Углублённый курс ACI 02 — «Руководство к образу жизни бодхисаттвы» Мастера Шантидевы, глава об уничтожении гнева (2004, Нью-Йорк), занятие 1

[Говорящий 1]
We were trying to decide something to teach in New York, and since I was angry at the moment, I said maybe we should teach about patience. And so that's really the main reason why we're learning about patience tonight, is I kind of find this thing, strange thing happening, that as I get older, I think it's the blood pressure, I get more cranky all the time. And no, wait till you reach my age, it's kind of weird, and I've been doing yoga and everything, but it doesn't quite do it, I don't know.

And so I just find myself getting irritable, you know, and I never was that way before, you know, like I thought I have all these mental afflictions, but at least I don't have anger, you know, but now I developed it through the course of my study. And so that's the very first reason we're gonna do anger. Secondly, I think everybody has patience problems, right?

I mean that's universal. So I thought this is one thing that's good for everybody, and no matter who you are, no matter what you do, it kind of transcends all religious divisions and cultural divisions. We all get mad, and it kind of ruins your life.

So that's a second reason to do it. Third one is sort of a serious reason. When we came out of three-year retreat, you know, when we went into three-year retreat, the stock market was at almost 4,000, and you know, the Berlin Wall had come down, and everybody was happy, and then we came out of retreat, and all this news hit us, you know, about violence, and I went to go see my mom, my stepmom, and I love her very much, and she doesn't talk about politics ever, and we were sitting around, and she said, I'm very ashamed, you know, and I said, why?

She said, well, you know, I grew up during World War II, you know, like I, my husband went to war. My father lied. He got into the Navy at age 15 in 1943 or something, and served on a submarine, and she said, you know, we were patriotic, but we had never attacked another country, you know, like the United States could say that we had never attacked another country, and then, and so I'm ashamed that that's happened now, and she was very, sort of, like almost crying, you know, and, and obviously for us to come out and see all the changes and the violence done in the world was very depressing, and I just thought, really, this chapter by Master Shantideva, it's 13 centuries old, it's a very powerful statement on what, it's really not, I don't think you can call it a patience chapter. I don't think, like, the art of getting, the art of not getting angry was a, was an option, but we didn't do that.

Then, based on the first few verses, which you'll hear about tonight, there's a thing called killing patient, oh, sorry, killing anger, and, and we thought we could call it that, but really, it's a whole little book in itself about what to do when somebody else does violence to you, you see what I mean? So, it's a little bit different, it's not like patience in this, in the sense of waiting for a bus, and it's not like the art of not getting angry in the sense of somebody's, I don't know, somebody upsets you or something like that, it's more specifically, the whole chapter is about what do you do when someone else does violence to you, you know, what's the proper response when somebody else does violence to you. So, we felt, James and I were talking, James Conner, and, and we felt very strongly that this was a very appropriate teaching to give, to start, especially some of the, what we call the Pate Institute for Peace Education, and so this talk is really, was supposed to happen at Godstow Retreat Center up in Connecticut, but they only legally let us have, like, 15 people there at a time or something like that, and we're working on them, we're trying to change the karma of that town, but right now we can't have a large, large group there, so we decided to move it to New York, and then that retreat center was given to us, the property is worth, I think, three, four million dollars, it was given to us by a group called the Maurice Pate Institute for World Peace.

Maurice Pate, it's a long story, but he was a businessman from Princeton who was very wealthy, and after World War II, he was very upset by the violence done to children, so he spent, right after the war finished, he, he actually left and went on this tour of all the affected countries, so he went to Britain, he went to France, but then he went to Germany and Japan as well, and he said, you know, we need to do something about the children who have been harmed by the war, so he actually started to go around and collect money for the kids who had been injured during the war, and in one night he got, he got one and a half million dollars from Winston Churchill, this is like in England, when they didn't have any money at all, but he was a very persuasive man, and so he worked more and more, harder and harder for the cause of peace, and helping children, and then toward the end of his life, his organization got quite large, and then he gave it to the United Nations, and they called it UNICEF, so he's the founder of UNICEF, and then he was offered the Nobel Peace Prize, and he refused it, he said it should go to all the people who are working with me, and he never took a salary from the, from the work, he just did it voluntarily, so I think it's a nice example, and it's a good karma that we have gotten his place as a retreat center, and we thought that we would revive the Maurice Pate Institute, given the problems in the world right now, with violence, and, and what are the proper ways to deal with violence, so on a larger scale, this talk is for my benefit, in a small way, this talk is for everybody's benefit who gets angry, okay, or upset, but then on a larger scale, Master Shantideva's work is a very much a masterpiece of how to deal with violence, how to deal when violence is done to you, how do you, you know, and it's easy just to say, oh don't fight back, or be a nice guy, but these are not, the issues are not that easy, right, I mean someone threatens a city with destruction, what do you do, you see, I mean, what, do you just sit around and say, you know, I'm not gonna hurt you, or, or, what, where do you draw the line, and where should you respond to violence with strength, and, and we have these two classic choices, right, respond to violence with, with some kind of power or strength, violence itself, right, and then we have this other choice of, of not responding at all, you know, and, and which is correct, and it's not, I don't think it's really fair to stand up here and say, oh you should always be nonviolent, you know, given the normal way of things, if you were president, and you knew there was a good chance that someone could actually blow up New York City, not just a building, right, then what would you do, you see, it's not as easy as, as just saying no war, no violence, you know, things, things happen in the world, people get hurt, mothers mug people, you know, people rape people, people abuse children, what do you do about it, you know, can you just say, we won't hurt you, you know, the proper response is nonviolence, yeah, but what, what will you do when they come into your room, or into your, you know, your house, and it's your mom, or it's your child, and, and then, you know, we have to discuss, I think we have to be real in that sense, so my idea was that when talking with James was that Master Shantideva's work, to me, it applies on a personal level, it applies on a community level, but what I really like about this chapter is that if you had to choose one of the 200,000 books of Buddhism about how do you respond to violence, and on an international scale, I think this would be the book, this would be the, this would be the book, and I, and I was encouraging James to, I think, work it out into like a, you know the poster they did for the meditation course, there's this big poster that tells you all the levels of meditation, and all the states of meditation, I thought we should make the same kind of poster, like people stick that up because they meditate in their, in their house, or their room, they stick it up where they meditate, but I was thinking you could make a big poster of the, this patience chapter, and you could stick that on the, on the wall of your room, maybe on your, the door where you walk out every morning, because you just look, you know, it'd be a flow chart, if someone insults you at work by 930, you should, this is how you can respond, three choices, you know, you have choice number one, choice number two, choice number three, and basically the whole chapter is about all your options, about what to do when someone does you violence, okay, and so that leads me to an idea that, and I was talking to James, maybe he and I will work on a book about how do you apply this to international situations, you know, it's an easy thing to get up and say I'm a Buddhist monk, we don't believe in violence, so don't hurt anybody, and you know, when the ships come from the Middle East, and park in New York Bay, and, and so, you know, they unload their nuclear weapons, we'll just, you know, you can't say that, you see, I mean, I think you need a more sophisticated approach, if it were that easy, people would have figured it out a long time ago, the solutions are not that easy, but there are solutions, so what I would say, this chapter presents a totally different idea about how to respond to violence, and I would say that it always works, you see, because sometimes violence back works and doesn't work, or sometimes non-violence doesn't work, so I think this chapter, this book, has a completely different approach, something you wouldn't think about, something totally fresh and new, so I think, to me, that's the exciting thing, I think it's something we could offer to the world, and to our country, you know, so I think that would be an interesting experiment, really, we're gonna work on it here, on a personal level, we're lucky this teaching, because each afternoon we'll be in breakout groups, and you'll be able to talk in smaller groups, but I urge you to keep those two ideas in mind, and then, and then, if you get some great idea, talk about it with James, or myself, like during the break, I'll be sitting up here, and just if you, A, if you think of any cool idea to put on a poster that would summarize, I'm thinking people can glue it on the door of their house, when they go out in the morning, you just check in, you know, what to do when someone irritates you this morning, oh, I'll try number two today, okay, and then you open the door, and you close it, and you lock it, and you go to your work, right, so that's the first thing, but on a second level, if you can think of ideas for how to present this internationally, like as a country, I think you might come up with some neat ideas, and then mention it to James, you know, ways in which this viewpoint about violence could be, I don't know, could become part of our culture, you know, we've been going around the country on a tour, a new book is coming out, I think next week, legally it's next week, or something like that, and Double Day published a book, and it's a book about Tibetan styles of yoga, special kinds of yoga, and so we've been on a tour, we're going around the United States, left, left ways, and we started in Tucson, and then we went to New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and now we're up to New York, right, something like that, like we've been going around in this big circle, and we've been talking about, sometimes we talk about the yoga book, which is here, I'll show it to you, I'm supposed to plug it, okay, this is the new book, it's by Double Day, and basically it's a much different approach of yoga, and we'll be talking about it in other classes in New York, and there are like, a bunch of the co-authors are here, this was done by a group of people, and we've been going around the country, and introducing this idea, the basic idea is that as you do yoga on the outside, in a Tibetan monastery, you would be doing special meditations, and special ways of breathing at the same time, to make it more profound, more powerful, not just every city we stop in, Christy and I try to take a yoga class, and so we've seen a whole bunch of kinds of yoga, but the basic pattern is, there might be a few minutes, I don't know, because we're always late, but at the beginning, there's usually a few minutes of, let's say meditate, and think about helping people, and stuff like that, and then they say, okay, that's over, let's do OM, then that's over, and then you do your yoga, you know, so with this kind of system, I mean, the basic difference, and this is how monks do yoga, traditionally, is that you're doing Tonglen meditation as you do your yoga, you know, as you breathe, you're doing special meditations to develop kindness, and compassion, and then according to our belief, that would affect your body, you know, that actually your state of mind, as you do the yoga, would open your channels, and your chakras, and then it would actually change your body, and then higher stuff would happen as well, so anyway, I thought I'd like to introduce the people who've been going around, because they've been working really hard, and they haven't gotten any sleep, they're driving like 10 hours a day, all of them have been giving really nice talks, like everyone's been sharing the talks, and they've been to, I think the schedule calls for a hundred and something stops, and I just thought they should get some, what do you call it, acknowledgments, so I'm going to start with Kimberly Bienha, you got to stand up, until I tell you to sit down, and then hold your applause, because we'll do that at the end, so Kimberly's started the whole, how do you say, she organized, she's doing the organization of the tour from Tucson, she used to work, she used to do all the Starbucks in the Northeast, she was in charge of training, so she's really good for us, because we like Starbucks, but anyway, she's done all that, then Elizabeth Prather, where is she? She's been the tour manager, which is the hardest job of anybody, anytime someone can't find a place to stay, oh, lest I forget, some of the road warriors, we call them, need a place to sleep in the next couple weeks, so if you have any space on the floor that the roaches aren't occupying, okay, even if they are, we can move them peacefully, please talk to Elizabeth, because there are a few people that still, we don't have a place for them to sleep tonight, okay, and that would be very helpful, I trained them to wash the dishes, so don't worry, I'm just going to go around, Zach, you want to stand up, Zach Dukerite is from Tucson, he's 17, he gave some hell of a talk in Gainesville, he got a standing applause in Florida, on the Inner Channels, who else, Palma? Palma, you got to keep standing up, I know you're so tall, but it's okay, Palma's been going around, especially to, she's been giving a lot of talks on poetry, and tonglen meditation for poets, to develop creativity. Chukila, you want to stand up?

Venerable Chukila has been heavy-duty, hands-on management of the thing, and taking a lot of stress and trouble off me, personally, me and Christy, as we go around, and driving, like, intense amounts every day. Where are the rest of these guys, they're hiding, Will Duncan, where's Will? He's not here, where is he?

Oh yeah, Will Duncan started out in Tucson, made the mistake of coming to a teaching there, and he's been doing really well. Like, the night I remember was in North Carolina, Virginia, he gave an intense tonglen meditation for everybody, and it was a huge audience in a public library, and it was very beautiful, and people just rushed up, rushed in, it was like a rock star afterwards, they rushed in, and it was very beautiful, it was very cool. Who else is around?

Benjamin, where is he? Oh, the video guy, he's been peacefully doing the video, and he's been teaching also at some bookstores, we've been at bars and normals, and places like that, going around the country. Mercedes, Mercedes has been working a lot, especially did tonglen meditations and demonstrations of this new kind of yoga, and I think some of the cool talks have taken place, the one I remember is that it was for an AIDS group, in what city, I forget, Asheville?

Cincinnati, and it was, where was it, I don't remember, anyway, it was intense, and they were very happy, really, they were very moved, and a lot of people came up afterwards, and came to that.

[Говорящий 2]
Andriana?

[Говорящий 1]
Andriana's been giving talks, you did tonglen? I don't remember, anyway, giving those talks, and helping with the work. Debbie Bai?

Gave an intense talk, where was that? An intense tonglen, I remember, in Florida, and everybody said that people in Florida wouldn't respond that well, but it was incredible, like people were like crying, and people were coming up and hugging her, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and everything like that, it's pretty cool.

Rebecca? I'm sorry, I'm senile, okay, Rebecca's been helping a lot, where did you give a talk? I don't remember, Cincinnati, so they've each been giving talks, and, who, Ora?

Where's Ora? She's shy. Ora's latest feat was to stay up to 3 a.m. in Asheville to finish this readings for tonight and get them to Kinko's by, she's got it in her hand for the next few hand readings. Christy McNally, she's been doing a lot of the actual exercises, demonstrating the exercises at places and that's been very cool. Who else? That's it, right?

I'd like to give them a hand, okay? Yeah. Thank you.

Thank you. And we'll pass this around. They have them in the back, I guess.

And just they've been working free, they don't get paid anything and they sleep on floors and they drive all day and really nice, good, for free. And stopping a lot of like old folks homes and places like that and helping people. So anyway, back to patience.

Oh, Winston gave one talk too. Where was that? Santa Fe?

Oh, somewhere in New Mexico. Okay, anyway, I probably forgot a few people. And you're welcome to come, we keep moving, okay?

So we leave in two weeks, if you wanna come, you're welcome to come. We just train people to talk. You can come as far as Boston or as far as your leash will take you.

But we're gonna keep going through the Northwest, across the country, then Northwest Canada and then down into California, et cetera. Okay, so that's that pitch. Tomorrow, we're gonna put up a list of cities that we still have to visit because we still need room on floors.

And if we don't find it, then we'll just be like homeless people and it's kind of cold. So we'll put up a list of cities, if you know, if your aunt lives there and you want to make sure she really never calls you again. You could ask her to put up one of our people.

Okay, anyway, we better get on with the patience chapter. I'm gonna follow, I've asked people, there'll be homework, okay? And quizzes, like as James mentioned, we believe in our lineage, in our tradition that when you learn something this precious that you gain a responsibility to give it to other people.

Like it's not enough to come here and listen and say that's interesting and then go home without, you know, what do you call it? Capturing it and being able to hand it to the next person. So really by sitting here tonight, you're sort of making a pledge that you will learn this thing and then you'll be in a position to pass it on to other people.

And it could be that no one asks you for six months about it and then you meet somebody at work who's having trouble with anger and then politely you take them out, don't get them mad, and say, you know, I always have this lecture and this guy had this stuff. It's like 13 centuries old and it's kind of cool and it works, it's worked for me and you never see me get angry, right? And then you can share it with them.

So we think it's a very serious responsibility to take a teaching because then you're responsible to pass it on. And in India and in Tibet over the last two and a half thousand years, they did that, right? Like they passed it on generation to generation.

They didn't say like, oh, I gotta go to a movie. You know, maybe Rob will pass it on. I'm busy, you know?

It doesn't work like that, okay? You gotta be ready. You gotta have it on your shelf, ready to pull off, to take to work that day and share it with somebody at lunch.

So take notes. There's a place in there for taking notes, right? I think it's designed, just open it, let me see.

It's designed so that on the left-hand side of your, when you open it up, you can open up to the first verse. There's a place for you to take notes and take notes because you have to pass it on to the next person, right? So we'll start.

This is called an in-depth course. This is a new idea. Before we did a three-year retreat, we taught, we had classes in New York for I think six or seven years.

And we went through 18 different courses that the monks go through in the monastery. So in a monastery, you go through 18 different courses over a 20, 25-year span. And then we finished a seven-year summary of that and people here got through that.

Then what I thought to do was next September, this September in Arizona, we will start a six-year Tantra course. And that's the higher studies that a person would do in a monastery. Those are what you do after you finish the basic 18 courses.

And then I thought that there should be someplace between the two, like there's these 18, what we call sutra courses. And then there are going to be a six-year course of study in Tantra or the higher studies. But somewhere there in between that we're gonna call an in-depth courses, which is sort of like you can go deeper into one of the courses we already had.

So like in Tucson last October, we had a course in Buddha nature by Maitreya. And we went deeper into the ideas that were presented in the 15th course of the ACI. So tonight what we'll be getting is an in-depth course in course 11.

Course 11 was held, I remember, in the Quaker house in 91, I don't know, seven, six, something like that, seven. And we went through Master Shantideva's, this is called Guide to a Bodhisattva's Way of Life. And what this course represents is going deeper into one of those chapters.

Okay, there's like 10 chapters to that book. And we're gonna go deeper into the sixth chapter. That's why we're here tonight.

I'll tell you a little bit about Master Shantideva and you don't need a lot. I think most of you know, but he was a prince, okay? He was born, I believe, in the area of West Bengal, north, west, eastern India.

And he was wealthy. And like Lord Buddha, at a certain point, he decided that that wasn't for him. And that just to eat a lot and live in luxury for his whole life was not where it was at.

And he left his royal family and he went to be a monk. And he ended up in a monastery called Nalanda, which is one of the great ancient monasteries of India. But he sort of got a bad reputation there.

Like, he was a great yogi and a great practitioner, a great meditator, but he didn't want to show up to anybody, so he called Busukhu. So say Busukhu. Busukhu.

If you can in Tibetan, if you look on the cover, the last three words of that caption are Busukhu. Busukhu means Mr. Worthless, Mr. Lazy. And they say, it was also called Dushye Sumbawa.

Say Dushye. Dushye. Sumbawa.

Sumbawa. Dushye Sumbawa means only thinking about three things. Food, sleep, and going to the bathroom, okay?

Like, his vision is limited to these three things. Like, his total motivation as a monk doesn't go further than eating, sleeping, and pooping, okay? And he was called Mr. Three Thoughts. And then there's a long story. I'm not gonna tell you the whole story. If you wanna read it, it's free online on the ACI website.

But basically, one day they thought the way to get him out of the monastery would be to ask him to give a teaching. Then he was so stupid and so worthless that he would get up on this high throne and then he would make a fool out of himself. And then they'd say, well, you know, we like you and everything, you're a good monk, but we really need people here who can perform and we're gonna ask you to leave the monastery.

So he gets up, he goes to the special thing. In Tibet, you have a throne, like, as high as the top of this project screen. The throne is about that high.

And it's not really a throne so much as just a flat platform with a mattress on it. And then I remember when the Dalai Lama came to our little temple in New Jersey for the first time, 1989, I think, we had to build, like, overnight, we had to build the stairs up to his throne. Every Galupa temple has a throne for the Dalai Lama in it, but he never comes there, right?

And then, so we had to build these steps really fast. Well, what they did with Shantideva was they invited him in, they conducted him to the throne, and then they purposely didn't put any stairs there, okay? So they think he'll make a fool out of himself trying to get up on the top.

But then everybody blinked and suddenly he's sitting up there and he's, and they're, how'd he get up there? I don't know. Then he said, do you want me to teach something you heard before or you want something new?

You know, I said, oh, give us something new, Mr. Three Thoughts, you know? And he's like, well, I have a little something I've been thinking about. Well, when you're asleep, right?

And then, no, no, and he started to teach this text. And then, you know, people were just amazed. It's like, it's so profound.

It has withstood the 13 centuries people have thought it was important to study, right? So, you know, he began to teach it. When he got to the chapter on wisdom, emptiness, ninth chapter, he started to rise off the throne, you know, and people are like, wow, where's he going?

You know, and he gets higher and higher and then he just floats off the top of the temple and he's gone in the sky. And then there's a few of the monks have like Siddha, they can fly in the sky, so they're like trying to run after him, you know? And that's why you see him in the sky, you see, in the cover.

I think it says Somkhe. Somkhe means he's a good author. Kalashekta means flying in the sky and then Busukhu means Mr. Lazy, right?

So that's him flying away with his book. Then the monks are all like, well, how much did he teach? I don't know, he flew away in the ninth chapter.

I heard a 10th chapter. I stayed with him up to a 10th chapter. Now there's no 10th chapters, there are nine chapters.

Then they got in this big argument. Then they realized they made a big mistake and they sent people to try to find him and I think three years later they find him in South India and he's just trying, he's pretending he's a Busukhu there and they say, please come back to the monastery. He's like, no, I'm not interested.

And they say, well, you're just here by yourself. Well, I got people to help. And he's helped people the rest of his life.

And then they said, well, what are we gonna do about this book? He says, you'll find it in the rafters of my, Mr. Lazy's room. I stuck it under the roof ceiling.

You can find the book there and that's how they found this book and that's why we have it. So the book was written in Sanskrit and there's a long story about Sanskrit and you need to study Sanskrit. Sanskrit is the mother language.

It is the sound of the channels and chakras within your own body. And it happens to be the source of all the languages from Iran to Iceland come from Sanskrit. So what we're trying to do in ACIP, ACI, Diamond Mountain, we're trying to sort of revive the study of Buddhism in Sanskrit because it died out about a thousand years ago.

The monastery where Master Shantideva lived was burned in the late ninth century. 1099, the last monasteries were burned in India by the Mughals who attacked from the Middle East. So that custom has dropped out since then.

What we'd like to do is revive the original text. In a 700 year period, the Tibetans got about 5,000 texts from India and translated them into Tibetan. And that's what all the Tibetan lamas are teaching is the text that came from ancient India and then were translated into Tibetan.

And then there are about 200,000 commentaries by Tibetans on native commentaries. So ACIP, James Brady, where, John Brady, sorry, where is he? He's hiding, stand up.

Oh, so his crew, which is basically two very large groups of Tibetan refugee women in India are typing the ancient books onto computer files. They've finished 20 years of work already. Then he has a crew in Russia which has just cataloged, 14 years cataloging 100,000 Tibetan books there.

They will finish in about a month or two months. We're gonna have a big party in LA. You're welcome to come.

You can sit down, he's too shy. But basically they've been saving all these books. So what we have now, we found out through that that the famous Tibetan commentaries, which I used when I taught this in 1997, were based on older commentaries and we found them.

And I thought it would be fun to revive them. So what you're gonna get tonight and tomorrow and the next weekend or the next time we come back is you're gonna learn this from the original Sanskrit also. So I'm gonna teach you, there's a master named Prajnakaramati, and I'm gonna put his name up.

Say Prajna. Prajna. Kara.

Kara. Mati. Prajna means wisdom, akara means spring or source of wisdom and then mati means like totally intelligent person, okay?

And that was his name. In Tibetan, it's shirok jung ne. I'll give you a moment to write it.

You have to write it. Okay? I call it the Patankot train station syndrome, okay?

Like I'm like 19 years old and I've just been studying this book in Dharamsala and I'm going back to Delhi to renew my visa or something and we stop in the Patankot train station and there's these Tibetans running back and forth from this waiting room and I poke my head in and there is Ling Rinpoche. This is the Dalai Lama's teacher. And he was very old and you could never meet him but here he is in the train station, you know?

So we run and we buy some cakes and the train is coming and we run inside and we make our prostrations and here's the head of the place where I was studying, the head of the Tibetan library standing behind him, you know? So I'm like, oh, you know, I'm so happy to meet you. He says in Tibetan, very slow, you know, what is your name?

You know, and I go, oh, my name is Michael, you know? And then we have this conversation with my six-month-old Tibetan, you know? And he's very happy, you know?

And then he says, what are you studying, you know? And then my teacher is standing behind him, right? And then I'm like, and I didn't know the name of the book, you see?

So, and my teacher was going, you know, and he was trying to yell at me. So anyway, just in case you meet somebody like that, you've got to know the name of the book, okay? And you've got to know who wrote it.

So you're studying, we're going to study Prajnaparamita's commentary. Prajnaparamita lived about a thousand years ago. We don't know anything much about him, except we know he lived a thousand years ago because his sidekick, his buddy was one of the gatekeepers at Vikramalashila Monastery, the other great monastery in India, one of the gatekeepers.

Who was that? Naropa, okay? So like when you talk yoga, and when you, when this book, when you get this book, you'll see this whole book is based on Naropa's yoga.

Naropa taught the Tibetans how to do yoga. Who did he teach? It comes down in two lineages, okay?

One is Marpa, whose student was Milarepa, and the other is the Pamtimba brothers in Nepal. And then they passed down the Vajrayogini lineage. So Naropa's very important for us.

Anybody who's studying in this lineage, Naropa, the yoga comes from Naropa, and the Vajrayogini comes from Naropa. So everything we do comes from Naropa. So his buddy is Prajnaparamita.

Prajnaparamita is the other gatekeeper. There are six gatekeepers at this ancient monastery. I put a little summary in your reading, okay?

When you get home, you can read it. But gatekeeper was an important job because in ancient India, there's this thing where other people can come and they debate the keeper of the gate at the monastery, and they debate about some philosophical questions. So it would be like, if somebody from the New York Times suddenly showed up at the door, then we would have to choose somebody from our group to go debate with them, okay?

About what? About how we view the world. Like, they're gonna defend New York Times worldview, right?

Because they have to sell the newspaper, right? Like, they have to defend the Western idea of where things came from, for example. So, you know, in the New York Times, every, I don't know, six months, you see a front-page article about, they're sort of enlightened because they will run a front-page article about the Big Bang.

You know, like, ex-scientists have decided there was not just a Big Bang, there was a Big Bang before the Big Bang. And, you know, only the New York Times would put that on the front page, you know what I mean? And that's their worldview, you know?

Like, where did the world come from? There was a Big Bang, you know? And they'll actually, you know, write an article about how many deutrons were measured and what direction the velocity was, and blah, blah, blah, and that proves that there was a Big Bang, or maybe it doesn't, but anyway, it's really interesting, and this guy from this university has figured this out.

So if they came to the door, and I didn't want to buy this idea of Big Bang, right? If I said, I have a different idea of where things come from, or, you know, if we had this different idea, worldview, of where things come from, then we have to choose a guy like Winston, you go, you're a good debater, you go debate with this guy. And it's big stakes, whoever you pick to watch the door, it's big stakes, why?

In ancient India, whoever won the debate, we don't have to quit our organization and go join the New York Times for free, okay? That's how it worked in the old days. Like, whoever loses has to go join the other side, the whole monastery.

So whoever you put at the door, it's an important thing, right? So anyway, Prajnaparamita must have been good, as good as Naropa, because those two were two of the six gatekeepers for Vikramadashila Monastery, okay? So that's about all we know.

We know he read some other books that are in the Tibetan, and he was very familiar with Master Shantideva's other great book, which is called A Summary of Training. And I'll make you a mazal, you know? If you don't die and I don't die, we'll study that book, okay?

That book hasn't been taught widely, and it's as powerful as this one. And I think that would be a really appropriate thing for us to study together in future in-depth courses. It's a beautiful, beautiful book.

It's as fantastic as this book. This book got a little more famous because some French guy printed it in 1908, and then Western people became aware of it. Prajnaparamita knew both of the books, and he quotes the other one a lot when he teaches this one.

So we're gonna lose Prajnaparamita a lot, okay? I think, oh, and his book, it's on your homework, okay? It's called, I'll just write it a short way.

It's called Panjika. Panjika. It's hot in here, right?

Sorry. Maybe we can open up some doors or something. But it's hard to talk to people who are hot because they get sleepy.

Say kane. Kane. Ka means tough stuff.

Hard, difficult. Ne means points. And it's, in our tradition, Dalai Lama's lineage, right?

We like, very proud of the fact that we deal with the kanes. Like, we don't, we skip over the easy parts and we talk about the hard parts. You know, we say, oh, those other guys, they don't do that.

Who the other guys are, I don't know exactly. But anyway. We like, take pride in the fact that we go for the hard parts in a book.

And so, Master Vajrakantamati's book is called Kane. Tough Points in the Bodhisattva's Way of Life. The Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life.

That's the name of his book. I'm just gonna talk about the hard stuff. The hard points, okay?

The deep points, the profound points. And that's what his book is all about. The quote, the homework also says you gotta name the Tibetan commentary we're using.

We're gonna use a commentary, you know, the Dalai Lama's, the first Dalai Lama's teacher was? Tsongkhapa, Je Tsongkhapa, right? Dates?

1357, 1419, okay? By the way, you gotta know all this stuff, okay? Why?

Because we have a lineage, it's authentic, you know? You're getting the real lineage, okay? It's not something I made up.

You're getting the original text, you're getting the Sanskrit, you're getting the original Sanskrit commentary. But I think it's very important that when you teach something, you have to keep it pure. You have to keep it the way it was taught to you.

You can change the, what do you call it? The presentation, right? Like, I'm gonna talk about Jimi Hendrix and Neil Young and important things like that.

That's okay, but the information and the text should be the old text, the original, and that way the information doesn't get lost. Like, if you had a recipe for the only cure for AIDS, you know, you wouldn't go messing around with it. And this is more important than that, okay?

So, you're getting an authentic lineage, and you should be able to say to somebody, here's where it comes from, you know? This is where I got it from. This is the text that we use, okay?

So anyway, the rest of the course is just patient stuff. But the first night is always, I have to prove to you that this is authentic lineage, you see? And you should keep it that way, okay?

You know, whoever's the next, you might be talking about Michelle Branch. For you guys, okay? See how many people laugh, not many.

Or whoever's next, you see? Instead of Hendrix and Neil Young. But the presentation can be different, but the information should be the same, okay?

So, Gyaltsabje, you're studying Gyaltsabje's commentary, okay? And to tell you the truth, Gyaltsabje copped most of it from Prashanth Kalamati 400 years before, okay? Is that a bad thing in Buddhism?

No. If I write a book about Buddhism, it better sound like a plagiarism of Je Tsongkhapa, then I'm doing a good job, you see what I mean? So that's okay.

That's Gyaltsabje. Gyaltsabje means, Gyaltsab means, he's the guy who took over when Je Tsongkhapa passed, passed on, okay? Gyaltsab means Yuga Raja in Sanskrit means young king.

It means regent, the one who holds the responsibility for that teaching after the original teacher passes, okay? And his book is called it's a little different in the master, but it boils down to this. It's called Entry Point for Bodhisattvas, which in Tibetan is Gyaltsabje.

And what it means is when you're, I don't know, in Tibet, there's a lot of rivers running north-south, and like when you gotta go from Tibet to come, or Lhasa to come, that means you have to ford like 50 rivers to get there. And then what you do is when you get to a river, you walk, you walk north and south until you find the shallowest part, the place where you can enter the river easily and get across to the other side, like a reef or something like that, almost. And in Tibetan, that's called a Julong, entry point.

So what he's saying is that if you use my book, you can get into the stream of these extraordinary ideas very fast. You see what I mean? Easy place to enter the stream is the point of his book.

So that's what entry point means. So if anybody ever asks you, what did you study Patience chapter from? You can say, oh, I studied Joseph Jay 13 what?

64, 1432, et cetera. You know, you can just like that. And that's where your lineage comes from, okay?

And then from person from person down to me, okay? I heard it from the Dalai Lama taught me and 5,000 other people, the Patience chapter in Tucson. I don't know, 95, something like that.

And then I received the entire transmission from Geshe Ngo and Dargay in Dharamsala in 1974. And then I got the transmission from Ken Rinpoche. Oh, he taught it for 10 years, the whole thing.

So those are the, your transmission comes down from the Dalai Lama, Ken Rinpoche and Geshe Ngo and Dargay. So you should be able, you should know who's your family. You see what I mean?

You should know your genealogy. Oh, oh, I got the Patience chapter from this genealogy, okay, and Mercedes, gotta stand up again. She's working on a new chart.

She and I have made a deal that we're gonna try to put out a poster for every one of the 18 courses that tells you your family lineage. It'll have every single great Lama who taught it from the time of like Master Shantideva up to the present. And then we also threw in all the new ACI teachers because you are the next generation, right?

So that's kind of cool. So by the way, if you teach it, you have to tell us and then we put you on the list, you see? So anyway, there's this huge beautiful, so there'll be a new poster.

Hopefully, it's like people are working on it in Russia and Australia. The images, the wood carvings are going from Russia to Australia via New York by email as we speak. And people are designing the poster in Australia and we hope to have it like by the second weekend, right?

And we can hand it out and you can, you know, it's a whole poster of the lineage for the second ACI course, okay? I'll do one more thing and then we'll take a break because I know it's hot and I'm sorry we start so late and I know it's late and you knew it was gonna be late and you know I'm gonna go late, so. Anyway, that's why we give you a bunch of sugar in the middle, keep you awake.

Then you get cranky at home, you can practice. Patience. I wanna say one thing up front, you know?

Master Shantideva is gonna talk about many methods of how to stop being angry and for me, it's like a godsend, you know? The minute I learn one, I put it into practice in five minutes, you know? Within five minutes, somebody's irritating me and I have a chance to put it into practice, you know?

And I do, you know, and you should think like that. You know, don't sit here and there, write down the dates and blah, blah, and then, you know, leave. You have to think, oh, this is for me, you see?

How did he know I was doing that, you see? They say if you have a good connection with a lama, that they are criticizing you personally during the talk. You know, how did he know I had that guy at work, you know?

Or how did he know I was fighting with my wife? Or, you know, it's like that, you see? So, you're gonna learn all these methods about how to not get angry, how to deal with anger correctly.

But I wanna say one thing before anything, especially if people choose to break to leave, okay? He's gonna give you maybe, there's 134 verses we gotta get through. He's gonna give you many methods of dealing with anger, many, many powerful methods for dealing with anger, okay?

But they can all be divided into two, okay? There's two kinds of methods for dealing with anger. And I'll write it up here.

There'll be a Sanskrit breakout group each afternoon. And you have to tell, who's running that? Who's running that?

James, or? Erica. Tell Erica, you know, which, if you wanna try to get into that group, which is overbooked right now, I think, but anyway, you can frustrate her more.

Tell her. And you can get the Sanskrit, because I don't wanna do it, we don't have time to go over that. But here we go.

Say, nyekap. Nyekap. Nyembo.

Nyembo. And then, nyembo. Nyembo.

Tatuk. Tatuk. Nyekap nyembo means like, nyekap means short-term.

Short-term, or temporary. Nyembo means, in Sanskrit, pratikara. It means antidote.

Short-term antidote, okay? And then, nyembo tatuk means ultimate antidote. Okay, tatuk means ultimate.

Nyembo means antidote. And it's something I want to make a very strong point about, okay? All throughout this chapter, you're gonna get temporary antidotes.

I call them band-aids, okay? How to deal with people at work that make you angry. How to deal with obnoxious people.

How to deal with members of your family when they upset you, okay? And that's gonna be temporary solutions, okay? They last for a couple minutes, they last for an hour, they last for two hours, and then they break down, okay?

Upon repeated attack, they will break down, okay? If the problem comes up again in five minutes, if the person comes back to you in 10 minutes, if the boss yells at you the third day in a row, those antidotes will break down, okay? So are they worthless?

No. Are they important to use? Yeah, they're very good.

But then there's nyembo tatuk, and that's why I'm here, okay? You can get the first kind anywhere. You can go buy a book on psychology.

You can go buy like 500 New Age books about dealing with your emotions. You can go buy a yoga journal, frankly. There's an article about anger, you know, be nice, don't be angry, blah, blah, blah.

I'm not teaching that, okay? Like I have to go over the verses because they're there and I want it to be complete, right? But that's not what I'm interested in.

What I'm interested in is the ultimate antidotes. They come tomorrow night, okay? Saturday evening.

We thought Valentine's Day would give you that present. Okay? So we're gonna do that one tomorrow.

What time is it? Five to seven. Five to seven, okay?

And the first class is two to four. The first class is two to four and the second class is five to seven. But really, if you're only gonna come back to one more class, which I very, you know, hope you do, tomorrow at five to seven, that's the important one.

That's the one where in the chapter we get to ultimate solutions for violence, okay? And to me, this is what has international implications. How do you respond when someone hurts you?

You know what I mean? We're not just talking someone yells at you. What if they hit you?

What if they hit someone you love? What if they attack a member of your family, you know, your child? What do you do, you see?

And then tomorrow night is like the night, you know? That's where Master Shantideva gets to the solution. And I just want you to know that before we take a break.

That solution doesn't break down. It doesn't matter how far you push a person. You can do anything to a person.

There's a story in scripture where you could cut off the person's fingers knuckle by knuckle and then their feet and their hands and their legs and they won't break down. They will maintain their patience, okay? Because they have this ultimate antidote.

And the other cool thing about that antidote is if you keep it up, you terminate all the irritating people in the world, okay? You gotta understand that. It's one thing to deal with, I almost said crap, but I'm not gonna use bad language.

It's one thing to deal with all the, what do you call it? Jump, bad stuff that happens to you in the world. That's one thing.

You become super coper, you know? Like super coper. You know, I'm a Buddhist monk, I can cope with anything.

Hit me on the head, punch me in the face, you know? I'll just give you the other cheek, punch that one. You know, super coper.

I can deal, you know, temperature's lousy, my heat breaks down, the landlord says he's not gonna fix it for two weeks. I can cope with it. That's the first approach, okay?

Second approach is I can undertake specific actions to change reality. I always call it Keanu Reeves reaching into the, what's the guy's name in the movie? Nemo?

Neo. Who's the, who's the fish? Nemo.

Nemo. Oh. We didn't catch up on our movies yet, but since there's DVDs, we're really making a push.

Okay, but he like reaches into the Matrix and there's these numbers coming down the screen and he like tweaks reality. And approach number two, which you will not get anywhere else, okay? That's a big advertisement for this course.

Approach number two, you can shift reality and there won't be anything to be patient about. Get the difference? Get the distinction?

You're not a super coper. You're just in a place where bad things never happen, okay? You actually adjust reality.

It's like putting some kind of block on a TV that certain channels won't play, you know? Certain people will not appear in your life, you know? People who bother you will just never occur in your life and there's a way to do that kind of tweaking, okay?

There's a way to do that and it's very, very beautiful and you can do it with anything. You can do it with anything, okay? You can do it with money, okay?

You can tweak reality and make millions of dollars, you know, and I did it. I've done that, okay? The company that I helped start is now up to 200 million a year, okay?

You just reach in and tweak, you see? And then I always tell people I had some kind of, what do you call it? I had like a physical thing with my foot.

It's called gout, right? Like, I don't know, 93, 94, 85 it started. I couldn't walk.

There were days that I couldn't walk. I couldn't get out of bed. I tell people I was in retreat in Flagstaff.

There was an outhouse like 150 feet away. I couldn't get to the outhouse. I had to crawl to the door and I pooped on the front stoop and I came back in and kept doing retreat, you know?

And then I just tweak, you see? You just tweak. You use certain kind of worldview, ultimate worldview, not the New York Times one.

That's what I was talking about in New York Times. And you tweak the bone in your foot and you change its shape. You see what I mean?

You could imagine what would happen to medical practice if people could change, if you could through certain purposeful practices change a bone in your body to make it better, you see? And change the shape of the bone. This is the power of the worldview.

And that's the second, that's come to my mind, okay? So you can apply it to anything. I always said if bowling gets better than yoga, I'm gonna write a book on bowling and emptiness, you know?

And no, it doesn't matter, you see? We've already done a book on business and emptiness. Then there was a book on yoga and emptiness.

And then maybe it'll be bowling or something else. I don't know. It doesn't matter, you see?

Anything you want, you can reach in and tweak reality itself. So we're gonna get to that. And if you've heard me talk about that 200 times on the tour already and you're bored to death of that, this is where it comes from.

This book and the chapter on patience is where this comes from. So you'll get it tomorrow night. I think that's a good place to take a break.

I'm sorry to go. We're gonna go late. So eat a lot of cookies and stuff.

If you just wanna come up and say hi to Christy and myself, we're gonna sit up here. And if you just wanna come up, don't be shy, just come up and say hi, okay?

[Говорящий 2]
All right.