Занятие 5, часть 2

[Говорящий 2] (0:00 - 8:25)
I think we'll do another meditation. Okay, grassy eyes. Deep, deep, deep.

Slightly tighten your stomach, your abdomen. Especially lower abdomen. Don't make a big effort, but just sort of find a line of balance where there's a slight tension in the lower stomach and lower abdomen.

And it loosens the muscles of the lower spine. Now I'd like you to put your mind into the middle of the Muladhara Chakra. Muladhara Chakra is like a knob, which is at the place where your legs meet in your groin.

Don't put your mind to the place where your legs meet. And then put your mind about an inch into your body from that point. Try to focus your mind there.

You don't have to do anything special or mystical. Just try to keep your mind there, gently, softly. See if you can feel some kind of a center there.

This center, you can almost feel it like a small ball, is actually a knob. Certain channels are twisted here, forming a knob. And what we're going to try is to open that knob slightly.

That knob is responsible for feeling tired, getting older, not having the energy that you would like to have. It's also responsible for not being able to achieve the things you want in life. The knots along the spine in the body, which are called chakras, are responsible for not feeling energy, not feeling youthful, vigor.

And they're also responsible for not having the willpower or the discipline to do the things we would like to do. So we're going to try to subvert those knots. We're going to take the mind inside of that chakra.

So now imagine the little ball you feel, or imagine a ball. You're going deeper inside the ball, to the middle of the chakra. Put your mind there, in the middle of the chakra, between your legs, about an inch into the body.

It's important not to go back towards the anus. Then that will cause some problems with your poopoo. You have to stay towards the front of the place between your legs, into the body.

But not as far back as your anus. Try to focus the mind inside that chakra. Try it comfortably, sweetly.

Try to keep it there. The longer you can keep it there, the more power will come out there, and the more energy you will feel during the day. Now I'd like you to imagine a special kind of power there, in the middle of that ball.

Like those geodes, where it's like a ball of stone, and inside there's crystals. So inside the ball, almost like a stone. I'd like you to picture this beautiful crystalline, clear, black water.

But crystalline like glass. It's a liquid, between a liquid and air. But it's crystalline.

[Говорящий 1] (8:28 - 8:38)
And it's a tiny, tiny amount, trying to crack through the chakra, move up and down through the chakra, like the vein of crystals for a stone.

[Говорящий 2] (8:39 - 11:26)
Just imagine a tiny, tiny flow, trying to crack through the chakra of liquid glass. Keep your mind lightly on that liquid glass. Your mind will wander.

Bring it back calmly, carefully. Don't stress, don't strain. Think about lunch.

Think about your laptop, and then slowly come back to the liquid glass. Try not to move. And slowly come back to your bed, and release the meditation.

Open your eyes. Yes?

[Говорящий 1] (11:26 - 17:45)
So, Pabongka Rinpoche begins to discuss where did the teaching of the Lamrim come from. When did Lamrim start? And those of you who've been, you know, consorting with Buddhists for a while, you kind of get this impression that Lamrim started with Tsongkhapa.

Tsongkhapa wrote the Lamrim Shambhala, the Great Lamrim, a very famous thousand pages about Lamrim. And then you will come to know, you will come to learn in this week, the story of Atisha, Lord Atisha, who brought the Lamrim to Tibet. Two amazing, you know, what do you call it?

Swashbuckling adventures, which we're going to talk about. That's the main subject of the later part of the week. You're going to learn the whole story of how it got from India to Tibet.

And in fact, how it got to India from Indonesia. And we'll be going through that. So then a lot of people, they start to form this idea in their mind, okay, Lamrim was taught by, by the way, you've got to know the casting characters.

On the left is Pabongka Rinpoche. And you can't imagine how lucky you are to see his face. You can't imagine how lucky you are to read his teachings.

Unbelievable being on this planet. Then the left one is Chidam Rinpoche, second from the left. And he's the disciple who wrote the text down.

The teacher of His Holiness. One of the two tutors of His Holiness, the current Dalai Lama. I just like his face, you know.

I just want to sit there and stare at his face. My mother came to India when she was dying. And I was studying near the Dalai Lama.

And the Lama taught her how to die. And she was dying. And then we got to see His Holiness.

And it's a beautiful time. And then she bought me this really beautiful little photo thing. You know, it's His Holiness and the two tutors.

And I used to just stare at it. And some Tibetan guy had painted it in with watercolors because they didn't have any money. And they make color photos with watercolors.

And I used to just stare at it. I love that particular photo. So anyway.

And then the next Lama is Khenpo Rinpoche, who looks very cheerful. Just before he hits you on the head. But I guess that's what I needed at the time.

But then I stayed with him for 25 years. We lived together for 25 years. A really tough, old-fashioned Lama.

But Khenpo Rinpoche was his heart teacher. And he met Khenpo Rinpoche as a young boy. Not a young boy.

He was about, let's see. He met him when he was teased. And he was a bad boy.

My teacher was a naughty boy. He was like in the... Monasteries have games, okay?

No. A Western friend of mine was trapped in a monastery. A monk.

And there are rough kids in the monks. There are rough young men in the monks. And then...

So he was really naughty. And then Pabongkha Rinpoche came to give a similar series of teachings. It wasn't this series.

But he came to Sara to give a series of teachings. And then my Lama was supposed to be the person that ran out and got the breakfast food. Right?

So it's kind of a tradition. Where is she? Food.

So people get stuck with the food oftentimes and end up being the big Lama later. So this is some kind of karma. But...

So my Lama was the nirbha. It means the quartermaster of the hall, of the college. So he had to run out to Prescott and get all the food and missed a lot of the teaching.

You know? And then one day he came in and... He came in and Pabongkha Rinpoche paid a surprise visit to the kitchen.

Which happened to me with his holiness. But that's another story. So then he saw my teacher.

And he came over to him and grabbed his head. And he goes like that. He says, oh, this one's going to be a really good one.

And this one looked like a good one. And then he, Rinpoche said something happened to him in that moment. That Pabongkha Rinpoche touched him.

And then his whole mind changed. He started actually studying the Buddha. Then he told his teacher...

He told his house teacher. He called again, right? He did again.

He told his house teacher, Pabongkha Rinpoche touched me. Now I'm going to be a Theravada Geshe. I'm going to be a first-level Geshe, you know?

And the teacher said, when you become a Geshe, I'm going to become a Dalai Lama. And he did. He became a...

He beat 10,000 monks in Tibet in 1956 or something. And he got invited to the Dalai Lama's personal quarters. The Dalai Lama was a child.

He was in his early teens. And he got the ultimate award from the Dalai Lama, which is a block of old Chinese tea. Anyway, why did I get into that?

Oh.

[Говорящий 2] (17:52 - 17:53)
So why?

[Говорящий 1] (18:05 - 27:28)
Oh, we tend to think it all started with the Tibetans. We tend to think of... Yeah.

That's it. That Pabongkha Rinpoche... We equate the Lamrim with somebody who lived in the 1920s.

Or maybe Tsongkhapa who lived in the 1400s. Or maybe back as far as Atisha who lived in the 1000s, right? But then Pabongkha Rinpoche says that's not how it started.

He said, the original Lamrim is the perfection of wisdom seekers. Okay? So there's a huge body of literature there.

I don't know. 20 volumes of scriptures that were taught by Lord Buddha called the Perfection of Wisdom. And they are extremely difficult and extremely beautiful.

But they teach emptiness. They teach the subject of emptiness. We call...

Musa Juche means direct subject matter. Explicit subject matter is emptiness. Their implicit subject matter is compassion, love.

Because what are you going to do with the emptiness? See what I mean? So you figure out that everything is coming from you.

You figure out that your complaining girlfriend is coming from you. You undertake steps to change the seeds that will make her change whether she wants to or not. You change her.

And you don't have any negotiations and you don't discuss anything. You save so much time. And you just...

You stop complaining about people at work. And then that changes the seeds in your mind. And then she stops criticizing you.

She becomes quite, you know, on demand, though. And then... I mean, you can do anything in your life.

But probably you'd better not have a human being. Then... Then that's wisdom.

You just... By making your girlfriend criticize you, stop criticizing her. You have just...

What do you say? You have just performed in its ultimate fashion the perfection of wisdom. That's all it's for.

And that's all it means. You understand she's coming from you? She's empty or coming from herself?

You changed the seeds that made her criticize you? And you have just fulfilled the purpose of the perfection of wisdom scriptures 20,000 pages taught by the Buddha. Because what else did you think it was for?

You see what I mean? And then you change her, right? And then you start to get these ideas that maybe you could change the world that way.

You see? You say, if you can work on my daughter, you can work on anybody. You know?

I could change the whole world. I could change everybody in the world. I could stop Iraq.

You know? I could fix big problems. Because they're also coming from you.

You see what I mean? And then... And then necessarily and always the perfection of wisdom slides into...

Compassion. Bodhicitta. And the wish to save the world.

You see? It always does. You fix your complaining girlfriend and then you're like, God damn, I could fix Afghanistan.

You know? That's easier than her. You know?

And... You know? It always slides into compassion.

You always get this idea. It pops up. Bing!

You know? I could use this on the whole world. You know?

So the direct subject matter of the ancient teachings of the perfection of wisdom is emptiness and seeds and how to change things. That always... That always slides into compassion.

Because you start to get these ideas like maybe I could change, you know, the budget and maybe I could change the mafia in Russia and stuff like that. And you just get... Weird stuff starts to happen.

And you can change anything. And then you start... That's bodhicitta.

So that's how the Lamrim started. It started with the perfection. The Buddha invented the Lamrim.

Don't think it's some Tibetan thing. It's not... It's not Pabongka Rinpoche or Khenro Rinpoche or Thich Nhat Hanh Rinpoche or...

It's the Buddha. And it's not the Buddha, okay? I mean, he's just a kid.

I mean, there are billions of Buddhas before that. And we can't even imagine where it started. Who started it.

Billions of planets. Billions of enlightened beings. It's not some Tibetan thing.

Another thing. That Lamrim has come down historically from the Buddha in two great streams. The emptiness stream, fixing your girlfriend's criticizing, comes down through Nagarjuna.

Arya Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna lived in 200 AD. Sometimes he's called the second Buddha.

The teachings on emptiness had gotten... What do you call it? It kind of got lost.

It happens through history, right? From time to time ideas get... They start to wander off a little bit, you know?

And people start explaining things wrong or they don't get it. When you have a lineage which is 100 generations old, then stuff gets confused. So, between the time of the Buddha and Nagarjuna for 700 years, things got a little weird on the emptiness time.

Which happens. Which happened in the last couple hundred years. And then you have to clarify it a bit.

So, Nagarjuna did that. And we trace our lineage, our emptiness back to Nagarjuna. So that stream of knowledge has come down to the Lamrim through Nagarjuna.

The emptiness side of things. The complaining girlfriend fix it methods have come down through Nagarjuna. The compassion side has come down through Asanga and Maitreya from the middle of the 4th century, maybe 350 AD.

And Asanga was taking dictation from Maitreya, who is the next Buddha in this world. The fourth Buddha of this Lamrim. So, those are the two great streams.

The Lamrim teachers are considered to have come down to us in two great streams. The emptiness stream coming down through Nagarjuna, which is sometimes called the profound, the profound stream. And then there's the stream on love.

What do you do after you fix your girlfriend? Then you naturally start to want to fix big stuff, like the world, like war or poverty or hunger in the world. And that's Bodhicitta.

And that's love. And that stream has come down through Asanga and Maitreya from the 4th century. So, we trace our current practice of the Lamrim to those two great streams.

And they were united into that by Atisha, which is going to be the subject of a lot of the coming weeks. It's good to know where your stuff comes from. It's just good.

You think maybe it's a little boring now. I'm about to hit you with a lot of dates. Hopefully 10 o'clock will come before that.

And it seems a little boring, and you're like, I don't care who wrote that commentary and that commentary. But later you will appreciate it. Later you will.

You go to so many things. You go to so many classes. My first yoga teachers, Lady Ruth and David Knife and Sharon Cannon, they told me, whenever you travel, take a class.

Just take a class. Yoga class. Wherever you are, take a class.

Someday it will be a disaster. You know? Some guy will hurt you.

And then someday you'll discover some beautiful, magic guy, you know, teacher. So, when we travel, we really try hard to go to a class wherever we are. So, we were in Ukraine.

We were in Kiev. We were out looking for Mrs. Hancock's stuff. We walked by yoga studio.

And I'm like, God, it's a yoga studio. And then we're like, let's go there tomorrow, you know? And we got the schedule and we went the next day and we struggled.

We went to one class and everybody's like, you don't speak English. So, we're like, that's okay, we'll just watch what you do, you know, because you cannot watch what I do. You'll never get it.

And then we said, yeah, yeah, just try it, you know. I'm like speaking broken Russian to this guy. And he's like, okay, you can try it.

And we go into the class and he's like, oh my God, you know, he's awesome. Totally awesome. And he's like, you cannot understand what I'm about to do.

Here, walk behind me. Put your arms around my stomach. Hold my stomach.

Feel what the organs are doing. And he's like, his muscles are like, ding, ding, ding.

[Говорящий 2] (27:30 - 27:31)
I'm like, wow, you know.

[Говорящий 1] (27:32 - 27:43)
He's like, I'm showing you how to do it. And then we did this really weird thing, right? And it was beautiful.

He was incredible. His name is Vadim, if you ever get his name.

[Говорящий 2] (27:45 - 27:46)
Lesser Ukranky Street.

[Говорящий 1] (27:46 - 39:17)
Lesser Ukranky Street. We couldn't remember the name of the street we were living on. It was Lesser Ukranky.

So, we said, Lesser Ukranky. But they had these books on the wall. And they were, oh my God, they were so messed up.

They had all these very weird books you could imagine. Because they don't have anything to compare you with yet. There haven't been enough teachers come to Ukraine yet for them to distinguish between what's cuckoo and what's not cuckoo.

So, there's everything. There's like so-and-so on cosmic sex. And then they're over here.

It's all mixed up. And you're not like that. You have a real lineage.

You have a 2,500 year old lineage, which is tight. It was passed on tight. And it's strong.

And it's alive. And the Dalai Lama is just the most recent guy. And it goes back.

It goes back for a hundred generations. And you should know a little bit about it. You shouldn't be lazy.

You shouldn't, like, some guy shows up to your class and you're like, I don't know. There are some Tibetan guys. There are some Indian guys.

I mean, you should, you can be proud of your lineage. It's not like you're just shopping. You have all this weird, gross stuff on the wall.

Like, don't be me. Just some guy made up something, you know, this month or this year. And then next year it's going to be somebody else.

It's not like that. All right. There are three main forms that come out.

Well, there are three main ways of studying these subjects. And you should know. There are three.

We talked about two streams of content. But there are three streams of style. Okay.

So the content has come down in two streams. The way of teaching that content has three manifestations. And you should know the three.

And you should be able to replicate them at will. Right? That's what a good teacher is.

Some people will need style number one. Some people will need style number three. You should be a master of all three styles.

Okay. So here are the three styles. The first one is called Shun Bawa.

Say Shun Bawa. Shun Bawa. Bawa means a person who follows X.

Shun means the five great classics of Buddhism. So there are five great books of Buddhism that we study in the monastery. Five great classics.

And Shun Bawa means someone who goes through like a Geshe course. Like that. The ACI courses are Shun Bawa.

The 18 ACI courses are Shun Bawa. These are meant for people of greater capacity. Okay.

They can handle it. And they can handle 18 courses of study for 25 years of study. You know?

They're great capacity. They get more detail. And they go through the five great courses.

What are the five great books? I don't want to bore you. And I don't want to overwhelm you.

But I guess I should mention what I can remember. It's what we study in the monastery for 25 years. So we spend the first 12 years on the Jewel of Realizations.

Luntoken. By Asanga. Fourth century.

Subject matter is you can say lower middle man. Then we spend four years on Madhyamika. Middle way.

And we study that according to Chandrakirti. Master Chandrakirti. Who was descendant of Madhyamaka.

Then we spend two years on Abhidharma. Which comes from the fourth century. And it was taught by Vasubandhu.

Abhidharma Kosha. My lama taught it to us for almost 10 years. Then the fourth book is Vinaya Sutra.

Which is not a sutra. It's a commentary by Guru Prabhupada. From about the sixth century.

And then every year, during your studies, you spend three months on perceptual theory. How do we perceive things. And formal logic.

Thinking. How do you think straight. And we debate for three months straight.

We debate that every year for three months straight. So that's based on Ramana-vartika. The commentary on correct perception.

By Dalai Lama. Master Dalai Lama. From the...

I think also around the sixth century. Seventh century. So those are...

Those are the five great books. And we spend, in monasteries, we spend 20 to 25 years on them. That's a Shambhala.

That kind of person has a huge tool kit. You know, they go to Ukraine, somebody asks them a weird question, they say, aha, yeah, yeah, somebody asked that back in... Somebody was asking me in Ukraine, you know, so what you say means everybody visioning ahead.

The people around me also coming from me, I'm so lonely. You know. Yeah, I'm living by myself.

I'm living in my head, you know. And then I said, no, no, no problem. Dada came to this head, you know.

Sixth century. Then you can pull out, you know, Dushyant Rupa, who wrote a book called Other People Exist. You know, it's not true, you know.

They're coming from you, but as other people. And you can relate, you can have an interaction with them. You can argue with them, you can make love to them.

They are separate from you. You're not living in your head. But a Shambhala can pull that out of the hat.

They can say, oh, yeah, I remember, we got taught that back in, you know, 2012. That's over here in my tool kit. A Shambhala has all that stuff already.

That's Shambhala. Second one is called Long Realms. Long Realms, technically speaking, is a synthesis of all the five great books, without mentioning the five great books much.

It's a simplified version of the five great books. What we're doing now in the next 10 years is a simplified version of what we did in New York in the 90s. But this is a simplification of the ACI courses.

They're all in here, in a single book. The five great books are in the Long Realms. And they're being educated to be comfortable for the common man.

And you should know how to teach that also, right? You might get into situations where I estimate that one in 10,000 people can study in ACI courses. Long Realms, you go up to about one in 5,000.

So Long Realms is more comfortable for people. It's more user-friendly. So that's Long Realms.

That's a style of teaching where you synthesize the great books and you don't overwhelm people. And it's maybe more appropriate. You should be able to do both.

You should be able to do both. Then the third one is Dhamnakpa. Say Dhamnakpa.

Dham. Dham. Dhamnak.

Dhamnakpa. Dhamnakpa means teachings which are passed on through personal interaction with your heart lama or your other lamas. They are teachings which are passed on from the heart to the heart, oftentimes in personal situations.

Like, I always think of the Howard Johnsons just before you hit the Delaware Bridge. So I had to drive an infotainment in Washington, D.C. once a month for 15 to 20 years. And that was great because I had him trapped and I could ask him questions in the car.

And then he would fall asleep on the New Jersey terminal. And then he would let me ask him questions. But when we hit Howard Johnsons, I would get like one good hour.

I could ask him anything. And he couldn't get away. And there was nobody else there.

So a lot of my knowledge comes from Howard Johnsons. Probably we should make a stupider. But that's Dhamnakpa.

And that's special. There's nothing like that. What happens between you and your lama in private or the things that are passed on by osmosis when you're in the airport in Oslo and you're all exhausted and somebody gets upset and, you know, magic happens.

And that's Dhamnakpa. That's the private advices of your personal teachers. It doesn't have to be your heart teacher.

It can be the other one. Those are irreplaceable. Those are obviously the heart-changing ones.

Those are, you know, cannot be done without. Sinkhwanron. There's another word for that.

Irreplaceable. You can't do without. You've got to have it.

They give meaning to the other two approaches, the shungpa and the lamrimma. They give meaning to those other approaches. They give a special experience.

It's your lama's experience and how it rubs off on you personally. So you also have to learn that and you have to learn to grant that. You see, if you're going to be a teacher, you've got to be able to pull out Dhammakirti's proof of other people and then you've got to be able to, you know, sit down with a new audience and do some lamrim together.

And then you also have to be able to take somebody into a room and in five minutes, you know, do a download of the heart essence of all the lamas of history, okay? In a hotel room in Kiev when you've got jet lag. You know?

And you want to eat. Okay? Now you've got to be able to do that.

So those three things you've got to learn. You've got to learn how to pass on the lineage in those three ways, okay? Deal?

Then you're really useful to the world. Then you're really, you know, valuable. Then you're like valuable goods.

If you can do all three, then you can do it. The first one takes some time. The third one takes some luck.

The middle one takes some consideration for others who might get overwhelmed by the first and the third. Okay?

[Говорящий 2] (39:17 - 39:18)
All right.