AGOL 38, Ганден Лха Гьяма (Тысяча ангелов Небес Блаженства) — стенограмма

[Говорящий 1]
Hi, this is Geshe Michael Roach and welcome to this little talk about the practice of the Thousand Angels of the Heaven of Bliss. I know you guys have about another week or two before you're going to go into your three-day weekend retreat. I know that you'll be using the practice of the Thousand Angels in your three-day retreat.

I just wanted to talk about it. We've been through the steps of it many times and we'll talk a little bit about that today. I think I was trying to remember the first time I ever did this practice myself and the time that my teacher taught it to me.

I remember it was a little bit, it felt a little bit strange because it was some Tibetan guy and I was supposed to close my eyes and picture this Tibetan guy. Of course, my teacher had many paintings of this ceremony. There's Je Tsongkapa up on some clouds and then he's coming out of the heart of Maitreya.

Then I'm supposed to think about this Tibetan guy and imagine that he's coming down and then I do all these nice things for him. It was very foreign to me. I didn't feel close to the people that they were describing.

I didn't know Tibetans very well. Recently, I was working on a text about emptiness meditations and somebody asked me, Veronica, my wife asked me, well, where did Tibetan come from? You're always talking about Sanskrit and how we can get English words out of Sanskrit.

Then she said, I'm just curious about where did the Tibetan come from? I have to say, I've heard people say it just dropped out of the sky and Tibetans will tell you something like that. It just dropped out of the sky.

Then you read, if you go online, you'll see people say, oh, it's Burmese, Tibeto-Burmese language group, but that doesn't really help. It just spread a little bit towards Burma. It really does seem that it just dropped out of the sky linguistically.

It's not related to anything in the world that I know of. It really does seem like it's from another planet. I spent the last two days in a hospital.

A friend of mine is undergoing some difficulties and a couple of friends of mine have got some serious illnesses and they've asked me to help them. It got me thinking about this world. These are people who are close to me.

One of them is not close to me, but they heard about me and they keep writing me letters, emails about what's going to happen to them. Then I was thinking about it myself and how to explain it to them. I think at a certain age, if you spend a lot of time around people who are dying, who are seriously ill, and they trust you and they're asking you for advice and they're like, what's going to happen to me and what's it going to be like?

I think only when you have someone talk to you, your phone just did a clunky thing. Yeah, that's from another world too. Then something happened to me in the last few days and then I just became really aware of different realms.

I've been trying to explain to someone what's going to happen to them when they die. When you think about someone leaving this world, then this world becomes, I don't know, in my mind it becomes like a pocket or some kind of a pocket. There's other worlds, other pockets around it and there's little, almost like submarine hatches between the pockets.

Then you die in this pocket and then you're going to go through one of those hatches to a different pocket that we can't see. Then I don't know if I'll ever see you again, anytime soon, because there's probably millions of pockets like that and you're going to go through a small hatch or doorway and you're going to pass to a different pocket, a different reality and we may not see each other again. There's no reason to think there's just one world.

There are many, many worlds and they may touch each other, like eggs in a carton, but they're completely separate and they're different and you will go to a different world and there will be different things there and different people there and it may be completely different from the world you're in now. You can go there anytime. One of the people who's been writing me, who is not a Buddhist and they're not interested in Buddhism, but they are dying and they found out about me through a relative and they were strong, healthy, young, successful filmmaker, very famous in his field.

Then just suddenly he's got some kind of terrible stomach cancer and they say he'll die in a few months. He has a beautiful son and a beautiful wife and they're both filmmakers. He's asking, what's going to happen?

Where am I going to go? It's kind of interesting that he, I don't know, for some reason he thinks I can tell him and then he's really being good about listening to me. Sometimes I've had that in my life where someone will come to me and say I have a terrible disease and I only have a few weeks and can you help me?

They're almost the best students, right JB? Because they really listen and they really do what you tell them. I'm trying to get you in the mood of, somehow these Tibetan things came to us and even as a language, it seems that they dropped out of another world.

Like all of these teachings that we have in Tibetan language just dropped out of another world. John Brady and his team, I mean today they're working on grants. I'm trying to push them to break into another library in Mongolia that has 300,000 books there.

It's just like, I can't stand it to think that those books are there and they might burn up tomorrow or something might happen. It just drives me crazy. Wow, we have to try to get those books.

Then I think about those books and they also seem to be from another world. It just seems like they're not from this normal world and they're unique. Those books are very unique.

So why am I talking about that? The practice of the thousand angels is kind of like you're trying to open up a little doorway to another world. I have to say something about Tibetans that maybe you don't know.

I've lived with Tibetans for 25 years and I was surprised about some things. One is that as a country, they're not different from any other country. I'm sorry to say that, but there's not a big difference between Tibet and America and Russia and India and China.

There's not a big difference. The country as a country is not much different. I was very, what do you call it?

Kind of disappointed. I was disappointed when I got to know normal Tibetan people and I started talking with them and seeing how they live. It's just about like everybody else.

There's good people. There's really bad people. There's greedy people.

There were wars. There was terrible killing and hurting people. It's not different from Europe or America.

It's not different. The people are basically the same, but they have this one doorway to another world. I don't know why, but it just came through Tibet.

If you ever have to live in Tibetan society and deal closely with Tibetan, even in a monastery, it's disappointing. They're just pretty normal and they have the same kind of very sad things going on there that go on every place else. But there's this one doorway that they learned how to open.

To me, we're talking about Tsongkapa. Even the name Tsongkapa, when I started to learn about Tsongkapa, it was very uncomfortable. They can't even agree how to spell it, right John?

Everyone wants to spell it a different way. Nobody's name starts with T-Z anywhere. It's just weird.

It's hard to remember when you're new, to remember that name. Why didn't they call him John or something easy? It's just Tsongkapa.

It felt strange and foreign to me when I first learned it. It felt kind of distant, like I would never be able to... I couldn't see that I felt too close to this person and I didn't feel that attracted to them.

My teacher was insisting that I should try to learn about Tsongkapa and study about Tsongkapa and read Tsongkapa's books and I should try to get a personal relationship with Tsongkapa, which is what you're trying to do in these three days. You're trying to get a personal relationship with Tsongkapa. I just want to say, I don't know where you're from, Russia, China, wherever you're from, Mexico, but it's weird.

There's somebody named Tsongkapa and they wear strange clothes. It's not something easy to relate to. It's not something from our culture.

It's a totally different thing. Then I struggled with that and I'll be honest about it. In the first few years that I spent in the small Mongolian monastery, I struggled with that and I didn't feel very close to Tsongkapa and it was very foreign and I didn't know much about him.

All I heard was he wrote a lot of books and they were complicated and difficult and I wasn't attracted to him. But the point of this practice is that I can tell a story of Tsongkapa. Tim, you got an image I think.

The first one maybe. Yeah, this is a nice story and I think the DCI people know it. Tsongkapa wanted to have a relationship with Manjushri and Manjushri, again, that's some kind of foreign word and foreign name and foreign person.

I remember trying to learn his name and all the Westerners in my class already knew his name and I felt uncomfortable that they knew his name and I didn't know his name. So they must know who he is, but I don't know who he is. Everybody would say, oh, he's the god of wisdom.

I'm like, well, what's the god of wisdom? So Tsongkapa is, I think he's the person with his hands like this in the middle, and he wants to meet Manjushri. So he heard that Manjushri understands emptiness and he really wants to meet him.

He's kind of not like you and me. Tsongkapa is not thinking, oh, I would like to meet a teacher who can explain about Manjushri to me. He's not thinking like that.

He's thinking, well, if the source from another world about emptiness teachings is Manjushri, this is so Tsongkapa, then I want to meet him myself. I'll just tell me where he lives and I'll get in touch with him. I don't need all you guys to tell me what Manjushri said.

So he goes around asking everybody, I'm glad you're offering me classes. I appreciate it. I've learned a lot, but could I just talk to Manjushri directly?

And then everybody says, well, that takes years of practice. And he says, well, is there anybody who actually did it? And that's the kind of dumb, smart question that new people will ask.

And later when you get more experience, you stop asking, but I think you should ask. And he said, well, can I just meet him directly? And then somebody said, well, there is a guy who met Manjushri.

There is such a person. And then he says, well, just tell me his address and I'll go talk to him. And they're like, he doesn't have an address.

And he's like, what do you mean he doesn't have an address? And he says, he's up on the Sedona Mountains somewhere. He's wandering around with a bunch of sheep.

He doesn't have a house. He just keeps sheep in the mountains. If you go wander around the mountains, you might run into him.

It's so funny, right? There's one mountain, there's another one, there's another one. Good luck.

And he says, well, okay, what's his name? And they say Umapa, which kind of means master of the middle way. His name means kind of master of the middle way.

But he's a sheep herder. So Tsongkapa's like, okay, let me go try to find him. And that picture, Tim, you got it?

They should have put it in a meadow on a mountain somewhere, but anyway. Tsongkapa meets Umapa. And he says, I heard that you got direct contact with Manjushri.

I heard that you can talk to him directly. And Umapa says, yeah. I just imagine he's like, yep.

I log on down. Because he's probably no teeth. He's just a sheep herder up in the mountains.

Yeah, yeah, I'm direct contact. Yeah, that's me. So Tsongkapa's like, do you mind if we just confirm this?

Can you put the picture back? This is the moment of confirmation. Tsongkapa says, look, I'll ask you questions about emptiness.

And then you ask Manjushri what he thinks. And I'll ask you some difficult questions I have. And then you talk to Manjushri.

And then I'll judge from your answers whether you're in contact with Manjushri or not. Unfortunately, we don't have the questions. It would make a good movie.

Sorry, he starts asking questions and then Umapa starts answering. And the answers are perfect. The answers are totally perfect.

And then Tsongkapa's like, oh my God, you really are in contact with Manjushri. And then of course, he writes down all the answers. He incorporates them into some of his greatest books on emptiness.

And then he gets kind of impatient. He says, well, how about I just talk to Manjushri directly? Can you introduce me to Manjushri?

And Umapa says, it doesn't work like that. You don't have the karma. You don't have the seeds to see Manjushri.

You can't just ask me to introduce you to Manjushri. It won't work. He could be sitting next to you.

He is sitting next to you. And you can't see him because you don't have the seeds. So it's not like I can make an introduction.

You have to make the seeds. You have to collect the seeds to meet him. And then everything will be awesome.

Then it'll really be awesome. So I encourage you to make the seeds. And he helps him to make the seeds.

And the biggest seed of all is to realize that it takes seeds to meet Manjushri. That's all. The biggest seed to meet Manjushri directly is to understand emptiness enough to understand that Manjushri is coming from you.

So if you really want to meet Manjushri, you can. You just have to plant the seeds. And the most powerful seed is to believe you can.

BDAG PA'I MYO NDZOR What's that mean? $500. Tim got it.

$500. Collect from Ali, okay? $500 from the young man.

BDAG PA'I MYO NDZOR means yeah, it starts by believing that it could happen. You just kind of pretend that it could happen. And Tsongkapa does it.

Why are we talking about that? We're supposed to be talking about the practice of the thousand angels and trying to make contact with Tsongkapa. And again, what I want to say is that for me, I'm stuck in this little Mongolian temple in New Jersey and here's these people talking about this guy whose name I can't pronounce.

And they're trying to prove to me that this is going to save my life. And I never heard of him at Princeton. I'm like, are you sure?

And then Rinpoche taught me the GANG DANG LHA RGYAL MA, the thousand angels practice. And these are seven, eight steps that you do before a meditation practice. And it's called SAK KYANG.

Say SAK KYANG. And you guys know SAK KYANG, I think. SAK means collect good new karma.

The word TSOG comes from SAK. So when you do your TSOG twice a month by assembling great quantities of offerings, which is called TSOG, TSOG-ing them, that's called SAK. And then BYANG means like SO SBYONG comes from BYANG, which means to confess your bad deeds.

So the whole practice of the thousand angels is to SAK BYANG. On one hand, you want to try to accumulate a big pile of good seeds. And then BYANG means you want to clean away a big pile of bad seeds.

And if you do enough collecting new seeds, and if you get rid of enough bad seeds, then the door opens to another realm and Tsongkapa shows up in your life, personally in your life. So the purpose of this ritual is to make contact, direct contact with Tsongkapa the way he did with Manjushri. So you're trying to get the portal to open.

And it's a lot easier if you know how it works. It's not that Tsongkapa's waiting for you to ask politely or Tsongkapa refuses to come to your meditation room if you don't do the thousand angels a thousand times first and then on the thousandth time he'll come. It's not like that.

It feels like that when you're new. When you're just starting, it feels like, okay I'm going to have to do 500 of these or I'm going to have to do 600 of these and then maybe Tsongkapa will be happy and come visit me. But it's not like that.

It's that you have to open the door to get him to come and you open the door by doing the ritual, by repeating this ritual. And I'll be honest, I just did it out of respect for my teacher. He said, do this practice and I was not attracted to it and I didn't see much point to it.

I waited a long time before I did my retreats because I wasn't attracted to it. I just thought it was kind of superstitious and I thought, just the GANG DAG LA DGE'I DGOS NGES DU DGANG NAS RAB PAR BZHAG BSAM PO'I NUS BYIN TE DROD GYIS RGYAL BA DGOS NGES RNAMS SANGS RTAG ZHIG RANG BYAS PA NAS DU ZHES SO SO Okay, okay, I recited it 25 times and nothing happened. I just felt it was kind of artificial.

But if you can get into the actual practice, then Tsongkapa does come. And he's cool. So I know he has a strange name.

I think Je Rinpoche might be easier, right? Let's call him Je Rinpoche. That's his other name, which means precious one or something like that.

But I just want to encourage you to do the practice because if you do it in a relaxed, happy, creative way, the door does open to another realm. And he comes. And he starts talking in your head and it's really cool.

So you can meet those people and he is amazing. So let's talk about Tsongkapa. We just finished editing a book about him.

We wrote a book, I don't know, 20 years ago. We translated a book about his life and we made a big, thick, expensive book as a fundraiser to help this little Mongolian temple. And we sold all the books finally.

I think it was $100,000. We gave all the money to the temple. We saved some money to print the book again.

Recently we were editing the book. We were cleaning it up to make it into a... Now that we sold all the copies to help the temple, we were making paperback, a big paperback book, coffee table book.

And we'll be releasing it, I think, on New Year's party? At the New Year's party in Singapore. Let's talk about that book.

In the book you can read, basically, the biography of his life. It's a story about writing books. So here's this great master and he did do other things than write books.

He went into deep retreats and there's a beautiful painting of him in a kua. Kua means a leather coracle in English. It's a boat made of a skin of a cow.

It must be scary, I don't know. They don't have bridges in Tibet and they have the most rivers of anywhere in the world, the most streams. You can't walk five miles without crossing a couple rivers.

So you jump in one of these little personal boats. It's round and then somebody pushes you over and then you get out and you keep going. So there's a beautiful picture of him and his eight closest disciples going to Yarmulung which is a place and he did a retreat.

There's also a picture, Tim, you got it there. I think it's the last picture you have. Before he went to retreat, he was having some physical problems and I think that's kind of encouraging that Tsongkapa had physical problems and he had bad back.

He had a bad back. His whole life he had a bad back and it was hard for him to meditate and it's hard for him to do retreat. Here he's meeting a yoga master and he's offering him a mandala.

I think that's very important in your retreat. When you do your three-day retreat or a three-year retreat, I've been having fun doing yoga with Karmi, the director of Yoga Studies Institute, and John Brady. Every day we've been doing yoga together and it's a great practice.

So if you're going to do this three-day retreat, I really encourage you, do what Tsongkapa did and take care of your health. You've got to have a physical body to do the Thousand Angel practice and to make contact with Tsongkapa. You have to have a healthy physical body, so you have to take good care of your body and you only get one.

So it's really important every day to do some physical practices and to eat carefully and to get enough sleep. That helps you open the door. So you do see a lot of other paintings of Tsongkapa doing different things, but the main thing was writing books and studying books.

I want to tell you a story of a book I'm working on right now. I'm in a group of translators called Mixed Nuts and we decided to try to translate maybe the 20 most important books in the world, from ancient Buddhism. So I got like 10 fools, including Seiji.

What do you call her in Spanish? Loco. Personas Locos.

I said, let's translate the 20 greatest books of Buddhism together. Some of the Mixed Nuts had no experience in Tibetan translation, like Seiji, like zero. He didn't know any words.

I said, well, let's just start. So we've been working really, really, really hard for five years. There's about 10 main translators and they all have a very difficult book to translate and they're all struggling.

I'm really amazed and grateful that no one has quit yet. So I don't know why. I don't have a good record in the past.

Most of the people who learned to translate with me quit. But none of these 10 people has quit, which means an intense amount of work for me, like hundreds of hours of work. Just the classes and the class preparation is, I have five, six hundred hours of work and it's intense.

Then people I know are asking me, can you do this Geshe-la? Can we have a meeting? Can we just talk for 10 minutes?

Can we go out and have coffee? Can you come over to my house? Someone told me recently, they live in Sedona.

They said, I see Stanley Nelson more than I see you, Geshe-la. They live in China. I'm like, I'm sorry, but it's intense.

The amount of work is intense. Then the question is, is it a good spiritual practice to spend your whole day in books? It seems like Tsongkapa's thing that he was spending most of his day in books and not really meeting a lot of other people and not socializing and not getting to see the people's real lives.

It seems almost artificial to spend your whole day in books. It also seems too technical. It seems, Geshe-la, if that's what it takes to meet Tsongkapa, if I have to read those thousands of pages that the mixed nuts are spitting out, it just doesn't seem practical.

It seems like it's too scholarly. So I wanted to say, as a method of reaching those other worlds, it's fantastic. I know it's not a popular thing to say and I know those books are difficult books.

They are difficult books. They are really difficult books. But I want to say it's our lineage.

It's Tsongkapa's method to put your head in those books a couple hours a day and struggle. It's not easy. It's not easy.

It's difficult and it's hard. It's just hard to sit there. It's hard to read hour after hour things that you don't understand.

It's just frustrating. I don't know. It's like trying to read a foreign language and you can't get it.

There's foreign languages and you can't. French. I decided three times to learn French or Chinese.

It's frustrating. It doesn't seem very mystical and it doesn't seem very sweet. Rasa, right?

It doesn't have much flavor. But I want to describe what happens. I think it happens with Tsongkapa.

If you read his life story, we are trying to invite, with the practice of the Thousand Angels, we are trying to invite to our meditation room a person who spent many, many years deep inside those ancient classics that John Brady's been saving. Because of that, he found a door. He created a door to meet these beings from another world.

Tibet as a country, as a, what do you call it? Governmental structure, it's lousy. It's like below average.

I'm sorry. As a country, it's kind of dysfunctional. That's not the point of what's going on in Tibet.

The point is that there are people there who worked on these ideas, struggled through those great books day after day, and the karma of that was that they opened a window to another world. People came from another world and helped them. We can do it too.

So when you do the practice of the Thousand Angels, what's really happening is that you are trying to open a door and then you will meet these unbelievable people from another realm. They are not like us. It's even uncomfortable to be with them because they're so good, it's frustrating.

You feel, what do you call it? You feel like an idiot when you're sitting with them. I really want to encourage you to learn this practice.

I know it's very foreign. I know it's not a language that we're familiar with. I know even the main guy's name is hard to pronounce.

But without being romantic and, what do you call it? Sentimental, you can open a window to another world. Those Himalayas, they were...

Shangri-la? They were a real doorway to another world. Again, I'm not attracted to Tibetan country as a country.

It's just another country. It's not different from any country you've been to. But the doorway is there and if you practice the Thousand Angels, you can open that doorway.

I'm not going to... I personally, I've taken you through those steps in the Thousand Angels many times. I kind of want to talk about something else today.

You can do those on your own and you don't need me to explain to you which flower is blue and which flower is red that you're going to be offering. You can do that. But I'd like to talk about an experience.

So I've been translating, I've been helping prepare a book. It's being translated by Venerable Utpala, Betskir. She's been working on this book for about five years and many of you have been through the classes.

It was hard. The book was hard. It's supposed to be a book of emptiness meditations.

We worked on it. Many of you guys came to the classes and we spend an hour, we go about half a page, we can't understand much. I know the words, I can explain it to you, but it's difficult.

It's really, really difficult. She finished. She finished her book.

Then I have to work on the translation, make it smooth. So I have a pleasant duty that I have to go through and make the whole translation. I have to really connect the five years of classes into one beautiful flow and that's my job.

So I started and then it starts blowing my mind. I start seeing this pattern. I taught the book to her for five years and I didn't see the pattern.

Now I have to lay the whole thing out. I'm like, oh my God. It's 25 emptiness meditations and they're stunning.

They're just stunning. It's not one or two proofs of emptiness. It's 25.

One after another. They're deep. They're very, very deep.

If you can't just, if you don't spend time with them, you don't get it. One and many. Things are not one and things are not more than one.

Things are not one and things are not more than one. Really. Why?

Because they have parts. Things are not one. Nothing in the world is one thing and nothing in the world is more than one thing because they have parts.

Everything has parts. Then they go on like that. It's a long, long, oh my God, 25 proofs and then there's another flow under it which is through the great four schools.

Sometimes you get the same argument taught from a different school. He repeats the argument of one and many three times but from different schools. Then it's unbelievable.

It's just unbelievable. Then suddenly you're like, oh my gosh, I get it. I finally got it.

Then he says, wait, let me tell you something else. You're like, okay, I got it. I got 25 proofs of emptiness in my head and I understand it.

I just used it with my wife. That's the cool thing. It's like, oh my gosh, I got it in the morning.

I translated it and in the afternoon I used it when she asked me why I didn't do the laundry or something. I actually took one of those proofs of emptiness and I secretly used it. I opened a portal to another world by using it.

I was so, wow. I was like, wow, that's cool. Oh, you have parts.

Your laundry has parts. She's like, huh? I got it.

Then the author, who is called Choney Lama, he lived 250 years after Tsongkapa. But I think he was Tsongkapa. I think he was Tsongkapa.

A lot of the books or chants that he's teaching they are from Choney Lama. He's like Tsongkapa but more accessible. He's more reachable.

He says, hey, you're like the 25, worked with the laundry, huh? You get to know these guys. You're like, hey, worked with the laundry and your wife, right?

He said, yeah, yeah. It didn't just work. It was like opening a door to another world in the washroom.

Then he's like, well, let me show you something else. Then he goes through 15 mistaken proofs of emptiness. Slightly defective emptiness proofs.

That's so cool. He says, hey, I got a proof for you. How about this one?

You go, you read it. Then he says, how do you like that one? You're like, sounds great to me.

He says, nah, it's messed up. You're like, why is it messed up? He says, well, look at this little thing here.

It doesn't work. You're like, yeah, I never thought of that. That doesn't work, does it?

After he teaches you 25, is it 23 correct proofs of emptiness from all four and a half schools of ancient Buddhism, then he says, hey, let's do some messed up proofs. Let's go through some messed up proofs. I'll mess something up and you tell me what's messed up.

Then you're like, I don't see anything messed up. Then he takes you through 15 different messed up proofs of emptiness that you've probably said to your friends many times. It's just awesome.

Then you're like, oh man, I'm so happy. I'm almost at the end of the book and I can send it off to Ellie to get it printed. Everyone's going to be so happy.

Then at the end of the book he says, hi, I forgot to tell you how to meditate on the emptiness. You're like, how's he going to do that with two pages left? How's he going to teach you how to meditate with two pages left?

Then he says, well, I don't really have space in the book anymore to tell you how to meditate on it. I'll tell you there's three steps to the meditation. First you have to learn the book.

You must get a hold of an emptiness book and you must spend time with a qualified teacher and read it. You have to struggle with those ideas. You have to struggle.

Learn the correct ones. Learn the wrong ones. Struggle why this is correct, this is wrong.

Struggle with why this school explains the same proof different from that school. Struggle with those things. That's called shruti, learning in the class, classroom hours.

Then I want you to go to sampa. What is that? Chintaya, something.

I want you to contemplate what you learned. For me, that's when I'm driving. I don't know.

Veronica swears by it. She says, driving is my meditation time. It's actually contemplation time.

If you meditate, you'll crash. She mulls things over. She thinks things over in the car.

It's a really sweet practice. You're like, well, so I'm having trouble with this jewelry thing. Let's see, does it have parts?

Is it empty? You do that in the car. Then you get to that.

Then he says, then you can get to, then you can meditate on what you contemplated on. When you get home in the car, then get out of the car and take 20 minutes on your cushion and go into it deep and see if you can see it in meditation. What you learned in the car that you learned from the book.

Then he stops the book. Choney Lam stops the book. Sara's frustrated.

I said, this is kind of dumb. We're going to call this book Emptiness Meditations and there's 38 proofs of emptiness and there's three sentences about meditation. Then that's not going to go.

Let's add the meditation section from Pabongka Rinpoche to the second half of the book. Let's add it to the book. Then you get, in the first half of the book, like 200 pages, you get emptiness proofs.

Then you get 200 pages of how to meditate. All the details of how to meditate. I said, oh wow, that's what we'll do.

We'll add Pabongka Rinpoche's explanation because it's also, I've taught it so many times that I could translate it with my eyes closed. I said, I'll just knock that out. That's going to be 200 more pages.

Then I thought, well, he based his meditation description on Kamala Shila's stages of meditation. There's a beautiful chart. There's a beautiful carving of all the stages of meditation.

They kept it in the, I shouldn't say. Anyway, I ran into this chart once and I copied it. I mean, I took photographs of it and I learned what it meant.

I learned to read it. I said, well, let's put the chart in the book and that'll be beautiful for people and I'll translate the whole chart. So we did.

We got the whole chart and we put it in the book. Then I was like, well, this chart comes from Kamala Shila. It's interesting because he's an Indian who was a great meditator and a great emptiness master and a great mind-only master.

You guys read his commentary. We went to his commentary on the Diamond Cutter Sutra. He actually went to Tibet and he had some interesting debates with people and stuff like that.

So he was passionate about teaching people meditation. Then he wrote three famous books. As John knows, he went and got them for me called The Stages of Meditation.

They kind of overlap. You can tell, there might be manuals that he prepared for DCI, SCIM, and ACI. So it's the same stuff in a different package.

Then there's a fourth one, a very beautiful one that he wrote. So I was looking at those and I was trying to choose which one to translate. Then I noticed there's another stage of the meditation in the Tengyur from ancient India.

I said, oh, I wonder who wrote that? Nagarjuna. Arya Nagarjuna.

I said, oh my God, there's another book on how to meditate written by the greatest emptiness master of all time. Wow, let's go look at that. It's got the same name as Kamalashila's three books.

It's the same name. So I'm like, wow, I wonder if Kamalashila ripped his off from Nagarjuna and the way I'm ripping mine off of Kamalashila and the way Pabongka and me ripped off. So I went and read that one and it's a stunning book about the stages of meditation heavily mixed with emptiness teachings.

Heavy, heavy emptiness teachings and how to meditate. So you got this thing. You could learn the posture of retreat, learn everything about how to meditate from Pabongka Rinpoche.

Then use the chart. Put the chart in your meditation room and use that every day to work on your meditation. Then go through Kamalashila's meditation book and then go through Nagarjuna's book with the same name but deeper on the emptiness part and then slide into Choney Lama, 38 Proofs of Emptiness which is really just Tsongkhapa recooked.

You see what I mean? So you get this whole picture of a huge work. Half Vipashyana, half Shamatha.

First half, how to see emptiness. Second half, how to get into meditation to see emptiness. So now you've got 200 pages on Vipashyana, how to see emptiness.

Then you got 200 pages on how to meditate, Shamatha. So really it's this, now poor Betsy's book has become this great, incredible book. It's a real emptiness meditation book.

So half of it is how to understand emptiness and then half of it is how to meditate which is the great marriage of Vipashyana and Shamatha. Vipashyana, insight into emptiness. Shamatha, quiet, quietude, getting silence.

Silence and insight match together in one book. Guess who did that before? Tsongkhapa's in a retreat and he's like, God, we should make a book that's 50% Vipashyana and 50% Shamatha.

And he writes, it would be about a thousand pages in English. He just knocks it out. And then, I don't know, my jurisdiction's like, hey, why don't you do the first four perfections?

Throw it in there. Let's call it Lam Rim. So he's got emptiness teaching, Shamatha joined together and then my jurisdiction says, ah, tack on this Lam Rim stuff at the beginning.

So that's what Tsongkhapa did. So that's what Tsongkhapa was up to. Why am I talking about that?

Well, first of all, I'm obsessed with it nowadays. But secondly, use it when you do your thousand angels practice. Try to understand that you are going to be doing, let's go through it.

First Chaksa Welsh, SPYIR ZHIN ZHAG PA DANG, RJES SO YID RANG These are the seven steps. First one, Chaksa one. Bow down to, how much time we got left?

Okay, we got time. So the basic structure of the thousand angels practice, which I would like you to do with a special mantra called OM MANI PADME HUM and I'll explain more about that. First thing, how to get this guy to come through the doorway from the other realm.

There's a certain etiquette. In the New Testament, the Bible, Jesus always washes his disciples feet when they show up, which is very unusual for the master. We kind of got to do the same thing.

It's like cookies for Santa Claus under the tree. I don't know about you, but my family was very serious about Christmas cookies for Santa Claus. One night I went out to see Santa Claus and I saw my dad eating them.

But anyway, yeah, first thing, prostrate to some company. Now I feel uncomfortable prostrating. I did grow up Christian and one of the rules in Christianity is not to bow down to, I don't know, unapproved objects.

So I always felt uncomfortable to do prostration. But really, the first step of the Ganden Hagyalma is just to admire Tsongkapa and that's a prostration. That's all.

If you want to get some exercise, then prostrate. But the real prostration is just to admire this guy. The real way to get him to come through the portal and show up in your meditation room, which is possible.

That's what I'm trying to say today. It is possible. You can get him there and it's awesome.

First thing you have to say, God, you're so cool. You're just so cool. All the stuff you did.

Mainly, that you taught us emptiness and how to meditate. You brought that into this world from your world. That was cool.

So if you just admire him, you did the first one. CHAGS RTOG BA'I ZHING SPYOD SPYOD means SPYOD PA. Yeah, make some kind of offerings.

I know it's a tradition to offer water cups and fruit and stuff like that. I was never much into it, I'll be honest. I did it.

I can make a torma as good as anybody. But what Tsongkapa really wants from you is an offering of your goodness. He wants to hear that you called somebody in the hospital or that you washed the dishes or at the building after everybody else left, right, Nor?

The other roaches were running around, if you know them. That's the kind of offering that Tsongkapa really wants. Oh, my neighbor was pissing me off and I went out and talked to him and asked him about his family.

I admired his new truck with the decals on the back. That's a great truck. I did, okay.

And that's the kind of thing, that's the offering Tsongkapa wants. Okay, it's okay if you're meditating and you're in a three-day retreat. Okay, get some fruits and donuts and stuff and make offerings.

That's fine, that's good. My teacher would spend two or three hours at the grocery store checking every kind of cookie, the whole aisle, every kind of cookie. Then he would decide on one and then he would carefully stand there for half an hour and look through the plastic and try to see if any of them were chipped because it's improper to offer a chipped cookie to Tsongkapa.

So they should be perfect, that's fine. But also don't forget that what Tsongkapa really likes for offerings is some small thing you did, like wash the dishes at the college building after everybody else dumped them on you and went home. And you're trying to hold a baby and wash it with one hand.

It's like, that's good yoga. You don't have to have barbells. CHAGS SU BA'O ZHIGS CHOS ZHING ZHAG PA Then confess mistakes you've made.

If you think you haven't made any mistakes, that proves you're not meditating because you make mistakes all day. You repeat mistakes your whole life. I'm 60 something years old and I can tell you, 68, you repeat the same mistakes every year over and over again.

And if you can't think of any mistakes to tell Tsongkapa, then you've reached a real mindless meditation. Tell him the stuff you've done that you're not proud of and get it out of the way. He enjoys talking to people who will admit that they made mistakes.

And if you're the kind of person who wants to pretend you're perfect, okay. But when you die, it's going to be messy. So just be honest about who you really are.

Tell Tsongkapa all your mistakes. Normally we tell everybody our second worst mistake and we hide our first worst mistake. But with Tsongkapa, you can tell him the worst one.

CHAGS SU BA'O ZHIGS CHOS ZHING ZHAG PA NA RJES SO YI RANG What's that? YI RANG Yeah, rejoice. Be happy about it.

There's so much good in the world. There are news outlets that talk about the great things people do. You got to work hard to find them.

They're not very well known. They're not very popular. But there are news channels on the internet that honestly report not grand good deeds by people, but just normal people who are cooking food for homeless people or doing nice things for people.

You got to work hard to find these news. The big news outlets are only interested in scandals and troubles and wars. It's very unbalanced.

There's millions of people doing kind things all day. Enjoy. Find one of those news outlets.

I get this stupid magazine from my university where they brag about all the students and the professors. It's so nice to read. Oh, this one just found out how the virus grows this bump on it and how to take it off and stop the virus.

This guy just... This secretary who's been in the McLean house at Princeton for 34 years just passed away and she made coffee for people every single day. It's nice little things.

Rejoice in the things that other people are doing. ,'JES SU YI RANG, ,DANG, ,GUL ZHIG, Hmm? That's later.

What happens after that? Request? Yeah, ask him to teach.

Ask him to teach you. It doesn't mean Tsongkapa is going to pop through his portal and start talking to you. He's probably going to send you a Mixed Nuts book and say, I hope you open it.

I've been teaching a lot online. I've been teaching some deep, deep books and I have some students who prefer that and they are very brave and they are unusual. I say, can I teach you something that's not easy and that you probably won't understand?

They're like, yeah, go ahead, Geshe-la. Then I'm like, listen, when you study things, when you try to read things you can't understand, that affects you more than listening to things that are comfortable for you. Things that are uncomfortable to hear because you don't understand them have a very powerful effect on your mind.

Then things you know and things you're familiar with, to hear them again is not very helpful. I have a small group of students. I'll say, can I just teach you something that you're not going to understand for three years?

They're like, yeah, go ahead, Geshe-la. They really work hard and they don't understand it, but they try. When you try, it changes your brain.

It changes the intelligence of your, spiritual intelligence, it changes it. But just keep doing the same thing you always heard, that doesn't change much. So struggling mentally with new ideas is extremely powerful on your mind.

I'm just saying, try it for six months or so. Read stuff you have no idea what it means and just struggle, struggle, struggle. That's going to change your entire being much more than reading something that you're already familiar with.

So anyway, you're asking for teaching. Don't forget the most powerful thing. When you ask for teaching, they might send...

It troubles people who teach you stuff. People who hurt you teach you more than people who help you. I'm sorry, that's the way it is.

When you ask for teaching, watch out what you ask for because you might get a whole pile of irritating people showing up and that's a blessing. I know you don't believe it, but it's true. When you have to struggle with somebody, you advance, you become more advanced.

If you're just comfortable with people you know, you don't change much. All right, what's the next one? You ask them to stay.

I have people all the time, so please stay. I'm like, yeah, I hope I can. I also would like to stay.

But it's a terrible tragedy to come close to wisdom and lose it. That's a real tragedy, to come close to being able to do a great retreat and then lose it. I don't think there's anything more tragic than that.

Talk to this famous movie maker. He's been emailing me. I never met him in person.

I never met him in person. He just got cancer. He said, well, okay, I'll do the chemo.

They said, don't bother. He's like, what? Can I do anything?

They said, go home and die. Don't take up space in the hospital. Your wife can keep you as comfortable as possible.

Here's Brompton's cocktail. You know what this is? What do you call that stuff?

It's like heroin. It's like straight heroin. They said, here, when it gets bad, when it gets into your bones, take this.

Then you'll die. Say anything you want to say to your family because you won't be able to talk after that. You'll just be a vegetable, but at least you'll be alive.

It happens. Things change. You lose opportunities.

While you have a chance to do a three-day retreat, for God's sake, do a good one. Take the time. Take the chance.

Do it and do that retreat. What's the last one? Yeah, dedicate that good karma.

Give it away to people. I can't avoid the image in my mind of a fire offering. When we do fire offerings, like at Diamond Mountain, when the smoke goes out to the sky and the wind blows it away, I always imagine that sooner or later it will touch everyone.

That mini pollution. Sooner or later, the particles of the offerings during the fire offering will reach all beings. Do some kind of, imagine the good karma being sent out like that.

That's all. What I'm saying is hard work, especially study. Oh, one more thing.

Kamalashila, in the stages of meditation, he rushes through the actual stages. The nine levels of meditation, and I don't know, the five antidotes, the eight antidotes to the five problems. He rushes through that.

I was waiting for him. I thought he would... His book's kind of long, so I thought, wow, he's going to give some detail.

He doesn't. He rushes through all the stuff that's on the chart. Then he spends like 20 pages on SO SO SNAM PAR RTOG PA YANG BDAG PAR SO SO SNAM PAR RTOG PA YANG BDAG PAR SO SO SNAM PAR RTOG PA which means cogitating.

In English, cogitating means to sit in your meditation cabin. Right, Connie? For three years, three months, and three days.

Just think about stuff. Just think about why stuff empty. Don't forget Kamalashila went to Tibet.

He and his teacher were involved with these intense debates with other practitioners about the usefulness of thinking about nothing. There was even some intrigue. Somebody was murdered.

It got hot. Don't forget he was in this... He was there.

He spends about 200 pages in English defending thinking about emptiness. He spends about 200 pages defending trying to figure out emptiness from the books. He says, you have to.

He says, it's not a luxury. It's not some scholarly thing. It's not boring.

It's not difficult. It's not technical. It's the only way to see emptiness directly.

He goes on for... In English it would be, I don't know, almost 200 pages in English. He's just repeating the same thing over and over again.

You have to struggle in meditation to understand about emptiness. Then it will turn into the direct perception. That will turn into the direct perception.

You got to get all those Mixed Nuts books. You got to struggle through them. You got to try to understand the 38 Proofs to Emptiness.

You must do that struggle. He says, without that, forget it. Then the last thing he says, okay, and then we can stop.

He says, you know when the Boy Scouts, when they teach you to rub sticks together and make a fire. God, you don't know how many days we spent trying to do that in Boy Scouts. It is possible, but it's difficult.

You can do it with a bow and a string and a bowl and certain kinds of shavings from certain plants. You can do it. I've done it.

But it takes about four hours or something. A match is much easier. We always had matches hidden in our pockets.

Then he says, I'll tell you something. Struggle, struggle, struggle, four hours and do stupid, stupid sticks. Then he says, you know what's really fun is throw the stick in the fire first thing.

Once you get the fire going, throw the stick in. Then he's like, okay, see you guys later. They were like, what?

Yeah, got it. Yeah, use the stick, make the fire and then throw the goddamn stick in the fire and burn it up. What he means is, there is a state of non-conceptual direct perception of emptiness.

But the way you get there is through thousands of hours of conceptual thinking, of thinking. It's like the stick that makes the fire. Then okay, you can throw the stick in the fire and it will burn up in the fire of direct perception of emptiness.

But you can't make it without the stick. You can't make that fire without the stick. It's a very beautiful image.

It's a very, very beautiful image. By the way, that's where he says, he says in Sanskrit, I think it's Davyam or something. Davyam bhumi ashwa pashyet davan.

Thousand dollars, nah, I'm not serious. Show the horse the course before you run the race. It comes from him, I didn't know that.

You don't take a horse out for a race without showing him the track first. Ride him around the track for a couple of days and then you go on the race. So it's like, read the books on emptiness, study them deeply, and then run your race.

Now, what are we doing with the OM MANI DE MI HUNG? It's very simple. I also used to, okay, this is a whole story of things I didn't believe from my teacher.

He said, oh, do this mantra a thousand times, or do it 10,000 times, or do it 100,000 times. Lock yourself in a room and do this mantra. And I was like, yeah, okay, I'll get to that.

That was my thing with my teacher. I learned that you're not supposed to say no. You just can delay.

I'll say, oh yeah, as soon as I get a couple of weeks off of work, I'll definitely lock myself in a room and say OM MANI DE MI HUNG. It's on my list of things to do. Bucket list?

Before I die. And then he went on a trip to Europe to see, John Pelsengi was his name, Tucci's teacher. He went to go see him in Rome.

So I was kind of stuck in the house alone and I said, well, he's got this guest room. I had another monk with me. He said, I'll cook if you want to say mantras.

So I said, yeah. So I went in Rinpoche's guest room, which I built. I did a two, three week retreat and I just did OM MANI DE MI HUNG.

It's a very, very powerful mantra and I don't think a lot of people understand the meaning of the mantra, but OM is called NGON RJE. NGON RJE, which means the door that opens, the door that opens to the mantra. So OM is the door of the mantra.

And then HUNG at the end is SHUG RDZOGS, which means to stick the sacred dagger in the ground and say, may it be. So HUNG means that. So OM is like, I'm about to say a mantra and then HUNG is like, God damn.

So between that is just MANI DE MI. MANI means a gem, gemstone, a jewel. It's funny because it sounds like money, which you need to buy a jewel.

And then PADMA means a lotus flower. And it's very important that it's PADME, which John will tell you is the, which case? LAK LAS.

Yeah, in the lotus. The jewel in the lotus. So it's not just jewel lotus, it's jewel in the lotus.

And it's a reference to tantra. It's a direct reference to tantra. And it's funny that it's a mantra.

If you're the kind of person who believes it's possible that your spiritual partner could be a Buddha, then it's very important to you. And the people who criticize that are doing OM MANI PADME HUM all day. It's so funny.

Because it means have a spiritual partner. It's so funny that the people who criticize the practice of a spiritual partner, which Buddha followed and taught, say, well, let's go do OM MANI PADME HUM instead. But OM MANI PADME HUM means, I hope I meet my partner.

And it's funny, just to me it's funny. But anyway, you can think of the jewel as love and bodhichitta. And you can think of the PADME as inserting it into understanding of emptiness.

I like to call it a marriage of emptiness and compassion or a marriage of emptiness and love. For other people. Then that's perfection.

And that's Buddhahood. So try to put your compassion into emptiness. And that's OM MANI PADME HUM.

So if you understand a little bit about it, and you do, I would try to do 10,000. Sometimes you can try to do 100,000. It's not stupid to count them.

That's another myth. It's very cool to count them. And it's cool to reach 10,000.

And it's cool to reach 100,000. And things happen at 10,000 that don't happen at 9,999. I'm telling you.

So set yourself a goal and get a rosary and try to do, and keep track. I keep a hatch mark, one, two, three, and then cross 500, like that. So actually keep a count of how many you do.

And it works. It really does work. And trust me, I thought it was stupid and I thought it was a waste of time and I thought it was superstitious, and it's not.

It's very, very powerful and very beautiful. So try to do three days of mantras. You're supposed to not rush them.

You're supposed to say them clearly or it doesn't work. It doesn't work as well. So don't rush them so fast that you're like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But, OM MANI PADME HUM. OM MANI PADME HUM. OM MANI PADME HUM.

Try to use the third finger of your left hand that has a special prana and it's more powerful. It's uncomfortable for the first few days, but hold your rosary here. I had a...

Okay, last story. Grandpa's last story. I was in a train station in India and I was with a couple of hippie friends and we didn't know anything.

We saw these Tibetans rushing into a little side room and we're like, hey, what's going on in there? And they said, Ling Rinpoche's there, the senior tutor. He's sitting in there.

I'm like, wow, that's cool, man. Can we meet him? And they said, well, you can try.

And they said, normally you got to have an offering. So we run across the street. We bought this crummy little cake at a bake shop and we rushed back to the waiting room and he's in there and the train's coming.

We said, we got the cake, we can come in. And they're like, yeah, yeah, okay, go in. We met him and we had an extraordinary meeting, but he was going like this the whole time and he didn't have a rosary.

He did so many mantras that he decided he didn't need the rosary anymore. So he would just be like this all day. It was kind of a weird thing.

We're like, what's going on with his hand? And then I was doing mantras. Does he need a rosary or he can go buy one?

They said, no, he doesn't need one anymore. So do your mantras and enjoy. And work hard.

When you work hard, when you study things you don't understand, you learn more. When you study things you do understand, you don't learn as much. All right, see you guys later.

Good luck on your retreat. Thank you.