«Дар освобождения», курс 36 «Любовь во времена вируса», занятие 12

[Speaker 2]
Hi, welcome back to the Lam Rim.

[Speaker 1]
Today, episode 12, we're going to do something called visiting an art museum. We've been talking about how central it is to your practice. All year we talk about how central it is to see emptiness directly.

Now suddenly we've gone off a little bit different way. We've said the crucial thing is that you have to have the direct experience of bodhichitta. And have this experience where you meet every living being.

I almost hesitate to talk about it too much because I don't want it to start to become a thing in a book or something like that. It's an experience that you can have and that you should have. You can have it in this lifetime.

Again, I just repeat that. Imagine what it would be like if you met billions of beings in 20 minutes or something. And establish this bond with each one where I will take care of you as if you're my own mother or you're my own father.

Try to imagine what your life would be like if you could get to this experience. And that's where we are now. That's really where we are.

And then after this we're going to go into the six perfections. After we learn to think like a bodhisattva, after we have that motivation. You can have that motivation before.

But that's called sugar cane. Sugar cane means it's a little bit hollow. It's like bamboo.

You can have a serious commitment to helping everybody in the world that you know of. But it's a much different thing to have a direct personal contact with each being and make a commitment to them personally, each one. So keep that, at least keep that seed in your mind.

Keep that idea in your mind. Somebody said, Geshe Michael said this is possible. You can do it.

You can reach that. And that's crucial. So in this lam rim, it's almost presented as the main act, right?

As the Rolling Stones playing. Then there's a kind of a lousy band that plays before. If you enjoy concerts, it's sometimes very frustrating to sit through the opening act because you're waiting for the band you really like, the one that you bought the ticket for.

Then they come up for just a short time and then they go off and some other kind of not so good band closes for them. So, just remember we've been going from the steps of the path for beginning person and medium person. Then we're going to get to the main event, which is trying to have that experience.

Then we're going to do everything else, like the six perfections. The six perfections come after the main event. Becoming a Buddha comes after the main event.

So it's very interesting. Somewhere in there at the end is tantra. It's the diamond way.

Trying to use a way that you become a Buddha within one lifetime. Within this lifetime you become a Buddha. Guaranteed to become a Buddha during this one lifetime.

But Pabongka Rinpoche says, even for that, the main act has to be this experience. This experience of a commitment to help every living being. Of a direct commitment with every living being that I will help you.

I will help you get there. Then he talks about how necessary this attitude is for the practice of the secret teachings to become a Buddha in one lifetime. He's still on that theme.

We're going to be on that theme during this episode. This episode is called Visiting an Art Museum. I got Seiji and Tim here with their masks on mostly.

It's okay, it's okay. They are thinking, Geshe-la, what's the art museum? What's that all about?

Well, here we go. We're going to start with a quotation from a text by Arya Nagarjuna. The Arya, right?

That's his nickname. Pagpa. Just The Arya.

Rinchen Trangwa le dang ni dang ni jik ten di la me jang chub tom du na, de tsa wa jang chub sem, ri wan gyalpo tar ten dang, This is a famous piece of poetry from Nagarjuna's advice to an Indian king, Udayibhadra. He's giving him suggestions about how to run his kingdom. I was thinking, we're thinking to make a new management book with all of Nagarjuna's suggestions for kings.

I think that would be interesting. Some publisher in Japan wants that. Maybe in my free time.

So, dang ni dang ni jik ten di, la me jang chub tom du na. If you want to reach this place where you can emanate billions of bodies at the same time to help different people, whether you want to reach it or you want the whole world to reach it, this matchless state, la me, de tsa wa, the root, the thing you have to get first is jang chub sem. You have to get this wish for Buddhahood, which now we know means making a direct connection with countless beings and making this commitment to each one of them in a finite amount of time, which is also kind of amazing.

ri wan gyalpo, ri wan gyalpo means the king of the lords of mountains. Ri wan gyalpo, it means Mount Sumeru, which is like the highest Himalayan mountain, like Mount Everest. Immovable.

In Indian philosophy, it's called dhruva, which means the axis of the entire world. The whole world is built around this immovable axis. So, he says tar ten dang.

You should make that wish to help everybody else. As firm in your heart as the Himalayan mountains. You can't move the Himalayan mountains.

The earth moves. Those mountains don't move. So, your hope, your wish to help other people should be that stable.

You should keep coming. It should be the core of your life. It should be the immovable core of your life.

It's this attitude to want to help everybody. What we've been saying is interesting. If you had that attitude towards countless beings, then you would be sort of like the middle of the sun.

Your mental state would be 25 million degrees. Then things like the virus, coronavirus could not exist in your world. They would be burned up.

They couldn't coexist with that motivation. I do think it's a cool idea that together we could wipe out the coronavirus. People say, oh, that's naive.

But maybe the other approaches are naive. All right. SEMS DI MED NA NI If you don't have this attitude, SANG SNGAGS KYI KHYER RIM BSGOM PA LHA GANG LA BSTAN PO LTA BA LTA BU There are two stages to the secret teachings, the one lifetime Buddhism, Buddha teachings.

There are two stages. They are KHYER RIM and RDZOGS RIM. I'm glad I didn't offer you guys money.

KHYER RIM means I don't know, raising the Buddha, creating the Buddha. RDZOGS RIM means finishing the Buddha. What it means is KHYER RIM and RDZOGS RIM KHYER RIM means actually to make contact with divine beings.

To practice, meditate, do your yoga, be nice to other people, and then one day you make contact with divine beings. That's the first stage of the secret teachings. The second stage of the secret teachings is after you meet them, then they start instructing you and helping you.

They have a unique insight into what you need because they can read your mind and they can see your future. They're pretty good at suggesting a course of action for you. That's called RDZOGS RIM when you study with them and you change into a Buddha.

That's called completion stage. He's talking here SANG SNGAGS KYI KHYER RIM BSGOM PA If you don't have this attitude of bodhichitta, if you haven't had that experience, then meeting those divine beings will be like walking into a museum and looking at a painting. I went to Paris and we saw the Mona Lisa with Veronica and her sister.

Actually, we couldn't get too close to it because there were so many people. But imagine the difference between looking at a painting of Mona Lisa and meeting Mona Lisa. I think I would rather meet Mona Lisa.

I'm going to ask her why she has that smile. What was it? What went on during the painting that she has this mysterious smile about?

You can imagine how much more powerful it would be to meet Mona Lisa personally. What he says here is, if you don't have this connection with every living being, if you haven't made this commitment, if you haven't had the experience of bodhichitta directly, then when you meet the deities, it'll be like a thangka, like a painting or a statue. People will say, did you see Tara?

You say, yeah, I've seen Tara. What did she look like? Oh, she was made of silver and she was about this tall.

I say, no, no, no. Did you mean Tara, not a Tara statue? What he's saying is, your practice of the secret teachings will be limited to meeting the statues and not Tara herself.

DEM PA LTAR means you're going to become a spectator in the divine game and not experiencing it directly. RDZOGS RIM BSGOM STE and then your practice of second stage tantra, which is called RDZOGS RIM. Now, when the divine beings, when angels start teaching you personally, they will also work on your plumbing, on your prana, on your channels, on your jing.

They will start working directly on your channels to open up your channels. That's one of the methods they use. You're going to meet them and they will give you instructions.

The instructions written here for working on the inner plumbing, the inner channels, I found them in John Brady's database and thank you for supporting that. It's in a book called PHYAG RGYA CHEN PO, which is called Mahamudra, which is sort of amazing. The separate title is called PHYAG RGYA CHEN PO.

The section is Mahamudra, which is the great, you can say the great seal, which refers to practice with your inner channels. This one's called PHYAG RGYA CHEN PO, another great example. Okay, and it says, the text says, DNGOS DANG, GANG DANG, ZHIL BA DANG and he's quoting some elementary principles of pranayama, of how to open your inner channels through breath practice.

So what it says here is DNGOS means inhale, GANG means hold the breath, hold the prana, and then ZHIL BA means to expel it. And those are three steps of four steps of a certain pranayama practice. He only names three of the steps of a certain pranayama practice.

I'd like to say something about this practice. Lots of people in yoga studios or stuff like that, they read a book about pranayama and they try to do some of it. I've had yoga teachers who encouraged me to breathe in and then hold my breath as long as I can, and then they would actually count.

It was weird because I tried to do it, and I thought they knew what they were talking about. So I sincerely tried to do it. Then I realized it was all a mistake.

They read some book about pranayama and it doesn't do anything to help you to try to hold your breath as long as you can. If you want to do that, then do laps under the pool, under the swimming pool, and then see if anything happens to your buddha body or something. It doesn't.

It gave me headaches. It messed up my prana a little bit. It made me nervous.

These are mistaken practices. The goal of this breath practice here is called kevala kumbhaka. Kevala means spontaneous.

Kumbhaka means a closed ceramic jar. The goal is, when you're close to seeing emptiness directly, your inner plumbing will fix itself. Then when you see emptiness directly, the prana does enter the central channel as if you were shooting an arrow.

It enters the central channel. Then you might, I don't know, in the weeks before that or the days before that, you might be, for example, at your university and you're sitting in the library and suddenly you realize you have not taken a breath for 10 or 15 minutes. That's kevala kumbhaka.

You don't hear, when it says here, ngup gang shilwa, you don't have to do that. That's what happens. You do breathe in, you do hold it indefinitely, and then you do breathe it out, but it's a very relaxed, spontaneous thing.

One of the best ways to get your prana to shoot into your central channel like an arrow and stay there is to be nice to other people and to be kind to other people. You don't have to. It's not really the best method just to hold your breath and not think about other people.

It'd be better to be nice to everyone around you, to be kind to them. Then that pranayama will take care of itself. You can still do the different pranayamas, but what he's saying is, the core of that practice is love for other people and wanting to get other people out of trouble.

All right, shilwa dang. By the way, if you're interested in what's the fourth of the four pranayama steps he mentioned here, because he doesn't mention the fourth one. It's called datar gyen du pangpa.

datar gyen du pangpa means to shoot the arrow upwards in the central channel. He was kind of being very tundra. He left out the fourth one.

He just gave us the first three steps. If you want to know about that, then finish your 18 foundation courses. Get some nice long rim courses under your belt.

Learn them. Then get a proper initiation from a teacher of the Diamond Mountain lineage. Secret teachings.

Then you can learn all this stuff in a very happy and healthy way and it will be good for you. Okay, shepa tar lungjor. Lungjor is kind of cool.

Lungjor means pranayama. Lung is prana. And jor means ayama.

A-yama. This is one of those cases where two A's meet each other and they became a long A. But you don't know if the two A's that met each other were short A's or long A's.

It's very important with pranayama to know that the first A was short and the second A was a long A. A-yama would mean not to control the breath. A-yama would mean perfect control of the breath to where you could actually hold it.

And that's called jor. So one of the words for breathing practice in Tibetan is lungjor and it's here. The translation is pranayama.

sok che pang bu-pa tabu le mi-yong In Tibet when you worked with steel or iron it was all done by hand. The guy was called a karwa, which means a blacksmith.

[Speaker 2]
And there's a good dirty joke about it.

[Speaker 1]
Let's do it. I mean, what if we get the virus and this joke is lost forever? So I'll teach you a famous thampe.

Thampes are great ways to learn Tibetan. Thampes are... What do you call those?

Cliche? No. Little sayings.

Little folk sayings. And Tibetan has hundreds of them. In fact, if you want to learn Tibetan well, it's nice to learn those little folk sayings because they reflect the ancient language.

Because they don't change from generation to generation. Each generation passes them on to the next. Okay, so this is a break from the Lam Rim.

You're going to have it. I'm not cutting the filming. But I want to teach you a dirty joke in Tibetan.

[Speaker 2]
Okay? Just for fun. Okay, say chak chepa la garwa khe chak chepa la garwa khe kyakpa chepa la gub khe kyakpa chepa la gub khe If you want to cut steel you're going to have to get a blacksmith.

[Speaker 1]
You're going to have to heat the rod and then hit it with a special instrument. And that's the only way to cut a piece of steel.

[Speaker 2]
If you're going to the bathroom and a poop's coming out, then the best way to cut that is with your anus, with your butthole. Okay? So to translate it correctly, the master at cutting steel is the blacksmith.

The master at cutting poop is your asshole. Okay. I hope Veronica doesn't watch this episode.

[Speaker 1]
Anyway, why are we talking about that? The guys who cut steel in Tibet, they have to have a bellows, right? They have to have an instrument that shoots lots of oxygen onto the fire and makes it very hot.

So he makes a joke. He says, if you try to do this pranayama without bodhichitta, then you're like a blacksmith. And you do all these special breathing things.

You're just playing with some kind of bellows. You're wasting your time. You might as well buy a bellows and sit there and do this, because it's going to have the same result.

Nothing. Okay. All right.

By the way, there's no author listed for that Mahamudra text in the tengyur. SANG SNGAGS KYI NGOS SKAD KYANG SEMS DE LHAG TU BSTAN BA LAS SBYUNG BA YIN And he makes a very radical statement. The secret way, diamond way, tantra practice, is supposed to get you enlightened in one lifetime, as opposed to billions of years.

And he says, what makes it faster is bodhichitta. What makes tantra faster is the attitude that you do it with. The thing that makes tantra go faster is wanting to do it for other people.

Then he quotes some famous lamas. BYANG RGYAL ROL DOR GYIS PHUR CHOG SNGAGS BA'I BYAMS PA LA SPYOD SEMS DE So, BYANG RGYAL ROL PA'I DOR BYED, which his name here is abbreviated, is a very, very famous scholar of Buddhism. He's famous for a four-volume study of all the schools of Buddhism and other schools.

He had a teacher named PHUR CHOG SNGAGS BA'I BYAMS PA who's a very, very famous logician and we use his books in our Geshe program. LA SPYOD SEMS DE They lived in the 1700s, the early part of the 1700s. BYANG RGYAL ROL PA'I DOR BYED used to go to PHUR CHOG SNGAGS BA'I BYAMS PA for classes.

These lamas had a connection with teaching the Chinese emperor in Beijing. There's still a temple there where they would teach the Chinese emperor. Secretly, Pabongka Rinpoche was a reincarnation of these lamas.

It's very interesting. BYANG RGYAL, he was a reincarnation of the lama who taught the kings of China. But there was a lot of political problems at that time, in his lifetime.

So they made an announcement that he was an incarnation of the Pabongka line, which he was not. He was an incarnation of the BYANG RGYAL line, but they didn't want to make it public. So he was misnamed his whole life.

But it's interesting that he quotes himself, is what I'm saying. LA CHOS ZIN TE, LAMA BYANG PA'I DBANG PHYIN SNANG BA'I SNANGS Boy, now he says, BYANG RGYAL says, when I go to my teacher and he starts teaching tantra and he decides to teach an initiation, and we are in the next lam rim retreat, which was supposed to be at Diamond Mountain in October. I'd like to repeat that we're going to be doing a Medicine Buddha initiation online with permission of Medicine Buddha.

And we're going to have teachings on Medicine Buddha with a famous Chinese master, a good friend of mine. So you're welcome to come to that. Now BYANG RGYAL is complaining.

He says, I go to him for one of these high Medicine Buddha initiations and DBANG ZHES DU, when it gets time for him to explain the tantra to us, he goes off on lam rim. And you can feel BYANG RGYAL is a little bit frustrated. Like we're supposed to get this very mysterious tantric teaching and I don't know, PHO CHOG RIM PA BYAS.

He just goes off on lam rim and we're all waiting for the secret stuff. And he just goes off on lam rim. Lam rim shatak.

Shatak means he just teaches lam rim, nothing else. shatak nam-wa-la, GZHAN GYIS BSTAN NA, SANG SNGAGS KYI GSUNGS SHES BYED RGYU MED PA LTAR And if another person were to walk in the room, they would never, it would never occur to them that this guy's giving a tantric initiation. So if a stranger came in the room, I don't know, to deliver the refreshments.

And he went back to the kitchen and they said, what's that guy teaching in there? And he said, oh, he's just doing a lam rim. There's nothing tantric about it at all.

SANG SNGAGS KYI GSUNGS SHES BYED RGYU MED PA LTAR NANG MOD MOD means BOD. GONG GI DE LAM GYI GNAS KHYEN PA'I GSUNG YIN BOD BYANG RGYAL later said, it finally occurred to me that when he's teaching bodhichitta from the lam rim, instead of explaining the tantric initiation to us, that's the real initiation. So that's cool.

That's amazing. SNGAGS PA RDZAD means, and he praised his lama for doing that. All right.

I'm behind on this one. You guys hang in there with me. BYANG CHUB KYI SEMS MED PAS SKAD DOR BYED NYAL SBYOR PA ZHIG RGYUN ZHUGS STOGS PA'I GTAM SBYOR BA CHEN PO'I SEMS NAS This is a very strange story, okay?

This is a HANG SANG. HANG SANG means, wow, that's F amazing. BYANG CHUB KYI SEMS MED PA'I SKAD DOR BYED So there was a, NYAL SBYOR PA here means yogi, but it means a tantrica, a practitioner of the secret teachings.

He was studying He Vajra. And the He in He Vajra for $20. What's it mean?

[Speaker 2]
Vajra means diamond, right? What's the He mean?

[Speaker 1]
It means Hey, okay? Hey, DOR BYED. It means Hey, SKAD.

SKAD means Hey. Hey, DOR BYED. Don't ask me why, that's a long story.

Anyway, there was a guy practicing He Vajra tantra, which is a very high tantra. But he didn't have BYANG CHUB KYI SEMS. He didn't have this motivation. RGYUN ZHUGS THOB PA'I GTAM But he achieved the direct perception of emptiness, which here is called RGYUN ZHUGS.

Entering the stream. Entering the stream, okay? RGYUN ZHUGS.

He achieved, entering the stream, seeing emptiness directly, same thing. And then somebody came up to Atisha and said, oh my god, you know, today this guy, he saw emptiness directly. And you know, Atisha's like, well, why?

What was he working on? And they said, well, he was working on his tantric practice. And he saw emptiness directly, you know, almost by the way, almost by accident.

SEMS PAS YANG MTSAN DU MDZAD means Then Atisha said, wow, I can't believe it. You know. SNGA'I BYANG CHUB KYI SEMS MED PA'I LEN Yeah, he blew it.

You know why? He didn't have the bodhichitta that I have. He blew it.

It's very funny. Okay, I think we should have a skit, you know. This guy comes in to Atisha and says, god, this guy just saw emptiness directly today.

Atisha says, what was he working on? And he said tantra. And he said, oh man, he screwed up, didn't he?

Okay. Why? He didn't have the bodhichitta that I have.

LEN HE BADZRA Same thing, right? It's SKAD DORJE and HE BADZRA. Here's the Sanskrit for SKAD DORJE, the same word.

HE BADZRA BSGOM PA NYAL BAR GRO BA YANG YOD And then he said, jeez, it's too bad he didn't have bodhichitta. But he's lucky he didn't go to hell. You know, he's lucky he didn't go to hell.

Which means he was trying to practice tantra without love for other people. And this is such a weird conversation. Hey Atisha, this guy just saw emptiness directly.

Yeah, what was he working on? Oh, he's working on tantra. Oh, poor guy.

I'm so sorry. He should have had bodhichitta. But he's lucky he didn't go to hell.

It's a weird thing to say. It's an amazing paragraph. All right, BDAG SDUG DE YANG PHRAG BZHED YIN GYI So the guy came out good.

It's pretty good. He did pretty well. He didn't go to hell.

He just saw emptiness. YIN GYI BYANG CHUB KYI SEMS DI MED NA, YI DAM MTHO'O MANG PO'I NGA'ANG DON DON GDUG GDUG MANG NA SDUG MDZO'I DANG NYAL BA SOGS SU SKYE BA'ANG MANG BZHING Then he says, you know, there are people who do a tantric practice centered on a fierce deity like Yamantaka. Here he gives the...

he doesn't name them, but for example Yamantaka or someone like that. And they do this mantra over and over. And he said many of them due to the power of this fierce deity's mantra, if they don't have bodhichitta, they are born in the hell realms.

Or they are born as a... SDUG BRAS means like a fierce preta, like a fierce spirit. The mantra has the wrong effect on them.

The fierce mantra has the wrong effect on them because they don't have love. They try to do tantra without love. And then it backfires and they get these weird results.

All right. CHU ZHUR GYIS ZHIBS BDAG RGYAL SNGAG NYAN CHEN DANG BA ZHIG ZHIBS BDAG TU SKYE MTSO And by the way, the ZHIBS BDAG means local boss preta deity. Local boss preta.

So according to Buddhism there are spirits who run the spirit show in different localities like, I don't know, like a city block or two city blocks. There's a local spirit who's kind of in charge of the spirits there. ZHIBS means a locality, like a few blocks in a city.

BDAG means the boss, the boss spirit. And it's pronounced ZHIBS BDAG. We pronounce the B ZHIBS BDAG.

So anyway, he says, by the way, the ZHIBS BDAG around here was someone who blew a three-year retreat. They did a three-year retreat and they messed it up. And they were reborn as the ZHIBS BDAG, the big number one preta around here.

Just for your information, if you try to do tantra without bodhichitta, then you could have these disastrous results. GONG GI RGYUN ZHUGS THOB PA'I RGYAS SDOGS KYI NYAL CHOG PA DE LA BYANG CHUB GYI SEMS YOD NA TSE DER TZAM RGYA RGYU YIN YANG If that tantrica who was practicing her Vajra had had bodhichitta and then saw emptiness directly, YOD NA, TSE DER TZAM RGYA RGYU YIN, he had a good shot. He had a good chance of getting enlightened in one lifetime.

In that lifetime. YANG KHO LA TZAM RGYA RGYU TSOS DU THEG MED KYI BDUS PA THOB PA SEMS DE MED PA'I LEN But instead, he had a Hinayana result of his tantric practice. He got a Hinayana result.

What was the Hinayana result? Yeah, he saw emptiness, but on a lower track. He saw emptiness directly, but on a...

Nobody says that here, but it's assumed. THEG MED KYI BDUS PA THOB PA SEMS DE MED PA'I LEN By the way, LEN here doesn't mean to tong len len, and it doesn't even mean to give an answer like chi len, question and answer, but it means it's the fault. The fault, what went wrong was that he didn't have bodhichitta.

Then you can kind of see Pabongka Rinpoche leaning back and he says, this is why the Dharma is so incredibly profound. He just kind of leans back, like we're going to lean back. This is the last sentence of this episode.

He's just kind of cogitating, and he says, CHOS SRAB PHYIR PA BDIN DANG LA SEMS When they say the Dharma is unbelievably deep, that's the kind of thing they're talking about. Somebody could practice tantra, see emptiness directly, and blow it. They could blow it by seeing emptiness directly.

Man, Dharma is... God, who could figure it out? That's the end of the episode.

[Speaker 2]
See you on the next episode.