«Дар освобождения», курс 13 «Джорчо: песнь медитации», занятие 1

[Говорящий 1] (0:00 - 34:27)
Okay, let's start. So, we're having a, I think it's a 12 or 14 year trip to the Lam Rim, started three years ago. It's a text, it's a, Lam Rim means A to Z Buddhism for Idiot, what do you call?

Dummy's Guide to Buddhism. A to Z. And it's a genre of literature that was popular, started in India, but it really reached its pinnacle in Tibet.

And it's a specific series of meditations that if you devote a couple years to going through those meditations, then it's believed that you could become enlightened. And it's called Lam Rim. Lam means marga, path, and rim is, I don't know, steps of the path.

So that's a, we've been going through that. I was taught very kindly that by my teacher. I think it's the greatest book ever written on this planet.

It was written by the teacher of the teacher of the current dharma, who is also my teacher, teacher's teacher. And in that book, he devotes a large quantity of his teaching to how to prepare properly for meditation. It's called jor chö.

Jor means, in this case, preparing for meditation. Chö means practice. So there are, he, in that book, he gives the best presentation of jor chö that I'm aware of.

And in that presentation, which we just finished after three years, he often refers to his teacher's song, meditation song. His teacher was Jampel Hundrup Gatso, Dagpo Rinpoche, Jampel Hundrup Gatso. And his teacher wrote a meditation song on how to prepare for a meditation.

So the jor chö, the six, did they get a copy of this? Did they get a copy? They didn't.

They're shaking their heads. So his teacher wrote a beautiful ritual for how to go into a deep meditation, the jor chö. And he often quotes it.

And then I thought we should pause in the lamrim teaching and review the jor chö that we've done for the last two years or so, that we've been on that subject. And then it would be a nice time to actually read the original by his teacher and translate it and give it to you so you could use it. It's meant to be sung or chanted before a meditation session.

And it's very, very exquisite. It's very beautiful. And so there's been a team of people working on this translation and publishing the book.

It was laid out in Guadalajara by our Guadalajara team. And the photos came from all over the world. And somebody drove eight hours today to get it from the printer.

And it just got here like a half hour ago. And so I'd like to thank everyone who worked on that. Thank you.

Especially Venerable Jigme worked really hard on it and I'd like to thank her for that. She has to pay for all my parties. Okay.

So we're going to pause in the lamrim teaching. We're going to spend 10 days on this on this ceremony, which is normally sung before you do a deep meditation. The components in this ritual are meant to prepare your mind for meditation.

And it is believed that if you do this ritual before meditation, the meditation will be much more powerful and much deeper. Because its function is to purify negative karma and to accumulate positive karma just before you go into meditation. Very powerful practices, series of thoughts through which you take your mind.

And then you go to a meditation on the lamrim. Then you meditate on the lamrim. So what he did in his text, at the end of the text, he put a lamrim, which is the source of all my good, yun den shi gyu ma.

So that's the last part of the text. And it's meant that you go through the preliminaries and then you choose a subject from the last part, the last few pages. And you meditate on that, on the lamrim.

Like it could be impermanence, death. It could be compassion. It could be the four immeasurables, like from the Yama Sutra.

And you choose one of the subjects from the end and then you meditate on that. So you go through the whole ceremony and then you choose a subject from the end. I have, we've purposely put about 10 blank pages at the end.

And what I was hoping was that each person could take notes. Because I didn't want to put my comments in the book. I thought you should just have the the original by itself.

But a lot of it, it needs comments. And if you're going to teach it to your disciples, your students, which is a very sweet thing to teach. Ken Rinpoche, when he first taught us 39 years ago, he said we couldn't learn tantra unless we memorized it.

And we had to memorize it. So when I was like 20, I had to memorize this text and it means a lot to me. And it's very beautiful.

So I think it's a wonderful thing to get in your toolbox. A wonderful thing to have to teach you. Especially new students, they can learn to prepare properly for meditation.

So I encourage you, especially those of you who are teaching, which is most of you, which is the real glory of this university. It really is a university and there are 303 people in the world teaching ACI courses. so take notes, okay?

Use the pages in the back. Somebody told me, Geshe-la, they're bound in the book. Duh.

I want you to have your notes with you, so you can't separate them from the book. When you teach it, you can just flip back and see what you were supposed to be thinking at that moment. So I purposely put, so I really will be very happy if I see people taking notes in the back of their book for the next 10 days.

Because then you can teach it to other people well. So let's go. Also, this was originally meant, you know, it's a meditation song, like a Gita, meant to be sung.

And we had this wonderful idea that over the next 10 days, these guys will be dividing into groups. And so we'll just have one session in the evening and that's it. No other sessions.

Usually we do other philosophy books and stuff. There'll be no other sessions, just one session at night. And then during the day, we will work together to create a performance piece of this song.

So on this side, we're going to do poetry, dance, songs, rock and roll, cowboy music, jazz, James Brown music. There's different groups, like you're either in the James Brown group or you're in the jazz group or you're in the poetry, or some people just lead a meditation in their own way. And then somebody's doing trapeze, you can't guess who that would be besides me.

so my dream is that, and I had long talks with my own teacher about it, my dream is that without thinking that you're performing there will be no audience for the final performance, which will be next Sunday, a week from Sunday in Scottsdale. We have a nice place there ready and we will do the performance, but there won't be any audience except Buddhas and Bodhisattvas of the universe. And I just thought it would be nice for a group of people to say, okay, we're going to put together a sweet, moving performance for invisible beings.

You know, that we can't see. there's going to be, try to not have ego, you know what I mean, like there's nobody to perform for except them, you know, and there's no reason to sing your song well or do your dance well except to please them and to make an offering to them. So I just had this really strong desire that we do a piece together.

Everybody do something. Even if you're shy, you can say, okay, I'm leading a meditation. I told the DCI teachers, if you get stuck on the stage, lead a meditation.

Because then you don't have to say anything for 10 minutes. so if you're shy or I don't, doesn't matter, you know, let's just do something. I told them I would do a ballet piece that's been in my head for years, you know, and I told them I wouldn't wear the tights, okay.

But I think we just let go and have fun and make an offering to a bunch of invisible beings, you know, and make it from your heart and no one's watching. Sometimes I dance in my house just by myself and offer it, you know, and then nobody cares if I slip, you know. So like that.

So just, I'd like to propose that we do that, okay. Then you're going to have lots of time during the week to practice and you'll be in your own group. Maybe you'll be in one or two groups and you get together with five or six other people and you do it.

And I would propose that you guys do it too. I don't know when your non-layering ends. How many more days?

Show me with your fingers. Yeah, so if you want to do it on Sunday at the same time and we'll just make it a different time so they can get to yours. Yeah.

But I think it'd be nice, anybody who wants to sing a song or you do a dance or read a poem. It could be something you wrote yourself. It could be something you like from earlier in your life, you know, or you just make a new meditation and you need it or a new yoga series, some yoga movements or something like that.

Anything, you think about it, but make it beautiful. And what I'm really asking people to do is devote some real time to it. Like it's not a, what do you call those things when people get up and just, it's not karaoke or what's a talent show or what do you call that?

They can't talk. It's not like just people get up and do something improvised. Yeah, I'd like to, maybe we can do comedy also, Grant.

But I'd like to see it be, I don't know, just something that comes from your heart and you do it, you know, and you don't worry. But I also don't want it to be amateur. Like you should practice it over and over.

When we play jazz someplace, we have a rule, we play the song five times every day for like, it's a lot of time. So I mean, make it serious, like the Dalai Lama is coming, you know, and you're not just going to get up and bang on a drum or, you know, without practicing. So I'm really hoping, I'm asking people this week to devote maybe four or five, six hours a day to getting ready for Sunday, your piece.

And then on this side, we have a few people who are going to, what do you call, direct it. We've been importing a director from one of Lama Murth's Hollywood groups. And they're going to kind of make sure that, what do you call it, the transitions are done nicely.

Like I don't want to, somebody sing a song and then everybody waits and then it should really be done, what do you call it, polished, as well as we can being amateurs. But it should be serious, you know, like this is a real thing that we're doing for Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. And it shouldn't be a talent show thing or, what do you call that when people get up and sing at night, like Mike Niners, it should be a polished thing.

You should put your heart into it. You should spend 20 hours on it or something, 30 hours on it. Don't make it something that you were too busy to make a proper offering.

That's what I'm saying. Like, I'm saying give a whole week to making a, my ballet piece is 1.30 minutes. It's one and a half minutes.

And, but I'm going to make it nice, you know, and I have a piano player at home. And I just make it exquisite. That's what I'm saying.

Because it, and give it, give it a week, give it a whole week or give it a lot of your week. And don't just say, oh, on Saturday night, you'd like, oh, I'll write down the words to the song that I kind of like. Don't do it like that.

Like do it really, give it a week of your time. Give it the best that you have. Don't say you don't have time.

Give it your time. That's what I'm saying. It's hard to get money out of Americans, but getting time out of them is impossible.

Give it your time. Really give it some time, serious time. Okay.

Make it your practice for a week. That's what I propose if you guys want to do it. You can ask Brady.

He's in charge. Okay. So let's go through the text.

I'll stop around, what time is it supposed to be? 9.30, I think. Yeah.

Okay. And bear with me. I know you're tired, especially I know, I know what it's like when you come out for, I used to get this migraine and it wouldn't go away until I went back in the labor room.

And then we tried not coming out and that was worse. So I know it's exhausting for you. I know it's a lot, it's a lot.

But hang in there, just everybody hang in there. Okay. It's worth it.

It's something, the reason we bound it with spiral binding is you can lay it flat, like David Swenson's Ashtanga manual that sold 5 million copies. No, it's just like, you can lay it on the floor and it'll stay there. And then you can meditate.

You don't have to do the whole thing, by the way, I clock it at 45 minutes, which is too much for this side of the room, forget it. You can just do some part of it, before your meditation, do some part of it. The supplication part at the end, which is our whole parampara, it's our whole lineage thing.

It's long and you might want to just skip that and go into your meditations. Okay. So you don't have to do the whole thing every day, but it's nice if you learn how to do it.

Okay. So let's start. The name of the text is Kelsang Dengen.

You can talk Tibetan, right? Kelsang Dengen. Kelsang Dengen.

Sometimes they call it Dzogchen, Kelsang Dengen. Dzogchen, as I said, means preliminary practice to a meditation. There are six classical Dzogchens.

There are six preparations to a meditation. The fifth one has seven parts. So total is, be careful, I count 12, right?

See what I mean? Seven plus five, because the fifth one is all in the seven. So basically there are 12 important practices that you should do before you do a meditation.

In our tradition, and this is heavy duty Je Tsongkapa, Dalai Lama, Ken Rinpoche direct tradition. This is our lineage. This is your lineage.

Like it or not, this is your lineage. If you are here at Diamond Mountain, if you're studying ACI, DCI, all those other CIs, this is your shtig. This is what we do, okay?

And it's not what other people do in this country. And that's uncomfortable for some people, but that's life. This is an ancient and very strictly held tradition.

And I love it. And I think for me it works. I understand it might be different for different people, I'm sure.

But if you want to know what we teach or what we do, it's here. This is what we do. This is who we are.

And this is what we do before meditation. This is what we believe in. If you're in this lineage.

It doesn't mean you can't do other things, but if you want to know what we do, it's here. This is what we do. This is what we commit our lives to, and happily, proudly.

And it's not what everybody else may do. So that's all. Okay, kel means good karma from the past.

And it's like a quantity thing, like how much kelwa do you have? And you might have enough kelwa to hear about Diamond Mountain. You might have enough kelwa to come here, it would take more kelwa.

To do a retreat here, it would take extraordinary kelwa. You are one in, the people sitting over here are one in 10 million in this country. One out of 10 million people in this country is sitting over here, had enough kelwa to do a three-year retreat.

And it's a very expensive kelwa. Karmically very expensive. You'll probably be filling propane tanks for thousands of lifetimes.

And Chuck will have them filling his propane tanks for thousands of lifetimes. So kelwa means how much good karma do you have? Do you have enough kelwa to get here?

Do you have enough kelwa to hear it? Do you have enough kelwa to understand what's being said and not fall asleep? There's all different levels of kelwa.

Kelsang means, sangpo, means you got a good one. You've got good kelwa. You have enough karma from your previous lives, billions of lives, countless lives.

You've done enough kindnesses to other people that you get to meditate on the path to enlightenment. And that's expensive karma, very, very rare. It takes millions of lifetimes to get here.

And to do a meditation takes millions of lifetimes. To have the honor or the ability or the interest to do meditation, it takes many, many lifetimes. So you are kelsang.

You are kelsang. Din means throat. It's honorific for throat, din.

And gen means a necklace, an ornament, alankara. So kelsang, the name of the book is a necklace for those who have enough good karma to hear it. A necklace for those who have enough good karma to hear it.

And necklace is meant to mean you're supposed to sing it. So you're supposed to put this text on your voice box and sing. That's the meaning of din gen, kelsang.

So that's the name of the, that's the sub name of the text. Meditation song, kelsang din gen. The author's name is on the cover.

Dagpo Lama Rinpoche Jampel Sundrup Gyatso. And he was the teacher of Pabongka Rinpoche. We found a drawing of him.

It was tiny and we blew it up. So it's kind of rough, but let me see what page it's on. It's on page 122.

Okay. And there were no cameras in those days. And as I, I believe that's the only image of him.

There's two of them. And we got it off of this poster actually. This is the Lama lineage poster.

And he's in two places. He's on the bodhisattva side and he's on the wisdom side. And he's not named, but he's sitting next to his teacher, you know, so we know who he is.

And that's the only image of him that I'm aware of. It's kind of cool. So I think we'll just go through it and do it together.

There's some notes on page three about how to pronounce things. Don't worry about it. Page three also says, take your time.

Okay. So for an American, I think that's the biggest advice you can give someone who's going to do this practice is make it sweet. Give up a day and do it.

You know, like when I cook for my Lama, I spend two days and that's it. Three days because the third day I clean the dishes. And I take my time and it's a struggle for me not to rush or to forget the other things I have to do, you know, to really devote myself to that offering.

So it requires your attention and your time. Or don't do it. Do something else.

Okay. It's like that. Okay.

The first page you can see, this is a beautiful photo. I think it was taken by Michael Wick in about 1972. And it's Ken Rinpoche himself doing the jorture.

Okay. So I thought we don't have many photos of him, but we have this photo of him doing the jorture. If you're interested, it was on Third Street in Howell, New Jersey.

And he was in Geshe Wangyal's monastery when he first came. So he's probably about 50 years old, 51 in that photo. And he's offering, he's doing the jorture.

Okay. I really like the photo. There's a reason why I put it there.

Every photo has a reason and I want to talk about them. This particular photo, the jorture is founded on guru yoga. Okay.

The jorture is founded on guru yoga. The preparing for meditation and all practices in our tradition are founded upon your relationship to a living teacher, you know. And the word guru in this country is poisoned, right?

It's been poisoned, which is very strange because it's like the most important word in Sanskrit. And it's a sad, terrible demon thing, you know, that people, you know, people told me all this guru stuff. And we believe in our tradition, guru in Tibetan is lama, right?

Translated into Tibetan is lama. So in our tradition, the reason Ken Rinpoche's picture is first, in our tradition, a living human being who takes you into their care is the basis of all evolution of a person, all spiritual life. All your spiritual life is based on a relationship with a human living, if you can, teacher and not a book or internet.

I heard some of my students are getting stuff off the internet to fill in tantric practices, and I think it's not good. You get those things from a human being. And that's our lineage.

That's just who we are. That's just what our lineage is. You carefully, and the tradition is sometimes to wait for 12 years before you accept the person as your teacher.

Be with them for 12 years before you call them your lama. But you have to find one. And they're all different.

Everyone's different. We all have different temperaments. We all have different personalities.

Some people are nerds. Some people are into dance. Some people like farming.

You know, everyone will have their own lama, but you cannot be lama-less, okay? And in this tradition, you cannot reject the idea of a lama, period. You have to find one who fits you.

And it could be unexpectedly. It could be, I know some people whose martial art teacher are their lama, and that's okay. You know, or their yoga asana teacher is their lama, that's okay.

But find, you must find one. And you cannot, in this tradition, you cannot engage in a practice like this necklace without having that relationship, or at least being in the process of seeking that relationship. Even in monasticism, we have what we call ney lama, right?

And we have rites, 108 rites, monastic rites and responsibilities. And they are very serious, like going to sojong, attending the, every two weeks, the confession ceremony is required of all monks. But if you lose your teacher, you are exempted from all other monastic rites.

You must find a new one. You must stop everything and go find a new one. Or you can't do anything.

It's not possible, okay? You just can't do it. You have to find a living teacher who you can be with and learn these things from.

So that's why we put that photo there. And you should remember, you should tell your students, okay? Teachers can make mistakes, teachers can have problems, but you can't live without them, okay?

And you have to be wise and careful, prudent in finding a teacher, and then you must serve them, okay? The happiest years of my life, my whole life, I've never not had a teacher, you know? And it's the best thing in life.

There's nothing better than that, okay? All right. I lived with my lama for 25 years and it was hard, but it was the best thing in my life, okay?

And I think Lady Ruth would say the same thing with her sweet teachers. Okay. So there's an introduction by the author on page five.

I like the second verse. I put verse numbers so we could be on the same page, okay? I like it.

There's a holy being who is half my lama and half the Buddha himself in his most secret form, the Keeper of the Diamond. Keeper of the Diamond is Vajradhara, which is the form that Lord Buddha takes when he teaches the secret teachings, right? These two parts can never be divided from each other.

I bow down to the holy feet of this being in every single moment of the day, for all days to come. In you do I take my shelter. And I ask you please, shower upon me your infinite love.

Take me with you, keep me with you. We'll go to the next page. The notes by the author are in italics and you're not supposed to sing them, okay?

Unless they're mantras. The mantras are also in italics. So when you sing it, you don't have to do his comments, okay?

In this holy book, I have set forth in one place just a song that you can sing for the six preparations which you must follow before meditating upon the steps of the path to enlightenment. According to the personal advices of that victorious Buddha, Master Wensapa, the saint of the desert places, I thought to tell you a little bit about Wensapa, okay? Wensa means a desert place.

And so he spent so much time doing retreats in desert plains of Tibet that they named him Mr. Desert Place, which is what Wensapa means. Gyalwa, his traditional name is Gyalwa Wensapa. Gyalwa means Jina in Sanskrit.

It means a Buddha, okay? The victorious one, okay? It sounds like Gyalpo but it's not.

Gyalpo means Joaquin. Gyalwa means victorious one, okay? So he's often called Gyalwa Wensapa.

So what he's saying is that this song has been written in the tradition, in the oral tradition of Gyalwa Wensapa. So I thought I would tell you a little bit about Gyalwa Wensapa. And as usual, I got out ahead.

So I thought I would tell you a little bit about his life. Why? If you ask a Tibetan Lama, you know, I think all these practices are nice.

They all sound very good. This whole thing is supposed to get you enlightened. Are there any real examples in Tibet?

Did somebody see somebody turn into a Buddha after singing this thing? Can you point to anybody? Because they got 200,000 scriptures in Tibet, 200,000 holy books.

But can you show me a person who got enlightened? Can we go see him? And they'll say Gyalwa Wensapa did.

And of course many Lamas got enlightened. But he's the classical example. So I thought, I was curious.

I said, okay, if this guy got enlightened, what happened? He was having breakfast and he bit into that waffle and suddenly he turned into a lion. Exactly when did it happen and where did it happen?

What was going on? What did he do? Did anybody write down what happened in that moment?

How did they know he was a Buddha afterwards? So I've been researching this thing because I'm just curious about it. People ask me also and I'm kind of like, oh, I don't really know.

So here's a little bit. And I'll tell you more tomorrow and I'll tell you more the next day because it's too much to tell in one night. But I'm going to start to tell you his life story.

Okay. Because I thought it was cool. Just in case we die tonight.

He got enlightened, they say, by doing two practices. All right. Two practices.

The first was Guru Yoga. His devotion to his teacher. Okay.

His relationship with a teacher. And secondly, Vajrayogini practice. Okay.

The practice of Vajrayogini. Which is what this university teaches. It's what the seven-year course is devoted to.

And it's what the three-year retreat is devoted to. So that's how he got enlightened. By those two practices.

Okay. 1505 to 1566 in the mortal body. It's a nice lineage if you are into lineages.

Lineages are cool because it's kind of like, okay, Neil Young sang with Buffalo Springfield and then he broke off on his own and did Neil Young, two albums with Crazy Horse. And then after that, he met up with Stephen Stills again and Crosby and Nash and they did Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. And then they broke up and Crosby got arrested.

And then they had to do... It's like that. If you really love music, it's nice to know what they went through.

The lineage of... Really, it is nice. You can see patterns.

So anyway, he was a teacher of Sangye Yeshe. And his best student was... Do you know Sangye Yeshe?

First Panchen Lama. Okay. Who wrote the Devil Angel text that we've been studying.

Wrote a lot of the texts that we... He wrote the Deilam that you study. So very important for our lineage.

That's the immediate lineage. He's the teacher of the teacher of the First Panchen Lama. The First Panchen Lama is who he is because of his teacher.

And he is who he is because of his teacher's teacher. Also, when Sapa studied with Gendun Gyatso. Who's that?

Second Dalai Lama. He was a student of Gendun Gyatso. Who was a great follower of the Niguma Yoga practice.

And when Sapa was also devoted to the Niguma practice. And he got enlightened, you see. Wensa is also the name of a particular place in Tibet where people did so many retreats that they started to call the place the Desert Retreat.

So the monastery even before he was born was called Wensa.

[Говорящий 2] (34:28 - 34:28)
Okay.

[Говорящий 1] (34:29 - 42:05)
Here's a cool story. Here's the first story and then maybe we let it go. So I've been trying to find out where was he at the moment of enlightenment.

I'm just curious. So I was reading all his biographies, which is a big trouble. It's a lot of pages of stuff.

And there's a beautiful story. When he was born, right out of the womb, like in the first few days, he started to recite, he started to say, MA SEM CHEN THAMS CAD MA SEM CHEN SNYING RAY BYAS OM MANI PADME HUM MA SEM CHEN SNYING RAY BYAS OM MANI PADME HUM MA SEM CHEN means all living beings who have been my mother in my past lifetimes. We did this meditation, I don't know where it was, recently.

Some people objected to it. I was like, pick your enemy and think about drinking milk from their breast. And the people got really uncomfortable, especially if the enemy was a guy.

But for myself, I found it very, it broke my dislike for this person. Suddenly I had to think of him as my mom. And it was very powerful.

So anyway, here's the first words that came out of his mouth, where every being has been my mother. SNYING RAY BYAS, SNYING RAY BYAS means, oh man, they're hurting so bad. SNYING RAY BYAS means, SNYING RAY BYAS means compassion, right?

SNYING RAY BYAS in Tibet, it's kind of like, you see a car accident and you go, oh man, it's just, there's no translation, I think. Maybe there's something in Spanish, I don't know. It's like, SNYING RAY BYAS means, ah, they also say, ATSATSA, ATSATSA, you know, it just means, oh man, you know, like SNYING RAY BYAS.

So he came out saying, oh man, and then, they're all my mother. And then he said, OM MANI PADME HUM, you know. So the story is that his father was, he found that disconcerting, that an infant would be reciting OM MANI PADME HUM.

He was scared by it. He thought that the child was possessed or something. So he actually smothered, he took a Tibetan carpet, a piece of Tibetan carpet, and put it over his face so he wouldn't have to hear it.

And it deformed his face as a child. It deformed the bones of his face. And then he had a deformity during his life.

So I think it's interesting that this person is going to be the person in Tibet who got enlightened. Apparently his face was deformed from childhood because of that incident. And I've read other authors who defend him.

They say, no, his face was like a murder for the eyes. They denied that he was unattractive. So he grew up like that.

He grew up that way. I read a text today when he was eight years old. He was laying in bed and the window was open and the full moon came up and it broke over the mountains, which is so lovely here.

It does that so well here. And then the light hit his chest and his body. And he looked down and he saw himself dressed in white silk with jewels all over.

And then he saw his body floated out of the window and he was riding on the moon like a horse. And then suddenly there was a bell in his hand and a Dorje at eight. And he was ringing the bell and then the bell sound covered the whole planet.

And then his teacher said, oh, that's a good dream. You're going to be teaching the wisdom of Je Tsongkapa tantra and sutra across this planet. It's a sign that you will teach that across this planet.

And then they said he took to Je Tsongkapa's teachings with the instinct of a child sucking milk from the teat of the mother. You see? Nobody had to ask him.

He saw those teachings and he went crazy. And then there was a disciple of Je Tsongkapa called Duwa Zimba. And it's believed that he was a past life.

In his past life he was Duwa Zimba. Duwa Zimba means the Vinaya holder. And I think it's Drapa Gyong.

I'll tell you tomorrow. Drapa something. And then they go into his past lives and they said he was a yogi in India, in northeast India, Bengal, which is like the hotbed.

In around 800, 900, it was a hotbed of yoga and tantra. Buddhist and Hindu sages practiced together the teachings of tantra and yoga. And he was born there.

And he learned and he spread the tantric teachings there. He also went to China. And in his past life he's practiced in China at a place called Riwo Tse Nga, which is Wushan.

And it means the five mountains. And these are five mountains that are sacred to Buddhists in Tibet, in China, in India. And Je Tsongkapa is said to have practiced on those mountains also.

I went to one of them. And they are in the four directions and the central mountains. And there are five great mountains in China.

So he was influenced. His past life influences were Chinese Buddhism, Indian tantra and yoga, and Tibet. So I think he's a special sort of person for us.

He studied a lot the six yogas of Naropa and the six yogas of Nikoma. He was also trained in that at, I think, at the age of 11. So he was special.

So that's enough tonight, I think, on Gyalwa Wensapa. Just know the name. A wensa means a place just like this, Diamond Mountain, is one of the few wensas around.

There's a definition. It has to be 500 yantraks from the nearest town. So I don't know if you're going to count Bui.

As a town. Nowadays they would say it should be out of cell phone range, which it is for my cell phone. And it should be really...

And I heard somebody saying, this is out in the middle of nowhere. And I'm like, yeah, that's a wensa. That's what it's supposed to be.

It's a wensa. So it's a perfect wensa. It's a great wensa.

That valley is a very perfect retreat valley. Hard to find something like that. Okay.

So I thought I'd just review with all of you the six preliminary practices. Just the names and then we'll go through them.

[Говорящий 2] (42:05 - 42:05)
Okay.

[Говорящий 1] (42:05 - 1:31:37)
First one is called NGES GANG CI DOG BYED LA GUS SUM THUGS KYI RTEN DANG PA And by the way, this is the first step of the lamrims, is to prepare for lamrim meditations. So this is after you tell people the history of the lamrim and all the lamas of the lamrim, then you're supposed to start with the jorja. That's supposed to be, even before you talk about lamas, the practice of having a lama, you're supposed to talk about these six preparations because you can't meditate on the lamrim without knowing them.

Without this book, you can't meditate on the lamrim. Okay. First one, NGES GANG CI DOG BYED means straighten up your room.

That's the first meditation preliminary. The room should be pleasant, elegant, neat. I don't know.

My house was messy when I was growing up. We had four boys, one mom who was working. So it was not technically neat, but it was warm and loving and full of light.

When I say the room should be beautiful, I don't mean like my next door neighbor when I grew up, she was this grumpy old lady and they had a white carpet and a white couch and they were covered with plastic. And it was so neat and unhappy. So don't get overwhelmed with the neat part.

I mean, it means you should, it's our tradition to clean the room and to straighten the room before you meditate. We'll talk about it. CI DOG BYED LA KUSUM THUGS KYI RTEN DANG MA Set up your altar.

That's still part of number one. Make sure you have an altar. People make fun of American Buddhists.

You know, oh, they're cultish and they have these cardboard boxes with a candle and a flower and a cheap Buddha image from Thailand. No, they make fun. Alanis Morissette has a song about it.

And then when they get cancer, they're all knocking on your door. Could you teach me that cardboard box thing? I swear to God, everyone who ever said that to me is, later they write you, even my old Princeton friends, who were lawyers and diplomats.

And they're all like, I got lymphatic cancer, got six months to live. Tell me what you've been studying. Now I want to know.

It's not culty anymore. It's life or death. Now I understand why you were doing it.

So you kind of just understand that. Regardless of what people say, at the end they realize it's, when it comes to your life, then they realize that nothing else counts. And then they want to know about what you're doing.

And then you're going to say, go get a cardboard box. Clean up your room and get a cardboard box. I got an extra cheap Buddha from Thailand.

And then they're like, oh, thank you. I swear all my old friends, one by one they came. Now they're all there.

They're all practicing. The ones who made fun of it, or said it was culty, or things like that. Because it really is the only important thing in life.

Other things are important. Other things are wonderful, beautiful. But if they don't have a spiritual component, then they don't matter.

They're not, they don't have meaning. Everyone understands that by the end of their life. Some people earlier.

All right. GNAS GANG CI DANG DANG, KUSUM THUGYI BRTAN DANG MA Second GYOR GCOD. CHOS PA YOD MED, YOD MED CING GOS PA RDZAS PAR BSHAMS PA Put forth some kind of offering, which is YOD MED and GOS PA RDZAS PAR YOD MED, YOD MED is not YOD MED.

YOD MED means honestly obtained offerings. The offerings should be totally clean karmically. They should have been obtained, either flowers that you found out in the wild, or things that you bought with money that you earned by hard work.

It shouldn't be things that you kind of sneakily, what do you call it? Sneakily gotten stuff cannot be used for offerings. Stuff that you grubbed off other people who didn't want to give it to you, really, is not to be offered.

It has to be clean, karmically clean. Your livelihood has to be honest and sincere. And then you can buy things and offer them.

GOS PA RDZAS PAR means they should be beautiful. The arrangement of them on the altar should be attractive. It's not unimportant that things are elegant when they're spiritual.

That's what I was talking about. Your performance, whatever you choose to do, should be beautiful. You should put a lot of work into making it something beautiful.

That means something. All right. GSUM PA RTEN DE BA LA LUS RNAM NAM GYI CHOD DONG LDAN DU KHOD BDE DGE SEMS BSKYED PA CHEN GYI SNGON GNYIS BSKYED PA GSUM SOGS BYA BA Get a proper meditation cushion.

Sit on it in the proper way, the seven-point posture. And then prepare your mind, prepare your heart for meditation, mainly through taking refuge and thinking about bodhicitta, universal love. You could get a recording of Lama Dvora at that point.

That'd be cool. All right. This could take all day.

I don't know if I can do this. All right. Don't think like that.

Number four. Number four is you visualize your Lamas and the Lamas of the lineage. This is the technical visualization up here.

I don't do it because it's too complicated. And you simplify it. There's a Kundunorbaluk where you just see your own teacher.

You just imagine your own teacher. So you can go anywhere from one teacher to these, this thing here. Wensop is up there somewhere.

Number five. SAKSANG GI GNAS DUG PA YANG LA BDOD MA MAN DAL DANG PHYIR PA That's the seven-part prayer. It's a seven-part prayer that we do.

It's instant good karma collection, instant bad karma purification. Step number five. And then step number six.

Ask for help just before you meditate. Ask for help. If you study this text, you'll see that probably the last quarter or third is asking for help from all the Lamas of the lineage.

It's a little too much if you've got a job and you've got to get up and go to work. When you get to that part, you can do your own Lama and you can start meditating. But you do have to ask someone for help.

That's number six. Just before you meditate, ask your teachers for help. Ask somebody for help.

All right. Those are the six. Tonight, we'll only cover the first one.

This is a review for the people who have been coming to Phoenix and doing the 10-day courses. So I wanted to pause, review the six preliminary practices, and then give you the transmission of this wonderful practice, this oral transmission. So here we go.

The first of the preparations is to clean. This is page seven. The first of the preparations is to clean and straighten up your room, and set up an altar there.

And what I did was I went to the Gift of Liberation, Trust into Your Hands, Nambra Lakchang, which is the real title. And I took out the main points to teach in one night, okay? So we'll just do the main points of how to clean up your room, or the main tradition for teaching this subject, okay?

This is what we call highlights. We call it football. Highlights?

Yeah, replay the highlights of like 12 games in five minutes, right? Okay. So I'll just give you some highlights from the text.

First of all, Pabongka Rinpoche says that this comes mainly from Lama Sarlingpa, which is Suvarna Dvipa, which is whose teacher? Lord Atisha's teacher, okay? So the Lama who brought this tradition to Tibet from India, his teacher lived in Indonesia, Sumatra.

And in the year 950-something, he took a very dangerous sea trip around Southeast Asia to go get this teaching from Sarlingpa. And it's said that he, after taking, I think it was a nine-month voyage, very, very dangerous, pirates all the way. And it's a tiny wooden ship in a typhoon area.

But he went to get the bodhichitta, the kindness teachings from this famous Lama. And it's said that, by the way, when he got there, he didn't go to the Lama. He checked him out.

And he spent a long time checking him out. He did not, he risked his life to go there. He got there, and then he didn't meet the Lama.

He went and talked to all these people. He did, what do you call, detective, like he's doing a scoop on him, like find out, is there anything bad about him? Has he ever done anything wrong?

And it's tradition that he spent a long time checking out the teacher before he went to him, even after the voyage. Then this Lama is credited with teaching him about how to clean up your room, okay? So that's where it came from.

Then the sutras by Lord Buddha, they say, this is a great practice, this is an important practice, but it's not for you. Cleaning your room, straightening your room is not so much for you, but it's a sign that you expect an important guest, okay? It's a sign that you really believe that during your meditation, your Lama's going to be there, okay?

So you don't just close your eyes and picture your Lama there if you haven't made the bed. Because the Lama doesn't like it when you haven't made the bed, okay? It looks messy.

Who got points? Aaron or Nick? Who wants the bed, man?

They were like waving at each other, okay. So the sutras by Lord Buddha say that the reason to clean your room and make it neat and attractive is that you wouldn't invite the Dalai Lama to your apartment if it was messy or it was junk lying around or the dishes weren't washed. So it's by tradition you go through your room and clean it and straighten it because you're expecting important guests.

If you don't straighten your room, it means you don't really believe unseen holy beings are going to be there. It's a sign that you don't really know what you're doing, okay? If your room is a mess, it's a sign that you don't know what you're doing, okay?

Because you don't really believe someone's coming. Got it? Okay.

The Lam Rim gives five benefits of cleaning your room. Here you go. This is the kind of stuff I want you to put in the back, okay?

You should be writing in the back. Please, I beg you for your students' sake. Number one, they use a word that means crystal clear, DANG BA.

And it also means Shraddha, like that great teacher Shraddha, right? His real name is Shraddha. Faith.

But the word in Tibetan is called crystal. Shraddha is translated as crystal. It means a state of mind which is crystal and pure and devoted.

DANG BA So if your room is elegant, it could be elegant in its simplicity, right? And it could be elegant in its warmth and its messy warmth. But it should be purposeful, thought out.

The ambience that you want. Like I find some temples that are too clean, too antiseptic. You know, like I don't feel at home there.

I like a little, you know, a cat over in the corner and a monkey running around. You know, it's kind of a nice temple. But it should be purposely, it should be elegant because that makes your mind clear.

If the room is beautiful and elegant in your own style, then when you come into that room, you should feel happy. It should feel happy. You should, you know that, like Rob Resinger's living room.

I don't know how you feel about your living room, but when I go in there, there's this light pouring in. He feeds all the, well, we're not supposed to talk about that. He has water out nowadays for the birds.

There are birds singing, the sunlight's pouring in, the place is neat and beautiful. Probably Donna forces him to do that, I don't know. But even the instant coffee is put away.

And it just feels good there. The place feels good. And you walk in and you're like, this feels good here.

And that's the first benefit of cleaning a room. For you, it feels good. Second one, when other people walk in that room, they feel inspired and they don't really know why.

A real yogi's room, there's a meditation mat, well rolled up, what do you call it? Leaning in the corner. But they can tell it was used this morning.

You know what I mean? There's some vibe about the place. The meditation cushion doesn't have a half-inch of dust on it.

You can feel the vibe in a spiritual person's room. The yoga mat, the meditation cushion, the water bowls are worn and used, nicely worn, like an old pair of shoes, nice pair of shoes. And the meditation area feels well used in a sweet way.

So the second benefit is that people who visit you, can smell your practice, your sadhana. They can feel it. That's the second benefit.

Third benefit, the beings that you cannot see, you call bodhisattvas or buddhas or angels, whatever you want to call them, ha, they don't like messy places and they don't go there. They will not enter a room which is dirty. They're offended, not offended, repulsed by it.

They don't like those places. Devas, has, yamantaka, Vajrayogini, people like that. And the lamas I believe to have been Vajrayogini, I can attest that they don't like dirty rooms.

Now they just come in and they start cleaning up and then you feel so bad. You invite this lama and they start cleaning up. Then the next time you vacuum and you clean they really do prefer, I believe in my own life, in my own limited interaction with those kinds of beings, is that they really do prefer a sweet space.

They're more willing to visit if the place is sweet. Okay, that's all. Number four, if you take the trouble to make your room something which is pleasantly attractive, and I'm not talking, what do you call, glittery or gaudy.

I'm not talking about that. There's some places I go in Asia where they'll say, this Vajra costs $50,000 and that statue. And I'm like, I don't care.

I'm not talking about that. I'm saying, if you take the trouble if you've put some effort, my lama likes the garden well done. I have to work in the garden.

The garden has to have flowers all the time and hundreds of flowers, really wonderful flowers. I'll show off, I'll make a video. It's extraordinary.

But they want beauty. They want to come through beauty to come to the door. So the fourth benefit is the karma of paying attention to that is that your life becomes beautiful.

Your surroundings become beautiful. The people around you become beautiful. The roads, the buildings, what other people are wearing, it's all beautiful.

You just have beauty around you all the time and you become more beautiful. Which is ironic to think that this is the traditional Nguyen Sapa guy whose face was apparently deformed. Anyway, number five.

The seeds that you collect in your mind, the deep seeds that open in future lives or in future years of your life, if you pass away or if you leave this world, you will go to a world which is very, very beautiful. The world will be very beautiful. And you know places like, there's a place in China, there's a city in South China that I went to.

The first time I was there, I didn't have the karma. And it just felt cold and dark and drizzly and dismal and concrete apartment buildings. And then we worked there for three years.

And then nowadays when I go there, it's just so warm and beautiful. And suddenly I saw stupa, a huge stupa in the middle of the city, walled off. You can't get to it.

If you walk towards it, you just hit a wall by any street. But from a high apartment building, you can see it. And it's this ancient stupa in the middle of the city.

And I didn't have the karma when I first got there to see it. And then later I was like, God, look at that. You can't get to it, but it's there.

So the place will change. If you try to practice this, the place you live will change because it's coming from you. Right?

Okay. Then I want to tell you the story. I'm repeating.

The people who've been to the Lamrim courses and didn't fall asleep have heard this story. But I'm going to tell it again because that's what I'm doing. I'm reviewing what we did for the last few years with the Georges.

So the classic story to tell at this point is the story of Chuddha Bhantaka, which in Tibetan is called Lam Chum. Okay, Lam. Lam means what?

You know now. Marga, path. And Chum means little, little one.

So this is a Bodhisattva who's in the time of Lord Buddha whose name was Lam Chum, Chuddha Bhantaka, a small path, trail. I call him trail. I translate it as trail.

And his brother was called Mahabhantaka. Okay, big, big path, big road. His brother was called highway.

He was called trail. Okay, how did they get their names? Okay, when they were born, there was some genk.

Okay, genk means like some obstacle to their life, life force. And so in those days, if the baby comes out weak or it looks like their life might be in danger, you go to a sage and you say, what can we do that the baby will be stronger? And this Hindu sage told them, take the baby, give the baby to the nurse, tell the nurse to go to a crossroads where there might be a lot of saints, Hindu or Buddhist saints walking by.

And then with the baby in the nurse's arms, the nurse should honor those saints like Hindu mendicants or Buddhist monks, sadhus or monks. The nurse should honor them and show them respect with the child in her arms and then the child will be healthy. So they gave the child to the nurse and the nurse thought it over and said, it's better if I go to like a really busy street, crossroads where there are lots of people coming by.

So she walked a long way to get to a place where there'd be lots of people coming by. And there were lots of monks coming by and lots of sadhus coming by. And every time a sadhu came by or a monk, she would, with the baby in her arms, she would say, oh, you're so wonderful and the Dharma is so wonderful.

And she would say beautiful things to them. And then they would give their benediction to the baby. And so Mahabhantaka, the older brother, grew up like that.

And then he became a great sage and he became a great teacher. And all of these blessings changed his mind. And he became a very healthy, strong teacher, good mind.

Then his little brother was born and he had the same thing, he had a gig. So they took the child to the sage and the sage says the same thing. Tell the nurse to take the child to a crossroads and honor sadhus and monks coming by.

So this was a lazy nurse and she didn't want to walk a long way with this baby in her arms. So she just went out back to, there's this little trail, and out back, like if you lived in India or China, and took them to this little place where two trails crossed and nobody came by. Nobody was coming by.

And she's just waiting so she can go home. And then Lord Buddha was in Jetavana. Jetavana, I've been there.

I spent the millennium sitting there. That's where Lord Buddha taught the Diamond Cutter Sutra, at the gardens of Jetavana in North India. So Lord Buddha was sitting nearby in the gardens and with his omniscience, he saw the lady standing there with nobody walking by.

So he got up and went down the trail and walked by. And the nurse is like, He's like, Hi. And he touched the baby and then he kept going.

So Chittapantika grew up. This is a funny story. I'm sorry about this story, but really dumb.

And he couldn't remember anything. He was just really terrible. And he just was like retarded.

I'm not supposed to say retarded. Challenged, mentally disabled, challenged something. He was retarded.

And so he was, they were like, the family wanted to get rid of him. So this is what they do even now. Even in our monastery, they'll often bring handicapped children or just because they can't take care of them.

And we take them. A lot of my classmates were crippled and they were great debaters. One didn't have a hand and he would debate like this.

And he became a Geshe. He's really good. So anyway, they sent him to a Hindu school, like a sage.

And the sage tried to teach him. And he was teaching him OM BUR BUVAH How's it go? The Gayatri, DYO YON NA PHOD CHOG DANG YOD This Gayatri mantra.

OM BUR BUVAH See, I'm also the same. OM BUR BUVAH TAT SAVITUR BARENYAM So the Hindu sage tried to teach him the Gayatri, which starts with OM BUR BUVAH. And when he'd say OM and the kid would go OM and then he'd say BU and the kid would go BU and then he'd say OM BU and the kid would go OM and he'd say BU and he'd say BU and he'd say OM BU and he'd say OM When he got to OM he forgot BU and when he got to BU he forgot OM.

He couldn't remember the first two syllables. I can't remember the fourth and fifth. But he said, then finally he kicked him out.

He threw him out of the ashram. He said, this kid, this kid not possible. He will never be, I can't do anything with this kid.

And then they sent him to his brother's monastery. And they started teaching him a mantra that starts with SIDDHAM SIDDHAM to be accomplished. And they'd say SID and he'd go SID and they'd say DHAM and he'd go DHAM and then they'd say DHAM and he'd say DHAM and he couldn't remember the SID when he got to the DHAM.

Like he had this problem. And then finally his brother just, they said, look, it's not going to work out. You cannot be a Hindu sadhaka and you'll never be a Buddhist monk either.

And they expelled him and they said, you're hopeless. And then, of course, Lord Buddha is watching all this and he came, somebody said, try Lord Buddha. Maybe Lord Buddha can make something out of you.

And they sent him to Lord Buddha. Lord Buddha was like, there was a custom then. Lord Buddha had two disciples who could read minds and they had an assignment.

They would stand at the door, they would read the person's mind and say, okay, this one's, he's monk material or he's hopeless. And all the doorkeepers said, he's hopeless, forget it. Don't even let him in.

And Buddha said, no, no, let him in, I see something. I see something. Because he touched him on the head.

And so he let him in and he's like, you want to be a monk? You want to be one of my monks? He said, yeah.

He said, okay, you're going to sweep the temple. You're going to clean the temple. Can you do that?

And Chudapantika's like, yeah, I can do that, I can do that. And he's like, okay, you sweep the temple. You just sweep the temple.

And he taught him a little mantra. It was like a dipa pang, dipa pang, dipa pang, far south. The mantra was dul pang, chimpa pang.

Dul pang, chimpa pang. Dul means dirt, pang means clean it. Chimpa pang means the impurities.

So he said, dul pang, chimpa pang. While you're sweeping, I want you to say dul pang, chimpa pang. Can you remember that?

Yeah, I can remember that. Dul pang, chimpa pang. And then he swept.

And then Lord Buddha did this thing, it's cute. He would work his way up the right side of the temple, like this temple. He'd work his way up the right side of the temple, sweeping.

And then Lord Buddha would snap his fingers and dirt would settle again behind him. And then he'd work his way around the left side and then the right side would be dirty again. And then he'd have to go around the right side, and then do it again.

In the meantime, the Lord Buddha made the left side dirty again by magical power. So all day he had to walk around the temple, dul pang, chimpa pang, dul pang, chimpa pang. Clean the dirt, clean the dirt, clean the dirt.

Lord Buddha made sure he didn't have a rest. And he kept sweeping and sweeping and sweeping. And then finally he stopped one day.

He just stopped in his tracks and said, dul pang, why did Buddha tell me to clean out the dirt? Oh, it's my mind. He's talking about my mind.

He got it. Chimpa pang, oh, I have to clean out the impurities in my mind. Then he started meditating because he thought Buddha wanted him to clean out his mind.

He thought, oh, that's why he's asking me to clean and everything. So the practice of cleaning he became an arhat. He's one of the 16 arhats.

He's in the text. He's got, he's in the Djordhra. He's in the song.

His name is forever recorded there. He's one of the 16 elders. He made it.

He became an arhat by cleaning. So cleaning is a good practice. Cleaning is a good practice.

And then Pabongka Rinpoche mentions a tradition that the Dalai Lamas would clean the Patala Palace. There was a broom that was passed down by the Dalai Lamas. After three or four of them, they took this broom and they encased it in gold and hung it up so everyone would know that the Dalai Lamas thought it was important to sweep.

And then he tells a story about Lord Buddha himself came one day to the Jetavana, to the gardens, and it was dirty. The leaves were still there and they didn't deadhead the roses. And then Lord Buddha went to the garden and cleaned it himself.

So Lord Buddha thought it was worth his time to clean the meditation place, to straighten the meditation space. By the way, there's a story about Chudapantaka that he, one day the nuns, the local nunnery sent a nun to Lord Buddha and said, would you come and teach at the nunnery? And he said, no, but I have a student that I could send.

And they're like, oh, that's nice. Who would that be? He said, I have this guy named Chudapantaka.

And they started making inquiries, like, is this a good teacher? And then everyone said, yeah, yeah, he's the guy who can't remember OM when he says BU and BU and he says OM. He's going to teach you guys?

And the nuns got very angry that Lord Buddha would send an idiot to teach them. They thought, oh, he thinks we're idiots. So they did two things.

It's very similar to the story of Master Shantideva, but they did two things. First of all, they advertised to everybody in the town that this monk is coming and that the teaching is open to everybody because they were hoping to embarrass him. We heard the story from Jeff at the prison.

You told the story at the prison yesterday, right? About Master Shantideva. So they made a big advertising about the teaching.

And they said, everybody, if you want to know about emptiness or this guy, he knows everything. And they were hoping to embarrass him. So they said 12,000 people came to the teaching.

And again, they made a throne which was too high. This is called a teaching throne, the platform. But they made the platform like 15 feet high and they didn't put a stair up to it.

They just wanted 12,000 people to see a guy standing in front of the platform not able to get up. They were trying to climb up and they wanted to embarrass him. There's a couple of versions of the story, but one is that he just reached his hand up and suddenly the hand was 15 feet long.

And he went, and he lowered the throne with his finger and then he got on it and it went back up. Like that. That's the story.

Some stories that he just appeared on the top of the throne suddenly. Nobody knew how he got up there. And then he started to teach.

And he taught half a verse and 12,000 people saw emptiness directly. People ask me, how many people saw emptiness? That says 12,000.

So that's the story of why it's good to clean your room. It's not below us to clean. It's a good practice.

We have like 10 more minutes, so I'll tell you a little bit about setting up an altar, which is also part of the First Preliminary. And I encourage you to go through the book tonight and just look at the pictures. Especially, they were carefully chosen.

Rebecca helped a lot and other people helped. Because they're all going to have a message. And I want it to trigger something in your mind.

When you see that picture, I want it to trigger something in your mind. So now when you see the Ken Rinpoche's picture, it's going to trigger this thought in your mind that, you know, teacher is important. The first picture in this book is a teacher.

And in our tradition, that's everything. Teacher is everything. The second picture is these roses.

Those are from my garden. That's a picture of my own altar. And then you look at that and you think about, I need to set up an altar.

I need to have nice offerings on it. I go out every morning and go pick some nice... If you plant, if you have a hundred flower plants, you can go out every morning and pick one.

And you stagger it for the seasons. Some are blooming now. Like the roses are over, but these narcissists came up.

I don't know why for me the narcissists grow so well. But... But you can always have something out there to pick and offer on your altar.

It's a very sweet practice. A very wonderful practice. It gets you outside in the fresh air also.

So when you see that picture, think of your altar. The name in Buddhism for an altar is gu sung tok ten. Say gu sung tok ten.

Ten means like a home base. R-T-E-N, right? RATTA TATTHAD DU MA BRTED NA BSTAN It means home base or headquarters for ku, for sung, and for thug.

Ku means enlightened being's body. Sung means their speech. Thug means their state of mind.

So this cardboard box on which you put a napkin, you're not really going to do that. But... It's meant to house the actions and the words and the thoughts of a divine being.

It's meant to be one square foot in your apartment or your house which is where they hang out. I have kind of a big one. Not that big.

Not this big. But that part of your house is sacred. And in that part of the house is where the holy beings hang out.

It's ku sung tok ten. The name for altar in Tibetan is where they hang out. Where they speak, where they act, and where they think is that place.

That's the name for an altar. And then by tradition we put something to remind us of each of those three on the altar. That's just a tradition.

And this is what in our tradition there would be four things on the altar. Minimum four things on the altar in our tradition. First is some kind of image of Lord Buddha, the historical Buddha.

Secondly, in our immediate tradition you would have some kind of image of Je Tsongkapa. We are very fortunate that, I don't know if the Chui Chitins have seen this, but a Chinese sponsor donated a very beautiful gilded image of Je Tsongkapa. Or you can use that.

Red Book has hundreds of them in there. We have a nice image of Je Tsongkapa up there. But if you belong to this lineage, if you are studying in this lineage, you should have something to remind you of Je Tsongkapa on the altar.

Because that's where we all come from. That's where our immediate lineage comes from. So that's those two.

Image of Lord Buddha and an image of Je Tsongkapa. It could be a painting. It could be a print.

It could be a statue. It could be a satsang. It could be the book.

Something to remind you of Je Tsongkapa. There's several Je Tsongkapa images in here. And you could keep this on your altar also.

Those two are the actions of an enlightened being. Those two statues or those two images represent the ku, the holy actions. Tsong.

You should have some kind of scripture on the altar. For our immediate tradition, the Diamond Cutter Sutra, any sutra of the Prajnaparamita, Heart Sutra, Diamond Cutter Sutra, 8,000 verses. These are very, very powerful, especially Diamond Cutter Sutra.

That's why we named it Diamond Cutter Institute. That's why this is called Diamond Mountain. We were talking about changing the name because we got so much bad press.

Then I don't know, we're all kind of like, we're proud of the name. Let's just let them adjust. So, some kind of diamond cutter.

Something to do with diamond cutter if it's on your altar. That's a tradition in our immediate meditation. Then a bell and dorje, especially if you've had a tantric initiation.

A bell and a thunderbolt, those represent the mind. The scripture represents the speech of a Buddha and the bell and dorje represent the mental state of an enlightened being. The dorje represents love and the bell represents wisdom.

I'll tell you something interesting in Tibetan. It's a tradition. In Tibetan, when you go to someone's house, you say, can I see your altar?

But they don't use the word see, they use the word gel. And gel means to be in the presence of a holy being. Or to meet somebody.

In Tibet, the word for seeing someone's altar, when you go to someone's home, you say, can I gel your altar? Can I meet the beings on your altar? You don't say, can I see a thangka in your house?

You don't use the word see for thangkas or for statues. It's a very beautiful custom. They say, can I make the acquaintance of the holy beings on your altar?

It means, can I come and look at your altar? And it's a big deal in Tibet. And Rinpoche used to hit me.

I'd be like, wow, that's cool. He'd say, get those hands up there. Thumbs inside.

Bow down. Put your head on the altar. There's a way to gel a kusum tukten.

And you're supposed to feel the being who's there. And it's not like, oh hey, you got a cool image of Jetsun Kapa. You're supposed to think you're in the presence of that being.

When you see someone's altar, you meet the altar. The altar is a very sacred thing in Tibet. And everyone has one.

And a lot of families dedicate a whole room to their kusum tukten. But at least you should have one in your bedroom or something. And you shouldn't have your feet towards it.

That's a tradition also. Okay, we got like two minutes left and it's working out perfectly. There's a story.

You know Shariputra, right? Sharipu. This is one of the monks who recites the Heart Sutra.

He's the one who speaks the Heart Sutra, right? Sharipu. Very, very, very, very famous disciple of Lord Buddha.

And then they say, how did he meet Lord Buddha? What was his karma that he could be Lord Buddha's big disciple in this lifetime? What happened in his previous life?

And there's stories about it. And it's a cool story. He was hiking somewhere.

He was on a trip walking through Tibet. His shoe fell apart, which is very common in Tibet because they just sewed them up. And his shoe fell apart.

Sorry, not Tibet, India. Northern India. And he was walking.

Sorry, previous lifetime. Anyway, shoes fall apart. And he was walking and his shoe fell apart.

Then he realized he'd have to stop and sew it. He couldn't go anywhere that night. He'd have to stop and seek shelter.

So he looked around and all he could find was an old temple, like a broken down temple. This is very common in Asia. Like if you take a bus trip, Lady Ruth knows, to Mysore to Bangalore or something, in the rice fields you'll see lots of old abandoned temples.

And they kind of leave them there and it's kind of really beautiful. So he saw an abandoned temple and he crawled into one corner of it that wasn't wet. And he's like fixing his shoe.

And then he started a fire because it was cold. And then he looked up on the wall and in the flickering light of the fire he saw an image of a Buddha, an old mural on the wall. He's like a fresco.

And something happened to him and he stopped sewing. And he was sitting there and in the firelight he's staring at this Buddha image. He says, Oh, that's the most beautiful thing I ever saw in my life.

And then he says, I'd give anything to be a disciple of somebody like that. And that was it. The next morning he got up, he forgot all about it and he just walked away.

But that was the karma, the admiration. They say not so much the admiration of the artwork or something, but the feeling that he might have been in the presence of a divine being in that moment is what made him be born as Sariputra. So that's in a section of the Lamrim where they say, try to reach a point, and this happens when you see emptiness directly, most strongly.

It happens to some extent before that. But especially if you've seen emptiness directly, something happens to your appreciation of paintings and statues. If you reach that point in your spiritual journey, then when you see a statue, it comes alive and you see the being in it.

You see who it was. And then you have this very strange, but very standard reaction that you get down on your... You do a Surya Namaskara.

That's what those things are really. You get down on your stomach, not just down on your knees. You get down and you put your head down and you put your body down and you prone on the ground.

That's where that custom came of namaskara, of prostration. It came from people who saw real divine beings and had to get down on their bellies and put their face in the ground. And it only happens to special people.

Someday it will happen to you. And you'll meet somebody and see who they are and you get down on your... and you put your face in the ground.

I always read this thing about Moses met the burning bush or something and his reaction is to throw himself on the ground. If you ever see a Buddha or a divine being, you cannot help yourself. You will do the same thing automatically.

You cannot stop yourself. Everyone who ever sees a divine being throws themselves on the ground and puts their face in the dirt. And then this whole custom of prostration and bowing down to lamas and all that, that came from that.

So it'd be nice to do the real one someday. It'd be nice to have a real one happen. And they say that...

Why are we talking about that? Putting nice images on your altar. Careful thought about an image.

Taking good care of it. Honoring it as if it were that being. Then one day it will happen to you.

You will meet them. So take care of that. Lots of people have lots of...

They just treat their altar like a junk collection place. They put little knick-knacks. It's a knick-knack collection.

Kusum knick-knack ten. Don't do that. You know what they do in the monastery, which is a very good custom?

And then we'll stop. It's 9.30. They... What do you call them?

They rotate the images. And they actually have another room that has basketball lockers all the way up to the ceiling. It's like 40 feet high.

To get up to the locker, you have to climb on a special ladder and kill yourself. And they have hundreds of sacred images. And the kunya, the temple keeper, his job is to change them every two or three days.

So a thangka only stays up in the Serra temple for two or three days, and then it gets replaced by some other image. And then that helps you appreciate it. If you leave an image on your altar for months or years, it starts to...

I got this thing in my eye. It's called floaters. I was all worried.

I went to the optometrist. I said, I see these black things floating across my eye. And then sometimes they go like this.

He says, Yeah, those are floaters. And I'm like, Well, I heard if you do headstand, you get bad floaters. He said, Man, that's BS.

And then I said, Well, what do I do about it? He said, Don't worry. You just leave them there.

They're inside your eyes, some kind of crystals inside your eye. And they suck in light, and they look black. And they float around in your eye.

And then I said, Well, what are we going to do? And he said, Your mind cancels them after like two months. Your mind cancels them out of the picture.

And you don't see them anymore. They're there. They're still there.

And they're in the same place. But your mind decides to ignore them. A lot of old thangkas are like that.

Like you get used to them. You have one of the most beautiful images, Gandharvan images of a Buddha here. You have extraordinary images here in this temple.

In this temple you have extraordinary images. They're very valuable actually. And the Shiva and everything, they're very extraordinary images.

But they're like, you just got used to them. You don't even see them anymore. So it's good to change them sometimes.

Because then you can honor them and appreciate them. So it's a good time to rotate. Rather than keeping all the images you have on the altar, that it looks like a knick-knack collection facility, like rotate them.

And then you appreciate them more. And then try to get this emotion. And they say, regardless of the quality of the artist, regardless of the skill of the artist, appreciate them as a divine being.

Somebody saw a divine being, painted it. Somebody else copied it. But if you trace it back, someone saw a divine being and painted it.

And so think about that. Every image you see here of like Tara, or Je Tsongkapa, these divine beings, they come from many generations. But the first generation was painted from the real thing.

Somebody saw them. So just think about that. And don't treat them lightly.

And then you'll have this experience of running into them. And then you'll find out what a real prostration is. And all the Surya Namaskars are just practicing.

All right, Dr. Phil. Show me. That's the first jorcha.

Clean your room. Put up an altar.

[Говорящий 2] (1:32:31 - 1:33:12)
Chant Chant Chant Chant Chant Chant Chant Chant Chant