ACI 5 «Как работает карма», занятие 11

Class Eleven: Course Review
December 1, 1994
transcribed by: Mira Prabha

... we’ll take a break, and after the break we’ll discuss [unclear] thinking time.
[laughter]

[student: I visualized the homework, and now I remember some [unclear].]

All right.

[student: [unclear] [laughter] ...some funny parts. I thought he was cheating
(?)... [unclear]]

These are some of the things that would be good for you to know. Okay? I
think these are the most important things. And I’ll just go around the room and
ask people questions. I know I got [unclear], you didn’t, all right? Who wrote
the book we’re studying and when did he write it?

[student: Vasubandhu, 350 AD.]

And what was the book?

[student: The Treasure House of Knowledge.]

The Treasure House of Knowledge. In Sanskrit what? Very famous?

[student: Oh, Abhidharma Kosha.]

Yeah. [laughs]

We should call him Master Vasubandhu or something like Acharya or something
like that. We’re not supposed to mention them by their naked name. Vilma,
who wrote the commentary?

[student: Gyalwa Gendun Drup.]

What is it’s title?
[student: Illumination on the Path to Freedom.]

Yeah. What dates?

[student: 1357-1419?]

That’s Tsong Khapa.      [laughter] I didn’t write it down here and everybody
knows it.

[various students speaking at the same time]

[student: That’s what I said, wasn’t it?]

[student: No, no. [laughter]]

[student: That’s what I heard.]

So how old was he when Je Tsongkapa passed away? He was 28.                Okay.
[student’s name], literal meaning of Abhi, Dharma and Kosha?

[student: Kosha means “treasure house,” Abhi means “path approaching”...]

Approaching.

[student: And the Dharma part I think means “Nirvana”?]

It means Nirvana because Nirvana’s the highest Dharma. Nirvana’s the highest
existing dharma, especially in this school. Robin, the literal meaning of the word
“Abhidharma”.

[student: You just said “literal meaning”.]

I shouldn’t say literal meaning, that was the literal meaning. [laughter] What’s
Abhidharma? How’s that?

[student: It’s the treasure house of knowledge that leads to nirvana.]

“Treasure House” is the book, okay? So don’t mix up Abhidharma Kosha with
Abhidharma. What is Abhidharma? You know, people have some pretty weird
books out there about Abhidharma. If somebody asks you what’s Abidharma....

[student: The realizations that take you to Nirvana?]

Yeah, specifically what?

[student: Selflessness.]

That’s pretty good. The perception of selflessness. The last three paths.
Unstained knowledge. Unstained wisdom. Unstained wisdom in this school
means the last three paths of the five, which are what?

[student: Seeing, habituation and no more learning.]

Right. So seeing is the first time you see emptiness directly, habituation is
getting used to that perception and using it to remove the last of your bad
thoughts, and then no more learning is when you’ve removed your bad
thoughts and that’s Nirvana, okay? Then what’s the connection between... I’m
sorry, we didn’t quite finish with the... when you explain the literal meaning of
the word “Abhidharma,” you should add one more thing. “Abhi” means “takes
you up to,”, “dharma” means “Nirvana”. But what is that which takes you up to
Nirvana?

[student: Wisdom?]

It’s Abhidharma. [laughs] So you have to tie it up. It’s not enough to say
“Abhi” means “up to” and “Dharma” means “Nirvana”, you have to say
“Abhidharma” is higher knowledge and it “abhi’s” you to “Dharma”. So it’s a
pun. You have to say Abhidharma “abhi’s to dharma”. Abhidharma meaning
knowledge, takes you, abhi, up to, Dharma, Nirvana. So you have to tie it up.
It’s not enough to say “Abhi” means “up to” and “Dharma” means “Nirvana”.

[student: That’s for the literal translation of the meaning?]

Yeah. So there’s three parts to it. Abhidharma means “Abhi Dharma”, meaning
that knowledge is the thing that takes you to Nirvana. That’s the point. That’s a
little tricky. Next question says now what does Abhidharma refer to? And then
you say, “unstained wisdom,” meaning the last three paths. And then there are
accessories to Abhidharma. What are they?           They are also considered
Abhidharma. Can you name any of them? There’s two kinds of accessories to
Abhidharma. One is real accessories, and one is not real accessories. Wisdom
you’re born with is one of the not-real, nominal, accessories. What’s another
one?

[student: Wisdom that you gain from hearing?]

Hearing, contemplation and meditation, which all occur before the first path. So
those are also accessories.

[student: Hearing, contemplation and what?]

The three wisdoms, the one you get from hearing, classroom time, really, the
one you get from contemplation, and then the one you get from meditation.
The difference between contemplation and meditation is this: in contemplation,
you’re supposed to be analyzing something to see if its true or not. And in
meditation you take your conclusion and meditate on it. That’s the difference
between meditation and contemplation in this case. So those three are also
nominal accessories to Abhidharma. They are Abhidharma, but they’re not real
Abhidharma. What’s the real accessories to Abhidharma? Remember any of
them? Something that has to come along with that knowledge, something that
must be present with that knowledge, especially at the path of seeing, especially
when you see emptiness directly.

[student: Intellectual understanding of emptiness?]

Not at that time. Must be concurrent, must be going on at the same time. What?

[student: Bodhichitta?]

Nah. [laughs] Especially in this school. Concentration, okay? Meaning those
meditative levels, those high meditative levels. Your mind has to actually be in
the form realm. So the concentration and also the other parts of the body and
mind at that moment, your physical body, your other five heaps, the other parts
of you that are going on. If you’re in the formless realm, it’s the fourth.

[student: You’re talking about accessories?]

Yeah. The real accessories are the parts to you and the levels of meditation that
you must be in to before you can see emptiness directly. The levels of
concentration that that wisdom has to be married to, and that’s where you get
into shamatha and vipashyana, that’s the great marriage of shamatha and
vipashyana. She’s late and she’s allowed to come in because she called to say her
plane was late and she was rushing from the airport. [laughs] That’s all. Okay.
So that’s what Abhidharma.... that’s a little bit of a long story, but I want you to
say the whole thing, okay? Abhidharma meaning higher knowledge, unstained
knowledge, meaning the last three paths, meaning you’re not anywhere in
Abhidharma until what? Till you see emptiness directly, till you see selflessness
directly. In this school, you don’t even have Abhidharma until you’re an Arhat.
And then obviously the meditative levels that you have to be on—those are
accessories, they’re not the main Abhidharma, but they have to be around. And
then the parts of accessories. And then not real accessories, but nominal
accessories, are those three wisdoms, and the wisdom you have from birth, and
also the books on Abhidharma. They’re not real Abhidharma. That’s very
fundamental teaching and instruction, that the books are not real Abhidharma.
Okay, a good book should have four qualities... be on the New York Times list...
[laughs] [laughter]

[student: For two weeks, at least.] [laughs] [laughter]

Stillwell.... shouldn’t waste your time on a book that doesn’t have these four
qualities, that’s the point.

[student: Subject.]

Has a meaningful subject matter. Then what? By the way, also, on this question,
tell me in the Abidharma Kosha, what is the subject matter?

[student: Stained versus unstained matter.]

Stained and unstained phenomena. Stained things and unstained things. They
want to teach you the dirty side of the universe and the clean side of the
universe. That’s the subject matter.

[student: Then the purpose?]

Yeah. You can say a temporal purpose or a short-term purpose of something
like that. That’s a {duba}. In this case?

[student: To plant the seeds of selflessness?]
To plant the seeds of knowledge that can discriminate between what and what?
[unclear]

[student: Selflessness.]

[student: Stained and unstained.]

What’s stained and what’s not stained. We’re confused, you know. We don’t
have that kind of knowledge because we think that some things that are stained
are nice. And we probably haven’t even experienced those things. So it’s to give
the student the ability to discriminate between those two things, to plant that
wisdom. Third thing?

[student: Ultimate goal?]

Ultimate goal. Which is what?

[student: Nirvana.]

Nirvana. And then fourth one?

[student: To show the relationship between the prior three.]

There has to be a relationship between the first three. You should state it
backwards, okay? You should start from number three and go down to number
one. How do you do that?

[student: To reach Nirvana you have to have the wisdom to discriminate
between stained and unstained things and to get that you have to read a book.]

Read a book. [laughter] Read a book that has the subject matter of stained and
unstained things. That’s it. That simple. But all Buddhist books must have those
four qualities. If a Buddhist book does not have those four qualities or any book,
then it’s not worth your time. Your mental... the time of your life when your
mind is clear and you have time to read a Buddhist book and you’re healthy and
you can meditate, it’s very brief. Don’t waste your time on other books. Test
your reading material against these requirements. I think the New York Times
will leave quickly. [laughs] Something like that. Even the New York Times.
Don’t waste your mind time. I mean, you know, if you’ve got half an hour, use
it for something meaningful. Your healthy time is very short. Use the time.
[student: Michael, for the exam, do you want us to reverse the order?]

No, I want one, two, three, four, but when you get to four, explain the
relationship by saying that three depends on two and two depends on one.

[student: Oh, I thought you said...]

I didn’t mean to reverse it. I just meant when you explain the relationship, it’s
easier to go from three to two to one. Three depends on two and two depends
on one. But the order should be like John gave you. Helen, two basic... most,
most, most basic divisions of karma.

[student: Motivated and motivating.]

Yeah. Called {sembe lay} and {sambe lay}. {sembe lay} means the movement of
the mind which motivates you to do something. That in itself is karma. And
then the actions of body, speech that you do. So one is motivating karma, which
is the movement of your mind, it’s shifting towards its object, and then the result
of that, a physical or verbal deed, is {sambe lay}, is motivated karma. The main
point is that you know who’s the driver. And you know that any time the mind
moves, that’s karma. And that means you’re collecting a helluva lot more
karmas than you thought. Before you thought you were doing a couple of
karmas a day. Really, you did think that. Now you know that you’re doing
karmas every few seconds.

[student: But you can’t do much about that.]

You have to learn. That’s the whole point.       One mental slip can cause you
hundreds of years of suffering.

[student: But you don’t have control over your thoughts.]

Oh yeah, you do, if you try. You have to practice. That’s the whole point. One
slip of the mind can cause... according to Buddhism, one slip of the mind can
cause many years of suffering.

[student: What’s a slip of the mind, Michael?]

Like a very angry thought, or [unclear]....
[student: When you meditate and you’re watching your thoughts...]

...something you wouldn’t do when you’re well-rested or your healthy... you
know, to keep your morality you actually have to take care of your mind and
make sure it’s not weakened, if you can help it, you know, you don’t allow
yourself... out of your responsibility to keep your morality, you shouldn’t let
your mind reach a state where it could be easily tempted. And that means...
that’s the whole idea behind not drinking. It lowers your ability to resist, and so
does exhaustion, and so does not eating properly and so too a lot of other things.
So your morality actually gets into taking care of your mind so that it’s always
strong enough to resist.

[student: So the idea of understanding emptiness, when somebody yells at us,
we choose to say, oh I understand my karma caused me to be yelled at. He’s
empty, therefore I’m not going to yell back.]

Right, I like that. [laughs] That’s the essence of Buddhism.

[student: There’s still the guy yelling at you and the initial, perhaps impulsive,
reaction is that oh, he yelled at me and I don’t like it. And then the thought
process kicks in of all this. So you still the thought even though you don’t speak
it. So even though you break the cycle of the karmic action, do you still have the
karmic thought ripening as a result of this?]

Until you get more and more used to it and it happens more instantaneously.

[student: So the idea is that the only time you really break that cycle is when you
don’t even have a thought, when you just have a natural thought of emptiness.]
[laughter]

It is like that. It becomes so much of a gut reaction that it actually... your
implication is that the reaction of anger is a natural thing, and it wasn’t
something that was caused by your former habits. And if you condition yourself
in the opposite way, you’ll never have a moment of anger. But, you know,
obviously it takes a lot of conditioning. I’ll tell you one thing—if you don’t work
at it you’ll never get that far. And if you work at it, you’ll find some nice results.
And if you don’t keep a record of your progress, like some kind of daily diary or
something that you carry around, I doubt that you can, I don’t think you can do
this. You have to be a scientist of your own reactions. You know these English
journalists, Samuel.... eh?

[student: Pepys.]

Pepys. Anyway, they kept these stupid diaries of every thought they had. You
need to keep a similar thing of... you know, pick something that you’re worst at,
keep a little diary. If you don’t do something on a regular basis, on a formal
basis, you’ll never do anything, you’ll never change. It’s not enough to go to
classes. You gotta undertake some kind of regimen. Okay. Whose turn?
Mikael! (?) [laughs}

[student: [unclear]] [laughter]

The Abhidharma school believes that when you do a really good deed or a really
bad deed, some kind of cosmic photograph is taken. We called it an aura. It has
five qualities. Give me any of them. It has five qualities. [Tibetan -- unclear]

[student: It has something to do with a {bakchak}...]

No, this was first class. It’s a very unique idea to the Abidharma school, the
Vaibhashika school, nobody else believes it. But I think it’s a useful idea and it is
or else the Buddha wouldn’t have taught it and he did teach it, so there must be
some use to it. So what’s the first one? Even if you’re not thinking about it, it’s
there. For example, if a monk takes a vow, on the day he takes the vow, in the
moment that the Khenpo snaps his fingers, he has that vow, and that somehow
causes a physical form to form on him. And even when he’s not thinking about
that vow, he has that aura. So that’s the first quality. Even when you’re not
thinking about it, you have it. [Tibetan--unclear] Even when the mind stops...
does the mind really ever stop? No. Will it ever stop? No. Did it ever begin?
No. That’s one thing you’re stuck with permanently, okay? [laughs] But it gets
to a very low level in deep meditation. Even on those occasions, which means
you’re totally not thinking about it, it’s still there. [Tibetan--unclear] It has an
ethical component. It’s either very virtuous or very non-virtuous. You don’t get
[nambay richi ma yi me su], you don’t get this kind of aura from doing a flimsy
virtue or a flimsy non-virtue. It has to be serious. You get it when you take a
vow, you get it when you agree to kill animals for the rest of your life, to be a
butcher, those are examples in the Abhidharma Kosha. So it has to be a virtue or
non-virtue. {je del gang je dang}. It continues in a flow, which means, if I take
my monk’s vows here, and then I walk outside, it comes with me. It sticks to
you and it continues on like a stream. It’s like those slow-motion photographs
where those things follow the car, the light, you know what I mean? [Tibetan--
unclear].

[student: Does it end at death?]

Yeah. And it ends when you lose that vow also. If a monk loses his vows, that is
gone, the aura disappears. Or when a person decides to give up the vow to be a
soldier or something, when he formally renounces being a soldier.

[student: Or when you move, also.]

No, when you move it doesn’t. That was the fourth quality. If you move
around, it follows you. And number five? It’s made up of four elements, which
means... it’s Buddhism’s way of saying it’s physical matter. When you say, in
ancient Buddhism, it has the four elements, what you’re saying is, it is physical
matter.

[student: Does that mean it’s obvious to someone else?]

No. No. It means that somebody else must be able to perceive this, but not us.
It’s subtle physical matter and we can’t see it. But if someone were on the correct
level, like a real-life person, he could see it. But what it means is that... when you
say it has the four elements, then it has the four functions of the four elements.
It must be able to affect other things as the four elements do. Give them
motility, give them stability, give them some kind of quality of being able to
produce light, warmth, things like that. Okay. Those are the five qualities of that
aura. It’s an important idea in this school, especially in morality, because as far as
ethics, we accept most of what Hinayana says, and the monk’s vows are all
Hinayana. The whole practice of monks is Hinayana. So we study that. And we
study Vinaya. Next one. Mikhail. Definitions of virtue, non-virtue and neutral
karma.

[student: Eeyu.] [laughter]

It’s easy! What makes something good or bad in Buddhism? Is it that God
doesn’t like it? Is it necessarily that it hurts other people?

[student: No, it’s what brings you a pleasurable result or an unpleasant result.]
Yeah, that’s the guts of it. Something is a good karma if it brings you a good
karmic result later, a pleasant karmic result later. Something is bad karma if it
brings you an unpleasant karmic result. And something is a neutral karma if it
brings neither one. And there’s another little part to the first one which you’d
better put down. What was that?

[student: That it takes you to nirvana ultimately?]

Yeah. Ultimately, it brings you to nirvana. In the short-term, it gives you a
pleasant karmic result. In the long term, it brings you to Nirvana. That’s the
definition of virtue. The definition of non-virtue doesn’t have them, right?
Doesn’t have that part. Doesn’t say also prevents you from going to nirvana.
Actually it does. All right. The Abhidharma school says that when you do a
good deed, there are two mental functions that are always there, and they have
to do with some kind of shame. There are two kinds. You remember what they
are?

[student: There’s shame that’s not doing it because of yourself, and then there’s
consideration, not doing a bad deed because of what other people might think.]

Yeah. You have to put in the word “avoiding”, okay? The definition is that
{jerba}, {rang gye che [unclear] gyewa zemba] means... you must put that down.
A lot of people just put if you do it for yourself, or something like that. [laughs]
The definition is that this is a negative thing, you avoid a bad deed, you turn
away from a bad deed because you would be embarrassed personally to do it,
even if no one ever found out about it. You’re in your own room, the door is
locked, nobody’s around and you still don’t do it. That’s {mosa} and then
{cheyu} means you avoid it either because it would hurt other people if they
found out, or if just actually it would have some bad effect on other people.

[student: I though it was more [unclear]]

That’s a very important part. That is part of the meaning of that word.
Especially for monks. Monks are supposed to avoid the appearance of a bad
deed because it might hurt others, because other people might think badly of
Buddhism. That’s part of it. One part is that... it’s consideration for others in two
senses. One is that they would think badly of you. And secondly, maybe it’s
something that actually hurts them. Like a lot of times a good person will avoid
doing something because it will have ramifications on others, even though it
would help him. So it has both of those meanings. Okay. [Meshin?] Ten good
deeds, ten bad deeds. Give me the first three. Three bad deeds of the body.
These you should have like Om Mani Padme Hung. If you don’t, then what are
you doing? [laughs] It’s your guideline for Vinaya.

[student: My brain went blank.]

Okay. Any bad deed of your body. Guess.

[student: Killing.]

84,000 kinds. Killing...

[student: Oh, killing, stealing and lying...]

Killing, stealing and sexual misconduct. Those are the three for... I used to
remember them as “kiss”, KSS. [laughs] when I was first learning. Killing,
stealing, sexual misconduct. Those are three that are to do with your body.
Then four of speech. What are they?

[student: The four of speech? Lying, divisive speech, harsh speech, idle speech.]

Okay, good. And divisive, we don’t have a good word for it in English, but you
know, it’s either true or false, but the intention is to alienate other people from
each other. Mrs. Kiley. Three mental ones.

[student: Coveting, being happy when other people fail...]

We call it ill-will.

[student: And wrong views.]

And wrong views. What’s a classic wrong view? Especially in Abhidharma?

[student: Not believing in emptiness, self-existence.]

Their’s is more specific.

[student: Not believing in karma]

Not believing in karma. The tenth bad deed. The ultimate bad deed. Right?
The mental ones are the worst. The ultimate bad deed is, in this school
especially, is to not believe in karma. Because then what? What about the other
bad deeds? [laughs] If you think there’s no karma, then why the hell be good?
Just do what you like. (A) Do what you like and (B) think you can get away with
it. Those are the ten. [unclear] Karma’s also divided into three according to
when it’s experienced. What’s the answer?

[student: Karma experienced in this life, next life and after.]

Yeah. And that’s an easy thing, and why repeat it? And why have all these...?
Could be on the exam. [laughter] Probably will be unless the thing isn’t printed.
It’s very very very very important because it explains why life is so screwy, you
know. It explains why good people have to die, and bad people get rich, and
things like that. I think if you don’t have your mind on this division, you could
go crazy, and it’s very hard to believe Buddhism because you have to realize that
much of what you experience is not your fault in this life. A lot of people come
to me. They have terrible experiences, you know. They have really terrible
experiences. And they say, what did I do? And you study the books and you
say, you must have done this karma. And they say, but I never did anything like
that! And it’s true, they never did anything like that that they can remember.
And I think that if you don’t keep your mind on this, you can’t really be a good
Buddhist. Once you study the correlation between certain deeds and their three
results, which we’ll talk about later. Then you can explain, theoretically, where
every experience in your life came from. But you didn’t do anything, and that
can really bother you, that can make you crazy. So it’s much easier... and it’s not
a cop-out to say that you have done that in the past. And it’s still very important
in the act of purification to examine yourself for any traces of that kind of deed. I
had a lady who told me she got molested when she was a child and it ruined her
whole life. Many people are like that. And you know, in the Abhidharma,
according to the laws of karma, it would have been some kind of sexual
misconduct that she did in the past. But she was too young to have done sexual
misconduct. Then the person goes crazy trying to think of why this could
happen to them. People’s lives are ruined at age three by some event like this. I
think it’s very important to recognize these three divisions of karma.

[student: [unclear]]

We’re going to talk about it tonight. So it’s not like I’m going to say fourth year,
right? That’s my usual answer.
[student: Second hour.]

[laughs] If you don’t die from the tea, you’ll be all right. Okay. This next
question is one that nobody got right in the homework because it wasn’t
phrased very well. [laughter] I said give an example of a deed of body and a
different example of a deed of speech and a different example of a deed of mind,
and give me the three results. So, for example, in the first one, you could put
killing. The deed is killing. What’s the first result? That’s called {namen kyi
debu}, that’s what we call classic karmic result. What is that? It’s one of the three
lower realms. So the answer for all three, for the first part of all three, is that it
gets you into one of the three lower realms. That’s the main {namen kyi debu},
that’s the main cooked result. Then the second one is what?

[student: Personal.]

Yeah, you can call it a personal result. The literal word for that is “corresponding
result,” somehow similar to the cause. And what is that? That has two flavors,
and by the way, you always start the line by saying, and even if you were born
as a human, because the last two take over then, the first one you already said
you take a birth in one of the three lower realms. Then finally you’re born as a
human, and then what? You have a short life, you live in a country.... it’s
amazing, things in India don’t work. Penicillin doesn’t work, you know. People
take tetracycline and they still get stuff. And it’s weird. You eat all day and you
get skinny. The food doesn’t help. I mean, the whole country... you go to
Thailand, it’s on the same latitude, same parallel, same dirt, same soil, same
everything, and everything gets you fat, I don’t know. It’s really strange. It
really is something strange. So what was the second personal result? You have
a liking... what do you call it? You gravitate towards that sort of thing in your
next life. So some kids that you knew in high school were cruel. I remember one
guy, you know. And some kids were just naturally very pure, they loved to
help you. Where did they get this from? Where did it come from? So that’s the
second part. So if you give a good answer to number two in each case, give me
a personal result like, I don’t have much money because I stole. And secondly, I
like to steal, I’m kind of attracted to the idea of stealing. Those are the two.
Third one is what?

[student: Environment.]

Environment from killing? [unclear] [laughs] [laughter] Or you [unclear].
[laughter] I asked some people from New Jersey and they said they don’t want
to come to class because they’re afraid of this one lama. [unclear]

[student: [unclear] New Jersey] [laughter]

All right, that’s all. You answer that way on the exam. Okay.

[student: It’s not clear to me, the idea of taking a lower rebirth a higher rebirth...
which actions lead to which?]

Projecting karma, right? Oh, which of these necessarily causes lower rebirth?

Yeah, in this case we’re talking about...

They don’t have to. They have to be of a certain strength to do it. And a lot
depends on the last moment of your life. Your thoughts...

[student: So when you’re saying...]

They say in.... Tsong Khapa says it comes from doing it over a period of time..
you know, constantly.

[student: So in this case you’re saying select a bad deed and what it will result
in... it’s going to lead to a little...]

We’re talking patterns, we’re not talking like one specific case. Those eight... the
first result and the second result are contradictory. Okay. What are we up to?
You’re going to like this question.

[student: Philosophical.] [laughter]

[student: [unclear] after I’m gone...]

I bet you can answer it anyway. According to the Mind-Only School, what are
you really looking at when you’re looking at the sense power of your eye and
not the outside object?

[student: It’s a conceptualization, or it’s a flowering of a pre-existent seed....]

Mind-Only School. Mind-Only School. Guess from the name of the school.
[student: From the mind.]

They say that it’s like a....

[student: In your mind there’s a storehouse of consciousness which projects as
this image that you see.]

Very close to that. They say that it’s like a you, and here’s your mind and here’s
the object of your mind, and they’re actually the same stuff. It’s just the mind
curved around and you’re looking at your own mind. And that mind is
appearing as Eric Davis to me, and my eyes are here... even my own eyes I take
to be apart, outside of my mind, but they’re all actually made of my mind.
Prasangika says you do exist out there, but you are my projection of certain
data. But Mind-Only School says no, it’s more radical. You are my mind. I never
got past this skin right here, you know. You were never beyond that. And
you’re just in my mind and you’re part of my mind. And the reason they give
for that is a good reason and accepted by everyone, which is that the seed that
creates the appearance of you for me, and the seed that creates my mind to see
you, are the same seed, the same karma. I love that. I think that’s great. It’s one
karma that creates the appearance of the object, and also creates the eye which
sees the object. That’s where they’re coming from, and that part is okay. That’s
true.

[student: Say that again please?]

One karmic seed is creating the thing you’re looking at and the eyes you have to
see it, and the mind you have to think about it. One karmic seed is creating all
three simultaneously. And it has to be that way, I like that, that makes sense.
Even if he’s only a projection of mind.

[student: Why do you distinguish those things into three different things, then?
What makes those three different things different?]

Oh, there’s a time line, for example. The object exists for a millisecond, and then
the eye senses it, and then the mind perceives that. So there’s a three second
time lag.

[student: So you’re saying the interpretation...]

That’s the higher... you’re mixing up Prasangika.
[student: That was brilliant(?).

Brilliant?

[student: The object exists and then a second before you look at it, just like we
had with that glass of water...].

You’re always a nanosecond behind. Your perceptions are always a nanosecond
behind.

[student: It exists because I have projected the nanosecond earlier, but I only
perceive it a nanosecond later?]

All right, give or take a nanosecond. [laugher] It’s like the light of the stars.
Some stars have actually gone out and we’re still seeing them? The light hasn’t
got here as yet? Something like that. All right. Janet. You’ve got a hard one.
All right, three things about Mind-Only School. We’re talking about how a
mental seed from a karma is planted. How is it planted, where does it stay, and
how can that seed hang around for the million years it might take just for it to
ripen?

[student: After you do a deed, for instance, yelling at your boss, right after
you’ve completed the deed, the energy gets transferred to the {bakchak}....]

As a {bakchak}.

[student: ...which gets stored in the kunshi, and then it replicates itself, over and
over again like still frames in a film, and then it eventually flowers so that you’re
yelling at someone else? No, wait.] [laughter]

No, if you yell back...

[student: Yeah, if you yell back, then somebody yells at you. I think that’s a
terrible example of a boss because I always think of a boss yelling at you,
[laughter] I don’t think of you yelling at the boss, that’s what I mean.]

All right, I get it. [laughs] [laughter]

[student: If you’re yelling at the puppy, then [unclear]] [laughs] [laughter]
I knew there was a reason he was around. The only thing you need to add, and
this is very important—seeing yourself yelling at the boss is the main thing.

[student: So wait a minute.... I was just thinking about like bad deeds. It seems
that most of us don’t do too many really bad deeds consciously. Most of us
don’t consciously do stuff that isn’t too nice, so a lot of times you don’t realize
how bad it is and then you think about it five minutes later, and you go, oh, I
shouldn’t have done that. So how does that affect all this? If you’re not really
conscious of it at the time?]

[unclear] We’ll get to it. That’s the reason for the distinction between a karma
and a karmic path. And the karmic path has to have those five elements present.
And if one of them is incomplete, like one wheel on a cart, you know, still you
can get somewhere, but it’s not as deep or as powerful as I thought. And the
same thing on a karmic path. Any one of those four, like if you don’t identify
with it, you really didn’t realize that... you really thought that animals couldn’t
feel anything, that they didn’t mind having their skin stripped off. [laughter]
[laughs] If you really believe that, and a lot of people do, they really believe that
animals can’t feel anything, then it’s actually less of a bad karma than if you
really learnt how badly it hurts to kill them.

[student: Let’s say for example that, like to a person, where maybe you did
something differently that wasn’t nice, and maybe on some level you kind of
knew it, but your negative emotion was stronger than your desire to be nice to
the person, so it’s not exactly like you thought you were being nice, but... you
know what I mean?]

Then it’s {koolong}, then the element of {sampa}, the element of thinking, is not
complete. We’re going to get to that. But basically, when you’re thinking about
those questions, think about the idea of a karmic path with those four parts
complete, and if something is defective there, if something is less than whole,
then the karma’s much less.

[student:     Remember we talked about the {bakchak} being created and
streaming for millions of years. You know, you’re saying that the energy
doesn’t dissipate, this is some energetic thing that is preserved and doesn’t
dissipate, like when you yell at someone, the energy runs out and it turns into a
{bakchak}. So I don’t understand how the activities of generating a karma... the
energy runs down, and yet a {bakchak} maintains and increase.]
It’s the question... there’s two things going on, okay? I remember having this
argument with my boss like twelve years ago or something, in the back of a car.
And he said, your obsession with impermanence, or that things are always
falling apart, this Buddhist idea is incorrect. What about a muscle? The more I
use it the stronger it gets. So you have to view it in two planes, two dimensions.
As the muscle appears to be getting stronger as you weightlift, it’s actually
approaching death. It’s going up, but it’s reaching this axis faster. Know what I
mean? It is going up. It appears to be getting healthier, and a company which is
growing appears to be growing rather than being destroyed. But the longer it
lives, the closer it is to its destruction, the longer it gets stronger, the closer it is to
its destruction. So that’s an illusion. So here it’s the opposite. The seed is
actually getting stronger as time goes on, but it is being destroyed in the sense of
getting closer to the flowering of it, and that’s the moment it’s destroyed.

[student: Where’s the energy coming from, if it becomes stronger? There’s this
energetic seed which is streaming on and yet it’s increasing in potential. How
does that happen?]

Let’s say a lot of factors. What makes a seed healthier than other seeds? It’s the
secondary causes, the fertilizer, the earth, the water and the sunlight. And then,
what’s in your mind that would make those seeds fresh and healthy... what
keeps them from rotting? Mainly ignorance. Mainly the misperception of
objects.

[student: So you’re saying that if you changed your mind, those seeds would
disappear?]

They don’t disappear, but they become... they call it rotten, unable to produce
their result properly. And we’re going to get to that... the purification process is
just that. The seeds are there. How do you deactivate it? How do you make
them rot in your brain and never flower? That would be nice.

[student: I have a question about Janet’s question. When you hear about, let’s
say a psychopathic killer who is defended by the defense of being temporarily
insane. Now does he.. can we assume that he goes through a complete karmic
path with those four parts, or that he goes through it and he doesn’t know it?]

No, it’s not all complete because we always say insanity is a defense. Because
he’s not having a {sampa}, his motivation, his perception of the events, is all
defective. It’s not complete. It’s as if you machine-gun a corpse in a bed which
you didn’t know was dead already. He’s in a similar situation. And we believe
that because of certain factors like extreme grief, that a person can actually go
temporarily crazy, misperceive objects and do something bad, and he’s not as
responsible for that.

[student: So extreme disassociation would be the same thing?]

Yeah, yeah. Somebody didn’t like that because it would mean that Hitler’s
getting less of a payback for his deeds than he would have if he really thought
that all those beings were nice people who deserved to live. He had this
misperception, and actually it would make the karma a little lighter for him. Or
my father, he thought that animals couldn’t feel anything when he went fishing.
He really believed that. So actually his karma would be a little bit less, not much.

[student: I mean, it strikes me that we’re all in this class, trying very hard to
know what we did, what we’re going to do, [laughs] and there are a lot of
people that you talk to on an everyday basis who don’t know when you ask
them a question, they don’t know.]

Well, the more you know, the more dangerous it is. [laughter] Seriously. The
more you know, the worse the karma is, much worse. Maybe you don’t want to
be in this class. [laughter]

[student: I know we had that immediate life, and all those things about when it
plays out, but how do you... what is it that makes the {bakchak} come back?]

Many people ask me that. It’s a queuing process. You know computer printing?
Whoever gets their printing job in first gets the first thing out of the printer,
unless there’s this program where you can shove it ahead in the queue, and it’s
the same thing. Deeds done with those peculiar aspects, extreme rage towards a
very holy object, where you torture the guy as you kill him, those all move it up
in the queue. So you must experience those karmas first. That delays the other
ones.

[student: So you’re always going to experience lesser ones further on?]

The more powerful ones first. It doesn’t mean that the first birth won’t be much
longer and more painful because the same power can maintain human life, I
mean, the megabytes it takes to maintain a human life and the amount it takes to
maintain a hell life... it takes less energy to maintain a hell life. A smaller bad
deed can give you more time in hell than a very powerful deed can give you in
the human realm. That’s just a... in the Abhidharma, in the third chapter at the
end, they describe how time slows down for those beings. They have a different
perception of time. A day here is a month for them.

[student: [unclear]

You can ask questions, but you guys stay till 9:30. It’s a deal? [laughs] [laughter]
Don’t get mad at me now.

[student: How does the energy really move once you die? How does it move to
the next life?]

That’s when you get to what stores it, you know, and that’s why you have to
say, on a gross level, you have to say the flow of the mind. Which is actually just
a replication as is the {bakchak}. But on a more subtle level, it’s the flow of your
perception, and that’s the Prasangika, and that takes some time. It’s not the flow
of the mind, it’s the flow of the perception of the mind. That’s where the
{bakchaks} stay. That’s Mahayana.

[student: You said, very briefly, the most important thing, the thing it’s very
important to understand is that it’s your perception of what you....]

I should go back to that. What’s particularly important is your perception of
yourself yelling at your boss, or at your dog. [laughs] All right? You should
mention that. It’s the perception of yourself doing it that is paramount, and
that’s why intention is so important. But it’s the actual perception of what’s
going on, naturally. A mental event which causes the {bakchak}, the karmic
seed, to be planted. And that’s why the result is a perceptual event, isn’t it? It’s a
conception, isn’t it? It’s thinking you’re seeing yourself being yelled at. [laughs]
Okay? Which is equivalent to being yelled at, by the way. Except that you can
change the second one and you can’t change the first one. Sorry. If it weren’t
that way, you could never stop being that way. That’s Nagarjuna’s obsession.
It’s this... yeah. I said the perception of getting yelled at is equivalent to being
yelled at. But if you only understand it on the level of just being yelled at, you’ll
never be able to change it.

[student: So the perception being understanding where that’s coming from? Is
that what you mean?]
Oh yeah. Okay. No. Partly. But if it weren’t just a conception, you could never
change it. If it were actually the outside event, the way it looks like, you would
never change. If it’s a conception, you can change your karma, change your
perception, and then the event changes. You never achieve any thing you want
to happen in the universe... nothing in life is going to happen the way you want
it to happen except that it happens through your past karma. There’s no will
power involved. There’s no manipulation that you can do to your world, which
will bring anything to you that you wish, except to be good. And that’s
profound.      That’s why sometimes you try something and it works, and
sometimes you try it and it doesn’t work. Because that’s not what’s causing it.
And that’s the proof of it. Anyway.

[student: If nothing can come to you through will, then how can making
changes do...]

What I mean is ... you can will to change your deeds, and therefore change your
perceptions. You use your will to change, and then you get this understanding to
be good and then you be good, and you get your results.

[student: So then there’s no will in that, I mean, that’s all...]

That is will. That’s all will ever was. But it’s good enough to be will. What do
they say? {unclear}. Because something is illusory, it’s enough to say it exists.
{unclear} But because something doesn’t exist ultimately, doesn’t mean it doesn’t
exist. That’s very beautiful. If something exists illusorily, we can say it exists. If
something doesn’t exist ultimately, we cannot say it doesn’t exist, we get in
trouble. Okay, we ought to go on. I think we’re back up near Fran. Mind-Only
School says we are right because the Buddha said in many places that the
universe is made from the mind only. And that’s...what did the Buddha really
mean when he said the universe is mind only? What did Shantideva mean when
he said hell was not put there by ACME Construction Company, hell was put
there by your mind? [laughter] What did he mean?

[student: That there’s no creator.]

There was a negative way and a positive way. Negatively speaking, don’t blame
it on god. Positively speaking....

[student: That the mind is greater than matter?]
Yeah, that mind is the main cause. It doesn’t mean that everything is made of
mind. That’s not what the Buddha meant. Mind, especially in the form of
ignorance, not understanding all these things, creates all this. All right. Next
question I think is the most holy statement in Buddhism. I really do think that.
So I give... [name} should be good at this. Maitreya in his work called [bk: The
Higher Line] describes six different steps in the process by which the tendency to
grasp to some self-nature causes karma and therefore the [unclear]. So where
does all this screw-up come from? That’s the thing. Six steps. Mr. Kiley. Got a
minute? Six steps as to where this whole trouble comes from. Where does this
come from? Remember? I don’t mind if you look.

[student: Well that’s nice of you. [laughter] Where does the bad karma... the
mental seed from past lives...called a {bakchak}...]

Okay, the mental seed for ignorance, that’s the beginning of the beginning. You
carry a mental seed for ignorance. By the way, it’s different from a karmic seed.
That’s number one. Number two?

[student: Tendency to grasp to the self-nature of my self as a person exists...]

And something else. Me and my.

[student: Yeah, me and my self.]

Two kinds of ignorance. Ignorance about me, and ignorance about my parts
and my things. They start. So the seed starts. Amoebas have them, kids have
them, turtles have them, according to Madhyamika Prasangika, every living
being, I mean non-Buddha, non-Arhat, has them.

[student: Does that extend to possessions?]

Yeah. Because in a sense they’re all objects of your eye-consciousness [unclear].
I used to wonder about that myself. But mainly parts to your personal self.
Number three, Kiley?

[student: We see things backwardly, things that seem to be pleasant to us really
are unpleasant.]

That’s not quite it. That comes next. Okay? But we perceive things as pleasant
or unpleasant. Is that wrong? Is that a misperception, is that a {tsema}?

[student: No, yes.]

It’s a {pramana}, it’s a {tsema}, it’s a correct perception. Some things are nice and
some things are bad. Third step here, the third part of the process, is not
thinking that some things are nice and some things are not. They are nice and
bad. They are. It’s what?

[student: It’s how they exist, how they come about.]

Yeah. It’s misunderstanding how good things and bad things exist. It’s not the
perception that some things are nice and some things are bad. They are nice and
bad. Are you going to go out and eat a rock instead of a doughnut? I mean,
that’s not a crazy thought, that’s a {tsema}, you don’t want to eat a rock.

[student: So what’s the confusion?]

It’s to think, it’s to perceive a good thing as self-existent, and to perceive a bad
thing as self-existent, which is not to understand where they came from. And
then what?

[student: Then the desire to avoid unpleasant experiences and the desire not to
lose pleasant objects.]

Ignorantly. Please add that. Okay? Ignorantly. Is it bad to want nice things?
Well, then the Buddha never would have become a Buddha. He worked for 213
countless eons. [laughs]. It’s nice to work for good things. It’s nice to want good
things and to not want bad things or you would never be a Buddhist. You’re
here because you want good things.            But ignorantly, because you don’t
understand their nature. So you think that the way to get something good is
what?

[student: Just get it.]

Yeah. Keep the money for yourself, that’s how you get rich. When you give it
away, your bank account runs down. That’s crazy. That’s the ignorant part.
Okay, number four. [unclear]

[student: Karma and the accumulation of {unclear}.]
Yeah, then you can collect karma. Then you can actually withhold money from
people and think that action is getting you rich. And you’re actually doing the
opposite of what you should do to get rich. And it seems to work, doesn’t it?
For a while. And there’s the rub, that’s the problem. That’s coming from a
former karma. Some people try to take the money and it gets worse. That
proves it doesn’t work. Number six.

[student:   You’re suffering in samsara because you don’t understand the
emptiness of it.]

They just say {korwa la kor}, you circle in the circle. That’s all. That’s all the sixth
one is. Then you suffer. But specifically you should say, in the English... what’s
the word? When something you do makes something go wrong?

[student: Perpetuate.]

Perpetuates. That’s how you should say it in English. That’s exactly the
problem. The natural reaction causes it to perpetuate. And you know that. Let
me ask Vilma something. Maybe I should just let you study all the realms.
[laughs] What are we up to? Okay, Vilma. This is a little bit of a hard one. This
is a question that was unclear and it was fuzzy on your homework because it
was fuzzy for me too. And I got a little better understanding now. How does
Madhyamika Prasangika explain it? When a person comes into a room and he
sets down a glass of water and then you get a hungry ghost, a hell-being and a
human. What do they say is going on? One being sees water, one being sees
blood and one being sees ambrosia.

[student: Well, there’s a material cause that is wet and flowing and there are
three parts to the wet and flowing that are what each one of those different
beings has the {bakchak} to see. And so that’s what...]

That’s how they explain it. I’ll do it a little bit more, but why is it important to
say three parts? It’s a reference to {pramana}, to {tsema}. Yeah, what?

[student: [unclear]] [laughter]

[student: Because they’re perceiving different things.]

They have to be seeing different things. They have to be seeing different things.
You cannot have three {tsemas} towards the same object which are
contradictory. That’s impossible.

[student: Doesn’t make sense. [laughs] No, how could you say there’s three
parts? I mean, it sounds like [you made it up?]]

The three parts is not... the emphasis of the three parts is not at the time of the
perception. The emphasis of the three parts is at the time of the cause of
perception. The moment before they all sit down, at that point, it has three
parts. When they sit down, it has three parts. When they sit down, it has three
parts. Did it have three parts when the guy came in and put the water on the
table? No. Just before they come in and sit down...

[student: You’re saying that the wet and the flowing has three parts. I thought
that you were saying the cause...]

The material cause, the stuff that turned into blood, the stuff that turned into
ambrosia, and the stuff that continued being water, was liquid. There has to be
three distinct pieces of liquid that become those three things. The moment
before they come in, there has to be three parts to the liquid.

[student: So there could have been twenty-five parts if there were twenty-five
beings?]

Absolutely. And if there were 8 million people in New York, there would be 8
million parts to the Empire State Building.

[student: But what does it mean to say that? If it’s [unclear] a number of parts,
then how is it a part?]

[unclear]

[student: I think a part...]

Infinite perceptions of the glass.

[student: Yes, but a part implies a part, a section.]

I don’t... people don’t think of it as a physical part so much. If you want to think
of it as a...
[student: Wouldn’t you say they’re more like attributes or modes that [unclear].]

They say part, and then they clarify it in the reading. Part in the sense of arms
and legs and a hand. Pretty....doesn’t mean there’s a glass of water and there’s
three appearances. They’re trying to say that it’s not that. That a priori there’s a
glass of water, and there’s not.

[student: Wasn’t there some discussion about it not being the kind of part that’s
obscure? That one part obscures another part? So, if it’s physical, how can that
not be, because the pus and blood would certainly obscure water?]

That came from a... somebody came to Chandrakirti and said, didn’t you say
before that it wasn’t this sort of obscurity thing. How could you complain about
this Hindu school that said that all objects have all qualities? And then there’s a
karma creates this screen, and you only see one part. That’s not blood, pus,
water and ambrosia all at the same time. And the human’s karma screens out
blood and the ambrosia. And Chandrakirti says, that’s not the case. That’s what
he means by that.
[student: In the other class, didn’t you say that you visualize this glass of water
as there are three beings looking at it as having something like interleaved
molecules, so that each side was the...]

There’s a perception of the sense, there. There’s a perception of the sense.

[student: But didn’t you say that [unclear]]

And that becomes reality. That is reality. As much as the guy is bad and got to
you, you [unclear]. Okay. I don’t mind. I can stay late.

[student: I’ve heard a lot about this also, and I’m wondering, can this be a
situation where the object sort of has different facets to it, and depending upon
the perceiver of the being, their capability is such that they pick up on certain
facets while not being able to pick up on others? For instance, if I look at a
flower, and see a flowery object that’s red with a dark center to it, and a bee
looks at the same flower, and because bees look at things with infrared light, the
bee would see something yellow with a white center to it,. And it looks flowery
also to the bee. That’s a bee, I’m a human being, we see a flowery type of thing
in a very different way. The same object. Is it something like that?
He discusses that. He says, what about a microbe in a glass of water? His
perception of the water and the human’s perception of the water? Because one
perceives of the water as his home, his conception of the water is as a place to
live. And the other has a perception of the water as something to drink. And he
says that’s not quite the same time. You can read it, it’s at the end of the reading.
And he says that those are not contradictory {tsemas}. The perception of a bee,
and the perception of a human, of the same object, as being red to this
wavelength-catching eye, and yellow to that wavelength-catching eye, those are
not contradictory {tsemas}.

[student: But it seems to me that...]

[cut]

Four parts to a karmic path. [name]. [unclear]

[student: For the complete path, you mean?]

Yeah. Complete path meaning a nice big ball of karma, really powerful.
Anything missing is not quite as powerful.

Okay. Correct identification of the object.

Well, object. Not the identification. That’s the second part. Object is what? In
the case of killing?
Living being.

[student: [unclear]]

Yeah, Buddhism personally extends to bugs.

[student: Oh, I’m sorry.]

It does, actually. The word extends to bugs. Okay, living being is the object.
Then what?

[student: Intention.]

Then, what’s called the thinking. I translated it as thinking or thought because it
covers a lot of different things that we’re going to get to later. Third one?
[student: Undertaking.]

Yeah, undertaking. Pick up the knife and you go after the guy.

[student: Completion.]

Completion, which is what?

[student: When he dies.]

When he dies, as a result of your {jorwa}, as a result of your undertaking. And
then the second one has three parts of its own. Caroline?

[student: Intention?]

That’s number two. What’s the first one? The first one was identification. You
see him for what he is, as a living being. You understand this. We talked about
somebody who thinks that animals don’t feel any pain because they’re not a
sentient being so it’s okay to kill them. Second one?

[student: Bad thoughts?]

Bad thought.     Are you under the control of desire, hatred or just stupidity?
[laughs]

[student: Motivation.]

That’s the motivation, which means, I want to kill him. That’s what’s not
complete when you run over somebody in the car by accident. We’re getting
there. Robin. What does {gesar}, “most basic virtue” refer to?

[student: It’s the virtue that you have from birth as a result of virtuous deeds
from many previous lives.]

Yeah. Of the two collections, which one is it?

[student: It’s the collection of merit?]

Yeah. There’s the collection of merit, and the collection of wisdom. Collection of
merit causes what?

[student: The form body?]

All the good deeds you ever do are massed together and someday will force you
to see yourself as a Buddha. That’s the idea. Okay? That great mass of good
deeds, that great mass of energy is called the Collection of Merit. And what’s the
other one? Collection of...

[student: Wisdom.]

Collection of Wisdom. Wisdom is not the one meant here. A lot of people, you
know... I talked about the two collections on the homework, they said, oh, virtue
root is those two. That’s not the case. It’s mainly the Collection of Merit. Mainly
the cause for your form body. So if you cut your {gesar}, if you destroy your
most basic virtues by which two actions? Anger at a Boddhisattva or...

[student: Not believing in karma.]

Yeah, {loktha} wrong view, then what would you be mainly be cheating yourself
of?

[student: Form body.]

Form body. Looking like a Buddha. [laughs]

[student: You could still be a Buddha, but wouldn’t look like a Buddha?] [laughs]
[laughter]

Sorry, you have to look like a Buddha. All right. Let’s just do a...

[student: Collection of wisdom, what it causes?]

The omniscience of a Buddha, and it’s not what we’re talking about here. Don’t
give me both collections on that answer, it’s just the first one. Stillwell. Give me
personality type for the person who does that kind of thing.

[student: Someone who’s intellectual, who can clearly evaluate the idea, hold a
conclusion and sustain it.]
Yeah. They are intellectual rather than sensual types, and they are smart. Well,
they’re not really smart. [laughs] [laughter] But they are capable of holding a
sustained conviction, and that’s what it takes to destroy that virtue. It’s not just
an occasional thought that that might not be true. It’s a strong conviction. A
well-thought out, well-considered conviction. Let’s see. Janet. Why is an
immediate deed called an immediate deed?

[student: Because you feel the result in the very next rebirth.]

Right. There’s no other birth between this and the next one. And that makes a
perfect what?

[student: Oh, if it’s a bad deed, then it’s hell, and if it’s a breakup of the Buddha’s
sangha, then it’s the lowest hell.]

Yeah. Any one of the five will get you to hell, must get you to hell. And the
worst one of the five must get you to the lowest hell. And any one of the other
four could get you to the lowest hell, but not necessarily. The schism always
does, unless you do a purification. Which, by the way, the Abhidharma wouldn’t
accept that philosophy. Fran, the five great bad deeds in order of worst to least.
What’s the worst one of the five bad deeds? Fran?

[student: Causing a schism....]

Breaking up the monks.

[student: See, I don’t know... [monks]]

Historically what? I guess so, you can have {gendin} here. The idea of {gendin},
which is a quorum, applies to the nuns also.

[student: The next one is to kill the Buddha.]

Attempting to kill a Buddha.

[student: The third one is killing of an arhat.]

Right.

[student: The fourth one is killing your mother.]
Right.

[student: The fifth one is killing your father.]

That’s from worst to least. Faith, four qualities that make a person to whom you
give something to exceptional? And give an example for each one.]

[student: First one is type of being, a human is better than an animal.]

Good. Okay.

[student: The second one is suffering, it’s exceptional to give something to
someone who’s suffering.]

Right, or sick.

[student: Third one is giving to someone who has given you assistance in the
past.]

Like parents. Why? There are a lot of people.

[student: Because they’ve done so much for you, and have given you life, even if
they do nothing else.]

Right, okay. A lot of people, ah, my mother was bad to me. Or she beat me, or
she left me, or.... it doesn’t matter. In Buddhism, once they give you life, that
qualifies them as an exceptional object because with life you can attain nirvana,
without life you can’t. Last one...

[student: Is giving someone with high spiritual qualities like the Dalai Lama,
who doesn’t need your offering.]

Okay, take a quick break. Then we’ll do a short thing on purification. Try to
come back in ten minutes. I can finish in ten. [cut] It wasn’t supposed to be part
of this class, but since you know how karma works, you might be concerned
about it. All the karma you collected in the past. And that’s [unclear].

[student: While we’re waiting, can I make a real quick announcement? It seems
like a fair number of tapes are gone, so if anybody’s got the class tapes, bring
them back so that they can stay in the library and other people can use them?]

By the way, December 9, 6:30 p.m., holiday party. Heroine is... Nancy Nelson
one time in a...

[cut]

Get rid of the all the bad karmas I did hundreds ago, and I don’t remember any
more, and even when I was young I don’t remember, or even yesterday I don’t
remember, so, there’s this thing called {chishak}. {chishak} means general
confession, blanket confession. And we have... the monks have to do it every
two weeks. And it’s a very nice confession ceremony. It covers the bad deeds
that you might have done, it says here from time with no beginning up to the
present moment. [laughs] Okay? So it’s a blanket confession. We believe that if
you do it correctly, you can move those {bakchaks}, or you can deactivate them.
We’ll talk about how that works. It’s not easy, because if it was easy, you could
just do whatever you want and then five minutes later, you could just confess it.
It doesn’t work that way. And then this is a translation of that, and there’s a
picture of the Buddha here, so I suggest you fold that and keep it in your wallet
and every time you do a bad deed, you pull it out and... Atisha used to carry a
stupa, and he would be riding around Tibet on a horse, and every time he had a
bad thought, he would get down off his horse, stop the whole procession, and
go off somewhere and confess the thought. Other lamas used to keep black and
white rocks in their pockets, and move the rocks every time they had a bad
thought, and then count the black rocks at the end of the day. [laughs] You can
keep a little... I keep a little diary in my pocket, a little pocket book. Just to track
your progress. There’s a thing in manufacturing that I do, that if you’re getting a
lot of defects, you don’t yell at the people, you don’t say cut down the defects,
you say could you please count them for me. Just count them, you don’t have to
fix anything. Just count them for me and give me a report everyday. And then
they fix it, because they notice it, and then within two weeks, you don’t have any
defects. You don’t even have to tell them not to do it, just ask them to watch
out. This confession has to have four parts. If the four parts aren’t complete, it
doesn’t work.

[student: Excuse me, Michael, could you write the Tibetan for [unclear]?]

You want the Tibetan? Actually they’re called the Four Forces. Okay? Four
forces. First force is foundation force. Some folks describe this as the person
you offended, and it’s either the Buddha or other living beings, but the deepest
interpretation of it is different, and the deepest interpretation is that the
foundation force is refuge. Refuge means putting your faith in the Buddha,
Dharma and Sangha for what’s going to be able to help you. What kind of faith
is it? It’s faith by knowing.... the ultimate dharma by the way, is exactly what
we’ve been talking about in this class, is knowledge. It’s refuge in knowledge.
It’s not refuge in some big guy up there or anything else. The ultimate refuge is
your own understanding or what’s right and wrong and selflessness. So really,
this is the state of refuge, the mental state of refuge, which means, the ultimate
Dharma refuge is understanding emptiness.            And karma.      So that’s the
foundation force. It’s called foundation because you’ve gotta have some firm
foundation... when you fall down, it takes something solid to get up from, and
that`s why... when you fall down, and when you do some bad deed, you restore
yourself, you stand back up, by asserting your refuge. That’s the meaning of
foundation force. It’s going for refuge again, it’s not some blind belief in some
guy, it’s understanding what happens, and that’s refuge. And that’s the only
thing that will save you. Destruction force is this. It’s called {nambar sim jimbe
tho}. {nambar sim jimbe} is a really nasty word in Tibetan. {nambar sim jimbe)
doesn’t mean just mean destruction. It means to rip something out of the
ground like what you do to a weed. It’s the word for rape in Tibetan. It’s a very
powerful word. It means to rip out the roots of something.

[student: [unclear]]

{nambar sim jimbe tho}. That is regret, and regret is defined as follows. It’s not
a guilt complex, and it’s not this fuzzy bad feeling. It’s an intelligent knowledge
that you have just screwed yourself. [laughs] That you have just caused
yourself much suffering. And the example they give in the scriptures is there’s
three guys sitting at the bar, and they all order the same thing, and the bar
tender comes out and pours three glasses out of the same bottle, and they all
down it, and then the first guy starts choking and he goes like this and he falls
over dead. And they all realize that the guy has poured out a bottle of poison by
accident. And then the second guy starts to go like this. And then the third guy
starts to feel creepy. And it’s the feeling of the third guy. Really, that’s what the
Lam Rim says. It’s the feeling he has that, oh my god, I’m dead, I’m really dead.
And for you, as an educated, intelligent, American Buddhist who has understood
all the theories of the Mind-Only School and Madhyamika theory of emptiness,
and has studied karma carefully, and knows damn well that you just planted a
{bakchak} and you must experience the result of that {bakchak} unless you do
some incredible deed to purify.... you now know that you must experience that
result, and you know how it was planted and everything. Mainly through the
perception of what you did. And you know you’re going to have a result. And
it’s just that cold, calculated knowledge that you have just caused yourself much
suffering. That’s what the destruction force is. Because that has a peculiar power
to fix up the whole situation. If you really understand what you did, and if you
have a sincere feeling... I think regret is a lousy word... it’s a sick feeling... it’s
this...

[student: Oh no.]

It’s this... when the space shuttle blew up, the last thing on the tape... [laughs]
there was this oh, oh, you know. You know you’re in trouble. You know as an
educated Buddhist now, you know the process, you know what happened, you
know how many of the elements were present, you know what’s going to
happen, you know how it stays in your mind, and you realize that you did it,
and you just feel bad. It was a compulsion that made you do it, and now you
must experience that result. It’s that cold knowledge that you’re going to
experience that result. That’s {gyepa}, regret. Last one has a long word. Third
one, sorry.

[student: The destruction force... is it always purely selfish just knowing the
suffering that you’re going to face yourself?]

Yeah. Also there’s this other element which we talked about. Knowing how
much it’s going to hurt other people. And the ultimate form of that is that if you
take longer to become a good person, for every day that you delay becoming a
good person, you’re influencing other people badly, you’re messing up other
people. As long as you have your particular problem, I know what mine is, you
know what yours is, you’re going to affect other people. So in a way you’re
hurting other people. As long as you delay your own perfection, you’re hurting
other people. One less Buddha around to help people. [laughs] Okay, the
restraint force is very simple. You just don’t do it again. Now you see why it’s
so difficult to do a purification. And now you see why you can’t just do what
you want the night before and take the morning-after pill. You do this
confession the next morning, and then everything’s okay, I can do what I want
tonight, because as long as I don’t die tonight, everything’s all right in the
morning if I just do a nice confession. It’s not like that. Because if you have the
restraining force, if you have restrained yourself from doing it again, you’re not
doing that confession for that particular deed. And then the lineage instruction,
the instruction of all the lamas in the lineage, let’s be frank, you can’t stop,
probably. We’re like alcoholics. You probably won’t be able to stop completely
doing that thing again. You’re supposed to work on the thing that you do the
worst, the thing that you do the most, the thing that you’re really out of control
on. And frankly, you and I know you’re going to do it again. So the lamas say,
and it’s a very profound part of the instructions, set a time limit. So for the
restraint force, set a time limit.

[student: So they say then you have to do that, or it’s recommended, because of
human nature?]

Recommended. Probably you won’t be able to stop it for the rest of your life. I
mean, if it was you know, an abortion, or something like that, and now you
know it’s wrong. That’s the kind of thing you can say I’m never going to do that
again as long as I live. But if it’s something like yelling at someone, or me
looking at a girl on the street or something, I’m not supposed to, I know I’ll
probably do it again, I have to set a time limit. You can’t keep your awareness
that tightly for a long period of time. If it’s a slight thing that you’re doing that’s
very easy to do, it’s very important to set a short time limit and swear that you
won’t do it for that period. Because if you break that, what happens?

[student: You lied.]

You lied. [laughs] You collected number four. You just piled a bad deed on top
of the first one.

[student: So you just keep renewing it, then?]

You have to keep renewing it. But these are for things that are chronic with you,
and in all honesty, and in all frankness, you know that you can’t stop right away.

[student: When you say you set a time limit, I thought you meant that I’ll stop in
six months, when six month’s up I’ll stop.] [laughter]

No, not like that. Maybe that would be a better one. So you say look...and the
book says one year, one month, one day, one hour. I have had the same
thought occur before I finished my confession ceremony. [laughter] That’s very
depressing. [laughter] So I have to set a 30 second limit. But it’s very important
to set one that’s realistic. And you know, that in that exercise and in any other
thing that you do with practice, make it longer, build it up, build it up as long as
you can. But be kind, and be very pure, pick a time period in which you can
truly keep it purely. Then you’ll get used to being pure, and that’s what I do. If
you don’t do that, it’s not a confession, and that’s why you can’t just keep doing
whatever you want to do and then next morning confess it and everything’s
okay. People accuse Buddhists, Mahayanists, of thinking like that. It’s not like
that. If you’re doing it repeatedly, then you’re not improving and you’re not
doing your confessions. Yeah.

[student: So you’re saying that if you get to the.. you set a time a limit of like,
I’m not going to do that for ten minutes. If you’re successful in that, is that a
successful purification.]

Yeah.

[student: And if you set it for thirty seconds, and you’re successful....]

If it were an reasonable honest maximum that you could do. Okay. What is it
mean purification? Okay, you have to experience some kind of result, but it’s
much less. You are knocking out the table legs of those karmic paths elements,
as opposed to karma elements. You’re knocking out a lot of the intention, a lot
of the {sampa} part, a lot of the motivation part is being ripped out and that seed
is getting much less powerful. They say that if you’re supposed to go to hell,
you get a real bad backache. And practitioners who are really good at this, and
I’ve seen that in India, you know, in certain places. People do a teaching on
purification for six weeks or something. They’re all really working hard on it.
Everyone gets sick. Some guy died, you know. [laughter] It’s like, really, you
may experience some minor problems after this, and that’s a good sign. You’re
wearing off something that would have been much worse.

[student: Michael, is there any time when what you did hurt a particular sentient
being like a person, is it important to apologize to that particular person?]

It helps a lot. It’s part of the {deng yo tong}. It helps a lot.

[student: For the first one?]

In the sense of them being the object. It helps a lot. Really helps a lot. Okay.
Antidote [unclear]. [laughter] I’ve been thinking about Tibetan... antidote is like
this. There are six antidotes. Antidote means you do something to make up for
it, you undertake some concrete act. I remember, we have a guy in our
community down in New Jersey who was in Vietnam. He was an infantryman.
He says he sprayed jungles with machine guns and he doesn’t know whether he
killed anybody or not. He doesn’t remember shooting someone, you know, and
seeing them fall down, but he was in fire fights and he thinks he may have hit
people, he doesn’t know. So he asked Rinpoche what to do. And Rinpoche
knew that his father was keeping two sheep with the intention of killing them,
and eating them. So he said, get the two sheep from your father and feed them
until they die of natural causes, [laughter] These sheep live like sixteen years,
you know. So that’s like a {unclear], okay? All right. They’re like this. The first
one is studying the names of the Buddhas. Reciting a Buddha field.

[student: Any of these six or all these six?]

Any one of these six and I’ll explain. Some of them are more powerful than
others. And there is a confession which I didn’t give you which is a lot longer
which is called the Thirty-five Buddhas and [unclear]. You recite the names of
the Buddhas that have lived....

[student: Is that more powerful?]

It would be nice if you had it, but I also think that as an American in this society,
you have to do the ones that are most powerful. I could have given you a five-
page thing, but then you wouldn’t use it. Okay. Second one is to recite mantra.

[student: [unclear]]

We talked about how a mantra works. Do you remember? Of all places it was
where? It was in the logic text, of Dharmakirti, and he said a mantra works
because... two reasons must be present for a mantra to work. It must come
from a holy source. The person who wrote the mantra or invented the mantra
must be a holy being, and secondly and most importantly, the person who
recites the mantra must be moral, must be a pure person. You know, the person
who recites it must really have noble intentions and good morality. I like that.
He was explaining how mantras work. It’s not like it’s a holy word and if you
say it you’re a cool person. All right. Number three, is to study or read the
scriptures. Fourth one, which is the most powerful one, is to meditate on
emptiness insofar as you understand it presently. It doesn’t matter if your
understanding is crude. I told you last week about Tsongkhapa, right? Je
Tsongkhapa? I was reading his biography, and the first time he met Manjushri,
he was not good enough to see him, but he was good enough to ask questions
through another person and he asked Manjushri, how’s my view of emptiness?
And Manjushri said, terrible. And then he says, well, am I more a Madhyamika
Prasangika or more Middle-Way? What is that word? Why is it such a good
antidote?

[student: Conditions(?) you the next time?]

It’s the only thing that can remove your tendency to do the thing the next time.
Permanently. It’s the only thing. Only that understanding can remove... you can
try all the tricks you want to be a good person and you could try all these mental
gymnastics and acrobatics which you must try as a temporary measure, but you
cannot remove your negative emotions permanently, impossible. Fifth one is
making offerings to a Buddha image or...

[student: Actual offerings? What about offering your good deeds?]

The highest kind of Buddhist offering, it’s well-known, it’s called the {dupe
chupa}, the highest kind of Buddhist offering is to succeed in your practice, to do
what your lama taught you. If you go to work and someone screams at you
tomorrow, and you keep your patience, that’s the highest form of offering,
according to Buddhism. Better than all the money or...

[student: Michael, whatever [unclear] only the things that are done.]

That’s rejoicing and that’s a great, that’s a powerful good deed, that’s a great
offering. You know, some people interpret that to mean that they should never
go to a temple and offer anything. It doesn’t mean that either. You should have
to do both. Do everything you can. And the last one is to {kusubla temba}.
{kusubla temba} is to use holy images. And to tell you the truth, I’m not very
clear what that means. [laughter] I guess it means to confess in front of the
image.

[student: Confess yourself in mediation perhaps?]

Could be. It says to use holy images. I tell you the truth, I don’t know exactly.
I’ll have to ask Rinpoche. I think it’s... normally they say it’s very good to
confess in front of the image.

[student: Michael, you said that when we do bad things we should take out a
sheet of paper...]

Which you’ve already lost... [laughs] [laughter]
[student: No....]

By the way, Anila has agreed to show you a little thing that you can really fit in
your wallet. What do you call it? A plastic covered thing...

[student: Laminated?]

Which you slip open, and you have a little Buddha there.... I think that would be
good for us.

[student: This you could do anywhere, I mean at work.]

Oh, absolutely. That’s the whole idea. You can thank Anila. She did...

[student: What you’re saying is that we can’t just read this and have a
purification, it won’t work.
Well, if you read it carefully, you’ll see that most of these elements are in the
prayer.

[student: Reading is enough?]

No, reading is not enough. It will not work without these four.

[student: Without feeling it.]

Especially without restraining yourself from doing it in future. That’s why, if a
person’s doing this general confession over and over again, he’s still a lousy
person, he’s not improving. It will not work. It’s not removing the {bakchaks}.
If you do do it, it does remove.... according to Mahayana, according to the
highest teachings of Buddhism, it does remove the energy. And it is important
when you finish to believe that it’s finished. It’s important to think to yourself,
that’s it, I’m clean. That’s very important. Especially as you die. [laughter] I’m
not kidding. As you die, hopefully you’ve got this {tichak} in your mind
[unclear], and you do it, and we believe that the Catholic thing about last rites is
correct. As you die to believe that you’re pure.

[student: Can you explain what the ten non-virtues are and the [unclear] one.]

This took us six weeks to do, and you can ask any of these Buddhist scholars in
this room who’ve just finished a course on that.

[student: Michael, there’s two schools, but I’m not sure if they refer to the
[unclear] right now?]

Yeah, {Khenpo} and {lopen} is a little bit special. {Khenpo} most people think
Abbot. {Khenpo} literally in the Vinaya means the person who grants you the
vow. And {lopen} in the Vinaya is the assistant to Khenpo. So this part is for
monks. By extension, it can be the person who gave you any of your vows,
Bodhisattva vows or secret vows.

[student: Is that the same {khenpo} as in [unclear]?]

That’s the same one as in Khen Rinpoche.         {khenpo} has three different
meanings. One is the abbot of the monastery, one is the person who grants the
monks his full vows, and then the third meaning... you can reach a certain point
where you are like reincarnated.

[student: Michael, how do you do this?]

You go in order. Go ahead, Kiley.

[student: Someone had mentioned that the Vajrasattva meditation, which I
presume is the same thing, or similar thing, or achieving the same result for the
same purpose...]

More powerful.

[student: Then what?]

[student: That’s more powerful?]

Yeah.

[student: So in other words to...]

But this is a basis for that.

[student: I understand that, but if you have a certain amount of time everyday
that you allocate to that, it would be a mistake to cut that in half....]
No, right, that’s much better. Much better if you have that initiation and you
know how to do it, that’s much better. They’re actually, what do you call it, you
know....

[student: One goes into the next.]

They go together. I wouldn’t say it as either/or.

[student: So whenever they talk about, you know they say do 21 recitations of
Vajrasattva mantra to purify your karma, that’s not really correct. But that’s just
a recitation I’m talking about.]

That’s number four, but if it’s not accompanied by the other three, it cannot
work.

[student: So it doesn’t really have any effect, really.]

No, to recite it is always good.

[student: Michael, how do you do this?]

[laughs] When you do a bad deed, a particularly bad one, pull it out of your
purse and recite it, and get these other three ideas...]

[student: But if you’re at work, you cannot do the other ones.]

Write them on the back. Write these four on the back. And then as you read it,
think of those four. That’s all.

[student: Okay, you cannot write....]

And do it as soon as you go home, you might die on the subway. It seriously is
the game of not dying with it on you. And you don’t know when you’re going
to die. I always tell people go to the bathroom. Nobody’ll stop you from going
to the bathroom. They’ll just wonder what you’re doing in the stall so long.

[student: You cannot [unclear] which is a Buddha, Michael.]

You’ve got one right there.
[student: Oh, okay.]

[student: Quickly, I need to put emphasis between confession for lay people and
monks and nuns?]

We have more responsibility. It’s worse for us. [laughter] All right. So please
please read this, and also I want to tell you, you did a very good job. I know it’s
late, and I know when I rarely work a full day [laughter], I know how hard it is
to come here, and I admire what you did. I really admire you. You’re coming
here, there’s no degree to speak of, at least they come like six months later
[laughter] and you’re not getting any financial benefits on this, you’re not
getting famous, no worldly benefit out of this, you’re coming here after work, I
know it’s difficult, I know everyone in New York doesn’t have much time, and
you’re studying these things out of some good {bakchaks} that you have, and I
admire you. I think it’s a great deed and I’m very happy. It’s excellent. You
must do some regimen, you must keep some kind of log, you must have some
daily check. None of this will work, it will all fade away, you know that. You
know, make it a part of you. If it’s not a practice, you won’t do it, and there
won’t be much benefit to doing this in class. Keep up the habit of doing
something every morning and make confession. And then you’ll just be happy.
And the side-effect... even in this life, it’s much more pleasant. All right. Okay.

End
Course V: How Karma Works—NYC
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