ACI 16 (обзорный курс), Занятие 01 (прогон ГМР, Нью-Йорк 1999) — стенограмма

Class One




Okay, we’ll start. Welcome to the ninety-nine classes. I want to talk to you a
little bit about the class and then we’ll start.

In nineteen ninety-nine the goal is to review the last five or six years of classes
that we’ve had. My goal when I started, you know, when I started six years ago
was to take American people for the first time through the whole Geshe course.
This is the course that a Tibetan monk does for eighteen years and I thought,
maybe, we could do it in five or six years. I called it the ‘Five Year Course” for a
while and then it became clear that it wasn’t gonna finish. Anyway, so people in
this class have been through all the major subjects of Buddhism, the five great
books. Which is the Perfection of Wisdom, the Middle Way, Madhyamika,
Pramana or Logic and Perceptual Theory. They’ve been through Vinaya and
they’ve been through Abhidharma. And those are the five great subjects. Then
we threw in Lam Rim for free so there were six great subjects. And people have
been through those. The goal in ninety-nine is to review all of those courses.
That’s about three or four thousand pages of material that was translated for
those courses. You’ll be going through a three month course at the rate of one
every two nights, okay [laughs], all right, so necessarily, it’s gonna be packed
and I tried to select the most important things but I hate to leave things out. I’d
rather overwhelm you then leave things out. So it’s a lot, okay. Some people
told me they felt very relaxed because it was a review class [laughter] and then
Ora was trying to print out the reading which was too long to print out tonight
so you won’t get it tonight. It’ll be Tuesday. But it was too long and anyway I
think the first reading is seventy pages or something, okay. And this is gonna be
a kick-butt class, okay. The homework is the longest homework ever done, the
first one, okay. Seriously. [laughter] All right. And you’re gonna have to work
hard.

I wanna make one thing clear at the outset. I consider any person who makes it
through ninety-nine would make a pretty good teacher eventually of Buddhism.
So I want you to be, I want to go into my retreat feeling that you’re qualified and
that’s gonna mean feeding you a lot of stuff. You’re gonna have to work really
hard, okay. We had a rule in this class that was abused for several years that if
you missed two classes, two classes okay. If you miss three you can’t come back
until the next session which is in, I don’t know, June or something, okay.
Something like that. So, we’re going back to that rule very strictly. And I want
to make a pledge, okay. You cannot get into this class at seven o’clock if you
don’t have your homework from the last class, okay. So don’t even try, okay.
Stilwell’s gonna be there with a gun or something. [laughter] [laughs] And you
can’t get in. You won’t be able to get in, okay. Period. If you missed a class you
can bring last homework, right. See what I mean? But you can’t get in to this
class after tonight without your homework, all right. And you will have to take
a quiz. You’ll be breaking out into discussion groups at a certain point and if you
don’t have your quiz you’ll have to leave, okay. So, period. And I don’t care if
we lose thirty-five, I mean, seventy-five percent of the people. It’s okay. I’d
rather have ten people who really know their stuff and at least I know who they
are than have, you know, a hundred and fifty people, and I thought a lot about it
‘cos I’m gonna miss you guys [laughter] [laughs] you know. I feel better when
there’s a big group. I feel like I’m a success but I, on this one, I’m gonna do it
that way, okay. You must do the homework and it’s hard. It’s gonna be a lot,
okay, and you don’t get into class next Tuesday without this homework in your
hot little hand, okay. And, very clear about it, okay, from the beginning. And
I’ll lose, maybe, half of you. That’s okay. But the half that stay will be really
great. I encourage you to do it, okay. You’ll never get a chance like this again.
In nineteen ninety-nine you’ll be able to go through the whole Geshe course and
I don’t think you’ll get a chance like this again. I’m going on three-year retreat
after that. You will miss the classes and you’ll regret if you miss ninety-nine I
think. Ninety-nine will equip you to have a really good future in your life. And
if you miss it I think you’ll be sorry after about a year, you know. It’ll occur to
you that you really blew it, okay. So, I encourage you to try really hard.
[discussion of retreat / monastic university plans]
And I encourage you to do the work, okay. You’ll feel very good and you will
know Buddhism backwards and forwards. You will know everything about
Buddhism in this, in nineteen ninety-nine, if you really work hard. You’ll have a
very, very beautiful foundation for when you do your long retreat out in
Arizona, okay. All right.
This is auspicious: the emptiness of the light bulb. [laughter] Got one? All right.
Anyway, he’ll fix it. The first of the fifteen courses that we taught here in the last
six years was called ‘The Principal Teachings of Buddhism’. And this comes from
a very famous book. It’s actually only about three, four pages that were written
to one of his students by Je Tsongkapa. Je Tsongkapa is the teacher to the first
Dalai Lama. He wrote ten thousand pages of amazing Buddhist books. People
say he was taking dictation for Manjushri, which seems probable because no
human being could do that in sixty years, like he did. So, we’re gonna go
through, the first two sessions are gonna be the whole commentary to Je
Tsongkapa’s book. The book is called the ‘Three Principal Paths’ and I’ll write it
for you. Say {lam tso}[repeat] {nam sum}[repeat], {lam tso}[repeat] {nam sum}
[repeat], okay. The basic goal in this lifetime for you and, and the whole process
I’m trying to drag you through, is to see emptiness directly. On the day that you
see emptiness directly you directly perceive your own enlightenment. You
directly perceive the day that you will become a Buddha and you will be. You
directly perceive how long it will take. You directly perceive the Buddha, okay.
And after that night all questions are a moot point. After that moment, it takes
twenty minutes or so in deep meditation, that you see emptiness directly,
everything’s over with. You’re on your way out. Everything is totally different.
Your whole life is totally changed. You met an enlightened being. You know
they exist for the first time. You see your own enlightenment. You see how
many lifetimes it will take. You know everything that’s contained in the
Scriptures within twenty minutes, you know. Hundreds of thousands of pages
become totally transparent to you in, in twenty minutes. The whole point of
these courses and the whole point of retreats and, and, and meditating,
practicing, is to have that twenty minutes happen to you, okay. It can only be
triggered by intense study, okay. That’s just a Buddhist principle and anyone
who tells you different is not correct, okay. It can only be triggered by, studying
very intensely, deeply, the principles of emptiness and the things we’re going to
talk about tonight. So the purpose of studying what we’re going to study this
year is to get you ready to trigger that experience later when you get into deep
meditational states. Which is much better in Arizona. It’s quieter, okay. I don’t
think it’s easy to do in New York City. Possible, I think, but it’s very difficult,
okay. So the book we’re going to be studying the first two nights is a summary
of all the steps you have to take. {lam} means path. I said that in Brisbane and
everyone looked up at me. I said ‘path’ and they go and said ‘parth’ and I said,
oh [laughs], okay, path. {lam tso, tso} means principal or main, primary. People
mistranslate this word and call it ‘principle’, p-l-e. It doesn’t mean that, p-a-l,
means ‘primary’ path, okay, {lam tso}. {nam sum} means, the three, the three
different main paths, okay, the three main paths. In Buddhist philosophy a path
means a stage of realisation. For example, the day that you finally get true
disgust with this suffering of your life you will have reached the first of the five
stages of Buddhism. And that’s a {lam. You see what I mean? In other words,
it’s a mental condition. It’s not, it’s not like the, the path that lays ahead of you
or something like that. It’s a thought. It’s an attitude, okay. And when you
achieve it, it’s achieved in your mind. So the Three Principle Paths’, okay. This
book was written by, by the way, those of you who are new, you don’t have to
write the Tibetan on your homework, okay. You can do English. That’s fine.
Sooner or later you should learn the Tibetan. Say {Je}[repeat] {Tsongkapa}
[repeat], {Je Tsongkapa}[repeat]. Je Tsongkapa is the teacher of the first Dalai
Lama. Do we have another one? No. You’re so lucky.
 The teacher of the first Dalai Lama, and again, sort of a sidekick of Manjushri.
And some people say he was Manjushri. But anyway, he wrote an amazing
amount of things and he basically, he or his students, founded all of the great
monasteries of Lhasa. All the great monasteries of Central Tibet: Sera, Drepung
and Ganden. Also, Tashi Lhunpo. And his dates are 1357 to 1419, okay. You’re
gonna be getting a reading, hopefully, which is a commentary on this book. By
the way, this book is so popular that, almost every time the Dalai Lama comes to
teach somewhere, He’ll choose this book, okay. This book is about four pages
long. It was a letter of instruction written to one of his disciples who he said,
could you go out to East Tibet and found a hundred monasteries and come back
when you finish, you know. Like, and he did, okay. His name was Tsako
Wonpo. I’ll spell it for you, okay. T-s-a-k-o W-o-n-p-o, okay, Tsako Wonpo.
Tsako Wonpo means, the priest or the friar from Tsako. And he was a disciple of
Je Tsongkapa. You’re gonna be studying a commentary to that book by
Pabongka Rinpoche, okay. It’s P-a-b-o-n-g-k-a, p-a, Pabongka, I’m sorry, just
leave it Pabongka. P-a-b-o-n-g-k-a, okay. Pabongka Rinpoche. He’s famous for
writing a book that’s very popular in the west right now called ‘Liberation in the
Palm of your Hands’ or something like that, okay. And he was a teacher of our
root Lama, okay. He was a teacher of Khen Rinpoche, all right. Okay. His dates
are 1878 to 1941. He’s also the main teacher of the teacher of this Dalai Lama,
okay. So he’s your grandfather and he’s the Dalai Lama’s grandfather. All right.
So there’s one lama between us and Pabongka Rinpoche and there’s one lama
between His Holiness and Pabongka Rinpoche, okay. So, he taught the teacher
of the current Dalai Lama. And you’re studying this commentary. [student]
Trijang Rinpoche, yeah. Okay. I’m gonna talk a little bit about the three
principle paths and what they are. So the three ideas you have to get straight in
your mind if you’re gonna get enlightened. What does enlightened mean?
Yeah. [student] Oh, no, the commentary’s name is, we’ve translated it as “The
Principle Teachings of Buddhism”, okay. And that’s the contents of this little
book that we’ve, that you’ve seen. But we’re gonna give you the Tibetan and
the English put together. Okay. You’re gonna get selections from the whole
thing. We didn’t have time to do it for tonight. We’re gonna get it out on
Tuesday. But this is a book on the three principle paths and I wanted to go over
the three principle paths, okay. These are three spiritual states that you have to
get through in this lifetime if you want to get out of suffering, okay, if you want
to become a Buddha, all right. What does suffering mean? Very simply, if you
count up all the good things that have happened to you in this life, you know, if I
say, count your blessings, you know. And you say, oh, life’s not so bad. I had a
guy today arguing with me that life’s not so bad, you know. He’s the president
of this big company and we had this long debate. And, he invited me to come
and have a debate with him. And, and he said, life’s not so bad, you know. I got
money. I’m still healthy, you know, I’m not so old yet, you know. Not so bad,
you know. So, he’s counting the good things in his life., And this is: he’s the
head of a big company, he’s still pretty healthy, he has a good mind, he has a
good wife, his mother’s still alive although she’s senile, you know what I mean.
But he’s counting these things as the good things of his life. This is what he lives
for. This is why his life is not so bad. And, and it’s amazing that here’s an
intelligent man, sixty years old, fifty-five years old, intelligent, not stupid, owns a
big company, sensitive, spiritual, spiritually-minded and it doesn’t occur to him
that, that his fate inevitably is to get old, die, lose all the money he’s worked for
every single day, lose all that property. Do you know how long it takes for your
kids to sell your house? [laughter] [laughs] You know. It’s amazing, you know.
It’s incredible. All that equity that you’ve built up in so many years of work, you
know. It doesn’t usually take more than, like, a month, you know, and then all
those years of work are just cancelled. They blow the money usually. You
know that. And, it’s all over. You will lose your health inevitably. You will lose
your intelligence. I have people say, I don’t care if I get sick as long as I can think
straight. Well you lose that just after that, you know what I mean? Like, if you
live long enough, you will be some mindless person in a nursing home. And, if
you don’t think so, go to a nursing home. That’s why nobody wants to go to a
nursing home.         Nobody, nobody, nobody goes to nursing homes unless
grandma’s still there and she still has some money to inherit, you know what I
mean. But nobody likes to go ‘cos it’s so depressing ‘cos that’s what you’re
future is if you live long enough, you know. So, everything you’ll lose. Your
body, your mind, your money, your friends. Shortly after that you lose your
name. People don’t remember what you looked like. People come with your
picture, they’re cleaning out the house, second generation, and they’re, like,
whose picture is this? You say, I don’t know, throw it out, you know. And they
throw it out. And they don’t even remember your name anymore. And that’s
it. You won’t remember your name either. You won’t stop. Your mind will go
on and, and you won’t recall what your name was. And you won’t be able to
remember what you looked like. And you’ll be in some other realm. And that’s,
that’s what you have to look forward to and nothing else. That’s the, that’s the,
it’s your career, that’s the way it’s going, you know. Where did you think? I
mean, it’s gonna stop after the vice presidency, you know? Is it gonna stop after
ten years and just stop there and you’ll stay the same age or something like that?
I mean, you have to look ahead a little bit. So the first of the three paths is to
admit that.      It’s called {nyenjung}, okay, renunciation.    Okay.       The, the
knowledge, that this is what your life is going to be, okay. And by the way,
there’s a principle behind it, which is karma, okay. All things wear out. Why?
Because all things are produced by karma, okay. So, like, I used to get upset
when my girlfriends started to change, in high school, you know. At first they
seemed so nice. After six months they seemed like monsters, you know. And I
thought it was me, you know. Luckily, I found out. It’s just your karma. Any
good thing you get wears out because your karma wears out. And you can’t
keep anything, okay. The things that have produced your life, the things that
has produced your face and your money and your job and your family, is
wearing out as we speak. And it just wears out. Okay. And then you lose them.
And it happens with everything. So to get that idea in your mind, when you
really get that idea in your mind, you are on the first path. I think everyone in
this room has some kind of level of renunciation. Everybody here in this room
is here for some kind of reason, you know. The best Buddhists I know, they had
some kind of terrible death in the family or something like that. Someone they
know got sick, they were in a terrible accident, they lost somebody else. Almost
all the great Buddhists I know are, are working off of that. And oftentimes I
don’t think it’s conscious. It’s subconscious, you know. Like, they start to get
interested in spiritual things early because of some disaster in their life. Lots of
old people get interested in spiritual things and you see old people in churches
and synagogues because they know the score, you know. They’re not fooling
themselves any more. But usually, for a young person to do it, is hard. And,
and I think you have it to some extent. You have to try to cultivate it more and
get it stronger to the point where you’re not fooling yourself anymore and you
go after the big time stuff, you know. You go after becoming enlightened. And
then your body changes. And we don’t call it karma anymore. Things that are
producing your body and your mind and your face and your identity are
something different. And they don’t wear out. And your body, your whole life
changes. You can become a being who doesn’t have to go through all those
things I said. But first you have to know that not to put your effort into this, this
worldly thing that’s not going to work. It just doesn’t work. The best you can
do is die rich, okay. It just doesn’t work, okay. And to admit it. I mean it’s very
logical. It’s very hard to do. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a job. You
should have an honest living. That’s part of Buddhism. I’m not saying you
shouldn’t have money. If you have lots of money you can help more people.
It’s a good thing, okay. I’m just saying, this is not the main things you want to
work for. You want to use your resources, your life, your health, your money,
your intelligence, put them into something useful like, like getting enlightened.
Which, you can do, okay. A certain number of people in this room will do it in
this lifetime. And you can. Lots of American people, I had some guy arguing
with me today, you know, oh, Americans can’t do it, you know. Only Milarepa
and Moses and people like that. We’re just normal American people. Forget it.
You know, the beauty of Tibetan Buddhism is it’s an instruction book. If you
follow the instructions you get enlightened. Any normal American can do it.
Seriously. Conversely, if you don’t do it you won’t get enlightened. And you’ll
be in the obituaries, you know. So, it’s your choice, you know, really. Okay.
I’m gonna write the word for renunciation in Tibetan. And this is the first of the
principle paths. Say {nyenjung}[repeat] {nyenjung}[repeat]. {nyenjung} is the
Tibetan word for ‘renunciation’. I don’t know if renunciation is such a good
word. When I hear of renunciation I think of, you know, Christian monks in the
Middle Ages in a little cell or something like that. It’s not like that. You can be a
businessman in a big company and working a normal job and still have very
good renunciation. Renunciation means I recognise that it’s` only the spiritual
things that are important, you know. I recognise that although I can have a
good job and a good family and everything else, I have to find the solution for
those problems in this lifetime. I have to find that out before I die. And I can.
And that’s renunciation. {nyenjung ….} means, the day that you think, day and
night, about getting out of suffering and you don’t worry anymore about good
things in this life so much, then you’ve got renunciation, okay. So, can you want
money? Of course. Bodhisattvas want lots of money. They can do more things
for people and they use every penny for other people. That’s fine. Should you
want money for yourself to save and to store up, to have and to use it for
yourself or something like that? No, stupid. You’ll die. And, and the kids’ll
spend it, okay.        Don’t kid yourself, you know what I mean.            So that’s
renunciation, okay. The Dalai Lama was the richest person in Tibet. His house
had four hundred rooms in it, you know. Did He have renunciation? Yeah.
Okay. Because he didn’t, he used to say, the last Dalai Lama said, I only own two
things. I own my bell and my dorje, you know. I own these two things. I don’t
own anything else. I don’t have anything else. The rest belongs to other people.
It’s not mine, okay. And that’s like your attitude. Okay. All right. The second
path. Say {jangchub}[repeat] {kye}[repeat] {sem}[repeat], {jangchub kye}[repeat]
{sem}[repeat]. {jangchub} means ‘bodhi’, okay, Buddha, bodhi, okay. It means
enlightenment, okay, {jangchub}; {sem} means mind, okay.                Some people
translate this as ‘bodhi mind’.       The Sanskrit is ‘bodhichitta’, okay.       Not
‘bodhicitta’, okay, bodhichitta. What does bodhichitta mean? Very simply, the
wish to get enlightened yourself so that you can really help other people, okay.
It’s much easier to help other people when you can see the next three thousand
years clearly in your mind. This is what a Buddha can do. It’s much easier to
help other people if you can read their minds and see their future for the next
zillion years, okay. Very efficient. Much better than us struggling. It’s much
easier to help people if you can emanate trillions of bodies on trillions of planets
at the same time to help people, okay. So the idea is get thee first and then help
other people, okay. The job that you swear to do when they swear you in as a
bodhisattva is, I will to the best of my ability reach total ecstasy and paradise as
quickly as possible so I can help other people, okay. That’s your promise, you
know. This whole idea that bodhisattvas wander around life and, and wait to get
enlightened so they can help other people is a, is a Dharma rumour. It’s not true,
okay. No such thing. I mean, are you gonna wait to get enlightened so you, are
you gonna wait to have a trillion bodies to help other people and wander around
in one and try to help people like that? It doesn’t make sense. You see what I
mean?      The day you become a Buddha you’re able to show yourself as
thousands of different people in New York City, you know. Half of the people
on the subway today could’ve been enlightened beings trying to teach you
something.      No problem at all. It could’ve been one enlightened being
emanating that many bodies, okay. So a bodhisattva’s job is to get to that point
as fast as possible. That point happens to be total bliss and ecstasy. So, you
know, why not cover two things at once. You help everybody else and you
become total, you reach a state of permanent, total ecstasy. I had a big debate
with some people today. They said, oh, that sounds very selfish. I say, come on,
what are you thinking? What are you thinking, you know, you should, this
Christian thing where you beat yourself with a stick or something like that? I
mean, the best thing you can do for other people is to get enlightened and to get
to a Buddha paradise. It happens to be the best thing you can do for yourself,
okay. Now, just because it happens to be the best thing you can do for yourself
doesn’t make it ignoble. It’s a very noble thing. In Buddhism the best thing you
can do for other people is to become totally happy yourself and then teach other
people to do it, okay. And don’t think any, don’t get that baggage from the
Middle Eastern religions, okay. It’s not like that. You don’t have to suffer to
help other people, okay. You can go to pure, perfect enlightenment in your
Buddha paradise and be very, very, more capable of helping other people. So
bodhichitta is that; {jangchub kyi sem} is that. People translate it as ‘bodhi mind’
and then some people think, oh, it means, the mind of a Buddha. Is it or not?
No, it’s the wish to get enlightened, okay. It’s the intention to get enlightened.
It’s not the mind of a Buddha, okay. It’s about a, it’s about a zillion years before
that, okay [laughs] if you don’t use Tantra, okay. I mean it’s a long time before
that. Seriously, okay. So it’s not a Buddha’s mind, okay. That comes later. This
is the thought, I want to become a Buddha so I can really help other people,
okay. That’s, that’s what bodhichitta means. That’s what bodhi mind means,
okay.
The third of the three principle paths. Say {yangdak pe}[repeat]{tawa}[repeat],
{yangdak pe}[repeat]{tawa}[repeat]. {yangdakpa} means, ‘pure’, okay, correct;
{tawa} means, your worldview, the way you view the world, okay. The way
you think about the world. And this is the third principle path, okay. The third
path, the third level of realisation that you must get to in this life, is to
understand emptiness. And that’s what correct view means. You have to
understand emptiness, okay. {yangdak pe tawa} means, a worldview based on
an understanding of emptiness, okay; a way of seeing things based on
emptiness, okay. We’ll talk a lot about emptiness in the next class, okay. I’m
going to try to cover it now. Had a big fight with this guy today, you know.
[laughter] No, we had a, this guy purposely came to one of my classes. He’s
very wealthy and he’s very interested in Buddhism. And he says, I’m gonna
argue with you. I’m gonna fight with you. I’m gonna debate with you. And
brought a Tibetan scholar from Virginia just to back him up, you know.
[laughter] And I said, okay, we’ll take him on, you know. This is the old
Buddhist way of ancient India, you know. We’ll kick arse. We’ll see who can
out-debate the other, you know. He got on one side of the table, I got on the
other side of the table. And he starts asking questions. He said, something like, I
said, what do you think are the causes for an airplane crash, you know. He’s
talking about airplane crashes. I said, what do you think are the causes? He said,
oh, the, the wing gets weak or the, or you know, the tyre blows out or the
engine stops or something like that. I said, are there any other causes there? He
says, no. Then I said, so, so some people get in a plane and it falls down and
some people don’t get in a plane and it doesn’t fall down, okay. Is there a reason
for that? Is that an event? And he says, yes it’s an event; some people got in and
some people didn’t get in. Some people’s plane fell down and some people’s
plane didn’t fall down. So I said, is that an event? He said, yes, it’s an event. I
said, does it have a cause? He said, yes it has a cause. All events, all things have
a cause. So then I said, why did some people go down and other people didn’t
go down? Oh, their wing fell off and their engine stopped. I said, no, no, no, we
finished that already, you see what I mean? We already talked about how the
plane fell down. You didn’t tell me why the plane fell down. Get it? You see
what I mean? The, the, the, that that plane falls down is due to a bad engine or,
or bad wing or something like that. But why are these people in the plane and
those people are not in the plane? You see it’s a different question. You’re not
saying why did the plane fall down you’re saying why were these people on the
plane and other people weren’t on the plane. And you don’t ask that question
anymore. People don’t ask that question anymore. They just say, oh, it was bad
luck, you know. It’s just random, you know. They, they bought tickets on
Icelandic Air and they bought tickets on Kuwati Air and, you know, they had a
problem. You say, but why did they go to that travel agent? They say, come on,
you can’t answer those things. You say, is it an event? They say, yes. Then you
say, so it has a cause, right? They say, yes. So, it’s not random, right? Oh, oh,
no, no, some things are random and some things have causes, you know. And,
and it’s like that, you know. Worldview of emptiness is different, you know.
The worldview of emptiness is explaining all of the events. And then you have
to study it. And you can’t be a Buddhist if you don’t study worldview, if you
don’t study emptiness. Why do things happen? Why are you here? How did
you get here? What, what’s going on here? Can you become a Buddha or not?
Is there future life or not? Or are you just gonna live here and die in New York
City? You know what I mean? Is that, how’s it gonna go? And, and are there
reasons for that and can you change them? Okay. So that’s worldview, okay.
Those are the three principle paths.
These three principle paths turn you into an enlightened being. They make you
change. And anybody in this room can change, you know. This guy that I’m
talking about today, it’s still fresh in my mind. It was, like, a four hour, five hour
debate. He owns, like, six hundred rare Tibetan paintings all over his house.
They’re hanging up all over the house. So I said, what are those paintings of?
And he said, oh, this is Manjushri, this is Chenresig, this is Vajrapani, you know,
this is so and so, you know. So I said, so are they, are they real people or are
they just pictures, you know? He said, they’re just pictures, you know. So I said,
yeah, so there’s nobody like that, right? There’s no person that was Manjushri
and there’s no person who was Avalokiteshvara. He said, no, no, no they’re just
pictures, you know. So I said, why do you keep them here, you know, what’s
the point? Why do you put up these pictures and you don’t put up other
pictures, you know. And he says, well they’re so beautiful, you know, they’re
just so nice. They’re so special, you know. I said, look, get it, these are real
people, you know. They exist. They lived. They still live. You can be like that.
That’s the whole point of painting them, you know. You don’t have to live like
this president of an insurance company and die somewhere and have more
expensive coffin than other people. You know what I mean? You can, you can
be those people in the paintings all over your house, you know. That’s, why did
people paint them, you know. And he’s, like, wow, I didn’t think of that, you
know. And, so how do you connect those people to the three principle paths?
What’s the connection between an enlightened being like Manjushri and the
three principle paths? I’m gonna get into that,okay. To get into that you have to
break down an enlightened being into two parts. What? Physical part and
mental part. Okay, we’re gonna talk about the mental part and the physical part
of a Buddha. They call them the two bodies of a Buddha. It’s a misnoma. Okay.
It’s not like they have to buy four pairs of socks or [laughter], okay. ‘Body’ in
this case, means part, okay. So when they talk about two bodies or three bodies
or four bodies of a Buddha, they mean the two parts or the three parts or the
four parts of a Buddha. So we’re gonna talk, we’re gonna reduce it to the two
parts of a Buddha: a physical part and a mental part. And we’re gonna try to
connect the three paths to that. Here’s the first one. Say {suk ku}[repeat] {suk
ku}[repeat]. By the way, in Sanskrit, and I don’t wanna load you up with a lot of
Sanskrit, I don’t care if it’s English, Sanskrit, Tibetan. To me it doesn’t matter at
all. Okay. If you know what it is who cares what you call it. You can call it
boogaloo, okay. It happens to be, but I wanna put it ‘cos you might hear it a lot,
it’s called rupakaya. What will you look like when you get enlightened? How is
it different from your body now? This body is born to die, okay. This body is, is
a bunch of flesh, bones, blood. Looks pretty solid until you get cancer and then
you start looking at in a different way, okay. It’s a big bag of time bombs
waiting to happen. If one thing doesn’t kill you something else will and you’re
already carrying it around with you. The seeds for your death are already
parked in your body underneath your skin. It’s no beautiful machine of nature,
okay. It’s an accident waiting to happen. And, and someday, if something
outside you doesn’t kill you, it will kill you, okay. One of the organs will stop.
The organs, in Tibetan medicine, are working against each other. The heart is
doing one function that works against the lung. The lungs are doing a function
that works against the stomach. And, anytime one of them gets the upper hand,
if, if, if you go out of balance, you’ll die, okay. If the heart gets too strong, if the
lungs fill up with water, if the stomach does something, they’ll actually kill you.
If you don’t get killed from the outside you’ll get killed from the inside. That’s a
human body. That’s the miracle of the human body, okay. An enlightened
beings body is different, okay. Your human body has a very subtle core in it
which is made up of what we call, you know, charkas, winds and drops, okay.
Tantric system. You have an inner, invisible, physical body going on with your
body now, okay. You can’t, if you cut a person open, you don’t see it, okay. In
the process of Tantric practice you actually transform your body and this body
starts to change into a Tantric deity’s body, okay. So it’s not like you’re just
sitting there trying to picture Manjushri or, I mean, the practice is not to sit there
and try to, try to imagine a guy with four heads and six arms and purple and
green and red and all that. It’s not the point. At some point in your spiritual
career, due to your good karma, due to keeping your vows, due to acting kindly
towards other people, due to compassion, your own body will start to change.
And it just goes through a transformation. It’s very gradual. Rome wasn’t built
in a day. And it’s very noticeable, okay. It starts to come in, kick in, and then
you get excited ‘cos you see it happening. You start to get younger, you become
more strong and then the body actually changes into, into a body which is, you
can see it and you can touch it but it’s like light. It’s,like, made of light. And
that’s, you can call it Angel’s body or Tantric Angel’s body, it doesn’t matter. At
some point your body will change. And that’s and you can do it in one lifetime if
you practice Tantra properly, okay. And that’s a {suk ku}, okay. That’s the
physical body of a Buddha. One millisecond after you reach that you reach the
ability to emanate other bodies in other worlds and all over the place, okay.
Every person you’ve ever met in New York City could have been a Buddha’s
emanation. Could have been the emanation of one single Buddha. The family
you grew up with, all the kids at high school that used to pick on you and your
girlfriends or boyfriends, could all be the same person, okay. Buddhas have this
ability to do that and they do that kind of stuff. They’re very patient, all right.
So when we talk about the physical part of a Buddha there’s two parts. There’s
this body that’s made of light and, and, and you can reach it and you will reach it.
And then there’s this other bodies that they’re emanating out like movies and
different people are seeing them, okay. And they have that ability. That’s the
rupakaya.
Second part of a Buddha. Say {chu ku}[repeat], {chu ku}[repeat]. In Sanskrit
{chu} means ‘dharma’ and {ku}means ‘kaya’.              So you may have heard
‘dharmakaya’ in the Sanskrit, okay. {chu}is a general dharma means ‘thing’,
okay, stuff, thing, phenomenon, {chu} dharma means, let’s call it dharma, okay.
It’s easier. Okay. Dharmakaya means dharma body, your dharma body. Now,
what’s your dharma body made of? Two things, all right, two things. What’s
left of a Buddha after we’ve covered their body by the way? There’s their mind,
very simply, omniscient, okay. You can see everything in the universe that ever
is, will be, or was, everywhere in the universe, in one moment, okay. So the idea
that bodhisattvas wait to get to enlightenment ‘cos they’re compassionate is
crazy. Okay. Once you get enlightened you know the problems for the next
fifty thousand years for every person on this planet directly. So you can help
them. You can really help them. Okay. That’s the dharmakaya. Is there any
other part of this person that we left out? Their emptiness, okay, part number
three. Yeah, they usually lump that in with the dharmakaya, okay. The
emptiness of the Buddha’s what? Body and mind. Okay. Once you got the
Buddha’s body and then you glue on the Buddha’s mind and then you throw in
the emptiness of the Buddha’s mind and the emptiness of the Buddha’s body,
you got the whole Buddha, okay. So, add dharmakaya and rupakaya and you
come out with a Buddha. And that’s all a Buddha is, okay. What’s the emptiness
of the Buddha’s body for example, okay. What’s the, very briefly, what, what do
you see here? I mean, it’s a hand, okay. Like, you’re on a karmic level, as am I,
to see a hand when I hold this cylinder up, you see a hand, okay. If you had
worse karma and if I had worse karma what would you see? A dog’s leg, okay
and some, some cloth, okay. If you had much better karma what would you
see? Like a deity’s arm, like golden light and can’t be cut or hurt or won’t get
old, won’t have freckles or hair, okay. And, and {.. backchak me pa dang}, it’s
said in the Abhisamkara, you don’t have to have any more freckles, okay.
[laughter] [laughs] So, so you’ll have it, okay. The emptiness of my arm is that it
doesn’t have any nature of its own. If your karma was better you’d be seeing
Manjushri up here. If your karma was worse, you know, I’d be up here playing
some music for you or something, okay. And your karma is somewhere in
between. All right. And that’s all. I don’t have an arm. I have a cylinder. How
you see it is up to your karma, okay. That’s the, that’s the emptiness of a
Buddha’s body. Yeah. [student] See a what as a dog? [student] [laughter]
[laughs] [student] Yeah, you see it’s kinda tricky ‘cos the minute you say ‘see a
dog as a dog’ the first dog doesn’t exist. Yeah. So, yeah, it would be your bad
karma on the assumption that a dog can’t teach as much as I can, okay. [laughs]
[laughter] It may not be true. All right. Okay, so those are the two parts of a
Buddha. Now, what have those got to do with the three principle paths? This
physical body of a Buddha you can get if you get really good at path number
one and path number two, okay, one and two. Which, if you remember, were
what? Path number one? Think of path as spiritual level. You have to get to
renunciation. Sooner or later you have to figure out that your whole life up ‘til
now has been meaningless. And all the stuff you’ve ever worked to do,
everything you ever got up for in the morning, was something that you’re
gonna lose in a few weeks or months or years anyway. What’s the point, you
know? I admire those people that sit in bed all day depressed, you know. They,
they understood. They got it, you know. They’re not crazy. They got it. Now
they should get up and do something about it. That’s another thing. Number
two is, is bodhichitta, okay, is, is, is ultimate compassion for other people. Hey, if
this is gonna happen to me, it’s gonna happen to every single person I bumped
into today on the street. It’s a bunch of skeletons walking around New York
City. They’re just skeletons waiting to lay down, you know. I mean, start to go
out and see that, you know, on the street. You, you get irritated when
somebody bumps up against you. But look down Fifth Avenue, you know, and
see thousands of heads bobbing up and down and realise that every one of them
is going to die shortly and you won’t feel like that. Every one of them is in your
same position. We’re all gonna die. I was on an airplane one time. They told us
it was going to crash. We took off all our jewellery. We had to take our shoes
off so we could run faster. They flew around in a circle for an hour and a half so
the fuel would be used up because they said the landing gear don’t work, you
know, and a certain number of you are gonna get hurt, you know. And you had
an hour and a half of good death meditation, you know, like. And, I’ll tell you,
the sweetest thing was that every one started to bond together, like, it was the
weirdest thing. Like, we didn’t know if we were gonna live for another half
hour or what and everyone was helping each other and people were hugging
each other and weeping and, and, and loving, truly loving each other. It was the
most extraordinary thing, you know. And, but it’s like that all the time. Your
life is like that. The whole thing is like, every one in this room is gonna die if
they don’t practice well they’re all gonna die. So why worry about somebody
bumping you on the arm, you know? This guy’s a walking skeleton, you know.
This guy’s dead in a few years or a few weeks or maybe tomorrow, so what’s
the point? And then there’s some kind of empathy, okay. Those two thoughts
in your mind create your physical Buddha’s body, okay. Get used to that idea.
Okay. And if you study Tantra, which you must eventually, you must, the
process is very beautiful. Because the winds, the inner winds and the mind are
linked together, then the more good thoughts you have, the more your body
starts to change. It’s very interesting, okay. If you have true compassion and
true renunciation it affects the winds running through your channels and that
can trigger an enlightened being’s body. And that’s the whole point of Tantra,
okay. That’s the whole, the whole point of it is to do that. The more you can
fight {..} in Tantra. Every time you have a victory over some kind of normal
thought and start to think of everyone as being sweet fellow human sufferers,
you know, your own body will start to change, okay. Every time you have that
kind of thought something happens within your channels. And if you keep it
upover a long period of time you actually change into an enlightened being. So
you wanna know how to cure your health problems, you know, these are the
two things. And they really work, okay. I mean, even if you just get a little bit
your body will be much lighter, much stronger. And if you get really good at it,
it’ll transform into, into a Tantric deity’s body. And that’s the whole point of
practising Tantra, okay. {chu ku} is brought about by the third principle path,
which is what? Correct view. Like, get it, you know. Why do, why do planes
fall down? Oh, the bolt fell off the number three engine. Don’t give me a stupid
answer. Why did the bolt fall off the number three engine? The guy forgot to
check it. Yeah, yeah. Why did he forget to check it? You know what I mean? I
mean, what is the real reason why things happen? Okay. And you gotta study
that, all right. If you study that long enough your brain will transform into an
enlightened being’s mind, okay. And it will. And even as you get closer to it it’s
very cool. You start to see things. You start to understand things. It’s
unbelievable. It’s unbelievable. Like, things you never dreamed of. All the
things you read about in the Bible when you were a kid really happen to people,
okay. It’s just nobody’s tried it lately, all right [laughter] and it works. All those
things work. All those things happen, okay. They will happen to you, you
know, all the miracles, things like that. Being able to see deep things, being able
to see, there’s a whole world that you can’t see right now ‘cos your mind is not
used to it yet. If you practice you can, this is about, you know, two percent of
the world, what you see so far. There’s ninety-eight percent there you never
saw. And if you start to study emptiness you can see those things. It is easy to
see your future lives, you know. It’s easy to see the day of your enlightenment.
You can, everyone in this room, can do it. You just have to study emptiness
seriously and you have to meditate seriously, okay. So, that’s the connection
between the three principle paths and the two bodies of a Buddha, okay. Oh, we
got time for one more. Let me see. So there’s a question here. Is there any
relationship between these three principle paths and Tantric practice, you know?
I had a lady come up to me and say, you know, Geshe Michael, take me in a
room, give me a secret practice, you know. I said, okay, you know. I took her
in a room and said, here it is, you know, the book you started out with six years
ago on the three principle paths. And she got angry, you know. She actually got
angry and she said, don’t teach me this off the shelf Dharma stuff, you know. I
want a deeper practice, you know. I want something like Mahamudra or
something sexy like that, you know. And I said, you didn’t get it, you know.
You don’t get it. Practice these three things well and you don’t need a Tantric
initiation. Get it? I mean, you’ll be seeing Vajrayogini in the flesh, sitting next to
you, know what I mean. You’ll meet her one night walking down Second
Avenue and Sixth Street, okay. [laughs] You know what I mean? And she
[unclear] good to see a Vajrayogini practitioner, you know, in the East Village, all
right and thankyou. And you’re, like, wow, you know. If you keep these three
principle paths, you know, Buddhism 101, Lam Rim, study it well, keep it well,
you will be in a Tantric realm before you can say, I don’t know, Vajrayogini,
okay. [laughs] I’m not kidding. And, conversely, impossible to get there
without these three things, you know, impossible, totally impossible. You can
go to, you know, open up a New Age magazine, you know, twenty-four Lamas,
highest lineage from z-z-z, you know, teaching sixteen tantric initiations today;
bring forty-eight dollars, you know. And you go there and they’re all wearing
these special hats and the only one who can ring the bell in that way and
everything else and you get this initiation. If you don’t have these three things
absolutely nothing will happen. I promise you. I’ve met Americans who have
been trying to do that for twenty years and they didn’t get anywhere and they
know it, you know. It doesn’t work like that, you know. You have to develop
an insight [unclear]. You have to develop this insight. If you do then, then those
things can happen. Then those tantric initiations can have their affect, okay. If
you take a tantric initiation, you don’t have these three trainings in your heart,
and in particular, you don’t have the tantric vows. I met very few Americans
who when they got their tantric initiations were even taught the vows. If you
don’t know the vows and you don’t know the morality of tantra it’s impossible
for it to work. It can’t work. It’s impossible. If you don’t have these three
principle paths, these dumb off the shelf Buddhism 101 Lam Rim, you can’t,
won’t, nothing will ever work. Impossible. Okay.
So that’s the connection, which to state it again is this: if you practice these three
basic attitudes properly you can almost automatically enter a Tantric realm. If
you don’t practice these three, you can forget entering a Tantric realm no matter
how many holy initiations you have and stuff like that. Got to have these three,
okay. It’s what drives enlightenment. It’s what drives the tantric process. Yeah.
[student] Yeah. [student] Yeah, yeah. [student] Yeah, he said , Mahamudra
really consists of the second and third paths and that’s exactly true, okay.
Roughly. Okay.
Number nine. Should we take a break or not? What time you got? [students]
Hang on. Let me see. [laughs] We’ll do half of the next question, okay.
I think, one of the most important things from the first course was the ten
qualities of a real lama, you know. People are always coming to me and saying,
you know, I wanna have my own Lama. And I say, well you gotta find them.
And they say, well what am I supposed to look for? And I say, well all the
Scriptures have ten, what do you call, qualifications of a Lama, okay. They gotta
have these ten things. So if you’re wondering if you should take a person as
your Lama and you’re thinking of going out and finding your own Lama, which
you must do, okay. One of the things about tantric practice also is that you must
have your own Lama. You must have a Lama that you are in close contact with
and that, and that, who can bring you to that place. You must have a human
being to bring you there, okay. A book is not enough, never was. Quotation
from the current class, you can read it in the reading, you know. Never
happened before, never will happen. You must have a being who possess ten
qualities and you must make an intimate relationship with them, okay. So I’m
gonna give you the ten, ten qualities. And I think, if you’re gonna teach
Americans, this is one of the most important things you can teach them. How
do you recognise an authentic lama, okay? You go find an unauthentic Lama
and you have a lot of suffering, okay. I have a friend now who’s in jail due to
the blessings of an unauthentic lama, okay, for the next three years, all right,
very bad. You have to be very careful with your spiritual real estate, who you
let walk on it, you know what I mean. Check them out and make them pass
certain tests in your mind. And here are ten qualities that they have to have.
Say {dulwa}[repeat]; {dulwa} means they are very good at practising the first of
the three trainings, extraordinary trainings. This is morality, okay, an ethical
way of life. [cut]
[end side A]
[side B]
Are they sensitive not to kill things? Are they sensitive about stealing things?
Do they avoid sexual misconduct? Do they avoid lying, other bad parts of
speech? Are they people who need a lot of physical wealth or money or things
like that? Or are they people who’ve learned simplicity and can keep their
morality? Do they keep their bodhisattva morality? You know, is their whole
life dedicated to helping other people? Do they keep their tantric morality? You
know, are they using special methods to reach enlightenment quickly so they
can help other people, you know? Are, is this person keeping those kinds of
morality or not? Check them out, okay.
Second one. Say {shiwa}[repeat], {shiwa}[repeat]; {shiwa} means, oh by the way,
{dulwa} means, ‘controlled’, but now you know what it really means: keeping
their morality. All the way from what we call Pratimoksha morality up to
Tantric morality, okay. {shiwa} means ‘at peace’, peace. They have found peace.
This is a code word for a person who can really meditate well, okay. That’s the
second quality that you’re looking for. Do they have the extraordinary training
of meditative concentration? Are they able to meditate deeply? Are they able,
do they know how to meditate? Do they know how to teach meditation? Do
they meditate? Do they go into deep meditation? Okay. You wanna find a
person like that. Second quality.
People ask me, how do you know, you know? Hey, your life’s at stake, okay. I
mean, a barber, the worst they can do is mess up your hair a little bit, right.
Doctor can cut the wrong blood vessel and kill you. A bad guru can wipe out
your happiness for several thousand years, okay, if you believe in future lives.
So, you, you have to check them out as much as your able, okay.
Say {nye shiwa}[repeat], {nye shiwa}[repeat]; have they attained the
extraordinary training of wisdom? Meaning, do they understand emptiness and
karma? Okay. Or do they think that aeroplanes fall down because the guy
forgot to tighten a screw, okay? All right.
Say {yunden}[repeat] {hlagpa}[repeat]; {yunden} means ‘spiritual qualities’,
{hlagpa} means ‘better than’. Better than whom? Their students, all right. You
gotta find a person who’s at a higher level. When I was in high school I played
tennis, okay. And my coach had a rule, during the season, we could never play
with someone who was worse than us. It was very interesting. He would never
let us play with girls, okay, not that they weren’t better. But anyway, we, you
know, we were always supposed to play against someone who was better that
us. And, and it’s the same thing with spiritual things. The teacher should be
someone who’s obviously got a lot more experience, a lot more knowledge, a lot
more spiritual savvy, then you have so far. And you have to seek out people
like that, okay, who are very, very highly qualified compared to you. Don’t put
yourselves in the hands of a person who’s just starting out or something like
that, okay. This has to be a person who has an extraordinary amount of the
qualities that you’re looking for and much more than you have, okay.
Okay, number five. Say {tsun che}[repeat]; {tsun che} means, {tsun} means
‘effort’, okay. What does effort mean in Buddhism? Joy about doing good
things. Like, you’ve gotta find a teacher who they can’t think of anything better
they liked to do than teach you, you know. They just love to do it, you know.
They get excited about it, they spend all their money to do it, you see what I
mean. Someone who really, really enjoys teaching, really, really enjoys helping
you. And someone who takes joy in it, okay. They want to work for you, okay,
free. I would stick that in there, okay. I mean, I’ve never had a teacher, there
are no teachers at Sera Monastery who get paid. Dig that? Okay. They’re all
doing it for free. And they support their students. When you take a student in
the major monasteries, Gelugpa monasteries, you’re required to feed them and
to house them yourself, okay. That’s the contract that you make with a student,
okay. And that’s the beauty of our lineage I think. Dharma should be free and,
and a teacher should just be really thrilled to teach it to you and happy to give it
to you, okay. Like that, you have to try to find someone like that, okay.
Number six. You will get cookies, [laughter] after ten, okay, after number ten.
Someone has to bring me some, okay. [student] Sorry? [student] Yeah, sugar-
free.
Say {lung kyi}[repeat] {..}[repeat]; {lung kyi} means ‘scriptural knowledge’, {..}
means ‘rich’, big bucks. This person has to be, have a big toolbox. They have to
be very, very rich in Scriptural knowledge. They have to know the Scriptures
well. They have to know the holy books well, okay. They have to have a very
wide variety of knowledge in all the great subjects of Buddhism, okay. They
have to have really studied intensely for a long time, okay, so they have all this
stuff ready to help you with, okay.
Say {..} [repeat] {..}[repeat]; {den nyi} means shunyata or emptiness, okay,
emptiness. {den nyi} means, emptiness. {rab ..} means they must have perceived
it. This, I think, is the most important qualification of all, okay. If you can find a
Lama who has seen emptiness directly it’s about ten thousand times better, ten
thousand times better than someone who has not, okay. There’s no substitute
for it. It’s like trying to learn swimming from someone who hasn’t swum. You
see what I mean? You want to see emptiness directly in this life. Everything’s
over the moment you go through that twenty minutes. You are forever
changed. You see your own enlightenment directly. You know how long it will
take. You see your future lives. You see Buddhas. You, all your efforts should
be directed towards this one goal. You need someone who’s done it before to
explain it to you, okay. Much better if you can find someone who has gone
through it and who has done all the steps to explain to you how you can do it,
okay. Those people are extremely rare, okay, extremely rare. If there are a
handful on the planet at any time it’s good times, okay. Extremely rare to find
someone like that, okay. So the text says, if you can’t find one, then someone
who has good Scriptural knowledge or, or good intellectual knowledge of
emptiness. But, but no comparison, okay. It’s on the order of a million to one if
they have seen emptiness directly themselves. Which means, they are shortly
going to become enlightened anyway. You should try to find a person like that.
You must try to find a person like that, okay.
Did you have a question? [student] [laughs] How do you know how to
recognise it, okay. Couple of things, okay. A person who has seen emptiness
directly will not admit it directly. Period. It’s part of etiquette, the protocol of
Aryas that they will not admit it directly. Okay. It’s just part of the experience,
okay. So, all you can really do is base it on their description of what it would be
like to see emptiness directly, okay. How well do they explain emptiness to you?
And, in particular, how well do they explain that twenty minute experience and
what happens directly after it, the next twenty four hours? How, how accurately
can they describe it? Then you can go back in the old books, Abhidharma,
Madhyamika, Prajnaparamita, you can find the old descriptions of people who
saw it. And does this person’s explanation coincide directly with what those
books say? Perfectly. And does their explanation of how karma and emptiness
work together and how if you understand emptiness you must be a moral
person, you must keep your vows; do they explain that whole thing very well?
And you start, you know, I always say on this question that, dogs can smell
people who like dogs. You know what I mean? Like, you walk into a room and
you don’t like a dog they start growling. If a dog lover walks in the same room
they start wagging their tail, you know. They know somehow. If you’re
vegetarian they get in [unclear], you know. There’s something, or cows, you
know, like, they can sense it, you know. They have this sixth sense about it, you
know. And I think you also have to trust that. I mean, there’s a whole way that
a person talks about it when they’ve seen it. And there’s a whole sense, there’s
an instinct that you get that this person has seen it. You know what I mean.
And, and, and you have to work on that. Does what they say correspond to
everything you heard from authoritative Scriptures? Does what they say
correspond to your own experience, you know? Does what they say make
sense in light of morality and vow keeping and other arts like that, you know?
And you have to judge it on that. And I repeat that an authentic Arya will not
admit it directly. Okay. It’s part of their, it’s part of the experience that you learn
not, not to say it to people. Okay.
Number eight. But if a person seems fixated on this event, you know, of seeing
emptiness directly, it’s a very good sign. You know what I mean. It’s like, this is
the most important thing you have to do and these things do happen to you
when you see it. You really do see your future lives. You really do see the day
of your enlightenment. And you can do it. And you must study properly to do
it. Okay. And every normal American person can do it, okay.
Say {..den}[repeat]; {..den} means ‘good teacher’, okay. Can express themselves
well, can communicate to students at their own level. They’re not throwing
around thousands of Sanskrit words. They are not requiring you to learn the
Tibetan. [laughs] [laughter] Okay. I mean, they’re talking, I mean one of the
qualities of a good teacher, one of the qualities of a Buddha, is to speak the
language of the people who are listening, you know what I mean. And they can
express the deepest contents of Buddhism in a way that you can easily
understand, okay. And that’s, that’s not a sign of stupidity or naivety, it’s a sign
of skill that they can, they thought about your level carefully, they know the
way to present it to you and they present it to you in your vernacular, in, in your
language that you can understand. And you can practice yourself. And this is
the sign of a {ma kyi den} all right.
Number nine. Say {tsewe ..}[repeat]; {tsewa} means ‘love’, {..} means ‘the very
image of love’, okay. It means the, this person has to be a person who is
teaching you Dharma only because they love you, okay. They’re not interested
in the money. They’re not interested in the fame. They don’t care whether you
abuse them or not. Okay. They don’t care whether you respect them or not.
You know, they don’t care about all that stuff. They just care about you and
they wanna help you, okay. And they have no other motivation for teaching.
They’re not into it for any other goal but to get you enlightened. And they care
about you for that, okay, and you have to find a person like that. The sign is,
generally, they won’t be hitting you up for all kinds of stuff [laughs]. And, and,
and they will be very patient with their students. I mean, the students, by
definition, a student is misbehaving at the beginning and saying improper things
and doing improper things and having weird thoughts about all kinds of things.
The person just loves you enough to put up with that and get you over that into
a very nice place. But it takes a lot of patience and, and love on the part of the
teacher to, to go through that process. It’s a long process with each person and
it’s, and it’s no fun sometimes. But they love you and they want to do it and
they like to do it and they’re happy to do it. Okay. Like that.
Last one, then you can have some cookies. Me too. Number ten. Say {..wa}
[repeat] {pang}[repeat]; {..wa} means ‘got tired’, okay, fed up, {pang} means
‘they don’t’, okay. [laughs] And it means, specifically it means, they don’t care
how many times they have to repeat something to you, okay. Like, you don’t
get it the first time, you don’t get it the second time, you don’t get it the tenth
time. The twentieth time you’re still asking the same dumb questions, okay, and
not doing your homework, you know, and not doing what they asked you to
do. And they don’t give up on you, okay. They don’t get tired of you. They
say, okay, come on we’ll do, we’ll go over it again, you know what I mean. And
they’re willing to keep coming back to you and they don’t get, like, fed up with
your slow progress, okay. They’re willing to stick it out with you. That’s called
{.. pang}, okay.
These are ten qualities that you should search for in a lama. Everybody needs
their own lama. You have to try to find a Lama, okay. You have to try to find a
lama that you can get close to and be around constantly. It’s like, seeing
emptiness is very similar to learning to play concert piano. It takes about the
same amount of time and effort, okay. That’s totally impossible without a
qualified piano teacher, okay. I mean, you becoming a concert pianist without
meeting a qualified piano teacher is about the same as you seeing emptiness
without meeting a qualified Lama and being in close contact with them, okay.
That’s, that’s just the way it is. So you have to, the odds of you getting [unclear]
are hard. If you’re close to a person who has these ten qualities your odds
improve by about a million percent, okay. So it’s a matter of survival. You have
to find this person, you know. And if you’re living in California, surfing, and
they live in New Jersey, the armpit of the nation, you, you sell your surfboard
and you go to New Jersey, you know. You find them, okay. You have to go
find them and you have to stay close to them, okay. And they’re hard to find.
And you should invest the time to find them. And when you find them you
should sink your claws into them, you know, and don’t let them go, okay, very
important. And every person in this room has a different personality. Everyone
has a different aptitude. Everyone has a different outlook on life. You have to
find the Lama that fits you. There are four Tibetan sects, you know. There are
thousands of sub-sects. Why do they exist? Because they help somebody, you
know. Somebody’s attracted to that. Somebody’s attracted to that. And god
bless, you know. Find the one that fits you but then devote yourself to it and
commit yourself to it. And you have to find it. You have to go on an active
search to find this person, okay. And then, you gotta stick like glue to them,
okay. Or you can’t, you won’t make it. You have to find this person, okay. And
forget where you’re living and what job you have and everything else. Once
you find them, move, attach yourself to them, you know. Don’t, it’s the primary
thing to think about.
Last thing before you have your cookies, right, I always say that. Pabongka
Rinpoche says, look you might not find a person like that or you might find a
person who has six of these qualities, go for it, okay. I mean, holding out for ten
is a little hard, all right. I mean, the main thing is find the person who has the
first three, okay. Do they keep their morality well? And we’re talking all three
kinds of morality, meaning, are they moral, are they compassionate, and are
they committed to the secret teachings? Okay. Second quality, do they meditate
well? Third quality, do they really understand emptiness? Okay. At minimum
try to find somebody like that, okay. Should have, at least, those three qualities,
all right. Okay. Have a refreshments. Come back in about ten minutes.
Somebody asked me to write the name of Pabongka Rinpoche in Tibetan, okay,
‘cos that’s when the projector went out. Say Pabongka [repeat] Rinpoche
[repeat], okay. Just for your knowledge, there’s a place called Pabong, near
Lhasa. It’s a big rock and there was a small monastery there. And an Abbot
there, he died and Pabongka Rinpoche was recognised as his reincarnation. And
you can read about it in your reading if you ever get it, okay.
We’ve gone through the qualifications of a good teacher. Unfortunately, they
also list the qualifications of a good student. [laughter] And there’s three, okay.
And these come from Aryadeva. Aryadeva was about, he was after Nagarjuna.
So, about, you know, three hundred AD, four hundred AD, something like that;
very, very early. And he wrote the qualifications in a book called the “Four
Hundred Verses”, {..}. And I’m just gonna give them to you in English, okay.
The first one is they have to free of preconceptions. In other words, they have to
be willing to reconsider their entire worldview, okay. They have to be people
who are not attached to the New York Times worldview, okay. They’re willing
to think about giving it up. They’re willing to think about the possibility that the
reasons planes fall down is not whether somebody tightened the screw or not
but may have to do with the past actions of the people on the plane, okay. They
have to at least be able, willing to think about it, okay. They don’t have to buy
everything. In fact, they say you’re a bad student if you buy everything the
teacher says. You have to examine it. You have to be a critically thinking person
but you have to be open for possibilities, okay. First quality.
Second quality. They have to be intelligent, okay, and intelligent in a spiritual
sense. I call it spiritual IQ, is a little bit different from normal intelligence, okay.
Like, they have to be, they have to be people who, who are wondering where
they came from. You see what I mean. They have to be people are wondering
why planes fall down. They have to be people who are wondering why
penicillin stopped working last year. Okay. They have to be people who are
curious about higher things and not necessarily geniuses, okay. That’s not the
point. Spiritually intellectual people, okay.
Third one. They have to have some high aspirations in life. In other words, the
really good Buddhists I know, are people who are very concerned about death.
They are very concerned about the possibility of, of being able to do miracles or
what’s going to happen to them after death. In other words, their whole
viewpoint on life is much bigger. And their aspirations are not to get a house
and a washing machine and a better car. You can have those and there’s no
problem with those but they also want to know how can I stop the suffering in
the world, you know. I mean, they’re the kind of people that, that when they
were kids they were wondering why people suffer and why animals suffer or
they’re, like, interested in bigger questions of life, okay. Those are the three
qualities. {..} in Tibetan means, you are willing to consider new options, okay.
You’re unbiased.       You don’t have preconceptions so strong you say it’s
impossible that I had a future life or gonna have a future life, okay. And then,
secondly, you’re just intelligent. You have the brains to think clearly, okay,
about spiritual things. And then, thirdly, you have bigger things in mind than
the next promotion at work, okay. You wanna know why there’s suffering in
the world. You wanna know if people can do anything about it. And you’ve
been that kind of person since you were young, okay. And I don’t think you’d
sit through this whole thing if you’re not. Okay. They say, in Buddhism, that
your goal, one of your goals is to escape from samsara, you know. People say
samsara, the cycle of rebirth, you know, and they talk about that. What would it
be like if you achieved nirvana tonight? Would you look different than other
people? You know, would you go some place out of Manhattan? You know,
what is samsara? Where is samsara? People tend to say, my life is samsara or
they tend to think, they equate samsara with Manhattan or something like that,
you know what I mean. And, and you have to understand what, or, or, or they
hear people say, oh, samsara is continual rebirth and what a drag. And it doesn’t
click with you, because you don’t believe in rebirth anyway, you see what I
mean. So, what is real samsara? Samsara is the condition, okay, of having to
die, of having to get old, of having to undergo change, hopelessly, helplessly.
Okay. That’s all. Forced upon you. It’s a lack of control. And when you escape
from samsara what will it be? You’ll, you’ll escape from the condition of having
things fall apart around you by the nature of things. Your karma will be
different. Okay. You won’t have to get old necessarily, okay. The relationships
you make won’t necessarily fall apart. The money you get doesn’t have to all be
spent and then you get more automatic, you see what I mean? Things don’t
have to work the old way. They can work a new way, okay. It’s not a question
of is there enough money in the world for everybody. We3 can make as much
as everybody wants. You just have to do it the right way. There can be plenty
of water and resources for everybody because they come from karma they’re
not dug out of the earth, okay. The question says, give the word for samsara in
Tibetan. [cut] Say {korwa}[repeat], {korwa}[repeat];{korwa} in Tibetan comes
from a root that means ‘to go in a circle’. That’s the word for samsara in Tibetan,
okay. What does a circle mean very, very, very simple? You don’t understand
your boss’s emptiness. So your boss comes in and yells at you and then you yell
back at them. That’s the only way you can create in the future a yelling boss.
They come and yell at you again in the future. You yell back. You create the
karma again to see them yelling at you. And that’s like a self-perpetuating circle.
Okay. That’s what {korwa} means, okay. Your response to your world because
you don’t understand emptiness is asking for the thing to happen again, okay.
When someone yells at you, you yell back. When someone treats you bad, you
treat them bad back. When someone’s jealous, you get jealous. You know, like
this. And, and it’s the only way according to Buddhism to get it to happen again.
So, it’s like perpetuating itself, okay. It’s spinning itself and it keeps going like
that. That’s {korwa}. If you understood the emptiness of your boss, the next
time he or she yelled at you, you would shut up and break the cycle, break the
wheel of life. The picture of the wheel of life, break it at number one, one
o’clock, {.. marigpa} and then it doesn’t happen any more. You just stop it.
Unilateral truce. Okay. I choose to stop my {korwa} so I’m gonna be kind to the
person who’s bad to me. That’s all, okay.
There’s a question here that says, list the eight worldly thoughts. They’re called
the eight worldly dharmas or something like that. And it says, list them in
Tibetan and you don’t have to, okay. Quote me on that, all right. Here they are.
Number one: being happy when you get something. Being happy when you get
something. Number two. What’s the converse? Being unhappy when you
don’t get something. Number three: being happy when you feel well. Number
four: being unhappy when you don’t feel well. There’s a joke in Tibetan, {nga
…}, ever since I’ve been ill I haven’t felt well at all. [laughs] [laughter] Okay.
Where did that other one go? Number five: being happy when you become well
known, you know. Number six. Guess. Being unhappy when no one knows
who you are, okay, [laughs], all right. Number seven: being happy when people
say nice things to you. Or speaks well about you. Number eight: being
unhappy when they speak badly about you, okay.
These are the eight worldly dharmas. They say if you want to commit spiritual
suicide, suicide? If you want to ruin your spiritual practice, then worry about
these eight things, okay. By the way, it doesn’t refer to whether or not you get
things, okay. Like, getting things is not a bad thing. And not getting things is
not a good thing, okay. It’s not a good thing but don’t get upset about it. You
see what I mean? There’s one thing about having good things or bad things
happen which is good or bad. It is good or bad. But then, you get upset and
make it worse, see what I mean. Or you get proud that you got this thing, you
see what I mean? So don’t make things worse. You will get some things
because you did collect a little bit of good karma and you will not get other
things because you didn’t collect enough karma to get them. But the point here
is don’t get too high about it and don’t get too upset about it, okay, ‘cos then you
just collect more problems. That’s the eight worldly dharmas. Can you avoid
getting things? No. Can you avoid not getting things? No. So, it’s not the
point, you don’t give up the eight worldly dharmas by refusing to take anything
from somebody. You give it up by getting too happy about getting stuff and
being too worried when you don’t get stuff. It’s pretty much out of your control
now, all right. You set those karmas in motion a long time ago. Don’t get too
excited when you get something. It’ll be taken away soon enough. Don’t get
too sad when you can’t get something ‘cos you can’t. {..}, you know, Shantideva,
you know, if you can fix it don’t worry about it, {…}, if you can’t fix it you also
can’t do anything about it, so why get upset about it, [laughs], okay, all right. So
it’s just like that. Those are the eight worldly dharmas.
Two more questions, very short. This one I think you should write. And this
whole class is gonna be like this. If you can’t take it stay home next time, okay.
Really. Okay. We’re covering eighteen years in one year, okay. I’d rather have
a bunch of hard asses than worry about going over, okay.
In the course of the three principle paths they talk about the laws of karma,
okay. And you should know them and you should teach them to the people you
teach. When I say that you’re gonna be a teacher, you might become a teacher
tomorrow at work and, you know, I still have people from work and I left that
place five years ago essentially. They’re still calling me up. What should I do
about this? What should I do about that? You know, you don’t have to be a
guru, you, you just help people and then people will call you and [unclear]. You
can be a guru to somebody in a coffee shop, okay. But you must know the four
laws of karma. And this, this is the four laws of karma.
Say {le nyepa}[repeat], {le nyepa}[repeat]; {le} means ‘karma’, {nyepa} means
‘definite’. Okay. What does karma’s definite mean? It’s very simple. If you do a
good thing, if you do something to help somebody, if you do something out of
kindness, you can never, ever get a bad result. Period. It’s impossible, okay. If
you do something with a crappy motivation, if you do something with a bad
motivation, you can’t get anything good out of it. It will be bad, okay. Period.
Jesus said it over and over and over again. You can’t get lemons from apple
seeds. Forget it, you know. Same thing, very, very same thing, okay. So people
say, well, I, I, I, I decided I’d be totally honest at work, you know, and I told my
boss what I really thought and he made me work overtime for six weeks, you
know. So your laws of karma don’t work. You have to get it, okay. Being
truthful means that in the future everyone will believe you. That’s the karmic
result. And you will live in a society where truth is valued. If the boss gets mad
at you right after you tell the truth there is no connection, get used to it;
Buddhist worldview, okay. The fact that the boss got angry comes from
something you did negative in the past. A negative result called anger can not
happen from speaking the truth. It’s impossible. Get used to it. We talk a lot
about my boss sending me out to buy diamonds from somebody and lie about
the value and try and get a hundred dollars off or a thousand dollars off. And
sometimes it seems to work but it’s not, it’s an illusion. Okay. If you lie the only
result that can happen is that people won’t believe you in the future. If they
happen to give you a thousand dollars off on this diamond deal because you told
a lie it has nothing to do with the lie. Get used to it. It has to do with what?
Being generous in my past. And there’s no connection between the lie and the
money. Get used to it, okay. That’s the first law of karma. And the whole
appearance of things is not like that and therefore the world suffers, okay. If
you were totally honest the whole time you’d be enlightened, okay. Period.
People ask me, should I cheat on my green card, you know, should I lie? I say,
does it work every time? And they say, no. So I say, that’s not the cause, see
what I mean? If you lie to get a green card the only result that can ever happen
is that people won’t believe you in the future. But what if I get the green card?
That’s because you helped someone find a home in the past. It has nothing to do
with the lie. Get used to that. The bottom line is there’s no reason to lie
anymore. If you believe this first law of karma you have no need to lie anymore
‘cos it doesn’t work. Get it? Prove it. It doesn’t work all the time, okay.
Sometimes you tell a lie and it helps. Sometimes you tell a lie and it doesn’t help.
That’s proof that lying doesn’t work. Get it? I mean, it’s so simple that you don’t
get it. Okay, anyway. [laughter]
If a lie caused a desirable result it should work every time and it doesn’t.
Therefore, the lie is not causing the thing that you thought it was causing. That’s
all. Get used to it. Bad deed, negative action, negative thought, can never have a
good result. And everything, every good that came to you had nothing to do
with something bad you did. Cannot happen. Impossible. Technically
impossible. Totally impossible. One atom impossible, okay. Get used to it.
What if everybody lived that way? Oh, that would be weird. Okay.
Say {le}[repeat] {pel}[repeat] {che-wa}[repeat], second law of karma: karmic
energy always increases. {le} means karma, {pel che-wa} means it always gets
bigger, okay. And think of a walnut or somebody gave me in California a
Redwood seed. They’re smaller than the tip of your little finger. The seeds that
grow those trees are smaller, we handed them out in class when I taught karma.
Everybody got, like, three of them, you know. These are the trees that crush
houses when they fall over and they come from this little tiny seed. Don’t think
that karmic things aren’t the same. They are, okay. People tell me is okay to
have, to tell white lies, you know. Is it okay to dislike my friend at work a little
bit? Oh, yeah, instead of going to a hell realm you’ll just die ten, ten years
earlier. You know what I mean? Things get bigger with karma. I mean, it’s
scary. It’s the same as physical stuff, okay. Your whole body replicating itself
for seventy years came from one sperm and one cell, one egg. And don’t think
that karmic thinks don’t work the same. They work then same. One small slip
in karma has its affects for years. And get used to that idea. That’s a law of
karma. Okay. One small lie, one small irritation at somebody, and, and, and you
will have things happening to you for years, okay. You gotta get used to that.
Okay, this is the last line, okay. I just realised I told you the other question so
you’ve covered everything. Say {le}[repeat] {ma je pa}[repeat] {mi-tre-pa}
[repeat]. I’m sorry, there are four. You got one more tonight. {le ma-je-pa dang
mi-tre pa} means if you don’t do a karma you will never have anything happen,
okay. So, in a negative way, this is comforting. I mean, if you go to work
tomorrow and because of this lecture you don’t tell one lie that you would have
told your future will be much happier, okay. I mean, avoiding even small
negative deeds is very powerful, okay. If you can avoid just one a day it’s very
powerful, okay. You will never have any karma from that, okay. If you could
just keep this skin on top of this skin, you know [laughter] when, when your
boss says something, just, just once, tremendous karmic results; tremendous
saving in karmic pain. Okay. And you gotta think of that. One missed
opportunity for a slight bad deed is very, very big step for mankind, okay. It’s a
great achievement. Nothing will happen from nothing. Okay. And that’s good
news, all right. It also means, don’t go round expecting a big change in your life
if you don’t make any effort, okay. If you don’t learn your vows, if you don’t
check them every few hours, don’t expect a big change. Don’t go to some
Tantric initiation and think that something’s gonna change. It’s not. Okay. If
you don’t do the karma, nothing’s gonna happen. Okay. Period. Okay. If you
don’t become a vow master, a vow keeping expert, forget it, nothing will change
in your life. You can just forget it now, you know. Better, better not to even
take them. I’m talking bodhisattva vows and tantric vows, okay. Don’t expect
anything to happen if you don’t know them and you don’t keep them, okay.
Last one. Say {le je-pa chu}[repeat] {mi-sa-wa}[repeat]; {le che} means, but if you
do do some karma, okay. By the way, three ways to do karma, I’m sure you
know. I don’t have to talk about it. You do something with your body. You say
something with your words. But, most importantly, you think something, okay.
That’s the most powerful one. {…}, fourth chapter, Abhidharmakosha, raw
karma is thinking. Okay. You don’t have to say something to someone or hit
them. Just to think about it, just to be angry at them in your mind is much more
powerful, okay. That makes the whole karmic game very difficult. Okay. I
mean, it’s kind of comforting, the idea that if you don’t punch him or say
anything, everything’s okay. It’s not like that. You actually have to control your
thoughts ‘cos they are raw karma, karma in the raw. They are ultimately, they
are the most important karma. {…}, means ultimate karma is thought. It’s just
having a thought, okay. { le je-pa chu mi-sa-wa} means, once you’ve done a
karma they don’t ever go away by themselves, okay. Impossible. Okay.
Karma is, your mind is a perfect video-cam recorder. Okay. It, it registers every
single thought and every half thought is registered on your karma meter
perfectly. You never get away with anything, okay. Never. Once a thought
crosses your mind the karma is recorded in your consciousness and it will come
back to you, okay. That’s, that’s the fourth principle of karma, you know. It
doesn’t, people, it’s weird, it’s funny, once you know karma well, it’s a joke
when you think that someone’s hiding their bad deeds. You know what I mean.
Oh, I go in my room and make sure that nobody’s there, you know. I close the
curtains and then I do my bad deeds, you know. Or, you know, I stole that
money, but it’s totally okay ‘cos there were a hundred people in that room and
nobody saw it drop on the floor and I got away with it. Forget it. You know,
karma is collected by the act of perceiving yourself do something. Karma is
collected by the act of being aware that you’re thinking. And you’re doing that
all the time. So, you’re collecting karma all the time. You can’t get away. There
ain’t no place to, you can run but you can’t hide. Karma is, is merciless, okay.
Once you have the thought you’ve collected the karma. Okay. It’s worse if you
say something but it’s still bad if you think it, okay.
Last thing to say is, in the Mahayana system, okay, taught by Lord Buddha, you
can short-circuit that karma. Okay. Otherwise it’s impossible to get, to be a
Buddha. It’d be impossible to get enlightened. Everyday we have thousands
and thousands of bad thoughts, even little bad thoughts. And then very few
strong, firm, noble thoughts, you know. So if there wasn’t some way to deal
with old karmas we’d be in trouble. And we’ll talk about that on another night.
It’s the principle of short-circuiting karmic energies in your mind so they don’t
come back to you. And you can do that. There is a practice for that. It’s called
the Four Powers, okay. And we’ll talk about that some time. So, there’s a,
there’s an exception to the fourth rule. If you undertake proper purification you
can remove almost all the energy of a karma. And the Diamond Cutter says
that. And when we get to the Diamond Cutter in about July we’ll cover that.
Okay. We’ll do some prayers and then you can go. You’ll get a homework
tonight. That’s due Thursday. I made a mistake. I said Tuesday. It’s due a week
from now. Okay. So I guess you can still get in on Tuesday without homework,
all right. But I’m gonna be very strict, no jokes, okay.
[discusses meeting]
[prayer: short mandala]
[prayer: dedication]

Okay, see you next time. Don’t get scared just ‘cos it went on a little bit. There’s
a lot of stuff, okay. Don’t get nervous. Don’t get scared. Just do it. Okay. And
it’s very valuable. You’ll appreciate it later. Okay. All right.
Asian Classics Institute
Course XVI: Great Ideas of Buddhism