ACI 18 (обзорный курс), Занятие 01 — стенограмма

[short mandala]
[refuge]
[cut]
Thank you for coming. Let me see. We’re all still spaced out. We got back last night, very
late. We didn’t get any sleep [unclear]
[cut]
[student: unclear]
[retreat / godstow notices]

We’re covering in this series of classes the last five courses of the ACI curriculum. [unclear],
eleven and twelve were the second two thirds of the Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life.
And thirteen was [unclear] Madhyamika, Logic. [laughter] [laughs]
And fourteen was Lojong.

And fifteen was very difficult on the Mind Only School.
So you’re gonna get in this final course, this is the last of the eighteen courses. It’s been seven
years, okay. And you’ll be getting notes from a review of those courses.
I believe you have three people qualified [unclear] to do a baby Geshe at the end.
Sera Mey monastery has offered to give them a Geshe degree. I said , I don’t know [unclear]
offered me some kind of degree status, but I [unclear] have to talk about it, after [unclear],
okay.

It’s traditional that even after you’ve finished all the work at the last minute everyone ets to
take a shot at you. So I see the day we take a final, final final sometime around the end of the
year. And then maybe February, early February- March, on Tibetan New Year eve, it’s very
auspicious to have a final examination of them publicly. [unclear] if you don’t know it your
friends tell you about it. [laughter] And it’s a lot of fun. Just after midnight on New Year’s
[unclear] you get, you know, your hat [unclear] and then the next morning [unclear]
Okay. [unclear] And there’s lots of people around the world who want teachers to come,
okay.

We’ve had invitations from Singapore, Hong Kong, South Africa, Holland, England, another
one from Ireland. Mongolia wants five or six of you. And all over the world, maybe Hawaii
[unclear] many people talk about them.
So my dream is that, you know, we send out [unclear]
We’re gonna be studying{chunjuk} [cut]
Say {chun juk}[repeat]; {chun} part means activity, the way of life of a bodhisattva, okay, a
person who has dedicated their whole life to the service of other people. And {juk} [unclear],
to get into
We’ll be studying the commentary by Gyaltseb Je [unclear] [cut] . {gyal} means, victor or
victorious one and it refers to an enlightened being [unclear]This is,I think, the greatest
commentary to Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life [unclear]
We’re gonna be covering in the first two classes [unclear]. We covered patience, effort and
meditation [unclear]
We taught in California a thing called {tob shi}. {tob shi} means four ways of restoring your
old bad karma. Like, if you did something really stupid when you were young, knowing
that you don’t do those things anymore, you can get rid of the karma, okay.
That’s a special teaching, a very special [unclear] help focus your mind on how to remove
that karma.
And the principle that you can remove old karma is often derived from the section in the
‘Bodhisattva’s Way of Life’ where it says you can wipe out your old good karma, okay,
alright [laughs]. If you’ve worked very hard over the years to collect a lot of good karma,
you can very effectively destroy it before giving the proper results, through anger, okay.
So anger is the ultimate method. Actually, there’s two methods, but anger’s the easiest one,
okay. If you want to wipe out your old good karma, alright. And it’s on that basis that they
give you teachings on wiping out old bad karma also, okay.
We’d rather wipe out the old bad karma, okay.
The main danger in anger is the object. If you get angry at a bodhisattva, okay, a person
who has reached a very high level where they don’t do anything in their whole life that’s not
directed at getting people to enlightenment, okay.
They are constantly, ever since the day that they got bodhichitta, getting bodhichitta is this
big difficult step, but once you get there, everything you do after that, every moment of your
life, and you know it from the moment you get bodhichitta, that you will only be dedicating
all your efforts to helping other people [unclear[, helping them get enlightened and things
like that, okay.
So, who around us is a bodhisattva, you know? What do you look like when you reach
bodhichitta? When you have that experience of direct, when you have that direct experience
that you will be spending the rest of your life helping other people all the time, constantly, all
day, all night, okay. When you get that thing, does your face change or do you get an aura
or unclear] or something like that?
No. You don’t, okay.
And so, really, you don’t know who around you is a bodhisattva.
That was one of the first questions I ever asked Rinpoche when I went to study with him.
I’m twenty, twenty-one years old. We’re sitting in the kitchen which at that time was all the
space he had and I asked him, how do you know who’s a bodhisattva?
He said, you don’t, you know. And, so it’s dangerous. The point is that it’s dangerous. It’s
better not be angry at anybody, okay, ‘cos you don’t know who’s a bodhisattva.
If you get angry at a bodhisattva it destroys thousands of good karmas, okay.
The next question on your homework is the [cut] is a very famous quotation from
Bodhisatvvacharayavatara. I had to sit there and cut down these famous quotations to, like,
fourteen questions on the homework instead of fifty. Ora wouldn’t let me do the [unclear],
okay. [laughter] She kept saying [unclear[ cut it, cut it, you know. And I can’t cut Master
Shantideva. Anyway this is {…}. You should memorise it, okay. I think a lot of students
have.
This is the idea that when you’re studying the perfection of patience, which I prefer to call
‘the art of not getting angry when the time comes to get angry’ because [unclear]
There’s a certain sequence of events which happen, okay. And if you know it you have a
little bit more time to stop it, okay.
Anger is always proceeded by being upset, okay. So the state that comes just before anger is
called being upset, alright.
And there’s a state just before being upset called getting off balance or losing your joy, okay.
So it goes like this. Somebody says something like maybe they praise somebody you don’t
like. And then you get slightly bit off balance. Your mind goes a little bit off keels, right.
Like, you’re on a steady keel for about an hour and then somebody says something to you
and it takes your mind, I don’t know, maybe it takes your mind four, five seconds to evaluate
what they said and [unclear] what they said. And they’re saying something nice about
someone you don’t like and it gets kind of, tilts you one way. It’s, like, rocks the boat a little
bit. That’s called getting off balance, okay. Then comes {..} meaning getting upset, okay. It
means you have about, I don’t know, must be about four or five seconds to reflect on how
off balance you’re getting and to start not like what the person said, see what I mean. So you
go from being off balance to getting upset. And then directly from getting upset you get
angry. You see what I mean.
If you’re lucky you can have {..} after that. {..} means, holding that anger for minutes or
hours or weeks, okay. That doesn’t even come in [unclear]
So you got four steps here. You’ve got, actually, it’s five. Somebody says something; it
throws you off balance; you get enough off balance, you get upset; and then you get angry.
The point is, to intercept anger when you get upset, okay.
As you start to get upset to realise that you’re upset. This gives you about five second head
start on anger. And I’m not kidding, okay.
The other perfection takes years of effort, weeks of contemplation, meditation, application.
The perfection of patience you either succeed or you fail within five seconds of [unclear]
about all the time you have, you know.
And this perfection is practised throughout the day on [unclear] occasions and you only have
about ten seconds maximum before you either do it or don’t do it, okay.
And then you’re practising it in retrospect, oh, I shouldn’t have said that, you know what I
mean, okay.
So these verses, the first two lines say, and His Holiness loves this opening verse. It says, if
there’s something you can do about [unclear] then why get upset? Just do it.
Okay, if there’s something you can do about something you don’t like, why get upset. Just
do it, fix it, okay. [unclear] Okay.
If there’s nothing you can do about it, why should you get upset? You know, just chill out,
okay.
And Master Shantideva says, be like a bump on a log. Just freeze, you know, try and chill
out, okay.
If you can do something, do it. There’s no reason to get upset.
If you can’t do anything, you won’t be able to do it, so why worry about it, okay.
Very famous quotation.
If you can avoid getting upset you won’t get to anger, okay. It’s the concentric theory of
morality, right, you know it.
Somebody in [unclear] came and asked me how. She said, we can’t see the overhead
projector on the tape and you keep talking about ‘concentric circle’ theory of morality, right.
[unclear]
It’s like this. Here’s the anger which you want to avoid at all costs because you might lose
[unclear] years of good deeds, okay, in ten seconds it’s ruined.
And then over here is getting upset. And then out here is getting off balance. [cut] And the
truth is, oh, and I wanted to show you one more. This is losing your joy.
And the concentric circle theory of morality, which I was taught two months after I started
studying Buddhism in Dharamsala by [unclear].
He said that, you know, if you never lose your joy, if you never break this one you’ll never
get off balance. If you’re never off balance, you’re never upset.
If you never get upset, you’ll never get angry.
So, try not to lose your joy. You know, all throughout the day try to remain in a state of,
like, pretty happy about what’s going on, okay, like that.
And then you’ll never get off balance and get upset. The [unclear] of the mind from here to
here takes about ten seconds. You only have about ten seconds to react.
If you’re aware of these two steps here, or these three steps, you give yourself a little more
time. You have a little more time.
And if this sounds like [unclear] it is, okay. They are trying to steal your good karma from
your mind stream. It’s a frontal assault on your good karma and they can break through in
ten seconds, okay. And there is no enemy like anger.
The scriptures all say that, you know. AIDS, atomic bombs, the Russians or the Chinese;
they’re nothing compared to what anger can do to your mind and the karma.
The evil that happens physically can’t hurt your karma. Anger can wipe out your happiness
for weeks or months, okay, and you’ll never know it. You’ll just be miserable for the rest of
your life, okay.
So you have about ten seconds to do something. And if you know that, if you know the
danger signs [unclear]
Yeah. [cut]
[unclear] It doesn’t seem reasonable that, you know, five minutes of anger can wipe [unclear]
And there’s a debate about it in the scriptures. But the point is the object, okay. We say
[unclear] primarily that power of the object [unclear], okay.
I believe this person is a living being, probably a human, someone who has tantric [unclear]
enlightened in one lifetime, okay, very holy object. [unclear] It’s because of the powerful
object.
[cut][unclear] If your virtue has the intensity of your anger [unclear] and I’m speaking quite
frankly [unclear]
Asian Classics Institute
Course XVIII: Great Ideas of Buddhism