«Дар освобождения», курс 8 «Учимся быть тихими», занятие 7

[Говорящий 1] (0:00 - 31:37)
Okay, so we're in the middle of preparing for meditation. We cleaned our room. Then we...

Oh, you can't say anything. I think you can answer me in class, okay? It's okay.

Second one? Yeah, offering. Setting up your altar and making offering.

Third one? Sitting up nicely. Fourth one?

Taking refuge. Okay. And in the visualization, you imagine that out of the refuge objects is coming nectar.

It cleans any mistakes you've made about that particular form of refuge. And then it fills you with the good qualities of that form of refuge. So we're on the sangha.

We're in the middle of the sangha. And he was talking about the first of the mistakes you can make with the sangha, which is maybe the most serious of the bad karmas we've been talking about, which is splitting up a group, a spiritual group. Then he just got through saying that although the apparent sangha, the traditional sangha is anyone who is ordained and has robes on, the actual sangha is anyone who has seen emptiness directly.

And that could be a lay person. So you don't know. You have to be careful splitting up people because they might be sangha, the real sangha.

So actually the ultimate sangha could be a single individual who has seen emptiness. It doesn't have to be a community per se, a group of people. Now he's going to continue with that thought.

SOG RGYAS YIN NA, RGYEN DRIN RNAM DAG ZHIG DE GCIG PA RGYEN DRIN DU SBYOR If we're talking about the apparent sangha, then technically in the scriptures, to have a division, you have to have, I think it's four people on each side. There has to be four ordained people on each side. Then it's a schism.

Then it's a split. RGEN DRIN is a joke. So technically in the Vinaya, a sangha is four monks or nuns.

So he's just telling you about the apparent sangha. DE NA, SOG RGYAS YIN KYANG RGEN DRIN ZHIG ZHIG CHEN PA NYID SU BYAS NAS THUG MI DUM PA DE So even if a person is a SOG SOG RGYAS WO, what's a SOG SOG RGYAS WO? That's the opposite of an Arya.

It's the opposite of someone who has seen emptiness. Someone who hasn't seen emptiness is called SOG SOG RGYAS WO. Which means just a regular person.

SOG RGYAS YIN KYANG RGEN DRIN ZHIG ZHIG CHEN PA NYID SU BYAS NAS So in the case of normal sangha, apparent sangha, there has to be two groups of four in order for there to be a split in the community. At least four on each side. NYID SU BYAS NAS THUG MI DUM PA DE And you must have spoken words that cause those two groups to become alienated from each other.

They don't like each other because of your speech. Which we call CHAM MA. Say CHAM MA.

CHAM MA is the second of the negative deeds of speech. It's the fifth of the ten non-virtues. And it's very subtle.

If a non-virtue makes it into the top ten, out of how many possibilities? 84,000. If a negative deed is in the top ten, out of 84,000, then we must be doing it on a small level all the time.

We must be doing it on a small level every day. Maybe every few hours. So CHAM MA means, it's a special kind of bad karma.

It's in the Ten Commandments of Buddhism. And it's dividing people with your speech. And it's very subtle.

And somehow we like that. Somehow we like people should be divided from their old friends and they should like me. You know what I mean?

We do that all the time. Somebody was walking with me on the way here and we were allowed to talk because I'm doing my appointments on the walk. And so they said, some Lama has asked me if I would like to go to India and see the holy places of India.

And then I'm like, you know, why would you want to go to another Lama somewhere? And then they're like, I heard I could get sick in India. What do you think?

Should I go? And then in my mind I'm like, oh yeah, tell them they're going to get sick. And they shouldn't go.

And then I caught my mind. And just at that moment I could say, oh yeah, you'll probably get worms or something. And it's not a big thing I'm saying.

It's not like I'm making a big plan to separate them from this Lama. But I just say a little thing. I mean, if worms are okay with you.

And then they get scared. And I've done a little Tama. So we must be doing Tama all day.

There's a special word in Tibetan. We don't really have it in English. You can say divisive speech.

It's words which make people draw apart from each other. And we do it all the time. So he says, Tama, this form of Tama is something you say to separate groups of spiritual practitioners.

Tama chen ne. DE THUG SUG GYUR THUG means to disturb the harmony of a group. THUG SUG GYUR DE THUG CHEN NA RANG NYID RTAG CI DE CHOG PHEN GSUNG DU RTOG TSE NGAN SONG DU RANG BRAL NAS BRAL DE THUG means if you do manage to upset or disturb the harmony of a spiritual community.

CHEN NA RANG NYID RTAG CI Not just you. DE CHOG PHEN GSUNG DU However many people you have managed to get involved in the split. Through your skillful Tama.

Then he says, holding hands you will all go to the hell realms together. However many people you've gotten involved, through your gossip, you will all hold hands and go to the hell realms. Then people say, I don't believe in hell realms.

I was watching TV one day. I don't have a TV and I've never watched TV. Rinpoche had a TV.

I used to go up in his room and sit with him. And there was a... I think it was when the Iraqis invaded Kuwait, right?

And then they, the Americans said, we're going to come and fight you. And they tricked him or something. They made a big thing on the ocean.

But then they didn't come from the ocean. They came with, that's a Lama form. So then, I don't remember how it went down, but the Iraqis were trying to escape.

All the soldiers were trying to escape and they stole people's private cars and they all got on the highway. And then the American jets just came down and bombed all of them and killed all of them. And it was all this big massive fire.

And these guys who had just stolen the art and probably raped some ladies and stolen bags of gold. And they're in the car and a new Cadillac. And they're like, I'm going back to Iraq.

And then suddenly the car is in flame. And they're in the middle of a ball of flame. So even in, what happened to them?

A karmic siege to see pleasant things around them manifested. They opened and they saw bags of gold and they saw girls and they saw pieces of art and they saw things to take, cars. And in those seeds, when they got the car and they got the girl and they got the gold, then those seeds are finished.

By getting something, the seeds are finished. Then new seeds come up under them. Older seeds come up, more seeds come up.

And there was a seed to be in a ball of fire. You see? Under the gold seed and the girl seed was a seed to be in a ball of fire.

And it happens to people, okay? If you have more seeds in the mind to be in a ball of fire, if you have enough seeds to live a life in a ball of fire, then you do. And there is such a thing as hell.

There is such a place, okay? It's not a place. It's a new seed coming up in somebody's mind.

So if you can be in a ball of fire for half an hour, you can be in a ball of fire for a lifetime. It's not a big deal and it's not strange and it's not some middle-aged religious belief or something like that. They exist.

It's possible. If you cause someone else enough pain, because that seed doubles every day, then you could be in a ball of fire. You can hold hands and go to a hell realm.

He's not speaking, what do you call it, metaphorically, it's real. It can happen. What kind of karma do you have to make to be in a ball of fire, splitting up a spiritual community?

That's the worst thing you can do. So just be really careful around it. People get into it.

In every church, in every community, in this community, people get into it. Dumb people. Then you just walk around them like that.

They're like, which side are you on? And you're like, let's have breakfast. Just don't get into it.

Don't get into it. Don't be online fighting people. Don't argue.

Don't gossip. Don't try to convince each other. Just avoid those things like poison, because they are poison.

And then just do your meditation, do your yoga. Nobody's stopping you. Be nice to other people.

If somebody doesn't want you to be nice to them, be nice to somebody else. You know what I mean? Free glasses, okay?

Free glasses. We'll pay for your food. And then, I don't like the food.

Okay, I'm sorry. And then be nice to somebody else. It's a good business, right?

In the, what do you call it, do-gooder business, there's always people to help. If some problem comes up with this group, then okay, you guys work it out. I'll work with this other group.

But don't get into this thing, because it's poison. It's just poison. Very, very bad karma.

The worst karma. Fall of fire karma. All right.

LAM BRDAM DO. SNAR KA DAM PA'I RGYAS CHE SER BA ZHIG Now he's going to go off into a long story. Okay, let's do it.

There was a RGYAS CHE. RGYAS CHE has only been a title in the last 500 years. And before that, it just meant a teacher, spiritual friend.

So there was a RGYAS CHE from Kadampa times, 1,000 years ago in Tibet. His name was SEL CHE, which kind of means, thinks clearly. ZHIG DE CHUG CHE NE.

But he caused a split in a spiritual community. He got involved in the gossiping that caused a split in the community. ZHIG DE CHUG CHE NE.

And then he died. Then there was a RGYAS CHE DRUM DUM PA, Lord Atisha's main disciple. And he was his teacher.

He was SEL CHE's teacher. And he said something after his student died. He said, ZHIG DE CHUG CHE NE.

He calls him affectionately. He says, If my SEL CHE had died three years earlier, he would have died as a master of the scriptures. Okay, you know what he's going to say.

ZHIG DE CHUG CHE NE. But he died three years too late. He should have died three years earlier.

Because then he went to a bad place. KHOI TU PHUR GOM PA DE CHE SHES SUNG. There's an expression in Tibet called KHOI TU PHUR.

You can see it up there. You got any more? KHOI TU PHUR GOM PA DE CHE.

Okay. I checked my friend Art's translation of this book. He wasn't sure what that line meant.

And I spent some time on it with Dan's database. It took about half an hour or something. So I looked through thousands and thousands of scriptures.

And this is a very rare expression. So I think I have it, but I'm not 100% sure. But nobody else does either.

But I think it's closer. So KHOI means his. TU PHUR.

What's a PHUR PA? It's a dagger. It's a ritual dagger.

And they use it for ceremonies, for example, to stake out a spiritual site. Like, what do you call it? Consecrate a site.

So if there might be some spirit disturbance there, you take a golden dagger or a brass dagger and you stab the earth with it. And then you do a ritual. And it's like staking out this place.

It's like what coyotes do with their pee-pee. And you stake it out. You say, no bad spirits can come in here.

So that's a ritual dagger that you use. But it means a stake. Like a stake that you would use.

TU means to tie a horse to a stake in a meadow so they don't walk off. So TU PHUR means a stake that you would use to stake down a horse. What do you call that?

Like they do this thing. Hobble. It's like hobbling them.

TU PHUR means that. GUM PA. And then the idea is, in scripture there are some rare references to TU PHUR.

Meaning sometimes you do something so bad that it stakes you down. And then you starve in that circle. You walk around the circle and eat the grass until it's all gone.

And then you die in that circle because you can't go anywhere else. So I'm going to take it that way. I think he's talking about that.

GUM PA DE means his monastery or the place that he created that schism became his TU PHUR circle. And he lost his life there. He lost his spiritual life there.

He got staked down in that place where he caused the split. And it killed him. I think it's like that.

CHE SHES GSUNG ZHING ZEL ZHES THAN DA YANG NYAL BA NA YOD PAR LA RNAMS CHE PAS LAMA NAM GYI GSUNG RGYUN TSIS GROS DA BU TSE So the big word here is called TSIS GROS. TSIS GROS can mean to give an account. TSIP SHAG is similar.

TSIS SHAG means, like once every two or three weeks in the monastery you have an examination. And you have to recite the new scripture you've learned. So it might be like 20 pages or something.

And you have to recite it out loud. And the way they do it is the abbot of the monastery gets up on a small throne out in the debate ground. And then your class runs up and you kneel down and you go like this.

And everybody goes, And he's supposed to walk. He will recite the first page from memory. And then he'll say, And then you have to recite the page back.

And then the guys who can't remember, they kind of get in the back. And the guy in front is called GYOR PUN. GYOR PUN means your class leader.

And he's GYOR PUN because he always memorizes what he's supposed to memorize. So he sings real loud. And all of us in the back are And that's called TSIS SHAG.

And that's a required recitation. Or you get kicked out of the Geshe program. What he's saying here is that telling the story of Tsel Che and telling how he is still now in the hell realms, in the ball of fire, is like a TSIS SHAG that all the lamas who teach Lam Rim over the centuries have to.

We're required to tell you this story. It's TSIS SHAG. It's TSIS CHU.

It's like a required thing. We have to recite the story of Tsel Che who split up the Sangha and is still now in the hell realms. In our lifetime also.

So that's a tradition. Required tradition. You're supposed to tell your students.

All right, tabu zen. TSAT CHO DE YANG DIG PA'I MED SIG NE SHEN SHIG DER DUG PA LO CHI NI CHE KYANG THO PA MI GYEL BAR SUNG The place where he split up the Sangha was so polluted by the action that people tried for 12 years to practice there and no one got the slightest realizations. The place became, he says scorched.

He calls it scorched by the fire of the lack of harmony. So when there are groups or individuals who have a high lack of harmony with the rest of the spiritual group then it can burn that place spiritually and disturb the vibes of that place. And then people can try to practice in that area but they won't make progress until those vibes settle down.

You can do the opposite, right? You can go look for places where beautiful things have happened. And then you can do your practice there.

We had trouble at Diamond Mountain. I mean, Diamond Mountain, the main house that was there when we bought the property is at a spring. It's one of the only springs in Arizona, in Southern Arizona.

And that house still has gun slits in the adobe. There are still slits where the soldiers would shoot the native people who came to use the water. And then we worked really hard to clean that vibe.

But it's hard there. The vibe is hard there. And we're working on it.

But it will take time. Okay. RIGS SUG NI SKYE BAR GSUNGS RANG CHAG GZHAN DANG LAR BRGYA'ANG ZHIG YIN SEMS LANG TSOG DANG GYUR TSOG SHES RGYEN DONG GI DE RIS SU BYAS NAS CHAG DANG BYAS PA DE DE'I THUG GI TSA BA RDZUGS PA YIN NAM NYAM Then Pabongka Rinpoche says a very, he speculates.

YIN NAM NYAM You got it, Nimbo? Means, it seems to me. He's like speculating.

He says, it seems to me that the root, right? TSA BA of a schism in a spiritual group is when people just start, even start thinking that's not the way we do it in our group. Like, that's, I remember I went with my friend to his Baptist church in Phoenix when I was 12 years old, you know.

And we did mass or communion. And then they were giving out grape juice. And I'm like, grape juice?

You know, the wine is the body, the blood of Christ. You know, we don't do it that way. We use wine, you know.

And he's saying that kind of thinking is the root of a schism. Thinking, you know, that's not the way we do it at our, we ring the bell with our left hand, not with our right hand. And they get very serious about this in Tibetan Buddhism.

It becomes a very, if you ring your bell with the wrong hand, then you're, he, what he's saying, he's speculating. He says, I think the root of all these schisms is when people start to think that's not how we do it. Okay, this word, very rare word in Tibetan, lar gya means that's not the way we do it.

You know, we do it differently. We don't recite the prayers with that particular tune. They're off by, right?

Very common, right? Oh, it fills off by three notes. That's not the way we do it, you know, in our group, you know.

And then that becomes the root of a larger schism is these little thoughts about that's not quite how we do it. So be careful about that's not quite how we do it. What's his name?

C.S. Lewis, the great Christian writer. He calls it the fish knife syndrome. And he said when he was a little kid, he would go to, he went to some other family's house for dinner and somebody said, can you get the fish knife?

And they pulled out a knife and he said, that's not a fish knife. That's not what my, is a fish knife in my house. You know, and it's like that.

You get into this kind of thinking. That's not how we do it. So be careful with those thoughts because they lead to a schism after six weeks or six months, something like that.

Watch the thoughts of that's not how we do it. Be a little tolerant of other people's customs, okay? In your whole life.

If you spend enough time with somebody else, like in other countries, people, you start doing stuff their way anyway and you don't notice it. And then it's not wrong anymore. All right.

I had to take a break. I wanted to make a mini announcement. It's that tonight I guess, right?

Tonight we'll be doing Marshmallow Sojong. Sojong means, so means to fix your vows. Jong means to clean away any mistakes you've made.

So in these retreats every six months, the monks, the ordained people, are supposed to do sojong every two weeks. And in the old days, you got in a little circle in someone's living room and you whispered to each other. You know, like, I was checking out a girl in the bus station.

You know, and the guy's like, that's bad. You know what I mean? They say, nyepa la nyepa sigla means, do you understand that that's a problem?

Sigla. Yes, I understand. Chinji lepa doma.

Do you agree to try not to do it next week? Yeah, okay. You know, and then this was the old sojong.

And it's beautiful. The words are very beautiful. So tonight we will do a sojong.

I'll recite, just for good luck, some of the sojong. It takes a couple hours. So I'll just recite a little bit of it.

And then, by tradition, we burn, we write down nasty stuff we've done in the last couple months, maybe. Okay? If you have something really bad from you when you were young, you can throw that in there.

And I would ask you to make three slips of paper. They should be about, not too hard to read, because someone's going to read it for you anonymously. Okay?

So don't put your name on it. But put three, make three slips of paper. Let's say half an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven page.

Half of a page. Tear off half a page. Make three pages and write down something you would like to purify.

Something you want to get rid of. Okay? And then if you have more than that, and you want to make a little piece of paper that you keep with you, you can do that.

And then it's a tradition also in Buddhism. There's a beautiful story. I'll tell you.

It's very quick, okay? Not that quick. Which you've heard.

Many of you have heard already. But there was a time when the Pope, I forget which Pope it was. I think it was John Paul.

I'm not sure. Or Benedict? Before that.

Anyway, he announced that all Catholic churches should have talks by people from other religions, which is a very beautiful thing. And we used to have a pretty good relationship with a Catholic church nearby our monastery in New Jersey. So they called us and said, can Rinpoche come and give a talk?

So he said, sure. And then I remember we went, and it was kind of a big cathedral. And the priest and Rinpoche, I was like, I was Rinpoche's slave, so at least I got to be it.

I got to go everywhere. Even when he met the Dalai Lama, I got to sit in the back in their private meetings. I got to listen.

And then, so anyway, he walks in with the priest down the aisle of this huge cathedral. And then he looks to the right, and there's these, there's a little room, right, with a screen separating two little rooms. And a priest goes in one side, and a lady goes in the other side.

And Rinpoche's like, what are they doing in there? What's going on in there? And he said, don't worry, it's all okay.

And he's like, well, what are they doing? And they said, well, she's giving confession. He's giving her confession.

So she's telling him, through the screen anonymously, the bad things she did last week. And then he gives her some assignment, like, okay, you have to say 50 Hail Marys, or something like that. Then he says, what's Hail Mary?

And I said, it's some kind of mantra, Rinpoche, that you do on a rosary. And he says, oh, that's such a good idea. It's a special room.

People can go in and tell what they did wrong. And then the priest gives them a mantra. This is fantastic.

That's great. And then he looks to the left side of the cathedral, and he says, where's the other one? And the priest is like, what do you mean, the other one?

He says, you know, the other room where the priest goes in and the people come in. And the priest says, no, we just have one. And he's like, you mean, you don't have one where the people come in and tell the priest all the good things they did?

And the priest is like, hmm. And it was really cute. Like a rejoice and all, instead of, you should have both.

So you really should have both. Even if you tell people you should rejoice in your good deeds, they still fixate on their bad deeds. It's very hard to get people to think about their good deeds.

It's really hard. And it's a big difference in people's lives. Coffee meditation, right?

Before you go to bed, think about all the nice things you've done. And then that reinforces them, and those seeds grow while you're sleeping. So in our tradition, we also write down, you're going to write down three half pages about the nice things you've done in your life.

Like the big things. Let's say both are the big things you've done, okay? Like the real big ones.

Like I was involved in an abortion when I was in college, okay? I was told it was okay by my high school teachers. And then later Rinpoche said, you messed up.

And so that's my big, I always write the same thing. So you probably have three big ones in your past, three bad ones. Then I have a couple of good ones.

So give them equal time, equal air time. So you're going to write three really nasty ones and then three really good ones. And then tonight, we'll go make a fire.

We'll have two big bowls. Don't throw your thing in the wrong bowl, okay? One is all the good stuff, and one is all the bad stuff.

And then we'll read them. Somebody will walk around with a bowl, and we'll take one out, and they'll read it. And then we'll all try to help the person purify that one, okay?

We'll all pray for that person, help them purify. Just to admit it is half of the purification. Just to write it down is already progress, okay?

And then after we do the negatives, we'll eat marshmallows, and I don't know. Or maybe we'll do the positives first. I don't know.

And then we'll celebrate, okay? And we'll just do the traditional Arizona Boy Scout campfire with burnt marshmallows, and people all nervous from eating sugar, okay? Hot chocolate, okay?

And then you can do that all the time. There's a custom where you know English breakfast, what do you call it? Twinnings tea.

Those little tins. You buy one of those tins, and you dump the tea out, and then you do little sojong fires in those. Be sure to put bricks underneath, okay?

We did one on national TV in Mongolia many years ago, like 15 years ago, right? And it was on a plastic table. And in the middle of the TV show, then there were like 500 people there watching live, and it was ThyssenMann.

What was it?

[Говорящий 2] (31:37 - 31:38)
Ora? Lama Ora?

[Говорящий 1] (31:40 - 50:36)
Yeah, and so then the table started to melt, and it was like this, and I remember that. So you can do it all the time. You use ghee, and you use mustard seeds.

But that's another thing. We can do it sometime. We did a retreat in California one time.

What? Medicine Buddha? Vajrapani?

And we bought everybody a tin, and we practiced it together. Maybe sometime we can do that. ,,NGA MTSO DANG, ,,KHYOD TSOG SHES GYEN DUNG GYI ,,DE RU SU CHE NE, ,,CHA DANG CHE PA DI, ,,DE DRUG GI TSA BA DU," So what he's trying to get at is that we have to watch our own mind when we say, that's not how my group does it.

That's not how... We don't have grape juice in our communion. We always ring the bell three times, not four times.

Like that. And then he goes off on, we have to respect. We have to have some latitude for other people's traditions and beliefs.

Great deal of latitude. What some other spiritual group is doing seems unusual to us, or it seems like not the way we were trained to do it. And then we tend to think, oh, that's wrong.

But I think you have to think, does it help them? Right? Does it comfort them?

Does it help them? Does it make them better people? And I think you'll find that almost every religious tradition helps somebody, or it wouldn't exist.

The Dalai Lama. The first time I... Maybe the first time...

Yeah, the first time I ever saw the Dalai Lama, I was in Dharamsala. I was studying at the Tibetan Library. In those days, you could just walk to his house and knock on his door and ask him a question.

You didn't have to go through 14 Indian CIA guys with machine guns. And so I remember a bunch of us went. We're just all hippies.

Like six or seven, ten hippies. And we went to his... We just walked up the hill.

He's just up the hill. And he was living in this small bungalow with a porch, a wooden bungalow. I remember the...

And a nice porch, just a wood porch. Small, very small. And then we show up and we bang on the door.

We got a question for you. And then we were all standing in front of the porch and he comes out on the porch and he says, OK, what's your question? And he answered questions for a while.

And then one hippie guy next to me who was not a very nice guy, he was like, I got a question for you, man. And we're all like... And he's like...

And he's like, all this religion stuff, Buddhism, Christianity, Jews, Muslims, it just causes suffering. And they all fight with each other. It's all like...

It's just all, this is my religion, this is my religion. The moment you say my religion, people start killing each other. He's like yelling at the Dalai Lama.

The Dalai Lama is like... And then... And then he finishes his rant.

He's like ranting. And then the Dalai Lama, he goes like... And then he goes...

And he says, here are all the religions of the world. He's got this power with his arm. Here's Jews, here's Christians, here's Buddhists, here's Hindus.

He goes... Then he says, cut them all like this. Cut them all like this.

And then we're like... And then... Everybody above this line is a practicing Buddhist, is a practicing Christian, is a practicing Jew, is a practicing Hindu.

Everybody below that line is not doing what the religion said to do. These people are all acting the same. These people are all acting the same.

You see, it was really cool. These people fight with each other. These people don't.

Because they're all acting the same. And that was it. That's all he would say.

So I think you've got to think... Practicing spiritual, people are all acting the same. So...

They're all following the same thing, basically. They're taking care of other people, being kind to other people, being nice to other people. And then it doesn't matter what religion you say you are, if you're being mean to other people, or you're hurting other people, then you're not really practicing, right?

And I don't know if you can... Like you hear on the news, the Christians in Syria are killing each other, and you're like... And your reaction is like, they're not Christians if they're killing each other.

You see what I mean? Like that. So...

He's saying, respect everyone's traditions. Be very careful to respect other people. Because in the end, they're the same.

All right. This is where he says it. Pongwa Samten.

Gendun thukma thuna. When tension develops in a spiritual group, lokpa thur samdang. The study suffers.

People can't study. It's distracting. The mind is disturbed.

And you can sit down with the scripture, and you can look at it, but you can't get into it, because your mind is disturbed, and you're thinking about these problems in the group. Thur samdang. Pongwa samten, mi phelwa.

And it hurts everyone's meditation. The level of meditation drops for everybody. Because there's tension going on.

Mi phelwe. Tenpa nyam be gyur chesha yin. So if you wanted to destroy the Buddhist teaching, that would be the best way to do it.

Get people involved in some kind of tension or schism, and then everyone will be too distracted to study or meditate. When they try to meditate, it won't come. Chesha yin.

De na do le. Therefore, he quotes a sutra. Gendun thunpa dewa te.

Thunpa nam gi kaduk de. Gendun thunpa dewa te. Thunpa nam gi kaduk de.

There's a very, very famous line from the scriptures. The Lord Buddha said, Gendun thunpa dewa te. What is happiness?

It's when all the people in the group are getting along. That's happiness. He said it.

Buddha said, What's happiness? It's when everyone's treating each other kindly and with harmony. Gendun thunpa dewa te.

Thunpa nam gi kaduk de. Kaduk means what? Kaduk in Sanskrit.

It's a Portuguese eating system also. Or in Spanish. Tapas.

Okay. Isn't that tapas? Anyway.

So tapas means spiritual hardship, right? Like, you know, I don't know. Going to Anatole's yoga class three days in a row.

That's tapas. You know, like something difficult. Spiritual difficult practice is called tapas.

Kaduk. In Tibetan it's kaduk. Kad means difficult.

Tuk means I can do it. Kaduk. It's tough but I can do it.

Kaduk. So he, in the scripture, the Lord Buddha said, the most difficult thing that can come to spiritual practitioners living in harmony is happiness. The biggest problem they have is happiness.

So here's the whole quotation. When the community is in harmony, that's what happiness is. Happiness is the worst thing that can happen in a community that has harmony.

Okay? It's kind of cool. Happiness is the worst thing that can happen if you have harmony in your group.

In Tibetan. The Lord Buddha is saying the most important thing for us is to be in harmony with each other. Now he has finished the first of the very negative karmas that you can commit with the Sangha, with the community.

Now he's going on to the second one. Do you have it somewhere? Korthopa.

It's way back before we started talking about schisms. We had a list. Yeah, stealing the resources of the Sangha.

Okay? There are many variations but he's going to talk about it in general. Okay, here we go.

Genin Korthopani. To misappropriate Dharma money. To steal Dharma money or use it for the wrong thing.

Okay? This is a very, very serious bad karma. Okay?

Tongo Chakpa Dang. Tongo Chakpa means a sponsor has given a donation that's meant to be used for all the Sangha and you don't spend it the way they wanted. Okay?

Okay, Tongo Chakpa. Genin na bab nge ki tel mi bulwa. You're supposed to hand out a certain...

In the monastery, a sponsor might come and give 14 bags of wheat or in Tibet, you know, 12 bags of yak butter. Like that. And then it must be divided properly among all the monks, among all the community.

To not offer it equally and properly is a very bad karma. Chi tse gen dun ki ma nang war dong chepa so yin. And then to use for your personal purposes things which have been offered to the community as a whole.

Like a computer printer or something like that. So, you know, a sponsor has offered a computer printer to ACI Phoenix and then they're keeping it in your house. And then you have to print out a letter to your aunt.

Then that's a very bad karma. To use the Sangha's possessions for your own personal things. Ki ma nang war dong chepa so yin.

Without permission. If you ask permission, it's okay. Di bak chi nyer la sokpa jung ne shing.

Chi nyer sokpa jung ne means... Chi nyer means in the monastery there's quartermasters. There are people whose job it is to take the money from the sponsors or the wheat or the yak butter.

And then their job is to spread it out among all the monks. And so those guys who are in charge of... In our group it would be the treasurer or the bookkeeper.

They have to be really careful. I was the bookkeeper for Rinpoche for 20 years. And I was working full-time.

And then I was the bookkeeper for my college in the monastery. Gerong College. And it was hard and it was a lot of work.

And it was countless hours sitting there trying to balance accounts. You know. And there's a story.

There's a beautiful story. In the early years, I was working with the only surviving assistant of Pabongka Rinpoche. The original Pabongka Rinpoche.

His name was Umdze Na. So he was the chanting master for the man who wrote this book. And he was the only person left alive.

He's really old. And he would sit down with his tsompen. Tsompen means abacus.

And I would sit down with my calculator. And then they'd say, go. I'd go like this.

And he'd go, And then he'd say, 43. And then I'd go, damn. Then I complained to Geshe Tutor Rinchen one day.

I said, I spend all my time doing accounting. And it's like the last thing. I hate accounting.

And he said, no, no. You don't understand. Who was the accountant at the Nalanda Monastery?

And I'm like, who knows? Who cares? This is 1,200 years ago.

I don't know. This is the greatest monastery in India, right? Nalanda.

Who was the accountant? And I'm like, I have no idea. I'm like upset.

And he says, Nagarjuna. They appointed Nagarjuna the accountant. He kept the accounts at Nalanda.

And I'm like, really? He's like, yeah. And he says, you know why?

And I said, no. And he said, because to make a mistake in the Dharma funds or to misuse them is the biggest bad karma you can do. So they take the best monk and they make him the accountant.

You know? So I'm like, OK. So you have to be really careful around Dharma money.

And it's close to us. They say in Tibetan, nyewa. Nyewa means it's close to us.

We're constantly dealing with Dharma money. And it's hard. And there's money flying around.

There's thousands of dollars, hundreds and thousands of dollars. And we're trying to do the right thing and not misuse somebody's money. We are trying to develop online QuickBooks in the cloud system where a sponsor could see where their $50 went to 24 levels down.

And so we're working on that. But I believe that's the future for good, clean karma finances, Dharma finance, that it's all on the web. And the sponsor can go in and see, when did my $50 go to the Tibetan refugee woman who's typing the scriptures on last Friday?

And that's what we're working towards. We're working on that. It's close.

But it should be like that. And there should be that level of accountability for Dharma money. Every penny.

When the monks give me an account sheet, when I was the accountant, it would be down to $0.50. They would say, this guy drank a cup of tea sitting watching the construction workers for the new school for the young kids. And that was $0.50. And they would write it down on the count. You're talking paper.

So it should be like that. We have to be very careful. We have to be like that.

Okay, anyway. Yeah, so we'll continue. The next thing is kind of dopey.

I better do it then. Jindaki Nation. So sometimes a person in the monastery will be assigned to take the donations of yak butter or barley flour.

Okay? That's their job to interface between the monastery and the sponsors. And then they know the sponsor, right?

They have a personal relationship. Maybe it's their cousin or something. In Tibet, this is in Tibet.

So then sometimes thinking that they are showing more loyalty, shatsa means loyalty, to their cousin, they will say, look, you don't have to give so much butter. You want to give 10 pounds, but let's make it 8. Because I know your family could use the butter.

And then he talks the sponsor into giving less. When it would be comfortable and desired, when the sponsor wants to give more. Okay, like that.

Then if you reduce the butter by a single butter knife cut full, okay, that's chi shok, chiktsam chikyam. That's stealing from the sangha. There's a joke in Tibetan, it's called the Dalai Lama's butter.

They don't say butter, they say respectful butter. So there's a joke about the Dalai Lama's butter. So this nomad will go to the Potala Palace and give 20 pound sheep guts full of butter, which is how they store things in Tibet, because they don't have plastic.

And then the guy will check the butter. The first guy will check the butter. And then he'll pass it up to the next floor of the Potala.

The Potala has like 18 floors, right? So by the time it gets to the Dalai Lama, it's a pad of butter. And then all those guys have, you know, taken their cut, literally.

And then what he's saying is, then you collect a lot of bad karma. 100% of what a sponsor offers should go to what the sponsor wants. And you can't, like, take cuts out of it or percentages out of it, unless you tell the sponsor.

Okay, all right. Last thing, okay. There's a thing there at the bottom called shal du du e go.

You got that, Ningbo? That's a very unusual expression, and you should know it. It's from the Naya.

Shal means mouth. It's the honorific for mouth. Shal du means into the mouth.

Du means taken into the mouth. Go here means resources, okay? So shal du du e go, resources taken into the mouth, is an ancient word for money that a sponsor gave to the organization for some reason, okay?

It was aimed at certain mouths in the organization. And if it doesn't get to those mouths, then you've done a very bad karma.

[Говорящий 2] (50:37 - 50:37)
Okay, like that.

[Говорящий 1] (50:37 - 53:18)
One more sentence. Shal du du e go chokpa ni nyawa nara me ki gyu dam. If you want to go to the ball of fire hell, the lowest one, steal the resources of a spiritual community.

So what he's saying is just be very careful, like with printers or computers or telephones. When someone offers money, make sure 100% of it goes to what it was meant for. And make sure they get a report of how it was spent and proof of how it was spent.

Okay, like that. Shen dag ni nyi tse we gyur gyur. Lesser forms of stealing from the sangha are a cause to go to what we call, say nyi tse we.

Nyi tse we. Nyawa. Nyawa.

You got it, Nyingpo? Nyi tse we nyawa. Nyi tse wa is an interesting word, and we're going to go into it in the afternoon, okay?

Nyi tse wa is a very strange, special word that, so hell realms, our realm is different from the hell realm. You can't normally see a hell realm, okay? Like Dante got taken to one, right?

By who was that? Virgil takes Dante to the hell realms, right? We say that's possible.

We say that it can be done by a powerful practitioner, can take another person to the hell realms on a visit, okay? Just to teach them something. We say that the Inferno could have happened, that book by Dante.

So we say that those realms are completely separate, right? We can't normally see a hell realm. But there's a thing called nyi tse wa.

Nyi tse wa means a hell on earth, okay? There are hell on earth. There are places called hell on earth.

To be sitting in a stolen Kuwari car on that highway and to get hit by a missile and be engulfed in flame is a hell realm on earth for that half hour. There's a hell realm on the earth for half an hour, right? Like that.

So there are places on this planet, on this earth, which are, we call partial hell realms, like that, okay? And you can see them. They're not even close to the real thing, but they're bad, okay?

So he's going to start talking about that idea, okay? Because if you fool around with the sangha's money, that can cause that, okay? It's serious, yeah.

[Говорящий 2] (53:19 - 53:24)
What if somebody wants to donate something and you know that you can't afford it?

[Говорящий 1] (53:24 - 55:03)
If someone wants to donate something to a spiritual group and you know they cannot afford it, you should refuse it. You should refuse it, okay? And you should refuse it politely.

Maybe you could give them some other alternative. But if you know, Rinpoche, when I was with Rinpoche, he used to go down to Washington, D.C. to teach. And he was sponsored by a woman who was a professor, I think George Washington University.

And then one day, after particularly sweet teaching, she was like crying and she said, You can have my house, Rinpoche. I'm signing it over to you tomorrow. And he was poor.

He was a refugee, right? He came to America with one metal suitcase, this old, terrible metal suitcase, box, and all his stuff was in there. He was very poor.

And he said, No, I won't take it. He just said, No, you keep it. He needed money.

He said, No, you shouldn't give it. So you have to be very sensitive to, especially in a moment of great faith, especially new people. They say, Here's all my money.

And then you should say, Let's talk about it next week. Something like that. Then when it wears off, they'll give you a hundred bucks.

That's okay. So you have to be really careful with that, okay? And we have the example of our Rinpoche.

All right. Let's do yoga. Ew.