Базовый курс ACI 1: Основные учения буддизма (2019, Аризона), занятие 1

[Speaker 1]
So, what's step 1? Cell phone. Step 2?

Andreas, I had a breakthrough in my yoga teaching. I told the students they could make noises of pain and frustration during the class. They just go ...

Okay, please don't forget you're meditating in a group and be considerate to the other people, okay? Suffer in pain. Ichi shoku.

Okay, that's my new word for yoga in Chinese language. Mutual suffering. Okay, here we go.

When you teach yoga, sorry, when you teach meditation, it's good to know the traditional warm-up. So, we'll go through it in a relaxed way this morning. The traditional warm-up for meditation.

And, you should learn it. And, if you're doing a meditation which is going to last more than, I'd say, 20 minutes or 30 minutes, it's good to do the warm-up. So, if you're teaching a group of people meditation, if it's going to go more than 20 or 30 minutes, I would do the warm-up with them.

You can shorten the warm-up if you like. The purpose of the warm-up is like, before you run a race, you should warm up your legs. And, in China last month, we did a course on balance.

And, for fun, we did ballet balancing with all the students. And, it was very cool. And, they got ballet shoes, and they got ballet bars, and we did balancing.

But, to do that, you have to warm up first for about half an hour with yoga, or you will hurt yourself. And, it's the same for meditation. So, today we're going to go through the normal warm-up.

The purpose of the warm-up is called sak jang. Say sak jang. Yeah, sak jang means two purposes of the warm-up.

Number one, jang, is to clean away big negative seeds that we've done in the last few days, which might mess up the meditation. That's called jang. And then, sak means to inject some powerful good seeds into our mind before we start the meditation.

So, the preliminaries, or the warm-up of the muscles, meditation muscle, before meditation, is meant to sak jang. Clean out fresh bad seeds that are influencing your mind today, this morning, and then sak, to collect new good seeds that will help us to have more power during the meditation. So, if you do the warm-up, the meditation will go better, because we learned yesterday, meditation is also coming from seeds.

So, if we do some seed fixing, and some quick seed planting, just before the meditation, it'll go better. So, here we go. Then the sak jang process, the warm-up process, requires a heavy karmic object.

And the heaviest karmic object is your teacher. As you teach ACI, you may or may not be the heart teacher of the student. The student may be, will have a relationship with you, where they feel that you are their heart teacher, or you feel, they feel you are their Lama.

But in many cases, you'll be teaching some of the people, or most of the people in the room. Maybe they don't know you yet, or they already have a different heart Lama. And this is the system in the monastery.

I went to 12 different teachers during the Geshe course, but only one or two of them were my heart Lamas. So, when you ask the students to begin the sak jang, they're going to have to do it with the teacher in front of them, in their meditation. And I think you can encourage them to use a teacher who they feel close to, so it may not be you.

You can, when you start the sak jang with your students, I would say bring a teacher to mind. Someone that you feel a close connection to, and it may not be me. But in your life, so far, you have met people who taught you.

It could be your mom and dad, who are your first great teachers. And they are certainly great teachers for everyone, even if you didn't have a good relationship, or you don't have a good relationship now. Your mom carried you for nine months, risked her life to give you life.

And your father, even if he wasn't a great father, he supported the family, usually, and worked hard, and had many, many hard days to support you. So, they are your first great teachers. And it's always appropriate during the sak jang, during the warm-up, to bring your father or mother into the room in your meditation.

And with them, you can do sak jang, because they are a heavy karmic object. Then I like to go through other kinds of teachers that a person might have. You might have school teachers when you were young, or even up through your college years.

Some special teachers who helped you a lot. I know I had four or five very special teachers. And you can do sak jang with them.

You can change the sak jang teacher every day. You can do different teachers. Or, if you feel very close to one teacher, a heart teacher, you can do the sak jang with them.

Or you can do it with them most days, and then do it with some other teachers on some days, just for more variety in meditation. Variety in meditation is good, sometimes. I like to tell people, you know, obviously there are other teachers in your life, people who taught you your occupation.

If you're a real estate agent, or an investment manager, or you sell cars, you learned that skill from somebody. I know the diamond business is a very long training period. If you make a mistake, you lose a lot of money.

So, there were several people who taught me the business, and they didn't have to teach me. And they were very kind to spend almost ten years teaching me the business. So, probably you have a similar person in your life who taught you your job.

Some people like to bring a teacher into the room to do the sak jang, who is a historical teacher, who's already passed away, someone we didn't meet, maybe historical Buddha. Many Westerners like to do it with Jesus. If you grew up in an Islam tradition, it might be the Prophet Muhammad.

So, it depends on your upbringing, or who do you feel close to. These are people of the past who were great teachers. And those great teachers in Buddhism, we would say they are probably Buddhas, and they can hear you, they can read your mind now as you start your meditation.

So, it's very appropriate to invite them to the room as a heavy karmic object to do your sak jang. A final choice for a teacher, oh by the way, your family is a great teacher, your wife or your husband, especially in the Diamond Way teachings. Your children are great teachers, which all parents know.

I've had students who felt very close to a pet, a pet dog or cat, and they felt that those animals were teaching them as a Buddha. So, those are also teachers. And that's fine if you want to do sak jang with them.

A final choice is a teacher you haven't met yet. So, maybe in this life, you haven't yet found your heart teacher. But you want to, and you think you will, and you're planting the seeds by sharing wisdom with other people who want to hear about it.

So, as you do the sak jang, you could also invite a teacher that you haven't met yet, and your perfect future teacher. And you can try to imagine what they might look like, or how their face might be. In every case, it's tradition that the teacher with whom you do the sak jang is very happy to be invited to this room this morning.

So, it's traditional to imagine, with your eyes closed, that they are looking at you with very great love and affection. And they're very proud of you that you have decided to meditate this morning. Keep your meditation commitments.

And they're very happy that you invited them to the room. When you teach sak jang to your students, I think it's very important to encourage them not to think of the teacher who's sitting with them. Don't think of this teacher as a picture, or a statue.

We are not meditating with a piece of paper, or a piece of metal. We are meditating with a real living being. So, I find it useful, and it's traditional, to imagine their chest rising and falling with the breath.

And you can feel the warmth when they walk in the room. There's some air moves past you. When they sit down in front of you, there's some disturbance of the air.

And in Buddhism, there's a tradition that very holy people, good people who are good persons, have a special smell, fragrance, of their body. It could be like incense, or it could be like a flower. It could be like the ocean.

But they have a special smell coming out of their body from their good deeds. People who don't eat meat for a long time, they also have a special sweet smell. So, imagine that your teacher has this nice smell, and they're looking at you, and they're very happy.

And you invite them to come sit with you. I like to say knee to knee. Your knees are almost touching.

And they're going to be the karmic object for your sakjang. The first warm-up is to greet them and show them respect. You could imagine that you are prostrating, or you could imagine that you just hold your hands at your heart.

The custom of prostration in Buddhism came from the reaction of a person who just saw emptiness directly. Because at that time, you see Buddha directly for the first time. And I would say, in every case, that person who saw emptiness will do a full prostration automatically, even if no one ever taught them or they never saw one.

So, when we meet our teacher, we bow down to them. The reason you prostrate is that you respect this person. Something about them is very special.

So, a mental prostration, before you start meditating, is just to think about something you admire in this person. The word for faith in the ancient languages, shraddha, and the word for, how do we say, admiration, are the same word. So, faith means, I'm looking at my teacher and there's some beautiful quality about them that I admire.

And if you think about it, that's why you ask them to teach you, because you want to learn this quality. Ideally, a teacher is not just giving you information. A teacher is giving you an example.

So, it's a mental prostration as a warm-up to meditation, to think about some beautiful quality of this teacher. My teacher, I can think of, really enjoys helping sick people, old people. Spends much of their day doing that, much of their night doing that.

So, I'm going to pause here. These are things to teach your student if you have time, about collecting seeds to have a powerful meditation five minutes from now. And I'd like you, yourself today, to invite a teacher to please come in the room to meditate with you.

And then I'd like you to do a mental prostration. Think of one quality that you admire about them. When you think about some beautiful thing about your teacher, you are collecting heavy karmic seeds, which will make your meditation five, ten minutes from now much more powerful.

So, the quality of your meditation in this meditation tradition depends on how clearly you think about their good qualities, and something about them as a living example, which you would like to learn. Okay, here we go. Invite a teacher, any teacher, who's close to you, and then admire something about them.

Here we go. The next part of Sakyong, or warm-up, is to make an offering to this teacher. It's both gratitude, and it's a request.

I think as you become an ACI teacher, people may offer you things. Maybe it will be a pen, or maybe it will be a house. And you will start to understand more about offering, if you're the person receiving the offering, as opposed to the person giving the offering.

I think when you're a baby teacher, when you first start teaching, you really enjoy things. People give you a sweater, or people offer you a special book, or a pen, or people give you money, or offer you money, or even a car, or a house, or something big. And I think as a young teacher, you feel happy.

You feel some kind of, I don't know, pride, that people are giving you attention, and people are making you offerings. I'd like to say two things about those offerings. Number one, they don't last, and they're not very important.

oftentimes the people who make the largest offerings are expecting something else from you than teaching. They want your attention, or even your affection. There could be many reasons why people make offerings to you.

But oftentimes, the person who gives the largest offerings actually wants something from you, which is not related to teaching. And even if the offering is sincere, those offerings disappear. You use them, or you lose them.

So, I think as you, I think John or other, Connie, other senior teachers here can tell you, those offerings are not so important. It's a good thing to offer things, and it's a good thing to accept them gracefully, and to use them if it's appropriate. But I think as you get older as a teacher, you realize that the real offering you enjoy from your students is to see them get happier and happier, is to see their meditation improving, to see their yoga improving, to see their health improving, and especially to see their mind improving, their attitude, their patience, their goodness.

And as you become a teacher, and as the years go by, I think your attention will shift from physical gifts to enjoying success with your students, enjoying seeing your students become good people. So, in the Sakyong process, it's traditional to offer your teacher, you don't visualize a new house or a new car, you offer them your improvement and your practice. I'm more patient this year than last year, and I've been trying hard.

I haven't succeeded. I still have many faults daily. But in general, I'm working hard to be a better person, and I offer to you my small successes.

So make an offering. This is planting tremendous seeds for the meditation ten minutes from now. Sakyong, we are Sakyong.

Make that teacher an offering. There's a Samantabhadra offering where you imagine the whole sky filled with roses or lotus flowers, all the beautiful cars in the world. That's okay if you're in the mood.

The best coffee you drank this year. Some days you can do that offering, but the offering they really enjoy, and the offering you will enjoy later as an ACI teacher, is to see the student improving and happier. The next part of Sakyong, the next part of the meditation warm-up.

And again, as a teacher, or as you lead a meditation, you have to judge how much time you have, whether you go through the whole Sakyong. As you teach a meditation, be sensitive to the fact that people's attention degrades quickly in half an hour. People's focus drops every minute during a meditation.

It's very hard, especially in the era of the internet and cell phones, for people to focus, and they get tired meditating. So, you have to move the meditation along. You can't go slow.

You can't go too slow. You will lose the people's attention. People who live on a cell phone can't focus more than a few minutes.

So, be aware of that, and be careful not to take the whole time with the Sakyong, and then you don't have time to meditate. Okay, the next part of Sakyong is, so far we did two big socks. Well, three.

We invited our teacher. That's a good seed. We admired something about them, which is a mental prostration, and then we made offering to them of the best offering, which is the small improvements in our own behavior.

I think if you're like me, when you report your improvement to your teacher during the offering, you automatically think about all the things you didn't improve, and all the mistakes you made. When I make offering to my own teacher, all I can honestly say is, I've made some small improvements, and that makes me aware of all the mistakes I've made, and I continue to make, year after year. So, the next part of Sakyong is not sock, it's jang.

It's admitting in a very honest and open way, not hiding anything. Because after all, it's all in the mind, right? It's not as hard as telling your teacher directly things that you've done that are bad, but in the meditation, sock jang, we can get in the habit of being totally honest with our teacher.

So, think of mistakes you've made, and continue bad habits that have lasted for years, or decades, and just be honest with your teacher, and say, look, I'm sorry, and if I was stronger, I could stop all of them, but I'm not. And be honest about your mistakes, and negative attitudes. Here we go.

Admitting your mistakes to anyone around you is a powerful way to break those bad seeds. The next warm-up of sock jang is really what we call coffee meditation in the DCI teaching. And think about good things you've done, small improvements, and you can also think about cool things other people are doing, and offer them to your teacher.

For me, the second warm-up, sock jang, which is offering, the highest offering is your practice. To me, the second one, and the fourth one, which is rejoicing about your small successes, your small improvements, to me they overlap. So, sometimes I think of one small progress I've made, and I offer it in step number two.

And then when I get to step number four, I think of a different one. But for me, the two steps are not so different from each other. What we found in DCI, teaching 30,000 people every year, what we found very interesting is that this step is the most difficult for almost every person we meet.

People have a lot of trouble admitting that they're doing some right things. We all like to brag. We all like to praise ourselves.

But we have trouble when it comes time to loving ourselves in a deep way, and admiring what we're doing right. But we tend to focus more on the mistakes we make. So, during this Sakyong step number four, try very hard to think about how lucky you are.

All the good things in your life. You're here meditating. You are inside a holy, powerful lineage, Tsongkhapa.

And you have so much hope. And you are so fortunate out of millions and millions of people in this world, hundreds of millions of people. You are special.

So, the great books always say, don't do it as pride. We're not talking about pride. Pride says, I'm the best meditator in this room.

And nobody can meditate like me. Pride compares themselves to other people. We were in a shoulder stand yesterday in Andreas's class, and he said a cool thing.

He said, you know, maybe you're going to stare at other people during the whole yoga class and compare yourself to them. But please don't do it during the shoulder stand, you'll hurt your neck. It's kind of funny.

That's pride. It's not pride to say, to report to your Lama, I did my yoga yesterday. It wasn't that easy, but I did it.

And I did my meditation, and I'm doing retreat at Diamond Mountain, Holy Diamond Mountain Retreat Center. I have a lot of mistakes. Some of them are very old mistakes.

But I'm really trying hard. And I'm here. And I'm happy about it.

So, do some coffee meditation. It's very powerful seeds for good meditation. Ten minutes from now.

Inside of here, if you like, as a change of pace, just to change things, some days you can think about cool things other people are doing. Oh, Tim is working so hard. And Jigme is working for many years to help.

And you can rejoice in other people's. John and Connie teaching so devotedly for so many years. And Peter and Maria teaching, giving hope to so many people in the Russian-speaking countries, for example.

So, you can also rejoice in other people's good seeds. As a meditation teacher, start speeding up the steps towards the end. Because, again, people's attention, people's mental power drops quickly during a half hour of meditation.

At the end, they are much more tired. The next step of Sakyong, and we're almost finished. And by the way, as a teacher, it's a good strategy to tell your students you're almost finished.

A lot of yoga teachers will say, just stay for one more second, two more seconds in the pose. Then they keep you in the pose for another minute. So, it's good to tell your students, oh, we're almost finished, we're almost going to take a break.

We just got one or two more to go, which is true. The next warm-up, the next part of Sakyong, is to ask your teacher to teach you, keep teaching me. Okay?

Never stop teaching me. I like to share with my students, in my own experience, is, the people who hurt me in my life have taught me more than the people who were nice to me. It's when you have trouble, big trouble, from another person, that you go deeper into your life, into your understanding of emptiness.

So, I like to share with my students, that if you ask for teaching, publicly, from the world, then in the next week, you might get a lot of new problems. Because you asked for them. Because you asked for teaching.

So, as you ask for teaching, remember, it's not all Dharma teaching. It's not all scriptures and meditations. Your greatest teachers are the people who cause you trouble, people who push you, people who demand your time, people who criticize you.

So, be careful during this preliminary, when you ask for teaching. Be aware, remember, the greatest teachings are the greatest challenges. And be grateful to people who challenge you.

Again, you can speed up the steps as you, as the students get tired, mentally. Last step we're going to do today, and then we'll take a break. It's called asking the teacher to stay in your life.

So, it's very difficult, karmically, to make enough good seeds to meet your teacher. Probably, a lot of those seeds were collected by your past life. I have a friend, he calls his past life Joe.

He says, Joe created this teacher, not me. My past life worked harder than I do, and they created this beautiful teacher. My job is to keep enough good seeds going that the teacher doesn't leave me, or pass away, or we're separated.

So, during this last Sakyong step, we ask the teacher, please stay in my life. And that request, if it's sincere, creates enough seeds to keep them with you. And almost nothing more sad in the world than when a father or mother loses their child.

If you talk to them, they'll say, I was hoping I would die before them. And there's maybe nothing more painful than for a mother or father to lose their child. But to lose your teacher is harder.

Much, much harder. So, we want to, you know, ask them sincerely to stay. Now we're ready to meditate, and we're going to take a break here.

So, you can open your eyes, and take a stretch. I'm going to declare an official PP break after questions and answers. Okay?

Anybody have a question? Anybody want to keep everybody from the bathroom? Nope?

Okay, Stephen. Don't feel guilty, okay? Now, I do have a question.

I find it difficult when we have to do visualization practices.

[Speaker 2]
I get really agitated. It's almost like mental tasks or mental gymnastics. When I'm really relaxed, it's a lot easier, but in a way, sometimes it's really difficult to do these visualizations.

Is there any tips that you have?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, I would have two suggestions. And they both come from scripture, okay? I guess to me the most important one is, you know, and I feel cool sharing— I've been trying to do all this stuff for 45 years, 50 years, you know, and it— it's sweet to give you, you know, tips that I learned.

One tip I learned is focus on their presence and not on their color and shape. Okay? So, it's actually more important that you just feel their presence than that you get the word on their nose correct.

You see what I mean? So, I think when a meditation teacher tells us to bring the teacher, we're trying very hard to get the color and the shape, and then we got to keep that going while we do this other stuff, and it gets stressful inside the meditation. And then we feel guilty.

That's a third thing, that we're not getting the color right, you know, and the teacher's melting on the left side, and, oh my god, I'm supposed to be offering, you know? And then the whole thing gets stressful. The meditation is supposed to be peaceful, but it becomes stress— it's like juggling a lot of balls, you know?

So, yeah, for sure. I think you're totally right. You're totally—your instincts are totally right.

Don't worry so much about the color and the shape and the eyes, okay? That's not the point. The point is the presence of the person.

Maybe you want to meditate that they're behind you, and you can't see them, and they're just like, you know, and you just feel them in the room, okay? And that's enough, okay? That's the important thing.

It's the heart connection with them. There's another suggestion in the Lamrim, somewhere, that— just start with their outline. If you know the story of how the Wheel of Life was painted for Udayana, they held up a sheet, and they built a fire behind the Buddha, and they just did his silhouette, his outline, okay?

So, that's fine. Some meditation books say just get the outline right, and don't worry about the rest, you know? Like, the silhouette.

And then some meditation books say the outline's not the main thing. The loving eyes are the main thing. So, if it's just two eyes floating there, but with great love, they say that's more important than getting their toes right, and their, you know, elbow right.

Because, yeah, that becomes stressful, and then you can't focus on the other stuff. So, yeah, feel happy about it. Get their presence right, that they're in the room.

Believe that they're in the room, and that's the important thing. Not the colors and the shapes, okay? Any other pee-pee blockers?

[Speaker 2]
Thank you, Geshe-la. I have a practice problem. If I meditate for over 30 or 40 minutes, I can feel tired in 20 years.

I don't know how to deal with it. And another Buddhist who was learning from you yesterday, it's almost the first time you teach us, and when we close our eyes to keep the eye seeing about the horizontal, it helps me a lot. I do appreciate that.

[Speaker 1]
Cool. Okay. So, I'll talk about that first, and I just want to repeat that the scriptures say keep the ...

if you crack your eyes open, keep them at the nose. So, a lot of people are like this. And I've heard many teachers do this, and it's completely wrong, okay?

It means at the plane of the nose, and what it means is don't focus your eyes. It just means don't focus your eyes, okay? When you're in high school, and you meet that cute guy, and you go home, you're like ...

and you're not looking at anything. That's what we want. That's what we want.

So, it's just like ... you know? And I'll give you a personal tip.

This carpet for example, we call it paisley. It's a flower design from France I guess, I don't know, Italy, and it's very destructive. So, in your meditation space, just have plain colors, and the altar cloth in front of you should just be plain colors, okay?

And for me, when I do a retreat, you know, if you're a serious retreat person, let's say you do two retreats a year, a week or a month, and depending on what just doesn't get you fired at your job, and you'll find it's not enough to be a good meditator. You have to be a good retreat house finder, and it's not easy. It's probably not a good idea to do retreat in your own apartment or your own home.

There's too much history. So, it's really ideal if you can go out into nature to a place that's super quiet. I was trying to make noise yesterday because it was too quiet in my cabin.

You know, I was getting uncomfortable, and try to find a place, but my suggestion is, the first thing I do when I get to a new retreat cabin is I box up all the books and magazines. Anything that has writing on it, I get it out of my sight, because when you're meditating, when I'm meditating, I'm a book person, so if I see a book or a magazine, you know, I'll read it. We used to have fights in three-year retreat for the cereal boxes, because we didn't have any books.

We decided the first year we wouldn't have any books, except for our prayer books, and then we were really hungry to read something, and we all were reading the cereal boxes, like how many vitamins, and how, you know, it was so interesting. So, my first suggestion is if you do crack your eyes open, okay? Keep it down, okay?

But keep your chin level, okay? So, when you look down, don't go like this, because you'll get tired, okay? You'll get tired.

So, if you do open your eyes, which is fine, crack them and point them down, but don't let your chin come down, because that will be a tendency, you know, when you lower your eyes, your head goes down, okay? So, keep your chin level, keep your eyes down. It's kind of like all those Buddha statues, right?

He's like ... you know, maybe that's ... maybe he did the same thing, I don't know.

So, anyway, that's my first suggestion. About here, yeah, anytime you feel tightness in your chest, or here, my first thing I would say, and I think John and Connie, people have done long retreat, don't let it go. Don't say, oh, maybe it will be okay.

Do something, okay? Because it will get worse. If you're doing a lot of meditation, it's a lung ...

it's a prana, chi blockage. So, don't think it's going to go away. Do something, okay?

So, what's a good way to take pressure off of this ajna chakra is to smile. Okay? And I know it sounds stupid, but most simple solutions are more correct.

So, a small Mona Lisa smile. I'm going to go to France, me and Vy are going in May, and you know, everybody wants to see the Mona Lisa in the loo, and I mean, it's not very exciting, but her smile is cool, and yeah, there's something about it. I think the artist was ...

chose not to drop a glass? Anyway, you'll figure that out. So, it actually releases the termination point of these iddha and pingala here, if you smile a little bit.

If you get tight, if your face gets tight, it'll pull down the chakra here. Here. So, that will cause a problem, okay?

In general, if you get a chakra problem, and by the way, I'm going to take a pee-pee next, I don't care if you have any questions. That it'll be ... normally it'll be here.

Sometimes it'll be here. And don't forget this chakra is along the spine, it's in front of the spine, so you might feel some kind of discomfort back here, more than here, but it could be either place. And traditionally, if you have a higher chakra tightening in your meditation, drop the focus to your navel.

Okay? Drop the focus to your navel. Navel chakra doesn't mean they painted a chakra on this little bump here that your mom left you.

Okay? It doesn't mean that. Navel chakra is in the back.

Navel means at the level of the navel, okay? So, find your navel and go back. And ...

if you're doing a visualization, even your teacher, then don't put them in front of you, put them in your navel chakra. Put them down here, at the back. Okay?

And that will draw prana away from these two sensitive areas. Because ... and you must do it.

You can't wait. You can't think it's gonna get better. It won't.

It'll get worse and worse and you'll have to stop your meditation. Okay? I know people who damaged these chakras 50 years ago.

And it's still ... They wrote me this week. They're still having trouble.

They went to some teacher who didn't teach them properly. They damaged these chakras and they're still having problems, 50 years later. So, don't let it go.

Okay? It's like ... a leak in the bathroom.

Do something about it today. Okay? Don't wait, you know, until it ruins the floor.

Okay? It's one of those things you have to work on right now. Okay?

Drop it here. Drop it to the back. Even the visualization.

Even the Lama. Even the teacher. Okay?

And that will help a lot. That'll help a lot. Try that.

Okay? Okay? As all the long-term meditators know, eating heavy oily foods, whatever is heavy and oily in your culture, I don't know.

In our culture, it would be a piece of toast with half a cube of butter on it. Like half a pound of butter. Butter is very good for lowering your ...

a chi problem. Okay? Something greasy.

Have Mabo Tofu with lots of oil. Seriously. Something with lots of oil.

Okay? And that helps also. Okay?

Alright. Let's take a pee pee break. Yay!

Okay, and then we'll start Lam Rim. Please come back at nine o'clock. Please come back at nine o'clock.

Okay?