Серия ежедневной практики, курс 03 — Размышление о практике даяния и принятия (1997, Коннектикут), занятие 5

[Speaker 3]
Session five.

[Speaker 2]
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

[Speaker 1]
Okay, I'm going to give a short spiel. Lots of people have come up to me during the course of this class and said, is there anything you need help with? And a lot of people are from out of town, and I might not be able to talk to you in the next week or so.

So I want to let you know what's going on as far as plans for the next year or something like that, and what things we do need help with, and maybe you could help. So I'm just going to go through that quickly. Then what I'd like to suggest is that afterwards, if you hear something that appeals to you, write your name down on a piece of paper.

Write down, I'd like to help with X thing. I can spend this much time. This is my phone number.

This is my email. And that's what this bowl here is for. So just throw it in there during the next tonight or tomorrow morning.

So I'm going to describe some of the things that are going on. I also want to describe briefly the plans for the rest of the year and so on, because I know some of you won't be in the classes in New York and things like that. And these are in no particular order.

We just listed them in the computer. We have an input project called ACIP. We're inputting thousands of texts.

The goal is to input 200,000 Tibetan texts in the computer and save them forever. Nobody else seems to be interested. Nobody is really doing it.

Even the Tibetan Library in Dharamsala is not actively trying to save these books or anybody. As I go into three-year retreat, I don't want to dump the project. I'd like to have people continue to help with it.

This is mainly managing centers in Mongolia, Russia, and India. We employ a couple hundred Tibetan refugees in India. We employ a lot of women's centers.

So if you'd like to work on that, like to help raise funds for that, we make CD-ROMs with Tibetan texts on them. We give them away for free. We post them on the web for free.

It takes a lot of money. I won't be here to raise the money. We need help with that.

We just got a nice grant to help raise money, but they'll need help with that. Those are computer nerd type of people, stuff like that. People with Tibetan skills to help a little bit with the textual work.

We'll be having a meeting on that next weekend, I believe, here at Godstow. We'll be doing theme weekends at Godstow. You're welcome to come if you want to help with a project.

You're welcome to come if you seriously want to listen and maybe help with a project. You're not welcome to come if you want to come and hang out while the other people are working and eat and make a mess and et cetera. So the hanger-outers who come will be assigned work.

So you're welcome to come and hang out. And I know some people like to hang out. It's your right to hang out.

But if you choose to come and hang out, you might have to cook for a couple hours a day or help with the painting here or scraping a wall, and I think that's an honor. And so I'm quite happy if you come. It'll be fun.

It'll be like a party. But your part of the party is going to be cooking a little bit also or cleaning a little bit or something like that. And then the people who are really working on the ACIP stuff will be meeting all day.

[Speaker 2]
Okay.

[Speaker 1]
We just started a lot of work in Mongolia. I went to Mongolia. I gave five days of lectures on their national treasure, the Diamond Cutter Sutra.

They have not heard the Dharma for 70 years. There are no surviving Geshes from Mongolia. And they went wild.

I mean, 10,000 people a night watching, 20,000 on TV, 1,000 people every night crushing the doors, standing up for three hours listening. And it was amazing. And they need a lot of help.

This is like a chance to revive a whole country's Buddhism. And they are the last Tibetan Buddhists in the world who have a free country. And they are dying to know Buddhism.

And they begged me to send American Buddhists who could teach them because they are obsessed by the idea of learning English because they think that's the only way they can get into the modern world. And what's happening in the meantime is that very, very heavily funded Christian groups are sending thousands of missionaries. And they are doing 24 hours a day TV.

We can't afford a half hour show each week. They are doing 24 hours a day satellite broadcasting. And so they begged me.

I get letters every week, it's unbelievable, begging us to send people, begging us to send books, begging us to come back and teach. So we've set up a Dharma center there. There's hundreds of people who want to work at it.

And we'll need help with that project. That might involve living there for a while. It might involve going to teach there for a couple of weeks.

It might involve helping to raise funds for more TV shows, things like that. We'd like to do a weekly TV show there called Dharma English and teach them, like have 15 minutes of Buddhist talk and then about 10 minutes of the English that was used in the Buddhist talk. And then maybe five minutes of, this is how a typical American student is studying Buddhism.

And then we'll interview different people for that. Ian's going to be in charge of that show. And Richard Gere's helped us a little bit.

And a lot of different people have helped us. So I think we can get some funding. And if you'd like to help with that, then put the thing in here that you're interested in Mongolia.

It's a chance for a few dedicated American Buddhists to revive a whole country's Buddhism. And it's a very crucial time at this moment. They have a 1,500 mile border with China.

They have no army. They could be gone in a week or a month or a year. They're dying to know Buddhism and they want it.

So I think it's important to... There used to be a million and a half Russian troops on that border protecting them. They left.

So it's very important to get a presence there and to be helping them. They're dying to learn Buddhism and they get it like that. It's in their blood.

You teach them karma and emptiness and they're like a thousand people shouting back the right answer. Like every minute. It was extraordinary.

So a very exciting place to be. I think Thomas also was talking about it. Some people like that.

Especially as I go into this retreat. It might be a place you could really help out. Godstall.

This place here needs a lot of help. John Stilwell has agreed to put a lot of work into it. Nancy's putting a lot of work as program director.

Amber's been putting her heart into it. We still don't own this place. We're still on probation.

The probation ends within the next 12 months. If we impress them, we have a chance of getting awarded the place. If we don't, they'll just take it back.

And also, just because I think it's a cool place to help out. So we need painting, carpentry, all kinds of work. The previous owners.

Yeah. They want to see programs. They want to see people using the place.

They want to see successful people doing lay rooms, retreats. These people know about Buddhism. They'd studied with Professor Thurman, some of them.

They want to see the place well used. They want to see it well kept up, clean. They want to see things happening, people working on it.

And they're not impressed by our last few years. The outside is still not very beautiful. They came to me and said, We wrote a three-year probation into the contract.

Two years are up. They said, You'd better bust ass in the last year. You know?

And that's not the only reason to do it. We see this as being a very strong center for the people who have had six or seven years of philosophical training in New York to come here and catch up on the meditational part and the practice part. Because you need a balance of both of those things.

This could be the place where New York Buddhists can come and do retreats, their lay room retreats. Ken Rinpoche has sent some people here to do their lay room up there. We could attract lamas like Geshe Lothar, like that.

We could do all sorts of things here. But we have to do the work. This could be the epicenter for a lot of the practice and meditational part that we haven't done in New York.

And New York will continue to be the educational part. But John's committed to do a lot of work here. They've dumped thousands of cubic yards of garbage out here already.

Whatever. They worked really hard on it, he and Amber and a couple of other people. And we can make this place, it's free, it's a $3 million property for free if we work hard on it.

And I think it's an opportunity that people in this room, for example, you can serve Buddhists in New York for the next few hundred years. You see what I mean? Try to find a hundred acre property within an hour and a half of New York City.

They don't exist. That could be used as a Tibetan meditation center. It's a very, very precious opportunity.

So if you could put some work into that, you're welcome. Yeah?

[Speaker 2]
Is there something specifically that you're doing?

[Speaker 1]
It's not any one thing, but it's a combination of activities, interest, people coming, people taking care of the place, people respecting the place. We'd like to paint the outside, we'd like to paint the inside. There will be a major tantric retreat here over New Year's.

There will be a lay room retreat, a group lay room retreat. So starting December 15th or so, going to about January 15th. We'd like to do it over the millennium.

Those of you who don't go to India, there will be a major retreat going on here. John Stilwell will lead it. And you'll be doing your Vajrayogini mantra retreat, because that's something we've got lined up here.

There'll be a Mahamudra retreat here in October. There'll be theme weekends almost every weekend here. If you're interested in one of these things, we'll be asking you to come to Connecticut third week of July or something to work on such and such.

You mean here? Anybody has some excess money? I don't like to do this.

Anyway, we have to make some improvements here quickly. The water system needs a purifier. The outside has to be painted.

Whether we get the property or not, we'd like to leave it in nice condition as an offering to the people who let us use it for these years, to honor them. We'd like to either paint the whole place or put in a new water purification system or something like that. But if you're interested in really putting your heart into this place, I think it's a beautiful thing.

I think you'd be serving hundreds of future Buddhists in New York. I accepted the challenge of this property, not because I thought we could use it in this lifetime, but because in my mind, if there's a core of dedicated people, this place could have a major retreat center on it in 50 years or 30 years or something. Right now it's just a pain in the butt to take care of this much property with so few people.

But it's really a gift for future generations. It'd be dumb to pass it up. So think about it.

If you'd like to work on this place, it's a lot of fun. It's a beautiful place to work on. All right.

Okay, next subject. Classes in New York, just for your information, they will continue while I'm on through your retreat. There'll be one more major course starting in November?

Mid-October. That's class number 18. That's the last of the formal study course, non-secret classes.

And then we'll start... People in New York know. I'm requesting that...

My idea is that when I get out of the three-year retreat, I'll start teaching tantra to those people who are qualified. Qualified means you've finished 18 courses. And that's your work's cut out for you.

You have three years to finish the 18 courses. So in New York City, probably in different homes throughout the five boroughs, there will be small groups meeting together once or twice a week under the guidance of a student teacher who will go through the courses together. And I call those seminar courses.

So there will continue a full load, maybe even more than a full load of courses, but it'll be more like five to ten people meeting in a home to cover the courses they didn't do yet. And we have this guy in D.C. named Dr. Taylor. He's figuring out...

He's got this big database of who took what course, and he's actually going to design what would be the best way to get the most people through the 18 courses in the course of those three years. So that's what will be happening. John will be in charge of that process.

John will be also in charge of Godstow. And he'll be helping to make sure that a flyer goes out like three times a year and says, okay, this is where the courses are going to be held in these homes, and this is who will be directing each course, and that's the way those courses will go. So the courses will continue.

I'll continue to teach three-week teachings twice a year from Arizona during the three-year retreat. So I'll come out, teach a class, go back into my little house for three weeks twice a year. Those dates are already set, and you're welcome to come.

And we'll talk more about that. Of course, Seichu, Sojong, those things will continue. Seichu will continue at Leon's house.

Sojong will continue out in New Jersey. We still need help with the classes in New York, the two remaining classes. We have people who are in charge of setting up, breaking down, doing things like that.

We could use a lot of help with that. Yeah. There are paths to the forest here.

They were put in by the previous owners who were trying to get tax exemption by saying that the paths were a public park, and they forgot to take down the no trespassing signs, and the tax man said no. I don't know. Talk to John.

He's in charge of it. But yeah, that'd be nice. Extension courses.

We still have extensive courses going on in Vajrapani Institute and LMB at the end of August and early September. We have a major trip to India. We were invited to give teachings to each of the FPMT centers in Southern Asia.

So that'll be Kathmandu, Bodhgaya, and Goa. And then after that, teachings with Geshe Tutun Rinchen, who's one of the greatest teachers of philosophy in the world. I'd say second best.

Guess who's first?

[Speaker 2]
No.

[Speaker 1]
But an extraordinary teacher. He gave us three weeks of teaching, five hours a day. Last winter was it?

And the people who went were blown away. So he said, would you continue? It'll be the second half of Je Tsongkapa's presentation, Mind Only and Madhyamika.

So he's getting to Middle Way School. And he's agreed to do it. That'll be in January.

So you can either come to part of it or come to the whole thing. It'll take about a month and a half. We'll be gone?

Maybe 40 days or something we'll be gone. That includes this person in Bodhgaya. What's his name?

The Dalai Lama. We'll be giving teachings in Bodhgaya to us and 10,000 other people on a very beautiful text by Master Shantideva. He's famous for the Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life.

And most people don't know he wrote an equally beautiful piece called The Companion of All Bodhisattva Trainings or something. And it's not often taught. And His Holiness is halfway through.

He's going to finish it this year. So we'll be catching that also. So you're welcome to come to that.

We need help organizing that. We need help getting visas. Friend Diane's doing a lot of the work.

But we'd like people to help. We need people to help with all the logistics. 55 people have already signed up to go to Sara.

We expect 150 or something. We need help with all the logistics. We need major help with travel arrangements and things like that.

Taking care of these people who will be traveling through India during the millennium breakdown of all computers. We'll be doing a major extension course, Mongolia-Ireland. They begged us to come back.

We just got funding for it by two sponsors about a week ago. So we'll be going back to Mongolia for a week of TV and public teachings on their second most important book, which is the Golden Light Sutra. And then we'll be going back to Ireland for some teachings there in Galway, which is a beautiful place.

Probably we'll be setting up a center in Galway. It seems like we've been offered a place there, a very nice sort of like ancient chapel on a very beautiful property with a circle of yew trees that the Druids used to use. It seems like a special place.

And it looks like they want to build a center there dedicated to our courses. Same in Mongolia, same in Australia. So if you're interested in helping with that, that's another thing in helping.

Anyone's welcome to come on that trip. You have to pay for your airfare. You have to arrange your housing if we can't, but we can give you a lease and stuff like that.

And mostly you can usually find someone's floor to sleep on. So mainly it's just getting there. That trip's in September.

And you're welcome to come to either part. You can go to Mongolia or Ireland or both. Three Jewels Bookstore, we'd like to keep it open during the three years.

Ani Palma won't be here. We have one student who runs bookstores who may take it over. I think it's very important to continue the social outreach aspects of Three Jewels.

We'll be having a weekend at God's Store dedicated to that. And if anyone's interested in that, be very pleased if you could help. I'd hate to see the place just stop.

We put a lot of money into fixing it up. It's a beautiful place. The store and the apartment are connected legally.

The apartment is really cheap because we're using the store. I wrote into the contract that I could take the apartment and give the store up. But it's a good deal.

It's a beautiful apartment. It's a nice location. There are three other stores that have just gone in that block.

I really would like to keep it as a place where ACI students could congregate, study together, where people with mental, alcohol, drug, any other kinds of problems could come and get help, where people could come in a quiet place and have free tea or free coffee and read a book all day long. I'd really like to keep this haven going. So if you're interested in that, put that on your slip of paper.

If we don't get something going on all of these, they'll just die while I'm in retreat. You see what I mean? We decided to put a major push on getting the English materials cleaned up and out to the general public.

Doubleday Corporation has suggested, and I've written one and a half books that they wanted. They wanted two books on Buddhism. So we're moving into the English stage.

We went to the ACIP, Protected the Tibetan Scriptures. These 18 courses are translations from the Tibetan. And now we'd like to move into the English.

Three people in New York City can read the ACIP CD-ROM. It cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars to do the work. The readings by themselves are difficult without a teacher in the course materials.

We'd like to move on and get the transcripts all finished and put into nice booklets. All the lectures like this one put into a booklet. People like Matthew and Dennison and Ellis worked on a book.

I guess there's about five books that are ready to go out that are nice English. There's no Tibetan in them. We'd like to start putting that on the web.

We'd like to get all the homeworks, all the courses up on the web. You could take your own homeworks off. You could send them in to be graded by the web.

Somebody in Australia has sponsored a multimedia presentation of some of these classes and they finished a very beautiful module of the Diamond Cutter Sutra teachings last year. You see video of the whole class up in the corner. The whole transcription is there.

The Tibetan comes off the board and parks at the side and you can see it and the pronunciation. You can click on any subject you like and it jumps to the transcript and then the video comes up and you hear an explanation of that. This is going to be put on the web for free.

We'd like to do more of that. So in two weeks from now at Godspell there will be a meeting of people interested in that. Those skills are typing out transcripts, editing transcripts, making them into books, web design, video, audio, things like that, skills like that.

And administration of the whole thing. We have around the world maybe a thousand people. No.

There's many hundreds of people who have asked during our trips around the world to help with this project. Like by typing out the transcripts. We don't have the people or the time to send them the tapes.

We need help with dumb stuff like that. It's very frustrating. Hundreds of people in Australia have signed up to help and we don't have time to send them a tape because it's just three people or something.

So if you want to help with that, throw it in there. Arizona will be having a separate meeting about it but I wanted you to know what's going on. By weird circumstances.

We went to ask for one acre. Now we're negotiating for 9,000 acres. They want to give us basically 9,000 acres.

5,000 is free. 4,000 costs something like 400 an acre or something which is like, nearby in Tucson it's 30,000 an acre, just to give you a comparison. So the idea is to build a Buddhist university there, to have classes like this, to teach Tibetan, to do traditional medicine, to do traditional dance, traditional art, architecture, tanka painting.

There would be colleges of this university like that. A meditation retreat center like that. And now it's grown into a big project.

We had a meeting last two weeks with these incredible people. A guy came from Ireland. He just built an $85 million project there.

He wants to work for us for free. A guy came from Australia. He just built 1,500 homes there, designed them and built them, and he wants to work for free for us.

And we got a lot of other talented people. Petra is interested in working there, who is running 120 centers for the FPMT and stuff like that, and just a really extraordinary group of people there. Winston is running that project, and Andrea, and that will be like some extraordinary thing.

We anticipate retreat facilities for several hundred people, a college for maybe 2,000 people, and maybe a small town for a couple thousand more people. When we were in Mongolia, we saw these things called yurts. I don't know if you know what a yurt is.

It's a circular house made of felt on wood, skeleton, and it's a beautiful place to stay, and it's perfect for Arizona. And they've agreed to change the export laws for us and allow us to buy some. And this means that any person in this room who wants to go out during the three years and have a comfortable place to stay and do their own meditation for one week to two years, I don't care, will have a place to stay for, I don't know, maybe you could do it for $500 each or something, instead of having to build a building.

And the owners have said that's fine. And you could be half a mile from the nearest person, because the property is that big. It's five miles square.

It's about the size of Manhattan or something, I don't know. But you can have your own place out in the middle or wherever you want. It's totally, totally quiet.

It's up against a national forest. And the idea is that you could just have your little place. You could go out and stay there, and you can meditate and do retreats.

I'm thinking people could go out and do courses together. Like if they want to go out and cover Course 10 together, 10 people go out and stay together in a couple of years and do that or something like that. So we need people to work on that.

Last thing is Enlightened Business Institute. We have this, what do you call it, conspiracy to enlighten all the business people in America. We figure these people are the wealthiest people, the most influential people.

Often they're the smartest people. And oftentimes they're not religious, not because they don't want to be religious, but because the religions that are available, they don't consider challenging or true or logical, and they want to be spiritual. So we've made an institute to handle business people especially and teach them the principles of Buddhism.

We started giving courses in Australia. We had a national radio interview. The next morning 200 businessmen had sold out, came to a breakfast on business and Buddhism, like how to use Bodhisattva principles during business and get richer while helping other people.

And they loved it. And then we were invited to the Edmund Barton Institute. This is a big deal business institute in Melbourne.

And that was 150 people. And then we went to Perth, Western Australia University. We gave a talk to the business faculty and the students about these ideas.

And they called me up the next morning and said, could you deliver the commencement address in four years when you get out of retreat? You know what I mean? I mean they really, really liked it.

So I think Buddhism is going to take off, if it's presented well, among the business people. And then they could really help Buddhism also. And then all the corporations would become much more compassionate.

That's the idea. And it's not at all impossible. So Doubleday has commissioned a book about it.

Forbes magazine came and did an article about it. And it's kind of exciting. So Ernie Spears will be in charge of that.

Winston will be helping him. And if you want to get involved with that, that's something. We'll have a conference center out in Arizona.

We'll have a center in New York City. And we'll be teaching Buddhist principles to business people without calling it Buddhism. Just a better way to make money.

So that's all the projects we have going. Did you have a question? Oh, yeah.

Business people are not stupid. They're intelligent. The reason they're not spiritual is that all the spiritual paths available to them are stupid.

And I didn't break any vows, did I? Anyway, they need something that really makes sense or they won't buy it. And when you give them a good presentation of Buddhist principles without calling it Buddhism...

I was halfway through the lecture in Melbourne. I said, can you people handle a different level? All the hands went up.

These are all crusty old business people in Melbourne. Oh, shucks. And so then we went into emptiness and karma.

And they got it. And man, they were so excited afterwards. So people, they'll get it.

You just have to present it in a compelling way. Anyway, there's all the projects we'd like to keep going during the three years. During the three years in Arizona, we'll be starting to build the first building of the university.

Winston will be in charge of that. He'll be moving to Tucson in maybe six months or eight months. And if you'd like to come out and help with that, you're more than welcome.

If you'd like to help with organizing the teachings during the three-year retreat, I anticipate a few hundred people at least. It's going to take a lot of work to help those people come out, give them a place to stay, take care of them. So if you want to help with anything like that.

There'll be a special food fund for a starving Michael Roach. We need somebody to help organize that. So I get my Cheerios every morning and stuff like that.

So those are the things we need help with. And those are the things that... I think they're all really cool.

If you think one of them is cool and you want to help with it, put your name in the bowl. I suggest now you take a short break, five, ten minutes. We'll come back and do a short meditation.

[Speaker 2]
One more question.

[Speaker 1]
John says... One of the reasons to go into a three-year retreat is to force the issue that this organization should not be a one-person thing. You see what I mean?

If this comes to depend on my presence physically, then it'll just collapse the day I'm gone. So I want to force the issue before I'm dead. Which is, you have to take responsibility.

This lineage and all the work, ten years of intense work to get all the knowledge down on paper, transmitted, all the classes, everything, it'll just all fizzle if you guys don't take responsibility for it. Buddhism has been passed down for two and a half thousand years in many countries. Somebody in each country took responsibility for the next generation.

And frankly, it's totally on your shoulders now. You know what I mean? If you don't pass it on, it's going to die.

In this country. I'm not aware of any authoritative courses like what we have here. And that's why there's a thousand people signed up in the correspondence course.

We don't have one person to help grade the classes. You know? That's just bad Buddhist manners.

If the Tibetans had done that, we wouldn't be Buddhists now. You see what I mean? It's actually your responsibility.

Once you've drunk the sweet nectar of the Dharma, and then you refuse it to the next generation because you don't feel like it, that's really dumb. So I think you have to take some sense of responsibility. Part of the reason I'm going away for three years is to put that trip on you.

Now it's your problem. All the courses are there. All the tapes are there.

The video's there. Everything's ready. Just take some effort.

You guys have to invest some effort, or else it'll just die. And if you think the Tibetan system is strong, it's not. There's three good scripture teachers left in Sarah Monastery.

There's no good Vinaya teacher left in Sarah Monastery. Sarah Mae. I mean, in the Tantric College, the great Tantric teachers are almost gone.

If we don't get our act together and learn it and pass it on, and you guys put some of your time into it, especially you guys, it'll just die. That's kind of embarrassing to be the one country where Buddhism died out. So think about it.

It's not just your A, it's fun, B, it's virtuous, C, it's your responsibility to help with something. Pick the thing that you are most attracted to and help. And everybody can do something.

Okay, take a break. Okay.

[Speaker 2]
This is the end of session five.