Углублённый курс ACI 01 — Учения будущего Будды: «Уттаратантра» Майтреи (2003, Аризона), занятие 6

[Говорящий 1]
Today is Drupa Tse Shi, means fourth day of the sixth month, and this is the day that Lord Buddha first turned the wheel of the Dharma. And I don't know if you know the story, most of it. It was actually the first class I ever taught in New York.

It was about over 20 years ago, let's say. And we studied the Golden Light Sutra, which is famous in Mongolia. And one of the big scenes in that is Dhammo Lugen, which means when Lord Buddha, in one of his former lives, gave his body to the tigers and her four cubs.

And then he prayed that in the future, when he was reborn, that those five would be his first disciples when he first turned the wheel. And then they were the cubs and the mother were reborn, called Deng'a, which are the five first disciples, who were originally yogis, Hindu yogis with him, and they were practicing asceticism, like burning themselves, or staying out in the sun, or doing weird things like poking themselves with sticks, as a method for enlightenment. And then Lord Buddha got tired of that and said, I'm going to try a different way.

And then he sat under the Bodhi tree in Bodhgaya and got enlightened. And then, I guess, I don't remember how long it was, but for months he didn't teach. He just stayed in the forest and he said, nobody can get it.

He was kind of discouraged and he thought that no one would be able to understand what he had to teach. And then finally he goes to Varanasi, to the deer park in Sarnath, Benares, and teaches very close to Benares, and turns the wheel of the Dharma for the first time, and teaches what, mainly? Yeah, the four Arya truths, okay, in the first turn of the wheel.

So, you know, people all over the world, they celebrate Sagandawa a lot, when Lord Buddha was born. But to me, this is the holiest day of the year, you know. To me, this is the greatest day of the year.

It's one thing to put your body in the world, it's another thing to put your teachings in the world, you know. And to me, putting the teachings in the world is much more worthy of commemoration, you know. And also, it's very custom, much a custom, to do big pujas, and put out big offerings, and you know, and pray all day long, and stuff like that.

And personally, that just seems to me often, I mean, when I've been there, and I enjoy prayers, but even for me, it gets long. I read His Holiness's biography, he said he used to be looking at the cup day, and wondering when the break would be. And to me, there's also a distinction in Tantra.

As you get higher in Tantra, there's less and less emphasis on physical ritual, and more and more emphasis on inner ritual. And so, I mean, that's what distinguishes in one school the four Tantric classes from each other. Less and less on the outside, more and more done with the body and with the inside.

So to me, the neatest thing to do on today is to teach Dharma, and have a class, and that's the offering. You see, to me that's billions of times holier than making a bunch of pancakes and offering them on the altar, and stuff like that. I mean, offer the class on the altar.

Offer the understanding and the wisdom on the altar. And it's always been my way, and I have a feeling that Diamond Mountain is going to be, I have a feeling we're just going to be less, I think what distinguishes ACI in general from many groups is the emphasis on offering your knowledge, and your understanding, and your practice. And less emphasis on outer physical kinds of, you know, buildings, or temples.

You know, to me, if ACI never gets bigger, or Diamond Mountain, then people sitting in Winston's living room, taking classes, then that's okay with me. You know, like buildings just need more. I mean, we ought to have some buildings, as we'll soon find out, but generally it's the knowledge passing from living person to living person, to me, which is the offering.

So today, I don't know, it's just coincidence, I guess, but we are entering today the greatest part of the Uttara Tantra, the holiest part, which is about kam, right? Dhatu. Sangye gyurik, dey shin shekpay rik, the sugata garbha, the seed of Buddha inside you.

The seed of Buddha. And that's really, you know, what most people think of when they think of the Uttara Tantra. When you debate in the monastery, and when Uttara Tantra comes up, I don't know, 80% of the time it's in connection with inner Buddha, you know, the Buddha seed within you.

And so I thought to dedicate a lot of classes to this particular subject. And it kind of works out nice because this session in August, we have three Uttara Tantra classes, and we finished two more, I think, just before the October teaching in Tucson. But I figured to devote these three to kam, to dhatu, to the Buddha seed inside of us, you know, Buddha nature.

And I thought to do it in the following way. First of all, there's a very long section in Uttara Tantra that we're going to cover today called the nine images. These are nine different images about how Buddha nature is within you, and how it's concealed from us.

So how we have a Buddha nature, but how it's concealed by certain things, and we can't see it. And then working to remove those obstacles, those obscurations, and then we can reveal Buddha nature. And there's going to be a lot of images, like the first one is a little Buddha image hidden within a closed lotus flower.

So if you've ever seen a lotus as they open, the petals are not that soft. They're more like artichoke. Yeah, a lot like that.

They feel like that. They're not like silk or anything. They're more hard.

And then when they're closed, you can't get them open. And then finally when they open, you find out there are beautiful things inside. And if you know the Padmasambhava, which means Pema Jum, which means who was born out of the lotus.

And they say, like Virgin Mary's Immaculate Conception, that holy beings can take different kinds of miraculous births. And Padmasambhava is thought, many holy beings are thought to come out of lotus flowers. Like a lotus flower opens, and then this tiny little creature is there, and then grows into a full person.

Like you heard the story of Patanjali. Patanjali fell in the water, in his mother's cupped hands, and then this being just pops forth. So the idea is that Buddha is within you, and then when the lotus opens, you can see, oh, Buddha was there.

So there are going to be nine images like that today. But there's a certain danger to those images. There's a big danger to those images, which is the idea of what's inside.

What is it that's revealed? Is it Buddha, or is it Buddha nature? You see, what is hidden from us?

Is it a finished Buddha? Because all of these images are going to be like, oh, there was all along there was a little Buddha statue inside this flower. And then the flower opened, and oh, we see this little beautiful little Buddha statue.

So you can imagine that over the centuries there's been this problem. People took it to mean that there's a Buddha inside of you already, and you just have to uncover it. That somehow you are already fully enlightened inside, and you just have to uncover it.

And if you read the entire tantra, and you go through the nine images for Buddha seed, Buddha nature, they are all in the form of like something that opens, and then you see something inside that was there all along. But Buddha nature is different from Buddha. Buddha nature is the seed for a Buddha.

In fact, we said that Buddhas don't have Buddha nature. Well, it already grew into them. But through the centuries there's been this problem that's popped up, that people have interpreted Buddha nature to be Buddha.

Somehow, like a positive thing. In our lineage, in our direct lineage, we understand that what Arya Sangha means is that the capacity for Buddhahood, and especially the space for Buddhahood to happen, which means what? Emptiness.

Your emptiness is like the space for Buddhahood to happen. That's inside the lotus. But it wouldn't make a very good image, would it?

I mean, you open it up and there's nothing there. You know what I mean? So Arya Sangha, or Maitreya, is like saying, okay, there's a little Buddha statue there.

But then over the centuries people have gotten confused and taken it to be an actual finished Buddha inside of you already. Now, there's a reason why that would be useful, and there's a reason why that would be harmful to think that. Like, if you didn't understand emptiness very well, it might be more useful for you to tell your disciples, oh, you have a Buddha inside of you, we just have to reveal it.

Then if the person is more sophisticated, and they've been through ACI courses and all that, you could say, look, you have an emptiness inside of you, and that allows you to become a Buddha, and that's what this little statue represents. So why I brought that up is that we're going to have three classes this month on sanggye gyurik, kam, tattva, the Buddha nature. We're going to have three classes.

First class is the nine images from Arya Sangha's, Maitreya's work. The second one, we're going to go through the Saramay monastic text presentation of Buddha nature, which is very detailed and very cool, and very correct. Really cool.

And I'm still trying to decide, I haven't picked the text yet. We can choose either Kedrup Tenpa Dargye, who's the main textbook writer for Saramay. He lived about four or five hundred years ago.

Or we could take, Choney Dhapa Sherup has a nice section on it, like 20 pages on it. And of course he wrote the Diamond Cutter Commentary that we study. So he's the secondary textbook writer for Saramay.

So I'm kind of like seeing which one. I kind of like Kedrup Tenpa Dargye because he has a debate about, a lot about the mind-only school's ideas about Buddha nature. And I like Choney Dhapa Sherup because he's Choney Dhapa Sherup, and he's more, he's like Amdo, he's more, he's more Western in his presentation.

So I'm kind of, or maybe I'll mix them together or something, I don't know. But that'll be the second one. And then I thought for the third one, there are a lot, there's a very big school in Tibet that grew up over 700 years time, called Jal Namba.

And this is like a Kagyu influence, but it also has Nyingma influence, and sometimes Galupa influence, and sometimes what we call Rime, which is called the non-aligned sect, the non-sect sect school. But it was a synthesis of all these ideas. And they were pretty strong in Tibet.

And a lot of the lamas you'll meet in the world nowadays who are not Galupa, whether they, how well they can express it or not, they are Jal Namba by tradition. Their viewpoints are the emptiness version that was taught in the 13th century by a certain lama from a place called Jonlang, and then was carried on in Tibet up to the present time. And especially strong in a lama named Jamgon Kongtul.

And we're studying Jamgon Kongtul, because he's good. He's got some good presentations of the inner body, the chakras, the channels, and things like that. So actually some of us have been working on that text, and it will form part of the Tantric series.

And I'll describe that in Tiger Rider Weekend, I think next weekend. But their presentation on emptiness is wrong, and the presentation of Buddha nature is wrong. The emptiness teaching they give is called shentong.

It's called emptiness of something else. And we touched on it a little bit back in New York during the ACI classes. Do you know which ones?

Was it Bodhisattva Chakravarti? I think. Jetsun Kapa criticizes this version of emptiness.

And we spoke about it very briefly. And I remember afterwards some guy came up to me and said, I'm leaving class. And I said, why?

He said, because you're dissing shentong. And my root lama believes in shentong. So at the time I was like, well why don't you just stay in class and debate with me?

And he said, no, I'm just going. And he left, for good. And then I felt bad because I felt like I should have presented shentong, that kind of emptiness, more thoroughly, and then described why it was mistaken more thoroughly.

And then maybe I wouldn't have had that problem. But I didn't know that much about shentong, except for what Jetsun Kapa complains about. So what I wanted to do for the third class this month, I got a nice root text on shentong by the greatest master of shentong.

And I'd like to teach you that. I'd like to go through that with you. And then we have in Sammo Nangdon, which is another text by the same master, Janggun Kongtrul, we have their version of Buddha Nature, which is based on a mistaken understanding of the Uttara Tantra.

You see? And I thought it's really good to go through those two mistakes, because they're intertwined. The idea of what emptiness is, and the mistake about what Buddha Nature is, both come from these nine images that you're going to get today.

Ultimately they all derive from the mistake that, oh, you open the flower and there's something in there. It's not just emptiness. There's a Buddha in there.

And then this whole idea about what emptiness is, and things like that, you can kind of historically see the threads going back to the Uttara Tantra. So I thought it'd be really nice to have a whole reading of the original texts of that school, and also containing original readings from them about Buddha Nature. Because if you read their book on Buddha Nature, which we did in Sammo Nangdon, when they get to our version of emptiness, it's one line long.

And it says, and some weirdos think that emptiness is something negative. That's all they say about Nagarjuna's version of emptiness. You know what I mean?

What we call the Nagarjuna's version of emptiness. And I'm afraid that when you get to the Gelugpa presentation of Shentong, you might see the same mistake. Meaning, oh, some weirdos say that emptiness is blah blah, and then they just go on.

And you don't get to hear the other side really make their case. So I thought it'd be cool to let the other side make their case in a detailed way. And then I think it can sharpen your understanding of emptiness, and it sharpens your understanding of Buddha Nature.

Because what you'll get when you teach it in Tucson in October, is you'll get the same ideas come up in people's minds automatically. Emptiness is a black hole. Emptiness, if I took this wall away, that would be emptiness.

Emptiness of the wall is everything other than walls. Or if you remove the wall, that would be emptiness. Or Buddha Nature is revealing, like I like to think of it as a banana peel is probably the closest thing in the Western world, is the banana inside.

Like there's something substantial inside that if you could just remove the obscurations, you'd find out that you're just a Buddha inside. And you hear that a lot. It's sort of true, and it's sort of not true, and it's good to know why.

So I thought the third class could be a straight presentation from the horse's mouth of the other idea, which you'll understand is mistaken from the second class, which is the monastic presentation, you know, straight Nagarjuna presentation, Gelugpa presentation. And then if the first class is about the images that caused the problem in the first place, then you'll have a real nice progression. Images that caused the problem in the first place, why Buddha Nature really is emptiness itself, and then why other people got confused and thought that Buddha Nature or emptiness was something else and not negative, for example.

It's not an absence of something. Okay, so we got to get through the nine images today. And since being a holiday, what I thought was, I don't know if you had any plans, but I thought to just invite everybody for dinner, who can stay for dinner, if you make dinner.

Okay, so that's up to you. You know, I think there's lots of food in there that you could improvise. We didn't buy anything specially.

Like, you know, there's lots of Cheerios and ice cream. I mean, that would be my idea of a good dinner. But, you know, there's like rice and bread.

I don't know, whatever, you can make something. And then, you know, we can hang out and have dinner together after class. So, you know, anybody who wants to stay and help do that, that's cool.

Anybody want to be in charge of that dinner, just so there's a boss? No? I'll be in charge.

You sure? Okay. Well, you decide.

You look around during the break today and see what's edible. And I don't know, like the pizza from the day we got out of retreat is probably a little old now. But, you know, I didn't see what's in there.

Yeah, okay. So I thought it'd be cool to do that. Okay, we'll start.

I tried to finish the readings. I'm sorry I didn't get them yet. They're two and a half hour translated.

You might get the first one printed out on Wednesday, okay? And maybe the second one. But this time we're putting in Sanskrit and it's a little gets a little more complicated to do all the conversions and stuff.

And we're not used, we're not really used to it yet. We haven't really, we figured it out, but it's a little slow. Okay.

Okay. Here's the first of the nine images for Buddha nature. Okay, for kam, right?

How do we get to kam? First we did Buddha, dzul, sanggye kongchok, chok kongchok, gendung kongchok, and then kam, right? We're on to kam, right?

What is the seed inside of us that creates all those good things? Okay, so nine images. Here's the first one.

Good morning. Good morning. What does that mean?

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. You guys are fun. I thought that we should start speaking a little Tibetan around here, and maybe Sanskrit.

Eventually, by September 2004, I'd like to just be doing a lot of the normal conversation in Tibetan and Sanskrit. You know, what you do at first is you just replace words, like Geshe Lotar would do with you and Sarah. So he'd say, you know, it's not really necessarily good, because it's no good to carve it.

And then you just have one Tibetan syllable in there, and then you start to expand it from there. And then you just naturally start to understand more and more. Say, sang gi, pe ngen, la.

Sang gi means Buddha. Pe stands for pe ma. I mean, if you really wrote the whole thing out, it would look like this.

Okay, I mean, this would be connected here. It would look like this in a book. And that's padma.

That's the Tibetan way of squishing the two syllables together, padma. Like when you say, oh money, pe me, it's a corruption of padme. And the Mongolians say padma.

So you see a lot of Mongolians say padma. Ngen means lousy, bad, stinky, rotten. It's kind of weird for a padma, for a lotus.

La means inside. Okay, and we'll do the Sanskrit for each of these. You'll do it with Kristi on Wednesday.

Okay, coming up, oh sorry, next Saturday. No, we'll have to figure it out in time. It's not going to be in October.

I think you'd better cover it before then. But we'll talk about it. Because next Saturday we're booked.

It means, but we have the Sanskrit. This is all taken directly from the Sanskrit verse from the entire tantra. This is the translation in Tibetan.

So a Buddha inside of a rotten lotus. Closed, shut closed, right? But the point is that the lotus is somehow old, got old, like it never opened properly.

And it smells bad. And the petals are starting to get brown, you know. And so it's called like a, and it's an ugly lotus.

Now in all of these images, we're going to have different levels. First we're going to have what you can call the, I think the most important part is the obscuration. I don't know what you want to call it, the cover or the veil.

How do you spell it? V-E? V-E-I The veil.

The veil that covers the Buddha nature. So in each of these nine images, there's going to be something bad that's covering the real thing. So inside the lotus flower is this tiny little Buddha image.

And you have the feeling that if it opened up, then the Buddha would pop out. And then suddenly they just grow full size, you know. Like that's how Patanjali was born and things like that.

So this idea of a veil. So first we're going to have an idea of a veil. Then there's going to be the idea of a special angle of the Buddha nature.

In each of the nine. Like the Buddha nature looked at from a slightly different angle. So you can say veil.

You've got to remind me to cover each one. Then there's an angle. Is that an angle?

On the Buddha nature. Right? And then there's going to be some clue about removing the veil.

So we'll start with this one. Gyel Tsubje says that each of the nine images is talking about the veil in a slightly different way. A slightly different veil.

So he says that the reason there are nine images. And these are very famous images, I should tell you, from a book called De Shik Nyingpo Do. It's a sutra called The Essence of the Buddha, or the Sugata Garbha.

So these are all coming from an ancient sutra. Which in my mind brings up a problem, you know. Or maybe a question.

If you read Arya Sangha's commentary on Nurtara Tantra, a lot of it is chunks of other sutras. But who taught those other sutras? Gautama Buddha.

But where did Arya Sangha get the Nurtara Tantra? Maitreya Buddha. So why does Maitreya Buddha go through the trouble of taking Gautama Buddha's images and presenting them?

Why does he just come up with his own images? If you're a scholar you could probably argue about that, but I don't know. Anyway, it's often like that.

Often huge parts of the Nurtara Tantra come from sutras taught by Gautama Buddha. But the veil, in this case, says Gyaltsabje, is one of the three poisons. Give me the three poisons.

The three critters in the middle of the Wheel of Life. In the right order. But that's the causal order.

How about the normal recital order? DGOS BYAG SHES REN, DIM MU BWANG GI NI, DIG PA LUS BDAG GIS RGYIS PA, GYIS CI ZHIG PA Is that in the BDAG GIS? Yeah, anyway, DGOS BYAG.

When they recite it, although Michael's right as far as how it occurs, Marikpa occurs first, right? Here's the first one. Desire.

Which in ACI we prefer to call liking things ignorantly. I still have problems with that desire thing. I'm still talking with people.

We saw many Dharma groups in the last month. And people are still talking about I shouldn't have attachment to ice cream. And I'm like, that's not the point.

There's an urge for happiness. There's an urge for what you like. That's a great thing.

Or else you wouldn't get enlightened. There's an urge to avoid what you don't like. Like whether it's eggplant, or seeing beings go to the hell realms.

There's an urge to not want to see those things. And that's a good thing. You should have that urge.

If you didn't have that urge, I would propose that bodhichitta is closely linked to those two urges. If you don't have the urge to get something cool, if you don't have the urge to avoid what's unpleasant, I don't see how you can have bodhichitta. Because bodhichitta is just another form of that.

The point is that it's faulty, right? It's a broken version of that. Where you would hurt someone to get what you want because you don't understand what you like.

You don't understand where it comes from. You would push in line to get the ice cream, which is certain evidence that you don't understand that allowing others to get their ice cream is how you get your ice cream. You see what I mean?

Then you've got durchak. To me that's obvious. Of course you should like things.

If you don't like Buddhahood, how are you going to do it? If you don't like to see people get out of trouble, how are you going to do it? So anyway, durchak.

But not in its manifest form. In its... What do you call that?

Latent. There's another word. Like sleeping inside of you.

What would you say? Dormant. Yeah.

So the lotus, says Gyaltsabje, in the first image, refers to dormant, ignorant liking of things. Dormant desire. As one of the three poisons.

The habit within us, the potential within us to have this kind of wrong desire that would hurt somebody to get what we want. That within you is what the lotus represents. And that veils what?

Buddha nature. Which is basically what? Your emptiness.

Which you can call capacity. Capacity is a little tricky though, because it starts to shift towards a positive thing. I like the word capacity.

In the Diamond Cutter book we used potential. And then that's why people get confused after a few hundred years. Oh, Geshe Michael said potential.

It must be a positive thing. And then that's what happens. So Gyaltsabje says the lotus is like this.

Because when you first get a lotus, when you first get a flower, those of you who've ever been at Godstow, two weeks after a course was given, and the people cleaned up the Godstow really well, they mopped the floor, they cleaned up the kitchen, they washed the dishes, but they forgot one thing. All the offerings of flowers. It's very natural.

People do this. So there's flowers all over the house. And then everybody goes away for three weeks or something.

And then they rot. And it's this specific smell of a flower. So Gyaltsabje says, look, this lotus is the same thing.

You see? When you first get a flower, it's so pretty, and it's so fragrant, and it's so soft, and it's so beautiful. But then it always rots.

In fact, I guess you could say that the closer it is to almost its perfection, then the closer it is to the day of it rotting. It's just a few... It's a day away from starting to rot.

So he says, ignorant desires like that. Like at the moment that you bud in line at 31 Flavors to get pink bubblegum ice cream before it runs out. Not that we've ever done that.

Not that I like it either, but somebody I know does. And at the moment, it feels good. You get it in your hand.

You get the ice cream. You start eating. Everybody else is still in line.

You sort of saunter out the door. And it looks like everything went well. And that's like the lotus at the moment that it's most fresh and beautiful.

But then it goes rotten. Because then the karma comes back to you. And the next time you go to 31 Flavors, they only have 30 flavors.

And the one you wanted isn't there anymore. Because you budded in line. And so that's why that veil is very tricky.

That veil prevents us from having the clarity of mind of seeing our Buddha nature. And it makes sense, right? If you went and budded in line because you didn't understand how ice cream is made, really, then that reinforces your misunderstanding of the world.

One more contribution to your total misunderstanding of the world. 0.001% more reinforcement for your misunderstanding of the world. And so then naturally that would conceal or start to obscure or veil your Buddha nature.

So he says that's what's covering Buddha nature. And again, this is the latent form that you're carrying around with you all the time if you haven't seen emptiness directly. The latent form.

That's sitting there in you, nice and fine. Example. I think I told it a thousand times, but I was in Hawaii visiting my brother.

Surfing, right? When the oil crisis broke out in 1970-something. Six was it?

Three? And it was really bad in Hawaii because there wasn't any oil. There was less oil than everywhere else.

I had just been to India, and I was so proud of Americans that they never fight over things. I had stood in riots to get a cup full of kerosene from my stove where I couldn't eat the next day. A truck would pull into town and there'd be a riot, and you'd just end up hitting people to get your cup of kerosene.

I always said Americans will never do that. And then I went back, I went home, I went to visit my brother, and here people are in line, in the gas thing, cutting in front of each other, screaming, and people were shooting each other. There was actually instances of people shooting each other.

That's where the dirchak had been latent because there wasn't a necessity. There wasn't a situation where they really needed the oil. And then the moment that the oil wasn't there, this seed just erupted among American people.

And you see it now. We weren't violent because we didn't need to be violent because no one ever attacked us. And now we get to demonstrate our ignorance in full power and attack somebody because they attacked us.

So it was latent. That anger, violence, was latent. Now you can see it.

Now you can see it wasn't gone. We weren't more civilized than other people. We just didn't have to be violent at the moment.

There was no compelling, apparent reason to be violent for the moment. So that's that desire. I want to check one more thing.

Oh, and the angle. Did we say angle? The angle of Buddha nature here is that everybody's got it, even people in the hell realms.

And Buddhas can see it inside the lotus. So the theme through all these nine images is going to be that an enlightened being or a wise person who's had ACI classes can see through the veil and see the Buddha nature inside. So even a hell being.

Buddhas can even look at a hell being and see the Buddha nature hidden within the hell being. And then, let me see what they're talking about. Oh, and one more angle is that this particular little Buddha inside the lotus is supposed to be particularly pretty.

It's supposed to be made of gold and jewels. The idea is that you will be gaining the marks and signs of a Buddha, the 112 marks and signs of a Buddha. When a flower opens up and when your Buddha nature evolves or is revealed, you will be gaining these beautiful marks.

So a Buddha can see your Buddha nature and be aware of the beautiful marks that you're going to get. Like that.

[Говорящий 2]
How did you reveal that?

[Говорящий 1]
I'll come to it. Because it connects to the first three images respectively. Which brings me to the second one.

About revealing it, I didn't see anything special in Gyatsobje, but the idea is that Lord Buddha teaches you or you attend a class like this, and then next time you're in 31 Flavors in Tucson, or it's even in Buri, right? The single... I haven't been there, I have to go make my prostrations.

But the idea is that the next time you're in there, because of this class, you just let the other person go ahead graciously. Then a little bit more of your Buddha nature is revealed to you. And the idea is that by teaching, that's the big deal to me about today, this holiday.

Lord Buddha can't wave a wand and take away your suffering. Lord Buddha... People always ask me to pray for sick people, pray for dead people.

Come on, come here while you're alive. Come here while you're well. It's cement by then.

It's pretty hard by then. It's almost impossible to change it by then. Come while you're well.

Come while you're alive. Come to class. And the teaching is the main help that anyone can give you.

So that's how you see through the lotus. You see through your own latent desires. You don't act bad at 31 Flavors next time you go.

The second image, and we'll come back to the second of the three poisons because it's going to be the second image. Say dang-ma-la. Dang-ti.

Dang-ma-la. Dang-ti. Dang-ma means a bee, like a bzzz bee.

What's the other one? Brahmari? Otherwise known as Brahmari because you go brrm, brrm, brrm.

Dang-ma-la. Dang-ti means, ci means like induci, means nectar, right? This is the ci induci.

So dang-ci means honey. The nectar of a dang. Dang-ma.

So that's a word for honey. In Sanskrit it's madhu. And came into the English words meow in French for honey and mead for a honey-based intoxicant.

Malifilis. Yeah, like that. Some other things too.

I can't remember. But anyway. Oh, madana in your sechu comes from that.

So anyway, this is like a bee. Now, let's go back to the second of the three poisons and see if there's a... Oh, the obvious idea is can you separate the honey from the bee?

Can you get the honey away from the bee? Yes. But that's the point of the image.

The image is that the honey is there and it's sweet and it's inside their house. But you've got to get past the dang-ma to get to it. Which means you've got to be able to skillfully get the bee away from the honey in order to get at the honey.

So the bee here is the veil or the obscuration. And the honey is what? Rick or...

Kam. Buddha nature. To get at the Buddha nature you've got to get past the bee, which would relate to which one of the three poisons.

Now, naturally. Shebam. Again, it's the dormant form at this point.

It's still dormant. Dormant what? What's shebam?

Hatred is the old way. What's the ACI way? Disliking things ignorantly.

Why do I say that? I'll give you the reasoning again. Someone comes in and says, I heard 46 lamas call this desire, hatred and ignorance.

I don't mind the aversion. Give me a break. When's the last time you had aversion?

Except for eggplant or something. But again, the three poisons are flowing in your blood every second of the day. You're having an actual experience of the three poisons.

Ten times a minute? Something like that. Aversion to me means eggplant.

Desire means the Playboy magazine. Which might come across your path every six months or something. If people know you don't like eggplant and they...

I went to a restaurant the other day and the waiter tried to tell me the specials of the day and they started with eggplant and I was like, you don't even have to tell me about that one. But that's like, aversion would only come up once in three months or something. But what we're talking about is the poisons that are running in your blood all the time.

You're having them five, ten times a minute. In a very subtle form. I don't like it hot in here.

If I went outside it would stop the heat. Right. Maybe if you took care of someone else and served someone else a lemonade during the break you wouldn't have to sit in a room like this in six months.

That's the intelligent way to not like things. Dislike things. Like that.

Big difference. It's difficult for us because we're brainwashed into the first way of acting. You'll be cool if you walk outside.

No, that doesn't work that way. You'll be cool if you walk out there and get a lemonade for someone and serve it to them. Then these Diamond Mountain guys will build a nice classroom with central air.

Right? Okay. Before September 04.

Alright. So we got shit in. What's this other stuff here?

Oh. A skillful beekeeper can get the honey away from the bees, right? Like if you're skillful, knowledgeable, if you understand karma and emptiness, you can get past your own tendency to dislike things in a stupid way and get to your own Buddha nature which is your own emptiness.

Then you can see it. You can get it away. And the angle, right?

I promised an angle about the Buddha nature here. What's that mean? Eka rasa.

All taste the same. All taste the same. Sometimes I call it, I translate it as a single song.

It's a difficult word to translate. But what it means is that honey tastes great. I mean to most people.

Most people have the karma that honey tastes really good. And it all tastes the same. You can have French honey, it's a little better actually.

Irish honey is awesome. Mesquite honey is pretty cool. And Subi honey from this huge factory in Kansas or something, tastes like...

I mean if you're a honey freak, it's just like normal. But generally speaking, honey all tastes the same. Eka rasa.

And the Buddha nature in each being is all the same. Taste the same. If an enlightened being looked at all the beings in this room, including all the bugs, they would have the same taste.

Eka rasa. One taste. It all tastes the same.

Are they different emptinesses? Yes. Do they apply to different beings?

Yes. Are they different from each other in any other way? No.

They are all simply the absence of anything that was self-existent. So they all taste the same. Everybody has an equal Buddha nature.

That's the cool thing. So that's why honey is used here, says Gyaltsabje. Gyaltsabje's comments are really useful because they're hard to find anywhere else.

What number? Three. Oh, yeah, let's see if he says anything.

I don't think he says anything. Again, I think it's just generally teaching. Teaching of Lord Buddha.

Yeah, they don't say anything special. He does mention a skillful yogi here, but he doesn't say anything special. You said there was a clue about removing teaching?

Yeah, not on the first two months. I mean, just Lord Buddha teaching. Just studying Buddhism.

ACI courses. I should say that last thing, like a clue or a hint. It only comes in a few of them, clearly.

Say bun la nying po bun la nying po This is not the bun that means the ancient religion of Tibet. That's B-O-N, bun. This is bun.

Bun means, it's a very rare word that means the husk or shell around a plant, sorry, like a nut or a seed. Like the, what do they call it around a grain of rice? The hull.

It's like the hull or the husk. Like the chaff. That's what bun means.

Bun la means hidden within the hull or the husk or the chaff, is nying po. Nying po means the essence. It's the idea of something edible, something good to eat, hidden within an inedible covering.

So naturally you have to get the covering off. And again, Lord Buddha teaches you studying, and then slowly you can remove the cover and enjoy the essence. And the point here is enjoyment.

The angle on Buddha nature here is that you can't really enjoy your Buddha nature. You can't have the bliss of swimming in your Buddha nature as long as the husk is still on it. Meaning, in this case, especially referring to a certain mental affliction, what would that be?

Timuk. Back to the three poisons. Say timuk.

Timuk. So the normal formula, I don't know if we have that in the dhaki. I think it's dhaki.

du jang she dang timuk wang gyi ni, dipa dhaki gyi pa chi chi pa, dey la tam jay so-so, shock, right? So, timuk means ignorance. And especially the one that triggers the first two poisons.

That's why in the middle of the Wheel of Life in the old paintings, what? Yeah, the rooster and the snake. In the old, old ones, it's a pigeon and a snake because pigeons like to procreate so much.

Coming out of the mouth of the pig, which represents ignorance. So the rooster or pigeon, du jang, and the snake, which we can appreciate around Diamond Mountain, coming out of timuk, the pig. Ignorance.

And again, this ignorance is the dormant form. So all three are dormant. The first three images all refer to these negativities in their dormant form.

Sleeping inside of us. Didn't wake up. We have the manifest ignorance all the time.

But we also have the dormant form all the time. And then it applies itself. Normally, ignorance is most active right after an emotional stress.

If you haven't slept enough, if you haven't eaten well, if you haven't done your yoga for the day, if you haven't done your meditation for the day, if you just had an argument with somebody, then your timuk is gone from dormant to active. Ignorance is much stronger. That's why they say go up on a high building if you want to look at your ignorance.

Go up and stand at the edge. I'm not advising it, okay? This is the old days.

But you stand at the edge of a skyscraper and then you have someone go like this. And then you can watch your timuk go from dormant to active. You know what I mean?

Many people interpret it as the fear of death, which is not what the point is. The point is that all idea that you should be moral and that that would get you out of this problem is erased at that moment. Like Prajnaparamita disappears at that moment.

There's just this instinct to fight. All idea of taking a moment to figure out the real cause of this karma and avoiding that karma just disappears. And then ignorance just goes from dormant to dominant in your mind stream at that moment.

So that's a good exercise to watch your last shreds of Prajnaparamita disappear from your mind. Or it could be your favorite ice cream and then someday someone says, you can't eat that. Something like that.

So, bun la nyingpo. I mean, like having Jerry Garcia in your hand and having someone take it out of it. And then all your...

Or a chocolate milkshake minutes away, 30 seconds away at McDonald's and then having somebody say, you don't need that. And then this thing comes up. Then ignorance goes from dormant to very active.

And then triggers the snake. So, bun la nyingpo. And again, the idea, the angle here is you can't enjoy the Buddha nature.

You can't get to the taste of it. You can't sit there. Some people I've seen eat whole sunflower seeds, like in baseball.

They'll eat the whole thing and spit it out. But most people would rather take the shell off. It's kind of fun.

You have a choice of buying the sunflower seeds unshelled. I don't like that. I mean, it's not the same hit.

It's like if you take off the shell and then you get to the essence, the nyingpo, and then you enjoy it, and then you feel like you earned it. Or it's like a pistachio in a way. Rinpoche's dog Druma loves to eat pistachios.

So if you really care for her, you open the pistachio and you give her the nut. Otherwise she doesn't get it. She gets a piece of it and then some is stuck to the shell and then she gets this shell going to her.

You don't get the same enjoyment for her unless you take the shell off. That's the idea. Okay, number four.

Okay. mi tsang nang na ser mi tsang nang na ser mi tsang means not clean. Literally.

But it's a word for a cesspool. A cesspool. Okay.

What's tsang chuh? chuh ni la tsang chuh. tsangpa chupa brahmacharya Celibacy.

Like clean life. mi tsang means unclean or filthy. In this case it means a cesspool.

nang na means inside of the cesspool. ser means gold. In this case it means a gold coin.

And the image here is the guy is running along the road. He has a gold coin in his hand. There's a pond of muck on the side of the road and he's running and then accidentally the coin falls out of his hand and falls into the cesspool.

And then he's not in the mood to try to go get it and he just walks on. So it's like a gold coin laying at the bottom of a cesspool. And the angle on the Buddha nature here is that if the gold has been down there for a day or the gold has been down there for a hundred years, it doesn't change.

It doesn't get somehow polluted or corrupted. And it's also not going to melt. It's a noble metal.

It's not going to disintegrate. The gold coin can sit there for a thousand years. And it's not going to get anyhow less gold or somehow dirty, somehow less pure gold, somehow less hundred percent gold.

No matter how long the veil is there, the Buddha nature is just as pure, just as unsullied as it ever was. And if somebody comes along, they call it lai chen. Say lai chen.

Lai chen means one of the kind of... Do you know what it is? It's one of the kinds of clairvoyance.

It's called the eye of a deity. And it means that you could see in the cesspool where the coin is. You could just get your hand in there and get it out right away.

You wouldn't have to go swimming around in it. That's a kind of clairvoyance where you can see gold underground and stuff like that. So that's an image for a Buddha who comes and teaches you how to reach down and get to the gold and not get too dirty in the process.

Let me make sure this way. We're talking about a cesspool. Guess what it represents in terms of a mental affliction or mental afflictions based on what we went through.

[Говорящий 2]
Yeah.

[Говорящий 1]
Well, it happens to be manifest all three. All three mental poisons. All three poisons in their manifest form.

Like at the moment that you butt into the line at 31 flavors. It's not dormant anymore. At the moment you get angry because they wouldn't give you the ice cream.

At the moment that you order an attack on a country 99% of whose population never hurt anybody. It becomes manifest. The anger, the violence becomes manifest.

And that's filthy. That's dirty. That's something impure.

Very impure. So that's the idea of the fourth image. All right.

We'll do one more and we'll take a break. Hang on. Say sala.

Sala. Sala. Sala.

Sala. Sala. Sala.

Sala. Sala means here in or under, under the floor, under the earth of a person's hut. Is it there?

There means a treasure. There's a famous genre of literature called dharma. Yeah, which means a buried text like in the Latter Day Saints, the Mormon church.

They say Joseph Smith found these books that were hidden somehow. Yeah, and in Tibet it's a very common form of literature that somebody will find an old book that Padmasambhava wrote and hid under a rock. Now you know what a dharma means.

It means like a buried treasure, hidden treasure. So the idea here is that there's a guy who's been poor his whole life, and he lives in this crummy little hut with a dirt floor. But it happens that centuries ago there was a palace standing on that ground and a king had put an inexhaustible treasure.

The kind of treasure that when you start spending it it just gets more and more. It would be nice, right? Founders program.

Anyway, there would be a treasure under the earth like that. The angle here, can you guess what the angle is about the treasure? What's the guy's relationship to the treasure?

Yeah. It's just he doesn't know. I'm not talking about the kind of veil right now.

I'm talking about the treasure. A, it's inexhaustible. Could never run out.

But B, he just doesn't know. He's living his whole life, spent in poverty, suffering. Bills piling up outside in his mailbox.

And he could just dig down three or four inches and get this treasure. He just doesn't know. That's part of it.

And then Gyatsobje says there's another angle here. If you think about it, the treasure's not helping him out either. The nature of the treasure is that it doesn't announce itself.

It's not like the treasure can knock on the bottom of the floor and say, hey, I'm down here. Just dig a little. And that's the nature of Buddha nature.

You have it. And then other angle is that you've always had it. You've always had it.

It's always been right there. But it's not the kind of thing that's going to knock you on the shoulder and say, look, I'm here. It's not going to announce itself.

You need someone from the outside to come and say, look, you've got this Buddha nature thing. There's this emptiness to things. There's an emptiness to you.

Therefore your arm can become Manjushri's arm. You need someone to come and... That idea is so weird.

We were on the plane yesterday from Newark, four hours, 45 minute flight. There's a guy next to us who's very interested in yoga. See, it's a hook, right?

He's a president of a tech company. And he's into yoga. So he sees Kristi's thing coming up on yoga and Sanskrit.

And he's like, oh, well, tell me about it. But then we tried to talk about the business idea and that things are empty and nothing clicked. And what are the odds of him coming up with it on his own then?

You see what I mean? What are the odds of coming up with the idea that money is empty, therefore the more you give away, the more you're going to get? Who was the first caveman who figured that out?

I have a theory. I have a theory. A guy kills a deer.

He lives up on the mountain and there's a lower cave. And then one day he knocks a deer over this cliff and the caveman down below gets the deer body carcass. And then the caveman below eats it and the caveman above gets down there too late and it's already eaten.

And then the next day, three deer come to his door and he figures it out. But that's just my theory. But I mean, how many of us could figure it out?

Giving away the very thing you want is how you get it. I mean, it's totally abnormal. It's totally against human nature.

Who could imagine that? So it doesn't announce itself. It's not like your Buddha nature or emptiness is going to declare itself to you.

You need an outside source normally. You need someone to come up to you, not only tell you, but spend years and years trying to convince you and giving you demonstrations of cases where it worked and stuff like that. So that's the idea of the poor man and the treasure under his house.

Let me see if there's anything else. Yeah, just that point that it's been there for time with no beginning and you didn't know about it. And then you need someone from the outside to come and tell you.