«Дар освобождения», курс 22 «Ретрит безграничной удачи», занятие 10

[Speaker 1]
Alright, so we're going to continue through this ancient book. We're discussing the hell realms. It's not a popular subject in the world right now.

But according to Buddhism, the hells are real. And you have to go someplace after you die. And this is one of the options.

So even if it's wrong, the worst thing that can happen is you get ready. The way you get ready is to be nice to other people. But they are real.

They exist. And it's better if you know about them, you can prepare to avoid them. And as we said, tomorrow afternoon's class will be how to avoid them.

And if the weather is this good, tomorrow afternoon after the class, we will do a fire offering. So, Orit's class worked, but try to make it ripen tomorrow. But we have to make it ripen tomorrow.

Okay, so we're going to read from the ancient Tibetan. Adam, we're at Achu Serwa? Achu Serwa?

Yeah. Okay. achu serwa men chen la kari dang kyang pe thang la nyangway lu chu ten la trawa tapa tar jar ne yo gul me par reng shing So, from the hell called Achu, del infierno llamado Achu, where the person is so cold they can only make small pitiful noises, uh, uh, donde el infierno es tan frio que las personas solo hacen unos ruidos así, dolorosos, on down from that hell, y de ahí para abajo, people's bodies are either on a mountain, or on a frozen plain, and their body is stuck to the mountain or the ground, like, I don't know, like an ice cream got stuck in your refrigerator.

Y su cuerpo está pegado a la montaña o al piso como se les pega un helado en el congelador. And you can't, they can't move, they're stuck to that place by the ice. Then in Tibet, they will attach jewels to metal statues, like gold statues.

They will put, you know, ruby or diamond or something. So, those of you learning Tibetan, where is, where is synapse? Oh, we call cha tapa, say cha tapa.

So cha means jewels that you put on a religious statue or building. And tapa means to attach them to the, like prongs or something. Tapas means prongs or glue there.

Yul gul mepa means you can't move them. The body is stuck, frozen to the ground. Then he quotes Nagarjuna, Letter to the Student, which is not the same as the letter to the friend.

LHAG PA BAS MED RUG PA LA YANG THING PA YID LUS BDEBS DANG ZHING DGUR NAS KUN KUN POR DUG PA CHUR RGYA CHUNG DUR BA LAS SKYE SOGS CHAGS KYIS TSOS DANG GZHAD NAS ZHAGS DANG CHOS ZER GANG BYAS ZAG LHAG PA means the wind. BAS MED means you never felt anything like that. RUG PA LA YANG THING, it reaches down to the bones.

LUS BDEBS means the body gets skinny and thin. DAR means it's always shaking. And GUR KUN KUN means you roll up in a ball to try to stay warm.

Those people are always rolled up in a ball to try to stay warm. CHUR BUR RGYA CHUNG means the skin starts to form blisters, cold blisters. DUL BA means they break open.

And the body starts to crack open like a flower. SOGS CHAGS KYIS Then these cruel animals, like German Shepherd, big cruel dogs, then they will come and eat from your body. And there are hell guards, like prison guards, and they whip those people.

The people cannot move and they are whipping them. ZHAGS DANG CHOS ZER ZHAGS means the fat of the body ZHAGS means the fat of the body starts to tear off. CHOS ZER means pus.

And GANG means marrow inside the bone. And these start to steep out. And then those animals like the smell and they come and they're chewing on your skin.

BYAS PA LTAR LUGS KYIS ZER KHAG NAS BHAG PA'I CHOS ZER LA KHOR BA'I GRANGS PU DRUG GIS CHOS CAN DU MED ZE BA Then there come these creatures like bees and wasps. They are attracted by the pus. And they come and they start to feed off your body.

CHAGS THIG PA SOGS RUNG BA'ANG RNAMS SHES KYI MA LTA BA'I Then blood starts dripping out of your body. And the karma in the hell is that each drop has its own consciousness. So each drop can feel the pain of the whole body.

Even though it's not in the body anymore. RNAMS SHES KYI MA LTA BA'I KHYAGS SHING RGYAS PA'I SDUG BSNGAL MYONG BAR Then you feel the cold and you feel your body splitting open. JA DUNG DE'I RTEN RIM NAS NA TSOGS PAR SNAR BA SOGS KYIS SDUG BSNGAL YOD Then the different parts of your body, they also start to get diseases.

Like HIV or things like that. NA TSOGS PAR SNAR BA SOGS KYIS SDUG BSNGAL So you have that kind of suffering on top of the other suffering. Then somebody asked the lama who gave this teaching.

And that lama is the teacher of the teacher of the current Dalai Lama, right? What's the karma? What do you have to do to go to this hell?

DER PAS BA'I RGYUD NI SKYE RAB LAS MED PAR LTA BA TSE RAB PHYI MA LA MED PAR DE NA RNGUB LUNG BYANG DANG DE NI RUG PA'ANG JIGS PA'I GNAS LONG MA BDAG LA PHAN DU GSUM GZHIG DER DU SBYUG So he gave an answer from the Jataka tales. Jataka is the story of Lord Buddha's previous birth. MED PAR LTA BA means LEN BRAS MED PAR LTA BA Synapse LEN BRAS It's the next subject of the lamrim, I think.

LEN BRAS LAS DANG BRJES BU LAS DANG BRJES BU Karma and its consequences. MED PAR LTA BA means, ah, there's no connection between hurting other people and getting cancer or something like that. That's a big bad karma.

One of the worst karmas. It doesn't matter who I hurt. If I do it quietly and I run away fast, nobody will catch me.

So the belief that you can do something and there's no equal and opposite reaction, it's a very bad karma. SRID RAB CHI MA LA GNAS PA DE NA So then the place where you go next, you will live in a place of darkness. There's no light in the hell realms.

In the cold hell there's no light. LUNG DRANG DANG Then terrible cold winds will cut through your body. DE NI RUG PA'ANG JI PA'I GNAS LONG NA And even the inside of your bones get differently cut.

There are different kinds of diseases. BDAG LA PHAN DU GSOS ZHIG DER DU SBYUG If you have any kind of mind at all, you should try to avoid it. And again, tomorrow we'll talk about the ways to avoid it.

BYAS GSUNGS PA LTAR LAS RES SANGS MED PAR LTA BA'I LTA LO BYAS LTAR BRDZIN PA SOGS RGYUN So, what they mean by the view that there is no karma and result is called BYAS LTAR. BYAS means cut. So it means you don't believe which something which is really there, you don't believe it's there, that's called cutting idea, cutting opinion.

GZHAN YANG RANG CHAGS LA DER GYI BA'I RGYUD RGYUD ZAG This is misspelled in the text. RGYUD ZAG LA MA NYAMS PA MA BU YOD TE You and I have a lot of karmas that could take us there. They are ZAG LA MA NYAMS ZAG LA MA NYAMS Anybody remember from yesterday?

My lama would say, it was a long time ago. It was yesterday. The karma is ZAG, which is a tense of TSOGS, so like TSOGS LAM, but it's not NYAMS yet.

The karma has been, you have the karma in your mind, but you didn't damage that karma. How do you damage that karma? You can do the four powers.

You can confess to a priest or to a lama, and you damage that karma. But we have a lot of karmas in our mind which are collected, but not damaged. GZHAN GYI DGOS GROB PA DANG BSTAN GYI SNABS SA ZHUGS PA ZHIG LA SOGS PAS SEMS CAN GYAK GRIR STANG BA SOGS KYIN So he gives three examples of karmas that could take you to these hell realms.

Number one, steal other people's clothing. Think about my brother Jeff. He took one of my best shirts.

The next day I was like, well, why'd you take my shirt? He said, I went to Tijuana and I got married. To his girlfriend.

I needed a nice shirt. Stuff like that. BSTAN GYI SNABS SA Let's start a dictionary entry on him, okay?

This is a case where the prefix letter of the second syllable is pronounced. So we say SNABS SA. Say SNABS SA.

SNABS SA So in Tibet, if you cast a statue of the Buddha or something, or a Tsongkapa statue, we will make little clothes for them, like Barbie clothes. We make a hat for Tsongkapa and put robes on the little Buddha. I took Ken Rinpoche to Rio de Janeiro one time.

I tricked him. I told him he was going on vacation. Then we got a lot of classes prepared because the Brazil people really enjoyed Dharma.

And there's a beautiful story. One guy had a strange dream. He's a pretty wealthy businessman.

He came to me when I was doing business in Brazil with precious stones. He said, you have a Lama, right? I said, yeah, I have a Lama.

Can he come to Brazil? I said, yeah, but we'll have to trick him. We'll tell him he's having a vacation.

He never went on vacation. I said, yeah, we can trick him. Then he said, can he come to the mountains outside of Rio?

I said, why? He said, I built a huge temple there. I want the Lama to bless it, to start it, open it.

So I said, okay. We took Rinpoche down there and we drove him into the mountains. There was a huge, beautiful temple.

I said, why did you build this temple? The guy said, I had a dream. In the dream some angel told me I should build a big temple.

He had a sign on the top of the temple. He said, I heard a word in the dream. So I put it on the name of the temple.

Tsongkapa Temple. He never heard any Buddhism or anything. It's amazing.

Why I tell you that story? We went to, is it called Corcovado? The crest above above Rio, right?

Is it called Corcovado, I think? Yeah, so we went up there. He really liked the statue of Jesus.

He said, I want to buy jewelry. So I'm like, okay. He spent like five hours choosing jewelry.

Then he had a statue of Vajrayogini, right? When he got home, he was so excited. He's putting Barbie jewelry on the statue.

So Tibetan Lamas like to do that. But if you steal those things, like it's very common for people to sneak into the temple and try to steal the jewels out of those statues. Or if you take small animals like roaches or ants, termites, and throw them outside in the cold, in the cold weather, where they can die in the snow, that's the cause to be born in this hell.

So we had roaches. We had to take them out in the winter. We made a compost heap.

It stays warm all the time. We made them little houses and we put them in there. Okay, one more sentence and then we have a coffee and, sorry, a cappuccino and orange juice break.

The sponsor of today's cappuccino break is Janice from Colorado and Geshe Michael. TSE TSE NI, how long do you live in those cold hells? SA'I NGU ZHIR SEMS CAN NYAL BAR CHEN POR SKYES PAS SEMS CAN RNAMS LA CI MA CI MA BYAS SKYES The book is called SA'I NGU ZHI.

It's part of Master Sangha's famous book, which is very popular in China. It's called Yoga Charyabhumi. Yoga Charyabhumi.

It's about the levels of Buddhist practice. Scott, can you show that photo in front of the temple, Ken Rinpoche? Can you show that photo of Ken Rinpoche in front of the temple, Scott?

Okay, SEMS CAN NYAL BAR CHEN POR SKYES PAS SEMS CAN RNAMS LA CI MA So, each hell you go lower, they live 50% longer. Okay, this is Ken Rinpoche's first retreat ever in America. My enemy get to sit next to Ken Rinpoche.

He's on the right side. His name is Art. I was jealous of him for 25 years, because Rinpoche liked him better than me.

Also, his Tibetan is better than mine. Anyway, he spent about 40 years translating two books. One is this book, Lam Rim.

It took him about 25 years. And he did a good job. I hate to say it.

There's three volumes. You should get them. If you read English, you should get it.

I think it's the best translation. Then recently he finished another book by Asanga, and he finished this book. It's called Yoga Charabhumi.

The levels of practice. Very difficult and very long. Several, I think several thousand pages.

So, if you have free time, you can read it. Okay, one quotation from Abhidharmakosha, then we have a break. ,'DIL BYANG SNANG NAS BLO RGYA NA, ,'DIL GCIG CHUNG BA'I ZAD GYUR PA, ,'CHU BUR CHEN GYI TSE YIN TE, ,GZHAN GYI TSE NI GNYIS ZHUG YOD, ,'DIL BYANG means MA RGA DAG GIS GAL It means a box of sesame seeds in a storeroom.

And you can fit about 200, and I calculate 240 pounds of sesame seeds. So, if you have this many sesame seeds, BLO RGYA NA, DIL GCIG CHUNG, if you take out one every hundred years, when that sesame seeds are finished, that's the life in the first, in the easiest cold hell. Okay, and it's not crazy.

We talked about it this morning. When you are sitting with your girlfriend in the drive-in movie, time speeds up. If you were supposed to take her home at 11, it would be 2 o'clock in the morning.

And if you go to the dentist, he drills you. It feels like two hours, but actually you've only been there for five minutes. So time is flexible according to karma.

It's not crazy to say that you stay in this house for millions of years. Okay, let's take a break. Please come back at 5.15. It's 5.03 right now. So then Pabongka Rinpoche explains the Abhidharmakosha quotation. So Magadha was an ancient state of India, like Jalisco. Or, what do you call that place?

Netanya in Israel. Magadha, kel means a special box they used to keep sesame seeds in. And if you have 80 of those, you can have what's called a storeroom of sesame seed storeroom.

So it equals 240 pounds of sesame seeds. LO RGYA RGYA NA STIL RE PHYIR BSTAN PAS If you take out one sesame seed every hundred years, STIL MA LUS PA ZAD PAR DGOS ZHING when all of the seeds are finished, that's the lifespan in the easiest cold hell. Then he says one Tibetan kilogram.

He had somebody check, okay? GCIG RGYUD NA STONG is about 15,000 seeds. So a Tibetan kilogram is called a pool.

There are six dres to a pool. Dres. It's just called dres.

And there's 20 dres in a kel. So anyway, I figured it out for you. It's five million years.

DE'I GRANG SNYAL DANG PO CHUG POR CHEN GYI TZIM DE'I, that's the lifespan in the easiest cold hell, which is called blisters, I think. Blisters? Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
Okay.

[Speaker 1]
Yagas. CHEN NI GNYIS ZHUGS GYUR In the Abhidharmakosha it says 20 times more for each lower cold hell. So that brings us to the fourth division of all the hells.

So, so far the first big group of hells is called what? Hot hells. The second big group of hells is called?

Yeah, surrounding hells. The third big division of the hells is cold hells. Now we've reached what's called the hell on earth.

It's called the hell on earth. In Tibetan it's GNYIS RTZE BA'I GNYAL BA GNYIS RTZE BA means not quite the full thing. So in different places on this world there are GNYIS RTZE BA'I hell, partial hell.

Like I think about that soldier who was put in the cage and he was burned by ISIS. So that soldier is living on the earth, this earth. But for half an hour he was in the hell realms and he died there.

So the next thing we'll talk about is the partial hells. And then that's the end of the hells. I'm glad.

I hope we can get to a more pleasant subject later. So we have a few minutes. We can do some questions if anybody has questions.

Talk to Nick. Guess what? He chose his wife.

Imagine that he chose his wife.

[Speaker 2]
Geshe-la, in your teaching the other day, when you were talking about the subjects and objects, you said there were two types of subjects, and the mind and the errand. When you see the direct perception...

[Speaker 1]
Wait, take a pause.

[Speaker 2]
Oh, sorry. Geshe-la, in the teaching you gave the other day, you said when you see the direct perception of emptiness, you're looking at the emptiness of the errand, is that right? Or is it the mind?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, I'll say two things about it. First one, the first time you see emptiness directly, it's always the emptiness of Michael, or Brigitte, or Sophie. And there's a thing called jey ten yeshe.

In the hours following that, you have many, many... after you stand up out of the meditation, many cool things happen to you. For example, you can see the day of your enlightenment directly.

And you can see the faces of every living being on every world in the universe. And you know you will help them. And there's a little understanding that comes in there, okay?

In those ten hours. When I become a Buddha, they will not call me Michael anymore. Okay, that's all.

I'll just tell you that, and when the day comes, you'll understand it. What is the name of all those cool ideas you have after you come out of emptiness? The four noble truths, okay?

So if somebody asks you, what is the basic philosophy of Buddhism? It's been mistranslated as the four noble truths for 50 years. In this case, noble is a wrong translation of the word Arya.

Arya means anybody who saw emptiness directly. So the correct translation is the four Arya truths. Or the four truths which are seen by a person who saw emptiness directly.

And you know, we teach it in level seven of DCI. The next time we're teaching level seven will be next month. Am I right?

Am I right? In Singapore, where all the smart people live. And those are some of the things that are the four Arya truths.

You can see the day of your enlightenment. You know how long it will take. You can see the faces of every living thing, bugs and people in the whole universe within about two or three minutes.

And you know you will take care of them. And beautiful things like that. Okay.

Then there's that little thought, you know, they won't call me Michael when I'm getting enlightened. Then some people came to me, Geshe-la, Geshe-la, I think I saw emptiness directly. Can I check with you, you know?

If you think you saw it, you didn't see it. Because one of the truths which you see always is that I saw it. You know.

If you have to ask, you didn't see it. So don't ask me. Okay, next question.

Thank you, Geshe-la. If we've all been living from times without beginning, theoretically we have done infinite horrible things. And at the same time we've done amazing things from times without beginning.

So theoretically do we have the karma to become Buddhas already? Good question. Okay, good question.

This is a basic problem in the ancient books. So they will say in the ancient books, you have done every bad thing there is. All of them.

And not once, but countless times. And then they say, why? Because you lived for infinite time.

There's no beginning to your mind. And there's no end to your mind. It takes a piece of mind to trigger a piece of mind.

And it takes a piece of physical material to cause another piece of physical material. So when you ask a Buddhist which came first, the chicken or the egg? They will say both.

Okay, no problem. But during that infinite time it's very... if you are who you seem to be in this room, you have never seen emptiness directly.

Because if you did, you wouldn't be here. You wouldn't be here in this world. Yeah.

This world is where the slow students have to go. Who couldn't understand emptiness. Seriously.

So you have to think about it. One of those statements is probably wrong. So let's look at the first one.

So how many numbers on one dice? Six, yeah. So if you roll a dice six times, will you get six different numbers?

I mean, it's possible, but it's not certain. Is it possible to roll a dice six times and get one number each time? If there's a mathematician, they can figure out the odds.

I don't know. So in my opinion, it's not necessarily true that you have done everything because you lived countless lives. And that argument is mainly used in the development of compassion.

According to the system of Shantideva. Why? How?

Yeah, everyone has been my mother countless times. So I should love all of you equally to how I feel about my own mother. But in my opinion, it's possible to roll one countless times.

Logically it's possible. And that's why if we didn't see emptiness, we didn't see emptiness yet. You roll the dice billions of times and my number six never came up.

So I think you have to say that. Okay? Now, why did I talk about that?

What was the question I forgot? The seeds to become a Buddha if you have them already. Yeah, so that's why we're not a Buddha yet.

We didn't roll that number yet. Okay?

[Speaker 2]
Let's take one more question.

[Speaker 1]
Thank you.

[Speaker 2]
Yes, you know, what is the seed to live in a world where people don't believe in hell anymore? I mean, I guess deeper teachings obviously are off the table, but things like hell, things like spirits, why are we in that kind of place?

[Speaker 1]
Geshe-la, what is the seed to live in a world where people don't believe in hell and in spirits? Don't say in the higher teachings. So I told V this morning, she said, how's the teaching going?

I said, it's going pretty good. I talk about the hell and they didn't kick me out. If you teach this in America, some people will leave, I think, because they just don't believe in it.

There are old books about hell, like the Christian books, and there are fiction books like Dante about hell, but people don't talk about it seriously anymore. And I told you there's kind of a joke in the book by C.S. Lewis where the devil is bragging. This 1900s, this century, it was a good century for me because in the beginning of the century many people believed in hell.

And by the end of the 20th century nobody believes in hell. So they're not worried about going there and they just do whatever they want and therefore many people will come to my home. What's the karma that in our country people don't believe it anymore?

Or don't believe in the devil. I'll tell you honestly, I met a demon once. In this lifetime.

I met one that I recognized. So I believe in them because I met one, myself. Then why do we see the country doesn't believe in them?

I think it's because ... Oh, it's always something in us, right? So I think it's when people told us things they try to help us with something and we don't have an open mind.

So it doesn't have to be about philosophy. Like, I don't know, Alfredo came to Sedona a few months ago and he teaches, he trains more people, I think, than I do. Then he's like, I have some suggestions for you Geshe-la.

How to improve your programs. Then inside I go like this. Outside I go like this.

Oh, tell me what I should do. I think about this karma a lot. I think if you're not open to other people's suggestions, which are difficult for everybody.

Nobody likes to get advice. I wrote a book with a Muslim author. He's from Russia.

Sorry, Uzbekistan. He's a very famous author. We wrote a book together.

It's coming out in August or something in his language and then it will come out in English later. And he said, we talked about it for about two years. What should we write about?

Because we want Muslim people and Western people to get together. So we decided to call the book The Ten Biggest Mistakes You Can Make in Your Life. And how not to make them.

Then he wrote Ten Biggest Mistakes and I wrote Ten Biggest Mistakes. And we worked hard and we finished the book. And we had the release party in Tashkent, Uzbekistan last month.

Everybody was excited. Then we went out to dinner together. And he looked at me and I looked at him.

And we said, no one's going to listen to this book. We tried to tell younger people, here are ten problems, here are ten mistakes, you will definitely make this in your life. If you listen to me, you can save yourself some trouble.

Yeah. But anyway, nobody listens, okay? Yeah, he's the author.

Why the world doesn't listen to suggestions? Because I don't. So, that's why people are not open to the idea of hell.

It comes from me. Because I'm not open to Alfredo's suggestions for my programs. So, what I decided, I should listen and I should consider them and then I should reject them.

But don't reject them before you listen. Okay? It's not wrong to say, you know, I understand your suggestion, but I don't accept it.

That's okay. But I think if you listen carefully, you will learn something new. And then you'll start to see in your world more people are open to the idea of hell.

Okay?