Занятие 2, часть 2

[Говорящий 1] (0:00 - 30:15)
DE YANG DROM CHUG GI RGYAL BU BSTAN PA THAMS CAD GRU ZHIG LAM GYI GAL ZHES PA SNGA'I LAMA Okay, so he quotes Drom Tönche. Who is Drom Tönche? We just spent a year on it.

The great disciple of Lord Atisha. He's famous because he wasn't ordained. He's one of the greatest lamas of Tibet and he was never ordained.

He was a householder. Like the beer drinking businessman named Marpa. The great yogi.

The great first yogi of Tibet never got ordained. These are famous for being lay people with normal jobs who helped the teachings in a fantastic way. So Drom Tönche.

BSTAN PA THAMS CAD GRU ZHIG Drom Tönche once made a strange statement. Okay, you ready? You got to listen to this statement because then we're going to talk about it for like a week.

Okay, maybe just a couple hours. Maybe half an hour. Anyway, Mercedes and Ningbo say I exaggerate but I don't know what they're talking about.

BSTAN PA THAMS CAD GRU ZHIG Only my lama knows how all the... Only my lama knows how to... Only my lama understands how all the teachings of the Buddha tie into the four corners.

Only my lama understands how all the teachings of the Buddhas tie into the four corners automatically. How's that? He said something like that.

Then there was this big debate about what the heck was he talking about? LAMA SHES GSUNGS PA LTAR RE DE'I DE'I TSAD ZIG LTA BU YIN That famous quotation is almost like the Bible about the idea that all the teachings are internally consistent. That quotation is the one you pull out when you're talking about this idea that all the teachings fit together.

DE LA GRU ZHIG RGYAS BU GSUM DANG BSLAG BYAS SHES LA GSUNGS PA DANG It has been said properly that the four corners he was mentioning are the three trainings... Sorry, cancel that. Are the steps on the path for the people of three different capacities.

The steps on the path for people of three different capacities and the secret teachings, tantra. So the four corners he was talking about were the teachings for people of least capacity, medium capacity, and then highest capacity. We just had examples of teachings that those three kinds of capacities go through.

The first was honoring the ten virtues, which would be an example of a teaching for people of first capacity. And then we had learning about the four truths. And the three trainings would be an example of a teaching for people of medium capacity.

And then the six perfections and... What's the other example? Oh, bodhichitta.

These are examples of teachings for people of higher capacity. So all of those ideas plus tantra are the four corners. BSLAG SHES LA GSUNGS PA DANG ZHOG DE JI LTAR PHANGS KYANG So then people have struggled with what did he mean by saying four corners.

And then there's a tradition to explain this quotation with dice. Like when you throw a dice, a die, a single die, right? When you throw one dice, it always ends up with four corners facing up, right?

Unless you're a really special person and it's... Okay, I've heard about it. Normally it lands, it rolls around, and it settles.

And then there's by definition four corners facing up. ZHOG DE JI LTAR PHANGS KYANG It doesn't matter if you throw it over your shoulder or throw it ahead of you, or it doesn't matter what kind of twist you put on it. It's going to end up with four corners.

ZHOG DE JI LTAR PHANGS KYANG LAM LAM BYUNG BA LAM LAM BYUNG BA means it's automatic. It just always happens that way. BYUNG BA LTAR MI GOR RE RE NANG DU YANG LAM CHAGS SANGS PA RE DUS PA'I DON YIN Then some people said, of all the topics of the Lam Rim, what are some topics of the Lam Rim?

Don't do these 10 bad things. Study the Four Truths. Study the Six Perfections.

These are topics of the Lam Rim. Then people have explained Drom Tsung Je's statement as saying, in the way that a dice, no matter how you throw it, always comes up with four corners. Then whatever part of the Lam Rim, whatever topic you look at, let's say the 10 virtues, right?

Or the Six Perfections. Whatever topic you look at, the whole Buddhist teaching is in there somewhere. People have explained his statement as meaning, whichever single Lam Rim, whichever single step of the path you look at, you can find the entire path in there.

Okay? There's got a mosquito up here. There's a little mosquito up here.

SANGS PA RE ZHES DU YOD MA Then YOD MA means, YOD MA is kind of a put down. It means, yeah, I mean people, you could say that, okay? Like somebody says, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you say, you could say that.

It's a put down, right? It means, I don't believe it. Obviously, there's a better way to explain it.

YOD MA means, you could say that. Then it's always followed by, but, okay? YOD MA KYANG BUT BDAG GIS BSKYAB DGON LA MA RIM PO CHE BDAG PO BYAMS PA'I LHAN GRUB Say BDAG PO BYAMS PA'I LHAN GRUB This is Pabongka Rinpoche's own direct teacher.

His own direct Lam Rim teacher. He had hundreds of teachers, but his own direct Lam Rim teacher was BYAMS PA'I LHAN GRUB from BDAG PO. Then he said, my teacher says, now you're going to get the right thing.

DENG KHA GANG MA DRU ZHIG LTA BU ZHIG LA LING GI KHYER BA LTAR So in Tibet, they weave, they don't have chairs. People don't have chairs. People have DEN.

DEN means asana. It's the translation of the word asana is DEN. Asana, it comes directly, meaning a place where you put your ass.

I'm not kidding. The word ass comes from the same root, asti. So it means to be seated, to be there.

So the word is comes from that. I didn't make it up. So anyway, DEN means asana.

Asana means a seat, a place where you sit. So in Tibet, a DEN is a small sitting carpet. I don't know if you've seen them.

They're about this big and they weave them. In the monastery, they ring the bell, you're supposed to go to debate, and you take your DEN. You roll it up and you throw it over your shoulder and you're allowed to sit on that if it's a cold night and you're on the gravel or you're on flagstones which are freezing.

So you're allowed to throw a DEN. So that's your chair. People carry them around.

Everybody has their DEN. By definition, on a weaving frame, a DEN is always what shape? It's always rectangular and it has four corners.

It always has four corners. Just the way it is. Got it?

Nobody has to tell you, don't forget to put a fourth corner on your DEN. I don't know. What would you say in America?

I mean, do you have a car? Yes. Nobody says how many wheels is on it.

I mean, car, when you say car, normally it has four wheels. So when you say car, you're talking about a thing on four wheels. When you say DEN, you're talking about a thing with four corners.

Got it? So once you got a DEN, you got something with four corners. Once you got a car, you got something with four wheels.

That's just the way it goes. KHYER BA LTAR GSUNGS RAB DGONGS BRAL GSUNGS RAB DGONGS BRAL DANG, BYAS PA'I GCOD BYA, GANG ZHAG GCIG TZAM RGYAL BA'I NYAM LEN DU DUS NAS, SNYING GI KHYER BA LA ZER BA YIN So the point, he says, is that every sentence in the Buddha's teachings fits somewhere in the lamrim. Let's put it that way.

Every sentence in hundreds of thousands of scriptures has its place in the structure of the path to enlightenment. When I hear lamrim, I don't know. Rinpoche was teaching me one day and I remember we were trying to fix a lawnmower.

And he said, go get the lamrim for the lawnmower. And we had a filing cabinet and that's where I kept all the, what do you call them? Manuals for each machine in the house because I had to take them apart.

Then he said, go get the lamrim for the lawnmower. And I come out and he says, and it's like step one, unscrew this, step two. And it's all step one and it had these little circles with numbers in them.

And he said, look, perfect. This is a lamrim. Because then I got this, my conception of the word lamrim is that lawnmower manual.

No, it's because step one, step two, step three, step four, then the thing will start. That's how you start the lawnmower. And that's what, see for Rinpoche, that was a perfect lamrim.

He loved instruction manuals. He memorized the New Jersey driver's manual. He got 100 on the test and he failed the driving test like 20 times.

Anyway, then this, anyway, that's a long story. I probably shouldn't talk about it. But we didn't bribe the guy.

It was his idea. So anyway, any, all the teachings of the Buddha from the first thing he spoke when he got enlightened under the tree to the highest tantric teachings, every single sentence can be inserted somewhere in the manual. It has its place in the manual.

From beginning to end, there's a place. There is nothing that doesn't fit into the structure. So really it's the opposite of what the other people said.

I'm trying to wrap my own mind around it. They said, what? Any single step you take out of the manual will include all the Buddhist teachings.

And Pabongka Rinpoche's teacher kind of said the opposite. You see, every Buddhist teaching there is can be inserted into one of the, it is one of the paths of the Lamrim. Got it?

Do you see how it's the opposite? So other people were saying, saying that a carpet has four corners is to say that any one subject of the Lamrim includes all Buddhist teachings. And his teacher said, no, it's the opposite.

You can open any Buddhist book and read any sentence no matter how high or low the book is. Like you can take a logic book and take a sentence out of a logic book and you can find a place for it in the structure of the instruction manual. It's there somewhere.

There's a place where it belongs in the one to 100 instruction manual. Got it? So what was Dromtonche saying?

He was saying my teacher is the only person that really appreciates this. Okay. My teacher is the only person who really appreciates this.

My teacher, who is Lord Atisha, who wrote the first great Lamrim in Tibet, or for Tibetans. Only my teacher grasps the fact that you could open up the Kangyur? Right?

You could open up 100,000 pages of scripture at any place, at any line. It's fun to do it, by the way. Someone teaches this.

You should go open up some Buddhist book somewhere in English. It doesn't matter. And see where it fits into the Lamrim.

My teacher understands how the four corners make a carpet. Meaning my teacher, Lord Atisha, he's the only one who really gets it. That if you grasp the Lamrim, if you study the Lamrim, then you can go to any Buddhist book, hundreds of thousands, you can go to any page, read a single sentence, and you will grasp where it fits in the instruction manual.

Got it? How it's part of the big plan. How it's part of the big plan.

And he said only his teacher grasped that. We're still on the first of the four greatnesses, right? We're still discussing how no teaching contradicts any other teaching.

Oh, we still have time. It's a lot easier to sit up there than to sit there, up here than to sit there. All those years in the monastery, I was like, one day I'll be able to sit up there and other people will suffer listening to me.

Okay. So there's hope, okay? Just keep plugging away.

It's a lot more fun to talk than to sit there. Okay. He finished the first one.

He's on to the second one. Ready? GNYIS PA GSUNG RAB MA LUS PA DAM LAG TU BYA BA BYED PA NI I love this one.

To me, this is my favorite one. So, there's a word called Kadampa. Say Kadampa.

Kadampa. Kadampa has several meanings. The very first Tibetan Buddhists of our major lineage, of the Dalai Lama's lineage, right?

The very first Tibetan Buddhists in the first century, sorry, the 10th century, in 1000 AD. The very first, which is Yuan Chao. Okay?

Yuan Chao. In those years, the very first Buddhists were called Kadampa's. So there's a school called Kadampa's.

Then 400 years later, the teacher of the first Dalai Lama appeared, who is Je Tsongkapa, 1400s, roughly. Then he revived the purity of those teachings. So sometimes when you say Kadampa, you are referring to Lord Atisha and that whole gang of Lamas, a thousand years ago.

Sometimes when you say Kadampa, you are referring to the new Kadampa's, which is anybody after Je Tsongkapa. Je Tsongkapa and beyond is called the new Kadampa's. Then the old Kadampa's got to be called the old Kadampa's.

Okay? So sometimes you'll hear Kadamsar and Kadamning, meaning the new ones and the old ones. Then there's a Lama in England, a Tibetan Lama who has taken the name Kadampa or new Kadampa for his group.

So you should just know where the word comes from. So when you say Kadampa to a Tibetan, they get all, it's like saying the Christians in the catacombs, like 200 AD, right? They get all, how do you say?

By the way, that was, what's that called? Liang Jin Chao, okay? That time, during that time, during that empire.

It's like when you say the Christians who hid out in the catacombs, when you say Kadampa to a Tibetan, they feel all warm in their heart. These are like the guys who, they were like the pioneers. Think of Kadampa as the pioneers.

They pioneered everything in Tibet. Tibet was a bunch of yak herders, crazy warriors. They defeated China at one point.

They took Nepal. They were cuckoo. The first ones were really cool people, like you guys.

You are Kadampas. Guadalajara, you are the Kadampas of Guadalajara. They are bringing a whole new thing, and it's a little difficult.

So those are the Kadampas. So what does the word Kadampa mean and why do they call them Kadampa? Ka means command or word.

Word means the word of an enlightened being, the word of the Buddha. Ka means the word of the Buddha. Or the command of a king is called a Ka.

You know the word Ka in the word Kangyur, which is our scriptural, what do you call it? What's that word? Canon.

The surviving teachings of Lord Buddha on this planet, on paper, are called the Kangyur. The translated word. Kadampa means something cool.

Dampa means damlak. Damlak means personal advice. So your Lama wants to teach you something.

Like you've been, I don't know, you've been less than completely respectful or something like that. Then your Lama says, let's have a talk. And they take you in a room and they close the door.

In Rinpoche it wasn't always just talk. But anyway. Then they sit you down and they say, we got to have a heart-to-heart.

It means a heart-to-heart. Damlak means a heart-to-heart. Then they talk to you for 20 minutes and you feel really bad.

Then they cheer you up a little bit. Then you're better for a couple of weeks and then you go back. Then they have another damlak with you.

So it's a heart-to-heart talk with your Lama. So kadampa means a person whose karma is so extraordinary that when they open a Buddhist book and read a single sentence, it seems like personal heart-to-heart advice that was inserted there by some omniscient being just for them. It's a cool place to be at.

It's a cool place to reach. You open it. If you're a really good kadampa, it gets tantric.

If you really get extraordinary kadampa, which means you have kelwa, right? You have good karma. If you get really good karma, the whole world becomes kadampa.

You open up the Arizona Republic, a newspaper. I've been living with this thing for 40 years. All right, anyway.

And they have some article in there. Where was it? I was reading a science fiction novel.

I was having a personal problem. Now I don't have any big personal problems, but I was having a little one. I don't even remember what it was.

But I opened up this science fiction novel and the first page is the answer to my question. And I'm like, that's so goddamn cool. I can just open up a science fiction novel and what I need is right there in the first page of the chapter.

And I just closed it and I'm happy. What I needed I got. You know what I mean?

That's kadampa, okay? I love it. I think it's really cool.

Tantra, by the way, first stage tantra, which I'm not allowed to teach you within our empowerment, but it means kadampa, okay? It's like things get really kadampa. You open up anything.

You turn on the radio and there's a message for you and you're like, oh wow, stop. The whole world seems to be conspiring to get you enlightened, which of course is impossible. So anyway, that's kadampa, okay?

Kadampa shanwa means you get to the point where everything you read in the scriptures is a personal teaching. And this takes on a, what do you call it? In a group teaching, okay?

There's a specific phenomenon which is a flavor of kadampa, okay? In a group teaching, there's a kind of phenomenon that takes place which is kadampa, okay? What do I mean?

You're sitting with, I don't know, I don't know, X number of other people, right? In a room. Let's say a big teaching, like 100 people or 200 people.

And then the teacher starts talking about your lama having a heart-to-heart with you. And then suddenly you think they're talking about you. Like you're like, oh man, he's mad at me for something.

He wants to have a heart-to-heart. I knew it. Like Geshe Michael's mad at me.

Geshe Michael wants to get me in a room and tell me I'm doing something wrong. That's a kind of flavor of kadampa. I'm just warning you.

It sounds like either the teacher is talking about your personal situation. How does he know I'm having that trouble with my girlfriend? How did he know?

And why did he bring it up in the class? He's talking about me and my girlfriend right now, not about anybody else in the whole room. And then oftentimes it emanates, it manifests as personal criticism.

He's criticizing me personally. He's taking a dig at me with his teaching this afternoon. And what I wanted to tell you is this is a common phenomenon.

It has occurred with every Buddhist disciple in history. The lama is not out after you, but maybe he is. Or she is.

But it's a blessing. It's a blessing. The teacher is coming from you.

The teacher is coming from you. The teacher is coming from whatever you've done to other people in the last six months. So everything you hear is going to be personal because it is personal, because you're creating me to talk to you.

So of course I'm going to say something about your current situation, because you made me. And that's the way it works. And just embrace it.

You see, don't fight it. You have certain seeds to hear me say something, because of your seeds. Then whatever I say is relevant to you.

It's supposed to be relevant to you because you created me from the same store, from the same place in your subconscious, you created me and your boyfriend. So if I talk about a problem that you're having with your boyfriend, that's sort of natural, because him and me are coming from the same set of seeds in the same part of your heart chakra. And so just kind of think, oh, yeah, that makes sense.

In the Lam Rim that started with Lord Atisha a thousand years ago, at the New Vision Age Center, on Saturday afternoon, it makes sense that Geshe Michael should be criticizing me directly in some teaching which he's supposed to be teaching everybody. Okay, got it? Of course, because I'm coming from the same seeds as your problems are.

So of course, when you understand that, you have reached the second level of an appreciation of how fantastic the Lam Rim is. The second level, what's the first level? It's all big one, big ball of gur.

Brown sugar. Buram in Tibetan, by the way. It's all one big ball of, doesn't matter where you bite it, you're going to get the same incredible sweetness.

That was cool thing number one about the Lam Rim. What was the second one? It was, what is the second one?

Wherever you open it, it's going to talk to you personally. And there's a reason for that, because you're creating it. You're also creating this book as we go through it.

The next page doesn't exist until I turn the page, because you make it. Got it? You create this book.

There is no book, right? I turn the page. What the next page says is coming from you.

You write it line by line as we go. And you wrote it in Tibetan, which is amazing. No, really, okay?

Your karma is creating the words that we see on the page when we turn it. So you should, it's desirable that you get to a point in your spiritual life where every single word you ever hear in your life is a message from a divine being. Because that's who you really are inside, and it's coming from you.

It's very beautiful. That's the second level of understanding what's going on with the Lam Rim. It is personal.

It is a, what do you call that? Who's that guy Sam killed people? What's his name?

Yeah, son of Sam. I was in New York at the time. This guy, he heard voices.

And then he would go to where young people would go to make out, and he would kill them. And it was, of course, very popular in the newspapers, because to kill somebody while they're making out is really mean. And he would say he heard voices.

After they caught him, he had this thing about he heard voices. We're actually talking about something similar, but you're hearing beautiful voices. You're hearing voices telling you, like, help the poor, or cook a good enchilada dinner for everybody.

You're hearing these messages. And that's Kadampa. That's a real Kadampa.

So Kadampa, in the end, it doesn't mean, does it, a sect that flourished in Tibet in 1000, and it doesn't mean post-Jetsun Kappa Tibet. It means anybody who understands enough to listen to every song on the radio and listen to the lyrics, and they were meant for you. They're a message for you.

That's why I play rock and roll all the time. I think that's a good place to stop. So listen to songs on the radio, and there's a reason why that song is playing right now for you.

There's always a reason. And try to open yourself to be changed by those words in the song that you're hearing right now. And that's a Kadampa.

And then you're a Kadampa. It's not a sect, and it's not a group of people from ancient Tibet. It's any person who understands that they are constantly getting messages from an enlightened realm.

And you are. So you're a Kadampa. Okay?

All right, let's dedicate the good karma, and then let us eat enchiladas.

[Говорящий 2] (30:19 - 31:09)
Jared, you ready? Okay. Venerable Jigme Phuntsok Rinpoche