AGOL 39, 22 метафоры бодхичитты (спецучение) — стенограмма

[Speaker 1]
So anyway, thank you, all of you, volunteers and sponsors. And this is a special class for you. And Tim and I, we didn't know what we wanted to do in the special class.

And then it came up, the 22 types of bodhichitta were mentioned. They mentioned ultimate bodhichitta and deceptive bodhichitta. And then they mentioned wishing bodhichitta and action bodhichitta.

And then they said, by the way, there's also 22 types of bodhichitta. But we didn't learn them. They weren't in the text.

So I thought for this class, for all you special people, we'd go through the 22 kinds of bodhichitta. I don't think I've done it in public. I don't remember.

But I've taught it privately to some people. And so here we go. This 22, this list of 22 comes from the Abhisamaya Alankara, which is a famous, one of the five great books of Maitreya, the future Buddha.

And they were taught by Maitreya to Arya Sangha, who was taking dictation in Maitreya's heaven, and then brought them back to this world. And there's a cute story, like he was, there's a long story about the dog, but he ended up going to Maitreya's heaven, taking dictation for a couple days. And when he got home, it was like 75 years later or something.

And all his friends had already died. And time passes differently in different places. So he brought back these 22 metaphors.

There are 22 metaphors for bodhichitta. And they're very, very famous. So I thought we'd go through them.

I have a commentary by His Holiness, the first Panchen Lama, Losang Chukyi Gyeltsen. And he's a great, great poet, a great, great philosopher, and a great activist. He personally stopped a war in Tibet through his personal efforts to mediate between the two armies.

And he was a great retreatant. So I think it's appropriate that we are studying his version. And then Gyeltsen Kappa also wrote a commentary on the 22.

When he was in his 20s, I think he was 26, he wrote a 500-page commentary on the Perfection of Wisdom, Tim. And it's an interesting work because his thinking is obviously not mature yet. And so it's kind of the bold work of a 25-year-old.

And it's intense. It's a good piece of work. It's not like his later work.

Later, he kind of mellows down. But he's kind of like, gung ho, like a 25-year-old would be. Right, Daniel?

Just kidding. So sometimes we'll go to Tsongkapa. Mainly we'll work with the first Panchen Lama.

All right, okay, so here we go. We have the root text in Tibetan, translation. And we're fortunate to have the root text in Sanskrit, the original Sanskrit.

So we have it as it was spoken to by Maitreya. And of the 4,600 scriptures from India that were translated into Tibetan, about 90% are gone. The Sanskrit is about 90% missing.

And that's because the Mughals came and took over India in the 800s. And there's a tradition that says they thought the monasteries were fortresses. So they took special care to destroy them and kill all the monks.

And then after that came the British for, I don't know, 300 years. And they did sort of a cultural attack on India. And they convinced the Indians that they didn't have any useful literature and things like that.

Similar to what they did in China. So we've had to try to recover the Sanskrit after about, I don't know, anyway, maybe 1,000 years of abuse. And so we worked really, really, really hard.

And we have a strong team, still going to villages, still looking at little local collections, and still finding great books. We just found the Medicine Buddha Sutra from the rubble of a stupa in Afghanistan. So we do find, and that was carved on birch bark.

Okay. And we find stuff like that. So it's exciting.

So we do have the Sanskrit. And that's John Brady's work, and you should thank John Brady. Every time you see him, you should thank him.

Because they worked really hard for 35 years. And you don't see it, and you don't know about it, but they're traveling all over the world trying to find the last copy of something. So anyway, we're lucky to have it.

And they input it for us. So I'm going to recite it. This is called a lung.

Lung means someone who got the oral transmission of the root text gives you the oral transmission. So your job during a lung is to sit there with open ears and try not to think about lunch. Okay.

And that's called a lung. So a lung is you just relax. You just open your ears, and you get an unbroken oral transmission from Maitreya, from the days of Maitreya.

And I always like to say Maitreya is much closer than you imagine. The next Buddha is much closer than you ever imagine. All right, here we go.

Are you ready? I'll do it three times. DE YANG SA SRED DA BA MED DE DAG RIN CHEN BYUNG NAS TSOR RTOG RJE RIM MED ZHIG NYID DANG YID ZHING RNAM BU NYID MA LUS GAL PO RDZOD DANG RNAM PO CHE ZHUNG PA GOS MED CHOS DANG NI DRAG NAS CHU'O DRIN NAM GYIS RNAM PAR NYID ZHUGS TSAG NYID SOR First time, three times.

DE YANG SA SRED DA BA MED DE DAG RIN CHEN BYUNG NAS TSOR RTOG RJE RIM MED ZHIG NYID DANG YID ZHING RNAM BU NYID MA LUS GAL PO RDZOD DANG RNAM PO CHE ZHUNG PA GOS MED CHOS DANG NI DRAG NAS CHU'O DRIN NAM GYIS RNAM PAR NYID ZHUGS TSAG NYID SOR You want the old, old one? DE YANG SA SRED DA BA MED DE DAG RIN CHEN BYUNG NAS TSOR RTOG RJE RIM MED ZHIG NYID DANG YID ZHING RNAM BU NYID MA LUS GAL PO RDZOD DANG RNAM PO CHE ZHUNG PA GOS MED CHOS DANG NI DRAG NAS CHU'O DRIN NAM GYIS RNAM PAR NYID ZHUGS TSAG NYID SOR Okay, now you can give it to your student. Okay?

Maybe in English is okay, or Chinese. Okay, I'll read you the Sanskrit just for good luck, okay? BU HEMA CHANDRA DZWA LA NAR NI NI RATNA KAR ARNAVA BHAJRA CHALA SHADI MI KHRA'I SHES CHEN THA MA NI ARGA RGYIS TE PA'I NAR BA RGAN BYA MAHA MARGA YA'O NA PAR SRA BA GNOD DAG KA'I ANG NAM GDOG TU'I NA DE'I MA'I KHAR DVAG PA'I ZHAG TU'I RIGS DAG SA CHA Okay, that's the Sanskrit.

All right, so here we go. We're going to go through the 22 according to the Penchen Lama. And if we have time, we'll go look at what Je Tsongkapa said as a young man about these 22, okay?

All right, as a hot-headed young debater. All right, which is what he was at the time. DE LTAR DER TEN SEMS SKYES PA'I YANG CHOS CAN RNAMS PA NI ZHUGS SA NI YOD DE So I'm at DER TEN, apostrophe D-I-R, space B-S-T.

It's the bold, it's the next bold part. You okay? DER TEN, apostrophe D-I-R.

It's the next bold part after the root text. Okay, okay. DER TEN SEMS SKYES means bodhichitta as presented by Maitreya, Lord Maitreya.

DE YANG CHOS CAN And he couches it in debate language. Let's consider bodhichitta as taught by Maitreya. RNAMS PA NI ZHUGS SA NI YOD DE There are 22 different forms of this bodhichitta because, and then he gives the 22, okay?

First one, say BU. BU, okay? Then when you do the mandala offering, you say what?

OM BADGRA BU MI So OM is called the door of all mantras. It's the first sound of most mantras. Then OM BADGRA.

BADGRA means diamond. And then BU MI means the earth as a platform. The earth as what you plant your trees on.

Right, cat? Okay, so think of earth as flat in the old system and a vast, flat plane that stretches to the edge of the world. Why did Alexander in 420 B.C.? Something like that. No. 200, I don't know, B.C. Why did he turn back after, he never lost a battle. He conquered everything.

50,000 men conquered, I don't know, six million people. Then he turned back, went back home. Why?

You didn't want to go back. The soldiers were afraid you would fall off the edge. Yeah, yeah.

They thought they would fall off the edge of the earth. So imagine a big, flat plane stretching to the edge of the earth and then you should stop there. Stop your car there.

GAR CHEN THAMS CAD KYI ZHI So that's BU. BU here means BU MI, which means the flat foundation of the entire world, the earth. But the earth as a support for all things.

GAR CHEN THAMS CAD KYI ZHI BYAS PA'I RNAMS Bodhichitta is considered BU, is considered a platform or a foundation of what? GAR CHEN, say GAR CHEN. What's carpel?

Do you know carpel? Carpel tunnel? No.

Carpel? White, right? Carpel.

So GAR CHEN means all the beautiful thoughts and activities in the world. All the beautiful thoughts and activities that exist in the whole world. These are called GAR CHEN.

White dharmas. White dharmas. So bodhichitta, if you can...

The bodhichitta that has existed in the minds of beings before, since when? Yeah, time with no beginning. So bodhichitta has been around since forever.

Somebody's had bodhichitta since... There's no beginning. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Buddhist says yes. Okay. So for time with no beginning, there has been bodhichitta.

People have had that wish in their heart and then it has, from it has grown the plants of the world. All the good things in the world sooner or later go back to somebody who had bodhichitta. So all the good things you can point to in the world have been started or maintained by people with bodhichitta somehow.

All the good things you ever saw, even thoughts or life itself or nature, wisdom, it all traces back to somebody who had bodhichitta. That's like a foundation of all the good things in this world. That's the first one, BU.

You can say BU means... In English BU means to scare somebody. I have pictures for you.

Did you get the pictures? I don't know. Oh, yeah.

I like this picture. It's of a vast... Can you see it here?

It's a... When I think of BU, I think of this valley. It's a valley of crops and trees.

Try to imagine the soil of this valley, the vast soil underlying all the life, all the houses, all the roads, all the trees, all the crops. Under all of them is BU. When you think of the first form of the 22, think of bodhichitta as the ultimate source of all food, spiritual and physical.

It's kind of amazing how the earth has all those components, chemicals which can turn into food and be used by people. Somehow it's quietly feeding everybody and it's just sitting there. Bodhichitta is like that.

Bodhichitta is quietly feeding the whole world. All good things in this world started from somebody with bodhichitta. Cool?

All right. Number two, say HEMA. HEMA.

HEMA is an old word for gold, pure gold. H-E-M-A, HEMA. Probably hematite comes from that.

It's an old word for gold. There's another word in Sanskrit, suvarna. Say suvarna.

Suvarna means color. The word varnish comes from that. And varna meaning cast, which is an unfortunate meaning of varna.

My computer died again.

[Speaker 2]
Okay.

[Speaker 1]
It's okay, it'll come back. He's okay. He just likes to turn off once in a while.

So HEMA is another form of suvarna. And suvarna means the thing with a good color. It's coming back to him.

So in this case, HEMA is used instead of suvarna because HEMA means pure gold without any impurities in it. It's called HEMA. So general gold is suvarna.

And then HEMA means pure gold, no impurities. And it's what in science we call it a noble metal, meaning it will never oxidize. It will never rust.

It will stay forever. It doesn't get corrupted by oxygen. And so pure gold will last, hang on, forever, without rusting.

And the first penchen lama, come on back.

[Speaker 2]
Okay. Okay.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah? Okay. Let's try that one.

Sorry, he's kind of cranky, just like me. All right. BYANG CHUB KYI BAR DU And what it means here is that once you have bodhichitta, you will never lose it until you become a Buddha.

It's like a noble metal. That intention, that bodhichitta, that decision to serve all beings based on a direct meeting with every single being. You can't meet face to face every single being in the universe who has no number, right?

But in theory it's impossible to meet all of them directly. But if things are empty, if things are coming from your seeds, then it is possible simultaneously, well, almost simultaneously, to meet every living creature. And once you have that experience, and by the way, your mind right now is, what do you call it?

Locked. It's blocked. You have a mental block.

The natural condition of your mind is that you could communicate with billions of beings at the same time or within 20 minutes. Your mind is that. That's the natural state of your mind.

And right now, because of not understanding where things come from, you are limited. It's like you're handcuffed or you have shackles on your legs and that's not natural to you. It was, we call, what is that word?

Adventitious. It's not part of you. It came from the outside.

And somehow your mind is blocked, but that's not its natural state. Your natural state is that you are able to communicate to countless beings at the same time, almost simultaneously. You're able to slow down time and you're able to shorten space enough to directly promise every living being that you will be their mom.

So just try to imagine that experience. And once you had that experience, could you forget it? And it's not possible.

You couldn't ever forget it. So your intention would be like gold. It would never be corrupted or it would never be lost.

Would you have bad days? Yes. Your students are fighting or something.

That's possible. But you wouldn't really have a real bad day. And you're unchangeable.

You would never change. So immutable in English, it can't change. That intention, after you've had that direct experience, you can never forget it and you can never really lose it.

You can have bad days. You can get grumpy. You can flip off bad drivers, right, Jigme?

I was flipping off bad drivers in her car and then I realized it was tinted windows. They can't see me anyway. Now I roll the window down and do it.

So anyway, it's possible to have a few bad days, but not really. You're not really can change. So that's the goal.

That's the goal. All right, third one is chandra. What's that?

The moon. Yeah, and that's the third type of bodhichitta of the 22. And this is not a plain moon.

It's called Dawa Tsepa, which in Tibetan means the full moon. The full moon. And more specifically, the moon from the 1st to the 15th of the month.

So the time when the moon, on the 30th of the lunar calendar, the moon is black. And then on the 1st, you see the sliver starting. We're like halfway through the sliver now, I think.

Yeah, and then it keeps growing, right? What do you call it? Waxing.

In Tibetan it's called YAR NGOS. YAR NGOS and MAR NGOS. And then the 10th of the month is called TSE CHU.

So you YAR NGOS to TSE CHU. Then you go to the full moon. And then you MAR NGOS to TSE CHU again.

And then you go to the black moon. So we're in... That's Dawa Tsepa from the 1st to the 15th.

The moon is increasing. And what it means is Bodhisattva's development, once you have that experience, it's unstoppable. And they just keep going deeper and deeper and deeper.

Like they never slow down. They never stop. They never say, okay, that's all I can learn or that's all I could develop.

They don't have a time even that they could, before they go to bed, say, well, okay, that's enough for today. I'm a little deeper than I was yesterday. They don't like that.

There's no point even during the day or the night when they are not developing deeper. So a Bodhisattva's development is unstoppable and moment by moment until they become enlightenment. When does the moon really stop?

Does it like pop quarter and then it waits and then it goes? No, it's gradually increasing all the time. And if you check online, the full moon is at a certain hour, a certain second, certain tenth of a second, and then it starts shrinking again.

So it's never, what do you call it, static. The moon is always moving. The light of the moon is always either increasing or shrinking.

He's talking about the increasing, the waxing moon. It never stops. It never pauses.

So the development of a Bodhisattva is unstoppable and it's constant. Like you can't, they're always like got another idea. They always have another project.

They always have another manual because there's no, because things keep happening. They don't pause and they don't run out of ideas or something. I heard a story about, what was that lady who started modern dance?

What's her name? Martha Graham. I think it was Martha Graham.

Yeah, I think it was Martha Graham. She lied about her age. She told, by 20 years.

And she told everybody she was, she told everybody she was 30 when she was 50. And she danced until she was 80. And when she couldn't move her right leg, she wrote lots of dances for left leg.

And you just stand on your right leg and you move your left leg. And then she designed dances laying down on the stage. So if you go to a Martha Graham, what do you call it?

Dance recital. Sometimes the dancers are on their ground and they're making movements. And everybody thought, oh, this is so revolutionary.

Actually, she couldn't stand up because she lied about her age. And they interviewed her one day and they said, how does it feel to be the most innovative dance master in the world? And she said, I wouldn't wish it on anybody because it's relentless.

And you can't relax. And you can't stop. And every time you sit and watch someone perform your work, you have an idea for another work.

And she said, it's exhausting. It never stops. And it's kind of painful.

So that's the mun bodhisattva. It's kind of like they never get to take a break. There's never a day when they don't have a new idea about how to teach the Dharma or how to improve their own practice.

It's just endless. Yeah. Yeah, they do have ups and downs.

They do have ups and downs. That's a reflection of karma which is less than enlightened. So naturally it's going to go up and down.

Okay, we got to speed up, Geshe-la. Okay, I know. I'll teach you a teaching trick.

When it's obvious you're not going to be able to get through the 22, you say, oh, I was going to leave some for next time. Which is a tradition because it means we have to meet again. And so there's a way to spin it if you can't finish.

But I'll try to finish. Say, jvalana. Jvalana.

Jvalana. Yeah, a real Sanskrit J is a Z. Like Raja is king.

So jvalana. Jvalana. Jvalana means a fire.

Okay, a fire. Jvalana. Jvala.

Jval means to burn. So jvalana, a fire. So the fourth kind of bodhicitta is called the fire.

And this is complicated. So when I was a kid, we lived in Phoenix and we had a wood pile out back because my dad was in the military. He liked fires.

And we had nice fires. And he would send us out to get the firewood. And there were scorpions in the firewood and we were supposed to move it carefully and we were supposed to be aware of what was underneath.

We were supposed to move it and check and then move it and check. And so there's this idea of firewood, a stack of firewood called bushing. So think of a stack of firewood which is blocking something.

Like you can't see what's under the stack of firewood. And then you just light it and it burns all the wood and then there's ash and whatever's down there you can see. That's what this one means.

So this fire means specifically fire which could burn your obstacles from seeing things. Fire which can burn the energies or the powers which prevent you from seeing something. That's why bodhichitta number four is fire.

So it means fire which burns away obstacles. And specifically obstacles to knowledge. Obstacles to seeing.

And specifically, guess what kind of knowledge? Seeing emptiness. In three different forms.

If you want to go deeper. So there's three different forms of knowledge that we're blocked from. And this bodhichitta, this form of bodhichitta burns off obstacles to seeing emptiness on three different levels.

So what's the first level? Is a person who's not a bodhisattva yet. And this is a Prajnaparamita teaching and Tim's going to be working through it for how many years?

70? Grandpa's going to be 140. They got to see that.

But it's the main topic of the Abhisamankara is the three perceptions of emptiness. And we haven't talked about it. I haven't taught it.

We spend 12 years on it in the monastery. So the first one is before you reach bodhichitta, you can still have a deep perception of emptiness. You can actually see emptiness directly.

And I can give an example of, there's certain physicists I've heard say, when they explain, whose law of uncertainty? Heisenberg. The contradiction between light moving in a wave and light moving as a particle and the presence of the observer changing how light behaves is a perfect example of emptiness.

And there are physicists who understand it deeply, but they have no interest in saving the universe. In fact, they'd probably blow it up to see if it works. When they had the first nuclear test over there, you can almost see the land.

Harry Truman was like, what's going to happen? And the physicists are like, well, we don't exactly know. And he said, well, what could happen?

And he said, well, if it works well, it could ignite the whole atmosphere of Earth and we could all die in the next five minutes, the whole planet. And he's like, okay, push the trigger. They're like, let's see what happens.

So this one, it's possible to have a deep insight into emptiness, but not have any kind of bodhichitta. It is possible. There are people like that.

So that's called ZHI ZHES, foundation knowledge. In the study of the perfection of wisdom, that's called foundation knowledge. And it's the knowledge of emptiness by a person who could care less about other people.

And it's possible. It's not great, but it's possible. That's called foundation knowledge.

Then there's called LAM ZHES. Say LAM ZHES. Which is called path knowledge.

And that's the perception of emptiness by a bodhisattva, a person who wants to use emptiness to serve all living beings. Their state of mind in Tim's text is called LAM ZHES, which means path-level knowledge. So you got foundation-level knowledge.

They understand emptiness, but not necessarily any kind of emotion. And then what's called path-level knowledge. They understand emptiness, but they do have bodhichitta, but they are not yet enlightened.

Then guess what the third one is? NAM KHYEN, omniscience. The direct perception of emptiness by a person who can see everything else in the universe at the same time.

And that's the goal of Tim's translation that he's working on. That's the goal of the Abhisam Alankara, is to explain those three kinds of knowledge. Why are we talking about those three kinds of knowledge?

Obstacles to those three kinds of perception. Obstacles to those three understandings of emptiness are burned by bodhichitta. Okay, got it?

So some knowledge or some appreciation of wanting to help all living beings is going to be like a fire that burns away the obstacles, inborn, inherent obstacles in your mind to seeing emptiness. We all have some natural hindrance in our minds to seeing emptiness. And the bodhichitta acts to burn them.

And that's why bodhichitta number four is the fire. In Sanskrit, dzvalana, dzvalana. You can say dzvala also.

When Sanskrit appears in a verse, it's often modified to make neater. So there has to be banta, banta, bang, bang, bang. And so you can't just take it out of a verse.

You have to know the original. All right, so dzvala is the original. In this verse, it's dzvalana.

All right, number five. Say nidhi. Nidhi.

Nidhi is the same as kosha, which is? Yeah, a treasure house. Or in this case, it means a deposit of precious stuff, like an oil, petroleum deposit, or a gold deposit, or silver mine.

You can almost say mine, like a silver mine. In English, mine means the hole. But in Sanskrit, it refers to the precious stuff underground.

And you drill a hole to it, like that. So it's called nidhi. And this is a cool idea.

A person who has bodhichitta is like a deposit of gold, underground deposit of gold. You can say a mine, but it's not quite the same thing. What do you call it in English?

Yeah, who said that? Nice, perfect, yeah. Like a mother load, like a big bunch of gold underground that is hidden.

And then when you hit it, you're like, that's nidhi. That's nidhi. By the way, the D comes from der, like dharma, like that.

Staying there. And the idea is that a person with bodhichitta is like a nidhi to supply wishes to their students. They're like a huge...

We got this marble quarry over here. They told me it's 800 meters deep. The marble goes down 2,400 feet.

And you can keep pulling out marble for a long time. And it's hidden. We probably have part of that nidhi here.

We probably have some on our property. We don't know how deep it is, how far down it is. If you walk up there, you find a lot of pieces of white marble sitting around.

So that's a nidhi. There's marble under there somewhere. And if you have bodhichitta, then you are a constant resource of beautiful things for your students.

You're constantly giving them gifts of dharma. You're constantly helping them. You're constantly taking care of them.

Yesterday, somebody committed suicide. Not one of our regular students, but another person lost their mother. If you're a bodhisattva, then you are constantly giving gifts to your students.

You are a goldmine for your students. And they can come and take what they need. They need some comfort after their mom died or after their brother died.

They need money or somebody else needs money. And you just keep supplying. Endless supply of cool stuff for your students.

So that's why bodhichitta is called a goldmine. How about goldmine? That's sort of the meaning.

I have a picture for you, by the way. What kind of mine is that? It's a diamond mine.

Diamonds come out from the magma. Diamonds are carried up to the surface of the earth in volcanic tubes. And so a diamond mine, you have to drill straight down.

How come they have this big hole? Because you have to keep expanding it to drive a truck down there. The truck goes down in a spiral.

So you have to keep destroying the land around it to get to the diamonds. The deeper the diamond mine goes, the more land you have to destroy. That's general with most mines.

Nowadays you can make a diamond in the lab, so there's no reason to do that anymore. And they should cost about a dollar each, but that's not happening. Okay.

Number six. We just have to have another special class for the volunteers and the sponsors. I guess last free time.

YIN RTEN RIM PO CHE SBYUNG KHUNG YIN PAS RIM PO CHE SBYUNG NAS LTA BU DANG Say ratna akhara. Ratna akhara. Ratna means a jewel.

Literally it means a gift. And then akhara. Akhara means source.

So ratna akhara means a source for jewels. And here's a picture of a traditional ratna akhara. So in ancient times, they believed that the bottom of the sea was the ratna akhara, was the source of all jewels.

And coral in Tibet was one of the most valuable jewels because Tibet had no access to the sea. If the Ukrainians lose Mariupol and Odessa, they will have no access to the sea. They'll have no way to get food, supplies, other things.

Okay, that's the game. So ratna akhara means, in ancient times it was the bottom of the sea and all jewels were thought to come from the bottom of the sea. And ratna akhara is also one of the five Buddha families.

So if you take a tantric initiation in this tradition, in the highest of the four traditions of tantra, then you might, you do a lottery and you get a connection to one of the four Buddhas, five Buddhas. And ratna akhara is connected to the five Buddha families. And your tantric vows are in part, they're based on the five Buddha families.

The vows for this Buddha, which is called source of jewels, I like to just call him or her jewels. What are the vows mostly related to ratna akhara? You know.

What vows? What are their vows? What's ratna akhara?

[Speaker 2]
Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
Yellow color. Yellow color. And giving certain gifts on a daily basis.

Like every day you have to give material support to other people. You have to give emotional support to other people. Like that.

You have to give love to people. So the vows of, this ratna akhara is a famous tantric principle that we should be generous in both material and in emotionally. Making emotional connection with people, offering them emotional support is a tantric vow of ratna akhara.

Related to which direction? Huh? No, which direction?

South, yeah. And yellow. The color yellow.

I always think of ratna akhara as Mexico and the big desert and it's all yellow. And then California's got the sunset, so that's Amitabha, which is red. Canada's all green with these forests.

And so that's who? Amogha city. And then New York is blue.

I don't know.

[Speaker 2]
Okay.

[Speaker 1]
You have to apply it to China or wherever you're from. Yeah. So ratna akhara, there's tantric implications here.

And in what sense is a person with bodhisattva, sorry, a person with bodhichitta, in what sense are they a source of jewels? If you hang out with them, you will improve. If you hang out with a bodhisattva, you will pick up.

By association we say, you will improve spiritually. You will become a better person. And choosing your friends is a high lam rim practice.

Deciding who you want to be around. I always say one out of eight friends, 12.5% can be assholes. And then you're taking care of them.

But seven out of eight should be good people who are better than you. And you pick up good qualities from them. So you can always go around and say, you're my 12.5. I have energy flowing out to you. And then the 87.5, you pick up energy from them. So choosing your friends, and if you find someone who has a bodhisattva's quality, who is a bodhisattva or has bodhisattva qualities, then try to hang out with them. That's why I got married actually.

Because that person is so fine and kind that I was hoping it would wear off on me. So try to choose a few friends like that. And that's the sixth metaphor for a bodhisattva.

If you hang out with them, you will pick up fine qualities as if you were at the bottom of the ocean picking up coral or pearls like that. Okay, cool. Ratnakara.

All right. Yeah, I'm not going to rush it. Let's just have fun.

Then he says something strange. Arna. Say arna.

Don't forget to twist your tongue back. That's called retroflex. So hit the tip of your tongue.

Hit the... Go to the end of your tongue. Connect with the space just under that and then hit that on the top of your mouth.

And then you will be talking like that. It is amazing. You suddenly have a perfect Hindi accent.

That's called retroflex. Turn back. So this is arna.

Which means it's an ancient word for the ocean. It's a different word for the ocean. Sagara is another word for ocean.

But here it's arna. Arna. And then he says, here's a picture.

And the emphasis here is not that the ocean is the source of jewels. We finished that one. The emphasis here is that it's hard to piss off the ocean.

Okay? Like, it takes a hurricane to get the ocean to go like this. Generally, the ocean is unflappable.

New word for you. Undisturbable. Mitukpa.

Cannot be disturbed easily. It takes a huge, powerful storm to upset the ocean. And then the next morning the ocean just goes back to perfectly flat.

And that's the nature. You can stir up the ocean. But when the storm is gone, the ocean returns to total equanimity, total peace.

So a bodhisattva's nature. Can you stir up a bodhisattva? Yes.

If they're not an arhat, yes. Yet, you can. They might whine a lot, for example.

But in general, they're kind of undisturbable. They don't get upset easily and they don't stay upset. They get upset if they're not an arhat yet.

But in general, they're pretty un-upsetable. Bad stuff can happen and they're just like, yeah, okay. Let's move on.

So that's arna, arna, arna. The bodhisattva is like an arna. This bodhichitta makes you un-upsetable.

Or you return to your equanimity and your peacefulness by the next morning. The ocean comes back. All right.

LAM LAS GZHAN GYIS MI BYED PA'I DOR BYED VAJRA I like $100 for the root of Vajra and an English cognate, a related English word. You sure? Yeah, vegetable.

$50 each. Or $70 for shopping and $30 for Stanley. Yeah, Vajra, which means diamond in Sanskrit, comes from the root Vaj, which is the root for the English word vegetable because the ancients saw vegetables as containing extraordinary power.

Now, I don't believe in that system. I think donuts have extraordinary power. But it's interesting that the ancients saw vegetables as having extraordinary power.

So the word vegetable means power holder. And if you eat it, you get this power. You get this power of good health.

So Vajra, the word for diamond means power. Now, in a specific way. So the ancients saw Vajra as unsplittable.

And that's the meaning of Vajra. Vajra meant undividable. Now, in practice, we divide diamonds all the time.

You can tap a diamond and split it. Diamonds have grains like wood. And if you find the grain, if you know the grain, if you study the grain, which you can do with a magnifying glass, you can just tap it and the diamond will fall into two parts.

And there's a cute... At the original mines in South Africa, there was, who's Cecil Rhodes? Oppenheimer.

There were diamond buying offices. So these poor guys would stand out there in the sun all day digging and they would find a diamond, a raw diamond, and they would bring it to the buying office. And the buyer would say, that's not a diamond.

And the guy would say, no, I found it in the mine. He'd say, nah, nah, it's not a diamond. I can tell.

And I'll prove it to you. And then he would tap it with a hammer and it would break into two pieces. And he'd say, see, diamond can't be broken.

And the guy will leave. And then the guy, the diamond buyer, pick up the pieces and sell them. So diamonds cannot be scratched by any substance in the universe.

Nothing can scratch a diamond. But they can be split with any kind of... And you can split a diamond, if you know the grain, if you can see the grain, if you know how to study the grain, you can split a diamond easily.

But in ancient India, and ancient India was a source of many diamonds because the tectonic plate of the delta, Indian plateau, used to be up against South Africa. So there's plenty of diamonds in India, but they came from the pipes in South Africa. Like before the earth split up.

Why am I talking about that? Here it says, a bodhisattva cannot be split from the path. Therefore, they are like a diamond.

Their state of mind is like a diamond because they are indivisible. And indivisible means you could never separate them from the Buddhist path. I mean, you can torture them, you can kill them, you can pay them, you can threaten them, but no bodhisattva would give up the path.

Ever, never, not possible. Unsplittable, can we say? Unsplittable from the path.

So bodhichitta, once you get that experience of meeting all living beings, it doesn't matter what people do to you or say about you. You just never would give up. You would never be divorced from the path.

You would be unsplittable. Cool? All right.

We'll figure out a way to finish the rest. Some way to honor our sponsors and some way to honor our volunteers. We can't do these programs without some money.

It doesn't take a lot of money, but it takes some money. You know, just the garbage service here and stuff like that. I mean, sooner or later there's bills.

And you can say that we would love to have the programs be... I gave programs free for 20 years and I lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's not free.

It always costs something. So without sponsors, we can't really do these programs. And so we really thank you for sponsoring.

And it's so much easier if everyone gives a little money instead of Geshe-la giving all the money. And then Geshe-la has to work in the diamond business and teach at the same time and that's difficult. So I really appreciate that we have sponsors.

And I appreciate that Tim is really good at inspiring people to help. And he's really, really good at finding talented volunteers. Like Vivian has that quality.

She found these guys. But thank you for being volunteers. Thank you Tim for...

What do you call it? Creating this team of volunteers and for keeping them happy, which is almost impossible. And I don't know how you do it, but I know it's a lot of work.

And I know that being a volunteer at Diamond Mountain, for example, I was my teacher's driver, laundry man, dishwasher, and cook, and financier, and accountant, and taxman for 25 years. I know what it's like. First of all, it's incredibly hard to be a volunteer.

Secondly, Daniel, you guys, there's no better life in the world. I'm so happy that I did all that stuff for 25 years. It's an honor and it's a smart thing to do because then people are making you nice Chinese white tea all the time, and coffee, green drink, orange juice, water.

It all comes back later. But my friends from Princeton said, oh, this guy's taking advantage of you. And I'm like, no, I'm taking advantage of him.

He's letting me serve the Dharma. And it just made my life perfect. I've had a very blessed, happy life, and I still have a blessed, happy life.

And it comes from being a volunteer, being a sponsor, not whining too much about it. And I can't tell you how much you get out of it, how much happiness will come to you in your life. All right, thank you again.

And we'll finish this quickly, quickly.

[Speaker 2]
We'll take a 10 minute break and then we'll come back with Q&A.