ACI 16 (обзорный курс), Занятие 07 (прогон ГМР, Нью-Йорк 1999) — стенограмма

Class Seven

Geshe Michael Roach

Transcribed by Angie Overy




Okay, we’ll start. Sorry we had a little late start, it’s ‘cos we had some foul up
with stuff.
Clarification about talking tome during the break: during the break it’s first
come first served and you can line up there and we can talk. But what I found
was that during the discussion groups, people were starting to line up over here
and, then you won’t learn anything. So, during the discussion groups we’re
gonna limit it to one or two people up here and then, you know, they’ll, you tell
Ora that you want to talk and we’ll just make sure there’s no more than two
people out of their discussion groups at the same time. Otherwise you won’t
learn something and you won’t be able to pass it on to your students, okay.
Tonight we move on to the fourth of the fifteen courses that the ACI program is
all about. We finished, so far, the Three Principle Paths, the principle teachings of
Buddhism. That was the first two classes. And that’s the first ACI course. Basic
Lam Rim.
And then we finished basic Perfection of Wisdom, which is mostly Refuge and
Nirvana. And the, you graduated last week from the Meditation course, which
was number three, based on Kamilashila, about 800 AD.
So, this time, you’re moving on to class number four. Class number four was
called the, ‘The Proof of Future Lives’. And by the way, once you’ve proved
future lives you’ve proved past lives, okay. It was just too long to make a name
out of it. And this is an interesting, how this course came about is interesting. In
the monastery you study logic every winter for two to three months and if
you’re good at it you get selected on your monastery’s team and you get sent to
the, like, the Olympics or the, it’s called {..} and it’s a inter-monastic debates
which rotate every year between the three great monasteries of Sera, Drepung
and Ganden.
And you study the four chapters of a book by Dharmakirti, who’s about 700 AD,
something like that and you study logic. The first of the four chapters concerns
logic and formal logic. And Tibetan logic, Buddhist logic is exactly the same as
Aristotelian logic. The logic is the same because the human mind works the
same. It doesn’t matter what country you live in. You know, if A then B; if B
then C then A then C, it doesn’t matter where you live. And all language is
based on that same logic. So it doesn’t really matter where you’re from logic is
the same.
There’s a distinction between Buddhist logic and non-Buddhist logic in the goals
of Buddhist logic are totally different, you know. What you’re trying to achieve
with logic is totally different. And we’ll talk about that tonight.
But anyway, if you’re really good you get to go to two winter debates. If you’re
really good you go to three. Some people go to four. And very few people ever
get to five. But in the fourth one they start to move into the second chapter of
the Pramanavartikka, which is the great logic text of Dharmakirti.
Not to be confused with Chandrakirti, okay. The first six months that you learn
Tibetan or Buddhism you mix up Chandrakirti and Dharmakirti all the time.
Chandrakirti is the great madhyamika emptiness scholar, the different thing.
Dharmakirti is the great logician.
So, we’re talking Dharmakirti, okay.
In the second chapter Dharmakirti starts to prove the existence of past and
future lives, okay. And it’s interesting, when you debate this in the monastery,
and I did in the winter debates, is that Tibetan’s are not very good at it. Why?
‘Cos they grew up in a country where they said, you’re gonna have a future life
and you did have a past life and no one questions it. And,they, they were bad at
this chapter. They weren’t very good at it. And, and Kedrup Je noticed the same
thing. Great student of Je Tsongkapa’s back five hundred years ago said,
everybody in Tibet believes in a past life and a future life because their mom said
so and their first grade teacher said so. And I haven’t found a Tibetan, who
could explain to me, why there is a future life or a past life, you know what I
mean. And, and then he went about trying to prove it.
And his proof is very beautiful and it’s part of the course and you can find it in
there.
Dharmakirti’s proofs are very wonderful, Master Dharmakirti, and we went
over a lot of those proofs during the course.
There’s a sort of a very basic principle of the proofs of past and future lives and
we’ll be talking about that, okay. There’s also a {ngunsun tsema},a direct
perception of past and future lives that you can have during deep meditation and
you don’t have to debate it. You can, you can do that, okay. You have two
choices of how to establish future lives and one is, just to see them and two is, to
debate them or do it logically.
When you’re teaching a course you do it logically because not everybody’s been
meditating every day and you can’t take them that way, alright. So you do it
logically. So we’ll be doing that in this class and in the next class.
The beginning of this class is to give you a little bit of a background in Buddhist
logic. And Buddhist logic and perceptual theory: How do you perceive things?
How do you know something? How do you recognise something? Are very
closely tied together. Those two are a very important foundation for emptiness,
for understanding emptiness.
If you don’t understand how to reason and then you don’t understand, for
example, how you perceive an object and why you can recognise an object, like,
why do you, why do you look at a chair and look at a car and see different
things if they’re both rectangles? You see what I mean? What is it in your mind
that, that happens, that you can recognise a car as a car and things like that?
So, these are questions of Buddhist logic, the logicians of Buddhism. The first
logician of Buddhism was who? Lord Buddha, okay. [laughs] Very famous,
okay, very famous Scriptures where Lord Buddha taught logic, okay. But the
point of logic is to get into the question of how you can recognise things. That
gets into the question of emptiness. And if you get deep enough into the logic
Scriptures it’s a very, very powerful tool and I would say, a necessary tool, for
seeing emptiness directly. Okay. So, I’ve heard even Tibetan Lamas say, oh, the
logic stuff is too hard or the logic stuff is boring or the logic stuff is irrelevant to
modern life; is totally not the case. Gyaltseb Je said the kindest thing that Je
Tsongkapa ever did for him was to teach him logic. Because by teaching
someone logic you teach them perception. And by teaching someone perception
you teach them, you must start talking about emptiness and, and then you can
perceive emptiness directly.




 And, and in experience, in practice, if you want to see emptiness directly, you
must study the Buddhist ideas on perception just before that, called {chi jedrak},
okay, the idea of ‘qualities and characteristics’, okay. And mental images, how
do you make a mental, how do you use a mental image to see something?
Okay. So this is the study of logic is very much tied into the study of perception
and we’re gonna talk about that.
All this comes from the second of the four great Schools of India called the
Sutrists School, Sautrantika, okay, sorry, Sautrantika, yeah. Okay.
In the monastery the whole study of logic, when you get to this subject, which is
one of the five great subjects, it’s called {tsema}. Say {tsema}[repeat] {tsema}
[repeat]; {tsema} in Sanskrit is Pramana. And pramana just means, a valid
perception of something, a normal perception of something. Okay. I’ll give you
an example of a {tsema} and the I’ll give you an example of a non-{tsema}, okay.
 By the way, how many {tsemas} do you have during the day? How many
correct perceptions or valid perceptions of things do you have during the day?
Depends on what school you’re in. [laughter] Okay. Don’t, don’t forget whose
hat we have on. We’re Sutrists School, okay. Sutrists School, I mean, valid, if
you say, ‘valid perceptions’, not accurate but valid, you have millions and
millions of those perceptions every day all day long, okay. You’re having
thousands of them while we said the last few sentences, okay. You had, these
are all correct perceptions.
 People have translated Pramana as ‘valid cogniser’ and other weird words like
that. I mean, I used to go home and worried if I’d ever had a valid cogniser or
not, you know. You have valid perceptions all day long. You have correct
perceptions all day long. You’re having them all the time, okay. And I’ll give
you an example of a non-valid perception and you’ll know the difference, okay.
If you’re totally jealous of someone and then out of complete, under the
influence of that emotion, you, you think they’re trying to do something to you
that they had no intention to do to you at all. That’s a non-{tsema}. If you’re
driving down the road in Howell, New Jersey, Fifth Street, you know, and it’s
the fall and there’s all these leaves. And a windstorm comes up and the leaves
are going across the road at dusk and it looks like a squirrel, ‘cos there’s lots of
squirrels down there, and you slam on the brakes. That’s a non-{tsema}, okay,
that’s a non direct. If you’re on LSD, alcohol, something like that, you see a pink
elephant or something, that’s a non-{tsema}, okay. Very common example in
the Scriptures is, you’re rowing a boat at a certain angle along a line of trees and
it looks like the trees are moving and not the boat. Or you’re in a subway car
and the other one’s moving this way and you’re not moving yet but it looks like
you’re moving. Those are all examples of non-{tsemas}, okay. So, non-{tsemas}
are relatively rare. You have a non-{tsema} once every thousand {tsemas} or
something like that. And you have a {tsema} every, you have a few {tsemas}
every second, you know what I mean, many actually.
So that’s the thing. I mean, I used to read in these bad translations these weird
words and I was thinking, boy, I wonder if, I wonder if I’ll ever get to where I
get to have a valid cogniser, you know. And it doesn’t mean that at all, okay.
You have valid perceptions constantly. You are living in valid perceptions,
according to this school and, and only those rare examples of where you’re very
angry and you have a total miss take on something or, or something like that.
You’re drunk and you see something or something like that. That’s a non-
{tsema}, okay.
{tsema} has a lot of other meanings which we’ll explore tonight.              But if
somebody says, what are you studying, you’re gonna say {tsema}. What does it
mean? Valid perception, how you have a correct perception, what does it mean
to have a correct perception, okay.
And correct perceptions are tied up with mental images.                  And he who
understands mental images can see emptiness directly. So it’s important to study
{tsema},okay.
Here’s one example of the use of the word {tsema}.
Say, {tseme} [repeat] {mikpa} [repeat] {yurpay} [repeat] {tsennyi} [repeat],
{tseme} [repeat]{mikpa} [repeat] {yurpay} [repeat] {tsennyi} [repeat],okay.
{tseme} means, ‘by a valid perception’, okay, by a valid perception; {mikpa}
means, ‘that which is perceived’ by a valid perception, okay. {mikpa} here is a
verb, that which is perceived is the {tsennyi}. {tsennyi} means, ‘definition’,
{tsennyi} means definition. Definition of what? {yurpa}. {yurpa} means, ‘to
exist’,okay. I perceive therefore it is, okay.
The definition of existence in Buddhism is, ’anything which is perceived with a
valid perception’. If you can see it with a valid perception then it exists, okay.
There’s a little bit of a trick between ‘valid’ and ‘correct’, okay and I’ll give you an
example. In my glory days in the diamond business I had to try to predict the
market sometimes, you know. So, I would have the option, without asking the
boss, to buy, maybe, half a million dollars of extra diamonds above the orders
on the idea that in a month they might go up in value because in my idea it was a
good, judging the market conditions, this was going to happen, you know.
Knowing that the electricity was going to go out in Gudjarat State in India next
month a lot then these diamonds would increase in value, you know, and stuff
like that, you know. So, then sometimes based on all my information, which
was extensive, you know. I’d have spies in Poland doing stuff about the Russian
production and I had people in Gudjarat State calling me every day and Belgium
calling reports and people in the jungles in Brazil calling me. And then we’d
figure these diamonds are gonna go up next month so I would buy an extra, you
know, so many hundred thousand dollars worth. And then the market would
collapse [laughs] and then there’d be an inventory the next fifteenth of the
month and I’d go to the boss and say, you know, guess what, we lost a lot of
money. He’d say, that’s impossible, we don’t have that much stock. I’d say,
guess what, I [laughs] [laughter], you know, I cornered the market and then the
market fell through. And he’d get very angry, you know. And then he’d say,
that was a wrong decision, you know. And I said, no, no, it was a right decision
because based on what I knew at the time it was the best decision, so it was valid
although it wasn’t correct, you see. You see what I mean? So valid means, valid
means based on what you know this is the wisest course of action. I mean,
logically, the boss can’t deny that. I should have done it. I should have made
that decision. It was valid. Now, was it correct? No. Okay. So that’s the
difference between valid and correct, okay.
What’s that got to do with perception? You could say valid when, given all the
information at hand for your screwed up state of mind, this seems to be the way
things are. That’s valid. Is it correct? No. Okay. I mean, according to the
highest school, Madhyamika, you never are correct in your perceptions until you
see emptiness directly, okay. So that’s a distinction you have to live with. You
have to think about it, okay.
Generally speaking, valid means correct and you can leave it like that. But if
you’re wondering why I keep saying valid, it’s from my old diamond days,
okay.
What’s the, I said that the distinction, I said, first of all, that Buddhist logic, like in
the first chapter of the Pramanavartikka, which is the great book by
Dharmakirti, okay, which is a defence of Dignaga’s book, Master Dignaga’s book
on logic, is, is presenting the same kind of logic that you studied in high school,
you know. There’s a major premise, a minor premise, there’s a conclusion, blah,
blah, blah.
It’s all the same. The words are slightly different, the processes are slightly
different, but the whole formal logic is the same. And then I said, but there’s a
big difference between the goals of Buddhist logic and non-Buddhist logic.
The goal of Buddhist logic is to get you enlightened. The goal of Buddhist logic is
to help you to see things which you cannot see with your direct senses, okay.
Every human mind in our realm, and there are many other realms, but every
human mind in our realm has very, very subtle, invisible defects or blocks in
your mind. You could picture them like little marbles in your brain that are
transparent and you can’t see them but you have plenty of them, okay. They
are small very subtle, mostly invisible, blinders that you have in your mind. If
you mind was free of those you would see some extraordinary things, you
know. All around you, at this moment, you would see things that you never
imagined existed. You could see past and future time. You could see all kinds of
creatures living in this room that you can’t see right now, you know. You would
become aware of, of, of enlightened beings hovering around you all the time. I
mean, there are all these things going on around you all the time that you can’t
see due to certain very subtle blockages in your own mind. And you’re born
with them. You see what I mean. And, and the practice of meditation and
studying Buddhism and doing long retreats and things like that, tends to break
them down. First, it makes them more and more, less and less powerful so that
you get glimpses of things and then you lose it, you see what I mean. You pass
in and out of these glimpses of higher things. And then, as you study more, as
you meditate more, as you do more retreats, you break down those obstacles
and you start to see things that you never dreamed of, okay.
 And that’s the idea of Buddhism. To break down those subtle, they’re called
{drupas}, okay, those subtle obstacles, to break them down the first tool we
always use is study and based on study we logically work through those
blinders, okay. So it’s almost like a horse with these things on their, you know,
and the horse says, no, no, there’s no such thing as a side of the road. I can’t see
it. And you sit down with the horse and say, no, you know, you got these black
things on your eyes and there’s trees on the side of the road that you can’t see.
And they say, no, no, I’ve never seen them, I don’t believe you, you know. And
you say, no, no, really, you got these things. You don’t know. And then you
start to reason with them, you see what I mean. And, and then after a while
they say, okay, I believe that it’s possible that there could be trees there or yeah,
I believe you, there probably are trees there. In a sense then, they are seeing
through the blinders, you see what I mean. We say that logic helps you see
through the obstacles to these higher objects, okay.
For example, if I had enough time, I could prove to you the probable existence in
this room of some tantric deities.          And then, you’d have to say yeah,
intellectually, I think you could be right and then, in a sense, you would be
seeing through the obstacles. You’d be, you’d be penetrating those obstacles.
Later on, after you remove them completely, you’d see them sitting next to you
and you’d say, oh, you’re sitting next to me, you know. But we always begin
with intellect. We always begin with reasoning. We always begin with piercing
through the obstacles with your mind and with your own rational sense that
okay, given all this, given A, B and C, I understand that D must be true even
though I can’t see it directly yet, okay. So that’s the idea of Buddhist logic. The
process is always like that. It’s not like some satori thing where you don’t see
them one minute and you do see them the next minute.
 There’s no such thing. You go through a learning process and then you slowly
break down the obstacles and the first time you see the deities in this room will
be logically. And then, after you’ve done that a lot you’ll start to see them
directly.
You see what I mean. But the first goal is always, the first method is always
ration, rationality, rational sense. Logic. Reasoning. Okay. And Buddhism is
based on that. And you can say all the ‘what’s the sound of one hand clappings’,
that you want, you know, but the Buddha based his whole teachings on logic
and, and on reasoning, you know. And the more you study Buddhism, the
more you study the great books of Buddhism, you know, and tonight we’re
wrapping up the CD ROM, I think, at four am. Right, Genevieve? [laughs] If
we’re lucky. You know, hundred and fifty thousand pages of the original books,
there’s not one that doesn’t say you have to do it rationally first, you know. You
have to understand things clearly, logically, first.         Then you have other
breakthroughs that follow after that, that may not be so rational or logical, but
you must reach those through a process of clear reasoning, okay, and learning,
alright.
So here’s the goal of, the very first goal of Buddhist logic is very interesting. This
is a direct quotation from Lord Buddha, the printer didn’t print out the second
half of it but I’ll fill it in, okay.
Forget all this stuff. [cut] And it’s kind of long but to me it’s one of the most
beautiful statements in Buddhism. And in the monastery when you step into the
debate ground for the first time you better have this on your lips ‘cos they will
ask you, okay.
First thing you ever learn in Buddhist logic, very, very, very first thing and just
repeat it. I’m gonna give you the debate ground version, okay. Say, {gangsak
kyi}[repeat], I’m sorry. I blew that.
{nga’am}[repeat] {dang}[repeat] { nang drawe}[repeat] {gangsak gi}[repeat] {tsu}
[repeat] {zung gi}[repeat] {gangsak gyi}[repeat] {gangsak gi tsu}[repeat] {tsur}
[repeat] {micha te}[repeat] {nyampar gyur tare}[repeat], [laughs] okay, okay.
{…} means, ‘a person like me’, me or a person like me, okay, {nga’am dang
drawe} means, me or a person like me; {gangsak gi tsu zung gi} means, we can
judge other people. ‘Me’ meaning the Buddha or a person like me, meaning a
person who can read other people’s minds easily, clearly; {gangsak gi tsur zung
gi}, we can judge other people. The {gi} means, but, okay, you know what’s
gonna come. {..} but normal people shouldn’t try to judge other normal people,
{nyampar gyur tare} because you will fail, okay. And sometimes the ‘fail’ is
translated as you will ‘fall to the lower realms’, okay, {nyampar gyur tare}.
And, you know, you always go into the debate ground and the first thing they
say in the winter debates is, hey, what’s the purpose of Buddhist logic, you
know. You say, you’re not supposed to judge other people. They say, give me
the quotation. You say, {..}. They say, okay, good, you know. And then they go
onto the next subject, you know.
And then I kept asking around, where’s this from? They said, it’s Lord Buddha,
you know. I said, but where? What’s he talking about? Where did it come
from? They said, I don’t know. We never asked that, you know. So I asked the
computer. I looked in the computer and it took me awhile and I finally found it.
It’s in a book by Lord Atisha called {do kum du}, which means, a compendium of
stories from the Sutras, okay. And he excerpts a story from a Sutra and it’s a
beautiful story.
And I’ll just tell you very briefly, okay.
There is one monk who is staying in a monastery out in the countryside and he
studies really well and he gets bodhicitta.
 And he starts to think that it would be very useful to go into town and teach the
laypeople a little bit about Buddhism. Out of compassion he decides it would be
good to visit the town and teach people about Buddhism. And so he starts to go
to town.
And then this other monk is jealous of him and he starts to spread a rumour that
he’s going to town to mess around and to do bad things and things like that.
And, and he starts this rumour in the monastery. And it gets so bad that the first
monk finally has to leave and go to a different monastery, start a whole different
place and move to a different place and, and that’s how this whole thing comes
up. Like that. In actuality, he’s going to the town and out of compassion he’s
teaching the laypeople about Buddhism and it’s not true that he’s messing
around at all. And also out of a desire not to have bad things happen at the
monastery he, he voluntarily leaves and goes to a different place and starts his
own thing there. Then the Buddha says the monk who was jealous and accused
him of all these things that he didn’t do ended up living, you know, five hundred
lives as a dog and then five hundred lives he lost his robes. Like, he became a
monk and then disrobed and terrible things like that. And that was all this
karmic result of, of being jealous and of saying untrue things about this other
monk or judging the other monk without knowing what he was really doing.
And then Lord Buddha says, and you know who that was? You know,
[laughter] he says, that was me. I was the jealous monk, you see. This is most of
the Vinaya stories are like that. At the end the punch line is always I was the
jealous monk. I went through five hundred births as a dog. I went through five
hundred births losing my robes, you know. And I’m telling you out of
compassion don’t do it, okay. {..},you know, if you’re like me, if you’re
omniscient, you can judge other people but {..}other people shouldn’t try it,
you’ll mess up, you’ll be a dog [laughs] for five hundred lives, something like
that, okay.
So this is actually instruction from Lord Buddha saying, don’t judge other people,
okay, unless you can clearly read their mind don’t judge other people.
Can you judge their actions? You see what I mean? I mean, are you supposed
to stand around while somebody mugs another person and say, you know, I
can’t judge you so just go ahead, you know. No, you can’t do that.
If you see a monk who seems to be doing something bad should you speak up
and say something? Yes, you should. You have to, okay.
But do you judge the person indubitably, are you sure that that’s what’s going
on? You have to say, no, I’m not sure. So you have to stand up against the
action and you have to stand up against something wrong but not to judge the
person. Not to be sure that you know why they’re doing it, okay.
 And, and there are many different levels of many different people’s actions and
they are inscrutable to us. I mean, you can’t be sure what a person around you
is doing and why they’re doing it.
 Based on your best knowledge, based on your own level, you have to resist evil.
If they seem to be doing something wrong you have to actively resist it but in
the back of your mind you have to leave some room there that says this person
could be doing something important and, and I’ll keep my eyes out, you know.
If I see any evidence that this might be something important or holy or
something good for people, you know, I’ll keep my eyes out. In the meantime,
given what I know, to the best of my knowledge, this is something wrong and I
have to resist what they’re doing. You know what I mean. That’s not
contradictory. But, but mentally, reserve some judgement. You see what I
mean. Then you’re not, you don’t get in trouble.
And that’s the purpose of Buddhist logic. It’s to know the limits of your direct
perceptions. Okay. It’s to know the limits of your direct perception.




And, and normally we, we judge. I personally, have done long retreats where I
got out and I was in this really good state of mind for about three days, very
aware that I judged constantly all day long, all day long judging other people.
Deciding that they must be this or that or this, you know. Not talking about
what they do but I’m talking about judging the person, you know what I mean.
And, and I would say that we probably do it all day long and you have to be
careful. It is the source of much bad karma, okay.
There’s two kinds of {tsema}. There’s two kinds of correct perception, valid
perceptions and you should know the difference, okay.
[cut]
Say, {ngunsum}[repeat] {tsema}[repeat]. This is the first of two basic types of
{tsema}, okay. There are more types but basic types are two. {ngunsum tsema}
means, direct perception, okay. For example, awareness of colours and shapes
that I’m holding up here, okay; awareness of the sound that I’m speaking.
You don’t have to use logic to perceive those things. To you they are what we
call ‘obvious reality’. They’re reality on an obvious level. We give that reality a
name. It’s called {ngun gyur} and that’s right here.
Say, {ngun gyur}[repeat]; {ngun gyur} means the obvious level of reality, the
obvious levels of reality, okay. You don’t have to be Einstein to see blue, okay.
You don’t have to use logic to see blue, okay. You don’t have to use logic to
hear what I’m saying. You don’t have to use logic to hear your own thoughts.
These are all {ngun gyur} to you, okay. These are all what we call obvious
reality, an obvious level of reality. And those could be perceived with your
direct senses or your direct mental sense, okay. Which are called, {ngunsum
tsema}, direct valid perceptions, okay.
Now what about stuff which is a little harder? Okay. Like what? There are two
classic examples in Scripture: emptiness, which is called, pretty hard to see and
then, the subtle workings of karma, which are called, very hard to see. Okay. So
they are even more difficult to see than emptiness, okay. You know, why,why
are there certain scratches on the plastic here on the, that I can see here, you
know? What’s responsible for the fuzz on the floor? And each one of the fuzzes
on the floor? You know, why does your eyebrow go like that and what’s
responsible for each angle of each hair on your eyebrow?
 I mean, you gotta be a Buddha basically to see those things, okay. To know
what karma you did that’s responsible for the fuzz, the configuration of the fuzz
on the floor tonight, okay, that takes a Buddha. Okay.
Emptiness, as well, for most people is hidden, hard to see. And you need
different faculties to perceive it. That’s called, {jepak tsema}. [cut]
Say, {jepak}[repeat], {tsema}[repeat]. {tsema} means? Valid perception, correct
perception. {jepak} means, deductive, okay, things that you figure out with your
logic, with logic.
How many times a day do you use logic? Here, what’s this? This is a, yeah,
cylinder, okay. [laughs] This is a pen, okay. It’s a pen. Okay.
Now, listen carefully, okay. [drops pen] Do I have a pen in my hand? Yeah, you
see you can’t perceive it directly and you just used {jepak tsema}, okay, to
perceive something which has just moved to a deeper level of reality. It’s hidden
now to you. Whether I have a pen in my hand is, to you, now a hidden object.
And you’ve had to move to a different level of {tsema} to figure out if I have a
pen in my hand, okay.
You moved from {ngunsum tsema} to {jepak tsema}.

You know, when I was holding the pen up in front of you, you were utilising
what we call direct perception and then after I put the pen behind my head and
you heard a bang on the floor you were using, you moved up to {jepak tsema}, a
deductive perception to perceive that my hand is empty right now. But you
can’t see that directly.
Is it as valid as the direct perception? Can you see as clearly that I don’t have
anything in my hand as you did that I do have something in my hand before? I
mean, does it have the same validity to you? Is it as correct as the first
perception? I’d say, yes, okay. I’d say, yes. I mean, there’s a little bit more
room for doubt, you know. Maybe I’m very good with my feet or something
and I didn’t drop the thing. There is a little room for doubt you can say that.
But, generally speaking, the correctness of this second mode of perception which
means, deduction, is just as, just as strong, if the logic is fool proof. If the logic is
waterproof, what do they call it? Airtight. Okay. Then, that perception is as
correct and as valid as seeing with your own eyes. So ‘seeing is believing’ is
false, okay. Seeing or deducing is believing, okay. Like that. By the way,
technically, if you’re really good {jepak tsemian}, you know, if you’re a really
good person about deduction, you’d have to say, the odds are quite likely that
you don’t have a pen in your hand because I heard a bang. Okay. I mean, if
you’re gonna be perfect airtight you have to say something like that. Unless
you’re really good with tapping your feet in a clever way or something or you
had a tape, you know, Seamus had a tape recorder set up back there with a bang
sound on it then I can say that you, I can say with certainty that, if that’s not the
case then you don’t have a pen in your hand.
And, and Buddhism says, whether you see something with your direct
perception, valid perception, or whether you see something with your deductive
valid perception, the results are just as valid, just as correct. And get used to it,
okay. Why? Because, for example, when you see emptiness, you’re gonna have
to start with deductive perception of emptiness because you can’t see it directly
until you have seen it logically. Okay. There has to be a process like that.
So you have to get used to believing and understanding that all day long you use
your deduction as a perfectly valid substitute for direct perception. It’s just as
correct. It’s just as accurate. Okay.
Did you have a question? And I see you were right. [laughs] Huh? [student]
Oh, Jay says, well, then it wouldn’t matter if you saw emptiness directly or if you
saw it deductively, right. All I can say is that there’s a certain power to seeing it
directly, okay.
When you see emptiness directly certain events happen to you on that same day
called the ‘Four Arya Truths’. You see your future lives directly. You see the
dharmakaya, you know you have seen the dharmakaya directly. You know the
day of your enlightenment. I mean, those things you see directly and it only
happens to people who have seen emptiness directly. So there’s a certain power,
you know, to seeing it directly.
It’s just as valid that, you know, I mean, just as true that you know emptiness
exists but the effect on your mind stream is not the same, okay. Alright. Like,
that’s a long story. Okay.
{kok-gyur} is level number two of reality.              {kok-gyur} means, ‘hidden
things’,okay. This is {ngun-gyur}. This is {kok-gyur}. Okay. {kok-gyur} means
a sort of hidden level of reality.
The classical example of a, of a {kok-gyur} object, an object which is number two
level of reality hard to see, is emptiness itself, okay. Emptiness itself is called
{kok-gyur}.
Now I’ll ask you a question. This is a very beautiful debate I had at Ganden
during one of the winter debates. It was beautiful. It was really one of the most
beautiful times in my life.
And we debated it like this. I mean, it was a two-hour debate but, is the blue
{gnun-gyur} or {kok-gyur}? Is it, is it the obvious level of reality or is it the
hidden level of reality, which you have to perceive with logic? It’s {ngun-gyur},
okay.
But, what about to a blind man? You see, the same object becomes {kok-gyur},
okay.
So this is a very profound thing. Every object in the world can be {ngun-gyur}
or {kok-gyur} depending on who’s looking, okay.
How many {kok-gyurs} are there to an enlightened being? None. Okay. The
subtle workings of karma, why the fuzz on the floor has the particular set up it
has tonight, you know, the emptiness of every object in this room and the blue
are equally {ngun-gyur} to an enlightened being. Okay. They’re equally
obvious to an enlightened being. They don’t need any more logic at all to see
anything, okay.
To a person who’s blind all the colors in this room have suddenly become {kok-
gyur}. They are a deeper level of reality, more hard to see. They can only see
that level of reality based on logic. Someone says to me, to them, do you ever
walk down the street and you have trouble crossing sometimes and you don’t
have trouble crossing at other times? They say, yeah, yeah, I’ve noticed that,
you know. And then you say, are you aware that the cars stop in New York at
certain places and then they go after a while? They say, yeah, yeah, yeah, I
understand that. Then you say, well the reason is there’s this electrical thing up
above and it changes from this thing called red color to this thing called green
color and then they go, you know, and that’s why they know how to go. And
they say, okay, that’s logical. I believe in red and green, okay. I perceive red and
green. Okay. Or that there’s such a thing as a red and green. You see what I
mean. But for them it has to be logical. You have to say, now it makes sense
why my seeing eye dog always pulls up short and then lets me go after thirty
seconds, you know, now it makes sense.
Then they’ve perceived, in a way, the red and the green, okay. That’s {kok-
gyur}.
{shintu kok-gyur}. [cut] Oh, sorry. [cut]
Say, {shintu kok-gyur}[repeat] {shintu kok-gyur}[repeat]; {shintu} means, really.
When Tibetans get mad you hear a lot of {shintu…} [laughs] means, he’s really
bad guy [laughs] {shintu ..}. {shintu} means, really {kok-gyur}. And, and this is
like a deeper, deeper level of reality like the subtle workings of karma, okay,
very subtle workings of karma; difficult to see even with normal deduction.
Probably you’ll have to rely on some kind of deduction mixed in with some kind
of statement by a person who cannot lie, okay. And this is an interesting thing in
Buddhism. There’s a exercise in Buddhist logic where you try to establish that
Lord Buddha is a person who cannot lie, okay. And, and you go through that
exercise first logically and then you take the other statements that he’s made as
probably being true, okay. But the exercise of proving that the Buddha is a
person who cannot lie or who is unlikely to lie is the basis for {shintu kok-gyur}.
{shintu kok-gyur} means things that you probably couldn’t work out even
deductively for a long time.
So you, you base your actions on what lord Buddha said having established him
logically as a person who cannot lie, okay.
And, and in the Scriptures they’ll say, what’s the biggest indication that the
Buddha is a person who cannot lie? What’s the, what’s the biggest indication that
the person, that the Buddha might be someone who always tells the truth? And
the answer’s very interesting. And people ask me, why did you become a
Buddhist? I say, my parents died and my brother died all in one year, you know.
And then I came across this book, very badly translated sutra, that I didn’t know
was badly translated in college, from eighteen something, but Lord Buddha was
saying over and over again, everything is suffering. Everything is impermanent,
you know. And then I said, this is for me, you know. I don’t know who this guy
is. I never heard of this thing. I don’t want to read the rest of this book
particularly. It’s very boring. But this one statement, you know, everything is
suffering, everything is subject to change and therefore everything dies, you
know, this is absolutely true. You know, especially when three people in your
family have just died and you’re twenty years old and you’re, like, this guy’s
brilliant, you know. This guy’s got something. I have never heard another
person in my whole life say something so true, you know. Everyone avoids it.
Nobody in my family wanted to talk about death. Now they’re all dead. You
know what I mean. And, and here’s this guy, comes along says, everything’s
gonna die. Wake up. Do something about it, you know. And, and the fact that,
out of the whole world, you know, out of the whole magazines and newspapers
and TV shows and radio shows and all the people I know in the world, not one
of them ever came to me and said, you’re gonna die just like everybody else.
You better do something about it, you know. Try this. Try this. Do this. You
know, you gotta, you got more time after you die than before you die so don’t
waste your time on what’s gonna happen before you die.
Get ready for what happens after you die, you know, or something like that.
Nobody says that in the New York Times, you know. Nobody says that. Time
Magazine never ran a cover story that said, get ready, you know, everything
dies, you’re gonna lose everything. Everything described by our advertisers,
you will have to lose, even if you can get it, you know what I mean. [laughter]
Nobody ever [laughs] I don’t think the advertisers would let them write that,
you know. Every attractive object for sale in our magazine is worthless because
you have to lose it. You know what I mean. And just open your eyes and see
that that’s happened to all the millions and millions of people who ever lived
before you. Do you think you’re gonna be different? You know what I mean?
No one ever said that except one person. Lord Buddha. Open up a sutra, you
know, I don’t know what’s the first Buddhist book you saw, but you open it up
and it says, every thing is suffering, everything dies, you have to lose
everything, do something about it. You know what I mean.
And the basis in Buddhism for accepting the Buddha as being a person who
might be telling the truth all the time is that he told the truth about that. And
nobody else does. You see what I mean.
So you already give him more credit than you give anybody else and that’s the
basis of {tseme kyebu}. {tseme kyebu} means, a person of pramana, okay, a
pramana being; meaning, a person who is valid, meaning correct, you know.
How do we decide, how do we establish that the stuff that Lord Buddha said
about hell realms and hungry ghosts and all that other stuff that you can’t see
might be correct? Well, because he’s the only person that I’ve ever met in my
life that even attempted to describe the suffering that I’m experiencing. The only
person I ever heard of who admitted it outright, you know.
His Holiness talks about suffering and all the interviewers say, that’s so
depressing, you know, that’s so, what do they call it?            There’s a word.
Pessimistic. You know. And he says, but it’s true [laughter] and when you
admit it you feel a lot better, you know. [laughs]
And it’s so true, you see, and no one’s talking about that. Nobody wants to say
anything about it, you see.
And then you get one person comes along and says, this is the way things are.
Then you can say, ah, this might be a person who can’t tell a lie because they
described my condition so perfectly and everyone else is afraid to talk about it,
okay.
That’s the basis of what we call a person of pramana.
All of this comes from a very famous quotation which you’ll study in your
discussion groups called, {tsema gyurpa drola penchir pa …. chak tsel lo},
opening lines of Dignaga’s book on logic.
Dignaga was a few generations before Dharmakirti. Some people say he was his
direct teacher. And he wrote a book about logic but the book starts out and
says, {tsema …}, means, there’s one person who’s valid, {drola penchir pa}
means, there’s one person who cares about other people in the ultimate way.
Who’s that? {tenpa}, the Teacher, the Buddha, {deche},the One who has already
Gone to total bliss. {deche kyob}, the One who can protect you, okay. {la chak
tsel lo}, I bow down to this person, okay. And this is a very famous line.
That line sounds like one of those plain old Buddhist exaggeration lines, you
know. Oh, the Buddha, the glorious One, above all others, you know, most
wonderful in the universe, blah, blah, blah. It’s not like that. I mean, there’s a
statement in there. It says, {tsema gyurpa drola penchir pa}. {tsema gyurpa}
means, a person of pramana, a person who cannot lie. And then it says, {drola
penchir pa}, a person who cares more for other people than himself, you know.
A person of ultimate compassion.
And then the non-Buddhists came up to Dignaga and said, prove it, you know.
Prove, prove this person’s, got ultimate compassion. How could you have
ultimate compassion? How could you care more for other people than for
yourself? How could you spend the rest of your life, every single moment,
working for the benefit of people around you even at your own expense and
even as they resist you or attack you, you know? How. Who would do that?
Who’s crazy enough to do that, you know?
 And Dignaga says, Lord Buddha is.
And he says, people say, well, how do you get to be that compassionate? I
mean, you don’t run into people like that every day, you know. You meet nice
people but you don’t meet people who give up everything in their lives to help
other people. You know what I mean.
And you say, yeah, it’s possible, you can do it, people can do it. You can get this
thing called bodhicitta and you can learn to be like that.
And they say, right, right, how long does it take to learn to be that way?
And you say, oh, about a million lifetimes, you know. I mean, that’s the answer,
okay. Oh, a couple of thousand years maybe, you know, of trying, of practising,
you know. ‘Cos you can’t do it right away. It’s so unnatural. It’s so inhuman to
care more for other people that you do yourself and, and to give up everything
in your life to help other people, you know. It’s so weird that it would take a
long time to get that way.
And so Dignaga just naturally says, oh, it takes lifetimes, you know.
And then, these guys come along, called the shravakas, okay.

These are certain kind of Hindu group in ancient India and they say, hah, hah,
hah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right, yeah, many lifetimes right, right, you know.
There’s no such thing as many lifetimes, you know.
And Dignaga says, whoa, wait a minute, you’re the first people I’ve met who
ever said that, right, ‘cos this is ancient India. Almost everybody’s a Hindu.
Almost everybody believes in future lives and past lives but here was one Hindu
school who says no, there is no future lives.
What’s that Budweiser thing? It’s like, one life to live, you know. Do it. Do it
now. Drink as much as you can, you know. [laughter] Just one life to live, you
know. It’s on their advertisements all the time, one life to live, you know.
And the shravakas come up to Dignaga and say, come on, one life to live.
And Dignaga says, what makes you say that, you know, everybody knows
there’s a future life. Mrs. Melvin taught it in the first grade, you know. My mom
and dad said so.
And then the shravakas say, come on, you can see there’s no future life because
the mind stops when the body stops.
And Dignaga says, what makes you think that?
And they say, come on, go talk to a corpse, you know, go, go, go try to
commune with a corpse, you know. When the body stops they stop talking,
stop talking so they stop thinking. The mind is dead, you know, the guy’s not
moving any more.
Why?
There’s no mind to make him move. Okay. There’s no mind. There’s no driver
any more in the skull going turn left, turn right, say something now, you know.
The guy’s not moving at all. You can stand here all day and try to talk to him he
won’t say anything. Therefore, the mind must be dead. Okay. And since you
say future life is really mind going into a future life, there’s no such thing as a
future life.
Okay. And that’s how the battle is, what do you call it? There’s a nice word in
English. The battle is joined. Yeah. That’s how the fight starts. That’s why we
get to future lives which we’ll do next class, okay.
The reason we get to future lives is Master Dignaga is praising Lord Buddha,
{drola penchir pa}, ultimately compassionate.
And they say, well how long does that take?
And he says, lifetimes.
They say, hah, hah, lifetimes, you only have one lifetime.
How do you know that?
The mind stops.
How do you know the mind stops?
Hey, listen, try to talk to a corpse, it don’t move anymore. The mind must be
stopped.
Okay. That’s all.
Who believes this kind of stuff? We do. Alright. Like, when I was in the
monastery they always picked me to be the shravaka, you know. Why? ‘Cos
you’re American and you guys think that when the body stops the mind stops.
You always say that.
And I was the perfect shravaka. I was a really good one. It was hard to beat me
because I used all the arguments that my society taught me for twenty-five,
thirty years about why there is no future life, you know.
And it was very compelling. It was a really nice debate. It was a hard debate
‘cos they weren’t used to having anyone who really believed it, you know, and
[laughter] no, it was good. It was really good, you know. So I didn’t just roll
over and say, okay, yeah, you beat me, you know. Okay.
[cut] [end side A]
[side B]
That’s how you go from logic to the study of future lives, okay.
I’m gonna let you do the rest with your leaders. I have one more comment
about, I think, it’s the next to last question on the homework.
{tsema gyurpa drola penchir pa}, {tsema gyurpa} I mean, there’s an implication
here that it’s also possible to become an omniscient being, okay. Like, when you
go to most Buddhist lectures they’re not, like, saying hey, if you meditate really
well, you could become Mr Know-it-all, you know.              You could become
omniscient, okay.
And we distinguish between omniscient and omnipotent, okay.
The Christians believe that god is omniscient and omnipotent, okay. Omniscient
means, knows everything in the universe. The bible says, you know, every time
a sparrow falls god is aware and thinks about it. You know what I mean. Like,
god knows all things. All things that ever were, are, and will be, god knows.
Directly. Okay. He’s aware of all those things for all time. That’s omniscient.
Omnipotent means god can do anything. Okay. God can make cancer stop,
AIDS stop. God can make the sky turn green. God can make a woman out of a
guy’s rib. Okay. Stuff like that. That’s called omnipotent.
Buddhists believe that there’s no such thing as an omnipotent being. And a
Buddhist would say the proof of it is quite depressingly simple.
What?
Cancer does exist. AIDS does exist. Babies being burned in car accidents do
exist. There’s probably babies being burned right now by American bombs,
okay, as we speak, you know. What did they do to deserve that? Did they
disobey god at such a young age? You know, were they not listening to the
divine father before they could even think? You know what I mean? What’s the
point to torture them, to burn them? You see what I mean?
We say, no such thing as a, as, as a divine being who can stop those things.
There’s no such thing as an omnipotent being, okay.
Is there such a thing as an omniscient being?
Yes. Okay. A Buddha.
And then they say, you know, it comes up, they’re asking Dignaga, well what do
you got to do to be omniscient, you know.
He says, do you have to know everything? Does Buddha go around all day long
classifying all the genuses of plants and animals, you know? [laughter] I mean,
does a Buddha sit there all day long and say, oh, locuses maximus, you know,
[laughter] and over here we got a zinc oxide, you know. Which is called all the,
in Tibetan it’s called {..} which means, all the various divisions of existence. Is that
what it means to be omnipotent, I’m sorry, omniscient. You see.
Is it that you can classify everything? I mean, because that’s the goal almost, you
know, it’s almost they’re taking a jibe at science, you see. Science is almost of the
[unclear] if you could classify everything you would know everything. If you
could name everything you could know everything.
And to be omniscient is to be able to name and perceive and to categorise all
things. And omniscient beings are really busy ‘cos every single moment of their
life they must perceive all the chemical structures and all the biological names of
every object in the universe. You see what I mean.
Is that what it means to be omniscient? You see what I mean.
And then the logic texts say, no. Okay. The guts of omniscience, is very
beautiful. It’s to know what’s right and what’s wrong. Okay. And that’s
enough, you see.
If you knew what kinds of actions would bring total happiness to all living
beings and if you knew what kinds of actions are hurting all living beings, that’s,
omniscience. That’s the guts of omniscience.
Do they also see all the chemical names of everything? Yes.
Do they, are they into taxonomical whatever? Yes.
But that’s not what it means to be omniscient.                Omniscient means they
understand the way to get out of suffering.
They understand if you do these things you will be ultimately happy forever. If
you do these things you will continue to suffer.
And because they understand that division, that one division perfectly, they’re
omniscient. And that’s the point of omniscience. Okay.
I think that’s kind of cool. I really like that. It’s kinda, you know, you can feel it’s
true that that’s what you’d want an omniscient being to be worrying about,
okay, in reality. Okay.
We’ll stop there and take a break and then we’ll get in our groups. There’s a lot
more stuff on the homework to cover.
Next week, I’m sorry, next class we’ll cover future lives and the proofs for future
lives. Okay.
[break]
[cut] … give them away for free. We’ve given away about ten thousand disks in
about fifty countries. And now they’re all on the web. You can take any book
that you want as of a couple of weeks ago. [celebration / acknowledgements]
Last week we talked about the core curriculum of the ACI and we talked about
the distinction between Lam Rim, {lam rim pa and the {tsennyi pa}, okay.
{lam rim pa} is an approach based on the Lam Rim teachings. Lam Rim is an
abbreviation of all the steps of the path. And that’s mainly what has reached this
country so far. I mean, most teachers who’ve come here, Tibetan, knowing the
special circumstances here: there’s a language barrier, Americans are always
busy, they don’t have time to come to class. If they do come to class they’re
gonna skip a lot of classes. They’re probably not going to be willing to
memorise anything, or like that. So, based on all that, you know, these Geshes
who’ve spent their whole lives studying {tsennyi pa}, the five great books, start
teaching Lam Rim. And that’s a good thing and it’s very lucky for Americans
that the Lam Rim exists and many people learned it.
But also it means that Americans haven’t been able or had the opportunity to go
through the five great books. And so ACI is supposed to be something
different.
ACI is supposed to be where we don’t concentrate so much on {lam rim pa}, we
study more the {tsennyi pa}, the five great books.
It takes more time. It takes more commitment. And fewer people will come,
you know. Not so many people can spend that much time. Not so many people
are attracted to that much work.
And, and the idea is that we’d rather have fewer people who are willing to go
through that kind of work and, and produce teachers of high quality, you know,
who really know their stuff.
So that’s been the theory behind the structure of the courses.
I’d like to talk, not very long, maybe about five minutes, about how they’re
presented, okay. And I think this is very important. I think there’s been this
tendency to present the ancient books as too difficult for Americans, you know.
Like, every teacher who comes to America says, we better water this down or
we’d better make this easier or we can’t give American people can’t read the
original books.
And, and I’d like to say that ACI doesn’t accept that, you know. All of the
courses that were ever taught here were based on the original Scriptures. Like,
there haven’t been any readings until this year that were written by anybody
than some Tibetan or Indian master from the ancient days, you know. You
studied the original Abhidharmakosha. You studied the original Madhyamika
text. You went through, you’re going through the original Pramana text.
And I think that should be a principle of ACI that the texts that are studied as the
core are the original texts. You see what I mean. That I don’t think that
Americans are too stupid or, or they’re not interested enough or they don’t have
the patience or the, or the willpower to get through the original books. I don’t
believe that. I don’t think it’s true. And I think, I would like to see those texts be
the core of, of what we do. I think the problem is in the presentation of them,
you see what I mean.
If you sit down and try to read the Abhidharmakosha, it’s impossible. You can’t.
Okay. It’s not something that you can read like His Holiness has ‘The Art of
Happiness’, you know, you can’t sit down and read the Abhidharmakosha like
that. You can’t. It requires a commitment of some time in your life. And you
have to sit down and be willing to learn it thoroughly and then you need an oral
explanation of it. And here’s the punch line for tonight: in plain English. Okay.
In plain English.
So, I think you have to have that combination, okay. The original ancient
Scriptures as they were written and you must have that as the core of your
course and as your Institute. But I think at the same time, you must have an oral
tradition, an oral explanation about it which is given in ordinary English, in
normal English without the gibberish, without weird English words, without
Sanskrit words that you don’t know, without requiring that you learn Tibetan. I
think it’s good to have Tibetan if you want to learn it. But in normal English that,
the ancient original texts, are explained in a way that a normal American person
can relate to. And then, relate it to people’s lives.
That’s the theory of ACI. That’s the theory of the core, okay.
So, you know, when we send out the readings to, like, people, we always send
them tapes because the readings by themselves are hard. And, they were not,
meant to be books that you read by yourself. They were meant to be guides
that you used with a teacher and, and with an oral explanation, the oral tradition
and the blessings of the oral lineage.
Khen Rinpoche gets very upset. People say, I heard you’re gonna start teaching,
which he is, by the way, and you should know. I think on Sundays, very soon,
so keep in touch and find out. So people say, I can’t make it, my brother’s
getting married, you know, or something like that. I’ll send Joe with a tape
recorder, you know. And Rinpoche gets furious and says, you don’t get the oral
blessing from a tape recorder, okay. You have to be there, you know. You have
to listen. There’s something that happens between a living being and another
living being that you can’t put on a tape recorder. And, and so I say that, that
the theory behind these courses has been threefold. Okay.
One, you use the original Scriptures. They have been either written by or
written down from a being who is omniscient. You can present them in a
modern way but you can’t improve on that information. It’s, it’s, it’s infallible. It
has been written by an omniscient being. You don’t need to correct Lord
Buddha’s statements or fix them or anything else. They’re fine. He knew you
were gonna think like that a million years ago. And if you don’t think so then
why study it. You see what I mean.
So, so you must have as the core the original statements by Lord Buddha and
you must study them.
Secondly, they must be interpreted and presented in your language, in your
vernacular. They should be presented in normal English without a lot of weird
philosophical terms or foreign languages or things like that.
They must be passed on in the language that normal people can relate to. And
they can be. And there’s no reason to make them unintelligible. That’s just a
problem of people not knowing the language of the original very well.
If a translation sounds weird to you, you can bet it’s been badly done because
you can bet the original sounds fine. You see what I mean.
So, if a translation sounds weird or odd or, you know, unintelligible, it’s a
reflection of the translator, okay. The originals are amazing. The originals are
fantastic and beautiful and wonderful. And they sound great in the Tibetan,
okay.
So those are two principles. You have the original texts and you present the
information in normal language of the people that you’re speaking to.
And Lord Buddha does that. That’s one of the qualities of a Buddha; sixty
qualities of a Buddha’s speech. Number one of the sixty is, speaks the language
of the common man of that place.
And that’s the first quality of a Buddha’s enlightened speech, okay.
And then, the third quality, is to continue to recognise the blessing of the oral
tradition.    You know what I mean.            The importance of a living being,
transmitting some kind of blessing, to another living being through the class.
So you will never be able to do ACI courses only from the books or from the
tapes, you know. Sooner or later you must have direct contact with a living
teacher and, and, and the information can only be spread that way.
There’s factual information that can be spread through tapes and books but
there’s an oral tradition, unbroken, back to the time of the Buddha, of some kind
of special synergy that takes pace between a student and a teacher that cannot be
replaced. It must be direct contact with a human teacher. And the blessing of
the oral tradition must continue unbroken. Okay.
And that’s where you guys come in because, (a) I’m going on retreat, (b) even if
I wasn’t I can’t talk to everybody who wants to know this stuff. And you must
start taking the role of the next generation of teachers.
It’s not something, how you say, presumptuous. It’s something you have to do.
It’s something you are bound to do. It’s something you are obliged to do. You
see what I mean?
Once you have taken teachings and once you have become the next link in the
oral tradition, it’s your responsibility to pass it on or it will die. You see what I
mean.
The oral, the books will be around and the ACI tapes you’ll be able to order
from Ani Pelma for the next fifty, sixty years, but it’s your responsibility to take
the oral tradition and pass it onto other living beings, okay.
And you can and you should. And that’s the way it’s always been done.
And don’t think that you’re not smart enough or good enough to do it because
that’s the way it’s always worked, okay.
Each generation thought they weren’t as good as the last generation. Maybe
true but we’re all you have right now. Okay. So you have to think like that and
don’t, don’t get like some feeling that you’re not good enough or you’re not
smart enough.
Learn it well and then fearlessly pass it on to other people. It’s not only your, it’s
not only possible or desirable it’s your responsibility or else it will stop, after two
and a half thousand years, with you. Do you want to do that? You know, if you
want to be the first dead end street in two and a half thousand years,[laughs]
okay. No, you have to not think like that, okay.
And the way I see the teacher’s doing it here is very sweet. The twelve teachers
that we have here are doing very, very well and I hear good Dharma going
down, okay.
Okay, we’ll stop there and take a break. No, see you next week. [laughter]
Okay.
[prayer: short mandala]
[prayer: dedication]
Goodnight
The Asian Classics Institute

Course XVI: Great Ideas of Buddhism