ACI 16 (обзорный курс), Занятие 02 (прогон ГМР, Нью-Йорк 1999) — стенограмма

Class Two
Geshe Michael Roach

Transcribed by Angie Overy




  …. start. Just to bring you back to where we were. By the way, I’d like to
welcome [unclear], long time; one of the first students who ever studied there.
To bring you back to where we were, we were halfway through the vert first
class we ever had. We were talking about the three principle paths. First one
being when someone close to you dies and you finally decide that maybe you
should check something out, okay. Renunciation. And, again, the best Buddhists
I know are people who had some personal disaster and then they went looking
for something, okay. So I had this lady come up to me the other night and say,
I’ve been praying that I can have this personal disaster [laughter] and I’m happy
to report my prayers were answered. [laughs] Some terrible thing happened to
us. Anyway, hopefully you can do it intellectually.
Secondly, is bodhichitta, okay, ultimate compassion. And we’ll talk about that
tonight.
And then, finally, correct view; the view of emptiness. To understand emptiness
and karma, okay.
We’ve covered, already, renunciation and now we’re gonna go onto bodhichitta
or ultimate compassion. And then, finally, we’ll go onto correct view, all tonight,
okay. Because next class you start the second course we have which is Refuge,
Perfection of Wisdom, okay. So we’re gonna cover a month and a half of stuff
today, alright.
Bodhichitta is a very famous word. People sometimes spell it without the ‘h’
because when you transcribe Sanskrit you don’t use an‘h’ and then people go
around saying ‘bodhicitta’, okay. That’s a mistake, alright. Bodhichitta is the
Sanskrit word. I’ll give you the Tibetan word. Say {jang}[repeat] {chub}[repeat]
{kyi}[repeat] {sem}[repeat], {jang chub kyi}[repeat] {sem}[repeat]. By the way,
there’s also another word for bodhichitta called {sem kye}. And I’m not gonna
write that here but you might see that sometime; {sem kye]. Okay. The {jang
chub} part means, ‘bodhi’ and the {sem} part means ‘chitta’. Bodhi means
Buddha and chitta means mind, so in the early days, people were translating as
‘bodhi mind’ or ‘buddha mind’ and then people though that meant the mind of a
Buddha. Like, an enlightened being’s mind. And that’s wrong. That’s not what
bodhichitta means. You can get bodhichitta thousands of years before you get
enlightened, okay. So it doesn’t mean the mind of a Budhha. It means the wish
to become a Buddha, okay, wish to become a Buddha. So you can really help
others. So then you see, this is a very important point, this is how bodhichitta is
defined, okay: {sem kye …}, very famous. Maitreya defined it that way, okay.
{sem kye ..} means, bodhichitta is {..} for the sake of others, {yangdak ..} means
to want to get to be a complete Buddha. So, the definition of bodhichitta is, the
desire to become or the wish to become a fully enlightened Buddha so you can
really help other people, okay. And usually people say, by the way, once you
get bodhichitta you’re automatically a bodhisattva. Okay. That’s the difference
between a person who’s not a bodhisattva and a person who is a bodhisattva.
As soon as you have real bodhicitta, you are a bodhisattva. On the first instance
that you have real bodhicitta you become a bodhisattva, okay. And then you
hear people saying, he’s a really nice guy so I think he’s a bodhisattva. Or I
heard this lama say this guy must be a bodhisattva, you know. You say, why.
And they say, he’s just so nice, you know. He’s nice to everybody. And he’s
always giving money away to poor people and stuff like that. Those are good
things and that’s, those are good indicators that the person is a good person or
holy person. It’s not what bodhicitta is about at all, okay. Bodhicitta’s a much
different thing. A person with bodhicitta, by the way, to experience bodhicitta
really, okay, to have the real experience of total compassion for all living beings
is extremely rare. Okay. Like, in a room of typical people you might find one or
less. To really get pure bodhicitta in your mind is a spiritual breakthrough that
very few people reach, okay. Extremely difficult to get true bodhicitta. And, and
it’s not like some vague desire to get to enlightenment, okay. It’s not some idea
that I’d like to get enlightened some day. It’s a mystical experience that occurs to
you. It’s a specific, visions are connected with it and, and then you truly see
yourself for the rest of your lives doing every single activity of the day and night
to aid other beings by becoming a Buddha yourself, okay. And that’s big
difference, okay. A typical bodhisattva might be, rather than being sweet and
nice to everybody and going out and helping everybody all the time, they might
be doing intense meditation or they might be trying to see emptiness directly
because they realise this is the way they can really help other people. And that’s
a little bit difficult for American people, you know. I had a big debate with
somebody the other day, you know. They said, oh, bodhisattvas should go out
and feed poor people and stuff like that. That’s a very important activity and if
you are a bodhisattva you probably will be doing that activity. But the real state
of mind of a bodhisattva, the bodhisattva state of mind is very specific and
there’s no doubt about it. They have one thing in mind. They can see what it’s
like to be totally enlightened and they’re spending all their energy to get there
with, with other people in mind. And they have, you know, there’s a big debate
in the Scripture, can they see every single being. You say, no they can’t. But
when you get bodhicitta directly, when you have the direct first experience of
bodhicitta, you have a what we call, a {neljor gunsum}, a yogic or a mystical
experience of actually being able to serve every living being. You don’t see
every living being but you have this experience of covering every other living
being and being able to treat them well, okay. I’ll give you an example, okay.
Some people talk about bodhisattvas being willing to hold off from their
enlightenment, you know. They’re, like, so compassionate that just before they
get enlightened they say, no, you know what, I’ll wait a few years and I’ll hang
out in this suffering world with other people just to be with them and guide
them. I will even delay my own enlightenment for others, okay. This is like a
typical dharma rumour, okay. Remember what happens the minute the get
enlightened. The minute you get enlightened you pick up an extra trillion bodies
or so, okay. And then you help, you can emanate trillions of bodies on trillions
of planets. You can read the minds of every person on this planet. You can see
their future for millions of years, every detail of it. I mean, would you rather be
a person like that or one single guy walking around planet earth trying to help a
few people? You see what I mean? The point is get to enlightenment as fast as
you can yourself and then, and then, learn how to bring other people there well
because you can read a million people’s minds. You can tell them, you can tell
what’s going to happen to them in the next thousand years or so every day in
one moment. You want to pick up this capacity. You want to reach this capacity
and you can. Every normal American person sitting here has the capacity,
mentally, to reach this before you die. And, and you gotta put your mind on
that and that’s, that’s real bodhicitta. A bodhisattva might not look like a
bodhisattva. A bodhisattva might not be a nice guy or a smiley guy or
something like that. They are intent on one goal and, and that’s to become
enlightened so they can really help other people. Everything they do from the
time they wake up to the time they go to sleep, every action they undertake is
aimed at becoming an enlightened being. They’re fanatical about it. They know
what they have to do and they’re, they’re concentrating on only that. That’s,
that’s bodhisattva, okay, that’s bodhicitta, okay. Does it mean you can just sit
around all day and study books and ignore the suffering people around us?
That’s an indication that, the person didn’t get it, you see what I mean? It’s
unlikely that a person would be wanting to save all living beings and not be
willing to help a homeless person, okay. They don’t quite jive. You’d have to be
someone who is (a) studying Scripture intensely, (b) meditating for long periods
of time, (c) going on retreats a lot and (d) organising some kind of projects to
help poor people who are needy and stuff like that. You see what I mean? It’s
not like when you become a bodhisattva you don’t do those normal good things
but you’re concentrating very heavily on meditation and study that you need to
do and uncontrollably you’re spending time helping other people in a physical
way. And, and I doubt it that you could find a bodhisattva that wasn’t doing
both, okay. That’s what I’m trying to say, alright. So that’s {jang chub kyi sem},
that’s bodhicitta, alright. And you have to, that’s the second of the three
principle paths and you must try to reach that, okay. You must try to reach that
experience; very, very difficult. If you had it happen to you once in this life
you’d be very, very fortunate, okay. It lasts about two minutes. And to really
have it happen to you would be worth a lifetime of study and effort. Very rare
to reach that, okay.
How do you reach it? There are several famous instructions and I’m gonna give
you one of them, okay. This is called the Seven Step Instruction for Developing
Bodhicitta. You can ignore, well, you can read this. This one over here, by the
way, is the other spelling of bodhicitta, okay. This is the other Tibetan word for
bodhicitta. You can use either one on your homework, okay. Say, {mar she}
[repeat] {mar-she}[repeat], this is the first of the seven steps for developing
bodhicitta. {mar-she} means, recognise that all other beings have been your
mother, okay. Recognise that all other beings have been your mother. Now, I
get a lot of people telling me, Americans especially, my mother was not very
nice and it’s no big deal to recognise other people as my mother, okay. I’d
rather not [laughs][laughter] you know what I mean. Scripture says, no matter
what you think of your current mother, if you had to do what she did for you,
just by having you, you’d probably change your mind. You see what I mean.
Just to carry somebody around for nine months, to go through some kind of
body-splitting torture. I remember Bill Cosby saying it was something like
wrapping your upper lip over your head [laughs], something like that. That
even just that. And you don’t know anything or you can’t learn anything
without your mother. You assume that all people talk and you assume that all
people walk and you assume that people know how to do basic things, basic
ways of behaving in society. Your mother has equipped you with these things
from the beginning and you don’t even remember it and you take it for granted.
But actually, what, the first five, ten years it’s constant trouble for them. Every
single minute of the day they either have to be taking care of you or worrying
about taking care of you, responsible for taking care of you. And not to
somehow thing that they did a, and to worry about the fights you had with your
mother when you got to twenty or something, is to ignore the fact that they
didn’t invest one hour in you or two hours in you. They invested, they invested
their entire mind’s energy for five to ten years, fifteen years. Some people fifty
years. They, they, they couldn’t stop thinking about taking care of you.
Whether it was them or some kind of babysitter they had to arrange it. Every
hour of the day they had to be wondering where you were, if you were alright,
how to take care of you, how to feed you. And to ignore it is crazy. So we’re
talking about the ideal mother, okay. If your mother was a bad person and she
left you or something like that, don’t think of that. Think of an ideal mother,
okay. That’s what we’re talking about here. Every other being in the world has
been your ideal mother countless times, okay, countless times. Your mind has
no beginning. You have had every relationship with every other person
countless times. You’ve been Miss America countless times, okay. I’m not
kidding, okay. You’ve been President of the United States countless times,
alright. You’ve been everything countless times ‘cos the odds are infinite and
you’ve been through it countless times. This involves proving that your mind
didn’t have a beginning and you have to work on that. You have to study it.
You have a prejudice that comes from a western background that says that your
mind started when your brain started. And that’s not correct. That’s not true,
okay. But it takes time to prove it to somebody [unclear]. You have to work on
it. But, there hasn’t been a time in history when your mind wasn’t somewhere in
this universe. Your mind has been here forever. There’s no beginning to your
mind and there will be no end to your mind, okay. Meaning, you’ve been
everything to everybody else, you know. Logically, how do you prove it? I
think, for an American, you can just say statistics, you know. If time is infinite, I
mean, I’ll give you just a high school, that’s all the statistics I ever did, I’ll give
you high school statistics. If time is infinite, if the time before this is infinitely
long, and, and if you could happen once, which you did because you’re sitting
here, is it impossible, isn’t it likely that you happened before? I mean that’s, to
me, that’s all the statistics you need, okay. If time is infinite and if you were born
once then can’t the same thing happen again? Maybe you can say it’s just a
bunch of accidental chemicals coming together on the shore of the [unclear]
ocean or something but can’t that happen countless times if time is infinite? You
see what I mean. If you can be here once why can’t you be here again, you see?
If the odds are one in a zillion that you can happen then you’ll happen countless
times because the odds are infinite, you know. The zillions have no end. You
will come again and you were here before and everybody around you has been
everything to you. So then, some Americans come up to me and say, well then,
I should hate everyone ‘cos everyone’s murdered me countless times, [laughter]
you know. You know, Ann Lindsay has eaten me countless times, [laughter]
you know. And I say, come on that’s not a positive attitude. [laughs] [laughter]
Okay. It’s true [laughs], it’s true but we choose to focus on the fact that she has
served me countless lifetimes. She has cared for me in thousands and thousands
and thousands of lifetimes. Iremember this was one of the first teachings I ever
got. I was in Dharamsala, India, up on the mountain in [..] and I got out of class
and I determined that the first person I met I was gonna meditate on them as my
mother. And I met this grubby Indian chappati seller, you know, [laughs] on the
side and I’m, like, this is my mother, [laughter] you know. And so I’m, like,
trying to concentrate on this guy as my mother and then I’m like, and if you try
then it’s a very good exercise. You know, we can talk about it. We can talk
about it theoretically but tonight when you go home, you know, don’t count
people in this class, but when you go home you go out, first person you meet,
you know, first person you have a few minutes to be around them, wonder
about the possibility that they were your mother and that they took care of you
like that. Okay. That’s the very first step in developing bodhicitta. It’s a very,
very beautiful exercise. It’s a good way when you’re walking around the streets
of New York and you don’t want to waste your time, think about it. When you
eyes catch on somebody think this, this could have been my mother, okay. I
say, statistically, they have been, okay.
Say {drin dren}[repeat] {drin dren}[repeat]; {drin} means kindness, {dren} means
think about it, recall, recall their kindness, okay. Think about their kindness.
And again, you know, in this life I haven’t been a mother, okay. I can remember
one time I made a deal with some friends in Arizona. I said, if you cook for me
during retreat I’ll baby-sit your kids for two days afterwards, you know. This is
fair right? Thirty days of cooking for two days of babysitting. And I was, like,
thirty something years old and I thought this is gonna be a cinch, you know.
This is, like, all day and all night. There’s two kids. I don’t know, they must have
been about oh, four and six, or something like that. Two boys, alright. And so I
came out of this blissful retreat, silent [laughter] for forty days. And then I said,
you guys go on your second honeymoon and give me the kids. And they left
the kids at my house and I’ve never gone through such torture, you know.
[laughter] the worst thing, I mean, the worst thing was that I couldn’t get to
sleep at night ‘cos I had to think about them. You know, I mean, I had to worry
that one of them might get up or wander out of the house. And it was, like,
completely, I mean, the fact that every single minute of the day I had to be
engaged with them was, was unbearable to me, you know. [laughter] I mean, I
like to play with people’s children and then I like to send them home, you know.
[laughter] But to be there every single moment of the whole day, and I
remember going into the bathroom ‘cos I had to poop, you know, and they
wouldn’t let me. They were banging on the door, you know, and I was thinking,
how do people do this, you know. And that’s the way it is. I mean, you, you
can think of your mother as a good person or a bad person, it doesn’t matter.
They did that for you, okay, for years, you know. They gave up everything to,
whether they were immediately taking care of you or somebody else was, it was
their responsibility. And every moment of the day they were thinking of it,
okay. And {drin-dren} means, think about that, you know, think about that.
The ultimate kindness, by the way, that your mother has given you, according to
Buddhism, is that they gave you a body, okay. Good, bad or indifferent, your
mother provided the physical material to produce you, okay. I mean, according
to Buddhism, once conception has occurred their greatest kindness has already
been delivered, you know. Which is, just to give you a human body. ‘Cos once
you have a human body, if you study properly, practice properly, meditate
properly and then study tantra properly, you can get enlightened in this body.
You can become an enlightened being with the material, with the raw material
they provided you. No one has ever paid anyone a greater kindness than that,
you see.     And that’s the big deal. They talk about the five greatest sins of
Buddhism, one is to kill your mother. And the reason is only that they have
provided you with the greatest gift that a person can give another one which is
the opportunity or the chance to become an enlightened, to get out of suffering;
to become an enlightened being in one lifetime. So, just based on that, you owe
them a lot. And as you walk around and the first person you see on the street
tonight, I think the subway’s really good if you sit across from somebody, then
look at them and think, maybe this person did that for me. And that was really
nice. I remember that. And thank them for that, okay.
By the way, each step is built on the one before. And your homework asks you
about it, okay. Meaning, you can’t appreciate their kindness if you don’t believe
they could have been your mother, okay. So you gotta have the first one first
and then you have the second one. And the, and the Lam Rim and the other
books say, meditate on each one in order. Think about the first one a lot and
then think about the second one, okay, based on the first one. If you jump
ahead to the second one without going through the first one you won’t, it won’t
work so well, okay.
Say {drin-so}[repeat] {drin-so}[repeat]; {drin-so} means the next step is to think
about paying back their kindnesses. {so} means ‘to pay back’, {drin} means
‘kindness’, okay; {drin-so} means pay them back. And, in Buddhism, gratitude is
like a high spiritual level, okay. Gratitude is a, I think in our society it’s a very
weak point. I think in our society we’re almost handicapped or retarded about
the concept of gratitude. But it’s a very fulfilling concept, it’s a very wonderful
emotion to have, is to think of what someone has done for you and then do
something to help them in return, you know, do something to pay them back.
Those of you who have taken bodhisattva vows this is one of your vows, okay.
If someone has paid you some kind of kindness you must repay them. You
must go out of your way to pay them back, okay. And all throughout Buddhist
Scripture it says, you are some kind of monster if you don’t think this way, you
see what I mean. You have a mental illness, you have a defect in your head if
you don’t, if it doesn’t occur to you that you should help that person back who’s
been giving you something; who’s been serving you, helping you, giving you
something. That, that it’s one of the greatest human emotions spiritually to
think, oh, this person’s spent a lot of time trying to help me, maybe I should do
something back to help them, okay. That’s called {drin-so}. Okay. By the way,
that can’t happen unless what? [students] Yeah, unless you think about what
they did for you. I mean, Americans, I am very good at ignoring both, you
know. Like, I don’t think about how much time someone’s spent to train me, for
example, and then it never occurs to me to give anything back to them, okay.
That’s a real typical cycle, alright.
Say {yi-ong}[repeat] {jampa}[repeat], {yi-ong}[repeat] {jampa}[repeat], okay.
{jampa} is Tibetan word for ‘maitri’ in Sanskrit, meaning love, okay, love; {yi-
ong} means, pretty, okay, pretty love. And this is a special kind of love. In
Tibetan philosophy when you’re studying bodhichitta this is a special kind of
love. The ‘pretty’ part means, if a mother had only one child and they weren’t
able to have any other children and they spent all their energy on this one child,
how does that child look to them? {Yi-ong}, you see, {yi-ong} means, pretty or
beautiful, you know. It’s not a joke, okay, I have a certain number of students
with children, each of them invariably comes to me and confides in me that they
have the most intelligent child they have ever seen, you know. Even the modest
ones, you know, they come up and say, well I’m not bragging or anything, but
today he, like, waved his arm, you know [laughter] [laughs]. You now, you’re
like, wow, you know. That’s {yi-ong}.          {yi-ong} means, you look at this kid
and you just can’t, they just look like the most beautiful thing you ever saw, you
know. That’s called {yi-ong}. So, {yi-ong jampa} is a state of love where when
you look at other people no matter how ugly their mug is you, you still are
struck with this impression that they’re the most beautiful, precious little thing
you’ve ever seen. And you think that about everybody, okay. That’s, like, very
hard, okay, and that’s a high spiritual achievement. That’s, that’s the next step in
developing bodhichitta, okay, the wish for enlightenment. It’s to get to where
you could reach that state where anytime you saw somebody, no matter how
good they were or bad to you, you would think, oh this is the most lovely little
thing I ever saw. Now, how could I help this thing? Okay. Tsultrim makes
these sounds when he sees a cute dog, you know. Suppose you made this
everytime you saw somebody, you know. Doesn’t matter if they’re tall or fat or
short, you just see them and you’re like , oh, you’re the most beautiful little thing
I ever saw. And then you wanna help them. You wanna do something for
them. {jampa} by the way, there’s two versions of want t love in Buddhism;
{jampa} means you want to give them something, you see what I mean. You
want to provide them with something, okay, with every kind of happiness you
can, alright. You can see how it comes out of wanting to pay them back, okay.
Natural progression from wanting to pay them back which was the step before.
Here’s number five. Say {nying je}[repeat] {chenpo}[repeat], {nying je}[repeat]
{chenpo}[repeat]; {nying je}means compassion; {chenpo} means big, okay. In
Sanskrit, mahakaruna. By the way, {nying} means ‘heart’ and {je} means ‘king’ –
king of hearts, okay, compassion, alright. And this is how it differs from love.
See, love wants to give people things. Love wants to supply everybody with
everything they ever hoped for. Real bodhichitta says I want everyone around
me to get enlightened during my lifetime. I want to watch it happen. And by
the way, I also want to feed them a nice Indian dinner. You know what I mean.
It’s what we call common attainments and ultimate attainments. But, but
{jampa}, love, wants to do both, okay. {nying je} is different. {nying je}looks at
people and says, I want to remove from them all the problems they have, okay.
I want to identify everything about the lives of the people around me that is bad
and I want to help them get rid of that thing, okay. I want to help each person
get rid of everything bad about their lives, okay. So in a short time it would be
teach them how to make a living, you see what I mean. Teach them how to
cook something. Like that. In the ultimate it would be teach this person how
not to have a mental affliction, you know. Teach this person how to get away
from the tyranny of their own bad thoughts, you see what I mean. That’s like a
real gift that you could give somebody. Your bad thoughts push you around all
day. You make yourself miserable all day. If someone could come and teach
you how to stop doing that, that would be {nying je}, you see what I mean.
{nying je} is like, teach somebody how to stop shooting themselves in the foot,
okay. And that’s you’re ultimate {nying je}. Teach them how to stop the impure
part of their own mind, is the ultimate kind of compassion, okay.
I wanna point out something about these two. The first one was love. The
second one was compassion. And there’s a debate in the text, you know, maybe
we should have put compassion before love. Maybe it would be more logical to
put the compassion before love. Why? Suppose you have a child who’s very
sick, who has a very high fever. And you had a choice between giving them an
ice pack on their head, my mom used to do that, okay, or giving them a nice
new bicycle? You see what I mean? I mean, first you have to deal with people’s
pain. First you have to remove their pain and then you give them the nice stuff
that they want, okay. So, theoretically say people, compassion should come
before love. First you have to remove all of people’s problems and then you can
give them all the nice stuff. So why is it this order? The {yi-ong} part is very
important. {yi-ong} means you have to learn to look at them as being … , you
know, the most beautiful thing you ever saw and then you’ll want to take their
pain away, you see what I mean. And that’s the reason for the order this way.
Sometimes they do it this way, okay.
Now we’re onto number six.             Say {hlaksam}[repeat] {namdak}[repeat],
{hlaksam}[repeat] {namdak}[repeat]; {hlaksam namdak} I really like this, means,
ultimate personal responsibility. Okay.
{hlaksam namdak} means ultimate personal responsibility; {hlaksam} means,
like, super personal willingness to take responsibility, {namdak} means pure. But
the whole thing together means something like, ultimate personal responsibility.
Meaning this: I will take it upon myself to do the best I can to remove other
people’s suffering and to give them all the things that they need and I don’t care
if anyone else helps me or not. Okay. I don’t care if anyone else helps me or
not. I don’t care if they think I’m crazy. I don’t care if they attack me. I don’t
care if they don’t help me. I don’t care if I spend all my own money on it. I’m
gonna do it. Okay. It’s just that personal decision that I’m not waiting for other
people to show up and pitch in because, guess what, they won’t, okay. Alright.
[laughs] This is like, you just decide, you know, no matter what people say
about me, no matter what I have to do, no matter how much of my personal
resources I have to spend, no matter how much of my time I have to spend, I
will take care of as many people as I can. Period, you know. And I won’t wait
for other people to help me, okay. That’s just a decision, a resolution in your
mind and, and that’s very close to bodhichitta, okay. You’re like, you’re flirting
with bodhichitta now, okay. When you get to that stage you’re getting very
close to bodhichitta.
Then you flop over into bodhichitta. And that’s, that was up here. That was
number seven.
{sem} this is the other word for bodhichitta. {sem} means mind or ‘chitta’
meaning the wish to get enlightened and {kye} means, you get it, you achieve it.
Rinpoche’s new book, ‘Achieving Bodhichitta’, {sem kye}, okay. That’s the
meaning of it. And that’s the result of the other six steps. This is like this final
decision, I want, by the way, it comes naturally out of number six. How? In
number six, you decided if no one else in the world helps me and, in fact, if every
single person I know attacks me, I don’t care. I’m still going to do it. I’m going
to do the fastest way I know how to get myself enlightened to take care of other
people, okay. And then, number seven is, okay, what’s the fastest way for me to
do it? What’s the best way for me to help other people? I gotta get enlightened.
I gotta get those other trillion bodies going, okay. I have to get the ability to see
other people’s minds. So what’s the most important thing, you know, you
should be thinking, if you have ultimate compassion, it’s a very simple thought.
I want to reach paradise, I want to reach total ecstasy as fast as I can and then I
can show other people how to do it, you see what I mean. The rest is all BS,
okay. I mean, to stand up there and say, everyone should get enlightened,
here’s how to do it and you guys try, okay. That’s not the way it works. If you
were really compassionate, if you really cared about other people and if you
understood a little bit about Buddhism, you would see that it’s possible to
become an enlightened being, especially if you practised tantra, in this lifetime.
You would see that this is a real possibility. And so the most compassionate
thing that you can do for other people is to get enlightened yourself first, okay.
In the Lam Rim it’s called, ‘eating the meat first’. There’s a story in the Lam Rim.
This family’s in a famine; and there’s three kids, a wife and a husband and there’s
no food. They’re down to, it’s called, it’s called a ‘popcorn kernel famine’.
They’re going through the cupboards and trying to find old popcorn kernels that
fell out of the box because that’s all there is to eat in the house. And there’s
nothing in the whole country.          This is at the end of the third chapter,
Abhidharmakosha, okay. It’s called ‘the famine year’, you know. And then,
suddenly, by good luck, they come across a hamburger, okay. Like, a big hunk
of meat. In the Scriptures it’s a hunk of dried meat or something like that, okay.
But suddenly they come across this freeze dried hamburger or something.
 So, they’re making a decision, you know, should we cut it into five parts or what
should we do? What’s the best thing to do? And the father, out of compassion,
eats the whole thing himself, so that he can be strong enough to go out and look
for food for the family, see what I mean. And then he’ll be strong enough to
bring back more food. And that’s the most compassionate thing you can do. It’s
very interesting concept. It means sometimes the most compassionate thing you
can do is to get enlightened so that you can help other people. So it becomes a
very interesting commandment of Buddhist practice: you are required by all of
Buddhism, all Buddhist Scripture, all Buddhist knowledge, all Buddhist masters
who have ever lived, require of you personally that you reach total ecstasy as
quickly as possible so that you can help other people, okay. And you have to
think of that. And I have a lot of students, Americans, who say they don’t feel
comfortable with that, you know. It seems selfish, you know. I got total ecstasy
and that’s the best thing I can do for other people? Get it. Right. Okay. That’s
right. And, and don’t feel uncomfortable with it, okay. It’s not selfish and it’s
not unspiritual. It’s your duty, okay. You can sit their and explain emptiness, for
example, all night because you read about it in some book, but if you’ve seen it
directly and you’re explaining it to other people, they can smell it. Okay. You
don’t have to say, I saw emptiness directly. You just say, here’s what it’s like.
Here’s what happens to you, you know. Here’s exactly what happens to you.
And they smell it, you know. They, you don’t have to get up and make wild
claims or, or say one thing or another. They smell that you’ve seen it. They
know that you’ve seen it. And that’s the same difference. If you’re gonna really
help other people then you’ve got to enlightened yourself first. It’s the only
way, it’s the only position from which you can honestly describe to other people
how to do it is if you do it yourself. And that’s the best thing you can do for
other people, okay. You gotta get used to that. Did I, I was saying these words
a couple of days ago to this guy and he started shaking and he got angry. And
he said, so that means you shouldn’t help starving people? That means you
shouldn’t help homeless, hopeless people? Homeless people? You shouldn’t do
all these things? I said, no, it means you should because that’s how you get
enlightened. And he said, that’s even worse, you know. So are you telling me
you’re only gonna do these things for other people because they’ll get you
enlightened? I said, right. Because that’s the only way you can help them, okay.
That’s the only real way you can help them, okay. You become a Dalai Lama
you can help tens, hundreds of thousands of people, okay. You gotta think like
that, alright. Does it mean you shouldn’t help other people? No, you should. I
don’t know a single bodhisattva who doesn’t help other people; homeless,
hungry people, all kinds of people, okay. You will. You don’t have to worry
about it. That’s a by-product, okay. But the mind has to be, the definition, {…}
it’s focussed on all other people and wants to get enlightened, you see what I
mean. So you gotta be in that mood, okay. That’s ultimate compassion. It’s not
just being friendly to other people, okay. That’s not gonna save them. You can
feed other people. You can clothe them. You can comfort them. And while
you’re doing it they’re getting older and dying, okay.             You get into
enlightenment you can teach them how not to die, teach them how not to get
old. You can teach them how not to need food or beds or houses, okay. And,
and that’s the point.        It’s very difficult in our realm, you know, our
neighbourhood here, our hood, you know. The hood that you’re in called the
‘desire realm’; this kind of talk sounds crazy. I had a woman the other day, a
big, famous writer who’s doing an interview with me, you know. She says,
you’re talking like Walt Disney on acid, you know. [laughter] I don’t know
what you’re talking about, you know.

And I said, you’re in the desire realm. You haven’t seen the enlightened realm.
You haven’t seen the other hoods that are around, you see what I mean, and
you assume that this is the only realm there is. It’s not like that. There are other
realms. There’s a form realm. There’s a formless realm. They exist. They’re not
just some Buddhist fantasy. And enlightened realms exist and if you saw one for
five minutes you’d stop all this other stiff and try to get there and try to get
other people there, you see what I mean. Don’t think that this is the only place
there is. It’s not. And, and you can see those other realms and you can get there
and then you can teach other people to get there. This realm is a accident, you
know. You don’t get into this realm unless you have some karmic accident.
Unless you have ignorance you can’t get into this realm. This realm is full of
misfits. If you’re in the desire realm that’s proof that you’re a misfit, okay. It’s
proof that you didn’t do things right, actually, you screwed up big time. And
you’re in this realm that doesn’t work, okay.             It’s a dysfunctional realm.
Seriously. The world, as you know it, is dysfunctional. The only thing you can
get here is death, okay. You can work your, I mean, you can work your whole
life, collect money, try to go to the gym, use all the makeup you want, buy the
best high-heel shoes you can locate, doesn’t matter. It’s all doomed. It’s a crazy
man’s activity to live in this world. And, and this is just one of many, many
realms and you don’t have to live here. And you don’t have to be here. And
you can teach other people to get out. And that would be the kindest thing to
do. You have to think that, it’s true, it’s really true, okay.
Alright, that’s bodhicitta. Okay, we’re gonna go, like, another ten minutes.
You’re gonna learn all about emptiness in ten minutes, okay. [laughter]
Say {tendrel}[repeat] {tendrel}[repeat]; {tendrel} has been translated, clumsily, as
dependent origination: de-pen-dent-or-ig-in-a-tion, eight syllables. I think you
can’t be an American Buddhist unless you can say ‘dependent origination’
quickly, like, five times in a row, okay. [laughter] I like to call it ‘dependence’ or
‘interdependence’, I don’t know. I think ‘dependence’ is probably easier. It does
mean dependent origination. {…} means, things happen because of dependence,
okay. Things happen because of its dependence. Everything around you and
you has occurred through some kind of dependence on other things, okay.
That’s all. If you want to understand emptiness you’ve got to understand
dependent origination first, okay.           It’s the flip-side of emptiness, okay.
Dependent origination is the positive side. It’s why things happen. Emptiness is
the negative side. It’s why things don’t happen. Okay. And we’ll get to it, okay.
But without understanding dependent origination or why things happen, how
things happen around you, you can never get to emptiness. So we’re gonna go
to dependent origination first alright. The book that you’re studying, which
you’ll finally get tonight, in your notebook, okay, is ‘The Three Principle Paths’.
And the commentary by the holy, glorious Pabongka Rinpoche, translated by
the holy, glorious Khen Rinpoche, okay. And in there is the most beautiful
explanation of dependent origination I have ever seen, okay. So you gotta know
it and you’re gonna have it on your homework, okay. He goes through
explaining three different versions of dependent origination, okay. There are
three different explanations of what it means to be dependent, okay. And we’re
gonna go through all three because you can’t understand emptiness unless you
understand those three, okay.
Here’s number one. The first version of dependent origination is the one that’s
accepted by these three schools. Remember, there are four great schools of
ancient India. We’re not talking about the four Tibetan schools, okay.
We’re talking about the four great schools of ancient India. The Vaibashika,
which is Abhidharma; the Sautrantika which is Sutrists, those who put a lot of
faith in Sutra and they teach a lot of logic; and then thirdly, the Mind Only school,
Cittamatra or {sem tsampa}, okay. And these are the three, the three lower
schools of ancient India. And they all made a consortium and said, we’re all
gonna sell dependent origination this way, okay. What? Very simple, things
depend on their causes and conditions to occur.              That’s what dependent
origination means. Things occur in dependence on their causes and conditions,
okay. Causes, in the case of a fruit tree, being, like, a apple seed. Conditions
being: the water, the soil, the sunlight, the fertiliser, okay. But, dependent on
those, all things occur. Now I’m gonna teach you something about emptiness,
okay. Supposedly, the only way to be happy, according to Buddhism the only
way to remove all your bad thoughts forever, is to see emptiness directly. There
is no other method to be happy, okay. Get it? If you don’t see emptiness
directly in this lifetime it’s physically impossible for you to be happy. It will
never occur. You cannot remove anger, jealousy, hatred, desire; impossible to
remove them unless you see emptiness directly, okay. So something about this
explanation has to be able to overcome your anger, your desire, your jealousy,
okay. Let’s investigate. Is this a good explanation of dependent origination or
not? Okay. And I saw this in, I don’t know where it was, anyway. So suppose I
get mad at my boss or something, okay. Suppose I’m mad at my boss when
they come in the office because they’re criticising me for something, okay. And
then I’m looking at them, does it help to say, you know what, this guy came
from his mother. If his father hadn’t have been there as a condition he wouldn’t
have been here either, you know. Now my anger has gone away, you know.
[laughter] Okay. Okay, anyone who goes and tries to sell the meaning of
dependent origination, the ultimate meaning of dependent origination as being,
oh those things which depend on their causes and conditions, I mean, maybe it
helps a little bit, okay. To know, okay, he may be yelling at me ‘cos he had a
backache in the morning and had a fight with his wife and he ate at an Indian
restaurant on sixth street last night and got sick, okay. So I understand where
he’s coming from, does that remove your mental afflictions forever? No. It
helps you appreciate his problems. It makes you a little more compassionate
towards him but it doesn’t remove your mental afflictions. This is not the
ultimate explanation of dependent origination, okay. It’s not. And, and, you
know, unfortunately I think, many presentations of Buddhism never go beyond
this, you see. They say, look, don’t worry, realise everything comes from causes
and conditions, see you later, you know. And you’re, like, that’s it, you know?
That’s not it. There are two more versions which are even more helpful, okay.
Is this one dumb or retarded or something we should forget? No, it’s very
helpful. That’s why Lord Buddha taught it. But it’s not the ultimate, okay.
Here’s number two. Okay, the next best explanation is by the Independent;
Independent is the translation of the word Svatantrika. The ‘tantrika’ here has
nothing to do with tantra, okay. It’s a wholly different meaning of the word.
Here it means a kind of logic. They accept that there’s a kind of logic which
works to explain emptiness and that logic itself is self-existent in a way. You
don’t have to worry about why they’re called Independents, okay. Enough to
know that they are the lower half of the highest of the four schools. What’s the
highest of the four schools? Middle Way or Madhyamika, okay. The highest of
the four schools of ancient India was called Madhyamika. This is the lower half
of that school. And they have their own idea about dependent origination, okay.
 They say the following: something is dependently originating when it depends
on its parts. Something is dependent origination if it depends on its parts.
Instead of saying what the lower group said, what did the lower group say? It
has to depend on causes and conditions, that’s what makes it dependent
origination. This school says, no, no, no. You have to say something is
dependent when it depends on its parts, okay. And our explanation is better
than those Functionalists because, as everybody knows, there’s stuff in the
world, which has causes and there’s stuff in the world that doesn’t have any
causes, okay. And their explanation only covers half, okay. Our explanation
covers everything, okay. By the way, uncaused things are not too numerous,
there’s only a few. Emptiness is one. It doesn’t have a cause, okay. It exists but
it doesn’t have a cause. Another one is empty space, okay. Space can come and
go, planets can come and go, milky ways can melt or not melt, empty space
remains. After all is said and done empty space is there, never had a beginning,
never had a cause, okay. It’s there. Its parts are direction. Okay. The parts of
empty space are direction. The emptiness of emptiness you can say the
emptiness of four o’clock, the emptiness of five o’clock, stuff like that, okay.
Really. The emptiness of the object as the object changes, okay. The emptiness
refers to different bases as the object change. And those are different. Those are
parts, okay. So, like that. They like this explanation. They say it’s better. Now
remember the text that I, you know, I went through years of trying to find this
explanation and, and I went through years. I remember being in Dharamsala,
I’m twenty-one or twenty-two years old, I’m starting to study Buddhism, this
Harvard post-graduate has a, his, what do you call it, his thesis, you know, that
he’s been doing there with some Lama for the last four years, you know. And
he says, here, read this, it’ll give you everything you need to know. So I open it
up and start reading. And then he’s got this part, it says, those of you who have
trouble with desire, which includes me, okay, for girls, alright. He says, check
this out. Read this. All you have to do is realise that they’re composed of parts
and everything will change, you know. So I’m, like, wow, okay, this is the
emptiness of girls, you know. So I’m, like, just realise that they’re made up of
left eye, right eye, left ear, right ear. I’m, like, concentrating, left ear, right ear,
you know, and nothing changed. It didn’t fix anything. Okay, so they’re made
of atoms. Okay, so they’re made of parts. It didn’t seem to remove my negative
emotions, okay. It didn’t seem to remove my negative thoughts. Doesn’t seem
to relate to emptiness which is supposed to fix all your problems, okay. Doesn’t
seem to directly relate to that, okay. I can try to think of them, you know, as
being Mattell parts, you know, but it doesn’t really remove it, you know, my
desire, my improper desire, okay. So I was very happy to find out when
Pabongka Rinpoche says that’s not the ultimate explanation, okay. So what is?
Here’s number three. We’ll say Consequence Group. In Sanskrit it’s called
Prasangika. This is the higher half of the fourth school, okay. This is the ultimate
explanation. This is the school of Lord Buddha, Nagarjuna, Chandrakirti,
Shantideva, the Dalai Lama, the Panchen Lama, Khen Rinpoche. Everybody.
Okay. All tantric schools accept this explanation. Okay. This is the ultimate
explanation of dependent origination, okay.             By the way, they’re called
Consequence because they believe in the power of consequential logic used for
some one to prove something. For example, they believe you can prove
emptiness to somebody just be showing them the consequences of their wrong
ideas about emptiness, okay. And that’s why they’re called the, that school. You
don’t have to worry about that. You don’t have to know that. That’s just why
they have a weird name, okay.
What do they think dependent origination means? What do they think it is to be
dependent origination? They think that everything is dependent because they
exist on the projections that are coming from your mind to be there. And those
projections are forced on you by your past karma, okay. You gotta get all that
in your answer. They believe that the very existence of everything around you
comes from projections of your own mind and that those projections are forced
on you by your past karma.
Doe sit mean that they think everything is just the mind only? No, okay. Do
they accept the existence of outside objects? Yes. If you don’t think so go and
stand in front of a car, okay, and report to us whether it’s outside of your mind.
You see what I mean? That’s not the point, okay. The point is, is, is this, okay.
You can, you can apply it to my arm, okay. Prasangika Madhyamika says,
ultimately speaking, this is only a flesh colored cylinder, okay. This is a flesh
colored cylinder. Okay. So if you’re going to be a real scientist, this is a flesh
colored cylinder, okay. There is something in my mind that’s making me see it
as a human arm, okay. There’s something coming from me, from my side,
that’s making me see it as a human arm. There is no human arm-ness in that
cylinder, okay. And, if I happen to have different karma, lousier karma, I would
be seeing that cylinder as a dog’s leg, okay. You gotta get used to that. And
that’s what it is to be a dog. And that’s what it is to be a human. You gotta get
used to that. Technically speaking, this is just a neutral cylinder. Emptiness
means ‘blank’ or ‘neutral’. This is just a plain old innocent, neutral cylinder.
Whether I see it as an arm, human arm, or whether I see it as a dog’s leg,
depends only on my state of mind, what’s coming out of my mind. Okay.
Madhyamika Prasangika says, there’s no ‘arm-ness’ about this cylinder. There’s
nothing ‘armie’ about it, okay. Whatever arm-ness it has is coming from my
mind and being imputed or labelled or attached to that cylinder, okay. And it
could have just as well being a dog’s leg, okay. If I had different karma I would
have been, so what is the dependent origination of this arm? This arm has
originated through there being a reasonable basis, meaning a flesh colored
cylinder, and a reasonable state of mind forced on me by my past karma, that
turns it into an arm. And there is no arm other than that, okay. There is no
other arm that exists in the universe that exists from its own side without my
mind forcing me to see it as an arm. And if I had just a little bit different karma,
and it don’t take much, get it, okay. Slight shift in my karma I could see it stop. I
could see this stop breathing. Very slight shift in my karma. People don’t stop
breathing. Their karma shifts slightly and they see themselves stop breathing.
That’s called ‘death’. And it takes a tiny shift more to see it as a dog’s leg. It’s
very easy to get reborn as a dog if what I just said is true. It takes about two
minutes of mental shift. It takes about two minutes of changes of your karma.
And that’s a scary thing. If what I’m telling you is true then that whole rebirth
stuff is true and anyone in this room could be a dog five minutes from now,
okay. You have to think about it. If Madhyamika Prasangika is true, this whole
stuff about rebirth is no, like, there’s no dog factories in Kansas turning out dog
bodies and they stuff your spirit into it or something like that. If your karma
shifted slightly, if your perceptions shifted slightly this blank, empty, neutral
cylinder, you, you would be seeing it as a dog’s leg. And, you would be a dog,
because you’re seeing it that way, you see what I mean? Very frightening, it
makes everything very serious. Are we’re getting close to the real Buddhism,
you see what I mean? Is this what dependent origination really means? Yeah.
Okay. Then it becomes very important. What are the practical applications of
thinking like this? You know, next time your boss comes in and yells at you, you
focus on that boss. You say, is this a neutral, is this neutral decibels going up and
down with changes of coloration on an oval, with another oval.
And some kind of changes of, you know, I mean, technically is that what, if
you’re a physicist you’d say, oh, look, here comes an oval. And there’s another
oval in the middle and there’s some red cylinders moving like that and there’s
changes in the decibels around me. You see, that’s all really that’s there. That’s
all the raw data there is. And something about you is making it sound like a
boss who’s screaming at you, okay. That’s very important to understand. That’s
the emptiness of your screaming boss, okay.
[end side A]
[side B]
How do you prove it in an easy way? Is that boss an unpleasant screaming boss
to everyone in that room? No. The guy sitting across you, that hates your guts,
it’s music to his ears, you see what I mean? He thinks this is the best thing that’s
happened all day. He truly, honestly perceives this as a pleasant experience,
okay. So that proves the emptiness of the boss, okay. The boss is just decibels
and changes in shape and color then your mind is making you see it as an
unpleasant experience.
Why? Because of some kind of imprint you put in your mind before. When?
When you’ve done something unkind to someone. So, what’s the stupidest
thing that you could do back to your boss? Scream back. What’s the most
natural thing to do back to your boss? Scream back. What’s the Tibetan word
for this? Suffering world, {korwa}, self-perpetuating stupidity. Okay. You
scream back, that’s the most natural thing you can think to do. Then you have
to see it again. You have to see the decibels and colors and shapes as a ugly
yelling boss, again. The stupidest thing a Buddhist can do is react with violence
to violence. You are assuring what? That you’ll have violence again. In fact, it’s
the only way to have violence happen to you again, you know. If you really
were, like, trying to design your future suffering carefully, that would be the
ideal thing to do, you know. I would really like to suffer next year, I’ll scream
back, you know. I want to make sure he’s still around next year, okay.
By the way, I’ve always said that this is the method by which you can eliminate
people at work that you don’t like. Be kind to them. Don’t respond to them
with violence. When they’re bad to you, when they hit this cheek say, hey
would you like to hit this one?         Okay.      Then you’re guaranteeing their
elimination. They’ll be transferred to Iowa, they’ll get a heart attack, something
will happen. They’ll be out of your life in a year. I swear to god it works. I was
in corporate life for sixteen long years, twelve hours a day. It works. By the
time I got out of there it was like heaven. I’m not kidding, you know. I had a
department of a hundred and fifty people and it was, like, everybody wanted to
go to work, you know. It was really weird. Okay. [laughs] So that’s the
ultimate meaning of dependent origination, okay.
So what’s emptiness? Emptiness is very simple. It’s the fact that nothing’s any
other way, okay. Double negative: nothing is not that. That’s all. Nothing is not
that. What? Your projections forced on you by your past karma, okay. Very
simple. What do you mean when you say ‘emptiness’? Everything is not not
dependent origination. Got it? Is that the same as dependent origination? No.
It’s a negative. You’re stating what things are not. Okay. And there’s another
cool thing about this. Once you understand it intellectually, if you can learn in
deep meditation to put your mind on this particular fact, that nothing is not
dependent origination in the ultimate way of describing it, if you can put your
mind for twenty minutes on that fact, when you come out of it you see your
future lives directly. You see your own enlightenment directly. You know how
many lifetimes it’s going to take and you see them directly. You know that you
have just seen a Buddha directly, okay.
Al this stuff happens to you if you can practice thinking like I just described and if
you meditate. It’s very cool. That’s the big selling point of emptiness, okay.
First of all it helps you at work. Secondly, you can see all this stuff. You can
pinpoint your own enlightenment and you can make it happen. It’s very cool,
okay. But you have to understand emptiness, okay. And that’s the third of the
three principle paths.
You have some burning question, what is that? [student] Say it loud. [student]
Yeah. [student] Oh, right. He said, yeah, he said, basically, do you reject the
Sutrist’s view? Do you throw it out? But doesn’t it give a good explanation of
why the, why the, why the cylinder’s there in the first place ‘cos it comes from its
own causes and conditions? That’s true. You know, all the explanations of
emptiness that Lord Buddha gave, those first two versions are not stupid. The
guy who proposed them was? Lord Buddha, okay. Because he knew people
could relate to that more easily. In fact, when you study emptiness in detail,
there are basically six different flavours of emptiness that Lord Buddha taught.
The first five are wrong. The first five are not ultimate but they lead you up very
beautifully to number six, yeah. So of course it’s important to think of, to think
that this hand has come from its causes and conditions, but that’s not ultimately
what’s gonna liberate you, you see. You must see the highest one. You must
come to see the highest one but you work this out through the lower
explanations. So they’re beautiful. They’re exquisite. They’re important. You
have to know them. That’s one of the Mahamudra meditations that we’ve been
doing, people went to California. You go through the six versions of emptiness
that Lord Buddha taught. The first five are not true. The last one is true. But
Lord Buddha taught them because for that particular audience, on that particular
night, that was the best one that they could relate to and that’s how he did it. So,
yeah, that’s true. The Sutrist’s position is basically true but it’s not the ultimate
one, see what I mean.
One more question then we’ve got to stop. [student] Debbie said this, if you’ve
gone through seventy years of practice seeing this particular cylinder as a
human, how is it possible that you can switch in a minute, you know, how could
that really happen? You’ve built up such a habit of seeing it that way. I’m saying
this, come on, everybody dies, in a minute. Everybody dies in a minute. Get
used to it. The shift, that radical shift in your karma, in your projections, in your
perceptions, from seeing this body as breathing to seeing this body as not
breathing happens to everyone, okay, if you don’t practice tantra. Okay. It
happens to everyone. You will see that. That’s just an explanation, you know,
people worry about getting cut on their finger, people worrying about losing
their jobs, people worry about having a fight with their wife or their husband.
Get this. Your karma to own everything wears out in one minute. That’s called
death, you know. Like, you have this really crappy karma. Every year or so it
makes a very bad change in your life, okay. That’s how karma works. Every
year or so you lose something that you loved, okay. But get this, on the last
hour, it all gangs up on you and you lose everything. All of the projections
change in about a minute, okay. One minute you’re sitting there with your nice
happy family around your bed grasping your arm and crying and in the next
minute you’re in a very weird psychedelic horrible experience called the bardo,
okay. And it happens to everybody. Karma is relentless. Karma is ruthless, you
know. And that particular karma to be alive all wears out, al the karmas wear
out to own everything you ever owned, to look like anything you ever looked
like, to have the kind of mind that you ever had, to have the name that you had,
all that wears out in five minutes. And, suddenly, you’re this nameless person in
the bardo, you know. Alone and terrorised.
People say, oh, I can’t wait to die, it’ll be so interesting. Forget it, you know. It’s
terrible. And, and yeah, that wears out in a minute. It doesn’t matter how, it
doesn’t matter if you had seventy years getting used to your body and your
mind, you lose them. You can’t think at all like you used to five minutes later
because your mind is a projection, okay. Your mind is a projection. You’ll stop
projecting a reasonable intellectual sensitive New York mind and you’ll, you’ll be
a beast in five minutes. And, and you won’t know the difference. You won’t
remember what you were. Why do you think people can’t remember former
lives? Buddhists aren’t making it up, okay. You did have former lives. You can’t
remember them. Your mind is totally different now. And in that space between
living and dying all of those changes, all those projections of your own mind
come down, the changes all come down in five minutes. And you, you couldn’t
recognise yourself for anything five minutes later. You have no, you can hardly
remember what you were. You have a new projection of your mind. That’s
why death is so serious. That’s why we have to learn all this stuff and get
enlightened fast, okay.
Alright, we’re gonna take a break, then we’re gonna make some kind of sound
and then you’re gonna get into, I don’t know what we’re gonna do. John
Stilwell’s gonna do it. And that means you’re gonna get into certain groups with
certain teachers who are gonna go over the rest of the homework with you. I
repeat that you cannot get into this class this Thursday if you don’t have a
homework in your hot little hand, okay. That’s our contract. I don’t charge you
any money but you gotta have that homework, okay, or you don’t get in. It has
to be filled out too [laughter] [laughs]
In each of these review classes I’d like to go over the mission statements for this
thing that’s happening here. These classes, these translations, this whole thing,
what’s going on here and its implications and the methods we’re using to teach
Buddhism. I want to do that in the last year that I’m here. So I want you to
know the logic behind how we build the classes and stuff like that because I
expect each one of you to be teaching other people if not now then shortly. So
I’d like to expouse my viewpoint on how Buddhism is taught in the United States
and what are good ways to teach it. What are effective ways to teach it. So, so
we’ll have a break, five, ten minutes …[instructions for group discussion]
Okay, we’ll start. This is very brief, a two-minute thing and then you can go
home, okay. Seriously. Every class during the coming year I wanna give a few
comments about my approach on teaching Buddhism and how I think Buddhism
can spread in America. And how it can help people in America. And I think the
first, I call it the ACI manifesto, okay, and you’ll get pieces of it every night,
okay, whenever I finish them. So the very first part, which I’m doing from
memory, okay, is the mission statement, okay. What are we trying to do. Why
should we have classes like this? Okay. What is the purpose of a class like this?
If you’re gonna be a teacher of Buddhism in the United States, what are you
supposed to teach? Why are you teaching, okay? I had a Geshe [unclear], he’s a
Geshe from this minor College called Sera Je [laughter] that called me from
Boston. I was in Boston and he called me and he says, I have to see you, you
know. And I got scared. I thought he was gonna get mad at me for some
teaching or something like that. I don’t even know him. I’ve never met him.
So, he’s this big Geshe in Boston, so, like, I’m kinda nervous. I went to his house
and he was sitting on this throne and he says, sit down, you know. And I sat
down and he says, I gotta tell you something. So he says, listen, Buddhism has
to spread in America. There’s two hundred and fifty, three hundred million
people here, they have to learn Buddhism.
And you’ve gotta atop thinking that us Tibetans are gonna come over here and
teach it. You have to learn. You have to spread it. Americans have to learn it.
Americans have to teach Americans. And that’s up to you. You have to help do
that. That’s all, you know. [laughter] And then he says, [laughs] you know, and
then he keeps smiling and says now I’m taking you out for a Chinese lunch, you
know. [laughter] But it made me think, you know. And, you know, we are like
the first Tibetan Buddhists, you know. Indian gurus came to Tibet for about a
hundred years, you know, and they, and I’m sure that the Tibetans thought at
first that they could never be teachers, you know. They probably said, what do
you think you’re teaching? You gotta call a real Indian guru here, you know,
Tibetans don’t count. Tibetans don’t know Buddhism you gotta have an Indian
here, you know. We gotta get some gold and go down to Calcutta or West
Bengal and find another Lord Atisha, you know. Tibetans can’t teach Buddhism,
you know what I mean. And then, obviously, after a few years they were and
now they’re the best, okay. So it will naturally come to our country. The
manifesto, the very first statement in the ACI mission statement says, that the
reason to teach Buddhism, is nothing less than stopping the death and old age of
the people whom you are teaching, okay. It’s not to make them calm. It’s not to
make them friendly. It’s not that they learn to cope with the problems of their
life better. It’s not even that they become compassionate citizens of the world.
Those are all covered also but the goal of having these teachings is nothing less
than each person here seeing emptiness directly and becoming enlightened. And
that’s it. You know, when you become enlightened, in this lifetime if you
practice tantra, okay. If you go on to practice tantra, that you yourself don’t
have to die and that you can move out of this realm. By the way, the nature of
the way you move out is that it’s not very obvious to the people who are in,
okay. That accounts for the fact that you haven’t seen thousands of Tibetan
Lamas disappearing from the face of the earth, okay. There’s a thing about
being in the desire realm that you cannot even recognise it when a person
moves out of the desire realm but they have. And thousands of people have.
And the goal of this institution, the goal of these classes is, nothing less than, that
each person in this room is assured to reach enlightenment in this lifetime if you
can pull it off. And I want you to have that as the mission statement. There’s no
other goal here than that. No lesser goal than that. And sometimes I think that
in a lot of Buddhist classes around the country they don’t talk about that. That’s
actually when the lady said I was Walt Disney on acid is when we started to get
to this part, you know. But that’s really what the Buddha said: {ma rikpa me
marikpa sepa pa mepa me ga she me ga shi ..}, Heart Sutra. The heart of the
Heart Sutra. The middle of the Heart Sutra. You don’t have to die. You don’t
have to get old. Just stop your ignorance, learn how to do it and that’s what I
want you to think. When you think of this Dharma Centre if you want to call it,
or Institute if you want to call it or group of people who are gonna teach other
people, that has to be your mission statement in your own mind. You’re trying
to get yourself and other people to see emptiness directly, to experience your
own enlightenment, to know what day it’s gonna be, to know how many
lifetimes you have to go, to know what a Buddha looks like, to meet a Buddha
directly and all of those experiences. That’s why we have this Institute. So that’s
the, that’s all I have to say tonight. That will be the first paragraph of the mission
statement. If you’re a teacher from ACI you gotta keep that, that’s what your
goal is, okay, by hook or crook, by sutra or tantra [laughter] I’m gonna get these
people enlightened, you know, and they don’t have to die. And we’re gonna do
it before people get too old to do it. And that’s the treason to have these classes,
okay. That’s the mission statement.
Yeah. [student] Oh, yeah, Bill says, you can’t get up in the first class, you know,
and start telling people, you know, I’m gonna make it so you don’t die. And
they say, I want to die, you know, and [unclear] [laughter], you know what I
mean. So it’s not like that, yeah.
Even Lord Buddha, as you studied it in the last course, oftentimes didn’t present
the ultimate goals in the beginning knowing that it would freak out his audience.
But I’m being very frank with you. These are the only goals of this class is that at
least one or two people see emptiness directly and don’t have to die and don’t
have to get old. And that is the goal of Buddhism. Buddha said it in the Heart
Sutra, okay.
We’ll do a prayer and then we’ll stop, okay.
[prayer: short mandala]
[prayer: dedication]
CLASSES 3-5 missing here
Asian Classics Institute

Course XVI: Great Ideas of Buddhism