«Дар освобождения», курс 29 «Большой побег», занятие 11

[Speaker 1]
Today's our last full day, so I thought we should do all five rounds. No, four, sorry. Well, maybe five.

I think let's do four good ones, how's that? The fifth is not much, and it's a way to get you back next time. So, get ready for a long meditation.

Lots of cushions. Lots of nose blowing. Lots of phone turning off, turning offing.

Yeah, if you want to record, this is a good one to record. Then you can follow it, you know, for the next week at home, and then you don't need the recording. I had this idea on the fourth round, which you noticed yesterday, to split it up, and I think it goes better.

So, you can try stuff like that, okay? You'll see this time how we do it, okay? Alright, then you can, for the next week you can follow the recording when you forget what to do, and then you won't need it after that, okay?

It always helps to have a small smile when you meditate. Peter's like, hmm. So, sit up straight.

Find a position that you can keep for about an hour. Heat. As comfortable as possible.

We don't want to move, especially in a group, okay? It's not possible to move without making noise, so forget it. Okay, just don't move.

You can do it if you're determined. If your nose starts running, it's really cool. It'll get to your top lip, and then it'll drip on your lap, and it will look strange later.

Okay, so, very quiet. Please, please don't move. And we'll start listening for a noise in the room.

When I was in my cabin this week, Diamond Mountain has a problem. There's no noise. So, I started following the noise of the air molecules hitting my eardrum.

You might try that. Ten breaths here. Glue your mind to a sound in the room.

Desire realm. The lobby of the hotel. Floor zero.

You might try to see which one of the meditation levels you're at. Is the mind more on the sound or off the sound? Are you good enough to have patches off and mostly on?

Now please come to your heartbeat, first form realm level. Glue the mind to the heartbeat. Try to keep it on the heartbeat.

Can you reach patch-like, longer on the heartbeat than off the heartbeat? You can time the first few levels with your breath. I suggest ten breaths.

You can do twenty if you really are feeling ambitious. If it's a weekend, you have lots of time. Or you can do five if you're going to work later on.

You don't have much time. Time the first few levels with your breath, and then you will feel the time for the rest of the levels, and you don't have to divide your attention with the breath. Now please come inside the chamber of the heart.

The heart's beating around you, but it's very quiet inside. There's certainly no outer world. Then the heart at a distance, beating, tiny beating heart, maybe five, six meters away, still in the center of your heart, and you're observing it sort of impassively.

You don't have much connection to it. And now shrink your focus to a single point, almost like the tip of a pencil, and you're inside of a tiny, single grain of sugar. It's good to make the grain of sugar or diamond a bit shiny so you don't...

It helps you not to get dull, dullness in your mind. It helps you not to get sleepy. If it's white and a little bit shiny, first formless realm, expand your mind as wide as the ocean.

Try to really feel how wide. I like the Pacific Ocean, very quiet. The surface is very smooth.

And try to imagine your mind spreading out left and right, as wide as an ocean, still inside the sugar crystal, as wide as a planet. Now increase that width and increase that expansion of the mind throughout all of space. I like to imagine a ball of awareness increasing and growing from where I'm sitting.

It goes past the sky, past the Earth's atmosphere, into space, outer space. Continues past our sun, our planets, and out to many other stars, galaxies. And I like to imagine that my ball of awareness is overlapping with other people's on other worlds.

Other worlds are countless. Other people are countless. Certainly there are some people meditating together just like us right now on this second formless realm level.

Now turn off the mind. Just shut it down. No feelings, no thoughts, no images.

If something comes up, block it. Stop it actively. Now stop the mind, but allow thoughts and impressions to pass through the mind without watching them.

Fourth formless realm level. Now choose one of your teachers in your life, someone who helped you a lot and someone whom you admire. Could be alive still.

Could be someone who passed away already. Could be an historical figure that you admire. Could be a heart lama that you haven't met yet, but you feel they are there in your future.

Ask them to come and meditate with you knee to knee. They are not a picture. They are real.

They are breathing. They are warm. There's a slight beautiful fragrance coming from their body.

Their eyes are open, looking at you with great love. Your eyes are closed, but you can watch them. And please think about how you first met them and how did that meeting take place.

Our human minds tend to think in terms of impossible cause and effect. We think, oh, this person drove to my house in a car and this person moved into a house near mine. They used to live somewhere else and they moved to another house and that's how they came to the point of our meeting.

And from my side, oh, I used to live in this place and then I moved to this other place. And then one day I was invited to a certain house. Because of the invitation and because of where I was living, I met this teacher first time.

So try to think in terms of normal cause and effect, different events, different causes, why you met this person on the day you met them. If it's a historical figure that you're thinking about, try to remember or reconstruct why did you hear about them? Who first told you about this person?

Look for normal causes and events that brought you together. Now if the world is like a pen and if the world is coming from me, from seeds in my mind, then perhaps those other causes and events were there and they came before the meeting and in a way they led up to the meeting. But if I look at what really caused those causes, it was seeds in my mind.

My mind made them move to my city. My mind made them move to the house they moved to. My mind made them get in a car and come to the place where we met.

My mind caused me to be born in a certain place. My mind caused me to come to the point of the meeting. Those things are consecutive.

One is leading to the next, but they aren't causing each other really. Each one is being caused by me. The most difficult part of the lion's dance is to try to find the teacher who's not there, the impossible teacher.

And that's a teacher who exists in the way you always thought they did, caused by certain things, brought to you by certain events. That teacher that you imagine has always been impossible. And because you don't recognize the real causes of this teacher, you have trouble.

You have emotions about them. You have emotions about other people. And then you can hurt people because you blame them for things in your life.

So try to, this is the most important moment of the whole meditation, can you sit for a few minutes recognizing that the teacher you thought was there, who was brought about by normal events, is impossible. And that's emptiness. We'll stay here for a little bit longer.

This is the most important part of the dance. So if this teacher came from seeds that I planted, let me go on a little trip to my past lives, try to imagine what seeds did I plant, how did I plant those seeds, what happened specifically, what were the events with what people that caused my teacher to come to me. You can also take one of the beautiful qualities about your teacher, maybe you admire their patience, or their compassion, or their wisdom, and then go back in time, choose a country, choose a historical period, it could be thousands of years ago, choose a man or woman that you were, how did you dress, who did you live with, and make a beautiful movie about the kindness that you showed to other people to plant this beautiful quality in your teacher that you see. And your teacher themselves, they didn't come to you by accident.

They are created by the seeds in your mind, and the events that brought them to you are also created by seeds in your mind. They don't cause each other. Make a beautiful story, relax into your meditation, forget what you have to do today, forget the big issues in your life.

This is important. This is the most important thing you can do right now. We can't see past life directly, but you must have seeds to imagine what it was, and those seeds were also planted by your past life.

So have fun, relax, make a beautiful incident in your past life when you were so kind to someone else. Then come back to this time and place, go to the center of your mind, see silver seeds laying there, five or six, like a bird's nest. One of the seeds opens, cracks open, a small picture comes out made of light, and this picture is the quality of your teacher, the compassion or the patience.

I like to imagine it goes to the back of my forehead, it continues out and settles over my teacher's body like a coat, coating, and kind of sinks into them. And because of that image, I see this patience in my teacher. It's possible that other people might not have those seeds and they might not see my teacher as beautiful as I do.

That's the emptiness of my teacher. So watch a few seeds open and settle on my teacher, one by one. Now we're just sitting with our teacher and enjoy the quality you see and understand strongly that what you see is coming from something you did in the past.

This is the Wheel of Life teaching. This is dependent origination. The original line by Maitreya for this meditation says, first do the lion's dance and it should lead into a meditation on emptiness and then into a meditation on the seeds, dependent origination.

Enjoy the teacher who came from you. And they are real. They are not artificial.

They are more real than a teacher who came through outside causes. And you have the power to keep them with you. You have the power to create a person who can take you to enlightenment.

Now we'll go back down through the eight levels. It's going to be a long meditation today. Let's be tough and get used to it and push ourselves, like you would do in a yoga class.

Back to the mind stopped. Very quiet inside. Thoughts passing through the mind.

Quietly. Going down you spend half the time, maybe five breaths. Come out of the meditation a little bit.

Rougher state of mind. And when you see thoughts come, then slap them down. Be more active.

Surrender to the meditation. It's long. You feel restless, then surrender.

Give up the restless feeling. Relax. Enjoy.

It's very important for you and for other people. Bring the ball of awareness back from countless planets to this planet. Bring the ocean back.

Ripples coming to the center. In the very center of the ocean, a crystal of sugar or salt, single grain. Keep your mind inside.

Now come back to the heart beating at a distance. You feel neutral about it. It's disconnected feeling.

Back to the chamber of the heart. Now you're more aware of the heart beating around you. But not yet the outside world.

And now you're in your body and you're watching your heart beat. We came back to the first floor. We do not go back to zero.

We stop here. Stop the elevator here. And then you go up one more time.

A little bit quicker. I'm just going to say a single word and see how fast you can jump to a different level. See how strong your concentration is.

Heartbeat in your chest. This is round three. It's good to speed things up a little bit here because your focus, your ability to concentrate is getting tired now.

That's okay. Back to the center of the heart. Heartbeat at a distance.

Be quick and be strong when you change the image. See how fast you can go to the new one. How fast can you drop the old one?

How few other thoughts can you have between crystal, ocean, space? Turn off the mind. Block thoughts.

Turn off the mind. Let thoughts flow, float through. Don't watch them.

Very, very quiet. Very, very tiny single point. Imagine your teacher again.

Probably the same quality in them. Try to think the old way about how they came to you, how this quality appeared to you, from what we normally call causes. Cancel that kind of person.

It's not possible. And if you think that way, you will always have trouble in your life, including death. Go to dependent origination.

Who really created this teacher? Who really created their patience, their compassion? Review the thing you did in your past life.

Attention span is dropping quickly in the last 15 minutes or so. You have to keep it moving. Now we walk into the elevator shaft and we drop down to the heartbeat again.

We don't go to the sounds in the room. This is now the fourth round of the five. We're in over the top already.

Back to the heartbeat. It's moving much faster now. The meditation should be moving along.

Don't dwaddle because you're tired. Show how good your mental powers are and skip immediately to thinking about something you would like to happen in your personal life in the next few weeks. Show your mental powers and skip to the chamber of your heart immediately.

Heart beating around you. Skip immediately to seeing the old way you would plan what to do to make that thing happen in your life. If you wanted to have more money to pay your bills, is it that you would work harder or try to invest some money?

Think of the old way. Try to think the old way. If it's a challenge with a friendship or marriage, think the old way.

Oh, I should talk to them or I should ignore them. Skip right back to the heart at a distance. Skip right back to the plan you had.

Cancel that plan. It won't work. Those are not the causes of what you want.

Think about planting the seeds instead. Think about serving someone using the four steps to make what you want to happen, happen. Show your mental powers.

Skip right to the crystal. Total silence. Single point.

Inside the crystal. You're like an acrobat. You are very, very flexible.

Your mind is getting stronger and more flexible and more obedient. Skip back to thinking about that thing you would like to achieve. What person in your life will you have to serve or help to plant those seeds in the way you planted your teacher in your current life?

How are you going to plant those seeds? What person will you choose as your karmic partner? Skip back to the ocean in a single heartbeat, in a single breath.

Total silence spreading in the mind. Palmar Gomba. Skipping meditation.

Skip back to this person. What exactly will you do to help them? Pick something concrete.

Try to feel determined to do it. Skip back to the mind expanding into space. The mind's tired.

Now push. This is when you make progress. Jump back to this person.

Where and when will you help them? In the next week or two. You don't have to make a firm, firm plan.

You can talk to them from retreat, but pretty firm idea. Maybe I have time on May 2nd. Maybe I will try to meet them at this coffee shop.

Turn off the mind. Plan your coffee meditation. Turn off the mind with thoughts floating.

Come back to your teacher. Enjoy their good quality, knowing that you can keep it by serving the person you just planned to serve. And you don't have to lose your teacher ever.

And they will bring you to enlightenment as long as you keep serving others. Ask them if they wouldn't come into your heart and stay with you quietly, unnoticed most of the day, and guide you. They happily agree.

They start to rise up off the seat. As they float up, they get smaller and smaller. They come to the top of your head.

You can feel the warmth as they land on your head. They turn to face in the same direction as you. They get as small as your thumbnail.

And they start to sink towards your heart, down the central channel, coming to the center of your heart. Say one last goodbye to them. Ask them to stay.

Then three long breaths, exhales. Imagine you are sharing the good seeds, like pollen in the whole world, carried on the wind. Slowly open your eyes.

Take a good stretch. You guys did very well. That's the fruits of a whole week of hard work.

Yeah. It will not be as good at home. Okay?

You've got a lot of stuff going on there. So don't get frustrated. Do the best you can.

You have a thing called your life. And there's other people and you're busy. So don't expect it's going to be so good on Monday.

Okay? With the jet lag. And me and Stanley, after a tour we have these crashes.

We crashed for a couple of days. Probably other people do too. I don't know.

But we like to talk about how frustrating it is that we can't do what we did during the tour. So if you expect it, it's easier to deal with it. I would like to take a pee-pee break.

I know you all would too probably. So take a pee-pee break. Drink a lot.

Okay? And then please come back. Okay.

Let's do it. Scotty, can you get that online for me? IDIMS, KD LA.

48. Yeah. Let's do 47.

Please send your photos to KD today. I got some good ones, but I don't have time. But I'll do it.

Alright then. We talked about Tsongkhapa's letter. Connie found it.

ACI 3, right? Course 10. Sorry?

It is what? Yeah. Thank you, sir.

Emergency. Okay. So what's the photo?

What's the image? He's encouraging another person. It took me like an hour to find somebody encouraging somebody.

There's lots of photos about killing people. So, be encouraging to other people. Put other people's mind at ease.

If you want to be a meditator, the most important thing you can do is put other people's mind at ease. It doesn't mean if you're a teacher or a wife, you don't have to yell at the other person sometimes to straighten them out. You got to do what's necessary.

When it's time. It doesn't mean you have to be nice all the time. Someone is doing something bad, you should try to stop it.

So don't feel bad about upsetting the minds of bad people. Understand? But in general, we do a lot of mind upsetting, which is totally unnecessary.

We often upset other people just because we're in a bad mood or we're tired. So, if you want to be a meditator, the most important skill is not on the cushion. It's the week before the cushion.

Watch other people's mind state and try to be encouraging to them and helpful to them and positive. Then your meditation will go well. And if you don't, if you disturb other people's minds without great purpose, then you will never be able to meditate.

It doesn't matter how many years you try. How many retreats you do. It doesn't matter.

If you plant the seeds by being careful how you relate to others and being peaceful to them and being encouraging to them, then you're going to find great meditation even when you don't want to. Okay? Understand?

And your concentration will get better and better. You can be at an age when you're supposed to be getting daughter-y, something. Foolish?

Old? What do you call it? Janice, what's the test for...

What do they call that? Alzheimer's. It's when you...

It's when you can't remember the word. You probably haven't. But frankly, your mental powers can get stronger and stronger the older you get if you are planting the right seeds.

Like your ability to, for example, read a foreign language or something can markably increase every year. Okay. Next idim.

We are... What's happening between 47 and 48? Can anybody tell me?

Close. What did we just go through? Since idim number one, I think.

Or, you know, number four or something. I'll go back and check. Starting with idim four and continuing up to 48.

Yeah, that was meditation. What's happening between 47 and 48? We're switching to vipashyana.

We've been in shamatha and we're switching now to vipashyana. Okay, so these are the first retreat or two of the 29 retreats so far were shamatha and vipashyana. And then we started back at the beginning of the lamrim.

You see what I mean? Because I wanted you to have some technical skills before you started the lamrim. Okay?

So, if we get through all these... I think it's 60, right? Let me see.

61. We try to get through these 61 today and tomorrow. And that's a review of the first retreat or two.

Okay? And that was the tools I wanted you to have to study the lamrim. Okay?

So, the first retreat or two that we did, we went to the end of Pabongka Rinpoche's book and we covered shamatha and vipashyana. And then we went back to the beginning so you would have meditation tools for the lamrim meditations. Okay?

And it didn't take very long because it's a very short presentation in Pabongka Rinpoche. Why? Because Tsongkapa nailed it and there's not much use for anyone to try after that.

Okay? Tsongkapa's presentation of shamatha and vipashyana is 500 pages in his lamrim. And no one's ever touched it.

So, Pabongka Rinpoche covers it just to be polite. But what he's saying is, you know, go study Tsongkapa's presentation of meditation and emptiness. And that's our plan also.

So, when we get to the end of the lamrim that we haven't covered yet, which I predict will be about seven more retreats or eight more retreats. Two more years. Then the plan is to jump into those 500 pages of Tsongkapa.

Okay? His lamrim. Just for dessert.

Big dessert. Because I like big desserts. Which is my problem.

Okay. Me and Phil, I think. Except he's looking.

The Germans did something to him. I think they didn't feed you or something. I'll tell you some restaurants there I know about.

Okay. So, 8M48. We go to the two kinds of emptiness.

Can somebody tell me why the image is appropriate? Huh? You're close.

I can see. The synapse is about to... No, it's not middle way.

But you could say, I mean, but it's not what I was thinking of. Not chi che dot yin. Hmm.

Say it again, Mr. Brilliant. If a monkey types on a typewriter for six weeks, a few words will come out. People and things.

The emptiness of people and the emptiness of things.

[Speaker 2]
Okay?

[Speaker 1]
And one, you know, there's a video of my Geshe exam. And I look scared to death, and I was. And afterwards I look relieved, and I was.

And the question the guy is asking me in the video was the hardest question. This is a guy who came down from North India and he said, I'm gunning for the Western Geshe. And I heard about it before he reached Sarah.

And I was a little nervous. He came to embarrass me. And he was like, he can't be a Geshe, you know.

I'm like, okay, I'm here. Then he asked me this question. And luckily, I had studied it.

When you see emptiness directly, okay, which of the two kinds of emptiness do you see first? Yeah. Not just people.

It is people. But it's me. Okay, Stanley will see Stanley's emptiness directly first.

That will be his first emptiness that he sees, which is also his Buddha nature. Okay? It's cool.

The first one you see directly is your Buddha nature. Why is it your Buddha nature? Your emptiness provides the white, empty screen for you to project your Buddha on.

Okay? That's Buddha nature. Your emptiness.

You already have that part of your enlightenment. You've always had it. You've always had the white screen, you just don't have the movie.

You don't have the right movie yet. Really, okay? Like the best movie is yet to be made.

Okay? That's what practice is. You're writing the script, right?

But when you are studying emptiness, you always start with the DCI people know a thing, like a pen or a car. So, I got ... This is Tim a few years ago.

And ... Just kidding. He looks like you a little bit.

Okay. Handsome and daring. And ...

So, that's what you're supposed to ... My idea is that Jasmine and me were talking about it, that maybe if you could give a coherent three-minute explanation of a photo without a lot of uh-uh, then maybe you understand it. You see what I mean?

Okay. So, there you go. That's the first subject that Pabongka Rinpoche talks about when he hits emptiness.

He divides it into two kinds. Okay. You ready Nick?

Okay, because Ben's not here. You're his representative. How does that relate to Siddhanta, the study of the Buddhist schools?

You want to take a shot at that? It's not an easy question. Yeah.

Like, how would you characterize the lower schools if I said how they present the two kinds of emptiness? Okay. I'll give you a clue.

If I call one of them dakme and I call one of them tongpa nyi, like, sometimes we say emptiness and sometimes we say no self-nature. Okay. Yeah.

He was in fact. Good. Yeah.

So, the different schools have trouble. The lower schools, one of the things that makes a lower school a lower school is they confuse these two or they can't handle the emptiness of things so well. So, they're dealing with anattaman, lack of self-nature, especially Abhidharma people, but also second school.

What separates the schools is how they treat emptiness, how they explain emptiness, okay? That's what created the different schools. And really, Ben Kappa's text, which is the comparison of the ancient schools, and by the way, all the treatments of the Hindu schools there, if you study it carefully, they're talking about the soul, the self, okay?

It's not a survey of ancient religions. It's a survey of what they think about self. You see what I mean?

So, the lower, by the way, something I wish Ben Kappa had said, which I think is cool, who created all the schools? Yeah, you did. Okay.

So, the reason we study them, the schools of ancient Buddhism, is that those represent ideas that every normal person has. They represent misunderstandings that every normal person has about emptiness. Okay, got it?

Therefore, his text is important. He's studying how did the lower schools misunderstand emptiness, including Hindu schools, like Sankhya and Charvaka, okay? And then Vaishnavite.

You know, how did they, Shaivite, how did they misunderstand the self, okay? So, they tend to have more, they tend to dig around in the self of a person, and then later they understand that it extends to things, okay? Got it?

So, in Buddhism, we treat pens first, cars. We try to understand chi che dak by driving a car outside the hall. Where were we in Germany?

Near Hamburg. So, I wanted to talk about the no-self nature of a car. We got permission from the hotel for Scott to drive the car on the hotel grass around to the teaching room.

It was really cool. And he didn't sink down into the grass. So, yeah, in Buddhism, we explore things first when we're studying, okay?

Because it's harder to see the emptiness of a person. But, in the direct perception, you start with, the first direct perception you have is of yourself, okay? Your Buddha nature, okay?

Your own emptiness. Alright. How am I doing on time?

Not so good. Okay. IDAM 49 is easy.

Anyone can tell me this one. A bird needs two wings to fly. There's a specific technical name.

And it's in your final prayers. I'm sorry, it's not in your final prayers. Yeah, method and wisdom.

Who said that? Probably Tahiya and then, yeah. She's your muse, right?

Method and wisdom, which basically means you can say the first three perfections and the last two perfections. Or you can say the bodhisattva ideal. What I do, I do to save the whole world, okay?

And many other worlds, okay? And I understand emptiness, okay? Those two things.

One wing is a strong understanding of emptiness. And the other wing is I want to use this understanding to help the whole world. I think DCI, as I said before, is very two-wing.

I really like the two wings of DCI because it's really making a sincere, concrete effort to help the entire world. And it's not easy. It takes tireless work.

Those events, when 3,000 people come in, it takes many, many, many months of hard work. Okay? Vivian knows.

Jenny knows. Jasmine knows. But especially Ari and Scott.

And I'd like to give them a hand. Yeah. If 3,000 people come to an event, somebody worked their ass off for about a year.

It doesn't happen by accident. You can't sit and wait, okay? Nobody will come.

Then you can have dinner. Okay. In M50, it's similar, but it's different.

Who can tell me? Yeah, you can say karma and emptiness. You can also say, dependent origination and emptiness.

You can also say, oh, you're too smart. Just take a break. Yeah, okay?

One of those three. And we really emphasize, sometimes I use a cell phone. You know, I make sure it's off.

Why? I need the ... Just calm down.

Yeah, I need the ... I'm kidding. I love it.

I love it. He's my son. I really enjoy it.

Okay. Dark, screen, emptiness. And then this is dependent origination.

So we use that in DCI. You can use a coin, but I think coins are going to go out of business now. Like paper.

I always thought paper would be around. And I chose a pen because everyone used pens all the time. And now nobody uses a pen.

It's very frustrating. Okay? So two sides of the same coin.

In the lion's dance, when do you flip this coin? Huh? Yeah, good.

After you ... Exactly. After you ...

He's my other son. After you cancel the bubu lama, which is emptiness, then what? Yeah, then you go back to your past life and you explore dependent origination.

Okay? So in a really good spiritual practice, you are using both concepts. You have to be a master of both concepts.

Okay? If you want to reach enlightenment, which is really fun because you can help millions of people, but it's not like washing dishes. It's just kind of fun.

Okay? So you don't feel like it's a difficult thing. If you want to have fun helping people just by breathing, study these two ideas.

Okay? You need these two ideas. Okay?

Number one, there's no thing or person, right? Two kinds of emptiness. In my life, which is coming to me by what people call causes.

What people in the world call causes are wrong. They don't make other things happen. Okay?

There's no connection. Okay? It's ...

My mind emanates a pen and then my mind emanates writing on a paper, but the pen didn't cause the writing. Okay? It's very difficult.

But if you can crack this idea, then you can do anything. You can have anything in your life that you want. Okay?

And to be honest, the DCI people, even the management, right? We're not very good at it. You know?

We're doing it about 2% of the time, which is 1,000% more than other people. So we get these weird guys showing up and giving us a million dollars for roads and stuff like that. Okay?

It's coming from someplace, right? If we did it better ... Somebody proposed during the board meeting yesterday that we should use the four steps and everybody's like, what?

I think it was Tim, actually. God bless. Okay.

Item 51. This is a tough one. Anybody solve this one, I will make a cappuccino for them.

What? What'd she say? Oh.

Okay, I'll buy you one on the way home. Okay? She's my chauffeur.

The car needs gas, the driver needs cappuccino. Yeah, that's exactly right. Three great teachers.

Okay? And if you're going to be a Lam Rim teacher, you should know, you know, I don't have time during this review to tell you the life story of Nagarjuna or Chandrakirti or Je Tsongkapa, but you should learn them. If you want to know Nagarjuna's life, there's a beautiful introduction and very rare.

My teacher wrote a history of Nagarjuna, which is difficult. There are not many histories of Nagarjuna. Xuanzang went to Nagarjuna's library in South India.

Nagarjuna had an ACIP project going on and this Chinese master went and visited in South India, not far from Sera, in a place called Badalya. Anyway, my teacher wrote a nice history of Nagarjuna. If you'd like to read it, it's in his introduction to Letter to a Friend.

Okay? So, you can buy it online. Letter to a Friend, translated by Geshe Losantarchen, written by Nagarjuna, commentary by Rendawa, Tsongkapa's teacher.

Very rare commentary. He translated it from a handwritten manuscript. I was there.

Okay? Still difficult to find. Chandrakirti, hmm.

For that, I think you should just study Tsongkapa's Illumination of the True Thought, which is the greatest commentary ever on Chandrakirti. You can either meet a person by studying their birth date, etc., or you can meet a person by reading the books they wrote. Guess which one I prefer.

Okay? So, Tsongkapa, probably Tsongkapa's greatest book is called Illumination of the True Thought. What did Chandrakirti really mean?

What did Nagarjuna really mean? Okay? We're translating that with the translation team.

I think we're about, I don't know, three, four hundred pages into it. You can talk to Nick. Okay.

Alright. But if you're going to teach Lam Rim, you should know something about where did the emptiness teachings come from.

[Speaker 2]
Okay?

[Speaker 1]
And I'll tell you something. These three people understood it. Okay?

And thousands of others did not, and do not. Okay? So, you can trust these three.

Especially Nagarjuna. Okay? They understood.

They saw it. They really saw it. Okay?

You can trust it. What's Nagarjuna's nickname? The Arya.

Okay? In ancient times they'd say Arya. They'd say, oh Nagarjuna, yeah.

Okay? So, if you study Nagarjuna, which we're going to start, in Jina's home, Guadalajara, Seiji's home. Okay?

When? July? July.

I'll start it there. Okay? For the hardcore people.

But we'll do a longer one here in the fall. So, if you cannot come to Guadalajara, try to plan to come here in the fall. I'm thinking to do just Nagarjuna the whole time.

Because we have enough long rim retreats. There's three every year because of the success of Thailand. I think we'll just do Nagarjuna the whole time.

Okay? We'll have a Nagarjuna party. I'm tempted to start with Wisdom.

He wrote a book called Wisdom, which is the mother book of all emptiness teachings. All emptiness teachings in China, Japan, Korea, Tibet, they all come from that one book. So, and it's extremely difficult, and I've never seen any good translation.

And I've never, you know, it's very difficult. And it's very short. He was a genius, super genius.

It's very short. It's very poetic. It's very mystical.

It's very dreamy. And lots of people explain it wrong. Item 52.

Say gotcha. You all know this word. By the way, you might notice something as we go through this review.

You'll say, why is Geshe-la teaching this? I already know this. That's why it's a review.

If you look at these pictures and you say, why is Geshe-la teaching that? He taught that ten times in China, right? Then I'm happy.

I did my job. You're supposed to know what these are already. You're supposed to tell me.

I already know that one. Well, what is it? What is it nowadays at most DCI events?

The second husband on the stage. Okay? If you haven't heard about the two husbands, you're going to continue to have two husbands.

Okay? That's your problem. Talk to, I don't know, Birgitta or somebody, Jenny Wong.

They'll teach you about the two husbands. Okay. All right.

It's okay for a nun to teach about the two husbands. Just theoretical. Okay.

Item 52. So, GACCHA means the thing that we deny. The thing we say is not there.

Okay? The thing we want to stop. Okay.

Okay. Is there an elephant in this room right now? People said no and they didn't look behind them.

Christopher and all the, Mr. Baker and Susie. They didn't check under the chair. They didn't look behind them.

Why? It's too big to fit behind, under the chair. Okay?

So, you know, nobody was looking around when they said no elephant in this room. Okay? Is that a good example for emptiness?

And I refer you to the Discover card in Kamalashila's items which we are going to kick ass on next week. We're doing a complete review of Kamalashila. Could not have been here, an elephant?

No, I didn't say a two-headed purple one. I said, I asked Susie, is there an elephant in this room? She said no.

Yeah, why is it a purple head with two heads? When you teach emptiness, the thing that's not there has to be something which could not be there. Could not be there.

Impossible. So, just teaching the emptiness of elephants is not a very good example. You should choose an example of something which is impossible.

You see what I mean? Which could never have been there. So, and I like, in Kamalashila, we use a credit card.

We say Geshe Michael took, this really happened I think, took John Brady to an expensive restaurant in Sedona and thought that he should change his pants before he went because they started to smell bad after a couple weeks. And forgot that his credit card was in the pants. And took John and Connie, I don't remember, to Kuchina, expensive place.

And at the end of the meal, Geshe Michael likes to show off that he has money because I didn't have money when I was a kid. And he said, I'll pay John. And then Geshe Michael is looking through his pockets frantically.

The frantically part is important for emptiness. Okay? Because self-existent things should cause you stress and emotion.

You see? A llama who came to you by accident should cause you stress because you can lose them. You see what I mean?

A llama that you know how to plant should make you feel confident because you know how to make them stay. You can force them to stay. I had a student in Bulgaria.

What's her name? Jana Ivanova. She came to Humber yesterday.

Many years ago. She said, I want you to come to Bulgaria. I said, I cannot.

My schedule is full. Bulgaria has half the number of people in the country as Guangzhou. Okay?

Really. I said, I'd rather go to Guangzhou. She said, I'm going to force you to come.

I'm like, yeah, let's see. She did. Why?

She planted the seeds. So, the emotion you get from seeds is confidence. I can make things happen that I want to happen because I'm not using old idea of causes.

Okay? The emotion you get if you don't understand how causes work is stress, and anger, and frustration, and unfulfilled dreams. Okay?

Got it? So, I go to John. Right?

The guy gives me the bill. Then there's really an embarrassing moment for Geshe Michael when he has to ask John to pay the bill. He's hoping John will believe that he left his credit card at home and not thinking that the credit card doesn't work anymore.

Okay? But that's not the end of the story. Why?

Huh? Lucas got it. Come on.

Say it one more time. Yeah, we need a credit card that's not a credit card. You see?

The lack of credit card is like a lack of elephant. That's not a good example for Gokcha. Why?

Elephant exists. Credit card exists. So, in the Kamalashila we used a discover credit card that doesn't work anyway, even if you bring it to the restaurant.

Okay? Got it? For a good example, in the restaurant with the credit card, you got to pick a credit card that doesn't work.

Oh John, I don't have my credit card. But Geshe-la, which one was it? A discover card.

Hey stupid, those don't work anyway. Of course they do work, but it's like 3,000% interest every half hour. I call it doesn't work.

By the way, it's the only one they would give me for a while. Okay. So that's Gokcha.

Does the lion's dance have any Gokcha? What? Oh, I'll kiss you, but I'm embarrassed.

Alright, the teacher coming from my side. Okay, it's the Gokcha. But there's another Gokcha.

Now you get into the two kinds of Gokcha. He's got the Tibetan name, give it to me again. Yeah, good.

The logical Gokcha and the Gokcha during practice. Okay? What's the difference?

Hmm? Yeah, come on. Oh, you're so cool.

Okay? There's one kind of Gokcha which is not the real, real Gokcha, which makes it an even better Gokcha. Just kidding.

The less silent place you reject. When you're going up. Okay?

When you're going round one, round three. Right? Round four.

There's a less quiet place you are rejecting. Oh, that air conditioner is too noisy. I'm going to go to my heartbeat because it's more quiet.

At that moment, we call the air conditioner the Gokcha. That's a Gokcha, but not the Gokcha. Okay?

Exists, it does exist. Is it something to reject? Is it something to deny?

Yes. Is it the ultimate Gokcha? No.

So we divide between normal Gokchas and ultimate Gokchas. Ultimate Gokchas never exist. And paradoxically, it's the Gokchas that don't exist that upset you the most.

Okay? A partner who's not being nice today is the ultimate Gokcha. Okay?

Got it? Alright. That they're more upsetting.

And according to Buddhism, nirvana is only possible if you understand the Gokcha. Because then you won't get angry at other people. No one can hurt you and you cannot blame any other person on this earth for your problems.

Okay? Alright. We could talk about Gokcha for a couple days, but let's keep going.

Some Buddhist words just don't exist in English. And Gokcha sounds enough like gotcha that people like it. It's like lelo.

There's a few Tibetan words that are interesting to English speakers, like three. Okay. Now, how much time I got?

Two minutes. Let's just do it. In M53, in ancient times in Asia, there was a rumor that if you poured milk and water into a glass, a duck or a goose could drink the milk out without the water.

They could separate. There's something about their ... They could remove the water and drink out the milk and there'd be half a glass of water with no milk in it.

This is an old belief in ancient times. Why did... This is a hard one.

Why did Pabongka Rinpoche use this example? And why does Buddhism use this example? What are we trying to distinguish?

Two things that are not easy to distinguish. Okay. Since we only have two minutes.

One minute. It's the two husbands. Okay.

It's the two husbands. Okay. Why?

Because it's a very common error when you teach emptiness to people that they go too far. And it's called RGAG BYA KHYAB CHE BA Say RGAG BYA KHYAB CHE BA Adam, you are the logician. The KHYAB is too big.

What's it mean? Yeah, great, beautiful. His book is a study of KHYAB partly.

You went too far in the RGAG BYA. There's no husband, Geshe-la. There's no husband.

I don't have a... My husband doesn't exist. That's emptiness.

He looks like he exists, but he doesn't. You're not a goose. What's it mean?

You've got to be able to distinguish between the two husbands. One of them is coming from you. That one really exists.

One of them... It's not my fault. I just walked in and he started yelling at me.

Okay, we call it, in DCI we call it it's not my fault husband. Okay. That one could never exist, but say it in a more deep way.

Say it the Buddha always, the way the Buddha always said it. Yeah, good, say it louder. Yeah, okay.

It's how we talk about the RGAG BYA. Always, okay. That's how you tell a good Buddhist from a lazy Buddhist.

What about this second husband? Who's, no, I didn't do anything. He just come in the room and he started talking bad to me.

That husband comes in three flavors. Number one, never existed before. Number two, doesn't exist in your kitchen right now.

And number three, will never exist in the future. That we can say doesn't exist, okay. You covered everything, past, present, future, okay.

That husband's completely impossible. I didn't do anything, he started yelling at me. Okay, got it?

I'll bet you $10 you're going to say this about somebody in the next week. Me too. It's so hard to practice it.

It's easy to talk about it, right? You will think about somebody in the next five days and you will sincerely believe that they are doing something to you that you don't deserve. It will happen.

I tell your future. My Lama in India, Geshe Ngalandagi, he used to, we used to go to a fortune teller, Hindu fortune teller. He got really mad one day.

He said, I can tell your future. You want your future? This week you're going to be upset at someone and think that they don't come from you.

That's your future. He used to get really upset. Don't give your money to that guy.

Alright. Okay? So, what's the milk and what's the water?

I don't know, you decide. I mean, it's not very clear in the scripture. I guess milk is sweeter.

That's the husband who's coming from you. Okay? Pay Vimala some money if you're going to...

And then the water is the fake husband. And only a very wise Buddhist can separate them. We're not saying there's no husband in your life.

We're not saying you shouldn't have a husband. The Hinayana schools, the lower schools in the 700 years of darkness from Lord Buddha's death to Nagarjuna, they believed there's nothing. Okay?

There's nothing. There's no husband. And it's not possible to have a happy relationship.

And you should not have things that you enjoy. You shouldn't have a nice car. You shouldn't have nice clothes.

You should live in a cave. Okay? This whole idea came because they didn't understand emptiness for 700 years.

Okay? Abhidharma. And we study Abhidharma.

I spent 12 years on it. Okay? But it's wrong.

Okay? But we study why it's wrong, which is right. Okay?

Got it? You should have beautiful... They're not staying in...

There's beautiful flowers there. They don't have dead flowers and you know, cow poops and... Okay?

They live in a paradise. Okay? You should too.

That's the goal. Okay? It's not that you go in a cave and you don't eat chocolate.

Okay? That's not enlightenment. Okay?

Got it? Okay? But it takes a goose to understand the difference.

Okay? Enjoy your mouth. Leave behind the water.

Okay? Divide. Learn to divide.

But then enjoy your life. Have a happy life. Have a happy marriage.

Get a nice house in Sedona.

[Speaker 2]
You know?

[Speaker 1]
If your karma is good enough, you'll have someone to come over and do your hard work. Okay. Aaron, you ready?

We got to finish the rest in the last class. Your idims are good. It makes me happy.

I didn't really test you yet. It means I didn't waste the last nine years. Okay.

Alright.