«Дар освобождения», курс 9 «Семь дверей медитации», занятие 1

[Speaker 1]
So this is, I think, a 12 or 14 year program to go through a text called NAMDRA LAG CHENG. Do you have that first image, Jigme? It's a scripture, I think.

It's the first one in the list. It's the very first one in the list. It says page of GIFT, Tibetan, 01A, yeah.

So that's the text that we'll be studying. It's about a thousand pages long. It's enlightenment from A to Z.

My teacher taught it to me for about 25 or 30 years. He went through it three times. The author is, are you okay?

Is your, is 01B. Is it, Jigme, is it not in order? Click on NAME at the top.

Click on NAME. It's okay. Yeah.

This is the author of the text, Pabongka Rinpoche. He lived 1878 to 1941. He was the teacher of the teacher of the current Dalai Lama.

So he was Thuchya Rinpoche's teacher. He gave these teachings in, I believe it was 1921 in Lhasa. He met my teacher when my teacher was quite young.

I think he was about 17 or 18. And he was giving talks at Sara Monastery in Lhasa. My teacher at the time was Kunye or Nyerpa.

Nyerpa means he had to get the food to the event and that was his job. So it's kind of a thankless job as those of you who are doing it know. And so my teacher's job for that event was to make sure that, I don't know, like 3,000 monks got fed every day.

And he was a goofball up until that day. And then he met Pabongka Rinpoche in the kitchen and Pabongka Rinpoche grabbed him and said, this one is special. And he touched his head to his head and then something happened to him.

And he became a high Geshe. They had a competition of 10,000 monks in Lhasa culminating in a competition in front of the young Dalai Lama in the Potala Palace and my teacher won. And so something happened on the day that he met.

Something changed on the day he met Pabongka Rinpoche. Pabongka Rinpoche's student was Trijang Rinpoche, O2A. Jigme, it should be lining up.

If you click name at the top of the, yeah, there you go. This is Trijang Rinpoche who's one of the two tutors of the current Dalai Lama. He was a young incarnated Lama who went to these talks.

I believe he would have been about 20 at the time of these talks, 20 to 22 years old. And they didn't have tape recorders. They didn't have electricity.

And he was a human tape recorder. And he took down notes from the teachings that Pabongka Rinpoche gave. And he spent a large part of his life organizing those notes into the text that we're studying.

So it's because of the Dalai Lama's teacher who is my teacher's root Lama that we have this record of the teachings that were given in Bhasa in the 1920s. They were carved onto blocks in the lifetime of Pabongka Rinpoche, which was very unusual in Tibet. Normally you have to be dead for 300 years before they carve your stuff onto blocks.

But people were so in awe of this particular teaching that it was like printed immediately, meaning they carved it in about four years into blocks. And it became a very popular text to teach. There's a nice, I think the next image, O2B, that's an image of Chittamiputra.

He did escape to India in 1959. He spent the last 21 years of his life in India. And I just like his face and his face makes me happy.

And it just looks like a lot of love. This is after he lost his country. This is after he went from being like the second highest person in the country to a refugee.

And I just think the joy that he kept and he retained in his lifetime is sort of a testament to the study that we're going to do. Then he taught this text to my teacher, which is the next slide. We're trying to do this, what do you call it, audio-visual thing.

So it's kind of shaky tonight, but we'll get better at it. I like this particular picture of him. There are lots of other pictures of him dressed in robes and stuff.

He didn't like to be seen out of robes. He had to take a passport picture one day in Lakewood, New Jersey. I think this is about 1975 and I was his attendant for 25 years.

And so I stole the picture from the passport company. I just like it. It's very much his energy.

He was kind of stern and demanding. And he taught this text. He thought this text was the most important thing for anyone who wanted to get enlightened.

He thought this was the most important text. And he taught it continuously during the 30 years he was in this country. Okay, so we're going to start.

We've reached the fifth day of the original teaching. I'm going to teach it the old way. When I'm on tour, I have to teach business people, bankers, all kinds of strange people.

Communist Party members last time in Beijing. And I don't really get a chance to teach the traditional way. But I would like to teach this text in the traditional way.

So you don't get a thousand people coming, but you sort of get hardcore people coming. So maybe three or four times a year, I would enjoy teaching the old way. Which is sort of demanding and precise and more, I think, deeper.

So we'll go through it like that. We are filming it for people who requested it in other countries. I think especially China.

People have requested a record of the 14 years teaching in DVD. So we're trying to upgrade the quality of the filming. And maybe somebody will come and put your face in the film and you have to try to wake up and look intelligent.

Because I thought it's just boring to have a, what do you call, talking head for 14 years. And so we're going to try to have more graphics. It's hard because this tradition is two and a half thousand years old and there's not a lot of photos.

Of people and events. There are just some carvings and stuff. But we'll try to make it as lively as possible.

Just for the filming. So here we go, fifth day. ,NYING RAB BAG PA'I BRAL DEN, ,BAR PA LUS DUG GI GSUNGS LAS, So you can kind of follow the, Nyingbo is going to follow the Tibetan with you.

So this is the traditional Tibetan text. Tibetan has a lot of silent letters like in the English word, I know what to do. I-K-N-O-W.

So it would look like canal or something. So just be aware, Tibetan is like that. Then you can kind of follow it if you ignore the Ks and stuff.

,NYING RAB BAG PA'I, On the fifth day. So this is a big deal. We're starting the fifth day of the original teaching.

We're about three years into the text. We are starting on the fifth day of teaching. And that's the way it's going to be.

,NYING RAB BAG PA'I BRAL DEN, ,BAR PA LUS DUG GI GSUNGS LAS, By the way, he taught maybe 10 to 12 hours a day without a microphone to 3,000, 4,000 people. So that's the old way. We're not going to do that.

,BRAL DEN, ,BRAL DEN means glorious, Srivant, Sri Mantra in Sanskrit. ,BAR PA means Arya, someone who has seen emptiness directly. And LUS DUG means Nagarjuna.

So GSUNGS LAS means from his words or from his teachings. So I'm going to put up a picture of Nagarjuna. Ta-da.

I like this one. There are lots of sort of wimpy modern ones that make him look like a wimp. I kind of like this one.

The snakes on his head are Nagas. These are serpent beings. I think they're equivalent to dragons in Northern Hemisphere mythology, European mythology.

Because these Nagas are said to like to collect shiny things and hoard precious gems and gold and sit on them, you know? Much as dragons are said to have been. I think they're probably the same creature as dragons in the Northern Hemisphere.

And so they would also collect shiny books and great books, classics, and they would take them to their lairs and they would just sit on them for several centuries. So a lot of the books of Buddhism that got lost in this world over centuries, in the seven centuries after the Buddha lived, lots of books had gotten lost. Copies were said to be in the lairs of Nagas underground.

So this Buddhist saint undertook to go try to find them in the same way that Scott and Orit and I went to the St. Petersburg Library last week and tried to recover the 140,000 books they're sitting on, Tibetan books. We did pretty well. I think it's going to work.

So anyway, he gained mastery over the Nagas. Arjuna is the great warrior of the Bhagavad Gita who speaks to Krishna. And so they called him Naga Arjuna, the warrior who can control the Nagas.

So in the picture you see Nagas. Sometimes when the weather was hot, he would command the Nagas to put their bodies over his head and spread out their hoods. So he would, it's like his umbrella, his sunshade.

So that's the kind of mastery he had over the Nagas. So he's called Nagarjuna. So we have a quotation here of Omkar Rinpoche in starting his fifth day of teachings.

Each day when he starts a teaching, he will quote some classic scripture to sort of get the audience in the mood of what he's going to talk about. So here we have a quotation from Arya Nagarjuna. This particular quotation comes from a book called Shitting.

Say shitting. In my own home, the people are the laziest of the 23 countries I go to. Anyway, in Sanskrit it's surlekha.

Say surlekha. It means a letter to a friend. And this is one of the great books of Nagarjuna.

It's an epistle similar to the epistles of Paul. He was a great letter writer to great kings and he would advise great kings. So Shitting is a famous book of poetry addressed to a king and it's fantastic.

Ken Rinpoche and one of his students translated one of the only commentaries on that, which is by Randhawa, who's a teacher of Je Tsongkapa. GANG ZHIG ZER NUS RIN CHEN BRTRAD PA YID NGES RGYUD CHAGS PAR RGYIS PA DE BA'I KYANG GANG ZHIG MI RUG BSKYED NAS SDIG PA'I LAS RGYIS PA DE NI CHE RAB LUM PA LAG GANG ZHIG means anybody. ZER NUS means a golden vessel.

A pot made of pure gold. ZER NUS RIN CHEN BRTRAD PA means studded with jewels. BRTRAD PA YID NGES RGYUD is the old word for RGYUD PA and RGYUD PA means vomit.

RGYUD PA CHAGS PAR RGYIS PA who smears vomit in a golden vessel. So somebody gives you a bowl made of pure gold and then you smear vomit in it. RGYIS PA DE BA'I KYANG That person would be called a fool who kept vomit in a golden vessel.

But GANG ZHIG MI RUG BSKYED NAS but a person who was born as a human and SDIG PA'I LAS means who committed bad karma. RGYIS PA means ancient word for committed. DE NI CHE RAB LUM PA LAG would be even more of a fool.

Someone who took a golden vessel and smeared it with vomit is a fool. But someone who has gained this vessel, this temple and uses it to do negative karma is even greater fool. That's Nagarjuna.

That's Arya Nagarjuna. I cut out the whole text for you, but I don't think it's too much, I think. That would take us 20 years.

He goes on to say, NA DANG DGA' DANG CI BA'I DUS BYUNG NA MI RUG CHOS ZANG RGYUR KYANG PHAN PA MED And then when you come to the end of your life, you regret the way you spent your time because you wasted this vessel. And then he goes on like that. ZHES LUNG PHRAG DE KUN LUNG SPYOD PAR DOR DU ZHIG GSUNGS The big words here are KUN LUNG SPYOD PAR DOR DU ZHIG GSUNGS KUN LUNG SPYOD PAR means, he tried to put the fear of God into his audience so they would listen for the right reasons.

You're going to get old. You're going to die. You have been blessed with the vessel of a human body.

Don't put shit in it, is what it says. Don't waste it. Use it for something good.

DU ZHIG GSUNGS KUN LUNG DANG KUN SPYOD LAS PAR BSAM STAB NAS Try to imagine, try to think of having come here in order to serve the world. You have come to this teaching for these 10 days to make you better equipped to help the world. And you can say that kind of thing.

I want to help the world. I want to save the world. But the people who are going on tour to many, many countries, I think we can see that it's possible to help the whole world.

The internet is shrinking the world and we are just constantly touring the world. I think for us, the borders of the world are dropping. And it is possible, if you study these things well, that you could literally be of service to the whole world.

KUN SPYOD LAS PAR BSAM STAB means, imagine what you could be and who you could serve. Also, you don't have to go to Bulgaria to serve the world. The best way to serve is to become an example.

We were in Russia, they call it ZHIG RBO'I PRIMIR. ZHIG RBO'I PRIMIR means a living example. If you study these things, you master yoga, you master meditation, you understand how to alter reality, and you do it.

And you're obviously a very happy person. One of the Bulgarians came up to me and said, all your people are smilish, smilish people. And I said, yes, we're from Smiland.

And they were all, we want to be smilish also. I said, okay, you can be smilish also. And it means they were attracted to the people who came.

We usually take 10 or 15 teachers with us. I think there were 10 or 12 teachers on this tour. And they are ZHIG RBO'I PRIMIR.

They are a living example of the teachings. And then people are attracted and people want to know what you're doing to make you smilish. Okay?

And that's a good, what do you call it, advertisement. That's how you save the world. You become a smilish person.

You join the smilish clan. And then people who see you, we're on airplanes and stewardess has come up to us and says, where are you guys from? What do you do?

How can I join you? It's like that. It's very strange.

So I think the best way, what he's saying at this point in the text is, learn the text, practice the text, become a happy person that other people will be attracted to and will ask you, what the heck are you doing that makes you so happy? And then happiness will spread. LAS PA SROG TAB SEMS PAR ZHUGS SEMS PAR ZHUGS means I beg you to listen.

And he uses the honorific for listen. SEMS is only used by a lower person to a higher person, but Pabongka Rinpoche is using it to us. ZHUGS means to make a request from a very low person to a very high person.

So he's flipping the tables around and he's saying, I beg you, your honorable self, would you deign to listen with that kind of vision in your mind that I would like to be a living example for the world? He's saying, please keep that in mind as you listen. On this, the fifth day.

SEMS PAS CHOS NI, SEMS BYAS CHOS NI So what are you supposed to listen to? What's the dharma we're going to listen to? KHYAL DENG KYI SKYE BU SANGS RGYAS KYI SA BRDZOD PA'I ZHES SOGS Then he went into the SAB BYAS.

You got that, Nyingpo? SAB BYAS SAB BYAS Right, yeah. You see it?

The beginning of the second paragraph, 92B. SOGS SAB BYAS So SAB BYAS in Tibetan, those of you trying to learn Tibetan, which is Nick and Nick, there's a Tibetan word, SAB BYAS, which means an outline. And it's one of the only Tibetan words where you pronounce the B prefix letter.

So it's pronounced SAB BYAS, SAB BYAS. So SAB BYAS means to run down an outline of a teaching, all the subjects of a teaching. So KHYAL DENG KYI SKYE BU means those people who have enough good karma.

SANGS RGYAS KYI SA BRDZOD PA'I who need a path to go to enlightenment. Dot, dot, dot. He doesn't finish the sentence because he's pulling it out of Lam Rim, classic Lam Rim texts.

SA BRDZOD PA'I SHES SO SA CHE BRTAN PA'I PAR Then he went through the outline down to that section. SNGAR LTAR LA means he, and he, it's a tradition in our lineage to review what you learned the day before or three months ago. So I mean, ideally in the teaching, the Lama should review some of the main subjects of the outline that came up to now in the teaching.

SNGAR LTAR, we're going to do it, so don't worry. SHES PA, now he's reached the fourth category of the whole teaching, of the great teaching on the Lam Rim. Lam Rim means, is the genre of this scripture.

Lam Rim means an idiot's guide to enlightenment. It's enlightenment from A to Z. It's a simplified, it's a simplified presentation of the entire 25 years of the Geshe course.

The five great subjects are shrunk into the Lam Rim teachings and they are complete. They are Buddhism from A to Z. There's nothing in Buddhism which is not included in this text.

SHES PA, fourth category. BDAG PA NGOS KYI BLO MA JI LTAR GYIS PA'I RIM PA LA NYID How do we actually guide a disciple to enlightenment with the actual teaching? BDAG PA NGOS means the actual teaching.

BLO MA means disciple. JI LTAR GYIS PA'I RIM PA means there will be two parts to the whole book about how do you guide a person to enlightenment. First, DANG PO GZHAN YIN RTEN GSOL GYI SBYOR BA LA DANG PO GZHAN YIN RTEN GSOL This is the first and the greatest teaching of all of Buddhism, of all of Buddhism.

GZHAN YIN RTEN GSOL Say GZHAN YIN. GZHAN YIN. RTEN GSOL.

RTEN GSOL. GZHAN YIN. GZHAN YIN.

RTEN GSOL. GZHAN YIN means a spiritual guide, your personal spiritual teacher, whoever it may be. I'm your scripture teacher.

I'm functioning as your scripture teacher. Then you have to find your heart teacher. And it could be your mom.

Somebody told me it was their dog. I have no reason to doubt that. You have to find your own heart teacher.

And then you need to know how to relate to them so that they can get you enlightened. And that subject is the most important of all of Buddhism. And so that's the first subject that they teach in the Idiot's Guide to Buddhism.

So we've reached that section on GZHAN YIN RTEN GSOL. RTEN means, it's a very delicate word. RTEN means, it's related to another word, B-R-T-E-N.

This one is what? How's it spelled? B-S-T-E-N.

BHA'O SA TA TA LTAR LDAN PO'I DE NAR BSTAN. BHA'O SA TA TA LTAR LDAN PO'I DE NAR BSTAN. C-A-T-K.

BSTAN is different from B-R-T-E-N. You know B-R-T-E-N from BSTAN BRAL, meaning dependent origination. So B-R-T-E-N means to depend.

BSTAN means to rely upon, in the sense of being cured, like to rely upon medicine or to rely upon a physician. So BSTAN, B-S-T-E-N, is a very, very rare and special word meaning to take yourself to a high physician who can cure the illness of lifetimes. The mental illness of lifetimes is BSTAN.

So GZHAN YIN RTEN GSOL means how do you do it? How do you take yourself to a spiritual guide who is going to heal countless lifetimes of mental illness? And that's the subject of the lamrim.

That's the first and greatest rimba of the lamrim, the stages of the lamrim. How do you relate to a spiritual teacher in the proper way so that they can enlighten you? Because half of it has to come from you.

If you BSTAN them in the wrong way, you don't get healed. If you don't relate to a physician in the correct way, it doesn't matter how good the physician is. If you don't follow their advice properly, you can't get healed.

So the first section of the lamrim is how do you follow their advice properly? How do you relate to your teacher? GZHAN YIN RTEN GSOL.

To relate to your teacher properly, first you have to visualize what it is to relate to your teacher properly. Then you relate to your teacher properly. So first you imagine, you try to get in your mind what it is to relate to a teacher properly.

And then you go do it. So first you might do it in a meditation to imagine how to relate to your teacher. And then when you're ready, when you've meditated on it enough, then you would go out and go to their house and cook for them or whatever it's going to be.

You would take yourself to them. But first you have to do it, first it's a meditation practice that you visualize how you're going to take yourself to your Lama. And before you can do that meditation, you need to prepare the mind for meditation.

So there's three steps in how to take yourself to your teacher. One, prepare yourself for a meditation on how to take yourself to your teacher. Number two, meditate on how to behave around your teacher.

And then number three, what? Go to them and actually do it. But those are the traditional steps.

Prepare for the meditation, do the meditation, and then actually go to their house and be with them and learn from them. So we're on the preparation. We're on the preparation.

It has six parts. GZHOR CHOS GRUB. Say GZHOR CHOS GRUB.

These are the six famous preparations for a meditation session, centering upon your teacher. You could also use the GZHOR CHOS for other meditations, like on impermanence or on compassion or exchanging self and others. You see, you can use the same preparation, but you should know the classic preparation for meditation.

Meditating without these six steps, I was, what do you call it? I was having a lot of meetings up at my house during the Olympics. And so I don't let people come to my house because I want to stay sane.

So I have a little garden and a tiny little house. And when I have to meet people, I go to the sports bar down the hill. And there's 12 TVs and it's a little distracting, but it's fun.

Anyway, they were showing the Olympics, which I don't get to see because I don't have a TV for my whole life. But it was captivating. And I kept saying, when are they going to swim the race?

And the announcer was like, now they are stretching their legs. And then you're like, they make you wait for an hour and you watch them stretching and warming up. And then the actual swimming race only takes a minute or two minutes.

The whole lifetime of preparation is finished in two minutes in the pool at the Olympics. But you can't swim in the Olympics without warming up for a couple hours before. So there's the same for meditation.

You must warm up. You must go through the traditional warmup. You can't sit down and meditate cold.

You can't run a race cold. You got to know how to warm up. If you don't learn how to warm up, you will never be a good meditator.

The six preparations help you to be a good meditator. But Geshe-la, the name of this teaching this time was the seven doors of meditation. The seven doors of meditation are only one of the six.

Is that all right? You okay with that? There will be six practices for preparing for meditation.

One of them involves seven parts. All right then. By the way, the quotation that he alludes to, those of you who care about the Tibetan, where it says, ,GAL DENG KYI SKYES BU SANGS RGYAS TSAR BRGYOD PA, comes from, you can find it in Delam, and you can also find it in Marthi.

Marthi, what is Marthi? Red instruction. Red instruction, meaning when a surgical teacher in a college teaches their students, they dissect a body together, and it bleeds all over the place or something.

I guess it's fresh. And then that's called a Marthi. That's called a red, it's called a red instruction.

It means to take the guts out of a spiritual teaching and say, here's the inner guts of the whole thing. But it's kind of a weird name. So there was a Marthi written by the second penchant lamrim.

We'll talk about that. But he's quoting that book, and he's going to do that a lot. He's quoting how many great lamrim texts?

Eight. You had that already. There's a joke in the monastery.

The older monk says to the, the younger monk's reciting some, he's showing off how well he memorized some texts, and the older monk will say, I forgot more texts than you will ever learn. Okay. Tenso jor la jorway chodukle.

So there are six preliminaries. Nyur lam marthi kap. Nyur lam means a quick path.

Marthi means that red instruction. Kap. When we teach the steps to enlightenment, using that particular lamrim as our model, which was written by the second penchant lamrim, I think, let me check.

Yeah, Losang Yeshe. I think we have a Losang Yeshe there, Jigme. That's His Holiness, the second penchant lamrim.

There was a book carved in Tibet just as Tibet fell, the year before Tibet fell, in the Dalai Lama's palace. A special edition of the 8,000 verses of the Perfection of Wisdom was carved. And in that edition, they put most of the lamas of our lineage.

And I don't know how realistic the faces are. Some of them are suspiciously similar, the same, but that's about all we have. And I went and dug them out for you.

SBYOR BA CHOS GRUB GA SNGON DU BYUNG BA LTAR So in the tradition of the second penchant lamrim, we will first go through all six preliminary to meditation. GRUB means six. GRUB GA means all six, all six.

GRUB GA SNGON DU BYUNG BA LTAR GZHON NA GSUM KHA SANGS GZHUS ZIN GSUM means three of the six preliminaries. KHA SANGS means before, yesterday, in day four. GZHUS ZIN, ZIN means finished.

I already did it. That's the past tense, if you care, of ZIN, which means to hope. ZIN means I did it already.

We already covered the first three. So I'm going to take you through, what did I say? GSUM KHA SANGS GZHON NA Let's go through the six.

You've had three. You're learning for tonight and this week. First one was?

Yeah, clean your room and set up an altar. Number two, make offerings which have two qualities. They are arranged in a lovely manner and they are YOD MED.

YOD MED, YOD. YOD MED means to cheat somebody. YOD MED means, yeah, which have been obtained properly.

The money that was used to buy the offering, the orange or the flower that you put on your altar in the morning should have been purchased with money that you earned honestly. And it should be pretty. It should be arranged in a pretty way.

I made a joke. See this, do you see this painting? Can you see it?

I asked, I went around asking all my students, do you think this is like a Belgian painter or do you think it's a French or Italian? So what do you think? This is an iPhone photo of my kitchen table.

And I have a big garden, which I grew just for the purpose of putting stuff on my altar. But that's my first pomegranate and I have like 12 kinds of roses. And it's very beautiful.

You should do it. It's a very nice practice. You grow the flowers that you put on your altar.

So that's the second. What's the third one? Yeah, sit down on your meditation cushion in the seven-point posture of Vairochana.

And with an exceptionally virtuous state of mind, go through practices such as taking refuge, which basically means thinking of ways to deal with your problems in your life. And that involves realizing that they come from you. All the irritating people you ever met are coming from you.

To understand that and to deal with them properly from that viewpoint is taking refuge. Then bodhichitta is what? If I study this stuff and if I learn how to have a proper daily practice and how to relate to a heart teacher, then I will join the smilish clan.

And people will admire me and they'll ask me, how did you get that way? And then I will help them. And that thinking, smilish people thinking is bodhichitta.

To seek to become a smilender so that you can change other people's lives is bodhichitta. So you think that over. You sit down with the seven points of correct meditation posture and you go into a smilender fantasy, vision.

Number four is going to be called SOGS SHING SEMS BDAB. Say it, SOGS SHING SEMS BDAB. So number four is what we're starting tonight and we'll probably take most of the week.

A vision, going into a vision of the lamas of the entire lineage. Going into a vision of the lamas of the entire lineage. And that vision is called a garden of karma.

It's called a garden of karma, SOGS SHING. I will explain why. But the subject for the next 10 days, next 10 classes is SOGS SHING.

It's called the garden of karma. That's step number four. Step number five is the seven doors to meditation, which we will probably get to in Guadalajara, I think.

And then sixth is how to request blessings from holy beings. We'll talk about that. All right, those are the six preparations for the Olympics.

You don't try to meditate without doing those six because it won't work. Je Tsongkapa Chenpo, now he's quoting Je Tsongkapa. Okay, Je Tsongkapa Chenpo, ,GNYEN NA TZIG MI SEMS, ,SAM NA DON MI DGOS, ,GOM NA RGYUD LA MI DGE BA'I, ,BLO THU BZHIN DU CHUNG BA'I THOS SU, ,BZHIN GYIS THOS LA BSTAN PA DMAN NGA YIN, ,GSUM PA LTAR So now he's quoting Tsongkapa, Je Tsongkapa.

And Je Tsongkapa said, and I looked it up for you, okay, which I'm always going to do because then I can go see what else he said in the same context and we can take 20 years instead of 10. I like it. We have 13,000 texts input over the last 25 years by our teams in India, in the refugee camps.

They are typing in the classics of Buddhism. They have finished 13,000 volumes of texts, which is about a million pages. It can be searched in about 10 seconds.

So we were trying to impress the Russians in St. Petersburg, who are the greatest Tibetologists in the world for the last 100 years. And we said, check this out, man, and give me any Tibetan quotation. And he gives it, and we go, ,DE LA DANG, and he goes, ,PHOB And he's like, can I get that?

And we gave it away. We gave it to him for free, 25 years of work for free. And they were really happy.

Okay, anyway. So I went and got it for you. It's from the LAM RIM CHUNG BA, which is the shorter or the briefer presentation of Je Tsongkapa.

What's the big one called? LAM RIM CHUNG BO What's the medium one called? LAM RIM DING Say DING.

LAM RIM DING DING means middle length. LAM RIM CHUNG BO means the greatest book ever written in Tibet. Just a great presentation on LAM RIM.

LAM RIM CHUNG BA is the shorter one. And that's where this quotation is from. NYES NA'I TSIG MI SEMS means we listen to the words, but we don't grasp them.

We're not able to hold the words. BSAM NA DON MI GO We contemplate, but we don't get it. BSKOM NA RGYUD LA MI SKYES And then we meditate, but those realizations are not born in our heart.

LO'I THOS GZHIN DU CHUNG BA'I The spiritual power of our minds is small. We don't have much strength, spiritual strength in our minds. CHUNG BA'I DUS SU At such a time, right?

DUS SU. SHING GI LTOS LA BSTAN You must take yourself to the garden. Take yourself to the garden.

MEN NGAG YIN That's my advice. If you find that you try to memorize, but it's not coming, and you try to think about it, but you don't get it, or you try to meditate about it, but it doesn't become part of your being, then go to the garden. Go to the garden.

That's the whole practice for these 10 days. It's called the garden. And we'll go through that.

Here's the whole context. We're going off our book to another, the original book by Je Tsongkapa. PAS NA ZHING SA BZHIN PA ZHIG LA SA BON BDEB DUS SU MA BTAG PAR DUS PA BRTEN DE SBYOGS NI PHOS PA LTAR DI'I PHYI DE LAS THAMS CAD BYUNG BA'I ZHING SA BSTAN PA If you have a beautiful field, but you don't plant anything in it, if you don't plant seeds in it, DI'I PHYI DE LAS THAMS CAD BYUNG BA'I ZHING SA BSTAN PA DU BZHI THAMS CAD DU RGYUN BYAS MED PAR DE LEGS KYI SEMS DTAB PAS There are fields, there are gardens in which you can plant the flowers of your own enlightenment. You must use the plow of faith in those fields.

And this is all described in the sutras. This is the original by Je Tsongkapa. That's where he pulled that quotation from.

So of course I went to go look for the sutra, which if you have it all on the computer, you can ask, you can say, plowing the fields with faith, and then you'll find it eventually. I went and found the sutra, which he doesn't mention, but it's called BHAG PA GRANGS SONGS RGYAS PA'I ZHUGS PA ZHES BYA BA THEG PA CHEN PO'I SDOM The Mahayana Sutra, which was requested by the Siddhi whose name was Gyepa. And this is a sutra that was requested by a non-Buddhist sage, by a Hindu sage.

His name in Tibetan is Gyepa, which means broad or wide, like Sangye, right? Broad or wide. His hoiness's name is Gyatso, right?

Wide lake, which means ocean, which in Mongolian is Dala, Dalai Lama. So anyway, Gyepa means wide. The Sanskrit for that is Vyasa.

Vyasa. So I want to show you Vyasa. Ta-da!

We're going to get used to this thing. This is Vyasa, okay? Veda Vyasa wrote many of the great classics of Hinduism.

He's credited even with some of the Vedas. And the Mahabharata, he wrote the Mahabharata. He wrote the Bhagavad Gita down.

Okay, Vyasa. There are something like 62 Vyasas. Vyasa is said to still be alive.

He's of a special clan of people who live forever or something. So I wrote some of my Hindu friends, Shankar from the, what do you call it? Sivananda Center in the Bahamas and the great teachers there.

And then they asked their teachers in India, I said, did Vyasa ever study with the Buddha or did Vyasa ever ask the Buddha a question and was there ever an exchange between them? And they said, we don't remember. But to me, it's sort of interesting.

It'd be interesting to follow up on it and to study it. But apparently, according to the Kangyur, there was an encounter between the author of the Bhagavad Gita, the Mahabharata and the Vedas and Lord Buddha. So that quotation about plowing the field of your Lama with your faith, came from a discussion between Lord Buddha and Vyasa.

If you care, but nobody cares. CI RTEN NA, BYAS NAS KYI SEMS KYI ZHING MA PO'I GYUR CIG DE LTAR LHA'I PHUNG MA DE DAG GI GUR TE PHYI MA SOGS When these words were spoken, all the divine goddesses surrounding them began to weep. SKAD DGAG ZHING THAR RING PO NYID NAS BSLAB PA YAS KYANG STE They choked up, they couldn't speak, and they stretched out their hands toward the Buddha.

MED DO LTOR And they threw flowers toward the Buddha. And they yelled and they cried out, SKYE MA, all wonders. DUP PA, this is so beautiful.

LAS PAR BYED PA'I CI RTEN MI CI RTEN DU SONG STE He has come to the world. And with the plow of faith, he has plowed the field of goodness. That's the original from the sutra where Vyasa speaks to the Buddha.

I think it'd be interesting to study that sutra in light of, and see if there's any clues from the Bhagavad Gita there or something like that, in your free time. All right. Ted Lemon used to say, in my copious free time.

We'll do it. We'll go for another 10 minutes, okay? Like I'm in no big hurry to go home.

I'm sorry if you were. RANG RES RNAMS LAS KYI BYAS PA THUGS PA RNAMS PA'I THOS PA BYED KYANG ZHIG PA ZIN Then Pabongka Rinpoche is going to explain the quotation by Je Tsongkhapa, which was based on the sutra. Okay.

RANG RES RNAMS People like us. And as I've said before, Pabongka Rinpoche is being kind. He refers to himself and us in the same words.

People like us guys, which is like the Dalai Lama saying, people like you and me. LAS KYI BYAS PA LAS KYI BYAS PA means karmic obscurations. Obscurations which come from our old karma.

I think there's an obscuration there. Jiggy? I'm not sure.

Pay attention now. Yeah. So I thought to mix in some modern pictures.

Rebecca's helped me with these. We're going to look for some video also, just to make things more interesting. But it's like that.

Your karma, that's a DIPA, okay? DIPA means like a fog or a karmic block that doesn't allow you to see something clearly. THUG PO means very thick fog.

NON DPA'I means we are oppressed by the thick fog of our karmic obstacles. And therefore, THUG PA BYAS, we can go to a class and we can listen to the subject, but SIG MI BZIN, we're not able to grasp it totally. It can also mean we're not able to memorize it.

SAM KYANG, we go home and we think about the teaching. BRDZON GYIS BZHIN MI DGOS But we don't understand the point of it correctly. You were learning HAKO MIN GDUG.

So in scripture, you cut the HA, and you just said KHO. So KHO means, MI KHO means you don't get it. DGOMS KYANG, even though you DGOM, meditate, RTOGS PA RGYUD LA MI KHYAD You don't get realizations happening within you.

MI KHYAD BAR U THUG Say U THUG. U THUG. U THUG means, it's very colloquial.

U THUG means desperate. You are desperate. U THUG DE SKABS STIR We are desperate.

We go to class, we don't get it. We go home to think about it, we fall asleep. We meditate on it, nothing happens.

U THUG, we are U THUG. We're like, what do you call it? Up the creek without a paddle, something like that.

That's U THUG. U THUG means that. U THUG means like you run out of gas and you go look for the gas can and you loaned it to your friend last week, and then you're U THUG.

U THUG. The difficulty of this particular text is that it was taught in a colloquial style to the population of Lhasa, not just monks. And he got in trouble for doing that.

It was one of the few times that a high Lama attempted to give a teaching to hundreds of common people. And so he used a lot of colloquialisms, which makes the text extremely difficult to teach or to read. You've got very ancient words mixed in with, hey dude, like you're up the creek, you get it, man?

So, okay. All right, U THUG. U THUG PA'I SKABS STIR ZHING PHYIR PAR CAN LA SOGS PA BDEBS ZHING We have to beg.

We have to go to the garden and beg for blessings. ZHING means garden. We'll talk more about it.

BDEBS ZHING. SOGS BSAKS GRIB BYANG Say SOGS BSAKS GRIB BYANG SOGS BSAKS GRIB BYANG Before you meditate, you have to SOGS BSAKS GRIB BYANG. This is two things you have to do.

SOGS BSAKS means you have to collect new good karma so that the meditation goes well. GRIB BYANG means you have to get rid of your old bad karmas so the meditation goes well. Anytime you meditate, right before you meditate, you should SOGS BSAKS GRIB BYANG.

You should do something to clean out your bad seeds and something to collect new seeds. I think people who go on the DCI tours, who get on a plane and go 24 hours to Moscow to sit in front of some hostile people, the first night's always rough in Moscow. Most of the audience in Moscow is required to come by their company.

So they're like, you know? So you crack them. You work on them for five days.

By the end, they're all crying and begging you to come back, right? And you collect really good karma. Then you come home.

And if you go to the movies, you see the best movie you ever saw in your life. If you read a book, it's like the best science fiction book you ever read. You see your old friends and everyone.

You go to Diamond Mountain and everyone's happy. This is because you SOGS BSAKS GRIB BYANG by going on the tour. And it wears off about two weeks later, right?

So anything important you're going to do, you got to do it right after you have some heavy good karma, like going on a tour. If you're going to meditate, you should collect some heavy good karma and then meditate really fast before it wears off. And the meditation will...

I'm not kidding. The meditation will go really, really well. That's called SOGS BSAKS GRIB BYANG.

Give me another five minutes and we'll take a break. So GRIB BYANG CHEN NA If you do it, NYER DU GNAS DU GRO BA YIN MA MA HAR TA MAR MA HAR TA Say MAR MA. MAR MA HAR TA It will strike...

What do you call it? The mortal... Literally, it means to strike the mortal blow.

MAR MA means mortal in Sanskrit. HAR TA means to strike. The word gun comes from the same root.

MA MA HAR TA means... If you SOGS BSAKS GRIB BYANG and then you meditate, it will stab you in the heart. And your meditation will do something amazing.

So we have to learn how to SOGS BSAKS GRIB BYANG just before we meditate. Before you have a chance to get angry at whoever you're irritated at this week. All right.

DE YANG BYAS TSUN BYAMS PA'I YANG LA SONGS SKABS PA CHEN POS DE YANG BYAS TSUN So Je Tsongkapa, who founded our lineage and who was the teacher of the first Dalai Lama, and he lived about 600 years ago, his own teacher was an angel, was a deity called Manjushri. BYAMS PA'I YANG RTOGS PA NYON DU RGYUD LA SKYE BA'I THABS KHANGS LA BAS DGOS ZHUGS PAR He asked, Je Tsongkapa asked his heart teacher, who was a divine being, Manjushri, the god of wisdom. And he said to him, if I really want to get realizations fast, what's the best thing I can do?

What should I be doing if I want realizations fast? Then Manjushri said to him, LAMA YIDAM YOD MED DU BYAS Say LAMA YIDAM YOD MED DU BYAS You must see that your heart teacher is none less than the Buddha himself. All the Buddhas.

In fact, superior to. Your own heart teacher is superior to all the enlightened beings in the universe. And you have to see that they are not inseparable.

Sorry, that they are inseparable. YOD MED means inseparable. I think I have a, don't yawn on me.

Find me the, we translated Je Tsongkapa's biography and we did a book, we did an art book. And I'm pulling out sections of it, which are mentioned in this text. So here's a scene.

This is the scene where Je Tsongkapa asked the question. I thought you'd like to see the real scene. You can see Manjushri up with the sword and then you can see Je Tsongkapa down below.

And he's asking Manjushri, what's the best way to have a great meditation, to have great realizations? And this is an actual event that took place in Je Tsongkapa's life. It's recorded and there's a photo of it in a thangka.

Okay. DE'I RGYUR ZHIG PA YIN You must see that your teacher is a divine angel and so on that, then you should ask them for blessings. Ask them to help you.

SOGS SRAB GDUG BYANG NA BAD PA Work on collecting fresh, good karma just before you meditate. Work on negating negative seeds just before you meditate. BAD PA DANG NYE RGYUR LAN GYI RGYU MIG RNAM KYONG BA So he's mentioning three main practices before meditation and that's the whole point for this week.

This whole week we'll be talking about three main practices. SOGS SRAB, how to collect new good karma. DIP BYANG, how to cancel all bad karma.

And then GSUM, that means ask your Lama for help. How to ask your Lama for help. And these are the three great practices of the fourth preliminary.

NYE RGYUR RGYU MIG RNAM And then he said, of course, you have to know the subjects of the Lam Rim. You must be able to meditate on the subjects. For example, the fact that you're going to die, tonight, tonight.

They don't say soon, they say tonight. You have to get good at believing that you're going to die tonight. And then you wouldn't waste your time.

You would always be doing what was highest priority. If every morning you got up, you believed that you would die today, you wouldn't do stuff that wasted your time. That's an example.

So knowing those meditations and practicing them is NYE RGYUR RGYU. It means that is the stuff of which the realizations are made. But the DUN GYUR, the factors that make it happen are those three.

Collect new good karma, wipe out old bad karma, and ask your Lama for help. They are the fertilizer and the water and the sunlight that makes the realizations come out of particular topics of the Lam Rim, such as I'm going to die today. So you need the seed, which is thinking about how you're going to die today, for example, but you also need the fertilizer and the water and the sun, which is those three practices.

BRDZUN LA, BRDZUN LA means, BRDZUN BRDZUN LA means mix those three together. BAD DGOS, that's what you have to do. Who's talking?

Manjushri is talking to Je Tsongkapa. Okay. Okay, I promised you a break.