«Дар освобождения», курс 9 «Семь дверей медитации», занятие 7

[Speaker 1]
So just to recap where we are. We spend most of the year, a team of people, I don't know, probably a hundred people total, traveling the world and teaching general seminars. What do you call, non-Buddhist.

We don't mention Buddhism and we teach people how to use basically the laws of karma to succeed in their life, have a happy life. And then thousands of people come to that. Then four times a year.

People ask me if I could teach in Phoenix like once a month, and maybe four times a year, do an extended teaching, the old way, so the way I was trained, which is that you go through a traditional classic scripture. So I chose one, which I think is the most important book I've ever studied and which my teacher taught for 30 years. And that's like enlightenment from A to Z.

So it's an ancient book called, ancient style called Lam Rim. And so it's about a thousand page text. I think it will take us, I was saying, what, 12 years?

I think I'm sort of upgrading that to 15 years or maybe, I don't know. We're studying two books. The other book, we just finished the first chapter a couple of nights ago, and that was the 10th year that I was teaching it.

So that's going to be a while, that one. But this one, I think it would take about, I don't know, 12 to 15 years. And we're about three years into it.

And we reached a part where we are studying how to prepare for meditation. So in this text, meditation is compared to running a race. A meditation session of maybe 20 minutes is compared to running a race.

Like in the Olympics, how you spend years preparing for a race, and then you spend a couple of hours warming up. And then the race itself takes, I don't know, 20 minutes or five minutes or two minutes. So meditation is the same according to the classics of Buddhism, according to the ancient tradition.

You can't just sit down, plop down on a cushion and start meditating. You have to prepare your mind for meditation. And there are six ways to prepare your mind, six steps you have to take your mind through.

And we're on the, which one? Fourth one, which is a tiny exercise. It might take you two or three minutes if you got to get to work in the morning.

You could do it in two or three minutes. You could do it in five minutes. And you do an intense exercise to attempt to collect a large amount of good karma and to try to clean out a large amount of negative karma within a few minutes, just before you meditate.

And then the meditation is supposed to go much better. So there's a practice called tsok sak dip jang. Say, tsok sak?

Tsok sak. Dip jang. Dip jang.

Tsok sak means you try to collect powerful, quick boost of karmic energy just before you start meditating. And then dip jang, you try to wipe out some negative seeds just before you start meditating. And then that has a profound effect on the meditation.

In the way that warming up before an Olympic race might make the difference if you warm up properly. And if you don't warm up properly, probably you won't win the race and you won't do too well. So anyway, we're in the middle of that exercise.

And the most powerful way to collect good karma in a short amount of time is simply to think about your own heart teacher. So we've been talking about heart teachers and we said that it could be anybody in your life. It could be your mom.

It could be your sister. It could be your girlfriend. It could be a high school teacher.

It could be anybody. The definition of a heart teacher is whoever in your life opened your heart the most. That's your heart teacher.

So it's supposed to be the case that if you just bring them to mind, and sit with them for a few minutes, then when you start to meditate, it'll be much more powerful. Because just to be in their presence is probably the highest good karma you can make. And I'm not talking about me.

I think everyone has their own heart teacher and you will find your own heart teacher. If you didn't find them yet, keep looking. It's important to find them in your lifetime.

Okay, so then we were discussing how your heart teacher in this tradition is really four different people mixed as one, right? No, good, okay, good. We just spent all last night discussing why it wasn't that.

The name of the heart teacher in this case is, I don't know, Lama Losang Thubuang Dorje Chang. Lama Losang Thubuang Dorje Chang. The names of four different important enlightened beings in our tradition.

Lama is your own personal teacher. So even if they're not Buddhist and even if they're not overtly spiritual person in robes or something or in a church, it's someone who has changed your life and guided you in your life. That's Lama.

Losang means the founder of whatever tradition you are into, if you're a Christian, it could be Jesus. If you're a Muslim, it could be Muhammad. If you're Jewish, it's Moses.

It doesn't matter. Whoever's the founder of your tradition, Lama Losang. In our case, it's the teacher of the first Dalai Lama, which is Je Tsongkapa, Lama Losang.

Thubuang means the Buddha, an enlightened being, someone who has imparted teachings in this world formally as a teacher. And then Dorje Chang is the form that the Buddha takes when the Buddha teaches the secret or higher teachings of Buddhism. Then that's completely different from the form they take when they teach the open teachings.

When the Buddha teaches the open teachings, the Buddha appears as a shaved head. They called it, what'd they call it? Urek Shep Gen.

Urek means baldie. And meaning shaved head. And then Shep Gen means barefoot.

Their bare feet are sticking out of their robes in the pictures. So traditionally, the Buddha takes that image when he comes to a planet to teach. That's called Chokyi Tuku, which means the Koch Classic form of a Buddha for teaching.

But then there's another form that the Buddha takes, which is more of like an angel, an enlightened angel. In this world, it was long hair, jewels, silken robes, very graceful, like a dancer, very sensual. And that was called Vajradhara.

So when the Buddha taught the higher teachings, the secret teachings in Buddhism, he took that form. In the scriptures, which are our canon, our Bible, it consists of the Kangyur and the Tengyur. The speech of the Buddha himself is about 100,000 pages in our tradition.

You could compare it, the only records we have of Jesus, which have been considered historically to be the four synoptic, three synoptic Gospels plus John, are 30 pages of his own speech. So we're fortunate in Buddhism. Lord Buddha lived to 81.

He got enlightened around 30 something, and he taught constantly for 50 years. So we have 100,000 pages of the Buddha's teachings. Half of them are secret and half of them he taught in a different form.

So when you are visualizing your own teacher, you can incorporate, in that visualization, you can imagine that you're... We were talking the other night that you can imagine that there was one enlightened being who chose to take many forms to teach. And so when you visualize your teacher in our tradition, when you close your eyes before meditation and just bring your teacher to mind, you are supposed to reflect that they are...

If you are a Christian, it would be, my teacher is Jesus, and my teacher is God, and my teacher is the Holy Ghost, and my teacher is a human being who appears on this planet. Like you would think that one being has appeared in three or four different ways on this planet for your benefit, for my benefit. So in our tradition, you consider your heart teacher to be the Buddha in disguise.

Okay, that's our tradition. So you're supposed to reflect on that. And then we went into some long scriptures that talked about how enlightened beings are like actors.

Like I had a problem the other day. It was, who was that? No, I was on the airplane.

I watch a lot of movies over people's shoulders because I'm too busy to watch them myself, but I end up watching most of them anyway. But I never get to know what's going on because I don't have the earphones on. But there was, I think it was, well, there's a case like the guy in Harry Potter, his friend, sort of chubby guy.

Ron. Ron, yeah. Then he played in 50 First Dates.

Did you see that? And he played a fool, a surfer, like a beach bum fool. And it didn't work because you thought of him as Harry Potter's friend and now he's supposed to be a beach bum and it just didn't work out.

But in acting, you have one person who might play many roles and many roles that are not at all similar. And then we were saying that in our tradition, when you meet your heart teacher, you're supposed to think that they are the Buddha or they are a guardian angel who has taken the form of your girlfriend or your sister or your mother or your dog or your high school teacher and they are teaching you. They have come to the world because you need, at this moment in your life, a girlfriend who is more stable than you in studying can help you decide on your career path or something like that.

And then you begin to suspect all the people in your life. You see, once you've established that one of them is a guardian angel, your heart teacher, then other people you've met, like your parents or your kids, they begin to be suspicious. Like if Buddha can appear as my girlfriend, then why not as my best friend and why not as my boss at work?

And how many Buddhas are there really running around in my life? And in the higher teaching of Buddhism, you're supposed to think there's a lot of them. There's a lot of enlightened beings in disguise trying to guide you through life secretly.

What do you call it? Anonymously. Even those who irritate you, they teach you something, right?

Or the people who hurt you the most in your life could very well be an enlightened being who's trying to take you further. So in our tradition, it's very difficult to completely hate anybody because you never know. You're always suspicious.

You're never quite sure that they're not a Buddha. Before we go on, I wanted to say one more word about that, mainly because it's on your homework. You can also think in the reverse.

Like we are also trained in the monastery to think in the reverse, which would mean if you were enlightened and you wanted to help other people, then wouldn't it be useful to morph into different roles during your life to help them? So if it's the case that one enlightened being has been morphing into my mom when I was young, my sister when I was older, my wife when I got to maturity, and my kids when I grew up. If one enlightened being has been playing many roles in my own life, then if I wanted to help other people, then I would emulate that enlightened being, right?

Which in our tradition means morphing, morphing to fit the audience. And the Buddha was famous at it. The Buddha was very good at it.

So just in teaching the two groups of teachings, the open teachings and the secret teachings. For the open teachings, he was very traditional. He wore robes very nicely and he shaved his head just right.

And he sat up in a certain way and he looked like the Buddha. But then when it got to the secret teachings, he had to morph into sort of, I don't know, a very sensual, like a dancer, and like a being of great beauty, an angel at the same time. So if the Buddha can do that kind of thing, morph to fit their audience, and to fit the teachings they're giving, then I think it's important for us to think about it.

I have friends. One close friend I did a three-year retreat with once, and she used to teach some before we did retreat. And she had very long hair and she was, I don't know, I thought her appearance was kind of striking and people were attracted to that.

And then later, she became a Buddhist nun and she shaved all her hair off and she was always wearing these robes. And frankly, I thought she wasn't as effective after that because people were a little, there's connotations to a woman cutting her hair off. And then some people felt like they couldn't approach her because she was a nun and they couldn't talk to her about their problems with their husband.

They thought it was inappropriate for me to talk about my sex life with a nun or something like that. So then I felt like, I feel like it's useful to be able to morph and to fit your audience. So we have DCI.

We have the Diamond Cutter Institute. It's a business management training. And we just got back from Russia and China.

And we all wear ties and suits and we try to look like business people. And if you don't wear a tie and a suit and you try to teach the corporate heads of Earl Sibb Banking Corporation, which has 32,000 workers, they just won't listen to you. They just will ignore you.

If you look amateur, they won't listen to you. These people, the people we taught in St. Petersburg, each one of them runs five or 10 or 20 banks. Each one of them in one district in the largest landmass in the world.

So you have to look professional. So that's one kind of morphing. And then when you teach a yoga audience, you have to put on yoga pants and you have to use a slightly different language.

When you're teaching business people, you're talking our return on investment and you're talking about profit margins and P&L, and you use their language. And then when you get with yogis, you start quoting the Yoga Sutra and Yoga-siddha-vrtti-nirodha, and you try to impress them with the Yoga Sutra. You memorize the Yoga Sutra so that you can relate to yoga people.

And then when you go to talk to a Buddhist audience, you better know some Tibetan or Sanskrit and you could wear a red suit or like that. You would look different for them. And I personally believe it's an important skill and I believe Lord Buddha is the precedent for it.

I don't think it's useful to just go around in one of those forms as just a yogi, or as just a business person, or as just a urek, gorek, shaved-headed monk. I think you should leave your options open. If you want to help people, you should be able to talk different languages.

In Europe, if you go teach in Europe, you have to know football, which is not football, right? It's soccer. And you better be able to say something intelligent about the teams in England and how they did against Spain last week and why the manager is a schmuck and the owner is a cheapskate.

And then when you get back to America, you better know something about modern music and be able to talk about or play some music that they enjoy. And then when you go to Latin America, you better know your Cervantes. UN ILDAL GO YIN GYI NGES SO An Ingenious Gentleman named Don Quixote, which is the real name of the book.

So you better be able to at least relate to people in their own language a little bit. Scott's really good at it. He gets to a country and within two days he knows like 50 important words in that language.

I'm just saying that if you want to help people, you have to be able to morph. And the precedent is here in what we're studying. You should be able to adjust to different situations, different kinds of people.

Don't be attached to yourself as being any one of the above. Don't say, I'm really a hippie who's trying to look like a monk, or I'm really a surfer who's trying to... Don't think like that.

Don't think you're really anything. Just think you're, I am whatever it takes to help people at that time. And don't say, I'm this presenting myself as that.

Just be everything to whoever needs it. Gain that skill, because that's what the Buddha is doing to us all the time, according to the text we just read. So if you want to be like the Buddha, you should be fluid.

And also fluid in your location. If it helps people, if I can help more people in China, then I just go. I just go.

We had a couple came the other day to Sedona, Chinese couple, and they said, we would like to invite you to China, but we know you don't go to small cities. And I said, what's a small city? They said, well, we only have 5 million people in our city.

I said, how many cities of... All of Phoenix, all of metropolitan Phoenix is 4 million, which is the fifth largest city in the United States. I said, how many cities are there in China of 5 million or more?

270. Then yeah, you should go. You should go.

I mean, your location should also be fluid if your job is to help people. You shouldn't be attached to any particular country or race of people or language. You should be global.

You should be able to morph to whatever country it's helpful to morph to. And when you're in China, respect their laws, respect their customs, respect their opinions. And when you're in Russia, do the same, and when you're in Mexico, do the same, and like that.

You shouldn't think of... I think if you really become a serious teacher, you should be able to... You don't have a standard identity.

You're just... They make fun of me because when I go to France, I say, my ancestors are from France, De La Roche, and Normandy. And then when I go to Ireland, I say, actually, my ancestors are from Ireland, the roaches in Cork.

And then when I go to Germany, I say, no, no, my grandmother was Lieberman, and we're from Germany. And when I go to... Anyway, like that.

When I go to Israel, I'm saying Jewish because my grandmother is Lieberman. And it goes down the female side, right? So, which we don't know for sure, but anyway, the point is, relate to everybody.

When I go to China, I say, all my teachers are from West China. You see what I mean? And they really appreciate it, you see?

And like that. And if you're going to help people, you should relate to them, right? And don't think of yourself...

I'm American. Somebody asked me, where are you from? We were in, what do you call it?

We were in the Middle East. When they ask you where you're from, you say, you never say America. You say, I'm from Manhattan.

It's an island off the coast of America. And then like that, you fit to where you are, okay? Because you aren't anywhere.

If you're really trying to help people, and you have to stay in China the rest of your life, then you stay in China the rest of your life. It doesn't matter where you are. It's just, where can you help more people?

And in what form can you help more people? So, don't be attached to who you think you are. Be able to be everybody, okay?

And practice it. It's a skill. And it's a kindness to people, to relate to them, right?

To fit to them, right? Okay, anyway, that's reversing what we're learning here. Because the Buddha did it.

According to this text, the Buddha has been impersonating all the principal people in your life, your whole life. If the Buddha can impersonate a dog, or your sister, or your mom, or your brother, then you can, okay? You can do the same.

Got it? Okay. Okay, right around there.

,RDZO NAS NGES PA NYES NAS, ,DE NYID TSOGS SHING GI RTZO BA SANGS RTAG PA, By the way, we're going through the Tibetan word by word. We're putting it on video because I think it's important for future generations, even though it's a little bit tedious for you. ,DE NYID TSOGS SHING GI RTZO BA SANGS RTAG PA, If you come to grasp that all these people in your life have been a guardian angel in different forms, okay?

,TSOGS SHING GI RTZO BA SANGS RTAG PA, Then you can sort of imagine that the person whom you visualize just before you do your meditation is like a combination of those people. ,RTZOGS SHING GI RTZO BA SANGS RTAG PA, And that's why we, ,TSAN PHYAG PA, at the end of that sentence means, that's why the name has come to be. ,TSAN means name here.

,PHYAG PA here doesn't mean desire. It's a separate verb that means became. So, ,TSAN PHYAG PA means, that's why the name became Lama, Losang, Tubong, Dorjechang.

Four of the important people in your life. It's like saying Edith, Philip, Jeff, and George was our dog, okay? It was our basset hound.

Edith, Jeff, George, and you know, like you, when you visualize the people who have meant the most to you in your life and guided you the most in your life, you glue all their names together and call them that, okay? Got it? ,TSAN PHYAG PA, that's the name.

Then we give it that name, okay? That multiple name, ,TSAN PHYAG PA YIN, ,DER MA ZAD SANGS RGYAS KUN GYI NGO BO NYID, There's a, this is a quotation from a scripture that says, they are, so now he's going to make another point, okay? It's a famous line that says, they are the essence of every enlightened being.

There is. So we don't believe there's just one Buddha in the universe. We believe there are millions of Buddhas in the universe.

One came to this planet, but we believe there are countless Buddhas. Countless people on countless planets have already evolved, and countless planets have evolved to where everybody on the planet was already a Buddha. And then they're running around the universe doing good stuff, okay?

,BRAG PA'AN DE BA'I PHYAG RA BSTAN TE, What's that from? Yeah, Kaladanda. What?

Hatha Yoga Pradipika, right? Which that says they're still running around the world in disguise, okay? ,SNGO NYID BYAS LAM MA NI SANGS RGYAS KUN GYI ,YES ZHIG GIS RANG GZUGS GCIG TU BSDOD PA'I NGO BO YIN PAR, Your own heart teacher, whoever that is, is actually the embodiment of the wisdom of every single enlightened being in the universe, okay?

So it's true that a single enlightened being has been impersonating all the people who have influenced you most in your life. But the opposite is also true. That one Buddha is the embodiment of every Buddha.

Okay, got it? Different, it's a different point now. ,SDOD PA'I NGO BO YIN PAR NGES PAR NYES DGOS PAS, You must come to see that this is true.

At some point in your spiritual life, you have to come to see that. Two things, right? Now we have two different things.

One, all the people who have influenced you most in your life were one guardian angel in different forms. Number two, that guardian angel incorporated every enlightened being in the universe, okay? NYES DGOS PAS, you must grasp both points.

You must understand that both points are true. ,ZHI BAR, ZHI BAR means in detail, ,'OG DU, ,'OG DU means below, meaning further on in the text. So in a text, ,OG, below means further on.

,RGANG means I told you back there. ,ABAB means back there in the text. ,'OG means later on in the text, below, okay?

What's ,OG LUNG? What's LUNG? Huh?

LUNG, not LUNG. Wind. So what's an ,OG LUNG?

It is a fart. Now I'm just trying to give you a word that you'll remember. I don't know why, but people remember bad words and they don't remember philosophy words.

So lower wind, ,OG LUNG, okay? Now you'll remember the word, ,OG, right? If I tried to teach you ,OG MIN, you wouldn't remember, right, Phil?

What's ,OG MIN? Below none, meaning the highest paradise of Buddha. If I tried to teach you ,OG MIN, you wouldn't remember.

But ,OG LUNG, you will remember now forever. ,OG DU, ,ZHIN NYEN RTEN GZOL GYI SKABS, When we talk about how to relate to your teacher, which is the first great step of all spiritual journeys, SKABS, and how to find them and how to relate to them is the first subject of all spiritual evolution. SKABS TSUL, BYAS PA RGYUR NGYUR, NGYUR, future tense.

We will explain. BYAS PA, present tense, BYAS PA, future tense. We will explain it later.

We'll talk more about it later. ZHI BA, in detail, in detail. DE LA, KHA BA LAS PA MA CHAGS NA, If you don't grasp these two points well, what two points?

All the people of influence in your life were probably one guardian angel in different forms. Two, that guardian angel is actually every enlightened being. They are one with every other enlightened being in every other world.

MA CHAGS NA, if you don't get this point, and get means internalize, right? So that you are acting on it. You become suspicious of everyone who shows up in your life.

It's a pleasant suspicion. It's a reverse of, yeah, it's a benevolent paranoia. LAM MED NYON SBYOR SAB SAB CINDER BSGOMS KYANG You can go and get any guru yoga text.

There are many guru yoga practices where you pray to your guru and you pray to your Lama and you can bow down to them and you can fuss over your teacher. But SUG NYEN TZAM, SUG NYEN TZAM. SUG NYEN means a reflection in a mirror.

And in Tibetan it means it's only a shadow of the real thing. It's only a, what do you call that? Shadow of the real thing.

If you don't feel like your teacher is a guardian angel and your mom and your brothers and sisters and your nephews and all that are a divine being playing with you. And if you don't believe that that divine being is all the other divine beings glued together, then somebody can give you some ancient wood carved text and say, recite this, it's a Lama practice. It'll just be a shadow of the real thing.

SUG NYEN here means, TZAM means just, just a shadow of the real thing. DE LAM RIM CHEN MO LAS So now he's quoting, right? In Buddhism you can prove things in two ways, which is quote an authentic scripture, authoritative scripture, or prove it by logic, right?

He's choosing to quote a scripture, which is the LAM RIM CHEN MO, which is probably the most famous book ever written in Tibet. Written by the teacher of the first dharma, Je Tsongkhapa. LAM RIM CHEN MO LAS DE LTAR NA LAM MED NYAL SBYOR ZHES YONGS SU BYAG PA'I BSTAN PA'ANG Yeah, there is this famous practice called, say, LAM MED NYAL SBYOR.

LAM MED NYAL SBYOR Lama means llama. Okay? NYAL SBYOR means yoga.

It's the Tibet word for yoga. Why is the Tibet word for yoga we could talk about for half an hour? We'll do it some other day.

NYAL SBYOR Anyway, a famous, one of the most famous spiritual practices in all of two and a half thousand years of history in India, and over a thousand years of spiritual history in Tibet, one of the most famous practices is devotion to your teacher, like doing prayers to your teacher, honoring your teacher, like that. Trying to follow your teacher's advice, even when you don't like it. Okay, like that.

LAM MED NYAL SBYOR YONGS SU BYAG PA'I BSTAN PA'ANG means, okay, that's a big, famous, everybody knows this is famous. Lama devotion practices. BSTAN PA'ANG SNGAR BSHAD PA LTAR GO DGOS KYI But you must understand them as I have presented them to you just now.

Meaning, Je Tsongkapa also made those two points about your teacher. One, that they are probably a divine being in disguise, and two, that, yeah, they're every divine being. Question for you.

Do they have to be aware that they are a divine being? No, okay? That's an interesting point.

If you put bamboo under their fingertips and torture them and tie them down and say, okay, admit it, are you a divine being? They say, no, I'm not, really, I'm not. And they'll be speaking the truth.

It's possible that they don't see themselves as a divine being, but that doesn't mean that they can't be a divine being for you, okay? That's the emptiness of a teacher, right? The magic of empty teachers.

MIG PA MTHUN RE TZAM LA SBYANGS PA'I NI KHAR YANG MI PHYIN If you just kind of bring up your Lama to mind once in a while, like once a day you're doing your meditation and you say, okay, I'll close my eyes and think about my teacher. Okay, what's for breakfast? KHAR YANG MI PHYIN means you won't get anywhere.

You won't get anywhere. So you can have some big, famous Lama Cipa practice and you can recite it. But if all you're doing is bringing them to mind once in a while, you won't get anywhere.

They have to be... There's a story in Hinduism, right? They cut open the body of Hanuman and every bone had the name of his teacher carved on it, all over, like circling the bone.

And it has to be like that. Your relationship to your teacher, and I'm your scripture teacher. I'm talking about your heart teacher.

Your relationship to your heart teacher should be like that. That should be constantly thinking about them. I personally find that the meditation we did this morning, the third one, which is a kind of Mahamudra, because you are watching your own mind.

You're watching the thoughts float to your own mind. If you get good at it, it's a little disturbing because you suddenly realize, you think about your Lama like once a day for two seconds. And the thoughts that are expended on donuts far exceed the number of thoughts expended on your teacher.

I'm speaking honestly, frankly, totally honest. Like if you learn to listen to your own mind, it can be a little bit of a shock to see how little of your day is spent on anything important in your own mind. So learn to listen to your own thoughts.

All right. YOD SU BTAG PA'I DE LA That's Je Tsongkapa's take on it, in his most famous book. We'll go for a bit more, okay?

Is that right? We got a late start. DKA' DIN GSUM NI Okay, so the original Georgia text, the text on how to prepare yourself for a meditation, talks about DKA' DIN GSUM DANG RTZA BA'I LAMA, which means My Root Lama who has the three kinds of kindness, who possesses the three kinds of kindness, okay?

Then Pabongka Rinpoche wants you to know what the three kindnesses are, okay? So a traditional teacher will pay you three kinds of kindness. They will show you three different kindnesses.

They differ between the open teachings and the secret teachings. So if your teacher is teaching you the secret teachings, they show you three kinds of kindness, the list is not the same as the three types of kindness that your teacher shows you in the open teachings. But obviously they're the same thing.

They boil down to the same thing, okay? DO LUGS LA DO LUGS LA means here it's sutra as opposed to tantra, okay? So sutra has many, many, many meanings.

When you say DONG LA, you are, in that case sutra means open teachings. The word sutra means open teachings, okay? So DO LUGS means, LUGS means say?

System, yeah. Without the S? Sheep, who said that?

Yay, all right then. And I'll tell you something cool. That LUGS, L-U-G, is the Tibetan, is an ancient, ancient translation in Tibetan for IDA, which is the left-hand channel.

Why? Because it's white, okay? That's cool.

Most yoga teachers, even in India today, have no idea what IDA means. But it means sheep, okay? LUGS.

Anyway, that's irrelevant here. Okay, DO LUGS LA, okay? A Lama grants you, S-T-Z-A-L, okay?

It's L, a Lama grants you. It's a beautiful verb in Tibetan. This is not CHAGS L or anything like that.

So they grant you three things. Say LHAG PA. LHAG PA.

Good, one more time. LHAG PA. The laziest audience we've ever encountered was in Moscow recently.

But I think we've replaced them. Okay, say LHAG PA, LUGS, ZHIG. So LHAG PA means private advices.

Like your Lama takes you aside. I got to talk to you. The way you've been acting recently at so-and-so, it wasn't really appropriate and I hope you will.

Now I'm asking you if you could try to improve on that, okay? Then it's something they tell you personally. They don't tell it to other people.

That's LHAG PA. LUGS means, in Buddhism, there's a practice of taking an important book, like say the Bible, okay? And the Lama simply reads it out loud to the disciple.

And then there's a blessing which has come down through, in our case, like 40 generations. Each Lama read out loud this important text to their student. And there's a blessing that comes down through a human lips expressing themselves to a human ear, which cannot be replaced by Google.

There's something going on when a person, or when you sing a song to somebody, right? It's not the same as a recording, right? There's a human element going on.

So LUGS means a transmission, a sacred transmission, which is what I'm trying to do with this text in those 12 years. I could go to Sedona and record it on a webcam, but it's not the same thing. Try to give a human transmission, human to human transmission, okay?

And then finally, CI. CI means formal teachings, okay? So CI happens in a classroom situation.

A LHAG PA happens in private, and usually it's unpleasant. And the teacher is like, tell you why you're naughty, or why you're not doing stuff right. And then a LUNG is sort of neutral.

They're just sitting there and they want to make sure you hear every Tibetan word of an important text, which is what we are doing a LUNG here and a CI, okay? We are doing a LUNG and a CI. And then we do the LHAG PA over in that little room over there.

And only the best students get LHAG PA, okay? They don't like it, and they complain about it, and it's unpleasant for them. But I may point out that it's only the close students who get the LHAG PA, who get personally criticized by their Lama, because they believe they won't run away if they criticize them, right?

So if you get criticized by a teacher, it's a compliment. I'm sure we'll all take it this way. All right, so LHAG LHUG LA.

LHAG LHUG LA means in the secret teachings, there's a different list of three kindnesses, okay? They are, say, DBANG BKUR. DBANG BKUR RGYUD ZHES MED NA'ANG DBANG BKUR means what?

Yeah, BKUR here means to grant an empowerment, okay? DBANG means an empowerment, okay? Some of you do that.

You've done that, what do you call that? THEG CHEN SO SBYANG, right? Jigme, you guys do that sometimes, right?

One-day vows. And then they say KUR POR BA is the name for an arhat. It's one name for an arhat.

Someone who's reached nirvana is called KUR POR BA. KUR POR BA means they have dumped the load. Not the usual meaning, but they're like a horse which has had a heavy load on them, and then at night the guy takes the load off the mule or something, and then the load has been removed.

It's KUR POR BA. So the word for giving an empowerment in Tibetan is to load an initiation onto somebody, and it's a big responsibility. They are putting a...

The word in Tibetan for granting initiation is loading the burden of an initiation on the student, okay? KUR, KUR means that. DBANG KUR So initiation means there are special practices you can do, and you're not allowed to do them unless your personal teacher thinks you're ready.

And the DBANG or the empowerment is the seal of approval by your teacher that they think you're ready for higher teachings, okay? And that DBANG also passes down from human to human, and it's unbroken, and it has to be personal. It has to be given personally.

DBANG KUR RGYUD ZHES means to explain to you the secret teachings in a formal setting. They'll sit you down and say, okay, now we're going to go through the Vajrayogini Sadhana. I'll take you through each word of it, and you will understand what it means, okay?

These practices, I will teach you word by word. We did a seven-year Tantric course in Diamond Mountain. I think it was 12,000 pages of translation, and they got it word for word, right?

That was cliché. They got that explained word for word. It took, I don't know, it took something like five or 6,000 hours, okay?

I don't know. DBANG KUR It's the first time it's been done in the West, okay? DBANG KUR RGYUD ZHES MAN NGAG NANG Then MAN NGAG means private advices.

It's similar to LHAG PA that we had before. So MAN NGAG means they take you in a corner and they say, well, now you've got the secret teachings, and you personally need to concentrate on this, okay? Not the other people.

You have a lot of jealousy. So it'd be useful for you to do this, right? My teacher, in my MAN NGAG, said, you have a lot of jealousy.

And I'm like, me? And he said, yeah, that's your main problem. So there was another student that I was jealous of, and he got all the attention, and he got to write books.

I didn't get to write books. And so the teacher said, okay, so to break your jealousy, I require that you type this guy's, the manuscript for this guy's next book. You type it.

And it was three times. It took me a year to type it, right? I typed it three times.

This was before computers, so I had to type it three times. So I did. He's breaking my jealousy.

He's trying to break my jealousy. Then I finished it, and it was ready to publish. Then he said, you raise the money.

You go to work. And you raise the money to print his book, $20,000 in 1980, which was about, I don't know, six months of 40, 60 hours a week. And he said, you pay for it.

So that's menga. Like the teacher will identify your personal needs, and then he'll break you. But it didn't work.

Okay. I did it, but it didn't work. Okay.

Maybe it worked a little bit. DE GSUM LAMA GCIG LAS THOB PA DE GSUM LAMA GCIG LAS THOB PA means, if one of your teachers grants you all three, then we call it GARTEN GSUM DEN LAMA. GARTEN GSUM DEN means, the Lama who has paid me the three kinds of kindness.

All three kinds of kindness. So normally it's all three from one person. And that's called GARTEN GSUM DEN LAMA.

And that's a special kind of Lama. That's the Lama who has granted me all three from one person. Either in the secret tradition or the open tradition.

I'll go one more minute, then I'll give you a break. Pee pee break. And a rehydration break.

If you're new to Arizona, drink a lot. It keeps you awake during the class. Just kidding.

Do you have an image of Je Tsongkapa? Jigme? I mean, yeah, I think you had one, right?

That's a pretty wimpy one. You gave me one. That's better.

It's not great, but it's better. The statue's okay. We're trying to get the color now.

But let's leave it. Leave it for now. Okay, we'll leave it for now.

So by the way, we just reached class three of this series. We're supposed to get through 10. It's Wednesday, right?

Thursday? It's Wednesday. Yeah, good luck.

We'll continue in Brahmahara, okay? I hope to get through five classes by Sunday night. We'll see.

We may not make it, and I don't care. Okay, gui nampa. So in our tradition, in our immediate lineage, how can you picture the teacher?

How can you picture your own teacher? How are you going to picture this person with four names? And this is just for people in our tradition.

If you're from some other tradition, you can picture it differently. It's useful, if you're Christian, to picture your personal teacher as looking like Jesus, and et cetera, whatever you're following, okay? Gui nampa.

What is the... How are we supposed to picture this teacher? Their body.

Chi. Chi means their outer form, their outer appearance. You know chi from chi nang, tabla, tso, or bet, right?

Use inner and outer methods to move Prana. Chi, RGYAL BA MTSONGS SKABS PA CHEN PO. They could look like Je Tsongkapa, the teacher of His Highness the First Dalai Lama.

RGYAL RANG, as a monk, okay? NGOR DMIGS RDZIN PAS RNAM PA Say NGOR DMIGS RDZIN PAS RNAM PA One who holds the NGOR DMIGS in the form of someone who holds the NGOR DMIGS, okay? Then this is a very, very common word in visualizing holy beings.

NGOR DMIGS NGOR DMIGS Then he's going to explain it. And this is the only place you'll ever see it explained because it's weird. Here we go.

NGOR DMIGS NI You want to know what NGOR DMIGS means? He says, BYA BA NGUR PA'I KHA DO LTA BU There's a duck in Tibet, a mallard, that has golden feathers, okay? And that's why you had the duck up there, right?

You were trying to... I didn't get it. That duck isn't the right color, all right?

That duck's a little too brown. NGOR DMIGS is more of like gold paint, like if you get gold and you melt it. That's the wrong color, okay?

My dad used to hunt ducks and we had a few stuffed ducks around the house and they have exquisite coloration around the neck and they have a bit of true gold color. So in Tibet, gold is more... When you say gold color, it's more of a, I don't know, it's a metallic gold.

It's like the color of pure gold, okay? So there are some ducks whose feathers have some color of pure gold. So NGOR DMIGS DZIN PA means they are wearing the golden robes.

So in ancient India, these robes are a corruption, or I don't know, but anyway, the maroon is unique to Tibet. This is considered gold. This exact color is considered gold.

And in ancient India, a monk was required to wear this color only. There were two other acceptable colors, one of which is the blue here. That's a legal, a legal color.

And the maroon is also legal. But the NGOR DMIGS is preferred. This is considered a golden color.

And it was supposed to be one piece. Yeah, I mean, modern Tibetan monks wear an outer shawl of NGOR DMIGS. But in ancient India, you were required to wear a single piece that wrapped around your whole body like a sari.

And that's a long story. And it had to be sewn in a certain way and things like that. We'll do one more and then we'll take a break.

Did I say that before? Oopsie. DE YANG CHAGS RGYAS CHOS CHE CHAGS RGYAS means, can you go back to Je Tsongkapa?

That's not great. Okay, anyway. CHAGS RGYAS means his right hand.

CHOS CHE GYI MUD RA We call MUD RA, right? MUD RA means a sacred gesture. ARGAM, BAD DBYAM, BUS PA'I, DUS PA'I, ALOKA'I, RGYEN LAS, GNYUD LAS, ZHAGS PA There are gestures called mudras, right?

So his right hand is in this mudra. And that in Buddhism, this gesture means I'm teaching you. This is the teaching gesture, okay?

We call CHOS CHE in the text. CHOS CHE means explaining the Dharma. Then his left hand, YUN, is in what we call the gesture of meditation.

So this gesture on the lap, this gesture on the lap means meditation. That when a Lama is making that gesture in a painting, they are in meditation, okay? So this is a contradiction.

It's not possible to be in deep meditation and delivering a teaching at the same time, is it?

[Speaker 2]
What's the difference?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, well, only a Buddha is, this is a sign that the person in the painting is supposed to be enlightened. Because it's impossible to think discursive thoughts, like what will I say next, at the same time as you're in deep meditation.

[Speaker 2]
Whoa.

[Speaker 1]
You know, okay? So I mean, normally they are, it's impossible to have both states of mind running at the same time. And a Buddha can do both.

A Buddha can be in ultimately deep meditation and at the same time be choosing their words for the next sentence, okay? They can do both. In fact, they can be in meditation on emptiness directly and teaching verbally at the same time, which is impossible for any other being.

No other state of mind can split itself into those two, okay? At the same time. So, and he holds a feng shui.

Feng shui means a bowl, a monk's bowl, okay? And I went to, I told you, I went to Sri Lanka on a business trip to buy emeralds and rubies in Topaz. So I spent like a couple of weeks there.

And then one night I had to do Tse Chus, so I had to dress up as a monk and then the businessman realized I was a monk. And then from then on, it was really fun. So he said, well, you'll have to go eat with the other monks.

So I said, well, you know, I know there's a custom, but I don't really know how to do it. He said, don't worry, we'll take care of everything. So they take me to some temple before noon, right?

And they hand out bowls. It's this thing like, it takes both arms to hold it. And then you sit down and the sponsor comes and they, you're supposed to beg for your food, right?

So you like carry this bowl up to the family that's sponsoring lunch. And then they start throwing, they throw like a 12-course meal into the bowl. And the last thing is an ice cream cone, you know?

And then I'm like, how do I get to the food under the ice cream cone? And then you sit down and you got to try to eat fast before the ice cream melts. Because you can't have more than one bowl.

So anyway, lungtse means this begging bowl that monks get. My teacher refused to call it a begging bowl. He objected to that.

He called it a wisdom bowl. Lungtse, dutsi karma. Dutsi means it's filled with dutsi, which Sanskrit is amrita, amrita, amrita.

How they got that, I have no idea. Say amrita.

[Speaker 2]
Amrita.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, amrita is the root for mortuary, mortal, murder. It means death. Amrita means deathlessness.

The privative A in Greek. Atheistic, agnostic, apathetic. The negative A.

So amrita means, the Greek came from Sanskrit, negative A. Amrita means no death. Dutsi karma nambah.

And in the wisdom bowl is amrita. And all of that has significance. He's teaching.

He's also in deep meditation. He must be an enlightened being. And he's holding, with his meditation hand, he's holding a bowl of deathlessness, which he can offer to you.

He or she can provide to you deathlessness if you learn properly. All right then, you can have deathless nectar. They are selling it out there.

Cookies and brownies and other illegal things. All right, so we'll take a break.