Углублённый курс ACI: Колесо жизни в Сутре сердца (1999, Сан-Франциско), занятие 1

[Говорящий 1]
Okay, welcome to the latest series. We're going to be doing this class for six Friday nights. We might have a break or two, I think.

And the subject of the class is called the Wheel of Life. I thought I'd tell you the story about the Wheel of Life. I think a lot of people don't know who painted it the first time.

And the story goes like this. There was a king in ancient India named Bimbisara. And this was about two and a half thousand years ago.

And then there was another king named Udayana. And their two kingdoms, which were adjacent to each other, they had some kind of karmic connection. So, every time that one of them was doing well, the other wouldn't do so well.

And they had this kind of strange symbiotic relationship or something like that. And... during this time the Buddha was alive and walking on this planet.

I don't know why, but somehow King Udayana and Bimbisara started sending each other gifts. And, you know, instead of fighting with each other or declaring war on each other's kingdoms, they had some instinct or some urge to share things with each other. So, every few weeks, you know, one of them would start sending this beautiful gift to the other one.

And then, in ancient India, you know, and in most of Asia, you have to send something back, which is a little bit better. So, they got this competition going, you know. And every time Udayana got something from Bimbisara that was beautiful, then he would have to think of something even more beautiful.

And there's this story, you know, like those Russian dolls, like the doll within the doll within the doll. And they started sending each other boxes like that. And, you know, you open up twenty different precious boxes, and then in the middle you find this big jewel or something like that.

And this is a really sweet trading went on. And then finally, one day, Udayana sent Bimbisara this priceless jewel or something like, I think it was actually some kind of special cloth or something. But it was like priceless, totally priceless.

And so, Bimbisara, instead of being happy with the gift, he's a little bit upset, you know, because there's like nothing he can send back. And he's like stumped. And he sits and he thinks for day after day, and then he finally calls all his ministers together and says, you have to help me out here, you know, I don't...

I don't know what we're going to do now. I don't know... I don't know what kind of gift to give this king back, Udayana.

And somebody said, well, listen, Lord Buddha is teaching in your kingdom nowadays. He's out in the forest. He's got all these followers.

He's teaching Buddhism to the people. Send somebody to ask him, you know. He's omniscient, probably he'd know something better.

So... So, they send out the search party, they find Lord Buddha, and King Bimbisara himself, you know, with all his regalia, goes to the forest and prostrates to Lord Buddha and says, you know, what am I going to give Udayana now, you know. And Lord Buddha says, how about a picture of me?

So... So, they agree that, you know, the king's painters will paint Lord Buddha, and he'll send the picture, because it's the most priceless body in the world, you know. And...

And so, King Bimbisara gets everything set, and he hires his best painters, and he puts them out there to do the portrait, and he goes back to the kingdom, back to the palace, and he waits, and after a week he asks for a progress report, you know, and people come back to the palace and say, nothing, they haven't started yet. And he says, you know, what's going on? And they said, you better come and see yourself, what's going on, you know.

So, he goes back to the forest, and he goes out into the... to see where Lord Buddha is. And Lord Buddha is like standing there, and there are these painters, like this, staring at him.

They can't... they can't stop looking at him, at his beauty. He has this kind of special body that, no matter who sees the Buddha's body, they see the most beautiful body they can imagine, you know.

So, he looks different to each person, and to each person he looks like the most beautiful thing they ever saw, male or female or anything, you know. And they... So, he's just standing there, and they're not doing anything, and Bimbisara is getting nervous.

And he says, Lord Buddha, what are we going to do, you know. So, Buddha says, I have a solution, you know. Get a big piece of canvas, and I'll stand behind it, and then you have somebody shine a light from behind me, and then they won't see me, so they can take their eyes off me, and they can draw my silhouette.

And then they can fill it in later when I'm not around, or something like that. So, they actually do that. And they sketch the Buddha out, and they make all the design, and they fill in all the paint and everything else.

And then they... Bimbisara says, great, you know, this is the greatest thing, and he starts to roll it up. And Lord Buddha says, wait, wait, wait, I have something else to add.

And then he sketches out, Lord Buddha sketches out the Wheel of Life. And he puts himself up in the corner, you see. So, this started out as a portrait of Lord Buddha, and it ends up as the Wheel of Life.

So, this painting, which is very familiar to many people, very famous in Tibetan Buddhism, it was designed by Lord Buddha himself. And each detail was... he told the painters what to paint, how to paint it, and like that.

So, every single detail in there was designed by Lord Buddha himself. They put the painting in a big box, they send it to King Udayana. He opens it up.

And they say that he unrolled the scroll, and he just stared at it for hours. He just like sat down on a chair and he stared at it. And then, the next morning, he went into a state of meditation, deep meditation.

And then he saw emptiness directly. Okay? So, this is like an easy way.

Usually... You know, usually this process takes many, many years to see emptiness directly. But they say that the next morning, or after meditating on the contents of the painting, and he had such a strong seed in his mind that he understood everything right away.

And then the next day he became an Arya. Arya means someone who has seen emptiness directly in Buddhism. So, he reached the state of seeing everything, emptiness directly.

Later on, because he saw emptiness, he was able to remove his bad thoughts, which is nirvana. Okay? If you can see emptiness directly, and you use it to remove your negativities, then we say you reach nirvana.

You don't have to disappear, you don't have to change bodies. The definition of nirvana is... nyun drip ma lupa pa me so so ta ko, means to stop your bad thoughts permanently because you saw emptiness directly.

So, he reaches that stage also, which is much more difficult. And then he decides to give up the kingdom. And he actually gives up his kingdom, and he goes following the Buddha around for the rest of his life.

And there's a lot more story, but I'm not going to tell you the whole story. Okay? Later on, there's an additional story that there was a disciple of the Buddha who became a monk, who was married, and then later became a monk.

And then he couldn't stop thinking about his wife, his ex-wife, right? And Lord Buddha took him on a trip to hell. It reads a lot like Dante.

If you read Dante's Inferno, it's very, very, very similar. It's kind of very strange how similar it is. And he takes him with him on a trip through hell, and he wants him to get serious about his meditation and about his practice and to stop worrying about his wife, you know?

And he takes him one by one through the realms of hell. It's very similar to the Inferno. And then at the end, he's just freaked out.

The guy's freaked out. All he wants to do is meditate, study, not go there again, you know? And it says in the Abhidharma, you can see hell with the assistance of a higher being, a being who's more realized than you, can take you to the hell realms and show them to you and come back.

So then Lord Buddha said, now are you going to get serious about your studies? He says, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm serious. And he said, well, I'd like you to paint what you saw.

And then I'd like you... We'll make a rule that every monastery has to have this painting on the doorway, at the doorway of the monastery, or we call it in the Gonjor. Gonjor means the foyer of a monastic institute, any monastery building, that there should be a Wheel of Life painting there.

So that was another occasion where the Wheel of Life was painted. The detail on the inside, which we'll get to later, was painted on those occasions. And then it became a rule, by the time of about 500 AD, in the Vinaya, in the monks' rules, it has become, in the Vinaya Sutra, the whole wheel is described.

And the whole wheel, it tells you how to paint each part of the wheel. And then it tells you, you must put this painting at the front door of all Dharma institutions, you know. So, if you're going to have a good Dharma center, or a temple, or a monastery, or a nunnery, it's important to get a nice Wheel of Life.

And it's still in Mongolia, Tibet, China, it's still a custom to put... I've even seen in Thailand, it's a custom to put the Wheel of Life at the door of the temple, so that when people come in, immediately they think about the meaning of it, which is death. The wheel's real meaning is death.

If you look at the... You can take it out if you have the... And we'll put it here.

This one, by the way, was painted from a... It was traced from a woodblock print that was found in India. We found it in India around 1975, or something like that.

And I'm going to give you a quick overview of the wheel. And then during this class, we'll go through the wheel in great detail. We'll go through bit by bit, piece by piece.

By the end of this class, you will know every single detail in this wheel, and it will all be really beautiful to you. This thing is like a drawing for a Boeing 747, you know? And it is very detailed.

This is a design of a way to get out of suffering, you know? And I mean suffering, I mean... I'm not talking like Buddhist classical suffering, you know, people wailing in the hells, or something like that.

I'm talking about people you don't want to meet on the subway. I'm talking about your boss. I'm talking about your backaches.

You know, I'm talking about things that you look in the mirror and you don't like, or getting old, or things like that. We're talking about all of those things, real things for you. And if you understand this blueprint, this is a blueprint of how to get out of all those things, okay?

If you follow this blueprint with knowledge, with wisdom, which you can pick up in this class, okay? In six courses, you will learn about... If you can follow it from that, you don't have to suffer those things.

You don't have to have those things happen to you, okay? You can change those things. It's very interesting.

And so this is not just an art class, you know what I mean? And this thing is actually a coded, you know, it's got all these secret codes in it, and this is a blueprint of how you yourself can avoid the things in your life that you don't like. So it's very, very much relevant to each person here.

It's not my intention, and I don't enjoy just getting up and talking about some kind of philosophy or something like that. It's a beautiful, beautiful blueprint, which each person here can use to avoid whatever kind of suffering you're having, okay? And ultimately to avoid death itself.

If you follow this carefully, and if you understand the wheel carefully, and with good knowledge, and you meditate on it, you don't have to suffer the way that normal people suffer around you, okay? You don't have to do that, okay? If you understand how the wheel works, okay?

That's the point of being here, okay? It's not just like a fun class on some interesting picture, okay? It's not like that.

This is a very, very beautiful summary of how to stop all the lousy crap in your own life, okay? Very beautiful, very interesting, and it works, okay? I'm gonna go very slowly over the general picture, and then each week we'll do a few of the pertinent keys in it that help you stop your own lousy stuff in your own life, okay?

But first I'll give you an overview of the painting, okay? I think the most striking figure for almost anyone is the monster. His head is here, and he's got this wheel in his grasp.

Here's one of his arms, here's another one. And then traditionally the feet are also holding the wheel. And he has a tiger skin clothing on, which generally in Buddhism means some kind of ferocity or something like that.

I mean, he goes and strips skins off tigers for fun, you know? And that's the... This monster here is called chidak, say chidak.

Chidak. By the way, I like to say a little Tibetan, you repeat it, and then I might write some on the board. And we say it helps you remember later.

If the original sound, that as it was taught to millions of monks and nuns and other Tibetans over the last thousand years, it gets into your mind, it starts to work there, okay? So say chidak. Chidak means Lord of Death, okay?

The lama who taught this to me, which is the incomparable Khen Rinpoche Geshe Losantarchin, who spent about a year on this with us, teaching us this painting, he was very... he was almost obsessive about explaining. Almost every class he would say, we Tibetans are not like some superstitious, foolish people, okay?

And we don't think that there's this boogeyman that runs around at night, you know, and sneaks in your bed and kills you, and this is the Lord of Death or something like that. This is a metaphor. This monster doesn't exist.

It doesn't exist as an outer entity. This monster is born within you when you are born from your mother's womb, okay? When you are formed in your mother's womb, as your body is formed, your death, integral part of your body, starts to form there also, okay?

So it's not like there's little gremlins running around in you either. It's the energy or the force called death is born in you the moment you are conceived, okay? Buddhism says that nothing is necessary to destroy your life other than its beginning, you know?

It doesn't technically take an outside force to kill you. If there were no car accidents, no AIDS, no cancer, if you sat in a bank vault your whole life, in a chair, your body would still kill you. You see what I mean?

Because it has an energy or a force as you are born, as you are formed, that forms within you. And in each day of your life, it is ripping out your insides. From the inside, you know, metaphorically, there's this energy which is ripping a little closer to your heart.

And that's how Tibetans see this painting. That's how Buddhists... That's how you have to think of this guy who's holding the wheel, okay?

It's an energy that was created in you when you were born and it rips a little closer to your heart every day. Every moment that you're alive, this thing or this energy is ripping a little more of your life out. And then eventually it will kill you, okay?

And that's... that's the main feature of the wheel. The wheel is in the grasp of the Lord of Death, okay?

And that's... everybody inside the wheel is in trouble. Everybody inside the wheel is having a problem, okay?

Okay. I'm gonna skip the outer rim and I'm gonna go to the next part which you see, one, two, three, four, five different realms there. One, two, three, four, five.

And this represents the different kinds of life forms you can take. Let me see if I can get it straight. This one here is the human realm and we can see that realm and we live in that realm.

[Говорящий 2]
Okay.

[Говорящий 1]
I had all these lectures. The last three or four months we've been on the road in different countries and I think it was in Mongolia and these beautiful old sheepherders and yakherders in Mongolia and we had them all in a big place and they were all discussing emptiness and karma and they were brilliant. It was unbelievable.

And I asked them, can there be multiple realms? What do you guys think? And they said, of course.

And so I thought, oh, maybe they're gonna give me some science fiction answer. And then they said, in this very room there are two realms going on. And then they proceeded to show me how if there were a dog in this room and a human that there are actually two different worlds going on in the room at the same time.

Parallel universes going on in one room at the same time. I mean, if there's a dog in this room watching what's going on right now and watching all the events in this room, they're experiencing a totally different world than you and I. There are actually two parallel worlds going on at the same time.

And once you accept the idea of two parallel worlds going on, it's not hard to go to three or four or five or a thousand. Okay? It's not difficult at all.

There are quite certainly beings who are experiencing this room as we speak that you and I cannot see.

[Говорящий 2]
Okay?

[Говорящий 1]
And they're having some kind of experience of this room. It's very unlikely that they're not. Just logically, the odds are against it.

Okay? So this... this is the human realm meaning the human experience of the world, the human plane of experience.

And there can be a thousand planes of experience going on in this room at the same time. This room can and is a Buddha paradise for those beings in this room who are seeing it that way. And that's one realm.

Okay? Another realm here is right here. We call devas and asuras.

Devas and asuras. These are like... According to Buddhism, if you, for example, decided right now to dedicate yourself forever to some kind of meditation in this life, and you sat...

went back to your room and you fixed it up really nice and you got people to sponsor you for the rest of your natural life, and you just sat there and meditated in very deep meditation like on your breath or some kind of peaceful meditation, something that never disturbed your mind, you would automatically not collect all the bad karma you normally collect. Okay? Because you can't lie when you're in meditation.

You can't steal when you're in meditation. You can't commit sexual misconduct with somebody's wife when you're in meditation. Okay?

You're stuck there. All right? And so you're automatically collecting less bad karma than normal.

And we call this the morality... the vows of a person in meditation, meaning you have automatic vows. Because during that time you can't tell a lie.

Why? You can't talk because you're in deep meditation. Okay?

So, if you kept up that way of life year after year after year, according to Buddhism, after you died, your mind would begin to see a very beautiful place.

[Говорящий 2]
Okay?

[Говорящий 1]
And you would begin to see around you very, very beautiful things. And when you look down at your own body, you would start to see some kind of beautiful, very radiant body and live with happy people and be there for a long, long time. Okay?

That's what we call a worldly deva realm or a worldly heaven or something like that. It is not nirvana and it is not enlightenment because it always ends. Alright?

The things that make it happen, the things that get you there are temporary energy and you always come down out of it. When you come down out of it, because you've used up so much good karma, we believe that you normally go to a hell realm afterwards. Okay?

So, not a place you want to go. It's like a waste of time or something like that. But this represents that realm.

Okay? You might see two different groups here and there's like... You can either take birth as a...

as a better temporary heaven being, right? Or as a worse one. And they tend to get jealous of each other and fight with each other.

So, sometimes when you see the Wheel of Life, you'll see it divided into six realms and here you only see five because those two have been joined together so that they can fight more easily with each other.

[Говорящий 2]
Okay?

[Говорящий 1]
Then down here you have the animal realm. We had a beautiful debate in Mongolia also. These people are nomads, right?

And they... they spend half their time nomading and half their time thinking about advanced Buddhist philosophy. They're really extraordinary.

And... So, we were talking about being reborn as a dog or a cow or a yak or something like that. And they got it right away.

They understood right away. You know? It's not like you go to a...

special factory near Ulaanbaatar and there's cow bodies there and they take your old mind and they open up the cow body and they put you in there and then you walk around in a cow body for a while. You know? They said, no, no, it's not like that.

They said... I said, well, what is it like? You know, how does your mind enter a cow body?

They say, you asked the wrong question. You're not saying it the right way. You start to see a cow body.

You see what I mean? Your mind starts to see things like a cow as a cow sees things. You see?

It's not that you take your mind and open up a cow body and stick it in real fast and saw it shout or something like that. It's not like that. I mean, that's...

When you talk to a Westerner about rebirth, that's what they think. They think, oh, there's this cow body in a cow mommy's womb and then the mind comes and then the cow body opens up and the mind goes in the cow body, empty cow body, and then the cow body's filled. And then, when it comes out, the poor human mind got stuck in a cow body now.

It's not like that. To be born as an animal just means that your perceptions shift into seeing things the way an animal sees things. Then you are an animal, you see?

In Buddhism, that's all it means to be an animal. Why are you a human? Because you have four limbs and a head and you walk around upright, you know?

Somebody proposed that in the French Academy of Science. Somebody else brought a chicken and disproved them. That's not what makes you a human.

You're a human because you see the world as a human. And that's what makes you a human. And when you look down, you see a human's body because you see everything the way a human sees things.

So, to take birth as an animal or to become an animal is not strange. It's not impossible. It's simply a shift in your perceptions.

And those shifts happen every five or ten minutes anyway. Death will be a very similar perceptual shift. You just stop seeing yourself as alive and you start seeing yourself as dead.

And that's what it is to be dead. You see what I mean? And you gotta get used to that in Buddhism.

The reality of what is around you and the reality of what you are is just you seeing it that way. And that's what it is. And that's what makes it what it is.

So, what I'm trying to say is this is not some superstition of Buddhists or something like that. There are minds which exist in this world which used to be very normal, human, reasonable. Like you and me minds.

And then they started to see things different. They started to see the world as an animal sees the world. And then they became animals.

That made them animals, you see? So, to be born as an animal is... If it takes having your mind transplanted to some pre-existing cow factory body, then that's kind of weird.

But that's the way you think of it, right? All it takes is a slight shift in your perceptions. All it takes is a shift that can occur in five minutes.

Anyone here can have that happen to them in five minutes. And it very well could happen. The same thing happens when you die.

It's not that the outer body dies. It's that your mind shifts and you start to see yourself die. And then you do see yourself dead.

And then you are dead, because you see it that way. You see what I mean? It's very profound.

Okay, this one here... They call them hungry ghosts in Sanskrit. They call them pretas.

Tormented spirits or something like that. You can call them ghosts, like what we call ghosts. In scripture it says you cannot see them.

It says that they do exist around us. And they are typically people whose minds were very attached to their houses, or their possessions, or food, or other objects like that, money. And then when you die your mind is so attached to those things that you begin to see yourself in the opposite mode, which means not able to get them all the time.

Always hungry, always thirsty, always suffering. And your own body is very, very... how to say...

subtle. The form of the body is very subtle. You can walk through a wall.

People cannot see you. Normal people cannot see you. Other spirit beings can see you.

But you cannot... normal people can't see you. Okay?

And that's a preta realm. This realm by the way can be taking place... where?

In the same room. You see what I mean? This realm can be taking place in the same room.

This realm can be taking place in the same room. In the room. This realm down here is a hell realm.

We'll talk about it, you know. I think when I was growing up, and I grew up Christian, it was considered naive to talk about hell, you know. I mean, people had overcome the idea of hell, you know.

We are modern people. We are sophisticated. We don't believe in voodoo or we don't believe in superstition anymore.

And that was just something that the church used to use to control people or fool people or something like that or get their money out of them or stuff like that. Buddhism says no. Buddhism says there are hell realms and we'll talk about them.

And we'll talk about the likelihood of their existence or not. Okay? We'll talk about whether or not you and I can see a hell realm and whether you can establish that it really exists.

Okay? So, these are five different ways in which the mind can see its world, which means, are you going to be a human or not or something else? You see what I mean?

It's not a question of moving into another body. Okay? Forget that.

It's a question of your mind shifting to seeing the world a different way. Okay? And that's all it takes to become an animal or a tantric deity or a Buddha or anything else.

That's why you can move between different kinds of bodies. Okay? That's why you and I can enter an enlightened being's body.

It's the same shift of the mind that happens when you die or when you become an animal or something like that. Okay? These are the five realms, sometimes six.

Okay? This is some kind of gruesome... Okay?

This side is supposed to be black and people are being dragged down to hell by a hell realm guard or something like that. There's a joke in the scripture, it says, do you think that Acme Construction Company went down to hell and built it? I mean, who built hell?

You know? And who hired all the hell guards? You know, I mean, do these guys get time off or what?

You know? These guys here. Okay?

The guy that's dragging them down, you know? Where did hell come from? You know?

Was it like some construction company went down at the beginning of time? We don't believe in God, right? So, we can't say he made it, right?

So, it's gotta be some like really perverse construction company that goes down under the ground, works for years, you know, and builds these horrible chambers and puts in all these instruments of torture and then they have to go out and hire... they probably hire people... well, anyway, they...

they find... they find people to staff the place, you know? And...

and then, you know, the sutras say, Lord Buddha says, what do you think? You think that hell was built like that? You know, you think Buddhas are stupid?

You think we think that somebody went down in a construction company and built hell? No, it's your perceptions.

[Говорящий 2]
Okay?

[Говорящий 1]
As much as the world around you. Who built planet Earth? You know?

Who makes the sun come up in the morning? Where does the sun come from? You know?

Why are you perceiving the sun in the morning? Okay? It's your mind.

Okay? You have some seed in your mind. You have some very subtle seed in your mind which makes you see the sun come up in the morning.

And you say, no, no, it comes up whether I'm here or not. It's not true.

[Говорящий 2]
Okay?

[Говорящий 1]
Buddhism says no, not true. Okay? If you did not have the karma, if you did not have the seed in your mind to see the sun come up in the morning, you would die the night before.

Or you'd be blind. Or someone would put you in a prison and you wouldn't see the sun come up. Something like that, you see?

It's not your God-given right to see the sun come up in the morning. It's a projection of your mind.

[Говорящий 2]
Okay?

[Говорящий 1]
And we'll talk more about that. So, hell is not some kind of a thing that some stupid or sadistic guy built. Okay?

It's a projection of your mind in the way that this room is, and in the way your own body is, and in the way that your own office and the people you live with are. And that's why you can get out of it. You can change it.

It's very interesting. If you know how, you can change it. Okay?

So, here you see, this is kind of the black side of thing, people pushing people down. And then over here are people doing good Dharma things. And they're going up.

And then this is like a tantric deity and having a body like a a Bodhisattva angel or something like that. Okay? Here in the middle, like this donut.

Okay? Here you have a kind of an interesting thing, which is three different animals. I don't know if you can see it very clearly on the copy you have.

This started out as a huge print, and we shrank it, and it kind of lost a little bit. And now we can't find the print. We wanted to copy and give everybody one, but we can't find it.

This here is a pig. This here is a snake. And this is a rooster over here.

And these represent the three principle states of mind that give you all the trouble you have in the world. Buddhism says that if you could crack the code here at the center of the wheel... You know, we're going to talk about the center a lot.

It's one of the nights that we'll spend just on the center of the wheel. If you could understand the code that Lord Buddha implanted here at the middle of the wheel, then you wouldn't have to have anything unpleasant happen in your life. Nothing.

You wouldn't have to run into the people that you don't like. You wouldn't have to have the pains in your body that you have now. You wouldn't have to have anxiety or depression or any other kind of mental unhappiness.

Everything would be going right, and you would know how to keep it that way. You would know the method to keep it going right, to keep things going right. It's very interesting.

And deep down here in the middle are the keys for doing that. And we're going to talk about that. These are three mental states that are represented by these three animals.

If someone teaches it to you well, you can actually change the things in your life that you don't like. That's the whole point of coming to this class. The main purpose of Buddhism is to stop everything unpleasant in your life.

From what? I don't know. From the pain of sitting on these wooden chairs, all the way up to death itself, okay?

And including your boss and your family. Okay? Alright?

Seriously, I'm not kidding. That's the purpose of Buddhism. And I'm not saying that you learn to meditate and then all this stupid stuff happens to you and you just smile, you know, that's cool, I like it.

It's not like that, okay? We're actually talking about manipulating your reality. And there are reasons why your boss was created.

He was not created by some big guy in the sky with a big white beard. It's not true. But he was created by certain forces.

He did come into this world, or she, in my case it used to be a she, through certain energies, okay? And those energies can be changed or modified and they can be... you can correct them and then they change.

Those people change or they get transferred or stuff like that. It's very cool. It's very very nice.

And you can do anything like that. Anything in your life that you don't like. Anything about your life.

And I'm talking all the way up to your death. The point of Buddhism and the point of this wheel is to change it, okay? Is to be...

find out how to change it, okay? And you can. Very interesting.

So, people ask me, you know, we had a class last night called Interpreting the Buddha, you know, what did the Buddha really mean? This is a very very important subject in the monastery. How do you know when the Buddha was saying what he meant?

And how do you know when he was just playing with us? Or when he was just presenting something that wasn't 100% true because he knew we couldn't handle 100% truth. You know what I mean?

The Buddha did that all the time. All the time he was adjusting what he said. If you hear the Dalai Lama speak, you know, in Washington DC in a few days, very fortunate, and then you go hear him speak in front of 2,000 monks at Serra, totally different, okay?

You know? He's like Mr. Nice Guy up in Washington, and he's saying, oh, you can do this and this, it's all right, no problem, you know, just be happy, do it with a good heart, you know, no problem. He gets a group of Tibetan monks, he's like, you idiots, you know?

And he'll go on for an hour and just beating everybody up because he knows that's what they need, you know? And... and...

and this is... So, this is the quality of an enlightened being, is to relate to each person in their own way. And this is something we were talking about last night, and that's something that...

in this wheel, you've got to... there'll come parts that... you have to interpret what the Buddha was really meaning.

And the real meaning of the wheel will come down to emptiness, okay? We'll get to a point in the wheel where we'll start talking about emptiness. Ultimately, you have to get to emptiness to understand this wheel, okay?

That finishes the inside. Now there's this rim around the outside, okay? And this is where the mechanism of the wheel is, this is where it all works.

Over here are twelve different steps. And if you... you always remember that it starts like a clock, okay?

The first step starts at one o'clock. So, when I'm talking about the wheel, I'll be saying, Oh, now look at one o'clock. One o'clock is here.

And then two o'clock, three o'clock, four o'clock, five o'clock. Okay, like that. We'll go around it like that.

These are twelve different pictures. Twelve different scenes are going on around the outside. This is very beautiful.

These are the... the mechanism that makes the wheel work. And this is the mechanism by which you can stop the wheel.

[Говорящий 2]
Okay?

[Говорящий 1]
We say, ten jin gyelwa lu jung dang, nun do... nun do nam la shin. Like that.

ten jin gyelwa lu jung dang, nun do. This is where the wheel is taught by Maitreya. Maitreya is the next Buddha.

He wrote a beautiful book about the wheel. And in the... in his book he says, ten jin gyelwa jung dang, nun do dang, nun jung dang, nun do means...

I'm going to teach you the mechanism by which the wheel gets put into motion, like that. And then I'm going to teach you the mechanism by which to stop the wheel. Okay?

This wheel is like... you know those big things in the Charlie Chaplin movies? Of the gears going, you know, and then he's like being thrown around by the gears, and then finally he takes a pipe and he sticks it in the right place, and one gear hits into another gear, and the whole thing breaks down and shuts down.

It's exactly like that. The wheel is exactly like that. These are the gears that make the wheel go, these twelve gears.

And then there's a certain point in the wheel, which happens to be right here, at one o'clock, where you can throw the gear off. Okay? If you throw a monkey wrench in there, the wheel is stopped, and it breaks.

[Говорящий 2]
Okay?

[Говорящий 1]
Breaks in what sense? You don't have to die anymore, and you don't have to have anything unpleasant happen in your entire life.

[Говорящий 2]
Okay?

[Говорящий 1]
That's the claim of this wheel. That's how the wheel works. Okay?

So, we're gonna study, over the next six weeks, the twelve links that make the wheel work, and where to break it. Where's the weakest link to break it and get out.

[Говорящий 2]
Okay?

[Говорящий 1]
We're all in this wheel, by the way. Okay? I mean, where are you?

We're all right here. If you are who you seem to be, and I'm not sure. Okay?

But, as far as I can tell, which is not very far, you're here. Okay? Meaning, if you are a normal person in this room, you are within the grasp of this being, and you are going to die.

Okay? You may have a good time for a while, you may not have a good time for a while. The good times in your life may end next week, or may end five, ten years, or twenty years from now.

But sooner or later, each one of us here has to go through tremendous suffering. And each one of us here, no matter what age you are now, and no matter what your health is now, you will get sick, you will get old, your eyes will fail, your ears will fail, you know, you will become like your parents. Okay?

And don't think you're the one who's gonna be different. Everyone thinks that, you know. Okay?

It's not like that. People, you know, they used to ask me, why don't you go out with girls? I said, well, I usually just judge them from their mother, you know.

Because that's... They say, why didn't you get married? I say, well, that's what they're gonna look like later on.

They say, no, no, I'm beautiful, you know. I say, no, but you are gonna look like that, right? And they say, yeah, you know.

It's gonna be like that. You have to be. You know.

You will be. You must be. If you laugh, it means you didn't think about it.

You see what I mean? You know, you will be. Or your grandmother.

You will be, if you live that long, you know. You'll be as weak, as feeble, as slow, you know, as funny. And people will ignore you, and they'll think you're just some fuddy, you know.

And it'll happen to everyone in this room. That's all we have to look forward to. You can struggle.

You can try to have a good career, you know. You can have meaningful relationships. You can have...

You can write poems, music, everything, you know. Do internet sites and stuff. But...

In the end, it all boils down to the same thing. Everybody in this room, if you don't figure out some extraordinary way of stopping it, will end up just like that. There's no...

There's no doubt, actually, that that would normally happen to a person like that. Is it possible to stop those energies? Is it possible to stop death?

Is this picture, you know, real? Is it really a blueprint, or is it just a kind of an interesting oriental picture? You know what I mean?

Or is it really possible for a person to stop their aging and their death, and actually control their life to the point where they don't have outside things making them unhappy, or inner things making them unhappy? Is it possible to do that? I think the most natural question is, I haven't seen anybody like that.

You know what I mean? You see, I didn't see... I've seen Buddhist monks in India, that some of them look very peaceful, but their hair is getting grey, they are bent over, some of them, you know, they seem to have dental problems, you know, they seem to be aging about the same as you or me, you know, his holiness seems to be getting bald or something, you know what I mean?

It seems like it doesn't work, you see? You see, I'm not talking about Buddhism as a method of being more calm, or more happy, or even more compassionate, or anything like that. I am asking the question, does this blueprint here, which purportedly gets you out of the clutches of death itself, and aging itself, does it work?

Is it possible? Have you ever seen anyone get out? Is there like a special Buddhist monastery where you go after you, you know, get out of the wheel, you know, and then you can go and confirm it, you know, send New York Times people, and they take their interviews, yeah, back in, you know, 1950 I was this old man, and then I got out of the wheel, and now I'm this 20 year old, you know.

You know, you can't, you're right? I mean, does it mean that it doesn't exist? You have to think about it, okay?

Don't forget that in Buddhism, it's that thing about the construction company in hell. We don't believe in Buddhism that there is a separate construction company that built hell. We don't believe that there was some external force that built this world, this planet, the sun, other things like that.

We don't believe that. We believe everything is your perception. You have seeds in your mind, which you put there from what you did before, and everything around you is coming from those seeds ripening in your mind.

Everything you... every time you see the sun come up, the sun is not coming up. Your mind is shifting due to stuff you put in your mind before, okay?

And it's quite possible that there are people in this room now who are not seeing this room at all the way you are seeing it. You can agree already that each person here is having a different perception of the room, right? Some people are moderately bored, some are very bored.

Some are mildly interested, some are wondering when the break is going to happen. You know, some are wondering, what's that thing up in the corner there? You didn't talk about that yet.

And... you know... I mean, there's about 100 or 200 different perceptions of this event happening, even as we speak.

I mean, you have to agree to that. On a deeper level, there are perceptions of this same room, or this same event, that are very likely going on in the minds of some of the people here, that are completely beyond your imagination. You know, that there could be people in this room who are...

who are seeing it in a totally different manner, and who are seeing their own bodies in a totally different manner than what you see. Okay? So, to say that the Dalai Lama looks like he's getting older to me doesn't prove anything, according to Buddhism, about what His Holiness sees about his own self.

You see what I mean? What does His Holiness see in the mirror? And does it match what you see?

It... it... it almost surely doesn't.

Now... now, how to decide what he sees, that's another question. Okay?

But it's not out of the question that people have reached this goal, and that we wouldn't be aware of it. There's an interesting thing... People ask me, does Buddhism accept miracles?

Can... can you walk on water, according to Buddhism? We say, yeah.

There's a thing called, uh... Seppur Ketingen Zen. It's a kind of samadhi, or meditation, in which you adjust the physical molecules of a object near you, and...

and you can do it. For example, you could make fire, as it touches you, coal, and you could put your hand into a fire. And it's very, very typical in Seppur Ketingen Zen...

Seppur Ketingen Zen, to change the molecules, or change the physical configuration of, say, water, so that you could walk on it. And that's a very common, uh... thing in...

in Buddhist philosophy. Abhidharmakosha, 350 AD, no problem, you know? It tells you in certain chapter 7 how to do it.

You can do that. So, we say, yeah, that's possible. But then you say, but I haven't seen anybody do it.

And then they say in Buddhism, you have to be very close to that before you can see someone do it either. You see what I mean? Your mind has to be pure enough to be near a person like that.

You would never meet this person. You'd be the person who took the wrong turn the block before. You know?

You know? Because the... the karma, or the goodness to take the right turn, and the karma to see someone walking on water, really, and the karma to be the person walking on water are all very, very close to each other.

And they take very good karma. And you would swear there weren't anybody... there wasn't anybody in New York City walking on water today.

You know what I mean? I mean, somebody could tell you, yeah, yeah, we saw it. You say, yeah, yeah, right, you know?

Where was it? Oh, it was on 14th Street. Oh, it was over on 12th Street, you know?

And, you know, the karma, or the goodness to have the instinct to take the right turn and to see it, is very close to the ability to do it. What I'm trying to say is that it's very possible, according to Buddhism, that you could succeed in getting out of this wheel by studying it carefully. Each person here has the ability, every human mind in this room, according to Buddhism, has the ability to get out of this wheel.

You can do it yourself. Each person here can do it themselves. And you can get out of this wheel.

And when you do it, it won't necessarily be obvious to the person sitting next to you. Okay? And that's no problem, according to Buddhism, because their perceptions are different.

Many realms, many parallel worlds can be happening in this auditorium at the same moment for different people. Okay? No problem like that.

So, it is possible to get out of the wheel. We're gonna talk a little bit about this guy here, and this strange little box over here after a break. So, please have a break.

There's free refreshments back there. If you'd like to bring your child. Up here, outside the wheel, okay?

Here's the edge of the wheel. So, what do we have so far? If you remember, in the middle are three different states of mind that cause the wheel.

They're like a little engine at the middle of the wheel that makes the wheel run. Okay? These are three states of mind that we all have that make the wheel run.

By the way, in older paintings of the wheel, you will see, here you see the pig with its mouth. In its mouth is the snake's tail. In the snake's mouth is the rooster's tail.

And in the rooster's mouth is the pig's tail. That represents the fact that these three mental states tend to perpetuate each other. Okay?

And we're going to talk more about that later. You'll see older paintings which are more correct. This one is not as correct, in which the...

out of the pig's mouth is coming the tail of the snake and the tail of the rooster. That has its own meaning. Okay?

But the way in which these three states of mind run the whole wheel is something we'll talk about later. Then out here you have... you know, outlines of typical behavior.

Do black deeds go down? Do white deeds go up? Okay?

Out here you have the different realms. Forget realms, okay? Please.

Alright? There's no... places, somewhere, that some guy with some long white beard on a grumpy day has created.

You know, it's not true. There is no such thing. So, does that mean there's no hell?

Not at all. There is a hell, as much as there's an auditorium of PS school. Probably some of the kids see them as the same, right?

But... they're absolutely the same. I mean, if you can perceive this, you can perceive it as hell.

Okay? You got to remember that. Okay?

It's a perceptual thing. So, then you have these realms, meaning these five ways of seeing your world and seeing your body and seeing your own mind. Okay?

And we'll talk more about that later. Then out here, you have twelve different links, twelve different elements, like... that keep the wheel going.

And they're very crucial because you can break the wheel at only one point. You have to break it here. Okay?

You... when it comes time... when you get tired of life, my lama used to say, samsara, meaning suffering life, it has one good virtue, you know?

There's one good thing about our lives. And then we'd say, what? He'd say, sooner or later it always reveals its true nature, like how much it sucks.

You know what I mean? Like... he would say that, you know?

He'd say, sooner or later... the only good thing about this wheel is sooner or later you get tired of it. Sooner or later it will demonstrate to you just how bad it is.

I mean, you can have a good couple of weeks or months or a couple of years and then sooner or later it will always reveal its true nature. You will lose whatever you got. You know, you'll start to get sick.

Whatever good thing was happening to you will fall apart. They always fall apart. Okay?

And that's the nature of this part here. And it's all held in the clutches of death, which is not some monster, right? It's some energy which was planted in you when you were conceived by your parents.

When the sperm and the blood met to gather the egg, at that instant, an energy was formed in you and began to kill you. By the way, that's why this particular link here, which is death, right? I don't know if you can see it very well.

It's the 11 o'clock link or 11.30 link. It's in Tibet. When someone dies, you put them into a fetal position and you put a belt around them.

You strip them and then you kind of crunch them up into a fetal position. You put a big belt around it. And then somebody carries your body out to a cliff and throws it out like just dirt, you know, just garbage.

And that's what's happening there. Some guy is carrying a body out. And that represents...

That link is not called the link of death. It's called the link of aging and death. Okay?

And we'll talk about it later. But what it means is that aging didn't get to be a separate link. Why?

Because not everybody goes through it. You see what I mean? On the one hand, like people die in the womb, many people, okay?

And then on the other hand, everyone's aging all the time. Okay? By being alive, you're aging.

The minute you are conceived, you start to age. Okay? That's the idea of it.

That's the outside link, the realm. It's all held by death. Now I want to talk about Lord Buddha and this thing over here.

Okay? This represents someone who has escaped the wheel.

[Говорящий 2]
Okay?

[Говорящий 1]
I was walking around the temple in New Jersey with some new guy who was thinking about becoming a Buddhist and we paused in front of a thangka of Lord Buddha with the bumpy head and the long ears and kind of a belly, you know, and he looked at it and said, I don't think I want to be like that. Kind of like, you know, Schwarzenegger would be okay. Something like that.

And, you know, you see this person up here, he looks kind of nice, but he has this bump on his head and long ears and things like that. I mean, this is the way it looks in Asia to a certain person and blah blah blah like that. You will become an enlightened being.

Okay? If you understand this wheel, if you follow the wheel carefully, if you get out of the wheel, you will become an enlightened being. One of the qualities of an enlightened being is that your body is like the most exquisite thing that you can imagine.

Okay? And it doesn't have to look like a Buddha in a Tibetan picture. Alright?

It will be the most exquisite thing you can think of. Okay? To you.

[Говорящий 2]
Okay?

[Говорящий 1]
So, it will be—you will look like the most exquisite being you can imagine, male, female, whatever. You will be that. And you will be like that.

What I'm trying to say is, don't think that this is some historical guy with a big bump on his head or something like that. You won't be like that. You will come out, you will look down one day, and your mind, because you changed it, will make you see your own body as the most exquisite thing you can imagine.

And definitely not getting old. Okay? Anymore.

Okay? And you will be outside. Okay, so that represents that kind of body.

The... These things are rays of light coming off the body. The body at that point is made of light and doesn't have inner organs and bone and flesh and blood and things like that.

Your body changes. Okay? Is it that you go to a Buddha body construction factory, you know, and they take your mind out of your ear or something, and they stuff it into this other body.

It's not like that. Okay? It's not like the animal thing either.

Okay? It's... It's different.

You just start seeing yourself as a Buddha and therefore you are a Buddha. Okay? So, could I do it now?

You know, could I say, I'm tired of having these wrinkles and, you know, knobby fingers. Maybe I'd rather... Could I have like golden fingers for a while, you know?

I think I'll just look at it that way. It doesn't work like that. I mean, you can try.

That's not the way it looks. It is something that your mind makes you see. It is something that your mind is creating.

But it's not done by force of will. It's not done because you decide to do it that way. You have to make certain karmic things happen.

And then you're forced to see it that way. You see? There's a difference between staring at your bony hand and trying to pretend it's golden.

Right? And then just waking up one morning and looking at it and it's golden. And both are happening because of your own mind.

You see what I mean? The reason your hand looks the way it does now is your own mind. And the idea is to make the mind so pure that you start seeing it differently.

Okay? By the way, that's the proof in Buddhism of the emptiness of your hand. And we'll talk more about it later.

Okay? It's the emptiness of your hand which makes it possible for you to see that later. And we'll talk about that later.

Last thing. He's pointing to the moon. This thing on top of here is a moon.

This represents that state of your body changing and your mind changing. Okay? You can call it ultimate nirvana.

Okay? That's the meaning of this moon up here. And Lord Buddha is pointing to the moon and saying, you can do it.

[Говорящий 2]
Alright?

[Говорящий 1]
There's a little... like signpost and... there's two very, very famous verses of poetry written there.

We're gonna go into that later. But those are the beginning of the instructions that Lord Buddha wrote. Lord Buddha said, I want two verses of secret instructions written on the Wheel of Life painting.

Okay? And we have them in the Vinaya Sutra. So you're gonna get those verses and we'll translate them and we'll talk about them.

Those are like the secret code to the wheel. Okay? I wanted just to write down the words for emptiness.

[Говорящий 2]
Okay?

[Говорящий 1]
Because it's a very auspicious place to... to lead the class. Say, tongpa.

Tongpa. Nyi. Nyi.

Tongpa. Tongpa. Nyi.

Nyi. Nice, nice. The Sanskrit is shunyata.

In your reading, which is a very, very technical reading, okay? I'd like you to look it over. You'll say, he didn't talk about any of that stuff in class.

I'm giving you a very technical reading. This is the textbook that's used in a Tibetan monastery when they study the Wheel of Life. Okay?

And it's very difficult. It's based on a book by Maitreya. And we study it after about twelve years in the monastery.

And you can look it over and read it and get as much as you can about it. But I'm not going to go through it in order. Okay?

So, we might get to that one in the third class and like that. But I'm going to keep cranking out installments so that by the end of the six weeks you have the entire textbook that a Tibetan monk uses when they study this subject. The textbook that was written first about sixteen centuries ago.

Okay? So, it's a beautiful, beautiful text and a beautiful textbook. Okay?

It's going to talk about emptiness. It's going to get to emptiness. Don't forget that the person who first opened up this scroll and looked at the painting, King Udayana, right?

He's just this innocent king in ancient India. And he's just getting a gift from some other king. And he's opening it up and he's looking at it and he's meditating the next morning and suddenly what?

He sees emptiness directly. Okay? Very, very difficult to see emptiness directly.

Extremely difficult. Somehow, this painting triggers the understanding of emptiness. What's the big deal about emptiness?

Okay? Buddhism says that if you don't see emptiness directly in this lifetime, it's completely impossible for you to remove your negative emotions. Okay?

You can, if you practice for a long time, learn to control your negative emotions. If you meditate a lot, you can learn to mask them or hide them or... what do you call it?

Like... repress them. Okay?

That's possible to repress them if you do a lot of meditation or something like that. But they will always be there running under the surface. You know?

And if someone pushes your buttons in the right way, no matter how much you've been meditating, as you know, you get just as angry as you did before you were meditating. Okay? It's very depressing actually.

Okay? Meditation in itself cannot fix your negative emotions. And...

just trying to be a good person and following things like that, it does not change your basic personality, your basic emotions. You must see emptiness to do that. The basic work of removing your negativities forever depends crucially on seeing emptiness.

You must see emptiness. According to Buddhism, it's impossible to ever overcome anger, jealousy, whatever, if you cannot see emptiness directly. Okay?

Impossible. Buddhism says that. Part of the definition of Nirvana is remove his or her negative emotions because they saw emptiness directly.

How long does it take to see emptiness directly? About 20 minutes. You have to be in a deep state of meditation.

What does it feel like? Long story. We'll go into it.

Okay? How do you get it to happen? It takes years of practice.

It would be very similar to learning piano. Okay? People ask me, you know, what are the odds I can see emptiness in this life?

And I say, what are the odds that you could get really good at piano in this life? Starting now. If you started now.

It's about the same. Okay? And you'd have to be just as serious.

You know? And people say, I don't want to spend the time, or... or, is it really that hard?

Or something like that. Is... is learning piano hard, even if you start at age 40 or 50?

Is it hard? And if you enjoy it? Probably you play pretty well within three years or something.

Learning to see emptiness directly is almost the same. Very, very similar. Okay?

And it takes the same sort of discipline. Do you have to be Mozart? No.

Can you learn it in a few weeks? Impossible.

[Говорящий 2]
Okay?

[Говорящий 1]
It takes a pretty good practice, with a very good teacher, who knows what they're talking about, and then, just like piano, you know, in about the same time frame, you could see emptiness directly.

[Говорящий 2]
Okay?

[Говорящий 1]
It would take about... it would take that kind of commitment also. If you're not up there, you know, driving the neighbors crazy a few hours a day on your meditation cushion, it's impossible.

Cannot happen. It's as if... you suddenly learned a...

if suddenly you're playing piano great the next day after you started something, impossible. It takes training, it takes some kind of commitment, and... and it takes a good teacher.

And... and with those things, you can see emptiness directly. There's one key to see emptiness directly.

All right? One thing you have to see before you see emptiness, and then you get to go home. Okay?

Tendrel? Tendrel? Tendrel.

Tendrel is a Tibetan word that they translate as dependent origination. Basically, you... according to Buddhism, every finger snap, you have 65 different experiences of your world.

Okay? Every time I snap my finger, your brain is going through 65 separate frames of your world. You're playing the film that fast.

That's why the world seems to move. It's actually 65 discrete karmas going off every time I snap my fingers. And it's making you think I'm moving, for example.

Okay? But there are actually that many... perceptual events going on in your mind every...

every millisecond. 65 every millisecond. Okay?

And that's how many frames it takes to keep things going. Multiply that times 24. Multiply that by, you know, 30.

Multiply that times 365. Multiply that times the number of... years you've been alive in this planet.

That many perceptual events have happened in your mind. Billions and billions of events have happened in your mind since you began. Okay?

And you can divide all those into three. This is ultimate reality, okay? So, if you're highly trained, and I'd say it's very like learning to play the piano.

If you're very good at meditating, you've been very well trained by a good teacher, and you see emptiness directly, it takes about 20 minutes. The experience goes on for about 20 minutes. It's extremely rare to have that happen in a human lifetime.

Okay? So, if one person in this room has done it in a lifetime, that would be unusual. That's 20 minutes out of all the hours of your life.

Okay? 20 minutes are spent, even in a very fortunate person, like, you know, the most fortunate person in the United States, say, has seen emptiness for 20 minutes of their whole life. Okay?

That's enough to get them out of the wheel.

[Говорящий 2]
Okay?

[Говорящий 1]
Takes you out of the wheel. 20 minutes of that takes you out of the wheel. Okay?

It's extraordinary. Something amazing about that experience takes you out. Okay?

Perception of your world, ultimate reality. Okay? Let's call it 20 minutes.

And then down here you have what we call... What do we call it? Fake-out reality.

Fake-out reality is called kunzo denpa in Buddhist philosophy. It means during much of your life, you have... you are looking at the things around you and they are faking you out.

Okay? You think they are one way and they are not. Okay?

Your mind is constantly telling you that things are a certain way and they are not at all like that. Okay? There is a certain way of seeing your life.

There is a way of seeing yourself. There is a way of seeing the people around you. There is a way of seeing the buildings around you and everything else in this room.

And at every moment of that part of your life, you are misunderstanding what's going around you. You are misunderstanding where you came from. You are misunderstanding where all the bad things in your life are coming from.

And mostly you are just pissed off at them. Okay? Much less understanding them.

You are just in a state of being irritated. As you get older, it gets worse normally. Okay?

Your brain gets more ossified. You start to become less tolerant of painful things and painful people and bothersome people. You start to want to stay home more.

You know what I mean? And as you get older, this process starts to get worse and frozen in your brain. And you start to dislike the bad things around you, bad people, bad city, bad problems, bad things, your own body.

You start to dislike it more and more. And during all of this process, as you get older and older, you are misunderstanding everything around you. Buddhism says that for a normal person, except for those 20 minutes, in the rest of your life, every perception, 65 a second, was mistaken.

Okay? Every single perception you've ever had in your life was mistaken. Okay?

Until the day you see emptiness directly, every single one is mistaken. Okay? You don't understand where you are, you don't understand how you got here, especially you don't understand where the painful things in your own life come from.

And you just sit there like a sheep and you take it. You know? They are killing you.

They are making your family, all the people you love, they are killing them also. And everyone is just sitting there and getting killed because they don't know anything else to do about it. And that...that's the human condition. That's...that's number three. You can say every moment of your life. I mean, statistically it's like...

it is that. It's exactly that.

[Говорящий 2]
Okay?

[Говорящий 1]
65 times... you know, whatever, I don't know how many million, but every single impression you have of your world is mistaken and it causes you to suffer. It causes all the bad things in your life.

Collectively, over the length of your life, it causes you to get old. Okay? It causes the actual process of aging also.

The continued habit of not understanding where your world is coming from and why things are happening to you makes you get older. And eventually kills you. It's very interesting.

It's a bridge. Okay? And that's dependent origination.

This is something invented by Buddhist scholars in the 1920s or something. It drove me crazy. And I tried to find a better word.

There is no better word. Origination means where does everything come from? Why am I getting old?

Why did I meet the people I don't really like? Why do...why do things in life let me down all the time, you know? Why do things never go quite right?

And why is it when they finally go right, they screw up the next day? You know what I mean? Why does it always...

Why can't I have one good thing go right, purely go right, and then end right? You know what I mean? Or something like that.

Why does it always go up and down like that? You know, why is that? Why...why am I at the...

what is it? The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, you know? I mean, why...life seems like that. Life just seems to be throwing curveballs at you, your whole life. Why? Why?

Why? You know, why is this happening to me? And...and just works out 100% peaceful, finished, everything cool. Why can't I have at least one thing go like that? You know, why? Why is that?

That...that's the origin...origination. That's what the origination part means. Where is it coming from? What's causing your life in general, all the details of the day, when everything is not quite going right?

Okay? Okay. And then finally, the big not going right, you know, which is getting old.

And...and getting... you know, your eyes change, you get slower, people start not to call you for that job you used to do. You know what I mean?

You don't have as much money anymore. You know, people don't want to drop by and see you, because they don't want to hear about your medical problems. And...and stuff like that, you know. And you just become less fun, because you are less fun, because you're dying, you know, and you're getting older. And...and that's...that's origination. Okay?

Origination means that. Is there some place where this is coming from? Can we understand where it's coming from?

Dependent means... depends on something else. Okay?

It's coming from something else. It has a cause.

[Говорящий 2]
Okay?

[Говорящий 1]
When you see in the reading, there'll be two ideas of what dependent means. Dependent origination. Dependent origination means finally, one day, you wake up.

This is before you see emptiness, right? Before you see emptiness. One day you wake up and you figure out where everything is coming from.

Okay? Is that the same thing as emptiness? Okay?

Why? Well, first of all, emptiness is the absence of something. Okay?

There's a pen, and then there's the emptiness of the pen. You see what I mean? It means something was there, and now something's not there.

And that emptiness implies an absence of something. Something's missing. Okay?

That's what emptiness... Emptiness always means the fact that a certain thing is missing. That's the meaning of emptiness.

Emptiness is a negative thing. Emptiness is like your credit card balance or something like that. Okay?

It's an actual absence of a physical thing. You know what I mean? I mean, not a physical thing, but anyway, it's the absence of something that was there or you expect it to be there, and the fact that that's not there is called emptiness.

Dependent Origination is the way in which everything works. It's the mechanism by which everything works. Okay?

Very, very special and very difficult. Okay? So, you start out your whole life, you don't understand what's happening to you and why it's happening to you.

That's—you're at level number three here. You're down in level number three. You are dying like a good sheep.

Okay? Very steadily, slowly, every day, cooperatively, you are walking to the edge of the cliff, you know, and, you know, moo, and, you know, and you keep going, and you don't put up the least bit of fight. You don't even know you could, you see?

I have to prove to you in this lecture that it's possible not to die, right? I mean, people don't say in the New York Times, you know, sign up for chorus, don't have to die, you know? You don't even know that it's possible, so you're just going.

Okay? That's at the level of number three.

[Говорящий 2]
Okay?

[Говорящий 1]
Number two is a very, very high spiritual level where you actually figure out what's going on. Right? Emptiness is the absence of something or the lack of something.

It's a very, very high ultimate reality. We're not talking about that. But dependent origination is not some high ultimate reality thing.

It's just figuring out what the hell is going on around you. Finally. You know, why is it you're getting old?

Why is it you have to meet the people you don't like? Why is it you can't make enough money? You know, it's things like that.

Why is it you can't have a relationship that lasts? Okay? Why is it?

Then you, one day you just come out, Buddhist, you study Buddhism, and suddenly, wow, you get it. Okay? You figure it out.

It's very, very, very cool. Okay? That's dependent origination.

Shortly after that, within 24 hours of that ultimate experience of that, you can see emptiness directly. Okay? Very, very cool.

So what's the bridge here? It's understanding dependent origination.

[Говорящий 2]
Okay?

[Говорящий 1]
It's understanding what we call the way things work. Okay? You can think of dependent origination as the way things work.

What makes our world tick? Where did everything in your life come from? Can you stop it?

Okay? That's called dependent origination. How many steps to dependent origination?

Twelve. Hey, if you wanted, if you had a king that you really liked and you wanted him to see emptiness, you could like put it on a picture, like twelve pictures, around a wheel, you know, and send it to the guy, see if he figures it out. You know what I mean?

And that's exactly what those twelve links are around the outside of the edge. Okay? Those are dependent origination.

Okay? Okay? That is a blueprint for how dependent origination works.

We're gonna study it. We're gonna study Dendel. Say Dendel?

Dendel. Khorlo means wheel. Okay?

Sipa means life. Suffering life, by the way. Sipa, I'm studying the wheel of life.

Okay? You want to get serious, you say, I'm studying Dendel. Say Dendel.

Dendel. Dendel. Dendel means dependent origination.

How is it that things are happening to me? Where do things come from? Okay?

Where is it going to? How can I stop it? That's the mechanism of these twelve.

These are called the twelve links of dependent origination. And this is the key to seeing emptiness. Once you see emptiness, you get out.

You see what I mean? But you have to understand dependent origination first. Where are we now?

We're like in one of these lousy circles here, seeing everything the wrong way. Okay? Faked out, by what's going on.

There's an illusion going on, and you're falling for it, and you're dying. It will kill you. If you get up to here.

And then when you figure that out, you get to emptiness, and you're out of it. You see what I mean? So, so we're at a, we're going to study the bridge.

Okay? Take me to the bridge. You got to have the bridge between where we are now, and you can't jump on emptiness.

It's like, could you play, what's that guy? Rims and Quartz. You got to go through the bridge.

Okay? And the bridge is that. We're going to work really hard on dependent origination.

Then you can see emptiness, based on that. That's what happened to King Udayana who first got this painting. That's how the Buddha designed it.

He wanted it to happen. He wanted that to happen. Is that something that happens to people two and a half thousand years ago and doesn't happen anymore?

But Buddha doesn't think like that. To Lord Buddha, in 1998 and 500 BC, are exactly the same time.

[Говорящий 2]
You see?

[Говорящий 1]
To Lord Buddha, designing the painting for King Udayana, and designing it for you to see it in this place, takes exactly the same effort. You see what I mean? He, he designed it for King Udayana, knowing you would see it.

And, and aware that some people in this room would see emptiness if they understood it. You see what I mean? For him it's the same thing.

He is seeing this moment as clearly as he's seeing two and a half thousand years ago. When he stood up and said, you know, draw my outline, he's doing it for you too. No problem.

Buddhas don't think, they don't have limitations like we have. Okay? So, this painting was made for you too, at the same time.

Designed for you. Now you have to try to crack it.

[Говорящий 2]
Okay?

[Говорящий 1]
Alright? Okay, we'll stop there.