ACI 18 (обзорный курс), Занятие 08 — стенограмма

Class Eight
Geshe Michael Roach
Transcribed by Angie Overy




Okay, we’ll start. [announcements]
As Winston so eloquently started the Lojong I get to finish it. And thank you for that.
[applause]
I get to cover {shenpa shi drel}. [cut]
Say {shenpa}[repeat] {shi drel}[repeat].
[announcements]
{shenpa} means ‘attachment’, {shi} means ‘four’, {drel} means, some of my students can’t
pronounce this right, they say {drel}, which means ‘connected’. {drel} means ‘disconnected’,
so you have to be careful with this one. {shenpa shi drel} means ‘free of the four attachments’.
That works, right? [microphone]
{Shenpa shi drel}, freedom from the four attachments, okay.
I’m gonna read them to you in English.
A person who is still attached to this life is no Dharma practitioner. That’s number one. A
person who is still attached to this life is no Dharma practitioner.
Second one is, a person who is attached to the three worlds has no renunciation.
Three worlds are basically the desire realm, the form realm and the formless realm, okay.
Meaning this realm, this broken realm that we’re in.
Number three, a person who is still attached to getting what they want is no bodhisattva.
Number four, a person who still grasps to things has no worldview. Meaning, grasps to
things self-existently, right, as existing.
A person who still grasps to things has no worldview, okay.
Those are called the four attachments. And then the purpose of this {lojong} is to get free of
them.
I want to talk a little bit about the lineage of this {lojong}.
Fourth one again is a person who still grasps to things, meaning self-existently, has no
worldview. [student]
Sorry? [student]
Number two, a person who is still attached to the three worlds has no renunciation. Your
class leaders will give them to you.
Okay.
I like totell people that it’s important to do the {Sakya lojongs} because really the early
teachers who came to Mongolia were the {Sakyas}.
You know the story, Godun Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, came to the edge of Tibet,
eastern edge of Tibet to collect the tribute.
The Tibetans were not invaded by Genghis Khan, as everybody else was, you see. Korea,
Vietnam, China, Moscow was taken by the Khan. That’s why so many people in Russia look
Mongolian. All of the Middle East like, Persia, Northern India. He got down into Vietnam.
He took basically the entire world. Outside of Vienna, in one day, they killed four hundred
thousand Viennese and were about to march into Vienna. And we’d all be speaking
Mongolian. The Hungarians still speak a Mongolian dialect. Bt they turned back because
they got a message, three-year message, sent three years before down the line, that the Khan
had died, Genghis Khan.
And they turned around and went home. Okay.
Anyway the Tibetans stopped paying as soon as they heard that the Khan had died. And the
Tibetans never got attacked because they just paid basically, what do you call it, tribute.
What do they call it in grocery stores in New York? Protection money, okay. [laughs]
Okay.
So, Godun Khan came to collect the protection money again, the grandson. And on the
border he began to take an interest in Buddhism. He sent a message to what he heard was
the greatest Buddhist teacher at the time, the Sakya Pandita. And sent a message to him. We
still have the message. It’s very beautiful.
It says, I’m taking an interest in Buddhism, I’ve heard that you are interested in liberating all
living beings. I am a living being and I request you to teach me Buddhism. And if you don’t
come and teach me Buddhism I’ll destroy all the monasteries in Eastern Tibet. [laughs] We
still have his letter.
Sakya Pandita was already an old man. He was very old at the time. And he kept getting
stopped on the way to teach which was very common, even with people like Lama Zopa and
stuff like that.
So, he was afraid he’d be late so he sent ahead, as a good faith measure, his two nephews to
meet the Khan as sort of, like, a ransom.
Then one nephew named Pakpa actually had converted the Khan before the Sakya Pandita
even got there.
And this Pakpa went on to be the main lama of the Mongolians. He invented one of the
Mongolian scripts that they used to write.
He became the court lama of Kublai Khan in the court in Beijing and met Marco Polo there.
And Marco Polo wrote about him.
So he’s a very illustrious, he also invented the mandala offering that we do, the long one.
That’s called Pakpa’s mandala offering. Things like that.
The Sakya Pandita’s nephew was Pakpa. And Sakya Pandita’s uncle was called, let me get
this straight, Sakya Pandita’s uncle was named Drakpa Gyeltsen. Okay.
And Drakpa Gyeltsen’s very important in our Vajrayogini lineage, okay.
One of the most important lamas for {dzog rim}; he is the source for teachings on one of the
branches of the {dzog rim} tradition that we do in Vajrayogini. Okay.
So I thought it would be auspicious if you studied his commentary. So what you have in
your reading is Drakpa Gyeltsen’s commentary.
Drakpa Gyeltsen was, I believe, the nephew of Sachen, who had the vision of Manjushri who
taught him these as a twelve-year old boy. Okay.
Anyway, that’s your lineage. Pakpa went on, Buddhism stretched all the way to the front
lines of the empire, the Mongolian empire.
As the empire shrank there was a certain number of Mongolians left behind. And in the
seventeen hundreds on Christmas eve, seventeen seventy-six or something, on Christmas eve
they decided to go back home to [unclear] in Mongolia. And the river didn’t freeze that
night.

They got the word from the fifth Dalai Lama at that time, who said go on this night, you
know. And that night the river didn’t freeze and the Mongolians were separated on two
sides of the river.
So, all the Mongolians on the east side of the river came back to Mongolia and actually were
slaughtered on the way. There’s a few pockets of them left in western China or something.
Then the ones on the western side of the river got stuck. And they say that the word in
Mongolian for ‘left behind’ is kalmuk or kal. So they got left behind and they were called
the kalmiks. And then they became the protectors of the southern border of the Russian
empire when the Russian empire began to grow.
And then they were allowed to join this secret Christian society called the Cossacks, military
society. They sided with the wrong side in the revolution to protect the Tsar. Tsar got killed.
The Cossacks were disbanded and that’s when the kalmiks began to run away. Carmen’s
father and [unclear] comes to class sometimes, father, were actually trained in the Cossacks
and had scars. You had to scars on your face and stuff like that.
Anyway, that’s how, then the great kalmik teacher was, what’s his name, Dorjea tried to
convince the Tsar, convinced the Dalai Lama that, thirteenth Dalai Lama, that the Tsar was an
emanation of Chenresig, I think, and Russia was ready to join Tibet and become one country.
As a sign of unity they built a temple in St. Petersburg together named the Kalachakra
temple.
And then, Dorje had a student named Wangyal, Geshe Wangyal, who came to the United
States, taught Professor Thurman, Jeffery Hopkins, Christopher George and all those guys.
And then, brought Rinpoche here in 1972 I think it was or something like that.
So, that’s your lineage. You are in the lineage of the Sakya Mongol teachers. You see what I
mean.
So that’s just a short explanation of what lineage you are, okay. That’s how you got here.
Through the kindness of the Mongols, right. So it’s nice to pay them back.
Anyway, I wanted to talk about the one {shenpa shi drel} where it says, the first one,
‘whoever is still attached to this life is no Dharma practitioner’.
And in Drakpa Gyeltsen’s commentary, Jetsun Drakpa Gyeltsen’s commentary; by the way,
Drakpa Gyeltsen was a layman and a great master of Buddhism. He was a layman with
lifetime vows and also with celibacy vows. And then he, he’s actually the source of some of
the most secret teachings for Vajrayogini, okay.
He explains it very, very interestingly. He says that attachment to this life is already in the
context of a Buddhist practitioner, meaning, a person who’s already a good practitioner.
So, I like his explanation because I think it speaks to most of us.
Most of you have been through at least a couple of courses. Some of you have been up to
ten or twenty years of classes with great lamas.
And Drakpa Gyeltsen is explaining this text, these simple four lines that were taught to a
twelve- year old boy by an emanation, okay, Sachen Kunga Gyeltsen. He’s explaining these
in terms of great practitioners. And he says attachment to this life isn’t at all what you think it
is in this context.
Attachment to this life in this context means attachment to what you grew up with;
attachment to the worldviews that you grew up with, okay. Doing your practice for the
wrong reasons, okay.
And then he starts to give a long list. And I’m gonna go through some of them, okay, what
it means to be attached to this life in the sense of attached to what you grew up with, you see
what I mean.
And what he’s saying is, he goes through a whole list of worldviews, okay. First one, I
would say would be your parents, right.
And you have to be free of attachment for the worldview of your parents. You see what I
mean. That’s one of the most dangerous attachments.
Does it mean that you should abandon your parents?
No.
Does it mean you should be unkind to your parents?
No.
I was preparing text for the database, the HIP database today ‘cos John Brady’s making me.
Not really. And I got to a text by Kunchok {..} which is a whole text on how to repay your
parent’s kindness, you know. So he wrote a book on it in the seventeen hundreds.
And so, no, it doesn’t mean to dis your parents or junk your parents or anything like that. It
just means you have to examine the worldview that you inherited from your parents. And
don’t believe what you believe just because your parents told you. I can give some personal
examples, you know.
My parents grew up in a time when it was considered very sophisticated to drink hard
alcohol. You know what I mean. Like, you had to know, I mean, my father would brag
about knowing twenty-five different ways to make vodka drinks, you know.
It had all these exotic names and he had to go out and search for exotic mixers and stuff like
that. And it was considered very manly.
Like, he would read Hemingway. He would fish for Marlin. He’d drink, you know, special
drinks. You know what I mean. That was considered very manly.
And then I remember, you know, taking me out, here’s your first drink and everything like
that. It was very, very important to get it right, you know, very important to smell the wine
the right way and everything else. And very important to know what kind of whiskey is
better than another kind of whiskey. They all taste the same, right. [laughs]
And that’s just a wrong view. That’s just a totally wasted, ridiculous, insane, crazy, wrong
view. It costs a lot of money. It has absolutely no benefit to human beings. It’s ruined the
lives of countless people including my parents. Probably gave both my parents cancer, you
know, ruined their whole lives. You know what I mean.
And so that, but if I had just bought into my parent’s worldview, I would be doing that now.
And I almost did, you know.
I can remember going to the bar for the first hard drinks, you know, and being very proud.
My dad would be proud of it, you know.
When I was twelve years old my father sent me to NRA marksmanship school so I could
learn to shoot deer. And I remember getting my first twenty-two rifle and he told me how to
shoot squirrels and birds. And then I could move up to a two-seventy Remington the
following, you know, three years later and shoot deer with him. And my high school would
give us time off during hunting season.
And this is just a lousy terrible karma that I grew up with but, but, and those are two that are
obviously wrong. But you have dozens that you are carrying from your parents that you just
believe because your parents taught you that. You see what I mean. No other reason than
that, that your parents taught you that.
You have no better reason to be thinking the way you think except that your parents taught
you that, see what I mean?

 So {shenpa shi drel}, first of the four attachments examines the views that you’ve inherited
from your parents and reject the ones that are harmful, okay. That’s just first one.
It doesn’t mean to disrespect your parents. If you go to their house for dinner you don’t,
like, throw the wine bottle down the toilet or something. You just say, no thankyou or, you
know, I can’t drink that. I have liver thing, you know. [laughs] [laughter] Okay [laughs]
something like that. Okay. Parents.
School. You know, a lot of my worldviews came from, I think of her name okay. This is no
joke. Mrs Bucks, okay, in the fifth grade. And she was just like that. And [laughter] okay.
And just ridiculous viewpoints of the world, you know. Like, if Oprah had have been
around it would have just been straight Oprah Winfrey. You see what I mean. Like, her
whole worldview, her whole idea of what was right and wrong, important to do – chocolate,
bridge, playing bridge, eating chocolate, watching TV, you know. Couldn’t believe that I
hadn’t read Life magazine, you know, that week or something, you know, things like that.
And, you know, sometimes I remember going back and visiting them and they’re just
frightening, you know. Their whole worldview was culled from the Arizona Republic
newspaper and TV. And what’s that show? I forget. Anyway. TV shows [laughs] like
Archie Bunker. Archie Bunker. All from that.
And the whole worldview was drawn from that. I remember one thing they told us, the
Russians are evil, horrible, deadly people trying to kill us, you know.
They made us hide under the desk in case the atom bomb was, like, it’s going to help you to
hide under a desk, right? [laughter]
And years later I went to St. Petersburg. Started work on the catalogue there, spent a lot of
time with the Russians. I remember being in a old ancient cab with a Mongolian driver, you
know. And we’re headed to the airport and they said, [Russian], you know. And I’m, like, I
like it. It’s fun. You guys are great, you know. And they said what do you really think
about Russia, you know. And I said, well, you know, to tell you the truth, when I grew up
they told me you were evil and that you drank blood. And you wanted to bomb us and we
had to hide under the desks, there’s a special drill on it. And they started laughing, you
know. And they said our parents told us the same thing about you, you know.
This was serious when I was a kid and when I was a teenager. This was serious, you know.
They were really evil, hateful, abnormal people, you know.
So just junk that worldview. They were pleasant, happy, caring, loving, wonderful, human,
warm people, you know. They’re just over there and we’re over here.
So you can scratch the second worldview. What your school taught you, you know, you
have to examine it.
And to be attached to it is the first kind of attachment, okay.
I think you can go next to your church. I think the main thing there is very obvious: that
there’s a god, that god created this world, you know. And the first time I openly, in New
York City, talked about how it didn’t make sense I felt like I was almost committing heresy
or something. You know, I felt like, almost frightened to say it. But it’s just ridiculous, you
know what I mean, how could there be a creator being who cared about us, who makes
everything and then makes AIDS, makes cancer, makes my mother die of cancer after getting
her breast chopped off and big holes put in her and, you know, radiated. What’s the point,
you know? What are you trying to teach her, you know? Okay. Maybe she had time to
displease god but what about all these kids, you know, like little tiny kids, infants born with
AIDS. What’s the point?
Why make a being and then give it AIDS to die before it can even think a straight thought,
you know? It’s just doesn’t make any sense at all.
To blame your world on some guy up in the sky, you know what I mean, is just primitive.
I remember talking with Tibetans the first time I went to Dharamsala. And they said, tell us
about Christianity, you know. We heard that you drink your god’s blood, you know. And
I’m, like, no, no we wouldn’t do that. And he said, well what’s this communion thing, you
know? It says you do transformations. That means it turns into the real blood and then you
drink it, you know.
I said, no, no, it’s not like that. Your, your, your religion sounds weird, you know.
They said, who made the world?
I said, god.
They said, come on, everybody knows it was a monkey mating with a deer [laughter] you
know what I mean.
And we had this big debate, you know, and then we both realised that they’re both equally
silly. You know what I mean.
Like, when I say the world was invented, the first human came from the marriage of a
monkey and a white deer or something, you just laugh. You just laugh.
But then you say, oh, some guy came. The guy was asleep. He broke a rib out of him. He
made a lady. They got together, you know. They ate this apple. There’s a snake, you know.
And then you’re like, come on, you know what I mean.
You have to examine that worldview. You know what I mean. You have to examine it.
Is it such an evil thing to believe that somebody created the world?
Yes.
Why?
You can’t take responsibility for your own actions. There’s a big hurdle you have to get over
if you had the bad karma to be born in this society with that myth, okay, and I’m not saying
that the teachings of Jesus or anything like that which are fantastic.
I’m saying that particular myth is harmful to you.
Why?
You think that everything bad that you encounter was put there as a test by some big guy,
you know, or just he was negligent, you know, or something.
But it’s not like that, okay, can’t be like that. And that gets in your way of believing the laws
of karma. Very simply that every bad thing that ever happened to you was created by
something bad you did to someone else.
But you have trouble with that. You really don’t believe it. In your guts you don’t believe it.
In Princeton they called it ‘visceral presuppositions’, you know, meaning what your parents
put into your insides in the first ten years of your life. And you have trouble now. You have
a, we called a {dupa} in Tibetan. You have a spiritual obstacle to the idea that every single
aspect of your inner and outer life was created by you.
And you have to fix it. You see what I mean?
And you just have a block about that. And when I say the proof that karma is true is that
everything comes from something similar that came before, you think, oh that just sounds
simplistic. You see what I mean.
It doesn’t, like, send a big light off in your head. You see what I mean? You say, oh yeah, I
get it. Every time, you know, I’m in a traffic jam it’s because I blocked somebody. And you
think that’s just too simplistic.

And you have an actual spiritual blinder. You have worldview obstacles put there by your
past karma and by your culture. Just wrong. Just flatly wrong.
And they’re very hard to take off. It’s like a horse taking off his own blinders. It’s almost
impossible. It’s almost impossible.
You believe all those things deep down in your heart. The plane starts to go down, what are
you doing? Oh, Jesus, oh Jesus [laughs], you do. I did. I remember, recently. Okay.
[laughter] Okay.
By the way, I’m not saying that there aren’t omniscient beings. There are.
And I’m not saying there are not circling around in this room watching you and trying to
help you directly. There are.
Okay. I’m not saying that Jesus Christ was not the Buddha. He was. Okay.
I’m not saying that.
The worldview thing about the creation of the world, refusing to take responsibility for your
own life and for your world, is just totally wrong.
And until you get over it you’ll be stuck here, okay. You have to overcome that worldview,
okay.
How about the culture?
Attachment to the views of your culture, okay. Whatever the New York Times says, is true.
And whatever the New York Times has on the front page is important. You know what I
mean. And the whole big bang, you can say, science in our case, okay.
Science is false. Science doesn’t work at all. Okay.
Why does the atomic bomb go off?
If it hurts somebody it’s due to the karma of the people who got hurt. Period. Okay.
How does the atomic bomb go off?
Oh, a neutron hits another atomic particle and they multiply too fast and the thing blows up.
That’s the how.
Why? Why didn’t it go off until 1940? You see what I mean. That’s karma. You got to get
used to that.
‘How’ and ‘why’ are different. Okay. Science is describing how. Karma is describing why.
And you’ve got to get that straight. Okay.
I’m not being simplistic. I’m saying something, if you think it’s hard to get over the hurdle
of believing the creator god, how about science?
That’s really hard. Okay. That’s really hard. Okay. I saw a National Geographic article at
Don [ ] house in North Carolina. And it was on aging. And there was this beautiful
description of aging process. And in the middle was a fold out, you know, not like a
playboy fold out, like, it was like a body. And it had little arrows towards all the things that
get old and fall apart in your body. Every piece had an arrow on it. You know, this is what
happens to the liver when you get older. This is what happens to the muscles. This is what
happens to the hair. This is what happens to the eyes. This is what happens to the ears.
And then, at the very bottom, was like an act of truth. It said, and we don’t know why, you
see. It was very beautiful.
Like, this is how you get old but we don’t know why you get old, you see. And we don’t
know why different people age at different rates. We just don’t know why.
We don’t know why a body should replenish itself every seven years magically and then just
stop after a while. We don’t know why.
We don’t know why it was alive in the first place and we don’t know why the life drains out
of it. And we don’t know why some life drains out faster than others. Okay.
That’s karma. And you have to understand that worldview or you will never get anywhere.
You can’t.
And this is hard. This is really hard. Go round telling your friends at work science doesn’t
work. They say well why are you going to the doctor this afternoon. You know what I
mean. It’s hard. It’s very, very hard.
As you get into the more important worldviews to overcome it’s just more difficult, okay.
It’s much, much more difficult.
The reason medicine works is the karma of the people being treated. Period. Okay. That’s
all. If the person being treated doesn’t have the karma to get better they can’t get better and
they won’t get better no matter what treatment you use. And that’s all. Same with
investment strategies, okay, economic theories. All false. Every single one, false. Every one
you ever heard of, every one you were ever taught in school, wrong. Totally wrong. Okay.
Why?
You want to get rich? Just give away things. Period. Okay.
What’s the implication? What would happen if every, they used to ask, tell us at Princeton
religion department, the test of a good religion is what if everybody did it?
What would happen if everybody gave away with an understanding of emptiness their
possessions? What would happen?
Everybody would get rich. Everybody.
What kind of economic theory is that? You see what I mean. What kind of economic theory
ever said that everyone on the planet could be extremely wealthy at the same time?
Oh, no, no, no, resources are limited. Oh, yeah, right, and the web wasn’t invented five
years ago and a hundred and thirty billion dollars of commerce now taking place where
there wasn’t any before, you know, four or five years ago.
Oh, so, like amazing things can happen that, suddenly, create wealth for millions of people
overnight?
Why do you think that happened? You see. It’s karma. It’s giving. You see what I mean.
It’s not impossible at all that everyone in the world would have enough money and, in fact,
that everyone in the world would enter a tantric paradise and have everything they ever
wanted all the time. Period. Okay.
The idea, all these ideas about how to distribute wealth, how to share wealth, should it be
capitalism, should it be communism, should it be socialism; they’re all based on a fallacy. It’s
not true that there’s a lack of wealth or that there’s not enough wealth for everybody. That’s
not where wealth comes from.
Marx big idea, you know, everything comes from the dirt. Whosoever controls the dirt
controls production. You know what I mean? It’s just wrong.
Whosoever controls the first perfection [laughter] controls all the money in the world.
Really. No cent of the economy of the world at this moment was not created by the personal
generosity of the person who has got it. Period.
There is no other economics, you know. It doesn’t I exist but you have trouble with it you
see. You still {shenpa shi drel}, you’re not {shenpa shi drel}, you’re {shenpa ma drel}. Okay.
You’re not disconnected yet from those attachments to your worldview, okay. It’s the
hardest thing in the world because what’s the karma to have a worldview? What’s the karma
to have all these wrong views? Killing animals is good; we should give the kids a week off.
Some big guy is responsible for cancer. He’s a nice guy and he can do everything but, you
know. [laughter]
And, you know, like, there’s not enough money for everybody.
Where do these worldviews come from? What’s the karma of having those worldviews?
Why are you born in a society that holds those worldviews?
‘Cos you had them in the past, okay. It makes them really nasty. It makes them chronic.
You see what I mean?
To have them is to have them later. You see what I mean. To have them now is to have them
later and they’re the hardest thing to break out of.
Nagarjuna called it ‘breaking out of the egg’, you know, ripping out of the egg.
Trying to break the shell and get out is the hardest thing; is to break a worldview trap that
you’re in. You see what I mean? Very hard, extremely hard.
Who else can we pick on?
I had some more but I don’t remember them. Let me see. Oh, how about the law? What’s
legal, you see? Right now it’s legal to kill foetuses which, according to Lord Buddha, and
you can forget the Tricycle article about it, Lord Buddha who states it no less than a thousand
times in the sutras, killing a being after the moment of conception is murder, okay. Abortion
is murder. Period.
But the law says it’s okay but it wasn’t okay before. Okay.
In my, where I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, it was called ‘running numbers’. I was reading
the newspaper. I used to read the newspaper every morning at breakfast and I asked my
mom, what’s running numbers?
She said, oh, only people in South Phoenix do that.
And I said, well what is it?
Oh, it’s only those bad people down in South Phoenix, you know, the poor people.
And I said, exactly what is running numbers, you know?
She said, oh it’s like heroin and boxing and drugs and all that stuff.
Come on, what’s running numbers?
Well, everybody goes to this dark basement and they give this sinister man a number written
on a piece of paper. And then he collects them and takes fifty dollars from everybody. And
then, they put all the numbers in a hat and they pick out one of the numbers and that person
wins all the money. And that’s a felony in the state of Arizona and, you know, I don’t know,
fifteen years in jail. And the sinister guy gets a cut of the action. And that’s running numbers.
Now, the state of New Jersey, the state of New York, is running numbers. Now it’s okay.
Now it’s legal you see what I mean. The government does it you see what I mean.
 And, what I mean to say is, that the nation in which you live, the country in which you live,
what is considered legal will just turn like that. It’ll just shift like that.
It’s just somebody’s karma for this to be legal right now. You can forget running your life,
half, I shouldn’t say half, many of the things which are legal are immoral. Many things,
which are immoral, are legal. And you can’t run your life by that worldview and there will
be times when you have to break it, okay, or that you shouldn’t break [unclear] [laughs],
okay.
You can’t look at that for your worldview. Your worldview has to be something that you
come to through pure logic independent of what you grew up with, okay. Very hard.
Extremely difficult, okay.
And then what your country says is right, okay.
Like, Americans have this, you meet arrogance, you know, about what’s right for the rest of
the world, you know.
I grew up. I was twenty travelling through India telling people how they should do things.
That’s not how you should sweep the floor; put a stick on that broom, you know. [unclear]
up and sweep the floor. You can’t sweep the floor like that. That’s not how we do it, you
know. You know what I mean? [laughs] You can’t even speak English, [unclear] Hindi or
whatever you talk, you know.
And it’s just this thing, the worldview, it’s just parochial worldview. C.S Lewis calls it the
fish knife thing. At the age of six you go to your neighbour’s house and there’s a strange
shapes knife there and you say, what’s that?
And they say, that’s a fish knife for cutting fish.
And you say, no it’s not.
And they say, yes it is.
And you say, no it’s not. It’s not the one we have in our house. You see what I mean?
And a lot of your worldviews are that. You think that the rest of the world should run by
our worldview, the American worldview. And, if they don’t then you’ll send troops or cut
off their foreign aid, okay.
And that’s just you believe that. It’s not what’s right or wrong, it’s just what your country
says, right.
So you have to examine to be attached, also even Buddhist worldviews, okay. There’s a
hierarchy. There’s a hierarchy. Lord Buddha taught the four great schools of India and then
he taught tantra.
And then people say, people get into Vaibashika, the lowest school, and they say, oh the
Sautrantika’s are wrong, you know what I mean, they’re evil.
You know, the Sautrantika’s say, no you’re backwards, you know.
Then you get up to, you know, Mind Only and they say, oh you both are backwards. They
say, no you’re evil, you know. Then you get up to Madhyamika Svatantrika and they say,
no, all three of you are {..}, that’s lousy. You believe functional things are self-existent. They
say, no, no, you’re evil, you don’t even believe in the self-existence of things, you know.
And then the Prasangika says to the Svatantrika’s, no you’re crazy. You think that the self is
the consciousness, the awareness of your thoughts. Are you crazy?
They say, no, you’re nihilists, you Prasangika’s. Nagarjuna’s a nihilist. He doesn’t believe in
anything. He thinks nothing’s anything, right.
And then the non-tantric schools say to the tantric schools, you’re really crazy. You think
you’re gonna become a god in this life, you know, what do you think? You know and then
the lower tantric schools to the higher tantric schools, you’re filthy. You’re dirty. You’re
insane. The practices, I can’t believe it, you know, dancing? All that other stuff, you know?
And there’s this hierarchy in your practice. And there’s a hierarchy in the speed with which
things work and the power of the practice. You know what I mean. You have to know all
the Buddhist schools. You have to master all the Buddhist schools. You have to understand
why Lord Buddha taught them all, which we’re going to get into next class, okay.
And then, you have to move up the ladder as fast as you can. You cannot be attached to
your current level of comfortable practice. Even that, you have to give up, okay.
Even that lower Buddhist worldviews, you have to be willing to chuck them or understand
why you have to move up beyond them when the time comes.
You have, you are sworn by your bodhisattva vows to work up that ladder as fast as you
can. And to understand, appreciate, embrace as the word of Lord Buddha, all the lower
schools. Understand why Lord Buddha taught them and not practice them.
And then move up, okay. That’s the, you’re sworn to do that.
You know, how many people in this country are really practising {dzog rim}? How many
practising {kye rim}? How many are just sitting reciting sadhanas? I don’t know. You know
what I mean.
But you’re sworn by your vows to move up this ladder as fast as you can. But people get
attached to what is comfortable and Drakpa Gyeltsen attacks it.
Drakpa Gyeltsen, you know, the biggest {dzog rimmer} of all time for Vajrayogini, is like,
attacking that. He says, you can’t get attached to your current level of practice.
You have to keep moving up.
In tennis, during seasons, they wouldn’t let us play with girls. The coach had a rule. You
always had to play with somebody better than you during season. You were not allowed to
play with someone who wasn’t better than you because that would force you to get higher.
I used to do rowing crew in college and we had to go weight lift. Every day you had to lift
more than the last section, every single time you had to do five pounds more, three pounds
more, one pound more, doesn’t matter but you have to do more than last time. You have to
run a little farther. You have to run up the stadium steps a little faster every time.
And your practice has to be the same. You can’t get attached to what’s comfortable. You
have to, each day move on and move up to the higher practices ‘cos you are sworn to do that
by your bodhisattva vows. You are sworn to accomplish this goal as fast as you can.
And then, I personally, it seems that people get attached to a certain level and then they just
freeze. Five years, ten years, twenty years, they just sort of freeze at a certain level. And they
don’t study more and they don’t try to push themselves further and they don’t take, I think
you have to be with weight lifting or with yoga or with dance or with any kind of physical
thing, you have to take a bit of a risk. You have to be willing, if you’re really interested in
saving humanity, you know, then sometimes you’re gonna have to take a shot. Sometimes
you’ll fall down.
I had this teacher in college. They say you try to make a move, you have to try to make the
move, and once in a while you’ll fall down and you’ll hurt yourself, but if you don’t keep
trying the new ones you don’t get better.
And your whole goal of your life is to reach tantric enlightenment now as fast as you can.
And you’re fighting a war against time.
Your body is falling apart. Your personal world is falling apart. Your karma is wearing out.
Your mind’s getting duller by the year, [laughs] okay. No, after a certain age, you know,
your senses, why don’t they take air force pilots after twenty-three, you know? I saw the,
who was it? The Vikings- largest amount of men over thirty in the whole NFL; thirty, fifteen
guys over the age of thirty, three guys over the age of thirty-five. What do you think they’re
trying to tell you?
Your vitality drops. You won’t be able to meditate so well. You won’t be able to think so
well. Your eyes and your ears and everything else will start to degenerate.
You don’t have time to get stuck at a certain level. You see what I mean?
You have to keep pushing on and keep pushing on to get higher.
And at each point, as you release each of these worldviews, at each point you will take some
heat for it, okay. And get used to it, it’s part of the process, okay.
At each point in the Buddhist teaching as you go up the four schools each of the lower
schools attack the higher schools.
The most bitter opponents of Nagarjuna, Je Tsongkapa, Khen Rinpoche, guess who?
The lower Madhyamika school, the Mind Only school.
You guys are stupid, you guys are crazy, you guys are nihilists. You don’t believe in
anything, you know.
Each time you move up slightly in that pecking order evolution, it’ll be hard, especially with
worldviews, okay, especially the worldviews.
And the only way to break out of a worldview is to get some infusion of new worldviews.
That’s why you have to study.
That’s why you have to go to great lamas. That’s why you have to keep pushing it, keep
reading, keep studying, keep trying to meet as many holy lamas as you can. And then they
break you out of your old worldviews.
That’s the only thing that can really do it. Your own virtue, your own {gelwa}, your own
willingness to do good deeds, good karmas ‘cos that karma, boosts you above where you
were before, okay.
It’s very, very hard to break out of worldviews and it requires more karma than any other
thing to break out of the worldview that you grew up with.
You know, you laugh at the ones I talked about tonight. You have thousands of worldviews
that you wouldn’t laugh about if I attacked them. You got a little quiet when I get to science,
okay [laughs] alright.
No, and you have to move up and the only way to do it is {gelwa}, good deeds.
Keep your vows, keep your book, actively go out looking for good things to do for people,
actively go out and think of good things to do for great people like Lama Zopa like helping
him with fire offering stuff, stuff like that.
And then that just pushes you over your next threshold. And there are many thresholds to go
over.
Don’t be attached to your old worldviews.
That’s the first of the four attachments, okay, and that’s the holy teaching from Jetsun Drakpa
Gyeltsen, okay.
Take a break, okay, it’s a holy name.
Okay. I just thought of something to talk about. Okay. [discussion, student]
I get asked a lot, people come to me and say, so and so is giving an initiation this weekend,
should I go, you know what I mean. Like, some lama is coming into town and should I go?
And then, people say I know such and such a lama could they come and teach at ACI?
I’ll just draw out my thoughts about it and then you tell me what you think about it. My first
thought is that I think in spiritual things in general there’s already too much division between
people you know what I mean. Like, there’s my centre and your centre. And my gelugpa
centre and your gelugpa centre and my drepung gelugpa centre and your drepung gelugpa
centre and your gomang drepung gelugpa centre and your gomang drepung gelugpa centre.
And I think there’s too much of that.
I had a dream, I think I told you, one night, very strong in a vajrayogini retreat.
And I was sitting around a table with a bunch of newsmen and they’re interviewing the Dalai
Lama, His Holiness.
And I’m sitting next to the Dalai Lama, you know, and I get to translate something. And
then they say, His Holiness, since things are empty, we don’t have to practice morality any
more, right?
So, I’m like, I go like this and I say, let me answer,I’ll blow them away, you know.
[laughter] And he looks at me like that and says, you know, sometimes Michael, it’s more
important to have harmony than to be right, you know.
And it was very powerful, very strong dream.
And so I think in general, my general feeling is that there’s so much division. There’s so
much lack of harmony.
And I think the very first bodhisattva vow is a symbol or a sign that that’s been going on for
a few thousand years maybe. You know, the first bodhisattva vow is, it says {dak …}, ‘don’t
praise yourself, don’t put down others’.



 But it specifically means don’t praise your group, your Mahayana group specifically, and put
down another Mahayana group, you know, and that teacher, something like that out of
feelings of, like, possessiveness, pride, whatever, out of some kind of negative feeling. Like,
you feel attached to your group for the wrong reason.
And I think so in general just it feels to me like there’s been so much division and even in the
Tibetan tradition there’s been so much division.
And in every tradition, I mean, American also.
The Tibetan’s asked me, what did you grow up. And I said, I don’t know, it’s three hundred
protestant sects in America.
They said, well how does your differ from the other two hundred and ninety-nine when you
were growing up?
I said, I don’t even know, you know. I used to go to my friend’s church and they would
recite something and they’d have a different word in the Lord’s Prayer and we’d say it’s no
good, you know what I mean. [laughs]
It just feels to me like His Holiness is on the right track. You know, the only thing that His
Holiness asked me when we gave Him the CD ROM was do you have the Bonpo text on
this? It wasn’t even the Buddhist text, you know. It was like, are there Bonpo texts on it, Bon
texts on there?
And I said, I changed the subject [laughter] but anyway. [laughs]
Anyway, I think there’s too much division already. I think that we should try to reach out to
other groups. I think as far as possible we should try to have great lamas come if they can.
And I think we should try to reach out and to learn from other people.
And I really believe that and I think we should try to do that.
Now, I’ll talk about the other side of it.
And by the way, like somebody asked me can Godstow be used by a certain person, a
certain lama, certain group? And I said, yes, I think that’s fine. I think it’s good.
Even another group has asked us if they could use Godstow. And I said, as long as we don’t
have any programs that week. As long as there’s no one who’s going to be disturbed on a
{..} retreat or something like that.
And if the place is there and if some one wants to use it for a nice spiritual retreat then I think
it’s wonderful.
And then they said, should they pay?
And I said, well, I think it would be kind of cool to give it to them for free if we could and
then tell them that if they want to pay for it this is how much it costs to open it for that
weekend. But if you can’t pay it’s okay.
I think if there were more of that going on I think it would be very beautiful.
Then they said, could we sponsor it?
And I said, no, you know. And that’s a different thing. You know, to say that we sponsor
this thing or that we put our name behind a teaching that I have no idea what the content is
going to be. I don’t personally know this teacher.
They said, they’re a Geshe, you don’t have to worry about it. Okay. [laughter] [laughs] I’m
not putting down geshes.          I’m saying, geshe’s not a ticket to being, you know, correct.
Except in my case. But anyway [laughter] no, I just mean that you have to know the person,
you have to check the person.
One time this geshe guy showed up. He says he’s a geshe.
I said, really, where from?
He says, oh this college.
I said, oh really, when did you finish?
He says, well, I’m almost finished, you know.
And I said, oh, how much did you finish?
He says, I got through {parchin}.
{parchin} is first year, you see.
And then, you know, I’m like, yeah.
I mean, it doesn’t, you see signs up says geshe so and so, ex-abbott of so and so, pretty good
friends with the Dalai Lama [laughter]. The [unclear] group came to thirty-ninth street when
Tom and I were there. These are the people who attacked people on the Tokyo subway with
gas. They had a picture of their leader reaching out towards His Holiness as if they were
shaking hands.
Later it turns out he just did that at the side of the road and they took a picture you know
what I mean. But it didn’t sound right to me. Everything sounded funny, you know.
What I’m saying is that I wouldn’t have a person, I wouldn’t sponsor a talk or a teaching by
a person, unless I knew who they were, unless they were well recommended, unless I knew
their personal background and unless I knew that their worldview was correct. Personally, I
wouldn’t support it.
It doesn’t mean that they’re bad person or something like that.
No, there’s another extreme too. I told you the story many times. The guy calls me up says
he’s the leader of Mongolian Buddhism.
I say, oh, great, you know, what’s your name?
He says Jetsun {..}.
I said, well what monastery are you from?
He says, I’m not from any monastery.
So, I’m like, yeah, right, you know. And I said, well are you from [unclear] or where?
He says, I’ve never been to Mongolia, you know. So, I’m like, well who are you, you
know?
I’m the head of Mongolian Buddhism.
And I said, nice to talk to you, you know, maybe I’ll catch you some time.
Then I go out to Khen Rinpoche. I said, I met this guy, he gave me this spiel on the phone.
He says you made a big mistake, you know. [laughter] [laughs] he is, you know.
By the way, he’s just been reinstated on his throne in Mongolia, he really is, you know.
[laughter] And [laughs] you know, I went, his two sons are my classmates in the monastery.
They never mentioned about their father, okay. [laughter]
Anyway, I’m saying you can make big mistakes. So I’m not judging that the person is not
capable of teaching. I’m just saying I don’t know them and I don’t know their background.
And your mental real estate, your spiritual real estate is very impressionable, very valuable.
So I wouldn’t, I mean, if you check the person out, if you know them to be good, you
know, like Lama Zopa. He’s done such extraordinary things for people throughout the
history of American Buddhism for year after year after year, twenty-four hours a day burning
out his body to help people. Thousands and thousands of activities just to benefit people, you
know, totally from his heart. Totally giving, you know, of course if you have a chance, I
think during the coming year in 2000, I think you should try to have him give some talks
here and things like that.
Art Engel I think should, you should try to get him here once a month or something.
Try and get Khen Rinpoche here a couple of times in 2000, things like that.
I think you have to grab the opportunity when it comes.
I sort of discourage the idea of quick weekend talks, you know, like come to town Friday
night, leave Sunday morning, cover the {Lam Rim Chenmo} in between, you know. I
discourage that.
I think it’s, as you’ve seen at this Institute, the idea is you have at leat eight to ten weeks
course, you know. You have lots of time to think. And it’s part of a larger program of study
that could go on for years.
I go all around the United States on those two-night stands. I don’t like them. I actually
refuse them when I can. I say, four, five days, ten classes okay, but less than that I don’t see
how it can have much benefit.
And I don’t like that. And that’s all they get. And they get the same thing over and over
again. People get crazy.
You know, the lama comes into town. He teaches the {lojong .. gyema}, does the short {lam
rim}, gives a long life Tara initiation and then blows out of town by Sunday evening, you
know what I mean. And it just frustrates people after a while.
So I think those are the considerations you have to have.
Now, what kind of teaching?
Khen Rinpoche used to always say that if you try to mix the four traditions of Tibet you will
have a problem. Not that they are not each pure. They’re all pure. They’re all beneficial.
They’re like the four schools of ancient India;
 they’re beautiful, great, each one is perfect for a certain kind of disciple and you have to find
the one that’s perfect for you, you know what I mean.
Like, you have to decide and pick one but it’s like, but then to go and try to do two of them
at once or three of them at once it’s like, when I grew up they told us that if you used ajax
and chlorax at the same time you’d kill yourself. Of course, we tried it and nothing happened
[laughs]
[end side A]
[side B]
Individually, they’re great but Khen Rinpoche used to always tell us that. And I never
regretted that.
I got fed a pure, holy, sacred, Je Tsongkapa gelugpa diet and I’m not ashamed of it. It’s
fantastic. It’s perfect.
You can get enlightened that way. You don’t need anything else.
People ask me, how many tantric initiations you had?
One, you know.
And they said, gee, well I had fourteen, you know.
I said, I don’t care, you know. Just do your thing. Do that one thing purely. You don’t
need more than that.
So I don’t think, I’m not disrespecting the other traditions and I’m also not to the point of
feeling apologetic where I think we have to have at leat one Chinese master here a year or
one Nyingma master here a year or one Kagyu master here, don’t think like that, you know
what I mean. If it’s relevant to our immediate studies, you know, if it’s for example, that you
have some advanced students who are doing serious Vajrayogini studies and they’ve gotten
back to the original Sakya works and if there’s a holy, great master of the Sakya tradition
who’d be willing to come and help us with those texts or help us with a certain part of our
own tradition, I think it’s beautiful.
I think it would be great. But again, great study of that person’s character, their background,
what they’re doing, what they’re teaching, how their worldview is, are they really a master
of what they do.
You guys are spoiled because you grew upon Khen Rinpoche who is a true master. There’s
nobody left like him alive in Southern India.

 In the great Gelugpa monasteries out of ten thousand monks there’s nobody like that but you
just take it for granted.
You don’t realise that the kind of training he’s had and just off-hand imparts to you stuff that
you couldn’t get anywhere else in the world, you just take it for granted ‘cos you didn’t
know anything else.
So, I mean, there are lots of people less qualified, there are lots of people who didn’t quite
finish class number five through eighteen or something you see what I mean.
And you just don’t even know about it.
Somebody comes, they have a red robe on, they have some kind of degree from somewhere,
you can’t, you have to check them out, you have to know what they know.
That’s my feeling on it personally. I think you have to reach out to other traditions. I mean,
you have to be, there’s too much division going on and it’s harmful.
If a lama has proven themselves to be a great teacher and a great person and a great servant
of the disciples then I think we should work, like, I’m thinking of Lama Zopa or somebody
like that. I think we should work very hard to try to get them to teach here when we can.
If it’s someone who’s supposed to be great but we don’t know about them, I think we have
to learn more about them or ask other, the great lamas that we know, we have to ask them is
this lama qualified and do you want to have them teach here.
If they’re from another Tibetan tradition, I think in general, it would confuse you if you got
extensive teachings from more than one tradition.
I think you got a taste of it if you read the Kagyu lojong and then the Sakya lojong and then
the Gelugpa lojongs, they’re all beautiful. But if you don’t have the right kind of teacher and
the right explanation for the Kagyu lojong that you’ve had for example, you’d just plain get
confused, you know. ‘The nature of the mind is nothing’, you know. ‘The path itself is gone
beyond’. You know what I mean? And you need someone who’s well trained to explain it.
So I think you would get confused.
Again, if a person is a highly qualified master of one of our lineages that stretches beyond the
Gelugpa beginning, for example, we’re studying {..}in the Vinaya class. [ ] was born two
hundred years before the Gelugpas started but we’re studying that text in our Vinaya class
‘cos it’s the greatest. It’s a Kagyu text you see what I mean.
People tell me, oh, you’re Gelugpa, you don’t like the Kagyu’s. I said, yeah, I spent, you
know, twelve years studying Vinaya with a Kagyu text. But it’s not like that you see what I
mean.
So if it’s somebody, if it’s a great lama who relates to your lineage, if you’re strong in your
lineage and you understand your lineage well and the teachings well, then naturally, reach
out further to get more teachings from holy beings on those subjects, okay.
As far as interfaith dialogue, you know what I mean, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Moslem. I
don’t like it for the sake of political correctness, you know what I mean. If it’s just for that, to
be politically correct, you know, oh, every year we should have a rabbi here so we can say
we had a rabbi here.
Rinpoche and I once got invited to Lakewood, New Jersey. The pope had just issued a, what
do you call those things, a new [unclear] I don’t know. What do you call those things?
Anyway, it was something he announced at, you had to have more people from other
religions come and give talks at catholic churches, you know. So this church in Lakeland
asked me and Rinpoche to go talk there not because they wanted to hear what was said but
because they were required by these directions, instructions that we had to go, they had to
have at least one per year. We were the representative Buddhists you know what I mean.
And it just felt very uncomfortable and actually the people were very beautiful and we ended
up having a good time. But the motivation behind it, just for correctness, I don’t think so.
If it’s a true desire to learn more and to learn from those people about the holy teachings of
their great teachers or something like that I think there’s a place for it and I think that there’d
be a sweet place for it. But not as just a gesture of, not as just a gesture. As a real taking the
time to learn what they teach, to learn what they know, to benefit from what they know.
Like, how the Christians run their charities, how the great Christian charities run, you know,
like even Salvation Army type of thing. How those successful places work because the
Buddhists are lousy at it. We don’t do anything. There’s no Tibetan Buddhist charities in
India. They just started the first one at Sera. It’s a free hospital. But the concept of a free
hospital ten years ago would have been unheard of in the monastery. They would have said
you’re crazy you know what I mean.
And that kind of stuff, I think we have to be very open and frank about what we don’t know,
what we don’t have in our tradition and what we can learn from other traditions. But not just
this PC stuff you know what I mean.
Those are my thoughts on it. And as far as the course I’ll repeat from an earlier talk, it’s pure
Buddha, Arya Nagarjuna, Chandrakirti, Dharmakirti, you know, Master Shantideva, pure
one hundred percent original texts. There isn’t anything in there that’s, there’s no major part
of the eighteen courses which is not direct translations of the classics. That’s why the place is
called Asian Classics. There’s nothing there that was made up by anybody or anything like
that. And the information that you’ve been taught, every homework question, is a pure one
hundred percent the great masters of Buddhism all the way back to Lord Buddha.
There’s nothing else there.
And I think it should stay that way. And I think it should be that way. The instruction itself
should be pure one hundred percent what the Buddha taught and what the great masters have
taught since then.
I anticipate that in the coming decades there will be American commentaries on those things
and I think that’s wonderful. And you should write commentaries. Your students should
write commentaries.
Within two hundred years of the move of Buddhism to Tibet the Sanskrit books were gone.
By Je Tsongkapa’s time nobody studied the originals in Sanskrit you see what I mean. It was
all the Tibetan commentaries.
So I think the same thing might well happen in English but you goddamn well better be
qualified [laughs] to write them. That’s all.
That’s my idea about it. Do you guys have anything to say about interfaith or any other
traditions?
[student]
Mathew asked if you think it would be useful to have debates. I can see two things
happening.
I can see marriages. Like, I had some great students who came from the Zen tradition and
they are really good at meditating. And then I think they came here and learned more of
content for the meditation.
I can see places where the lineages can marry you know what I mean. Like, you have a
great Zen tradition, of how to sit and sitting discipline and how to concentrate well and then
you get the content poured in.
I can see that. And yeah, I can see debates and I’m not, when I say reach out and have unity
and stuff like that there should also be very frank open debate, public debates on certain
points you see what I mean and they should be gloves off you know what I mean.
They say {senge ngaro}, say {senge}[repeat] {ngaro}[repeat], you know, be nice to that lineage,
respect that lineage, speak well of them, appreciate them, learn from them, listen to them, but
when they give that bullshit explanation of emptiness, {senge ngaro} means, attack them with
the roar of a lion, you know, publicly. Or abortion, the Tricycle magazine drives me crazy,
you know. What, did the Buddha outlaw abortion? Of course he did. I can show you four
or five hundred places in the Scriptures where he did. You know, come on, you know what
I mean and you have to be willing to stand up and say, come on that’s obviously wrong.
And then you have to be ready to debate it.
I think that would be wonderful. Like this idea that emptiness is some kind of coloured light
or something like that, just something totally wrong, then yeah, should be willing to debate
it. You show me.
Some guy came up to me and said, anger’s a good thing for you, they said so in the
Scriptures, you know, get it out, you feel better.
I said, show me, you know, just show me, come next week and show me the scripture.
In four thousand five hundred works in the Buddhist canon, the {kangyur} and {tengyur},
there’s not a single line that says that. Come and show me next week.
He did. Next week he brought this book by this guy who made up this thing and, you
know, oh this is my thoughts, you know.
So I said, you said it was in the Scriptures. This guy’s still alive. He just made this up. So I
said, show me a Scripture, you know.
He couldn’t. He left. He never came back. He wrote me a nasty letter but [laughter]
[laughs] no such thing you see. That’s all.
Yeah, that’d be great. That’d be great. And under very controlled circumstances and with
great respect for each other’s traditions you know what I mean.
To say that the Vaibashikas are crazy or you know, it’s to put down their teacher who is
who? Lord Buddha, okay. [laughs] You got to be careful about that.
Lord Buddha might have taught hatha yoga. Lord Buddha might have taught, you know,
certain kinds of baseball, I don’t know. [laughter]
You got to be careful. You really have to be careful. You don’t know. You really don’t
know.
I mean, the very first bodhisattva vow is not there by accident. It’s you must have a deep
respect for the other traditions and honour them.
Each one, if Buddha could teach Vaibashika, then Buddha could teach anything else to help
people so you can’t dis it but you have to, when there’s a case when you have an
opportunity to debate in a proper setting and with great respect for each other, I think we
have to do it.
I think we have to stop tonight.
We’ll do a prayer.
[prayer: short mandala]
[prayer: dedication]
Thankyou.
The Asian Classics Institute
Course XVIII: Great Ideas of Buddhism