«Дар освобождения», курс 6 «Ретрит страсти», занятие 1

[Говорящий 1] (0:00 - 33:37)
So, we're studying a text called Namdo Lakchang. Say, Namdo, Lakchang, Namdo, Lakchang. Namdo means liberation.

Lak means your hand, lakpa. And chang, chang in this case means to thrust it into somebody's hands, okay? So, it's a gift of liberation thrust into your hands, like, take it, you know?

Like, I don't know, Christmas present. Like, you're just shoving it into somebody's hands and take it, you know? It's been given some, what do you call it?

I don't know. I don't like any of the translations of the title. But anyway, it should be a gift of liberation thrust into your hands or something like that.

It's a lam rim. Lam rim means steps of the path. And I always, when I hear the word lam rim, I think of my teacher, my Tibetan teacher, Ken Rinpoche.

We bought a lawnmower. I had to mow the lawn, I hated it. Because I killed all those bugs all the time.

And anyway, when we bought the new lawnmower from Sears, we got a, what do you call, manual, little instruction manual. Like, my students bought me a car last week, which is very kind of you. I was driving a 1980 Volvo, 30-year-old car.

And it got a little dangerous. It broke down on the highway a few times. I mean, really bad.

But anyway, I was really grateful. But I've learned, I took the manual out of the car, and I put it in my reading room, which is the bathroom. And I keep it there on the shelf.

And I'm like up to page 20. And it's step by step. Then there's all this stuff in the car that you don't know about.

There's an iPod jack, there's an outlet for your computer. You have to read the manual, or you don't even know the stuff is there. After you sell the car, you find out it's there.

So, Alarm Rim is like that. Alarm Rim is an instruction manual from A to Z on how to get enlightened. So, other texts are extraordinary.

You can study logic. You're going to do some clear thinking. Class with Ningbo.

And there's a sutra you're going to do with Mercedes. It's a very beautiful sutra about an enlightened woman who was questioning the Buddha in the time of the Buddha. And those are good.

But they are more like a book about the transmission, or a book about the windows, or a book about the cooling system, or something like that. So, Alarm Rim means the whole thing in one book. So, the Lamrim Larchan, I think, is the greatest Alarm Rim ever written.

It really represents the end of an... not an end, but the next step in an evolution of Alarm Rims for the last thousand years. So, probably you will write a new one for your generation, or for Mexico, or whatever.

But at this point in our history, evolution, it's the greatest book to come out of Tibet before the loss of Tibet. And it'll be maybe a hundred years or more before there will be anything else like that out of Tibet, I think. So, it's really the peak of a tradition.

And my teacher, Khen Rinpoche, Geshe Losang Tharchin, taught it three times to us. It took ten years each time. So, he taught it to us for thirty years.

And every time he finished, he'd start over again. So, I guess we didn't get it the first time. So, I've calculated it.

If we go at about this pace, we can finish in about ten years. I don't know, that would be around 2019 or something like that, I guess. And it's worth it.

And it's an extraordinary spiritual document, guide map, the greatest in this planet, in this world, that you can find. And you should learn it. And you should be the next person in the lineage.

You see, it's a lineage that's gone on for a thousand years. And it hasn't been broken. And really, my job is, I'm near the end of that job.

Now you have to pick up the ball and carry it. So, you have to learn it well. You have to learn this lamrim well.

And then you have to pass it on to other people. It's crucial that you not let it go. And something happened.

You can say good or bad in Tibet, I don't know. But now it's out in the world. And it's in each country, different countries.

And you're at a crucial moment historically, when you could bring it to your country, or where you live, or the people that you know. And that wasn't the case for a thousand years. You had to be Tibetan.

And now things have changed. And you are a link between a Tibetan tradition and the rest of the world. And you have to learn it well.

So you have to listen carefully. Take good notes. The notes aren't useless.

Even if you never look at them again, the exercise keeps you awake in class. I've learned that. When I go to listen to His Holiness or anything, I always take notes.

Sometimes I never look at them afterwards. But it keeps me engaged. And I think that's really important.

So take good notes. If you do look at them, you'll be even a better teacher. So I'm going to have to truck it.

We're a little behind schedule. It's going to take 20 years if I go this speed. And we're going to...

I forgot the big Tibetan text. I bring that just to impress you. I don't use it personally.

We have a project now. This is the 25th anniversary this year. We have a project for inputting the lost books of Tibet.

And I don't know. It's up to 8 million pages. Doris is...

Dan Stivers is in charge of that. And it's extraordinary. I think with the TBRC effort, they've now finished 8 million pages of capturing the text.

Maybe a million pages are input and searchable. And I haven't used a Tibetan scripture for about 15 years. I bring it because it looks cool.

And I'll bring it. I forgot, okay. But I don't use them anymore.

Because you can search it. If you come to an idea, you can search almost 3,000 years of text in a few seconds. And get more about a certain idea.

But the book is very impressive. Maybe you should get one anyway. I'm going to just review some of the ideas that we talked about.

Also, I like that thing in the New York Times where they have the... What do you call it? Retractions?

Corrections? So, I think it's important for a teacher to say, I blew it, or I missed some point. And the Tibetan is difficult here.

It's very colloquial language from 1920 or something in Tibet in certain region of Tibet. And there are some things I'd like to correct or talk about that I had more time to look at. So, we've been talking about why should you learn this text?

Why should you spend the time to learn this instruction manual? And we had four qualities that made this a great text, a great manual for spiritual development. And the first of those four qualities was, which means to understand that nothing in this entire ten years of instruction will contradict anything else which is taught.

You see? It's consistent. Those who studied this system well find that it's highly internally consistent.

So, we teach in many countries. We give programs. They're like success programs or something.

It's just a trick to get people to study these things and to make it non-religious. So, we go to many countries including Muslim countries or communist countries and we teach these ideas or how you can apply them to your personal life without the cultural baggage or religious baggage. It's just ideas that you can use to make your life a success and to make your life happier.

So, we just got back from Beijing and Shanghai. And that Beijing was a tough crowd. The first day was tough.

And you're talking like the center of communist movement in China for 50 years. And they are still very tough. And their thinking is very tough.

And they have a viewpoint. And it's very hardened and very tough. And then we sat down and we did five days together.

And by the end they were crying. Everybody in the room was crying by the end. And it was beautiful.

It was something beautiful. But you will often hear from people in every country that, you know, I didn't know the system you're talking about. We call it diamond-cutter system, right?

Basically, it's that you are creating seeds in your mind by how you treat other people. And that's creating your reality. What's cool is in every country we were just in Ukraine, right?

Kiev and Bulgaria, Sofia. And what's cool is that people in every country will come up to you and say, you know, I may agree or not agree with your system, but it's consistent. It makes sense.

You can answer any question that I have satisfactorily and not contradict anything else you said. So it's a system which is pure. Internally pure.

And nothing in the system contradicts anything else in the system. I mean, you can take it or not, but it's pure. The system is pure.

The ideas are pure. We're giving a talk in Princeton to the physicists. I'm working on a book called A Better History of Time.

No, really. Really. Seriously.

And we did some preliminary work there with some physicists, especially two young physicists. And they said, this totally makes sense. This explains quantum mechanics better.

And it's so beautiful. It's such a beautiful... You can go to the center of communism in the modern world.

Or you can go to the center of scientific thinking, which is another kind of communism. And you can solve the inconsistencies in those... They are both beautiful systems.

They are both good systems in a way. And they can be made consistent and perfect with these ideas. And it's very beautiful.

Internally it's a beautiful, it's a consistent system. Let's see what else. They made the point that not only is the system consistent on paper, but the viewpoints or the thoughts or the ideas are also consistent.

On paper the system is foolproof, airtight. But also the ideas can swim around in one person's head quite nicely. All those fish get along with each other.

Those ideas can coexist in a single human mind quite nicely. And they actually make the mind happy. Those ideas or those concepts, when you insert them in a human mind and let them interact, there's a beautiful consistency there that results in happiness and compassion and love in a single human mind.

The deepest philosophical ideas of this path, if you master them, have the side effect of making you a completely happy person and bringing peace in your world. To carry out these instructions is to bring peace to the world by the nature of the instructions. And we'll talk about that.

The second quality of these teachings, which are great, is KADAMPA SHARWA. Say KADAMPA SHARWA. KADAMPA means private advice, personal advice.

Like the advice you get from your teacher when you've been naughty and they take you into the room and they say, you know, last week, and they tell you the stuff that they can't tell you in a crowd. And sometimes it hurts. But they're like, you know, really, you're kind of a selfish person.

or really you're jealous of this other student. And they don't say it in a mean way. They're just kind of, what do you call it, giving you the word or something.

I don't know. Anyway, dampa means sweet, heartfelt, private advices. It could be positive.

It could be I saw you struggle to be nice to this other student the other day, and I just want to tell you how beautiful it was. And you both start crying or something. So that's dampa.

Dampa means heart, heart advice. Got dampa sharwa. Sharwa means it strikes you that way.

Someone, you go into a teaching. They start talking about anything. You go to the bathroom.

You pick up a book there. I have a whole shelf. And you open a book at random.

It could even be a gardening book or a rock and roll guitar warehouse catalog. And you open it up. And right there, in that first sentence you look at, there's some personal advice for you.

And this is the magic of the Lam Rim. This is the magic. If the Lam Rim is taught and studied properly, a certain magic will come.

And just any book you open, you can open a science fiction novel. And it will be some kind of profound personal advice. Got dampa sharwa.

If you keep that up, it becomes tantra. That is tantra. That's level one tantra.

The evolution of that kind of experience where everything strikes you as, what do you call that? When you think everyone's out to get you? Paranoia.

That's the opposite of paranoia. Everyone's out to help you. You know, everyone's enlightened already.

And they're trying to get you to teach this class. So maybe you will notice that you don't do some of this stuff yourself. OK?

Like that. All right? So that's tantra.

That's the first level of tantra. So kadampa sharwa would go automatically to that. And not just books, but people you meet and things they say to you would strike you as personal advices from an enlightened being.

OK? So that's the second quality of this system, kadampa sharwa. And that became a name of a sect in early Tibetan Buddhism called kadampa, kadampa.

And that was the meaning of their name. Sometimes the galupa sect of the Dalai Lamas is also called kadamsarpa, the new kadampas. And then one group in England took that as their name, a spiritual group.

But the Dalai Lama's lineage is kadamsarpa, the new kadampas. You are like the new, new kadampas. OK.

There was a little verse from, I think it was the seventh Dalai Lama, yeah. And it was about jumping from spiritual path to spiritual path and not really getting into anyone very deeply. And there were some words there that I kind of fudged when I taught you, because I wasn't sure what they meant.

So one was called tak chung, OK? It said that tak chung jumps from flower to flower. I thought it was a place name, because there are places called tak lung, tak chung, tak chen.

There are many names, like Kansas and Wichita. I thought it was one of those, but it wasn't. Tak means tiger.

Chung means little. Tak chung means the bee, because they give you a little bite. OK.

So that was just a poeticism for a bee. And they said we shouldn't be like a tak chung. We shouldn't just shop.

Shop at the beginning, then pick one path and follow it for a while. Seriously. Shop at the beginning and then later.

Then it had a weird name for a flower called dung den. And I looked it up. I don't know if you can see.

That's a dung den flower, OK? I didn't know what a dung den was. That's a dung den, OK?

That's one of the flowers, I guess because it looks attractive, and it might attract a bee. So yeah, you can shop and look for dung den flowers philosophically. And then at some point, you have to park somewhere for a while, because your life is not endless.

Your life has a limit. There's only so many paths you can explore. And some of them take a long time.

Some paths take 5, 10 years to explore properly. So he was saying, you can be a dak chung, and you can go to the dung dens. But sooner or later, you've got to settle down in one and go to some depth in it, OK?

What was that? OK. NANG PHYIN CHOS PA BYANG CHUB.

There was an expression called NANG PHYIN CHOS PA. I'm just saying this for the record. If somebody ever listens to the tapes, it means to come to a deep belief in a certain system.

It's a very rare word. OK, third quality of this teaching. RGYAL BA'I BSGOM PA DE LAG TU NYER PA means if you study the Lam Rim, then you can easily come to an appreciation of what the Buddha really meant.

It's plural, actually, in the Tibetan. What the Buddhas really meant. You can easily come to a realization of what the Buddhas really meant.

So we go give these success seminars. It's two nights of public talks. It's three days of retreat.

I was thinking of Shanghai. So we went to Shanghai. And the public talks were at a university.

I think it's Tangzhong University. And they didn't heat the room. It was 25 degrees outside.

And I guess that's just normal in a university in China. I don't know. But everybody was all wrapped up.

And most of our staff got sick that night. But everyone was all wrapped up and like Eskimos. And we were giving this talk.

You could see the breath. And it was a big auditorium. And we gave two nights of talks.

And we went through the idea that your reality is created by seeds in your mind, by how you treat other people. So in two nights, in Shanghai, the essence of the path, that's all there is. If you can reasonably establish with any group of people within two hours that their world is flowing from their own mind, from seeds that they put there, by how they treated other people, then that's gyelwa gompa dey lak cunyepa.

That's the essence of the path. That's it. That's all there is.

Compassion comes from that. Compassion derives automatically from that. If people in the world believe that their prosperity or their health or their relationships are flowing from how they treat others, then automatically compassion derives.

So you have taught compassion and emptiness and karma in two hours in Shanghai, in a 20 degree room. And anybody can get it. Everybody gets it.

And that's the lamrim. That's the beauty of the lamrim. gyelwa gompa dey lak cunyepa.

That's all the Buddha ever meant. The rest is just details. In two hours, you can learn half of the path.

Anybody, anywhere, whether they ever heard it or not. And that's the beauty of the lamrim. That's the beauty.

In two hours, you can give them half of a 25-year course. It's beautiful. Fourth, nye chu chenpa ranggak su drowa means you avoid the great mistake.

Lamrim helps you to avoid the great mistake. What's the great mistake? I like the presentation.

I like what I've heard of the path. I appreciate it. And I like it.

But this one thing just doesn't make sense to me. I don't see why that means you can't kill animals and eat them. The whole thing, it makes sense to me.

But I don't see why I should be vegetarian. I understand your whole presentation. I like it.

It all makes sense. But this vegetarian thing, I don't know why you're stuck on the vegetarian thing. I don't know.

Actually, your desire for a hamburger has overcome your reasoning. It's just desire has made you stupid. It's just as simple as that.

It's not that there's any problem with the philosophy. It hurts animals to kill them. And it's stealing.

Even if you don't believe it hurts them, if you think that somehow they don't have feelings, and why you spend $6 billion a year in America on pet products, I don't know if they don't have feelings. But that's another question. But OK, let's say they don't have feelings.

Is it your skin to take? Does that skin of theirs belong to you? No, I mean, it's just you're bigger than them.

So you can take their skin. You can force it. And it's a violence.

It's a stealing. They haven't offered you their skin. You've stolen it.

At least it's stealing. Even if for some reason they don't have feelings, it's at least stealing. But you don't want to believe that.

Then you say, I buy your whole system except that. Then that's called the great mistake. Your desire has overcome your clear thinking.

So is it wrong to criticize or to be skeptical of some part of this path? No, it's encouraged. You're supposed to criticize.

Also teachers, you're supposed to be critical of them. Don't buy what a teacher says, and don't buy a teacher. Evaluate every single thing they say.

If it doesn't fit, if it doesn't make sense, reject it and criticize it. And say, I don't accept that part. That's good thinking.

But you have to say, for now, for the time being, that doesn't make sense to me. And respect it. I respect that that's, let me get this clear.

You're saying I shouldn't kill animals and eat their flesh. I say, yes. OK, I understand your position, and I respect your position, but I don't hold it.

I don't accept it yet. Do it respectfully. And honor other people's ideas, even if they sound crazy.

Even if some idea sounds really, really bad to you. And I'm talking any idea of any system and anything. Be respectful and honor it.

And say, right now, as I understand what you said, I can't accept it. But I still love you as a person, and we can still go out for veggie burgers together, like that. So the great mistake is not to be critical.

That's a good thing. And to question, and to reject what you can't accept. But always with a good heart, and always with a good calm.

Stay funny, and stay good humor. And say, I don't buy that right now. I understand the cosmic consciousness will be affected if blue-colored light flies out from mangoes.

But I hope it helps you. And I'm on another thing right now. You're just respectful, OK?

OK. There was a book quoted there called Number Tapa by Thamjey Dubey Do, which means, I think I mistranslated it. Tapa can mean to weave something.

But it can also mean to destroy something into dust. And I think it should be read that way. So there was a sutra called Number Tapa, Thamjey Dubey.

And I would now read it as crushed to dust, or something like that. Basma Kura in Sanskrit. There's this basma, dust that people smear on their head.

That's called basma. It's actually crushed bone of humans. Basma Kura means crushed, crushed to dust.

I would read it that way, basma kura. And it's interesting because he quoted that book because he was talking about what a heavy karmic block could be created by rejecting things. LAS KYI SGRIB PA.

Say LAS KYI SGRIB PA. So LAS KYI SGRIB PA means a karmic veil or obstacle that is created, LAS KYI SGRIB PA, by rejecting outright other people's ideas. Or by picking and choosing within this system.

Ultimately, you either buy the whole thing or you don't. And picking and choosing is a mistake. And you create a bad, it's a very serious karmic obstacle.

If you say, I buy your whole system, but I don't believe in animals. And then you leave it at that and you don't try to figure it out. Then that creates a karmic obstacle.

Why? Then you have a system where you're trying to follow a system 10% or 20% of which you don't accept. And then that's a problem.

That's like saying, I accept transmissions, but not carburetors. And that will be a problem if you take the carburetor off the car. It won't work as well.

You see what I mean? Ultimately, you have to investigate each piece and see whether you accept it or not. Because as a whole, it works in a certain way.

All the systems interact with each other. You can't just take the carburetor off and say, I don't accept the carburetor. You see what I mean?

In the end, you're going to have to reconcile all the pieces of the system. Because it's an engine. And it doesn't work if you take out certain pieces.

Really. Spiritually, it's very much like an engine. Every part of the Lam Rim is necessary.

It's very much like an engine. And you can't just take parts off and think it's going to work for you. You'll still get nice results.

You'll still be kind of happy. And you'll still have kind of cool things happen to you. But it won't be enlightenment if you start taking parts off.

So he talked about that taking parts off creates a certain kind of karmic obstacle, naked jipa, for you. Then I found the full name of the sutra that he quoted, nambar thagpay do, the crushing sutra. Here's the full name of the sutra.

parpa le gyi jipa nambar thagpay do. le gyi jipa nambar thagpay do. That's cool, right?

Got it? He selected a sutra whose name was crushing to bits to prove why taking parts off the engine would create a karmic obstacle for you. And if you go find the ancient name of the sutra, it was called Crushing Karmic Obstacles to Dust.

And they took the karmic obstacles out of the title. The ancient title was le gyi jipa nambar thagpay do, the sutra for crushing karmic obstacles to dust, because he was trying to prove that taking parts off was a karmic obstacle. Got it?

So he quoted a book about crushing karmic obstacles. It's really cool. It's really significant.

Anyway, I thought so. OK. Then quickly he went through three additional features of the lamrim.

The first one was that every subject is presented. Like if you study, if you go through this 10-year course of study, you've covered all of the, I don't know, there's probably 200,000 or 300,000 beautiful Buddhist books that still exist on this planet. But if you cover this text, you've covered all of them.

Even if you cover a short lamrim, you've covered all of them. If you cover the, if you study the Three Principal Paths well, which is to say, if you've been to a DCI 2R seminar in Shanghai, then you've covered everything. You've really covered everything.

[Говорящий 2] (33:38 - 33:38)
OK?

[Говорящий 1] (33:38 - 34:37)
That's how powerful the lamrim is. You've covered everything there is. There was a quotation by Je Tsongkapa in which he said, all I really need is Lord Atisha's lamrim.

That's enough. OK? He said, nowadays I'm just concentrating on that.

There was a word in there. I think it's a misprinting. ,MAN NGAG CHEN CHUNG DU MA ZAD, ,DU MA ZAD It said CHE CHUNG.

And I looked it up in like 20 books that quote him. And they're split 50-50. Some of them misspell it, some of them don't.

So I don't know if it's a misspelling or not. Some have CHUNG CHUNG, some have CHE CHUNG. I'm just doing this for the record.

The text is probably, I don't know, probably corrupt. It's probably not CHE CHUNG, it's probably CHUNG CHUNG.

[Говорящий 2] (34:37 - 34:37)
OK?

[Говорящий 1] (34:38 - 38:53)
Which means minor points. All right. But CHE CHUNG is possible.

OK. I just want that on the record. OK?

Here we go. We had a guy, this was a cute quotation. He said, it was an old monk.

And he referred to himself as BAM RGYEN ZE BA. OK? BAM RGYEN ZE BA.

And I kind of skipped it because I didn't ever hear of BAM RGYEN ZE BA. OK? And it's extremely rare.

BAM means a roe. What's a roe? Roe.

A corpse. OK? So he's referring to himself as a roe, BAM.

RGYEN means old man, old corpse. It's an elder monk who's referring to himself as a BAM RGYEN. Then ZE BA means a kind of mange that dogs get, where the hair is partly falling out.

And he says, I'm a BAM RGYEN ZE BA. OK? I'm a mangy old corpse of a monk.

OK? And I didn't understand that. OK?

So there you go. BAM RGYEN ZE BA. And he says, when I teach the Lam Rim, when I teach the little tiny two-page Lam Rims, then all the scriptures in the world, DAR GUR.

DAR GUR means they shake in their boots, like those high philosophical scriptures shake in their boots. OK? When I teach the Lam Rim, they get scared.

Because they know I'm teaching all their essence without all the hassle. You know? They're afraid people are going to figure out that they don't need those high philosophical texts when I teach the Lam Rim, how I teach the Lam Rim.

And they shake in their boots. OK? DAR means to shake.

GUR means to, literally, it means to bow their heads. They shake in their boots and they bow their heads to me. To the old mangy corpse of a monk.

OK? All right. Then he said later, CHUG GI YAG PO CHE ZHA BA.

I have slain, I was confused about the word ZHA BA. ZHA BA means, I have slain the YAG of the Dharma by teaching Lam Rim. So YAG, if you ever met a YAG, they're like twice as big as a buffalo, and twice as powerful, and twice as ornery.

OK? They're really grumpy, big things. And to pull one around on a rope, it takes a lot of guts.

And to kill a YAG is not easy. So he said, I have slain the YAG of the Dharma by teaching Lam Rim. He's comparing the Dharma, these thousands of high philosophical texts.

And he says, I slit their throat by teaching a little two page Lam Rim. All right. We said you, he was talking about a kind of medicine called KHA PO NYON NGA.

KHA PO NYON NGA is a kind of Ayurvedic, Tibetan Ayurvedic medicine. KHA PO means camphor. And probably camphor came from KHA PO.

Anyway, it's Sanskrit. And then NYON NGA means 25. KHA PO NYON NGA is a Tibetan Ayurvedic medicine with 25 ingredients in it.

And it's based on camphor. Then he said, you could have a truckload. That was the word I missed.

He said KUR PO. KUR PO means a huge suitcase, a chest full of one of the 25 ingredients. And you could take it.

But it wouldn't be as helpful as having all 25, as having a quarter teaspoon of all 25. Got it? So in the Lam Rim, there are, I don't know, 25, 30 important spiritual concepts.

And you can be, what do you call it? It's like in yoga, and you get really good at one pose. Like, I don't know.

I don't know why. I can do the, what do you call that?

[Говорящий 2] (38:54 - 38:54)
Baddha Konasana.

[Говорящий 1] (38:55 - 46:27)
Baddha Konasana I can do. I don't know why. And then I can't do like dana, urdhva dana.

I hate it. I don't know. My body can't do it.

So should I work on my urdhva dana? Or should I work on my baddha konasana and get it even better? And he's like, maybe you should have some range here.

You know, like maybe you could work on your urdhva dana and don't spend two hours on your baddha. OK? So he's saying, don't get super strong.

We call that. Don't go overboard on one Lam Rim idea. Like emptiness.

I think a lot of people in our group, they go overboard on the emptiness, and they go underboard on the compassion. Like they can explain to you 25 reasons why something's empty. But if you get sick and you need an aspirin, like, good luck.

You know? So like that. You shouldn't get like over muscle on one side.

What was that movie? There was a movie. Some guy was, no, it was a recent movie.

What was it? He was just exercising one arm and not the other arm. And he looked really weird.

And I was wondering if he actually did that for six months, or if they just put something on his arm. I don't know. But it was some movie.

And the guy, he was into making one arm big, and the other one wasn't. And he said, don't be like that. Like your Lam Rim knowledge should be well distributed.

You should be good at everything. Pretty good at everything. All right.

Second of the three qualities is that it's easy to practice. I'll give you something to chew on, and you work on it, OK? He says the Lam Rim is easy to practice, as opposed to other Buddhist presentations, because it's all about working on your own mind.

And then he just leaves it. He doesn't explain it. He says, because it's all working on your own mind, it's easily practiced.

I mean, I would think he lists some other scriptures, and he says they are not focused primarily on working on your own mind. But the Lam Rim is. And therefore, it's easy to practice.

So it's all wrassling with your own mind. It's all wrassling with your own mind. That's an interesting idea.

And somehow that gets you more points more quickly. I don't know. OK, number three.

It is superior to other systems, meaning it combines two great streams of spiritual inquiry. Emptiness, reality, and compassion, love. That's all.

The two streams that have come down to Arya Nagarjuna and Arya Sangha. The idea of where reality comes from. Try to struggle with this, OK?

Try in your own practice to understand one thing. If you go around the world promising people more money, or a nice relationship, or better health, if they will only serve others. If you go around the world preaching to people that they can get whatever they want if they provide it first to someone else, OK?

Just if you go around country after country giving these same old teachings, that drives the staff crazy. They fall asleep in the first 30 seconds. Because they heard it 10,000 times.

But if you go around and telling people you will get money if you give money to others. You will get health if you serve the sick. You can find a girlfriend if you go to the nursing home and take care of someone there.

Then a girlfriend will materialize, and a good one. That's emptiness. That's Arya Nagarjuna.

You see? That's saying that your reality is coming from you, by what you do. That's emptiness.

That's Nagarjuna's side of the lamrim. That's the whole half of the lamrim. And then at the end of the program, usually on the fifth day, this is where they start crying.

Then they say, OK, you're sitting there in Beijing with a bunch of hardcore Communist Party guys. And you say, by the way, before we leave, before we say goodbye to each other today, and until we come back in eight months or a year, can you just, I want to ask you one question. And they're like, yeah, what do you want?

And I say, what would happen in the world if everyone believed that the only way to get money was to help someone else get money first? And then I just shut up, which is very rare for me. I just stop and I let them think.

And you can see the minds going, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And it's like the slot machine, ding, ding, ding. And then they go, then people yell out at random, in every country, it doesn't matter what country, people yell out at random, world peace, world harmony, prosperity for everybody, no war.

Because that's true. If everyone accepted the emptiness, then compassion would rule the world. You see, if you understood where things were coming from, the world would become a compassionate place.

By definition, by necessity. Because you couldn't get anything without serving someone else. So emptiness demands compassion.

The natural conclusion of a person who understands emptiness is that they serve other people. You see? And so to have a system which is based on those two ideas is like, that's it.

And people all over the world, they get it. In every country, it doesn't matter where they're from. We spoke to a big Muslim group in Jakarta, and they were like, wow.

So anyway, that's the third calling to lamrim. It has those two high ideals that could help the whole world. And then you can continue to be whatever you are.

It doesn't matter. You could have pictures of the Dalai Lama. You could have pictures of Muhammad.

It doesn't matter at all. It doesn't matter. Just follow those two ideas which are consistent with every religion.

And then whenever your mom and dad had a picture, you can have the same picture. It doesn't matter. Okay.

Let me see. I think that's probably a good place to stop.