Базовый курс ACI 1: Основные учения буддизма (2019, Аризона), занятие 2

[Speaker 1]
Just because it's so depressing that Stanley gave such a good talk about how to have negative thoughts, and the whole morning was about how to have negative thoughts, and I kind of wanted to take a long-run break, so I would like to go back to that explanation about the structure of the ACI courses, because if you're going to be an ACI teacher, in the back of your mind you should have a ... the whole structure of the 18 foundation courses okay? So, we did four of them already, and I would like to continue with that, maybe we do three or four more courses.

What's some things we're talking about in each course? Give me anything, one thing. No, I mean we're talking about ...

flow. We're talking about why did the course come before it, and why did the course come after it? Where is its position in the flow?

What's something else we talk about? Huh? Yeah, which of the five Geshe topics, and which of the four ancient schools okay?

And then you know, we should talk about the content a little bit, what's another thing that you ... I think you're not remembering to say. Yeah, great, hmm, you are remembering.

Yeah, which great book, and most of those courses have a great commentary okay? So, I don't just use the ancient poem ... poem book, all those books are poems, they're too deep, they're too difficult, they need an explanation.

So, I took the best of the best, and I'll mention which commentary we use okay? And let's do that now, just before I do that, I was looking over the course and I was thinking, to me it's very interesting, the flow of the five great topics in the Geshe course, which one comes first? You know, do you start with lowest school and then go to highest school, or do you start with highest school in case you die halfway through the Geshe course?

I mean maybe you should start at the top, and the dropout rate, the death rate is pretty high, because 25 years you know, so naturally ... my class started with 60 young men, and we finished with four okay? And that's pretty typical, we had four Geshe's graduated from my class okay?

And the rest died, or they left, or they couldn't do it okay? So ... so how do you arrange the order?

What's the order okay? And it's a little bit unexpected, and it needs some explanation okay? So here we go, and I put it in the document, in your manual okay?

By the way, some of the manual documents are not finished, if they don't look finished, don't read them, because they're not, and we're going to try to finish the whole thing in three terms, in three trainings okay? So by the end of this year, you will have all the policies of ACI, you will have all those three courses, you will have all this information, the whole structure, blah blah okay? Okay, the first thing is the 75 pages text called Jewel of Realizations, by ...

yeah, dictated by Maitreya to his secretary, who took shorthand, named Asanga, yeah, and if you know the dog story from the lion's dance, you know how it happened okay? So, our five great books of Maitreya, and this one we study first okay? What's ...

you can call ... by the way, which of the five topics? Yeah, yeah, Perfection of Wisdom number four, which is what school?

No, what school? Mind only? Lower Middle Way, okay, Lower Middle Way.

By the way, Asanga's books are also mind only, so that's not a terrible answer but ... okay, so, we studied that, and the way I described it, you know, it's 27 years since I wrote these courses, and I kind of understood a way to describe the Perfection of Wisdom scriptures okay? Meaning the Lower Middle Way scriptures, and they are a vast encyclopedia of all Mahayana, all Bodhisattva teachings are there, except ...

yeah, except a correct, totally correct presentation of emptiness. Everything else in there is amazing, it's similar to Abhidharma okay? Abhidharma is like all the foundation stuff you need to know.

Hundreds of ideas okay? And Lower Middle Way, the Jewel of Realizations, by the ... written by the next Buddha, which is a pretty good source, and everyone agrees he's already a Buddha by the way, he's just hanging out, and he's waiting until people have enough seeds for him to come, or to recognize him, so ...

and he's close okay? It's coming, everything's close. So anyway, that body of literature, we spent 12 years on it okay?

The first 12 years. So that's the first thing you study in the monastery, 75 pages, you memorize it, normally you memorize it before you're 15, and ... and it's cute, the kids go out on the ...

we have 12 colleges right? And every night around this time, they go out on the front porch, and they go ... DE NAS ZANGS RGYAS RNAMS RGYUN PA'I DANG NGES RIGS LA MYONG SHUG RGYAS They have no idea what they're saying, and it's cute, and they're trying to do it louder than the kids in the next house, so the monastery ...

you can't take a nap at that time, because the whole monastery, there's 15 year old kids screaming, the Abhisam Alankara you know, it's kind of irritating actually, but it's a custom ... it's a custom when you recite something like a mantra, you should do it loud enough for the spirits to hear, the spirits in the room, so it's a ... it's a tradition to ...

not to mumble your mantras, like, say them pretty clearly, so all the spirits in the room can hear, and I guess that's the theory of the kids screaming, it's to keep the monks awake, the other monks, okay? So anyway, 12 years there, and then after that ... what makes logic ...

I mean what's logical after that? Let's fix their teaching on emptiness, so you spend four years on higher middle way okay, so that's year number 13 to year number 16 of the Geshe course, you spend four years basically fixing the emptiness teachings. Technically, you are studying which book?

Yeah, Entering the Middle Way by Chandrakirti, which is a great commentary on Nagarjuna, Nagarjuna's wisdom okay, and these books have associated monastic textbooks okay, they have ... the commentaries that we use are ... are huge okay, for the first 12 years it's about, I don't know, 4,000 pages of commentaries, by one author okay, so each monastery has their own monastery commentary, and normally it's two, it's two different commentaries, one is called CI DUN, say CI DUN, CI DUN means overview of the whole lower middle way, all the topics, and then THA CHA, say THA CHA, THA CHA means analysis, and both books are always written in debate style okay, it's always two guys arguing okay, and that gets the student ready okay, so we actually don't study, we study the first 12 years based on eight books from our monastery, and big, huge books okay, and then when we reach the second topic which is higher middle way, called middle way okay, we spend four years on that, and again there's a CI DUN, and there's a THA CHA, there's an overview, and there's a dig into it okay, and those are incredibly beautiful books, we should translate those too when we have time okay, incredibly beautiful books okay, and there are Indian commentaries to each of them too, and we use those. For middle way, aside from the two monastic textbooks, what do you think we use? Tsongkhapa's Gompa Rabsel okay, so if you're, if you're a good student, if you're hardcore, you're not, you don't just study the two monastic textbooks, which are about 2,000 pages, but you throw in Tsongkhapa's explanation of emptiness, Tsongkhapa's explanation of Chandrakirti, which is called illumination of the true thought, what did, what did Nagarjuna really mean, what did Chandrakirti really mean okay, so that's in our translation team, we're translating that, we just reached halfway, it took five years, it's 750 pages so far okay, so it will be about 1,500, 2,000 pages when we finish in five years okay, and that's Tsongkhapa's ultimate commentary. Sometimes, most of the time there's not time to study it carefully, so when I got to this subject, I requested special teachings from my super scripture teacher, which is Geshe Thubten Rinchen, I guess there's a picture here, and we spent eight years on it, and we started with four or five of my friends, and they all dropped out, so I don't know, for me it was kind of cool, because I had an hour a day with the greatest master in Sara, and that was pretty cool, and he's an incredible teacher, so okay, so that's middle way, then we spent two years on Vinaya, two years on Vinaya okay, year number 17 and year number 18 are spent on Vinaya, vowed morality, ethics, who's the main book?

Vinaya Sutra, which is not a sutra, it's written by a human being called Gunaprabha okay, and so we studied from Gunaprabha, and again, every monastery has their own commentary, and if you're interested, I mean I enjoy talking about this stuff, it's probably boring to you, but anyway, I don't care, I don't get to talk about it very much, usually there's a DONG, say DONG, so DONG means a summary of all the Vinaya as a poem, and you memorize it okay, you memorize it, so Alison is translating one of those, she's translating the shortest possible one, and a commentary, but usually they're a little bit longer and you memorize it okay, so and if you really want to go into it, there are incredible commentaries, Gene Smith turned me on to one, which is Lodro Leksang, which is a little-known author, he's not very famous, but his commentary is the best, and I started to translate it here, I worked on it for about five years with somebody, they quit, and they took all the recordings ... okay, you're not gonna do that right? Okay, so anyway, this is Vinaya, now doesn't a question come in your mind when I tell you, you don't study Vinaya until year 17?

Yeah I mean, what are monks doing? You know, I mean they didn't study their vows, NYID RGANGS RGYUR GSA GSUM RNAMS, 253 vows for a fully ordained monk, GSUM RGYAL DROD CHUD ZA ZHIG RNAMS, 364 for a full nun, why they spend 16 years in the monastery before they learn their vows? And this brings up another detail of the Geshe course that I should mention, and that's the the role of your RGYER RGAN, the role of your RGYER RGAN or your TSA BA'I LAMA okay, RGYER RGAN means the house teacher, the college teacher, who's kind of a babysitter, you know, they teach their kids to put their robes on, and they watch the kids ...

when we started the monastery we were all refugees and it was all the kids in the same room, and they all had sores on them, we didn't have enough food, and they would spread, the kids would touch each other and they would spread, and everybody had these huge open wounds on them, and so the house mother's job, Geshe Lothar, who's been a house mother for probably 500 months, so you should thank him, he takes care of them, he feeds ...

it's his job to feed them, and to find the money, and to give them clothing okay, that's his job, and to make them monks, and normally it's that person in your life, so it's kind of an addition to the Geshe course, they tell you your monk's vows by personal experience, you see what I mean? Yeah, so when you break a vow they say hey, that's one of the 253, don't do that, and then that's how you learn your vows in the monastery okay, they might not sit down with you and teach you your vows, my teacher did okay, he used a Tibetan commentary called ... Tso, what do you call it?

Tso Nawa, say Tso Nawa, he wrote a 2,000 page commentary on the vows, both monks and nuns, incredible, extraordinary, he's before Tsongkhapa, so we do study other traditions, he's a Kagyu okay, and it's an incredible commentary, and we use it every ... I still use it almost daily when I'm teaching Vinaya okay, it's extraordinary, so we will follow this commentary. So, I did get training on my vows as soon as I became a monk, but I was already 30, so I was lucky because I had a chance to do all the bad things before that, so I did everything you know, really, so I think it's maybe ...

you know in the old days you didn't become monk till you're 30, like Atisha, people like that, they didn't become monk till they're 30, they didn't take full vows, a lot of them studied Tantra before they became a full monk, so it used to be we wanted to watch you longer, we wanted to watch you ... it was a kind of a big honor to be a monk, and oftentimes you did it later in your life okay, so the answer to the question is, before you reach the 17th year of the Geshe course, your house teacher has taught you all the vows by telling you what not to do when you do it okay, and in this kind of organic way, all the young monks learn their vows you know, like for example, I'm not allowed to take my robes off, I can't drop my robes and step over them, that's against the vows, I have to untie it and put it over my head, and I cannot step over the you know, and it's ... see there are many rules like that, and you can't really write it in a book you know, if your teacher hits you once with a rosary you'll ... you memorized it okay, got it?

So, that's where Vinaya ... then you get to year 17 and you learn the ancient sources, and you learn the ancient Lengshis, what's a Lengshi? The original incident, so this is a very very important idea, in the running of organizations like Diamond Mountain, or like ACI okay, Lengshi means somebody screwed up, somebody screwed up.

For example, originally Buddhists were allowed to drink alcohol okay, when the Buddha first started to teach, we were allowed to drink alcohol, then there was a Lengshi, what's it mean? Someone got drunk and caused trouble, I don't remember what it was, but you can study it, and because of John's database, you can search Lengshi next to alcohol, and you will search a million pages in less than 10 seconds. So, if you learn the scriptures with John Brady's database, if you ask me right now, what was the incident, what happened?

I can find it in about 10 seconds, I can search a million pages, in about 10 seconds. So actually, the courses that you're getting, are in many ways ... the information is more precise, more accurate, because I check everything on the database okay, I have access to, I don't know, thousands of ...

thousands of books, 10,000 books okay, so I can check things okay. Alright, mmm ... I like to tell stories, maybe you noticed.

So, I was going on a plane one time, to hear a teaching by a Lama, and there were lots of people on the plane that I didn't know, who were going to this small town to hear this person, and I was translating Abhidharma, in that period, I spent 12 years translating Abhidharma, and so, I was working on Abhidharma, and I just reached the part where Buddha said the leng shi for alcohol, and Buddha said ...

well, I'll tell you the story. So, a Tibetan sat down next to me you know, and I didn't know him, and we were flying, and he ordered a beer, you know, and I was kind of surprised you know, and I'm like hmm ... and then I had a ...

I thought of a very cool plan, so I found a page where the Buddha said don't ... the Buddha said if you drink enough alcohol to put on one piece of grass, one drop ... he doesn't say don't drink, he says don't call yourself a Buddhist, you know, don't call yourself my student, you're not my student, he says you know, you're a nice person, I like you, but don't call yourself my student, okay, if you drink that much alcohol.

So, I got the page you know, and I told the ... you're Tibetan right? He said yeah, I said can you help me out with this page, I can't get it you know, and he's like yeah, and it was really cute, okay, anyway, he finished the beer ...

okay, alright, so that's about morality. Now year 19 and 20 we do Abhidharma okay, we don't touch Abhidharma except as it comes up in other schools for 18 years okay, year 19, year 20 we do Abhidharma okay, okay, and basically the information there comes up in the Lamrim teachings as you've seen, and it keeps coming up in all the books, so you get a big dose of Abhidharma in the first 18 years, but in year 19 and 20 you study Abhidharma formally, and tell you, I'll tell you the truth, by that time there's normally less than 10 monks left in your class, and it gets kind of weird because you know what the other guys know, and you know what they don't know, so there can't be a debate, the debates are really boring, because you've been with these guys for 18 years already, and you know this guy never learned the four truths, or this guy never learned the names of the twelve links, and you can debate, and you're gonna get the same answer you got last year. So, they do a cool thing in the monastery, they join two classes, around this time they join, they bring the next class up, and the next class misses a year, which is unfortunate you know, so my class missed, we were the lower class, and we skipped a year, we were brought up because there was nobody to debate with each other, okay, there's only five guys left above us, so, we joined the two classes, we missed Chang'e, we missed interpretation, so I went back after my Geshe, and spent a couple of years working on that okay, but most people don't okay, so sometimes Geshe's have hole in their knowledge because something happened at the monastery okay. Now, what subject did we miss?

Nice okay, Buddhist logic, clear thinking okay, that's considered so important, it's called, nickname is the ...? Key to Emptiness, sometimes they call it the Door to Emptiness okay, it's so important that every year for three months, you stop everything, the whole monastery stops, all the regular classes stop, and you go, you join in a special group, and you go study subject number ... topic number three, you go study the second school, Sutra school okay, mainly from the book of ...? Chandrakirti ... Dharmakirti, I just keep making this joke because I'm figure you'll ...

I don't want you to do it, I don't want you to embarrass me with somebody, talk about Chandrakirti. By the way, I'd like to announce major success last night, during the offering, Candy Lai from Singapore was kind enough to make a damn good Mabu Tofu, which is tofu fried with hot spices, and luckily I got some of it before it was mixed with the chocolate cake, and it was the best Mabu Tofu I ever had, and anytime you want to come to my house and make Mabu Tofu, I'll pay you, I'll borrow money from word, okay, and it was amazing, then after that we mix some of it with the chocolate cake, and I'm happy to report that I checked it, I took a bite, I almost threw up, and I watched Stanley when he took a bite, and I think the stuff came to here, and he's like ... you know, and so, I don't know how many of you had that experience, but it was a very valuable lesson, and I hope that after Geshe Michael is long gone and you're teaching your grandkids, you will tell them the story about the Mabu Tofu chocolate cake okay, and they'll never forget. So, by the way, that's a good teaching tool, and you should think about it okay, you can repeat ten times to people that they shouldn't mix some hippie thing with 2,000 year Dharma, you can keep repeating it over and over again, or you can just make a Mabu Tofu chocolate cake and force them to eat some of it, and try to connect that bad memory to a bad action, you see what I mean?

And it's much more powerful, people don't forget okay, so, anytime you can come up with some kind of game like that, or something interesting, do it okay, so that's kind of your job as a teacher, I don't know your culture, you know, you have your own, you know, Finland, I don't know anything about Finland except it starts with fin and it ends with lun, and you know, you have your own food, you have your own stuff, so mix two things that are terrible together, and make your students eat it, and you do your own thing. One day we did a retreat in New York, and we made a plan, we fed everybody a big heavy dinner with lots of sugar, and then we did the meditation right after lunch, and everyone fell asleep, and everyone was unhappy, and then we announced that we did it on purpose, to show them not to eat those food before you meditate, and actually they got angry, people got angry, why you did that to us? And I said I'm sorry, but they didn't forget it.

Okay, year 21 to 25 okay, you know sometimes they say Geshe course takes 20 years, sometimes they say Geshe course takes 25 years, so 21 to 25. If you choose to go for a higher Geshe degree, you are waiting to be examined, even if you don't want to go for a higher degree, you might have to wait one or two or three years, because there's a limit on the number of Geshe's allowed in each monastery. In my monastery, it's two normal Geshe's and two advanced Geshe's, so there's a big bottleneck of people, they kind of wait till someone dies, and then they graduate the other guy, you know, so you can wait for up to ten years, if you go for a highest Geshe you see, because you have to wait ...

highest Geshe you have to be examined in all the monasteries, in all the six great ... seven great colleges of the Tsongkhapa, two colleges of Cicero, two colleges of Dribbhu, two colleges of Ganden, and then Tashi Humbo. So, these are seven great colleges, and you have to appear before each college, you know, so I appeared before Seraje College, but I didn't have to appear before all the colleges, you see what I mean?

Then you get a lower Geshe. So, you know, you're supposed to not waste your time, and that's when you might study Chang'e for example, you might work hard on Master Yonsei's book, how to interpret what did the Buddha really mean, okay? And that's a typical period where you might study other specialized subjects, okay?

And Chang'e is a very popular one. There's another one I'd like to mention, called Surku, say Surku. These are topics from topic number four, okay?

Which is Asanga, Maitreya, okay? The Jewel of Realizations. And in there for example, he mentions the twelve links of dependence and the Wheel of Life in like ten words, and that's it.

And so, there's a custom to extract that line out and write a whole book about it, okay? And that's Surku, means to extract juice from a plant as medicine, you see? It's the process of boiling, boiling, boiling, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing, and you get the juice out of the plant, and then you use it as medicine.

So, Surku means get the juice out of Maitreya, and then teach it separately. So, there's five great circles in my monastery, in our monastery, and for example, you do study some mind only at that time, one of them is mind only. One of them is called Samsuk, which is basically the lion's dance, all the details of the lion's dance.

One of them is dependent origination, the twelve links. One of them is Gendun Nyeshu, which means all the possible combinations of the five paths, there's 20 permutations. Like, suppose you are Hinayana for ...

you get the pen as Hinayana and then you graduate to Mahayana, and there's 20 ... that's a mind map, and it has 20 parts. So, it's called the mind map, 20-part mind map of how you can get to enlightenment, different ways okay?

And what's cool is that these books were missing in our monastery, during the Cultural Revolution they were all burned, all copies were burned, and we didn't have them, they were missing, and John Brady's project found them in Russia and recovered them and input them, and that was the first book ever printed on a computer in Tibetan, in the world, and it was a two-volume set, we have a copy in Sedona, and I'm so proud of that, it's an amazing ... I mean if ACIP only did that one thing for 30 years and spent 10 million dollars, it's worth it, and he did a few more. So, anyway, if you are waiting for your Geshe degree, if there's a bottleneck, too many people in your class didn't die, then you you might pause and do Chang'e Interpretation Yantze, or you might do those surkuls okay?

Got it? Okay. And then every year in the winter, for three months, you do Lodging, you do school number two, because it's so important for every subject, it's necessary for every subject, and then there was a custom in Tibet that ...

it's really cool, every year for one month the monastery would select the 50 best Geshe candidates from different classes, the 50 best students, and that's your team, that's your ceremony team, debating team, and they would all pack up a backpack and a sleeping bag, like a blanket, and they would hike to a monastery called Zhang, Ratte, it's a special monastery, small monastery in the mountains, and ... and they would debate together for a whole month, sometimes all day, sometimes all ... many ...

like once a week, or twice a week, you do all night, you don't sleep, you debate all night, and so that's kind of like the Olympics of debating. So, if every year your monastery stops for three months to study logic, two months is preparation for the winter debates, they're called winter debates, and in one month you go out for the winter debates, and the kids who are not so good, they stay in the home monastery and they try to get better for next year, and then they can compete to be on the team, you see I mean? So, it's very rare to go to one, to be selected for one or two, and I went to four okay, I'm bragging, why?

I told the teacher I'm going, I don't care whether you select me or not, he said I don't know if you can do that, I said I'm doing it, so I was like unofficial 51, and I'm happy I did it, because ... because then I understood, I had big breakthroughs in in that subject, so I learned it, and I ... it was extremely difficult, extremely hard, because when they debate they go very very fast, and I was very frustrated, when I taught course 13 I lost half of my students in New York, when I taught logic I lost half of the students, I had 80, I got 40, 40 dropped out, and it's hard, it's very hard, and I decided I'm gonna, you know, bet something you, I'm gonna, I'm gonna figure this out you know, so don't be afraid okay, don't have laziness right, go for the difficult subjects, this is Tsongkhapa's tradition, and I became one of the best okay, because I just ... I remember being so angry and frustrated okay, and then just do it okay, got it?

Okay. Okay, that's the years, I'm sorry we're spending so long on it Tim, maybe we don't get to the class tonight huh? Okay, I'd like to cover a few more courses okay, course number five is ...

yeah, How Karma Works. Somebody guess why I ... what was one of my motivations for putting that in the 18 foundation courses, what do you think?

I said my, as a Westerner, I'll give you a clue. Yeah, we were not brought up listening to karma okay, in China you were Ye Li right, and at different countries you have, at least you have the word karma, and at least people talk about it a little bit, maybe a lot of that talk is superstition, but at least you heard about it, and ... but in my culture, in Western culture, because I was doing the course for Westerners, mostly Americans, some Europeans, some South Americans, Latin Americans, but I ...

I thought I should put a course about karma in here, so that you can kind of confirm the details of karma you see. In America, when I was growing up, I remember my mom ... I remember the first time I heard the word karma, and by the way, in those years, like 1835?

Okay, 1950s okay, it was very rare to hear the word karma, but my mom, I don't know somehow how she heard about it, and I was killing bugs in our house, I was killing flies with a newspaper, and my mom said don't kill the flies you know, and I'm like why mom, and she said bad karma, and I'm like what's bad karma, and she says it's gonna come back to you, and I said how, what, where, where does it stay, where does it go, where is it stored, you know, and she's like I don't know, it's just bad karma okay, you know like mother says don't ask so many questions, so my ... that's where most Americans karma understanding stopped there, you know, we don't know where it goes, we don't know about seas, some people say it's like a big boomerang, it goes to Mars and it comes back 10 years later, like a satellite, you know, we have all these weird ideas, so I thought there are so many weird ideas about karma in my country, in my culture, I should, we should learn about it, and as I mentioned I think before, I think it's Ketub Jey said, Tsongkhapa student, said even the people who live in the countries like Tibet or other places where people learn about karma, or karma is always talked about, people don't understand it, they just believe it because their mom believe it, you see, so ...

and by the way, Pabongka, if we get to the real class, Om Mani Padme Hum, he's gonna talk about that tonight, you know, just blindly doing what your parents did, so, you know, that's kind of one of the big reasons why I put a karma course inside, at that point, because none of the students grew up with karma, and they didn't understand the details, okay, so we ... and I'm very proud of that course, it's how karma works, it gives all the details about karma. Now, sources ...

you know, Abhidharmakosha, Stanley's text, and we use heavily his ... Choney Lama's commentary, but also commentary of the first Dalai Lama, so the first Dalai Lama wrote a good commentary, he was a young man when Tsongkhapa was an old man, so he spent only a few years with Tsongkhapa, and I put a picture of him in the ... yeah, I don't know if it's too much to ask, but ...

it's in the images for the Eighteen Foundation Courses summary, so it's gonna take him a while, but I like the photo, it's a painting, I found a painting of him for you, when he met ... the day he met Tsongkhapa, and he's got a funny little mustache, I'm sure he had to shave it off the next day, but okay, monks are not allowed to have mustache and beards, that's specifically, and anyway ... we are allowed to not have hair up here, but don't let it come down here okay, so I use that a lot okay, and I'll try to find a painting for you.

This book by the way is the best biography of Tsongkhapa in the world by about a thousand percent, so if you want to know more about your own lineage, read it for fun, it's not very difficult, it's a cute book, it's an entertaining book okay, and it's big because it has lots of paintings in it, it's based on 15 famous paintings, but I'm very proud of that book, it took 15 years to finish it, and if you really want to know about Tsongkhapa's life, then you know what I tell people, make it a coffee table book in your living room, and every time you have company just open it.

There's a big tradition in the monastery that we open this book on a holiday, or on a birthday, so you know, Easter's coming up, Sunday, we're supposed to hunt for eggs, I don't know why, don't ask me, but we can open ... you could, maybe this Sunday, open up this book, just open up, close your eyes and look at a sentence, and it's a message from Buddha and Tsongkhapa, that's tradition okay. Alright, you got it yet Tim?

Are you carving it? Say again? What what?

Gendun druk, Gendun druk, Gendun druk, Gendun, look for Gendun. Okay, course number six, yay! What is it?

Yeah, Diamond Cutter Sutra okay, and you guys know that right? This has an interesting story behind it, and it's fun to tell you the stories of how I wrote these courses. So, you do not study the Diamond Cutter Sutra in a Tsongkhapa monastery, you do not, it's not part of the course you know, and it's a big ...

I think it's a big shame that they don't study it. So, most Geshe's have not studied the Diamond Cutter Sutra, they know about it, but they haven't studied it. And, I think I told you the story, so I you know, I used to go to prayers, I was living in a Mongolian community, I was living in a Mongolian temple with about 15 monks, and most of them were Mongolians, and we used to go to shabten, shabten means go to people's houses to ...

there's Gendun druk on the left okay, I say it's the first day, then he got shaved okay, but we use his commentary to Abhidharma okay, I translated it for 12 years, I didn't publish it yet, it's done, and I wrote a dictionary for Abhidharma, and that took me about 10 years okay, on the bus, going to New York, four hours every day, because I can't, I can't have to sleep at the monastery. So anyway, you go for shabten, which means you go to the community's home, you recite some prayers, and they give you lunch. And monks love it, you also get a little red envelope understand?

So, everyone signs up for shabten you know, and because monks don't have any income you know, and it was a poor community, it was a poor town, and so it was exciting for the monks to get some money and to have lunch, a good lunch, and we would all go and ... you're supposed to recite something, so in Mongolia the Diamond Cutter Sutra is very highly respected, it's considered very valuable, so, and I think in China also, Japan, Vietnam, so anyway, we would recite the Diamond Cutter Sutra, and my abbot at that time was a blind high-level Geshe from Debu, Mongolian, and he memorized it right? And then he would take a Diamond Cutter Sutra with him to the family's house, and he'd say look, he loved to eat, in fact he died with a roll in his mouth, I was there, I was with him, we were alone, he died with a roll here, a pon chik, you know, a yo chow, and he sat there like this for like five minutes, and I'm like, are you okay Geshe-la?

He didn't say anything, so you can really die anywhere, it was hard to get the donut out of his hand, and I didn't eat it okay, it was too ... but uh, so he loved to eat, so he said, let's split the scripture up, everybody take five pages, and we can get to lunch faster, and I said, but it's gonna sound weird, we're all reciting different pages, he said, they don't know anything, you know, so ... we all recite different pages, and I had this sexy page you know, about this cutting fingers off of this guy, it was very interesting, so I thought I'd like to read more about that, so anyway, I started studying the Sutra, we found in Russia, John's project found the only great Tibetan commentary, there's only one, guess who it's by?

Choney Lama, who you had some ... this morning, you had a taste of Choney Lama this morning, from Lama's family okay, and he's a great writer, so we found that commentary, later we input Kamalashila's commentary, which is also very long, it's ... we're translating it, it's gonna be about a thousand pages, and there's a short commentary by Vasubandhu I think, it's only 30 pages, it's shorter than the Sutra, so good luck, but anyway, something interesting happened, my personal Lama, Ken Rinpoche, here I think, yeah, he got ill, and the doctor said he had to have an operation, and so I spent many hours sitting in the hospital with him, and I didn't have much else to do, so I said, and I was in the middle of the ACI course, I'm saying what's next, you know, what do I do next, and I said well, let's do Diamond Cutter Sutra, you know, he's there, he can't get out of bed, he has to answer questions, and so I started translating it in the hospital, and that's how I always remember this Sutra, and then we made the course like that, so if someone asks you what's the flow, you can say either lunch or hospital, okay, those are the two flow, or if you want to make a good story for your students, you can say Geshe-la decided everyone needs emptiness before they go too far in the course, and that's a good reason too, okay, so before you go too far in the ACI foundation courses, you should have a good dose of emptiness, have we had a higher middle way emptiness in the course yet? Yeah, only course one, one third right, of course one, but not in any other course, so you haven't really had a course about emptiness, so course six, excuse me? Some, I don't remember, five, oh yeah you're right, there are some proofs, but they're lower middle way, yeah there are, and some of them are also used by the higher middle way, so anyway yeah, okay, so it's good to have a good dose of Diamond Cutter okay, that's the logic for course number?

Six, okay I'm gonna try to do two more today okay, and then we'll go to your homework and God knows if we'll do any of it. We also found a carving of Choney Lama in Russia, so one of the things that most of you may not know is that John's team spent 14 years in the St. Petersburg Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences okay, Oriental Division, they spent 14 years and they just made a catalog, they didn't input the books, which we still haven't done there, and hopefully we and our friends can get that together, at least to scan them, and they have a lot of books from Dunhuang, we have to try to save, in case there's a fire there or something, Russians love to smoke, understand?

And I saw some close, you know, tonight the Notre Dame burned I think, today, so it things happen, fires, fires happen you know, so anyway, so we had, we got permission to go into the library and when we catalogued the books, we catalogued every single drawing in every book okay, so there's tens of thousands of drawings are catalogued, you can search, there's a special search key, and so we searched for Choney Lama and there's one carving in the world, and it's in St. Petersburg and you got it, you have it Tim? It's in your ...

it's in your manual okay, I put it in your manual, those carvings all look the same to be honest, you know, it could be a Sangha, it could be Vasubandhu, but anyway, under the carving it says this is Choney Lama, so I was happy, I think it might be kind of Choney, his hat looks a little Choney, okay, there you go, okay, and as you know, next image, or you can just scroll down, as you know that course became the Diamond Cutter Business Book which is now sold about a million copies and is in 35 languages okay, and I think it's interesting that the ACI course became the book okay, and then that kind of started DCI and ACI really, so okay, kind of cool.

Okay I'm gonna do two more, you okay with that? I don't care, I'm just being polite, impolite. Okay, what's course seven?

Bodhisattva Vows, okay, the vows of a Bodhisattva. I was trying to find a painting for it, it's kind of difficult, but I did, you want to scroll down Tim? This is Chandragomi okay, Chandragomi, he lived around, I don't know, 600 AD, something like that, he was not a monk, he was a Genyan, lifetime layman vows, which many of you have, and he's responsible for a big part of the Bodhisattva Vows, he recorded them, he wrote them down, and also we have vows from Lord Buddha and other sources, and in this course, I'm sorry, our Asanga, Shantideva, Chandragomi, and Buddha, four sources for the 64 vows of a Bodhisattva, and I had Chinese friends, Dr. Wu contacted me recently and asked John I think to teach the vows to him, because not all of that transmission got to China in that form, so it's nice to have the 46 ...

64 total, how many root vows? 18 and 46, 18 root vows, 46 secondary vows, many other instruct, you know, many other associated vows, commitments, but there there's a book by Tsongkhapa called The Highway for Bodhisattvas, and I used that for the vows, he explains each vow in many pages, he spends many pages on each vows, and when that collection of scriptures, the most important collection in Tibet, is printed, they always put that book first, there must be a reason okay? So, The Highway for Bodhisattvas, say Changchuk Shunlam, Changchuk Shunlam okay? Shunlam means highway for Bodhisattvas okay?

So, we use that book. Now, again due to the kindness of Mr. John Brady, there's an incredible book called The String of Shining Jewels okay? String of Shining Jewels, it's by a Geshe from inferior monastery called Debum, just kidding okay?

You got to be loyal to your monastery. But, he was a tutor to one of the Dalai Lamas, 10th Dalai Lama I think, and he decided to write a book of vows, it's called Domsum, say Domsum. Domsum means three sets of vows, what are they?

Number one, freedom vows, eight kinds of freedom vows, monks, nuns, and lifetime layman vows, and one-day vows, and then secondly, the Bodhisattva vows, thirdly the Tantric vows. Now, if you actually write down the monks vows, that's 253 paragraphs you know, to explain each vow, and this Geshe Tsewang Samdrum okay, he ... he decided to write a book about all three sets of vows, but he decided to make it short, and sexy okay?

He doesn't talk about ... he doesn't blah blah blah, he just says here's the guts of the vow, here's the vow, correctly, completely, but shortly okay? And each ...

each one is like three sentences or four sentences, so he ... he decided to cover all the vows, including Tantric vows, which are hundreds of vows, and he wrote this cute book, an incredible book, very well written, very precise about vows, we should translate it, I'm just getting inspired. I taught it here at Diamond Mountain during the three-year retreat, I taught the Vinaya, I taught the monks vows, parts of the monks vows from this book, and it's a very ...

by the way, that was an extremely important teaching, and it was overshadowed by other events, but ... but that teaching was extremely important, and if you can get a recording you should, especially if you want to become a nun or something like that, you should study it, it's extremely important teaching, and I was very happy with it. So anyway, we found half of his book, we found half the pages, and then we spent years tracking them down, Gene Smith helped us, and we looked for the pages, and finally, in many countries we found all the pages, we found five pages here, three pages here, two pages here, and we put it together, and it's finished okay?

So, we should give John Brady a hand, yay! So, on the difficult Bodhisattva vows, I took Tsongkhapa's clarifications, and on the easier ones I used Geshe Tsongkhapa's okay? What school?

Yeah, higher middle way okay? Bodhisattva vows are higher middle way okay? Alright, one more course then we'll go to the class, hopefully, Aum Mani Padme Hum.

By the way, in the monastery Aum Mani Padme Hum means I hope so, Inshallah, it's the same as Inshallah, Inshallah means you know ... what's it mean? If God wills.

So, sometimes in the monastery Aum Mani Padme Hum means if God wills, but maybe not. We'll get to your class don't worry, Inshallah. Okay, by the way, Insh comes from ...

well, related to the Sanskrit, the word wish comes from that, the prenasal Insh, it drops out, okay, anyway here we go. Course 8 is called Death and the Realms of Existence, it wasn't one of the more popular courses, you know, I announced it, everybody come, oh Geshe-la what's the next course? How to die, you know, and they're like ...

and where can you go? You know, what are your options? You know, after you die, what are the places you can go?

You know, someone, a friend of mine is dying tonight, they are in intensive care, they're expected to die tonight, okay, and it's good to know where you might go, you know, it's good to get ready, and so basically, this is a very good book about how to get ready, things like that. Now, there's an interesting background to this, when I was doing the courses, it became very popular to translate and to study a book called the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Bardo Thodro in Tibetan, and it's very exotic, it's very sexy, I have a ... someone I know, a friend of mine went crazy from reading it, he was actually put in a mental asylum, so he studied it, he tried to do it without a teacher, and he spent like a year in a mental asylum.

So, Bardo Thodro, interestingly, that book is wrong okay, the Tibetan Book of Dead is wrong, it was not authentic okay, accurate, it's missing the first quality okay, if you study the Bardo from the Abhidharma, and from other authentic sources, Sutras, it's nothing like that okay, so you might want to tell people that, that book is not correct, and we don't study it, we don't use it okay, we use the Abhidharma Kosha, we use other sources okay. So, I thought at the time it would be good to put out an accurate description of what happens during death, and what happens in the Bardo, and what are your options for where you will go okay, so ... once you prove future lives, in course four, people are gonna think well where am I gonna go in this future life okay, again I was operating from a Western culture that didn't believe in future lives, so first I have to sell future lives, and then people are gonna ask me well where do I go, and what's this 49 days thing, what happens then, what's the spirit world, what's the Bardo okay, so I decided to write a course ... after you prove that there's future and past lives to somebody, you better help them to go there, and interestingly, you may be interested to know, a lot of this course was inspired by my mother, because when I first went to study Buddhism in Asia, she got cancer, and she was dying, and I went to my Lama, I said my mom's dying, what should I do?

He said bring her here, we'll teach her how to die. I'm like wow, okay, and my mom wasn't a Buddhist, and she wasn't interested in Buddhism, and I wrote her from India, you know in those days there's no email right, it's two or three weeks mail, I used to get letters from her a year later sometimes, Indian mail, and so I wrote her, I said come, what are you gonna lose, you're dying, they kicked her out of her school, she was a schoolteacher, they ... she had a ...

what do you call ... seizure in the class, and they said look, it's freaking the kids out, you can't ... you cannot teach, go home, so she's sitting at home waiting to die you know, and I wrote her, I said come, what are you ...

what are you gonna lose you know, so she came, she never traveled outside of the US, and she was very ill, we drove her up to the library in the back of a car, she was laying down, and so we put her in the class, we put her you know up in the wall, against the wall, and they taught her for three months how to die, and I was so impressed, I was like that's cool, that should be a course for everybody okay, so basically this course came from my own personal experience, that I thought it was important that people should have a correct you know, description of what's going to happen to you okay, so I like this course, and that's all, we use Abhidharma, and we use Gendun Drup's commentary. Next picture Tim, I'm sorry, it's Man Manda, I'm gonna change his name to Tim Man Manda, yeah there we go ... I also used a book called Tenrim Chenmo, say Tenrim Chenmo, so the greatest book ever written in Tibet is Lamrim Chenmo, which is the Lamrim of Tsongkapa okay, big, in English it would be about a thousand ...

ten thousand pages okay, sorry, eight thousand pages okay, if we translate it, with notes, and okay, and you might be interested to know he stole the name from an earlier book okay, called Tenrim Chenmo, all the words are the same except the first word, so Lamrim Chenmo means the great book on the steps of the path, Tenrim Chenmo means the great book on the steps of the teaching, and Tsongkapa stole the name, and he stole most of the material from Tenrim Chenmo, so Tenrim Chenmo is a ... we call proto-Lamrim, proto in English means primitive, early, super early Lamrim, Kadampa times, 1,000 years ago, and it's the longest book ever written by the Kadampas, as Seiji can tell you, like his text by itself is maybe ten pages, and that's typical Kadampa poetry, we don't normally see a book longer than 10 or 20 pages, this is the master book of all the Kadampas okay, this is a thousand pages, and it's a whole Lamrim, it's a whole Buddhism, incredible, difficult to read, old, 400 years before Tsongkapa okay, and it was missing in the world, after the Cultural Revolution it was missing, we couldn't find it, and Gene Smith helped me, Gene Smith who was Jeff's boss for many years, he helped me find it, and we worked together, we found we found half of a copy in Russia, we found some pieces in ...

somehow he ended up in Indonesia with some pieces of it, and so we joined them all together and we made a copy, and then we we printed it in the monastery, we input it and we print it, we saved the book okay, many years later when I'm writing Tsongkapa's biography, there's a story, and Tsongkapa is sitting with his students and he's saying I wish we could find the Tenrim Chumul, you know, I wish we could find this book that's missing, because it sounds really good you know, and they went looking for it, and they found it, he found the only copy at that time, 400 years after it was written, and this painting is him, all excited, and usually you use a stick, many sticks, a package of incense, in the monastery you don't light one, you light the whole thing, like 30 pieces of incense, and then when a high Lama comes like Geshe Lothar, everyone has a silk scarf, or a flower, you understand what I'm saying? With the red envelope over here, word can give the biggest one, and you you greet a high Lama with incense, some offering, and a silk scarf, this is custom. So, what you see in this picture is, the book is being delivered to Tsongkapa, and he does the Lama thing to it, he's out there with incense and a silk scarf to put on the book, you see, he's treating the book like a high Lama, okay, that's what's happening in this picture okay, and so I thought it would be auspicious, lucky, to put some of that book in your course okay, so I put it in the ...

in the Death and the Realms of Existence course, so some of the course is translated from that book okay, it's very very cool. About three years ago, some high Lama sent me a package, and they said I got this thing from Tibet, you're gonna want it, this is really rare, and I opened it up, it was the Tenrim Chimu, which I printed 20 years before, and I'm like wow, thanks a lot you know, okay, alright, okay anyway, that's enough bragging, it's ...