«Дар освобождения», курс 7 «Учимся быть тихими», занятие 4

[Говорящий 1] (0:00 - 41:10)
We'll start. So, we're in the middle of a section of the instructions for how to prepare for a meditation session. And there are six preparations, Georgia Duke.

And we finished the first of the preparations, which was cleaning up your room and setting up your altar. And now we're on setting forth offerings on the altar, which are obtained honestly and which are beautiful. And they're beautiful in two ways.

They are pretty themselves. And they are set like in a restaurant. They say the food is good and the presentation was good.

So, it should be like that. I learned that in Basel, Switzerland. We used to go for diamond shows.

You pay $100 and you get this huge white plate and two pieces of asparagus. And that was supposed to be a good presentation. So, Lord Atisha, who was an Indian who came to Tibet and helped start the lineage of the Dalai Lama there 1,000 years ago.

He said, in Tibet the water is so wonderful. Perhaps we could just offer water on the altar and it would be enough. And then he said, your water is yenlak gye.

Yenlak gye means that your water has the eight fine qualities. Your Tibetan water has the eight fine qualities. So, of course, our author wants to tell us what the eight fine qualities are.

Here we go. Yenlak gye ni chim dzu le. Say chim dzu.

Chim dzu. This is probably the greatest commentary ever written on the Abhidharmakosha. If you want to study Abhidharma, you should read Chim Dzu.

No one's ever tried to translate it. It's incredible. It's huge.

And it's beautiful. And it's very ancient. It's 13th century.

And it was written by a person named Chim Jambayang. He was from an area called Chim. So, Chim is like Kansas.

And dzu means kosha. So, Chim Dzu is the Abhidharmakosha commentary by Chim Jambayang. Very, very beautiful commentary.

Very amazing. If you want to study Abhidharma, you should study that. It would take about...

Rinpoche taught it to me for 10 years. Chim dzu ne. Sil dang, shin dang, yangwa dang, jam dang, dang dang, ching-a me, tung na, den dang, towa la, mi nu, oops.

Yenlak gye den chu. Here we go. I don't know how we're going to get the eight.

We'll see. Sil means it should be cool. The water should be cool.

Chim means it should be delicious. Yangwa means it should be light, not full of minerals. Jam means it should be soft.

Dang means it should be clear. Ching-a me means it should have no extra odor. Tung na, den dang, towa la, mi nu.

If you drink it, it should not hurt your throat or your tummy. I think we have to count throat and tummy as two separate ones because that's the eight. Does that work out?

Does it work out? Yeah, okay. Those are the eight.

It's very, very famous in Buddhist scripture. Good water should have the eight qualities. Gyen den chu she, sung pa tar, chu sil wa pul we.

Then each of the eight qualities, if you find water which has each of the eight qualities, and if you consciously or with great awareness, you choose water which is of the highest quality, then that awareness creates different karmic seeds in your mind. If you are consciously trying to find water which has these eight qualities, in that case only, each of the qualities will give you a different karmic result, which is kind of cute. People say that the Lamrim texts get too anal on that.

They say every little thing has a karmic result and people get irritated for some reason at the Lamrim. But I think it's beautiful. I think it's fun.

Each one of the eight qualities is going to give you a different karma. Here we go. What are they?

These can go in our list of correlations later. Chu sil wa pul we tsultrim dakpa dang. If you consciously make sure that the water is cool, then it will create a karma which makes it easier to keep your morality.

Chu sil wa pul we, se gi ro chok nye. Say, ro. Chok.

Nye. Ro chok nye. The Buddha has 112 qualities.

There are 32 major qualities. There are 80 minor qualities. An enlightened being has 32 physical qualities.

And when they describe an enlightened being, they say ro chok nang, which means they have the quality of ro chok. Ro means taste. The taste of food.

Chok means supreme. Ro chok nang means it's very beautiful. As your karma gets more pure, everything starts to taste good to you.

Even eggplant. Okay. You'll find that, I believe, as your morality gets better, as your practice gets better, then you just enjoy everything better.

I like to say, people ask me, are you tight with the Dalai Lama? I say, oh yeah, we're tight. And then they say, well, like how?

And I say, well, I went to dinner with him not too long ago. That was 1996 or something. And it was in Washington, D.C. and there was a fundraiser for Tibet stuff. I don't remember what it was. And then Harrison Ford got up to introduce the Dalai Lama and I jammed, I was with Rinpoche, I jammed him in the ribs. I said, do you know who that is?

And he says, that's some senator. I said, no, no, no, guess again. He goes, oh, Indiana Jones.

And then we had dinner together with His Holiness and about 500 other people in a huge football stadium thing. And of course, everybody was looking at his table to see, probably he'll take one pea and go like this and he won't want anything else. And we're all watching him and they bring the food out.

And then he's like. And he was obviously really enjoying it. He had seconds.

He didn't care that 500 people were staring at him. And that's called rochok nang. Rochok nang means it's a quality of an enlightened being.

Everything you eat tastes like Julia Child. Everything tastes wonderful. Because your karma is getting purer.

So if you offer water which is delicious to the taste, then that will create the karma to have that quality. CHU YANG BA PHUL BA'I LUS SEMS LASO RUNG BA CHU YANG BA means if the water is light and not too heavy, laden down with minerals or something like that. If the water is light, you will have LASO RUNG BA.

You guys know the short form of that which is LERU. LERU has come to mean a tantric retreat. But the original word LASO RUNG BA means fit for action, fit for work.

LAS means work. RUNG BA means fit. LASO RUNG BA means like if you go to Jenny's class and you've been doing your yoga every day for six months, like pretty hard yoga every day for six months, you are LERU for her class.

What do you call it? You're in shape. You're in shape.

LASO RUNG BA. So if you offer water which is light, then your body and your mind will be in shape. You have the karma to have a mind which is sharp and clear and devoted.

And you have a body which is light and flexible and quick. Like that. BCU BYAMS PA BU'I ZHES KYI BYAMS PA By offering soft water.

I don't quite know the difference between light water and soft water but maybe somebody could figure it out. Soft water, if you offer that, then you become a gentle person. The karma is that you become...

And we're saying it has to be conscious, right? You have to think, I'm offering soft water so that I could be a more gentle person. And karmically, you will become more gentle.

So even just the act of pouring water into those bowls, if it's conscious and aware, could be a great karmic exercise. BCUD DANG BA BU'I RIGS PA DANG BAR GYUR BA The word DANG in Tibetan, those of you who are studying Tibetan, D-V-A-N-G-S. DANGS It means water which is crystalline.

It has a quality of crystalline color. You can see through it, like in Hawaii. I used to go surfing in Hawaii.

It's scary because the waves are very big and the water is DANG BA. You can't see the water. When you're coming down a wave, all you see is the reef.

It's like six or ten feet underwater. He lived there. All you can see is this big reef staring at you and you can't see the water.

It's very scary. So anyway, that's DANG BA. But DANG BA also refers to a state of mind which is clear and bright and happy.

So by offering DANG BA water, your mind will become DANG BA. DANG BAR GYUR BCUD CI MED PA BU'I RIGS PA BYUNG BA DANG If you're careful that the water doesn't have any odor to it. Like if you've lived in India, oftentimes the water has some odor to it.

People are very careless. The industries are very careless about throwing mercury and anything in the water. And then cow poop and lots of human poop in the water.

There's an aftertaste and an aftersmell to it. So if you're careful not to have that kind of water, then you will find it easy to overcome spiritual obstacles like laziness or jealousy of the other students or anger at your teacher when they demand too much or don't demand enough. Okay, like that.

You will find it easy to get over those obstacles. SDIG PA BYUNG BA BCUD DO LA MI GNOD PA BUL BA LAS If you're careful to offer water which doesn't hurt your tummy, he's out of order. Did you notice?

Now he's doing eight and then he's going to do seven. But that's okay. He wrote the book.

If you offer water which doesn't hurt your tummy, then you will be free of illness. Karmically, you'll be more likely to be free of illness. Again, it has to be conscious and aware.

As you offer it, you have to think about it. And then finally, BCUD DO LA MI GNOD PA BUL BA SNGAGS BSNYEN PA'I PHYED If you offer water which doesn't harm your throat, then what do you think it would be? Yeah, your speech becomes more sweet.

You're able to speak more meaningfully and more sweetly. SNGAGS BSNYEN PA'I PHYED KYI PHEN YIN RGYAS BYUNG BAR GSUNG His Lama, Khyabje Pabongka Rinpoche's Lama, told him those are the eight correlations for the eight qualities of good water. And as I said the other day, I enjoy going to Safeway or Bosh's and looking through all the waters.

I like that Italian one in the glass bottle. I feel like plastic bottles, they add a smell to the water, I think. So I buy nice water.

It's hard for me. I don't have that much money. But I invest.

I buy some nice water, and then I like to offer it. I think it's cool. BYAS GRUB KHAMS PA RGYAL LAS RGYA MTSO DE NYID THOG MAR ZER ATSER DE NYID THOG MAR ZER ATSER BYAS GRUB GANG DU PHEBS CHAL KHABS SU BYAS DANG YOD BYAS BRTZEN PA'I YUN CHA BU LAS STING TZAM YANG MED PAR So there was a mama named GRUB KHAMS PA RGYAL LAS RGYA MTSO.

RGYAL LAS RGYA MTSO is a personal name, monk's name. GRUB KHAMS PA is probably, GRUB KHAMS means a yogi's residence. So probably he lived in a special house in the monastery, so he was called yogi residence RGYAL LAS RGYA MTSO, something like that.

He lived from 1641 to 1713, if you care, and nobody does. But I like to look these things up. DE NYID THOG MAR In the beginning ZER ATSER, he lived up on the top of ZER A monastery, towards the top of ZER A monastery.

ZER A was nestled into a mountain, and there was a lower part of ZER A and there was an upper part of ZER A. ZER A MED, which is our monastery, which is the best one, that MED means lower. It was physically lower, but of course it was spiritually superior to ZER A J.

Okay, ZER ATSER, JE GRUB KHAMS DU Now the word GRUB KHAMS meaning yogi's residence, he's using the word JE before it, which would mean, it implies that perhaps it's where Je Tsongkhapa practiced at ZER A. Je Tsongkhapa was around when ZER A was founded. One of his students founded it during his lifetime, and he taught there when it was two buildings, a shed.

JE GRUB KHAMS DU PHABS CHAL GAB SU When that Lama first got to ZER A, KHU CHE DANG YOD CHE BRTAN PAS he didn't have much in the way of personal belongings or furniture in his house or things like that. He didn't have anything. YOD CHE BU'I STING TZAM YANG MED PAR He didn't have one little bowl to offer the water.

He was that poor. MED PAR YOD CHE BU'I SKAB KHONG RANG GI ZHES BYAS CHU YAB PO CHU NAS So when he was going to do a meditation, and before that he had to make offerings, he would clean out his porpa. Say porpa.

Every monk has a porpah. A porpah is a little wooden bowl about this big. And you have to carry it around with you.

Then, like the way they serve breakfast at Serame is you got to show up at like five o'clock. You have to do prayers with 3,000 other monks or 1,300 other monks. And then everybody pulls out their porpah.

And the little kids in the monastery run around with teapots and they pour tea in it. And then they run around with sampa flour and throw it in the bowl. And they're required to run.

It's considered respectful if they run to the temple. And one of them always slips and pours hot tea over, buttered tea over some monk. Anyway, Deleon Chabu, so he would wipe out his porpah carefully.

And then he would offer the water in his porpah. Because he didn't have anything else. He was poor.

PHU BA'I YIN CHAD PHU BA'I RNAMS TSUL KHRED ZHES SKABS KHO YIN CHOG RIM PO'I CHE LA YAR PO ZHUGS TE LONG CHE And then when it was meal time, he would go to the altar and request Lord Buddha if he could borrow the water bowl to eat his breakfast in. See, I mean, he only had one bowl. YANG GROL NAS YIN CHAD PHU BA SOGS And then he would finish his churros and he would clean the bowl again and then fill it with water again and put it back on the altar.

But in his mind, he was borrowing it back. GZHAN YANG YAR GYI SKABS MED DOG BYUNG ZHING LAS PA DANG BRAL BU DANG CHOS DANG ZHING ZIL BA SOGS CHOS PA'I NGO PO'I GANG NA DUG LOD DANG DE PHU CHOG DE YANG CHOS PA'I BRTZIN GSUNGS DON NAS CHING GI BSLAB ZHING PHUL NAS THAR DGE BA NGO BO SOGS BYA BA THU'I DAG PA'I TSE PHYAG GI NAM THAR YIN GZHAN YANG YAR GYI SKABS If it's summer, MED DOG BYUNG ZHING LAS PA DANG you could just go out and pick wildflowers.

Or BYUNG ZHING LAS PA means plants which have a pleasing green stem on them, even if it's not a flower. DANG, BRAL BU DANG Or you can pick berries or something that are growing in the wild. CHOS DANG You can find water which is clear and cool.

So, CHOS PA'I NGO PO'I GANG NA DUG PA LOD DANG DE Even if you can't find those things, you can imagine them and you can offer that. And I prefer that. I like that.

I have a garden. I have nine rose plants. I have like, I don't know, 30 kinds of flowers.

I just grow flowers right now because I want to offer them on the altar. I want to have the flowers there to offer. And it's wonderful.

You find flowers that bloom at different times of the year and then you have a supply. So I encourage you. It's also healthy to go outside, away from your computer and your cell phone, like leave them in the house and go outside and dig around in the dirt for an hour.

And it just makes you a more sane and pleasant person, okay, than being on the computer all day. And then you can have a supply of flowers for your altar. It's very nice.

It's very sweet, okay. PHUD CHOG If you can't get fresh flowers, you can imagine offering them. And typically, it's a Buddhist tradition to imagine the whole sky covered with flowers, okay.

So when you're offering flowers mentally, it's a tradition to fill the sky with rose blooms or fill the sky with daisies and like that and offer them in your mind, okay. If you're too lazy to grow your own, okay. PHUD CHOG DE YANG CHOD PA'I PHYIN GSUM BRTEN NAS There's a special mantra called the mantra of Samantabhadra who lived 2,500 years ago.

And you can offer that, you can say that mantra while you offer the sky covered with flowers, okay. There's a mantra to say for offering the sky full of flowers in your imagination. So you can say the mantra while you make the offer, okay.

It's a very, very famous mantra, okay. I'll teach you sometime. CING GI LAG, then the flowers will be blessed if you use the mantra, okay.

CING PHUN NAS THAR BSGYE BA LO BA SOGS BYA BA PHYI DAG PO TSAD PAS Then at the end of the offering, you should be careful to bank the good karma, okay. We talked about it the other day. If you make good karma by imagining the sky full of flowers and offering them to your personal teacher, okay.

You make thousands of good seeds of karma. They can be destroyed by what? Anger, okay.

A few moments of really healthy anger or upset at somebody like a journalist or something. They can destroy all the good seeds you've made in the whole day, okay. A few moments of careless anger or what do you call it?

Like feeling really upset at somebody. They can destroy all the good deeds you've done the whole day. And that's why in those times people start feeling sad or down because they've wiped out all their good seeds, okay.

SOGS BYA BA So it's important to bank them. Bank them means sing the mantra, offer the flowers in the sky, imagine the good karma you've got and give away the good karma fast to somebody else, okay. And that protects their karma.

You still get it, but it's in somebody else, okay. I used to give away all the money from my job, okay. Every six months I would go to the CFO and I'd say, okay, it's time to cut the check.

Then he would figure out how much money was due to me. I gave away half directly to saving the books. So the money went directly to that.

And he would cut a check every six months. And then I would go in and beg the owner if he would increase the check a little bit. And he used to, he's Israeli, he's Jewish, right.

One day I said, why are you always giving me extra? He said, I'm just covering my basis, in case Buddhism is correct. But we would go in and they would cut the check.

And then one day the CFO came to me and he said, Mr. Roach, can I talk to you privately? I thought, oh, what's wrong? And he came into my office and he sat down and he said, you got to think about your retirement.

You can't just give away all the money. You should be investing some of the money. Don't just give away everything.

I mean, give away what you want, but save some for your retirement. You have to invest it. And suddenly this thing popped in my head and I said, I am investing it in the safest place, which is other people's hearts.

I'm giving it to other people. And I'm putting that karma in a safe place. It's not like your 401ks that suddenly get wiped out when the stock market changes.

My retirement fund, I don't have any of that money now. It's all gone. When I went into three-year retreat, I gave away all of it.

But I know where it is. And I get dividends every once in a while. Anyway, when you give the flowers, then imagine that you are giving away even the good deed of giving the flowers.

You give away the flowers and you give away the karma also. And then it's a complete gift. And then it's protected in a way.

CI BDAG PO TSAD PHAL GYI RNAM THAR YIN So this was the practice followed by a Lama named CI BDAG PO TSAD PHAL. CI normally means that that Lama was an abbot, a high abbot. It means throne holder.

CI means throne holder. CI BYANG RINPOCHE, who's in one of the pictures there, my teacher's teacher, CI BYANG means the holder of the throne. So CI BDAG PO TSAD PHAL GYI RNAM THAR He used to follow that custom.

BDAG GIS LAMA RINPOCHE GSUNGS said my Lama. My Lama described how one of his Lamas followed this practice. I don't have dates for BDAG PO TSAD PHAL.

I don't think anyone has found them yet. GSUNGS But I assume late 1800s or early 1900s. Okay.

DE NA RANG GI BDE PA'I LHAG THOB PA YIN GYIS BYAS PA'I TSE GYI LHAG THOB PA MED We were talking, I think Phil might remember, the other day we were talking about LHAG MA THOB PA and we said, don't read it as, right? So LHAG THOB PA means to be short on offerings. LHAG MA THOB PA means you're not short on offerings.

Okay. I said it wrong the other day. I said LHAG MA as a single word.

It's not that. LHAG THOB PA means to be short on stuff to offer. LHAG MA THOB PA means you're not short on stuff to offer.

Here he says, you're never, if you have a problem making offerings, it's because you're BDE PA'I LHAG THOB PA. What's BDE PA? Faith, okay.

If you think you don't have something to offer, you don't have enough faith. Okay. Just have belief.

Meaning, just close your eyes and imagine the sky covered with flowers and offered. It's very, very pleasant practice. Okay, try it.

Everybody's trying to do chakras and tantric deities and try a few skies full of rose petals once in a while. It makes you a very nice person, which is probably a good thing. SPYOD PA'I TSE GYI LHAG THOB PA ME So, you're never short of stuff to offer if you have faith.

DE LTAR BYAS NA RGA ZHIG GI GCOD PA NI SPYOD DANG MED DO SOGS BU BA'I PHYOG RGOL NYAMS NAS MA RTIG RTIG RNAMS SOGS SPYOD BYAS PA GANG THUB BYAS PA'I PHYOG SMOS NYAMS NA Then he says, I say stuff like that and the lazy ones among you, you grab that and you use it as an excuse to be lazy. I say, if you have enough faith, you can close your eyes and offer a flower. And then you lazy boneses refuse to go make a rose garden outside of your house because you think you can just close your eyes and offer the flower.

So, now he's criticizing people who are lazy and close their eyes and offer the sky full of roses, okay? DAG ZHIG GI GCOD PA NI GCOD DANG Some of you are thinking to yourself, oh, in that case, I can just offer a glass of water or I can go out and find some old flower and that will be enough. And I'll just sort of slowly collect my karma drop by drop, okay?

What's an English word for that? I'll collect my karma in small increments and that's enough, okay? You guys think that.

GANG THUB BYAS PA PHYOG SMOS NYAMS NA If you're thinking like that, DE NI PHYI MA YI DAG SOGS SU SKYE BA RANG LA YOD NA That reluctance to go to the store and buy the best water and offer it, that reluctance after you die, that karma might cause you to be born as what they call a hungry spirit. Okay, there's a like, when you have a haunted house, when somebody dies in a house and then people say, I heard a ghost or I heard a spirit wailing or crying. In Tibet, they say that's for real.

They say the person was so attached to the house that when they died, they were very upset and they went into the spirit realm, bardo, and then they got stuck in the house because of their attachment to the house and they're suffering because those kinds of beings can't get enough to eat. They're always suffering from hunger and thirst. So that's why they're crying or wailing or banging chains and stuff like that.

So if you want to be one of those Caspar the Ghosts, be cheap on your offerings, to the altar, to the altar. RANG LA YOD NA GANG TZAM LAS BU'O Whatever your capacity is, you should give the best you can. And he's very careful to say, according to your capacity.

It's important when you make an offering not to give more than you can. It also applies to donations. Don't try to give more than you have.

Don't run up your credit cards or, you know what I mean? Don't use your family's money without asking them. Money that you use for offering should be clean and free.

It should be after you've done your hard work and you got your pay and you paid all your responsibilities, you fed your children, you paid your mortgage, then whatever money you have free left over, which is honestly earned, then from that you should buy the best thing you can. And if it's only $5, that's okay, but it should be honest and clean money. Where are we?

RANG LA YOD NA GANG TZAM LAS BU'O YOD NA GANG TZAM LAS BU'O YANG PHYAG DANG DRAG KYANG SOGS KYI DRAG LA SANGS RIGS KYI CHOD PAR BU RGYUD MED RUNG RAB TU CHUNG BA LA DROD PA'I CHOD PAR TSOR BA GSUNGS PA'I DE KHO LA PHUL BA'I Then he's criticizing some of the monks in his audience. His audience was 99.9% monks. Most of the time.

He was unusual, as I said, because he agreed to teach lay people. He had huge followings of lay people. There's a beautiful story.

I think it was during this set of teachings that government officials started to come to his teachings, which was very controversial, and he was attacked bitterly during his lifetime for teaching lay people. And so hundreds and hundreds of lay people would come, and government people started to come, high ministers of the Tibetan government started to come. And the minister of war came, wearing his sword.

And one day the minister of war came up and offered his sword on the altar and begged him to become his disciple. And he followed him around for the rest of his life. So he was a very unusual lama.

He was attacked very viciously later in his life. And if you see photos of him, the early photos are very handsome and thin. And then later he's grossly obese.

He's very, very obese. And the story is that he was attacked by black magicians. He was criticized and then people attacked him, and some magicians attacked him.

And he fought psychically and then his body was ruined. So you'll see those later photos of him, very obese. Anyway, he's criticizing the monks in the audience.

He says, some of you have heard that the highest form of offering is your own practice. And that applies to any lama, including me. People say, would you like some money?

Money's helpful. Would you like some Cheerios? Cheerios is also helpful.

Then people say, well, what would you like the most? And then we say, drupay chupa. Say, drupay chupa.

Drupay chupa. Drupay chupa means the offering of your spiritual practice is the highest offering you can give to a teacher. They don't really need your money.

They don't need your Cheerios. What they really, what pleases them, which the Sanskrit word please is what? Puja, pujyate, puja.

Like you know guru puja or, what pleases a guru, guru puja, is your practice. If they see you being nice to someone that they know you're jealous of, they feel happy. Okay, and if you run to them and say, this other student hurt me today and I don't like them, then that's a, what do you call?

The opposite of an offering. That upsets them. It actually shortens their life, okay?

That sort of disharmony between students really shortens a lama's life, okay? So if you want to make an offering to a lama, the best thing is to be nice to other people, okay? Especially normal people who don't know you're a Buddhist, okay?

Then when the lama sees that, they feel happy. And they say, oh, that's the best flower that you could offer, okay? Now, Pabongka Rinpoche is criticizing monks because some monks will come up to him and say, okay, Rinpoche, I'm not getting you any flowers or water.

I'm just doing my mandala offering at home, you know? Be happy. And he's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Maybe you could do both, you know? Make some beautiful offerings. And every time you're nice to somebody, in your mind, send that to your teacher.

Offer that to your teacher, okay? NYON NA GANG SANGS RGYAS... BYA STANG means hermits.

It means guys who are living in caves and don't have much money, okay? BDAG KYANG, say BDAG PA. BDAG KYANG.

BDAG PA. BDAG KYANG. BDAG PA BDAG KYANG.

BDAG PA BDAG KYANG. It means, it's a beautiful, beautiful word. In Buddhism, it means...

The Dalai Lama is always saying, I'm just a simple monk, right? He keeps saying that. I'm just a simple monk.

He's translating in his head BDAG PA BDAG KYANG. That's the word BDAG PA BDAG KYANG. BDAG PA BDAG KYANG means a solo monk loner or something like that, you know?

Someone who doesn't have any commitments. They don't have a house. They don't have family.

They don't have a wife. They're just alone. They're just on their own.

BDAG PA BDAG KYANG. And free, free as a bird, like that. That's called BDAG PA BDAG KYANG, okay?

SOGS KYI BDAG LA SANGS RIGS KYI PHYIR PO BUD GYI MED Those monks like that say, look, I don't have anything to offer. I'm just a BDAG PA BDAG KYANG. I'm sorry, you know?

I've designed my life so that I'm, what do you call? Automatic vows of poverty, okay? And I don't have anything to offer.

Okay, BDAG PA BDAG KYANG MED RUNG RAB TU CHUNG BA LA GRUB PA'I PHYIR PO TSOR BA GSUM PA DE KHO NA NA PHU BA'I And then they tell me, oh, they're just offering their practice. CHOG MA NYAM DU That's correct. It's enough.

The highest offering you can make is your practice. He says, I admit that. But NYAM DU SANGS RIGS KYI PHYIR PO CHANG MO YANG MA PHU BA DE NA But if you don't make some attempt to offer something real, some physical offering, one flower, one piece of fruit, half a glass of water, if you don't make some attempt to match the mental offering with the physical offering, DE NA TSER RAB NAS TSER RAB DU BU RGYUD MED PA DE GA RANG NAS MI YONG DE GA RANG, say DE GA RANG NAS DE GA RANG NAS MI YONG You will be stuck in the same financial circumstances for many lifetimes.

Meaning you won't have anything for many lifetimes. I love this part. I really love this part.

Why? I think it really applies to all of us. And I think it applies to our group in recent years.

We got a little too, what do you call it? Theoretical? And everybody was really good at explaining emptiness, but nobody was going to help poor people or anything like that.

And I think it's a balance. I think you really need both. I think it's a mistake only to help poor people and not meditate and not study.

And I think it's the same mistake to just study and meditate and not help people hands-on. Luckily, tomorrow, you'll have a chance to help hands-on during your day off at the soup kitchen for the homeless, people who are experiencing homelessness. So Rebecca, you want to raise your hand?

She's organizing that. Rebecca's organizing that. Stand up, okay?

Don't be a loser, okay? Don't take the day off. I'm tired, Geshe-la.

I don't want to go work in a soup kitchen. Go work in a soup kitchen. You will feel more refreshed.

You will feel like you had a good sleep. It's better than watching TV or videos or just lazing around on a couch. Go stand in the soup kitchen, what, it's three hours or four hours, something like that.

And you'll feel great afterwards. You'll feel very, very invigorated, okay? Okay, try it.

You'll find that it's better than taking naps or stuff like that. DE GANG RANG LAS MI YONG ZHING ZHAL NAS DZUM MO TZAM DANG SPOS GANG BYAS RE TZAM LAS MA BYUNG RANG LENG CHUN MI BYAS PA PO ZHAL SAY means a piece of food. DZUM MO means this much, okay?

This is a DZUM MO. DZUM MO means a thumb. So it means that much food.

From your, if you eat a croissant in the morning, take a little piece off that big and put it on the altar, okay? In a nice plate, okay? Don't throw stuff on the altar.

It should be, the presentation is important, okay? Do you take the best part, do you take the part of croissant that you really like or the part that you don't like? Do you take the part with the filling in it or do you just give them the corner because they're not going to eat it anyway?

You know what I mean? No, no, I mean, don't think like that, okay? Don't think like that.

Don't think they're not going to eat it, okay? That's a big boo-boo, okay? Take the part out that you like the most and you eat the ends and then put it on the altar.

It's very, very sweet. Get in the habit, okay? Get in the habit.

The first few times you're like, I don't know why I'm doing this, you know? Nobody's going to eat the chocolate inside. And then after a few times you get good at it and then you feel happy.

You feel like I gave what I enjoyed the most and that's the way it should be, okay? Then you'll get in the habit of offering that to other people also and you'll become a nice person, okay? It's a nice habit, okay?

All right. BU GANG CHE RE TZAM LAS MA CHUN NA Even if all you have is half a stick of incense, SNANG CHUN MI BYAS PA means even if you're broke and all you have to offer is half a stick of incense or a corner of your morning croissant, SNANG CHUN MI BYAS PA means don't be shy about it, okay? Like, do it with chutzpah.

Or what do they call that?

[Говорящий 2] (41:12 - 41:16)
Pizazz. What do they call that?

[Говорящий 1] (41:19 - 59:45)
Panache, that's it, yeah. Do it with panache, you know, like, chuh, you know, like as if you're a millionaire, okay? It's that story in the Bible where the lady offers the penny, right?

And that's all she has. And she makes the best offering. So just, you know, the corner of my bagel is the best corner of bagel offered by anybody.

You know? Okay, like that. Don't be like, oh, I don't have anything.

Okay, MA BYAS PA BU NA SON NAMS SBYAR PA'I SKYES RJES SU CHOS PA BZHIN TU RTOGS CHE BU RGYUR YONG BA Now, a very important story is coming now, okay? A very, very important story. And I want you to, I'm not going to explain it till the end, why it's important.

And I want you to think why it's important, okay? You ready? SBYAR PA'I SKYES RJES SU CHOS PA BZHIN TU RTOGS CHE BU RGYUR YONG BA If you keep offering little things, you will have more and more to offer.

RGYAS SHES BU CHUNG BA So there was a Lama named RGYAS SHES BU CHUNG BA. He was a Kadampa Lama. Kadampa are the, there's a group in England now called the New Kadampa.

They're just one Buddhist group, modern Buddhist group. But they took the name of the first, some of the first Buddhists in Tibet were called Kadampas. And it's a nice name to take.

If they hadn't taken it, I might have taken it. It's a nice name. They were the hardcore first Buddhists in Tibet.

And you know, they were, what do you call it? Like the first Christians, they were, people didn't like them. And people criticized them.

And they were weird. And people felt like, what are they doing? So anyway, they were kind of courageous people.

Anyway, he was a Kadampa. It wasn't that he had a RGYAS SHES degree. That came 500 years later.

It just meant he was a teacher. RGYAS SHES BU CHUNG BA who lived 1031 to 1109, if you care. NAM THAR LTAR RE, say NAM THAR.

NAM THAR. This is a beautiful word in Tibet. NAM THAR means total freedom, MOK SHA.

It's the VIMUKTI. It's the Tibetan translation of VIMUKTI or JIVA MUKTI like that. And it means spiritual freedom, spiritual liberation.

In Tibet, the name for the biography of a Lama is NAM THAR. I like it. They don't say his biography.

They say the story of his liberation. I like it. So anyway, the NAM THAR of RGYAS SHES BU CHUNG BA describes this kind of, what do you call it?

Phenomenon where you start to have more and more things to offer if you keep it up. If you keep offering half a stick of incense, stuff will happen. And here comes the story.

RGYAS SHES BU CHUNG BA SHES NUS RGYAS DAM PO'I SPANG PO'I NAM TSAG DE NGE BA PHUNG Here comes that sneeze. No. Yes.

No. It's the incense part. Okay.

I don't know where it is. RGYAS DAM PO'I SPANG PO'I When I was first starting out, I was broke. When I first became a Buddhist, I was broke.

And I wanted to offer incense, but I didn't have any money. So I found wild grasses that smelled good when you burned them. And I would go wander around and look for these dried grasses and I would bring them home and I would burn them on the altar.

NAM TSAG means all kinds of wild grasses. Then TING NGE BA And when I burned them, it was a very beautiful... You know when you burn dry grass, there gets that glow, that beautiful glow?

DE NAS RENGBU ZHIG SBYOR It's misspelled in the text if you care. It says RENGBU, it should be RENGBU. And it would take you a zillion years to figure that out.

RENGBU ZHIG SBYOR is a kind of incense in Tibet that has four ingredients. For example, it might have LATSE. LATSE means musk from a deer.

It grows inside a deer, musk. Anyway, they mix it in. So that's considered medium quality incense.

It's called RENGBU ZHIG SBYOR. NAR SONG NGE BA'U RGYUD DANG So, first all I could offer was dried grass from the meadows. And then later I got more money and I started to offer musk incense.

THANG DAG AGAR ROL THANG DAG AGAR ROL DANG DU RGYUR NA SOGS PA GSUNGS CING NAS BUL GSUNGS Then now he's able, because he made those medium offerings, he's now able to buy AKARU, which is Sanskrit for agaru, which is a very fragrant and precious substance. It's a tree. It's like sandalwood.

And DURUKKA. DURUKKA is a kind of sap from a kind of fur that smells very good when you burn it. And it's rare and it's very expensive.

So I started with grass. I worked up to incense sticks. And now I'm offering these, like frankincense and myrrh.

Like expensive stuff. GSUNGS CING NAS BUL GSUNGS Very delectable. BUL GSUNGS GONG GI REG CIG LA SER SANG GNYIS SU TSAR GNYIS KYI BUR SBYOR NA'I PHUL BA RE And then there came a day when he paid 22 gold coins for a little thing of incense.

You're talking like $10,000 or something. He got up to paying $10,000 for this incredibly rare incense. PHUL BA RE What's the lesson there for us, for normal people?

We are normally stuck in downward cycles, okay? We, sansara, the word sansara, which is not Samsara, okay? That's wrong.

And nobody knows that, but that's okay. Sansara means the cycle of suffering, right? They say Buddhists have to escape from sansara.

I'm going to describe to you a sansara, a downward cycle. Your boss at work comes to you and yells at you and calls you stupid, which even my boss did sometimes. And they call you stupid, right?

And then human nature is to call them stupid back. And that's the same with New York Times stuff and all this Elephant Journal stuff. It's the same.

Human nature, your nature and my nature, is to want to, oh, you criticize me. I'll say something worse about you. I know something worse about you.

I can outdo you, you know? You criticize me, I can, oh, I have stuff to say about you. It's human nature to, someone criticizes you, then you're dying to say something worse about them, you see?

That has nothing to do with what you're doing wrong, right? It doesn't make it better that they're also doing something worse, you know what I mean? Rather than saying, thank you, I'll try to clean that up, you know, your reaction is, no, you're doing something worse, I know, and I'll write something about it, you see what I mean?

And this is, then you get into a downward cycle, you see? You criticize me, so I'm going to criticize you and make the karma that then next week you will criticize me more, or more people will criticize me, you see what I mean? And that's called a downward cycle and that's a samsara.

Unfortunately, there's no word in Buddhism for the opposite and I think there should be. Maybe you can invent one, okay? What's an upward cycle?

I don't have any money at all, I'm totally broke. I have an altar, which is like a cardboard box, you know? And all I can do is offer some tap water in an old Coca-Cola bottle, okay?

And then I want to offer incense. Well, go out and find a plant that smells good. Sage is free in Arizona, if you know where to look.

Diamond Mountain has a big pasture of sage in it, it's nice. Go out and pick some sage and burn it, or some juniper smells really good, or pine resin. You can find it, it's free, you know?

So go find some and offer that. The karma of offering the weed that smells good is that you will get some more money. Some money will come to you.

And then you can offer some, you can go to a store and buy some Indian incense, right? And it will smell nice and you can offer it, right? And then by offering that, you make enough money, you can buy the really high quality musk incense.

And then later you can buy, frankincense is fun to offer, myrrh is fun to offer, you know, these very expensive agaru. You can find agaru, you can still find agaru. It's in Indian grocery stores and it's expensive, okay?

And what I'm describing and what I want you to get the feeling of is that you can create an upward cycle, you see? Make an offering with a piece of grass, but make it sincerely. And then more money will come to you, you see?

Money will start to flow in. And then you can buy medium quality incense and then more money will flow in. Maybe you can get up to where you pay $10,000 for one day's incense, you see?

And that monk did, Geshe Puchongwa did 1,000 years ago, okay? He started an upward cycle, you know? Oh, everyone's criticizing me nowadays.

Okay, so just shut up and say something nice about somebody else. And then two people will say something nice about you. And then say something nice about four people.

And then eight people will say nice things about you. And then sooner or later you're in the, I don't know, CNN and they're only saying nice things, okay? Like create upward cycles from scratch and build on them.

You see, it's a very beautiful concept. Here it's with incense, but you can do it with everything, okay? All right, here we go.

I'm going to go just a bit more and then we'll take a break, okay? So have hope. ,RGA ZHIG GI KHO RTOG PA DANG LDAN PA'I GOM DUN LAS, ,CI BYA BA DE'I THUB PA LA BYANG CHUB MI RE ZHIG MA BA NI, Okay, so those of you who know, I don't know, there are four classes of tantra, okay?

There are four classes of the secret teachings. The people doing three-year retreat at Diamond Mountain right now had the most thorough tantric training of any person on this planet, including the Tibetan monks, because they don't get that kind of training. They had seven years of intense scriptural training, 10,000 pages of scripture they were trained in that have never been translated and no Tibetan monk gets that whole training.

Even in the two tantric colleges of the Dalai Lama's tradition, they don't get that training. So our people got it, right? And they studied the four classes of tantra.

So there are four ancient classes of the secret teachings. And the distinction between them is that in the lower tantras, you are making offerings with things. You are doing outer rituals.

You are ringing bells. You are banging drums. You are chanting mantras, you know?

You are painting sand mandalas, like that. As you go higher in the tantric teachings, it becomes internal. And a high tantric practitioner might work in a grocery store, and they might stack deodorants all day.

That's very typical of a high tantric practitioner. And they are imagining they are stacking planets or something like that, okay? And it's all internal, you know?

If you looked at them, you would never know what they were doing, okay? So some of the monks in the audience said to Pabongka Rinpoche, I've studied these big high teachings and I've learned that it's a higher thing to do inner offerings than to do those gross physical outer offerings. I'm offering secretly inside.

I'm not doing those lower tantra rituals where you pile stuff on the altar. I'm more advanced than that, okay? Srimadi, chugyur shintu chungwa te.

They don't know jack about dharma, okay? They don't know jack about dharma, okay? Got it?

All right, don't quote me. Gyur shintu chungwa te. SA DOG PA'I BYANG CHUB SEMS PA RNAMS KYIS LUS BUM PHRAG DU MA LAG PA RGYAL MTHONG LA SOGS PA'I PHYIR NAS RGYAL BA RNAMS LA CHOD PA'I KHYAB PAR RDZE PA'I TSUL LA SEMS NAS Please remember that high bodhisattvas who live in this universe, who have the ability to emanate avatars, right?

They're able to send out thousands of copies of their body, right? Those bodhisattvas who are very, very high bodhisattvas, they do that stuff. They split off.

They get up in the morning, they brush their teeth, and then for fun, they split off 10,000 bodies. Okay, then what? What do they do with those bodies?

They emanate a few thousand more arms. Okay, you see those pictures of Chenrezig, right? Avalokiteshvara, Guanyin, right?

And then they have a thousand arms, right? Why, he says, why do you think those high bodhisattvas emanate those tantric deity bodies and they add extra arms, like 998 extra arms on them? Why do you think?

They want to make more offerings, okay? They need more hands because they got to offer more flowers, okay? So don't tell me you're some big tantrica and you don't have to offer anything, you know, that you're beyond all that.

He says, that means you don't know nothing. He says it in Tibetan. He says, by the way, if you care, if you want to learn that, say chuh, gyuh, shintu.

Shintu means what? A lot, chung, chung chung. You know, yeah, minuscule.

Your understanding of the Dharma is, how should I say, minuscule. Okay, all right. Okay, got it?

Okay. Why do you think those guys emanate all those hands? How long do they make the offerings with those 10,000 hands?

Kalpa. Kalpa. So you've heard the word kalpa, right?

They translate it as eon. I tried to calculate what it was once because the fourth chapter of the Abhidharmakosha gives the data. I mean, if you worked on it, you could figure it out.

I think Buddha Rinpoche tried one time. Like he spent a month on it. I spent a couple of weeks on it.

I forget what it came out to. I think it's 10 to the 60th power. It's zillions of years, okay?

How long do they make the offerings with the 10,000 hands? Kalpa. They take a kalpa.

They take 10 with 60 zeros on it, years. In a small kalpa, okay? All right, anyway, you don't care.

RANG ROL GCIG LAS MED PA'I DE'I GANG NAS HUR THAG BYED DGOS You only got two hands. What should you do? He asked those monks a question.

Look, you're stuck with two arms. What do you think you ought to do if those high bodhisattvas do that? What should you do?

Duh. Okay, got it? All right, BYED DGOS.

CHEN PO'I BU LUGS NI RGYUR So we're going to take a break there now because why? He's going to describe how you're supposed to pour the water offerings. And that we're going to do a demonstration for you.

We've prepared it for like a week. Scott was fooling around with a camera for like a week and it broke 20 minutes ago. It's just your good luck.

So I'll do it up here and I'll probably have my butt to you and sorry for that. And we'll do it. I'll show you how to properly pour the water.

Okay, there's a system. So we'll take a break.