Серия ежедневной практики, курс 07 — Союз кармы и пустоты (1997, Центр Кадампа, Роли, Северная Каролина), занятие 1

[Speaker 1]
Okay, so we'll start. My name is Michael Roach. I studied in a Mongolian monastery in New Jersey for about 10 years and with a very great Lama named Geshe Losang Tharchin.

And then studied in India in a monastery for about 10 more years. And sometimes I feel silly when I come to give a talk because the people who are already here are sometimes, I think, more qualified to talk than I am. But I guess variety is good.

I heard a lot about your center, the Kadampa Center. And I've heard a lot about Don Brown. And I've never been here before but it's nice to be here.

And we were talking about the meaning of Kadampa. And Kadampa's were these, they were like the early Christians. They were the first practicing Buddhists in Tibet.

And they were, you know, Tibet didn't have Buddhism. And they were just people like you and I who, who started studying with these Lamas who showed up from India. And they were very fanatical.

It was, it was very interesting because they didn't know anything so they had to learn everything from scratch. There weren't many books in Tibetan. And people would go to India and come back with one part of the Buddhist teachings.

And then other ones would go and get something else. And if you try to draw the lineage tree, I tried it one time. You know, who taught who what?

It looks like a tumbleweed. Because, you know, everyone was teaching everybody else what they knew. So you had friends teaching each other.

One would go to India and learn Abhidharma and another one would go to India and learn a Middle Way. And then they would come and teach each other. They also asked people to teach, to come and teach who, you know, who, I mean, they really want the teaching to spread and they're not thinking, you know, oh, this guy's just an American.

And, you know, to ask me to come and teach is also a great, it's a good, it shows the goodness of their own hearts, you know. So you should appreciate it. And you should appreciate Lama Sarva and Lama Yoshi who started the whole thing.

So you're very lucky. And there's not many centers like this in this country. So it may seem like a small group of your friends, but it's a very great thing.

It's a very holy thing. And you're very lucky to have it. Kadampa is a beautiful word.

It means kadampa sharwa. When I teach, I like to force people to say some Tibetan. So say, say, ka dampar sharwa.

Ka dampar sharwa. I say, even if you never want to learn Tibetan, you should hear some Tibetan and say some Tibetan. And sooner or later you, all the people who said they would never learn it, end up learning it.

We have in New York about 50 people learning it who said, you know, most of them are cab drivers or things like that. And they swore they would never learn Tibetan. And now they're, some of them are teaching Tibetan.

That's nice. Ka dampar sharwa means, ka means the word of the Buddha. It also means the command of a king.

So the ka, ka is the, is the actual speech of an enlightened being. For example, the word kangyur. The ka there means the speech of the Buddha.

And gyur means translated from Sanskrit into Tibetan. So the name for our canon is the kangyur. Dampar sharwa means, dampar means personal advice.

Like if a Lama takes you into a room and, and gives you some advice, heart-to-heart advice, that's dampar. There's many kinds of instruction. Like a tree is when a Lama gets up and gives him an explanation of a text.

And a wang is where a Lama gets up and gives an initiation. But a dampar is something where he pulls you in a room and he says something to you, personal, heart-to-heart. Something that's meant just for you.

Sometimes it's called shel she, which means to know something from the Lama's mouth. So this is where the Lama is giving you a heart-to-heart instruction. And that's what dampar means.

Sharwa means, sharwa means it comes up in your mind that word, that way. It's the word that means the dawn of the Sun. It's the word that means for something to light up in your mind like a, an electric light bulb, right?

And for example, the word for East is shar, because that's where the Sun lights up first in the morning. So kadampa sharwa means that you reach a point in your personal practice, in your own practice, where even if you take a tiny scrap of a Buddhist text, let's say someone has ripped up a text and thrown it on the ground and, and you take up one of those scraps and there's like five words on it, that will immediately sharwa as dampa. That ka will sharwa as dampa in your mind.

It means that you'll immediately understand it as something that the Buddha meant for you to pick up and read those five words and suddenly understand them and know what it means. So kadampas had reached this level where no matter what teaching they heard or no matter what they were so sincere and they were meditating so well that no matter what little scrap of teaching they heard, it immediately seemed like the Buddha was talking to them personally. And, and that's what kadampa means.

So the kadampas were just really pure meditators and practitioners and, and they had reached a point where no matter what teaching they heard, it was exactly the right teaching for them at that moment. And that's a kadampa. So you try to be a kadampa.

I mean it takes a lot of goodness to be a kadampa, because you only get that reaction when you've been studying for a while and you've been sincere and you're meditating. So I think you're kadampas in that way. And then I think you're kadampas in, in the sense of being, you're, you are the pioneers of Buddhism in America.

We are the first generation. It's very exciting and it's also a big responsibility. You have to learn things very well and you have to be able to pass them on to, to other people.

The, the older lamas who came to this country have, many of them have passed away and now it's come down to our generation. We have to, you know, you're not only listening to a teaching for your own benefit, but you, by listening you then have a responsibility to, to store it and keep it and pass it on to the next generation. So as you listen, trying to keep that in mind.

So you're kadampas in, in all of those senses and should be, okay. I'm going to talk for about an hour. I don't think it's, personally I can't keep my attention for more than an hour usually, when I'm in a class, especially in the afternoon, on a warm day, after lunch.

So I like to stop after maybe an hour, an hour and a half and we'll, we'll take a break and, and have some, we have some coffee and tea and those drugs that keep people awake. So we'll do that. So I don't like to go on much longer than that.

And then we'll go, then we'll come back and do some more. What I wanted to talk about, you know, the talk was advertised as the marriage of karma and emptiness. And it's, it's meant to indicate that there's a close relationship between karma and emptiness.

And so I want to talk about that in general and then we'll, we'll get in. Today we're going to do, we're going to talk about karma. What is karma?

Hopefully by tomorrow we'll get into emptiness and by late tomorrow they'll get married or something. So I think when I was first starting to study, you know, like you, I heard about emptiness and I had all these weird ideas about it. I think, like, like anyone would.

And I, especially, and that's how this talk came up. Don said, can you think of anything that relates, like, emptiness to your, to your real life, you know? What's emptiness got to do with your real life?

And I used to, I used to wonder about that myself. I used to think, you know, okay, emptiness sounds neat, you know. It's, it's something that you, might happen to you in meditation and it's some kind of deep black hole somewhere.

And if you perceive it, something weird would happen during your meditation. And I used to sit and meditate and wait for it to come, you know. And, and then, you know, the question of how, how would it possibly change me or how would it, how would it affect my daily life, you know?

What, what good is emptiness to my daily life, you know? I, I used to be very confused about that and I used to constantly wonder, okay, so what's emptiness got to do with me, you know? So, so what happens if I see emptiness or, or so what if everything's empty, you know?

It doesn't seem to change anything. I, I don't see how it would help. If I was at the dentist's office and he was drilling my tooth and he hit a nerve, you know, and then suddenly I could think about emptiness, would it change anything, you know?

Would anything change? Or, or what's emptiness got to do with, if I go to work and, you know, I work during the day and I work in a normal office and people are always yelling at me or people are having fights or the company's in financial problems and, you know, all the normal things that happen and I, I just couldn't see how emptiness would have anything to do with my life, you know? I, I couldn't see, and then there were all these weird explanations of emptiness, you know?

Some people would say the worst ones, and now I'm going to a bad list, okay? So don't think this is the correct one. I think the worst one of all time, I, I read in a book by, there was a lady who described this, that, that she went to a hotel for a Buddhism conference and there was people there and, and on the last day they were all checking out and one lady's suitcase fell down on the floor and it broke open and all the hotel's towels, you know, came out of the suitcase.

And here's this Buddhist lady, you know, and she's sort of embarrassed and she says, well it's okay, everything's empty anyway, you know? And I think that's the worst all-time explanation. And you, as, as Americans get more sophisticated about Dharma, we don't fall for that anymore, but, but I think in the early days they would say, oh I can, because things are empty I can do what I want, or because things are empty, samsara, meaning the suffering of this life, and, and nirvana, meaning the freedom from, from much of that suffering, they're the same thing, you know?

They're empty so they're the same thing, you know? It's the same thing whether I just stay suffering or, or achieve nirvana, because they're both empty, you know? So, or, or because things are empty, you know, I don't have to be moral.

The teachings on morality, which are the first 16 volumes of the canon, 16,000 pages on how to live an ethical life, once you get to volume 17 about emptiness, you don't need those 16, you know? If you can get advanced enough understanding emptiness, you know, all that other stuff is just sort of passé, and if you really understood emptiness, you wouldn't need all that, all that monks vow stuff, and all that bodhisattva vow stuff, because you'd be beyond everything. If you understood emptiness, it wouldn't matter anymore.

So that was like, that was a pretty popular thing. I remember we've translated a book by Nagarjuna, and we submitted it to a publisher, and they said, could you tone down the morality and tune up the emptiness, you know? And they wanted us to take out the ethical living part, because it wasn't very interesting, you know?

And I think that's one typical wrong idea, and, and I just think that when you, that emptiness is something that you perceive in a deep, in a deep state of meditation, and then it's not very relevant to the rest of your life, and, and, and especially not relevant to any kind of ethical way of life. So I think those are, those are some serious misperceptions. I think a little more subtle is, if I saw emptiness today, you know, how would I change?

Would I, for example, would I still hurt, you know, would I still have suffering? You know, this somehow understanding emptiness, does that change your ability to deal with suffering, you know? Do you still feel the dentist drill, or, or not?

You know, what's the use of seeing emptiness? You know, if it doesn't change that, then why, why bother with it, you know? And, and if it does change that, then is it true that you can take any lama and start drilling on his teeth, and he, he won't jump, you know?

I mean, so what's emptiness got to do with, with stopping suffering? Or old age, for example, you know, say, GYE, GYE, louder, you guys, it's louder, GYE, GA, NA, SHI, GYE, GA, NA, SHI. GYE means being born, GA means getting old, NA means getting sick, and SHI means dying.

Those are the four great sufferings, you know. So what use is perceiving emptiness for those four things, you know? Does emptiness, does seeing emptiness just make me a better person, or make me a nicer person, or make me better able to put up with the, excuse me, crap of this life, okay?

I mean, is that, is that its purpose? Is it just supposed to make me more patient with the suffering, or more able to withstand a lousy life, or, or is it more profound, you know? Is it really supposed to get me out of aging?

Is it supposed to stop my aging, you know? Is it supposed to stop my dying, you know? And, and, and how come it's not working, you know?

These lamas die, and the Dalai Lama is getting bald, he jokes about it, you know, me too. And, and, you know, if it doesn't stop that, because that's what Buddhism is supposed to be about, you know, is Buddhism supposed to just make me a nice person until I die, or is it supposed to make me very, very patient with all the sufferings that come to me in life? You know, is that, is that the idea of Buddhism?

Am I just supposed to become some super patient person who can put up with any kind of suffering, and still be happy, you know? Or, or is it actually meant to remove those sufferings, you know, completely? And if it is, then how come all these big lamas are still suffering, you know?

I mean, it's a question, you know, that's a, what, what is the purpose of seeing emptiness? You know, what's the goal? Is it just supposed to make me a little happier while I suffer, or is it actually something very radically meant to remove that suffering entirely?

And, and if so, well, well how does it work, you know? So I think that's, that's what we want to talk about today, and those are the subjects we're going to talk about. My approach is, I grew up as a cenipa.

My lama, incredibly kind lama, taught me for 22 years so far. He's a cenipa. Cenipa means a, like a, a logician.

I mean, we do debating, and we study, we study through logic very heavily. Then there's a lamrimba, where you, you study more the lamrim teachings, and you, and you learn the, experientially, what to do. So we have to talk about emptiness from the point of view of figuring it out intellectually, and then we have to talk about it from the point of view of what actually happens to you, which are two different things.

You know, it's one thing to understand emptiness as a cenipa, as a logician, and it's another thing to undergo the experience of seeing emptiness directly. So, you know, I grew up in a different tradition in, than most Buddhists in America, in that I was trained by a lama who's a cenipa, and he, he has to have everything proved logically. So that's, you know, for some people it's boring, but that's the way, that's the way I can do it, you know, that's the way I can cover it with you.

So I'm going to be quoting a lot from the original books of Buddhism. We study, in the monastery, five great books. They, these are all the different great schools of ancient India, and they are the five great subjects of ancient Indian Buddhism.

Then, in all the monasteries in Tibet and in India, they studied those five books. And then Tsongkhapa came along in the 1400s, and he, he unified all those five books into a manual for practice, and, and that was the lamrim. The lamrim started before that, but it was Tsongkhapa and Pabongka Rinpoche who, who had this talent for taking the knowledge of those five books and then making it accessible to normal people in the lamrim.

So we're gonna go straight to the five books, and, and that's the way I like, I like to do it. So nothing I'm gonna say is my own idea. We're just going to do sections from the original texts, and that's the way I, I like to do it.

So you have to start out with a book called Abhidharma. Abhidharma was written, the Abhidharma Kosha was written in 350 AD, and you don't have to look at the reading, because, I mean, that's mostly for you to take home and digest after we finish today, okay? We're gonna start from the Abhidharma.

Why? Because Abhidharma Kosha, which is like a big encyclopedia of Buddhism, in the fourth chapter, it gives the whole teaching on karma. If you want to know about karma, you got to go to the fourth chapter of the Abhidharma Kosha.

And the opening lines are, lele jikten na tso kye, denny se badanday che. So say, lele jikten na tso kye.

[Speaker 2]
Lele jikten na tso kye.

[Speaker 1]
Okay, le means karma, okay? It's the Tibetan word for karma. Le means work.

Lega means, nga lega yomare, tari lega yomare means, I don't got any work to do today, okay? Le means doing something. Lele jikten na tso kye.

Jikten means, in Sanskrit, loka. Loka means the world, okay? It can either mean the outside world, or it can mean the people who live in the world.

And in Buddhism they say, the pot and the things in the pot. So the pot is the world, and the things in the pot is you and me. So that's jikten.

That's, that's the world. Na tso kye means, that's where they all come from. That's where all these different planets, and universes, and galaxies, and all these trillions of kinds of different creatures, that's where they all come from.

Because the third chapter of the Abhidharma was, is this huge presentation of all the planets in the universe, and the galaxies. It, it, it talks about time and space. It's very beautiful.

It explains time down to milliseconds, and then it goes up to galaxies, you know, light years. It explains where the worlds come from, and explains how they are destroyed. Like our world is going to be destroyed by a supernova of our Sun.

And it describes the whole process. It's very interesting. Then at the very end it says, and don't think all these things were made by some creator.

They weren't, they weren't put here by some being who, who was, you know, didn't have any lay that day, so he was making worlds, you know. Because the opening lines of the fourth chapter say, if you want to know where all these universes came from, all these galaxies, all these planets, you know, if you want to know where the trees in, in, in Raleigh, North Carolina came from, and things like that, it says lay, lay nātsu, jīta nātsu. Okay, lay, lay means your own karma.

Okay, they come from your own karma. If, if a group of you are experiencing a room called the Kadampa Center together, then you have a communal karma. You all collected some, we all met before, we all did something before, and as a result we're all experiencing this room together.

Lay, lay, jīta nātsu. Okay, so there are many kinds of karma. The next line says, de nī semba dāng de ce.

Say, say, de nī, semba, dāng, de ce.

[Speaker 2]
De nī, semba, dāng, de ce.

[Speaker 1]
Tibetan, you know sem? Sem means mind. The word sem in Tibetan, citta, means mind.

But this text says Daini Sempa. Sempa and sem are not the same thing. Sem means mind.

Sempa is something else. And people have struggled for years to figure out an English word for it, you know. And I heard a lot of strange ones, you know.

Meditation was popular for a while. But I've never seen meditation in the New York Times or any place. And I didn't know what it was, you know.

And it's important to know what Sempa is because Daini Sempa Dandreche, the essence of karma, is Sempa, okay. Daini Sempa Dandreche. That's the definition of karma.

In the second line of the chapter on karma, you know, Daini Sempa. So Sempa is the essence of karma. What is Sempa?

You know, you need to know what Sempa is. And it's very difficult. But what, basically what it means is anytime your mind moves, it's the movement of the mind.

It's every infinitesimally small shifting of your mind. It's when your mind shifts from one object to another. When you think of anything.

Anytime you're, in Tibetan they call it kukyo gyal. Kukyo gyal means this, watch. And that's a kukyo gyal.

Kukyo gyal means, you know, just when you have a very lazy person, you say, call kyuni kukyo gyal min du. Which means, you know, he never even twitches. But, so kukyo just means a twitch, you know, a twitch of the body.

But a twitch of the mind means anytime the mind goes from here to here, you know. Just the slightest thing like that. The mind goes to a new object.

The mind shifts just a touch. That's a Sempa. How many Sempas occur in a minute?

They say in this moment, I believe it's something like, it's many thousand. I don't remember the number. But it's in the, in the snap of a finger.

It's called the jagi kejig na tama. I think there's 64 in a finger snap. In this finger snap you have 64 Sempas going on.

I mean, your mind is shifting or, or, or it's like a jet, you know. It's moving in time, 64 times in the, in the time that it takes me to snap my fingers. And in, and during that time, depending on your motivation, you have just collected 64 what?

Separate karmas. Okay. You, you've just had, okay, I mean you've had that many Sempas, alright.

That's, that's a lot, okay. That's, that's karma. Karma means work or doing something.

So your mind has done something like many times in a single moment, in a single minute, in an hour, your mind has collected thousands of karmas. Thousands and thousands of karmas. That's the nature of karma.

de ni sempa dang se dang de che. Say it loud. Dang de che.

Dang de che. Dang de che means and what it produces. Which means, de ni lu dang nga gi le.

Next line. De ni lu dang nga gi le means, what does the mind produce? Well, it produces the other two kinds of karma.

So what are the other two kinds of karma? Not, not speech and body. Okay.

So bodily or verbal karma. You know, something you say or something you do. So by now we have three kinds of karma.

One is what? The first one is Sempa, mental karma. Second one is verbal.

And then the third one is physical, doing something with your body. So karma just means anytime you do something. If it's, it can be physical.

Classically you hurt somebody, you kill or, or you steal something. For example, bad karma. Verbal, you know, you say something bad about someone, you try to split people up with something you say.

Bad karma. Or mental, you crave something that somebody else has. You wish that somebody else would fail, for example.

Those are, those are the three kinds of karma. Those are the three ways you can express karma. And then supposedly, oh, by the way, how do you decide if a karma is good or bad?

I mean, what's the definition of a good karma and a bad karma? De nam yin gyur bu dewa nyongwa. De nam yin gyur bu dewa nyongwa means, and it's very interesting, you see, this is how Buddhism defines morality itself or ethical living itself.

Bad karma is defined as any action you take, meaning thoughts as well, which lead to a, to a sensation of suffering for you. That's very interesting. You know, bad karma is defined as anything that hurts you.

That's very interesting. You know, I mean, the definition of what, you know, if I want to decide whether or not something I did was bad or good, bad karma is defined as something that after it goes through that cooking process, which is called nambar mimba, it will come back and make me suffer. And that's the definition of bad karma.

That's very interesting. You know, there's three other choices, right? One is that there's this being watching and he doesn't like it, and it's not bad.

And the second is that even that it hurts other people, which is partly part of, part of the definition also, but that's not the main thing either. It's, it's the definition of bad karma is a karma, something you do that after a process of ripening will come back and hurt you, will make you suffer. So that's the definition of bad karma.

Definition of good karma is what? Yeah, yeah, any, any action, thought or action, which, which after a cooking process called pacitti in Sanskrit, after a time of ripening or cooking, or it sits somewhere and it cooks for a while, and then it comes back to you. That's, that's bad karma.

That's the bad karma. So those are all the meanings of karma. So you're collecting in one moment, you say 64 karmas.

Well, when do they have time to come back to you? You know, I mean that's a lot. It's gonna be a couple thousand in a few minutes.

Where do they all stay? Where do they go in the meantime? I used to think of karma as this big cosmic boomerang, you know, and, and I, you know, I yell at somebody at work and I'm throwing this boomerang, and then, and then, you know, six months later my boss is screaming at me for something I didn't do, and I can't figure out why, you know, I don't know where it came from.

And I used to think that it must be out near Pluto somewhere, you know, you know, it must be, I don't know where that is, I don't know where that karma went to, but I, I did a bad thing at work, and then I was just sitting there minding my business one day, and the boss comes in and screams at me, you know, and I, I'm like, yeah, I didn't do anything today, you know, and, you know, and it doesn't seem to make sense, you know, where does karma, where does karma stay in the meantime, you know, where does it, where does it, where did it go, and, and where did it stay, and how does it come back to me, you know, and those are all, that's, I think, I think if you study karma carefully, then you can accept karma much more easily, and if you, and if no one ever explains it to you, and it just seems to be like this belief that people have in Asia, that, oh, bad things that happen to them come from something bad they did, it sounds nice, it's a good way to keep people in line, but, you know, but, but does it really make any sense, and why should I believe it any more than anything else, you know, the Bible says, why do the wicked prosper, this is a big question, you know, why do bad people get rich, and, and have big houses, and everything's going right for them, you know, and why do good people have these disasters, you know, why do little babies get cancer, you know, what did they do, you know, how could it happen, you know, and there's this, it's one of the great questions of Christianity, for example, you know, how, how, given the Christian teaching, could it, could it happen, how could it be like that, you know, what, what did they do, or even if they did do something bad, you know, why is this happening to them, when they're too young, they didn't have time to do anything that bad, you know, and, and it's a big question, and Buddhism struggled with it also, you know, Buddhism has struggled with it all through the history of Buddhism, and all the different schools of Buddhism talk about it a little bit differently, so I'm going to go into some of those, and why are there four different schools of Buddhism, you know, why are, there are four great early Indian schools of Buddhism, the first one you can call Abhidharma school, those were the, those were the, the very, most elementary school, and they were, they're very, very great scholars, great Buddhists, and they, they, they talk about Buddhism in terms of Abhidharma, Abhidharma means higher knowledge, and, and you can call them the knowledge school, and they were the first great school of, of Buddhism, after that there are the Sutras, and they are, you can think of them as the logic school, they had a lot of faith in, in figuring things out with logic, and using logic to figure out, for example, how do we perceive things, you know, why, why do you, why when you look at a cow, do you think cow, what is it about a cow, is there some kind of cow-ness about a cow that makes you think cow when you look at a cow, or what is it about a Ford, that when you look at a Ford car, you see a car, you know, what is it that makes you see a car, you know, why don't you see, I mean if a bug looks at a Ford, he doesn't see a car, he sees something else, you know, he's got a whole different experience of that object, you know, what is it about me that makes me see car, and what is it about a bug that makes him see an insurmountable mountain, you know, what is it, what's in my brain that makes me see that, that's the whole emphasis of the second school, and then the third school is a mind only school, called samsampa, they're struggling, one of the big questions they're struggling with is where does karma stay, you know, where do you put karma in the meantime, and then the higher, the fourth school is samajamika school, middle way school, mostly concerning themselves with emptiness, and, and what, why did the Buddha teach four different schools, by the way, many of their ideas are contradictory, you know, many of the ideas in the first school are proved wrong by the time you get to the third school, in the monastery we have to study them for 18 years, we spend 12 years in the first school, we spend two years each in the other three schools, and, and it's always confusing because your, your teacher will teach you the first school, and you go and you debate it and you learn it and you memorize it and everything, and then by the time you get to the second school they tell you everything was wrong, and you, they say put on the new hat, they say you have to take off that Abhidharma hat and now you have to put on the logician hat, you know, and you're getting confused, and you say to the teacher, you know, why did the Buddha teach four different schools, and a lot of the ideas of the lower schools are wrong, what, what's the point, you know, and then it ends up that it's all very useful, there's nothing in the lower schools that's not very useful, and different people at different points in their spiritual lives need different explanations, you know, we're not all ready for the highest explanation at the beginning, I mean it would blow your mind, it would make you crazy, literally, and so start with the Abhidharma school, work up, you know, understand, and some people maybe will never be ready for the second school in this life, so the first, you know, teaching them the first school helps them, and brings them up slowly, which is the idea, you have to do it that way, but since we're so advanced we're going to skip right to the samsara.

Say sam-sam.

[Speaker 2]
Sam-sam. Sam-sam.

[Speaker 1]
You had sam already, sam was mind, ok, and sam means what? Yeah, only, ok, only mind, merely mind, ok. Sam-sam.

Citta-matra in Sanskrit, but this is a school that's, you know, widely misunderstood, the name of the school is mind only, and the Buddha did teach in certain sutras that things are mind only, ok, and then, you know, when this word got to our country, these poor samsampas, they got misunderstood, and people said, oh, everything is only the mind, you know. So sam-sam is the mind only school, and they have a really nice explanation of how karma is stored, where does karma stay, how is karma planted, and how does it affect you later. Supposedly, according to Buddhism, karma stays, the power of karma stays for up to millions of years.

There's three kinds of karma, one is called tong-gyur-gir-le. Say tong-gyur. Tong-gyur.

Tong-gyur means you can see it, and the implication is that before you die, you see the result of something you did in this life, ok, and that's a special kind of karma. And then the other two are ones that you see in the next life, in the very next life, and then, and then the results which you see in the second life and beyond, ok. So theoretically it could take millions of years for a karma to come back to you.

By the way, there's a beautiful book by, by Dharmakirti, he lived in maybe around 700 AD, that explains why future lives should exist, you know, and I think it's very useful for people like you and me who grew up in this country, because in this country there's an assumption that you don't live in a future life. I mean, there's a, you grow up, your parents tell you from when you're a little kid, nobody talks about future lives, nobody, when you, when you're a kid and you kill a fly on the window screen, you know, your parents don't say, oh, you're in big trouble in your future life, you know. It's just something that's totally absent from our culture, you know, nobody got, I never got told that, nobody in here got told that.

And it's just, you just believe it. You, in the depths of your heart, because you grew up in America, you don't think about future lives and when someone starts talking about them, you, you know, you, as a Buddhist you can sort of think probably they exist, but you don't have much proof for it. You don't understand why.

And then if you're an Asian and you grew up in Asia and, and your parents did yell at you and said you're going to be a fly in your future life, and so you believe in future lives, but you don't know why either, you know. We don't believe in them and we don't know why. And they do and they usually don't know why.

And Dharmakirti wrote a wonderful book about it. It's in the Paramita Bhārataka and he, there's a whole section there where he explains clearly why you and I can accept a future life and a past life. And I don't have time today.

It takes a month, a week. But at the end of a week I think most people in, in most normal American thinking people would say, okay, yeah, I do, I will have a future life. I, I, now I understand that.

You know, and you don't need to be, you don't have to have some, you know, higher plane realization or something to accept it. You can just accept it from a, a good, normal presentation of the, of, of Dharmakirti's thinking. There's not many Buddhist books that prove the existence of future and past lives because none of the audience was interested because they all thought they already existed.

Often they didn't know why, you know. And Dharmakirti himself says that. So, but anyway, the samsams are saying if it takes millions of years, perhaps, for a karma to ripen, well, where does that karma stay, you know.

And that was another misconception I used to have when I was a kid. People would say, oh, that's your karma. And karma would mean, I don't know what it, I think in that case it means more the result than the cause.

Karma means the cause. Karma is what you did, yeah, or bad luck. Bad luck, that's your karma.

Fate, something like fate. Karma is the action that you do. You know, kam-karo in, in India, what are you doing nowadays?

What are you up to? So, karma means the, the action that you did that causes the result. The result is not called karma.

The consequence, I like to call it consequence. The consequence is, is something else. So you have a, a cause, something you did, and then you have a consequence, and then somewhere between there, there has to be a connector.

There has to be something between the, the cause, meaning, you know, you yelled at somebody at work, and the result, which might come a million years from now. And, and where does the karma stay in the meantime, you know? Or what is it that stays in between?

We call it a seed. It's called a seed. In Tibetan it's, it's a nice, people, people like this word.

Say, bhāgyat. Sounds a mental, it's, it's a, a seed. In Buddhism, anything that changes has to be of three different kinds.

It can either be physical, like your body. It can be mental, like your mind. But there's a third category, uh, which are called demenduchi.

Demenduchi means something that's not physical or mental, but it's changing. Okay. Bhāgyat is one of those.

Bhāgyat is an energy. Okay. It is not the mind.

And it's not mental. It's also not physical. It's not like when you do a karma, somebody injects this little thing into your bloodstream.

Uh, and it's also karma, the seed for the karma, where the karma stays, is also not mental. It's in the mind, but it's not of the mind. It's, it's something that's residing in the stream of the mind.

Okay. And that's a bhāgyat. Okay.

So, it's not a boomerang going to Pluto. Okay. It's, uh, it's a bhāgyat.

It's a kind of energy. What is the nature of that energy? You know.

Where does it stay? There's a big argument about it. Uh, the mind-only school has one idea.

Other schools have other ideas. Uh, and they're, they're in the reading. If you're bored some night, you can read them all.

And they're difficult. And this is a very great scholar, Jetsun Kappa. The first reading is by Jetsun Kappa, most of it.

You know, his sentences are about 12 miles long. And, uh, his thoughts were longer than that. And, uh, and it's difficult reading.

But basically, he's trying to give a, he's trying to show what the mind-only school thought, where they thought karma stayed, in the meantime. Okay. You do, you yell at, you yell at somebody at work.

Six months later, your boss is yelling at you. You have no idea why. You know.

Where, where was the karma staying in the meantime? And how does it ripen? How does it come out?

How does it flower? You know. Why is the question important?

Because supposedly, every single experience you're having in your whole life is a result of karma. Okay. The, the color of this pillar, you know.

Your own awareness of your own mind. Uh, the shape of your body. Uh, whether you get a raise at work this year or not.

You know. Uh, the very shape of the planet. Uh, the question of whether the sun's going to come up in the morning or not.

Um, the condition of a tiny hair on the edge of your ear. They're all coming from the same source. It's, it's karma.

It's your karma. Every single detail of your life is being determined by karma. And, and even the karma it takes for me to move my hand.

You know. The karma it takes for me to be able to do that is tremendous. You know.

Uh, if you know computers, you can think about it in terms of bytes. You know. Like, they can't make good animation on a computer yet because it takes so many little dots to make the hand go smoothly across the screen.

Uh, it would take, you know, we did a ten minute section of my Lama doing a mandala offering, you know, for a computer thing. And it took, uh, fifty megabytes. You know.

It was like, you know. That one minute section of having it go smooth requires, uh, fifty million dots of information. And karma is exactly the same thing.

The karma it takes for me to move my hand like that. You know. All the individual karmas that have to flow and flower and ripen at the same moment in my mind and in your mind, if you can see my hand, are, are incredibly fantastic.

They're almost infinite. The amount of, uh, the, the, the energy of karma that has to go into a single motion of somebody's hand is almost infinite. Uh, there are, there are huge forces going on that maintain your world.

You know. There are, there are incredibly complex and numerous trillions and trillions of karmas are, are going off in a few minutes for you to maintain your world. You know.

For the whole world that you're experiencing to go on is requiring jillions of, uh, bytes of karma. And that's exactly what's happening. They are ripening in your mind at the rate of trillions per, per hour.

And, and you are having this smooth experience of a life in your own body and your own mind. It's, everything is a, everything is a ripening of your past deeds, of your past karmas. And for all of us to see the sun go up in the morning is a big event.

It's a big communal, uh, cooperative effort. All of us have to have had the same karma. Uh, we gave someone warmth.

You know, we provided light for someone. Um, and, and we, even such a natural thing as the sun coming up in the morning is, is a ripening of, if it's pleasant for you of a, what kind of karma? Of a good karma.

Okay. I mean, the sun is a tremendous good karma, is a result of a tremendous good karma. If, if it's pleasant to you.

You know, if you have a sunburn and the sun's coming up, it's not a pleasant karma anymore. Uh, it's the result of your bad karma. Same thing.

Same object. You know. But, but for you it's a result of an unpleasant karma.

So, and by the way, how long does it take for a karma like your life to end? I mean, does it peter out or, or what? No, you just die.

You have a car accident. And you have a car accident. Your head hits the windshield.

And in that one second, this, this ripening of millions of karmas changes radically. And you're not a human being anymore. You know.

That, those trillions of karmas that we're maintaining, it's like a, you see those water geysers holding up a ball, you know. And, and that's your karma. And the minute the water cuts off, the ball falls down.

And, and you're not having any of the experiences you used to have. You know. You don't have any, you no longer at that moment have any karma to be anything human at all.

You know. You, there's no reason to assume that you'll be anything like what you were ten minutes before that. Because those, those ripening suddenly ran out.

You know. Just ran out of energy. Somebody unplugged the computer, you know.

And, and you will have radically different experiences. You will go from thinking you're pretty healthy, and your life is going pretty well, and your family's doing nice, and you got this house and everything. You'll go from that to zero.

Your intellect also. You will not even have the mind that you have now. I mean, it's, to be intelligent or to be reasonable or to be happy or to be reason, all these things are, are, are karmas ripening.

And, and when the karmas run out, you won't even have a mind. You won't remember your name. You know.

You, you won't remember anything about what you were. Because the, the cause for even the, the karmas for that mind to exist also finished. And, and you'll just be a radically different being.

So it's no big mystery. You know. If you explain it in terms of karma, a sudden shift in your karma, and then you're not anything what you used to be.

You assume that you're going to be like you are today, tomorrow. This is, you can't say that. When the karmas run out, which could be this afternoon, you'll be at zero.

You'll go back to zero. You might as well be an insect. You know.

You can't even guarantee you'll be as good as an insect. You know. Because the, the karmas that kept you, that kept supporting you are, are finished.

You know. So how does that work? You know.

I have to explain that or else it just sounds a little crazy. Okay. We have to talk about bhaktyaks.

When you do a deed, when you, when you do anything, let's say that you yell at someone, okay. You, you, you say something unpleasant to somebody. That's bad deed number out of the ten?

Six, right? Harsh words. Saying something hard to somebody.

We have, you know, ten classic bad deeds in Buddhism. That's number six. You know.

Saying something unpleasant that hurts someone's feelings. Let's say you, you do that number six. You yell at somebody.

So, how is the karma collected? Okay. According to Samtsampa.

If you're going to talk about creating planets, you go to Abhidharma. If you're going to talk about where does the karma stay, you go up to school number three. And you talk about Samtsampa.

They say that perceiving yourself doing the deed is very important. In other words, your perceptions as you, as you yell at someone are very important. And what it refers mostly to is motivation.

You know. And it refers to recognition of what you're doing. Okay.

Like I make a lot of jokes at work and, and I've been informed by people that it hurts people. But I didn't have any, you know, I was just trying to be a good guy, you know. I was just trying to be friendly at work and I make a joke about somebody and, you know, a week later somebody tells me they really got upset.

That I said something that was not funny to them. Is that a harsh word, you know? Is that breaking the sixth non-virtue?

Is that a bad deed? A lot of it depends on your motivation. Okay.

If you're, it's very important at the moment for a good matcha to be planted. You have to be conscious of what you're doing. It's one of the, it's called Lekhi Lam.

Lekhi and Lekhi Lam are different things. Lekhi means karma. Lekhi Lam means a path of karma.

Path of karma means a complete karmic action as opposed to just doing something. And Lekhi Lam is different from a Lekhi. Lekhi, you've got all these sambas going on in your mind.

You've got all these, your mind is moving and twitching all the time. But a Lekhi Lam is one whole well-cooked deed that you did. And there have to be certain elements there, okay, for you to have a karma, to really collect a good karma.

First of all, you have to have the motivation. You know, you have to want to hurt somebody. You know, you have to have in mind hurting somebody.

It's very important also to have some kind of premeditation. You know, you have to walk in the room and say, I'm about to say this thing to this person, and I'll be quite happy if they're upset, you know. You know, and there has to be some kind of, it's called Shi Samba Joga Tantra.

Samba means you have to have some kind of intention there. And you actually have to undertake the deed. Sometimes you think to do something and then you don't get a chance to do it.

Do you collect any karma? If you want to say something bad to somebody, you burst into the room and they're not there. You do collect karma, okay.

You collect, you collect what we call Samba. You know, you've had some premeditation. But you don't have Jorwa.

Jorwa means you, you actually undertake the thing. You do collect karma, but you don't collect a full cooked, powerful karma if you don't have the actual, what do you call it, consummation of the deed, where you're actually, you know, able to do the thing. Shi Samba.

Shi means you should recognize the person for who they are. You know, if I burst into the room and the lights are out, and I say, you're an idiot, Jack. And it turns out somebody else is in the room and Jack's not there.

Do I collect the karma of undertaking the harsh words? I do. I do.

But the Shi is not there. Shi means the object that I'm meant to do it to should be there. There should be some kind of recognition, you know.

It's like stabbing a lump on a, going into a room at night and stabbing the person in their bed and you find out it's just, you don't have the object of the killing. By the way, in that case you also don't have tartuga. Tartuga is if you're intending to kill somebody that the person should, what, should die, you know.

Like if you wound them and they never die, you don't collect the karma of killing, okay. So, so all those things have to be there for karma to be there. But the main thing is you, you have to know what you're doing and you have to see yourself doing it.

You have to be conscious of yourself doing it. You have to know what you're doing and you have to see it. You have to be aware of it.

And that has, that's a very important about the creation of a bhaktya. How does karma get planted? There has to be a perception.

You have to see yourself doing it, okay. There has to be, that's why insanity really is a good defense in Buddhism also, you know. It really is.

If you're totally crazy and you have no right mind about what you're doing, you do collect some bad karma. But it's not as powerful as if, you know the kind of dirty deed I'm talking about, where, you know, you're angry, you're gonna say something to somebody, you get the person in a corner and you know who they are, the lights are on, you know it's them, you say exactly what you meant to say and you get the reaction that you wanted when they, their face falls and they, they get hurt. And then you've done a real deed.

But what's important, paramount thing there is that you are, you are doing the action and you are watching yourself do the action. Being aware that you're doing it, watching yourself doing it, plants a bhaktya. Okay, where does it plant it?

Okay, in the mind stream. There's a lot of arguments in Buddhism, you can read them in there, about where do they get planted. If they get planted in the mind stream, there's a lot of arguments about that.

Buddhism loves arguments, but it helps you clarify things also. If you say mind stream, okay, this is a debating in Buddhism. Okay, are you telling me it's planted in the mind stream?

And the guy says duh, say duh. By the way, duh doesn't mean duh, okay. Duh in Buddhist debate means, that's right, that's what I said.

And you gotta, you gotta have chutzpah, you know, you gotta say duh. Okay, and then I say, uh, tola merata. Okay, tola merata means, are you telling me no one could perceive emptiness directly?

Then you say, tshir. Okay, say tshir. Tshir means, what the hell are you talking about?

What's it got to, you know, what's it got to do with what I, all I said was it was planted in the mind, and then you're saying, you're telling me nobody could perceive emptiness. And that's how the chess game starts in a Buddhist debate, you know. So somehow I have to tie you up.

I have to, I have to, I'm gonna checkmate you about three arguments down, okay. And we already started, you already, actually already checkedmate. Okay, so I say, I think no one ever perceives emptiness directly, because at that moment, they still have, they still have bad thoughts in their mind, okay.

They still have bad, at that moment of the direct perception of emptiness, they still have impure items in their mind. Yimba ta. You say, you're gonna say, if you say ta madhu, okay, say ta.

[Speaker 2]
Ta.

[Speaker 1]
Madhu. Ta madhu.

[Speaker 2]
Ta madhu.

[Speaker 1]
Ta madhu means, of course they don't, okay. Or do they? What do you say?

[Speaker 2]
I say, of course they don't, or they wouldn't be able to perceive emptiness directly.

[Speaker 1]
Okay, good. Okay, so at the moment of perceiving emptiness directly, there's nothing impure in their minds, right. So le gi bhaja mera ta.

So a person who perceives emptiness, at that moment, doesn't have these bhajaks in their mind. Trillions of bhajaks just waiting to pop up like tulips in the spring in Raleigh, North Carolina, you know. Right?

Yimba ta. Okay, say duh. So if you say duh, then where do they go?

Bhajak mera ta. So they just, there's no more. If the stream of the mind is the carrier for the bhajak, and if the stream of the mind, at one moment in its history, becomes totally purified, which is true at the path of seeing, the direct perception of emptiness, then does that person destroy all his karmic seeds?

[Speaker 2]
I would think so.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, right. Okay. So then he becomes a totally enlightened Buddha upon the occasion of first seeing emptiness directly.

[Speaker 2]
Then he can accumulate more karma on top of that, correct?

[Speaker 1]
Oh, later. Instantly, next instant. When he comes out of that experience, say.

But that's not the case. You know, there is a fourth, after the direct perception of seeing, you go on for a long time before you become a Buddha or before you reach nirvana. Typical is seven lifetimes.

It's very typical. Seven more lifetimes before you are able to use that perception to clear out your mind stream. So you can't say they, you can't say, those karmas do live there, and the person for the next seven lives undergoes the results of those karmas.

So they are there. They're with him or her, but they are not in the mind. You're right.

Okay? You actually won that part. Okay?

They do stay in the person, but they don't, that's why the higher school says they don't stay in the mind stream. They stay in, with the person, but they don't stay in the mind stream. Somehow they stay with the personality of the person, the persona, but they don't stay in the mind stream.

Because the mind stream at that point has to be totally purified of those things. So that's the argument, that's one of the arguments. But what happens is, by the way, is the bhaktiak, is the bhaktiak a changing thing?

Yeah. I'll give you a clue, okay? Well, I'll give you a clue, because sooner or later it has to produce a result.

It has to do something. And in Buddhism, anything that does something has to be changing. Changing.

Changing means, as it produces its consequence, as the bhaktiak gives you some boss yelling at you, you know, as it ripens, it has to change. Like any seed, you know, like a tulip bulb, as it sends out a sprout, has to change. And normally it destroys itself by giving its result.

Hopefully, right? In the case of bad karma. So a bhaktiak has to be impermanent.

It has to be changing from instant to instant, okay? Then how can it stay for millions of years? How can karma be stored even for ten minutes?

The deed is finished. You know, the deed is gone. You yelled at somebody at work, you know, hours ago.

So where's the karma? You know, where's the bhaktiak? Sorry, the karma is finished, right?

The karma, which means that original deed of yelling at somebody, is finished. The bhaktiak is staying with the persona, okay? You can say mindstream.

Higher school says, ah, say mindstream, it's okay. You know, it's staying in your mind, okay? But how can it stay for a million years?

You know, is it changing or not? According to Buddhism, if it's going to give a result eventually, it has to be changing from instant to instant. So, so how does it stay?

How can it stay? And, and Buddhism says, ah, it's pretty interesting. It's like this, ah, billiard ball effect.

And, ah, it's true that a bhaktiak and everything else in the world, including us, is changing from moment to moment. And that we are santani, we're a stream of events. Um, but as the, as the bhaktiak, as this bhaktiak moment of bhaktiak ends, it, it leaves some, it imparts its energy to the next bhaktiak.

So it replicates itself. So that's how bhaktiaks go on. Karma can stay in your mindstream, we'll say, ah, for a long time.

Because as each instant passes, the, the bhaktiak of the first instant imparts its energy to the bhaktiak of the second instant. It's like a long string of billiard balls. And when you hit the first one, it goes tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, and the last one moves, you know.

So, so it's possible. And the perception, watching yourself do a good or bad thing, started it. That energy, this is the karma of yelling at somebody.

And that's, that imparts the original energy. That's the stick. That's the billiard cue, you know, the pool cue.

It, that's the action. The very first action you do, yelling at somebody, sets in motion the first bhaktiak. It imparts its, it's gone.

That karma is finished. The minute you finish yelling and your lips close and there's silence and the guy's going, you know, like that, the karma's already done. The karma's actually finished.

But it has just imparted energy to a bhaktiak. And that energy has begun. And that energy will replicate itself until, it doesn't, until it, the consequence comes out.

Until the, until you get the result, you know. That's one good thing about suffering, is that you're using up bad karma. This energy will be replicated until, until the moment that you experience the result, you know.

It will, it will replicate itself until the moment that you experience the result. Okay? Where do these little bhaktiaks stay?

I mean, that's a lot of bhaktiaks. They're going to be a big place to stay. They, the, the Tsimshab school says it's got to stay in a thing called kunshi.

Say, kunshi? Kunshi? Kunshi is alive, is nana.

Kunshi nangpa chepa. It means, kun means everything, all. And shi means basis.

And sometimes they translate it as storehouse consciousness. Sometimes they call it basis consciousness, or things like that. But the mind-only school says, there's got to be this big consciousness where all these bhaktiaks hang out until they, until the consequence comes back to you.

There's got to be some place where they stay. So they, they came up with this thing called kunshi. And that's a, that's a big part of your mind where the bhaktiaks are staying until the day that they come back to you.

Okay? And, and the way that they come back to you is very extraordinary. And it has to do with kunshi.

You know, if you want to know how karma comes back to you, what is it that's making you see this world right now? Why do you see the sun come up in the morning? Which, by the way, don't assume that it's always going to be that way.

Things can change as soon as the karma changes. It has a lot to do with kunshi. You have to understand how kunshi works.

So kunshi is that, what is kunshi? Do you remember? Which is, woo, what's that?

It took me like three years to learn that word. What's a kunshi? You can call it storehouse consciousness.

You know, it's the place where all those bhaktiaks are hanging out until they flower. Until they, now how do they flower? The mind-only school says, they flower in the following way.

You are, let's say that you screamed at somebody six months before at work, and then your boss comes to you and yells at you. When that, when that boss is standing there with a red face and saying something very unpleasant to you, that is the old bhaktiak, the old karma's seed. Which is ripening in the mind stream, in the kunshi, okay?

It's ripening in that consciousness. And so what you're really seeing, you are observing a karmic seed ripening within a part of your own mind. And there is no boss outside yelling at you.

You're actually observing, you know, a miniature little bhaktiak ripening in your own mind. And you mistake that for an external object. But you're just watching your own mind giving an apparition that's based on that bhaktiak that went ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding, and then finally flowered as an appearance of something.

And they say, that makes good sense. The, there's a very close correlation between you seeing yourself hurting someone, and then much later seeing yourself being hurt by someone else. Those are actually very, very compatible, if you think about it.

The nature of yelling at someone is unpleasant, red in the face, loud noise. And the nature of getting yelled at is unpleasant, red in the face, loud noise, somebody getting hurt. So they say that's very compatible.

That makes a lot of sense. You know, that, it's very, very interesting. So think of it as a psychological event.

Think of it as karma being collected when you see yourself doing something bad. And then it's being stored in your mind as an energy which, when it flowers, and when it ripens, forces you to have a very similar perception. And whether or not it's inside your mind or outside your mind, I mean, the Madhyamika says, who cares, you know.

I mean, they get to a point where they say, you don't need to explain it with kunshi, you don't need to say it's external or internal. It happens to be mostly external. But that's not the point.

The point is that, you know, when we got to this point in the monastery, I remember I was sitting at my teacher's, the foot of his bed. He used to teach on top of his bed. And in Tibet, you do not interrupt the lama.

You know, in the monasteries, you never, ever interrupt the lama, you know. And I just, I said, it sounds great to me. And I said, can I ask you a question?

And he said, yeah, okay. And I said, this explanation sounds really good to me. You know, you perceive yourself doing something bad.

It plants a seed in your mind. That seed replicates itself over a period of time. And when the proper causes are ready, the seed ripens and you perceive yourself getting yelled at.

It sounds great to me because now it makes sense to me. You know, it's a perception. It's created by a perception.

The result of the perception is this seed that replicates itself. And then at the end, you have a corresponding perception of being yelled at. And I said, it just sounds great to me.

You know, what's wrong with it? Right? We're in third school, right?

We're not in fourth school. We're not in Madhyamika school. We're in Mainomi school.

I said, what's wrong with it? I don't see, because it was a burning personal question I wanted to know. You know, I want to know about karma.

I want to be able to stop it. So, what's wrong with this? And he says, it's perfect.

He says, Madhyamika accepts it. They don't accept that you need a separate part of your mind to store the bhaktyas. But all that other stuff is fine.

They accept it. It's perfect. And I was so happy.

You know, I'm like, oh, great. You know, so that's how karma works. I mean, you have a ...

it's very, very dependent on what perceptions you're having as you do it. That's why you can do a wrong thing with the right motivation. And the example in the Abhidharma is killing your parents out of mercy.

You know, they're very ill and you ... the example in the Abhidharma, generally speaking, killing your parents is one of the five deeds that must take you to the lowest hell immediately after you die. But then the Abhidharma says, what if you do it with the wrong belief that it's somehow putting them out of their misery?

Why is it wrong?

[Speaker 2]
Well, you don't know where they're going to be born.

[Speaker 1]
In the Buddhist scripture, you know that you're not putting anybody out of any misery. Misery in the human realm is nothing compared. They say that being stabbed with 10,000 spears over the course of a whole lifetime in the human realm wouldn't equal a second of the pain in the hell.

So, you're not helping anybody. That's just a general comment, okay? But anyway, but the motivation at that moment is very good.

It's called why? It's a white motivation. And your motivation is very good.

Your perception at the moment of turning off your mother's respirator or something is that I'm helping this person. You know, I'm putting this person out of their misery. Therefore, you don't collect.

You don't have the perception of killing your mother wantonly and therefore, you don't collect the same karma. It's not the same thing. Because of your motivation.

And again, the perception is very much tied up to how the bhaktiak is planted. The bhaktiak is largely planted by your perceptions. So, we went to my teacher in the monastery.

I took one of my students last year and he got him in the corner and he says, what about Hitler? You know, he says, Hitler had the best motivations. You know, he was going to make the human race pure.

You know, he truly thought he was making the human race pure. His motivation was perhaps extraordinary. You know, he was thinking that he will clean up the human race and make it really nice.

And maybe even his motivation was even more cosmic or more widespread than any of us. He really was thinking in terms of the whole civilization should become pure, which we rarely do. We're mostly worried about ourselves.

So, what about that? He said, you know. And that's where, and the teacher didn't even hesitate.

He said, yeah, from a motivational point of view, if that was his motivation, then that motivation might even have a beneficial result for him. But the deed of killing so many people is obviously also planted a heavy bhaktiak. But the main thing is the motivation.

The main thing is what you're intending and that's what creates, that's what plants the karma in your mind. The main thing is what you're intending and that's what creates, that's what plants the karma in your mind. So, let's say that all of your life is a ripening of karma.

How does it ripen? Okay, that's a very interesting thing. What is the nature of the ripening?

Are you really just looking at another part of your mind as these forms, as these apparitions come and go? You know, are you just part of my mind? Madhyamika says, no.

Madhyamika says, there is data. There is external data. You know, when I look at someone in this room, I see hair.

I see a certain shape. I see patches of flesh color. I see patches of brown color.

I see the round corner of an eye and these two holes here. And Madhyamika says, yeah, you do see those things. You are seeing data.

There is data being presented to you. And then your mind interprets it. You know, your mind pieces it together.

And how it pieces it together is very much dependent on what? On your karma. And it makes nice sense.

So, I am getting, there is data out there. No one can deny that there's certain shapes and there's certain colors and there's certain patches of this color and patches of another color. And my mind is taking that data and it's imposing on it a certain object.

I am identifying him. I see a person sitting in a class. From that data of all these different shapes and colors, I get all these disparate sense data and then I am interpreting it and mentally I am creating an image of a person.

You know, I am imposing on that data the image of a human being sitting in front of me. That is guna-tattva. That is imputation.

That's what Madhyamika is always talking about, of imputing reality. Does it mean there's no colors and shapes out there? No.

They do exist. But I take those colors and shapes and in my own mind, I make an ideal image out of them. I image them.

And I image it into a person, a student sitting in a class. That image exists where? Where does the image exist?

That's in the mind. The imputation, meaning the perfection of an image from a few... Why, when I see a few angles and colors and different shapes, why do I image that as a person?

Is that self-existent in the sense of, is that necessarily the way it had to be? Could I take those same data and make something else out of them? I see a rather pleasant person sitting in a dharma class.

I image it that way. But could someone else image it a different way? Absolutely.

I mean, someone who doesn't like him could come in and say, oh, you don't know. He's so bad, you know. I say, no, he looks like an okay guy, you know.

They say, no, no, no. They're imaging him in a different way. They're taking the same data.

They see the same colors and shapes. But in their own mind, they see something else. And if a bug walks in, if a bug's going across the carpet and looks up at these same colors and shapes, I mean, it looks like Mount Rushmore, you know.

I mean, to him it's just a huge dangerous thing, you know, that might step on me. You know, to him it's the same, he's looking at the same data. He's also looking at colors and shapes.

The data exists, but he's imaging it in a totally different way. He's seeing, that bug is seeing something incredibly dangerous and huge and life-threatening. Who's right, me or the bug?

[Speaker 2]
You. Duh.

[Speaker 1]
That's what I'm saying. Duh.

[Speaker 2]
I seem to be a person.

[Speaker 1]
Suppose I do, okay. I perceive you as a person, right? So you're a person, right?

Okay, so you're a person. Am I drunk, crazy, on LSD, or anything else that you can tell? No.

[Speaker 2]
You're a mad monk.

[Speaker 1]
I know. No, but do I have, is there anything which might affect my perception in a standard way? Not that I can tell.

Yeah, not that you can tell. I mean, this is what we call pramana. It's called sema.

Pramana means normal, unaffected, unscrewed up, LSD, you know, undrunk, no seeing purple elephants or anything. Just a normal person's perception of you. Do I have a sema about you?

[Speaker 2]
You what?

[Speaker 1]
Am I having a pramana about you?

[Speaker 2]
See.

[Speaker 1]
I mean, I do. Apparently I'm having. You can say apparently I'm having.

Therefore you exist. Person exists. Therefore you are a person.

[Speaker 2]
What seems to be your perception?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, because I'm having a perception which is not messed up by some kind of drug or something else. Because I'm having a normal perception of you as a person, you must be a person.

[Speaker 2]
What seems to be your perception?

[Speaker 1]
No, assume I have. Assume I have. A priority.

Sure. Yeah, right. Because seme, mikpa, yöpe, tseni.

Say it.

[Speaker 2]
Seme, mikpa, yöpe, tseni.

[Speaker 1]
Seme, mikpa, yöpe, tseni. Seme, mikpa means perceived with a normal, unmessed up perception. It's called a pramana.

Seme, mikpa means I perceive you with that. Yöpe, tseni. Yöpe means what?

That's the definition of existence in Buddhism. How do you know something exists? Because I'm not crazy, I'm not drunk, nothing else going on, and I see it.

So it exists. And that's the very definition of existence in Buddhism. So you must be a person.

Can we agree? I'm having a pramana that you are a person. The definition of you being a person is for me to have a pramana of you as a person.

Therefore you are a person. Right?

[Speaker 2]
Yes, sir.

[Speaker 1]
That's not true, because you... Why? Because you are a huge, mountainous, life-threatening mass that might step on me shortly.

Right?

[Speaker 2]
Could be.

[Speaker 1]
No, I mean to a bug. To a bug. To a roach.

OK. Is he having a sem or not?

[Speaker 2]
I can't say, because that bug is appearing in my mind as a perception from this point of view.

[Speaker 1]
No, but I mean if he's just a normal bug and he's looking at you... Don't get too deep here.

[Speaker 2]
I'm not, I'm not. I'm not distorting the whole thing.

[Speaker 1]
No, but we can assume that he's pretty scared. If someone's moving towards the bug and he sees a huge thing that blocks out half his sky and he's coming down on him and...

[Speaker 2]
OK, from this point of view that you've given me, I'll say yes.

[Speaker 1]
Good, good. OK. So, you're both a normal, nice human being sitting here and a huge, threatening, mountainous mass.

You're both of those things. So they're both correct. According to Buddhism, they're both correct.

They're both valid perceptions. Yeah. Not at all.

Not at all. I wasn't going to get into it yet, but since you asked. I mean, as far as seeing him, whether the ant sees or you see, physically the same thing is being seen, right?

Physically the same or five senses are seeing precisely the same thing, but I think the mental perception of it is what is different. Or are these two interconnected in some way? Well, I think what I do, I was going to say this for tomorrow, but we'll go into it now.

We've got a little time. I'll set you up for tomorrow, OK? And it's the next reading, and I'll give it to you when we let out tonight.

How's that? There's three readings, and that one you can read also. There's a study of something...

Oh, by the way, let me just cover one more thing. So, the bug is seeing you one way, which is valid. And I'm taking that same data and organizing it in a different way, which is also valid.

So, one person can be to two different people, or two different beings, something totally different, and that's not contradictory. He can be both at the same time. The punchline here, and actually that's the end of the first part, is if all he is for me is an organization of the data, you know, if what I see is taking certain colors and shapes and organizing them mentally into an image of a person sitting there, is that something voluntary or not?

[Speaker 2]
That's the question.

[Speaker 1]
Could I have chosen to see you as a tantric deity? Could I have chosen to see you as a demon? Voluntarily.

Can I at this moment in my life say, I decide that from 3.30 everyone in this room is an angel, a true angel, and surrounded by holy beings. Can I, by my deciding that, will I perceive that? Will I organize the data in that way?

I mean, could I? That's another question. But can I voluntarily decide that from this moment on, every time the dentist hits my nerve, drilling my tooth, I choose to perceive it as flowers being thrown at me?

[Speaker 2]
Not in terms of karma as we've discussed it so far.

[Speaker 1]
Absolutely not. That's the rub. That's the rub.

It is artificial reality. It is my own organizing and imaging the data that I receive through my senses in a certain way. But the last thing is, is voluntary.

I'm being forced by that karma. That karma is absolutely in control. I may even understand that you are just my construct.

Even as I perceive you, I may very well understand that I'm just interpreting data a certain way. But I can't change it by will. Cannot.

That's the nature of suffering. That's the essence of suffering. That's why karma makes you suffer.

It forces those perceptions on you. We would all like to be in paradise in this room right now. I mean, all of us would like not to be getting older.

I'd like to be not having this headache. I can't. It's not a willpower.

It's not a matter of my will. There has to be... It's being forced upon me.

I'm taking the same sense data. If I were pure... Jesus walked in this room and his mind was totally pure and he had no past karmas that were negative, he would actually be experiencing this room as a room full of...

as he'd be in heaven. He would literally be in heaven, in paradise. And I can't be in a paradise.

I'm in a room of people that appear to me like me who is getting old and has all these bad thoughts and does all these mixed up... some good things, some bad things. I'm perceiving this same room as that.

But is it out of the question for... for someone who didn't have those problems to perceive it as something totally different? I mean, that's...

that's the case. But he or she would be forced to see that. Why?

What's forcing Jesus to see it as heaven in this room? His karma. It's interesting.

You know, if you could fool around with karma, you know, if you could find some way to mess around with the workings of karma, short-circuit the bad ones and enhance the good ones to an ultimate extent, then you wouldn't be in a room with normal people anymore. You would be forced to perceive that same data. That same data, your own mind would be forcing you to see it as something else.

And you would, by the way, you would know it and you'd be enjoying it. And you'd be... you'd be, what do you call it, perpetuating it constantly.

You know, you'd keep doing these things that you have to do to keep it going. And that is what it is to reach paradise. We'll get to that tomorrow.

But we'll do some questions maybe. But anyway, that's the idea of one object being perceived in different ways. And not willingly, not voluntarily.

But it's forced on you by your karma. Yeah, uncle?

[Speaker 2]
I have heard both ways about this, that it's useful to develop good karma, and actually create good karma, which is more karma-selective. Right. So I was wondering if you could speak about that a little bit.

And when you were saying this, I was also wondering if there are certain places where you get to where there's lack of karma, where you actually can't choose to see it any way you want. So if you could be able to put on the perception that I have to see the world through my eyes The Abhidharma and the other schools, they have two kinds of karma.

[Speaker 1]
They say sakche. Sakche gille.

[Speaker 2]
Sakche gille. And then sakme gille. Sakme gille.

[Speaker 1]
Pure karma and impure karma. Sakche gille means impure karma, and sakme gille is pure karma. Technically speaking, in Buddhism, karma is always dirty.

I mean, karma is always something that's perpetuating samsara. And in other words, if you do good karma, whether you do good karma or bad karma, if you do it with ignorance, it perpetuates suffering. And that's interesting.

What it means is, if you think of it in terms of karma, any pleasant experience that you and I ever have, that we're even capable of, for example, having a good job, or having a close friend, or being healthy, or looking nice, or being intelligent, or understanding Dharma, all of those are a result of a good karma. All of them. And they're all suffering.

All of them are suffering. Why? They must be connected with a painful ending.

They are always connected. I mean, I leave out learning Dharma, okay? That's the one exception in the Yabhi Dharma.

Lama tokpay duje nam sakche. That's the only exception. But let's leave out that.

Every other experience of a pleasant object that you and I can ever have in this life is suffering. Because it's always attached to a dreadful ending. You know, that's the tale of the dog.

It always comes. I used to say that when we used to drink tequila when I was a kid. But anyway, it's always connected to a suffering at the end.

You always get a suffering at the end. It must deteriorate. It must collapse.

It must go bad. It must turn sour. Every pleasure that you and I are capable of must and always will end.

And end in a bad way. You know, there's no relationship you can ever go into that will not eventually end, even if it's only by death eventually. There's nothing you can own that you won't eventually lose.

There's no state of health or handsomeness or intelligence that you can have that won't eventually turn to ugliness or stupidity or senility if you live that long. We can't have anything nice. We can't...

The nature of it is that it always deteriorates. Why? If it's a perception that's being forced on you, why?

[Speaker 2]
Those bok choks wore out.

[Speaker 1]
We ran out of bok choks. Yeah, you know, those little guys ran out. They always run out.

The bits that are making the picture move, all those megabytes of stuff, they always wear out. By being alive, by being pretty, by being handsome, by being smart, you are using up the bok choks for being that. And eventually they wear out.

And then you're back to zero. Back to ground zero. We're always back to ground zero.

They come and they go and we lose them. And that's samsara. That's dirty karma.

That's saktyakirle. Any karma you collect with ignorance is of that nature. So that's the answer to your first part of your question.

That's true. It'll always be that way. So is it useless to collect good karma if it only perpetuates suffering?

No, because you have to do it knowingly. You know, if you do it knowingly, you know, if you do it with understanding, with knowledge, then it becomes saktyakirle. And that's pure karma.

And what it means, the implication there is that you will know how to perpetuate it. It becomes, fusionism or fusion? Self-perpetuating reaction.

It's the holy grail of science. It's that you get more energy out than you put in. You know, you put in one teaspoon of water and you get endless amounts of energy and it creates more.

That's the idea. If you understand, that's wisdom. That's the perfection of wisdom.

If you understand what's going on and you manipulate it the right way, you can, that's the whole point, is that you can reach paradise. And you can, and it will continue. And it will not, it won't act the way samsara acts because you know what's causing it.

You know how to create everything perfectly and you just create it. Is it a creation? Yes.

Is it artificial? Yes. Is it real?

It's as real as everything else was, you know. It's being forced on you. You'll be forced to experience paradise.

I'm sorry.

[Speaker 2]
You know.

[Speaker 1]
Your mind, your karma will force you to think you're in paradise. And thinking you're there and being there for Buddha is the same thing because it was all just perception anyway. It was all just a projection anyway.

And you're just controlling your projections. So the Buddha knows perfectly how to, he knows how to create the correct karmas, although they don't technically call it karma at that point. And he's perpetuating that perception and it will always be like that.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah. It's not one for one.

[Speaker 1]
There's four rules of karma. There's four rules about how karma behaves. And one of them is that it always expands.

It expands exponentially. And the books on karma say, why would you expect anything else out of a seed? Because mental seeds and physical seeds work the same way.

And I always tell the story, she knows. You know the temple in New Jersey. It's got these huge oak trees around it.

And it was built by Mongolians like 40 years ago. And one day the wind came real strong and it blew down the oak tree and it smashed the roof. And the Mongolians all came and they said, you get up there with a chainsaw and cut the branches off.

And I'm like, my knees were literally shaking like that. I couldn't stay up there. And I was trying to cut these limbs with the chainsaw, you know.

And I looked out on the street and there was an acorn in the middle of the asphalt, you know, sitting there on the asphalt. And I looked at it and I said, you know, if 50 years ago somebody had taken this acorn and thrown it out on the asphalt, I wouldn't be up here, you know. It came to my mind, you know.

It came to my mind, you know. It's too late now, but if somebody had just thrown that acorn over there, you know, that would have been, none of this stuff would have happened. So, if you compare the mass of the acorn to the mass of the oak tree, I don't know what it is.

I can't even imagine. It must be 20, 30, 40 thousand to one. I don't know.

But they say karma acts the same way, you know. And that becomes a very dangerous... In Tibetan they say, kepen chenpo.

Kepen chenpo means big risk, big returns, you know. It's like a high-risk investment, you know. Any karma you do, if it's good, you're going to get incredible returns.

Even a small karma, even a wimpy karma, is going to give tremendous returns. But the same applies for the slightest bad thought you have at work. It becomes a very difficult thing.

The more you understand about karma, the more scary it is. Because just a passing irritation at someone at work could have tremendous bad results. And the whole Vinaya section of the canon, 16,000 pages, is telling you, be careful with even the small bad thoughts because they become huge oak trees later, you know.

When you talk about purifying electronic metals, you watch... Yeah, it's... I don't think you can teach this thing without getting into that at the end because it would be cruel, you know.

You know... You know, you... You know, you have to talk about that because according to Hinayana, there's no such thing.

According to the lower vehicle, you cannot purify them. Once you have planted a bak chak, by seeing yourself doing something bad, you are stuck. It will...

It's going to give a consequence and you... It will never, never be wiped out. Until it gives its consequence, it will never be wiped out.

You cannot affect it. That's why there's so... You know, mindfulness is so important in Hinayana.

Like, every second, just watching everything, because if the slightest bad thought goes through your mind, you're going to have tremendous consequences. And in my analysis, that's true, but you can also do certain practices to remove it. And once you study those practices, you understand why that seems...

It makes sense. It's not like a morning-after pill, okay? It really is...

It really is something that you can do afterwards that removes most of that karma, but it's a very... It has to be followed very precisely or it doesn't work. And we'll get into that tomorrow.

That's purification tomorrow. Any other questions?

[Speaker 2]
We could die tonight. I'm sure you don't want to tell us.

[Speaker 1]
I know. That would be your number. I think we'll do it tomorrow.

But there's a... I want to teach you a thing called chumbap. Say, chumbap.

Chumbap. Chumbap. Chumbap.

Chumbap. Chumbap is a very famous section of Chandrakirti's Madhyamika Avatar. Madhyamika Avatar is the ultimate book about emptiness.

Its structure is that it follows the six perfections. It talks about giving, morality, and effort, and then the other perfections, patience. But the sixth chapter is 90% of the book, okay?

What's the sixth chapter? It's wisdom, okay? And it's teaching about emptiness.

So, like in the monastery when we study that, we do it for two or three years, and the first part we... I think you go through the first five perfections in about three weeks. And then the rest is all the perfection of wisdom.

So, inside of that chapter, there's a subject called chumbap. Chumbap means a waterfall or a stream. And it refers to the stream that a preta sees.

What's a preta? Yida? They're called hungry ghosts.

I don't like the word ghost because it sounds like Casper, you know? I like to call them craving spirits because that's the nature of their lives. They're spirits in the sense that you cannot see them.

I guess ghost is like that, too. And Buddhism says that they exist around us. And Buddhism says you cannot see them if you're just a normal person.

Buddhism also, by the way, says don't claim you can see them if you can't see them. And don't say they exist for sure if you can't see them. So, okay, we have to say that Scripture says there's this thing called a preta.

And that especially people who have been cheap in this life, who have been possessive with their things, are born as pretas. Like if you've been attached to your house, then it might be likely that after you die you'd be born as a preta in that house. And maybe that's where haunted houses come from.

I mean, seriously, you know, maybe there's some thing that people had some, I don't know. But if you've had some connection with that house and you're very attached to it and you didn't share it with anyone and you got angry whenever someone messed up the rugs and stuff, you'd be born as this kind of a spirit and you live in that house. And they have, there's 36 kinds of pretas.

And they all have some kind of suffering related to their stinginess. And typically they have huge stomachs and tiny, their throats are like needles or straws. And if they get anything, they have this karmic habit of wanting.

And they want more food than they could ever eat. And if they find some food, then they try to stuff it down and it won't go down at the rate that they need to be satisfied. In other words, they're just in this total state of never being satisfied.

And that's their karma is to live that way. Other kinds of pretas, supposedly they can never get anything to eat or drink because the minute they walk up to something, like they say if they saw a stream in a distance and they ran to the stream because they were hungry all the time, thirsty, that the minute they got there, the stream would turn into this disgusting pus and blood and vomit and something very repulsive. And they, you know, that's their karma.

Their karma is that their perception of that liquid at that moment becomes the perception of vomit and blood and pus. So, they have this... that's their karma.

So, chumbap, the subject chumbap in Madhyamika Avatara, they say, what if a preta and a human and a pha or a deva, what's a deva? Pha. They say, God, you know, this is a really tough word to translate.

And I get in big fights with my fellow translators, you know. There's two kinds of phas, okay? And there's two kinds of devas.

One is an enlightened being. That's like a tantric pha. You know, like Chakrasamvara or all those beings that you see in the pictures, you know.

They are... these are phas. And they have beautiful body.

They're like totally enlightened angels, okay? They have this... that they're called phas.

But there's another kind of pha which is... if you're very good in this life, you can take birth in this temporary paradise and everything there is going right. And everything there is very beautiful.

You... it's like, I don't know, Beverly Hills or something. And everything is, you know, flowers grow and it smells wonderful and the ground is soft like a pillow and made of lapis lazuli.

Nobody ever argues with anybody and everyone's happy and you're young all the time and you just spend yourself with the... the girl phas hang out with the boy phas and they have a good time. And everything is nice.

And everything is perfect. And then after a few million years, they say the last day of your life there, or maybe a week before you die, all the huffing starts to go away. And you start to...

for the first time you perspire. And for the first time you start to smell. And for the first time your breath smells bad.

And for the first time wrinkles start to form on your face. And, you know, all these things start to happen for the first time. You start to get old.

All in one day. And the other phas, when they see you, they're just repulsed. They're shocked.

And then you have this extra suffering that no one wants to be near you anymore. You know, they all run away and they put you in a corner somewhere. And they say the last day in the life of a pha is worse than, you know, a whole human life spent bad.

Because you've never had anything go wrong. And now in the last day everything goes wrong. And you start to die.

You start to feel bad. Your stomach starts to get sick. And all these things happen to you.

And then you have these moments of prescience where you can see what's going to happen to you after you die. And normally the amount of megabytes that's required to maintain a world like that for a million years is extraordinary. I mean, you can imagine.

If you believe what I said about karma, and it's all these simbas, all these twitches of the mind, collectively going off, these bhaksaks going off and making you see this world for thousands and thousands of years, the amount of energy required to maintain that perception is extraordinary. And it's like burning up hundred dollar bills, you know. And then it ends.

And then you don't have any left. You use it all up. So what's your next birth?

I mean, yeah, they say the next birth is always a very bad one. Because you've used up all the good bhaksaks and all you have left is the lousy ones. So from then on you're going to be, your projection that's forced on you is going to be the one totally under control of the lousy bhaksaks, the horrible ones.

So then you see yourself becoming a hell being. And that's the way it exists. A lot of it I consider an unfavorable rebirth.

It is. Inevitably. It is.

Bodhisattvas avoid it like the plague. The scripture says that. Bodhisattvas avoid those births like the plague.

There's no place to go after that. And they can't get renunciation until the last day. And it's too late.

You know, a human being, the books say we're very lucky because our life is a big mix of crap and nice things. You know what I mean? It's very lucky that our life is so mixed up with pleasure and torment because at least we can think, you know, what's causing me to have torment?

And we can see pleasure. Pleasure is not bad in the sense that when you reach paradise, things will be like that. You know, I mean, in the back of your mind, you're working for that.

You know, Buddhists have this thing that I should avoid pleasure or it's bad if I'm having a good time, you know, or monks shouldn't see a good movie or something like that. I mean, not like that. I mean, there's something about pleasure which is similar to what you're going to have in paradise.

And that's absolutely why you come to Buddhism class. I mean, you want to get rid of the bad things and you want to be in some kind of pleasant state. That's the whole thing.

So, we can see the pleasure and imagine what it would be like to be in paradise. That's good. But we can also see the suffering and wonder where it came from in studying Dharma.

Go to Dharma class. So, supposedly, a human birth is the best for that. So, the Chumbap in the Madhyamika Avatara says, what if...

Oh, by the way, that's why it's called Chumbap, the stream. It refers to the stream that a praita sees when they run up to get a drink after not having water for six months or so. And they lean down and then suddenly the water becomes blood and toss and vomit and things like that.

So, it refers to that. What the whole scripture goes into is that if you have, in a room, sitting around a table, a pha, a praita, and a human being, and you set a glass of water in the middle of them, what happens? What do they see?

Yeah, it's very beautiful. It's very interesting. I'll give you the reading before you go home tonight.

We'll pass it out. Maybe you can go find it, actually. It's in one of those suitcases.

Oh, it's in the backpack. And it's... There's two different readings there.

It's not the one from the Diamond Sutra. It's the other one. And they all sit around the table and they look at that glass of water.

So, what happens? You know, what's going on? How does Madhyamaka explain that glass of water?

And this is the subject of emptiness. This is very, very intimately related to the subject of emptiness. So, what does the praita see?

Oh, wait. Start with the human.

[Speaker 2]
Water.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, the human sees a nice glass of water, you know, just a normal glass of water. And the praita sees some blood vomiting. What does the pha see?

By worldly thought. Yeah, they call it mrta, nectar. You know, see some wonderful ambrosia, you know, some wonderful, beautiful liquid, you know.

So, then you get into the whole question of what's really there. You know, what is really there? And that's, that's a very...

And what's going on when three different beings look at the same object and see three different, completely different things? So, I guess the first question would be, can one object be three things at once? And then they say, they're very careful in the scripture, they say, can this glass of liquid...

That's very cool. Can this glass of liquid be blood, water, and ambrosia at the same time? So, that's the first question.

Can it be? In a debate, they won't let you, they want yes or no. And that's how you get in trouble.

They can be all... I don't... Okay, so let's say yes.

Okay, then they say, so I'll debate, you know. It's a, it's a tenet of all Buddhist schools that physical matter has a quality of blocking. In other words, you can't fit two physical objects in the same space at the same time.

That's a tenet of Buddhism. You know, the nature of a tangible object is that once you, if you have one object there and you push the other one into its space, the first one has to leave. I mean, that's a, that's a tenet of Buddhism.

That's even the name of, the name of physical object is that something strikable, you know, blocking. It blocks the presence of the other object. So, wouldn't the blood block the presence of the water?

This is a big debate in the monastery. You know, how could it be three? Wouldn't the blood, if it were all blood, couldn't that blood block out the water?

And if it were water, wouldn't the water block out the ambrosia? And how could you have three different physical objects occupying the same space at the same time? Ha!

I mean, that's what they say if you say yes. If you say no, you get another problem.

[Speaker 2]
I mean, the argument's a little artificial to begin with. They're all perceiving liquid, they're all perceiving liquid in a, in a glass. You kind of made an artificial argument.

No. One might be an elephant, one might see a liquid, one might see spiders and scorpions. You're kind of limiting the argument.

Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
Ultimate ambrosia. You see, a different kind of ambrosia. Oh, now you're in trouble.

[Speaker 2]
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

[Speaker 1]
What is it actually? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Now, that's a big question.

What is it actually? I'll get out of, he gave a pretty good argument, so I'll just skip to you. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

What is it actually? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Oh, by the way, the scripture says, it's interesting, and I, this is what it says, and you can read it.

It's a little complicated. It might, you know, these are monastic textbooks, and they're kind of hard, but it says, insofar as when they're looking at the glass of water, sorry, the glass of liquid, okay, there's three different aspects appearing to each different one. So it's not, it's only a part of the glass of liquid which is appearing as blood, and a part is appearing as ambrosia, and a part is appearing as water.

So that's pretty easy. And then they say, if the preta reaches out and takes personal possession of the water and perceives the whole water, it all becomes blood and pus, and they say that's not contradictory. You know, then, if he has a unique experience of the glass of liquid, then it is purely and totally pus and blood.

And so long as three people are looking at it, three different beings from three different realms, by the way, are looking at it, then it's not contradictory for different aspects of it to be showing to three different people. So you get out of the problem of it being all blood, or all water, you know, or ambrosia. That's it.

[Speaker 2]
That's like, like, the physics of shrinkage.

[Speaker 1]
I don't know about that, but what's that? Like a photon sometimes acts like a wave and sometimes like a particle. And it actually has the potential to be both, I like it, yeah.

It's exactly emptiness. I mean, that's exactly what Buddhism says. That's exactly true, according to Buddhism.

So, cool. The physicists are getting there. OK.

So, you can't say, what is it really? Then you get in trouble. Or can you?

Is it really water? Yeah, I think you have to say that. I think, you know, I kept bugging him that he couldn't do that, but I'll let you do it.

It really is... Let's call him it. It really is...

You deserve it. Yeah, always. Yeah, it really is water.

And it really is blood. And it really is ambrosia. And one object can be all three.

And by the way, that's the emptiness of the glass of liquid. You know, it's not one way or the other by itself. It depends on your perceptions, which are, how do you get them?

Say it a little better. No, the karma forces you to. The karma forces you to interpret it that way.

You don't have a choice. I think that's important to say because I always thought that... I always somehow thought, and I think a lot of Buddhists think, that if I perceived emptiness directly, then after that I could choose.

But it's not true. It's not a voluntary thing. I may get to choose to a point where I truly perceive that the glass of liquid is nothing inherently.

It's none of those three inherently. I may reach a point like that. But can I then make it ambrosia by decision?

[Speaker 2]
Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
I can't. You can't. Because it's forced on me by other...

It's not under my control. If I wanted to be ambrosia, if I really want the glass of water to be, for me, ambrosia in a Buddha paradise, what do I have to do? No.

That's too easy. Yeah. And that's the time lag, okay?

The classic time lag. You might as well know, okay? It's the classic time lag.

I mean, there's nothing... You may perceive emptiness this afternoon, but it's not going to help you because you still have all those bhaktyaks. I mean, of course it helps you, but...

It's not going to change the world at that moment because you have all those old bhaktyaks that are dictating how you see things. In other words, because things are empty, then being good has some meaning. And we'll talk more about that.

But it's only because they're empty that being good has any point to it. Because they have the potential to be anything, because they are nothing until your karma forces you to see them one way or the other. It becomes very important to be ethical.

Good. You know, it becomes extremely important because that's the only way that water is going to turn to ambrosia for you. You can't...

It's not a question of deciding that it's going to be ambrosia. It's a question of what your karma is dictating to you, whether you want it or not. So the only way to get it to turn into ambrosia is to be ethical, is to be good.

That's the only way it ever will be. You had a question? Excuse me?

Excuse me? Say again?

[Speaker 2]
What is in the glass? What is in the glass?

[Speaker 1]
Oh, it's this. It's that our goal, and the goal of every living creature, is to be happy.

[Speaker 2]
Okay.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, okay. This is a classic question. And the question is this.

I'm looking at him again, okay. And the question is, if I stop focusing on the person, on the image in my mind, and now I start focusing on the sense data, the colors, the shapes, this relative shading or not, the shadows or non-shadows, if I start focusing on them, are they reality? You see?

You see, are they fixed? Okay, I admit that my image of you, as a human or as a mountain of threatening stuff, is dependent upon my karma, my projections, forced on me by my past karma. But what about the data, the very data on which I base my projections?

The liquid. Let's stop talking about blood, water or ambrosia and start talking about the wet stuff. Okay.

Is there really wet stuff there? Now I'm shifting levels, right? Here's the level of looking at water and now I'm looking at the wetness.

In Buddhism, it's called wetness and flowing. Lenshi Sherwa Churyutini. Definition of the element of water is that which is wet and flowing.

Okay, so now I shift my focus. I go from the water and I start focusing on the sense data, the wetness and the flowing. Is that inherently existent?

You know? Is that something which is really there, independent of my projections? Well, the minute I move my focus down to that, it's again a projection.

Okay. HANI DAG PA'I PHYIR MA NYID It means... It's a very beautiful proof of emptiness.

You can keep going down levels. Okay, what about the left side of the water? What about the bottom of the left side of the water?

What about the right side of the bottom of the left side of the water? And you can keep going down, down, down into deeper levels, component parts. But each time you shift levels, again, it's a projection.

You will never find the thing. You know, that's when lamas get up and start talking about you, you know, where is you? Which used to confuse me a lot.

Well, I'm right here, you know. Yeah, my projection of me is right here. That's okay.

And that, by the way, that operates, it functions. That's the big thing about Nagarjuna, you know. It still works.

Didn't say it's artificial, but it works. And you can suffer, or you can have pleasure, or you can be in paradise, or you can be in samsara, but that's because the projections are real. They make your reality.

And you can't get out of them by choosing. They're forced on you. So, every time you change levels, it's again a projection, you see.

And if you look for something fixed, that's not a projection, you'll never find it. And that's one of the proofs for emptiness.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, well, I mean, doesn't water have any properties depending on their projections?

[Speaker 1]
No, that's the whole point. The minute you start looking at the properties, that's another projection based on their properties. So, that is something static.

Water is static. So, would that mean to say it has no real existence outside of application? Right, exactly.

Exactly. Does that make it unreal? Does that mean you can't drown in it?

No. And that's a very important point. Very few people get to the first question you had.

Even fewer people get to the realization you can still drown in it. You know. For you?

[Speaker 2]
For you.

[Speaker 1]
As you think of it, it's there.

[Speaker 2]
It's there.

[Speaker 1]
If there were no one to... By the way, when they give the definition of the existence as samyikpa, this used to worry me, okay? Samyikpa yubay tsenay.

Definition of existence is that which is perceived by a valid perception. So, I used to ask my lama, what about the tree in the forest? That's your question.

When you go out of the room, what happens to the water? Does it cease to exist? In the Kadampa Center, in the basement of this building, we all go home tonight, does that glass of water disappear until tomorrow morning?

Or where does it go? If there's no longer any pramana which is perceiving that glass of water, then does it fail to exist if the definition of existence is that which is perceived by a pramana? And they say, well, unfortunately there's this omniscient being.

You see? There's never a tree in the forest. According to Buddhism.

[Speaker 2]
A Buddha is omniscient. So, Buddha is conscious, so he can value perceiving that water.

[Speaker 1]
It's all-knowingness. He knows everything. So, in one moment, a Buddha is perceiving every object that exists.

So, it's established by the tsema or the pramana or the valid perception of a Buddha. And even, by the way, by your thinking of the water. You know, if you go home tonight and you still have any memory or awareness of the water, and that changes per school, the water is still there.

It's still standing. It doesn't exist. No.

No, really not. If all of us stopped having the karma imposed on us to see that water, the glass would break, and the water would flow out and dry up.

[Speaker 2]
Oh, yeah. Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
Is it anything other than a projection forced on you by karma? So, that's the idea of the glass of water. And that's the idea that one object can be really three different objects for those three different people.

And there's no contradiction for that. And in fact, that's the way things are. And that's why you're having the experiences that you have right now.

That's the... That's what the glass of water... It's very famous in Manu Mika, the example of the glass of water and how three different people can perceive it as three different things.

Does it apply to a person at your office who is not very pleasant? You know, like all of us have this person at the office that we don't get along with. I don't know if you're a normal person, okay?

I have. You know, it depends on how big your office is maybe, but they say that... You know, I think almost everybody has some person in their life that really pushes your buttons, you know.

And just every time you meet them, they push your buttons. And there's something about this person that when you meet them it just doesn't click and things go wrong and you feel bad and they seem to be hurting you or bad to you. Do other people see the person in the same way?

Some. In fact, every additional person that sees them that way is good because you feel confirmed, you know. You feel like, he really is bad, you know.

And you strive to get other people to see it your way, you know. You'd rather have other people dislike him and agree with you than like him. Because then you would be convinced that you were right and this really is a bad person.

So, when the person's bad to you, is it just your perception or are they really being bad to you? Is it just your perception or are they really being bad to you? It's a quick trick question, okay.

It is your perception, so they are being bad to you. Really. Really, you know.

Uh... It's very interesting. Um...

I don't mean to say, and that's another thing about this particular lesson, is that there's things called attitude changes, you know, where you go to your psychologist and they say, go to work and try to try to think of the person as your father or somebody you love and then maybe you'll be able to overcome your dislike from them. In fact, Shantideva says that, you know, uh... for certain cases.

Shantideva, except till you get to the last chapter, is full of these little psychological tricks of if you can't control yourself and you don't understand emptiness, well, you better use these temporary patches called lojong and go and do anything to trick yourself out of being bad because you're collecting all those megabytes of stuff, you know. Even if you don't... Nagarjuna gets into it in his letter to the king.

The first half of the book is how to prevent yourself from collecting bad karma. And in the case of a monk or the lady, for example, try to think of her as your sister and don't have desire, or try to think of her as your mother or try to imagine the poop coming out of her rear end or anything to make it... They go through this whole thing and try to make...

try to focus on the bad parts and the ugly parts, and then you won't have desire for this object. Or try to conceive of the person as being a close relative with whom you'd never have that kind of desire. And then they...

suddenly Nagarjuna stops and says, but that's not going to really help. You have to understand the emptiness of this person, you know. And then the whole rest of the book is about emptiness.

And it's very... it's very beautiful, you know. So, really, what's the definition of nirvana?

Do you know? It's nyundup malupar pangbe sosor tanggo. Say, nyundup...

malupar... pangbe... sosor...

tanggo. Nyundup...

[Speaker 2]
malupar...

[Speaker 1]
pangbe... sosor... tanggo.

Nyundup means bad thoughts, kleshas, bad thoughts in your mind, mental afflictions. And all of the spiritual blockages that are caused by them. So, nyundup means that.

Basically all the mental afflictions. Anger, jealousy, hatred, desire. All of those things.

Malupar means in their entirety. Pangbe means you got rid of them. Sosor tanggo means a state of being rid of them which is caused by sosor togpa.

Sosor togpa is... It's a very weird word. And it means individually realized.

So, you know, everyone's trying to figure out what individual... Because that's important. That's the definition of nirvana.

Nirvana is getting rid of all of your bad thoughts through the method of sosor tog. So, what is sosor tog? Sosor means one by one.

Togpa means to understand. But it all refers to the path of seeing. It all refers to the perception of emptiness.

Directly. So, we got about like 20 minutes left and then I think we should quit. But I'd like to talk about...

We've talked about emptiness from a logical point of view. Now, what about from an experiential point of view? Then you get into the teaching of the five paths.

There are five paths in Buddhism. Five spiritual levels that you go through. The definition of path in Buddhism is togpa.

It means realizations. So, path in Buddhism in this sense means not what it means in Lam Rim, for example. The steps of the path.

Steps of the path means first do this, then do that, then do that, then do that. It's like a path of action. But five paths means five spiritual levels.

Say, tsog. Djor. Djor.

[Speaker 2]
Tong. Gom. Milok.

One more time. Tsog. Djor.

Tong. Gom.

[Speaker 1]
Milok. Tsog Lam. First path of accumulation, okay?

Path of collection. But what it is is you achieve this when you are able to develop true disgust with this condition of this life, you know. And that takes, that's a big threshold to get over.

It's extremely rare that a person truly gets fed up with the condition that every nice thing turns sour. I mean, when your wife dies or you're getting a car accident, most of the good Buddhists I know had some disaster in their life, you know. It takes a, it takes a very major event to, to make you admit the way things are.

And that's that any good thing you have in your life is, is going to be lost. It's going to, it's going to turn bad. And you might as well admit it now and do something about it.

Or you can go on kidding yourself, you know. So, so that's the stage of renunciation. If you get to that point, and it's not a big spiritual, you know, you don't have to be a great thinker to see that things go bad.

I mean, read the obituaries, you know, I mean. Or, you know, every famous person you ever know, every handsome movie star, every strong athlete, you know, every intelligent thinker, they lose it. You always lose it.

So you can either wait till it happens or you can do something about it before it happens. And that's renunciation. And it's not like being negative.

You can still enjoy ice cream, and I do. And it doesn't mean you can't enjoy things, you know. You enjoy the nice things, but you have to find a way that they're not fattening, you know.

What I mean is, you have to find a way to find the ice cream that doesn't make you suffer ultimately, you know. You have to find a way to find pleasures that don't turn bad, you know. That's the whole purpose.

You have to find this method. So it's not a big thing to say life is bad. It's not, it doesn't require thinking of something that you didn't think of yet, or trying to make it something that it's not.

It really is, you know. And you don't have to be a big genius, and you don't have to be depressed about it. But, but you just see it for what it is.

And you don't go running after things that are gonna turn bad on you. You go for the big things. Go for big pleasures.

As Sakyapandita said, dewa chung na chape, dewa chama tamisi. If you get attached to small pleasures like ice cream, you'll never reach high pleasures like nirvana, you know. I mean, you have to make a choice sometimes.

And it doesn't mean you have to deny the pleasures of this life. Enjoy them. I mean, I don't see the Dalai Lama being grumpy and depressed and, you know, he's one man who knows how to enjoy ice cream probably, you know.

I mean, he really does. And he takes enjoyment out of things. Enjoy the good things, but find a way that they're not going to turn bad.

You know, try to find nirvana. So the first path is renunciation, when you get true renunciation. And it's not a big deal.

Just admit the way things are. It's not a leap of faith to pretend that something's there and it's not there. That's the way it really is.

Just admit it. And stop running after things that aren't going to make you happy. But enjoy them.

But don't spend your time trying to get them. That they will come. It's a side, it's a byproduct.

Joelam is the path of preparation. Second path. It means path of preparation.

You are preparing for what, do you guess? Preparing for the perception of emptiness on the third path. Okay.

The second path is path of preparation. It is marked by intellectual understandings of emptiness. There are four stages in it.

And during this period, you are getting warm. In fact, one of them is called getting warm. You know, you're getting hot, you're getting close, you know.

And you start having all these understandings about emptiness. It's a direct result of being taught properly emptiness. It's a direct result of someone taking the authentic scriptures and teaching you properly what emptiness is.

From the, you know, Nagarjuna and Tsongkhapa and from the real people who knew. It's a direct result of classroom hours. And then contemplating those things.

So during that path, you start to have intellectual understandings of emptiness. In the last moments of that path, which are called peak, it's called peak, you have a direct perception of relative reality. It's very interesting.

Not ultimate reality, which happens shortly afterwards. But at the highest stages of the path of preparation, you truly perceive what you are doing about imaging those data. You see, you understood it when I explained it to you.

But at that stage in the path of preparation, you will actually catch yourself doing it. And you will see that there isn't any guy out there. There's colors and shapes.

And I'm perfecting some kind of image in my mind. And what I'm watching when I look at him is an image. I'm not looking at him.

I'm looking at an image. I'm looking at a mental image. I'm not looking at him.

And that is what they call relative truth or relative reality. Or dependent origination, if you will. Same thing.

Okay, you catch yourself doing it. You know that, you see yourself doing it. And then you finally understand that you never saw a guy.

Ever. All these years you thought you were seeing these things and you weren't. And I can explain it and you can understand it from my words, but when it happens it's a different thing.

When you actually perceive it directly. You go into meditation. Somebody asked me about shamatha, shinai, right?

You go into meditation. You must have been very good at meditating. You must have practiced it for years.

You must have done it like at least an hour, an hour and a half a day. Deep meditation. And your mind goes into a different level.

We are in a level called the desire realm. And in that state of meditation your mind goes into what's called the form realm. It's the next realm up.

And it's the first part of the form realm. And it's the introductory part of the first part of the form realm. Your mind must be and will be on that day, in that particular level.

Your body is still in the desire realm. And based on that level, based on that state of concentration or meditation, you can see emptiness directly. And only on that level.

Your mind has to be capable of reaching that level, which is a totally different question. That's the whole question of learning to meditate properly. It's just getting to that level because you can't see emptiness directly unless you're at that level.

So, and that's, that you have to perfect shamatha. You have to know how to get into shamatha to get to that level. And only at that level can you perceive emptiness directly.

And then you perceive emptiness directly. And it can last for like 15 minutes. And, and you're not aware of any relative object because this is a direct perception of ultimate reality.

So you cannot perceive a relative object. So do you think to yourself, I did it? Yes or no?

No, I'm a relative object. I, my colors, my shapes, my mind, my body, those are all relative object. They require imaging to see.

You can't even see it. So how could you say, I'm perceiving emptiness, finally I did it, you know. No, nothing like, you cannot have that perception at that moment.

You cannot even have any perception, obviously no sense perceptions, but no other mental perceptions. You can't have any other mental perceptions. It's pure, direct perception of ultimate reality.

And it lasts maybe 15, 20 minutes. And then you, and then you come down out of that. And then there's a whole story and we'll talk about that.

And maybe I'll save it for tomorrow. Then you perceive the Four Noble Truths directly. The word noble is a mistake of translation.

What is it in Sanskrit? It's Arya. Okay, it's Arya.

Arya, you know, Hitler misused it, forget that one. And it's not the tribe of people who came to India, although it probably means, it kind of came from that, but Arya means superior, or special, or elite. Elite's not bad.

Elite in the sense of you are now one of the people who has seen emptiness directly. There's only two kinds of beings in the universe. And I compare it, and I'm sorry if it's a bad comparison, but you're either a virgin or you're not a virgin, okay.

And you can think of your life as one long stream of time. And I like the thing of virginity because after that you're never the same. I mean, and you know, there's a point in your life where you lost it, and after that you're never the same.

You, I mean, you're either one or the other. Every being on the planet, every human is one or the other. And at some point in their life they changed.

And forever after they were different. Perceiving emptiness is exactly the same. Perceiving emptiness directly.

There's only two kinds of beings in the universe. They're either the elite or they're not the elite. They're either Aryas or they're not Aryas.

And there's that big division. And it's the most basic and important division of all living creatures. You're either an Arya or you're not.

You've either seen emptiness directly or you haven't seen emptiness directly. And just after you see it directly and you come down out of that meditation, your mind is back in the desire realm, then you perceive the Four Noble Truths, which are really the Four Arya Truths. They're the Four Arya Truths.

The Noble is a bad translation of the word Arya, Patpa. And it means a person who's seen emptiness directly. Why do they call them Arya Truths?

Because right after you come out of that perception of emptiness directly, you perceive those, those four things directly. And the four aspects of the four things directly. Sixteen total.

You perceive them directly. You, you perceive the Truths, those four Truths, those four facts directly. And, and they're confirmed by the knowledge of a person who's just seen emptiness directly.

So they are right on. They are absolutely true. Because they are something which is being understood by a person who has just come out of the direct perception of emptiness.

You see those four Truths one by one and that's Sosor. Sosor Tokpa. So we go back to the definition of nirvana.

We just did a big circle, okay? That's, to see those four Truths one by one, after seeing emptiness directly, is part of the definition of nirvana. The definition of nirvana was, Nyundra Manobhara Bambhisattva Sangha, was getting rid of your mental afflictions by way of having seen emptiness directly.

And that's, that's the only way you can get rid of your mental afflictions. It's the only way you can ever get rid of your mental, all the lobjong texts, the mental training texts, are band-aids, until they get to that part. You know, all this thing about trying to think of the guy at work, your enemy as your friend, and trying to think about how much they can take, your enemy is your enemy.

In the sense that, they hurt you, they want to hurt you, they're trying to hurt you. You know, I mean from that point of view an enemy is an enemy. You know, you can try to think that when they hurt you, they're teaching you something, but what is his intent?

What is he out to do? I mean, it's absolutely to harm you. He wants to hurt you.

You can try to imagine it, you can try to conceive of it as something else and benefit from that, but the reality is that the enemy is hurting you. They are hurting you. What do you do when they hurt you?

That's, that's the big question. You can only know what to do when you see emptiness directly. I mean, you have to see emptiness directly and then you will truly know what to do with this person who tries to, whose intent on hurting you, who fits the definition of an enemy.

And that's why it's really, you have to understand emptiness to do the right thing. To behave properly, you have to understand emptiness. We'll talk more about that tomorrow, but basically the definition of Gana is getting rid of your bad thoughts permanently because you have seen emptiness directly.

That's the only way you can. And so if you, if you're interested in getting rid of your, think of how it would be not to have any bad thought for the rest of your life, you know. I mean, I wish I could, it would be interesting.

You know, no more jealousy, no more anger, never irritated with anyone. Only happy, only loving, only sharing, you know, incapable of a bad thought. I mean, and that's, by the way, the fourth path.

Okay, so I better finish the five path. And then we'll go. That's called Gom Lam.

Gom Lam means path of, that word Gom can either mean meditation or habituation. Third one was the path of seeing. I'm sorry, we did it, but we didn't name it.

Tom Lam, path of seeing. What do you see directly? You must add the word directly.

Big difference between seeing it intellectually, which happens on path number two, and seeing it directly, which happens on path number three. Big, big difference. So third one's path of seeing.

Fourth one is path of habituation. Some people call it path of meditation, but habituation means the whole process of the years and years it takes to put what you experienced into practice and use it to collect good karma, you know, to use it to learn to be pure. And that can take seven lifetimes.

I mean, very typical is seven lifetimes. And that's a long time. It's using your knowledge of emptiness to stop creating bad deeds, to purify yourself.

That's path number four. And then path number five is, it's called the path of no more learning, miloplah. And if you don't have bodhicitta, if you don't have the desire to achieve Buddhahood for all living beings, when you reach path number five, that's nirvana.

That is nirvana. You eliminate permanently your mental afflictions. So could you achieve nirvana this afternoon and still come tomorrow and look like the same person?

Yeah. It's a mental thing. It's not a physical thing.

It's just removing your mental afflictions. You could have achieved it centuries ago. I wouldn't know.

Unless I could read your mind, I can't know. If you achieved it tonight and came here tomorrow, you'd still look the same, you know, most likely. So it's just a permanent removal of your bad thoughts.

That's the definition of nirvana. If you do have bodhicitta, if under the influence of bodhicitta you reach that same state, you become a fully enlightened Buddha. You are a Buddha.

So miloplah, path number five for a person on the Mahayana track, is Buddhahood. All Buddhahood. Path number one, by the way, just for you people who care, path number one for Mahayana track is reaching bodhicitta, the true desire to reach enlightenment for other people.

It's not just getting fed up with life. And the Lama's explained it as meaning getting fed up of life for other people as well as yourself. That's bodhicitta.

So it's not contradictory. It's the same thing. So that's...

we'll talk more tomorrow about the path of seeing. I mean experiential part of it. You know, we'll go on with that and why it ties in with the karma and ethical living.

And then finally, if there's anything you can do to clean up the old bok choks that are hanging around in your mind, wherever they are. Right? Anybody have any questions or anything?

[Speaker 2]
No, I think that's why, that's why only perceiving emptiness can remove them permanently.

[Speaker 1]
Because basically if you constantly contemplated this process by which your own bad karmas create your reality, then you would never want to do anything bad. I mean if you really understood what we said today, what we talked about today, the last thing you'd want to do is, is do any kind of bad deed. You know, I mean that's the whole point.

You see, that's why I started out saying, you know, when I was first starting in Buddhism, I couldn't see the connection. You know, what's emptiness? How am I going to change tomorrow if I see emptiness?

You know, how does emptiness help me be a good person? Well, if you understand how the projections of karma need emptiness to operate, you would, you would, oh, quite the opposite. You'd avoid it like the plague.

You know, you would never ever want it. The minute it started, you would, you would run away from it. You know, and there's two ways of running away.

I mean one is understanding and overcoming. And the other is what's called concentric circle theory in Buddhist monks' vows. We have concentric circle theory.

And that's, you can say the middle circle is breaking your vow of celibacy. The second circle is, is ever kissing a lady. The third circle is ever being alone in a room with a lady to kiss her.

The fourth circle is ever entering a house where there's a lady who's not accompanied by someone else. The fifth circle is not ever, is ever going out of your monastery, you know. So, if you never go past the first circle, you never get to the, the middle, the middle point where you break your vow.

So, for what it means for you, about bad karma or a normal person, it means, if you don't have a strong enough understanding yet, prajnaparamita, if you don't have the perfection of wisdom perfected yet, avoid the, avoid the circumstances, you know. If you know that you get bad when you get tired, then don't get tired, you know. Avoid getting tired, you know.

If you know that you lose your temper when you're overworked, for God's sake, you know, at any cost, avoid being overworked, you know. It's, it's better to be poor and underworked than to, to engage in overwork, which you know is gonna make you have a bad, do a bad karma, you know. This is concentric circle theory, you know.

If, if you are vulnerable to certain bad deeds under certain conditions, then avoid those conditions at all costs, you know. And don't let yourself get close to those conditions. Because once the bhaktiak is planted, it's really hard to get it out.

You don't want to wait that long. It's like, it's like the oak tree on the top of the temple, you know. It's better to throw it, seriously, much easier to throw the acorn out in the street, you know, really.

That's what I'm saying. And that's why the first five chapters of Shantideva or anybody else is, okay, here's how to be patient if you don't understand emptiness. You know, try to understand that it raises your blood pressure and, you know, I mean, try to...

Q.

[Speaker 2]
Could you say something, some people have expressed an interest in Buddhist refuge. Can you just say a little bit about that, I guess?

[Speaker 1]
A. It's a great time. I mean, if you take the three objects of refuge, which are what?

Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. Okay, there's, there's a thing, this is a whole thing from the monastic textbooks. If you wanted to study it, it would take about a week.

And it's beautiful, it's really beautiful. But basically there's two kinds of, there's a difference between the Buddha and the Buddha jewel. And there's a difference between the Dharma and the Dharma jewel.

And there's a difference between the Sangha and the Sangha jewel. The jewel is the one you take refuge in. And the jewel has two flavors, two versions.

One we call actual and one we call figurative. Okay, so figurative Buddha jewel. Now, the person, the thing you go to refuge to is the jewel and not the thing by itself.

So the jewel, the Buddha jewel, the Buddha ratna, is, there's a figurative one and there's a real one, the literal one. Okay, the figurative one in the case of the Buddha ratna is, is this image, is an image of the Buddha. That's a, that's the figurative Buddha ratna.

We don't go to refuge to the Buddha. I mean, you can come in here and sit down and, and, and ask this piece of bronze for protection and not much will happen, you know. It's, we need pictures of the Buddha and they're important and they have a function in taking refuge.

You can imagine the Buddha because of this piece of bronze. But obviously the literal Buddha ratna is what? It's that real being and it's particularly the Dharmakaya, particularly the Dharmakaya, which is the ultimate reality of the Buddha.

It's the, it's actually the emptiness of the Buddha's mind, okay. That's particularly what you're taking refuge in. You would like, you seek protection in the Buddha.

That's, that's one kind of refuge. The second refuge, you could say, Dharma, what's, what's figurative Dharma refuge and what's literal Dharma jewel? What's the figurative Dharma jewel?

We'll start with Sangha. Sangha's easier. What's the figurative Sangha jewel?

What's the one that you can look at and see and, it's monks and nuns. Anybody who's wearing this red cloth, if you're a Tibetan Buddhist, you know, this is the Sangha. It's, it's the, figuratively it's the Sangha jewel.

They represent the refuge of Sangha. But what's the real Sangha? Anyone who's perceived emptiness directly.

Perceiving emptiness directly is what really saves you from samsara. You know, it's really nice, it's cool, that the, the refuge you go to should be a person who has seen emptiness directly. That, that's the real protection, is, is, is a person who can explain it to you.

Then what's the second, what's the Dharma jewel? What's the figurative one? It's the books, it's the papers, it's the teachings, it's the sound of the teachings as someone teaches them.

And what's the real Dharma? It, it is the perception of emptiness. It's interesting.

You know, it's the cessations and the paths in the mind of an Arya Bodhisattva. So it's the perception, again, it's the perception. That's what can protect you.

And then Buddha, with the Buddha Ratna we're mainly stressing his Dharmakaya, which you perceive during the perception of emptiness directly. The emptiness you perceive is, you do perceive the Buddha directly also. So really when you take refuge, you're taking refuge in mainly, the, the perception of, the direct perception of emptiness.

By the way, if you saw Buddha directly during your perception of emptiness, or immediately thereafter, actually during, because you're seeing the emptiness of the Buddha, would you ever doubt the, and, and if you saw your future lives directly, and if you knew you weren't crazy, if you had this other perception that you were correct, would you ever doubt Buddhism again? No, you, you just wouldn't. And until that point you probably should or can or, or will.

But, but at that moment you never doubt, you cannot ever doubt it again. You meet the Buddha directly. You see your future lives, and many other things.

We'll talk about tomorrow. You, you could no longer ever have doubt about it. Also you could never again think that the way you saw things before was correct.

Even though you are now forced to see them again that way after you come out of the direct perception of emptiness. Very interesting. So there's only two mental afflictions that are eliminated by seeing emptiness directly.

The path of seeing has only, I'm sorry, out of 84,000, only two mental afflictions that you can never have again. And one is doubt about the path, and one is that, that you believe the way you see things is correct. Those two, that's the only two things you can never have again.

So, so why should it protect you to see emptiness? Yeah. It's because emptiness and, and acting good are so intimately related, you could say married, huh?

That, that, that it protects you. Because having seen emptiness you will never again want to, you may do out of control, and you do do out of control, but, but you would never knowingly, wantonly do something bad, because it's just suicide, it's self, it's suicide. You know, you're only hurting yourself, and you, when you understand emptiness then you understand that perfectly.

So the last thing you'd want to do if someone yelled at you at work would be to yell back, you know. That's the answer to your question. I think we got there.

You know, at that moment you have a choice. You know, the karma has brought you an ugly, red-faced, yelling boss. I have a couple of them, especially when the orders are late, and they're, they're in your face, and they're yelling at you, and, and if you understand their emptiness, which means that you're having this perception because it has been, it's being forced upon you by your past deeds, then the last thing you'd want to do is what?

Yeah, exactly. Do you want to perpetuate it? What, you like it?

You want to do it again? Okay, yell back at him. You want to meet this guy again?

Yell back. You know, if that's your only desire in life, if that's your goal is to meet this face again, yell back at him. Be angry.

You know, feel, let your heart start beating faster and get red and say something back. Because if you want to see him again, that's the, it's not the best way, it's the only way to see him again. And, and that's, that's the whole fourth path.

That takes you to the whole fourth path. So that's refuge. That's real refuge.

That's real protection. What else can protect you? During the Buddha's lifetime, his people were wiped out by, by a neighboring tribe.

And they came and ran behind him and hugged him for protection. And they were slaughtered touching him, holding him. They were slaughtered around him.

And, you know, the Buddha can't do anything from that point of view. There's certain blessings they can give that help you understand things. But, but if, if you don't obey the laws of karma, nobody can help you.

You know, they're laws. That's why they're called laws. They can't be broken even by the Buddha.

You know, the only thing that can protect us is, is, is understanding and the good behavior that understanding causes you to, I think that's a good place to stop. So we'll do, you have some prayers? Thank you.

[Speaker 2]
Thank you. This is the end.