«Дар освобождения», курс 9 «Семь дверей медитации», занятие 2

[Speaker 1]
I had something I wanted to show you from last time. Let me see. So I wanted to talk about, they mentioned a Lama who had a deep realization just by starting to read a lojong.

Do you remember who the lojong was by? Do I remember who the lojong was by? A Lama named Gyalgong.

Okay, a Lama named Gyalgong. Do you remember the name of the lojong? Diamond Song.

Okay, The Song of the Diamond. There's a lot of songs of the diamond in the Kangyur and Tengyur. There are probably 20 or 30.

But I thought I'd read you the line, the particular line that he hit and then he had this deep understanding of bodhichitta. And it's in the, the whole lojong is in the database. It's in the ACIP database and it would be nice to translate it someday if someone had spare time.

It's catalog number 0376. But it's a very beautiful lojong that we did not cover during the lojong course in the ACI, which was I think 14 or something like that. Anyway, there's a line in there or there's a lineage of that lojong called, and this is the verse that it refers to.

The verse goes like this, ,LAM CHOG GZHER CING RGYAS TSE, ,ZENGS SANG ZHAG, ,RGYAL BA'I MA NGAG KUN ZIN GUS SA LI, ,DRONG KUN TSE BA'I CING ZIN RGYAS BA CAN, ,DRO BA'I BDE BUN GSUM LA GSUL BA'I BDEB, So this is a verse of supplication. GSUL BA'I BDEB means supplication. Asking the lamas for the blessing.

When he hit the third line, he had an experience of bodhichitta because he was ready, like a pimple that was juicy. So we should rather be saying the fruit that was ready to fall. Because we're talking about positive qualities.

So he was like a ripe fruit ready to fall. And so when he hit the third line, he had an experience of bodhichitta. The third line goes, ,DRO KUN TSE BA'I ZENGS ZIN RGYAS BA CAN, DRO KUN means all living beings.

TSE BA'I means out of love. ZENGS ZIN, who takes them after him. The lama who takes all living beings after him in love.

RGYAS BA CAN. So RGYAS BA CAN means the one who possesses RGYAS BA. What's RGYAS BA?

Virtue. So RGYAS BA CAN means the one who possesses virtue. In Sanskrit, that's Kosala.

Like we have Kusali Tsog in our tantric practice. So Kosala and Kusali are the same. So his name was Kosala or Kusali.

The line before that says, ,RGYAL BA'I MEN NGAG KUN ZIN, To the lama who holds all the advices of the victors. Kusali. So you can get confused if you read that lojong and you don't know what's going on.

There are two Kusalis. One is sometimes called Kosala. One is called Kusali.

So in Tibetan it's RGYAL BA CAN GNYIS. The two lamas whose names are the one who possesses virtue. So you can get messed up if you don't know that.

And people have gotten messed up on that. There's two Kusalis who came after each other. Then before that was LAM CHOG SHER CING RGYAS BYAS SRENGS BSANGS.

SRENGS BSANGS PO is a very, very famous commentator on the Perfection of Wisdom Sutras. You know, what's SRENGS mean? Lion.

Like SRENGS POR. SRENGS POR is land of the lion. POR means fall.

P changes to F, R changes to L. Fall means a place which is full, or a city is called POR. And SRENGS means, or SING HA means city.

I think there's a beer called SING HA. Not that I would know. But Singapore.

So SRENGS, SRENGS means lion, or sometimes HARI in Sanskrit. HARI or SING HA, same thing. And then SANG PO means what in Sanskrit?

It's a famous yoga pose. VIRA BHAJRASANA. BHADRA, okay?

Say BHADRA. I don't know why the yoga teacher is called BHADRA. BHADRASANA, right?

Anyway, it's BHADRA. So SRENGS SANG PO is HARI BHADRA, who is one of the most famous commentators on the Perfection of Wisdom Sutras. We cataloged the Perfection of Wisdom Sutras in Moscow, waiting for pizzas.

Right? It was like a six hour wait. If you combine all the three days.

So we actually cataloged the whole section in the Kangyur while waiting for food from nine to midnight in Russia. And there's a 100,000 verses. There's a 20,000 verses.

There's an 8,000 verses. There's an 18,000 verses. The 20,000 is really 25,000, et cetera.

Okay, what are the shortest ones? Heart Sutra. Heart Sutra or Diamond Cutter Sutra.

But what's the shortest one of all? Yeah, she's translated it. I said, Jigme, you can say you translated a sutra.

It's called the Perfection of Wisdom in a single sound. And it's AH. So you can say you memorized the sutra.

You can just say AH. Okay? The sutra, I mean, if you're going to memorize the whole thing, it says, the Buddha sat down.

Somebody asked him, what's the shortest way to present emptiness? And he said, AH. This was translated by so-and-so.

This was written by... I mean, if you want to memorize the whole thing, I don't know if she's... You've translated the main part of it, right?

Yeah, she did the whole thing. So anyway, Haribhadra came later. He was an Indian pundit.

And the later presentations are based on him. So in Sarah, May, the first 12 years of study are on his presentation of the Perfection of Wisdom. Okay?

I think I have pictures of those lamas. You ready, you guys? Haribhadra first.

93B. 93B. That's Haribhadra.

In Tibetan, Senggye Sangpo.

[Speaker 2]
Okay?

[Speaker 1]
Then let's do Kusali. That's Kusali. They tend to look a little bit alike, right?

And then, how about Gyewa Chen, which is Kosala, which is the third one. Oh, they're kind of similar too. Anyway, these three lamas are called the three captains of the ship, the three ship captains.

And it was in the verse where it said, about the second one, when it said he was trying to help all living beings, that the person had a bodhichitta, had a spontaneous experience of bodhichitta. All right then. Because he had been doing all of those practices, pimple practices.

All right. All right. Nyingpo, we're on the words DE LTA BU'I SRAG BCANG D-E-L-T-A-B-U apostrophe I.

Right here, okay? Yeah. So we're picking up there in the text.

Everybody got it? Yep. Okay, here we go.

DE LTA BU'I SRAG BCANG SON DEP GANG LA SPYOD YUL DE LTA BU'I means like that. SRAG BCANG SON DEP, okay? SRAG BCANG SON DEP.

SOGS BSAGS means make new good karma. BCANG, GCIG BCANG, purify your old bad karma and then SON DEP. Ask your lamas for help.

Again, if you're going to do something important, what's the important thing that they are doing here in this case? Why should you do those three practices? Yeah, you're going to start to meditate.

And specifically on your lama, okay? That's what the Dzogchen are all about. The six preliminary practices are all about meditation.

You should do them before you meditate, anytime. But specifically before you meditate on your teacher, on your heart teacher. So that's why we're going through the six preliminary practices, all right?

Because you're supposed to do them before meditation, like warming up before a race. And it would be foolish to try to run an Olympic race without warming up first. And meditation is the same, okay?

And what I wanted to say, I was thinking about this morning, is that in my experience, it also works well before any other important thing you ever have to do. So if you're having a big business meeting that day for the Colorado Springs budget, or you're trying to ask some girl out on a date, or something important, do these three just before. You see what I mean?

Do the three practices. Collect some heavy good karma an hour before, right? And do a quick confession, a cleansing practice.

And then ask your lamas for help. And then go do the thing, like you have to appear in court for a traffic ticket, or, you know, I don't know, you're negotiating on a new apartment or something. I'm serious.

It's not just before meditation. You can do a quick sak jang sung dep, and then go do the thing. Because whatever meeting you are headed for is coming from your mind, right?

Whatever meeting you are headed for is coming from your mind. So if you want it to go well, do the sak jang sung dep before. I think it's also good to do yoga just before you go to a meeting.

Get your prana. That's a tempting practice to put your prana in the right place and then go to a meeting. People are funny.

They say, I'm going to skip my practice today because I have an important meeting. And if you do your physical practices, like yoga or tai chi or whatever you do, if you move the prana before you go to an important date of any kind, then it will alter the reality of that. It will alter the outcome of that meeting.

So it's a very cool thing to know. If you have often meetings with important people or stuff like that, you can adjust the outcome beforehand. Do your yoga practice.

Get the prana moving. And do your sok sak drip jang and sung dep. Do those three.

It's cool. It's a cool thing. If you have something important going on today, do those practices.

Sak jang sung dep gang la che yul. Gang la che yul means who you're going to do them at. Yul here means the object or the place, desha, at which you are going to do the practices.

Who are they directed towards, these practices? Sok shin nyi, none other than. The nyi means none other than.

It's the da and shunyata, just emptiness. None other than the sok shin. Sok shin I've been calling garden of karma, and we'll explain that right now.

YIN PAS. That's who you should do those practices towards. SHING BSGOM PA SHIN TU GAL CHE BA'I SOG SHING BSGOM PA SHIN TU GAL CHE BA'I SHIN TU means what?

Extremely. GAL CHE BA'I means important. It's extremely important to meditate on the sok shing, to practice with the sok shing.

Sok shing means this assembly of lamas. By the way, it's not exactly the same as the... Yeah, well, the refuge.

Yeah, the people that we've been going for refuge to. We had a visualization earlier. It was where we were supposed to take our meditation posture, take refuge, think about bodhichitta.

That was a slightly different group of people. So you have to distinguish between the people towards whom you take refuge and the people towards whom you do your TSOG BSAGS GRUB BYANG SON DANG. Mainly they're the same people, but the visualization is slightly different.

TSOG BSAGS YIN PAS. BSGOM PA SHIN TU GAL CHE BA'I DE'ER, here, SA BYAS CI'I BLO GSUR BRDZAD PA YIN SA BYAS means, we had it last night, SA BYAS. SA BYAS.

SA BYAS means the splitting of the land, right? But it means an outline. SA BYAS means an outline of a list of topics or a list of subjects.

It's very common in the Lam Rim, the SA BYAS. But you can do a SA BYAS of any great text, which means an outline of the main points. It's like the table of contents or something.

SA BYAS. BLO GSUR BRDZAD PA YIN means, we have made a separate section of this Lam Rim devoted to the TSOGS SHING. Why?

Because it's so important before you meditate. Because of those three practices, get new good karma, clean out some old bad karma, ask your Lamas for help. Those three are so important, directed towards this assembly of, a different assembly of Lamas, that we have, BLO GSUR BRDZAD PA means, we have separated it out and made a separate category out of it in the structure of the Lam Rim.

TSOGS SHING ZHES PA. Now I like this part because he's going to explain why they call it the Garden of Karma. TSOGS SHING.

Say TSOGS. TSOGS SHING. TSOGS SHING.

A lot of people say TSOGS SHING, which in Tibetan is a different word. Say SHING. SHING.

SHING. SHING. SHING.

There are two separate sounds in Tibetan, high tone, low tone. SHING. SHING.

SHING means a tree or wood. SHING means a field, an agricultural field. So people get them mixed up because they mispronounce them.

The transcription, the way to write it in Roman letters is S-H-I-N-G and Z-H-I-N-G. But it doesn't mean that the second one is pronounced SHING. It's just that there's no other S sound in English to use.

So then people get confused about that and they think they're supposed to say TSOGS SHING. That's just the transcription. That's just how it's represented in Roman letters.

It's not the pronunciation. The pronunciation is a low tone SH. SHING.

Say SHING. In transcription, Z-H-I-N-G. The word for wood?

SHING. High tone. Same thing.

They are both SH. One is high tone, one is low tone. People don't get it.

And then they mix them up everywhere. Like Tsongkhapa's name is mixed up. Like Sivananda yoga centers, the name of their centers is misspelled.

The name of Sri Lanka is misspelled. People don't get it. The name for Sanskrit is misspelled, but that's another story.

Okay. Because they are mixing up the transcription with the pronunciation. It's like incredible.

All right. Satchinchen Lodson's opinion. I don't know.

TSOGS SHING ZHES PA. What does the word TSOGS SHING mean, he says? I like this.

This is very useful. Western minds crave this kind of thing. Tell me what TSOGS...

Why is it called TSOGS SHING? ZHES PA YANG. TSOGS TSOGS PA'I SHING YIN PAS.

Well, it's a SHING for collecting TSOGS. Okay. Meaning it's a field for collecting masses of good karma.

Okay. Masses of good karma. Now I ask you, does that fully cover its function?

To explain it that way. It's called TSOGS SHING because it's a field, SHING, for collecting masses, TSOGS, of good karma. Does it fully reflect its function?

No. Why? Why not?

Yeah, it's missing the two other parts. You should have called it TSOGS BYANG GSUM BDEBS SHING. Right?

It should be called the field for making new good karma, wiping out old bad karma, and making requests to your Lama for help. So you have to understand that the literal explanation, the word that they use is incomplete. It's not just a merit field.

It's a merit, bad karma, requesting field. But the word is TSOGS SHING, and not TSOGS SHING. It's not a tree of merit.

I forget, it's woo, it's unbelievable. SHING YIN PAS, therefore, it's TSOGS SHING. That's why we call it TSOGS SHING.

ZHES BYA BA SHING. By the way, just for Nick and Ningbo and those other Tibetan nerds, Phil, he's playing with us. Listen, TSOGS PAS SHING YIN PAS, TSOGS SHING ZHES BYA BA SHING, SHING, SHING, SHING.

What are the meanings of those three SHINGS? First one.