«Дар освобождения», курс 11 «Искусство ценить себя и свою жизнь», занятие 3

[Говорящий 1] (0:00 - 33:00)
Okay, let's do some scripture. We're on a section called, LTUNG BZHAG GI LHAM RIM SOGS SHING DU YOD MOD There are special angels, enlightened beings, who are in the confession business. They specialize in confession.

They deal with confession of negative karmas. They are old negative karmic seed wiper outer helpers. They're all in the SOGS SHING.

SOGS SHING is the huge... This is the SOGS SHING here. The SOGS SHING is the visualization in the LHAM RIM of all the teachers of our lineage.

The middle section is all tantric lineages, different tantric lineages. The section on the right and the left are the lineages of love and wisdom. These are all the various levels of people who are practicing spiritual practice.

Some are Buddhists, some are almost Buddhists. In the center is your own teacher. However you wish to visualize them, it's your own teacher.

Inside this picture already are all of the enlightened beings who deal with confession. But YOD MOD means, those of you who are learning Tibetan, MOD means admittedly they are there. But, DER NENG DE'I RGYUD TSUL KHYI LAM MED THUG PA NI OD ZHER SOGS SHING DROD Here we should try to...

NENG DE'I means almost like Marma Hatha. What's Marma Hatha? NED DON NON PA To press a special point.

It's important in the practice of tantra, in the physical body, to learn to open certain channels by pressing them from the inside with meditation or like that. So NENG DE'I means, NENG DE'I here means you should force the issue a little. Don't be satisfied that there's a couple of confession Buddhas there.

Let's force the issue. From the LAM MED THUG PA, from the main figure's heart is another Buddha. There's a Buddha in the heart of the main figure.

From that heart come 34 rays of light. So if you want to do a confession practice, I can think of two common reasons to do a confession practice. One might be that you've had a major boo-boo in your life and you want to clean it.

You just decide one day, it's like deciding to clean out your closets and stuff. You just say, well, I'm going to get rid of that seed. Before it opens, I'm going to get rid of it.

So there can be seeds that you want to take out, that you remember. But I think for retreatants, there are extremely subtle seeds, which are subtly causing you to plateau in your practice. That's a common complaint of a long-term retreatant.

It's like, I made great progress in the first six months, then I collapsed for six months, and then I kind of cruised. And I'm up to a good level, but I don't seem to be able to make a breakthrough from there. Bok chenpa.

I don't seem to be able to put on the afterburners. Also, there's an accumulative fatigue in a three-year retreat. I know.

I went through it. We didn't know what it was because we didn't have anyone to help us. Not really.

There's a fatigue which builds. It accumulates over the three years. It doesn't matter how many breaks you take, or maybe it's because of the breaks.

I don't know. But you get tired. It's just hard.

And it builds up. It's extremely hard. So, in the final year, it's a struggle, because you're exhausted.

You have fatigue. Mental fatigue. Spiritual fatigue.

I think that that might be a good time to do a nice confession practice. Not for the big bad deeds you ever did, because you already cleaned those. You already worked on those.

But there may be some subtle, what do we call it? Nengen lempa, right? Nengen lempa.

Subtle, negative, I don't want to call it a force. It's more like a fog or something. It's a subtle negative taint on your mind that keeps you from breaking through to the final goals.

You see what I mean? So, I think it might be nice to consider these practices in that light. Like, try one.

You already have 10,000 practices. Try this one. No, try it for a week or two and see if anything happens.

That's what I would try. If I were you, I would. I liked trying new things in my three-year retreat.

Every two months, I'd pull out a new practice and see if it did anything. Okay. So, 34 rays of light come out of that Buddha's heart.

DANG NGOGS TU CHU CHU 10 rays of light go upwards and 10 rays of light go downwards in the universe. Don't think it's in the ground. Think it's south of earth and north of earth.

Got it? And then, YAS YIN DU BDUN DUN Seven light rays each to the left and right of earth. So, towards the sun and towards Pluto.

Like that. Covering the four main directions. DANG NGOGS TU CHU CHU NI YIN DUN LANG PHYIN GYI BSTAD PA'I RNAM PAR BYED MU THUGS KYI RGYEN PA SOGS SHES RE BSGOM Then, on those rays of light, usually on the GNAS, GNAS means the tip of the ray of light in a visualization, you picture a throne on the end of each ray of light.

This is called a throne in Tibetan. CI, CI means a teaching throne. We call it a throne because we don't have the word.

We don't have another word in English. Teaching platform maybe would be better. It's not like a king's throne.

It's a platform for teaching something. So, teaching platform, throne, 34 of them are going out on the ends of the rays of light. And those thrones are held up, oftentimes by lions, but in this case by elephants.

So, on the backs of elephants. So, it's like instead of legs on the throne, you have four elephants sitting there, very, what do you call, still. It's not like this.

And they are supporting the throne. That is partly a reference to the tradition that the world in Hinduism is believed to be held up by lions, eight great lions, one of whom is called Naga, although he's a, I'm sorry, an elephant, eight great elephants. One of them is called Naga.

So, they're called the Nagas of the directions. Dik means direction in Sanskrit. Digital comes from that, meaning to point with your digit.

And so, Dignaga, that's Chandrakirti's teacher, Master Chandrakirti's teacher. That's why his name is Dignaga. So, anyway, you've got four Dignagas, elephant, direction elephants, holding up those thrones.

,LANG CHEN DON DRO GZHAN LAS THOB CHE BA'I RGYUD TSEN GYI, ,DE'I ZHUGS KYI BDEG PA, Why do we choose elephants to hold them up? Because they are more powerful than other creatures. And you're going to need it if you're going to wipe out your bad deeds.

So, that's supposed to be a joke. ,KHAB DER BDEG PA BDAG LAS THOB CHE LA, ,RTEN BRAL GYI MED YOD, RTEN BRAL normally means dependent origination. In a very tiny percentage of the cases, it means auspicious power.

Like that. Metaphoric auspicious power. If you put an elephant under the tree, it's RTEN BRAL.

So that meaning of RTEN BRAL is like good luck or auspicious. It doesn't mean dependent origination. Many people have mistranslated that term.

,RTEN BRAL GYI MED YOD, ,LHA SONG NGES KUN GROG CHAGS SEMS NI, ,MING DAG BA MANG MOD, There is a custom of picturing the 35 Buddhas in differing colors and with differing mudras, hand gestures. And they each have their specific color and they each have their specific hand gesture. If you're interested, I can give you the list.

But this Pabongka Rinpoche says, let's not worry about that right now because that's not the main thing. Let's just make them all similar and go ahead with the whole thing. By the way, the source of the colors and shapes is in that thangka, that painting, which you guys can't see, but you can imagine.

On the upper left is a circle, a round cluster of guys. Those are the 35 Buddhas. And there's a beautiful story.

As you know, Je Tsongkapa did go on a long retreat with his disciples and it was a very controversial thing. He was already a very famous teacher and he already had thousands of students. And then Manjushri came to him in a vision and said, you're famous.

You are admired everywhere. You are affecting all of Tibet. Time to go into solitary retreat.

And Tsongkapa's like, no, they need me. And Manjushri says, shut up. You're going to retreat, long retreat.

And there was a little tension. When you read the story, there was a little tension. And finally Je Tsongkapa agreed to go into a long retreat.

And then he said, you can only take eight disciples. They're called nam dak gye, the eight pure ones. And I imagine there was a lot of jockeying for the position in the leather boat.

But he only took eight of thousands and took them out to retreat. And one of their main practices in that long retreat was the 35 Buddhas. So I thought it was sort of auspicious that the day that we did the lamrim here, we hit the 35 Buddhas.

You're like the pure 32 or whatever. No, you're like hardcore. So it seems like this practice has come auspiciously somehow.

I never did this practice. I never followed this practice. Rinpoche did not emphasize it.

Je Tsongkapa did. And the reason we know their colors and all that is that later on they were restoring a temple that had been, what do you call it, got old. And it needed painting.

And it had a painting of the 35 Buddhas. And the painters came to Je Tsongkapa and said, how do we paint them? And he said, he closed his eyes.

He says, okay, the first one is red. And his hand is like that. And he was seeing them.

And then when they finished the temple, restoring the temple, and there was a huge, what do you call that, mural on the wall of all the 35 Buddhas. And then they held a rabne, which is what we did for this corridor, which is to consecrate the ground and remove obstacles. So they held a rabne.

And there was a meditator named Changdra Dorje. He was like 35 miles away or something. He was meditating.

And suddenly he saw the 35 Buddhas for the first time. And he was all happy. He said, oh man, I see the 35 Buddhas.

They said, hey man, that's cool, but we got to get somewhere. We got to get somewhere today. And he's like, no, stay for a while.

And they said, no, Je Tsongkapa is consecrating a temple. They put a photo of us there. We got to go.

It's like this story that they ran away. So that's the 35 Buddhas. So he says, of course they all have their own colors and their own mudras, but LUN GYANG CHAR DE BAR BYED NA to make it easier to visualize, he suggests grouping them in five groups of seven.

He suggests group them in five groups of seven and make each group correspond to one of the five Dhyani Buddhas. And then just use those colors of that family, of that Buddha family. So you guys have been working heavily on the five Buddha families, I'm sure.

So it'll be easier for you to visualize the 35 Buddhas because seven you make blue, seven you make green, seven you make red, seven yellow, seven white, like that. So no stress. It's much easier.

Okay, so we're going to go through this kind of, not so quickly probably. I have to stop it. Yeah, never mind.

35 Buddhas for Purifying All Bad Karmic Seeds. I got them from a text by Je Tsongkapa. And then his disciple Gyaltsabje added some information, including an explanation by Lord Atisha of which Buddha relates to which kind of bad deed.

The reason I put those in, I added those from Gyaltsabje's work, is that I thought you might want to specialize. There are three options for doing the 35 Buddhas. You can focus on one.

You can do all 35. Or you can do one for a while and then do the second one for a while. So he's going to mention the three options.

But I thought, and for all of us, if you have a particular bad deed that you're working on, and he's going to say later that you can deduce bad seeds. That's a very important practice. Detective work.

People are criticizing Geshe Michael in the press, for example. Then that must have some kind of karmic seed. I don't remember what I did, but it's coming, therefore I must have that seed.

I can deduce that I have that seed, even if I can't remember writing articles about people. But I can deduce that I must be doing something like that. Then I would choose the Buddha here who seems to fit that the best.

If that's of concern to me, if it hurts me or it bothers me, then I can pick the Buddha here who relates to that, who most closely relates to that. As I said yesterday, the bad deeds listed here are the most extreme. He's got the five immediate bad deeds, which are the five most serious sins in Buddhism, like killing your father, killing your mother, splitting up the Sangha, killing someone who reached nirvana, or trying to hurt a Buddha.

Those are extremely... Let's say you've been... I don't know.

Let's say you've been divisive in your speech. You have to see around you schisms or splits between people, just between friends or between parents and children or things like that. If you are seeing that around you, that means you have that seed.

Then you would want to go to the Buddha who specializes in schisms. Even though you didn't split up a Dharma community, if you are forced to live in a family where two of the family members are always estranged from each other, then that's your seeds to see that. Even though you're not part of that estrangement, you have to witness it, which means you also have some of those seeds.

So in that case, go to the Buddha who relates to schisms and focus on that one. How do you focus on them? I suggest just learning their name and saying the formula here.

So let's take the first Buddha here. I bow down to the Buddha, Nageshwara Raja, Lord and King of the Nagas, who has gone that way to purify eight eons of bad karma. An eon is, I don't know, 10 to the 64th power years is the basic unit involved in an eon, but it's not an eon.

It's just a tiny bit of an eon. Then the numbers run out after that. But I don't know why you'd want to do the eight eon guy if you could do the 10,000 eon guy.

So personally, I'm going to focus on the 10,000 eon guy, which happens to be Buddha Shakyamuni in the second verse. But this formula is standard. Why?

It comes from a sutra. And I put the name of the sutra there for you. An Exalted Sutra of the Greater Way, which was requested by Upali, and which sets forth the teachings of vowed morality.

Arya Vinaya Vinishchaya Upali Paripurcha Nama Mahayana Sutra So this is a famous Vinaya work. It's in the Kangyur. And Jigme's been cataloging those.

She finished the Kangyur. No, I finished the Vinaya. You finished the Vinaya.

And she finished the Prajnaparamita. She's cataloging it. So now she's into the sutras.

And she got to this one. So I took it out of the sutra, the original sutra. This is the formal formula.

This is what you're supposed to recite when you do this practice. So if you want to do all 35 Buddhas, you recite all these pages. If you want to focus on a splitter karma, or a criticism karma, or something like that, you can focus on that.

And it's the same formula. I bow down to the Buddha, so-and-so, who has gone that way. And then you go down to the next Buddha.

Traditionally, you could do one prostration for each Buddha, or one Surya Namaskar, like that. And I think just throw it into your bag of tools. Try it for a couple of weeks.

Use it on some obstacle you have, a block that you have. And then you don't have to do it forever. You don't have to, you know.

It's just another tool for your practice, for your retreat. If you're having, I think, a subtle... If you've reached some kind of subtle...

It feels to me like the edge of a bubble gum bubble. It's like if you could just push through that, you'd go much higher. It's like a little veil or something, and you just got to push through it.

Then try this for a couple of weeks and see what happens. All right. I'm not going to take a break.

I was supposed to take a break. Maria got 20 minutes. But we'll still do the thing we were going to do.

We'll talk about that. DANG PO MI GYUR PA'I RNAM PAR CHEN DON So I've added the five Dhyani Buddhas here, and I split them up for you in the small print. The first seven relate to Mi Gyurpa, which is Akshobhya.

And they are blue. In the right hand is a Vajra, and in the left hand is a bell. All 35 have a bell in their left hand.

The right hand mudra changes, or chaktsang. The instrument in the right hand changes. DE NAS RIM BZHIN RNAM NANG BAR DO BYA NA Appearances is white, and in the right hand, a Dharma wheel.

Then RIN CUNG, which is Ratnakara, source of jewels, yellow. Right hand holds a jewel, gemstone. Then U PHAG MED PA'I MED PA BA Red collar, and in the right hand, a lotus.

Also, if you know the Buddha family names, you can see them coming here. DON DROD PA MOGGS PA SRID DIS Right hand, a sword. RNAM CHEN DON REL LAS BYA Seven Buddhas for each group of the five.

I think it would be useful to review the 19 vows of the five families. Because a lot of our higher practices come from these five families, including practice with a partner. I got this initiation in when?

I got Bhairava in 1978 from Ling Rinpoche, the Dalai Lama's senior tutor. He gave me permission to have a partner. He gave me the 19 vows of the five families when he came to New Jersey.

But these five families are the source of much of our higher practice and yoga practice, including Amitabha is very important for China. All of China. A billion people in China built 1.4. Many of them are very in love with Amitabha practice, and this is the source of that practice. So if you're going to teach in China, which some of our esteemed students are doing. So those are the 35. Now he's going to make some notes about them.

And that's how to visualize them. You can go through the other details of the colors. When I think of Vairagyana or I think of Amitabha, I like to think of the vows that relate to them and the practices which relate to them.

So partner practice relates to one of the five, and your Bellendorje relate to another one of the five, and things like that. And you know those correlations and I would use them. I would continue to use them.

As you do this practice. Let's see. DANG PO BDUN LAS ZHAG THUG NI LAM MED THUG CA DE'I PHYOG In the first set of seven is Shakyamuni Buddha.

And for him, it's okay. PHYOG means it's okay. This is PHYOG without the M.

PHYOG means it's okay if you just use the Buddha who's already in the center of this Lama's heart, Jatakarta's heart. Then the other groups, you have to picture them all like the first seven look like that Dhyani Buddha and the next seven look like that Dhyani Buddha. You see what I mean?

So they all look like Vairagyana in one group of seven. They all look like Akshobhya in the other group of seven. And they all do have their own separate colors and mudras, but he suggests make them relate to the Dhyani Buddhas.

And there must be some reason he's doing that also. But he makes an exception. He makes one exception.

He says LUS DBANG GI RGYAL PO LUS DBANG RGYAL PO DBYIN PA YAN GAR The one named Nageshwara, which one is that? The first one, Nageshwara. From the throat on up, he's a white color and the rest of his body is blue.

When we say that an angel has a white color, a blue color, a green color, don't think someone's painted green like that. By the way, it's customary never to point to an angel painting. You're supposed to go...

It's just tradition. It's an ancient Asian tradition. You don't ever point to it.

You go... So these beings, one is white, one is green, blue. That's because of the limitations of mineral paints in Tibet in 1000 AD.

If those painters were around nowadays, they'd be using neon light. Because the idea is the light's coming from inside of them. So I don't want you ever to visualize an angel as painted blue.

Like they were all shiny like a light bulb and then somebody painted them blue. And now they're just a matte blue. Don't ever think like that.

They are glowing. They don't have a sun and a moon in their lands because they don't need them, because they are a living flashlight. Some of the retreatants are developing this skill in small places when they walk around.

Anyway, so that one, that first Buddha, don't picture him like the group that he's in, which is like Shogun, right? Keep him his own specific color, which is white above the throat and then blue light below the throat. Why?

I looked it up. I was curious. Why did they make an exception for the first one?

And it was that, I believe, it's because that's the first one that Je Tsongkhapa met. And that maybe there's some kind of auspicious thing about picturing him as he was met by Je Tsongkhapa. So he was the first angel that Je Tsongkhapa met in person and saw his actual form.

LUS BDU BA'I CHAGS RGYAS BYAS CHAGS NI Then there's a, each one is making a different hand gesture, right? A mudra. And the CHAGS RGYAS for the first one is LUS BDU BA'I CHAGS RGYAS Mercedes talked about the word BDU BA.

It means to tame or to control. LUS means a naga, a serpent, a water serpent. Probably, of course, I believe it corresponds to the LUNG in ZHONG BAN, right?

I think so. But anyway, the mudra is like this. So that Buddha, the first of the 35, picture them with their actual hand gesture, which is called the gesture of bringing nagas under your control.

If you could bring a naga under your control, you could have a swimming pool here. That's the idea. We're working on it.

Okay. KHU TSE RGYAL BA'I GYI TSUL TSUL RGYAL BA'I Speaking of swimming pools, let me finish quickly, then I'll do my swimming pool pitch. DE BA'I DE NYID DU BYAS RNAM PAR BYAS KYANG DANG PO CHU LUNG DGON PAR When Je Tsongkapa was at Chulung Monastery, he did very intense retreat practices.

KHAB ZHIG TU SOGS BYANG LA BZHIN DU GYUR PAR He was working really hard on collecting new good karma and getting rid of old bad karma. MDZAD NAS LUNG BA'ANG GI RGA BU THOB MAR SHAL SIG And then in that moment, he saw the first of the 35 Buddhas, and that's why we lead him that way. DE NAS SANGS RGYAS GSUM GYI SONG NA SHES Oh, that's from a commentary, okay?

That's not from this text. SDUG BSHAGS PA'I BDUN LUG LA SHES SHES GSUM LAS There are three oral instructions for how to recite this 35 Buddhas sutra, really. This is the guts of the sutra.

First one, UN NAS SBYUG RDZOGS PAR TSAR REG RTEN NAS SOGS PA DANG The first system is simply to get a hold of that sutra and read the whole sutra from beginning to end. I can give you this sutra if you want. It's not very big.

I haven't translated it, but you can recite it in Tibetan. But it's just to go through it from beginning to end and not chop out the prostration part, which is where we are here. Second system, THUB PA NAS RIGS DBANG RGYAL PO PAR LA TSAR REG TSID DE TSEN RNAM PAR ZHIG BDAG GYUR TEN Then you could just make a certain number of, just recite their names.

You could just recite their names. You could stop on Shakyamuni and keep reciting Shakyamuni over and over. And the third system is YANG NA LTUNG BZHAG NYON NGAG TZAM ZHIG TU Oh, and he says all the way to SHA'I LAM DOR LA RAG GYUR, which is number 35.

Or you can go through, what I kind of like to do would be to, you recite the prostration to the first Buddha, then you go to the second one. And when you hit the one that you care about the most, you hang on there for a while and recite the prostration, and then stop and then go on to the rest. So those are his suggestions.

He gives you Dhamkar. What's Dhamkar? Dhamkar means your choice.

What do you call that? What's the English idiom? You get to choose how you do it.

Your... No, there's a colloquialism. Your call, maybe.

ZHIG NYON NGAG RAS BDUN PHYI MA DE'I MI GZAL BDE BA DANG SO SOGS PA YIN CHA DE BA MA NGA' IN He says, I like the one where you hang on certain Buddhas for a long time, because it's hard for me to do 35 different Buddhas quickly, one after another. To visualize them is hard for me. He says, I like hanging on one Buddha for a while.

DON NUG NI GAL LA SBYUG DU TSEN RNAMS ZIN NAS DE DAG LA SOGS PA MAN CHE GYI SBYUG DU BA'I TSAR CIG GI CHOG You can also recite the end of the sutra if you want to after the 35, but you don't have to. DE BZHIN SHES PA DE DAG GI TSEN REN DU YANG SPYOD PA'I PHAN YIN MANG PO YOD PAS There are many benefits of each name. DE DAG CIG SOGS LA BRTEN NAS NGES PAR BYED You can consult the commentaries if you care.

So I did. Because I always felt uncomfortable with this practice, because I know some Buddhist groups really emphasize it, and I always felt sort of retarded that I didn't know what they were doing. So I went and studied it.

So those are the benefits that are listed by Gyaltsabje, which I put on the paper for you. By the way, I owe you two mantras from yesterday. I'll try to bring it tomorrow at my breakfast party.

I mean at our holy ritual. DE BZHIN SHES PA DE DAG GI TSEN REN DU YANG SPYOD PA'I PHAN YIN MANG PO YOD PAS DE DAG GI TSEN REN DU YANG I'm going to leave the text there. He goes on to eight more Buddhas you can add, which is just going to make you more confused.

But we'll do them later. They are Medicine Buddha. There's a group of Medicine Buddhas.

So if you want their names, I can give it to you tomorrow also. And you can add them. And then they help with medical problems.

So there are eight Buddhas that relate to medicine. Starting with Menla, which means Medicine Buddha. Medicine Guru.

Vaisajya Guru. The Medicine Buddha.

[Говорящий 2] (33:01 - 35:22)
We're going to do a mandala. Okay? SANGYE SHINDU VIKTEH KURUH RABHU MANDHAK SHIRA SHARATASHA DINAM GUNAL MANDALA VIKTEH KURUH SUNAM YASHE SOGSOK SHING SUNAM YASHE YE CHU NAMPAK KUNI THO BA SHOK CHU SEM CHOG KUN PA MA SKYE PA NAM KYI GYUR KYI SKYE PA NYAM PA MED PA KHON NER KHON DU PHYANG WA