ACI 6 «Сутра Алмазного Огранщика», занятие 5

960829-1.aaa
92a.txt
transcribed by: Winston McCullough
Diamond-Cutter Sutra, Vajrapani, tape 6
8/29/96

[prayer: ... drupar shok]

Okay, tonight we talk about {tong lam}. Say {tong lam} [repeat]. I'll spell it.

[break]

Say again {tong lam} [repeat]. {tong lam} is the direct perception of emptiness,
okay. This is the stage at which you see emptiness directly. {tong} means "to
see," and {lam} means "path." So it's called "the path of seeing." Then I ask that
no one interrupt tonight, no one ask any questions, all right? Just listen. Please
don't interrupt tonight, okay? I thought to go through the, what happens when
you see the path of seeing, okay, how, what happens in the period just before
that, and what happens during it, and what happens just after that. So we're
gonna talk about tong lam in that way tonight.

[break]

Say {so so} [repeat} {kyewo} [repeat] {so so} [repeat] {kyewo} [repeat] {pakpa}
[repeat] {pakpa} [repeat] okay.          According to Buddhism your mind is
beginningless. You can't point to a time when your, when your mind started.
Any point in the past history of your own mind that you can pinpoint must have
been produced by an instant of mind the moment before that. Ergo, therefore,
there's no beginning to your mind. You cannot find a starting point to the mind
because it takes mind to create mind. There must have been a mind before any
given moment of your mind. There has to be a mind at two o'clock for there to
be a mind at three o'clock, and if there's a mind at two o'clock there must have
been a mind at one o'clock. Nothing can create mind except another instance of
your own mind. Therefore your mind is beginningless. It happens also to be
endless, okay, and I won't go into the reasons why, but you can, I like to say you
can think of your mind as one long spaghetti noodle that never had a beginning
and isn't going to have an end. So your life times have been infinite. Your past
lives are infinite. Your future lives are numbered until you become a, a Buddha,
and then you finish the process of rebirth but your mind still goes on forever. In
that whole spaghetti noodle of the mind, so imagine it going on for infinity, you
only see emptiness directly for the first time once. It's like a major, it is the
border between the left side and the right side of that spaghetti noodle, you
know. That's the big event of a mind in, in the universe is when you see
emptiness directly. That, that is the, the border between all living beings. You've
either seen emptiness directly or you haven't. I like to say it's like virginity in this
life, you know. You only lose it once. Up to that point you're in one condition,
and after that point you're in a different condition, and, and you can't say I had it
twice or three times or something like that, you know. You're either one or the
other. Absolutely you're either one or the other, and, and all living beings in the
universe are either, have either seen emptiness directly or they haven't. The first
type, the type that haven't seen emptiness we call {so so kyewo}. Say {so so}
[repeat] {kyewo} [repeat] {so so} [repeat] {kyewo} [repeat]. {so so} means
"ordinary." {kyewo} means "person," okay. {so so kyewo} means "ordinary
person." You're an ordinary suffering being {so so kyewo}. You haven't seen
emptiness directly yet for the first time, and then if you have seen emptiness
directly you're called {pakpa}. Say {pakpa} [repeat] {pakpa} [repeat]. So all
beings in the universe are either {so so kyewo's} or {pakpa}, okay. The sanskrit
word for {pakpa} is, is arya. Don't confuse it with arhat. I used to. It's a different
thing, okay. That's someone who's reached nirvana, okay, which comes much
later. Arya is a person who has seen emptiness directly. The word {pakpa}
means "superior," so Hitler was right when he called them aryas, okay [laughs].
Terrible, terrible, terribly evil meaning that he put on it so forget that one, okay.
It does mean diff, totally different, totally, totally, exalted type of being,
completely different from a {so so kyewo}. Once you've seen emptiness directly
you are just absolutely and totally and forever different from a {so so kyewo},
okay. So that you have to get in mind that there's only two kinds of beings.
Buddhas are by the way {pakpa's}. You don't lose it when you become a
Buddha. You're still a {pakpa}, okay. I wanna talk about the final moments just
before you reach the path of seeing, okay. What's path number two? [student:
Jorlam]. It's called {jor lam}, like "path of preparation." What it means is you're
preparing to see emptiness directly. {jor lam}, at {jorlam}, which is path number
two of the five paths, you are getting intellectual understandings of emptiness,
okay. You are, you are starting to understand or grasp what emptiness is, okay.
There's a very important stage or {jor lam} called

[break]

Say {chu chok} [repeat] {chu chok} [repeat] . {chu chok, Chu} means "dharma,"
or "thing." {chok} means "ultimate or supreme, the highest thing." Is it the
highest thing? No. You're only on the end of the second path. {chu chok} in this
case refers to the very peak moment of a person who is still a [students: {so so
kyewo}]. {So so kyewo, so so kyewo} [laughs], all right. {chu chok} is that. I
want to describe what happens at {chu chok}, okay. First of all you must have
been under a spiritual course of study for some time. We would say that in your
past life you had been under a spiritual guide and in a course of spiritual study
for, for thousands or possibly millions of years, okay, and that your mind has
been prepared. You have been in the presence of a holy teachers, and they have
been setting you up for this moment for perhaps thousands or millions of years
in your past lives. In this life, you've met a real spiritual guide. You've been with
them, and as I mentioned the other day, very importantly, you've been serving
them properly, you know. You've been serving them, their needs and getting,
therefore, karmically, exactly what you need from them. That's the way it
works. It's a give and take. You've been serving them with your, with
everything you could give them, and mostly in devotion, and then they've been
teaching you, and you've been going through a course in three stages. First one,
first one is called {tu jung kyi sherab}. Say {tu jung} [repeat] {sherab} [repeat] {tu
jung kyi sherab} [repeat]. That's "classroom, classroom hours," just hours of
hearing. {tu jung} means "study, hearing," which means "studying," and {sherab}
means "wisdom," okay, so it's the wisdom you get from being in hours of
classroom studying with your lama, okay. Then the second is {sam jung}. Say
{sam jung kyi} [repeat] {sherab} [repeat] {sam jung kyi} [repeat] {sherab}
[repeat]. That's contemplation. You've been thinking about it. You've been
working on it in your own mind. {sam jung kyi sherab}, "wisdom that comes
from concentration," and it grows from the first [unclear]. Then the final is {gom
jung}. Say {gom jung kyi} [repeat] {sherab} [repeat} {gomjung kyi} [repeat]
{sherab} [repeat]. That's "meditation wisdom, the wisdom you get from deep
meditation," and you've been in this process for a long time. Something triggers
that day. Something triggers the {chu chok}, okay. {chu chok} is the final
moments of the path of preparation.                 Something in your intellectual
understanding of emptiness triggers {chu chok}, triggers the process. Very
typically, it's a subject we call {chi jedrak}.

[break]

Say {chi} [repeat] {jedrak} [repeat] {chi} [repeat] {jedrak} [repeat]. {chi} means
"quality," like car, okay. "A quality like car." I don't ev, don't say "a." "Quality
like car," and we're getting into a point where you, I can't explain too much,
okay, you have to just think, okay. It has to come from your side, okay.
"Quality, for example car."      {jedrak} means "characteristic."      For example
"Chevrolet," and you have to think about the relationship between what we call
"car" and what we call "Chevrolet," okay. If you have "Chevrolet" you have
"car." [laughs] Now going to four kinds of {chi's}, okay, four kinds of {chi}. Car
is the quality. Chevrolet is characteristic of that quality, and you have to think
about that, okay, it's very difficult. It, it's very profound. There's something
happening there. I'll give you some clues, okay. We'll talk about the four kinds
of {chi's}. The first two are not too relevant, okay, but I might as well give you
all the kinds of {chi's}. The second two are ultimately relevant, okay.

[break]

I should say the forst, the first is not so relephant, ah, did I say elephant, relevant,
and the last three really are relevant. I should put it that way. Sa {tsok chi}
[repeat] {tsok chi} [repeat].         In this case {chi} means like "the overall
whole." {tsok} means "the collection of the parts." So an example of it's, and this
is normally physical. In fact it's always physical, okay. {tsok chi} means, for
example, this pen is the {tsok chi} of all the atoms that make up the pen. So you
can say it's a, it's "a whole" or "a general," in the sense of being the sum of its
parts, and {tsok chi} means "the sum of it's parts, the whole of the parts." So in
this case, {chi} means "the whole pen," and {tsok} means the, the separate atoms
that are making up the pen. That's called a {tsok chi}. You start to get the flavor
of what a {tsok chi} is. So in, in this case it's a, it's "the whole which is composed
of the parts," physically. That's a {tsok chi}.

[break]

Say {rik chi} [repeat] {rik chi} [repeat]. {rik} means "type" or "class," and {chi}
means again, here it refers to "quality." {rik chi} is car. Car is an example of {rik
chi}, okay. The definition of a {rik chi} is something that has a lot of things that
are characteristic of that quality, which are, in the case of car, what? Chevrolet,
Ford, Toyota, okay. Those are called {jedrak}. Those are sometimes called like
types of the general, examples of the general type. So {rik chi} means "the
general type," or, more correctly, if you think about it carefully, "quality," okay,
"quality."

[break]

Say {dra chi} [repeat] {dra chi} [repeat]. {dra} means "sound." {dra} means
"sound" or "name," shapta, sound or name. {chi} means "a general," okay,
"general," and what this refers to, this {chi} means "general," okay. What this
{chi} means is, I'll use the example my Lama always used, okay. It's kind of a
terrible example. Mao Tse Tung, okay, Mao Tse Tung. You know the sound.
You know the {dra}. You know the name "Mao Tse Tung, and when I say that
name, or when I say, if you've never been to Paris, when I say "Eifel tower."
Suppose you've never been to Paris, you've never seen, actually seen, you've
never experienced the Eifel tower directly, and I say "Eifel tower," and the minute
I say that you do get some understanding, even if you've never been to Paris.
Some kind of image forms in your mind. That's a {dra chi}, okay. It's a {chi} in
the mind, a mental image drawn from the name "Eifel tower," even though
you've never seen it yourself directly, okay. That's a {dra chi}.

[break]

Say {dun chi} [repeat] {dun chi} [repeat]. {dun} means "meaning," but here it, it
means "the object itself," as opposed to "the name of the object," okay, {dun}, "the
real thing," the Eifel tower itself that you see when you're standing there in front
of it, you know, "ahhh," okay. That's {dun}. Eifel tower is {dun}. {chi} means "a
mental image," okay. Why are we talking about these {chi's}? The most
important one, the crucial one here is {dun chi}. Say {dun chi} [repeat] {dun chi}
[repeat], and I'll give you the possible scenario, okay. You've been studying
really hard. You've been doing really good guru yoga in this life, and, and in fact
for many lives, and you're standing at the stove making a, a cup of tea for your
lama, for example, and it's in the morning, say like eight o'clock, and, and you've
put the water on the stove, in a aluminum pan, and you're standing there and
you've just been studying {chi jedrak} for like a week or something, and you've
been thinking about it really hard, and you've been meditating about it really
hard, and you're standing there, and you suddenly realize that you are not
seeing a pot, okay. You suddenly realize that you are not looking at a pot. You
suddenly realize that you are looking at a {dun chi} of a pot, okay. You are
looking at a {dun chi} of a pot. You are, you are not looking at a pot. You are
looking at a mental image of a pot, okay. You always thought you were looking
at a pot. For your whole life you thought you were looking at a pot, and
suddenly, under the influence of all these factors, serving your Lama, studying
hard, you know, praying for blessings of Lamas, all these things, Lamas helping
you your whole life, secretly, known or unknown, you know, all around you,
and then suddenly this happens, you, you realize you're not looking at a pot, and
you never have been looking at a pot. You're looking at the {dun chi} of a pot,
okay. Then you check what's going on, what's that, what does that mean, you
know, and you realize that the only thing you ever see of a pot is a few clues
from the front of the pot, maybe a good translation of {tsenma} [laughs],
meaning "indication," {tsenma}. All you ever see is a few clues. You see some
silver flash on the right side. You see a little bit of curve on the left side. You see
this black straight thing sticking out the side. Maybe you don't see more than
four or five clues. You definitely never see the back of the pot. For all you
know, they're all just cardboard things, you know, and in your mind you make a
pot. Based on those clues, in your own mind, you make an image of a pot, and
you call it "pot," okay. That mental image which is a projection based on a
number of parts that have come together because your eye went ding, ding,
ding, "square, round, white, flat, black stick, pot," and, and your mind is creating
the image of a pot. Your mind, due to previous circumstances, due to millions of
years of karma, is, is thinking, is seeing it as pot. If there was a being from
another realm in that room, they would not see pot, okay. They might see the
same colors and shapes. They would synthesize it in a different way. If a preta,
for example, was in the room, they might see bowling ball about to hit me in the
head or something, okay. They, they might have a totally different synthesis of
the same data, and rightly so for them. They're not crazy, okay. Their
perception is as correct as yours, but we'll talk about that later. So you're
synthesizing pot, and you, and at the {chu chok}, at the final moments of the
path of preparation, you realize "I'm not looking at a pot, and I never was. I'm
looking at my own mental image of a pot," okay. You have just perceived what?
Is that emptiness? No. You have just perceived the truth of dependent
origination, for the first time in a, in a countless years. You've finally figured out
what you've been doing all this time. You do see dependent origination. "What
dependent origination is," I should say, right? Because all around you, every
object around you is dependent origination. Every object in your normal
experience is what we call "deceptive reality." It's been around you all along.
You've never seen any kind of other object except things that are dependent
origination. That's your whole world, is those projections, and you've been
living in that. So that's, that's {chu chok}. That's a very, very important state,
extremely important, okay. You finish making the tea, take it up to your Lama,
go to the temple to do your prayers, to do your morning meditations, and you
get into a good meditation posture, and you enter what's called {nyam shak}.

[break]

Say {nyam shak} [repeat] {nyam shak} [repeat].           {nyam shak} means "deep
meditation," okay, "deep meditation."

[break]

Say {samten} [repeat] {dampu} [repeat]        {nyendok} [repeat] {samten} [repeat]
{dampu} [repeat] {nyendok} [repeat] We are living in the desire realm, but at
this point, your meditation is going so deep that your mind, not your body, but
your mind leave the form realm, ah, leaves the desire realm, and then does what
we call {samten dampo. Samten dampo} means "the first samadhi level," okay. It
corresponds to something in the form realm, okay. What I'm trying to say is
that your mind is actually in a different realm. It's in a totally different area of
the universe, okay [laughs], and, and then your meditation is so deep that your
mind has reached that place. This is the, and by the way that, it's the opening
stages of that level, and that's called {nyendok}, okay.         {nyendok} means
"opening stages" of the first samadhi. It's not what we call "the main event." It's
just before that, called {nyendok}. This is the platform, this is the unique
platform from which you see emptiness directly. Your mind must be in this
samadhi to see emptiness directly. If you haven't been practicing meditation on
a very, very regular basis, and I say one to two hours a day in the meditation
part, not the getting ready, and thinking about your breakfast, and doing the
water bowls, that don't count, okay. I'm talking one or two hours in meditation.
If you haven't been doing that on a regular basis you can't reach {samten dampu
nyenpo}. You'll never get there. You cannot reach that platform. If you never
reach that platform it's completely impossible for you to see emptiness directly,
okay. So that, that's the bottom line as my boss would say [laughs]. You gotta,
you gotta be able to get there, okay. You have to be able to put your mind at
that, in that state. What it means is a very, very deep state of meditation where
in particular none of the five sense objects can appear to you at that moment.
You can't smell anything. You can't taste anything. You can't hear anything.
You obviously can't see anything. You can't feel any physical tangible object.
Your mind is in a total deep meditation at that level, okay. Then, then due to the
influence of all those other things, study, contemplation, meditation, scripture
training, good scripture teaching from a real Lama, serving that Lama, getting
back the blessing from that Lama, having the blessing throughout your life of
many Lamas, and through many lives, you go into the direct perception of
emptiness. What's it like? How long does it last? It lasts maybe fifteen, twenty
minutes the first time, and, can you be aware that you're seeing emptiness?
Cannot, okay. You cannot have the thought "I'm seeing emptiness," okay,
because "I" is what? "I" is another dependent origination. "I" is another deceptive
reality. The minute you think "I" you're using a {dun chi} again. You're using a
mental image again, okay. So you can't even think "I'm seeing it," or "hey, I
finally did it," you know. You cannot have that thought. It's pure {chula chu
shakpa}. Say {chula} [repeat] {chu shakpa} [repeat] {chula} [repeat] {chu shakpa}
[repeat]. "Water poured in water," okay, water poured into a glass of water. The
glass, the glass, you have a bucket of water and you pour water in it. What that
means is during that fifteen or twenty minutes you cannot draw the distinction
between you and what you're seeing. It's impossible. You can't. You cannot
draw a distinction between the subject and the object. Impossible, okay, because
the subject is deceptive reality, what we call nominal, conventional reality, and
the object is ultimate reality. So, so you cannot draw a distinction because you
cannot at that moment perceive anything which is note ultimate reality. The
only thing that presents itself to your mental consciousness, and all the other five
are shut down, is, is emptiness, pure emptiness, is ultimate reality. You cannot
perceive anything else, because nothing else is appearing to your mind at that
moment, okay, nothing else. So in that sense there's what we call non-duality,
okay. I, I very much, I, I tell you to be very careful with that word. Be
extremely careful with that word. The ultimate meaning is that. During the
direct perception of emptiness, you cannot draw a distinction between the
subject and the object, simply because the subject ain't, ultimate reality, it ain't
emptiness, and all you can, all that's presenting itself to your mind, and all you
can see at that moment is emptiness, ultimate reality. If you were aware of
subject and object at that moment, you couldn't be seeing ultimate reality, cause
the subject, which is mind is never ultimate reality. It's a deceptive reality. It's a
plain old object that you have to see through a {dun chi}, through some kind of
mental image, okay. You can't have that awareness of subject and object at that
point, okay. That's non-duality really means. It doesn't mean, repeat, okay
[laughs] doesn't mean that somehow all the subject and objects in the world are
the same. Forget it. Stupid, doesn't mean that, and, and it would be no great
achievement to blur the distinction between subject through taking some
heroine or something, you know. That's not reaching a non-dual state, or
something like that, okay. Subjects and objects are totally separate. The
Buddha's mind, and everything the Buddha's mind perceives are totally separate.
Subject and object, even the word for rea, for existence in Tibetan is {yul},
"object," and the mind is {yul chen}, "the subject," and they are completely
separate and they don't, seeing emptiness is not somehow the process of getting
yourself to blend into the world or something like that. Nothing like that. It's
not what it means at all. So what does non-duality mean? In one sense it means
that during the direct perception of emptiness, you cannot be aware of the
distinction between subject and object simply because one of them is not
ultimate reality. It's not emptiness, it's you, and you ain't emptiness. Emptiness
is a different thing. The second meaning of non-duality is that in one sense all
objects and all subjects are totally equivalent, okay. In one very special sense, all
the subject minds in the world, and all the objects which those minds are
perceiving are totally equivalent. They share one quality which is exactly the
same. In one, from one specific point of view they are totally the same. What is
it? [students: unclear] They're empty, okay [laughs]. They're empty. All minds
and all objects of those minds are totally equal in that they are empty. That is,
they, they never were anything except your projections. They never were
anything except your projections. That can be said of every subject mind, and it
can be said of every object in the universe, that they are totally equal in being
anything but not your projection, okay [laughs], all right. That's the two
meanings of non-duality. Nothing to do with, with somehow, you know,
golden light and you melt into the object and stay there for a while and then
come back, or something. It doesn't mean that at all, okay. The experience goes
on fifteen, twenty minutes. You're not aware of the passage of time because
that's not emptiness. That's also a relative object. You cannot be aware of the
passage of time. You are there and you are in the pure direct awareness of
emptiness and that's all. You're not aware of the passage of time, okay. Then
the, then the direct perception of emptiness is over. That state of mind that you
have during that period, during that fiften twenty minutes is called {nyamshak
yeshe}

[break]

Say {nyamshak} [repeat] {yeshe} [repeat] {nyamshak} [repeat] {yeshe} [repeat].
You can divide, roughly, you can divide the experience of seeing emptiness
directly, the path of seeing, into two parts, okay. The first part is called
{nyamshak yeshe} [repeat] Cool [laughs]. I like that. Sometimes my Lama goes
"ah," and everybody goes "ah." [laughter].               {nyamshak} means "deep
meditation." {yeshe} means "wisdom," okay, "knowledge." {nyamshak yeshe} is
your state of mind during those fifteen twenty minutes, okay. That's called
knowledge during deep meditation as a part of the path of seeing, the first half
of the path of seeing, and that's all I can say about it. There ain't nothing else to
say about it. There ain't nothing else to describe. That's all it is. There's nothing
else you can say, anyone can ever say about it. That's what they mean when
they say, say {chudu} [repeat] {mepa} [repeat] {chudu} [repeat] {mepa} [repeat],
when they say emptiness is indescribable, okay, that you cannot convey to
another person that, the quality of that emptiness at that moment. You cannot
describe it to another person, okay. It's nothing physical. You can't describe it in
terms of something physical. There's a joke in the monastery that one kid in the
debate ground in Lhasa in nineteen fifty-something ran in and said "I've seen
emptiness," you know, and everybody says "oh, what's it like?" and he says "well,
it's a little green, and it has some yellow in it," you know [laughter]. Impossible.
You cannot see a color at that moment. If it had a color it would be deceptive
reality. It would be lower reality. It wouldn't be that higher reality called
ultimate truth. Can't describe it. Colorless, shapeless, clear, invisible to other
eyes, except for the {nyamshak yeshe} of an arya, okay, and that's all you can say
about it. Then you come down, and there's a physical sensation of descending
from the {samten dampo}, from the first meditation level. You feel, you have a
sensation of descending out of that meditation, okay, and you enter a thing
called

[break]

Say {jetop} [repeat] {yeshe} [repeat] {jetop} [repeat] {yeshe} [repeat] {je} means
"after." {top} means "the one you get," and {yeshe} means "knowledge," okay. So
it means "the knowledge you get right after you see emptiness directly," okay.
Are you still on the path of seeing? Yes. This is the second stage of two stages.
This is the second half of the path of seeing. Are you still seeing emptiness
directly? [students: No.] No, okay. During this period, which will last for the
rest of the day essentially. If you saw emptiness in the morning, this experience,
these experiences of {jetop yeshe} would last the rest of the day until you went to
sleep, okay. So if you saw emptiness in mid-morning this experience would
continue until the end of the day, {jetop yeshe}, and during this period you have
dozens of important spiritual realizations that you never could have had before,
okay. Dozen of deep realizations come to you which you could never have had
without seeing emptiness directly, okay. Things are happening to you that day
that never happened before, and could not have happened before because you
hadn't seen emptiness yet, okay. Those events and those experiences and those
realizations can be grouped into four parts, four groups

[break]

Say {pakpay} [repeat] {denpa} [repeat] {shi} [repeat] {pakpay} [repeat] {denpa}
[repeat] {shi} [repeat]. {pakpa} means what? [students: unclear]. Arya, okay.
{pakpa} means "arya," someone who has [students: seen emptiness directly],
seen, they've seen emptiness directly. By the way "see" is metaphorical." You
don't do this with your eye balls, okay [laughs].           So {pakpa} means
"arya." {denpa} means "truth," okay, and four mea, {shi} means "four," okay.
{shi} means "four." {shi} means "number four, the four." [student: denpa means
truth?] Tru, truth, and this poor word was abused by earlier translators, and
they called it [students: The four noble truths]. The four noble truhts, okay,
because arya means "noble" sometimes. It should have been called the four
[students: arya] arya truths, okay. So this means the four arya truths, meaning
four categories or four groups of things which someone who has just become an
arya now understands directly, okay, to be true, okay. You can group all the
realizations that you have during the following twelve hours, or whatever, as
grouping into one of these four arya truths. Things that only a person who has
just seen emptiness can understand directly, okay, can see directly, and that's
why they're called the four [students: arya] truths, okay, the four arya truths, the
four {pakpa} truths, okay. I like to call an arya a "realized being." I like to call an
arya a realized being. Realized in the sense that they understood emptiness
directly, not omniscient yet, not realized in the sense of omniscient, but realized
in the sense that they have realized emptiness. I'll give you the four truths and
then we'll take a break, okay. It's hot. This is extremely important so I want you
to be fresh. Sorry it's so hot. It must be all that {tumo}. I heard Vajrapani [cut]

[flip to side two of tape]

Say {dukngel} [repeat] {denpa} [repeat] {dukngell} [repeat] {denpa} [repeat]
{dukngel} means "suffering." {dukngel} means "suffering." {denpa} means "the
arya truth" of suffering, okay. During the period following your first direct
perception of emptiness, you truly understand what suffering is for the first
time. You truly understand how much suffering there is, okay. Is, is this pen
{dukngel denpa}? And the an, you can, you can answer by asking me "is it
samsara, is it a piece of samsara?" It is. This pen is {dukngel denpa}. Your body
is {dukngel denpa}. Boulder Creek is {dukngel denpa}. The United States is
{dukngel denpa}. Almost every thought you can have is {dukngel denpa}. All
your relationships are {dukngel denpa}, unless they are especially spiritual, okay,
seriously, okay. That's {dukngel denpa}. We'll talk more about it. The arya truth
of suffering. That person sees the true extent of suffering for the first time, okay.

[break]

Say {kunjung} [repeat] {denpa} [repeat] {kunjung} [repeat] {denpa} [repeat]
{kunjung}means "the source of suffering," okay. {kunjung} means "the source of
suffering." {denpa} means truth. So in the eight or ten hours following the direct
perception of emptiness, that baby arya, new, new-fangled arya truly
understands what's causing all this suffering, okay. That arya for the first time
truly understands where all this suffering's coming from, okay. Is this pen
{kunjung denpa}. There's a huge debate in the, in the scriptures, but basically
anything which is {dukngel denpa} is also {kunjung denpa}. Very interesting.
Don't think of {denpa} as truth. Think of {denpa} in the sense of a fact, and this is
one of the facts of suffering, and it is one of the facts of the source of suffering.
This pen is {dukngel denpa} and this pen is {kunjung denpa}. Don't think of it as
some principle, you know. "Truth" is a misnomer. It means "actual fact," the, the
reality of suffering. Think of it as the reality of suffering. It's not like, oh, true or
false, not like that, not like a principle. This is the truth of suffering, and it is the
truth of the source of suffering. The pen is both. Your head is both. Your mind
is both. Your ears are both. Boulder Creek is both, okay.

[break]

Hang with me okay. It's ext, it's terrible to, to have a teaching on emptiness
when it's humid and you're hot. It's really like Mara entered the room, you
know. It's extremely hard to think about these things when you're, when you're
uncomfortable, and particularly when you're hot and you just had a nice dinner
at Vajrapani, okay. So try to, try to focus, okay. Say {gok den} [repeat] {gok den}
[repeat] {gok den} means "the truth of the end of suffering," okay, the truth of
the end of suffering. That, that brand new arya, during that ten hours of {jetop
yeshe}, the knowledge which comes in the aftermath of seeing emptiness
directly, during that period, has all these realizations relating to the end of
suffering. They see the end of suffering directly, okay. They know the end of
suffering directly. Have they reached it? [students: No.] No. They got a long
way to go. They got all that fourth path to go. That we talk about some other
day, okay, but at least they see it, they know when the end is going to be, and
they know what it's going to be like, and I'll talk about it later okay {gok den}.

[break]

Say {lam den} [repeat] {lam den} [repeat] {lam} means [students: Path.]
"path." {den} means [students: Truth] "truth," and this is the fact of the path of, to
get out of, to, to reach the end, okay. "The path to reach the end." "The truth of
the path that gets you to the end," okay, the truth of the path that gets you to the
end, and this new arya understands how he's going to get out perfectly, directly.
He knows exactly what he must do to get out. He knows. He knows the
process that he's going to go through. That's called {lam den}. He perceives {lam
den} directly. Next we'll talk about some of the specific realizations that fall into
these four categories, okay, but first take a break.         Really try to refresh
yourselves, and come back all gungho, okay [laughs].

[teaching break]

Okay you guys ready? Ready. We'll go over the spec, some, I mean I might
leave some out, okay, but we'll go over a number of the experiences that happen
to a person during {jetop yeshe}, during that period following, in the next ten
hours or so, say. Some of them occur when you're still sitting in meditation, and
some of them occur while you're walking around afterwards, okay.

[break]

You have a direct awareness of your death, okay. You have a direct awareness
of your coming death. You know, you can do death meditation from the Lam
Rim, and you can study about death, and you can work on it in retreat for
months and months and years and years, but during that day you have a direct,
they call {nyepa} which means "a direct ascertainment of your death." You are
truly perceive your coming death, and, and for the first time you really believe it,
you know. All the other ones are like, if you get very good at death meditation,
you might start to approach this state and start to act on it, you know, you start
wast, you start stopping to waste your time, if you you're doing the Lam Rim
very well, but you never what this is. This is {pakpay denpa, denpa} meaning
they see it directly. They have a direct awareness of their coming death and they
act on that for the rest of their life, that they don't waste time, and they know
they're going to die. They see, they see the death directly, okay.

[break]

During much of the following ten or twelve hours you can read people's minds
for the first time, okay. You can actually perceive directly their thoughts. For
example you could be at a car dealer [laughter] seriously, and I'm not dissing car
dealers, but I'm giving an example, and you could be trying to sell a car to that
guy in a rush because you need money that particular day, and you offer them a,
a very nice red Thunderbird which is worth maybe two thousand dollars, and
the guy look, to, to you he, to him you look spaced out because things are
happening on that day, and, and he decides in his mind that he could take
advantage of you, and you, you read his thoughts, and you know he's about to
lie to you, and then he lies to you, and says "this is worth two hundred dollars,"
you know, and "I'll give you two hundred dollars for it," and, and you can read
those thoughts in his mind. You perceive the samsara in another person's mind
directly. You can read his thoughts directly for the first time ever, you can, you
can read another person's thoughts directly. Up until that point really you never
know what someone else is thinking. For all you know the guy next to you is a
Buddha, you know. You can't ever really tell. You can't ever really judge
someone else. The Buddha said {unclear} "anyone who's not like me should not
judge other people," meaning if you can't read other people's minds don't try.
You'll screw up {unclear} [laughter] You will, you will fail. You never know
what anyone else is thinking. You never know that the person next to you is not
enlightened, but on this day you can read other people's minds, and you, you're
completely aware of the suffering that they're undergoing. You're completely
aware of the jumble, and the, and the agony of another person's samsaric mind.
You can read it. You can, you can see it, okay.

[break]

Going on to cause of the, of suffering. The main cause is ignorance, and on this
day for the first time, coming out of that perception, you realize that was the first
correct perception you ever had. Throughout your life, and we've talked about
the finger snap, you know, you have, in a, in a minute you have hundreds of
perceptions. You have hundreds of mini perceptions. During the length of this
talk you're having tens of thousands of perceptions of the change in sound, the
change in the heat of the room, the lighting, the colors, the shapes, your own
thoughts. You're having tens of thousands of perceptions. Every single one of
them for the entire length of your life has been incorrect, okay, mistaken.

[break]

Another part of the truth of the cause of suffering and something that you
understand on that day is that you have never undertaken an action except out
of selfishness. Ultimately, every action you've ever performed at its root was a
concern for yourself, okay. You can be sitting in a puja to Tara and reciting, and
ninety-nine percent of your mind is, is ultimately occupied with how do I look,
how do I sound, are other people aware that I've memorized a little bit of this
text, you know. Your whole day, your whole existence up until that moment is
infected with thinking about yourself. That's not [dang dzin}, okay. That is not
grasping to self-existence. That's a cause of this second thing. Ego, the presence
of ego, and cherishing your, yourself, and never, even as I stand here describing
it to you, I'm doing it, okay, seriously, I'm not kidding. I, I am, my, everything I
say, everything I do, how I move, what I write, the reason I came to Vajrapani,
everything is infected with, with the concern for myself, and how I'll look to
people, and, and will they like me, and, and thinking about myself. This is part
of the disease that we all have, and, and you're never free of it. It's not grasping
to self-existence. That's the cause of this. This is a necessary result of that
grasping. You are only concerned about yourself. You cannot, a normal human
being cannot do a truly charitable act. You're always, even as you do good
deeds, they are, they're constantly infected by what is in it for me, how do I look
to people, are they aware of what a good deed I'm doing [laughs], you know, it's
the human condition, and at that, on that day, in that moment, it's depressing,
I'm sorry [laughs], you perceive the truth of that. You live for that. You live for
yourself, and relationships are the same way, and that's a sub-category of this
particular {denpa}, of this particular truth. You never engage in a relationship in
samsara unless you are getting something out of it. We're not capable of being
self-less or unselfish in relationships. A person in samsara will not engage in a
relationship unless they are, unless they are profiting from it in some way, and
that, and I'm describing our, our communal condition. We all have that. It's a
depressing fact that you perceive directly as, on that day that you see emptiness
directly, okay. Here's the good part, okay [laughs]. This is called the kleshic side
of the world. This is called the pure side of the world, okay. They're actually
divided that way.

[break]

I think this may be the most pleasant experience the whole day, okay. You see
your own enlightenment, and you know exactly how many lives it's going to
take. [student: unclear] I'm talking mahayana track. I'm assuming, this is a
bodhissatva, okay. You, you perceive directly that you will become a Buddha,
and you, you perceive exactly how many lives it could take, and seven is very
typical, okay. Seven is very typical. [student: unclear] This is {jetop yeshe}, after
the direct perception of emptiness, during the day. You saw it in the morning,
and this is happening, this is all happening during the day. [student: unclear]
Yeah, very typical, yeah, yeah, very typical that it would take seven more life
times to reach full enlightenment after you've seen emptiness directly, very
typical, classic, seven lives.

[break]

You and I in our current condition, if we haven't seen emptiness directly cannot,
cannot prove even the existence of a Buddha. You know, we are Buddha-ists,
you're sitting in a Buddha-ist temple, studying Buddha-ism, and you and I have
no real proof of the existence of a Buddha, you know. We know there was some
guy walking around India. We know he taught something. We have the books
that he taught. We have tradition that came from him. We don't know that a
Buddha even exists. We haven't had any direct confirmation of that. On that day
you realize you have seen a Buddha. You have met a Buddha, specifically, the
essence body of a Buddha, which is the essence of a Buddha. That's the real guts
of a Buddha, the emptiness of the Buddha, the dharmakaya, okay. By seeing
emptiness you have seen the dharmakaya of the Buddha, and, and you know
you've see, met a Buddha. It's this, and the, the conceptualization at that
moment is something like what you always thought it would be whe, before
you became a Buddhist, of meeting god, okay. It is that experience. It, it's
almost as you would have imagined it, you know. It's some kind of huge, clear,
powerful energy, and, and you came into contact, and you met it directly. You,
you have now confirmed the existence of a Buddha. You met the Buddha, okay.
You met the Buddha, and you know you met the Buddha, and at that moment,
by the way, you, you understand what the physical bodies of the Buddha are,
directly. I don't mean that you meet the physical bodies of a Buddha, but I mean
that by meeting the dharmakaya, and knowing that you've met the dharmakaya
of the Buddha, these things called tankas, you know, are, are something quite
different to you now, you know. You realize that, that they represent what you
saw, and they take on a totally different meaning, you know. Then you, you can
follow all that Lam Rim stuff about not dropping them on the floor and not
sneezing on them, and not, you know. You realize that this is a, a porthole to
the dha, dharmakaya. This, this is representing, this is the physical evidence of
the dharmakaya. Somebody, somewhere saw Tara, you know. Think about it.
I mean, it doesn't occur to you really until that moment. Somebody, somewhere
met Tara and they painted, and that's what she really looked like, and then
somebody saw that tanka and copied it, and somebody saw that tanka and
copied that tanka, and somebody saw that tanka and copied that tanka, but
ultimately, if you go back someone saw Tara. Someone had an experience of the
dharmakaya. So the pictures take on a totally different meaning for you, totally
different meaning for you. They are representing the highest object in the
universe, and, and you know that now. You can't really know that until that
day. You can't appreciate a painting of the Buddha until that day, okay. You
understand the meaning of prostration, okay. You understand that if you ever
bumped into a dharmakaya the immediate and natural reaction is to get down
flat on the floor, okay, and it's not any kind of oriental custom or Asian thing, or
something like that. In the presence of the Buddha, especially the dharmakaya,
knowing that you have just met the dharmakaya, you get flat down on the floor.
It's a natural reaction to that experience, okay. You, you understand what it is to
prostrate, and it's no longer some kind of a inconvenient knee-hurting thing, you
know. It, it becomes, it becomes, you, you really understand why people get
down flat down on their face in the presence of that being. You understand
prostration for the first time, okay. Path...

[break]
If you're on a bodhissatva track when all this happens, with the direct perception
of emptiness you achieve tong lam, path of seeing, you become an arya, {pakpa},
and thirdly you reach the first bodhissatva bhumi, okay.                   These are all
simultaneous. At the first instant, the first micro-second of the direct perception
of emptiness you are already three things have happened. You've entered the
path of seeing, you've become an arya, and if you have bodhichitta, you've
reached the first bodhissatva bhumi. During {jetop yeshe}, during the hours
following that experience, you have a direct and powerful experience of bo, of
real bodhichitta, and it's almost like a physical sensation of, of some kind of love
and care for other beings coming out of your heart, like, like a river, or like a,
like a clear light, and you know that you will spend the rest of your life serving
sentient beings, you know, and you, you're sure about it, and you know what it
will be like to serve them, and you know what you have to do to serve them,
and, and you know that you always will, from then on, from that moment on.
By the way, during those seven lives, and while you're in the service of those
beings, you will never again have any major problem in your life. You will
always be comfortable. You will always be among, among the people of the
world who at, in that planet at that time, have the leisure to study Dharma, you
know, have the teachers. You will always be surrounded by good teachers. You
will always be surrounded by good parents. You will always go to a good
school. You will always be ch, you life will seem like a charm. Everything will
go basically right. You'll still have to die in those lives. You'll still have to get old
in those lives, but the life that you live, you see directly will be on the whole
quite cool, and you know that You perceive that directly.

[break]

It's not a joke. I mean, what could happen to you in the years following that
experience if you could start to doubt the experience, you know, you could say
maybe it happened, maybe it didn't, maybe I was just having a good day, you
know, you know, maybe something happened, you know, you could start to
doubt what happened. There's a certain {tsema. Tsema} means pramana.
Pramana means indubitable perception, undeniable perception, absolutely,
purely correct perception you have during {jetop yeshe} that what just happened
to you was absolutely true. You, it's like a confirmation perc, realization about
the even. What just happened to me is absolutely, purely true, okay. What
happens then is kind of interesting. You understand that every Buddhist scipture
that was ever written is absolutely correct, and every detail is absolutely correct,
okay. I mean, I'm kicking the, the ones where people just lied and wrote
something down, you know what I mean. Forget those, which happened, but
the ones, the basic, the cannon, especially the teachings of the Buddha, there's not
a single syllable in them that's not absolutely true, and you cannot really confirm
that until this moment. You, you have a direct, undeniable realization that every
single page of the Buddhist scripture, of the Lam Rim, and of all the other books
is totally, absolutely true, okay, and that this path is a, is the true path, and I'm
not being sectarian, okay. I'm just talking about an actual experience which you
can confirm yourself, and until that moment you can't really confirm it. That this
path is absolutely accurate, true, you can follow it and you will absolutely get the
same results, and all of these events will happen to you, you know. That's
absolutely true. Then you get some kind of mania about protecting the books of
Buddhism, you know. You must preserve and protect those books. They must
not disappear in this world. They are the aids vaccine for the mental affliction.
They are the missing secret vaccine. They must be preserved in the world. You
must take, you must devote your life to making sure that those books, and the
teachings that are connected to them are never lost in the world, and, and you
get some kind of mania about it. You must try to protect them, okay. They are
all absolutely true, and they are really the only path out of suffering. You have
realizations about the diamond that we talked about, and if you had a car and no
other money you might take it out and sell it to that guy and go buy a diamond
and put it in the temple somewhere where maybe no one would ever find it,
doesn't matter, cause it represents what you saw. So, so there becomes
something important about diamonds, okay. What happens after that day? So
what are you gonna do now? I'm trying to think, I think you, well there are
other realizations but those are the main thing. What do you, what happens
next, you know, what are you supposed to do during those seven lives? Do you
see emptiness again? The next, the fourth path is called what? [student:
Habituation] Habituation. Some people call it meditation. It's a mis-translation
of the word {gom. Gom, gom}, without the head letter, and without the, with,
with more aspiration means, means "to be accustomed to something, to get used
to something." So it means "path of habituation." The fourth path is [student:
sneezed.] God bless [laughter]. The fourth path is, is about seven and a half life
times of using what you saw, and using these realizations to, to wipe, to clean
out the rest of your mental afflictions, okay. It's the fourth path of habituation is
that long, long process of using, getting used to what happened. It takes seven
and a half life times to get used to what happened totally, okay, and to, and to
utilize that knowledge in your day to day life to stop your mental afflictions,
okay, and we talked about the boss. I mean that's the guts of it. That's the
essence of it It's that process of what goes on as the boss screams at you and you
use the emptiness perception [student: unclear]. We'll talk about it. So {gom
lam} is that. You are, you are getting used to what happened in the sense that
you are applying it to your day to day life to wipe out your mental afflictions.
They say you do see emptiness during {gom lam}, okay. You do have other
experiences of emptiness during {gom lam}, direct experiences. [student: What is
{gom lam}?] {gom lam} is path number four, path of habituation, okay. Do you
remember what happened in the other life times? Not as a child, not as an
infant, not as a child, okay.         You don't remember what happened, as I
understand it, as I've been taught about it. You, you reach, you're, you're
constantly, you, you grow up like the Dalai Lama. You have the two greatest
scholars of Tibet are your baby sitters, you know [laughs], and, Trijang Rinpoche
and Ling Rinpoche, you know, and you grow up in these circumstances. You are
constantly surrounded by the holiest teachers in the world at that time, and, and
you are blessed by very, very moral fine parents, and everything is going, is
perfect. The conditions for Dharma practice are absolutely perfect for the next
seven lives, and at a very early age {bakjak sepa}, say {bakjak sepa} [repeat]
{bakjak sepa} [repeat]. The realizations of your past life rea, reassert themself.
{bakjak}means "mental seed" or "mental propensity." {sepa} means it, what do
you call it, "it becomes manifest, it flowers." At a very early age you start to have
these realizations again. At a very early age you start to manifest a knowledge
of all these things again. It, it doesn't take you long to get back on track. You go
through the infancy and you go through the childhood, and by, at a very early
age you're already understanding these things. It's like the life stories of
Tsongkapa and things like that. [student: Like four years old?] I wouldn't say
four years old, but I would say maybe ten, or ten to fifteen, like that, okay. If
you keep that up af, I mean, th, if you get rid of your mental afflictions then you
reach nirvana, of course, and then if you keep going you, you reach, you do
reach enlightenment. You know that, and you, and you reach it, and that's the
process of what, of what goes on after you perceive emptiness directly, but the
date that you see it, the hour that you see it, your future becomes predictable.
We call {lung tempa}, you know. We can then say, okay, you're, you're on your
way out. You are definitely on your way out. Within a fixed amount of time
you will become a Buddha. On your way out, on the way means {gyun shupa}.
Say {gyun shupa} [repeat] {gyun shupa} [repeat], "stream enterer," okay. That's,
that's another thing that happens when you see emptiness directly. You become
what we call a stream enterer because you are on your way out. You are really
on your way out in a definable amount of time, and, and that happens on the
same moment. After you perceive emptiness directly and these experiences of
{jetop yeshe} in the aftermath of that, a couple of other things happen. What
about doubt? Suppose some dude comes up to you and says "hey, Buddhism is
not the way, you know, there's no such thing as a Buddha, it's a little bit
mistaken, you know, there's no such thing as nirvana, karma doesn't exists," and
you'll say, I mean [student: Get lost.] Get lost [laughs], I mean it's, what I'm
saying is that you can never doubt Buddhism again. Impossible. Totally purely
impossible that you could ever be shaken out of this realization by anybody, any
time, any way. You met the Buddha. [student: unclear] Maybe as a tiny kid you
might say something but, but, I mean once the {bakjak sepa} you would never
have doubt. I, actually, I'd have to say you don't have doubt at any period after
that. It's a {tong pang}. It's permanently eliminated by the path of seeing.
Cannot doubt Buddhism ever again. Impossible. You can never again believe
that what you see exists the way you thought it did, okay, and what I mean to
say is you can never again entertain an intellectual belief in self-existence, ever
again, okay. You can never again believe that things are not empty. You can
never again believe that things are not your projection. Impossible. So we call
{jikta}, say {jikta} [repeat] {kuntak} [repeat] {jikta} [repeat] {kuntak} [repeat].
{jikta} is "the tendency to see you and yours, me and mine, as self existent." {jikta}
is the tendency to see me and mine as self-existent. It has two flavors. First one
is intellectual. Second one is inherent, okay. {kuntak} means "intellectual." It
means, if I ask you "are things the way you think they are," until you reach the
path of seeing, until you see emptiness directly you have to say "I guess so,"
okay, "I guess things are probably the way I see them," but once you've seen
emptiness directly and you've come out and you've entered {jetop yeshe}, and
someone comes up to you and says "are things the way you see them," you have
to say, what? "absolutely not," okay. Do you still see them as self-existent?
[student: Yes.] Absolutely. I always say it's like Jason tied to the mast. He, this is
the story of the argonauts, and, and they're about to enter the land of the sirens.
They're on a ship, and on the beach
there's these ladies that sing this beautiful song, and the sailors all get excited and
they, they row into the rocks and kill themselves, you know [laughs], or the, the
sirens catch them. So, so Jason says "you guys put wax in your ears, tie me to
the mast, and ignore whatever I say, like if I gesticulate to you and like, row this
way, just ignore me, okay." So it's this, it's this schizophrenic state of mind. It's a
schizophrenia like that. You know that what you are seeing, from the moment
you come out of the direct perception of emptiness is wrong. You know that
you are once again seeing everything in a mistaken manner, okay, but you don't
believe it, okay. You know that you're doing it, but you don't believe yourself,
okay. You no longer believe that what you're seeing is correct. You know that
your perceptions are screwy, and you also know that you can't stop yourself
right now, and in fact, the day that you do stop {jikta hlenye}, say {jikta} [repeat]
{hlenke} [repeat], "the inherent tendency to grasp to things as self-existent," as
not being just your projection. The day you overcome that you've reached
nirvana. That is the last mental affliction that you have to finish. That is nirvana.
The day you overcome that, roughly at the eighth bodhissatva level, you reach
nirvana. The day that you no longer think things are the way that, I'm sorry, the
day that you no longer see them as self-existent, that you overcome the, the
inherent tendency to see them as self-existent is the day that you reach nirvana.
That's the end of {gom lam}, okay, mostly. Even bugs, even amebas, even
grasshoppers, even Vajrapani bluejays have {jikta hlenke}. Even, even animals
have the inherent tendency to see things as self-existent, okay. All beings, that,
that haven't reached the end of that have that. One last thing, and this is very
important. Let me make sure it's the last thing. I shouldn't stick you with no,
with any homework answers that I didn't cover. Oh, I left out one thing. The
fact that you're still seeing things as self-existent on {gom lam}, okay, on the
fourth path, the fact that you're still seeing them as self-existent, but you know
you're wrong, and you don't believe yourself any more, that's called {gyuma
tabo}. Say {gyuma tabo} [repeat] {gyuma tabo} [repeat]. I hate, I wanna leave,
don't erase that, okay. That would be nice. Really, okay, leave it for a day.
{gyuma} means "illusion." {tabo} means "like an illusion" {gyuma tabo}. [student:
unclear] In Tibetan?

[break] Say {gyuma} [repeat] {tabo} [repeat] {gyuma tabo} [repeat] That's what,
that's illu, illusion, things are illusory. That's the meaning when Buddhist's say
"things are an illusion," and, and you don't know what it means until you get
there, and that's the only meaning of illusion. When we say illusion, {gyuma
tabu}, this is what it means. It does not mean that nothing exists. I'm up here
talking to you. If I didn't exist you couldn't hear me,okay. It does not mean that
things don't exist. It especially doesn't mean that you can do whatever the hell
you want, okay. It doesn't mean good and bad are an illusion, nirvana and
samsara are illusion, you know, evil and good are illusion, suffering and, and
paradise are an illusion, so I can do whatever I want. It's all the same anyway.
It's all an illusion, you know. It absolutely doesn't mean that, absolutely {lokta},
wrong view, poison view, disservice to humanity to say things like that, okay,
doesn't mean that at all. {gyuma tabu} means illusory in the sense that things still
look self-existent to you but you know you're wrong, okay, that's {gyuma tabu}.
Did I miss anything else? Ooh, there's one. Give you the Tibetan word for
renunciation, okay. It's called {nyen jung}. I'll stick it here, okay. {nyen jung}
means "renunciation," renunciation.

[break]

Say {nyen jung} [repeat]. This is short for lo, short for {nyepar jungwar. Nyepar
jungwar} means "to definitely come out," definitely come out. That's the literal
meaning of it, definitely come out, and in one sense it refers to giving up the
worldly like, okay, giving up the worldly life. That's one meaning of renuncia
[end of tape]
960829-2.aaa
93a.txt

8/29/96
transcribed by: Winston McCullough
Diamond-Cutter Sutra, Vajrapani, tape 7

Oh yeah. When you perceive emptiness directly it's through a {dun chi}.

[student: unclear]

No.

[student: unclear]

Yeah, but you don't, you don't necessarily have that experience again very soon.

[student: But it's pretty close]

It's close, but most of your, most of your perceptions of emptiness, even on the
path of habituation are intellectual again, okay. No, and that's very useful in the
case of the screaming boss. You can't go into deep meditation while your boss is
screaming. He won't sign the paycheck [laughter]. Michael Roach went
cataleptic while I was screaming at him, you know.

[student: unclear]

Yeah. You're aware that he's not what he seems to be. You know that you're
wrong. At least you know you're wrong. You're still wrong but at least you
know it. That's {gyuma tabu}, that's [unclear], that's the illusion, okay. Let's
meditate for like five minutes, okay. I think just meditate, have some {yi rang}.
Have some, rejoice. You know, we are flirting with the destruction of your
mental afflictions, you know. It's a very cool place to be flirting, you know. We
are, we are dancing around the subject, the only subject that can remove your
mental afflictions forever, and, and making truly contented forever, and that
would be really nice. This whole thing of going through the day swinging
between liking people and disliking people, and not in a major way, but just this
continual struggle of going down the street with like and dislike grabbing at you
and beating you up as you walk down the street, you know. It'll be over and
your mind will be in a place where you're just happy all the time so, so be happy
right now. I mean, rejoice that we are flirting with the weapon for the
destruction of the mental afflictions, you know, and it's very rare to have the
opportunity, and it's rare that, that a group of people sit in one place and, and
talk about these things, extremely rare, that, especially in an accurate way, so
rejoice. Just be happy for a while. It enhances the merit immensely, okay.

[break]

... about things that don't really matter very much, okay. Going to places that
you don't really need to go, seeing things that you don't really need to see. Cut
it down. You won't be able to see emptiness if you don't cut it down. If you
don't cut out those four or five hours of BS in your life per day, you'll never see
emptiness. You don't have time. You won't have. You just won't have time. It
takes a couple hours a day to work on it. Are, are magazines evil? You know, is
TV bad? You know, are, are movies destroy your peace of mind? Well, they do,
but that's another point. I'm going to one tomorrow, but anyway. It's not the
point. You don't have time for both. I mean, you can't serve both masters.
Make up your mind. I mean, you cannot live in both of those worlds. You can't
have both. You can't, you can't have samsara and get rid of it too, you know.
You gotta make a decision, and it's gonna take time. You're going to have to
devote a lot of your time to it. You must find a good teacher, and you must
serve that teacher. Those are, those are, you've gotta make up your mind in that
sense about renunciation. Renunciation, cut down on your worldly activities.
You don't need to read that stuff. You can't ever tell me what was in the paper
that you read a week ago, you know, or yesterday, you know, what's, so what's
the point, you know? Who cares what's on the news, you know? You know
what it's going to be. Who's killing who? What's going on? Because it has to be
like that, so just stop it. Cut down those other things, you know. People who
say they don't have time to practice Dharma, it's not true. Something's going on.
If your job requires you to over work to the point of being tired, that you can't
meditate properly, and it requires you to work overtime, it does not allow you
time to do, to do retreats, then find another job. Take a job that pays less, and
don't wait, you know. You don't have time. You don't know when you're going
to die, so, so act, do it now. Don't, don't have any doubt about it. Just make up
your mind. Don't, don't doubt what we talk about tonight. Don't doubt that it's
possible. You can do it. You will do it. Don't, don't kid yourself that anything
else is worth anything. This is, this is the only thing that's worth anything. What
we talked about tonight is the reason for having a human life, you know, this is
the goal. You can do it, but you have to commit yourself something. You can't,
you have to make up your mind. You can't sit on the fence. If you really want it
then cut down your worldly activities, and study this sutra deeply for a long
time, serve a spiritual friend, and, and you'll do it, and there's nothing else to do.
Last thing, last realization that you get that day, and then I'll stop, and then I'd
like to meditate for a few minutes because this is the holiest subject we can talk
about. What we just spoke about is the, is the holiest two hours you ever spent
in your life probably for sure. You, you just collected that merit that doesn't
have measure. We have just done some great deed. We are all chosen people
tonight, you know. The day that you become enlightened they will not call you
Mike any more. That's the last realization, okay. The day that you become
Buddha, they will not call you Mike any more, okay, or Jay or Elizabeth or Tessie
or Amy, or... They won't call you that any more. Okay, meditate for a while.

[break]

[prayer: {unkown to me}]

Tonight is just a chance to talk about what we talked about. I'd like first to just
give a brief review of what we talked about, and then make some notes to
yourself. You know, in the monastery we have this debating custom, and the
way it goes is that in the early morning you memorize some text, and then in the
mid-afternoon, I mean the mid morning, you might go to debate ground, but
normally in the mid-morning you have a class, and the teacher explains what
you've been memorizing. Then you have a big lunch, then you sneak a nap, and
everybody pretends that nobody knows, and then in the afternoon you have
another class, you eat dinner and take a rest, and then you hear what's called a
{ka nga}. {ka} means "space, sky," and {nga} means "drum," and {ka nga} means
"a gong." It's kept at the top of the main temple, and somebody goes up and
bangs on the gong, and the minute you hear the gong your heart starts to beat,
you know, and you start to get adrenaline because that means you have to start
thinking about coming to debate ground, and, and you hear it gong, and you're
kind of hoping that they'll cancel it tonight for some reason, you know, like, you
see if there's any rain coming.         Maybe the abbot's having a meeting or
something, but when you hear the first bong you know that you have to go to
debate ground so. Then you start cramming really fast, and then they hit it
another time, and then they hit it another time, and it gets faster and faster. It's
like dang-dang-dang-dang-dang-dang, and when it reaches its crescendo you
gotta be on your way or else you get in trouble, and you have to enter the gate,
you know, by the time they finish the last bong, and then you sit down and do
prayers, and, and you feel real naked because all you can take is your rosary and
your cushion, and you sit on stones. It's just flagstones and you just sit there,
and it's open air, and it's nice, and you start just before dark say, and then it starts
to get dark and you do some prayers. Those prayers are praying that, for
inspiration during the debate, and they're also praying that you don't have any
new mental afflictions because of the debate, you know, like "I hope I beat him,"
or, you know, I get mad from being beat, or stuff like that. So actually twice a
week they won't debate. They'll pray the whole time for two, two hours or
three hours just that you don't have bad, bad thoughts during the debate. Then
you break up into one-on-one, and that can be anybody, you know. You walk
around the debate ground and it's like a high school dance, you know, and
you're like [laughter], and if there's somebody you kind of want to connect with,
you're like [laughter], like across the courtyard, and if there's somebody who's
really good and you want to avoid the guy, you know, you, you keep your eyes
down, and, and then you do one-on-one, and that can be with anybody in any
class. It could be a junior debating a senior or an eighth grader debating a
senior, you know, and that's really good because you get to hear, if it's
somebody older than you, you get to hear what you haven't reached yet, and
you get, start to get a taste for it, and if it's somebody much younger than you,
you get to review the math that you did in the sixth grade, which you forgot
already. So it's a really good process. You do one-on-one for a while, maybe an
hour, an hour and a half, and then the {gi kyu} who's the debate master, he
walks around with his sand, his shawl. He drops his shawl, he goes like this.
You're supposed to run and get into your classes, and then all the seniors debate
with all the seniors, and it's like thirty people, and you line up in two lines and
you face each other like a gauntlet, and nobody wants to be the, the guy who's
getting attacked, who sits in the front, so everybody's like trying to get back,
you know, from the front, and then the class leader will come along and he'll
collect everybody's rosary, and you all throw your rosary on him, and he's got
this big pile of rosaries and he throws them up in the air and he closes his eye
and he grabs one as it comes down, and then that's the guy who has to defend,
and then he takes them all and he throws them up, and that's the assistant
defender. So there's two guys at the head of the column. It looks like a gauntlet
and there's two guys at the front, and he throws it up again and that guy has to
start the debate, and the reason I brought it up is that after a certain point in,
after a certain number of years in debating you find out that if you, if your
rosary gets picked last and you're supposed to start the debate that the best
thing to do is pick something that you're not sure about. You know, pick
something that didn't quite seem right to you in the class that afternoon. You
know, try to pick something, in other words, when you first start debating you
want to avoid those things because you don't understand them and you're afraid
that people will see that you don't understand them, but I think as you get more
mature in debating, and less defensive about it, you, you actually try to go after
the points that weren't very clear to you, or seemed confusing or seemed
contradictory, or, you know, you gravitate towards the difficult points, the ones
that didn't quite seem right when the, when the lama presented it, and then, and
then you have a real fruitful debate, and by the end of the debate you, instead of
seeing other people as opponents, you see them as helpers in trying to work out
this problem together, and by the end of the night it's really cool. You've really
worked it out in a very cool, normally you've worked it out in a very cool way
because everybody's putting their brains together, and then sometimes you go
back and you read a commentary by {unclear} or something, and it turns out
that he, he figured it out in exactly the same way that you and your debate
buddies did that night and it's really cool. So I propose we do something like
that, you know. Try to bring up all the points that didn't quite sound right, and
the points that I was waffling on and stuff like that, and probably I wasn't too
clear in my own mind about them, and then we'll, we'll work them out instead of
trying to work on what we know. We'll try to work on what's not too clear and
then maybe I'll be forced to clarify it in my own mind, and maybe we'll all work
it out. It's like a debate. I'll, I'll go over briefly what we talked about in the last
two classes, and then just to, maybe you can keep a list of things that you didn't,
weren't too satisfied with, okay, and then we should debate those. We should
talk about those. Tuesday night's class was about the perfections, and we pointed
out that the word perfection is admitted in the scriptures to be something, it's
almost a misnomer. If you're practicing the perfections like you and me, trying
to practice giving, the perfection of giving, it's anything but a perfection. We're
not perfect at it at all. It's not perfect at all. So why do they call it perfection?
And then we talked about the two meanings of perfection. One was {parol tu
chin che} which means "makes you perfect," and then we talked about {parol tu
chin sin} which means "already perfect." {parol tu chin sin}, already perfect, an
already perfect perfection are the kind of perfections the Buddhas do. {parol tu
chin che} are those six activities which get you to perfection, and then we, we
looked into {parol tu chin che} to see if, to see if every kind of action that we ever
do is that. So we took the perfection of giving and we talked about doing it, and,
and it came out that {parol tu chin che} is getting you to perfection if you're
doing it with an understanding of emptiness, and if you're not doing it that way,
it's not {parol tu chin che}, okay, but can you still call it a {parol tu chinpa}, you
know, {parol tu chinpa} meaning a plain old paramita. In other words, if you do
one of those six activities without an understanding of emptiness is it still a
perfection? Well, is it the perfection of somebody who's already perfect? No. Is
it a perfection that's directly acting to get you to perfection? No. Is it still, can we
still call it a perfection, and the Buddha says "okay, you can call it a perfection."
Why? It looks like a perfection. Why? Especially if you're doing it with the wish
of, of reaching enlightenment for the sake of other beings. So if that's in the back
of your mind as you do an act of giving, for example, we can call it perfection
because then it resembles a real perfection which is a perfection done with an
understanding of the emptiness of the situation, and those get you to {parol tu
chin sin} which is the perfection in the mind of a perfect being, okay, and we
talked about the three elements of a situation. You can say the giver, sometimes,
some scriptures leave that one out. You can say the thing that you're giving.
You can say the person receiving, and then most scriptures say the event of
giving, the giving itself, the act of giving. So some scriptures leave out the act
and add the actor and most, the scriptures we're using this, for this class, they
leave out the actor and put in the act of giving, but it doesn't really matter.
Those are obviously all elements in the act of giving,
and each one of those is empty, and you have to perceiv, be perceiving each one
of those three spheres, it's called, as being empty as you perform an act of
giving. So what does it mean to give, to perform an act of giving, while
understanding the emptiness? It means to understand the emptiness of those
three elements of the situation. The gift, the recipient, and the whole act of
giving itself, and then some scriptures say, they, they replace the act of giving
with the person giving it. Doesn't really matter. [student: unclear] I'd say some
have three and some have four, in my mind. We'll talk about it, and I'll just go
through the whole thing, 'cause some people weren't there and I just want to
make sure they, they hear it once. Is there anything else in that class? I don't
know. I don't remember. [student: unclear] I have a feeling, I can check it,
okay, but I have a feeling in that case it would be the meditator, what you're
meditating on, and the act of meditation. I have a feeling that it would be that, in
the act of meditation. Perhaps you could add the person that you're meditating
on behalf of, you know, which is all sentient beings, but, I don't know, that
applies to almost all of them. Then you get five or four. I believe it would be
those three in the act of meditating, but I'll check. I have this data base of like,
these guys, the guys doing the translation work with me know we have like a
hundred thousand pages of scriptures on computer and you can just ask what
are the three spheres in the act of meditation, so maybe we'll keep a list of things.
Can you do that, Clinton? Three spheres in the, in the perfection of meditation,
for example, okay. We talked about [student: unclear] what's that, cosmology?
Oh yeah, that, that their act of giv, oh, the act of giving with an understanding of
emptiness was more virtue than filling up, and then we went through
abhidharma where they say there's a thousand inhabited planets make one first
level world system, and then a thousand of those, which means a million planets,
makes the second order world system, and then a thousand of those, which
would be a billion planets makes a third world, a third level world system, and
that if somebody, it says if some virtuous man or woman {rikki pu-am rikki
pumo} was to, was to fill up those planets with precious gemstones, and offer
that, later it says offer it to the Buddha, by the way. Later they get more
extreme, remember Clinton, what we talked about today? There's a section later
where he gets more extreme than that about the Ganges, okay. What's he say?
[Bob Chilton: If there are as many Ganges rivers as there are particles of water in
the Ganges river, and you took all of those particles of water in all of those
Ganges rivers] And had that many planets, that many planets and filled them up
with diamonds, basically, and offered it to the Buddhas, the virtue that you get
from performing an act of giving with an understanding of emptiness is
infinitely more than that, okay, okay.         Is that all in that class, I don't know
[student: unclear] Oh yeah, that was the tough part. We went over a concept
that Choney Drakpa Shedrup covered which is if two things have a relationship
they have to, there's two requirements: they have to be separate, and what was
the other one, and they have to both exist. Do you have a relationship with,
how could you have a relationship with something that doesn't exist? How
could you relate to anything that doesn't exist? [student: unclear]. No, I mean
like if you say this man and this, and his husb, this, this lady and her husband are
having a relationship and then the husband dies, then the relationship, would the
death of the husband, there's no more thing called the relationship. If one of
them is gone there can't be a relationship. For them to be interacting there has
to be existence on both half, on both sides. [student: But one of the qualities of
karma is that the result is similar to the cause so that's a way of relationship.
When you do something it has to create a result that's similar to the cause, and
that's one way of using that.] Oh there's, so there was a big debate, you know,
Choney Drakpa Shedrup said, I mean, you can debate it so I'll say, so you're
saying that the result, we'll do a debate, okay. You're saying the result is related,
it's easier for me 'cause I win [laughter]. The result is related to the cause, in one
sense, and there's four different karmic results, but let's take that one. It's called
{unclear}. So, the result is related to the cause because the, in the, in one sense,
for example, when you kill people, that you get killed back. So you have a result
of getting killed back many times for one act of killing. So therefore getting
killed a lot of times later is related to the act of killing, so is that true? [student:
Yes] So those, getting killed a lot of times later has a relationship with having
killed somebody once. Right. So, in a, in a normal debate in a monastery you'd
say "well, which one of those two classical relationships is it? Is it cause and
effect, or is it a relationship of identity? Okay. A relationship of identity, an
example is [student: car and chevrolet] Car and chevrolet, okay, and remember
that what was, what was the check of the relationship? What was the test of the
relationship? If you remove one, the other one's always removed. So, for
example, if you had never killed anybody, you would never have to be killed
many times. If you removed all cars in the world, chevrolet would have to go.
By the way that's only a one-way relationship, not a two, not a two-way
relationship. Petra, and the oppos, Petra, and the reverse of all that Petra is not,
which is important in Buddhist philosophy, are, mutually related, in a, in an
identity, but anyway that's a big debate. [student: I guess in the translation when
they were talking about the sense in which a relationship does exist, they say
that you have to admit that it exists in a general way, and I don't understand the
significance of using the word "general."] General is a great way to get out of
problems in a debate [laughs]. Generally that's true, but anyway let's go back to
that. We'll get there. So, so getting killed many times later is related to killing
somebody now, right. So getting killed many times has already happened, or is
happening now, I should say, right. [student: unclear] Well, they must never
make it. Oh, oh, well when will it happen? [student: In the future which doesn't
exist] Let's leave it at in the future. So, so then the killing once is in the future.
They do this in the debate. They say "oh, so I guess killing once is in the future,"
and then they go like that, right. So let's say you just [unclear] it right now,
okay. So killing once is in the future. [student: No] It's not? Then you have to
feign like astonishment, like, it's not? [laughter]. So you're saying the, getting
killed back many times exists in the future. [student: Right] But killing once
doesn't exist in the future? Is that what you're trying to tell me? [laughter] This
is called {teln gyur}, prasangika. This is prasangika. [student: It's like bluffing.] It
is. A lot of it is bluffing. You're hoping the other guy will slip up sooner or later.
Are you telling me that, that they don't exist, that, are you telling me that doing
the one killing doesn't exist in the future? [student: Yes.] Yeah, you say "yeah,
that's what I said." {du}, you say {du} [laughter]. {du} means "you got it right."
So I say "oh, so, so they don't exist at the same time, so they don't have a
relationship, so they don't have a cause and effect relationship." Tsah, tsah. {len
je minu a mayinpa ta} So the, the laws of karma and effect, and effect are not
infallable? The law of karma and its consequences is not infallible, I guess, and
you say {chi chen} "why did you say that?" And then I say 'cause you can, cause,
because karma is not related to its consequences. {chi chen} Why do you say
that? Because they don't, they don't share a relationship, and then you say "why
do you say that?" And I say because they don't share, because they don't share a
relationship of identity and they don't share a relationship of cause and effect
which is the only two relationships. [student: But they do have cause and effect.
They do share a relationship of cause and effect.] Oh, they do have a cause and
effect relationship. No, go ahead. [student: It's just that they don't exist at the
same time.] No, all you say is "yes" and "no." Seriously, seriously, and when you
ride a truth, when you ride a truth as surely as a computer program does. So
they, so they do have, they do have a cause and effect relationship. Oh so I
guess they both exist. [student: unclear] So I guess they both exist. [student:
Why do you say that?] Because they, because to have a relationship two things
are required. They both exist and they are not the same thing. [student: Yes,
they both exists, just not at the same time.] Good, so the future has come
already. That didn't take long [laughter]. No, so the consequence and the deed
occur at the same time? [student: No.] So they don't both exist. [student:
unclear] Don't let her get out of it. Let's squeeze until the end here. No, in a
general sense you have to admit, says Choney Drakpa Shedrup, they,
they exist. If you examine it closely, they can't, one of them is yet to come, and
therefore doesn't yet exist, and from the point of view of the future result, one of
them has already happened. So they can't be existing at the same time, strictly
speaking, but when you're talking about the law of karma and its consequences
you are taking data, which means a future event and a present event, you are
synthesizing it into a, you are focusing on both of them at the same time, and,
and synthesizing that and calling it the laws of cause and effect, and in that sense
they both exist at, they both exist in the present because they are the law of
cause and effect, but if you take each one separately you're going to get in
trouble, something like, and maybe that, that's what general means here, okay,
and then I think, I mean personally I would show an example of Lincoln's
assassination, you know, he does, and by the way there's a big debate in
Buddhist philosophy about whether the future exists or not, and whether the
past exists or not. Just, if the past didn't exist, you wouldn't be here 'cause your
mom wouldn't ever have happened, but if the past does exist then the present is
getting very crowded cause you got the past and the future now, you know,
and, you know, you can go on like that all night, but I think the point is that if
you really examine things you come to these conundrums, to these unsolveable
problems. That's an indication of, of the {gakja}. The {gakja} is hanging around
because the more you examine it the less you find. So there's something {gakja}
about this whole question. You are thinking about things in a way that can
never be resolved. You couldn't be seeing Petra's face cause you're, you have to
see her eyes and her nose and her mouth to see her face, and when you've seen
her eyes and her nose and her mouth, how could you be seeing her face? But
how could you be seeing her face without seeing her eyes and her nose and her
mouth, and, and it's an, it's a con, it's a paradox, and that's a sign that we're
dealing with a self-existent object. It's an impossibility. In the sutra he says
{machipa, machipa}. He keeps saying {machipa. Machipa} means "it could never
happen." He said the marks of a Buddha are {machi}, they couldn't have
happened. You see them there but they couldn't have happened according to
the way you think, they couldn't have happened. That's a clue, okay. That's
called {ta-nye takpay takdun tsel-way tse-ne ma-nye} that we talked about the
first night. When you look for the object that got the name without giving it a
name, well, you're gonna look forever, because until it gets a name you can't find
it. You can't think of it until you give it a name, like that, okay. Did you have a,
and I don't know why I put that on the homework. I don't know I got into it
[laughs]. I don't remember why. Maybe, I think he covered it in a sutra at that
point or something. I don't remember exactly it was in that class. It doesn't
seem to go with the rest of this stuff. [student: unclear] No, not at all. I was
trying to, you know, they're using in the sutra all these words for self. They use
{dak}. They use {gangsak}. They use {sok}, and there's one more, what's the
other one? {semchen} yeah. {semchen} means "mind-haver" so you can say
sentient being. {sok} means anything alive, so you can say living being, and
then, what's the other one {gangsak, gangsak} is normally translated as "person,"
but {dak}, and then {dak} is normally translated as self, but I was trying to get, I
was using person for self, and I ran out of words so I was using
"persona." {gangsak} has more of the sense of persona in the sense of identity
and I thought that persona was more [student: Is it in the Latin sense of "mask"?]
No. We in fact, Dr. Cortzer [sp?], we spend like two hours on this, figuring out
what the real meaning of {gangsak}. What was it? [student: unclear] [gangsak],
you know, was that, was that [student: [unclear] ..you fill up, and then once you
fill up then you start leaking away], okay literal meaning of {gangsak}, you
know, person, what we're calling person. Full of, what was it, full of lower, full
of inferior {bakjak's}, and therefore falling into samsara, and that's {gang-sak},
which is person in Tibetan and in Sanskrit. We figured that it wasn't, that it was
really that way in Sanskrit also. I didn't want to bore you with that. [student: I
have a question about when you talk about the act of giving, instead of like giver
and gift. When you talk about an act, our minds think of actions like according to
what kind, and yet they're all empty, and it's [unclear] because if it's an act of
giving, what is the act part, what is the part that is, is empty, and when you're
feeding a bird, and then you give them one piece of bread and then another
piece of bread, and then another piece of bread, what part is, is the action, and
what is action?] It's a good question, and the answer is it's the difference
between the collection of the parts of a static object, and the collection of the
parts of an event, a moving event. You know, it's easy to think of the collection
of parts of a static object like a person. That's what we called {tsok chi} the oth,
last night. A collection of parts, a collection of physical parts. It's easy, you know
the example of the chariot or the car is easy because it's easy to imagine that the
parts are the wheel and the whe, and the windshield, and the top and the
bottom, and the, and the breaks, and the, everything together is "car." Not
exactly, but anyway, but what about moving events? You know, what about
the, an event of giving when you reach your hand out, they take it, then they
withdraw their hand, and there's, in other words, how do you impute time? how
do you impute action? It's on, it's on the series of moments. They become the
parts of the action, okay, so instead of taking Petra's eyebrows, eyes, nose, and
mouth and calling it "Petra's face," you take the person reaching out with their
hand, you take the person reaching out with their hands, you take the exchange
of the object, and the withdrawing of hands, and on those three parts you say
"act of giving." You synthesize it according to your past karmic seeds, you
synthesize it in the manner that you are forced to by your own past karmic
seeds, and then you call it "the act of giving." If your karmic seeds had been
different, then that same data would be called "stealing" or "someone giving
something to somebody out of hatred," you know, or, you know. In other
words, two people could have the same data and perceive it as opposite things
and one person would say "oh, that's cool, you know, Jim's giving dinner to
somebody," or something, and then somebody else would say "oh, look, Jim's
trying to poison that guy," you know, the same data, on the same data,
according to your own karma, your own past karma. That's why sometimes
you enjoy a dinner, and sometimes you don't. [student: I having a lot harder
time wrapping my mind around the non-existence of myself than objects
because it seems like the projection is projecting.] That's true, that's true, I mean.
What might help is to realize that you're always one microsecond behind, you
know. As soon as you're aware of yourself, the self that you're aware of is
already gone. It's already in the past. We're like that star where the light of
planet earth always reaches there twenty years after it left the pla, like we don't
know that the stars we see at night now are still, are still there cause it took
twenty million years for the light to, I don't know, twenty years, for the light to
get here. You don't even know that the star that sent the light is still there, and,
and technically you are the same. You might have died a microsecond ago but
you still see yourself as moving. Let's check [laughter]. [student: unclear ... we
refer to "I" this even when we're talking about the non-existence of self, we refer
in our explanations of it we talk about "I" and "me" so...] The question in
Buddhist philosophy is who's the driver? You know, who's the driver, and, and
each school has a different answer. The abhidharma says it's, it's the movement
of your five parts through time is you, and then by the time you get up to the
lower madhyamika they say that ultimately you are your mental awareness.
You are the person who hears the thoughts in your mind, and that's who you
are, you know, and that's pretty close. I mean, you kind of wanna hang onto
that one, you know. The person who's listening to the thoughts in my mind is, is
who I am. You know, that's the driver, you know. In the end that's the real me,
and then the next school up, prasangika, says that's not the way it is. You are the
synthesis of the parts of you and the naming of those parts, and that's who you
are. [student: unclear] Abhidharma actually. The second one was suatantrika,
and there's a lot between there that I don't quite remember, okay, but they're,
you know, they're less subtle. [student: So if all your perceptions are actually of
a past moment...] Well, let's say you're not, your, your perceptions are current,
but let's say the thoughts that you hear, those are already past, you know. The
thoughts that you're listening to are, are technically normally your mental
awarenesses of the microsecond before, and then there's a big
debate of whether there's a thing called apperception, meaning can the listener
listen to itself at the moment that it's listening. Are, are you aware of listening at
the moment that you're listening because if you are that means that mind has the
power to know itself before it becomes an object. The subject is perceiving the
subject before it becomes an object of the moment before, and then there's a
huge debate about that. The highest schools say there isn't such a thing as
apperception. [student: unclear] Say it again. [student: Can you repeat that].
Oh, I'm talking about, and we're going to talk more about it. There's a huge
division in the Buddhist schools between those who, understand and, and can
explain pretty much correctly the fact that we are naming, that a thing is the sum
of its parts, which is dependent origination according to the lower madhyamika
school, and then the next school up, which is prasangika, which is the highest and
the correct school, says the thing is not the sum of its parts. This is very delicate.
This is very subtle. Any object being the sum of its parts is not ultimately the
meaning of dependent origination. Why? Without anyone around to synthesize
that and then name it what it is, it couldn't be in and of itself anything. Therefore
the ultimate meaning of dependent origination is not that things are the sum of
their parts. It's that you take the sum of the parts, you synthesize them in the
way that your past karma forces you to, which is different for each person, and
then you name it something. When I say different for each person I mean in
detail, but generally if we're all in the same realm, meaning if we're all humans,
as opposed to bugs, as opposed to the animal realm of the five realms of
existence, we will, I mean, we all see this {gompa} as a {gompa}, generally
speaking. So in that way we're all synthesizing it in the same manner, but an
insect would not at all synthesize this same data as a {gompa} because they're in
a different realm, and then you get this beautiful thing in scripture about, you
know, there's a bar called "the samsara bar," and there's a table there, and the bar
tender, the waitress walks up and says "what will you have," you know, and they
all say "something to drink," and around the table you've got three people
sitting. One is a preata. One is a hungry ghost. One is a human being, and one
is a dei, you know, a worldly deity, a pleasure being who's in one of the
temporary pleasure paradises, you know, not an enlightened being, and they all
say "we'll have something to drink." So the waitress says "I'm sorry. We only
have one glass," and she puts a glass on the table of some liquid, okay, and the,
and it's a very, very delicate debate, but at that moment the preata says "oh my
god! Gross! She put a glass of blood and puss on the table, you know, I was
hoping something to drink, you know," and the human says, and the human
says, you know, "great, water. She put a glass of water on the table," and the,
the pleasure being looks at it and sees the nectar of the gods and says "cool, she
brought nectar of the gods." Probably Arizona ice tea I would guess [laughter],
and, and the question is are they all having pramanas or not? Pramana means a
correct perception, an acc, a valid perception, okay. Are they all having a valid
perception or not? And if they are there must be three different things there, but
there's not, so, and then there, you get into this huge debate. The bottom line is
there is something in the glass called liquid and if you live in a different realm
you'll perceive it in a different way. Now is it water that a preata is perceiving as
blood? Is that a correct way to state it? Not at all. It's liquid that a, that a [end of
side one]

[second side of tape]

... at that one level, there's no right answer, okay. It's neither of the three and it's
all three. What if you go down to the next level and check the liquidness of it?
You know, is that a projection? Well, there are pretas who would sit in the room
and wouldn't see anything in the glass, and it's a very famous example. They see
from a distance Boulder Creek, Kings Creek, and they say "finally, something to
drink," and they run, you know, and, and they get up to the edge and they look
down, and the, the water's gone, you know. So what's happening there? Is the
data self-existent? Is the data called "liquid" itself self-existent? If it were, it would
always have to be in the glass to any being that looked at it, but when a preta,
when certain pretas look at the glass they don't see anything in there. So that's a
big, that's a big debate. I forget what you asked [laughs]. So, okay, something
like that. [student: I have a question about {chi jedrak}.] Okay, now, bear with
me for one second, cause there's some people who weren't here last night, and
I'll, I'll go real fast over what happened last night. It's not much, just the ultimate
event of, of a person's zillion life times [laughter]. We went through the five
paths. We were shooting for the path of seeing. What happens on the path of
seeing, and we covered, we talked about, I mean we were trying to talk, not
from the point of view of Buddhist philosophy, but from the point of your actual
experience what actually happens to a person, if you were in an American that
this happened to, what would be a typical scenario, and, and first path would be
that, you know, maybe your parents died or something and you got
renunciation and you went to live in a monastery or something, you know, like
you had some very bad event happen, and you got, you got renunciation from
that event, so you, you, if you're very fortunate, if you're some kind of really
virtuous person already, or not really virtuous person, but if you're very
{kyelwa nyampa, kyelwa kyelsung}, if you have good virtue already, if
something clicks in you and you say "ah, life isn't the way I thought it was in high
school" you know [laughter], you know. Something's wrong here. How can,
actually say that half your family dies in one year or something. Something's
wrong here. Something has to, there's a problem here, you know. Life ain't
what I thought it was, and, and you go and stay with some Buddhist teacher, and
that's renunciation. Supposedly this person has reached the first path, true
renunciation. Truly bothered by and hoping to find some reasoning behind
these three deaths or something, you know. So you go and you study with this
person, and you serve that, that Lama.           You collect {tsok lam}, path of
accumulation, collecting virtue, serving the Lama, studying, going through the
three stages of {tu jung kyi sherab, sam jung kyi sherab} and {gom jung kyi
sherab}. Listening, which means study. It doesn't have to be book study. It
could be verbal study, but anyway you are learning from a qualified Lama.
Secondly, you're going, you're contemplating what you learned and you get a
kind of wisdom from that, and then that turns into {gom jung kyi sherab} which
is meditational wisdom. You start meditating more and more. You begin to
have realizations about the, intellectually about the nature of emptiness, and
simultaneously you are perfecting your ability to meditate, and you're, you are
getting up to the point in your meditations where you're able to keep your mind
on what's called the first "dhayi level." You're able to keep your mind on a
certain level of meditation which is out of this world in the sense that it's beyond
desire realm state of mind. Your bod, your body's still sitting in the desire realm.
You are able to put your mind into a state of the first {samten}, and a, and a
specific section of that {samten}. So two things are going on. You're learning to
meditate deeply and you're starting to understand emptiness intellectually.
That's the second path, {jor lam}, path of preparation. During the second path
you go through four increasingly subtle intellectual understandings of
emptiness. That takes you up to the day that you're going to, this is your big
day, day of the path of seeing. That takes you up to, I don't know, like June
fourteenth, 1974, or something, okay, and you're ready, and you're standing
there making a cup of tea, '75, and you're making a cup of tea and, and you're
looking at the cup of tea and you enter the {chu chok. Chu chok} means
"ultimate phenomenon," and that is the final moments of the path of preparation,
and you're looking at the pot and you suddenly realize that you're not looking at
a pot. You're looking at your mental idealization of a pot. You're looking at a
mental thing. You're looking at a picture in your mind, because pot as you
picture it could never exist, because all you can ever see at one time is a piece of
the pot. You're only getting data. You're getting disparate pieces of data. White
flash, silver corner, black rod sticking out the side. That's all you ever see. You
never see for example the back of the pot, but in your mind's there's this perfect
pot. That is a mental synthesis of all the parts into a nice mental thing that you
then think of as pot. So there's really three steps. You're picking up data which
is colors and shapes. It's not pot yet. You're picking up data. You're
synthesizing it into a nice picture, and then you're thinking of it as pot. That's
called "labeling" or "imputing" or whatever you want to call it, but you're
thinking of it as pot, and you, you're mistaking the, the mental image for the, for
something outside of yourself standing on the stove. You're mistaking that
mental image for a thing called "pot," and you're assuming that pot exists out
there on the stove independent of your projections. By the way that's {gakja}, a
pot that could exist that way, which by the doesn't exist at all and never did is the
{gakja}, and that's something you have to study. That's what we deny. It's the
object we deny the existent of, a pot which could exist standing there on the
stove, independent of you synthesizing it and thinking of it as pot. Why? Well
you let a bug walk up there and see if he, he synthesizes pot, you know. He's
synthesizing life threatening blob, you know, if I come closer I burn, better run
under the stove. If the pot were self-existently externally, from its own side,
independently, without your projections existing there, the, the roach on the
stove could have a nice cup of tea, because for him it would also be a pleasant
boiling pot which about, which you're about to make into tea, but it's not, so it's
not, okay [laughter] so. So anyway, you realize, you catch yourself, for the first
time ever you catch yourself. You have just understood what we call deceptive
reality, what is normally translated as "relative truth." You have just understood
for the first time the true meaning of dependent origination, okay. Is that
perception of emptiness? No. Dependent origination is a positive object. It's the
way things are. Emptiness is the way they ain't. It's always negative, and that's a
big mistake made by many Buddhist schools around the world, okay. All
emptiness is is the way things are not. Dependent origination is the way things
are, okay. So, so you finally for the first time catch yourself doing it. You, you
finish making the tea, you taking it up to your Lama, you go to the temple to do
your meditation, you sit down in proper posture, you go into the first {samten
level}. Your body is still in the desire realm. Your mind is in a higher state of
concentration, totally withdrawn from the senses consciousnesses, and you go
into the direct perception of emptiness, and then we talked about that particular
moment being like {chula chu shakpa} meaning "wa,
[cut]

... samsaric little mind, less samsaric than it was a few seconds before, but still
samsaric, okay. It's a mind, it's a relative truth object, it's a dependently orig, you
know, it's a deceptive reality, {kuntzob denpa}. So you cannot be aware of
yourself seeing emptiness while you're seeing emptiness because your self is not
emptiness, because yourself is not negative for example. It's not an absence of
something. Then you, maybe fifteen, twenty minutes you come down out of it.
You have the, maybe your first perception is the sensation of coming down out
of that concentration level, and you start the, all these realizations start to pop in
your mind like popcorn, and those are called the four noble truths. That is the
four noble truths, and we talked about how noble is mistranslation of the word
{pakpa} which means "arya," and they're called "arya truths" because only people
who have just seen emptiness see them, and, and you directly perceive the truth
of, of four, four different groups of things, and that, that experience goes on for
the whole day until the time you go to sleep, and, and we summarized them
here under the various truths that they represent, okay. I suggest we take a
break, and then after that you come back, and, and bring up any questions you
have especially about that last part, okay, that last presentation, okay. One, one
question first. [student: When exactly does the path of seeing end and the path
habituation begin?] That's a good question [laughs]. I would b, I think, yeah, I
think you could say that. {jetop yeshe} ends, I would say it ends that day.
[student: So perceiving the four arya truths is part of the path of seeing?] Yeah.
Now whether the night is in the {tong lam} or in the {gom lam}, I don't know,
but the point is that the perception of the four noble truths is ended. {jetop
yeshe} has ended, you know. The popcorn realizations in the aftermath of
seeing emptiness directly, at the time when those end, you're out of the path of
seeing and you're into the path of habituation. [student: unclear] Which one?
[student: The habituation.] {gom lam}, okay, {gom lam} [student: When you are
getting dependent origination for the first time, do you know then that you're
going to see emptiness directly?] No. [student: You just sort of realize that..]
That's all you understand at that moment and you have no, you don't know
what's going to happen a half hour later [students: unless you went to this talk!]
Well, hopefully, you might remember [laughs], but I mean if you haven't had it
described directly to you, you wouldn't know that. I think in the aftermath you
would, you would understand that had, you had just reached {chu chok}.
[student: Are there physical sensations that go along with that?] {chu chok}, not,
no, nothing like the physical, the two sensations that I mentioned which were, in
the {jetop yeshe}, which were the physical sensation of descending from that
meditation and then the physical sensation of love going out from your heart as
you have the experience of bodhichitta as a arya, okay, so like that. Take a
break, and we'll start after that.

[break]

Okay, I, I promised, Clinton, you gotta remind me to call Sera Mey tonight,
okay, he had one, he was half way through a question. [student: You said on the
last two, the {dra chi} and the {dun chi} [unclear] the first one is the mental image
based on hearing the name or label...] or, or having heard a description of a
thing but never having experienced it directly, like someone's, well I mean
maybe in a past life, or that you would, that you would be able to pull up. How's
that? [student: Well, what if you had seen it?] Then you can't have a {dra chi}
about it. [student: Then it's a {dun chi}?] Yeah. [student: So if you hear the sound
of a bird you never heard before and you develop a picture of it, is that a...] {dun
chi} [student: That's a {dun chi}?] You're trying to catch me. This is a very typical
debate thing [laughs] {unclear} Not every {dra} is a {dra chi}, okay [laughs]. He's
saying, in Tibetan you'd say {unclear}, "if something is a {dra}, is a sound and a
{chi}, is it always a {dra chi}? No, okay. Nice try [laughter]. [student: But you're
using visual perception.] No, I'm always using visual perception, but it doesn't
have to be visual. [student: But what if you hear something, but you develop a
visual image? Like you hear a bird sound?] And you, and you see a bird in your
mind's eye? You hear the sound and you see a bird in your mind's eye. That is
an object not, that's a {jepak tsema}, that's a, that's a logical perception, that's an
assumption actually, and that's a different thing. That, that object is a, is
imagination. That's an imagined bird. [student: The {dra chi} is only for...] You
get a {dra chi} first even to recognize it as a sound, a {dun chi}, sorry, of a {dra}.
You get a, you get a {dun chi} of a {dra}, and then, and then you go through a
logical process where you say "well, what makes this sound is that kind of bird,"
and then your mind synthesizes on, on mental colors and shapes, on imagined
colors and shapes, synthesizes a bird and names it "bird," and says "that bird
must be over there." [student: unclear] No the, no, well it is. Is it? Yeah. It is
different 'cause that's a {dun chi} [students: unclear] Oh, if you've never heard
that sound before, I don't know how you'd know it was that particular bird. Oh,
you mean that particular bird, no I'm talking about, that's a big debate in
Dharmakirti. It's a huge debate in the Pramanavartika in the second chapter, and
we, and we debate it in the winter debates for months. Generally, you are
having a {dun chi} of that species of bird, okay. It's not that you, necessarily that
you've seen that particular bird before, okay. If you said "Sam, the robin," you
know [laughter] No, then it'd have to be a {dun chi} of Sam the robin that you
saw before, or a {dra chi} of Sam the robin that someone described to you that
must be, that's living around Vajrapani but you haven't seen yet, okay. [student:
And what about {tsok chi} and {rik chi}?] What's the difference, or, that's a, that's
a easy question, okay. It's like when you're doing your geshe exams and you're
praying for easy questions [laughter]. {tsok chi} is the collection of parts of a
physical object, like the collection of parts, the car. {dun chi} is, is the mental
idealization. I'm sorry, did you say {rik chi}?, yeah, {rik chi} is "car" for chevrolet
{unclear}. The definition is something like "it's a general category which has
many members." It's a set which has many subsets. Think of it as "set and
subset." That's {rik chi. Rik chi} is set. If you get much more subtle into it, and if
you go home and think about {rik chi} for like three days straight, and meditate
on it, you will come up with the concept of quality and characteristic. Car is a
quality. Chevrolet is characteristic of it, is not "a," but is characteristic of that
quality. It's a really delicate distinction, and you have, you have to really
meditate on {chi jedrak} to get to that distinction, and that's very close to
perceiving deceptive reality.         That's very close to perceiving dependent
origination. [student: unclear] Yeah, yeah, I don't think I tied it up yesterday
exactly. You are seeing, when you're looking at the pot, and you realize that
you're not seeing a pot out on the stove, but you're seeing your mental
idealization of a pot based on, an imputation based on a bunch of colors and
shapes that suggest pot. That idealization is {dun chi}. I guess I never told you
that last night [laughs], sorry. Yeah, I never did tie that up. That's a {dun chi}.
[students: Yeah you did.] Oh, okay. You're actually only seeing the {dun chi}. All
you ever see is the {dun chi} and you name that "pot." You identify it as pot,
okay. You're living in a world of {dun chi's} that you're mistaking for external
objects. That wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't the case that, if those things really
did exist as external objects, they could never change, and that wouldn't be so
bad except that they could never change to a non-samsaric object, and that
wouldn't be so bad unless you wanted to get to paradise, okay, but if you did
want to get to paradise, it'd be a disaster if things were self-existent, because then
all these samsaric objects would always be samsaric because they exist external
of your changes, and you couldn't change them, and you'd be stuck here forever
[laughs]. Seriously. That's the whole idea. That's the whole point. That's why it
would be such a disaster if everything were self-existent, and we're going to get
into that. That's the whole point of the Diamond Cutter Sutra. What's the point
of talking about emptiness if it doesn't relate to your getting to paradise, okay.
Go ahead, sorry, I'm sorry, go ahead, she was, she's bigger than you. [student: I
have two questions about the path of habituation, and the first one is, so you see
emptiness directly for the first time...]        That's {tong lam}, path of seeing.
[student: Right, okay, so after that happens then you, you have approximately
seven life times left before you get full enlightenment, and then you said...]
Typically. It could be, somebody asked me today "isn't it true that the Buddha it
was like seventy-six countless eons?" I said "yeah," but typical is seven lifetimes.
[student: So how, how frequently do you see emptiness during the path of
habituation? Like you said that you could see it more. I mean, why can't you see
it every time you sit down to meditate from that point on?] Yeah. I'll say two
things. One is it doesn't happen very frequently or maybe never happens after
that. I mean, in the scriptures it says it happens. It doesn't say how often. Okay,
it describes a {nyamshak yeshe} and a {jetop yeshe} for {gom lam} which means
there must be a dir, you know, it describes a, a direct perception of emptiness
during the {gom lam}, and, and it describes a {jetop yeshe} during the {gom lam},
you know. Periods of aftermath realization. This is Abhidharma, but I have not
personally seen a scripture that tells you how often it happens, and, and it
doesn't happen, I don't... [student: unclear] I know what you, of course, I know
what you mean. Can't answer that. [student: unclear] Well, well, it's a
reasonable question. I can just tell you, it doesn't happen. Now why it doesn't
happen [student: Is it like the Buddha coming in the world, the karma just runs
out] Well I know that the big deal of the four noble truths, which is all these
things, happens only at {jetop yeshe} of {tong lam}, you know, and that that
happens at time, and perhaps the point is that, perhaps the point is that the
wearing, the working out of your mental afflictions using your knowledge of
emptiness, by the way, now, now I can tell you the real definition of nirvana, and
I'm not getting off the subject, so if I do bring me back. This is one way to get
out of a thing in a debate though [laughter]. Let me tell you about nirvana
{ngun-drip malupar pangpay sosor tak gok, ngun-drup malupar pangpay sosor
tak gok. Ngun-drup} means "obstacles which are caused by mental
affliction." {malupar} means "in their entirety." {pangpay} means "eliminating,"
and then the punch line: {sosor tak gok, sosor tak gok}. The {gok} in {sosor tak
gok} means "cessation of your mental affliction."          The {sosor tak} means
"realizing one by one, a one by one realization." So what that whole sentence
means is "the definition of nirvana is ending your mental afflictions permanently
because you have individually realized," and, and then they explain that
"individually realized" means these dudes up here on the board, okay. Due to
your underst, direct perception of these dudes up here, you are then able during
the path of {gom}, during the path of habituation to end your mental afflictions.
The day you do, you step off of path number four onto {milob lam}, path
number five, which is nirvana. Now, so I'm, what I'm saying, what I'm
suggesting is that during {gom lam} what's paramount is your intellectual
application of what you saw {sosor tak gok}. It's just a, it's just because I haven't
seen any other explanation than that, and, and, how to say, it's what happens.
[student: So during, because I've also heard that during the first seven bhumis
until you get to the eighth one you can kind of slip back...] Slip back in
this sense... [student: ... but you can't slip back beyond the first bhumi.] No,
impossible. [student: So you just can, like what's that about?] Bhumi number
eight, at bhumi number eight, mahayana track, okay, on the lower two tracks,
the lower two hinayana tracks, the day you end your mental afflictions and the
day you reach nirvana is the same thing. On bodhissatva track, when you reach
bhumi number eight, bodhissatva level number eight, which happens during
which path, of the five paths? [student: Number four] {gom lam}, happens
during path of habituation. At that point you can't have certain kinds of
grasping to self-existence any more. They just stop. They stop completely, and,
and you can't go back from there, and that, that is nirvana in the mahayana, so.
[student: But how can you even go back in the... ] from those other, I don't, I
don't, there's a, there's a subject, there's a book, textbook called {genden nyishu}
which is the twenty, what do you call it, there's a word and I always forget it,
combinations, permutations, twenty permutations of the five paths, and, and it's
a flow chart, you know, like you could go half way down the hinayana path, see
emptiness, skip up to mahayana. Would you have to see emptiness again? You
know, could you skip from nir arhat, could, could you go directly to {tong lam}
in mahayana, or would you have to start over again at, at bodhichitta, and, you
know, what are the, and could you drop, could you revert, and, and it's a long
subject. It's a whole text book about that. We were looking at it today, but, you
know, it's a long story, but basically I don't believe you slip back from those
bhumis because, because they are to have achieved the extraordinary ability to
perform that perfection, and I don't think you would slip back from that
although I'm not, I'd have to check the book. Clinton, let's put that on the list,
okay. All right. Did that, what was your other question. [student: That was it.]
Yeah, eighth bhumi is a, is, is important because at that bhumi you overcome
certain tendencies to see things as self-existent, and that is nirvana for a
mahayana, for a bodhissatva track person, okay, yeah. [student: Can I clar, try
to, have you clarify something you said about the very beginning of the path of
seeing?] Okay. [student: Did you say that when you enter into the state of
mental absorption and then meditate on emptiness?]               Or does it happen
simultaneous, you mean like that? Yeah, I would say that first you get into that
meditation and you haven't yet got as your object emptiness, and then, you
know, maybe in a minute or five minutes or three minutes you, you start to
have this as your object of meditation, emptiness. [student: And then in that
state of absorption, then did you say that deceptive truth cannot appear to your
mind?] Once, once emptiness becomes the object. [student: Okay. Before that
sensory objects are appearing to your mind?] No, it can't. [student: But, sensory
objects are not appearing, but deceptive appearances can still appear to the
mental consciousness?] Yeah, yeah, for example different thoughts about, the
meditation's going pretty well, I'm not hearing anything, I'm not seeing
anything, you know, like that. Aware, self-awareness could still be happening at
that point. [student: I see, 'cause I'm wondering is that the point where you
would have to bring back to your mind the experience you just had with the
pot?] Oh, no, you don't. You don't consciously bring it back. [student: Then how
can you meditate on emptiness if you don't bring that back?] I think the karma
ripens, you know. The, the sum, you know, it's not, it's not, it doesn't happen
like that. It's not necessary to do that. The, I guess it's momentum of the events
leading up to that, but you, you don't consciously, I mean it's not necessarily true
that you would consciously at that point bring your mind on the, on the pot that
you just saw, okay. [student: And yet, you can focus on emptiness?] Well, it
comes to you, yeah. [student: It's almost sounding as if emptiness is suddenly
becoming self-existent.] No. I, I was afraid somebody was going to ask [laughs]
can, "is emptiness at that moment a projection?" [students: unclear] Well how
could it exist, is, is emptiness itself dependently originating? If its, if it exists it has
to be dependently originating. So therefore, according to all the theory that I've
proposed, it has to be a, you have to be perceiving parts of emptiness, and then
you have to be projecting onto those parts, and, and like that. You have to be
doing that during that moment. Something to think about. What I mean is that
[student: unclear] the perception of emptiness is a result of momentum.
Emptiness is a result of nothing. It's not caused. [student: Well what could give
momentum to that perception?]              All, all those things I mentioned.           The
achievement, there's a big debate you know, there's a big distinction between
emptiness and the achievement of the perception, direct perception of emptiness.
The achievement of the direct perception of emptiness is caused by the
momentum of, of what you've just been through, you know. Renunciation,
studying hard, serving your Lama, and seeing the truth of dependent
origination, and then going into that meditation, and the, what I'm calling, what
I'm saying without necessarily bring to mind exactly the, the event of the pot
that you just went through, the momentum of all those events and your virtue
cause the achievement of the direct perception of emptiness. You can't say
"causes emptiness," because emptiness doesn't have a cause. [student: So what
about the likeness between the cause and the result?] In what sense? [student:
In the sense that giving, there's not a likeness between giving and that
perception of emptiness; there's not a likeness between serving your Lama and
the perception of emptiness. So these causes are not like the result.] That's a
good point. You have to distinguish between what we call {nyerlengyigyu} and
{hlenjik che khen}, okay. {nyerlengyigyu} is the thing which turns into the thing.
It's the material which turns into the result. So like with a ceramic pot it's the
clay. With a sprout of corn it's the corn seed. With the mind at eight forty, eight
thirty seven, it's the mind, it's your mind at eight thirty six that actually flops
over, we say, flops over into the new thing, which provides the main material
for the new result, and that has to be similar stuff. The stuff has to be similar.
There has to be a likeness between a corn seed and a corn sprout. There has to
be likeness between clay and a ceramic pot. There has to be likeness between
your mind at eight thirty six and your mind at eight thirty seven. {hlenjik che
khen} means "contributing factors," and in the case of the sprout it's fertilizer,
earth, water, and sunlight and air, and in the case of the ceramic pot it's the
potter and the wheel and the availability of clay and stuff like that. In the case of
the direct perception of emptiness, the {hlenjik che khen's} are all those virtues,
serving your Lama, you know, doing good things, building him a house, you
know, taking care of his teeth, taking care of his eyes, serving him when he's
sick, cooking for him for years, something like that. Those are the {hlenjik che
khen}. Those are the contributing factors. The thing that flops over into the
direct perception of emptiness is the {tu jung kyi sherab, sam jung kyi sherab},
and {gom jung kyi sherab}, the study, the, the understanding of emptiness that
was created by your study, the uncerstanding of emptiness that was created by
your contemplation, and the understanding of emptiness that was created by
meditating on your contemplation in an intellectual way, and that all flops over
into the direct perception of emptiness. That's the mind, mind states that became
the wisdom which perceives emptiness directly.           So you're talking about
contributing factors, and, and main material that becomes that, you know, okay.
Excuse me, one more thing, and without those {hlenjik che khen's} forget it. You
know, you can have all the corn seeds in the world but if there's no water you
can sit there and pray all day long, and that's what happens to people. That's
what happens to American Buddhist practitioners, you know.                 I'll study
emptiness for years from a book, but I don't have the contributing factors of
guru yoga, and, and you know, normal old virtues, not lying, not stealing,
taking care of other people's lives, you know, not committing sexual misconduct,
and, and it's not enough just to study, you, you have to have, you could have
real neat corn seeds, and if you don't have all the other stuff, forget it. It won't
work, and, and people get frustrated.            They say "I've been studying
madhyamika. I've been meditating. I don't understand what's going on. I'm not
sure if it's correct. Nothing's happening," and you gotta look at the contributing
factors, and those are necessary contributing factors. They're like water and, and
soil. [student: On the homework I was confused about number three, "The
principle most important for reaching an intellectual understanding of emptiness
at the path of preparation"] That's {chi jedrak}. It's the thing about the quality
and characteristic, quality and characteristic.
There's something about, listen, okay, there's something about thinking about
that which is very important. Car and Chevrolet. Quality and characteristic.
There's a big clue there. There's big ammunition there. There's something very
important there. It is very, very {je tumba, cha tumba}. It's very, very good
fertilizer for that moment of seeing what the pot really was. Somehow, the
knowledge of, of car and Chevrolet, quality and characteristic, studied sincerely,
becomes the {nyerlengyigyu}, the stuff that flops over into {chu chok}, the, the
final moment when you understand dependent origination, that you understand
that you're watching a mental image. Somehow all of that study of {chi jedrak} is
extremely important for, for that to happen. They call {dura}, which is baby logic
book, you know, {dura}, they call it the key to madhyamika. They call it the key
to understanding emptiness. These are elementary topics, mostly concerning
perception that come from Dharmakirti's logic books. So really, I mean, a lot of
Tsongkapa's students used to say the kindest thing he ever did for me was to
teach me Buddhist logic, and you wouldn't think that Buddhist logic would have
much to do with seeing emptiness, but there, there's, Buddhist logic and
perceptual theory are, are intimately related, and once you study how you see
things, it gives you a lot of big push. That's why Dharmakirti spent his life on it.
It gives you a big push into understanding {chi jedrak} and if you get that right
you're going to see dependent origination quickly, immediately. [student: Could
you give some more examples besides a car and a Chevy?] Any, any set and
subset. I'll give you the classic one. It's called {she drup kyi nyamshak}. Say {she
drup kyi} [repeat] {namshak} [repeat] {she drup kyi} [repeat] {namshak}. A two-
page summary of all existing objects, okay [laughs]. You start with existence.
It's up here, okay, and then two subsets coming off, and that's changing things
and unchanging things, mistranslated as permanent and impermanent, okay.
Changing things and unchanging things. Why do I say "mistranslated"? Is empt,
which side is emptiness on? It's unchanging. Is it permanent? Not at all. The
day I destroy this black board, white board, it's emptiness goes out of existence.
Did it change? No. It's quality was always the same. It was never more or less
pure emptiness, but there, but if I destroy the basis of it, it can't exist any more.
There's no more emptiness of the white board, 'cause there ain't no more white
board. So emptiness is not permanent, but it is unchanging, and that, I, it's a
very bad translation. It screws up a lot of people, okay, so [laughs]. There's a
word in Tibetan called {takpa} and {mitakpa} [unclear] I don't know what it is,
anyway, and it's been translated throughout the history of Buddhism in, in the
West, as permanent and impermanent, and in the case of this philosophy, not in
the case of, for example, the impermanence of death in the Lam Rim, it cannot be
translated as permanent or impermanent, because black boards, the emptiness
of black board is not permanent but it is {takpa} because it's unchanging. It'
quality is unchanging. So anyway, changing and unchanging. You go over to
the, so there you've got one {chi} and two {jedrak's}, two, two characteristics and
one quality, okay. Being an existing thing is characteristic of all unchanging
things. Being an existing thing is also characteristic of all changing things. You
want some more. Go over to changing things. They split into three, okay. Say
{suk} [repeat] {shepa} [repeat] {demin duchi} [repeat]. Physical changing things,
mental changing things, and changing things which are neither mental nor
physical [laughs], and an example of that is Jay Siller, Jay. Jay is not Jay's body.
Jay is not Jay's mind, but Jay is changing. Jay is a concept. It's a changing thing
which is neither mental nor physical, okay. There's an example, okay. Those are
three. Want to go further? Nah. Mind, you could go into main mind and
mental functions.       Main, basic awareness, and then the particular mental
functions, anger, jealousy, concentration, focus, feeling, sensation, and then you
could keep going like, but every time you split it all of the subsets are {jedrak} of
the {chi}. The minute you split it the {jedrak} becomes ano, a {chi} for something
below it, so {chi} and {jedrak} are not contradictory. You can be a {chi} and a
{jedrak} at the same time. It depends on which way you're looking at it. As the,
as the mother of a subset, or as the subset of another mother, okay. [student:
About the physical and the mental and about perception, and you have like eye,
ear, nose, you know, and then mind is a separate one, and it seems to me, the
way I've understood you, you're saying that the eye ones aren't physical, but
you just said it divided into physical and mental, and I thought you said if it's the
eye consciousness, it's consciousness so therefore it's mental, but then sometimes
I know they say that like eye, ear, the sense consciousnesses are physical, so...]
You have to distinguish between the eye faculty, and the consciousness of your,
and the visual consciousness, okay. The visual consciousness, awareness of red
and square, awareness of red and square is something mental. Red and square
is, is physical. The awareness of red and square depends on a small group of
cells at the back of the eyeball called {mikke wangpo}, the, "the power of the eye,
the faculty of the eye," and that is physical matter, okay, like that. This is first
chapter of the Abhidharma, long story [laughs]. Eye faculty is physical. The eye
consciousness is mental.        [student: I understand that during the path of
habituation, after the experience of emptiness that you're using], first direct
experience of emptiness [student: I guess it's correct to saying you're using the
merit of that direct experience of emptiness to remove the klesha during the
path of habituation.] We're going to talk about that tomorrow. We're going to
talk about, we've already touched on it briefly, but we're going to talk about
what, what that {sosor tak gok} stuff, how does understanding these events help
you to remove your mental afflictions permanently, and why is it true that if you
don't perceive these events {sosor tok}, you can never remove your mental
afflictions permanently, okay. [student: So even...] No, it's not just the karma.
Well, ultimately everything is [laughs], but I mean it's, it's understanding these
and applying it to everyday situations in your life that is the bread and butter of
the path of habituation. [student: I'm trying to get to another question though. If
I remember correctly, the final klesha is the propensity of that tendency to
project a self-existent nature] the inherent tendency [student: onto the event that
we're perceiving] Yeah, the inherent tendency to think it comes from its own
side. [student: So once that's removed then the individual enters nirvana.] Yeah,
that is nirvana. The, the removing and the entering are the same thing.
[student: So once an individual is in the state of nirvana, is dependent origination
and emptiness simultaneously perceived?] Good question, okay, good question.
By the way, they are still living in the world of de, of, of relative truth. They are
still, you know, they can still see red and colors and, they just don't get mad any
more, or they don't get jealous any more. They're incapable of it, but they're still
perceiving those objects. They just don't think they're self-existent any more.
Only a Buddha can simultaneously focus on, on emptiness and relative truth at
the same time. Only a Buddha can simultaneously focus on, on emptiness, on,
on ultimate reality and deceptive reality at the same time. [student: Is that, I
wonder, the removal of that final klesha, is it sometimes compared in intensity
and significance to that initial experience of emptiness.] I don't think there's
anything like the initial thing [laughs], but, but of course it's a big threshold. It's
like, I'd say, second most important threshold, maybe, I don't know, but it's
definitely a big event, definitely a big event. What happens then is that you no
longer believe in self-existence and things no longer seem to be self-existent, and
from that point back to the point of seeing emptiness directly, things, you know
they're not self-existent but they look self-existent, okay, and after the eighth
bodhissatva bhumi, if you're on the bodhissatva track, and you get rid of the
inherent tendency to see things that way that even bugs and amebas have,
things no longer look self-existent. Is that Buddhahood? No. You still have
some, there are, there are still some activities that you undertake in order to
reach omniscience. [student: unclear] [laughs] If have to think they're pretty
close. I, I can't say from experience, but, but I, but I, what I mean is ending,
when you get to point were things stop looking self-existent, between that point,
and the point where you can perceive every object in the universe, past, present,
and future at the same moment, there's a little time between there [laughter].
No, really. That's what the other bhumis are for, you know, okay. Yes. [student:
unclear ... to that one yet?] Sure, anything you want. [student: So I
wasn't able to listen fast enough to what was going on yesterday about that
direct sensation of bodhichitta if you're on the bodhissatva path. I just wanted to
catch that more specifically, and like what if you've just been giving bodhichitta
kind of lip service, not that you think of yourself as a hinayanist...] Yeah, right.
There's a thing called {semkye chuma, chuma. Chuma} means, the example my
Lama always used to give, we used to travel a lot to Washington, D.C. We'd
always stop in the same restaurant. The same waitresses would say "Hi, hayow
are yew?" and he would joke about them, and they would bring out this fake
[end of tape]