Серия ежедневной практики, курс 02 — Истинный смысл прибежища (1995, Ваджрапани, Калифорния), занятие 2

[Speaker 2]
This is the continuation of session one.

[Speaker 1]
So, are they cause and effect?

[Speaker 2]
I thought there were so many variables.

[Speaker 1]
There are variables, but we'll talk about them later. Also, I think sometimes what occurs is that there's intermediate, you know, intermediate effect. Yeah.

There's, you know, there's succeeding and there's such and that, and there's such and that, and there's such and that. So, sometimes the immediate effect is not a problem. The Guardian says something interesting.

The Guardian says it's all a big lie. He says it's all a big lie. He says the act of lying and the act of making a hundred dollars have nothing to do with each other.

You know, he's very adamant about it. In the Sulekha, in the Shirdi, he says, in the Guardian's letter, he says, he's adamant about it, there's no connection, no connection at all. The hundred dollars is coming from a previous event, a good previous event.

[Speaker 2]
Like when you have a recipe and you make a cake, you might get a different batch of flour or something, you get an elevation.

[Speaker 1]
And it's not the same causes.

[Speaker 2]
So, you're getting a different cake.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
Let's say the same recipe, different results. But different, not the same recipe. So, I'm saying the recipe was different, those times you got different amounts of money.

[Speaker 1]
No, different recipes. Different recipes? Yeah, because the recipe, a good recipe will say, don't use Tilbury, use this one.

[Speaker 2]
Okay, so you're agreeing in following the recipe. For example, the person you're lying to, the weather, where you were that day.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, no, there are other factors, there are other factors. I admit, but what you're positing is, well, planes don't fly when one of the wings fell off. I agree.

You know, if it's not all exactly the same, no, it's not replicated. But I'm postulating a case where everything is exactly the same. What I'm saying is like this.

Go read the New York Times business section. It's really funny. Forbes, we were in Forbes, okay?

We made it to Forbes. And they said, this company is really smart because they take risks. Three days later, it says, this company failed, they're really stupid, they took a lot of risks, you know.

And there's no connection. If somebody in the millions of years that human beings have been around hasn't figured out how to make their investments right, it's weird. It's kind of strange, you know.

Do you take risks or not take risks? I mean, one's got to be better and one's got to be worse. The fact is, it doesn't depend on that.

It doesn't matter whether you take risks or you don't take risks because it doesn't come from that. That's not the cause. There's a lot of evidence that things don't work the way they look.

There's a lot of evidence because people, I know business people go through their whole lives, generations of business people, millions of business people go through trying to figure out how to make money and it just doesn't work half the time. And half the time it doesn't. It seems to be almost random, you know, because it's not depending on that.

It's an indication. I'm not saying a proof, OK? It's an indication that the causes are not what they appear to be.

It doesn't matter how smart you are and how well capitalized you are and whether you take risks or you don't take risks because something else is happening. And that's causation. So anyway, it has to be similar.

I think those are all indications. You don't have to say total proof. It seems to be an indication.

We'll do one more, then we'll stop. Get bigger, OK? And that's very simple.

There's one rule about cause and effect. It's always true. It's always true.

The cause is always smaller than the effect and not just a little smaller. I mean, take a look at an oak tree and an acorn. We have this oak tree near this temple.

I live in a Mongolian temple. And one day this oak tree fell over on the temple, on top of the temple. It's a big temple.

And the oak tree was much bigger. And so they sent me up there with a chainsaw. You know, you cut it off.

And I don't like high places. And I'm standing up there with this chainsaw. And I had this very clear thought that I wish I had met this oak tree when it was an acorn.

And I would have taken the acorn and thrown it out on the street. And it never would have grown. And I wouldn't be up here.

You know? I had this very clear idea that if I could have been there when the acorn fell down and thrown it out on the street, everything would be OK. And that's the way it goes.

If you look at the matter, the amount of matter in an acorn and then the amount of matter in an oak tree, in a big oak tree, it's incredible. Or the parents, sperm and egg, it's incredible. It's like a few cells.

And then they grow into a huge organism that lasts for a long time. That's something incredible. It's the ratio of cause to effect.

I don't know what it is. It must be one to a couple million, I think. If you look at the cells that your body produces through the whole course of your life being caused by only two or three cells, the causes are always infinitely smaller than the results.

And in every case, if you think of any great thing you've done in your life, you know that there was that first moment you met somebody. Vajrapani, you know, it must have been somebody's thought. There must have been a couple of people sitting around a table one night and somebody said, Hey, what do you think about we do that?

And then here it is, years, 20 years later, thousands of students later who've been in and out of this place. And it all came from a few sentences that somebody said. All things are like that.

All causes are like that. All causes and results are like that. So, karma is the same way.

What you get is this tiny, tiny little deed, a tiny thought, and then you get a tremendous result. Fourth chapter, Abhidharmakosha, opens with, lele dikten naso kye, treni sempadambe che, which means, the universe comes from karma. And karma consists of, the essence of karma is sempa.

Sempa means, you know the word sempa, which means mind. Sempa is totally different and it's anytime the mind shifts. So, anytime the mind goes from there to there, that's a sempa.

That's the essence of karma. Karma is sempa. Then physical verbal deeds come later, but it starts with a shifting of the mind.

How many sempas do you have in a minute?

[Speaker 2]
It's action.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, it's the movement of the mind. It's the shifting of the mind, shifting of your thoughts. I mean according to the Buddha, I think it's 64,000, in a, I think 16, 16 or 64 in a thumb snap or something.

Kecik tamay. And that's how many sempas you can have, OK? And each one is a karma.

Each one is a discrete cause for something else. And each one is going to grow like an acorn.

[Speaker 2]
I'm afraid it has to be called so.

[Speaker 1]
That's why you're here.

[Speaker 2]
One of the Kuryans, they treat people like they're like an acorn, and they don't know what to do, and they don't know all the ancient stuff and satsang, and they're like, OK, I think you're going to go through a whole lot more. And you know, it's not like I'm going to let you have too much energy in your mind. It's the small moments where you need to join my mind, so I can heal.

So you know that I'm not like this, going to... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, OK.

[Speaker 1]
No, that's true. There have to be, there have to be conditions too. You're right, you're right.

There have to be conditions. There have to be the nutrients. Also with the thought, you know, if you dwell on the thought, like they say, do a perfect meditation on irritation at the co-worker at work, you know, which means you go home at night and you start thinking about what they said to you.

It starts with one moment of irritation at work. You get a new job, you're thrilled, you've been trying to get a job, you finally get a job, you know, you're really happy the first day and the first month, and then slowly, one person starts to irritate you, and it starts to build up in your mind, and then finally, two years later, when you leave the place, you slowly leave, to leave the place, you know. That's a case where they say that mentally you have given it nutrition, you know, mentally you have watered it, you have taken good care of it, and it's grown into this huge, ugly thought.

But I admit that if you don't have the nutrients, you know, if you have one frivolous thought and you don't follow up on it, and you don't dwell on it, and you don't give it all the nutrition it needs, yeah, it won't, it won't cause it. And same with an acorn. But the acorn, the oak tree, even though it doesn't get bigger, it does continue.

And for it to continue is more mass too. Ten minutes of oak tree is heavier than one minute of oak tree, you know what I mean to say. The cause had the power not only to create the mass of the oak tree, but to keep it going for another 50 years or something.

That means the cause is incredibly powerful. That cause is very powerful. So tomorrow we'll get into the invitation.

We've got three and four to go to. We have to cover two more laws of karma, and then we want to know what the heck it has to do with going for refuge. All right.

You have, I think we have a closing prayer, right?

[Speaker 2]
Okay. Thank you. Thank you.

This is the end of Session 1. Session 2.

[Speaker 1]
Session 3. Session 4.

[Speaker 2]
Do you believe in the effect or sometimes believe in the effect?

[Speaker 1]
I say always.

[Speaker 2]
Always?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. Then I really don't understand because in my mind it seems that so many things end up getting smaller or vanishing, and others really grow up proportionally to how I see the world. And then I don't really know.

[Speaker 2]
I was trying to make up an example of, okay, I'm happy and peaceful for one moment, and let's not look at how that came about. Then, how does the result get deeper? What's the result in a clearer way?

I don't even know what you think the result will be. Because in English, I would be much more happy somewhere down the line. Someone is going to be much, someone else is going to be much more happy.

Or what? You broadcast this conversation all the time. I work already.

[Speaker 1]
I know what you mean. Yeah, you're saying, I think I have two examples that you're mentioning. One is, what about things that decline?

You know, things that like certain organizations, you know, they start out very strong and then they start to die out. What about that? And then secondly, I think you're saying, what about a moment of happiness?

It doesn't necessarily get bigger all the time. Sometimes it peters out. What about things that peter out and just diminish and get less and less?

The Abhidharmakosha, in the chapter on karma, which is the fourth chapter, talks a lot about that. And, it divides things into results of karma and then karma itself. So that happiness, for example, mental feeling, which is good, is mainly a result.

The definition of karma, the definition of good karma is any deed which results in a ripening of a feeling of pleasure, mental or physical pleasure, happiness or physical pleasure. And then the definition of bad karma, bad deeds, is anything that results ultimately in a feeling of pain, suffering, mental suffering or physical pain. So that's actually a definition of karma, which is very interesting.

So anytime you have a happiness, any kind of good thing happen to you, it's a result, supposedly, you have to prove it, of good karma, of a good deed where you help somebody else. And then anytime you have any kind of suffering, it's a result of a bad deed, something you did to hurt someone else. So really, in the Abhidharma system, the pleasure and pain are mainly results.

Then they get into feelings, can feelings of unhappiness or feelings of happiness ever be good karma themselves and create more karma? And they do. According to the Abhidharma, the only really, the only bad feelings, for example, are always bad karma.

Except in one case, is where you have regret over having hurt somebody, where you have regret about having done something bad. To be upset that you've done something wrong is a good karma. But normally, in the Abhidharma system, every other kind of form of being upset or irritated or angry or any kind of negative, painful thought is a bad karma.

So, it wouldn't necessarily lead to an immediate feeling of pain because the other thing about karma is that it takes time to ripen. Nagarjuna said it's really bad luck that karma goes through this thing. In Sanskrit, it's called pacchate.

In Tibetan, it's called mimba. And it means that karma has to have time to ripen. It takes time to ripen.

Nagarjuna says it's really bad luck because otherwise, like people in New York are always asking me about killing roaches in their apartments, you know, because if you don't kill them, they take over your apartment. If you do kill them, is it bad karma? And Nagarjuna says it's really bad luck that when you crush a roach's sides that your own ribs don't start to break at that moment.

You know, if karma were immediate, you know, if karma worked that way, if the minute you said something harsh to a person, you started to feel as bad as they do, immediately, then everything would be alright. We'd never do bad karma. You know, he says if when you cut somebody's skin open, your own skin opened up and started to bleed, then you would never do any bad karma.

But there's this lousy gap. There's this lousy maturation period between when you do it and when it ripens. And it misleads you.

It's a kind of an illusion. And it hurts. That causes a lot of problems.

So like that. So, you know, a moment of pure, good thought is going to lead to a lot of other moments of happiness, but not immediately. You won't notice it.

You'll think it came from something else. That's the illusion. Someone else asked me that.

I don't have much good explanation for that. It doesn't go into it very much. It compares it to the physical world and to all other causes that you can see.

You know, all other causes. You know, all great enterprises come from tiny little causes. They say, you can see that.

You know, building the Golden Gate Bridge started with someone's idea. And things like that. All great things come from a tiny seed.

And they say, look at that in the physical world. Look at it in the world of ideas, in the world of great America. I mean, it started by a few thoughts of several people.

And all around the world you see how causes are smaller than their results. But I don't know of any... I think then you have to get into the function of ignorance on a seed.

You know, when you have a seed and you water it with a lot of ignorance of emptiness, then it gets more and more powerful. But for that, we might get into that later today. We'll see.

Okay. So, that's two principles of karma. How did we get to karma?

It was... We were talking about suffering in this life is no big deal. I mean, you can see that there is suffering in this life.

And I think you can see pretty obviously that there's no refuge in this life. There's no protection from it in this life. There's nothing in this life that can help you with the problems that you already have.

There's nothing ultimately you can do to keep yourself healthy. You will get sick and you will die. And there is no refuge, physical refuge in this life.

It's a lost cause. There's nothing you can do. People spend a lot of money to delay it.

And you can live well and you can try to eat well and you can exercise but ultimately it's a lost cause. You might delay it for a while. Anything you've undertaken, even virtuous deeds, even great things will collapse eventually.

The Buddha himself, when he started teaching, he gave a limit to his teachings. The last words of the Abhidharmakosha outline and the Diamond Cutter Sutra they outline how his own teachings are going to end. He understood while he taught that his own teachings would die in the world.

And he gave a date. He described how long it was going to take. He described what would happen during each period as it started to degenerate.

Even good, nice things end and are destroyed. Even creations of the Buddha go through this process, can't stop it. So any kind of happiness you have or any kind of good thing you have in this life it's obvious you're going to lose it.

You don't need a philosophy to know that. If you're young you don't want to pay attention to it but as you get older it forces itself on you. And there's this kind of intelligence that young people can have.

If while you're still healthy you can just try to observe older people and imagine that you're going to be like that you save a lot of time. But it's very difficult because it's fun to be young. So I don't think we don't need any big proofs for suffering in this life.

This life is a loss. Anyway, you can see that you can't keep anything. Anything you build, any relationships you make, any money you collect, any health you have, any good looks you have, any reputation you have, it's all going to just end.

And three or four years after you die nobody will remember you much, you know, really. And you can see that even with very famous people you know, just nobody remembers you after a while. There's nobody left who was around when you were around.

And then it's just a complete loss. So for this life it's obvious. Why did we get into karma?

We were trying to prove future lives and past lives. We went through a proof by Khedrup Jey which is based on a proof by Dharmakirti about twelve hundred years ago. And he's trying to prove that your mind, the first moment of your mind in this life, the first thought you ever had, had to be, had to come from some material.

There had to be some stuff that the moment before that turned into the first thought of this life, the first conscious thought of this life. And we went through that proof and we proved that there had to be something, some kind of material called mind that was there the millisecond before you had your first thought. And that provided the material for that first thought.

Not the content but the existence of the mind itself. Okay? There was some kind of mind just before that and that had to be across that border called this life.

There had to be some mind in some other life that provided the material which turned into the mind of the first moment of this life. There has to be. And we proved it, we talked about it yesterday, just due to the similarity of causes and their effects.

There has to be some similar stuff that was there the moment before you had your first conscious thought. There had to be a mind before that. If there was a mind a millisecond before that, then you're stuck with past lives.

Okay? And if you're stuck with one, you're stuck with endless past lives, beginningless past lives. Okay?

And that's the basic proof. There is no other great proof in Buddhism. I don't think any other one is necessary.

You know, they say on three levels you can perceive your past lives. You can, in deep meditation, under certain circumstances, you can perceive your past lives and your future lives directly. And they say that's no good for teaching other people because you can't prove it.

I can claim that I've seen my future lives, but I can't prove it to you. And you can't confirm it from what I say. I can sound very convincing, but we know that doesn't sometimes work.

So you can't really depend on that. There's other, there's, you know, people have memories of their past lives, so they have some kind of flashes from their past lives. Again, that's not something they can communicate to you.

They can't prove to you that they saw their past lives. It's no good for convincing people of past lives, and it doesn't work out to know. And the third one is just reasoning, and that's the one that Buddhists prefer.

It doesn't require any leaps of faith. It's just there. It's scientific.

If you had a first moment of consciousness in this life, it had to come from some place, and we eliminated all the other possibilities. There must have been a moment before that. So then we establish past lives and future lives.

I'm going to give you K.W.J.'s proof. This is, we do these, we have a five-year course in New York, which you're welcome to come to. It's free.

And we go through the basic monastic course in five years, and these are all from that, and it saves time. I don't have to do it all each time. So we were on karma, and we said there are four laws of karma.

We were trying to see what's going to happen after you die. The first law of karma is that it's similar. whatever the, if the cause is sweet, the result is sweet.

If the cause is sour, the result is sour. It's very, very simple, and it applies to morality as well as physical things. If a seed is defective, the result is defective.

the result is good. If the seed is really, really healthy, the result is healthy. If the, if the seed, if the cause and event is morally harmful, if it hurts other people, the result can't be good.

You can't get something good out of something bad. And it seems very simple, but it's just true. There's no similarity between something nice happening to you and hurting somebody.

There's no similarity. I mean, the content of those two experiences is totally different. Hurting someone, the content is bad.

Getting something nice, the content is good. They can't be a cause and effect. It's very simple.

It'd be like corn coming out of a watermelon seed. You can't. You won't.

That's similarity. Vigor is, in general, you can see that if seeds are properly treated, they always produce something, not just a little bit bigger, but tremendously bigger, like millions of times bigger, or thousands of times bigger. And we talked about your mother's egg, your father's sperm.

You could talk about the acorn for an oak tree. You could talk about a single idea for an institution which has helped hundreds or thousands of people. Those are all seeds, and they always produce something much bigger.

The other two rules of karma are pretty simple. I don't even have to write them. If you commit an action, there must be a consequence.

In other words, you can't set an action into motion and nothing will happen from it. It's the law of conservation of energy. If there's a pushing force, something's going to happen on the other side.

There's no such thing as doing an action and then nothing coming out of it. It's not accepted by any school of physics or any school of, Buddhist school of morality. If you do something, you're going to get a result.

There will be a result. And it will follow these two rules. You can't get out of it.

We're going to study later today why that's true as far as perception. Why does, what role does perception have in that happening? Why is it when you do something, you have to get a result back?

And the big question is, where does karma stay? I mean, we all have this fuzzy idea that when we do something, there's this cosmic picture taken. In fact, the Vaibhashika school of Buddhism, the earliest schools, they said that.

They said when you do an action, there's like a cosmic photograph taken. And it was called Nam-mur-ri-che-ma-yin-pay-suk. It's not accepted by any other school.

And it was some kind of form, physical matter that was created and it attaches itself to your body like an aura. Like when you make a prostration, you suddenly get this coating of virtue. And that stays with you until you get the result back.

So you've got all these coatings of all these karmas that you did and they stay on your body, an actual physical aura that you can't see. And that's how they explain karma got carried. And then you get more and more refined into the mind-only school and then the Madhyamika schools.

They explain, and I'll get into that in the afternoon. I think it's really nice to hear it because then you can buy the idea of karma more easily if you know how it's stored. Otherwise, you know, what is it?

You throw a cosmic boomerang, you know, and it comes back 20 years later and hits you, you know. Where does karma stay? Because according to Buddhism, it can stay for thousands of years.

It can be stored, put into storage and then come out a thousand years later. Well, where does it stay? And how could it stay?

What does it look like? Who locks it up? Is it God puts it in their closet and gives it back to you later?

Where does it stay all that time? And I think if you don't get into that, then you can't really appreciate karma. If you can't appreciate karma, you can't appreciate what's going to happen in your future life.

And if you can't appreciate that, you won't take refuge. And if you don't take refuge, you're not a Buddha, as we said yesterday. So, the fourth law of karma is if you don't do something, you won't get a result.

Okay, and that's pretty obvious. You know, if you can restrain from doing something, if you can stop yourself from doing something, you won't get a result. It's impossible.

And that's, those are the four rules of karma. Why did I get into that? What's it got to do with refuge?

The point is this. We talk about taking refuge about the suffering of this life. And then all the books in Buddhism say you have to take refuge because of what's going to happen after you die.

And if you read the reading from last night, we'll get into it. The lowest form of refuge, the most primitive, selfish form of refuge, the minimum refuge for being a Buddhist is to be worried about what happens to you the moment your breath stops. It's actually, if you have some kind of hope that Buddhism will help you in this life, it doesn't qualify as refuge.

That's not refuge. The minimum form of refuge is to be concerned about what's going to happen the moment after you stop breathing. That's the minimum.

We can't even accept that that moment exists unless you understand about that mind going on. You know, that mind is really separate from the body. And when the body dies and stops moving, the mind goes on.

You have no proof otherwise. Okay, I gave some proofs to the opposite. But you can't give me any proof otherwise.

There is no other proof. You can't prove to me that when the body stops flopping around, the mind doesn't go on. You just can't.

You can't prove it. In fact, it's not true. It does go on.

And because it goes on, you can't give me any decent proof why it should stop. It doesn't stop. It just goes on.

It keeps going on. How it finds a new body and things like that, you can understand by studying karma. But it will go on.

So what happens then? Then karma takes over and determines what happens to you after that. What's it going to be like?

I mean, is it... And then we get into the question, is there really a hell? Is there really hungry ghosts?

You know, Buddhism says there are five or six realms. It says that if you're not a good person, if you do a lot of bad things in this life, after you're... after you die, you'll have to go to a hell.

Or you'll have to go... become some kind of a spirit who is always suffering. And that's why you should take refuge, you know.

And you can get up and you can give a lecture about refuge and say, you know, you're going to probably go to hell. Buddhist books say that 99.99% people go down after they die. So...

So they get up and say, OK, that's why you should take refuge. And you say, yeah, but prove it. You know, I can't see hell.

Nobody's ever seen hell. No one's come back from hell and said, this is what hell looks like. A lot of popular ideas about hell taught by Buddhist teachers are that, oh, it's just a...

you have to interpret it. It's just a psychological state in this life. You know, it's kind of when you're really bummed out, it feels like hell.

You feel like hell. And there's no hell. The idea of hell doesn't really...

It's just a metaphor and there's no such thing as hell. That's not what the books say. The book The Abhidharmakosha, third chapter, second part, it describes hell in good detail.

And it's interesting that it's very similar to Dante's description. It's very similar, extremely similar to the description of hell found in other traditions. The question today...

Or you can see animals. That's a lower birth. And you can't see hungry spirits.

I can't prove to you. And it's in fact, in Buddhist logic, it's the prime example. I can't prove to you that this room might be filled with spirits of people who died, who are suffering horribly all around us.

You can't see them. You can't hear them right now. You know, I can describe it.

I can go into hours of explanation about what it looks like according to scriptures. But can I prove it to you? Because if I could prove it to you, you and me would all be very good people because we don't want that to happen.

If I can't prove it to you, you'll just say, oh, that was an interesting lecture and maybe it exists and maybe it doesn't exist. He doesn't know any better than me. He can't prove it to me.

He can't take me there. And then you don't really take very good refuge because you can't see it. No one can prove it to you.

There's these books that are pretty good. But you don't really know for sure that it exists. So we have to talk about whether or not, for example, a hell experience could exist.

If it's possible that after you stop breathing in this life, something monstrous could happen. You know, that Freddy and all those guys could come up and whether such a thing. Isn't it possible?

Are like monsters possible? Is it possible that after you die you'll meet monsters or you'll go to a place where it's all, like, you know, Friday the 13th or something. You know, where those things really happen.

Where all those things that the movie makers imagine really happen. Is it possible? You know, are those such things possible or are they just fantasies?

You know, I mean, are such things not possible? You know, horrible monsters and slashing you and anything you ever saw in a movie come true. You know, is it really possible?

According to everything we said so far, it's completely possible. Okay, your mind will continue. It will go on.

We haven't, there's nothing we've said that indicates that your mind will stop. It won't stop. You know, that's why Hamlet didn't commit suicide.

He says, to be or not to be, which means, should I commit suicide or not? And then he goes through a bunch of arguments to himself and finally, he's so indecisive but he finally decides not to kill himself because he says it might go on You know, he says, ah, but to dream, you know, some kind of consciousness might continue. So, he doesn't kill himself.

You will have some consciousness continue. What will it be like? You know, how will it be?

That's where these two things come in. Every negative thought you've had, every really harmful thought, every really thought where you strongly were angry at someone else or jealous of someone else or you had desire, ah, will, will magnify itself and it will be of the same type. So, you'll have a perception that you'll have a, a perception of, of something very negative and it will be infinitely more powerful than the thoughts you had because that's the nature of all seeds.

Ah, San Francisco Bridge started with a few thoughts. Vajrapani Institute started with a few talks over dinner after a course. Um, your whole body for 50 or 40 or 30 years of life started with two cells in your parents, you know.

The, the small tiny causes that are planted in your mind stream, ah, they grow and they become infinitely larger and they get twisted. In other words, it's very, very, it's not crazy to say that little tiny bad thoughts you had in this life could grow into huge twisted oak trees in your next life and you could see, you, you could be living in a place where there are Freddy's and, and monsters slashing you and killing you and things like It's very possible, according to all those, ah, ideas of karma, it's, it's not impossible. Ah, I mean, we can't see it, I don't say you can see it, but, ah, Buddhism says that if you see something with logic, in other words, if you can think something over and perceive that it's possible, then it's as good as being there.

There's no difference between, ah, logic and being there. If the logic is good, you know, if I say, ah, like, you know, how many fingers are there? Three.

Okay, that's direct perception. And then I go like that, so how many fingers are there? You know, I'll hit them one by one on the, you know, and you know there's three fingers there.

Ah, you can't see it, you're using logic, that's logic. You, that is seeing them as clearly as if I put them in front of your face. You still see three fingers, and that's, according to Buddhism, that's one kind of pramana, je-pak-tsema.

You, you're seeing my fingers as good as if I stuck them in your face. So I say, you can see your future life. You can see that, that the moment you die, it will happen that way.

And the, and the death process is supposedly, ah, that as the elements which don't cause the mind, but which support the mind, ah, start to break down, you start to hallucinate. And, and you start to go through these horrible hallucinations, and that's just the beginning of your next, of your next life. You go through these horrible, it's like being injected with all these drugs, and they affect your mind, and you can't think straight anymore, and you start to have horrible hallucinations, and then you start to perceive reality itself, in a, according to what you did in your past.

How does that work? So we'll, we'll talk about that. I mean, I still don't want anyone to take refuge, okay?

In other words, you don't take refuge until you are worried about this possibility, and that's why you take refuge. If you don't understand this possibility, or you don't perceive it, then I don't see how you can take refuge. So we'll talk about how these monsters are going to exist in the, in the next life.

You know, how could they exist? And for that, you need to understand how karma is collected in the mind. So we're going to go through that, okay?

We're going to take this from, it's from the Perfection of Wisdom Sutras. It's by a commentary by Kedrup Dhammadagye, who wrote the textbooks for my monastery, Sarame, in the 1600s, 1500s. These textbooks are slightly better than Sarajay's.

No. His teacher was from Sarajay. So whenever we say that at the monastery, they say, they remind us who his teacher was.

And we say, well, he improved on his teacher. So we start with that. And this is very interesting.

This is the process of how karma is collected. It's very, very interesting. It has to do with emptiness also.

[Speaker 2]
Now I'll do it. I'll do it.

[Speaker 1]
All right, this board is dirty. Let's do it this way. This is called bachat.

Say bachat. Bachat. Say it loud.

Bachat. Bachat. I like that word.

It sticks in people's minds. Bachat is a seed. Mental seed.

Bachat means a mental seed. So this is how the whole process starts. This is how samsara starts.

This is how suffering starts. This is how this world came into being. It started with bachat.

Bachat is a mental seed. In this case the seed is for ignorance. What is ignorance, we'll get into it.

Okay, but this is the seed for ignorance. Bachat. Okay, bachat.

When you're born you have bachats in your mind. They came from your past life. They came from the ignorance you had in your past life.

They're called bachat. So that's how the trouble starts. Say denzin.

Denzin. Okay. Denzin means the, it means grasping to truth or grasping to real existence.

It's a kind of tendency that we all have to believe that things have some inherent existence. That they have any nature of their own. So, think about what I said.

I mean, the word inherent existence is thrown around. You know, we all got used to the word and sometimes I think we don't think about what it means. I'll say it differently.

I'll say you don't have any nature or any quality of your own. Nothing about you is your own. You don't have any quality of your own.

Okay? Is that all right? Okay.

I mean, you're not pretty or handsome or ugly or lazy or tall or short or happy or sad or old or young or anything. Not anything. We'll get into it, okay?

You don't have any quality of your own. Okay? I just, it's a radical statement.

It should just say, come on, don't be silly. Of course, I have some qualities, you know. I got this bald spot on my head.

I got all this stuff. This is mine. This belongs to me.

This is my nature. Okay? These are all my nature.

Denzin believes that, that these belong to you, that you have some nature of your own, that you have any quality of your own, any characteristic of your own, that it belongs to you, that you have a characteristic of your own. Denzin believes that. And that starts to assert itself immediately.

According to Buddhism, in all living creatures, bugs, worms, amoebas, Einsteins, they all have Denzin. From the moment they start thinking in this life, every perception they have is colored by Denzin. It's like everybody puts on rose-colored glasses when they're born, and you have it from the first moment of your life, and you never lose it unless you are some kind of incredible Buddhist practitioner until the that you die, you still have it.

That's Denzin. It comes from the bak chak. You carry the seed, the mental seed from your past life, and then Denzin starts to assert itself immediately in this life.

You start to have Denzin. Say yi che chin chih lop pa yi che chin chih lop pa This means yi che chin chih lop pa Say chin chih lop pa Sounds like a new potential. Chin chih lop pa Chin chih lop pa Chin chih lop pa Yi che chin chih lop pa means you start to misperceive things, you start to make mental accidents, mental mistakes, you start to misperceive things, okay, you start to misperceive things.

This is all a process. Starts with the seed in your mind, then this tendency to think that things have their own nature starts, any nature of their own, and then yi che chen gyi lo pa starts. Yi che chen gyi lo pa means you start to misperceive things.

What does that mean? We'll take the case from last night of the diamond dealer who lied and got an extra hundred dollars, okay, so for him the hundred dollars is something good, it's something desirable, he's going to make a hundred dollars extra profit. He looks on that hundred dollars as having some kind of existence that it doesn't have.

He sees it as desirable, right, everybody likes an extra hundred dollars, mostly. He sees it as something desirable, but while he's looking on it, while he's perceiving it, he misperceives where it came from, right, where does he think it came from? He thinks it came from his talent of lying, and that's very common in that business, okay, and I guess in all business, you know, he really thinks, everyone says, boy, he's really clever, you know, he knows how to say things, he knows how to present things, he's very persuasive, he lies a little bit, and then the guy gives him the stone, it's underpriced, he made a hundred dollars.

So that's chen gyi lo pa. Yi che chen gyi lo pa means he truly believes that. He believes that he got the hundred dollars extra from lying, he believes that.

It's chen gyi lo pa. Chen gyi lo pa means back backwards, it's the best translation, okay, it doesn't mean just mistaken, there are other words for that, chu pa and do pa, things like that. Chen gyi lo pa means, chen gyi lo pa has all these meanings of complete, totally opposite, wrong, you know, complete reverse of what's real.

He sees the money as coming from the lie, but that's a total reverse on what's the real case. It's totally the opposite, and nothing to do with the lie. That's, the causes are totally different.

Because he has this grasping to this nature, he believes that, that the money has that kind of nature, that the profit has that kind of nature of coming from this lie. So that's called yi che chen gyi lo pa. If you have yi che chen gyi lo pa, what will happen?

It's called le sak pa. Say le. Sak pa.

Le sak pa. Le sak pa means you collect karma, okay. Le means karma, karma means, we talked about it last night, we'll get into it.

Sak pa means to collect. Collecting karma just means to do bad stuff and good stuff, okay. But ignorantly, based on those other things.

So based on the idea that the money comes from a lie, what will he do? He'll lie more, because it works, okay. Will it work?

Not every time. That's the lousy thing. It's not the cause.

That's why it doesn't work all the time. That's why sometimes you get caught lying, and it backfires, because it's not the cause. If it was the cause, you'd get money every time you lie.

It doesn't work. It obviously doesn't work. It's obviously not the cause.

It's just silly to keep lying, but we keep doing it, because we have yi che chen gyi lo pa, because we have denzin, because we have bak chak. Yeah. Yeah.

The very first one up there, bak chak, doesn't have much of a zik she. There's no word, the syllables don't mean much. It means a formation, a mental formation.

So bak chak means a seed that grows in the mind. Denzin means grasping, and den means to something truly existing as your own quality. So den means true.

Yi che chen gyi lo pa. Yi che is a mental function, one of the classic mental functions. In different schools, there are 50 or 40-something mental functions.

It's the function which directs the mind to think about something in a certain way. Chen gyi lo pa means totally backwards. So it means looking at things totally backwards, considering things in a backwards way.

Okay. And then le sak la. Le means karma, and sak la means to collect karma.

You change this verb around, it becomes sok, which means an assembly or a gathering of things. This is the same verbal root. Sak means to collect things.

So it means to collect karma. So le sak la means you start to collect karma. And then what happens?

Say korwa kor. Korwa. Korwa.

Korwa. Korwa. Korwa.

Korwa. Okay. Korwa means samsara.

Okay. Samsara is defined pretty much as the condition of having physical parts and mental parts which are going to deteriorate and die. Pretty much that's the definition of samsara.

Korwa means, so samsara is not a place per se. The place that we live in includes that, but you know, people say living in samsara, and it's a little bit of a misnomer. If you got away from samsara, you would actually be getting away from your own body and mind.

Okay. So korwa in samsara. Kor is the verb.

To circle around in the circle. Samsara in Tibetan is called the circle. The circle of life.

And kor means to keep circling. Okay. It means to circle in the circle.

To go around the round. And that's what happens. That's how it occurs.

That's how karma is collected. That's why ignorance is necessary for karma to be collected. If you didn't perceive the money the wrong way, you wouldn't do the karma.

If the moment you took the hundred dollars from the guy's hand, a hundred dollars was accidentally and permanently deducted from your bank account, you would stop doing it. But it just takes time. And that would be cool.

If life were like that, we'd all be very saintly, you know. If karma didn't take time to ripen, but you can't see it. So that's the process.

That's how ignorance causes it. When you misperceive anything. So anytime you have a pleasure, your tendency, because of yi je chenji lopa, is to try to hold on to it.

And what do you do to hold on to it? What do you do to keep a pleasure normally? I don't know.

Say, like I know people at work, you know, they have reached a high position. And they're trying to hold on to it. And they start to get shaky, you know.

They start to get old. Or they start to lose their influence. Or people, you know, times change.

Their ideas which were good when they became the Vice President are no longer so good. And then they start to get shaky and they start to lose their position. But what do they do to hang on to it?

I mean, typical things. You know, if you work in an office, you know, they'll start to protect themselves. They'll start to make sure nobody can get into their Toronto.

They'll do all sorts of things to... It's actually, they start hurting other people. They start doing bad things to keep other people away, so they can stay in their position.

That's an ignorance. That's not understanding how the position came to them in the first place. The minute you start to...

I mean, the tendency when you want to keep something nice, is eventually to hurt someone to keep it. You will do things that you wouldn't do before in order to keep it. And that's that's just ignorance.

And it's the same with things that you don't like. When when something keeps happening that you don't like, like for example, at work there's a person that you don't like. And they keep saying things to you that you don't like to hear.

Then the tendency is to try to avoid it. But how? It's to try to harm them.

I mean, you want... If it gets down to it, you will do something to them. I don't mean you're going to stab them in the heart, right?

But, but you would do, do things to make sure that other people in the office don't like them, or to make sure the boss thinks they're not too great, or you would start to do things like that, because you want to get away from them. You don't like them anymore. And that's how, that's...

Nitya Chintulopa misunderstands pleasure and pain. It basically misunderstands pleasure and pain. The good things, it tries to hold on to.

But it doesn't understand where they come from. They come from being good. But it doesn't understand that.

And it wants to hold on to things by, by hurting other people. And then, same with things that you don't like, in order to get away from them, you will do, if it gets down to it, if it really gets down to something personal. I used to be proud of Americans, because they didn't fight in the, in the gas stations like the Indians do.

You know, like in India, you get to, if there's any gas in town, you know, if the gas truck comes into town, which everyone's been waiting for, for five weeks or something, the only gas truck comes into town, then there's a riot. You know, everybody's trying to get gas. And, and everyone's fighting with each other.

And I used to be proud of Americans, because they didn't do that. Then we had the oil crisis. And I remember, I was in a line in Hawaii, and there was this long line of cars, and people were actually pulling out guns and things.

And I said, you know, when it comes down to it, when you really need it, we're all the same, you know. And when it comes down to really needing something bad, you would act just like all the Indians, you know. You would crawl over the scrambler to get on the last bus out of Dharamsala.

People do. It's the only way to get on the bus. And when it comes down to it, you do the same thing.

When it comes down to it, you, you will do the same things to hurt people that everyone else will do. When it really gets personal, you will react the same. And it's, it's a wrong concept.

So, we'll take a little break. I'd like to take a break. What time is it?

Okay, we go until what time? Do you still have those goodies that we bought?

[Speaker 2]
Okay.

[Speaker 1]
So, we'll take a little, I'd like to take a little break. And, uh... This is, this is two lines last night.

But we didn't get much into it. This is from the fourth chapter of the Abhidharmakosha. Abhidharmakosha was written 350 A.D. by Vasubandhu. And, uh... It's, uh... It's like a big encyclopedia of Buddhism.

And this is from the fourth chapter. This is the opening line from the fourth chapter. So, say, just repeat it.

It's like a blessing. It's like a blessing. One more time.

It's like a blessing.

[Speaker 2]
It's, uh... It's a king.

[Speaker 1]
So, this is the presentation of the world. It's a beautiful chapter. I mean, people should study it when the time comes.

It starts out with all the shape of the universe. You know, how did the universe start? Later, it gets on to how was measurements of space and time, where did they come from?

What are they? It goes down to subatomic particles. And then it makes explanations up to light years.

It goes... It gives different names for numbers up to 10 to the 60th power. It's 10 to 60 zeros on it.

It has different names for each number. And then it explains how the world was created and how it will be destroyed. The third chapter.

The third chapter leads into the third chapter. The third chapter gives all that. And then at the end, it explains how our sun will supernova, how it will melt the earth, how the earth will be destroyed.

You know, the whole thing. Very interesting. Then it starts the fourth chapter.

And the fourth chapter teaches about karma. And it's the best presentation of karma in the ancient scriptures. That's it.

All the Lamrim presentations of karma are mostly based on that. So what you're really getting is where the Lamrim came from. In Tsongkhapa's time, people were called kachupas.

Kachupa means people who have mastered the ten ancient scriptures of India. And later on, they shortened it to five. And that's what I guess the program is based on.

But Tsongkhapa was a master of thousands of scriptures, and he corrected from all the scriptures the most important points and designed the Lamrim. He based the Lamrim on a very, very rare book called the Tenrim, which was written 300 years before him. And that was recently rediscovered.

And we now have it. It's a thousand pages long. It's the same size as the Lamrim Shambhala.

Very interesting. Excuse me? Geshe Khyongpa.

And he was a Kadampa who lived around 1100. And the Kadampas didn't read much of anything. They were meditating as much.

And they left the Mojang texts, which are usually one or two pages long. And it's a great discovery. His Holiness found one copy in Siberia, and we found a copy in southern India.

So, now it will be put out. But he based the Lamrim on that. And that's another story.

So, le-le means from karma. The first le means karma. The second le means from.

Different words. Jigten Naksot means all the planets of the universe. It describes planet systems.

There's a tongchipa, which is a thousand planets. There's a tongpama, which is a thousand planet systems. And there's a tongchimba, which is a thousand systems of a thousand systems of a thousand planets each.

So, it goes into the structure of the galaxies and different universes hanging around. And all of these worlds, everything in those worlds, all the beings in those worlds, down to the slightest thought you ever have, come from karma. They all come from karma.

What is karma? Then he says, well, what is karma? By the way, he mentions all those planets because he's just finished this long chapter about the world, and measurement and all those things.

Then he says, what is karma? Dhenisambha dandrache. Dhenisambha.

Sambha is that movement of the mind. It's the shifting of the mind. Anytime the mind shifts, amila, it goes from here to here.

Anytime you have the slightest activity in your mind, the slightest thought, any slight movement of the thought, it's called sambha. Don't confuse it with sam, sam means mind. Sampha is a mental function.

Dandrache, and whatever that, whatever those shiftings of your mind, what's the word in English? What's that word? Something that you do something.

What it urges you to do, yeah. That's pretty good. Sambha and what that urges you to do?

It's a movement of the mind. Movement of the mind. So dandrache means anything that, that slight movement of your mind makes you do what?

Verbally or physically. So, you have a slight movement of the mind, meaning the slightest thought occurs. That is karma.

Dandrache means karma. Do means sambha means lay is karma. Karma is, whenever your mind shifts, that is karma.

The essence of karma is when your mind moves. Anytime your mind moves, that's real karma. That's the most, that's the essence of karma.

That's the material of karma, is when you sink.

[Speaker 2]
So that's like the office.

[Speaker 1]
Right.

[Speaker 2]
The invention of dandrache.

[Speaker 1]
We're getting there. Okay. Dandrache means, and what it inspires you to do.

What it motivates you to do. What it causes you to do. You know, when you have a thought.

That's the driver. Your intentions are the driver. And then you, you move your lips, or you move your arms, or you move your legs.

So the driver's up there, you know, turning the gears. That's sambha. That's, that's a movement of the thought.

And then it inspires you to open your mouth and say something, or to move your fingers and grab something that you're not supposed to take, or, you know, it's moving the machine. Sambha. But the essence of karma, the karma that always precedes the other two karmas, mental and, is mental.

Physical and verbal are results of the mental karma. So the real essence of mental karma, of karma, is mind, is the mental part. And that's why motivation is so important.

It's even possible to have a good motivation and commit a very bad deed. And the deed, from the side of motivation, can have beneficial results. For example, mercy killing.

Like a euthanasia. According, it's mentioned in the Abhidharmakosha. There's an example given of someone who, out of good intents, seeing their mother or father suffer, assists them in dying.

And it's a great sin. It's a very, very bad deed. And it's a mistake.

It's a mistaken idea that you're helping them. Why? From what I've said in the last day and a half, it's a mistaken idea.

Why?

[Speaker 2]
What? It's not that.

[Speaker 1]
Are you helping them? I mean, my father was dying of lung cancer. We had a family meeting.

He was in great pain. And they said, let's get the doctor to come down to the smithy and have some tea. Why?

Why do 99.9% of people go the minute after? Much more intense suffering. Infinitely more intense suffering.

You know, the moment after. It's throwing him out of the frying pan into the fire.

[Speaker 2]
You know.

[Speaker 1]
You're not helping anybody. I mean, that's one good argument against euthanasia. If the scriptures say on the day, that, you know, 9 out of 10 people will go down after they die.

[Speaker 2]
You can't perceive it.

[Speaker 1]
You can't. We're trying to prove it today and yesterday. We're trying to indicate that.

I'm not saying proof. Okay. I'm not saying that I can prove it to you.

But what I'm saying is that you will leave it. There's two kinds of, there's two kinds of, there's three kinds of doubt. There's three kinds of doubt.

It's called, there's three kinds of doubt in Buddhism. Dönmüngögyatatsam and Dönmüngögyatatsam are two of them. Dönmüngögyatatsam means where you, you're undecided.

I should say two kinds of indecision. Undecided about something, but you're swaying towards the truth. And then there's the kind of, where you're undecided about something and you're swaying towards the wrong thing.

So, I'm just trying to sway you from, you know, I can't make you have, tak chepa, which means, I can't make you, you're not going to walk out of here and say, yeah, there's hell. My mind's definitely going on and the odds are very great that I'm going to go to hell. Go to hell by the way is, to have an experience of hell.

That's a different thing. I don't believe that's going to happen from this class, but I'm trying to sway you from Dönmüngögyatatsam to Dönmüngögyatatsam. To get into the suspicion in your mind that maybe this is possible.

And maybe it's logically possible. Not just out of some persuasive person comes here, a great person, the Dalai Lama comes here and persuasively says there might be a hell. But just logically, as an American person, you know, the mind does go on.

It has to go on. No evidence that it doesn't go on. Lots of evidence that it might go on.

And then you're going to study the principles of karma. And then we're up to that point. So Dönmüngögyatatsam, but then they say, how is karma planted?

How does karma occur? It's very much connected. We were talking about euthanasia.

Another example is, in the ancient scriptures, there's non-Buddhist saints who, like James and people like that, who, there was a practice. They believed that you could reach nirvana if you meditated your whole life. And then you got to a point and you put this trident out.

You stuck it into the ground very firmly. And it had three points like that. And you were supposed to jump off this little platform.

And if one of the points went to your forehead and the other two went to here, just right, with the right motivation, at that moment of suicide, that you would reach nirvana. And so, it's murder. It's a kind of murder.

It's the first bad deed of the ten. But from the point of view of motivation, it was considered a virtue. I mean, the Buddhist books say, from the point of view of their motivation, it was a virtue.

From the point of view of the commission of the deed, which is one of the four elements in a karma, it was a great bad deed. And they got a bad result. From the deed point of view, they got a bad result.

From the motivation point of view, they didn't get nirvana, but they did have, they will have a pleasant result from that.

[Speaker 2]
How does that have two things besides getting motivation and getting the skill from it? You can have good motivation if you don't have the skill from it.

[Speaker 1]
Similar, very similar. Very similar. The desired outcome.

Long story. Long story. Basically, the four elements have to be present when you commit a karma.

There's the undertaking of it. Jorwa. Jorwa, Ngushi, Taltuk, and Jala.

You have to have a... Samba, Jorwa, Ngushi, Taltuk. Samba means what motivation you go into the thing with.

Jorwa means how do you undertake the thing. Ngushi means how does the actual thing go on, the actual deed. And then Taltuk means how do you feel about it afterwards.

All four have to be there for what we call Leku Dharma, which is a path of karma. To have a perfect karma, all four have to be there. If you want to have a perfect bad karma, you have to have a lousy motivation.

You have to intend to kill the person. You have to actually undertake, kill the person. And then afterwards, you have to say, oh man, I killed him.

I did it. You know, for a perfect karma, you have to have all four there. If any one of them is missing, or if any one of them is virtuous and the others are non-virtuous, you get a mixed result.

It's called karma dandana. It means there'll be, like if you, we had the case of this person who's killing himself. His motivation is good.

He wants to, he wants to get out of all suffering. And then everything else is lousy, you know. This part will create a good karma.

It is a good karma. He will have a good result from it. And the other three will have a really horrible result.

So, so, complete karma has to have all four. What? I'm getting there.

Sampa... It's good though, because if it's going along well, the doubts should come in your mind. The questions should come in your mind.

Sampa is the most important. Sampa is the motivation. The motivation is paramount.

The motivation is 90% of the deed. Why? Now, that's why we came to this subject.

How is karma planted? What is it that plants the karma in your mind stream? And it's very interesting.

It's the perception of yourself doing it. Okay? It's very interesting.

Watching yourself hurt someone is the main thing that plants the karma in your mind. The karma is, is, is transmitted into the future along your mind stream. But what puts it in your mind stream, what plants it in your mind stream is the perception of yourself doing it, which is very interesting.

You know, if your perception is mixed up with some kind of good motivation, the seed that's planted is going to have a strong, good element in it. But that's paramount. So it's very interesting.

As you see yourself committing karma, the karma is, is implanted into your mind stream. That's what...

[Speaker 2]
You are aware.

[Speaker 1]
That's why it's only one of the four elements. I mean, it's the main one. Like, if you step on a bug, and you never intended to, and you never knew it, and you killed him, and you never were aware of it, you don't have the first element.

You don't have a... You have a perception of yourself stepping. You don't have a perception of yourself stepping on a bug.

So it's almost... It greatly reduces the power of the karma. It's not a...

It's not a totally powerful karma. For pure karma, you have to have all those intention... There's also an element of recognition.

You have to recognize the object. If you go to kill one person, and there's this lump under the covers in the room, and you stab it, and you run away, and really you just put pillows under the blanket, there's no recognition. There's no factor of correct identification of the object, which means, you thought you were killing Joe.

All you did was stab a bunch of pillows. It's not a complete karma. You do get the motivation.

You do get the thought that you've committed it, and you're happy about it.

[Speaker 2]
So if you don't have the awareness of hurting someone, does that mean since you don't have the motivation you're hurting your alcohol?

[Speaker 1]
No. But it's much less. It's much less.

The karmic power is much, much less. The sampa, the motivation has to be there for it to be a totally strong karma. And the ones that are planted most firmly and have the strongest results are the ones that occur through recognition of what you're doing, and with motivation and intention of what you're doing.

So that's why it's so... It's actually... For a monk, there's a kind of bad deed called chisah, when you don't...

You commit a bad deed knowingly, and you think, what the hell? This is a stupid rule. You know?

I like all the monks' vows, but this one is stupid. You know? And that's a special kind of bad deed where you just flaunt it.

You know it's wrong, and you don't think it's such a great vow, so you just break it. That's a special bad deed. More powerful.

Much more powerful. So it's the perception of yourself doing a bad deed which helps plant it in your mind stream. And that starts it into your mind stream.

It replicates in your mind stream. That's an important thing. It's called replication in the study of karma.

Replication means that that seed stays in your mind. It can stay in your mind for millions of years. There's a big deal in Buddhist philosophy to try to explain how a seed could stay in your mind for a million years.

It's called replication. So if your mind is, according to Buddhism, it's a stream of instants, it's actually ke chit ke ke chit gen jin che ke chu which means it's being destroyed instant by instant. Your mind is growing.

There's mental events that are each ending in a microsecond are just tied in a string like that. So the big question in Buddhism was where does the karma stay? If the mind is being destroyed millisecond by millisecond, if it's just a long string of mental events that begin and end discreetly, how can the karma stay?

It's replicated in the mind. It's carried on through each, as each instant ends, it replicates into the beginning of the next instant. So the seed keeps going like that also.

The seed carries on, the seed of the karma. And then it comes out as a perception. It comes out as another perception.

If the perception that was planted was bad, of harming someone, then the perception that comes out is of being harmed. And it's much greater. And that's how karma is transmitted.

So what do we have so far? By the way, what I'll do in 335 today, I'll cover what we call waterfall. There's a study in, when you reach about your 14th year studies in the monastery, it's called Waterfall.

It comes from Chandrakirti, who's not the same as Dhammakirti. And he wrote the root text that we study in the monastery. Actually the commentary, it's called Madhyamika.

It's called Entering Madhyamika, Entering the Middle Way. And that's the highest school of Buddhism. They have a subject in there called Waterfall.

And it's a very, very beautiful subject. It describes how the karma comes out. It describes how the karma actually ripens.

And if you understand that, I mean, why am I spending like a day and a half on karma when we're supposed to be talking about refuge? Refuge requires two things. What were they?

Do you remember? But there's one thing I said last night. What's the most basic kind of refuge?

What's the first refuge you ever took in your life? You went to mom, OK? Your brother punched you and you ran to mom, you know?

I mean, it has to be two things. It's very, very basic. It's so simple that you almost miss it.

There has to be a problem. There has to be something you're afraid of. There has to be some kind of pain or suffering.

And then there has to be someone that you believe can help. Those are the two essential elements. There has to be something dangerous or something hurting.

And then there has to be someone who can grab you in the arms and say, Oh, it's OK. Let me kiss you. You know, you need those two things.

You got to have someone who you believe can help. And you got to have some problem. Those are the two elements of going for refuge.

Otherwise, you don't have refuge. Why spend all this time on karma? I don't have to convince you that this life is a big problem.

You know, we didn't take more than half an hour on that. Why? It doesn't take a genius to see that we're doing wrong and that you lose every nice thing you ever get.

Every nice thing you ever get screws up. Even the dharma things. You know, even the good teachers you have, the true relationships you have in the dharma.

Somebody dies. Somebody gets old. You get separated.

You know, the place starts. It'll happen. It always happens.

Even the sweet things all go bad. And that's the nature of samsara. That's our nature.

It doesn't take a big deal to see that. Being afraid of that and going for refuge or practicing Buddhism to solve the problems of this life doesn't qualify as a refuge. It's not in any of the three kinds of refuge.

You know, check the suit I gave you last night. It doesn't fit any of the five kinds of refuge. There's no kind of refuge there that says for problems of this life you should take refuge in the three.

It's a madness. It doesn't fit. There's no description like that in there.

If you do take refuge properly, which you'll get to tomorrow, this life will also straighten out as a side effect. You know, but it's not supposed to be the motivation. As a matter of fact, this life will become quite as nice as it can be.

And actually, some great things can happen. This life can straighten out, but it's not the motivation. The minimum motivation has to be some concern about what's going to happen after you die.

That's the lowest kind of refuge. So we've been talking about karma for that. And the point is, and we'll stop with that, is that your mind must go on.

We proved it. Your mind must go on.