Серия ежедневной практики ACI — Тонглен: размышления о практике даяния и принятия (2019, Аризона), занятие 1

[Speaker 1]
Okay, I have dessert for you, special dessert. Now, you're supposed to be ACI teachers. How many ACI courses are there?

Thirty-six. Eighteen open courses and eighteen Diamond Way courses, but there's about eight secret courses. Eight or ten?

Anyway, they're called practice module. Say practice module. And these are things you can use for your personal practice.

So, I didn't just write thirty-six courses. I wrote a bunch of personal practice courses. And they're hidden in all of the ACI courses.

If you're going to be a good ACI teacher, I suggest you explore those practice modules. They have special meditations, special practices you can do. Now, the one that I'm thinking about for you guys this week is called tonglen.

You know tonglen. Giving and taking meditation. If you're going to be a good ACI teacher, you should have tonglen in your toolbox.

Okay? To be a good teacher, you should have a big toolbox. Many, many meditations that you know how to teach.

I think tonglen is the most important meditation of all. It's the first one you should teach. It's the last one you should teach.

So, this week I'd like to give you some special teaching about tonglen. And go deeper, go deeper. Okay?

On tonglen. Okay? And it has...

How many parts? Oh my gosh. How many pages is that?

It's a hundred pages? I translated a hundred pages about tonglen from many, many, many scriptures. So, the whole thing is direct translation about tonglen.

And it goes very, very deep into the practice of tonglen. So, we'll give you the reading. Tim said they're going to have to print it in Tucson, I think.

Maybe you can talk to him if you want to help. But it's a hundred pages. We'll put it in your notebook.

We'll give it to you to put in your notebook. And then I'll teach you how to teach it. So, every night we'll do a little bit tonglen.

You know the basic meditation. You learned it many times. But you can go deeper.

There are probably a hundred books about tonglen. And they go very deep. There's many deep prana practices.

Pranayama for tonglen. Yoga practices for tonglen. So, we're going to go through some of those.

And that's just dessert. All right. Okay.

All right. And let's start. Okay, we have...

I'm going to give you ten minutes early so you like me. And then... Ah, it's okay.

I also have to write more homework. Yeah, I know. That was in a different world.

Okay. The first reading for tonglen is from the first Panchen Lama. Okay, who lived...

He lived about a hundred years. He's called the Lama who lived a hundred years, but he was born... We think he was born in 1566 or 67.

He died in 1662. And the tonglen practice, the classical source, is one of his books. The famous source for tonglen is one of the books of the first Panchen Lama, which is written about 500 years ago.

Okay. And there's a Lama named Lama Quicksilver, who's a famous Lama for DZIN GANG YUL SBYOR MO teaching Diamond Angel, Vajrayogini. And that's the secret practice we do here.

If you do a three-year retreat here, you're going to do DZIN GANG YUL SBYOR MO. So one of the most important teachers explained where you can find tonglen. And that's the first reading that I'm going to give you.

It's a structure. Where does tonglen come? In the structure of the Lam Rim.

Steps to Buddhahood. Where do we teach tonglen? Where does tonglen come from?

Okay, here we go. First, you need to study bodhichitta. What's the two parts of bodhichitta?

Makes you a bodhisattva. You want to become a Buddha so you can help everybody. That's all.

That's the definition. SEMS BSKYED PA NI YANG DAG RDZOGS PA'I BYANG CHUB Okay, so in the Lam Rim, we will study how to develop compassion. And that's based on DAG GZHAN YIM BYED.

What's that? Yeah, it's two steps also. Everyone has an equal right to happiness.

Everyone in this room has equal rights to get what they want. That's the first thing. It's very kind of a Dharma democracy.

Everybody has equal right to be happy. Everybody deserves to be happy. You don't have more right than the people around you to be happy.

It's not logical and it's not fair to work harder for your happiness than you do for other people. That's prejudice. That's, what do you call?

It's racism or something. To work harder for yourself happiness than for other people, it's unfair. It's the worst kind of unfair.

So you have to switch yourself and other people. So that's where the tonglen starts, in that practice. Then we work on that.

And then it goes into tonglen. So where does tonglen come from? It comes from that practice where you exchange yourself and others.

You put yourself in the other person's place because they have equal right to be happy. And it's difficult because whose hair do you comb every morning? Whose teeth do you brush every morning?

Who do you feed every day so carefully? It's always you. So naturally we have some prejudice.

Prejudice, right? You take care of yourself first. And we have to fight that prejudice.

So tonglen, the purpose of tonglen meditation is to fight the prejudice that says, I deserve to be happy more than you deserve to be happy. Got it? That's where tonglen comes, in the famous teaching where it was first taught.

All right. Then there's a lot. Then after that comes the six perfections.

After that comes the six perfections. So tonglen comes before.

[Speaker 2]
All right.

[Speaker 1]
And then you can practice tantra. Only then. All right.

[Speaker 2]
Okay, finished that part.

[Speaker 1]
Then I put in some readings. There's two ways to develop bodhichitta, you know? Two famous methods to develop love.

There are two famous methods to develop love. One is dak shen nyam je. You exchange yourself with others.

Equal right. And the other is the seven steps for developing love where you realize that everyone has been your mother based on the understanding that everyone has been your mother. These are the two famous ways to develop compassion.

People go through big, big expense and they work so hard to take care of their own mother. And then they don't take care of other people's mothers so much. And in Buddhism, everyone has been your mother.

So you owe everybody equally. You have equal responsibility to everybody. So there's seven famous steps for developing bodhichitta.

Or you can use dak shen nyam je. And the highest, coolest method is to mix them together to 13 steps. You mix them together with tonglen.

With tonglen. So now you have the big three. The big three.

Number one, switch yourself with other people. Number two, see that everyone has been your mother and treat them that way. And then number three, what?

Do tonglen. Do tonglen. And there's a very secret practice where you combine those three together.

You mix them together. It's very sweet. It's in your reading.

It's in your reading. And it's 13 steps. It becomes 13 steps.

And we'll do it tomorrow. We'll do it tomorrow. I think all of us, we feel like, oh, there's something wrong with me.

I don't love people as much as the Buddha loves people. There must be something wrong with me. All those bodhisattvas, they love people a lot.

Actually, I don't like half the people I meet. Am I a bad person? Am I a bad Buddhist?

No, you just didn't have these three trainings. Then you can learn to love everybody, but you have to practice. It's like yoga.

You can't do what those yogis do unless you do it every day. You have to do it every day. So we'll talk about, I don't know, if you're like me, I feel guilty.

I'm a teacher. I should love everybody. Some people come to talk to me, I actually run away.

If I see them, I go around the corner. And then later I feel guilty. Oh, I'm not a good person.

I don't love everybody equally. So, we'll talk about it tomorrow. You mix tonglen with shantideva, with, who did the seven steps instruction?

Atisha. You mix these three methods. How to be a more loving person.

How to learn to love. It's not natural. We don't have it.

I guess some people have it, I don't have it. I need to practice how to be loving. So we'll try it tomorrow.

We'll do a meditation tomorrow. Okay. Alright, that's my introduction to, because that's the most important meditation you're ever going to teach, right?

And that hundred pages translation is so cool. Okay, you should study it. You all did tonglen.

It's the first meditation they teach you in the monastery and you keep doing it until you die. Nobody stops. The oldest monk in the monastery is still doing tonglen every day.

The baby monk, seven years old, is doing tonglen. You never stop tonglen. So if you're going to be a meditation teacher, that's the first meditation you should teach and it's the last meditation you should teach.

Cool. And now you're going to get this super instruction about it. Alright.