Углублённый курс ACI 03 — «Руководство к образу жизни бодхисаттвы» Мастера Шантидевы: обмен себя на других (2004, Нью-Йорк), занятие 4

[Говорящий 1]
Okay, so we're on class four of learning how to exchange ourselves with other people, or exploring that border between what we consider ourselves and everybody else in the world, right? And last night, just to review where we were, last night in class three, Geshe-la talked about sacrifice and what it is to sacrifice yourself for somebody else, right? And why we would want to do that.

Basically, because that brings us the highest happiness of all. Right? Is that what he said?

Everybody was there. Right? Even if you're the one who doesn't get the cookie, bringing everybody else the cookie would bring you a much higher state of happiness.

Road choke, right? Ultimate delicious. I sort of really like that phrase.

So we're going for the ultimate delicious here. That's where we are in the text, just to remind everybody. So of course there's this rascally opponent in our minds, and he comes along or she comes along and says, you know, that's all very well and good, but I'm totally overwhelmed by this practice.

There are so many different bodies out there. You're trying to convince me that I should break this border between myself and other people, but obviously this is one body, and then there are millions of others, and it's just too much. And obviously we have different bodies.

We are different, you know. He's coming back again with that same argument that he did all through class two that we explored yesterday. So then Master Shantideva speaks to us in verse 11, or speaks to this opponent in verse 11.

1.11. Yes, sorry. Who was the last one to read? You were?

Okay. Did you read? Yesterday.

So it's your turn to read.

[Говорящий 2]
1.11. 1.11, yeah.

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah? I wasn't going to test it until next week, but...

[Говорящий 2]
That's good.

[Говорящий 1]
Oh wait, okay. You know, this little bird told me that someone actually memorized the first two verses we covered yesterday, which is verse 95 and 96. I don't have that special treat, though, because I was going to test it.

No, no. Could you do? Could you do?

It will inspire everybody else to do their memorization.

[Говорящий 2]
I had memorized this morning, but I have actually lost a lot of it.

[Говорящий 1]
Well, we could give you some... We could give you some pointers. It starts off with yada.

[Говорящий 2]
It's a special treat.

[Говорящий 1]
Oh, thanks. I'm just... It came so much to me to say this.

[Говорящий 2]
Yadamama, parashamcha, tuliyam eva, sukam riyam, tadatmana, ko vishisho, viena triva, sukadyama.

[Говорящий 1]
That's beautiful.

[Говорящий 2]
Yay!

[Говорящий 1]
Did you do the other one? No. That's great.

[Говорящий 2]
I guess I can do that one. Yadamama, parashamcha, tuliyam eva, sukam riyam, tadatmana, ko vishisho, viena triva, yatam, rakshamana, sukadyama.

[Говорящий 1]
That's the first one. Yadamama. That's beautiful.

Yeah, that's really good. It's because you're in front of a lot of people that you didn't just... I know you memorized it very well.

So, everybody else has their word cut out for them? It's a great blessing to memorize the Sanskrit words. You can, yeah, okay, first one, Lele.

[Говорящий 2]
By accustoming yourself to the idea, you have learned to think of a few drops of semen and blood that belong to other people as being yourself, even though there's no such thing at all.

[Говорящий 1]
So, this is talking about our physical bodies. He's going in now to a breakdown of ourselves. We did yesterday a breakdown of ourselves in thinking of in terms of time, you know, past and present and future, then we did a breakdown in terms of space, of parts, and now we're doing it in terms of like the physical substance that we call our bodies, you know.

And he says, nothing about our physical bodies has anything to do with us. We get every single physical thing of our bodies from somewhere else. From the very start, from the very moment of our conception, we're getting those two pieces of physical substance, the sperm and the egg, from two other people, from two other people's bodies.

This is not us, this is two other people's bodies. And somehow it creates this body, right? But it has nothing to do with us.

These are substances that come from somewhere else. Why do we consider them ourselves if they come from somewhere else? It's a habit.

It's abhyasad. It's from practice. We had abhyasa in the first chapter of the Yoga Sutra.

Say abhyasa. Abhyasa. Abhyasa.

Abhyasa. Abhyasa means to become practiced in something, or to habituate yourself to something, or to accustom yourself to something, as it says here in the verse. And Master Shantideva's big point throughout this whole book, not just the eighth chapter, is through practice you can do anything.

Your mind is totally malleable, and anything is possible through practice. This is a really, really big theme in Master Shantideva. And he keeps bringing it up.

Every single chapter we learn of his, it's there in four or five verses each chapter. Just through practice. So we're going to do a meditation.

Think about your body as it is in its physical form, with all of its internal organs and liquids and everything running through it, and try and just get in touch with the inside of your body, and the form of your body, and the bones of your body, and the shape. And then think about each substance that your body is composed of, and try and trace it back to where it came from. Like, did you have breakfast today?

Where is your breakfast going? How is your breakfast contributing to making your body? And was your breakfast you before you put it into your body?

Now think about all the cells that make up things like your bones, and your tissue, and how they are constantly dividing and reproducing themselves. And how this breakfast is nourishing them, and it's actually becoming your body. And the old cells are dying and leaving the body.

So how many of the cells do you have that you had when you were seven? We'll go back to seven. Actually, you have none of the cells that you had when you were seven.

They have all died and been reproduced into different new cells. And you have to get that feeling of your body being a constantly changing organism. It's not a solid, stable thing.

It's a constantly changing thing. Even if you look down, if you pictured looking down at your arm, for instance, you would see a solid arm, but that's not what's really happening, is it? It's a constantly changing arm on the cellular level.

Really, it's a constantly aging arm on the cellular level. It's a constantly going towards death arm.

[Говорящий 2]
Okay.

[Говорящий 1]
So, from the very beginning, from the moment that the sperm met the egg, we had borrowed substance for what we considered our body. And this brings into question what we consider me, because most of us, when we say me, we point here. We consider ourselves as part of our bodies.

And that's exactly what the opponent was saying. There are so many different bodies. Well, your body is not even your body, but you think of it that way.

Okay. So, what's the problem, then, if we've grown accustomed to thinking of something that's so foreign and something that's constantly changing and something that's constantly coming in from the outside world to make us up as us? Well, if we can do that with something so gross and physical and changing, then we can do that with anything.

Then we can do that with other people's bodies. You know? Let's go on to the next verse.

I think we're going across. Um, do you want to read? Yeah, did we go?

I think we went across yesterday, but why don't you read verse 112? Do you think she can read the English? No?

Maybe, uh, Andreana. Okay, so that's Mr. Shanti Davis' argument continuing from proving that our bodies are not ourselves, right? And therefore, we can extend it to any other piece of flesh, physical substance, you know?

I think we should go on to the next verse. So this is a crucial point in the text. We've just reached the point.

I want everybody to look at the outline on the other side of the page. It says the actual method to exchange ourselves and others. Up to this point, we've been giving explanations of why we are not ourselves and explanations of, like we had in reading three, I mean class three, why we should treat ourselves the same as other people.

But this gets into the point of actual exchange, the actual practice, how to do, how to really put yourself into another person's body, right? And Master Shanti Deva is targeting a question of the opponent, which I think we actually had with someone in the class here yesterday, who says, I can't do it. It's completely overwhelming.

There's too many people, right? There's too much pain in the world. I can't really take it all on myself.

It's just too overwhelming. And Master Shanti Deva comes back and says, well, instead of trying to drop your self-cherishing mind and think of other people constantly, why don't you just widen your circle to consider everybody as yourself and then self-cherish all you want, you know? Like, just go ahead and self-cherish.

Make the self-cherishing really big, you know? Like, you know, work at it from the opposite direction. It's almost a tantric approach, really, you know?

You take the weakness and you make it a strength by just simply changing the focus of your weakness, right? I like to cherish myself, right? I like to look after myself.

So instead of trying to fight that tendency in myself and beating myself up when I can't do it right or whatever, I just simply change who I think of as myself. And then I go ahead and let myself self-cherish, you know? It's much easier.

It's much less overwhelming. It's much more relaxing. I will cherish myself as Michael, you know?

I will make sure that I get everything that I want all the time, you know? And it's a beautiful practice, really. It's a beautiful practice.

You're so used to looking out. We're so used to looking out for ourselves. We're so used to thinking, gosh, how can I be happy?

That it's so hard to stop that. And we don't really need to stop that because we are one of the living beings, you know? It's not like Master Shantideva is actually even telling us to stop looking out for our own happiness, you know?

He's just like, make everybody happy. Become just the happiness seeker, you know, of yourself, your greater self. It's a really beautiful verse.

It's a really beautiful verse. And we talked about yesterday, we brought up something, and I want you guys to tell me what you came up with. We asked a question about what would happen to karma if we stopped seeing self in other people.

If we saw everybody as ourselves, and then we did the, and then we gave something to myself, you know, what would happen? Did you have time to think about it? Yeah.

Yeah, that's, that's definitely true. It's definitely true that you're, if you take care of, yeah, if you take care of yourself, every time you needed something yourself, it would be there because you're constantly taking care of yourself, you know, and it would just automatically come. I propose another thing that when you talk about the six perfections, like the perfection of giving and, and all the others, it only becomes a perfection when you have dropped that border between yourself and other people.

You can only collect pure good karma by dropping that border between yourself and others.

[Говорящий 2]
Yeah. I don't think so.

[Говорящий 1]
I mean, if you if you Yeah, I don't think so.

[Говорящий 2]
Is it just a practice?

[Говорящий 1]
I mean, is it really you?

[Говорящий 2]
If you really are doing just, you're just being selfish.

[Говорящий 1]
You're redefining. Yeah, you know, Master Shantideva is telling you to be selfish, like he's telling you to be ultimately selfish, just be selfish about your whole self, you know, and here, here lies the question, you know, people get into this, like, what's, what is it really, you know, is there really a line between myself and others? And is this just a practice?

Or is it really the case that there is no line between myself and others? And, and I just have to find it? Well, it's neither.

It's neither. It's completely empty. You see, it's neither the fact that there is me and there is you and I'm just pretending to, to have a bigger self, or nor is it the fact that we are really one.

And I just somehow got on some wrong track and drew a line between us. It's neither.

[Говорящий 2]
The idea is I am everybody. So I love everybody. So I love myself.

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah, yeah. It's a really radical idea. And it has really radical implications about, about emptiness.

This whole chapter, it's about emptiness, in reference to how we care for other people. And it's a huge exploration of, of ourselves, which is the thing that you see when you see emptiness directly for the first time, and you see the emptiness of yourself. So this is leading into the direct perception of emptiness.

Now, the whole, all the texts in, all the Tibetan texts say, you have to get to, you have to practice doing like something like tonglen or some sort of method for opening your heart to others in order to see emptiness. All the Tibetan texts say, if you want a good practice of emptiness in your emptiness meditation, do a tonglen meditation first. You know, and maybe this is why.

Because it has so much to do with seeing emptiness, relating to other people and how we relate to other people. And, and that line, you know, and, and so much to do with like the knot that's in our heart, you know, the, how, how far our border extends and how, how tightly that knot is tied in our heart chakra, you know, what is your question?

[Говорящий 2]
When Buddha says we are the same, when he says we are the same, that same is the same, your, your emptiness of what is something that has to be an emptiness of something, right? Something that has, that is empty, is the same something that I'm empty of. But we're not one, because if we were one, then we'd be hindered.

We'd say, make me go to the hospital, make me one with everyone, everything. Right? I mean, philosophically, we don't say we're one, but our quality, the quality, like when the diamond cutters shoot through.

[Говорящий 1]
Right, our emptiness is the same.

[Говорящий 2]
Well, our emptiness is the same too, that it's empty of.

[Говорящий 1]
Um, well, there are different objects and their emptiness is the same, right? Um, I mean, my subtle, like I'm not as tall as you, I bet you, I haven't been talking about physically.

[Говорящий 2]
I mean, no, no, I mean, just ultimately, ultimately mind, ultimate, the ultimate mind, as you call it, like when Geshe-la talks about breaking the diamond and right, right. That same thing that is empty of the self, it's the same thing. The emptiness is not a thing.

It's an empty, the emptiness can transform, but the thing itself. So since we're the same, then we should care about each other because there's also that thing that we've all been connected, right? So, but we're not, we are the same, but we're not, it's like the ocean and the bubbles.

We're all in the ocean.

[Говорящий 1]
Something like that.

[Говорящий 2]
It makes sense to care about others on the highest level, right? The ultimate truth, that we all are the same, we all have the same potential. So I mean, it's a logical progression.

[Говорящий 1]
Well, he brought up, he brought up something that's very interesting. And since we've been going a lot to yoga centers, we've been hearing it a lot, you know, like this Hindu idea of we all are one and the great Atman, and we all have to like, just connect to that, that one source, you know? Perhaps this is the teaching that that spun off from.

And it wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't the tradition to clarify it or explain it in the same way in the Hindu traditions. You were just supposed to figure it out. But of course, Galupa's Buddhists have to logically debate everything.

So, so we have a lot more explanation about what that is and what it isn't, you know? And basically, I'll say it again. It is the fact that there is neither a line there for real that I'm pretending to ignore so that I could be one with Benjamin, nor is it that Benjamin and I are actually one for real.

And I'm just, I just put this artificial line there. It's neither, right? Because the projection of both myself and Benjamin have come from the same seed, right?

And whether I see it, that projection, as two different beings, it's all another projection. It's simply another projection, you know? And then Master Shantideva, with his Abhyasad through practice, he tells us, we can create whatever seeds we want.

We can create a seed that erases the line between us. And would it be beneficial to erase the line between us? Now, Brian doesn't think so, because he thinks we need another person.

Yeah, it's really, it's a really interesting question.

[Говорящий 2]
Do we get karma if we take care of ourselves?

[Говорящий 1]
Of course.

[Говорящий 2]
So then we don't need another person, do we? Don't Buddhists have compassion for sentient beings?

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah, but not self-existence of sentient beings, right? I have compassion for sentient beings that I have projected, and I'm also projecting myself. So we're equal in our reality, right?

If I saw myself and all sentient beings as equal in the sense of being projected, all being projected in the same way, what's the difference between that and seeing all of us as one? You know, in that same way, in that same way, if you really got that you were projecting all beings, it might start to feel to you as if you were, everything was coming from one source. From one seed, you know, from one, not from a soul, no, because that's the thing.

The person who's projecting is also the same reality, which is as a projection, you know? Yeah, that's the confusing part, isn't it? Yeah, who is projecting?

Who is projecting? There is a projection, let's put it that way. There is a projection that creates, that creates the who's, you know?

In the same way, I mean, I know reincarnation is just a way of understanding, but what is this thing that's beneath what we are that advances to higher levels of understanding that we're all projections? Like, you know, if in one life we're murderers and then we enter another form and we understand that murdering is wrong, so we like, we're advancing. What is the thing that is advancing?

It's a deceptive projected self. That's advancing, yes, yes. In the Heart Sutra, it says there is nothing to reach and there's no one to reach it.

Ultimately, there is no progressing on the path, ultimately. But you have to progress, you see? We must say that like in the next instant or someone's going to wander away saying, I don't have to practice anything anymore, you know?

Like, don't do that. You must do good deeds and collect good karma because that's the way that you understand these things and that's, right, and you have to work through deceptive reality. And the more you understand emptiness, the more you understand how to work deceptive reality to your advantage so that you can progress faster and faster.

And isn't that what everybody wants, you know? So, no, they still have their own deceptive reality. Those Buddhas have their own Buddha paradises and all the Buddha paradises are deceptive, but they can, they see at the same time that, they see the emptiness of it at the same time, which is the extraordinary thing about Buddhas, is that they're seeing the emptiness of everything around them as they experience it.

And we can't do that. If we went into the direct perception of emptiness, everything around us would have to stop because we don't have those kind of... Oh, it's not deceptive to them.

It wouldn't be called the same word. It would be called deceptive to us because it would still deceive us. No, they wouldn't, they wouldn't be fooled by it.

[Говорящий 2]
Can I try one more?

[Говорящий 1]
No, it's a great discussion.

[Говорящий 2]
Maybe it's like how a parent feels towards their child. They are me, but they're not me. So, their welfare is deeply in my interest, but I see them also as beings that I take care of.

How can I take care of other beings if other beings are exactly me? Literally, you see, there are no other beings to take care of. So, it must be, I think, has to be something like that.

[Говорящий 1]
I think what happens is the me part changes. It's not as if the other, what you're experiencing of that other person changes. It's how you relate to yourself which changes, which changes how you see everybody else around you.

You know, I think it has something to do with that. Master Shantideva gets into it a little bit more in, maybe it's the next verse. I don't know.

Maybe we can read it. Yeah, it is the next verse. Why don't we read the next verse and then we'll talk more about this cool stuff.

I was going to do some Sanskrit because this is the Sanskrit track. So, let me just do a little, because you'll feel all deprived and stuff. You came to the Sanskrit track and I didn't write anything on the board.

Okay. So, the two interesting words here that I found because they come in so commonly. In the first line in verse 113, there's the word, actually it's spelled wrong in the pronunciation, but it's supposed to be sadosham.

Yeah, it's an O instead of an E. And the Shah is a retroflex Shah. It's like Shah, Shah.

You turn your tongue upside down, put it on the roof of your mouth and stick out your chin a tiny bit and you go Shah. Yeah. Okay.

[Говорящий 2]
Yeah, yeah.

[Говорящий 1]
I think it's the same. It's the same thing. You're making fun of me, aren't you?

Okay. So, you curl your tongue. Anyway, dosha.

We normally have that as like the three doshas, if anybody knows that in your body. Well, interestingly, dosha means fault or problem. And we are made up, and we're talking about the physical body here, right?

We're made up of three problems that balance us out. If we're lucky, it balances out so that the problems kind of work against each other so well that we don't feel sick. But normally, one of the doshas, one of the problems is bigger than the other two.

And then somehow we are out of balance. Fault or problem. And that's this physical body.

And do we really want to think of ourselves as this problematic, gross, rotting away physical body? No. I think that's one of the other things that Master Shantideva is saying in this verse.

You know, he's trying to get us away from this attachment that we have to our physical cells, which are just going to die and rot, you know, and which are borrowed from somebody else. It's nothing that you want to hold on to. That's what he's saying.

He uses these words very consciously, you know. There's many other ways that he could say this without referring to the three doshas in your body. You know, he's making a pun.

Say guna. Guna means good quality. And this is just a really, it's a really common word that you should know if you're studying Sanskrit.

No, that would just be quality. Sometimes guna means quality, and sometimes it means good quality. Here it means good quality.

And it depends on the context. And it's the same in Tibetan. It's yunten.

As people know who've studied Tibetan, sometimes that can mean like a branch or, right? And sometimes it means equality. And sometimes it means good quality.

Right, right, right, right, right. Let's go on to verse 114. Who just read?

She just read, right? So, this has a lot to do with what Brian was saying. You know, he's just, we're just talking about everyone as a whole just being a bunch of disparate parts of ourselves.

You could say your daughter was a part of yourself, right? And we can think of all the different me's around us as just a part of ourselves. They're not ourselves directly.

I mean, they're obviously not a mirror image of ourselves, but they are a part. And a daughter is a really, really good example because you get that, that's probably one of the only natural tendencies that we have to widen our circle, is with our children. We just automatically, the mother automatically just encompasses the child into herself and says, yes, this is a part of me.

If you get hurt, I'm heartbroken. I am hurt. If you're hurt, I am hurt.

And I can't be happy until that hurt goes away. And that's really what it's about. I can't be happy until your pain goes away.

You know? And can we really, like we said before in the last class, can we really be happy if someone else around us is in pain? Is it fun to be around somebody who's in pain?

Can we really, can we really, can we really sit next to someone who's crying and have a good day? Like, can we? No.

It's even if it's a total stranger, it makes you sad. It makes you totally sad. So why not just take, take action?

You know, obviously it's affecting you anyway, whether you draw the line or not, other people's pain is going to affect you. So you might as well work consciously, actively to stop it because you won't be happy until everyone's pain goes away. You know?

So this idea of a corporate body, there's like, there are other explanations that we can equate to it. You know, you can, if you've ever worked in a company, I've never worked in a company before, but it's, it's the same as, you know, different, different franchises, I suppose. And you're, you're like Starbucks, but you've got this part, you've got, you've got this part over here and this part in New York and this part in Kentucky and, and you communicate to each other and you're all part of this one Starbucks entity, you know?

And, and that's how you have to be, you know, you've got to be like Starbucks. You've got to like, you're just, you're just branching out, like, you know, taking over the world. You have to take over the world like Starbucks.

You have to like spread yourself out so that you are, you just take over every single person you meet until, until.

[Говорящий 2]
So it's not corporate imperialism, it's corporal imperialism.

[Говорящий 1]
Right, right. Corporal imperialism. Exactly.

Exactly. So we don't need to, we don't need to touch each other to be a part of each other. That's, that's his point.

You know, we, there are many examples of, of not having to, there are many examples that we have even in our, in a smaller experience, like, you know, a company or a country, for instance, considers itself one entity. I mean, America's this huge broad place and people in New York and LA never talk to each other, but, but somehow we're all the same country and we, you know, even someone attacks us and we're like, yeah, that's America, don't do that, you know. And it's that feeling, that feeling of, that's me, don't do that, you know.

Someone is, someone attacks someone on the street, someone attacks their car even, and that's mine, don't do that. You know, you just, you just, you get that sense of nationalism that, that everybody has so prevalently these days. You have to feel that, you have to come up with that personal example for you that works, right?

And then, and then try and elicit the same emotion for the other people around you. That's what he's saying. He's saying, pick a good analogy for yourself.

Pick an analogy where, where you feel a part of something. Like, maybe you feel like you're one with all the Buddhists in the room, you know, like, and everybody else, it's like Buddhist and non-Buddhist, everybody else is, or something like that, you know. Get an analogy that works for you and then apply it to, to, to widening that circle of yourself.

One of the other really interesting things. Yeah. No, no, I'm just saying, no, I'm just, I'm sorry.

I'm, I, I should have, I should have clarified it. I'm, no, I'm saying, um, Master Shantideva wants us to think of an analogy where we somehow feel like, like Starbucks, for instance. Like if I worked for Starbucks, she, she used to work for Starbucks.

So I'm saying that as a sort of a joke. But if I worked for that company, um, I would feel like I was a part of a team of everyone else who worked in that company, whether they lived in Kentucky or whether they lived in New York or whether they lived in LA or whether they lived in some weird place in Southern Arizona. It wouldn't matter where they lived.

It wouldn't matter. It, we would all feel like one team, you know, and you have to come up with a good example for yourself of where you felt that before. Like some people I've seen in America, you know, they, they suddenly got this really strong sense of nationalism.

Like before 9-11, nobody cared about being an American. And sometimes they even said bad things about their country, but somebody attacks them and swoosh. It's like all of a sudden this feeling of that's my country.

You know, we are one, we are this body. It's, it's an idea of a body, a one being, whether it's a country or a company or a sports team. People get this way about sports teams too.

I, we went to, um, England this summer and God, their football thing, it's just like, like they murder each other and stuff over the football. It's like crazy, but they have that feeling of nationalism, you know, and it's that feeling we want to get. But applied to everyone without a limitation, you just encompass everyone into your sports team.

You widen the, yeah, the whole world.

[Говорящий 2]
Yeah.

[Говорящий 1]
No, no, I'm, I'm saying you have to get that feeling of nationalism for the entire world. You have to expand your circle. Yeah.

Okay.

[Говорящий 2]
But something that, if something happens to, yeah, I, hello.

[Говорящий 1]
I, yeah.

[Говорящий 2]
If something happens bad to anyone, it affects you.

[Говорящий 1]
Right. Because you're part of one team.

[Говорящий 2]
So if you're looking for jack in the box and they get bad beef, it affects all of the jack in the boxes. Right. As one, even though it's not your store.

[Говорящий 1]
It's the same type of idea. Right.

[Говорящий 2]
Identify it with everybody.

[Говорящий 1]
She's going to get upset because you mentioned beef. I don't know.

[Говорящий 2]
I'm sorry. But if you think about nationalism in 9-11, are you able to take responsibility for why it happened? Why you did this stuff?

Because it sounds like you're becoming nationalistic in the South and in America.

[Говорящий 1]
No, I, I was.

[Говорящий 2]
I'm taking it to extreme. I'm sure you're not.

[Говорящий 1]
No, this is a, yeah, it's an analogy of the feeling. Personally, of course, we all know that everything that we see around us, including all the violence in our world has to do with our own karmic seeds. And the only way to create new karmic seeds for violence in our world and for people to attack our country is to attack them back.

So that would be the last thing that we would want to do in the whole world would be to attack somebody because that's what caused it in the first place. And, you know, that's, that's pretty much the bottom line on that, that point. So back to the, back to the hand thing.

And yeah, Michael. I'm not sure I understand the question. Okay.

Maybe I'll like cook it in by the end of class. Okay. One thing to think about this, this verse, when you're talking about parts of your body, you know, something that gets you, Michael, always likes to say, you know, if you, I think of this whole thing as my body, but if somehow I got in an accident and my hand was cut off, would I be less of myself?

Would you, would some part of me be missing? I mean, like if, like, would my identity be missing?

[Говорящий 2]
Right.

[Говорящий 1]
But, but do you think I would? Okay. So you guys can explore this.

Maybe you think, maybe you think that, that cutting off your hand, you would, you would feel like a different person, but part of you wouldn't go into the hand that was on the floor and you wouldn't be divided into two. And there wouldn't be like a tiny bit of me in the hand saying, I just got cut off. Can I come back to the mother ship?

You know, like I, it, it wouldn't be like that. It would just be like a piece of dead flesh. You see, it's just a piece of dead flesh.

It's just me. It's just physical substance. And then you have to think how much of my body could be cut off before I went away.

You know, I mean, really, he's just getting us deeper and deeper into who we think we are into exploring that idea of me. Not right now. So practically when we're, when we're trying to do this practice the texts say to start with one or two people, you know, start Master Shantideva famous lines, start with carrots and potatoes, right?

Pick a person that, that, you know, that you like. It's much easier if someone do it with something you like first, right? Like a family members, you know, you work with your family and then you branch out.

You pick one person in the place that you work with and you just decide, I'm just going to widen my me to encompass them. And then you try and practice this. So we're going to do a little meditation.

Just close your eyes. And I want you to pick someone now. I want you to pick someone now to practice on for the rest of the week.

Someone that you're going to come into contact with, preferably every day, someone that you see every day and just get their, get them in your mind right now. And we're going to do a preliminary exchanging ourself for them. Try and put yourself into their body and mind.

Try and put yourself, try and be them. Imagine what it would be like to be them. Well, no questions during meditation.

Okay. So pick one thing that, you know, that you want. You're them, right?

Think about maybe one or two things that you, that, that you want or that you need right now, being this person. Now figure out how you're going to get it for yourself. All right.

That's just a short, um, what they call Pemba in Tibetan. It's like, um, make a plan, make a plan to do it later, to do it during the week, make a plan to do it for this person during the week. No, that they want it as you.

Oh, Pemba. Well, it's not the Tibetan track, but, um, no. Yeah.

Pemba. It's, it's a lot, it's my, it's like a, um, like a spiritual commitment to yourself. Like when we do, um, sojong sometimes, um, for the next two weeks, I make a plan to work on this particular problem that I have, um, with my vows.

We're on verse 115. Would you like to read? Yeah.

Is it your turn? Yeah. Right.

You read the last one. Yeah. The Sanskrit.

Oh, it's okay.

[Говорящий 2]
Yeah.

[Говорящий 1]
Would you like to read English? Um, say niratmaka. Niratmaka.

Um, niratmaka, um, means a lack of a self nature or not self existent. Atma. Atma means self and nir means no.

And ka is like has no self, right? Or are the A-N-T of self existent, right? And this is, um, of course, an extremely important word in, uh, our careers as spiritual seekers, right?

This is like the foundation of our practice. So thought we should know the word. In Tibetan, it's what?

Anyone know? Dakme, right? Up in the Tibetan there, it's dakme.

Another word here. Still in the first line here, just before niratmaki, uh, it's swakaya. Swakaya.

Swakaya. And, uh, swa means own and kaya means body. Like, um, you know, the three bodies like nirmanakaya and arupakaya and kaya.

This is kaya. Comes a lot, even in, even in places where Sanskrit is, is very slight, it comes, sneaks in there. So.

And here again, we've got the abhyasat, right? In the middle of the line, we have it twice here. Abhyasat, abhyasan, right?

In the first line, in the second line, because you've gotten used to it. And again, Master Shantideva is just telling us it's all about collecting the right seeds. It's all about, about planting the seeds to, to not see that separation between ourselves and others.

To not feel like, um, your needs are more important than somebody else's needs. And really what we're, what we're attacking, we're attacking it on a, on a philosophical level of, of who is me, but what we're attacking is that feeling of, um, I have only so much to give. So I, I have to save some for myself.

You know, I, that feeling of having to save some for myself or that feeling of like, I only have so much time during my day. So I need to like section some off for myself because of course I just can't give it all away. Well, what would happen if we didn't feel that way?

What would happen if we didn't have that feeling of having to save some for ourselves? You know, it, it, it's, yeah, we have that fear. We have a worldview that tells us, Oh my God, if we don't protect ourselves, we don't look after for ourselves.

We don't save something for ourselves. We won't get anything. We'll be in the dust, you know, we'll, um, but is that really true according to a correct worldview?

What happens if you look after other people? Well, automatically, automatically things come to you and you don't have to worry about them. For instance, if you just worried about making sure everybody else's project had enough money to continue, then you wouldn't ever have to worry about whether you had enough money yourself.

Ever. You wouldn't even think about it. You could get to a point where you just wouldn't have to think about it because it would just automatically come.

The seeds happen. Like it just, it's a, it's a constant upward spiral. You know, the more you think about others, the less you have to worry about yourself.

And isn't it a burden to have to worry about your own needs? It's not very fun. You know, the funnest thing is worrying about somebody else and giving somebody else something.

And wouldn't we like to trade that? Wouldn't we like to trade the amount of time we spend thinking about ourselves to thinking about somebody else? Because it's so much more fun.

You know, it's so much more rewarding. You get so much out of it. Even in the present moment, it's like, it just feels good.

It just feels nice. You know, it's like that difference between when you cook a dinner just for yourself. If you've ever, you know, lived alone in Manhattan or something like that, it's just like, you don't even cook it.

You just eat out of the refrigerator. You don't put it on a plate. And it's like, so unrewarding.

You know, it's just like feeding whatever, just like get it over with quick, you know, but then you, you, you cook a dinner for someone else and you're like, and the tomato has to be just so, and like, you know, like you, you make this whole display presentation because you want to make this offering and it feels so good to see them eat it and say, Oh, this tastes great. Thank you so much for cooking it for me. You know, it's like, and then you have this sense and you don't even have to eat.

You notice a lot of cooks, like they don't eat when they cook. They just, they get nourished from cooking for other people. And it's that feeling it's that it's, that's what we're trying to turn around here.

I mean, I don't want us to get lost so much in the philosophical stuff that we learn that we lose the feeling of what we're trying to do, which is, which is just to open our hearts basically, which is just to turn around this, this feeling of wanting to draw things into ourselves and turn it into this feeling of wanting to give things out to ourselves. It's a feeling as well as it is a philosophical concept. You know, in terms of practicality, though, getting from where we are now, right, right.

[Говорящий 2]
It's a good question.

[Говорящий 1]
I want to use that kind of thinking as an escape from one's own day to day responsibility. It's like, I'm not going to do any of my own work. I'm just going to think about everyone else.

Right, right, right, right. I'm like, I'm not going to do my like writing. I'm not going to go to my right job as many hours because I need everyone else.

Like, how do you turn the bush? Well, to tell you the truth, keeping up with responsibilities does serve others, you know, and when you get to that, when you get to that point, it's like you get to a point and it might not be that you're doing anything different at all. You know, you're still chopping wood, carrying water.

That's a saying, right? But you're doing it totally for others instead of for yourself. It's a difference in mentality.

It's a difference in you totally redefine what you're doing and why you're doing it. That question was a deceptive duality. Like, I have this choice and this choice, but those are not those.

Right, it's that you need that you need that third choice. You're not going to ask me to spell that one. I think it's the same.

You want it? Anyway, we talked about in the Yoga Sutra, you know, you have these two dualities. It's either me or them.

And this is what Master Shantideva is saying. Don't get into that polarity. Don't get into that either me or them.

Either I have enough time to do the work for myself or I have enough time to help Kimberly with her work. You know, like, don't get into that polarity. Like, the work that I do here is also for Kimberly and, you know, and the work that I do for Kimberly is also for myself.

And it's it becomes it becomes a third option, you know. Yeah, that normally what we take to be a parigraha is like clinging to something as self-existent. That's sort of how we take that word.

Because you cling to it as self-existent, you would do something that hurts somebody else to get it. And that would be a parigraha. It's not necessarily that you don't want to please yourself, like that you don't want the chocolate chip cookie.

Like, we're not saying that chocolate chip cookies in themselves are bad. But if you took one, and because you took one, it meant that he didn't get a chocolate chip cookie. That would be a parigraha.

Because you would be taking it for yourself and dissing someone else. And that's how we take that word to mean a parigraha. And it is a huge Buddhist concept.

So I wanted to do, I actually wanted to do two meditations on the first verse of accustoming yourself to the idea that a few drops of blood and semen that belong to others were yourself. But I didn't want to do two of them in a row. So I'm going to do the second one here.

Because I think it also has to do with what it says here in this verse, you know, you're able to think it's mine of this body, which actually has no self. So think about the sperm and the egg. We're going to go back to the first moment of conception.

Right? And we're going to go back to the point right before the sperm touches the egg. So just picture that in your mind, okay?

You're in your mom's body. And it's right before the sperm touches the egg. And that's going to be you.

In just one moment, it's going to be you. Now, get a little bit closer and try and find the very first moment where the sperm and the egg meet when they first touch. You're watching like a movie screen and you have to point to the point in time where they first touch.

Okay? It's a point in time. Now, if you think about it, that point in time where they first touch can be divided into the beginning of that point in time and the middle of that point in time and the end of that point in time.

So the moment itself can be divided into three. And which of those three is the real very first moment that they touch? So you pick one of those and then you divide that into the beginning and the middle and the end.

And you can do this for every single step, like every single step of that conception. You can do this practice of dividing it into infinite points of time. You can never point to a moment where something actually started because the moment can always be divided into parts of that moment.

This is a really hard, so try and concentrate. I'll say it again. You can never point to a first moment where something started because that moment can always be divided into parts of that moment.

There is never a first moment. There is never a point in which it starts. The cause of something starting is as equally as empty as the thing itself.

There is no starting to things. There is no starting to you. You didn't start.

Okay, that's a really hard one. So if you didn't quite grasp it, then just think about it a little bit over the next couple years. It's a really hard one, but it's really important.

It has to do, like I said, with the fact that even the cause of who we think we are, the cause of our own bodies, is it doesn't exist in the way that we think it does. Just as our own bodies themselves are coming from a totally different place than we think they are. No?

What verse are we on? It does? Mine says 116.

[Говорящий 2]
I think that's two now. Yeah, and it's never ended.

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah, it's exactly like that. Yeah, yeah, yes. What do you mean by an end?

An end to yourself? And you never really die.

[Говорящий 2]
Yeah, yeah.

[Говорящий 1]
So, Orla, are you going to read? Or it just happened to be the end?

[Говорящий 2]
Hmm, good.

[Говорящий 1]
Uh, who hasn't read yet? Has everybody read? Who haven't read?

You didn't. You weren't here yesterday. Go ahead.

Yeah. If you could and you would never feel that it was strange nor conceited when you worked for others, you don't expect congratulations from yourself whenever you eat your dinner for yourself. Yes, Master Shantideva is funny, right?

He's funny. So, you know, this verse actually is repeated. We had it in the third reading, right?

Where Geshe-la covered it. It says, well, actually, it's the first half of this line. It's sort of repeated in the first verse.

But then it's like, that meaning of the verse was like, you won't feel that conceited about working for others because you get so much ultimate delicious, you know? Like, you get so much back that how could you feel, how could you feel pride about it because you're getting so much from it? That was in class three.

This one, it's a slightly different thing, you know? This one, we've actually entered into other people's bodies. And it's like, how can you feel pride about just doing things for yourself, you know?

Like eating dinner for yourself. You don't pat yourself on the back, you know? It's very clear, actually.

The verse is very clear. It doesn't need much explanation. You know, since it is you, of course, you're going to do something for yourself.

Of course, you're going to take care of yourself. You're going to brush your own teeth, you know? You're going to, you know, it's that attitude.

That's sort of off the subject. But yeah, you know, the first step, okay. There are people who are so down and out that yes, you would congratulate them for eating dinner for themselves.

In New York, yes, there are people. You're right, you're right. There are people like that, that you should congratulate them, yes.

But for us, we're talking about people in this room who are like at the point where they want to learn Master Shantideva. See, Master Shantideva is speaking to people who are already in a monastery, you know? They've already figured this stuff out.

They've already decided that they're going to devote their lives to collecting good karma so that they can get enlightened, you know? They've made the commitment. And it's kind of similar to being in this room here.

You've made the commitment to do something else on a Sunday besides go have fun, you know? Like, I mean, maybe this class is fun. But like, you know, you made the commitment to do something spiritual instead of just relax on a Sunday afternoon, you know?

You're already the person that Master Shantideva is speaking to. So we don't have to cover the people who we would have to congratulate for eating dinner for themselves, you know? Because he's talking to us.

He's talking to us. So this gets into the idea of that same kind of Hindu idea of not expecting, not doing something only to get reward for your effort, you know? And we see that a lot in the Hindu texts.

We see a lot of, like, don't do something just to expect a reward back for it. And it's a little bit confusing because in our tradition, we're taught that you do do things in order to consciously plant seeds. And then you expect the results to come.

I mean, that's the way you get enlightened is that you plant the seeds in your heart and then they ripen into good results. And then slowly, slowly, you become higher and higher on your spiritual path until you get enlightened. Well, the point of this here, and I think the point of the Hindu text, is that you don't get attached to minor results for yourself.

You don't get attached to, like, if you cooked a dinner for yourself, for example, using his analogy, you don't get attached to getting a lot of dinners back for yourself because you like food, you know? Like, that's not your motive, you know? That's not your motive here.

Your motive is a higher one. You think about collecting the seeds to benefit all beings and not just yourself. You know, like Geshe Michael used the example of a cookie the other day.

He gives cookies away so he can get more cookies so he can give more away to people, you know? And not eat any for himself. Or maybe one.

Yeah, he says a couple. I say one. But no, it's that same attitude.

You know, we don't want to give Bhani a cookie so that we could get a cookie for ourselves or lots of cookies for ourselves. We want to give Bhani a cookie so that we could practice this idea of breaking that barrier between us, you know? It's a higher motive.

We want to work for a higher motivation. We don't want to work for cookies, okay? And that's this idea of not working for that lower motivation and not being attached to the immediate results of your efforts.

Of course, you will get the cookies back. Whether you're focused on that or not. But you shouldn't be focused on that small little thing.

So that is another thing that's encompassed in this verse. It's like doing things just so that you can get something back for yourself. Even if you understand the law of karma and its consequences, it's still a kind of suffering.

You know, just thinking about yourself. Because it's still a very, very misperception, wrong perception of yourself and others, you know? You're still totally misunderstanding your world.

If you're working on that level of karma and its consequences, you're still totally misunderstanding your world because you're misunderstanding yourself. You know, you're misunderstanding you and others and that relationship. Okay, I think we're back to the beginning.

Would you like to read?

[Говорящий 2]
Do you have a...

[Говорящий 1]
You want to read the English? She can read the Sanskrit and... Yeah, okay.

[Говорящий 2]
What is it?

[Говорящий 1]
117. Oh, you guys haven't read. We have a few more verses.

You don't have to read together. You can read... No, I'll get her in the next one.

There's several more. Yeah, go ahead. Sure.

[Говорящий 2]
For that reason, you must get used to a state of mind where you protect all beings. You do thoughts of compassion as well, protecting them just the same way that you protect yourself on the very least unkind words.

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah. Mresla, you want to read the Sanskrit? Prahlila, you can read the next Sanskrit.

Good. Okay. So, this is also similar to a verse that we had in reading three.

He's drawing attention to our tendencies to protect ourselves, you know? I'm going to write that word, protect ourselves. Say, raksha.

Raksha. Raksha means to protect yourself. You protect someone else or you protect yourself.

Either way. So, he's talking... She's talking about that tendency that we have to get defensive, right?

If someone says something negative to you, automatically, something in you rises up. You're stupid. How does that make you feel?

Someone says you're stupid and you have this sense, this me rises up in you. I'm not stupid, you know? There's a me that rises up in defense of yourself.

It's automatic. It happens in a nanosecond, you know? I'm not stupid, you know?

Like, you have to get that feeling. You have to focus your mind on that feeling that arises and watch it very carefully. Like, go back.

Actually, we were supposed to do a meditation on... Why don't we just do a short meditation? Okay.

Sort of a casual meditation. Just close your eyes. Go back to the last time someone said something unpleasant to you.

I know since you're such good Buddhists, it's going to be a really long time ago. But try and stretch your mind back to it. And then replay it in your mind like a video camera.

Like, what was happening just before they said that thing to you? And then watch yourself. Watch yourself as they said it to you.

And then reenact that feeling that comes up in your gut. Now, ask yourself why that those syllables and decibels cause that reaction in you? Like, what is it about those particular words that were so magic that it just came out of nowhere?

They had so much impact that they caused something to happen inside your body. They caused you to go from being happy to upset. Like, is it in the words themselves?

Is it in, like, the magic of the syllables? Or, like, what happened? What exactly happened there?

Now, if you were thinking of yourself as more than just that one body, would it have had the same effect? Like, if you were also thinking of yourself as the person who is saying the words to you? Okay, what do you think?

Would it have had the same effect? If you thought at the moment they were saying those words to you, if you were also thinking of them as you, what would have happened? What would have happened differently in that scenario?

How would you have, how would the feeling in your heart be different? I can tell you what my personal meditation was. I think I would have understood where the other person was coming from.

Like, just in a basic, I can't practice this very well, but, like, trying in my little puny way to practice it, I could understand so well where that person was coming from that I wouldn't be, like, half my attention would be divided on their interest. And there wouldn't be, there would be only half as much coming up of, I'm not stupid, you know? Like, I would relate so much to them that maybe I would understand why they were saying that to me.

And maybe I would even agree with them, you know? You know, I mean, there would be a point where I was sort of torn, like, oh, maybe they're right. No, I don't think they're right, you know?

Like, like, the me's would get into a discussion at that point of whether or not it was true that I was stupid, you know? You know, like...

[Говорящий 2]
But what if it's not true? Yeah, even if it's not true, even if it's not true, I think it works. But it would still, you would still have a response to want to...

[Говорящий 1]
Oh, yeah. I don't want you to straighten me out. You can still, yeah, you can still clarify things.

I'm not saying, I'm not saying that the words that you say back to them would be any different. I'm saying that the feeling that you get of, that was me, how dare you, you know? Like, like, that horrible feeling you get in your gut of, like, someone saying something bad to you.

It wouldn't happen. It wouldn't happen if you were... And, and that's, that's what, that's what we're going for, you know?

We would never have anyone that could hurt us if we thought of everybody as ourselves. But they keep trying to prove to me they're not me, like what they say and how they act. So you feel like you're not being successful.

[Говорящий 2]
It's like...

[Говорящий 1]
Can you, well, no, no, get this, get this. Can you always control your mind?

[Говорящий 2]
Definitely not.

[Говорящий 1]
Right. So you can't always control the other me's around here. It's the same thing.

It's like exactly the same thing. You can't always control it. You can't control it in the present moment, right?

You can control them later. Just like you could control your own mind later.

[Говорящий 2]
To get to where you do control it.

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah, of course. But this is the preliminary step, right? Yeah, the more we plant the seeds, the more...

Like just talking about this in this class right now is planting seeds for us to see everybody around us differently tomorrow, you know? And maybe not tomorrow. Maybe it'll be in like six months or something like that, depending on how well we grokked the class, right?

It depends on how much we try to get what Master Shantideva is trying to tell us, you know, how fast it works and how strongly it works. And then it's up to you. When those seeds ripen, you can move forward with it and plant more seeds and get on some kind of upward spiral where it's happening more and more.

Or you can just let it go. In which case, it probably goes back to all those other seeds you planted of seeing things in a painful way, you know? Because these are like very fragile.

These seeds are just like a half couple hours in your day of like, you know, a billion and billions and billions of hours of seeing things wrong.

[Говорящий 2]
Yeah. Then you find out that there's a lot of different things.

[Говорящий 1]
Well, I'm not talking about, I'm not talking about any of those things. All I'm talking about is the feeling. Everything, like Michael said, you know, you have a responsibility to correct people when they're wrong about you.

Of course, you know, if you're not stupid, you have to tell them, by the way, I'm not really stupid. You've got that wrong, you know. But the way that you tell them and how you feel when you tell them and whether or not you piss them off when you're telling them about it probably has a lot to do with what's going on in your heart at that moment.

Yeah. It is a primal thing. It's a very primal thing.

And that's what he's getting at. That's exactly the feeling he's getting at is that primal response. And we're trying to get at that me that's causing it.

We're trying to get into that conception of me, which causes that to arise, that primal defensiveness to arise. And he's saying we've got to expand that feeling, that primal feeling of you just hurt me to every single person. So if you see anyone saying something bad about anyone, you should have that same feeling erupting in your mind.

Oh, my God. You know, like that same feeling should happen if someone says something bad about someone you don't even know. And that's wild.

You know, that's a really big reach for us. We're really, really far. I don't know about you, but I'm really, really far away from that right now.

You know? Yeah.

[Говорящий 2]
Right, right.

[Говорящий 1]
That's another. That was the second point that I had in this verse, which you so nicely led into, is if we're really thinking about other people's pain, are we really going to care so much if someone says you're stupid? Like if our if our focus is really on others constantly, is it going to impact us like that?

No. Not at all. Our minds are on higher things, you know?

And in this verse, I mean, it's hard to imagine, but in this verse, he says, you must get to a state of mind where you protect all beings. And this is talking about creating limitless results for yourself. You know, the idea of expanding your circle to protect every single being, not even just the whole world and all the humans on it, but like every single being, every single creature, every single being on all the other worlds that we don't even know about right now.

Every being. That's what creates a Buddha paradise for us. That's what creates limitless results, is that kind of limitless thought.

And when they talk about the four limitless thoughts, that's what they mean by limitless. It's hard. It's really, it's really limitless.

It's really totally almost beyond our capacity to imagine. But if you work towards that, if you work towards all beings, it will be even easier to do it with the beings around you, you know? Like go for the highest goal.

And then the lower goals will be easy, right? Yes.

[Говорящий 2]
I think I have a good example.

[Говорящий 1]
Sure.

[Говорящий 2]
That you could imagine.

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a great analogy. Yeah.

That's why they sometimes call the Lama, there's an epithet for a Lama called the Sun, even in Sanskrit, in the old Sanskrit texts and dictionaries.

[Говорящий 2]
I read somewhere. Yeah. Maybe.

[Говорящий 1]
You know, they say that enlightened beings can embody even inanimate objects like bridges, or they can be the sound of the waves crashing, and they can emanate as trees, you know? And I don't see anything wrong with an enlightened being looking after us like the Sun, you know, 24-7, right? I don't see anything wrong with that at all.

So, first 118 is... Wait, you guys switched? Were you scared to read the Sanskrit?

You want to read the English? It's up to you. Mom gets to read one and you get to read the other.

[Говорящий 2]
Hmm. Mm-hmm.

[Говорящий 1]
This is my last question, and this is my last question to you.

[Говорящий 2]
If there's a certain action that you would like to take, please ask. Okay.

[Говорящий 1]
Say Avalokita. Avalokita is... I'm so bad at these chords.

Is what we translated here as loving eyes. And interestingly enough, it's the one who looks down on us like the sun. Or who watches over us.

The one who watches over us. And they translated that in Tibetan as the one who looks upon us with love. And that's where we get loving eyes.

And Avalokiteshvara, which we see sometimes, Ishvara is like lord or master. So Avalokiteshvara is like a perfect example for us of the opposite of that feeling of defending ourselves when someone says the least unkind word to us. He totally turns it around.

And he gives his name as a blessing to every single being who ever has the slightest worry or fear. He says, just say my name and you will be comforted. And that's someone who's totally turned around his heart from the inside out.

So everything is going outward. He's focusing totally on us. If you ever have the slightest worry, just say my name and you will be comforted.

And the interesting thing, the meditation that we did, it's also talking about the power of words. And the power of a mantra. You know, like did the person who said something unkind to you have some sort of special power that reached into your heart and like squeezed it a certain way to make you feel bad?

Yes? No, I mean the words themselves, like what exactly happens there? And like, you know, what is the power of words?

Yeah, it's a belief in what they mean. And it's the power of your belief in them that makes them true. If you don't really believe the person, if the person who's saying it to you is like something bad to you, is someone that's so crazy, say they're just a lunatic on the street, and they say you're the devil, you know, like they're so off the wall and you know so well that you're not the devil, that like it doesn't have any effect on you because you don't believe them.

The people who upset you the most are the people who say things that kind of come close to the truth, right? Or could be true in a certain circumstance. You know, I mean that's the scary part about that, right?

[Говорящий 2]
You don't think words can ignite spiritual impulses?

[Говорящий 1]
Words, of course, that's why everybody writes books in Buddhism, of course words are very powerful. This is, these are three verses, this is the second of three verses about how powerful words can be. But it's us who create the power.

It's us who put the meaning into the words, according to the seeds in our own minds. And that's how, and that's how someone like who's so pure could create some kind of mantra where it would actually work to give my, just to give my name, imagine if you just could give your name to someone and it would make them feel better whenever they said it. Like where would you have to be on that scale of taking care of other people to have that kind of power to your name?

You know? I think you'd have to be a lot more than a good parent, actually. I think you'd have to expand your circle way farther than that.

Because there's a lot of good parents out there and they would protect their children if they could and sometimes they can't.

[Говорящий 2]
That love them.

[Говорящий 1]
Right, right. You do think, you do get relieved by thinking of your parents that love you if you feel scared or something like that. So you get that idea.

You get that idea. So just to cover the two requirements for a mantra to actually work is that they have to come from a holy source. They have to come from a being who is pure.

And the person who says the mantra has to be keeping their vows for it to work. So half of it has to do with the person who creates the mantra. Half of it has to do with us who say the mantras.

And then there's far more power to words than we give them credit for. I mean, words are just, they're like images in our minds. They're constructs, you know.

They're the same as the construct that we have of me. And this is what he's playing with here. Is this idea, this power behind a construct.

All our pain comes from this construct that we have of us, of me, of a me. All of our pain in the world comes from that. And it's just a word.

It's just a construct. It's powerful. It's very powerful.

Do you have a question?

[Говорящий 2]
Just the thing of freeing yourself from pain and freeing yourself from insensitivity so that you feel everyone else's pain. And I just kind of lost it a little bit. Where is your happiness all of a sudden seems far off in the distance?

[Говорящий 1]
Because you're feeling so many other people's pain? They say that the Buddhas feel everyone's pain. But it's kind of like, to them, it's kind of like a sweetness.

It's like a sweet feeling of compassion and love for them. That they feel. It's not at all painful for them to feel our pain.

Even though they do. Oh, they've got emotions. They've got like the biggest bliss you could ever imagine.

And you can't even imagine it. They're not attached to working for themselves. I will say that.

I'm sure they like the bliss. I'm sure they want to perpetuate it. I mean, that's what they do.

In fact, they want it for everyone. So does their bliss change if they reach this level where they're continuously feeling the pain of others and turning it into compassion? If it's that even, then there really is no concept of change.

So then attachment loses its meaning for them. No, it's constantly changing. It is constantly changing.

Yeah, it's constantly changing. It's constantly moving. Because that's deceptive reality.

Other people's pain. Any pain, any. Yeah, anything besides emptiness would be deceptive reality.

So it gives you kind of an idea. If they can do it, and they're in total bliss, then it won't be like we're... You don't take on other people's pain just so that you can be more miserable.

You do it for the purpose of eradicating their pain entirely. You do it for the purpose of opening your hearts to them so that you can get enlightened as quickly as possible and then be able to really, truly help them.

[Говорящий 2]
Is it conceivable that that true happiness that we're looking for is something that I can't conceive of right now? So I've never really known true happiness.

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah, that's probably true. You can get senses though, right? When you're really kind to someone.

Sometimes if you have a really good emptiness meditation, it can come to you. That feeling of true happiness can come to you. An emptiness meditation like Master Shantideva, especially when he's relating it to helping all beings.

Okay, last verse. What?

[Говорящий 2]
Pi?

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah. Yeah. It could be.

But you'd have to tie an emptiness to it. Like he's talking about a number that's infinite. And could it be a meditation on emptiness?

If you tied it into what we did earlier about the fact that you can infinitely divide things and therefore there is no starting to something, that would be a meditation on emptiness. But you'd have to apply it to something. Marcus, can we talk about this after class?

Because I want to give these people a break before Geshe Michael's talk. Yeah, I know you. Do you want to read the last verse?

I think everyone has read, so you have to read both parts.

[Говорящий 2]
Yes. Sweet, right?

[Говорящий 1]
So, after all this, Master Shantideva is really kind because he realizes that we're totally overwhelmed by everything he's just given us. It's totally radical. It's nothing that we've ever thought of before.

And it's huge, right? We have a huge amount of work to do. But he says, don't fear, don't turn back.

Anything is possible if you just keep practicing. And he talks again about the power of that construct and that name, that you'll come to miss the person whose very name made you afraid. It's the third part of this whole idea of words and their power.

And you know what I mean? Does everybody in this class know what I mean by the connection of words and constructs? This idea of me and the word me being very, very closely linked together.

So that's how he ends it. Every single construct that you have can be changed. And that's the end of class four.

And everyone can go to dinner. What do you mean? Well, you know, you can take it in a couple different ways that, you know.

I mean, you could take it to mean that... We're going to do a prayer, by the way, before this. You could take it to mean there is a person that you dislike and every time someone says their name, you're like, oh no, are they coming?

I don't know if you've ever had that experience. Or someone who dislikes you would be a better example because you're afraid every time they get in the room they glare at you or something like that. And you just tense up every time someone mentions them.

And then you plant different seeds and a couple years later they're like your best friend. And it happens like that. Anyway.

All right. Just a quick prayer before we go. Just to sort of seal this in our minds, we'll just dedicate this to all those people who are going to make me next week.

All right? We'll just dedicate it to being able to practice this. All right.

Namaskar. Namaskar.