«Де Шик Ньингпо До» — Сутра сущности Будды (Татхагатагарбха-сутра)

[Говорящий 1]
Today is Drupada Shri, 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 Tamo Lujin, 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 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, and 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 Banaras, and teaches very close to Banaras, and turns the wheel of the Dharma for the first time, and teaches what, mainly? Yeah, the four Arya truths, OK?

In the first turn of the wheel. So people all over the world, they celebrate Sagan Dawa a lot when Lord Buddha was born. But to me, this is the holiest day of the year.

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.

And to me, putting the teachings in the world is much more worthy of commemoration. And also, it's very much a custom to do big pujas, and put out big offerings, and pray all day long, and stuff like that. And personally, that just seems to me often, I mean, 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 today, 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 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 that the emphasis on offering your knowledge, and your understanding, and your practice, and less emphasis on outer physical kinds of buildings, or temples.

To me, if ACI never gets bigger, or Diamond Mountain, than people sitting in Winston's living room taking classes, then that's OK with me. 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? Tattva.

Sangye gyurik, deshin-shepa-yurik, the sugata-garbha, the seed of Buddha inside you, the seed of Buddha. And that's really 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, 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 tattva, to the Buddha seed inside of us, 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's beautiful things inside. And if you know the Padmasambhava, 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 birth. 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. Fell in the water, right? 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. You know, 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, all along there was a little Buddha statue inside this flower. And then the flower opened, and oh, we see this 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 Uttara Tantra, and you go through the nine images for Buddha feed, 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, right? Buddha nature is the seed for Buddha. In fact, we said that Buddhas don't have Buddha nature.

Yeah, but it already grew into them, right? But through the centuries, there's been this problem has 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 is, or Maitreya is like, say, OK, 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, OK? 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, you know? 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 Sanghegyurik, kam, dhatu, 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, you know? Like, 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 400 or 500 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 a 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 Jalnamba.

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 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 are, whether they, how well they can express it or not, they are Jalnamba by tradition.

Their viewpoints are the emptiness version that was taught in the 13th century by a certain lama from a place called Jalnamba, 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 Bodhichitta, Savatthi, Chaitanya, 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?

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 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 Nangden, which is another text by the same master, Jangun Kongtro, we have their version of Buddha nature, which is based on a mistaken understanding of the Uttaratantra.

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 Uttaratantra. So I thought it'd be really nice to have a whole reading of the original text 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 Samul Nangon, 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.

[Говорящий 2]
You know what I mean?

[Говорящий 1]
What we call Nagarjuna's version of emptiness. And I'm afraid that when you get to the Galupa 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, you see? Or Buddha nature is revealing, like I'd 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, straight Nagarjuna presentation, galupa 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. So we've 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.

So that's up to you. I think there's lots of food in there that you could improvise. We didn't buy anything specially.

Like, 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, or whatever, you can make something.

And then we can hang out and have dinner together after class, you know. So 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?

I'll be in charge. You sure? OK.

OK. 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, you can see what's in there. Yeah, OK.

So I thought it'd be cool to do that. OK, 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, OK?

And maybe the second one. But this time we're putting in Sanskrit, and it gets a little more complicated to do all the conversions and stuff. And we're not really used to it yet.

We haven't really. We figured it out, but it's a little slow. Here's the first of the nine images for Buddha nature, OK, for calm, right?

How do we get to calm? First we did Buddha. Jewel.

Sange, koincho. Chukwuncho. Gendunkoincho.

Yeah, and then calm, right? We're out to calm, right? What is the seed inside of us that creates all those good things?

OK, so nine images. Here's the first one. Gugamare.

Gugamare. What's that mean? OK, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You guys are having fun. I thought that we should start speaking a little Tibetan around here, maybe Sanskrit. And eventually, by September of 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 Lothar would do with you and Sarah. So he'd say, you know, it's not really necessarily good, because there'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, sange. Pengen.

La. Sange means? Buddha.

Penge stands for pema. I mean, if you really wrote the whole thing out, it would look like this. OK, 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. Peme, it's a corruption of padme. And the Mongolians say padma.

So you see a lot of Mongolians name padma. Pe, ngen means lousy, bad, stinky, rotten. It's kind of weird for a padma, right, for a lotus.

La means inside. And we'll do the Sanskrit for each of these. You'll do it with Kristy La on Wednesday.

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 that we have the Sanskrit. This is all taken directly from the Sanskrit verse from the Atthar 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, OK?

Now in all of these images, we're going to have different levels, right? 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, you know?

How do you spell it, V-E?

[Говорящий 2]
V-E-I?

[Говорящий 1]
The veil, the veil that covers the Buddha nature, OK? 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, 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 angle on the Buddha nature? And then there's going to be some clue about removing the veil.

So we'll start with this one. Gyaltsabje 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 Desik Nimbidol.

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, or maybe a question. If you read Arya Sangha's commentary on Uttaratantra, a lot of it is chunks of other sutras.

But who taught those other sutras? Gautama Buddha. But where did Arya Sangha get the Uttaratantra?

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. Huge parts of the Uttaratantra 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. That's the causal order. How about the normal recital order?

OK. Deja Sheren, Timu Wangki Ni, Tipu Daki Gipo Gyi, Chi Shi Pa. Is that the Daki?

Yeah, anyway, Deja. When they recite it, although Michael's right as far as how it occurs, Marikpa occurs first, right? But 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 mean, I'm still talking with people.

I went to, 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.

I mean, 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. I mean, you should have that urge. If you didn't have that urge, I would propose that bodhicitta 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 bodhicitta. Because bodhicitta 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 dracha. To me, that's obvious.

Of course you should like things. I mean, 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, dracha, but not in its manifest form, in its latent, or 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.

Your emptiness, yeah, 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. Like 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 than 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 desire is like that. At the moment that you butt 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 butted in line, right?

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 butted 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.

You see? 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 anyway, I was in Hawaii visiting my brother, surfing, right? When the oil crisis broke out in 19, I don't know, 70-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. And 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. And there were like a truck would pull into town and there'd be a riot. And you'd just end up like pushing, pulling, hitting people to get your cup of kerosene.

And then 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 Dhirchak 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, like 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. And then so it was latent. That anger, the violence was latent.

And now you can see it. Now you can see it wasn't gone. It was just 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. 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.

And 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'll be gaining these beautiful marks. So like a Buddha can see your Buddha nature and be aware of the beautiful marks that you're going to get, like that.

I'll come to it. Because it connects to the first three images, respectively. Which brings me to the second one.

Oh, about revealing it, I didn't see anything special in Gyaltsabje, 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.

And 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 are always asking 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. I mean, 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. All right, the second image. And we'll come back to the second of the three poisons, because it's going to be the second image.

So dangmala, dangti. Dangmala, dangti. Dangma means a bee, like a bzzz bee.

What's the other, brahmari? Otherwise known as brahmari, because you go vroom, vroom. Dangmala.

Dangti means, ci means like induci, means nectar, right? This is the ci induci. So dangti means honey, the nectar of a dangma.

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.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1 Mellifluous? Yeah, mellifluous. Yeah, like that.

Some other things, too. I can't remember. But anyway, oh, madana in your setu 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?

[Говорящий 2]
Yes.

[Говорящий 1]
You see, that's the point of the image. You see, 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 dangma 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 come, 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? Shedam. Again, it's the dormant form at this point.

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

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?

I mean, 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 10 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, right? I mean, if people know you don't like eggplant, and they, I mean, you're not going to say.

I mean, 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 5, 10 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. You see?

That's the intelligent way to not like things, dislike things, OK? Like that. Big difference.

And it's difficult for us, because we're brainwashed into the first way of acting, right? 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? OK.

Before September 04. All right. So we got shitted.

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. Rochipa. What's that mean?

Ekarasa. 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 know, you can have French honey. It's a little better, actually. Irish honey is awesome, OK?

I mean, 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.

Ekarasa. And the Buddha nature in each being is all the same. You see?

Tastes the same. If an enlightened being looked at all the beings in this room, including all the bugs, they would have the same taste. You see?

Ekarasa. One taste. It all tastes the same.

Are there 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.

You know, 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 hatred.

Yeah, not on the first two months. I mean, just Lord Buddha teaching, OK? 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. Ningbo.

Bun la. Ningbo. This is not the bun that means the ancient religion of Tibet.

That's B-O-N, bun, bun. This is bun, OK? 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 rice, a grain of rice? The hull. It's like the hull or the husk, like the chaff, OK?

That's what bun means. Bun la means hidden within the hull or the husk or the chaff. It's ningbo.

Ningbo means the essence. And it's the idea of something edible, cool, something good to eat, hidden within an inedible covering. So naturally, you have to get the covering off, OK?

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.

You know, 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? Yeah, 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. Dujja shedantimu wangi nidipadhaki gipa chijipa. Dedhatam chisosho, 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?

[Говорящий 2]
Yeah, the rooster and the snake.

[Говорящий 1]
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. OK?

So the rooster or pigeon, dujja, 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.

I mean, 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. Like 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. Like, ignorance is much stronger.

That's why they say, go up on a high building if you want to look at your ignorance. Have someone go up and stand at the edge. I'm not advising it, OK?

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, it's like, you know what I mean? Just that, you know, 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.

You know, like Prajnaparamita disappears at that moment. There's just this instinct to fight. You know, 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, OK? Or it could be your favorite ice cream, and then someday someone says, you can't eat that.

Something like that, OK? So bunlan yingbo. 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 like minutes away, 30 seconds away at McDonald's, and then having somebody say, you don't need that. You know, and then this thing comes up, you know? Then ignorance goes from dormant to very active, and then triggers the snake, right?

So bunlan yingbo. 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. I mean, some people I've seen eat whole sunflower seeds, like in baseball, like they'll eat the whole thing and spit it out. But most people would rather take the shell off.

You know, it's kind of fun. Like, you have a choice of buying the sunflower seeds unshelled. I don't like that.

I mean, it's not the same hit, you know? It's like, if you take off the shell, then you get to the essence, the yingbo, and then you enjoy it. And then you feel like you earned it, you know?

Or it's like a pistachio in a way. Like, Rinpoche's dog, Druma, loves to eat pistachios. And so if you really care for her, you open the pistachio and you give her the nut, you know?

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, OK?

That's the idea. OK, number four means unclean or filthy. And in this case, it means a cesspool.

Nangna means inside of the cesspool. Ser means gold. And 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, OK? And then he's not in the mood to try to go get it.

And he just walks on, you know? OK? 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 100 years, it doesn't change. Like, 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 1,000 years.

And it's not going to get anyhow less gold or somehow dirty, somehow less pure gold, somehow less 100% gold. No matter how long the veil is there, the Buddha nature is just as pure, just as unsullied as it ever was, OK? And if somebody comes along, they call Haichen.

Say Haichen. Haichen 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. Like, you could get it out.

You could just kind of get your hand in there and get it out right away. You wouldn't have to go swimming around in it, OK? 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, OK? Let me make sure this is right. Yeah, so Lord Buddha comes and tells you where it is.

That's the idea. Guess what this relates to, the veil, in this case. Guess what it relates to.

I mean, now that the veil got much grosser, it's not like a slightly aging lotus flower anymore. 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.

Yeah, well, it happens to be manifest all three, OK? 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, OK, that's a, it becomes manifest, OK? The anger, the violence becomes manifest.

And that's filthy. That's dirty. That's something impure, very impure, OK?

So that's the idea of the fourth image, all right? We'll do one more and we'll take a break. Hang on.

Let's say, sala, ter. Sala, ter. Sala means earth.

And here it refers to the floor of a house, of a hut, like an adobe hut, the floor of an adobe hut, like made of earth. La means here in or under, under the floor, under the earth of a person's hut. Is it ter?

Ter means a treasure. There's a famous genre of literature called terma, 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.

And that's called a terma. Now you know what a terma 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, like the kind of treasure that when you start spending it, it just gets more and more.

And it'd be nice, right? Founders program, anyway. But there would be a treasure under the earth like that.

And 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, four inches and get this treasure. He just doesn't know. That's part of it.

And then Gyatsobje says that 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. Like 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?

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? I mean, who was the first caveman who figured that out? I have a theory.

I mean, I have a theory. A guy kills a deer. And then 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. You know?

But that's just my theory. But I mean, how many of us could figure it out? The 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 works 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. We'll stop there and take a break.

Sorry, I'll repeat. So number six, the sixth image is, say, nyuk sok. Nyuk sok.

Je chung. Je chung. Nyuk sok.

[Говорящий 2]
Nyuk sok.

[Говорящий 1]
Je chung. Je chung. Nyuk, you may have heard nyuk, 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, you're saying, nyuk geno gen, 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. 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 something, the tree.

It's like the fruit of the tree becomes the seed for the next tree. Dre, normally meaning result. So the full result becomes the cause for the next tree.

So the result becomes a cause. The fruit falls down and becomes the seed for the next tree. And then there's this pit, or seed, within the fruit.

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. So this would be a good one to use for what kind of debate?

It's Buddha nature and Buddhahood at the same time. Yeah, nice, nice. 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 tu sam gom. What's tu sam gom? Learning, thinking, meditating on what you've thought about.

So going to class, going home, or driving and thinking about it, and then actually meditating on it, tu sam 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 something that wakens you up to the nature, to the Buddha nature.

That's what it is in this case. 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.

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 tongpam. I'll write it for you.

Say tongpam? Do you know tongpam? Tong lam gi pang ja.

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 tongpam, 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 shug chung dzin gyi ta.

Oh, I'm sorry, that's on, yeah. 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 shug chung dzin gyi ta, which is what?

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. 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 which feeds 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, you know, like that.

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

That it's a contradiction, you know. 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, okay? That's kind of cool. I think that's all there is on this one.

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

It came just before dvara in the verse. Yeah, alpha-dvara. This one is alpha-pala, okay?

Just for your information. That's the small. Ultimately, that word comes into roof and leaf because roofs used to be made from leaves, small pieces broken off of a tree, so it means small, but you'll get to that next in Sanskrit class.

Seventh. I don't think there is. Let me see.

I think, let me see. I think it's just a fact of cultivation, of cultivation. And that's the first time we've had that here.

And 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. Mm, smells good.

Say, ke. Ke. Shru.

Shru. You don't have that very often. Shru.

Shru. Nang na. Nang na.

Gyao ku. Gyao ku. Ke.

Ke. Shru. Shru.

It's HR, right? Nang na. Nang na.

Gyao ku. Gyao ku. Ke, this ke means clothes, cloth, piece of cloth.

Shru and shrel 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 shru, okay?

So shru. And then nang na means inside. And gyao here doesn't mean gyao po, which is king.

It means gyao wa, which is victor, which is a Buddha, jina, okay? 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, okay?

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

So, I was thinking of the rag a mechanic would use or something like that, you know? And the image is of, there's a road, there's a major footpath, you know, 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, you know? And nobody knows, you know? So obviously, you need somebody to come along, and it's Lord Buddha, and they say, look, you know, 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, you know, 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, okay?

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? You know, 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 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. 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 Jonanga. There are some very, very competent serious scholars who believe in Jonanga very strongly. So it's not a small thing to study.

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

Taranata, who wrote the history book that we studied for Arya Sangha's life, believed in it.

[Говорящий 2]
All the Kagis believe in it.

[Говорящий 1]
All the Kagis believe in it. And Taranata 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. But Gyatsobde 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. Say pume.

Pume. Ngenme. Ngenme.

Dona. Dona. Midak.

Midak. Okay. Pume means a woman.

Okay, it's a Tibetan word for a woman. Singular? Yeah.

Ngen means bad. In this case it means ugly, smells bad, doesn't have any money, and is wearing tattered clothes. Okay.

Like a really down and out lady. Street lady. Say again?

Like a street lady.

[Говорящий 2]
Yeah, like a bag lady, really.

[Говорящий 1]
It's like a bag lady, okay. And then to means jatara in, what's jatara mean? Do you remember?

The tumo, really. Belly fire. To means belly.

Belly. And inside the belly, this mi means a person, like human being, mi. Sometimes mi means negative, right?

But here it means, 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 girpe gyalpo. Chakravartin. What's that?

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

You know, like 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. Like they start to get a wheel on their hands, but it's like indistinct, and a little bit off-center. But they got that much karma that, you know, a lot of times people are faced with being king of the world, or to hold out for Buddhahood.

You know, like Lord Atisha, or Asanga, or Shantideva. You know, it's very common in Buddhism for somebody to get faced with this choice, you know. You can either be a very successful businessman and like own the corporate world, or you can sort of slow down on that and become enlightened, you know.

Yeah, 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, you know, do this?

And, you know, 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 becomes a, 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 know, like you're almost here and you're almost like President of the United States or something, and then you just, you go that way. And that's very common. So, anyway, so world emperors have these marks almost like a Buddha.

[Говорящий 2]
That's Midak.

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah, Midak is a word for Kuru Giri Gelpo, which is Chakravartin. So the idea is that this bad lady has within her belly, she's pregnant, and there's 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 if she knows she's pregnant, you know. But within her is someone who's about to become emperor of the world. And the angle here, okay, the angle is that she is unprotected.

She has no one to help her. Like 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, you know. Like no one would save you from getting raped or taken 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 you know, if you've seen the huts in India, why do you think people in India wear gold, you know, in the villages?

Because there's no place else to put it. It has to be on your body or it'll get stolen. You know, 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. And then, so she's like 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. Like already in her belly is a being who can defend the entire world, protect the gumbo, the natha of the entire world is in her belly.

And she's going to give birth to this being. And she doesn't have any protection at all, you know. 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. You know, we went and heard about who's got cancer.

We went and heard about who's dying. We went to the people who lost their jobs. We went and heard about people who are now afraid of losing their jobs and are working like slaves.

Like bosses must be going crazy in this time right now. You know, they're like, I have to work 18 hours a day. Well, just quit.

I can't get a job, you know. And so like it's, you know, we went and then we saw all the friends who've gotten old and their hair's all, you know, don't see somebody for five years or don't see somebody for 10 years. Be in retreat for three years and then come out and like, you know, it's like depressing.

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

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

It's like, it's just a matter of time. You know, 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. You know, and if they do, what's going to happen, you know.

So, you know, so, you know, when 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.

You know, it's just a matter of time. They don't have any protection. And the protection, 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 that, you know.

So that's the beauty of this one. That's the, I really like this one. I like the idea of a, it's just very touching for me to think of a, you are pregnant already.

Everybody in this room is already pregnant. That's kind of cool, you know. Everybody in this room is already pregnant.

You just have to gestate properly, you know. That's kind of cool to me.

[Говорящий 2]
Would that be the angle?

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

They say, rimbe rimbe means step by step, month by month. It will continue to grow and then it will come out. But the big angle is protection, you know.

That in this case, you're cultivating, you're gestating ultimate protection for yourself and everybody else, real protection. It, you know, it can be quite overwhelming to go from a three-year retreat to eating dinner next to a bar in, what's that place? Universal Studios with five different video things going on above the bar and a live band playing.

And, no, and a bowl behind you, the mechanical bowl with people screaming. And then they come out with a one-by-12 board, like a three-feet one-by-12 board piled with French fries for one person to eat, you know. And then you're just like, and she gets all gray.

She got all gray and she's gonna pass out, you know. And I'm like, don't pass out, you know. And then just to look around and the woman who took us there, just before we get out of her car, she says, wait, wait, I just want to ask you, you did this three-year retreat thing, right?

Yeah, well, my father died a few weeks ago and my brother died a few weeks before that. Can you help me, you know? Is there anything you could tell me?

You know, like we survived this whole dinner thinking, why are we here, you know? And then, but it's protection, you know. There's no protection, there's nothing, you know.

I mean, she was like very interested in three-year retreat because she had what we call Ngengyin pussy. Say Ngengyin pussy. Ngengyin pussy.

It means goosebump renunciation, like, okay, for six weeks she'll be real interested and then it'll start to wear off, you know, 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 dak-me-sa. 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. You can't, you know, 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 ma-da-pe-sa. Say ma-da-pe-sa. Ma-da-pe-sa.

Ma-da-pa means impure, not pure. And then sa means levels, like Bodhisattva bhumis. It's the bhumi, Bodhisattva bhumi, okay?

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 veil? 140.

Bodhisattva veil, it's like my favorite. I didn't know it was 140, I guess it's 140. It is, it's my favorite.

It's my favorite. Even before Tantra, I mean, this is an open veil, right? That's called dak-nam.

The main practice is called dak-nam, where you try to see everything as dak. So ma-dak means impure. The first seven Bodhisattva levels are called ma-da-pe-sa, 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, okay? 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, okay? So those are called impure levels.

And gross level? Yeah. 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?

[Говорящий 2]
Grasping at self-existence.

[Говорящий 1]
Grasping at things as being self-existent. All of those tendencies are compared to the mother's body, okay?

[Говорящий 2]
The bad lady is the first seven.

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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, okay?

The nature of the veil in each case. Okay, number nine. Say, sala, rinchen, suk.

Sala, rinchen, suk. Sala means in earth, which in this case means in mud or in clay, okay? Rinchen means precious, like Rinpoche, right?

And it can mean jewel, but it can also mean gold or silver, like all those are called rinchen. Gold, 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, veneer.

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 like that.

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? Yeah, Bodhisattva levels eight, nine and ten, which collectively are called dakpa-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.

You still have... So, you've reached nirvana in a way, okay? But you still have very subtle, subtle tendencies and you still have what we call mishepe gyushi, 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. Like, there's a distinction there, right? But 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, easy to...

I mean, not a big deal anymore. It's just a veneer, okay? The veil is like a veneer now.

And not a... It's not going to be a major problem to get it off. You know, you just get a cloth and you wipe it off and that's it.

The thing is finished, okay? So, the last one is the most hopeful one in a way, right? Let me see if he says anything else.

Yeah, it's just that by this time you're pretty aware of the veil, okay? By this time, it's not a big... It's not like totally hidden from...

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, okay? So, that's the last one.

So, I'd like to repeat. From here, we go to a... We go to a discussion of what is the Buddha nature like.

You know, 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, you know?

Beneath the clay, beneath the veneer. And so, the job in the next class is to go back to the Sereme textbooks which are the same among all the great monasteries. I mean, they all say the same thing.

To discover what is Buddha nature. You see, what is it really? Okay?

All these veils are called lobur ki cima. Say lobur. Lobur ki cima.

Lobur means temporary, removable, okay? Nothing innate. Like, 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, what?

Seven. We got to talk about what is Buddha nature. And we're going to do that with dialectic again.

You know? There'll be a debate, you know? A lot of debates.

And then we'll get to the Rangguk Sakpa 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, we'll go into, it'll be like, I'll change hats. Right? And I'll be a Jonang-myun.

And I'll be giving you our presentation of why those galukpas are wrong. You know? Why Buddha nature can't be just some absence of something.

You know? Nine images. I mean, you know, it's not like you, the mom has nothing in her womb.

You know? What are you thinking? What's wrong with you?

You know? 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 like mind-only, classical mind-only presentations that also support this idea. And I think it's very good just for advanced Dharma discussions with people.

Like, there might be three people in the country who understand Jonang-myun viewpoint well. And if you ever meet them, you can debate with them or something. You said they'll probably be in Tucson.

Yeah, well, what I mean is... In my class.

[Говорящий 2]
In your class. Yeah.

[Говорящий 1]
There's sort of a... Well, if you prepare, they 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.

You know? 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 is right. Because by...

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. You see?

So if the guy is smart, he'll open up both stores in one month. And then he'll start a raging debate over are the Jonambians right or are the Galupas right? You know?

And then in the process, all of us plain old schmucks will learn emptiness. So we believe that, you know, all the different... It's like Changi, right?

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, you know?

You know, 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 khe. Which means what?

We found a new translation. Whatever works. Yeah, if you think about it.

Whatever works is not bad.

[Говорящий 2]
So the sukha in the Salvation Sukha refers to...

[Говорящий 1]
Sukha means body in the sense of a statue.

[Говорящий 2]
OK, but it refers to... It's a metaphor for Buddha-nature and not Buddha-hood.

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

[Говорящий 2]
Yeah. That's the debate.

[Говорящий 1]
That would be this big debate. And we'll attack them voraciously. OK.

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

And then we'll have dinner together. OK, we can hang out and have dinner. Happy turning of the wheel.

Oh, good time. I miss you guys.