ACI 16 (обзорный курс), Занятие 10 (прогон ГМР, Нью-Йорк 1999) — стенограмма

Class Ten

Geshe Michael Roach

Transcribed by Angie Overy




[cut] you know in his former life. And collected the karma because he killed an
insect; cut an insect in two. And then, later, he was beheaded. That’s how he
died. So, was he aware that that particular bug had got cut in half? No.
Did he collect the karma? Yes.
Why? You can call it, like, peripheral awareness that you might be killing them.
You see what I mean,
When you go out with a lawnmower and cover half an acre of grass and see all
these jumping around, although you don’t see anybody get hit with the blade,
you have a peripheral awareness that, that you are killing, okay.
Alright.
Third one, motivation. [student] Hang on one sec, one sec, okay. Let me finish
this one and then I’ll take one or two questions.
I got conflicting hands here.
Premeditation, okay, did you intend to kill this being? You know, were you
planning it? What was your motivation, you se what I mean?
Did you sit down and plan it out? This is recognised even in the law, right? Like,
a lengthy premeditation is more serious than a sudden burst of passion or
something like that, okay.
To sit there for days and think about how you’re gonna shoot them and where
you’re gonna shoot them. Maybe they’ll bleed a little bit first and, you know.
To think like that is total premeditation.
Those are the three elements of what we call thought. Unless all three elements
are there you do not collect the full karma.
Do you collect any karma? Yes you do, okay.
But for a big juicy what we call [unclear] full karma called ‘karmic path’, these all
have to be satisfied, okay.
So what if you go into a room and you want to stab the guy and he’s put pillows
under a blanket and you go like that and then you run away and you believe
you’ve killed somebody, okay. How many are there? Is there a {shi}?
That’s a touchy one, okay. Is there a guy which you thought you were killing?
[students] Yeah. Okay. Is, I’ll say now, but I don’t remember the answer in the
scripture.
Did you recognise it for what it was? No. You see what I mean.
So the karma’s a little bit less.
Did you have a mental affliction? Yes.
What was the other one? Did you have a premeditation? Yes.
Did you undertake to kill? Yes.
Did you complete the killing? No. Hopefully not, unless there was a roach
under the pillow. [laughter]
Okay, that’s all. Those are examples and you can play around with your own
examples.
But this is the study of karma. People ask me how do you make a big karma,
how do you make a little karma? This is one of the main things.
Why should it be interesting to you? The principles of karma are how tantra
works, okay. I’m gonna tie it right up to tantra, okay.
Tantra works because of karma. You can turn this body, is like the glass of
water, never forget it.
This is the same as the glass of water. If you could fix your karma you would see
this body as a tantric deity’s body. And you can do it, okay.
And you have to do it. And you gotta collect these big juicy karmas. [unclear]
like saving life. See that this person is [unclear], okay, {shi ..}.
Recognise that they are a human being who needs help: Yes.
Have a mental happy thought: I want to save this person.
Have a premeditation: I’m gonna give them this medicine, this medicine.
You know, undertake to do it: go to their house, serve them, help them.
[unclear] they get better, you know and you own it. You say, I did that and I’m
proud of it. That’s a big fat juicy karma.
Keep that up long enough and you will see the glass of water different, you see.
That’s your hope to become a tantric deity in this life. That’s why it can work.
Those principles can be twisted around to serve our purposes and that’s {..},
okay. You just have to pull it off. And you have to pull it off before you
perceive this thing stopping breathing, okay. Alright. And you can. But it takes
extraordinary attention to the most powerful good deeds you can find.
Lord Buddha has made a list called the three types of vows. Check them every
hour and a half or so. This is the way to get to a tantric body. Really, okay,
{tundruk}.
One or two questions. Yeah. [student] Yeah, his head was cut off with a blade
of grass, okay.
Yeah. [student] Yeah, if you’re a medical doctor and you’re saving lives all day it
does help your karma. Will it necessarily help your karma in this lifetime?
Maybe not because there’s three ripenings, right. It could come in the next or
the one after.
What would make it speed up? An understanding of karma and emptiness,
okay.
By the way, that would differentiate normal act of charity of giving medicine
from the perfection of giving, you see.
The difference between a bodhisattva’s perfection of giving, perfection of
morality, perfection of patience, you see.
The difference between plain old patience and the perfection of patience is
exactly what I talked about with the boss.
If you understand emptiness, if you understand that this irritating guy is your
projection and then you’re patient, you see, that’s a totally different action.
That’s gonna get you enlightened in no time. You see. That’s a perfection. That
becomes a perfection. Big difference between that and plain old oh I won’t get
mad it’s not so nice. Okay. Alright.
We’ll stop there. Ask your break out teachers, alright.
Okay, we’ll wrap up. [announcements]
The thing I’d like to talk about tonight that relates to ACI is how the classes are
conducted, meaning, yeah [student] I don’t remember the exact dates..
I’d like to talk about a little strategy, you know. My dream is that you guys start
your own little operations going, you know.
I saw this movie about [unclear] and I was really impressed by how they split up
the territory. [laughter] And, you know, we don’t have any operation in
Brooklyn. [laughter] Think about it, you know. As far as I’m concerned the
purpose of these classes is that you become a teacher.
We have a guy named Skye and his wife from Yonkers or something and they
started a little centre and they put up flyers and three people came and they
taught them how to meditate. And now it’s about thirty-five, forty people and
they have a very strong group now. And it’s going really well. And they had
the same classes that you had. There’s a group in Australia, a man and a wife,
who have already done a Diamond Cutter Sura course and now they’re on
another course. I forget which one. Principle Teachings course. And they’re
doing great. And it’s about fifteen students in a little tiny town on the ocean in
Australia.
And a lady came up to me the other day and said, I’m from your Brooklyn
centre. And I said, I don’t have a centre in Brooklyn.
And she said, yes you do, but you didn’t know about it, you know. [laughter]
I like it, you know. I think it’s great.
I just want to talk about some ideas about how to do it, okay.
One is, don’t worry about how many people come. Don’t judge your success by
how many people there are. It doesn’t matter, okay.
To save one person’s mental continuum from a hell realm or something like that,
that’s okay. That’s worth some of your time. You know what I mean. Okay.
And it’s worth losing some money on too, you know, ‘cos that’s another thing
about starting a Dharma centre. The funder is gonna be you. And it’s gonna be
your living room and your cookies and tae and your bathroom that you have to
clean up afterwards, okay. And accept it, that’s a fact of life. That’s the Dharma
business, you know. The reason students come to you is they want to learn
about correct behaviour. So, by definition, they don’t have correct behaviour.
And you’ll be washing the bathroom for sometime. And they won’t contribute
for a while.
And you’ll be financing everything for sometime. You know what I mean,
And then you’ll even have a few students who’ll criticise you and say bad things
about you and blah, blah, blah.
And you have to say, that’s okay. That goes with the territory, okay.
But be happy to start with two or three people. When we started these class on
Thirty-ninth street we brought enough furniture to fit in a Honda with two
people. And that was six chairs and one little table. And that was the first class
furniture.
And don’t think it has to be some grand thing, okay.
Je Tsongkapa started with one student, you know. And that’s the way it goes.
So, something modest.
And what I’ve learned teaching in New York for, like, I don’t know, twenty
years, is make it a distinct start and a distinct end. Don’t let a class go on forever,
okay.
Say, we’re gonna have six classes or we’re gonna have eight classes or we’re
gonna have ten classes and then you’re all gonna go home and rest for a month
or something like that. You know, human beings need a beginning and human
beings need an end. And don’t let a Dharma class go on interminably until
everybody gets exhausted or stops coming, okay.
At the beginning you can’t make the attendance too strict or no one will come.
So loosen it up at the beginning and after they’re hooked then crack down on
them, okay. Alright.
As soon as you can institute some kind of feedback, you see, like homework or
something like that. You see, there are hundreds of Dharma events going on in
the city every year and classes. But it’s my experience, until I required people to
do quizzes or homeworks, nobody learned anything, nobody retained anything.
The day after they left they couldn’t tell you what the lecture was about. You
know what I mean. And I think it’s very important to have those, to have some
kind of structure like that where the person has to give back something, has to
show that they know the material. And people want to. You see what I mean.
Don’t think that you’re torturing them. People want to progress, people want to
know that they are making progress. People want a sense of knowing that
they’re learning something. You see what I mean. And in the monastery you’re
tested constantly. Every night you go to debate and you’re tested.
And everyday you’re asked by your teacher. They don’t just teach, they yell
questions at the students. And they have to respond like marines in boot camp,
you know. And you hear this, you walk down the street in the monastery and
you hear this {..},you know, you hear this. And, you know, students are yelling
back at teachers all over the monastery. It’s a very weird experience, like, you
walk down and it sounds like people fighting in each room, you know.
And it’s the daily classes going on in the teacher’s room.
So, don’t be afraid to test them. People don’t like quizzes. People will fight you
about it. People won’t bring them. People won’t do them. But they really do
want them because they want a feeling of making real progress.
So give them a chance to make real progress. My boss at work used to call it
bowling theory. And he said, if you don’t give people feedback about how
they’re doing, then it’s like telling someone to roll balls but covering the thing
with a sheet so they can’t tell how many pins they’re hitting. And then they get
depressed. They feel like they’re not making any progress.
And don’t be afraid to challenge Americans. Don’t think you have to teach the
same old thing every time and keep rehashing the same old thing. I’ve seen
Dharma centres where they just kept doing the same basic stuff over and over
again. People get bored and people stop coming.
The other extreme is to throw in so much foreign language stuff that no one
can,no one really understands what’s going on.
I mean, it’s good to reference it to the original text. It’s good to have the foreign
language available for those who wish to study it. But make sure you speak in
common, in plain English or you’ll lose half the people. And you’ll never know
it. They’ll come once and they won’t come back, you know.
And Dharma itself is so difficult that it’s like jumping over hurdles to get to an
understanding of emptiness. And when you throw in foreign words and foreign
expressions and weird English words you’re putting additional obstacles for
them to jump over. And some people won’t make it. You know what I mean.
Some people will leave.
The third time you say the [unclear] of the dhatus in the karmadhatu in the
abhidharmakosha, you know, then they’ll say this is too much. There’ll be one
more obstacle in the way that was not necessary, you know.
It’s hard enough to reach an understanding of Dharma without having to jump
over fourteen Sanskrit words and thirty-five Tibetan words, you know.
Use the Tibetan to impress them and then they’ll believe you that you’re
authentic, you see, but don’t make it an obstacle for them. See what I mean.
Don’t require that they have to spell back all this stuff.
In fifty years from now nobody’ll use those things. It’ll all be in English. And the
commentaries a hundred years from now will all be in English. And they won’t
study Tibetan commentaries.
How many Sanskrit commentaries are studied in Tibet now in Sanskrit? None.
How many were studied in Je Tsongkapa’s time? None. Okay.
And, you know, it’ll come here too.
So don’t put these obstacles in their way. It’s not necessary, okay.
Make things spelled like the way an American pronounce them. Not bodicitta,
okay. It’s bodhichitta, [laughs] you know what I mean, stuff like that.
If you have to use a foreign word at least give them, give people some help, you
know. Don’t assume that all the people in your class are gonna know the words
samsara, bodhisattva, Buddha, Tara. Assume they don’t know anything, you
know.
I see a lot of teachers they just don’t remember the day they started and they
didn’t know any of those words.
I remember when I went to Dharamsala. I got off the bus. I went straight into
class and it was bodhichitta, arya, arhat, bodhisattvas, you know, all these words
I had no idea what they meant. Don’t torture them.
Remember what you were like before you came into class. Remember what it
was like to come into a class and don’t trip them up with all these things. Try to
be sensitive to how it is for them, okay.
Have some authentic readings ready for them. Have something they can take
home. Have something that’s a package, you know. Don’t just teach a class and
let them go home and forget it all.
There should be some kind of notebook or something that they can take home
because they need to pass it on to the next generation.
So you don’t just teach a class and go through it and say good luck, see you later.
Give them something to take home that they can use to help the next generation
of students.
Couple of things happen when you do that. The authentic lineage gets passed
down. Unauthentic lineages don’t get inserted ‘cos you didn’t give them
anything. You see what I mean.
So these are the benefits. The true lineage keeps going on like that.
So take the time to prepare the class beforehand. I think a lot of people who get
into trying to teach something don’t enough time to prepare for things that the
students are going to need. And they think they don’t have to because it’s free,
you know.
Now if I was getting a sixty thousand dollar salary for being a professor here,
you know, and if I had a board of [unclear] was going to check me to see if I
gave out materials, then I would take the time. But this is hey, this is just a
Dharma class. I’m not charging these guys anything. Why should I work that
hard. You know what I mean. That’s a bad attitude, you see. You have a bigger
responsibility than all those college professors who work their butts off. You see
what I mean.
You have a much bigger responsibility. And the fact that it’s not a degree or that
they’re not getting grades which are going to be sent home to mom or dad, you
know, or the fact that they’re not paying you. It should have no relevance on
how hard you try, you know.
You should treat it professionally and the classes should be dome professionally.
And you should take the time to prepare them well even if only two people
show up, okay. And it always starts like that and then as you gain more
experience and like that, then it’ll start to grow, okay.
But treat it seriously and treat it professionally. And make it ready for the
people. When they walk in they get something very authentic and something
pure. And then as we said last week forget the money, okay. Take the loss
yourself, {…}, you know, take the loss yourself, okay. [laughs]
Financially. For a while when you start your centre it’s gonna be like that. Okay.
And I encourage you to do it, okay. I encourage you to think about the process
of eventually starting something.
Don’t get into big debts. Don’t rent, you know, don’t go buy a place and put up
signs and stuff like that. Run it organically. Run it from the inside. Run it on the
cheap, you know, at the beginning. Do it in your living room, okay.
And make it regular but give them breaks. You see what I mean.
Do it for a specific amount of time and then stop and give people time to digest,
okay. That’s important too, okay. That’s something I’ve noticed about the
classes, okay.
We’ll stop there and do some prayers.
[prayer: short mandala]
[prayer: dedication]
Goodnight. thankyou
The Asian Classics Institute

Course XVI: Great Ideas of Buddhism