«Дар освобождения», курс 8 «Учимся быть тихими», занятие 6

[Говорящий 1] (0:00 - 16:26)
Ngar Wonton. Those of you who are studying Tibetan, there's a very unusual D-B-O, which you pronounce what? W-O-N-T-O-N, okay?

Wonton. That's a famous Lama. So Ngar Wonton, Khyer Gangpa, so there was a Lama named Wonton.

It's really a teacher from a place called Wonton. Khyer Gangpa was his name. Shangpa Rinchen Lamdungi Ngapa.

He was the fifth of seven Lamas called Shangpa Rinchen. These are a special lineage called Shang. They were very heavy practitioners of Nyingma.

Rinchen Lamdungi Ngapa. Chenrezig Drukthopchenpo De. He was a great yogi for studying Avalokiteshvara practice.

Love practice. Chenpo De. De Jindak Khyenpo Sikkhunne Bumsik Yodpa Tsong.

Then he had a sponsor who was a lay person who was in financial difficulties. And then he had a Bum. What's a Bum?

What's Bum mean? 100,000. Yeah, Bum means 100.

Where'd that come from? Bum means 100,000. So Mille Gurbum, the 100,000 Songs of Milarepa.

It's called Gurbum, 100,000 Songs. But in philosophy, it refers to the 100,000 verses of the perfection of wisdom. So Buddha taught 25,000 verses.

He taught 100,000 verses. And he taught 8,000 verses. And he also taught longer ones, but they are missing.

They're believed to be in the land of the Nagas. And Nagarjuna went to get them, and that's why they called him Nagarjuna. But that's a long story.

So anyway, this householder had a Bum. They had a set of, I don't know, it would be, I think it's about, I don't remember. I think it's eight volumes, okay?

It's a Bum. So it's a beautiful, we should study it one day. We should read it.

We should read the 8,000 verses. It reads like science fiction. I really love science fiction.

I read science fiction almost every night. And the 8,000 verses is better than all the science fiction. Someday we should read that.

No one ever teaches it, and it's very beautiful. Anyway. BUM ZHIG YOD PA TSONG So on behalf of that sponsor, this monk sold the books for them, just to get some money for them.

DE'I DIG ZHAG SU KHYER GANG PA SOGS SHI DAG ZHIG DEN TANG So in order to purify that bad deed, let me get this straight, hang on. DROG DROG CHEN PO'I DE ZIN ZAG ZHIG MA ZHIG KUN ME BUM ZHIG YOD PA TSONG DE'I DIG ZHAG SU KHYER GANG PA SOGS SHI DAG ZHIG DEN TANG Okay. So believing it was a bad deed, later they decided to invite some monks to the house and do some prayers, and what do you call them?

Confession ceremony. And they invited four monks, ZHIG DEN TANG, including KHYER GANG PA. DE NYIN GONG RNAM GYI GSUL BYAS BUM GYI RIN THOB NAS PHUL BAS DE NYIN KHYER GANG PA LA NYIN ZHIG BZHIN DU DRAG PO CHUNG So then the sponsor decided that he would purchase the food for the monks from the money he had gotten from the hundred, selling the book, selling a holy book.

BUM GYI RIN THOB NAS PHUL BAS DE NYIN KHYER GANG PA LA NYIN ZHIG BZHIN DU DRAG PO CHUNG Then the main Lama there, having eaten that food, almost died that night. Okay. It was such, the money was so polluted that he almost, he got very, very ill that night and almost died.

THING YIN ZIN GYI NGANG NAS ZIG PAS ARG KA PO ZHIG KU LUS KYI NGANG DU PAR THAL SIR THAL DU RGYUG PAS SER DRAG PO LAM PA ZIG Then he went into a state of meditation to see what was the cause of his illness. There's a misspelling in the Tibetan. It says DE NAS, D-A-D NAS.

It should be NGANG NAS, N-G-A-N-G. Okay. Which means in a state of, yeah, N-G-A-N-G.

NGANG NAS ZIG PAS Then he saw a white A syllable. This is a sacred mantra syllable, just A. He saw an A inside of his body and it was like banging around.

It was like jumbling around inside of his body. He's trying to get out. SIR THAL DU RGYUG PAS Then SER DRAG PO LAM PA ZIG And then he saw that this was the cause of his pain.

This letter got stuck inside of him. And that spelling of A is not actually the OM AH HUNG. If you look at it carefully, it's not the long A with the two dots on the end.

It's just A. So it just means A. The letter A.

Like the first letter of the alphabet was banging, he's banging around in his body because he had eaten food bought with the money used by selling a scripture. Just A was banging around. YID DAM LA SIR BA BTAB PAS Then he asked his YID DAM.

YID DAM means your personal tantric angel. Like your guardian angel. His YID DAM was Chenrezig.

The Tibetans believe His Holiness is Chenrezig. OM MANI PADME HUM is Chenrezig's sacred mantra. The MANI refers to the man in a spiritual partnership.

The PADMA refers to the lady in a spiritual partnership. It's all about spiritual partnership. That mantra and his practice.

THAR PA'I CHENREZIG CHEN NAS So Avalokiteshvara came. KHYON NAM GYI SUNG RAB GYI LOD SOGS PA DE SHIN DU NAS MA LAS He said, you guys are all, the reason you're having all this trouble is that you were dealing in business. You were making a business out of selling religious books.

Okay? Sacred books. MA LAS KHYOD GYIG GYIB SRAB PA'I TSE DIL LA MIN PA YIN But because you tried to confess it, it has ripened suddenly.

Right? Like the four powers. So you tried to clean it, so it has ripened in a much lighter form.

And you just got sick for the night. DIL LA MIN PA KHONG GZHAN NAM DROG SANG NYENG BA MIN PA ME If it had been otherwise, there would have been no way you would not have gone to the hell realms. Avalokiteshvara told the monk that.

DAG KHYOD KYI DIG ZHAG SU SER TI GYI BUM ZHIG ZHENG Now to clean the karma, you should all do a SER TI. What's SER? Gold.

SER means gold. CI means to write. SER TI means to write a major scripture out in gold.

With liquid gold. You liquefy gold, and then you write the whole book out in gold on paper. So he said, I suggest you do a SER TI of the BUM, of the 100,000 verses.

I don't know how much that costs. Okay, ZHIG ZHENG. DRUL TOR GSUNG NAS DI MANG STONG DGOS GSUNG Then he taught Khyer Gangpa, this lama, how to do a DRUL TOR.

So DRUL TOR is a special cake, a special... You've seen them. They look like little cones.

And he taught, Chenrezig taught Khyer Gangpa how to make a special TOR MA to cancel the karma, to wipe out the karma. And that custom has been passed down since then. People are still making DRUL TORS.

We make DRUL TORS also. But it started then, with Khyer Gangpa. Khyer Gangpa DE BZHIN DU TSE NENG NYON LAS GRU BA RE The monk did what he was asked to do, and the sickness went away.

RGYAS PA'I MIG PA'I SKABS KHYOD GOGS LAM LA SOGS PA DU TSE RNAM PAR PA PA'I MUR PA BYED DGOS Then he closes this section by saying, you see, we have just purified negative actions that relate to scripture, or the holy, like videos, or tapes, or books. But what do you fill yourself with? Right?

First you're supposed to clean yourself with the nectar, and then you're supposed to fill yourself with something. So what do you fill yourself with? DU TSE RNAM PAR GOGS LAM LA SOGS PA DU TSE Then the nectar that fills you up should be GOGS or LAM.

GOGS PA or LAM. GOGS PA has two important meanings. The first is garlic.

Okay, that's not what it means here. GOGS, the other one is cessation. So what is a cessation?

What does it mean, a cessation? It's an important idea in Buddhism. So all of us, according to Buddhism, for a time with no beginning, all of us have had anger, desire, jealousy.

We have had those emotions forever. So to stop them in a human mind which has existed in a stream for a time with no beginning is almost impossible. So you undertake certain practices.

If you can see emptiness directly, then within a certain amount of time you will be able to stop negative emotions that you have had for countless lives. So that must be a very powerful thing. At a certain point, in your understanding of emptiness, you get enough understanding that you can never, for example, get angry again.

No one can upset you again. It's not possible. That's called GOGS PA.

That's a cessation. You reach a point where you are incapable of being upset, for example. That's just one example.

Then we don't have that word in English because we don't have the thing, I think. We can't say you reach a point where you never get angry again or something like that. We don't have that idea.

So GOGS PA is a special word. According to Buddhism, you can only reach the cessation of anger by understanding emptiness. There is no other way.

Then why is that so? Why do they say that? What does emptiness mean?

It means when your husband or your wife yells at you, when your partner yells at you. You come to a class, I teach you about getting yelled at, somebody criticizing you, and then I teach you you shouldn't respond because if you respond negatively, you will plant a new seed. And then a week later, someone else will yell at you.

Right? That's what we keep saying over and over again. But it takes a long time to manifest in a human being.

You can hear it a thousand times. Actually, it takes around three thousand times. And then you will leave the retreat on Friday.

You will go to the airport in Phoenix and they'll say, I'm sorry, we sold your seat to somebody else. And you will be saying, I ain't got damn, I don't understand. And then you'll forget all this responding, perpetuating the karma.

You'll forget. And then they'll say, okay, okay, we'll get you on a plane. Don't worry, don't get upset.

Buddhist people can be the most angry people because they're trying not to be, I guess. So you get on the plane and then you're halfway to Chicago or wherever you live. And you're like, dang, that's what the whole week was about.

And it takes like, halfway to Chicago is about two hours, right? On the plane. And then as you practice longer and longer, the time gap gets shorter.

The next time, you're only an hour toward Chicago and you remember you weren't supposed to yell. And then on the way to the gate, you remember you weren't supposed to yell at the ticket counter. And then at the ticket counter, you start to yell and you stop yourself.

And then that's practice. That's Buddhist practice. There will come a time when the reaction time is zero.

Somebody says, we sold you and you're already thinking, who did I screw last week? And you're not thinking to respond to the ticket agent because you know it's not their fault. They start to tell you bad news and immediately you're like, what did I do last week?

It's a big insult in a real Buddhist community. It's a big insult if you say something and people go, it means they're trying to figure out how did they cause you last week? It's one thing they can start to get mad at you but if they go like this, it's like they're trying to figure out where did this person come from?

Then when the reaction time reaches zero, you can only do that by understanding emptiness. Emptiness means what the ticket agent is saying is not coming from the ticket agent. It's coming from you.

It's coming from somebody you shorted last week. You didn't deliver something last week that you promised. Therefore this person is telling you this.

Only that understanding can get you a gokpa. Only that can stop you from getting angry. You keep practicing, practicing, practicing, practicing and then someday you reach a gokpa for anger and no one can piss you off.

Nobody. Nobody can make you upset. You're just like, okay, next time I meet somebody like you I'll be sure not to say anything bad to them.

Like that. You see? You're just totally in control of your mind because of understanding.

The boom, right? The hundred thousand verses is the perfection of wisdom. What is the perfection of wisdom?

It means when the ticket agent starts telling you that your seat has been oversold. What do they call that? There's a polite word for it.

They call it some... There's a euphemism, I forget. You know, maximized booking or something.

[Говорящий 2] (16:26 - 16:27)
You know what I mean?

[Говорящий 1] (16:27 - 46:24)
You're a victim of maximized booking. And then you're like, oh, you sold my seat. And you're like, yeah, we sold your seat.

And then you're like, okay. And then if you understand emptiness, which means if you understand there's no ticket agent who's coming from their side. That's emptiness, right?

Then you can't get angry again. You'll never get angry again. And you can reach a gopa.

So when you are taking refuge in the Dharma, in this preparation for meditation, you're supposed to think, that book is filling me up with nectar of gopa. May I reach a gopa. And it ain't garlic, okay?

Then lam means the path to get there. Gopa and lam. Lam is going to classes for a week so that you can handle a ticket agent for 30 seconds.

And that's about the ratio. Okay, all right. That's too bad.

Okay, so we have finished this classic preparation for meditation. We're on the fourth, right? The first preparation for meditation was to clean your room.

Tidy up your meditation space every day. Second one was set up an altar and put offerings out. Just some cute, beautiful little thing, okay?

Some precious little thing, like a flower. Those are nice flowers. They brought some flowers from the forest.

They're called Dakyamachepe Chopra. It's a special kind of offering. This is an offering which no one claims the ownership of.

No one's going to get mad at you for picking flowers in the forest. Except my lama gets mad. And she says, now they can't reproduce.

Like Arizona has very few flowers because of the weather. So just take one out of five or something like that. Don't take all of them because they need to do their thing together.

The bees have to come. Anyway, but that's a special sweet offering. And then just put one on your altar and offer it.

And that's fine. You don't have to make a big deal. What's the third preparation for meditation?

Sit down in the proper meditation posture with how many aspects to it? Seven or eight. And then the fourth preparation is to close your eyes and think, who can protect me in my life?

Who has the power to protect me and my loved ones and my not-so-loved ones? Who has the power to protect me? And then you visualize.

You don't visualize a doctor or a policeman or a fireman or a judge or money, a bank account book. None of them will... They will all fail you.

Eventually they will all fail you. They cannot protect you. Even a doctor who's honest and skilled and compassionate, there comes a point where they can't do anything for you.

Then they always turn you over to the priest, right? Here's the priest number. They did that to my mom.

I was there. His Holiness' doctor was treating her. And then one day he just took us out.

He's holding us like that in his arms and he says, take her to Geshe Dagye. That's all I can do. And he'll teach her how to die.

There always comes a point. So in this meditation you are focusing on, who can protect me? Who can give me protection?

And then you have these three or four objects of protection. So we just finished the teachings. The teachings can't protect you.

How? At the ticket counter they will protect you. The teachings, a whole week of teachings, will protect you in a few minutes at the ticket counter.

And the guy will say, we sold your seat. And you'll say... And then you will take refuge.

So it's not some Buddhist ritual. It's all wrong. All the texts are wrong.

All the traditions have grown up strange by people who weren't trained very well. So all the monks come and they go, we look good to me. That's not refuge.

Refuge is at the ticket counter. And they say, we sold your seat. And you say...

And then refuge comes, protection comes. And you say, okay, I'll deal with it. Then you don't see another person selling your seat.

Got it? And you stop the cycle. You cut the cycle.

That's protection. Okay, so now we reach the last one, which is you take protection in the community. Sangha.

I like Sangha. San or Sam is the Sanskrit prefix that means together. And Ga is the Sanskrit word for to go.

And it came into Greek. The San came into Greek as S-Y-N. And the Ga changed to Agog, and it became synagogue.

The word synagogue comes directly from the word Sangha. I like it. So a convening place, a place for coming together of the community.

In Greek it came in. And then the Jews were very attracted to Greek things at that time. So they called their places synagogues.

So anyway, I like it. You can go to a synagogue. Think about Sangha.

So Sangha traditionally, the apparent Sangha is people who are ordained, people who wear robes. The real Sangha is people who have a deep understanding of the ticket counter thing. If you go to the ticket counter and they say, we gave you a seat away, and you go, and you stop, you join a special club.

That's called Sangha. If you yell back and you have 12 robes on, you're not in the Sangha. Got it?

It's very interesting. You join a special community by your daily behavior. And there are scattered in the world these people who are not yelling back at the ticket agent because they understand.

And those are Sangha. And if you want to be in a special club, and if you yell the next day, you get kicked out of the club for a day. You see what I mean?

That group changes its membership every day. DGE RIN LA BSKYED PA'I TSE MDO LAS KYI BRTEN RIN NYAN RANG BYANG SEMS SUM DANG In the open teachings, which is called Sutra. Sutra has many meanings.

The word Sutra can mean a short book. In this case, Sutra is opposed to Tantra. There are two kinds of teachings.

Either it's Sutra or it's Tantra. Sutra means open teachings. Tantra means secret teachings.

And all Buddhist teachings are either Sutra or Tantra. What's the percentage in the canon? Okay, they just finished typing in our canon.

It took 24 years. Okay, good job. I think we did good.

So, what's left from India, after the invasion of India, and the slaughtering of all the Buddhists, is 4,500 texts survived, and came to Tibet. And I would guess that 3,000 are Tantra. More than half are Tantra.

Secret. Secret. Anyway, when you are taking refuge, you visualize the Sangha.

Of the open teachings, they are Nyen, Rang, Chang, Su. People on the three tracks, okay? Some of you know about the three tracks.

They are listeners. One of the main listener practices is, like when we talk about listeners, self-made Buddhists, and Bodhisattvas, there are three tracks. You can get to Nirvana on three different tracks.

You can be on a listener track, which is the lowest. You can be on a self-made Buddha track, which is the medium one. Or you can be on a Bodhisattva track, which is the third.

Since yesterday, you now have a grasp of what the distinction is. What are the listeners doing? Those 12 things, okay?

They are sleeping under trees. They are taking their clothes out of garbage. They get their medicine out of the garbage.

They are eating once a day. They are begging for their food. They are making a commitment not to live near a city or a town.

So now you have a sense of what they're doing. Listeners. How about self-made Buddhists?

Yeah, they're working on the idea of the 12, that wheel of life painting. They are masters of that wheel of life painting. They are practicing mainly that idea.

And then Bodhisattvas. So when you picture the Sangha in this meditation, you can imagine those three kinds of people. I guess one looks like a hippie or a homeless person.

And one kind of looks like a scholar. And one looks like they're working in a homeless shelter or something like that. They're helping other people.

Mother Teresa type of person, okay? Then he says, NGAG GI RGYEN RIN But if you want to visualize the tantric Sangha, it's different. And those are GANG ROL GCOD KYONG GANG ROL means angels.

KHA means sky. ROL means to go. DAG GIS NI is a GANG ROL, a sky-goer, an angel.

Tantric angel. Or GCOD KYONG. GCOD KYONG means a guardian of the teachings.

RNAM LAS DU TSIS BSTAB BYANG CHE So you can get your nectar pouring into you from either one. You can imagine some angels. Or you can imagine some monks or you know, hippie practitioners.

Okay. RNAM LAS DU TSIS BSTAB BYANG CHE Now he's going to cover, what's the pattern been so far? For each place of protection, he has covered two things.

The stuff you have to clean and the stuff you're going to get after they clean you out. So first we're going to cover stuff you have to clean, mistakes you made with the Sangha. With the Sangha.

So here we go. He's going to name four of them, for example. Number one, and the most serious, GEN DUNG GI YEN CHE PA GEN DUNG GI YEN CHE PA GEN DUNG GI YEN CHE PA means to cause a division in a spiritual community.

To cause a division in a spiritual community. And it's been a problem forever in every religion. And in Buddhism also.

I was in, where was I? I don't know. Amsterdam.

And I said, you know, what do you guys, historically, what have you exported besides diamonds? And they said, religious sects. We split every six years or something, we just make new ones because we fight with each other over religion.

Anyway, that's called genden yin zhe. Second, korchog. Korchog means to steal the resources of a spiritual community.

Third one, korwatapa means to, what do you call that? Put people down. What's a polite word for that?

Disparage is good. To disparage religious practitioners. And we'll get to some examples.

And then number four is in a tantric way. Number four is to disrespect the community in a tantric way. And the example is not to make timely offerings to the protector spirits.

Ningbo is really into that. Who is that guy? Taok.

So every monastery in Tibet has their own protector. Sarah Mae's protector is called Taok. And we are supposed to make a little cake for Taok every couple of days.

I don't know, Ningbo takes care of it. And by the way, there's a big controversy in the Tibetan community about one of the protector angels, which is a very ancient practice. And there's a big controversy about it, which has gone on for years and caused some murders.

I mean, it's a terrible thing. And basically it's that His Holiness' teacher who wrote this book, who wrote this book down, practiced a certain protector practice. And then when he passed away, before he passed away, he taught it to the Dalai Lama.

And then the Dalai Lama happily practiced it for some time. Then he came across some writings that said that this practice had been used against other Tibetan traditions in the past, like some kind of voodoo. So some people had used that practice as voodoo against people of other Tibetan traditions than the Dalai Lama's tradition.

So he requested his followers not to practice it. And then some of his followers said, look, we learned it from your teacher. And so we were sort of conflicted what to do.

Your teacher taught us to do it, but now he's gone. And so there came to be a controversy. And I'm not on either side, and I'm not involved with it, thank God.

I'm not at all involved. I can see that each side has their point, right? But there are thousands of other protectors in Tibet.

So when I say guardian or protector, I'm not talking about that one, and I'm not supporting either side in that controversy, okay? We have a protector who's not the bad one. His name is Thao.

He's a very sweet, tough guy, okay? All right. And nobody minds him, okay.

So one of the ways of creating a bad karma with respect to the Sangha is not to make offerings to those protectors that you promised to. Then you are sort of hurting the community, the secret community. Like that, okay?

Those are his examples. ,RGYEN DU NA BSTAN PA'I DIG THAB DI DAG NI, ,THOB ZHI ZHAG KYANG, What is THOB ZHI? The four powers, okay?

They are something that Lord Buddha taught to remove bad karmic, all bad karmas. So once you study for a while, and you study seeds for a while, and you become convinced that it's a cool system, naturally you're going to ask, what do I do about the old mistakes? Can I clean them up?

And Lord Buddha, and I found the sutra. We recovered the sutra and we input it, and we printed it, and we translated the important parts. And Lord Buddha gave a teaching called the four powers.

And it's written down as a sutra. So these are four ways to remove a bad karma. He's going to make a point which I think is important for those of you, let's say if you're teaching DCI, the four powers is a big thing in the DCI teachings.

We taught it to, I don't know, we taught it to 1100 business people in France last month, okay? I mean, we are teaching it a lot. So, you should understand something, and the point is made here.

What is the point? He says, shakkyang, you can confess that you've done something bad when you were 16, okay? Kyang means but.

Namin jungse manyongwa middak. Say namin, jungse, manyongwa, middak. It cannot be purified, dak, as a verb, without experiencing some small karmic ripening.

Okay? So that's important. Technically, you can't go around telling business people in Montpellier that they can get rid of their old bad karma.

It's not true. They can do a practice which triggers it prematurely, okay? It's like if you grow, I don't know what.

Somebody gave me some bean seeds from Mexico just now. So if you plant them too early in the year, they will grow very beautiful. The seeds of bean plants, the leaves look like bodhi leaves.

They are the same shape as a bodhi leaf. If you want some bodhi leaves in your house, plant some beans. But if you plant them too early, they will grow, they will open, the sprout will come out, and then there will be a freeze.

And then it will die prematurely. So did it sprout? It sprouted, but it didn't give you what it was supposed to give you.

This practice of the four powers technically doesn't remove the bad seeds. It causes them to trigger too early. It triggers them too early.

Sometimes they say the seed is scorched, or the seed is radiated. It opens, but it mutates, and it doesn't give a good result. Why is he talking about that?

MI BDAG PAR CHUD MA BA MED TOG DANG RDZE GYI BLO GYI LTAR YIN PAS This is similar to the story of the teacher named Medog Danze. I didn't look up his name. Medog means flower.

Danze means beautiful moon. There must be some Sanskrit, Pushpa Chandra something. Bhadra.

GYI BLO GYI LTAR YIN PAS It's like the story of this monk, this practitioner. CHOD DANG SANGS RGYAS LA BSTAN PA'I DIG PA LAS KYANG THUD TZAP BYAS BA YOD You can do some kind of bad karma towards the teachings. You can burn a library in Tibet.

Or you can rip down a Buddha statue. You can even attack the Buddha himself during his time on the earth. But to split a spiritual community is more serious than that.

Than attacking the Buddha's body. Or than burning down a library. They say that to cause a division among a group of spiritual practitioners is a direct attack on the inner body of the Buddha.

And you can feel that when it's close to happening or things are happening. You can feel how rotten it feels, how bad it feels. The bad stuff, you can feel how evil it is.

It's a direct attack on... To split people in a church, or split people in a synagogue or a mosque to create divisions, schisms, is an attack on spirituality in the world. All right.

DAG ZE RGYUR LO SANG YIN LA BSTAN PA'I DIG PA LAS And the opposite is also true. If you can bring people together, that's very powerful. I think there's been a big movement that this group has been involved with to bring the yoga people and the Buddhist people closer together.

And I think that's been very beautiful. We have a very sweet relationship with the Hindu community, Sivananda community, and we teach at each other's centers. I think that's...

That's the opposite karma. That's very powerful good karma. Or to give talks at churches.

I think we're giving a lot of talks at churches. Okay. We gave a nice talk at a synagogue in Tel Aviv.

Not this time, but before. And it was cool, because it was round. And I said, where's the front?

And they said, there is none. I said, well, where's the images? They said, there are none.

We're not allowed to make images. And it was beautiful. It was a nice place.

Anyway, they really liked... We talked about emptiness. It was very good.

THUD TSAB CHE BA YOD Worse to attack a community than to attack a Buddha. YUL DU RGYEN DUN MANG ZHING RANG RE RGYEN DUN DANG NYAM DUG BYED DGOS PA'I BYUNG YANG BZHIN DU NYE BA'I SAB DGOS The author of this book who's giving this teaching was a monk. His picture is on the end.

He's the monk who taught this teaching. The next person in line, the sweet face, the sweet smile, is Chögyam Rinpoche who's my teacher's teacher and is the Dalai Lama's teacher. He wrote this transcript down from his teacher who was Pabongka Rinpoche on the end.

So, Pabongka Rinpoche, 1878 to 1941. And then he taught Chögyam Rinpoche and Chögyam Rinpoche taught my teacher and the Dalai Lama. Pabongka Rinpoche taught my teacher a little bit when he was very young.

That's a long story but it's very sweet. We'll talk about it some other time. Anyway, Pabongka Rinpoche is saying, look, we are all monks in Tibet.

How many monks and nuns were there in Tibet? Six million people was the population in 1959. How many monks and nuns?

A million. One out of five people was ordained, was practicing all the time. And mostly they were killed.

Mostly that million was killed. So anyway, he says, look, we're in a country where there's a million people are monks and nuns. We have to be careful.

We live in a country full of monks and nuns. The traditional idea of Sangha, we don't want to split them. We are more at risk than people who live in other countries who don't have these monks and nuns.

Like that. DE YANG RGYEN DUNG KHOR LO YIN NI SANGS RGYAS ZHAL ZHUGS DU LA THENG RGAB MI BYUNG YANG We'll take a break soon, okay? Ooh, that's kind of late.

I'll say one more sentence and then we'll take a break. But I have a sales pitch before the break. But I won't tell you that.

There are five great sins in Buddhism. One of them is to split the community. It's the five greatest sins in Buddhism.

One is to split the community, up the Buddha. So technically, it can only be done in the time of the Buddha. Splitting the immediate followers of the Buddha is one of the five greatest sins in Buddhism.

But luckily, we cannot do it. Because those days are gone. That community is gone.

By the way, that community was split for 24 hours once. And it destroyed the spiritual vibrations of the whole planet for a long, long time. It was a very bad thing.

So anyway. And then the Buddha's two disciples brought people back together. It's a happy ending, but it was a terrible thing.

Anyway. RGEN DUNG KHOR LO YIN SANGS RGYAS ZHUGS DU LA DE YANG CHANG DRA BA'I RGYEN DUNG GYI DE'I GRUB PAR BYED PAR SHIN DU MANG But to see disturbances in spiritual communities is very common. It's very, very common.

GRUB PAR MANG If something happens like that, just try not to be involved. Try to get the people to come back together. If they won't come back together, then just try really hard not to be involved with it.

Say, I'm not going to get involved with it. That's better. That's better.

PAR PA'I RGEN DUNG NI Okay, just one more sentence. PAR PA'I RGEN DUNG NI STONG NYID NGON TSUN DU RTOG PA'I KHAL SA RGYIN PA'I The real Sangha is anyone who has seen emptiness directly. It's the real Sangha jewel.

The one that people pray to every day in Buddhist countries, like in Sri Lanka or Burma or Thailand. Thousands and thousands of people every morning get up and say, SANGAM SARANAM GACCHAMI In Pali, they say, I take refuge in the Sangha. Thousands and thousands of people, and still every morning millions of people get up and take refuge four times.

It's like the Islam tradition. Who are they taking refuge in? Which Sangha are they taking refuge in?

The real Sangha is anyone who has seen emptiness directly. That's cool. If you get to see emptiness directly, you will be the person that a million people are praying to every morning.

Got it? It's very interesting. That's who the real Sangha is.

Not people with robes on. Then he says, because that's the real Sangha, you can't tell who's Sangha or not. Real Sangha is anyone who has seen emptiness directly.

It could be the guy next to you on the plane home. You don't know. It's not as easy as saying anyone in a red suit is Sangha.

It's anyone who has seen emptiness directly is Sangha. So he says, SERKHYA. SERKHYA means light yellow.

Like SAKHYA means light soil, pale soil. SERKHYA means pale yellow. It's a word for monks, ordained or non-ordained.

You can't tell who's Sangha or not. Therefore, you can't what? You can't split up anybody.

Because you might be splitting up the Sangha. You can't go to Alejandro and say, you're a really nice guy, but did you hear what she said about you yesterday? And then you have split up two people.

If they are both Aryas, you have split the Sangha. So it's a very dangerous thing. It's probably safer never to alienate two people from each other.

Because you might be splitting the Sangha. He's trying to say that. Very dangerous thing.

Splitting people up is a dangerous thing. I have two announcements before we take a break. You can stretch your legs and stretch your arms and stuff like that.

I forget the second one, but the first one was... So we've been having these retreats. It was mainly Rebecca.

She said, Geshe-la, after Diamond Mountain, are you going to teach? And I said, well, Diamond Mountain I'm going to teach Tantra for seven years. And I'll teach the whole thing.

And we did. I taught the whole Tantric corpus in seven years. And it was finished.

Then they said, well, what are you going to do now? And I said, well, how about I do Lamrim? We haven't done Lamrim yet.

That's a ten year thing. Let's do the Lamrim. So I agreed to do the Lamrim.

Mainly she was bugging me. And then we decided we'll do it four times a year. Two times in Phoenix.

Just teachings for ten days. And then we'll do two retreats a year. And then the idea was that what you learn in the teaching in Phoenix, you go to Prescott and you meditate on it.

Then in practice what happened was, I had to keep the teaching going in Prescott also, because we would get behind. It would take 20 years to finish. So now we're basically on a 12 year thing.

It looks like it's going to be about 12 years. We finished about two and a half years, I think. So we got nine and a half years to go.

Okay, I suggest we take a break. And then we do a few questions. Okay.

[Говорящий 2] (47:04 - 47:13)
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