Серия ежедневной практики, курс 08 — Сутра сердца: медитация на пустоту (2000, Сокел), занятие 2

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

[Speaker 1]
It's one thing to show you how the Heart Sutra is a plan for your life, but also I think that you should understand all the different words in the Heart Sutra, and then when you say it, it won't seem so strange to you. First I'll go over the title. It says, The Exalted One, the Lady of Conquest, the Sutra on the Heart of the Perfectionist Wisdom.

Exalted One in Tibetan is Pada, in Sanskrit is Arya, and those of you who know, this is what you call someone who is senior, he is director. Pada also means higher, like elevated, and here it means, it often refers to a Mahayana scripture. Lady of Conquest has a couple of meanings.

The Sanskrit, sorry, the Tibetan is Chamden Vema, and Chamden Vema means lady who has conquered. Conquered what? Beaten the negativities in themselves.

Overcome the negative parts of themselves, and realize all things in the universe. And that's just the Buddha. So conquer, conquest, means conquest of your negativities, and conquest of those things which prevent you from reaching enlightenment.

Lady, in Sanskrit, is Bhagavad Gita, she is feminine, and in Tibetan it's Chamden Vema. Vema means woman conqueror. And a couple of meanings, one is, wisdom is a feminine quality, whereas method is a male quality, and that's also especially in Tantra, that the woman's side, the feminine side, the nighttime side, and the wisdom side.

And then the male side, the day side, the white color, and method, or bodhisattva mind, bodhicitta compassion. So, since this book is mainly teaching emptiness or wisdom, it's given the woman's name. Now in Tibetan, the ma is also the negative, and one commentary says, Chamden Vema, emptiness is an absence of something.

Emptiness is a lack of something. So they say, the use of the feminine, which is also meaning an absence of something, something missing, emptiness is the lack of something. So they say that's an important reason called Chamden Vema.

Sutra means something by the Buddha. Heart of the perfection of wisdom. The heart of the Heart Sutra refers to the heart of the Buddha's teachings, which is the perception of emptiness.

That's all. Somebody asked me, why is the Heart Sutra called the Heart Sutra? It's that the perception of emptiness, by any means, study, thinking, contemplation, prayer, logic, or the direct perception at this high state, is the heart of the Buddha's teachings.

This decides whether you get out of here or not. You can be a nice person, you can be a compassionate person, you can have true, ultimate love for other beings, you can be a moral person, but if you don't understand emptiness, you will not get out of this life. It can't happen.

It won't happen. You must learn to see emptiness. You must study emptiness, and your actions have to be motivated by understanding emptiness.

Then they become perfections. Then they can get you out of suicide. Perfection here, those of you who have heard about Diamond Cutter, it has two meanings.

One is Buddhahood. I mean, perfection. Who's perfect?

Lord Buddha. Tara. People who are enlightened are perfect.

That's perfection. So what are these six perfections that we're supposed to be practicing? Why do they call them perfections?

Yes? You're not perfect yet, so how can you do perfections? Paro.

Say paro. Paro. Paro.

Paro. Paro. Paro.

Paro. Paro means the other side, meaning like Japan or California. Okay?

Like the other side of the ocean. It's called paro. In Sanskrit, paro.

To means to the other side. To the other side. And then in Sanskrit, you have to add a block of it.

M. Paro. And chenpa means gone.

Okay? Which is itta. In Sanskrit.

So the whole thing is paro. Itta. Or paramita.

[Speaker 2]
Okay?

[Speaker 1]
Gone to the other side. Okay? Now, you know, you're trying to practice the six perfections.

Not because you're perfect, but because they make you perfect. Okay? So the great lamas of the lineage have said, you know, really it's not paro to chenpa, it's really paro to chen...

Okay. Say paro. Paro.

Paro. To. To.

To. To. To.

To. To. Get to the other side.

It's really not the six perfections, it's the six perfectionizers. Okay? It should have been called perfectionizer.

Today it means either. Okay? Seriously, okay?

Makes you perfect. Okay? Doing what?

Giving then...

[Speaker 2]
Ethical way of life.

[Speaker 1]
Ethical way of life. Not getting angry. The art of not getting angry.

[Speaker 2]
Joyful effort.

[Speaker 1]
Joyful effort. Recite. Meditation.

Meditation and movement. Okay? And they get you to the other side.

What other side? To where that high school girlfriend thing doesn't happen. And where the death doesn't happen.

In that order. Okay? Okay, no problem.

I mean, that would be okay. Midlife would be alright. You know what I mean?

Those two problems. No, I mean the first one representing all the ups and downs of life. Those things didn't happen.

I always get pissed off when people get up and teach Buddhism and it's some kind of happy thing or, you know, you will leave a kinder person and blah blah blah. The real goal of Buddhism in the Heart Sutra You know, you don't have to get old. You don't have to die.

Just figure out this stuff and you don't have to go through a normal life. You go through a different level of life. A whole beautiful, incredible, holy, sacred, paradise level of life.

And then gasshi ne. You don't get old, you don't die. That's what Buddha's sales pitch.

He's not telling you friendship. He's not telling you you can be a nicer person. He's saying you can get to total bliss all the time and overcome the fact of aging and death.

Period. That's right in the middle. It's not that you'll live long enough to get to that part.

But that's the goal of Buddhism. That's the real goal. There's nothing less than that.

Don't let people sell you Buddhism as just a thing to be happy while you get old and die and lose everything holy and important to you. You know what I mean? The stakes are far too high and it works.

It really works. You can do it. You can pull it off.

That's Padma Ksitigarbha. That's the part here that says perfection of wisdom. Perfection of wisdom itself means roughly...

Anybody want to get embarrassed? Probably great. Shri Padmasambhava Shri Sakya Narayan Now you can describe the perfection of wisdom.

Shri Padmasambhava Shri Sakya Narayan Shri Padmasambhava Shri Sakya Narayan Is the definition of perfection of wisdom? Sure. Say it to them.

Say it to Shri Padmasambhava. To see emptiness, or to perceive emptiness, under the influence of ultimate love. That's all.

That's the perfection of wisdom. So it's not enough to see emptiness. By the way, I didn't say directly, did I?

Understand emptiness, perceive emptiness, under the influence of bodhicitta, of ultimate love. That's all. That's the perfection of wisdom.

That's the subject of what we're studying. So now you know how to tell people what the subject means. By the way, lady in the title has also been called you, like in love you.

So what's the you in love you? You know, I once tried to put in wine. And everybody got all excited.

And so that's the whole point, you know what I mean? It's the husband and the wife. And then they get together and they make kids.

And that's Buddhas. And you, the perfection of wisdom, the scriptures on the perfection of wisdom, are referred to as you, or mother, or wife. Meaning, they produce Buddhas.

All these little Buddhas running around. So the reason this is called lady, one other reason, is that this wisdom gives birth to enlightened beings. And in that sense, it's the mother.

And the second turning of the wheel, the scriptures on the perfection of wisdom, are often simply called you, the mother, or the lady, or the wife. Okay. By the way, the first part there is all to them transcended none.

And it has their, he bows down to enlightened beings and every warrior is saved. And it is a translation from Bodhisattva that works better in Ireland than Bodhisattva. So we started using it off camera.

And it actually gives you a good feeling for what, sattva means warrior. A warrior is like an enlightened warrior or something. So when you see warriors saved, you have to think Bodhisattva.

Okay. By the way, this version of the Heart Sutra is the ancient one. We're using, it came from the Kanya.

The one that's used in the monasteries nowadays is a little bit different. And each monastery has a slightly different version of it. Okay.

So, you know, if you get some guest who comes up and says, I don't know what this is, and half of it doesn't read right, tell them this is the very good thing here, Kanya edition, you know, 1732. All right. Something like that.

Okay. And that's all. This is an older edition.

Now the reason I wanted to use it is that we're working with a special commentary, which I'll do the name with. Say, dini. Dini.

Selve. Selve. Nima.

Nima. Dini. Dini.

Selve. Selve. Nima.

Nima. So some Lama says, what did you study last week? And you say, kshetabhimbo.

You know, Heart Sutra. That's the short name, by the way. Kshetabhimbo.

I'll put it up here. Kshetabhimbo. That's the short name in Tibetan.

You know, they don't say, papa. You say, kshetabhimbo. Heart of wisdom.

And then they say, well, was I getting mindless again? No, no. I'm just crying from the commentary.

Which one? Dini, selve, nima. Dini means emptiness.

Venkulini means tattva. Suchness. Suchness.

Selve, nima means sunlight upon suchness. Sunlight upon suchness. Meaning, the commentary is so powerful that it's like taking emptiness out and showing it in broad daylight.

The idea is to take it out of the dark box and stick it out in the California sunlight. Anyway, it's called sunlight on suchness. I'll give you the author's name.

We tried to go to the second-best monastery in the universe, Sarajay. They're waiting.

[Speaker 2]
They're trying to commentate. So we have to go to the best one.

[Speaker 1]
Say, jane. Jane. Tattva.

Tattva. Selve. Selve.

Selve. Selve. Selve.

Selve. Selve. Selve.

He mentioned some other things about the commentaries of the Bodhicitta, okay? I guess he was into sutras, which is not very common anymore. In the great group of monastics, this is not very common for people to study sutras directly.

But he wrote a great, beautiful, commentary on the heart sutra. He wrote Sunlight on Suchness. Okay, you're wrapping up.

Then the opening lines of the sutra, right? Page one, right in the middle. Dike?

You've heard this many times. Sutras often start out, they say, what is it, thus have I heard, or thus did I hear, or something like that. And this refers to, during Lord Buddha's time, his disciples listened and memorized what he said on the spot.

They didn't have video or cassettes. They actually, according to tradition, they were of a much higher intellectual level than you or me. They could easily understand and memorize, and memorize for their whole life, everything he ever taught.

Like if you said, what did Geshe Michael teach at Vajrapani in 1993? On the third day, they would just start saying it to you. You know what I mean?

Then there was a conference. There was a convocation after Lord Buddha passed away. And then different people came up and said, this is what I heard him say one time.

It's important to translate it, by the way, as once. There are three traditional ways of interpreting the words here. Once I heard this teaching.

Why does he say once? The first explanation, traditionally, is that it's rare to hear someone teach this thing. Like, Lord Buddha only taught the Heart Sutra once.

So the first meaning of once means he only taught it once. And I was lucky enough to be there when he taught it. So that's the first meaning of once I heard.

Second meaning is to let you know that this was written down by someone who was actually there. Somebody was actually there. Those of us who went on the last trip to India recently, you know, like I was at Shravasti, I had a chance to sit on the bricks where they think Lord Buddha taught the Diamond Cutter.

And just to sit there and imagine, there's still this beautiful platform and there's this beautiful courtyard in front of that, and you can imagine everyone sitting there and listening. It was very powerful. So the idea is that by saying once I heard, it means I was really there.

I was one of the fortunate people who was actually there. It's like you meet people who say, I was there when Lama Yeshe taught out. What was the desert teaching?

I forget where. I was at Yucca Valley. There are still people alive who can say, I was at Yucca Valley, I heard it, straight from Lama Yeshe's mouth.

You get this feeling from them. And that's the meaning of this first line. The last traditional way of interpreting that line is to remind us of the level of disciples in the olden days, that people could actually memorize the thing as it came out of Lord Buddha's mouth.

And 20 years later, they could recite it word for word, and then somebody wrote it down. So that's the meaning of once I heard this teaching. The conqueror was staying on Vulture's Peak.

Vulture's Peak, so-called, I didn't get to go, some of our group went, but the commentators from Tibet say, did it look like a vulture's head or something like that? I don't know. No?

Anyway, the traditional explanation is that it looks like a vulture's head, that all the rocks piled up looks like a vulture's head. In the Keep of the King, King means it was a small fiefdom in those days, and there was a king who owned that area. With him was a great gathering of monks and a great gathering of warrior saints.

The traditional explanation of this sentence is the great gathering of monks refers to some extraordinary monks of a Hinayana tradition who were there. Lower motivation. And then great gathering of warrior saints refers to bodhisattvas.

So there were people there present who were both ordained people of Hinayana tradition and ordained people of Mahayana tradition. Now, who were the students for whom it was spoken? That would take us about three days, seven hours a day.

Some people here had it at Seram Monastery. And it depends on who you ask. The mind-only school says what?

Yeah, they say that it was meant for the mind-only school. So does the mind-only school accept the wording of the Second Turning of the Wheel? Not literally, right?

Who does accept the wording of the Second Turning of the Wheel? Upper Madhyamika. And the mind-only school says about them that they are crazy.

And they say about the mind-only school that they misinterpreted it. So the whole thing, all these huge schools of thought, centuries of tradition have overlaid this simple statement, this little sutra here. There have been schools that interpreted this thing totally differently and said that Lord Buddha didn't mean this at all.

Everything he said here was just... you have to interpret it. He didn't mean anything he said here.

The mind-only school says nothing here was meant by Lord Buddha. That's a whole other story. By the way, there'd be another debate in the monastery.

Dige dage tuba du jin na do yinpe che. It are the words, once I heard this teaching, sutra. Dige dage tuba du jin na do yinpe che.

If you agree, you say yin. If you don't agree, you say ta ma du. Do yinpata.

You're telling me it's a sutra? Sangye gai yinpata. You're telling me it's the word of Lord Buddha?

Uh! In the monastery, uh means what the hell? Sangye gai yinpata.

You're telling me it's the word of Lord Buddha?

[Speaker 2]
Uh!

[Speaker 1]
Sangye ma yinpe ka ma yinpata. And it's not the word of somebody who's not a Buddha? Uh!

Sangye ma yingen gi ka ma yinpata. It's not spoken by a person who is not a Buddha. Once I heard this teaching.

By our Lord Buddha. Is the person who said that a Buddha or not? Sangye...

He's reporting it as a disciple. Sangye ma yinpe ka ma yinpata. Sutra.

This is sutra. I'm not talking tantra. Sangye ma yinpata.

So he's not a Buddha, right? So sangye gi ka ma yinpata. So it's not spoken by Lord Buddha.

Once I heard this teaching. Uh! Sangye yinpata.

So the person saying that is a Buddha. Sangye da sangye ma yinpata. He's both a Buddha and not a Buddha.

Uh! No. Sangye gi ka ayin.

Ayin means is there or isn't it? Yin nam. Those of you who did the grammar today.

Is Buddha's word or not? That sentence, once I heard this teaching. Is the Buddha's word or not?

Just answer.

[Speaker 2]
Is it in the kangyur? Is it? Kangyur.

Yeah. It's in the kangyur. Is the kangyur the record of the Buddha's teaching?

[Speaker 1]
Generally. It's been reported. This is just the guy reporting it.

This guy reporting it.

[Speaker 2]
So why did they carve it in the kangyur? Why did they carve it in the kangyur?

[Speaker 1]
Oh, kangyur is the page number. So the page numbers are in the kangyur. So the speech of the Buddha.

[Speaker 2]
Sangye ma yinpata.

[Speaker 1]
Is it sutra or not? It's not. It's not the word of Lord Buddha, right?

It's not the word of Lord Buddha. Sangye ka ma yinpata. Ka yinpata.

Ka yinpata. Yin te. Why?

Why? Yin, yin, yin.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, yeah.

[Speaker 1]
You have to understand there are three kinds of ka. Ka means word of Lord Buddha. One is jing gi lapay ka.

One is nangway ka. Je sum nangway ka. And one is shen ne sum pay ka.

Meaning, what the Buddha actually said from his own mouth is one kind of Lord Buddha's speech. The word of Lord Buddha. Those words which were spoken because Lord Buddha went into some deep state of meditation and forced his disciples to say things to each other and then came out and said, Oh, you guys are so smart.

That's called, you know, blessed speech or magical speech or something like that. And then there's a thing called je sum nangway ka, which means allowed. Meaning, Lord Buddha said, I allow you to put at the beginning of my sutras, I heard this once.

And you can consider that the sutra. That is the Heart Sutra. That is part of the Heart Sutra.

I didn't say it, but it is my word. You see what I mean? And you're allowed to say, that is allowed to be inserted into the sutra.

In his lifetime, he gave guidelines of what could be said was his and what wasn't. What he said and what he didn't say. And you know, if you become a teacher and you see yourself quoted in different places, it's amazing.

I mean, you got to have some kind of guidelines. I didn't say that. So, Lord Buddha gave guidelines and that is part of the sutra.

All right. Where were we? Oh, page two.

At a certain moment, the conqueror went into a deep meditation on the part of the teaching known as the awareness of the profound. Awareness of the profound is a code word, says the commentary, for the direct perception of emptiness. Lord Buddha, awareness means the state of mind that is perceiving emptiness.

And the profound means emptiness. So, at the beginning of the sutra, Lord Buddha himself actually goes into it. It doesn't specifically say a direct state of direct perception of emptiness, but Buddhas have no other kind of perception of emptiness.

Okay? So, we can assume he's in a direct perception of emptiness. In fact, at the beginning of the sutra, Lord Buddha spaces out and goes in.

Then he's not talking anymore. He's just sitting there in meditation. So, if you read Tibetan, Sammo Nangwa, Chökyam Trungpa Rinpoche says a little strange.

You know, he went into balanced meditation on the appearance of the profound. And what it means is, he went into the direct perception of emptiness. So, Lord Buddha is sitting there in the corner, directly perceiving emptiness.

At that moment, too, did the realized being, the great warrior, the lord of power and loving eyes, and we talked about all that, which means Avalokitesvara, Chenrezig, see into this one deep practice, the practice of the perfection of wisdom. Now, see into has been interpreted by people over the centuries. The actual word here in the Tibetan is almost the imperative.

Like, you have to see. And there have been huge discussions about what it means. But most of the commentators say it means he also had some kind of perception of emptiness at that time.

Lord Buddha goes into the direct perception of emptiness. And then Avalokitesvara, at that same time, goes into a perception of emptiness. Now, whether it's direct or not, we don't hear.

But Avalokitesvara is also going into a perception of emptiness. So, two people are spaced out. And he saw perfectly that the five heaps, the five parts to a person, were empty of any nature of their own.

We'll get into that later. What it means, five heaps, what it means to see that they're empty, we'll get into that later because it happens again later. And then, by the power of the enlightened one, the junior monk named Sariputra.

Junior monk is a little bit of a... It means... The Tibetan is Tse Dan Dampa.

Tse Dan Dampa means a monk with time. And then the commentators in the Vinaya say monk with time means monk with time to go. Meaning a young monk.

Meaning, you know, relatively junior monk within that Sangha. Now, like Sabuddhi in the Diamond Cutter Sutra, throughout the sutra he's called the junior monk. Then the last word of the sutra, the last sentence says, and then the elder, Sabuddhi, you know, like they reveal who he really is.

And then the commentators say he's Manjushri. He's just Manjushri in disguise. So all these innocent guys who ask dumb questions in a Dharma class, you've got to be careful.

I mean, Sabuddhi was apparently one of the most irritating... I shouldn't say that. But he kept popping up questions all the time.

And then Lord Buddha had to answer them. And then later on the commentators would say they were just, he was the fall guy, or what do you call it? The straight man.

They would agree mentally, telepathically, you know, you ask me that question and I'll pretend to struggle with it and then everybody will understand emptiness better.

[Speaker 2]
Is there an actual historical figure associated with this?

[Speaker 1]
No, his name was... Yeah, there was. There was a monk named Avalokiteshvara.

So don't think of Avalokiteshvara as a tantric deity in a sutra, in an open sutra. This is a high bodhisattva like Joshmo who was a direct disciple of Lord Buddha and so was Maitreya, and so was Kshitigarbha and things like that. These are actual people in those days.

And in the open teachings they are considered bodhisattvas. They're not considered to be enlightened yet. Whether or not they're enlightened is a huge debate in the monastery.

You can spend years on that debate. It was my pre-geshe exam subject. I had to debate that for a week or something.

That was my subject. Next to the last guy from the bottom gets to debate that one. So at least I wasn't the last guy.

Then it says Shariputra goes and asks this question of Chenrezig If any son or daughter of noble family hoped to follow the deep practice of the perfection of wisdom what would they have to do? So that's the beginning of the sutra. And that one question reveals where Shariputra is at.

Meaning he's already tired of life. He wouldn't ask the question and he wouldn't be standing there in that god forsaken place in Bihar called Nagarjuna. If he wasn't pretty committed.

He's already left the home life mentally. It's one thing to wear a purple robe and not leave the home life. It's another thing to dress simply and live simply and even have a family.

But mentally you've left the home life. The second one is better. Where actually mentally you've made a decision that you will do what you have to do to see emptiness.

And that's where I'd like to wrap you up tonight. You will do what you have to do to see emptiness. Because if you don't, you'll just get older and get weaker.

Your eyes will go, your ears will go. You will be just like your grandfather or your grandmother. It's really, really funny to hear people talk about their grandparents or their parents.

They'll say, she's kind of nice but she's kind of deaf now. Or she was kind of nice or she can't see too good anymore. And it's almost this, what do you call it, condescending thing where she wasn't smart enough not to get old.

As if you're different. As if you're not going to be as feeble, as deaf, as blind, as dumb as the oldest person left in your family. Don't kid yourself.

If you don't undertake these five paths described in the sutra, if you don't follow the way of life described in the sutra, then you will be like that. And you will look back on all the things you thought were important and they will mean nothing. All the little promotions you got, all the ice creams you ate, all the movies you saw, all the money you collected and then divested, recycled through the years of your life and the efforts of your life.

I once went to my boss. I was in the diamond business, right? And I said, can we get eyeglasses examinations for our department?

Because we have to sit there with 10,000 stones a day. People saw them the other day. They went to my workplace.

And you pick them up with these little tweezers and you've got to go like this. And you just pick up diamonds all day long. And you throw them in the right pile.

And you get this thing like this. And it lands in the right pile. And you just go like this.

And I said, can we at least get eyeglasses for these people? Can we get them examinations? And he says, no.

And I said, why not? He says, they sold me their eyes. I paid for their eyes.

I'm paying for their eyesight. That's why they get the money. They got the pay.

I'm paying them for their eyesight. And I thought it was the cruelest thing. I said, I can't believe it.

These guys perceive the workers as being expendable things. It's like a throwaway cup or something. I paid for it.

But in essence, when you go to work, that's what's happening. They're paying for your life. They're paying for your blood.

They're paying for the moments of your mind until you get too old to be useful. And it's just a straight trade-off. You give them your eyesight, they give you the money.

And sooner or later, you run out of eyesight, and then they stop giving you money. And it's just as cruel as that. That's the way it works.

That's what it is. So you've got to decide. At some point, before you lose your eyesight, you have to say, okay, I could get by with less.

And I want to figure out if I could get out of this way of life. And at least cut down on it. I'm not saying, be irresponsible.

And I did work, and I did make money. You have to be responsible. You have to support yourself.

That's part of the Buddhist path, is yandape tso. One of the eightfold Arya path is to make an honest living that doesn't hurt anybody and don't grub off other people. But once you've got your own simple needs taken care of, you've got to go on to try to see emptiness.

Last thing, I'd like to give you a short list of what happens after you leave the home life. Mentally, when you're ready to go, there's a couple of things you should do. Why do they call it path of accumulation?

Why do they call it path of collecting things together? What are you supposed to do once you decide to dedicate yourself to this stuff? What kind of things am I supposed to collect?

Because it's called the path of collection. Don't forget the context we're in. We are about to embark on the Heart Sutra.

The LSD trip is about to begin. Go ahead and read what's coming. It's like, your body doesn't exist.

Your nose doesn't exist. Your brain doesn't exist. You don't exist.

But then you don't not exist either. And you know, there's got to be some sense in this. You can't understand that sutra unless you collect a lot of good karma together.

So the idea is before you go into trying to understand emptiness, or as you begin, planning your whole life, planning the next 20, 30 years, based on these three pages, four pages sutra, you know, before you do that exercise, you have to collect big time good karma. Or you can sit there and read emptiness books all day and you won't get it. It's like an automatic wall that you can't see through.

Until you collect enough good karma, you can sit and read this stuff all day and you just won't get it. On the other hand, if you do collect a lot of good karma, and then you hear one teaching on it, or you open up the book and you read it once, then boom, you get it. You go sit and you see emptiness directly and you're like, wow, why me?

Why not this other guy? The other guy didn't collect enough good karma. So what I'm trying to say is you need all this, I almost said a bad word, something load of big good karma.

You need a big pile. That's why it's called so long. Once you decide to get serious, so we're talking, you already had the girlfriend in high school thing, or the divorce of your parents, or somebody died close to you or something.

And you're like, okay, I'm ready to get serious now. What do I do? Between that time and seeing emptiness directly, or getting ready to see emptiness directly, you have to collect a hell of a lot of good karma.

And here's what it involves. These are just some of the things. You've got to find a real lama.

I mean, go out and find someone who's really qualified. The odds of seeing emptiness directly without a good teacher who's done it and who can teach you what to do is about like trying to become a concert pianist from a book. It's about like that.

Playing piano, you just couldn't learn it from a book. Maybe some extraordinary person could do it. It's the whole difference between having a live human being next to you telling you what to do next is incomparably, you can't compare it to any other method.

You can sit and read snow lion books about emptiness your whole life. And the scriptures say that over and over. No one ever saw emptiness directly just sitting and reading books.

You can't do it. You've got to have a qualified person to guide you. It's about the same as learning piano.

It's about the same amount of time, effort, dedication as becoming a pretty good piano player. And if you think you can do less than that, just forget it. You can't.

You have to give it about that kind of dedication. It's a very similar kind of dedication as being a serious ballet dancer or modern dancer or being a serious piano player or a serious yoga student or anything else. You've got to put in time.

And you've got to find a really good teacher. It'd be like trying to learn yoga from a book or something like that. Yeah, you can maybe do some things, but anybody who's really done anything like that with a master, two hours with a real master is worth about 50 books.

It's just something that happens between you and your master. So you've got to find a real one. Number two, serve them like crazy.

You go up to these levels of what they call guru yoga, or serving your lama. It starts out, you bring them flowers. And then you bring them fruit.

And then you come around once in a while and help rake leaves. And then as it gets more serious, you're just like around them. And the really good ones, Roger, people like that, they're just taking all the heat off the lama.

All the financial stuff is taken care of. All the transportation is taken care of. All the meetings are set up.

All the food is taken care of. Everything that the lama needs is just taken care of. They need a place to teach, it's ready.

Somebody's got to take care of the microphone. Somebody's got to take care of the cushions. Somebody's got to make sure there's enough tea for everybody.

And it's just all taken care of. And the lama doesn't hear anything. My lama hasn't seen his phone bill in 25 years.

He hasn't seen his cable TV bill in 25 years. And that's the way it should be. They just think this stuff falls out of the sky.

And they haven't seen the garbage bill. They haven't taken out the garbage. They don't know there's such a thing as taking out the garbage.

It's just done. And it's not for this kind of corrupt thing where they sit there and get fatter and fatter and eat this nice food that you make and laze around. That's not the point.

The point is that find a lama who's really, really lama sopa. Dedicated. Unstoppable.

Driving. Compassionate. Just totally living for other people.

And then latch onto them and help them. You know what I mean? And help them get the things they want to get done, done.

Hold out for a lama like that. You can be proud of serving this lama. This lama kicks butt.

Spiritual butt. You know? And you're there and you're just helping them get what they need done.

And there's no karma like that. There is no other karma like that. Glom onto a qualified lama.

Something like lama sopa. Just to sit on lama sopa's directions to make satsas all day or clean dishes at LMB is extraordinary good karma. There's almost no other karma like that.

And I'm not saying that I'm in retreat. I'm going to eat a toast every day or something. I'm not saying for my benefit.

I don't teach guru yoga. It's not in the 18 courses. You can't find it there.

Because I don't want people thinking it's in my interest. I'm not saying that. Go find a great teacher and if you really want the karma to see emptiness, then make some kind of commitment to them.

Some serious commitment of your time and your effort. Same with a dharma center. Serve a dharma center.

There's no... In Abhidharma it's called extraordinary special karma. Being involved with spreading the dharma.

Facilitating things at a dharma center. I left New York. 15 teachers are going to be teaching the next course series.

There's this big flyer and each one of them is teaching a different course. We had this big meeting and I got them all inspired and ready to go. I said, there's one more thing I didn't tell you about.

They said, how much money we got in the bank? I'm like, we don't have any money. They said, yeah, but how do we do this?

The flyers and the rent and all that. I said, there's never been any money. You do it.

You have the honor to be teaching people and you're going to have the honor to pay the rent and print the flyers and everything else. That's your problem. That's the way it works.

In Serra Monastery the people who pay for the teachings are the teachers. They don't get paid. They don't charge anything.

They have to pay for their students' food and stuff. That's the way it should be. So to serve a dharma center, meaning you help pay the bills.

You go out and sweat and work and make a paycheck and then you help run the place. And you don't charge for teachings. The people who are smart enough to open the center and to keep it going quietly pay the bills.

And then when you go in your three-year retreat, you'll have the pleasure of passing that tradition on to your students and say, guess what? They say, but how do we pay the rent all these years? You say, you're going to go to work and pay the rent.

And then you're going to teach. And they're like, really? Yeah.

Yeah, like that. You serve it with your real heart. And oftentimes it's the dirty work.

The people who are most collecting the karma to see emptiness and to get out of this life, to get up to a higher level of existence are the ones who are really willing to do all the dirty work. There's some kind of direct correlation between toilets and cleaning up after a Dharma lecture and seeing emptiness. I'm not kidding.

I really believe there's some kind of correlation between the people who clean up the bathrooms, right? Anupama did. She's famous.

She had a Dharma center in New York City. You want to see how people can trash a place in five minutes or less. And then those people who actually sit and clean the place and work the hardest, they get to see emptiness.

That's the kind of karma it takes. Then you need to study. Study about I'd say 300 to 400 hours.

Did I say 1,000 or 100? We'll make it easy. This is California.

[Speaker 2]
Sorry.

[Speaker 1]
I come from California too. Originally. What I mean is a lot of study.

A lot of study about emptiness. I mean go to teachings on emptiness. Every chance you get.

It's a bodhisattva vow, right? You hear about a teaching on emptiness or a teaching on meditation, you go. You have to go.

You have a vow to go. And go get all the information you can about it. Make sure the person is qualified.

Because emptiness is a delicate subject and it's often taught in a mistaken way. And you have to go and if you hear something weird that you can't find, you say, show me that in a scripture. And if they fudge it or they can't show you, or if they show you the book that they wrote.

[Speaker 2]
You know what I'm saying?

[Speaker 1]
Somebody did that to me. Yeah, I have a backup for that. Scriptural authority.

And then they show me the book they wrote. It's okay. Study a lot.

Put in the time. You have to put in the hours. There's no replacement for that.

You need to do that. Help the needy. I don't think you can see emptiness directly unless you are doing some kind of service.

Plain old, hands-on service. Old people, sick people, crazy people. Okay?

Your parents, whatever. Somebody... No, I mean some kind of hands-on, real, driving people to the doctor, buying groceries for them, making their bed for them.

I used to go and give an old man his insulin shots every morning. Help him with his room and stuff like that. You've got to have some kind of real hands-on service.

Like helping people with addiction problems, hospice work, prison work. It's not like politically correct, okay? It's not like so you can put in your newsletter, your Dharma Center newsletter, you know, we have a prison program.

Once every year we go take flowers to the people in the prison. Or something like that. It's not like this minimum politically correct service of others.

It has to be some serious thing. I think it's better to do it for a single needy person or two or three people that you just become their unofficial slave. They have to get to the doctor, you take them.

They have to get some groceries, you bring them. And you don't make a big deal about it. And they don't have to be Buddhists.

There's lots of old, sick, tired people around and they're not hard to find once you go out looking. You don't have to be the chairman of United Way or anything like that. This is more powerful.

Find one person who really needs you. Like that. They call it Chibita.

What's Chibita? Public course. Michael Wick got the official title from my lama.

Chibita means public course. Meaning anybody needs a ride anywhere in northeastern United States they call the same number. He just goes.

He doesn't say anything. He doesn't ever complain. He's just there.

I don't know how he does it for everybody. But he does it. Last thing on Soglam.

You've got to learn to meditate. You must get to a deep state of meditation. Learn to meditate.

You must be meditating. Meditation means at least an hour a day in deep meditation on a single object. It doesn't count your tantric sadhanas.

It doesn't count the preliminaries. It doesn't count the water bowls. It doesn't count getting up 14 minutes early so you can take a shower and get to work.

It means one to two hours in deep meditation. Totally silent. Totally motionless.

In deep meditation. If you can't do that... By the way, begin with 12 minute chunks.

That's the Sakya rule in the ancient times. It's still a great rule. They divide the sun into 24 quadrants and then divide the...

I figured it out. It's like 12 minutes. Start with very concentrated blasts of 12 minutes of meditation.

Then go off for 3-4 minutes, then come back. Then get up to 15 minutes, 20 minutes. If you think you can sit for an hour quietly within a year, you're probably mistaken.

You're probably just in what we call qingwa, which is what? It's a subtle state of dullness where you sit there quietly for an hour but you're just spaced out, you're just blanked out. It's worthless.

It doesn't do anything. So start with like 12 really concentrated moments where you can actually stay on the object for 12 powerful moments. Then back off, take a rest, 3-4 minutes, then go back on again.

And then start to stretch it out. And then, the Bodhisattva vow about avoiding the 5 obstacles to meditation means for the next 23 hours you are working to preserve that state of mind. So meditation doesn't stop when you get up off your cushion.

If the next 23 hours are not mindfully spent maintaining that state of mind, you won't see emptiness directly. It won't happen. You can't be good for 1 or 2 hours in the morning and then screw up the rest of the day.

What does screw up the rest of the day? Ok, Go-gyur-ni, Ni-mug-ni, and then Tetsam, and Duba-la-duba, Duba-la-duba, and Narsim. What are those?

These are Nagarjuna, right? Go-gyur-ni means Go-gyur means Gupa means wild What's that guy that used to be on the radio? Wolfman.

Yeah, Wolfman Jack. It means good, but good means that. Wolfman Jack.

It means you can't keep your mind on anything. You keep thinking about what you have to do. During the day you live in the future.

The whole day long you're thinking 4 o'clock I've got to do that, it's 2 o'clock, right? 4 o'clock I've got to do that, 6 o'clock I've got to do that 8 o'clock I've got to do that. By the way, it's only 2 o'clock now, what are you doing now?

I'm planning for 4 o'clock. At 4 o'clock you're planning for 6 o'clock. Baba Ramdas was right.

Be here now. That's a very beautiful thing. According to Buddhism, that's a very correct thing to say.

Meaning, you try to... It's okay to plan, but don't do it all day. Learn to be here in the present.

Gyupa means to live in the past. Oh, I have these friends, I used to know, they're such wonderful friends. And then you're always like off in the past, remembering the good old days.

Which weren't so good, they're just better now because they're gone. But you repaint them, and you reconstruct them. Current reality seems very drudging, drudgery and painful.

The old days, back in high school or college when you were carefree and you had real good friends and you went out to Denny's together. And then your whole life is spent remembering Denny's. And that's good yin yin.

That's an obstacle to meditation. Not being present at your current age with your current circumstances is an obstacle to the one hour in the morning. If you indulge in that during the twenty-three hours, you can't have a concentrated hour in the morning.

That's good yin yin. Yin yin means you either eat too much or you don't get enough sleep. Meaning you're drowsy.

And it doesn't mean just before meditation. It means all through the day you watch your intake of food so that you don't get mindless. You don't get like, when you ate so much that you're like dull.

And then you get enough sleep. One of the greatest obstacles to a successful session of meditation in the morning is just simply getting enough sleep the night before. I had a great lama and they said, what could I do to prevent sleepiness in meditation?

And they said, sleep the night before. So that's yin yin. So that's yin yin.

Tetsam. I said, Devala Dhamma. Devala Dhamma means don't spend too much time in the objects of your senses.

Meaning enjoy an occasional rock and roll song. Enjoy an occasional burrito dinner out. Or if it's Jim and Janice and me, it's pancakes or whatever.

Enjoy it once in a while. But don't get living in that. It ruins your meditation in the morning.

Even the 23 hours before that, you're constantly thinking about sex, or you're constantly thinking about food, or you're constantly listening to music, or reading magazines, or looking at TV, or reading newspapers, or things like that. Then all of that catches up with you on the 24th hour when you're trying to meditate. And 10% of your mind is off singing that last song you heard.

And 2% of your mind is thinking about whether you can get those pancakes again. And you know, the part that thinks about girls or boys is about 25% of your mind. And you won't be able to meditate well.

I mean, it will catch up to you. So you can't abuse yourself during the 23 hours and expect a good one hour the next morning. The next thing is called nasam or nusam.

Nusam means to get into hassles with other people. It destroys your ability to meditate. So between sessions, you have to be very mindful to try to avoid any kind of hassles with other people.

They ruin your ability to meditate in the morning. So if you have an argument at 3 o'clock in the afternoon at work for 15 minutes, you won't be able to meditate well the next morning or the next morning after that. So in the interest of being a great meditator, you have to actively avoid confrontations with people and negative exchanges with other people.

It will ruin your meditation. Last thing is tetsam. Tetsam means to wimp out about some detail of the Dharma and not resolve a question that you have that you could resolve.

Unresolved questions in Buddhism are very healthy. You know, like, I'm not sure if there's a future life, so I'm just reserving judgment for now. You know?

I understand I'm supposed to see my lama as Vajrapani, but I'm not quite to that level yet. So, you know, I don't reject that idea, but I'm just holding off right now until I feel comfortable with that. That's good in Buddhism.

But unresolved doubts of the kind like, I don't know whether I should be meditating, I don't know whether I should study. I really should study, but I kind of don't want to study. And then just to be wimpy about your spiritual practice.

Don't decide, I'm going to die today, tomorrow, I have to study now. You know? And I'm going to do this.

Just make up your mind. It's making up your mind. If you don't, you won't be able to meditate.

Seriously. So those are learning to meditate. You've got to be able to meditate to see emptiness.

That finishes tonight's presentation. That's where Sariputra is already there. As the sutra opens, and he asks his opening question, what are we supposed to do?

He's already doing these things. He's already at the side of Lord Buddha. He's already serving Lord Buddha.

I saw Ananda's house. It's really cool. This is Lord Buddha's summer residence in Sravasti.

I was thinking of Diamond Mountain, it would be kind of cool. Here is where he taught the diamond cutter. It's a big platform, like this high, out of pure old ancient bricks.

And then there's monks' quarters like this. There's this beautiful courtyard here. And then over here there's Lord Buddha's house, and it looks like this.

He's got this really cool meditation room like that. And then he must have lived in this area here. Over here he's got this cool thing.

It's like this long, and he used to just pace back and forth and meditate standing. It's like waist high. It's like a runway, like a model's runway.

And he would memorize, and that was the custom of walking meditation. He would just turn around and come back again and turn around and come back again. And then right here is Ananda's house.

There's a walkway around here. And they said at night he would guard Lord Buddha's house from his well-wishers, who would be banging on the door all times of day or not, trying to get to see him. And then he would just walk around like Roger or somebody, or Brian, and say, no, you can't see Lama Sopa right now.

He's trying to sleep a little, or would have meditated. I forgot how I got off into that. But anyway, it was this idea here to serve the Lama.

So Ananda or Shakyaputra, they're already serving Lord Buddha. By this time that he asked the question, he is already passed into tonglam. He's already doing all those things.

So that's where we're at in the sutra. And you have to get there in the sutra. So every time you read the sutra and you get to the question, you have to think, could I be there to ask the question?

Would I be at Lord Buddha's side, having left my other responsibilities, to even ask the question? You see, to be there, Shakyaputra has already made a lot of decisions. He's already made a lot of commitments, even to be there to ask the question.

He's already reached tonglam. He's already reached the path of accumulation. He's already doing all that stuff that was on the list.

Now he's ready to do the path of preparation. We'll do that in the next class. Sorry to keep you late, but I don't get to talk for three years, so...

[Speaker 2]
OK, here we are.

[Speaker 1]
Don't forget your homework.