching that
someone who doesn’t get a good oral tradition explanation will go for it and
waste their time for twenty years trying to see the ‘isness’ of the antidote or
something like that, you know what I mean? Very dangerous these lines if
they’re not taught properly. So I want to go over the difficult lines with you and
make sure you get them and that you teach your students properly, okay. So
here we go. It’s not just some vague mystical thing, okay. The more you learn
about mystical things the more you’ll learn that they boil down to Buddhist logic
of all things, okay. It’s all very logical. I mean you really want to go to a
mystical realm? Study plain old logic, okay. All right, here we go. When it says,
‘Learn to see all things as a dream’, this is talking about realizing that the outer
world and especially your body, is empty of having any nature of its own. It’s a
dream. It’s an illusion. What does illusion mean? It doesn’t mean, it doesn’t
mean, it doesn’t mean, it does not mean (laughter) that it’s all not there and you
can do whatever you want and you know, some weird deity has created this
illusion, another illusion around you, you just have to punch through it. It
doesn’t mean that at all. It means the way the world seems to work to you is not
correct. It’s an illusion. It’s a dream, okay? You want to get rich? Don’t go work
hard, don’t go slave at some corporation, give away your money as fastly and as
beautifully and as effectively as you can, okay. You want to be healthy? Take
care of other people. Don’t go to the gym and don’t buy vitamins. You want to
be healthy? Go serve the sick and make sure other people are well, you know.
You want to be beautiful or handsome? Meditate well. Think about compassion
for other beings. It actually changes your inner energies and you do become
that, okay. I mean you have to realise the real causation of things. And don’t
believe in the appearance of things. You want to get what you want? Take care
of other people.
You want to get some handsome guy or some pretty girl? Keep your sexual
morality perfectly, okay, you’ll be beating them off, okay. This is how the world
really works and everything else is an illusion. All that stuff about the world
being created by different things, other things, is wrong. It’s an illusion.
Why? Because things are empty. And what’s really making things happen is
your own karma.
That’s what really makes things happen. And you have to get used to that. You
have to get used to that. Somebody gave me that, I hate this goddamn question,
what about the roaches in my apartment?               You know, they always me
(laughter), right. Like I’m some roach expert, okay (laughs) (laughter). I say,
you want to get rid of roaches? The best way is to take care of someone else who
needs a place to live. If you want your place where you live to be clean, your
mind has to be clean and you have to be good to other people, that’s how you …
the roaches will go away. They say, well can I kill them? And I said, Buddhism
says that a negative action cannot have a positive result. If you kill the roaches in
your apartment and if they’re not there the next morning, it is not because you
killed them. There’s no cause and effect relationship between killing them and
them not being there the next day. That’s not why there’s no roaches in your
apartment. Killing them has nothing to do with them not being there the next
day. If you’re a Buddhist, you have to reject that line of thinking; there is no
such thing. A bad action, which harms another living being, could never make
your apartment beautiful. It’s totally impossible. Total wrong view. And Jesus
kept saying the same thing over and over again, you know. We’re in good
company right. He said you don’t get lemons from oranges, you know.
Impossible. Don’t even think about it. You don’t plant watermelon seeds
hoping for corn, it’s impossible. You cannot have a clean apartment from the act
of killing another sentient being. It doesn’t work that way. There’s no cause and
effect relationship between those things. Nothing, not the slightest bit.
Prove it. They don’t go away when you kill them all the time. That proves it’s
not cause and effect. Get it? Okay? If killing them got them to go away they
would never come back. They come back Oh, but wait, they come back because
my neighbour didn’t kill his. Yeah, what created that? Why do you have a
neighbour like that. I don’t know, because his neighbour didn’t kill his.
No, not cause and effect, okay You have to get used to that. Anything else is
illusion. Believing that is illusion. That’s what it means to ‘learn to see all things
as a dream’. The outer world and your own body and all the problems in your
life have come about through one thing only, your selfishness and your lack of
lojong. Your failure to practice lojong. Your failure to develop a good heart.
That’s what lojong teaches. All the problems around you - traffic, pollution,
dangerous parts of the city, roaches in your house, everything else, any problem
you have, problems at work are all created by your failure to think about other
people’s needs. Period. That’s the first thing. To believe anything else, to
believe that the bad things in your world came from anything else, is an illusion.
And that’s what the first line means. Got it? It’s not some nihilistic, cool,
Sartrarian thing, sorry, you know. It just means you have to be a good person.
Number two. ‘Examine the Nature of the Mind Unborn’ And this sounds really
cool because … then you get somebody coming to New York for a two day
teaching and they say, okay you guys, for the next three years until I can come
back, just meditate on the unborn nature of your mind. And everybody goes
home and crazy trying to figure out what’s the unborn nature of their mind. It’s
only this. The first line is talking about your world and your body. They are like
a dream because the things you think are what make your body healthy are not
what makes it healthy. It’s not food. It’s not vitamins. It’s not going to the gym.
You want a healthy body? Take care of other people. You will have a healthy
body. That’s the first thing. You want to clean up your New York City? It’s not
by electing this mayor or that mayor. It’s by watching your speech for example.
Very subtle, okay. Line number two is talking about the true nature of your
mind. Your mind is just like the city. Your mind is just like the… your body.
Are you tired of being depressed? Do you have low self-esteem? Do you often
feel anxious, anxiety? Do you feel unhappy? Do you feel nervous? Do you
worry about the future? Does it seem like nobody loves you? All these mental
problems, all stem from the same thing: not taking care of other people, okay
So he’s saying, your mind also is just as empty as the outside world. And if you
see something in your mind, which is ugly or unpleasant, that also is a projection
on an otherwise empty screen. The mind does not have any nature of it’s own,
it’s an ‘unborn’. In that sense, it’s unborn. It’s empty. If you experience your
mind as something painful or depressed or unhappy or anxious, it’s because you
have made other people feel that way. You want to stop that, you don’t have to
go to a $100 an hour psychiatrist. Just be good to other people, you know. And
in fact, according to Buddhism, you cannot stop it any other way. There is no
other way to take care of any kind of negativity in your own mind than to take
care of other people and to think about what other people need, okay. Period.
We’re going to put all these psychiatrists out of business. Anyway, they can
come to class (laughter). We need more people to do the folders and stuff.
Number three I think is particularly dangerous. The Antidote Itself Is Gone to Is.
And frankly you know, there were lineages in Tibet, traditions in Tibet where
this became very catchy. It was very sexy. It was very cool. And the meaning
seems to have gotten lost, you know what I mean. T hey go around, Oh
meditate on the ‘isness’, you know. Like after about three weeks of that or ten
years of that, people are always showing up in my class and saying, what did
they mean when they said meditate on the ‘isness’? I’ve been trying all this time.
I don’t get it you know. Here’s what meditating on the ‘isness’ is. ‘The antidote
itself has gone to is’ means … what is the antidote?
It’s the mind of wisdom which ahs done the first two lines. We’re into line
number three now. Wisdom is the mind, which understands what’s going on in
the empty outside world, in your empty body and your empty mind. And it
realizes that the outside world, your body and the condition of your psyche, is a
projection forced on you by your past karma. So that wisdom is number three.
That wisdom is being talked about in number three. Understanding what’s really
going on is the subject of number three. Understanding what’s really going on is
the subject of line number three. Then why does he say, ‘gone to is’ you know?
It sounds like ‘Wizard of Oz’ or something, okay. What does it mean to ‘gone to
is’? It means, sooner or later, you’re going to have to realize that wisdom itself is
also empty, okay. The wisdom which understands the emptiness of your world,
the emptiness of your body and the emptiness of your mind, is itself, empty.
And it also is a projection being forced on you by your past good deeds, okay.
Not even the antidote is self-existent. Not even the wisdom which gets you out
of the other problems is self-existent. Not only is the object on which your mind
is focussed empty and not only is the mind itself empty, but the understanding in
that mind is also empty. Meaning, it’s also a projection. Understanding
emptiness is itself a projection, okay. By the way, he’s flirting here with which
one of the five paths? If I say, {tsok jor tong gom mi-lob}
Say {tsok} [repeat], {jor} [repeat], {tong} [repeat], {gom}[repeat], {mi-lob}
[repeat], Okay five levels of spiritual realisation that every person in this room
wants to go through. {Tsok}, basically achieving renunciation and bodhichitta.
{Jor} understanding emptiness intellectually. {tong} - seeing it directly. {gom},
using what you saw directly to wipe out your negativities. {milob}, nirvana and
Buddhahood. Which of these five paths has he just been describing? (audience
member) Yeaho.. Yeah, number two. I mean you’re gaining intellectual
understanding.       Nobody in this room went into the direct perception of
emptiness that I could see just now. (laughter) okay I mean, I spoke about
emptiness and you were like, oh that makes sense yeah; outside world, yeah;
mind, yeah; my depression is a projection of my own mind, yeah I get that, yeah
okay. You just went through an intellectual understanding, you perceived
emptiness just now. Directly? I didn’t say that. (laughs) Intellectually, okay. Fine.
Number four. Let it go in the Essence, Source of all Things Again, very sexy,
very vague, very dangerous you know. Get these lojongs all put into a book,
pass them on in America, make that American Buddhism. I can’t think of a
worse way to ruin American Buddhism, okay. You need those other thirteen
notebooks also, okay. Lojong doesn’t work … remember Chekawa memorized
hundreds of those books, spent twelve years studying the classics and then they
let him study lojong, okay. Let it go in the essence, source of all things; ‘let it go’
here means two things. First it means, ‘let it go’ means let the problems of
meditation go, meaning try to overcome in your own mind the obstacles to
perfect meditation. ‘Let it go’ is a code word for you must overcome the
obstacles to meditation. What obstacles to meditation? Mainly two; {shing} and
{gur}{shingwa} and {gurpa}, right. {Shingwa} means … well, lets start with
{gurpa}, it’s easier. {Gurpa} means distraction.. When you’re meditating in the
morning and you think of, like me, my meditation is constantly ruined. I’m a
busy person, I have the whole day planned out. My meditation…anyone who’s
working like in an organized job, in any job situation this is the great demon in
your mind every morning. What do I have to do at 4.00? I have that meeting at
3.00. The budget’s not working out for department X, you know. And your
meditation is ruined by then. Or, you start smelling breakfast from your
neighbour’s door. That’s called {gurpa}; {gurpa} means the mind gets distracted.
That’s the obvious one, that’s the easier one. {Shingwa}, the opposite, means
mental dullness. In it’s gross form it’s the result of eating too much or not
getting enough sleep. And you know what it feels like. Like the day I fell asleep
in my room and hit my head on Puntsok’s closet (laughs). That’s why we’re
taking the bed out, so I can land on something soft. (Laughter) The more subtle
one, okay the more subtle one, is when you get very good at sitting very still
and your breathing is very regular and your mind is just buzzed-out. You’re not
thinking about anything clearly. This is much more dangerous, much, much
more dangerous, okay. So ‘letting it go’, on the fourth line on page four, means,
let go of those two obstacles. Meaning work your arse off and overcome them,
okay. It doesn’t mean like, you know, relax. The other meaning of ‘let it go’, is if
you do that and if you study emptiness properly, you will reach a point where
you can let go of the perception of things as being self-existent, okay. You will
move into the direct perception that things are not self-existent and that is {tong
lam}, okay. So from line three to line four, you just went from an intellectual
understanding to a direct perception of emptiness. That’s cool. That’s what line
four means. Now you go give these lines to any normal American person who’s
interested in spiritual stuff, could they get that out of those? Could they ever
figure that out? I don’t think so. You have to be careful who you teach the
lojong to. And you have to teach it correctly, okay. It’s plain old Abhidharma and
Prajnaparamita and Madhyamika and Pramana will a little spice of Vinaya, okay.
Asian Classics. And you have to study them okay to understand these four
simple lines, okay. Then what’s it got to do with this next one? Here’s a weird
one: In between Sessions be a Figment of the Imagination Oh, I’m just a figment
of the imagination (laughs) (laughter), I don’t have to keep my morality
anymore (laughs), yay (laughs), all right.It doesn’t mean that, okay. He’s talking
about a very specific spiritual level called {jetob yeshe}.Say {jetob yeshe}., it’s so
important I spelled it out for you, okay. {rjes thob ye shes} Say {jetob} [repeat]
{yeshe} [repeat].. What was path number? What was great spiritual level
number three? {Tong lam}, Path of Seeing. Direct perception of emptiness in a
deep state of meditation, Okay. Extremely rare. If there’s one person on this
planet right now, who has had that experience, it’s amazing, okay. {Jetob Yeshe}.
{Jetob yeshe}, is part two of that experience, okay. {Jetob} means subsequent,
that which comes after. {Yeshe} means wisdom or state of wisdom. This refers
to the… you could say, about ten hours or twelve hours following the direct
perception of emptiness. The direct perception of emptiness takes maybe
twenty minutes. During the next twelve hours or so, you have these incredible
spiritual realisations which are collectively known as the Four Arya Truths, badly
mistranslated as Four Noble Truths, okay.            You go through a group of
experiences that could be organised into four groups, called the Four Arya
Truths, misnamed the Four Noble Truths. Arya means anyone who has seen
emptiness directly, okay. Noble is a bad translation of arya, okay. Something
important to realise about that experience. Up to the time that you see emptiness
directly, you’re having (snaps fingers) mental impressions at the rate of sixty five
per finger snap, okay. Count this (snaps fingers 3 times), you just had two
hundred discrete mental impressions. (snaps fingers 3 times), in that much time,
you’ve had two hundred fleeting mental impressions according to Buddhism.
{kye chik ta me yin} That’s called {kye chik ta me} {ja tso gi tse chik}you’ve had
that many mental impressions, okay You have major mental impressions every
second, you know enough to say, I understand that sentence or I like this
milkshake or stuff like that, okay. To form a new thought happens every few
milliseconds, okay. During the length of your life, you have not had a single
correct perception . During the length of your life, okay. If you multiply that
times the number of hours and minutes and days and months and years of your
life, not one of those impressions (snaps fingers) was accurate. And you realize
that the day you see emptiness directly. That you’re belief that the things
around you come from their side and not from your projections, infects every
single perception you have. You cannot have a perception, until the day you see
emptiness directly, which is not infected by that belief. So much that we can say
you have not had an accurate perception in your life, unless you’ve seen
emptiness directly, okay. What happens when you…then you see emptiness
directly, that is your first accurate perception in your life. Now, what happens
when you come down out of it? I’m afraid that you go right back into the same
state (laughs) all right. Frankly When you come down out of the first direct
perception of emptiness, back into, {jetob yeshe}, back into the state of wisdom,
which is subsequent to seeing emptiness directly, you revert to your original
state. You do not overcome the innate tendencies to see things as self-existent,
but there’s one big difference. Before and after, there’s one big difference. What
is it? You know you’re wrong, okay. Like you’re looking at things and you’re
saying. I know I’m seeing them wrong and I can’t stop myself from seeing them
wrong, but at least I know I’m wrong. I’ve made progress, you know (laughs)
And then the next path, the whole fourth path, which typically takes seven
lifetimes if you don’t practice tantra, the whole next path for five hundred years
say, you are using that knowledge to permanently overcome that tendency,
okay. And when you overcome that tendency, finally, you’ve reached nirvana,
that is nirvana, okay That’s what line five is talking about, okay.
During the period after you see emptiness directly the whole world will look like
a figment, you have to keep reminding yourself, I’m not seeing things right.
They still look to be self-existent, but at least I know I’m wrong. That’s the
ultimate meaning of illusion in Buddhism. When the word illusion is used in
Buddhism, this is the ultimate meaning of it. For a person, who has seen
emptiness directly, they know the world isn’t what it looks like. But at least they
understand that they’re not seeing it right, okay So that one line is very, very
deep and never forget the real meaning of it okay. It doesn’t mean go around
thinking you’re like Casper the ghost, okay (laughs) It doesn’t mean that, okay.
And it especially doesn’t mean that morality doesn’t matter or something like
that, which is a very evil way to teach this line. It doesn’t mean that. It means
for that kind of person, at that high state, the world looks like that. It is a figment
… they know it’s a figment of their imagination. Meaning, something forced
upon them by their past karma. A perception forced upon them by their past
karma, okay I know you’ll never get it wrong, okay. There’s another part that I
find a little… I found difficult. By the way, at the bottom of page four, is the root
text, one of the first mentions ever, of the practice of tonglen, okay. The
meditation called tonglen. Those two lines at the bottom of page four, which I
always thought were by {Tokme Sambo}. It was {Tokme Sambo} who publicised
them openly, I mean very openly, two hundred years later, or a hundred and
eighty years later, okay. This is Geshe Chekawa writing down these lines for the
first time on the teachings on tonglen. Apparently ,even the teachings on
tonglen were secret until the time of Geshe Chekawa. And here you get one of
the first open references on it. I’m not going to try to teach tonglen tonight, it’s
too much.It’s a practice where you meditate taking the suffering of other people,
away from them, in on your breath. And you use your breath to give them all
good things they need, okay. But it would take about … we did it in North
Carolina, it was twenty tow hours of teaching I think to do it properly. So I
really think we should have a class on it in the next year or so. Like a weekend
special, or something like that, to do it properly. We have a good note- book
about it. We took all the teachings on it for the last eight hundred years and
collated them into an instruction manual that you can get. It’s available, but you
should really try to get the oral teaching. We should do it sometime, it’s too
much to do tonight, okay. And you shouldn’t try to do it until you know how to
do it properly. It’s a little tricky and it ain’t as easy as it sounds, okay. Page five
at the top. It has three lines at the top. It says, ‘Three Objects, Three Poisons,
Three stores of Virtue. Practise throughout the day in words. The order of taking
is to start with yourself.’ This is all pretty obscure and I want to help you. The
second line, we’ll start with the second line: ‘Practise throughout the day in
words’. This means, if you have had the teachings on how to do tonglen, if you
know how to do tonglen, there’s a very holy instruction by the first Panchen
Lama especially, where you repeat the meditation, in a prayer, all day long.
While you walk around New York, every time you look in a new person’s face
walking down the street, you fantasize about taking away their problems with
your breath.         Like sucking it into your nostrils and then destroying it
immediately. That’s very important to say. Every time you see … where was I?
Oh, I was at Grand Central Station at 5 o’clock or 5.30 and I was watching those
poor slobs come in to the trains with their brief case, they look so…it looked like
corpses….walking like corpses you know. And I felt so bad, I’d done it for
fifteen years, so I can empathize. And they’re walking in and I’m looking at their
faces are a little bit grey and their whole day is written on their face, like eight or
nine or ten nor twelve hours of struggling for money and trying to do business.
It’s written on their face, you can see all the worry and the pressure and the
stress, it’s on their face. And then you can fantasise about taking it all away from
them, you see. And in New York you have plenty of opportunities, you know.
So, New York is good for that. So that second line is, all day long you’re
muttering to yourself, come on give me your problems, I’ll take that, give me
that (sniffs in) (laughs) (laughter). And then you take that into your chest and
you destroy it, okay. You take their stress into your heart and you destroy it
immediately, you’re not supposed to keep it inside. You go (demonstrates
inhaling) and you take it away from them and you destroy it in your heart with
a bright burst of light. And then you go (demonstrates exhaling) practice
breathing out as if your breath itself could give them some kind of happiness,
give them everything they ever wished for. This is all done in about two seconds
as you walk past a business man who looks like he’s about to have a heart
attack. It’s like (demonstrates) and he never knows. And then you do this little
prayer, you do a tonglen prayer, okay. That’s what it means to do it all day long
in words. ‘The order of taking is to start with yourself.’ I’m not going to teach it
tonight, I’m not going to go into it. But when you do tonglen properly, you start
by taking away your own suffering first. In the morning you do a meditation to
take away the suffering of Michael Roach when he’s at that company in the
afternoon getting screamed at by that diamond salesman, you know. So in the
morning Michael Roach meditating in Leon’s beautiful quiet space, takes away
the suffering of Michael Roach at that company over in the west village, as three
phone calls come in at once and the boss is screaming, you know, I take away his
suffering. Start with yourself and then later you build up with other people,
okay. And it’s a beautiful meditation to do in the morning. It actually helps you
in the afternoon. When the poop hits the fan you remember that this nice guy
took away your suffering, and it actually helps. And it’s this whole karmic up-
cycle. You can learn it, we’ll do it some day. You can learn it, okay. What are
the three objects, what are the three poisons, what are the three stores of virtue?
I’m going to put it up here in Tibetan. {yul tid du ‘ong mi ‘ong bar ma gsum}. Say
{yul}[repeat], {yiduong} [repeat], {miong} [repeat], {barma} [repeat], {sum}
[repeat]. Three objects, means the three things that all people that people in
New York City on any given day are focussing on. The three things that every
person in New York is focussing on at any given time. What are they? {yul
yiduong} means things you like, things that are pretty, things that are nice, okay.
Could be a dress in a window, it could be a Michael & Zois milkshake, it could be
your boss telling you did a good job, okay. It could be your back feeling good
for one day. {miong} means the opposite; {miong} means anything you meet up
with during the day that’s not nice; a backache, boss screaming at you,
something bad on the street, seeing something bad on the streets, okay,
anything like that, feeling depressed, anything that’s not nice. It’s called {miong}.
{barma} you know the word {bardo}, it means in between state right, {barma}
means the same thing. In between likeable and unlikable, okay. This is the other
forty-eight people on the bus going to Howell that you couldn’t care less about.
If I was to ask you, who was on the bus today when you came down to Howell?
You’d say well there was this nice girl in the third row and there was this guy
next to me who was crushing me, the other people I can’t quite remember, see
what I mean. Those are called {barma}. {Barma} means the people you couldn’t
care less about. Neutral. These are the three great objects. What are the three
great poisons? {chags sdang gti mug gsum}. Say {chak} [repeat], {dang}[repeat],
{timuk sum} [repeat],
{chak} means to like the things that are nice in an ignorant way, and Puntsok, if
they don’t put ‘ignorant way’ on the homework mark it wrong, all right. It
doesn’t mean desire, anger and ignorance, okay. I don’t like those translations.
It doesn’t mean liking things, disliking things and being ignorant. The Buddha
likes things. The Buddha doesn’t have the three poisons in his mind. It doesn’t
mean simply liking things or being attached to things or anything like that. It
means, ignorantly. What do we mean ‘ignorantly’? It’s like being attached to
something in a way that you would do something wrong to keep it. That’s
ignorant because you don’t understand that this thing is being created by your
own mind. That proves you don’t understand it if you would hurt somebody to
get it. That proves you don’t understand where it came from. Because where do
all good things come from? Helping other people. So it’s a contradiction in
terms to hurt someone else to get what you want. That proves you’re not a
Buddhist. That proves you’re ignorant. It proves you don’t understand world -
view if you would hurt someone else to get what you want. It’s shooting your
own toes, okay. {dang} is disliking things ignorantly. Does the Buddha dislike
things. Of course. What does the Buddha dislike? He want to see you go to hell.
He doesn’t want to go to hell himself either. He dislikes things, but not
ignorantly. Disliking things ignorantly means you would hurt someone to get
away from something you don’t like. You would kill the roaches to get them
out of your apartment. It’s by definition a stupid thing to do. It creates the
vicious circle, okay. {timuk} is the state of ignorance that doesn’t get it. {Timuk}
doesn’t get what I just talked about. Now, last thing. It says three stores of
virtue. What are the three virtues that you can get out of these six stupid things?
Six crummy things have come already. Now he’s talking about thee nice things.
At this point in the meditation you take away those three poisons from other
people. Get it? Now if you read that line you’ll never get it. You see look at the
line and tell me that’s what it means, you’ll never get it. At this point, in the
practice of this lojong, you’re supposed to be sucking in the three poisons from
other people as they focus on the three objects; things they like, things they
don’t like and things they don’t care about, okay. At this point in the meditation
you are sucking it in. Give me your desire, give me your hatred, let me take
your ignorance please (demonstrates sucking-in), okay. Buddhists are snuffing
other stuff, right (laughs), other people’s problems all right. Better than that
other stuff. Okay. And by doing so you get incredible virtues which are the
opposite of these three poisons. And that’s what the three roots of virtue are. If
the homework said write the three stores of virtue in Tibetan, you could just put
a negative here. You could cop- out that way and you’d be right, okay,
especially if it was 9.30. Okay. Last thing. There’s a line that’s a little hard…by
the way, page five, where it says ‘the blame all belongs to one person’, you
know who they’re talking about. I don’t have to mention it.(laughter) (laugh).
You know, I used to go to Rinpoche to complain about stuff. I’d say, this guy
yelled at me at work. He said, if you don’t like it, you keep your vows better. If
you’re sick and tired of getting yelled at, at work, you keep your tundruk. Don’t
come to me whining. Conversations with Rinpoche are very short. (laughs)
(laughter) you know. As you may have noticed. People say, Rinpoche give me
some advice, you know what should I do? I want to make an appointment to
see you. He says, I don’t give appointments. I taught you lam rim for twelve
years, you do the right thing, you know. You figure it out. That’s why I taught
you for twelve years. All right. Page six, at the top. ‘See the deception as being
the four bodies and emptiness as the matchless protector’. This is supposed to
be the step on how to use problems as a spiritual path, okay. You know what the
deception is now. Deception means it looks like, if you lie you can get some
money; it looks like if you kill the roaches they’ll leave your apartment; it looks
like if you could get the guy in trouble at work everything would be alright for
you. That’s a deception. A negative action cannot lead to a positive result
according to Buddhism and according to Jesus and a lot of other people, okay.
Can’t do a bad thing and have a good thing happen from it. If you lie, someone
will lie to you in the future. It has nothing to do with getting the money or not
getting the money. Prove it. Because it doesn’t always work. Wake up. What
are the four bodies? He’s talking mainly about the Dharmakaya. What is the
Dharmakaya? The Buddha has four bodies, right. There’s the foxy body that stays
up in the paradise, white light, long black hair. I’d like … I’m just going to get
enlightened so I don’t have a bald spot anymore (laughter). Okay, I mean that’s
the first thing. Sending bodies all over the universe to whoever needs it. You
could look like a dog, you could look like a bridge, you could look like anything
– Nirmanakaya. So we have samboghakaya and then nirmanakaya, okay. The
paradise body and then the emanation body, okay. What’s a third.body? Their
omniscience, their state of mind. But when this text says four bodies, we’re
really talking about body number four which is? Dharmakaya. What is the
Dharmakaya? Hey, it’s the emptiness of the other three, okay. It’s the emptiness
of the other three. It’s the fact that the body you have now, and the mind you
have now, could have been that foxy paradise body. Could have been the body
that was emanated to thousands of planets at once. Could have been the
omniscience of a Buddha, if you had gotten your act together earlier. That’s the
emptiness of those thee bodies. You have those thee bodies, in a sense now,
because they’re empty. Your body can change to that body. Your mind can
change to that mind. And it’s the emptiness of that that makes it possible. That
is the Buddha nature. That is called {sang gye gi rik} sugatagharba. That is the
Buddha nature that you have. The fact that those are empty, okay. So what can
really protect you? What’s the real refuge? Emptiness. And that’s what the next
line means. You can bow down to paintings of the Buddha, won’t help you.
There were no more paintings of the Buddha in the world than in 5000 Tibetan
monasteries which got burnt to the ground. Didn’t protect them, okay. The
pictures cannot protect you. A million monks and nuns killed or forced to
disrobe. Wearing the robe doesn’t protect you, okay. It’s the emptiness that
protects you, understanding emptiness, okay. If you understand that your
world and your body and your mind are empty and that any bad thing that
comes to you is a projection of your own mind forced on you by your past
karma, what will be your natural reaction? I have to keep my vows now. I’ve
got to learn bodhisattva vows. I have to learn Pratimoksha vows. I have to learn
tantric vows. And keep them. And then I won’t have these problems. And then
the emptiness of the world will be my saviour because the fact that it’s blank and
what I see is projected by my mind that can save me. People ask me, what am I
supposed o think when the boss screams at me? First thing, emptiness. He
didn’t have to be screaming. He could have been coming in to give you a raise.
And he would have been if you’d kept your vows last week or something like
that, okay. Seriously. Emptiness is the only protection. That’s that line. That’s
the meaning of that line. Those are all the nasty lines, okay. You can figure out
the other lines I think, all right.
We’ll do some prayers and we’ll leave quickly because I’m a little bit over, okay.
[Prayer: Short Mandala]
[Prayer: Dedication]