Занятие 6

[Говорящий 1]
So, I'll repeat. So, number six, the sixth image is, say, nyuk sok, rey chung. nyuk sok, rey chung.

Nyuk, you may have heard nyuk gu, same thing. It means a sprout. It's also the Tibetan word for bamboo, and therefore became the word for a pen.

So, when you ask somebody for a pen in the monastery, say, nyuk gu dren che, it means, give me a pen. And the scriptural word is nyuk, which means a sprout. A sprout coming up out of the ground.

sok means et cetera. De means here. You know len de, which means karma and result.

So, de came to mean fruit. And de here means fruit. In Sanskrit, it's pala, which goes into all those words for full, and bowl, and blow, and meaning expanded like a fruit.

Okay? Full comes from that. And then chung means small.

And the image here is of, if you've ever visited this beautiful orchard, the image is of an apricot that falls to the ground. And then the sun, there's sunlight on it, and there's water. And then you put some fertilizer on it.

And then out of the small fruit comes a new sprout for the next tree. So the idea is of perpetuating, perpetuating something, the tree. It's like the fruit of the tree becomes the seed for the next tree.

Drey normally meaning result, you see? So the full result becomes the cause for the next tree. So the result becomes a cause, you see?

The fruit falls down and becomes the seed for the next tree. And then there's this pit or seed within the fruit, okay? So that represents the buddha nature.

The flesh or meat of the fruit represents the veil here. And then within it is the pit or the seed which represents the buddha nature. And then from that buddha nature comes what?

The sprout, which is the buddha, you see? So this would be a good one to use for what kind of debate?

[Говорящий 2]
It's buddha nature and buddhahood the same thing.

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah, nice. Nice. Okay, because in this one there, obviously, not.

The sprout is the buddhahood, the buddha growing, and the seed is the buddha nature. And the buddha nature is helping produce the sprout. Because of the tunkens, the conducive conditions of the sunlight, the fertilizer, and the rain, and so forth, which is a metaphor itself for thosam gom.

What's thosam gom? Learning, thinking, meditating on what you've thought about. So, you know, going to class, going home, or driving and thinking about it, and then actually meditating on it, okay?

Thosam gom. Those three khyens, those three contributing factors, are compared here to the sunlight. And that's the...

we said there'd always be... well, we said oftentimes there's a something that wakens you up to the nature, to the buddha nature. That's what it is in this case.

Okay? Something that helps to reveal the buddha nature. It helps the sprout to pop out.

And then everybody says, oh, there must have been a seed in there. Okay? So, that's the example here.

Now, usually there's a specific kind of veil, right? We went through the three, what? Poisons.

Then the fourth one was what? All three in their manifest form. So now we got some...

we move on to a whole different kind of veil. The veil here is called tongpang. I'll write it for you.

Say tongpang? Do you know tongpang? tong lam gyi pang jang Those things which are eliminated.

pang means eliminated by path of seeing. Which is how many things? Two or three.

Yeah, depending on how you present it, right? What's the biggest one, obviously? Intellectual belief in self-existence is a tongpang, meaning a negative thing which is eliminated, pang, by the tong, by the path of seeing.

The moment you see emptiness directly, you destroy any capacity to intellectually believe that what's going on around you is what it seems. The second one was tsultrim dang du shu chung dzin gyi da Oh, I'm sorry, that's... Doubt.

Doubt about the path, doubt about future lives, things like that. Because you see them directly, you see your own buddhahood directly, you're not going to doubt anything anymore. And then the last one, sort of two and a half, is tsultrim dang du shu chung dzin gyi da which is what?

If you detach yourself. Yeah, like wrong views about what things are valid spiritual practices. The idea that burning yourself or poking yourself or things like that could be very helpful in spiritual practice.

So the meat of the fruit, the flesh of the fruit, the veil in this case, is compared to tongpang. Okay? The negative emotions which are eliminated when you see emptiness directly.

Okay? And the idea is that, it's this old buddhist idea that the production of the cause, of the production of the result, does what to the cause? Destroys the cause.

Okay? The appearance of the result destroys the cause.

[Говорящий 2]
Like the sprout would feed off the flesh of the fruit.

[Говорящий 1]
Right, nice, yeah. The pit feeds off the flesh. The bigger the sprout gets, the smaller the flesh gets.

The more moments of path of seeing you've been through, the more details of these three negative emotions are destroyed. So it's a very cool image. The more the sprout grows, the more flesh of the apricot under the earth disappears, because the sprout is living off the nutrients of the flesh.

You see what I mean? The Buddha is being developed. The more developed the Buddha gets from the Buddha nature, the more the negativities start to shrink, like that.

It's kind of cool. There's a huge debate in the monastery about, at what point is there a sprout, and at what point can they really be totally simultaneous? And it's one of the evidences for emptiness, that it's a contradiction.

You can't point to the moment that one begins and one ends. At what point does the cause go out of existence, and at what point does the result come into existence? The fact that it's so difficult to pinpoint that is the evidence that it's being projected by us, and that it doesn't have an external reality.

That's kind of cool. I think that's all there is on this one. Yeah, this thing is cranky.

Yeah, that's it. Okay. Do you remember the word for the door, the kind of door that the Hatha Yoga Pradipika says you'd have on your yurt?

It came just before dvara, in the verse. Yeah, alpha dvara. This one is alpha phala, just for your information.

That's the small. Ultimately that word comes from roof and leaf, because roofs used to be made from leaves. A small piece is broken off of a tree, so it means small.

But you'll get to that next, in Sanskrit class. I don't think there is. Let me see.

I think the only thing... I think it's just a fact of cultivation. Of cultivation.

And that's the first time we've had that here. If you had to debate it, this would be the one that indicates that it's really buddha nature and not buddhahood that we're talking about inside of you. The idea that it must be cultivated.

And that the buddha which comes out of the buddha nature comes out in stages and grows out like that.

[Говорящий 2]
Smells good.

[Говорящий 1]
Say guh, shul. You don't have that very often. Shul.

nang na gyal ku guh shul It's HR, right? nang na gyal ku This guh means cloth, piece of cloth. Shul and shal mean the same thing.

Yeah, to rip something and it's onomatopoeic. When you rip a piece of cloth it goes... And it sounds like HR.

So HR. And then nang na means inside. And gyal here doesn't mean gyalpo which is king.

It means gyalwa which is victor, which is a buddha, jina. And then ku means the body, kaya, of a buddha. So the body of a buddha, meaning a statue, a beautiful statue of a buddha wrapped in a tattered cloth or a ripped cloth.

And in the Sanskrit, the word here in the Sanskrit, which is, what is that? paklinna also means stinky, rotten, old, falling apart. It's like a really bad piece of cloth.

I was thinking of the rag a mechanic would use or something like that. And the image is of, there's a road, there's a major footpath, like in India, between villages. And people are coming and going constantly.

And there's this, right at the side of the road, there's this old rag sitting there. And no one pays any attention to it because they don't need to. But inside it is a priceless golden image of a buddha or something.

And nobody knows. So obviously you need somebody to come along and explore the buddha and they say, look, pick it up, check out what's inside of it. And then the veil is lifted and you see what's inside.

Gyaltsabje makes the further note that the veil in this case, well, I should say what the veil represents. If the last veil, which was what? The meat of the fruit, the outside flesh of the fruit, if that represented what you eliminate by seeing, at the path of seeing, what do you guess this one represents?

Getting close. Yeah, what you eliminate at the path of habituation. Okay, path number four.

Okay. Yeah. So in this case, the cloth represents the negativities that you lose by perfecting the fourth path, the path of habituation.

Which is actually everything else. Okay, which is actually all the other obstacles. Somewhere along the path of habituation.

And Gyaltsabje says if you think about it, if you take a piece of cloth or a piece of paper and you rip it into three or four pieces, in a way it loses its substantiality. It loses its clothness in a way. At a certain point you stop thinking of it as a piece of paper.

At a certain point you stop thinking of it as a cloth. And just as the growth of the sprout was the cause of the destruction of the meat of the fruit, the ripping of the cloth, of the veil, means that it's almost insubstantial. And obviously from there it'd be a small jump to saying the mental afflictions that were giving you all the trouble at the fourth path were empty anyway.

They weren't substantial anyway, were they? They weren't what you thought they were. Okay, so Gyaltsabje throws in all that stuff.

Kind of cool. Oh, and I wanted to say, this one and the one about the the money under the earth floor, or the gold, what is it? Gold, right?

Treasure. Those two are the ones which are most quoted in later literature. Those two are the ones that you see almost all the time in the debate textbooks, in the monasteries.

Especially the one about the poor person finding an unexpected treasure and not even knowing it was there. You see, we get the theme here again. These two are very big on you have that buddha nature.

It exists inside of you. It's been there since the day you were conceived. Or if you believe in buddhism for countless lifetimes and you just never knew it was there, you know.

So those two are considered the most important two. The one about the cloth and the one about the treasure under the floor. And they'd be most likely to come up in a debate textbook or in a quiz, for example.

[Говорящий 2]
It seems like six would come up a lot too because it seems to substantiate what the difference is between buddha nature and buddhahood.

[Говорящий 1]
For us, I mean, we'll be using it the most in ACI, especially when we ever debate with anybody who's Jon Nangpa, right? There are some very, very competent serious scholars who believe in Jon Nangpa very strongly, you know. So it's not a small thing to study.

It's important to study. And Shantung, this idea of a different kind of emptiness, okay? Yeah, it's very good to know.

Taranatha, who wrote the history book that we studied for Arya Sangha's life, believed in it. All the kaggis believe in it. And Taranatha took it to Mongolia because he was the main lama there.

And so a lot of the understanding of emptiness among many traditions has been affected. I believe you can trace it historically back to these nine examples. Just because it seemed like something substantial.

Like you open the banana peel in the first example and there's a banana. I mean, it's not like empty. It's not like nothing's there, you know.

But Gyaltsabde is quite adamant that this is buddha nature. And it's actually an absence, but you can't discover the absence until you remove the veil. Okay.

Number eight. This one I think is the most sort of a touching one.

[Говорящий 2]
Yeah. Oh, sorry. I'm mistaken.

Sorry.

[Говорящий 1]
Say pü me. Ngen me. Dora.

Midar. Pü me means a woman. It's the Tibetan word for a woman.

[Говорящий 2]
Singular?

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah. Ngen means bad. In this case it means ugly, smells bad, doesn't have any money, and is wearing tattered clothes.

Like a really down-and-out lady.

[Говорящий 2]
A street lady.

[Говорящий 1]
Say it? Yeah, like a bag lady, really. It's like a bag lady.

And then to means jatara in... what's jatara agni? Do you remember it?

Tumo, really. Belly fire. Do means belly.

Belly. And inside the belly, this mi means a person. Like human being, mi.

Sometimes mi means negative, right? But here it's the mi that means a person, or a human being. Dak is the dak in dakpo that means owner.

And midak means the lord of all humans. And it's a synonym for korlu gyurpe gyelpo. Chakravartin.

What's that? Yeah, a world emperor. This is somebody whose karma is so good that everybody in the world knocks on their door and says, will you come be president of the world?

They don't have to campaign. They don't have to fight anybody. Everybody in the world unanimously is dying to have them be king of the world.

And they become king of the world. They own everything in the world. They have the karma.

They even get signs on them, like a Buddha's signs, but they're called selamazo means they're in the Abhidharma third chapter. Their signs are not complete. They start to get a wheel on their hands, but it's indistinct and a little bit off-center.

But they got that much karma. A lot of times people are faced with being king of the world or to hold out for Buddhahood. Like Lord Atisha or Asanga or Shantideva.

It's very common in Buddhism for somebody to get faced with this choice. You can either be a very successful businessman and own the corporate world, or you can slow down on that and become enlightened. Yeah, faced with the riches of the world.

And this is very common in religious literature, because obviously they have the karma to almost be anything they want to be. So are they going to step back a bit from this corporate success, or are they going to do this? I'm not saying you can't work in a corporation.

I'm not saying you can't be high up in a corporation. I'm not even saying you can't own a corporation. But what I'm saying is that you would be defaced at some point with putting all your energy into wealth or worldly success.

And then really, it's a common fork in the road for spiritual people. And then they kind of go this way and go off and live in a Europe or something like that. You're almost here and you're almost like President of the United States or something, and then you just go that way.

And that's very common. Anyway, so world emperors have these marks almost like a Buddha.

[Говорящий 2]
That's Midak.

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah, Midak is a word for Karlagiri Galpo, which is Chakravartin. So the idea is that this bag lady has within her belly, she's pregnant, and the next emperor of the world is in her belly. And she doesn't know it.

I mean, it's not even clear from the book that she knows she's pregnant. But within her is someone who is about to become emperor of the world. And the angle here, the angle, is that she is unprotected.

She has no one to help her. Maybe she's unmarried, she's homeless, and she has no one to fend for her. And in ancient India, this was a real problem.

If you didn't have a formal husband, it was just dangerous. No one would save you from getting raped or taking advantage of or things like that. If you didn't belong to a family, if you didn't have a husband, the force of law was not so strong that a woman could be protected.

And so the idea is that she's alone. She doesn't have a strong house. And if you've seen the huts in India, why do you think people in India wear gold in the villages?

Because there's no place else to put it. It has to be on your body or it will get stolen. Anyone can break into a straw hut.

And you can't trust the banks. So for hundreds and hundreds of years, people have converted grain or gold, everything into gold that you could wear on your body and take it with you out in the fields and know where it was all day. So she's defenseless.

She has nothing. And then the idea is that here in her belly is the person who will become the defender of the world. Already in her belly is a being who can defend the entire world, protect the gunpo, the natha, of the entire world.

It's in her belly. And she's going to give birth to this being. And she doesn't have any protection at all.

So the idea, the angle here is that if you play your calm cards right, your Buddha nature cards right, then slowly the gestation period will happen and a Buddha will come out. And then you become protector of everybody. Here's everybody with nothing.

Here's everybody in the world with no protection. Man, we went to see relatives for three weeks in July. That was all we did for three weeks in July.

We went and heard about who's got cancer. We went and heard about who's dying. We went up and heard about tons of people who lost their jobs.

We went and heard about people who are now afraid of losing their jobs and are working like slaves. Bosses must be going crazy in this time right now. They're like, I have to work 18 hours a day.

Well, just quit. I can't get a job. And then we saw all the friends who'd gotten old and their hair's all...

Don't see somebody for five years or don't see somebody for ten years. Be in retreat for three years and then come out. It's depressing.

It's really depressing. And then they hear all the people who died. And there's no protector.

There's no protection. They don't have any protection. It's like walking out and seeing a bunch of kids in the middle of the desert with no water.

It's just a matter of time. A bunch of one-year-old babies lying in the sand in the desert. And you just look at them.

They're not going to crawl. They're going to crawl to buoy. And if they do, what's going to happen?

It's hopeless. It's just hopeless. And you meet them and you shake hands and you have lunch and you try to be polite and friendly.

And then you say goodbye knowing that it's just time. It's just a matter of time. They don't have any protection.

And the potential for the protection lies within them. And if they just gestated it properly, they would produce the greatest protector in the world. They would become the greatest protector in the world.

They wouldn't have to worry about someone to take care of them. So that's the beauty of this one. I really like this one.

It's just very touching for me to think about. You are pregnant already. Everybody in this room is already pregnant.

That's kind of cool.

[Говорящий 2]
Everybody in this room is already pregnant. You just have to gestate. That's kind of cool.

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah. And what do you call it? The gradualness of the gestation.

They say rinpe rinpe means step by step, month by month, it will continue to grow and then it will come out. But the big angle is protection. In this case you're cultivating, you're gestating ultimate protection for yourself and everybody else.

It can be quite overwhelming to go from a three-year retreat to eating dinner next to a bar in Universal Studios with five different video things going on above the bar and a live band playing. And a bowl behind you, the mechanical bowl with people screaming. And then they come out with a one-by-twelve board, like a three-feet one-by-twelve board piled with french fries for one person to eat.

And then you're just like... And she gets all gray. She got all gray and she's going to pass out.

And I'm like, don't pass out. And then just to look around and the woman who took us there just before we get out of her car, she said, wait, wait, I just want to ask you, you did this three-year retreat thing, right? Well, my father died a few weeks ago and my brother died a few weeks before that.

Can you help me? Is there anything you can tell me? We survived this whole dinner thinking, why are we here?

But it's protection. There's no protection. There's nothing.

She was very interested in a three-year retreat because she had what we call ngenjen pusu. Say ngenjen pusu. It means goosebump renunciation.

Okay, for six weeks she'll be real interested and then it'll start to wear off because it's not based on knowledge. It's just based on a terrible experience that she had. So anyway, there we get protection.

Last one. Oh, that represents my dakpay sak.

[Говорящий 2]
So we're still on number eight?

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah, I'm sorry. This is the nature of the veil, which was, I guess, the woman and her clothing and her environment, which are misleading in a way. This is a veil, like her appearance.

The mother, the body of the mother, of the poor impoverished bag lady, is a veil. And then the child inside is like the Buddha nature, right? And the idea is that in this case the veil is my dakpay sak.

Say my dakpay sak. dakpay means impure, not pure. And then sak means levels, like bodhisattva bhumis.

It's the bhumi, bodhisattva bhumi. The impure bodhisattva levels. When you do the practice of trying to perceive everyone in your world and your world as pure, as per what vow?

Bodhisattva vow. It's not my favorite. I didn't know it was 140.

I guess it's 140. It's my favorite. Even before tantra, I mean, this is an open vow, right?

That's called dak nang. The main practice is called dak nang, where you try to see everything as dak. So ma dak means impure.

The first seven bodhisattva levels are called ma dakpay sak, impure levels. The first seven of the ten bodhisattva levels, bodhisattva bhumis, are called impure, because you still have grasping to self-existence and its gross seeds. In fact, when you reach bodhisattva level number eight, you've achieved what relative to lower paths?

It's nirvana, because you got rid of the last tendency of seeing things as self-existent. So those are called impure levels. So these are called the mother, the dirty mother, the poor ugly mother, is compared, the veil is compared to all the obstacles in the first seven bodhisattva levels.

All the obstacles, all the mental afflictions, all the problems in the first seven bodhisattva levels, which are mainly to do with what? Grasping at things as being self-existent. All of those tendencies are compared to the mother's body.

[Говорящий 2]
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Говорящий 1]
And these are all coming from Gyaltsabje, like he's researched the sutras and he gives it to you. It's really hard to find otherwise. The nature of the veil in each case.

Number nine. Say sala, rinchen, suk. Sala, rinchen, suk.

Sala means in earth, which in this case means in mud, or in clay. Rinchen means precious, like rinpoche. It can mean jewel, but it can also mean gold or silver.

All those are called rinchen. Precious metals and precious stones are all referred to as rinchen in Tibetan, or rinpoche. Suk means form or statue.

In this case it means a statue. So a Buddha statue made of jewels and gold, sort of covered with a thin layer of veneer. Veneer is a very good word here.

A veneer of clay. Or terracotta might be a good word. But the idea is you look at this statue and it looks like it's made of clay.

Terracotta. But one millimeter below the surface is a pure gold statue with jewels on it. And the idea is that, look, you can still recognize that it's what?

A Buddha, right? I mean it still looks like a Buddha, right? And it's just this little veneer, this little subtle covering of something impure.

So if the veil in number eight was the first seven, or the impure bodhisattva bhumis, what's the veil in number nine? Bodhisattva levels eight, nine, and ten, which collectively are called dakpe sa. Just take the ma off the last one.

These are called the pure levels. In bodhisattva levels eight, nine, and ten you no longer are seeing things as self-existent and you don't have growth seeds for doing that. So you've reached nirvana in a way.

But you still have very subtle, subtle tendencies and you still have what we call mi shepa gyu shi, which is obstacles to reaching omniscience itself. So there's a difference between polishing off your last bad emotion and then having your mind open to where you can see every object in the universe at the same time. There's a distinction there, right?

Get rid of your last jealousy, anger, hatred is one thing. Being able to see what's going on on the other side of Pluto right now on a certain speck of dust is a different thing. So the impurities here, the obstacles here, the veil here, is very trouble.

Trouble means thin, subtle. Not a big deal anymore. It's just a veneer.

The veil is like a veneer now. It's not going to be a major problem to get it off. You just get a cloth and you wipe it off and the thing is finished.

So the last one is the most hopeful one in a way. Let me see if he says anything else. It's just that by this time you're pretty aware of the veil.

By this time it's not a big... it's not totally hidden from you. The Buddha nature is not like something out of your league by now.

You can obviously see that there's a Buddha under the veneer. So that's the last one. So I'd like to repeat, from here we go to a discussion of what is the Buddha nature like.

Here we've been almost concentrating on the veils. And because of this presentation, it's beginning to feel to you like what's concealed by the veil is something solid, concrete, a positive thing. So you almost start to get that Jonangbian feel that there's something concrete beneath the veil, beneath the clay, beneath the veneer.

So the job in the next class is to go back to the Seramay textbooks, which are the same among all the great monasteries. They all say the same thing. To discover what is Buddha nature.

What is it really? All these veils are called lobur kyi chima. Lobur means temporary, removable.

Nothing innate. All of these veils are something you can get rid of. And then when you get rid of them, you can reveal Buddha nature.

And the process of getting rid of them creates a Buddha from the Buddha nature. So next class, which will be class number seven, we've got to talk about what is Buddha nature. And we're going to do that with dialectic again.

There'll be a debate, a lot of debates. And then we'll get to the Rangluk Shakpa, which is, okay, this is what Buddha nature really is. Emptiness.

Establishing that Buddha nature really refers to your personal emptiness. Then in the eighth class, the third class this month, it'll be like, I'll change hats and I'll be a Jonang-myun. And I'll be giving you our presentation of why those galukpas are wrong.

Why Buddha nature can't be just some absence of something. Nine images. It's not like the mom has nothing in her womb.

What are you thinking? What's wrong with you? It's a potential.

It's a positive energy. It's a seed. And that happens to be the mind-only school's idea also.

You see? So we'll be looking at it from both points of view. You'll get classical mind-only presentations that also support this idea.

And I think it's very good just for advanced dharma discussions with people. There might be three people in the country who understand your number viewpoint well. And if you ever meet them, you can debate with them or something.

Yeah, well, what I mean is, in your class. Well, if you prepare, there won't be, right? But there's sort of this thing where great historical debates are based on natural problems that all of us would have in our thinking.

That's why the Jonambas, who are really Buddhas, turned that turning of the wheel. They want us to think about it. They want us to thrash it out.

They want us to wonder who's right. Because through the process of agonizing over whether Zales has the best diamonds or B&B has the best diamonds, you will what? You'll buy a diamond.

So if the guy is smart, he'll open up both stores in one mall. Then he'll start a raging debate over, are the Jonambians right? Are the Galupas right?

And then in the process, all of us plain old schmucks Obviously those great lamas are not fools. And obviously they know what emptiness is. But by engaging in this giant acting drama, play, where they attack each other, where great lamas get in controversies, then they force their disciples to come to a clear understanding of a point.

And that's very common in debate and very common in the way that lamas do things. And Lord Buddha started all these debates also among the four classical schools of Buddhism. So it's just a thab kye.

Which means what? We found a new translation. Yeah, if you think about it, whatever works is not bad.

Okay. This suk means body in the sense of a statue.

[Говорящий 2]
Yeah.

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah. Well, according to us. They would say Buddha nature is Buddhahood.

That'll be this big debate. And we'll attack them vociferously. And voraciously.

Okay. We'll stop. We're going to run away for a while and take a break.

Then we'll have dinner together. We can hang out and have dinner. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay.

[Говорящий 2]
Okay.