«Дар освобождения», курс 7 «Учимся быть тихими», занятие 2

[Говорящий 1] (0:03 - 50:51)
I want to say one thing before we start. In the last week there's been a lot of crazy publicity about myself and Diamond Mountain. I haven't actually seen much of it.

But I was in Guadalajara a few weeks ago, right? Who was there? Yeah, and it was weird because the last time in Guadalajara I think 20 people came.

Or something, not many people came. And then this last time a thousand people showed up. And it was I think one of the largest places you could have in Guadalajara to fit people.

And that happened several times on this last tour, right? In, where was that? Colombia.

And then again in Mexico City they sold out in the Museum of the Wealthiest Man in the World, Carlos Slim. And it was strange, the tour was pretty strange. And I don't know about you, if you were in Guadalajara that night it felt like the Mexican Revolution was going to happen again.

I actually got nervous. I felt it very, especially when our friend got up. And I just felt this energy run through the crowd and I thought, oh, this could get out of hand.

Where do you go from here? To a soccer stadium or something? What's going to happen next?

And I thought very powerful forces were being unleashed. I felt like that. And it felt a little bit unsettling.

I was a little nervous about it. And so then I thought, oh, something strong is going to happen. In Buddhism they say when good forces are happening very strong then there will be, opposite forces will come.

And you have to expect it. And I think personally, this is just my own opinion, that we've done, I think many of you have done 20 years of work, 25 years of hard work, free classes, 25 years of free classes. The university is free.

The classes have been free. And 20,000 pages of traditional scripture have been unleashed into the modern world in a modern way. And people are starting to respond in a very, we were in Moscow just before that, 850 people came to the talks, the first time I've ever been there.

And things are happening, things are moving. Great forces are being unleashed, I feel. And I just want you not to be nervous or afraid or like that.

It makes me a little, it's overwhelming for me also, and stressful for me, all the attention and a lot of the negativity. But I think it's natural when good forces get very strong. And it's happened throughout history.

Read the story of, I'm not comparing myself to Jesus, but there's a story, he healed Lazarus. He brought Lazarus back from the dead, which I cannot do and I don't claim to be able to do. But then he got in trouble.

Beginning from that day, he was targeted by the authorities. Because they said he had, it was wrong to bring back people to life without asking the authorities and something like that. And then they said, oh, we have to go to Jerusalem now.

And Peter said, I don't think you should go, and stuff might happen. And he went anyway, right? So I just, I feel that very powerful good forces are being released.

And there will be a reaction. And don't be disturbed and don't be sad, and don't take it too seriously, okay? Bigger things are coming.

Much, much greater things are coming. And beautiful things, global things, globally changing things. And naturally there will be some reaction in the world.

The more we do, the more reaction there will be. And that's just natural in the whole world. So embrace it and ride it.

And don't be nervous, especially don't be unkind to other people, okay? Just be friendly, be kind, be understanding of their needs. Respond to them with kindness and grace, elegance.

That's your training. That's what you do, okay? So whatever comes, our job is to practice and to be kind to people and to be good to people.

And do our daily meditation, do our daily yoga, study, and show that you are well trained by being kind and forgiving and serve people, okay? That would make me most proud, okay? All right, here we go.

So the first of the six preliminaries has two parts. The first of that is clean up your room, okay? I think that's going to be the hardest practice of all.

But I'm glad it's on everybody's lips, you know? People are thinking and talking about cleaning up their house and their room, and this is a good thing, okay? It has a powerful effect on your mind, okay?

Clean up your room, then meditate. And the meditation will go well, okay? And learn to live in a house that looks like...

I think, personally, I lived in a Zen temple. That's a long story. I got stuck there.

Rinpoche made me stay there. That's a long story. But it was too clean for me.

I felt it was almost sterile, in a way. And I'm not suggesting that. But within your own ambience or your own lifestyle, make it...

My mother's house was a mess. But it was warm, and it was open all day. We never locked the door.

And poor people came in and slept in the house. It's not far from here. It's a few miles from here.

And anyone could come in and sleep in the bed at night. One night she came to my room. She said, that guy has to leave.

I said, who? She said, that guy who came in last night. I said, well, why?

And she pulled up her pillow, and there was a pistol under the pillow. She said, that guy cannot stay. And he slept in her bed.

And she had to sleep in another bed. But he left his pistol. And then she said, that guy can't stay.

But that was our house. And it was not... It was a little...

Stuff was broken, and doors were shabby because of our fights when we were kids. But it was warm, and people wanted to be there. And when she passed away, dozens of people came just to the house.

So I mean it should be warm and beautiful, but elegant. There should be an arrangement to the mess. Okay, all right.

Because that will affect your mind. When you meditate, that will affect your mind. Okay.

So here we go. I gave you this part so you could finish your homework last night. But I'm going to do it again from the actual text.

DE NAS KUSUM DUGGYI RTEN DRANG MA NI How should you set up your altar in your room? LAM MA YI DAM SOGS SOGS SHING GI CHOG DGOS LTAR CHAG DGOS We're going to get to a meditation practice where you visualize many holy beings and you do some prayers with them. And they're in a certain order.

And there's three different systems of doing that. But he says on your altar you might want to prioritize the images somehow. If you've got a lot of images.

So we'll get to that. According to the SOGS SHING. SOGS SHING means, SOGS means collecting good karma.

SHING means a garden or a field. We had Buddha field last night. It was SHING SBYONG, right?

Preparing your Buddha field. SOGS SHING means a visualization of the lamas and the other holy beings which results in a lot of good karma. So you should arrange the altar in a similar way to the visualization which will have, it's coming.

Generally you should prioritize like lower level arhats should be behind the higher level or in front of the higher level beings or something like that. Working towards the center the beings get more powerful. Then he says, if your picture of a lower being is bigger than your picture of a higher being and the lower being picture would block the higher being picture, well then just switch them around.

Don't be anal about it. Make it pretty. Okay.

GZHIG GIS CHOS KYONG RGYAL TZEN SOG KHAR TZAR BAR BSAM LAS SANGS RGYAS KYI DGOS CHA GONG DU SBYOR PA MANG PO Then in Tibet there were protector deities. There's a controversy going on right now in the Tibetan community about one of them. The other 99 are fine.

Nobody, everybody loves them. And I don't understand the controversy and that's one of the only controversies I'm not involved with. So, okay.

But he says there are people, there are monks who feel that their protector deity should go in front of the Buddha picture. Or, you know, it should be, it should take more, what do you call it, precedence over a plain old Buddha. Because this is a tantric, you know, heavy duty protector.

And then he says that's a mistake. Okay. Then those protectors are good and they're enlightened and they are wonderful people but don't think that a plain old Buddha image is less or cheaper because you can buy it next door at the garden center.

All right. They're still cool. All right.

Or as they say in Germany, Kuehl. It's a Berlin thing, I think. Yeah, Kuehl.

I don't know. I'm trying to go to Germany. DE NI KYANG DANG DAG GYI LA MED PAS THAG RTEN PA RE People who think that way don't understand what it means to take shelter.

And we talked about it last night. There's shelter. There's an idea in many Buddhist countries and communities that you take shelter in a picture of the Buddha or an image of the Buddha.

In our tradition, the shelter is in what they taught. Which is to be kind to those who are hurting you, for example. That's protection.

That's shelter. So people who think that a protected deity should go higher than a plain old Buddha don't understand the idea of shelter. DE NI KYANG DANG DAG GYI LA MED PAS THAG RTEN PA RE RGYAL SHES KYI GZER KU DNGUL KU LIM MA SOGS PHRA GO'ANG DU BYED Some people, he said, arrange their altar with the more expensive materials, more, what do you call it?

Dominant? No. Prominent.

Like if they have a statue which is made of gold, they'll put that in the middle. And if they have a statue made of silver, it goes off to the side. And in Lima, those of you who are trying to follow the Tibetan, it's up there somewhere.

Where is that? Lima. Lima is a very rare word which means bell metal.

It's the metal that's used in a Tibetan bell. It's not very expensive. So some images in Tibet that are made from, they're called bell metal, I think, in English.

PHRA GO'ANG DU BYED BYIN GUS RNAMS BRAL GYUG TU BYOGS PA NI Then they have images made out of clay or ceramic and they put them at the end because it's not worth anything, the clay. BYOGS PA NI KUN YAN LA NOR GYI DU BZHIN LAS MED PA'I DAG RE means that shows that those monks who do that are thinking of their Buddha images and paintings as a form of, what do you call securities which can be traded? What do you call it?

Yeah, they're thinking of images as commodities. Don't think of your images as commodities. If you're concerned, oh, this one's made of gold, this one's made of silver, this one's just copper, this one's just ceramic.

Then he says, you're thinking of holy beings as commodities, like baseball trading cards and you're not thinking of them as being something special. THANG KA YANG KHA SA NI GYI KHO RIM BYAS NAS BRAL MI RUNG Some people have THANG KA. THANG KA is a Tibetan scroll painting.

I don't think we have any here. Anyway, you can roll them up and jump on a horse and tie them to the saddle and they're easier to carry around. So that's why they've always been made as scrolls.

People, they get old. Over the years, the GCOD CHEN means the silk that you use for the frame and stuff like that, that starts to get old and they start to get torn and dirty and then people tend to, some monks might put their new THANG KAS in the middle and their older THANG KAS on the side because the newer THANG KAS look better, you know, better silk. He says that's also a mistake.

You're not arranging your holy images by the cost of them or by the appearance of them. It's by the meaning of each one. THAG RAS KHA SA NI BRAL MI RUNG LA LAS THANG KAS YUL WA'I KHO CHEN NAS DGOR MOR BSTAN PA DE LAS GDUG ZHIG KHA LA RUNG Say Kha La Rung.

Kha La Rung. Kha La Rung means, what's it mean? Dang, that's really weird.

Kha La Rung means where would it be good? But it means that's really weird, you're really being weird. What?

He said nowadays, I guess it was a problem in 1920 in Tibet that people would cut the silk off the borders of the Thangka and they would attach Indian rupees, silver coins around the outside of the Thangka to make it look more expensive than Kha La Rung. You know, that's just dopey. Okay, Kha La Rung.

SANGS RGYAS BYANG SEMS KYI NANG NGAN LA GANG PA DE DE NYA BA LA BAR TSA BA CI YANG MED PA DE YANG KHYAM RUNG MED PA DE YANG BAR BSTAN PA RE means in Tibet, and I remember I was in Thailand and I used to work there. I built an office there. And you go to the Emerald Buddha, it's a big deal.

It's a Buddha image that was, a war was fought over it like 400 years ago. Anyway, recently they found out it's not Emerald at all. Anyway, it was a big thing between Cambodia and Thailand, so I don't know, Burma.

So it's a big deal to be invited to go see the Emerald Buddha. I saw the Emerald Buddha. And there are all these signs there that say don't point your feet at the Buddha.

You're not allowed to sit down and point your feet at the Buddha. I had a Thai woman working for me for many years. She ran our colored stone, the precious stone department, which means non-diamonds.

And then she, one day she came in, she says, I'm quitting. And I'm like, I need you. Her name was Tasini Katapitu, which took me like three years to learn her name.

And I said, Katapitu, why are you leaving? She said, people are disrespecting me. And I said, what do you mean disrespecting you?

She says, people are pointing their feet at me all day in my room, in my department. And I'm like, show me how they point their feet at you. And she crossed her legs.

You know, like Kim is sitting right now with her legs crossed. Marc Ciperi is pointing his feet at Rosa. You see what I mean?

And she got really angry. I said, they're just crossing their legs. This is a thing in America.

People cross their legs. No, no, they hate me. They want to disrespect me.

So in Asia, it was considered very inappropriate to point your feet at anyone. And your feet were considered very dirty because everybody wore sandals. There were no automobiles.

There was cow poop and horse poop all over the road. And you stepped in it. And then when you got to someone's house, a servant would come out and wash your feet, like in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago.

So that was a big deal when Jesus went out to wash people's feet. It was a big deal. So anyway, in Tibet, it's also considered highly disrespectful to sleep with your feet facing a thangka.

It's considered disrespectful. So Christine Walsh put the garden picture at the foot of my bed. Where are you?

And I went to sleep the other night there and I was like, I like it. Because when I wake up, I can look at it. It's right in front of me.

And when I go to bed, it's the last thing I see before I put my head back. I think it's a matter of motivation. But anyway, he's saying in Tibet it would be improper to place an image in a position where you would sleep with your feet towards it.

Just so you know, this is the kind of thing that Westerners get anal about. Pabongka Rinpoche says be nice to everyone you meet. People don't hear that.

Pabongka Rinpoche says don't put thangkas at the foot of your bed. And then all these Western Buddhists are running into your house and tearing down the thangkas that are at the foot of your bed. That's more important.

So let's not get anal about it. Let's be nice and friendly about it. This is a Tibetan custom.

Some of the customs from Tibet we will use and some of them we will throw out. We're not Tibetans. We are Westerners.

We're kind of global, I think, actually. But we are modern people and we have shoes and we don't have cow poop on our feet normally. So it's probably okay.

So we have to divide between customs which are cultural and customs which are universal. And I believe that there will come to be a modern Buddhism. I think what you see when a thousand people come in Guadalajara it's a kind of a modern movement of Buddhism which is more effective and more people find it more relevant to their lives.

So in many Buddhist centers you have 10 or 20 people coming to classes or like that. Then if a thousand people show up it means that you are teaching something which is more relevant to modern people. I used to say American but that's not true anymore.

We're everywhere in the world. I was thinking to call it New World Buddhism maybe or something. I don't know.

We have to think about it. We came out of the Tibetan tradition. But I think aside from His Holiness the Tibetan tradition is not people have people haven't found it relevant to them mostly.

They don't want to be told don't point your feet at it's not the most important thing to them. They want to know how can I make a world where Iraq doesn't happen or how can I stop world hunger or things like that. You know what I mean?

So I think we are seeing also in these days the rise of a new kind of spiritual path. And I like it and I think it's helping more people. The old one is okay and those people who want to follow that it's okay.

But like the lecture that was given this afternoon which most of you losers didn't come to. Many I should say. About serving the homeless.

I find that I thought it was wonderful. And I thought Rebecca did a great job. Gunnar found this lady.

Where are you? I thought she was fantastic. That's the kind of thing we should be doing.

And I'm proud to be that kind of a Buddhist. All right. ,'DI YANG SKYAB DOR MED PA'I ,'DANG YANG BDAG RTEN PA DE, ,'GA' ZHIG GI THANG RGYA DANG GUS SOGS ,'NYING PHOS RNAMS ZHAG TU NYER BA ,,'KHAS NYID KYI DU SHES KYIS ,,TSA TSA GANG, Say TSA TSA GANG.

TSA TSA GANG. Do you know what a TSA TSA is? It's a small clay image of a Buddha or often times a tantric deity.

They are shaped a little bit like this. And they are made in a mold. They take a mold and they put clay in it.

Nowadays there's a lot of people in one of the Buddhist organizations who make them out of plaster of Paris I think or other stuff. So that's called TSA TSA. And then there's a place called a TSA TSA GANG.

In Tibet there's a thing called a TSA TSA GANG. TSA TSA GANG means when your TSA TSA's break, which they always do, you take the pieces and it's considered unlucky or disrespectful to throw them out in the garbage. So you could take them out to, I have lots of, I live on a Mesa.

I take them out to another Mesa. I hike to another Mesa. I put them in a nice place where the deer can see them or something, the pieces.

So in Tibet there were special little buildings called TSA TSA GANG. And they were like no roof, four walls and a little door made of adobe or something. And you could go in and place your broken images there or the thangka which tore or something, rather than throwing them in the garbage, which is disrespectful.

So he says if you have a thangka which is old, a painting, a religious painting which is old and TSA TSA GANG GYI RANG GI SON NAM GYI CIG RGYA BA GSUM to drag those images out to a TSA TSA GANG and just throw them over the wall as if they were garbage being thrown into a dumpster is wrong, he says. Don't think of those things as trash. They are holy beings who got broken.

And go and respectfully put them in a TSA TSA GANG but don't just toss them in there, okay? Got it? If you do, it's as if you're tossing your good karma also.

You might as well toss your good karma, he says. DE NA KUTEN SOGS LA SANGS RGYAS KYI BYANG CHEN DE DANG DE NGOS KYI DU SHES SBYOG DGOS We'll get into this more later but any image you see of a Buddha or of Jesus or of Mohammed or whoever it is that you follow, in our tradition, you should treat that statue or that painting as if it were that person themselves. You go into a church, there's an image of Jesus or something, then you should bow or you should go down on your knee, right?

That's a custom in many churches. And then you should imagine that you are in the presence of Jesus. I was in, I gave a talk, a large talk in a synagogue in Tel Aviv.

By the way, synagogue, if you want to know something interesting, S-Y-N comes from the Sanskrit S-A-N, sun. Gog is from Sanskrit also. It was G-H-A.

The word synagogue is directly derived from the word sangha. It's the Greek. It's the Greek form of sangha.

Just for your information. So, anyway, I went to a synagogue in Tel Aviv. I gave a nice talk there about emptiness.

They really understood it nicely. And I said, where's the front of the synagogue? They said, there is no front.

And I'm like, it was circular. And I said, well, where do you keep the images? And they said, there are no images.

And then I said, why? And they said, how can you make an image of God? Any image you make would be less.

It would be improper. It would be incomplete. Don't even try.

We don't try. And in that case, I think you could imagine that the lack of images in the synagogue needed to be respected. Like an image of Christ or something like that.

So, the point is not to think of images or the intentional lack of images as anything less than God or Jesus or Buddha. And treat them that way. And that's a nice exercise.

When I was growing up in the temple and I would grab a Buddha by his head to move it. Rinpoche would say, clean the altar. I grabbed the Buddha by the head.

He said, you can't grab a Buddha by the head. And he'd do this thing like, and in Tibetan you don't say I'm moving the image. You say, I'm inviting the image to move to a different place.

You can't use the word I'm moving an image. CHEN DON I am inviting the image to move its location. Like that.

You have to treat it as though it were the real thing. KUS TUG RTEN SOGS MANG PO MED NA KUS RTEN DU SANGS RGYAS BYAS SU BRJAN CIG RTEN PA'I KHO If you don't have a big pile of Buddha pictures and statues, there's a minimum that you should have. GUS RTEN DU To represent the GUS, which is what?

The holy body. When you say holy body, you should think holy deeds. Like the kind of stuff that Buddhas do, is GUS.

To represent GUS, he says, you should have a picture of The Teacher. When they say The Teacher, capital T, they mean Lord Buddha. They mean The Buddha.

Gautama Buddha. So you should have on your altar, if you're in this lineage, a Buddha, one Buddha statue. To remember SANGS RGYAS BYAS SU BRJEN PA'I PHYIR To maintain an awareness of the holiness and the source of this path.

LAM MA BYAS SU BRJEN PHYIR In order to remember your own personal teacher, BYAS RIN PA'I PHYIR KU RE'I NGES PAR DGOS You should have an image of Je Tsongkapa. So if you happen to be in this particular lineage, which I don't require, I'm not saying you have to be. If you feel like you want to be, in this particular lineage, it's a tradition to have one image of Lord Buddha and one image of Je Tsongkapa.

Je Tsongkapa was the teacher of the first Dalai Lama. 1357 to 1490. And the greatest religious figure in history.

Okay, I think. But if you're Christian, you can have a Christian image and whatever. It's whatever you want.

But it should be nice, okay? One image to represent the founder and one image to represent the person who taught it to you the most, okay? Even if it's Christian, okay?

That's up to you. Or whatever. Lama Je Tsongkapa, Je Rinpoche, Guru Rinpoche, Ngepa Gok.

Sung ten yang do du pa. Then you're going to need something to represent the sung. What's sung?

Gu sung. The way an enlightened being talks. It's called sung, right?

Gu sung. Sung means, so you should put a scripture on your altar, okay? We have this ACIP CD-ROMs. They have a million pages of Tibetan typed into them in the last 25 years by our refugee project, which has never been in the New York Times. Anyway, that's life. But that's a cool thing to have on your altar. It's one CD-ROM and it has a million pages of scripture on it.

Now, I like that, okay? And you can do things like that. He says, use the shorter sutra of the perfection of wisdom.

There is such a thing. But there's also a shorter sutra of the perfection of wisdom, which is the Diamond Cutter Sutra itself. It's also called that sometimes.

So you could have a Diamond Cutter Sutra in any language. It exists in Chinese, Sanskrit, Tibetan, English, okay? You could put that on your altar.

He says, BY THE WAY, I believe that for me personally, the Diamond Cutter would be the most powerful to have on your altar. You could have the Heart Sutra. I think the Diamond Cutter is the most powerful, okay?

Personally, if you want my personal opinion. If you put the CD there, you have all of them anyway. BDAG BU DANG Or BYANG CHUB LAM GYI RIM PA What's the BYANG CHUB LAM GYI RIM PA?

That's an alternate book you can put on your altar. This book, okay, this is one of them. There's maybe 50 or 100 of them, okay?

But one of them you can put on there. That little book called The Principal Teachings of Buddhism, that's the shortest LAM RIM in existence, if you have a small altar. Okay, THUGS BRTEN THUGS BRTEN means, what are you going to use for THUGS, right?

We got KHU, we got SUNG, what's THUGS? THUGS means the way a Buddha thinks. So how are you going to represent that?

Brooks, do you mind to get up and hold up that stupa? So that's a stupa, that's a traditional, you've probably seen them. There's one in Diamond Mountain that Amber built.

But it's a tradition to put that to represent the Buddha's mind. Or you could use a bell and a Dorje, okay? I kind of prefer a bell and Dorje myself.

Oh, you got one today, can you hold up that? So that's nice if you can get one of those. Nowadays you can get them online, you don't have to wait for 20 years to get a tantric initiation.

But you can keep one, it's okay. Everybody, you can buy one and keep them on your altar. And they represent how a Buddha thinks, okay?

All right. Satsatsunjog, he says you can use, mata means at least you should have one of those little clay Buddha things. Or tsun means or anything on up from that, okay?

Jog. ,MDO RJE RGYUD BU SOGS YOD NA'ANG THUGS RTEN DU JOG DGOS, If you have a bell and a Dorje, that's excellent, on your altar, okay? ,RGA SHIG GI RDOR JE RGYUD BU LA CHAGS CAN GYI, ,DUS SHING MA STOG MIN SBYOR PAR SNANGS TE, I see people who think that a bell and a Dorje are nothing more than ritual instruments, he says, okay?

I see people who think that way, but ,DI NYID THUGS KYIS TSE MA YIN PAS, ,DI NYID THUGS KYIS TSE MA YIN PAS, ,NANG CHUNG BYAS NA NYES PA BZHIN DU GCIG, By the way, those of you who know Tibetan, don't read it as MA YIN. Read it as TSE MA YIN. Okay, Ningbo?

Okay. Because you could make a mistake here. You could read it backwards if you're not careful, okay?

TSE MA is a word. TSE MA means it is a representation of the Buddha's mind, state of mind. If you read it as TSE MA YIN, it would say, this is not a representation of the Buddha's mind.

Then you'd be in trouble, okay? So TSE MA YIN means it is a representation of the Buddha's mind, the bell and the Dorje. Okay, NANG CHUNG BYAS NA.

NANG CHUNG is a very unusual colloquial expression in Tibetan that means to diss it. Diss it? If you diss the bell and the Dorje, you think, ah, that's not such a big deal.

NANG CHUNG means think it's not such a big deal. NANG CHUNG BYAS NA NYES PA BZHIN DU GCIG You get into trouble. You've made a big mistake, okay?

If you think those are just little bells that lamas play just before they take your money, you're wrong. These are not just little instruments. These are the Buddha's mind.

These represent the Buddha's mind. So respect them and keep one on your altar, okay? All right, now you've got a complete altar because you've got GUS, BSRUNG, THUGS, and the BSTAN means the table, okay?

So you have a body, words, and mind table. And that's a Tibetan word for an altar, okay? All right, NANG CHUNG BYAS NA NYES PA BZHIN DU PHYIR BU BRJEN PA NYIN DANG PO LAS NYIN LTAR BYA MI DGOS KYANG Set up the rows of the images on the first day and then you don't have to move them around after that.

He says you don't have to change them every day. SA BYAS DI TZAM LUS KYI DUS SHES ZHAG NAS BRJEL BAR BYED DGOS SA BYAS DI TZAM LUS KYI DUS SHES ZHAG NAS BRJEL BAR BYED DGOS So say BRJEL BAR, BRJEL BAR, BRJEL BAR. So when you go to a Buddhist temple in Tibet or a Tibetan monastery and you say, can I see the temple?

You don't say, LHA GANG MTHONG CHOG DGUR BAS You don't say, can I see the temple? You say, CHUN BYAS CHOG DGUR BAS means may I be permitted to meet the Dharma? It's beautiful.

You're not allowed to say, I want to see the statues in your temple. You have to say, may I be allowed to meet the Dharma? CHUN BRJEL Say CHUN.

CHUN BRJEL CHUN means Dharma and BRJEL means to. BRJEL means in colloquial to meet somebody on the street or something. You bumped into somebody.

May I be allowed to bump into the Dharma in your temple? And it's a beautiful, there's a whole language around relating to holy images and it's very, very beautiful. So he says here, SA CHE DE TZAM NGOS KYI DU SHES ZHAG NAS Remember this section of the text and BRJEL BYED DGOS And then meet your images in the morning, okay?

Get up in the morning and reintroduce yourself to your three images or your four images, okay? Like don't think of them as, what do you call it? Sometimes when you have an altar and you put the prettiest things you have there, after a week you don't see them anymore.

In the monastery, they rotate the images every week. There's a guy who just does that. He's called the KUN YER.

KUN YER means the image keeper, holy body keeper. And his only job is to change the thangkas every week. And he has to go through the whole temple and trade out.

And then in my monastery, they have, one day they said, we need to store these things. I'm like, well, what did you decide on? And they took me in and they had football lockers.

They had hundreds of football lockers stacked up to like 40 feet high. And they keep the thangkas in the football lockers. And then somebody has to climb up on a triple ladder to get to the top and open it up and pull out the thangkas for next week.

So they rotate them in the monastery so that you don't get used to them. And you appreciate them, okay? It's a very beautiful custom.

KUN YER RGYUD YIN PAS BTAG RGYU GANG YOD NYAMS PA CHA MI RUNG Don't get used to your images. Every morning, before your meditation, look at your teacher's photograph, if that's what you're using, and say, I love you, or you're cool, or... Okay, I'm not saying me, I'm saying whoever is your teacher.

Don't just treat them as, don't ignore them, okay? Don't get jaded by the image. If you have to change them to not get jaded, change them.

Have a bunch of different pictures of your teacher. Or have a bunch of different, you can have a Tara statue or whatever you like, but change them every once in a while so you don't get used to them. And then every morning before you meditate, gel.

Gel means, hi, stupa, how you doing? Hi, Buddha, how you doing? Good to see you this morning.

You're looking fresh, you know? Okay, and talk to them and have a relationship with them. Okay, really, that's what he's saying.

,NYIN LTAR BRAL NA BRAL TENG RE LA'ANG, ,BAG CHAGS RGYAS PA CAN SBYORG, Every time you sit in front of an image, say a photo of your teacher, and you just look at it, gel, you gel that image, you get special karma. Special seeds are planted in your mind. He says, BAG CHAGS, say BAG CHAGS.

I don't know why, but Westerners remember this word. I don't know why. They remember LELO.

They remember Tibetan curses, which I'm not going to teach you because you won't forget them. And then they remember BAG CHAGS. I don't know why.

BAG CHAGS means what? A seed in the mind, mental seed, vasana or sanskara in Sanskrit. Every time you pause to look at your teacher's picture, you will get a new BAG CHAGS.

So do it. Just do it. I keep them all over my house.

I especially keep one next to my computer. So I can't look either way from my computer and not hit my teacher's image. And I get a BAG CHAGS every time I do.

And I love it. All right. SKYE PA CHEN BYOG DGOS DGOS NGOS LAS GOS SU BYAL BA PHAN YON CHUD DU RGYUR GYUR GYI LHAG PAR GSUNGS Now this is a weird statement.

You ready? It has been stated in the scriptures that GEL, what's GEL? To meet.

To bump into your lama's photo or an image of a holy being is 16 times more powerful than bumping into them personally. I don't know why exactly. Well, we're going to talk about it.

Maybe let's just talk about it. So there's a peak experience in Buddhism. Buddhism says that there will, in your spiritual career, you will have five peak experiences.

They're called the five paths, right? But path in this case means a meditational experience. It's in the state of meditation.

You go in your lifetime, if you're lucky, you will have five meditative experiences. Very, very unusual experiences, okay? Number one, I think most of you already have.

And that's called the tragedy which formed your life. Your mother died. Your father got drunk and left you.

Your brother drove his car off a cliff by accident. There's some tragedy, some motivation that brought you here. Some sadness.

Usually it's a sad thing, brought you here. It woke you up. It was a wake-up call.

And then you thought, oh, then I noticed that the woman who spoke this afternoon had her own tragedy, right? And she talked about it within the first hour that we knew her. And I imagine that it has shaped her service for her whole life.

She is serving because of her brother, you know? And it's always like that. So there's a tragedy in your life or something, there's a great moment of awakening that comes about because of something hard in your life.

And that's considered path number one. Path number two, you're in a class and someone describes to you how stuff is coming from you. That's all.

You sit for many hours in a Buddhist class and somebody who knows what they're talking about describes to you how things are coming from you and how nothing else exists. Every irritating person you ever met, every TV show or newspaper article you ever saw was coming from you and nobody else. Don't blame the author or the cameraman.

You created that. That's second path. Sometime you'll come to a direct realization of that.

You will be standing in the kitchen and you'll have this peak experience. You will detect directly how a pot on the stove is coming from your own mind. You will see it coming from your mind.

And that's a big breakthrough. Those are two breakthroughs. The third breakthrough is called the path of seeing.

Path of seeing means in a state of deep meditation you see higher reality directly. That's the most important of the five. When you reach that, you will become enlightened within a short time.

When you reach that, you will become yourself a Buddha within a short time. That's a very important experience. That experience takes maybe 20 minutes.

It takes billions of lifetimes to get there. And it takes many years of study in this life. But if you're lucky, in a state of deep meditation, you will have this experience.

When you come out, you have four more semi-peak experiences that are related to that one. And those are called the four noble truths. And the word noble is a bad translation, extremely bad translation.

Big mistake. That's why I don't really trust a lot of those books. If they can blow that, they can blow anything.

It's the word arya. It means a person who saw emptiness directly. Arya, the Nazis used it for superior race or something.

It does mean superior. But in Buddhism, it refers to a person who has seen emptiness directly. It doesn't mean some white, what do you call it, supremacist thing.

It's not that. It means someone who's seen emptiness directly has four peak experiences following that direct insight. Those are called the four arya truths.

To call them noble is a gross error. It's a misunderstanding of all of Buddhism. Among those four is an experience that relates to pictures and statues of Buddhas.

A person who's seen emptiness directly is unique among all the people in the world in that they understand pictures of the Buddhas. They really understand them in a way that you cannot understand it before then. Why?

They have this weird insight when they see a Buddha painting or a Buddha image that this is the Buddha. And that this has, someone has sculpted this image who copied it from someone who sculpted the image before. And someone copied it from someone who sculpted it before.

But the first person who sculpted these images saw a Buddha. Okay, got it? Think about it.

Any image you see of the Buddha, if you trace it back generation by generation, or a picture of Tara, some angel, Buddhist angel, sooner or later there's the first person who made that image. They saw Tara. Tara appeared to them.

And they're like saying, hold still. And they made a statue. And of course they've been corrupted since then.

They've been copied for, I don't know, let me think about it. ,RGYAL BA'I RGYA TSA RIGS DPA'I SDOD PA'I PHYIR RGYAL BA'I YIN PHYIR, They've been, about 80 generations or something, okay? They've been copied through 80 generations.

Mistakes have been introduced. It's not exactly the way the Buddha looked, probably, okay? But when you see emptiness directly, you come to understand that any Buddha image you ever meet is the Buddha.

And it was sculpted by someone, ultimately, who saw the Buddha and saw an enlightened being. And the karma to see an enlightened being directly is priceless. We don't have that karma.

We don't have the karma to have been born in India in 500 BC, okay? It's like meeting Jesus directly, or meeting Moses directly. We don't have that karma.

So when we look at an image, we're seeing something that was seen by someone who did have that karma. Got it? So can we then say that it's 16 times more powerful to see an image which has affected 80 generations of people on this planet, then perhaps to catch sight of that being themselves?

Okay, that's the idea. I don't know if I buy it, personally. I don't buy it.

But anyway, that's what it says. We'll leave it there, okay? I respectfully think it'd be more fun to meet the Buddha themselves.

By the way, in our tradition, it requires more good karma to meet your personal teacher than it does to meet the historical Buddha. Okay? We believe this.

It takes more good karma to make contact with your personal teacher and be around them for a number of years. Like I was 25 years in the same home with my teacher. I served my teacher for 25 years.

I cooked for 25 years, okay? And in Buddhism, we believe that takes more karma than to meet the Buddha. To be able to meet your personal teacher requires more good karma than to meet a historical Buddha.

So appreciate whoever your teacher is. I don't want to be, and I don't believe I am all of your teachers, but whoever your teacher is, find your heart teacher, make contact with them, and understand that to meet them or to be around them requires more good karma than to meet the Buddha or Jesus or something like that, okay? Okay, all right.

[Говорящий 2] (50:55 - 52:07)
Kurt, you up for that? Okay, loud. SHI'I PHUL GYI BYUNG ZHIG DE DONG DANG RIGS RAB NI ZHIG YIN TE RGYAS PA NI SANGS RGYAS SHIN DU SANGS RGYAS SHIN DU MING TE YONG WAI RIGS NAM DANG SHING DANG ZHIG PAR SHA YI RANG KUN RAB NA MANG DI RIGS RAB NI ZHIG SANGS RGYAS SHIN DU SOGS SHIN SANGS RGYAS SHIN DU I repeat that I don't think you can practice successfully this path unless you are also serving the poor or the needy.

[Говорящий 1] (52:09 - 52:41)
Our team is in the prisons in South Arizona. They're doing beautiful work there. I don't think you will be successful in your Buddhist practice if you're not doing something hands-on for real people.

I think we've seen that that can be a problem if you don't balance that high practice with service with your hands. I think everyone needs that. I think we've seen that people need that.

All right. See you tonight.