«Дар освобождения», курс 8 «Учимся быть тихими», занятие 3

[Говорящий 1] (0:00 - 0:01)
Okay, talk loud.

[Говорящий 2] (0:02 - 0:23)
I have a question. This is on, you're talking about the poor fearlessness, where the Buddha is not afraid to tell somebody that basically it's all coming from them. So, this thing about a situation of a battered woman, you know, she has an alcoholic boyfriend, husband, and beats her all the time.

She goes to the Buddha, and the Buddha says, it's all you.

[Говорящий 1] (0:24 - 0:24)
Yeah.

[Говорящий 2] (0:24 - 0:37)
And, I mean, you know, in real life, if you give that message, you know, it's not going to be... I mean, that person, you know, won't need the battering.

[Говорящий 1] (0:37 - 0:37)
Yeah. You know what I mean?

[Говорящий 2] (0:37 - 0:39)
Because I think it's all their fault.

[Говорящий 1] (0:39 - 0:39)
Yeah.

[Говорящий 2] (0:40 - 0:41)
Or their responsibility.

[Говорящий 1] (0:42 - 1:15)
Yeah, that's why I said, in the appropriate circumstances. So, what's your name again? Jane gave the example of, would the Buddha be afraid to tell a battered woman that it was all her fault and not her alcoholic, abusive husband's fault?

And is that healthy for her, who's already feeling like she's nobody, to say, it's all your fault? And then, the answer is, obviously, it's not appropriate to say that to that person. You see what I mean?

And so, there are times...

[Говорящий 2] (1:16 - 1:18)
The truth is that it is her.

[Говорящий 1] (1:19 - 4:00)
Oh, it is true. It's created. It's true.

But it doesn't help her to say that. So, the Buddha taught four great schools in ancient India. They're called Vaibhashika, Sautrantika, Cittamatra, or Yogacara, and Madhyamika.

Three of them are wrong. Three of the schools he taught are wrong. And then, the Tibetans struggled with the question.

Jetsun Kappa was very bothered. He drove him crazy. Why would the Buddha teach four systems and three of them are wrong?

And then, he concluded that the Buddha felt that it wasn't appropriate for that audience to teach them the high school. And then, you can take that whole discussion and move it to discussion of, what do you tell a battered woman about karma? And you don't go there.

You don't go there. You go somewhere else that would help them more. The question of the Holocaust, things like that.

You can't go up to somebody and say, this is all your fault. It's just not appropriate. So, Lord, and the Dalai Lama.

You go to Sarah and listen to him talk, you wouldn't recognize him. He was in a talk in Tucson. Should I say this?

It was funny. He's got this Oxford-trained translator, right, who was one of my debating partners. So, we were in Tucson when he taught in Tucson.

He said, okay, if your neighbor bothers you, be polite to them, be nice to them. If they keep bothering you, make suggestions, deal with them, try to work it out with them. And then, finally, if it doesn't work out, just tell them, kya pa so.

Kya pa so means eat shit. And then the translator was like, express your extreme displeasure. What I mean is, there's audiences, the Dalai Lama also, when he teaches in India, he's a lot different.

And he's not being, what do you call that, when a person's disingenuous? He's not being disingenuous. He's not faking it.

He's not a crude person who's trying to be polite when he's in America. He's not like that. He's just really trying hard to be sensitive to the audience.

And that's a basic Buddhist principle.

[Говорящий 2] (4:00 - 4:05)
But then, you're still saying it's true then, like for the Holocaust, you know, for the example.

[Говорящий 1] (4:05 - 4:05)
It is true.

[Говорящий 2] (4:06 - 4:09)
How? I mean, how? How does it happen?

[Говорящий 1] (4:09 - 7:27)
Oh, that, why is any race on this planet subjected to, what do they call that? The Armenians. Persecution.

Worse than that. Genocide. Genocide.

Why is a race subjected to genocide? It's always, in our belief, and I'm not saying this outside of this room, it's always that those group of people, as a group, have committed heinous crimes to someone else. And in the case of the Holocaust, or Armenia, or something like that, they could have been living in a different planet before that.

They could have been living in a different country. You can't say the Jewish people as a whole did something. That's not logical in this system.

It's that, as a group of people, they did something before that. And then, and the people who did the Holocaust to them will experience this later also, as a group. And it tends to, they tend to perpetuate themselves.

But you don't go to Israel, I didn't go to Tel Aviv and make this announcement, you know. I was there a couple weeks ago. And it's just not appropriate, you know.

So you have to, when the people are ready, you can say things like that. But not, it would be foolish. Even in Buddhist logic, which Ningbo is going to teach you, this is interesting, okay, get this.

In Buddhist logic, in the art of reasoning, and rhetoric and debate, what do you call it, syllogism. That's a fancy word for teaching by, it's like a Socratic method. But anyway, in that system, get this, very interesting.

You are never allowed to present a reason which the person doesn't already accept. You are never allowed to try to prove the reason to them. What you give as the reason must be something they already believe.

Or the statement is wrong. Okay, so for a person to go to a country and say, you made this yourselves, when they don't have the equipment to understand that, then the statement that you made it yourself becomes false. In Buddhist logic.

Isn't that interesting? The truth of the statement doesn't depend on its objective truth. An argument made to a person is false, if you don't give it to them and they don't have the equipment to accept it after they, what do you call it, consider it for a while.

Yeah, I do believe that and I believe that. Oh yeah, it would mean that I believe this. That's the Buddhist reasoning.

And any other reasoning, then the statement becomes false. It's very interesting. It's very powerful.

So you would be telling a lie to tell the battered woman it was her fault. That's the point. It's very radical.

[Говорящий 2] (7:28 - 7:31)
Is that the compassion even in the debate of logic?

[Говорящий 1] (7:34 - 8:29)
Yeah, but it's also that, that's a basis also. You don't hurt somebody with the truth just to tell the truth. I had a dream one night.

I don't have a lot of dreams. I don't remember my dreams very well. And this was very unusual.

So don't think I'm dreaming about the Dalai Lama all the time. I don't. But one night I dreamt about the Dalai Lama.

He was giving a news conference, right? And I was assisting him or something. And then some reporter asked a stupid question about emptiness.

Like emptiness means nothing exists. And then I was like, let me give the answer, you know. And then he leans over and he says, sometimes it's better to be kind than to be correct.

You know. So it's like that, yeah.

[Говорящий 2] (8:30 - 8:39)
Okay, yeah. So the karma principles are not always inside?

[Говорящий 1] (8:40 - 8:46)
Yeah, are the laws of karma adjustable? If they're empty, is that what you mean?

[Говорящий 2] (8:46 - 8:48)
Yeah, empty, but they are.

[Говорящий 1] (8:49 - 12:52)
Yeah, that's it. So I'm going to twist it my way, okay? Which I always do anyway, I'm just telling you.

We say in this tradition that all things are your perceptions, right? So that the dog sees a chew toy, the human sees a pen. All things are coming from you.

And all things could be perceived differently by someone else. So I'm going to twist your question to, is it possible for a person to experience the laws of karma differently than another person? Meaning, if everything is coming from your karma, is it possible to have such weird karma that you could do a good deed and it would have a bad result?

Or something like that. The laws of karma could be broken. Because they too are like the pen.

And everyone should be having their own perception of the laws of karma, right? That's a really hard question. That's not what you want.

I think you could say that my way of answering that question, which is an important question, is that a person can have a misperception of the laws of karma. They can believe that lying will get them a green card about being married, for example. Or they could believe that bombing people in Iraq would prevent another building from being blown up in the United States.

You see, it's possible someone could misunderstand causation. So I would say they have a karma to see the laws of karma as being wrong or twisting the laws of karma. Everybody is doing that.

Most people are doing that. So I think that's possible. Is it possible for the laws of karma themselves to behave differently?

That gets into a thing called patterns, okay? And that's a very deep thing. How many forms of life are there?

And there are only six. Animals, you can see two of them. A normal person can see two of them.

Animals and humans. Then the scriptures say there are four other forms of life. There are worldly gods, worldly demigods, there are hell beings, and there are hungry ghosts.

So then the question in my mind, I asked my Lama, why only six forms of life? Why not a thousand? Why only six forms of life?

And then he said there are patterns to karma. So there are patterns, or what do you call it? Possible combinations that always work out to six.

All the karmas you could do. Although we're going to contradict this later, today or tomorrow. Normally there's only six forms of life.

Because of all the possibilities, they only interact six ways. And I think the same, I would say the same with karma. Karma could have worked differently.

But given the way things work, it will always work a certain way. In practice it will always work a certain way. In this room all the people will see a pen.

It's a pattern. Yeah, like gravity. But we believe gravity is not a...

We believe a saint can fly through the sky, for example. You see what I mean? So gravity is also empty.

But that's another story. So what I mean to say, the answer is this. In theory, all things can appear all ways.

In practice, there are patterns because of the possible combinations. Like that. Yes, Marjorie.

[Говорящий 2] (12:53 - 13:02)
I've heard you and the Dalai Lama both express how it's okay to eat meat if it's not co-specifically used as a must.

[Говорящий 1] (13:02 - 13:03)
Wait, you didn't hear me say that.

[Говорящий 2] (13:04 - 13:05)
I did.

[Говорящий 1] (13:07 - 13:08)
But I'll talk about it if you want.

[Говорящий 2] (13:08 - 13:23)
Yeah, I would because I'm curious what the teachings specifically say. I heard him say that I was wondering, well then what happens if someone accidentally hits a deer and it's already dead and it's a natural cause, then are you allowed to eat the meat specifically killed?

[Говорящий 1] (13:23 - 13:24)
Yeah, good, good.

[Говорящий 2] (13:24 - 13:26)
What's the karma phenomenon?

[Говорящий 1] (13:26 - 19:00)
Yeah, I think this is a misunderstanding in my case. The Vinaya, there's a monk's vow for the monks that you are not allowed to eat meat which was killed for you. So if you go...

Monks in traditional countries spend a lot of their time... People call them to their house. They say, please do prayers for a couple hours.

I did this for 25 years for the Mongols. So they'll call the monks and they'll say, come over and read the Diamond Cutter Sutra out loud for my family. And they sit there in the corner and they fall asleep.

And the monks skip pages. And then you get a good dinner, you see. And that used to be a way of monks feeding themselves.

And they get an offering, they get some money. So anyway, that's called tong chok. Tong chok means city ritual, town ritual.

Go to town, read prayers for a family. And then in that case, you're not allowed to eat meat if they cook it for you. If they slaughter a sheep for you, you're not allowed to eat it.

I think people... In the Lotus Sutra, Lord Buddha lists all the kinds of flesh. And it's long.

Horse flesh, cow flesh, rabbit flesh, rat flesh, human flesh, deer flesh, horse flesh. And he makes a long list and he says, don't eat it. He says, don't eat any of those.

So when I first came to the monastery, everyone was eating meat. And I was the cook. I cooked meat for eight years.

And they said, you should eat what we eat. So I ate it. And then I started to ask questions.

And I said, well, why are you guys eating meat? And they said, we don't eat cows, we eat beef. We don't go to the store and say, give me a cow.

We go to the store and buy beef. So beef is already dead. We didn't kill the cow.

We are just buying the meat. You see what I mean? Then I remember this very tense moment with one of my big lamas.

And I'm like, you know, lama... Someone in New York offered me a radio. A very expensive Sony radio.

Someone on the street, some guy on the street. New radio in the box. And they're like, give me ten bucks, man.

And I saw a truck across the street. Sony radio truck. And there's one box missing.

And I'm like, should I buy it or not? And he said, no, of course not. It's stolen.

You shouldn't buy stolen goods. Then I said, meat is stolen. Beef is stolen.

If it's not killed, it's at least stolen. You are dealing in stolen goods. And then he didn't have an answer.

Because the cow has not been asked. The cow hasn't agreed to give their flesh, right? So even in the worst argument with the worst cases, it's still stolen goods.

If it's not a killed thing, it's stolen goods. And I think it's killed. Then I worked for the farm workers for many years.

And we did, what do you call it, boycotts. Boycotts of lettuce that was picked by people who got sprayed with insecticides and stuff. And then we worked around the country.

We got the governor of Arizona impeached. The governor of Arizona was impeached, Jack Williams. We got him impeached.

He was removed from office for refusing to accept the signatures that we presented in favor of the farm workers. So I know that the power of a boycott. If everyone refused to eat meat, no animals would be killed.

Because it doesn't pay. There's no reason to. I think there's a lot of...

There's just many, many reasons not to kill an animal, not to eat flesh. I believe there's bad karma in it. Dairy also, certain kinds of dairy.

And I think it's related to breast cancer and things like that. I think it's related to cholesterol levels and heart attacks. I think the karma in those products hurt people.

The products hurt people. Dairy, I had a big debate with one of my yoga teachers. I think you could have a dairy which was compassionate.

I don't think... I could think you could have a dairy which was... The Sivananda people have a dairy.

The cows are taken care of. They're happy. They milk them.

When they get old, they don't kill them. They put them out. And it doubles the cost of the milk.

And I'm willing to pay it. So we had this project, I don't know, 15 years ago. We all paid double for milk products.

Every time we bought an ice cream for a dollar, we all put a dollar in a box. And then we sent it to Sivananda. And we said, that's okay.

Now we can have milk. We can have ice cream. But some people didn't buy the idea.

Anyway, I think it's bad karma. And that's where you got that from. That's where you heard that from.

[Говорящий 2] (19:01 - 19:06)
So unless you know it's the vows, it's the karma underneath that someone gave you.

[Говорящий 1] (19:07 - 20:47)
If he doesn't know his vows, does he still get karma? Oh, no, no, that's a different story. That's a different story.

Yeah, if a person has given you to eat something, if you're a monk in ancient India and you go to a person's house and they throw meat in your bowl, you were supposed to eat it. Without argument. You see what I mean?

I think if it were me, I would have thrown the meat out or something like that. And I've heard a debate in Tibet that there was no vegetables in Tibet. It was too high to have a lot of vegetables.

But monks lived on sampa, barley flour, and milk products. So I don't buy that. Anyway, the monk that I had the argument with at the age of 75 became a vegetarian.

I held out. He made fun of me for years. I didn't want to, what do you call it, insult the monks.

So one day I said, I have a really bad stomach ache. And then I drove to Farmingdale, New Jersey. And I sat in the car outside the doctor's office for like an hour.

And then I came back and I said, I'll still cook the meat. Because I'm the cook. But the doctor said I can't eat it.

Because it makes me sick. And then they all said, okay, you can eat vegetables. So yeah, I said no.

No, no, I didn't go in the doctor's office. It's okay. Maybe the supreme doctor.

[Говорящий 2] (20:49 - 20:53)
You're saying that the karma of eating meat is worse than the karma of lying to the monk?

[Говорящий 1] (20:53 - 20:54)
Yeah, I think so.

[Говорящий 2] (20:54 - 21:11)
But what you just said about Dalai Lama, about him trying to adjust his message to the audience, whether to monk find himself among people, to whom not eating meat would be a serious offense to their hospitality or to their way of life. How does that balance?

[Говорящий 1] (21:11 - 22:22)
So Pasha says, let's say you're a monk and you go to a Mongol's house and they're offering you meat to honor you. And it's their custom. We had it in Mongolia.

Kifa? What is that? Horse mares milk.

Fermented. And it gets you a little tipsy. And it wasn't kifa.

It's called something else. Kumis? Kumis, yeah.

Anyway, we drank it. Because it was offered, it would be a breach of hospitality. And it would hurt the Dharma if we didn't go along with their customs.

And we just kind of... Do you guys know Tizima? She got very drunk off that.

Do you remember that? She came home with a huge headache. Because she thought it was polite.

She was in the library and trying to negotiate for some Tibetan manuscripts. And they pulled out a huge bottle. She did it and we got the manuscripts.

So anyway... There's cases when you have to do stuff like that. You have to use your wisdom.

Yes, please.

[Говорящий 2] (22:22 - 22:45)
What about all the other products that we take for granted every day that are made from the pain of people in other countries, food in the earth. There just seems to be so many. It feels kind of like the same question as the meat question.

It's something that's kind of bugged me for a while.

[Говорящий 1] (22:48 - 23:39)
I think you should boycott them. Their iPhone is made with, what is it called, tantalum? It only comes from Africa.

You can only get it by sending guys down into holes and picking up rocks. And they come back with three rocks. You can't make an iPhone without that metal.

So I think we should boycott them. We should do that. We should have the courage to do that.

Then it will stop. If no one buys it, it will stop. Or you write them and you say, I don't want you to use that.

Just if enough people write them, they will try to change something. I think we have to try. Boycott things.

Somebody else? Yes, please.

[Говорящий 2] (23:42 - 24:11)
It's a little confusing. So let me ask you. Is it okay to tell a lie to get a good result?

A result that is helpful? The example I'd like to give you is, I remember reading the Dalai Lama's book How to Be a Human Being. I believe he said it's okay to tell a lie if that lie will help.

[Говорящий 1] (24:15 - 25:01)
There's a story in the scriptures about if a guy is being chased by bandits and he comes to hide in your house and you hide him in the closet and then the bandits knock on the door and say, is the guy here? You're supposed to say, no, the guy is not here. And a lot of it depends on your intention.

If your intention is that if I tell this lie it will help them. There are arguments that you can do that. The lie will have its own result.

People will not believe you as much in the future. But I think the big question comes down to did the lie prevent them from entering the house?

[Говорящий 2] (25:13 - 25:15)
They might not believe you.

[Говорящий 1] (25:16 - 25:20)
Yeah, they might come in the house anyway. Which means the lie doesn't cause them to not come in the house.

[Говорящий 2] (25:24 - 25:35)
Given the circumstances given the earlier example of the battery of a woman. It's a lie in a sense.

[Говорящий 1] (25:36 - 25:42)
Yeah, it is a lie in a sense. It's not telling the whole truth, right? What do you call that?

[Говорящий 2] (25:43 - 25:46)
A lie by omission.

[Говорящий 1] (25:47 - 29:35)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a lie by omission. I think my answer would be this.

A lie will always have a bad result. If you lie to the people looking for a guy in your house to kill him and they believe you, it's not because you lie. We have to hold that.

We have to hold that position. Out of compassion. Out of a...

There's an example that we had in the scripture last time, right? With the Buddha, Lord Buddha. What did he do?

He killed people on a ship, right? In a former life. If your motivation is special, I think it could have an unusual result.

But still the killing has a bad result. Okay, so if your motivation for lying to the guys who came to kill somebody is good, then that action is better than telling the truth. But telling a lie didn't protect the guy.

How's that? Your motivation was to protect him. So it was more of a good deed than a bad deed.

And it will have more of a good result than a bad result. As in the case of the Buddha. They call it the basketball event.

In the scriptures it's called the basketball event. Lord Buddha in his previous life killed some people on a ship. Killed a man on a ship who was going to kill 500 other people.

And they say he went down to hell like a basketball and bounced back up. But that his motivation was so pure that he cut off a few million years from the time it would take him to become a Buddha. So I believe you can do a deed like lying out of a good motivation.

But I don't believe, I don't think technically the lie can protect the person. And the proof of that is that it doesn't always work. So you've got to chew on that.

What would happen, I don't know, to not tell a... Your mother says to you, do you like this dress that I bought? And you don't like it, right?

Then should you say I hate the color? Or should you say you know, something? You can always say it's interesting.

Yeah, you can find something nice. You can deflect the question or something like that. I think so.

I think intention is... The lamas usually answer this question with intention. But I think it might be interesting to be a little more radical about it and say, I'm just not going to ever tell a lie.

That a lie can never have a good result. You have to always hold that position. A lie can never have a good result.

A lie told with a good intention can have more good karma than bad karma. How's that? I got eight minutes.

Let's finish that. And then we'll do one. Here's a practical suggestion.

For us, most of the bad things we do are clearly just stupid. They're not moral quandaries. You know what I mean?

We just lie blatantly when we don't have to lie. I think we could work on that.

[Говорящий 2] (29:37 - 29:38)
Okay.

[Говорящий 1] (29:40 - 29:46)
Say again? I do 430. Oh, one more question then.

[Говорящий 2] (29:46 - 30:06)
Let's say that Steve Jobs created iPhones in order to help avoid that more people would go to mines. You have to think of the motivation when you're doing something sketchy every time, every second. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

[Говорящий 1] (30:11 - 35:14)
I think, well, we don't know what other people's motivations are. That's safer to not assume that we know. We can guess.

But anyway, so some guy, there was a reporter who came to Phoenix and he was yelling at me for having worked in the diamond business. Of all things. Like, now I'm a bad person because I worked in the diamond business.

And I'm like, to be frank, in the early days we didn't know about blood diamonds. We really didn't know. The people in the business didn't know.

Later we found out. Right? So, then he's like, you should have quit the diamond business when you found out some of the diamonds were coming from Africa and were used to support revolutions or something like that.

And then I said from the first day I joined the diamond business they were doing sneaky stuff in the diamond business. They had accounts in Switzerland. They had, you know, all kinds of sneaky stuff.

Then I asked my Lama, I said, I had this, what do you call it? In meditation I had a, something happened. And I know I had to work in the diamond business because of that meditation.

Many years before I went into the diamond business. But I knew I had to work in the diamond business. Then when I went to the diamond business I asked my Lama, they're doing sneaky stuff.

What should I do? Should I quit? And he's like, stay.

Stay and then change them. And I said, well how long? That could take a long time.

It took 15 years of working on those people to change a lot of the policies. But I did. We did it.

By the end it was a totally clean thing and they understood why. But it took 15 years of, what do you call it, inside work, more. And so I think the example, why I bring it up is the example you're giving.

Hang on, Lama phone. Okay, good. Why I say that is somebody like Steve Jobs might have had a bigger thing in mind.

He might have had some mission in mind. And maybe we don't know. Because I know the people who worked with me for 15 years didn't know what I was up to.

I was keeping it secret. I was trying to change the whole company. But it took 15 years.

So we have to be careful about why is somebody doing something? We don't know. Say again?

Oh no, but I mean anybody. We don't know that someone else doesn't have a bigger plan that they can't tell us. Having said that, we have to do the right thing as with the information we have.

See what I mean? If the information I have is that his phone requires hurting people in Africa, then I should write letters to Apple and I should complain and like that. Then he might have a larger plan in mind.

Okay, I'll tell you this story. I heard this one in Dharamsala. This is an old story.

There was a Buddha image in Dharamsala between the library and His Highness' residence. So we used to walk a lot between them. And there was a Buddha image there.

Somebody put it on a stone. And then one day it rained. And this coolie, this guy with a, what do you call it?

A dhoti. Dhoti means a towel that they wear. He has towel and sandals.

And he's walking up to the upper Dharamsala. And he walks by the Buddha image and he says, this is really improper that a Buddha image is getting rained on. So he thought, if I take off my dhoti and cover it, it will be even more offensive to people.

So he put his sandals above the image like that. In India, your sandals are very profane things, dirty things. So then the rain stopped, the sun came out, and this other guy is walking up the path.

And he saw somebody put dirty, muddy sandals on the Buddha's head. And he's like, ah! And he threw them off.

And then they say both of them collected good karma. Obviously, right? So both of them collected good karma.

So I'm trying to stop Steve Jobs because he's importing some metal that hurts people. And he may have a grand plan to help the people of that country that I don't know about. And we both collect good karma.

I try to stop him, and he tries to stop me. And we're both collecting good karma. It depends on your motivation.

It depends on what you're trying to do. Is that okay? Is that helpful?

[Говорящий 2] (35:16 - 35:25)
So... For example, in California, legal marijuana, right? Most of the growers, I don't know, I assume they sell a lot more than legal.

[Говорящий 1] (35:25 - 35:51)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's a mixed karma then. That's a mixed karma.

Then they are hurting people with the illegal marijuana. Depends on their motivation. And they are helping people with the legal marijuana.

So both. They are getting both karmas. They call it mixed white and black.

Let's finish, okay? Let's finish this thing. I'm sorry it's so hot and sticky.