ACI 6 «Сутра Алмазного Огранщика», занятие 7

Class @

Um, kind of hot [laughs]. The Sutra says if you have enough virtue the shadows
will turn from their natural positions and cover you.[laughter] Could wait a long
time I guess [laughs], [laughter]. The next part of the Diamond Cutter Sutra is, is
very cool. The Buddha says to Subudhi, “Subudhi if, if any bodhisattva came up
to you and said, and you asked the bodhisattva what are you up to? And the
bodhisattva says ‘I’m working to achieve my Buddha paradise, I’m trying to
prepare my Buddha paradise so I’ll have some place to go when I get there.” He
says “If somebody said that to you he would be a lair.” Okay. He says that
{demba ma la} it says, “he wouldn’t be speaking the truth.” What he means is, of
course what?




[students: [many voices, unclear]




Yea. Any bodhisattva came up and said to you I’m gonna, I’m making, I’m
working on my paradise. And if, and if that paradise in that bodhisattva’s mind
was a self existent paradise he’d be a lair because you can’t [pause]




[students: unclear]




you can’t get to a self existent paradise because it’s a [pause]




[students: unclear]




{Gakja}. It’s a {gakja}, it’s a {gakja}, right? [laughs] they don’t exist. No such
thing exists. If they say I’m working for a self-existent par, Buddha paradise
they’d be a lair because there’s no such thing that,. A self-existent thing is non
existent, that’s the irony of what causes our suffering. The irony of ignorance is
that you are attached to something that don’t even exist. It’d be okay if it was
something that existed. It’d be a little bit easier to live with, you know. But we
are responding to things that don’t exist. A self-existent boss who screams at me
externally to my own projections, doesn’t exist. And so my screaming back is
predicated on, on believing in something that doesn’t even exist. That’s the hard
part, I mean, that’s the part that hurts the most you know, [laughs]. I’m reacting
to something that doesn’t even exist. Then the Buddha says, he says “Buddha
paradises don’t exist.” He says “that person would be a lair because Buddha
paradises don’t exist, the paradise of a Buddha does not exist. What’s the punch
line? [pause] Self-existantly, right? But he doesn’t say that. So of course the Sutra
has been interpreted all kinds of wild ways throughout history, and you can read
many books and even books about this Sutra that interpret it, in, in a quite
unusual way. [laughs] okay. Because that’s a hard thing to understand. And
then he says because they don’t exist we can call them Buddha paradise.




[students: unclear]
Which fits in perfect with this thing about imputations, you know. Because they
don’t exist independently of our imputations, our projections, therefore we can
call them Buddha paradises, if they, if they existed any other way we couldn’t call
them Buddha paradises. And what he’s trying to say is that okay they do exist,
of course they exist but they exist in name only,they exist by imputation, they
exist by your mind projecting on to certain parts, certain data, a thing called
Buddha paradise, and then calling it Buddha paradise. Is that something that you
can do right now voluntarily, at will? No it’s forced on you by your past karma,
by your past deeds. I thought you might be interesed in a scenario. We got up
to where? Where did we last leave our bodhisattva? Eighth level, okay? Eighth
level, got rid of your mental afflictions, got rid of their seeds, only extremely
subtle kinds of energy left for ignorance, still have to reach the point where you
can see all existing objects, something has to go between level eight and level
ten.      Something has to go on between level eight and reaching full
enlightenment. And at this point the scriptures stumble, okay? And, and all
these Buddhist scholars in Tibet are trying to figure out exactly what happens
during the last few moments, you know. And, and pretty much they’re in
agreement that this is like so far beyond us that it’s very hard for a human being
who, whose not close to that to, to figure out exactly what’s going on. So I’m
gonna give you a presentation from one of the Prajnaparamita scriptures. This
is as, as, as detailed as it gets, and it’s a little like reading a science fiction story,
okay, and, and maybe it won’t click or anything, and I’m just gonna put it up
here and you do the best you can with it, okay? This is from the scriptures. The
process seems a little like science fiction, but, it’s, it’s almost impossible for us to
imagine what it is like, so. Eight steps mentioned in that sutra, okay. Eight steps
mentioned in this Prajnaparamita text.                 [pause: writing on the board].
Apparently you are is some pre-paradise called Okmin, okay, like you’re very,
very close to a total Buddha paradise, but you are in a paradise called Okmin.
This is the result of incredible amounts of virtue. You have been practicing the
Six Perfections and the result of that is called {Shing Dak Dro} which means "the
purification of your own Buddha field", your own Buddha paradise, so you are
very close and you are in a place called Okmin, and it’s the same for every body,
you’ll be a place called your own Okmin, I’ll be in my Okmin. Okay?, like that.
[pause: writing]. By the way this is emptiness, okay? [continues writing].




[student: you see emptiness [unclear]
Yea, you are in the direct perception of emptiness, it’s called {par che me lam}.
And it is called, say {gyun te} [repeat], what’s it calling here yea. {gyun te par che
me lam}, {gyun te} [repeat] {par che me lam} [repeat]. {Par che me lam}, means
the direct perception of emptiness. {Gyun ta} means, {gyun} means the stream
of your samsaric existance, and {ta} means the final moment. Okay? So you are
what we call a bodhisattva in the final moment of samsaric existance, okay? That
triggers six events, the next six events all happen at the same time, okay?




[student: unclear]




Can I [laughs]




[student: This is the seventh level? The final one is the seventh]




No tenth, tenth. We’re talking just before you enter enlightenment.




[student: I thought the eighth level bodhisattva was no longer in[unclear]]




That’s a good point. Let’s say [pause], well he’s not in Buddhahood yet so I don’t
know where he is. We’ll call it samsaric existence, I mean technically he’s, there’s
a big debate about it, is he out of suffering yet? Hard to say, but they do say
{sitay parma}, lets say samsara, okay. The next six things all happen at once.

In general you can divide all existing objects into the sum total of all existing
objects and the real nature of all existing objects, this refers to number one. So
this being, in the first, this is the first moment of enlightenment, this being is, is
now perceiving directly every object that exists in the universe either past,
present or future, okay. He reached the final end. "Final end" here is called
{Yang Dak Ta}. It’s a big subject in Prajnaparamita and it’s a code name for the
end of aging and death, okay. This is the end of aging and death.




[student: Let me see if I get my numbers straight, so are we talking about six
things now, that are, these two things are all the same thing?]




Yea, these two are happening before enlightenment, okay. And the next six are
during the first moment of enlightenment, okay.




[student: Are they all related to the bhumis? ]




There’s a big debate about it, but you can call it going from nine to ten or
something like that. Some times ten to enlightenment but




[student: This is all after the eighth level?]




Ah, well there are ten bhumis total, and, and, we’re describing how you enter
the tenth bhumi, which is, which is enlightenment, roughly, there’s a big debate
about it, but some people say ten and then after that there’s something else but,
and that’s enlightenment, some people say ten’s enlightenment. I think it gets
fuzzy, because you have to be there to know, I guess.

They can’t say grow or generate or develop the Dharmakaya, ’cause the
Dharmakaya is, is, is, is, unchanging and, and can’t go through a process of being
smaller and getting bigger and then being complete like an adult or something,
it’s just there. It’s either there or not there. It passes from not being into being,
but it doesn’t go through a growth process or something like that. So it just
comes into existence, okay. It comes into existence at that moment, you have
the Dharmakaya, okay. Now how does this differ from number three, I’m not
completely sure but it would now include the true nature of all objects as
opposed to just the total quantity of all objects. And what this refers to is the
ability of a Buddha which is unique to a Buddha to see normal objects and see
emptiness directly at the same time, only a Buddha can do it. How they do it, I
mean when you get in the debate ground, we were talking about it the other
day and you start to discuss perception of something the first thing you always
say is {Sangye miemba shay shat}, which means let’s not talk about Buddhas
okay? [laughs, laughter]. I mean, like how do they do what they do? Very
difficult, very difficult to explain.




[student: [unclear] Does Okmin have a foundation?]




Ah, the, the literal, literal meaning of the words is below none, below none.
{Ok} means "below" and {min} means "none", so it means highest. There’s two
Okmins, one is a level of, in samsara, there’s, there’s a samsaric level of existence
called Okmin, and then there’s a paradise called Okmin. So you might see them
used in different ways and you have to be careful. This is talking about the
Buddha paradise called Okmin. The point here is that that, the body of that
bodhsattva at the last moment of samsaric existence provides the raw material.
It’s that { Nir leng gye gui} that we talked about last night, it’s the stuff which
turns into the enjoyment body, it flops over into the enjoyment body, okay.
Yea?




[student Elly: So you’re saying there’s no [unclear] for the Dharmakaya, how do
we see emptiness as [unclear]




It is, you can’t say {gyuto} please.




[student Elly: [unclear] you don’t have to let]
Well you can’t say cause, it doesn’t have a cause, okay




[student Elly:   I thought it was...[unclear, question continues while Geshela
answering]]




A little tricky, {two questions at once} the basis changes and the, and that
emptiness, it’s still the emptiness of your mind, that’s true. But now your mind if
you want to get technical has two extraordinary qualities, one is the emptiness
that it always had. But now it is empty in another way as well, and that, that is
that it is totally devoid of all obscurations, all obstacles, so in that case the
emptiness in the Buddha’s mind is slightly different from the emptiness of your
mind although, the thing which becomes the emptiness of the Buddha’s mind
you have now. And that is your, your [sugate gaba]. Okay.




       [ from here on taken from the video sound track]




Number eight is that your, the causes which will allow you to send out infinite
number of emanation bodies are complete. What that means is that it implies
that it takes another micro second to send them out, okay, they have to be sent
out from a, from an enlightened being. So there's a gap, there's a time gap, ya
know it takes a micro second to get them moving cause there's no enlightened
being to send them out yet, okay. Glass of liquid, okay, there's a glass of liquid
on the table, there's a preta, a human and a worldly pleasure being sitting
around it, and they all see a different thing. One of them sees water, one of them
sees a glass of blood and puss, and one of them sees a glass of nectar of the gods,
okay. And ah, and, and every object in the world is the same and at this point in
the sutra the Buddha says, "Ya know, I'm not just talking about Buddha
paradises, I'm talking about every object in the world". It's true of every object in
the world that they don't exist and because it's, and because they don't exist we
can call them what they are. So really if you, now let's posit a fourth person
sitting around the table, and that's a Buddha, okay, and you've reached level
number ten, you made it, you're sitting around the table, you're looking at the
water, uh, liquid [laughs, laughter] real human bias, ah [laughs, laughter]. And,
and what do you see?




[student: unclear}




[laughs] Well you're aware how other beings see them, you know, do you
experience samsara as a Buddha? I mean, this was, I had the honor of being the
first debater on the day that Pabonka Rimpoche, the new one, took his geshe
exam. Cause I'm the, at the time I was the oldest non geshe in our college, and
he's in our college, so I had the honor of making the first debate. And I said "Do
Buddhas go through, do Buddhas experience samsara?" And then he said "What
do you mean?" and I said" Well, is he aware of what the other two people are
seeing. Because what they are seeing is samsara. That's suffering so if, if the
Buddhas see what the other beings see which he has to see if he's gonna see
every thing, then isn't he experiencing samsara? You know, and ah, and that is
he aware of their pain, and doesn't that make him sad and isn't that a kind of
suffering?" So it was like a two hour [laughs] back and forth and I, you have to
think about it. But basically you can say, I believe they say it in this way.
Samsaric objects can present themselves, they can be aware that you are
perceiving these objects as samsara, but they don't experience them as samsara.
They, they are aware that that's how you see them, but they can't see them that
way, okay, themselves. So that you're sitting around and, and you're a Buddha
and you're sitting at this table in this special bar and ah, you're seeing a glass full
of totally, total bliss, it's, it's total bliss, the experience in, for a Buddha is that
every, every part of every object that they perceive is creating total bliss in
them. So it would be as if, I mean like to say think of the most pleasant
experience you've ever had in you're life, I mean everyone has two of three that
they cherish ya know, but I don't care if it is physical or mental or what ever, but
imagine the moment of your life that you had the most extreme and intense
pleasure, you know maybe it lasted for five minutes or something. And then
imagine that every single object in your life could, could, culd, could, could
trigger the same emotion in you all the time. I mean that's, that's how you have
to think of a Buddha field, so like the flowers there and the leaves on the trees
are, are provoking this intense bliss in them all the time and, and every single
existing object that, that, the squareness of the paper, the whiteness, the thinness,
the sharpness, the, the smoothness, every detail of every object is producing
total bliss in that being, okay. How, how could that happen? Okay we have to
talk about how could that happen, very dear to our heart's subject ya know. It
would be nice [laughs] . The first question and the obv, now it becomes very
simple to answer these deep questions. Is there two glasses of liquid on the table
or, I mean are there four glasses or just one? It's just one, okay. [laughter]. If
you don't go deeper is there [laughs, laughter] that's the right one if I don't say
go deeper. There's only one glass of water there , so now I ask you, liquid, sorry
[laughs, laughter]. Yeah, [laughs, laughter]. Where is this paradise? And I mean
specifically do you have to go somewhere else. I mean now the answer becomes
obvious. It's not like you have to ask the waitress to bring another glass of
liquid. Okay. {laughs, laughter] Okay. You're dealing with the data which is
already present. That's, that's one interesting point, okay, in other words
Buddha paradise is not like three miles up there or four miles that way or, or
something like that. The data for your paradise is around you now. It is your
world. You don't need to go somewhere else to find the raw material. You just
can't synthesize it in the right way right now 'cause you're not being forced to by
any ultimate karma. Ya know, by all these collected karma. The data is there.
You could be experiencing this world in a completely different way. It's just that
your mind is not cooking up the right interpretation of that data, okay, it's not
synthesizing it in an ultimate way 'cause it can't if you don't have the karmato do
it, the karmic seeds are not there to force you to see it that way, and by the way
it sounds very artificial and it is, but that's what makes it real and we'll talk about
that tomorrow. One more point about that, what, and that, and that pretty
much wraps up Buddha paradise. Okay, what is the difference between samsara
and a Buddha paradise? Why, why, why is samsara like this and why is a
Buddha paradise so much different? What's the basic difference between the
two, what makes them different?




[student: wouldn't it be [unclear]]




Yeah




[student: [unclear]
Yeah, yeah , yeah, we call {le nyomo gui wang gyi} okay, {le nyomo gui}, the
two big trouble makers.

There's an idea in Christianity, what's it called, original sin, or something like
that, ya know like the world is defective from the start. We have a very similar
idea. Samsara, your body, your mind, my body, my mind, everything about me
and the world I live in is defective from the word go. There's a basic defect,
there's a certain energy in our bodies, in our minds, in our world, which, which
screws-up everything and has to and always will, I mean until you get out. By
the way getting out of samsara now becomes a little tricky, right. Ya always
thought it was like leaving L.A. [laughter] What's it called, what movie we going
to see tonight, where's that guy? [laughter] Where's Ragdna? [laughter]
What'd you pick for tonight?[laughs] Anyway it's not like doing a, you know, it's
not like ya go anywhere, it's not like running away from anywhere. We, the
world we live in and every experience that we are allowed to have now, that we
are capable of is defective because it's running from the engine of these two
things, these two things are, are, are running it, they're, they're calling the shots
they are producing your world right now. {Le} means "dirty kar, karma", okay,
"impure karma", {sak chay kyi le}, and {nyomo} means "mental afflictions" and
you had a nice introduction to them this morning. And they've been close
friends for a long time, okay. So these two are calling the shots. In any world
where these two are calling the shots, if they are infecting your world nothing's
gonna go right, ultimately you'll always have, you'll always have frictions with
other people, your body will be uncooperative, it will keep getting older and
uglier. [student chuckles]. You'll loose your sight, you'll loose your hearing,
you'll loose your ability to taste things, you've got to have triple strong coffee
before you can face anything [laughter]. You can't do the things you used to do,
you don't have the energy you used to have, eventually one of those organs
miss-fires and, and they take you to the hospital. And, and it has to go like that,
with, unless you do something now there will be no other course of action it
must end up like that because it's being generated by karma and klashas. By
karma and bad deeds. It, it was created, this body was created, this kind of body
was created by karma and bad deeds. By dirty karma, okay. It can only be that,
it can have no other end, and you can't be happy until you get rid of {nyomo},
impossible, never will be no matter how you adjust your life, and we spend our
lives adjusting our lives, maybe if I did a little more yoga, ya know, maybe if I
ate those other vitamins, ya know, maybe if this guy would leave my office
[laughs], ya know, maybe if I just had a little more free time to myself things
would be all right, it's not gonna be all right, didn't you figure that out yet?
[laughs, laughter]. I mean did'n, didn't it click yet, ya gotta be forty-three and
you still didn't figure that out [laughing through this explanation] try a different
partner ya know [laughs].




[student: unclear . good deeds without....]




Right, exactly, exactly. She said "what's dirty karma?"          I said " Good deeds
without the knowledge of emptiness."




[student: unclear]




Basically. It's, what is it create, it creates good dinners, which has as the tail of the
dog getting hungry again, okay. Always have.

So now on this basis the answer that the two people gave was, yeah this is the
big difference between a Buddha paradise and samsara. Buddha paradise ain't
got these tow things running it. These two things are not generating a Buddha
paradise. A Buddha paradise being maintained, that, that projection is being
maintained and, and perpetuated like fission, ya know less energy going in more
paradise coming out by, by something which is total free of mental affliction and
karma, dirty karma, okay. It's being generated by different causes, there's no
taste of either one of these in, in what's keeping a Buddha field going, ya know,
in what's keeping a Buddha paradise up. Ya know what's keeping it running, it,
it doesn't have any one of these two, therefore there's no? Suffering, yeah.
Impossible and, and there's a, there's a thing in the scripture that says there's a
word missing in the vocabulary of those beings. They don't even have it in their
dictionaries, and that's suffering. The word for that thing doesn't exist there,
'cause there's no such thing. Some people say that would be boring, it's not
boring, you got all these emanation bodies now to send out to trillions of worlds,
quite, quite happily busy, okay. [laughs] It's not like static or nothing going on
there, it's alot of fun, okay and all those bodies going out and taking care of
zillions of people at the moment when they are ready to have it, okay. We'll
probably take a break, any questions? And, and this, this is exactly what you
asked, okay, um which is this; well basically how you're gonna get it to happen,
and it's this; if you are that guy and you're having your fingers and arms cut off,
or in the modern world if your boss is screaming at you for losing out on a big
deal for the company, same thing [laughs, laughter], and, and you just totally
understand the emptiness and you know that you don't want to perpetuate this
thing so you do not respound with violence, you know, you respound at best
with nuetral, I'm sorry, at least with neutra, at best with some kind of
compassion. Suppose you start acting like that today. Suppose you could do it
perfectly from today. Do you collect any new dirty karma?




[Student: yea}




Hum?




[Students: yea, sure]




No, I'm talking total arhat.




[Student: no]




Never again a bad thought, never again the slightest trace of a bad thought. Are
you, are you creating any more dirty karma?




[Students: no.(lots of answers all at once)]




Do you have any karmic pockets?
[Students: yea, sure]




Yea, now there's, there's a defect in the presentation, okay? Okay, from the time
point of view that you're an arhat on you're not collecting any new bad karma.
But you sure have alot of old bad karma. How old is it?




[Students: unclear]




And I'll ask you this way, is bad karma you created in this life, or is it bad karma
you've created in the life just before that, or is it bad karma that you created in
every life before that?




[Student: all three]




All three, okay. Abhidharma says of course all three, you have all three in your
karmic pocket. So now we have a problem, how long's it gonna take to reach
this Buddha paradise? No problem if you have a, no problem if you could shut it
all off now, in other words what I am saying is we have to deal with new dirty
bad karma and we have to deal with pockets of old dirty karma. To get to
Buddha paradise it is not enough to see emptiness now and start acting right
now. It's not enough, that only deals with the new bad karma, we have to talk
about how to get rid of old bad karma. According to the Hinayana, according to
the lower school you can not wear off that old bad karma, you can't accelerate it,
you must experience it, there's no getting out of old bad karma, you must go
through all the bad experiences from the karma you have stored up. You have
to wait until it wears off. Could take many, many millions of years, okay. You
have to wait until it all wears off. That's the Hinayana position. Mahayana says
something totally different. Mahayana says there is a method by which you can
accelerate that karma or even short circuit it. It's like, I always tell people it's like
this movie I saw with John Travolta, it's about an atom bomb, what was that,
um, Broken Arrow, yea. And the whole movie is about atomic bombs about to
go off and smart people turning them off at the last minute, you know, like
here's this huge potential called an atomic bomb and all these guys, good guys
and bad guys are all, you know as the counter goes down on the read out and
you're sitting at the edge of your seat, you know, they always, Christian Slatter,
is that the guy?




[Student: I didn't see that one}]




 you have to see movies [laughter] . He's always able to, to tinker with it at the
last minute, he's got guts, he doesn't run, no place to run anyway and he's
[continuos laughter] and he's tinkering with it and he's always, at the last three
seconds, ya know he's always pulling out the right wire and, and it stops and the
thing doesn't go off, that's exactly what we're talking about. We're talking about
how do you manipulate, how do you short circuit your old, your old karma, you
know it's of great interest to people who have already learned how not to create
new bad karma, which is where your at now. You already know the trick to not
creating new dirty karma. Now you just have to figure out how to short circuit
the old bad karma and you could reach paradise in this very life. In this
existence. The glass of liquid [laughs], could turn into a total bliss without going
anywhere and we just have to learn how to do that. Yea? Nope. So we're gonna
take a break and when you get back we're gonna talk about , yea?




[Student: unclear]




Okay




[Student: unclear]
Yea




[Student: unclear]




Right. She said ' suppose you're emanating as the Dalai Lama, suppose the Dalai
Lama's one of your emanation bodies that you are sending out, then are you
aware of the pain of getting old, getting bald, getting wrinkely, getting stooped
over, loosing your energy, are you aware of that? The answer is, do you think
he's experiencing his life that way? No? You don't know for sure. If you're an
honest Buddhist, logical Buddhist you have to say look I don't know for sure. I
don't know who he really is, I can not vouch for who he is really, but based upon
the evidence that I have that I can vouch for, and based on my knowledge of
what enlightenment is like, and based on my knowledge of, of the glass of liquid
in the bar , the Dal, it's, it's totally plausible and, and could very well be
happening that he ain't experiencing his body at all the way you and me are
experiencing it. Okay And that makes sense, you know, if my mind is not pure,
purified yet I could be seeing, I could have the incredible good karma to have a
Dalai Lama in the world by the way everyone who ever meets him, everyone
who ever hears about him, and you could throw in Lama Zopa, Lama Osel,
Lama Yeshe before, if you have the experience to even hear about them or see
them, or hear something they said and if they are walking on this planet you
already have an, an extraordinary amount of virtue, you know, like everybody
on the planet, we talked about communal karma this morning, everybody on
this planet in 1996 has the communal karma to see the Dalai Lama walking
around on the planet and that's an incredibly powerful virtue, that virtue's
wearing out. Okay, that virtue is wearing out, and, and as it's wearing out you
will see him getting older and older, okay and when it reaches a certain point of,
of weakness that karma, you will see the Dalai Lama pass in this life, okay, and
what he sees, he's up in dharmakaya, no problem for him if he is a Buddha. You
have to say if, you know. And he probably is from all I can see, but if you see
this peson gettin old and passing from this planet, that's, that's your good karma
wearing out, in other words you can't ride on good karma for ever, you, you
must take advantage of it while it's, while, you got it, that's what they talk about
a precious human rebirth. You know your good karma, every moment that
your in this body and every moment your in a class and every moment your
reading a scripture or being a Buddhist your wearing out good karma, and it will
end. And, and if you don't do it you have to do it before it wears out your out of
luck, ya know to get this kind of good karma back again is, is, almost impossible,
I mean the scriptures say never again and then they say okay one in a trillion,
you know, but ah {len che gyepa droway dencho de} you know {len che gyepa}
means "only one time" that you get this kind of circumstances, and it's wearing
out, your Dalai Lama karma's wearing out, your body karma's wearing out,
your Buddhism class karma's wearing out. And, and you will loose these beings
and you'll be back to zero. You literally go back to zero, okay. Two question
and then we'll




[Student: unclear]




By the way you don't have to wait to the end, it could be next year, okay




[ student: continues, unclear]




Oh no it does carry over , absolutely it carries over, I mean in any moment that
you can pick up a Dharma book and instead of picking up a newspaper it's no
waste of time, it's, it's all, it's an ecology, nothing is lost. I had a great Lama, a
Mongolian Lama and ah hum, and he just [starts to cry] as he was passing away
he was reading elementary logic, ya know, and I said 'Geshela you know you're
dying why are you reading the kindergarten book for the monastery?" He said "
Gotta get ready." [laughs, laughter]. So ah [still laughing], so nothing is lost,
nothing is wasted, the slightest Dharma thing you can do is, is saved and stored
and worth it, you know. One more question.




[Student: unclear]




Oh, absolutely, but when you teach Dharma your supposed to be very
patronistic, so, so, so people will get off their rear ends and, and [laughs,
laughter] do something you know, but by being, yea absolutely, but the
collective amount that got you here is almost impossible, the odds are, they
describe in the scripture something like a nine hundred and ninety nine to one
that you won't be able to pull it off. That you won't be able to pull off collecting
as much good karma which created your present circumstances for the future so
you must do it now. You have to do it now. Hunh?




[Student: unclear]




You say? Oh yea [laughs], Yea, yea. Okay take a break [laughs].




[prayer: short mandala]




[silence]




[prayer: refuge]




There's this idea of a stupa, okay, stupa, {chorten}, like this stupa and a, the idea
is that the place is holy ground, if, if you go around this stupa in a certain way or
if you make prostrations to this stupa in a certain way, when you make offerings
at this stupa in a certain way then you collect some very good karma. It's very,
very holy ground. And then the Diamond Sutra says that, the next thing it says
that, any place where this sutra is taught carefully and people are listening to it
seriously then that place becomes holy ground, that, that physical location
becomes holy ground, so that's the good news [laughs], it is holy ground here
now, okay, where you have sat will always be holy ground now. So that's very
cool I think. Now for the bad news [laughs], the Buddha says that, right after
that he says, "by the way all the people who were in that place when that sutra
was taught because of the teaching of that sutra will now experience extreme
suffering" [laughs], okay, he says 'anyone who was in that class, anyone who
understood what was going on they can expect some disasters in their life, okay,
like real suffering [laughs].




[Student: unclear]




And that's because the em, the study of emptiness accelerates your bad karma.
We're talking about your old pockets of bad karma, your pockets of old bad
karma. Now what are you gonna do with these old karmas? Is there any way
you can diffuse them, or get them to go off sooner in a lesser way or something
like that? And the Mahayana says absolutely yes, okay, and it's intimately
connected with the study of emptiness. And when I heard it was a Hinayana,
Mahayana thing I thought, "oh this is probably something that the, that the
Tibetan Lamas made up or something like that, you know this thing about short
circuiting karma or wearing out karma it's probably some later edition to the
scriptures by somebody who was trying to be optimistic or something," I mean,
Tibetan Buddh, Buddhism is, is often, people say "oh that's just those Lamas
made that up", you know, or "that's just those Lamas trying, trying to be a little
more optimistic", you know. The process of short circuiting your karma, the
process of purifying your old bad karma, first of all it's obviously taught in the
Diamond Cutter Sutra and you can read it, and it's there, and you don't have to
take my word for it, you have it in your reading today okay. The Buddha
directly says "anyone who studies this subject deeply will suffer because their
old bad karma will accelerate and it will ripen faster." So what's the use, I mean
maybe it'd be better to stretch it out a little [laughs], so you can, it's like would
you rather have one big root canal or four cavities, you know, I mean [laughs],
it'd be better to stretch it out a little bit. Then the sutra says well but the second
point is that it comes back in an infinitely lesser form, okay, that when you
accelerate it by the study of emptiness and the karma comes back to you, it
ripens upon you quickly, it's infinitely less than it would have been if you hadn't
studied the Diamond Cutter Sutra and the example in the Diamond Cutter, sorry
Choney Lama quotes another sutra is that if you were, so if you hada karma in
your karmic pocket that was supposed to lead you to a rebirth in the hells and if
you studied this subject carefully and do the proper purification which has four
steps and we'll talk about it, that karma which was going to lead you to hell will
ripen as a headache in this life, you see. You're accelerating karma and the
karma is coming back much, much less intense. So to learn that trick would be
very important [laughs], we better get to it fast in case somebody dies. Say {tob
she} [repeat], {tob she] [repeat], learn it well, okay, learn it now and learn it well,
and then use it, I mean there's two steps here, you have to learn it and then you
have to use it. Not many people ever learn it, almost nobody uses it [laughs],
okay {tob she}. {Tob} means "force or power, force, {tob, tob} means force, like
energy, strong energy, force," {she} means "four," so the're four steps to this
process, four steps to getting a hell birth to turn into a headache, all right, of
great interest to us, all right, not only from day to day, I mean they would make
you much happier immediately, but also in the process of getting to your
Buddha paradise, you know, you use your knowledge of emptiness to prevent
any new dirty karma and then you wipe out your old dirty karma with these
four powers, then you ain't got no dirty karma left and you don't see a glass of?,
water any more you see a glass of? Bliss, okay, all right. Number one: say {ten
gyi tob} [repeat], {ten gyi tob} [repeat], this is called the " basis force," okay "the
force of the basis, basis force." By the way the, the answer key here is, is messed
up, it says basis force for all four , okay, okay? [laughs}, just so you know if your
grading papers, okay. This is the basis force and the, the idea is this, when you
fall down you have to have some solid ground below you to get back up. When
you, you fall down you have to have, if the ground was like jello you couldn't
get back up, ground has to be, there has to be firm foundation to get back up.
The ida here is that you go back to the basics of Buddhism, and there's two parts
here, one is you go back to taking refuge, you review what it means to take
refuge, we had a taste of it the other day, you take refuge in, what are two of the
refuges, two of the refuge objects are what?




[Students: [unclear]




Yea, dhar, it's Buddha , Dharma, Sangha right, Dharma and Sangha are covered
once you see emptiness directly you've become the objects of refuge, you are
two of the Three Jewels the day that you see emptiness directly, when Buddhists
all over the world take refuge in, in the Three Jewels, hey you're two of them.
They're taking refuge in you, okay, because Sangha Jewel, not sangha but
Sangha Jewel is any one whose seen emptiness directly. Their state of mind is
the Dharma Jewel, is, is Jewel number two, so you got it cov, two and three are
covered already. The Buddha Jewel you don't have yet because you didn't go
through all those other levels. But the main Buddha Jewel is the Dharmakaya
and you saw the Dharmakaya, you were in the presence of the Dharmakaya
because you saw emptiness, okay, so you pretty much got two and a half Jewels
covered just by being your self at that point, okay. So you're taking refuge in
those three objects, okay, go back to taking refuge, you are not taking refuge in
some statue. You are not taking refuge in some book, okay, maybe in the
contents of the book, but I mean don't think of Dharma as, as a book, don't think
of the Buddha as some painting or some statue of a guy with a funny head or
something like that, it's not the point, the main refuge is the knowledge of
emptiness, okay. So you go back to taking refuge, you go back to taking refuge.
Why does it pretect, protect you? Why does that refuge protect you? If you
understand emptiness you are not going to retaliate, if you don't retaliate you
don't collect new bad karma, that's protection, that's refuge, that's the only
refuge, that's the main refuge, okay. That's the first half of the {ten gyi tob}.
Second half of {ten gyi tob} is go back to bodhichitta, you know, go back and
review what it is to have a deep compassion or a deep concern for other people's
problems, okay. Go back to that, go back to those two basics, which is, which is
what {Sangye chudang tsokyi choknam la} is all a, that is the practice, that is it.
Go back to those two, review those two. That's {ten gyi tob}, you get back up
from that. Did you have question? No, okay. What is the second {tob}? Say
{nam par} [repeat], {sun jinpa} [repeat], {tob} [repeat], {Nam par} [repeat], {sun
jinpa} [repeat], {tob} [repeat]. {Nam par sun jinpa} means" to rip something out,"
this is the force of destruction, the force of des, destruction, okay. {Nam par sun
jinpa me du}, to "tear something out from the root," okay. We translate it as the
destruction force.

And at this point most of the Lamas give this, this cool explanation. They say "
three guys are sitting at a bar," [laughs], this keeps coming up right [laughs]
[laughter]. Haven't really been to one lately, but. Three guys are sitting at a bar
[cut] pours out the three shot glasses from the same bottle, these guys are joking
around and they all sitting there and they all grab the shot glassses and they click
glasses they all, they all down it in one gulp, you know, in tibetan they call it
{hoop chick hoop} [all laugh] and then after that, it's really seconds, but the guy
on the first stool starts to go into convulsions [laughs] and, and he falls over dead
and the bar tender is like "oh my God I gave you that, that nitric acid I had on the
shelf," you know, and he, and the second guy is like [choking sounds] and he
falls over dead, you know, and the third guy's watching the first two guys,
[laughter] you know,[laughter] and, and that emotion right after the second guy
falls off the bar stool is, is {sun jinpay tob}. {Sun jinpay tob} [laughter] means,
[continuous laughter] it's called "intelligent regret," it means [laughter] okay,
[laughter] it means that I shouldn't'ave drunk that you know, it's, it's the regret
of an educated Buddhist, okay, it's the regret of an educated Buddhist. If we
have time someday you shou, you have to study Abhidharma fourth chapter
which is how, how is karma planted in your mind, when you commit a karma
how is the seed planted in your mind. Unfortunately the main requirement is
that you be present [laughs and laughter], when the karma is [laughter] is
committed the perception of your self during it plants it and unfortunately
you're always present, so [laughs] so it's, it's primarily the perception of your self
doing it which plants it, what it means is karma is absolutely unforgiving, okay,
if you do a bad deed and you're there when it's done it's planted, that means it's
no good you locking the door of your room and doing it in the privacy of your
own room, you know, 'cause smeone's still there, that's you, so as far as, as non-
virtues or bad karma it doesn't matter who knows or who doesn't know, it
doesn't matter where it's done, it doesn't matter how sneaky you do it, that's still
recorded, it's unforgiving, yeah?




[student: unclear]




Yeah, Yeah




[student: unclear]




Like in the Vinaya they discuss the, the idea of, of temporary insanity, okay, like
if a monk actually goes crazy for some reason of another, usually it's grief, okay,
someone, someone close to him die and if under those conditions he, he does
something you know while he's crazy and he's not even aware of exactly what
he's doing of something like that, it's almost, but he does not break his vow,
okay if he does something that he's not supposed to do, but he's under
temporary insanity you don't break your vow, it's not breaking a vow, okay. So
that's very similar yeah




[student: unclear]




Yeah as, as much [goes to tape ten]
960831-3.aaa

96a.txt Geshe Michael Roach
Diamond Cutter Sutra
Vajrapani Institute, tape 10
Aug. 31, 1996
 transcribed by: Amber Moore

I'm chained to samsara. [laughs] [laughter] It's okay. Okay, next thing in the [b:
Diamond Cutter Sutra], very cool. The... Subhuti comes up to the Buddha and
says," Oh Lord Buddha, you've been giving this teaching, what should we call it?"
You know," What name should we give the teaching you've been giving?" And
if you're reading this sutra for the first time you think he's gonna say," Diamond
Cutter" you know, [laughs] and he doesn't say that, he says...

[silence]

He says, "Let's call it the {Sherab Kyi Paroltu Chinpa}".      Say, {Sherab Kyi}
[repeat], {Paroltu} [repeat], {Chinpa} [repeat]. {Sherab Kyi} [repeat], {Paroltu}
[repeat], {Chinpa} [repeat]. Okay, uh oh [laughs], okay. In Sanskrit...

[silence]

{Prajnya} [repeat], {Parameter} [repeat]. The [b:Perfection of Wisdom]. He says,
"Let's call this book the [b: Perfection of Wisdom]." And as you know, the other
name of this book is the [b: Perfection of Wisdom in Three Hundred Lines], or
something like that. Even though it's not cut up the way that... it's not cut up into
verses but they call it the [b: Perfection of Wisdom], I think, I believe, you would
say verses, although it's not verses, it's the equivalent of the three hundred
verses of text. So they call it, "[b: The Three Hundred]". So sometimes it's called,
[b: The Perfection of Wisdom in Three Hundred]. The Buddha says, "Let's call it
the [b: Perfection of Wisdom]", then he goes on to say some other strange
things, he says, "And by the way, there is no perfection of wisdom." [laughs]
And then he says, "And that's why we can call it the [b: Perfection of Wisdom]."
Okay, let's call it the [b: Perfection of Wisdom], there ain't no perfection of
wisdom, and that's why we can call it the [b: Perfection of Wisdom], that's the
next thing in the sutra, okay. At this point the, the Tibetan commentator,
Chonyi Lama Drakpa Shedrup, he, he goes through the different kinds of,
perfection of wisdom, and I think it's really important to know. So we're gonna
go through the, "what does perfection of wisdom mean?". I, I used to wonder
for a long time. I never really saw a good explanation of, "What is the perfection
of wisdom".       You always hear Prajnya Paramita sutras, Prajnya Paramita
literature, blah, blah, blah, and you don't know what is Prajnya Paramita. So
we're gonna go through the four kinds of Prajnya Paramita.@@@ The first thing
to know is that it has a nick name, two nicknames. [silence]

They took the [she] out of {sherab}, out of {she} and they took the [er] out of
{rab}, and they say {shechin}. Say {shechin} [repeat], {shechin} [repeat]. So, I
mean nobody in the monastery goes around saying {Sherab Kyi Paroltu
Chinpa}, they just say, "How's your {shechin} going?". You know, "How's your
study of {shechin}?". In the monastery, well, I'm not gonna go into it... {shechin}.
Another name for it is, [laughter]... that is a (u), [laughs]. It sounds like "yummy"
but... Say {yum} [repeat], {yum} [repeat]. {Yum} means "mother", it's the
honorific word for mother. When you're talking about the Dalai Lama's mother,
you don't say {ama}. You say, "How's your {yum} doing?" [laughs] {Yum }
means the "great mother", okay. This is referring to the [b: Perfection of
Wisdom]. So the [b: Perfection of Wisdom] is also called, "mother". And the
sutras on the Perfection of Wisdom are often called, "the mothers", "the mother
sutras". Why called mother? Because these are what give birth to Buddhas. The
Perfection of Wisdom is what gives birth to Buddhas. The Buddhas are the direct
offspring of the Perfection of Wisdom. So the Perfection of Wisdom itself is
often called, "{Yum}". The Mother. Yeah. [student: [unclear]] Yeah, he asked
about all the different, there's a three hundred Prajnya Paramita, there's an eight
thousand, there's a two thousand, which is maybe really two thousand five
hundred, then there's a {bhum} which is a hundred thousand. They say there's
even longer ones that are missing nowadays. If you read them they appear to
be discreet teachings. They're not like they were distilled from each other. Like if
you read the eight thousand, it's really like a long science fiction story [student:
[unclear]] Yeah, yeah, many different beings in them, so. It's not like they took
the hundred thousand and abbreviated it into twenty. They seem to be different
teaching on the Perfection of Wisdom. So why is the Perfection of Wisdom... and
for example, in the Heart Sutra it's the feminine ending, on the, on the, end of the
{Bhagavati}, it's, it's the {Chomden... denma}. They , they call it the "Mother", it's
feminine because it's producing Buddhas, it's childbearing Buddhas, bearing
Buddha children, and that's why it's called the mother. And that refers to the
Perfection of Wisdom as the {Paroltu chin...}

[student: {che}]

We talked about it, perfection as, something that gets you to perfection.
Perfection as something that creates perfection. The real meaning of perfection,
like the perfection of giving, is the thing that gets you to the perfection of
giving. And obviously that like generating Buddhahood, generating perfection,
so the idea is that this is the real 'mommy' of all enlightened states is Prajnya
Paramita. What are the four kinds?

[silence]

Say, {rangchin] [repeat], {shechin} [repeat], {rangchen} [repeat], {shechin}
[repeat]. {Rangchen} means, "natural", natural. {Shechin] means, "perfection of
wisdom". The natural perfection of wisdom. This is the same thing as what they
call, "natural nirvana", {rangchen nyangden}, and it refers to emptiness itself,
okay. Emptiness itself, emptiness itself is given the nickname natural perfection
of wisdom, natural nirvana, same thing. Does it mean somehow that you've
already reached nirvana or something like that? No, not at all, we wish, it would
be allot easier. It just means that this is the object which the perfection of
wisdom focuses on, emptiness. So it's called the natural perfection of wisdom,
{rangchen shechin}.

[silence]

Say, {shum} [repeat], {shechin} [repeat], {shum shechin} [repeat]. {Shing} means
scriptural, scriptural, perfection of wisdom as a book or as a teaching, as a verbal
teaching or as a book is called {shum shechin}. And for example the Prajnyamita,
the Prajnya Paramita sutras are that, alright. The sutras which mainly treat the
perfection of wisdom. The sutras which mainly talk about the perfection of
wisdom are themselves called the [b: Perfection of Wisdom].               So when
somebody says," the [b: Prajnya Paramita sutras]", you gotta be thinking {shing
shechin}, the books, or the oral teachings about the perfection of wisdom, the
second kind of, the perfection of wisdom. See if I can...

[silence]

Say, {lam} [repeat], {shechin} [repeat], {lam} [repeat], {shechin} [repeat]. {Lam}
means, you know?

[students: Path.]

Path. This is the perfection of wisdom which is the path, okay. The perfection of
wisdom which is the path. This is the real one, okay. If you wanna say, " Which
is the real one?", this is the real one, alright. This is the real {paroltu chin che}.
This is the thing that gets you to that paradise that we talked about. This is the
thing that makes that glass of liquid or water turn into a glass of bliss. This is the,
that's the path, prajnya paramita, and it's definition is very cool, so you should
learn it. {Thekchen} [repeat], say {thekchen} [repeat], {sem kye kyi} [repeat]
{sembey} [repeat], {tongnyi} [repeat], {topay} [repeat], {yeshe} [repeat]. One
more time, just cause it's a blessing, and all those people who say they'll never
learn Tibetan always end up being the teachers, actually. {Tekchen} [repeat],
{sem kye kyi} [repeat], {simbey} [repeat], {tongnyi} [repeat}, {topay} [repeat],
{yeshe} [repeat].      Definition of the perfection of wisdom. This is the path,
perfection of wisdom. {Tekchen semkye} means, "bodhichitta".                {Tekchen
semkye} means the wish to become enlightened so that you can help other
beings, so that you can take them after you.              Okay, {teckchen semkye}.
{Tekchen semkye kyi simba}, the {simba} means, "soaked in" alright? Soaked in.
Imbued, imbued with, alright? {Tongnyi} means what? {Shunyata}, {shunyata},
emptiness, {tongnyi} means "emptiness". {Tongnyi topay yeshe} means that
state of knowledge where you perceive emptiness, okay? Where you perceive
emptiness, where you realize emptiness. So the definition of the perfection of
wisdom is, "The wisdom which understands emptiness, or which perceives
emptiness and which is also totally soaked in the wish to achieve enlightenment
for other sentient beings.", [laughs], for yourself too by the way. So basically
two parts, you have to have ultimate compassion, you have to have bodhichitta,
and you have to have the perception of emptiness. Did it say {tongnyi nu
sumbay topay yeshe}? Did it say, "direct perception of emptiness". No, okay?
So it doesn't say direct, so it doesn't, it means you don't have to achieve the path
of seeing, the third path, to have the perfection of wisdom. It does not say the
direct perception, okay. It could be the direct perception, but it doesn't say only
direct perception, so it could be all those other perceptions. You are, right now,
having a {tojyun kyi sherab} about emptiness. During this week, unless you've
been asleep totally, which is always possible, you've been having an intellectual
understanding of emptiness, that is [Tongnyi topay yeshe}.                   You are
understanding, you are perceiving emptiness at a certain level. As long as you're
thinking about it in a roughly correct way, intellectually even, even before you
reach the first path, you are perceiving emptiness in a way, okay? You are
understanding it in a very rough, intellectual way. That is {tongnyi topay
sherab}. If it's {sem kye kyi simba}, if you also have some kind of compassion or,
or wish to help other people, then you have the perfection of wisdom, you are
practicing the perfection of wisdom. And that's the real one, that's the one that's
really getting you there. The home work key is goofy, okay, it say's it's number
four [laughs]. Probably some text says that, so, I don't know.
[silence]

Say {drebu} [repeat], {shechin} [repeat], {drebu} [shechin]. {Drebu} means the, in
this case it means the final goal. Normally it means result, okay, but here it
means the final goal. The perfection of wisdom of the final goal. What is the
highest form of wisdom?

[students: Buddhahood.]

Not Buddhahood. Not emptiness.        We're talking wisdom, which is, which is
mental.

[student: The Dharmakaya.]

Half of the Dharmakaya, which is?

[student: The omniscience.]

The omniscience of the Buddha. Yeah, it's {Yana Dharmakaya}, the omniscience
of the Buddha. The Buddhas ability to know all things, the Buddhas knowing all
things. The wisdom of the Buddha which perceives all objects in the universe at
once is the perfection of wisdom of the final goal. That's the fourth kind of the
perfection of wisdom. So know you're experts about the perfection of wisdom,
okay? If anyone says, "What's the perfection of wisdom?", you can say, "Well,
which way are you talking about?". You know, " Are you talking about the
natural one?", that's emptiness.      "Are you talking about the books?", that's
{shum} scriptural [b: Perfection of Wisdom]. "Are you talking about perfection
of wisdom on the path?", that's the perception of wisdom imbued with
bodhichitta. Or, "Are you talking about the final perfection of wisdom?", which is
the one in the mind of the Buddha. Which one is this book? I mean, this is a...you
do this in the monastery and you'd have a four hour debate on your hands.
[laughter] Is the [b: Diamond Cutter sutra] the natural perfection of wisdom? I
mean, the Buddha says, "You can call this book the [b: perfection of wisdom]." Is
he referring to the natural perfection of wisdom?

[student: When you say the Diamond Cutter, do you mean the book?]

Good question. [laughs] I mean the sutra. Well let's go through all four, let's go
through all four. Is it emptiness?
[students: No.]

Emptiness is a negative thing. It's an absence of something, okay. It's the lack of
elephants on this platform. [laughter] It's, it's just an absence of something.

[student: Are you sure?]

[Laughs] Well, normal science, unless they're hiding behind the stupa. [laughter]
So this is not like the lack of something, like the lack of money in our pockets,
that's a negative, unchanging [laughs], meaning its quality doesn't change, if you
get money it goes out of existence, but while it's with you, which it often is, it
doesn't change. And that's, that's a total lack of something. It's either there or it's
not. If it's not there, that's its emptiness, and so the book is not, is not a , it's not,
it can't be the first perfection of wisdom. So the Buddha, I guess he didn't mean
that, how about number two?

[student: [unclear]] Okay sure, it is the expression of that subject matter, it does
talk about the perfection of wisdom. Is it number three? Is the book... which if
you want to say in the [b: Abhidharma], they ask that question and they say,
"{sugten da}" you know, "what are words?". And at the lowest level they are
sounds and shapes. At a little bit higher level they are conceptualizations. But is
this sutra the third perfection of wisdom?

[student: The meaning of the sutra?]

I just said, the sutra. No, you have to say no, it's the, it's either sounds or shapes
of letters or some kind of conceptualization as you hear the words, but it's not
the meaning of the sutra or the point of the sutra, or what the sutra's teaching.
And that's something else. So, the [b: Diamond Cutter Sutra] is not the path
itself, the path itself is the, is that perception of emptiness under the influence of
bodhichitta, okay. So the book is not perfection number three. The subject
matter of the book is number three and maybe the other ones also, but mainly
number three. And, is this number four? No, it's not the mind of a Buddha,
minds are invisible, to normal people, minds don't have color, minds don't have
shapes, okay. You can think of colors and shapes in your mind, but that's a
different thing. So that's what the Buddha... the Buddha is talking about, this is
the perfection of wisdom, meaning this is {shin shechin}, this is the expression of
the expression of wisdom, of the perfection of wisdom and its subject matter is
primarily the third, the path. The perfection of wisdom as a path, primarily.
Primarily is a wonderful word in debating that gets you out of all kinds of
problems. If somebody comes up and says," Well it does really teach the
Buddhas omnicience also.", you can say," Oh, I said primarily." [Laughs] Alright?

[student: I need to clear up something about number four.]

Okay, okay.

[student: The [unclear] Dharmakaya, can you say it's the mind of the Buddha?
I'm hearing two things, the omniscience of the Buddha and the mind of the
Buddha.]

Yeah, they are {nying kyab nam}, they are totally the same thing. The mind of
the Buddha and the omniscience of the Buddha are totally equal. Same thing,
there is no mind of the Buddha which is not omniscient, and there is no
omniscience of the Buddha which is not mind, okay. Then the Buddha says...
what does he say next about the perfection of wisdom? [students: [unclear]]

Now, what did I say he said after that? So Buddha says, what do I call this book?
What do we call this teaching? He says, "[b: Perfection of Wisdom].", and he
says, "By the way, there ain't no perfection of wisdom, and that's why we can call
it the [b: Perfection of Wisdom]." Chonyi Drakpa Shedrup jumps on this, he
loves it. He says, "Oh finally he got to one of the most important points", and
that's {Uma}, not the movie star, okay. [laughs].

[silence]

Say, {Uma} [repeat], {Uma} [repeat]. In Sanskrit, what's it called? Madhyamika,
okay, Madhyamika.

[silence]

In English?

[students: The Middle Way.]

The Middle Way. And infact, the word...the [mid] in middle and the [med] in
medium all come from the Sanskrit {madh}, {madh}, same root actually. The
{madh} in Madhyamika and the [mid] in middle, ultimately they all come form
the same thing, okay. You've been studying Madhyamika, we've been studying
Madhyamika. As a school in ancient India, which is not the way I'm talking
about it today. But just so you know, it had two parts, lower Madhyamika,
higher Madhyamika, we'll talk about it later. Everything we've been talking
about is higher Madhyamika. Higher Madhyamika school is the school of
Nagarjuna, is the school of Tsongkhapa, is the school of His Holiness the Dalai
Lama, Lama Sopa, Lama Yeshe, is the school of Shakyamuni Buddha, alright?
[laughs] It's the highest school. Well, didn't the Buddha teach the other schools?
Yes. Are they strictly speaking accurate? No, in some cases. Are they therefore
useless and we should forget them? No. They fit different students of different
capacities. If they're not ready to hear the highest interpretation, give them
something lower. If you ever try to teach Buddhism to your kids, you'll
understand why the Buddha taught the other three schools, [laughs]. You can't
go into Madhyamika Prasangika philosophy with your kids. You have to say,
"Don't kill a bird because it's not nice.", you know. That's not the ultimate reason
why not to kill a bird, but that's where you have to start. And that's how the
four schools started. They are very wonderful, they are very necessary, they
are brilliant, they are taught by an omniscient being, they are designed to fit the
minds of every possible disciple that might come along. And you must learn
them all, because they address the doubts that come up in, in any students
minds, okay. What's that?

[student: unclear]]

Yeah, you can call them consequence. Prasangika means like, "consequence".

[student: [unclear]]

Huh? Excuse me.

[student: [unclear]]

Say it again.

[student: [unclear] {Shunyata}?]

Maybe, I haven't heard of them spoken of that way, but it makes sense. People
who talk about emptiness, but I haven't heard it called that. So that's not the
{Uma} I'm talking about, I'm not gonna talk about the school called
Madhyamika, I'm talking about the state of mind called Madhyamika. What is
Madhyamika? What is {Uma}? What is the Middle Way? What does the word
middle suggest to you?

[students: Going between two extremes.]

Yeah, going between two extremes, okay. And those extremes are not extreme
in a sense of a political party or something like that. They are, in the word in
Tibetan and in the word in Sanskrit it refers to extreme in the sense of walking
off this platform, okay? The edge, the edge of a cliff, you have to think that
way. {Ta} or extreme in this case means the edge of a cliff, alright, and you can
think of a, of a pathway, I'm not a good artist, and people in New York know
that, [laughs]. This is the path to the city of enlightenment okay. And on each
side there are these horrible chasms, these horrible, deep, yawning, chasms, you
know and you can either fall off this way, or you can fall off the other side. Okay,
and that's what {Uma} means, {Uma] means you have to thread a very fine line
between two cliffs, {ta} means cliff, and, and if you, if you're not careful, like I've
been trying to be very mindful of when, especially over there, not to fall off the
back off the thing , you know. You have to keep your wits about you, or you
will fall of of one of these cliffs. Either case is disaster. Either case is a fatal error.
You will waste your life, you will never get what you need, you will never
understand anything, and you will continue to suffer. You will die, and you will
continue to suffer after that. So, so this is a very important subject. These are
the two cliffs, and if you, if spiritually, you've fallen off of either cliff, it's over
with. Unless you can climb back up , unless you grab onto some little branch on
the way down, you know and get back up, which is hard, you're spiritual body
will die. So you, you, I mean, extremely bad consequences, I mean, spiritual
death, essentially. So you, you have to know these two extremes, you have to
know what the two cliffs are, and to, to thread your way between them is what?

[students: Madhyamika.]

Madhyamika, that's the meaning of {Uma}. But it's not just like, a centrist
position between communism and fascism or something like that, you know, it's
not like that. These are deadly, fatal errors, if you fall into either one, spiritually,
your life is over, okay. It doesn't mean you can't recover if you get some good
teachings, but if, if your state of mind falls into either extreme, you're in big
trouble, extremely big trouble, fatal error, okay. So {Uma} becomes important,
{Uma} becomes a very essential, lifesaving thing. And think of it as lifesaving, to
lose your life is not so bad, to go off the edge of, of a Buddhist extreme is ten
times worse, is much worse, it's a much worse death after that, okay. What are
the two extremes?
[student: [unclear]]

[Laughs] [silence]

Say, {yeta} [repeat], {yeta} [repeat]. {Ta} means "edge", okay. {Ta} means that
edge of the cliff, {ta], {ta} means the edge of the cliff, okay. {Ye} means existence,
things exist, okay. And I'll say it in plain English the fact that things exist the way
I always thought they did, the fact that things exist the way I always thought
they did. And know I have a tricky question for you. Does that exist? Does the
fact that things exist the way you thought they did... or I'll say it a different way,
does the existence of all these things the way you used to think it existed even
exist?

[student: On the conventional.}

No, it's another {gak ja}. If I say, "Is it true that things exist the way you thought
they did?", and you say, "No", that means they don't exist. Things which could
exist the way you always thought they existed, is something which could never
exist.

[student: So {yeta} doesn't exist.]

So {yeta} does not exist, this is very interesting, {yeta} does not exist, so how
could you fall off {yeta}? How can you fall into {yeta}? Say, {tondzin} [repeat], I
better put it up here.

[silence]

{Tondzin} is grasping onto the {yeta}, believing in it.       Believing everything
existed the way you always thought it did. Does that exist? Oh yeah, that's the
source of all problems, it's not money, it's {tondzin}, okay, [laughs]. Probably
they're related somewhere I would guess. That's {tondzin}, so thinking that it's
true, that everything was the way you thought it was, is the problem, okay.
And this {ta}, this {ta} is the one that's most dangerous, okay. This is the {ta} that
infects ninety-nine point nine, nine, nine percent of all humanity. If you go up to
somebody at Boulder Creek, you know, at Joe's bar or where ever that was, and
you say, "Does this beer exist the way you thought it did or is this a projection of
yours generated by your past karmic seeds upon an empty screen?", and they'll
look at you like, [laughs] "Are you crazy or what? Maybe you should have a
beer.", you know. The mass of humanity streams like lemmings off the cliff,
you know. They are like sheep in a huge flock walking off this cliff, they don't
see that anything is in any way different from the way that they, they think it is
or from the way they always thought it was. What does that mean in, in real
life? How could you do a reality check and see, "Do I have {yeta} and {dzinba} in
my mind at any given moment?",okay. How, how, how are you gonna do a
check on yourself to see, " Do I have {yeta} today?", "Am I grasping on to {yeta}
today or not?".

[student: If you're upset.}

Great! He said if you're upset. John said if you're upset, okay. And, and, and the
point is, use the moment when you are most angry, you know. In Tibet, they'd
say, "Use the moment when you are most afraid". You know, go sit up on a sky
scraper and dangle your legs off the side and watch your feeling about yourself.
Pabonka Rinpoche says, "Wait till somebody accuses you of doing something
that you never even thought of doing.", you know, and you get in big trouble
from this person, accusing you of something that you have no intention of doing
and no, even dream of doing, but they are accusing you of it, other people are
believing in it, and suddenly you've got this thing in your heart like, "How can
they be saying that about me?" You know, me. And in that me, when your
under the influence of a strong mental affliction, is definitely {yeta}. Because if I
came up to you and said, "Is this happening external to you, without your
projection?" Is this you, or this guy whose attacking you, I find it easier with the
guy whose attacking me. Is this guy whose attacking you, and, and this is very
difficult to do because at that moment it's the last thing you want to think about.
You truly, really think that this guy is evil from his own side. You really truly
think that this person is, is bad inherently, from their side, you just can't believe
that there could be any other possibility. They're attacking you, they're attacking
something very dear to you, and, and hatred comes up. At, at that moment it's
almost absolutely impossible to think that what I'm seeing is not coming from
him. What I'm going through right now is in no way coming from him or her.
It's just not, this is me. That, do I mean it in the sense of psychological projection,
no. You know, shoe salesmen get on a bus, all they see is shoes, you know
[laughs]. Diamond buyers get on a bus, all they're doing is looking at women's
fingers. I don't mean like that your mind is sort of into that and you're noticing
that more or less. I don't mean that. So I don't mean to say that because you
had a bad breakfast, this guy looks evil to you, I don't mean that. He really is
evil, and we're gonna get into that, he really is evil at that moment, but not from
his side, it's not coming from him. If you had not collected the karma to meet
this evil person, who really is evil, you wouldn't be meeting an evil person now,
there wouldn't be an evil person there accusing you of this thing if you had not
collected bad karma yourself. How does the bad karma make him evil? It
causes you to glue together the sense data in a certain way called, "evil guy" and
call it evil. You give it the name evil, you think of it as evil, it doesn't have to be
thought of as evil. Nothing in the world has any inherent quality of its own,
period. Nothing in the world has any inherent quality of it's own, period. I
always talk about the dentist, like the feel of a dentists drill on your tooth must
be evil, when they hit the nerve. I mean the whole thing in going to the dentist,
the whole thing in having to sit there, and paying to have somebody torment
you. You know, I mean, that must be something inherently distasteful. That
must, that pain of the drill hitting the nerve, must be something inherently
unpleasant. But if you've ever been to India, [laughter], and your, and your a
westerner, and you've gone to Connaught circle, which I've done, and you go to
the dentist cause your tooth is hurting like crazy, and he sees a westerner walk
in, and he has the opportunity to drill up a westerners tooth, and he sees rupee,
rupee, rupee, you know, that same event is a pleasant event. [Laughter] It's a
pleasant event. Some one is sitting around a glass of liquid, and seeing it as
nectar, you know. He sees your cavity as big bucks. [Laughter] And for him,
the same sense data is, when you jump, he's thinking, "Great, maybe he needs a
root canal.", you know. [Laughter] And, when it's the same data, he is
synthesizing it, because of his past karma, as, as a pleasant event, and it is a result
of good karma for him. If if a guy, if a westerner walks in with those big money
belts they wear and he needs a route canal, it is a result of his good karma. Now,
is it a good karma that he's thinking to cheat you or something? Obviously not,
but the fact that you showed up in his office is good karma. What I'm trying to
say is that there is nothing you can point to in the world which is inherently one
way or the other, and that's it's emptiness, okay. {Yeta} is to be blissfully
ignorant of that thing, and to... why does it cause you trouble? Why does it kill
your spiritual life, if you hold to that? Well if you really believe that the people in
your life who attack you are inherently evil, and that it's not coming from your
side, and that it's not coming from your karma that you collected and that your
responsible for it then you will retaliate. The moment you retaliate, you are
assuring that you will meet him again, and someone will attack you again. Last
thing to say about that, does that mean that you have to sit and be wimpy when
someone accuses you of something you haven't done? No, bodhisattva vow;
you have to defend yourself. Especially if they're saying something dirty about
you, you have to try to explain yourself. You must. But you cannot see the
event as self existent. As you explain yourself and as you defend yourself you
have to see the whole situation as being empty of self existence, which means
you will never get mad at the guy. You will never hate the person because that's
only gonna bring them back. You say, "I can't hate this person, I've have defend
myself." Does the defending always work? No, and you better be ready for that
too, because what happens after you defend yourself is also up to your own
projections, and what kind of karma you collected in the past. What kind of
behavior does this lead to? And then I'll answer some questions, okay? What
kind of behavior will this lead to? Your life will continue to be a screen as it was
before, okay? Don't expect anything different, in the immediate. Eventually it'll
change, but not until you do those four forces and clean out your karmic pocket.
But what's the effect on your mind? Totally, totally, without any kind of bad
feelings, ever, and that's nirvana, and you can do it. Don't wait for the world
around you to straighten out, it ain't going to, [laughs]. You, know, it just won't
happen. In the chaos of life, as your karmic, crazy random karmic, bad things
express themselves in your life, you have to straighten out your own mental
afflictions, by not reacting with hatred or desire, and that's nirvana. And if you
keep that up, if you keep up not reacting for awhile, you can reach nirvana. If
you keep that up that over a long period of time and you do your purifications,
then you reach, paradise, a Buddha paradise. That's the difference between level
eight and level ten, cool. How do you get to level eight? Level one. Understand
the emptiness of the guy whose accusing you. It's very cool, this is the path to
Nirvana, this is the path to Buddhahood, there ain't no more to say, really. I
mean we'll have another class okay, [laughs]. But, you got all the data now, you
have all the information, now you have to implement it, and it ain't so easy,
okay, yeah.

[student: I know feeling isn't inherently evil, but are there any acts that are
inherently evil? Like the act of stealing?]

No. Is an act of stealing inherently evil? We talked about it yesterday. At a
certain level after millions of years of practice as a bodhisattva, you are required
by your bodhisattva vows to steal, if it would be of great benefit to another
being. Monks are required by their bodhisattva vows to work, if it would be of
benefit to other beings, so stealing too. Now what about wrong view? What
about {tongdzin}? Could that ever be a good thing? That isn't what I meant to
say, I didn't mean to say it could have been good, it could have been bad, in the
case of [tongdzin] is that it could have been wisdom if you had have collected
different karmic seeds. The same mental event could have been interpreted by
you mind, and could have been... [cut]

Yeah, as much as you are unaware, it's less karma, but it doesn't mean no karma
at all, because there are other conditions for planting the karma, but mainly to be
there, to be conscious and especially to be aware that it's not right is... Those are
very bad conditions under which to do... if you're gonna do a bad deed, then it's
better if you don't know about it and you don't know what it means. I'm talking
about the regret of a Buddhist who knows how that karma is planted, knows
exactly why this thing is wrong, knows what, what the result will be for him or
her, clearly, and then because of a klesha attack, because of an attack of one of
the bad thoughts, just can't stop themselves. And then the moment after you do
it you feel {nampar sengye metop} get this intelligent regret, so there's no place
in Buddhism for guilt complexes or low self esteem, or all that stuff, it's just this
cold, calculated understanding that this is going to give me suffering in the
future. And it will, I understand how it will, and I understand how I did it. I
understand how the karma was planted. I understand how the karma will ripen
on a blank screen and I understand that it must come to me. And that kind of
regret, you know, understanding regret, saying, " I screwed up, this is really bad,
I shouldn't have done this." Just that very clear understanding of what you've
just set into motion. You've just thrown a cosmic boomerang, that way. And
to know that it must hit this side of your head at some point in the future, that's
intelligent regret. It doesn't mean guilt, it doesn't mean you know, anything like
that. It just means, clearly understanding that this thing is going to come back to
haunt you, okay. That's intelligent regret. That, that destroys the power of the
bad deed, okay? Just to feel sorry, you know, that destroys the energy of the
bad deed, that's a very big blow to the energy of that karma. To understand
and feel bad about what you did.

[student: [unclear]]

It does, yeah. The opposite of that, you know, which is some kind of arrogance,
you know, "That's not bad", you know, "that's okay, I don't feel sorry.", especially
with the bodhisattva vows, makes it extremely bad karma.

[silence]

Say, {ngepa lay} [repeat], {larn dopay} [repeat], {top} [repeat]. {Ngepa lay}
[repeat], {larn dopay} [repeat], {top} [repeat]. {Ngepa} means "bad deed". {Lay
larn dopay} means to restrain yourself in the future. Okay, to restrain yourself.
When, when, when non Buddhists hear about the four opponent powers they
often come up to me and say, "You guys have really got it easy, it's like a
morning after pill." you know, "You can do whatever bad deed you want and
then you just do the four forces after that." And ah, "No problem, most of the
karma is taken away. You can do whatever you want, you can do a karma that
will take you to hell, knowingly and then ten minutes later you can do the four
forces, it's a real nice life you guys got." Not true because of number three.
Number three means, part of the purification is to keep yourself from doing it
again. This is the nuts and bolts of purification. This is the guts of purification.
This is the main energy behind purification, is the intention not to do it again.
The decision, or the resolution, not to do it again, okay. If you don't have that,
and if you treat the four forces like a morning after pill, they never will work,
okay. Because number three says, you have to truly intend not to do it again.
Now if it's something like getting mad at your boss, and you sit down at your
meditation cushion at eight thirty and you have to go to work at nine, right, and
you say, " I resolve never to get mad at my boss again.", now, what bad deed,
what new bad deed will you then collect?

[student: Breaking a vow.]

Lying. [laughs] If you say," I'm never gonna get mad at my boss again." and you
know, by nine thirty something's gonna happen and you get mad at him, then
on top of the bad deed, you collect the bad deed of lying. So the oral instruction
of the great Lamas, of the Lam Rim tradition is, "Set a time limit." Set a time
limit, set a realistic time limit during which you will not do this thing again, okay.
If you cannot give it up completely, which is unlikely, then set a reasonable time
limit. And I always tell people, and it's not a joke, that I have broken a vow,
broken the decision again, before I have finished the four forces. Sitting in
meditation, figuring out that I'm not gonna have a bad thought about my boss
again, or my fellow dharma student again, I have broken this one before I have
got up from the meditation pillow.          So make it realistic, you know, if it's a
thought which is bothering you allot, you might want to say five minutes, you
know. But normally twenty four hours or something like that you know, like, I
won't get mad for the next twenty four hours at my boss, I will... And, and the
point is that the decision not to do it for that time period makes it very easy to
keep your awareness at a high level. You know, you can stand concentrating on
not getting mad at a certain person for twenty four hours. We can do that.
That's the point, by the way of a one day vow, that's the point of a one day vow.
Okay, I can't keep these things my whole life, but if I really concentrate for
twenty four hours I could probably do it, as long as I could break it the second
day, [laughs] the next day. I can resist for twenty four hours, you know, if I
really work on it, and if I don' think about anything else particularly. So choose a
realistic time limit, you know, it's up to you, it's very dependent on your own...
you know, how strong is it for you, how bad it is for you. I could imagine being
involved in an abortion for instance. In that kind of thing, you could say, "I
won't do it again in my life, I set a time limit of, of the rest of my life." You know,
I mean, those big ones that take allot of work, and, and, you... and they're very
clear, or very easy to define. You could say, "The rest of my life I won't do it." I
know, I know about those things. So, but on other ones, like mental ones you
better keep it short you better make it short, it's more realistic, alright. But I
repeat, this is the essence of purification. If this part goes well, the purification
works. If this part is not strong, and you really don't intend to stop, if it's really
not your wish to stop, the purification will not work. And I'm also talking about
Vajrasattva, high tantric, you know all this stuff. The guts of Vajrasattva
meditation, purification is exactly the same thing. The four forces are the essence
of Vajrasattva meditation, practice. So, if you don't have the four... if you think
that visualizing some white guy in your head is, is gonna be more powerful than
these or, or that you don't need these if you have that picture of a person on
your head, it's not that way. These, these must be the essence of that practice as
you do it. It's obviously very, very powerful if on top of that, if you add that.
But, but the whole point of that practice is this, okay. Okay, what's number four?

[silence]

And this is the last thing for this class. Say, {nyenpo} [repeat], {kuntu} [repeat],
{chupay] [repeat], {top} [repeat]. {Nyenpo] [repeat], {kuntu} [repeat], {chupay}
[repeat], {top} [repeat].    {Nyenpo} means "antidote", counter agent, okay.
Antidote or counter agent, okay, {nyenpo}. {Kuntu chupay} means "to apply".
Some kind of activity that you do to make up for what you did. Okay, you can
think of it as a make up activity okay, a makeup activity. Some kind of activity
to makeup for what you did. I'll give you an example of a, of one, then I'll give
you an example of the one, okay. I have a fellow student, in New Jersey, who is
Mongolian, when he came to this country in the sixties he was immediately
grabbed by... they gave him a green card then they drafted him like a week
later, "thanks allot". And, and he went to Vietnam. And they gave him a
machine gun. First they pulled out all his teeth and they said, "you don't want to
get a toothache in the jungle so we'll pull out your teeth for you." So they pulled
out his teeth and they didn't give him dentures cause they said, "you'll choke on
them if you get shot". So they took him out to the jungle , gave him a machine
gun and said, "Here you go." After a couple weeks they're in a, they're in a
convoy, the convoy gets attacked by Viet Kong. And, and he's standing on this
truck, shooting this machine gun into the bushes. He doesn't know if he hit
anybody. So he comes to my Lama, who is his Root Lama, and says, "What
should I do?", you know. "What should I do to make up for it?". So he teaches
him the four powers and says, "Okay, the make up activity for you..",
Mongolians love to eat sheep, okay, sheep are like chocolate for Mongolians,
[laughs], and, and, and in my neighborhood they would even keep them in their
backyards to cut the grass, and then they'll kill them and eat them. And, and so
my Lama says, "I know that your father is keeping two sheep for that purpose,
in his back yard", so he says, "I want you to buy them from your father, and I
want you to take care of them until they die." You know, "Feed them and care
for them until they die, move them over to your backyard." So he does, and you
know how long sheep live? [laughs] Like he thought a couple of years, right?
Sixteen, seventeen years he took care of these two sheep, you know, and that
was his makeup activity. So it's often useful to, to pick an activity which
somehow relates to what you did. If you're a... if you're engaged in some kind
of killing, you can say abortion or something like that, or some kind of killing in
a war or something, then a very good makeup activity would involve some
kind of protection of other beings lives, okay. And like that, you can imagine the
rest. The ultimate... and that's the last point today, the ultimate... and by the way
it's very good to read scriptures, to circumambulate a stupa, to say one round of
mantras, particular mantras or something like that, those are all very useful,
those all qualify. But the ultimate one, by far, is the study of emptiness. The
ultimate makeup activity for everything is the study of emptiness. So I'd say,
you have this notebook, you got this notebook through the kindness of, actually
do you mind if I say that? Where is she? Where's Kendall's mommy? Anyway,
mommy Kendall has gratefully, graciously, offered all the cost of the notebooks.
I agreed to pay for it then I was like, gee I wonder how I'm gonna do that?
[laughs] And she offered all the cost of the notebook, and anytime you, you
commit a bad deed, as part of your purification, I really encourage you to just
pick one page and read it. Doesn't even really matter, open it up at one page in
the Diamond Cutter Sutra and read it and try to digest it, okay. That is the
ultimate makeup force, okay, that is the ultimate one. Now you tell me why.
Why would understanding emptiness have such relevance to being able to stop
your bad deeds?

[student: [unclear]]

It's about, yeah... yeah, you won't react, okay. That's the punchline. If you
understand the emptiness of that irritating object, whether it's between cutting
your fingers off or your boss blaming you for his last faux pas, or maybe you
even did something, but that doesn't happen very often. [Laughter] That's the
ultimate refuge, that's the ultimate protection, that is the ultimate way to purify
bad deeds, you won't want to do it anymore if you understand his emptiness,
okay. As emptiness, as your understanding of emptiness gets more and more
correct and stable. And by the way at the beginning, it's like forget it, it doesn't
do much. You know, at the beginning of this process of studying about
emptiness it's not much use, frankly, it doesn't really help that much. You have to
keep working at it, you have to keep reviewing it, you have to keep studying it,
and then at some point it becomes a, an atom bomb that stops all the mental
afflictions. It's the only thing that can stop the mental afflictions. And all bad
activities are caused by mental afflictions. So, so naturally it's the most effective
way. It's the most effective make up you can do. And that's why the [b:
Diamond Sutra]'s talking about it here. That's why the [b: Diamond sutra] is
saying, " If you study this sutra..." What? Expect some...?

[students: Disasters.}

Disasters, [laughs], okay. I mean, in Dharhamsala, when, when John and me and
other people were first there, I dunno, you remember?             I mean, so many
disasters, people dying, people going up in flames, people falling off cliffs, people
getting hepatitis for six months, you know. I mean, those were the good old
days. [Laughs], I mean, people were really trying to practice, hard. And, and
just major obstacles would come because their karma was ripening. The study
of emptiness accelerates the ripening of karma. So I'm not saying, we prefer to
think the headache thing would happen, right? And it will, I mean, don't get
scared and don't get, you know, panicky, don't throw the book away, [laughs].
Do a nice gentle confession, purification ceremony with those four. And, and, as,
as the obstacles come, which come with every human endeavor, rejoice! Okay,
my back aches from this meditation, interpret it, and take it as, as a ripening of
those karmas, and rejoice about it. Try to , try to not be thrown off balance by
it , you now, accept it as part of the, of the practice and work your way through
it. Will it hurt? Yes. Do you have to react to it? No. Okay, it's the whole thing of
being spread eagled on the ground and having someone, you know... so don't,
don't worry that you're gonna have major, it doesn't have to be major. The
sutra says, and it's in your readings, it can ripen as a headache or a backache or,
or something like that, poison oak. Where's Amy? [Laughs] Amy's been having
a real good class, [laughs]. That's all I have. You have a few questions? I mean
we'll take a... By the way, tomorrow is a hard day. You go a class, and then the
second class starts early, right, two o'clock, after that we have an oral
transmission, you know. My Lama, I, I misnamed the Lama that gave it to him, I
said {Drukarma}, that wasn't it, it's {Kangtsar}. And, and we have the oral
blessing of this scripture. From the time of the Buddha, Lamas have been
reading it to their students and now it'll go to you. So now you've got the whole
thing, you've got the instruction, you've got the materials, you have these pesky
homeworks and quizzes, which you can use for your own students and
godbless, you know, if you, if you have any opportunity to teach even one or
two people, do it. You can get the, you can get all the materials from, from the
New York office, if you need more, just call. And we try to make them for free.
So far, we've been able to do it pretty much for free. If you can give something,
cool. If not, we'll send it to you, and if you collect together three or four students
and you want to pass it on, do it. And if you, if you take the transmission, you
actually have the oral blessing that's passed down from mental stream to mental
stream, throughout the last two and a half thousand years. So, if you'll try to
catch that. And then, if you want to perpetuate this kind of thing, go have
dinner with us, [laughs]. Come and have dinner with us, it's really cool, it's a nice
way to end the class and it's a really... it's just a very sweet way to end the class, is
to have dinner with all of us together. So try to, try to sign up for that. The
money goes to Vajrapani, they, they need it, this, this place is not self existent. If
it was, it wouldn't need maintenance. Since it's not, it does need maintenance.
And, and it's, really it's priceless. I mean, what you just got, what you're getting
is priceless. So, so help them out, you know really, help them out. Okay, any
questions? Yeah?

[student: [unclear]]

Right, right, yeah. By the way, I wanted to write the name of a, a scripture.

[silence]

This practice of the four forces as not something made up by Tibetan Lamas,
okay. It's in the [b: Diamond Cutter Sutra] and it's in the {Cheu Shipay Do}. Say
{Cheu} [repeat], {Shipay} [repeat], {Do} [repeat]. The [b: Sutra of the Four
Practices], {Cheu Shipay Do} the [b: Sutra of the Four Dharmas] really. What are
the four? Those are the four force. This is in the {Kangyur}, it's in the Buddhist
canon. The Buddha himself taught it. So this is not just something that the
Tibetans made up, or that the Lamas made up or somethin' like that. You can go
back to that sutra, you can read it, it's in the {Kangyur}. Okay, so it's good to
know that it's, it's spoken by the Buddha himself, okay. By the way, the home
work says, "Describe how Maitreya reaches his enlightenment." That is what I
went through at the first... you know, that's those eight steps, I didn't mention
that it was Maitreya. But actually it's the same for everybody, but you might get
confused from the homework, it says Maitreya. Okay, any more questions?
[student: Is that the [b: Sutra of the Three Heaps]?]

No, totally different. Yeah, yeah.

[student:[unclear]]

Next question. Any more questions?

[student: In reading seven they mentioned the eight bodhisattva bhumi
experiences, and it says," All course objects appear to this person exclusively in
the nature of an illusion as empty as any true existence, not only during periods
of deep meditation. Does deep meditation mean direct meditation?]

I think it does.

[student: Then how are objects appearing as illusion here?]

I don't know, I don't know the answer to that you know. But I think the point is;
from that point on they don't have illusion in the sense of things looking one
way... things looking self existent and you don't beleive they're self existent. The
real meaning of illusion, the main meaning of illusion is, is in the steps after the
direct perception of emptiness when you still see things as self existent, but you
don't beleive yourself. And that's you know they're false, you know it's an
illusion in that sense.

[student: Sounds like it would have to be subsequent to the direct perception...]

Oh absolutely. I think they're talking {Gom Lam}, I think they're talking in the,
in the, during the fourth, during the fourth one. But that's not the main meaning
of illusion, that reference there. The main one is, is that after you've seen
emptiness directly and after you come out of it you are intensely aware that
what you're now seeing again, the same way you saw it before you went into
that meditation, looks to be self existent. But there's a big difference, you don't
believe yourself any more. And in that sense it's like an illusion, it's like,you
know everything is false. You know in that sense you're crazy, but you can't
stop it untill you reach the eighth level. You can't stop seeing it that way untill
you reach the eighth level. Yeah?

[student: When you're having the direct perception of emptiness, can you
recognize, can you call yourself I? And recognize that there really is no I except
for stuff...}

[Laughs] Well there's a whole collection of stuff, there's mental parts, physical
stuff. [students: I mean, how do you relate to people in the world if you really
feel, you don't, you're not an I anymore?]

Ah, yeah.

[student: [unclear]]

There's the...we talked about it. Say {yigyu dak} [repeat]. {Megyu dak} [repeat].
{Yigyu dak} [repeat]. {Megyu dak} [repeat]. There is a me standing up here
teaching a class. There is a me which you take data and synthesize and call him,
that guy up there. That me exists, and we'll talk about it more tomorrow. And
then there's the {megyu dak}. You know, the me that you thought was here that
was out there independent of your projections. That Michael Roach doesn't exist.
So there's no problem of going around after you've seen emptiness directly,
concentrating on the{yigyu dak}, the self which does exist. There's obviously a
self that exists or I wouldn't be up here talking to you. And there's also a self that
doesn't exist, because we have suffering. So, so no problem like that, no big
problem like that. It's not like you loose the sense of yourself or something, or
there's nobody there any more, or everything disappears, or, or, you're half
there and half not there, or something. Not like that.

[student: [unclear] like I'm not here, because I'm always here.]

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, good. And and the perception... there's one very
important distinction to make. Do the things around you exist? Are those
perceptions wrong in that sense? You know, you are perceiving all the events
on this platform this afternoon as existing events. Is that wrong? Is there
anything wrong with that? No, there's nothing wrong with that, that's, that's a
{tsema}, that's a {pramana}, that's a correct perception, valid perception. They
are happening, they really are happening.         There's one element of your
perception, inherent in that perception where you interpret these events to be
taking place independently of your projections, that's the problem. That's the
problem, not the perception of these events. The perception of these events is a
correct perception. These are happening. These are real, that's the big deal. You
can get enlightened if you pay attention. They do exist. But there's an
undercurrent, or there's a theme, or there's a thread, running throughout your
perceptions that holds it to be self existent. And that's the mistake. And you
have to eliminate that. As you eliminate it, it wouldn't be anything like
disappearing or even anything less than you appear to your self now. The
percept...the sense of an I is not mistaken. It's the pollution of the sense of an I,
with the feeling that this is happening external of my projections. And you gotta
get rid of the one without getting rid of the other, okay. So that really prevents
the extreme of thinking that some how things are gonna have to disappear for
me to be thinking straight. It's not like that. We're gonna talk more about that
tomorrow also. Okay.

[student: If one has an intellectual understanding of emptiness, is it always best
to try that when mental afflictions come up, or sometimes is it better to apply
other antidotes like tonglen, compassion and the [unclear] of things [unclear].]

She said, you know, there's two kinds of antidotes, and two kinds of things to do
when your getting a mental affliction. One is to think of emptiness. And then
there are countless other antidotes. Like for anger, you could think that this
person is really a bodhisattva who's trying to get you mad so you can work on
it, and things like that, so. And she said," Is there a time for each of those?". I
think I'd have to say yes, you know. In general, there will be moments in your
life when you're tired, you've had a bad day, you've had a bad week or a bad
month. And, you know, emptiness is not gonna come in your mind at that
moment, okay? Sometimes the best thing is just to get out of the room, go to
the bathroom, okay. [Laughs] Tell the boss, "Look, I know you want to scream
at me, but I have to go to the bathroom really bad. Can we do this when I come
back?" You know, I've done that, [laughter]. And if you can't, you know there's
a thing in the vinaya, "If you can't resist something, avoid it." So yeah, there's
definitely a place for those other antidotes. They will not permanently remove
your mental afflictions. Move on to the emptiness antidote as soon as you can.
And, and if you have any strength at all, use that one. If your just really
weakened by being sick or tired, or didn't get enough sleep or didn't eat right, or
ate too much sugar or had too much coffee, or something. If you're, if you're
weakened spiritually and you can't get to that antidote, then definitely use those
other ones, there's a time and a place for all of them. Yeah.

[student: This may be an ignorant question but, three dimensionally taking place
in my projections, if I died right now this event would still be taking place.]

But only in the minds of those people here.

[student: Right.]
And there's no existence of any object independent of those. There's no other
existence going on.

[student: But the same event is taking place.]

Not exactly the same, [laughs], you're gone. Yeah, but it's all personal. It is all
personal. It is all from your perceptions. There's seventy, eighty events going
on. That's the way you have to think about it.

[student: But we're sharing a similar one.]

We are, because we're all in a human realm.

[student: Do hallucinogenics have a place [unclear]]

[laughs] You know.

[student: Seriously.]

Yeah, I know. I'll tell you a story, you know, my mother was dying, I got her to
Dharhamsala, I was studying there. And I said, "At least she can meet the Dalai
Lama before she dies.", and, and at that point she didn't have any thing to lose
and she knew it. So she came, so she came to India and we dragged her up to, to
see the the Dalai Lama. And a so we sit down, and he turns to me and says, " Did
you ever take drugs?" [Laughter] And my mom's sitting right there and she
never... you know. You have a chance of lying to the Dalai Lama or... [laughter]
or upsetting your mother. And I said, "Yeah, I did." and she's like, you know.
[laughter] And he said, "What was it like? And he was very interested, you
know, I think in those days, many people were coming like that. Maybe he
knew that was a good opener for a westerner. [laughter] But, he said, "What
was it like?" And I said well, it was kind of like meditation or something like that.
[laughter] And then in general, I think in some extraordinary cases they have
some benefit in, in making you aware that there are other realities. More
specifically, all of those states of mind under the influence of a drug, are, are not
only wrong in the sense that we've been talking about, but on top of that they
are mistaken in a relative sense, you know. In Buddhism they don't count for
almost anything and they're not considered very useful at all, and it's just
another example of a wrong perception. It's like getting drunk and seeing
something or, or like that, or being very angry and seeing something which is
not true. Or being very jealous and thinking that people are out after you, you
know. And it's just another perception. In, in, in classical Buddhist scripture, not
considered a very useful thing, okay. I think in extraordinary cases, in a case
where a person just could not accept that some other reality could exist, maybe
some limited use, but, when you think about it, if there is some other mode of
existence, or some kind of paradise, why don't you just cause it to happen, and
get to it that way, and it will always be there, you can always sit there and enjoy
it, you don't have to keep taking something. You know, so just generally
preferable to cause it this way, through, through ethical way of life and through
compassion. Better to cause it that way, it'll last longer, you know. One more
question.

[student: [unclear]]

Oh boy, he says, " Well if I want to go back to my room right now, and do a
meditation on emptiness, what do you suggest I do? What am I supposed to
do?"       What's an analytical meditation on emptiness? There's countless
meditations on emptiness. And you, you know them from the scriptures, there's
like seven different medit.. analysis's that you can do. Your ability to see the
emptiness of an object decreases exponentially with the arisal of a mental
affliction, okay.    Your ability to see the emptiness of an object decreases
exponentially with the arising of a mental affliction. It means, the madder you
get, the more you grasp to the self existence of the person who's making you
mad, okay. That's just nature, that's why Lamas say, "Go to a graveyard and
meditate on emptiness, go to a cliff and dangle your legs off the side and
meditate on emptiness as you get scared out of your mind. Your perception of
self will be most enhanced at, at the moment of greatest fear. And, and grave
yards in Tibet, or India, ancient India, were not these well mowed, with these ...
you know. They're actually kind of pleasant to stay in if you try it. We're talking
about carrion grounds, we're talking about places where you throw a body off
of here and, and by one hour after sunset there's all these dangerous carnivoric
animals wandering around there slurping up somebody's arm, you know and,
and like that's the point of grave... I mean, I guess it'd be really be more like; go
to the zoo and go into a panthers' cage and sit next to him and meditate on, on
how strong your sense of a self asserts itself. And that was the real point.
[student [unclear]]

  Yeah, yeah, in general, in general. But what I'm saying, well if it's a kind of
dislike, okay? But what I'm saying is that in the greatest heat of anger is when
the false idea of a self, the belief in a self existent self asserts itself more strongly.
The last, the hardest place to meditate on emptiness is when someone's in your
face screaming at you for the order that didn't get shipped out, you know, I can
tell you. So what I'm saying is that, what I suggest might be useful is, go to the
moment of your day at which your mental afflictions were most powerful. You
know, go back to the moment in the last week say when your mental afflictions
were at their most extreme. I believe for most people it would be anger, for
some people it might be desire. For me, my specialty happens to be jealousy.
When I hear that some American whose doing really good at translating and
teaching, and I hear somebody praising them, I'm like... hmm. [laughter] So pick
your specialty. Go to your particular, the worst event of your week and I would
say, start to analyze the self existence of that object. You know, what we said,
and what we keep saying is that the perception of the emptiness of that event, of
the three spheres and the anger cannot coexist at the same time. I would
meditate on that, I, I would meditate on that, I would go back to the heaviest bad
emotion that I had had that week and I would, in retrospect right, you're
supposed to be doing it at the moment, okay, it don't usually work. Go back
five days, bring up that event again in your mind and start to analyze the
emptiness of the three spheres. Why is the boss empty? Why am I empty?
Why is the event of him screaming at me empty, and what the hell use is all of
that anyway? To think about the emptiness of it, what's that got to do with my
life? I, I would say analyze the emptiness of the situation in that, in that way. I
would say start with that. How is understanding that this is projection on to the
parts of the yelling boss gonna help me at all not to get angry next time? Because
that, that analysis has two useful parts; you start to understand why what you
did was wrong, your probably taking a big shot at the bad karma you created.
And then the next time it happens, I, I can tell you most likely, that when he yells
at me on Thursday I'll probably remember this course, for the first few times,
you know. And that's the whole point of the cause, you know. So I would say,
meditate on that. It has those three benefits. You analyze why you blew it, that,
that takes some energy out of the bad karma. And then next time you won't do
it as quickly or as easily. So I would say that if your gonna do an emptiness
meditation go to the event in which you had the strongest mental affliction,
because that's the direct opposite of emptiness meditation, they cannot coexist
okay? There must be... the understanding of emptiness and the heavy mental
affliction are totally opposite states of mind that cannot exist in the same skull at
the same time. I would say, meditate on that. Try to see why that's true. That
has direct application to your life, it'll make you immediately start to be a happier
person, immediately. And then it'll knock the power out of your own bad
karma. Okay, okay we'll stop there and I'll see you at ten tomorrow, okay. [cut]