«Дар освобождения», курс 39 «Ускорь своё сострадание», занятие 4

[Говорящий 1]
Welcome back to Lam Rim, and we have a cheerful wide-awake crowd here in Diamond Mountain. Well, at least one or two people. So we were at a cute place yesterday where, you know, Pabongka Rinpoche said you got to help other people.

And then what was the answer that the guy said? No. He said, I can't even help myself.

How can I help other people? But that's true both. And then he convinced us that, what?

We could help other people because we have the equipment, the Venice Canal running down the center of your body, right? And then he started to go into an interesting section that says, and not only do you have the right body, but you have the right teaching. Yeah, you have the Buddhist teaching.

And inside of that teaching you have the Mahayana. And inside the Mahayana you have the Vajrayana, Diamond Way. And then he said, everybody agrees, all the schools agree, Rime, right?

They all agree, without distinction between the schools, that you can achieve enlightenment in one lifetime. And then he mentions Jetsongkapa saying you could achieve it in 12 years. And that you can find in the Tantras.

That's in the Tantras. I have worked on that question. And then he says, in special cases, three years and three months.

Yesterday I said three years, and I read it more carefully this morning, and it says three years and three months. So I'm sorry for the three-month delay. And then, YAB TSE SOGS DANG PA'I KHO MA DU MED NAMTAR DTAR YIN So it means many holy beings of the past in this tradition have achieved that.

And I think if you're like me, I'll say, yeah, but I didn't see anybody achieve that. Nobody popped out of a body into a body of light that I have seen. And then he's like, yeah, of course not.

You wouldn't see it. You have to be close to it to see it. You have to be fairly close to it to see someone get enlightened.

Well, I never read about it, but that's the same question. You see, it's the pen thing. For you to read a book about it, you have to have the seeds to almost be there.

So you should feel lucky that you heard someone say it would take you three years and three months. That's pretty good. You didn't see anybody achieve it because you don't have those seeds, but you do have the seeds to hear someone say, seriously, three years and three months.

So have hope. And here's a picture of 40.20. Yeah, happy anniversary. This is your three-year anniversary.

And you can do it. All right. LHAG RTZEN THING SANGS NYID DUS RE ZER YANG People say this is the fifth of the 500s.

What's that? Yeah, bad days. Who said that?

In the Diamond Cutter Sutra, Lord Buddha says we are in the degenerate times. They call it NYID DUS. NYID DUS means when you have a cup of tea made from leaves of tea and the junk settles on the bottom.

That's called junk on the bottom. So our days are called junk on the bottom days. We're the junk on the bottom days.

It's called NYID DUS. There are signs of it. People don't live very long.

There's lots of conflict in the world. There are certain signs of it. NYID DUS RE So he says people say these are the junk at the bottom days, but DA RES LAS DUS SANGS NGON BYAS NYID MA MYONG BA'I ZER But for each one of us individually, we have never seen better times.

In all the lifetimes you have lived, you have never had a better chance than this. You have a body. It's still working pretty much.

They're not blowing up your house today. So you have a time. You have some space here.

And you got Diamond Mountain. Thanks to Venerable Gyeltsen and Venerable Khadeng and other hardworking people. Like spaghettis and stuff.

DE DAG SANGS NGON BYAS NYID MA MYONG BA'I ZER YIN LA BYAS MI LA DANG NSA BA'I THOB PA'I LUS KYANG Then there's two famous meditators that he mentions, Milarepa, who you probably heard of, and Nsapa. These are two Tibetan meditators who are famous because it is believed that they achieved enlightenment in this lifetime. They went on retreat at a place extremely similar to Diamond Mountain, except much more difficult.

Lack of grocery stores and colder. And they achieved it. NSA BA'I THOB PA'I LUS KYANG Nsapa's name means for $50.

The guy who stays out in the desert, in the hills. That's what his name means. His name is like Mr. Diamond Mountain or something. NSA means rocky, hilly, desert place out in the middle of nowhere. It's his name, Nsapa. NSA BA'I THOB PA'I LUS KYANG RANG GI'I LUS DANG DI LAS LHAG MA Their body wasn't any different from our body.

They had the same body we had. They had less groceries. If they did it, we can do it.

THUG RGYU ZHA'O'O'I KYANG LHA ZHIG PA LTAR BDAG PA'I DGE This is a weird story. THUG RGYU means a place, a small town in Tibet called THUG RGYU. ZHA'O'O means a lame guy, a guy with a bad leg.

He couldn't walk without a crutch. KYANG LHA ZHIG PA means he took a ride on a donkey. The lame, the guy with a bad leg who took a ride on the donkey.

The story is that this guy with a bad leg was sitting on a fence in a corral, a donkey corral. The gate broke open and the donkeys ran out. One of them hit the fence and he fell off and he landed on the donkey.

He had the ride of his life. He was so happy. We're supposed to take the example of Mr. Diamond Mountain and other former Milarepa. We're supposed to think that we could ride on... In English, new idiom, 20 bucks, what's the English idiom? We could ride on their coat tails.

The tail of their coat. In the old days, people had long coats down to their knees. They have a piece of cloth coming down in the back.

You grab it and you hold on. It's like Milarepa is a donkey. By accident, you fall on top and he'll take you to where...

If you just follow this guy who did it before, got it? A lame person, lucky lame person on a donkey. It's like, okay, can you take the example of these two people who did it before?

You could get there. By the way, here they... No, not yet.

RANG RE LAM RIM GOM PA LA SHI BA LAS TSER BA TZAM BYAS Okay, please repeat. RANG RE LAM RIM GOM PA LA SHI BA LAS TSER BA TZAM BYAS We avoid meditation on the Lam Rim worse than the plague. How's that?

That's another idiom. Plague means a disease that killed half the people in Europe. And we avoid...

Somebody says, hey, you want to meditate on Lam Rim? We're like, nah, maybe tomorrow. And he's saying it in an interesting way.

He says, SPE LOB PA DANG LOB NYER GANG RTEN LTA BU We enjoy reading the deep classics like Mind Only. We like studying that. We like memorizing tantric rituals.

But if somebody says, would you like to spend an hour meditating on impermanence? We're like, maybe tomorrow. We tend to favor the more sexy topics.

LOB NYER GANG RTEN LTA BU MI TSE RGYAL BA LA GA BA NI Your tendency to be attracted more towards the deep philosophy things and avoid just a short daily meditation on Lam Rim. NAS MA SHES PA You don't know the MAR MA HA LTA Yeah, you don't know the killing point. It means you don't know what's important.

You don't know what's important. You should try to do a Lam Rim meditation every day. And you could take one of those pictures.

There's been over a thousand pictures already in this course. And you could take any one and just meditate on it. That's what they're for.

Can't say you don't have any. All right. Here's how we feel about Lam Rim meditations.

The lady. That's the guy on the donkey, okay? That's us when someone says, let's do a Lam Rim meditation.

Show the last one. I think it's kind of cute. That's the guy with the bad leg who landed on the donkey.

Don't forget, you're going to have a quiz on these pictures. ZHIN NAS BSTAN DI LTA BU'I NYE MI SHES This BSTAN is an interesting word. It means a basis or a foundation.

And it's a code word for body and mind. When you speak about in the Lam Rim, and you say you got a BSTAN, which means you have a foundation, it means you have an appropriate body and mind to become enlightened. You have a body with all the canals, Venice canals, Grand Canal, and you have a mind that can understand emptiness.

So you have a BSTAN. It's called a foundation. You have a foundation.

CI NAS means later on. DI LTA BU'I NYE NYE means I'm not sure you would be able to get one for another million years or something. This kind of chance where you have access to Dharma.

Access to Dharma is a weird thing. It comes and goes. We're used to it.

We live in a country where you have free access to Dharma, but there's many places where you don't. You're not allowed to study these things. It's a tragedy.

It's available in the world and you're not allowed to read it freely or like that. You're lucky to have this kind of a BSTAN, to have this kind of a body and mind. MI NYE MI SHES MI SHES means we don't know how long it would take us to get this again.

It's millions of karmas you would have to do to get this chance again. It's not so likely you'd be able to do that. Even in a body that was created by those millions of efforts, it's kind of doubtful that you'd be able to replicate that, repeat that.

NYES KYIS YANG BSTAN PA DANG Even if you were to find a body and mind that was working, like completely healthy body and intelligent mind, YANG DGOS TZANG LAM MA NOG YANG DGOS TZANG LAM MA NOG BA'I RGYAL BA'I NYID PA'I BRTEN PA DE DAG PA BYA BA ZHING DU GA But then to meet the kind of teaching that you get from Tsongkhapa would be extremely rare among all the human beings. When I was younger, a hundred years ago, I saw this kind of sentence, like they're bragging about Tsongkhapa. And I'd be like, they're just bragging about their own...

the founder of their own tradition. But once you get a lot of background, once you read the classics, especially what we're doing in the Mixed Nuts with the great Abhidharma and Vinaya masters, once you read the classics, and once you understand them, and once you try to practice them, you really understand that Tsongkhapa understood it. And I'm not bragging about it either.

I don't really care. I'm not from Tibet. One Tibetan is the same as other Tibetan to me.

I don't care who's got this stuff. I'll just go for whichever guy has it. My parents weren't Tsongkhapa, and I don't have any reason to be loyal to one Tibetan or another Tibetan.

But if you read it and you study it, then you're like, oh my God, this guy's really got it. And you try it, you practice some of it, and you have personal life-changing experiences frequently. You have amazing experiences that no one you ever heard of ever had, and you have them over and over again.

And then you're like, wow, maybe this guy's got a weird name, but what the heck. Tsong... What Tsong mean in Tibetan?

Onion. He was from a little village called Onion Fields, Tsongkha. I mean, Mr. Onion Field has got the stuff. There's probably some secret why onion is important. I don't know. I'm not attracted to onions much, but that's some big difference between me and Veronica.

She's like, let's put some onions on this. I'm like, you take all of them. I'll sacrifice.

So anyway, it's got... Maybe the layers. Yeah, could very well be.

It's something worth thinking about. Anyway, to encounter those teachings is extremely rare. And by the way, all the Mixed Nuts books, we're working on 27 books at the same time.

Extraordinary classics. They're all of Tsongkhapa's lineage, and they're all extremely high quality. So you guys are spoiled.

You haven't seen the other stuff. There's 300,000 Tibetan scriptures. You haven't seen the...

You've only seen the cream of the cream. And it's exciting to be in the first generation, because you get to translate the best books. You get to work on the cream of the cream.

That's what Mixed Nuts is all about. All right. Here's a picture for you.

I don't know, this is kind of a stupid one, but it's unlikely that you will meet this person again. This is probably the guy who sold you your house. And you don't get to do it more than once in your life, right?

I mean, normally. It's like, we bought a skyscraper in New York for our diamond business, and it was really difficult. It was very, very difficult.

I was asking this business partner, why is it so difficult to buy a skyscraper? And he said, think about it. You only buy one or two in your life.

You're never going to... Usually when you buy something from somebody, they have to be nice to you so you come back and buy it again. But you don't buy a skyscraper twice.

You buy it once. So the seller has no interest in... They don't care if you come back or not, because they know you're not going to come back.

That's the idea of this picture. It's a deal that was made once, and it's unlikely to be made again. Anytime soon.

To get this chance with this body and mind, and this teaching. In this room, we had a tantric course for... How many years?

Seven years? Seven year tantric course. I took these guys through the tantra for seven years.

Over 10,000 pages of translation. I kept telling them, there'll be a day when we won't be together. We'll all just go somewhere else.

These classes will end someday. They're all like, no, no, it's going to go forever. How many are left out of the 80?

There's two here. Three. Three.

Four. Three of... Call it four.

The 76 are gone. Gone to the four winds, we say. Don't think it's going to last forever.

It doesn't last forever. This Lam Rim has a poignant sentence, a sad sentence, where Pabongka Rinpoche says, the people in this audience will die off one by one, and then the last one will die. And we'll all be gone.

The people in this teaching will all be gone. And it came true. There's nobody left from that audience.

That was like a thousand people. If you think about it, they all disappeared. They're all gone.

Their country is gone. Their religion is almost destroyed. It's a sad thing.

It'll happen. DE PHYIR RTEN DE DANG MA BRAL RING, DE LA RDZOGS BYANG GI RGYUD BYANG CHUB KYI SEMS PAS, AS SKYE ZHIG LTA DGOS Therefore, so long as you still haven't been divorced from your body, that's a funny way to say it, right? As long as you still haven't been divorced from your body, you should think that you would like to have the bodhicitta, which is what is the door to be a Buddha.

So I would like, at least in these classes, before Geshe-la goes to Nirvana, I would like to get the bodhicitta thing down. And then I have a good start on becoming a Buddha. So I'd like to...

You should kind of set yourself a mini goal of walking between planets once or twice and meeting all the people in the universe directly. Here's what happens later. You got the next picture, you guys?

I like this picture. He's looking for his next body and mind because he wasted this one. I'll tell you, there's something about the lamrim.

If you're lucky enough to sit in the lamrim before you're old, you don't believe it. I started lamrim when I was 20, 49 years ago. And you sit through it and you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.

Yeah, I understand. I'm going to get old. Yeah, okay, I understand.

It's a blessing to sit in the lamrim while you're still young. You don't believe it at that time, right Stanley? But it registers on your mind.

It stays in your mind. And then when you get older, you're like, ah, god damn, that was true. Oh my gosh.

I'm so glad I have that in my head. Because then you can access what you learned when you were younger. So young people, I think, right?

It's impossible to tell a young person about life. They don't listen. We didn't listen.

But when you get older, you will be glad that you heard it when you were younger. So don't practice it now. Don't try to do anything.

Just listen. Just listen. And then when the time comes and you get older and you're trying to climb up to your cabin, then you'll say, oh, now I can use the lamrim.

So it's good when you're young to... And I think most of our audience is not as venerable as me and Jigme, for example. Put it in your head now.

You won't be able to practice it with true conviction. You won't believe in the impermanence until you've experienced some impermanence, until you've had a few people die next to you. But get it in your head now for later.

It's like squirrels. They put those nuts in their mouth, and then when they need it, they eat them. So that's the principle of lamrim.

I was sitting in the class for, I don't know, my teacher... I said yesterday 30 years, but it was 25 years. And I was respectful and I listened and I thought intellectually it makes sense, but I didn't really see the truth of it until later.

So it's not bad to put the seeds in your mind while you're still a young... What do you call it? Whippersnapper.

New word for you. I charge him 20 bucks for each new word I teach him. If you find an addiction, I'll give you 50 bucks.

Whippersnapper. Whippersnapper. It means a young dude or a young dudist.

So get the information in your head. You won't use it. Later you're going to need it, and you'll have it.

It's convenient. It's on the hard drive. All right.

,DI GCIG BSKYED NA, ,DE RANG BZHAN GNYIS KYI STON CUNG STE, By the way, if you do reach bodhichitta, the cool thing is, you not only get what you hope for, but it's also a way to get everybody else what they hope for. So if you don't have the sense to do it for yourself, then do it for everybody else. Get bodhichitta.

It's the best thing you can do for other people also. It's the best thing you can do for yourself. I can sit here a hundred times and repeat over and over again.

In fact, if you have ever done planet jumping and talking to all the beings in the universe, you don't talk about it much. They don't talk about it much because people don't believe it. They don't really believe it.

And then the more you talk about it, the more...we call it chepto. $50, $100, chepto. Jaded?

You get used to it. Oh yeah, he mentioned that yesterday. It was BS yesterday and it's more BS today.

He keeps talking about it. It's tradition not to talk about it if it happened to you. But if you get older, you better talk about it.

So if you could do that, if you could actually have the experience of meeting billions of people in a half hour and assuring them that you will take care of them, then that's obviously fulfilling your own dreams, but automatically you fulfill other people's dreams at the same time. So if you're not going to do it for yourself, do it for your mom or do it for your brother or do it for somebody else. Get bodhichitta for somebody else.

GZHAN GYIS BDUN BYUNG STE SNGAR YUL GAM GCIG LA MU GREL BYUNG STE MI TZAM GZHIG GIS PA BU THAMS CAD GZHI YIN NYON NA Here starts a very, very... These are these little Lam Rim stories. You don't get them in the high philosophy books.

You get little, cute little stories passed on in the Lam Rim tradition. They are similar. I grew up with the Christian stories.

I grew up with the stories in the Bible, in the New Testament. Jesus would always tell a small story. Then hundreds of thousands of people spent centuries trying to think about what they meant.

So here's just a guy, he's a carpenter. He's sitting out on the rock somewhere in Israel and he's just talking about some little story. Then people for 2,000 years have taken those stories and meditated on them their whole life.

They're still doing it. My wife does that. It means a lot to her.

She finds deeper and deeper meaning in these little tiny stories. The Lam Rim is like that. The Lam Rim stories are...

They seem like stupid little stories, but you can meditate on them for your whole life. You can meditate on these stories for your whole life and you will go deeper and deeper and deeper. They are simple.

It seems like simple stories survive longer. Then people find... Oops, I'm supposed to slow down.

People find deeper meaning in them. So here's one of those stories. This one you could look at in a hundred ways.

There was a Muge. Muge means famine in a certain country. There was a Mi Tsang.

There was a certain family suffering from famine. Pabu, Tamche, Shu, and Nyewana. The family members were starving and they were close to dying.

The whole family was close to dying. Nyewana. That's the next step in Ukraine, by the way, is famine.

First you blow up all the grocery stores and then you destroy the land and then everyone starves in six months. That's still to come. Shiwana.

NYIN GCIG ZHAG GZUGS GCIG CHUNG BA DANG Then one day they found like a piece of meat. Most Tibetans are not vegetarian. They say, because they couldn't grow green vegetables at that altitude, we have to be meat eaters.

Then you say, well, now you're not at that altitude. But many of the monasteries, my monastery has become vegetarian, which is really a huge, huge change after 2,000 years. Anyway, they found a little hunk of meat stored away, dried meat somewhere.

PHA DE BSAM PAR The father thought to himself, DE NYID THAMS CAD LA DGOS DE GSOD KYANG I could cut this up and share it with all the members of the family. We could all have an equal bite or two bites and we could do it that way. NYON NGU RE LAS MI THOB PAS But each person won't get very much.

They'll just get a bite or two. BYAS PA MI ZAL And it won't stop the hunger. It won't stop the starvation from coming.

YOD TZAM LAS MI BSTAN PAR GZHAN NAS So we'll all die anyway. We'll just die after three days instead of tomorrow. So if I split this meat up and give a little bit to everybody, it'll just delay the death.

A couple days. DE BA'I means, here is comparative, Tim, the instrumental of comparison. DE BA'I, if rather, if rather, TZAM MA RANG GI SOS NAS The father thought to himself, if I were to eat the whole chunk myself, if I were to eat the whole piece of meat myself, SREG TSOR DROG GNOD I would have the strength to go seek more food on my own.

And I could return before they die. You see what I mean? It's an interesting moral dilemma.

I could get back and help them. DE NAS GONG SO SO NYAM NAS ZHAG THAMS CAD PA DE And then with the, he's very careful to say, with the motivation of getting the meat for everyone, he ate the whole thing. PA DE SOS TE SREG TSOR BYAS NAS He went to look for food and he found it and saved the family.

Now, you guys got to cook it. There's a picture, right? You got a picture?

I mean, there's a time to focus on developing yourself so that you can help others. There is a time when you should focus on yourself so that you could help others. You see what I mean?

So, I mean, there is a time at Diamond Mountain to do retreat. I mean, Vivian and us guys, we are used to overworking to help many people and then we don't have time to meditate or we don't have time to do our yoga. We don't have time to think.

But maybe it would be better to stop trying to feed everybody and take some time to eat the meat yourself. You know, like focus on yourself and get your own act together. And maybe that's better than being scattered and trying to help everybody at the same time.

You don't really have the inner resources. You don't have the realizations. You don't have the strength.

You just got scattered trying to help everybody. This is an interesting moral question. This story is not a simple story and it's not a simple thing to act on it.

It's a difficult thing to act on it. What's the right thing to do? Do you ignore Ukraine and go into retreat?

And what's the right time to do that? It takes a lot of wisdom. That's why it's good to have a personal teacher.

Somebody, you have a personal teacher, which was part of the whole earlier Lam Rim, right? GZHAN YIN RTEN TSUL If you have a personal teacher, there's a lot of decisions I didn't have to make about my life because I lived with my teacher for 25 years, okay? In the armpit of the nation.

Do you know this? New Jersey is the, it's where they make gasoline. A lot of the gasoline in America is made there and the north part of New Jersey stinks like gasoline factories.

It is a gasoline factory. I used to go through there every day to Manhattan. It's called Cancer Alley.

The New Jersey turnpike around Newark, it's called Cancer Alley. If you ask me what's the one place in the world that I would not want to live, it's New Jersey. We used to throw rocks at people from New Jersey when I was growing up.

If we saw a car with a New York or New Jersey license plate, we'd throw rocks at it. Then I found out the greatest teacher available is in New Jersey. I'm like, God.

But you have to, sometimes you have to do that. Sometimes you have to go where you wouldn't want to go. If it puts you close to your teacher, then you could ask them, I'm thinking to do a retreat, but I'm also signed up to help with the Ukraine refugee thing.

What do you think is better? What would help more people? Then the teacher will help you make that decision.

So to have access to a teacher is really important. I did for many years. I still have access to a teacher.

I think that's a big decision you have to think about. You might have to go to New Jersey. Okay.

I had so many friends from college. They're like, why are you living in New Jersey? I'm like, the teacher's here.

Anyway. Later they all called me and said, help me. All right.

,DE NA SANGS RGAGS NYAMS SU NAM PA DANG, ,MA NI PHRENG KHOR GCIG GRANGS PA TSUL KHYANG, ,BGRAG YANG LTA BU TSOGS CHOD, ,DRA THENG GCIG BRDZIN PA TSUL KHYANG, ,SEMS DE BZIN PA'I DGOS NAS BYAS, So you've heard this description. You got that next picture? I like this picture.

I mean, I tried to pick one that was kind of the feeling, that kind of gave you the feeling of that journey. This picture is close. So if you need to do a meditation about bodhichitta, I would suggest keeping this picture with you or having this picture around.

It's very close to the experience. It's worthwhile a couple of times a day. How do you take a photo of bodhichitta?

This is close. This is really close. So you might want to look at it a couple of times.

Like make a copy of this picture. Put it on your phone. What do you call it?

Screen saver? Put it on your phone. I got, I got.

What do I got on my phone? Oh, okay. $100 if you can identify this picture, except Stanley Nelson and Vinny.

[Говорящий 2]
Oh, sorry. Huh?

[Говорящий 1]
It's the library at Dunhuang. They had the, it's very, very similar to Diamond Mountain. Extremely, it looks like Diamond Mountain.

And they built meditation cabins there in the Tang Dynasty, before the Tang Dynasty, 800 AD. No, late Tang. Well, it was being used in the late Tang.

The book is from late Tang. And they found a walled up part of one of the caves and they broke through the wall and they found like a thousand books there. And that's where they found the Diamond Cutter.

And that's the oldest copy, that's the oldest printed book in the world. Oldest printed book with a date in it is the Chinese edition of the Diamond Cutter. Then they built this library in front of it and that's my wife.

But put a picture like this planet thing. I see Vivian has one. And then look at it a few times a day.

And he says here, when you are practicing tantra specifically, glance at that picture a couple times a day. MA NI CHEN GOR GCIG SBRANG BA'I SON DANG He says, I would encourage you never to even do one round of OM MANI PADME HUM without looking at the picture. He's like, every time you just do one OM MANI PADME HUM round then look at the picture.

GCIG GSUNGS CAN, BYA KYANG THA BU'I TSOGS SPYOD BYA THENG GCIG GSUNGS CAN And if you happen to be in a monastery and you go to one of those... TSOGS SPYOD means, every morning that you... this is a blackmail situation.

You don't get breakfast at the monastery unless you show up for morning prayers and morning meditation. So it's kind of an incentive. Technically you're not supposed to have a kitchen in your room.

So the only way you can get breakfast is to go for morning meditation. He said, look, if someone's forcing you to go meditate for half an hour and you're stuck, okay? You're not going to get your breakfast otherwise.

You might as well take this picture with you and think about it. Just think about it for a few minutes while your main meditation is about breakfast. Just once in a while bring your motivation back to, I would like to have that experience.

And if you keep looking at that picture it's going to build up a... The planets of the universe themselves are a picture. The planets of the universe themselves are a picture already of your mind, in your mind.

The planets of the universe themselves are already a picture in your mind. That's the only way you can visit all of them in half an hour anyway, because that's true. Therefore, it's logical to every time you have a few minutes, I take it in my special meditation room.

I put my phone out there, check CNN and then check the planets. Because the planets are also pictures, your world is pictures. So if you get used to those pictures, it can become a reality.

So it's useful, even if you're just waiting for breakfast. All right. I'm going to keep going, Tim, to the next class because we have a few minutes and I don't want to waste the time.

We have four minutes. SEMS CAN GYIS DON DU SANGS RGYAS THOMS DUG GI RTZOL BYED GYI NYONG BA THON NA BU RAM GYI GZHON PA LTA BU BYANG CHUB KYI SEMS SKYES PA YIN NO This is now a discussion of the different kinds of bodhichitta and there's a pre-bodhichitta called sugarcane bodhichitta. And here's a good picture of it.

Next one. Oh, we're on the next class, I'm sorry. Should be, that's not the right picture.

Should be a picture of sugarcane. Anyway, if you've ever been to India, it's kind of nice. I mean, they have lots of sugar.

They grow a lot of sugar there. In the harvest time, it's unbelievable. There's a thousand trucks loaded with sugarcane and the kids in the village are running after the truck.

The couple pieces always follow up and it's cute. There you go. It's cute because you see these little kids chasing after the sugarcane trucks and then a couple pieces fall off and then they chew off the outside of the cane, which is the skin of the cane, and then they eat the inside and they get this sugar, heavy duty sugar hit off the inside.

And if you have more money than that, you go to a sugarcane squeezer guy with a little cart on the street. He has one glass that hasn't been washed in 20 years and they have a big wheel and they crush the sugarcane and they make a little sugar drink for you on the spot. So instead of Coca-Cola, they have sugarcane drink.

And the water's from the local river. It's an excellent way to get diarrhea quickly. Where is my sugarcane?

You got it? Oh, okay. So anyway, the tasty part is the inside and the skin on the outside, you can see the skin here, it's not very tasty.

It has some sugar in it. So kids will peel off the outside and chew it like gum. It's not the same as the inside.

Inside is pure sugar and the outside is just the skin. Now, when you first study about bodhichitta, someone teaches you about bodhichitta, you're just thinking about bodhichitta, you're looking at the planets on your phone during your special meditation session at home. The name of that is sugarcane bodhichitta.

So it's bodhichitta, but it's not the real thing. It's just the skin. It's just the first step.

Is it bodhichitta? Yes. Do we call it bodhichitta?

Yes. Is it real bodhichitta? No.

Is it as sweet as the real thing? No. Is it sweet?

Oh, for sure. Just to imagine stepping from planet to planet. Imagine having a personal interview with every sentient being, even bugs, roaches, other things.

It's sweet just to think about. So it's not like the real thing. It's not like biting on the sugarcane inside, but you can chew on the skin and you can get a preview of the taste of the inside of the sugarcane.

So that's called buddham kishin. Say buddham kishin. Yeah, and there's some connection with sugarcane and Lord Buddha.

Sometimes he's called buddham shingpa, the sugarcane clan. His clan had something to do with sugarcane. So probably there's some connection there.

All right kids, we're going to take a break. Go chew on some sugarcane skin and we'll see you in 10 minutes. Thank you.