«Дар освобождения», курс 39 «Ускорь своё сострадание», занятие 8

[Говорящий 1]
Hi, welcome back to Lam Rim. Sorry to keep you waiting. Oh, no, sorry.

Next picture. This is called a socket wrench. And it's extremely useful tool.

If you have to take things apart or put things together, it would save you a huge amount of time if you know how to use a socket wrench. And recently I bought a piece of exercise equipment so I could cover my porch with more stuff. I actually used it, okay?

But you have to put it together with like 20 bolts. And if you have a socket wrench, you could do it in about five minutes. If you don't, it would take a couple hours.

And so my wife, Veronica, although she's perfect in all respects, she doesn't know how to use a socket wrench. And it was kind of funny because they're kind of tricky to use. They go shriek, shriek, shriek, shriek, shriek.

And she's like, great, great. And it was so nice to know something that she didn't know. And if you're married, you know how valuable that is.

So I was like, oh, that's a socket wrench. You got to click it this way. And then look what you can do with it.

And she's like, shoop, shoop, shoop, shoop, shoop, shoop. And she's all excited. Now she's a socket wrench fan.

Why am I talking about socket wrenches? If you know how to use them, they are the most sexy thing, you know. It's the, nah, that's enough.

I got stopped. I had a Volkswagen bug in the good old days. Me and my brothers painted it with spray paint randomly.

And I was driving from San Diego to Phoenix and the accelerator broke. So we just tied it full open. We tied it open.

And we just put a step on the clutch to slow down. So it's going like 80 miles an hour across the desert. And you can't stop it.

And we got stopped by a cop, you know. I guess because of the color of the car. It was all rainbow and stuff.

And he said, I got you on LIDAR. And we're like, what's LIDAR? And he says, it's the best thing since sex was invented.

It's personal radar for the cop, police car. He said, it's the best thing since sex was invented. Socket wrenches are like that.

The best thing invented since sex itself. If you know how to use them, they're really cool. Why don't you, Geshe-la, just tell us what you're talking about.

He says here, the dharma, the classical dharma, that's the books we study at Mixed Nuts, for example, the 10 classics. We're studying every major Buddhist school. And we're studying the most difficult classic of every major Buddhist school.

And that's like a socket wrench, if you know how to use it. Like the Mainoni School, which we are using for advanced business courses for very big business executives. I asked this lady, I don't know if you guys remember, she came to me early.

I said, what company do you work for? Can I say? She said, I work for Ping An.

I'm like, oh, that's the largest life insurance company in the world. She said, yeah, I know. And I said, what's your job?

She says, I'm an HR manager. I said, how many employees under you? She said, 1.5 million. I'm like, that's respectable. You know? Why was I bragging about that?

I forgot. Yeah, oh yeah. For those guys, we use Mainoni School.

And we take the ancient Mainoni School, which is extremely powerful and extremely deep, just like a socket wrench. And if someone can show you how to use it, you can run the largest life insurance company in the world better with Mainoni teachings. But you need someone to show you how to use it.

It's not user-friendly. The Mainoni School is not user-friendly. But neither is a socket wrench.

But once you get used to a socket wrench, you'll never go back. It's the best thing since. Okay.

So anyway, LO SBYONG GI SBYOGS BYAS NAS If you have, he says, GNYIS BSTOD. GNYIS BSTOD, GNYIS MA NGA means in the bad days. We had it earlier.

GNYIS MA means the crap at the bottom of the teacup. Okay, these are the days in, historically, we live in bad times. People don't respect these teachings.

People are more interested in food, killing themselves with food, or buying expensive cars. They don't appreciate wisdom. But, so in these days, SPYIR LAM DU MIN GRO $100 SPYIR LAM DU MIN GRO So simple.

[Говорящий 2]
SPYIR LAM DU MIN GRO Not bad, but no money.

[Говорящий 1]
Close, but no cigar. They know this one. Yeah, the Dharma is so powerful that in bad times, like now, people don't see how to apply it in real life.

Like, you have this extremely powerful ancient teachings. Very, very powerful. John Brady's whole library, over 10,000 books, digitalized, 16 million pages, scanned.

But people don't know how to use it. It's sitting there. If you knew how to use it, you could easily make hundreds of thousands of dollars every week.

Easily, if you knew how to use it. But it's like a soccer wrench. So what are you going to do?

Add LO SBYONG. He says, a little LO SBYONG spice in the ancient classics makes them usable by the general public. LO SBYONG is the training that turns a soccer wrench into a publicly usable instrument.

You see what I mean? The ancient classics become usable with a little LO SBYONG spice on them. They become digestible by the general public if you just add a little LO SBYONG spice.

Then these great classics like the Mind-Only School, if you just add a little compassion to the mix, suddenly they open their secrets to you. They will open their secrets to you. It's a very beautiful idea, right?

The soccer wrench instructions are in the box. I don't think instructions would work, right, Joe, for a soccer wrench? They just confuse your words.

You got to see someone use one and then you can figure it out. BYAS NAS RGYEN YIN GYIS MI THUB PA SOGS If you add the spice of good heart to your complex Dharma practice, you won't be thrown off by small disasters. RGYEN YIN means small disasters.

Like you're doing really well in your retreat and suddenly locust season comes. This happened to me just after I found out the retreat cabin was next to a peacock farm. If you ever heard a peacock, right?

[Говорящий 2]
Rrrr, rrrr, rrrr.

[Говорящий 1]
I'm like, you know, I'm trying to meditate. They like, the idea is beautiful about, I guess that's the poison gives them indigestion or something. And then right after they come down then the locusts come like, rrrr, rrrr.

Thousands of rrrr, rrrr around the cabin. So when you have small retreat disasters, which, Vivien, if you're going to do retreat, there's going to be some small disaster will come. Something will happen.

The shower will break for a month. You know, lucky no one else is with you. Stuff like that.

If you have a little lojong spice on your deep practices, you won't get off balance. Little problems won't get you off balance. You'll just say, okay, no shower, that's fine.

I can handle that. You learn to take a sponge bath. You take a wet cloth.

It's an old retreat thing. CHE BA SDU MA DANG LDAN CHE BA means this dharma is super cool. And that finishes a big section.

He says, look, this lojong is sexy. And one of the best things is if you spice your other deep teachings with it, it all helps you practice, especially when things go wrong, when little things go wrong. You don't get off crazy, you don't lose your practice.

So if you have a little lojong going on in your retreat, you won't go crazy when you get... I think one of the most delightful things about small disasters in a retreat is bed bugs. Now that's a treat.

And they're like crawling on you all day. In India, when you wake up, I don't know if you've ever been to that. They like to suck your blood all night and they blow up like this.

And then they sleep on the wall. So you wake up and there's your blood hanging on the wall. Little red, big red balloons.

So you won't go crazy if you have a little lojong. Okay, take my blood, good luck. I'll take the loss.

You take the gain. All that hemoglobin. You keep it.

I got enough here. You can have some. If you have a little lojong practice, you don't go crazy when things go off in the retreat.

All right, DE'I MTHONG BA THUGS SPYOD CHEN PO LA CHAGS ZAL LO At the beginning of this lojong text, first, it's traditional. SPYOD SPYOD, say SPYOD SPYOD. SPYOD SPYOD means an offering of praise.

And it's traditional before every great Buddhist classic that you bow down to something cool. Like I bow down to almond croissants. I'm just fantasizing here.

Like you choose something super beautiful and it's traditional before every great book to bow down to somebody or something. Later, one of the kings of Tibet said, let's organize this bowing down at the beginning of the book thing. Let's say, if the book's about Vinaya, you should bow down to Lord Buddha.

If the book's about love, you should bow down to Bodhisattva. People will be able to tell the general subject matter of the book by who you bow down to at the beginning. So who does Chakravarta bow down to?

At the beginning? Yeah, great compassion. Which is weird because it's not a person.

Traditionally, you bow down to a person. And he bows down to great compassion. And there's a precedent for that.

Somebody else did that. We'll talk about it. Chakravarta, I bow down to great compassion.

At the beginning of this lojong, BSHAD PA NI BAB PA CHEN RE ZIG LA CHAGS BSAL BA MIN This is not a CHAGS BSAL to CHEN RE ZIG. Who's that? Avalokiteshvara, okay, Avalokiteshvara.

CHEN means eyes. CHEN RE ZIG means to look like this, like you have a crush on somebody. Okay, it's a steady crush gaze.

RE ZIG means, in Sanskrit, it's avaloka. Ava means down, loka means to look. So look comes from that.

So avaloka, mister gazing down in love. The same spelling means a rag, a cloth rag. So some idiot translator in the West, who I won't name, calls it Mr. Rag Eyes or something like that. Okay, so sorry. Anyway, it means to look at somebody like you have a crush on them. And Avalokiteshvara's looking at every suffering being in the universe and he has a crush on them.

He's like, oh, okay, it's a beautiful name. Then he says, CHAGS ZAL MA YIN. Yeah, I don't, he doesn't bow down to the Buddha of compassion.

He bows down to compassion itself, which is weird. So it needs a comment. Somebody has to explain what's going on.

Why do you bow down to an emotion and not to a person? GYIS BLO BU'I BDAG PA'I DRAG PA'I U MA LA BYUG PA'I UR Hey, there's a precedent. BDAG PA'I DRAG PA Chandrakirti did the same thing.

Okay, the most famous emptiness book, except for Nagarjuna, Arya Nagarjuna. But Chandrakirti also, at the beginning of entering the Middle Way, he bows down to? SNYING RJE, SNYING RJE, yeah.

Compassion. SRED PA BZHIN DU DGE'ER YANG SNYING RJE CHEN PO LA GCOD PA BYA BA So he's just following precedent. Somebody else did the same thing before.

He's not being strange. He's just doing what Chandrakirti did. He's just bowing down to the emotion.

He's bowing down to the energy which makes the person a bodhisattva rather than to the bodhisattva. That's cool.

[Говорящий 2]
All right, did we have a picture? I think so. Why did I have this one?

[Говорящий 1]
Is that the right picture? No, the one before that. Yeah, she's singing on the bed.

SPYOD SPYOD also means to sing the praise of an... She's doing a SPYOD SPYOD. She's offering a praise.

If you think about it, every great song has an object that you are singing about. You're always singing about somebody you love or something you want, some car you're in love with. She's real fine, my 409.

You know, car, girl, other important things. All right, so you're always bowing down to it. When you sing, you're always singing about something.

And so every one of these praises at the beginning of a great classic, it's always bowing down to something beautiful. That's why I chose the picture. You understand?

When you sing with passion, you got to be singing about something. Or you couldn't have passion for it. SPYOD SPYOD PA BZHIN DER YANG GNYIS BYAS PA LA SPYOD PA SBYAL DE NAS BLO SBYONG NGO ZHIG LA DON TZAN DON NAS Now that we've finished the introduction, which is bowing down to great compassion.

By the way, there's a difference between compassion and great compassion. That's another topic. Let's start, he says NGOS ZHIG.

Let's get to the real nuts and bolts of our soccer match. Let's talk about the real seven points. Let's get to the seven points.

DON NAS, DANG PO What was the first one? Yeah, like foundation ideas. We have that in DCI, right?

Like we have foundation ideas. By the way, I will help you with that thing you were talking about. I just didn't get a chance to talk to you about it yet, but I'll do it over there.

DANG PO MNGON DROG BSTAN GYI MCHOD BSTAN PA ZHES PA SKYE BU CHUNG RDIN GYI RNAMS The foundation here is, next picture. Yeah, you can't see the whole picture here. They're sitting on the first two steps of a stairway.

They're sitting on the first two steps of a stairway. In the Lam Rim, what would be the first two thirds? Yeah, lesser motivation and medium motivation.

Lesser motivation, get my rear end out of the three lower realms, right? Medium motivation, get my rear end out of all the realms. Out of death.

So first step of the stairway. Here you can see they're kind of on the second step. It was hard to find somebody sitting on the second step.

So the first of the seven steps here is the first two parts of the Lam Rim, which is try to at least develop a concern about what's going to happen to you after you die. If you study any Lam Rim and you have any success in any Lam Rim study, you are afraid of what's going to happen after you die. That's all.

Months, years of study just to be scared shitless about what's coming. And we're all there. We're all there.

We're all facing it. And who knows who's going to go first? You don't know.

There's a strange irony that young ones tend to go first. So grandpas just hang in there like an old shoe and then the Tesla's crash. You see what I mean?

And you never know who's going to check out first. And so the first goal of Lam Rim, I will slow down. The first goal of Lam Rim is to be scared of what's going to happen after you die.

And it takes years of study to get properly scared. Or your mom dies in your arms. That pretty much does it.

If you're lucky, your mom dies in your arms. Then you finally wake up. They say the next cow in line at the slaughterhouse wakes up.

Oh, look, they're killing cows in here. Oh, there's a line. I'm second in line.

Do you know they have genetically mated the most stupid and cooperative cows for 50,000 years, each generation. My Lama, Ken Rinpoche, he used to grow zinnias. And he was so funny.

He's a seed master. So he would grow zinnias. Then carefully he would cut them when they got old, take them into his room and wait for them to dry out.

And the best ones, he would take the seeds out for next year. And then next year, he would take the seeds out of the best ones for the next year. What do you call that in desert farming?

Wild crap. Wild crap. Yeah, he would do that.

And that's what we do with cows and dogs for 50,000 years. We take the most cooperative wolf and we mate them. And then the second generation is cooperative, genes, genetically.

And we did it with cows for 50,000 years. Now we got cows that stand there in the slaughterhouse waiting to get killed because they're so cooperative. Why am I talking about that?

A person who doesn't study lam rim is a cooperative cow. And they're just standing in line. Did your great-grandma die?

Yeah. Did your grandma die?

[Говорящий 2]
Mm-hmm.

[Говорящий 1]
Did your mom die?

[Говорящий 2]
Yeah.

[Говорящий 1]
Are you going to die? No. You're just next in line, duh.

That's what lam rim's for. So that's the foundation for this lojo. You got to have this SKYES BU CHUNG, at least understand your next cow in line.

And then if you can, understand that even if you came back as a human, it would just be more of the same suffering. It's just getting old. When you're young, it's not such a bad thing.

When you're my age, you're like, it's really depressing. Oh, my finger just stopped working. Okay, oh, my knees just stopped working.

Okay, I can't do down dog anymore. The wrist stopped working. You're like, God, yeah, I got to do down dog.

Why? I got to live longer. Yeah, but I'm too old to do it anymore.

Just stuff falls apart. Parts start to fail. No matter how well you take care of a car, parts start to fail.

So anyway, when you get to that stage, you're ready to start the lojo. You can't really start the seven points without starting the first point, which is to understand your next cow in line. And even if you're a fresh cow, you're going to fall apart.

If they don't slit your throat, your body will slit its own throat from the inside, and you start to lose parts, and it's disturbing. Oh, I can do it without these two fingers, but what about this finger? I don't know, I guess I can work it out.

And then you're like, the stuff starts to fail. If you got that understanding, you're ready to start the other six parts of the lojo. That's called Sunday.

,'BYUNG RDIN GYI LAM LA LO BYAMS PA DE YON NA, ,DE NYID LAM RIM LAS BSHAD PA DANG KHYAD DMIGS, Look, those two parts are the same as the Lam Rim, therefore, yeah, I don't need to talk about it here because I spent 10 goddamn years explaining it to you. All right? If you don't remember, go get the recordings.

Okay, we finished that part. I'm not doing it again. Maybe the second generation will do it, for your students.

[Говорящий 2]
Right?

[Говорящий 1]
Okay, all right, good. ,GNYIS PA BYANG CHUB SEMS NYID BYANG BA LA, Now the second part of the seven, the second step of the seven, what was it?

[Говорящий 2]
What was it?

[Говорящий 1]
Huh? Yeah, it is lojong, it is the wish, bodhichitta, developing bodhichitta, okay, developing bodhichitta. He says two parts.

The second step of the seven-step lojong is developing bodhichitta. That bodhichitta has to be developed. Bodhichitta has two parts.

And here we take off on an amazing journey. Okay, you're so lucky you survived. Your parts didn't fall apart before you got here.

You're lucky. There's some people who didn't make it here and they're gone. We buried them a couple months ago.

So you reached the part where we're going to talk about the two kinds of bodhichitta. So we haven't really talked about it yet. Two kinds of bodhichitta.

DON DAM, say DON DAM SEMS KYIS.

[Говорящий 2]
DON DAM SEMS KYIS.

[Говорящий 1]
KUN RDZOGS SEMS KYIS. KUN RDZOGS SEMS KYIS. This is a difficult word, DON DAM and KUN RDZOGS.

DON DAM means the real thing. KUN RDZOGS means not the real thing. I learned all my Tibetan, not from a dictionary, but from my teacher's lips because I was his slave.

So I was his driver. So he couldn't go anywhere without me. And I remember how I learned this word.

We were in a coffee shop at the Delaware Bridge. Howard Johnson, and he would always, we would always stop halfway to Washington, D.C. and he had to have Tibetan tea, 21 cups a day. Guess who made it?

With a teacher. And he stopped at Howard Johnson and they would, he'd order a hot tea. And then they would bring this cream dream, fake cream.

And he said, oh no, not cream dream. That's KUN RDZOGS. You see, that's how I learned this word.

The second kind of bodhichitta is cream dream bodhichitta. It's all chalk and vegetable oil and dirty water. Okay, this little fake cream, that's KUN RDZOGS.

Okay, and then RDZON DAM means the real thing. He'd say, tell her to give me RDZON DAM. I don't want KUN RDZOGS.

And I, you know, anytime there was a difficult thing to tell somebody, he would suddenly forget English. You tell her, we don't want KUN RDZOGS. All right, he doesn't want fake cream.

He wants the real thing. We don't give that. I'll buy it.

We don't sell it. I'll pay extra. I'll give you a big tip.

Okay. Suddenly they have it. So anyway, that's KUN RDZOGS.

So there's a kind of bodhichitta which is like cream dream. It's not the, it's called, it's called, what do you want to call that? We'll call it cream dream.

Cream dream bodhichitta. That's KUN RDZOGS. Then RDZON DAM is the real thing.

Real cream. Okay. So bodhichitta is generally divided into the real thing and the cream dream.

Okay. What's the difference? THUGS CAN GYI RIGS CAN DBANG SNYING BDAG GIS DBANG DU BYAS NAS THEG CAN GYI RIGS CAN means people whose personality is Mahayana.

People whose personality is Mahayana. What's Mahayana? You're practicing for others.

You're practicing for other people. It's like a mojo. You're trying to reach Buddhahood because you cannot bear the suffering that you see in the world.

And it's heavy right now. It's very, very heavy, especially this week. I mean, it's really, really heavy.

It's extremely difficult to deal with it. My wife, she can't sleep. She just can't sleep.

She's thinking about it, but she can't. She just wakes up. Three o'clock she gets up.

She goes, sit, sit in the kitchen. It's a terrible, terrible thing. And it makes you want to forget the two husbands in the kitchen.

So, you know, we spent how many years with the two husbands in the kitchen? Ten years. Ten years we're studying that when you go in the kitchen and your husband yells at you, it's coming from your seeds.

You must have yelled at your kids or something. There's no such thing as a husband who yells from his own side. And that's the meaning of emptiness.

Forget cosmic black holes. The meaning of emptiness is that the person being violent to you, who's not coming from you, don't exist and cannot. It's impossible.

There's no such thing. It's like a two-headed purple. And that's the real meaning of emptiness.

Emptiness is not some philosophy thing. Emptiness means people who are hurting you are coming from you and only from you. And you cannot blame them.

They're not coming from theirs. They're coming from you. And that's a very hard truth.

That's a very hard thing to tell people. My teacher wouldn't let me tell some... He'd say, don't tell them.

He'd say, but I can't handle it. So anyway, here's the THEG CHEN GYI RIGS CAN DBANG SNON, say DBANG SNON. Spiritually high IQ people.

Doesn't have to do with the college you went to. Doesn't have to do with your grades at school. Those people who have a high spiritual IQ, who have a huge heart, huge good heart.

High spiritual IQ, called DBANG SNON. There's a separate word for those people in the scriptures. DBANG SNON High spiritual aptitude.

Those people, DBANG DU BYAS NAS SNGAR RANG GI PHYI'I RNAMS SUGS DAM BOR DUS RNAMS SEMS BSKYED GYI MGO NAS You can teach them the real bodhichitta first. You can teach them the real bodhichitta first. The non-cream dream, the real one, which is the direct perception of emptiness when someone's killing your people.

That's the real bodhichitta. That's the real one. Don't blame some other country.

Don't blame some other people. Don't criticize some, oh, he's crazy. Yeah, he's crazy and he's coming directly from you.

So maybe you should fix something. So the real bodhichitta, the real cream is coming from you. There's no leader.

There's no army. There's no policies that you can ever hear about or experience that are not coming from you. They're coming from you.

There's this whole thing about, they asked me to speak on Ukrainian TV this week. And I said, I was trying to think, oh God, what do you say? And I was thinking, I mean, what do you say that's, I want to teach the stick thing.

You know the stick thing? Someone hits you with a stick and you take a gun and you shoot the stick. It's like boom, boom, boom, boom.

And your friend's like, why are you shooting the stick? He hit me. No, the stick didn't hit you.

The guy hit you with the stick. Don't shoot the stick, shoot the guy. Well, if you're going to shoot the one holding the stick, that's anger.

That's not Russians or Ukrainians or anything else, Iranians, whoever else we're supposed to hate this week. They're just the stick. They're being held by anger.

They're being held by selfishness. They're being held by a disease that we all have. If you're going to attack somebody, attack that.

Where? Well, you could start here. Anyway, DBANG RNAN means people who get it and they get emptiness.

But it's not some philosophy thing. It's that there's nobody hurting you who didn't come from you. And so give up that fantasy.

There is no such thing. Stop hitting the stick, shooting the stick. Go for the person holding the stick, which is anger.

Which is ignorant anger, who thinks that the husband's yelling at me because he had a bad day yesterday. He's yelling at you because you yelled at somebody last week, duh. Okay, I was saying.

So anyway, in the old days, there were enough spiritually high IQ people that they could teach the real bodhichitta first. But then they got to us. And they said, we better water it down.

We better give him cream dream. We better give him the easy bodhichitta first. We'll teach him the emptiness one later.

So he says here, in the old days, SNGA RA BSTAN DAG PA SEMS KYIS RGYUD GO NI I'm sorry I'm talking so fast. The translators either died or they gave up. I'll try to slow down.

They used to teach people real bodhichitta first. Nowadays, LO BYANG BA LA DER GSUNGS KYANG BSKYANG But, DANG GZHI, nowadays, SNGON DU THAMS CA'I CHA MA BSTAN PAR BDE DAG SEMS KYIS LO BYANG SU BZHIN NA But if you teach people the real bodhichitta first, too early, they can kind of go the wrong way. People can misunderstand.

Oh, your husband's just empty. Slow down. Don't yell back.

Oh, if my husband's just empty, I can shoot him. Those kind of people, you got to go slow. Who might shoot their husband if you tell them the husband is empty.

So you got to slow down and don't teach them the real bodhichitta first. Teach them the dream bodhichitta first. And then he says, and I'm really happy, Tim, we got there.

He says, it's just like the story of Mr. Elephant Skin Coat. Okay. You got the guy?

This is an illegal picture from the internet, but I couldn't resist it. This guy has an elephant T-shirt on and his physique is just like Stanley and me. So this is a story of a guy named Mr., why are you guys laughing when I said that?

He's an elephant skin, Mr. Elephant Skin. He's called Mr. Elephant Skin. And I'm very proud that using John Brady's database, I think I'm the first person to ever find this story.

So here we go. And you're going to be the first persons to ever hear it in modern times. And it's sexy.

And if we go a little bit over, no one's going to mind. We got seven minutes, I can probably do it. And this is from a, well, I'll start it, okay?

And we'll finish it tomorrow. The author of this commentary is called Kyu Tsang, Losang Jamyang Munlam, born 1689, from the greatest monastery in the world, Seramay. So obviously, you'd be the only person to explain it correctly.

Okay. Che che pe. I'll just read it to you, okay?

Is that okay, Tim? You want to do it that way? Good.

By the way, Tim prepares all these texts. We should thank him some day. Yeah.

And you should thank John Brady some time for all the diarrheas he's had.

[Говорящий 2]
You know?

[Говорящий 1]
I gave a talk at university one day and the professor introduced me and he said, he didn't say he's a Geshe. He spent 25 years in a refugee camp. He's like, you know how many times he's had diarrhea to get here?

I was like, he understands me. So anyway, John Brady, you got to thank him for that. That's how he keeps his trim figure.

Che che pe tse. Yang, when you teach Dharma to somebody, GDUR BYED BLO DANG TSAM BAR You got to judge what kind of student you're dealing with and you have to adjust the teaching to the student. So don't go off on emptiness with new people.

You know, start with compassion and the good heart. Don't go straight to the ultimate good heart, which is emptiness. BLO BYANG TSAM BAR GOS RIM LAS PAR GRUB JIG NAS Try to conceive of a strategy for this person.

This person seems to be like this. Then think about it. I'll start them off on this, and then we'll go to that, and we'll get to emptiness in about six months.

Like make a plan in your head for the person. CI TSUL LA SKAD PA GAL CHE It's very important that you be SKAD PA. You should be skillful.

Skillful means think about the effect that your teaching's going to have on this person. Maybe it's too much to teach them that the enemy is in their own mind. Even on the battlefield, the enemy's in your own mind, not the other person with the gun.

But are they ready to hear that? You have to judge carefully. DNGOS RGYAS GYI In the old days, back in India, an elephant died.

And SHA RNAMS CHA GYIS SOGS KYI SOS BZIN And the beasts of prey, hyenas and wolves and coyotes, started to eat the inside out. They ate all the guts and the skin. They got into the abdomen and started eating.

CHA GYIS SOGS GSOGS KYANG RUG PA'I DROM DROM here means the, what do you call when the ribs are there, still the ribs are there? In Tibetan it's like the cage, rib cage. So the cage of the skeleton was still complete.

What do you call it? Intact, yeah. They ate the meat out of the middle, but the whole rib cage was still there and the skin was still on.

But all the meat was devoured. RUG PA'I DROM DU SPAGS PA YOG SPAGS PA YOG means the hide was still intact on the outside. YOG NAS MA ZHIG PAR YOD PA'I NANG DU And some Buddhist meditator, a cuckoo guy, said, boy, that'd be good for renunciation, to sit inside of that rib cage and do my meditation.

He's like a real yogi. So he said, that would be something to sit among the flies and the maggots and probably good for your renunciation because that's what we're all headed for. So I'm going to, he got this idea, who knows what, but he said, I'm going to meditate inside the rib cage of this dead elephant.

So he got crawled in there and started meditating. RTZON PO ZHIG GIS BSGOM PA'I STONG NYID DO STONG NYID DO He saw emptiness directly. I'm not, this is where American young guys go and find a dead elephant.

I tried something similar. I can tell you a diamond mountain cabin is more practical. I tried a cave.

I got almost killed by a green viper, a rattlesnake, and then I, there's no cure for that poison. And then I had the pleasure of daddy long legs, a thousand daddy long legs on my body, and I decided a diamond mountain cabin was more practical. Okay, so don't go looking for, you're not going to find an elephant skeleton anyway.

Okay, I got time for one more sentence, right, Tim? TSE NYON LUS PA'I RNAM PO BYED KHO BA ZHIG SGRAB PA NA So people started calling him Master Elephant Skin. I don't, it doesn't say he wore the coat around, but it kind of implies it, I guess.

They started to call him Mr. Elephant Hun. Master Elephant Hun, Acharya Elephant Hun. YOD DE PHYIR RGYAL BYAMS PA ZHIG GIS LA PHYIR DU CHEN DANG And then there was a Dharma King, Dharma Raja, right?

Spiritual, a king with spiritual aspirations, which is common in the old days, not nowadays. And he invited him to become the Lama, the state Lama, like the main Lama of the country. I got 10 more minutes?

Oh, nice. Maybe you're going to get through Mr. Elephant Skin. DER LOB PA'I GYIS STONG NYID KHO NA BSTAN PA'I Since Mr. Elephant Hide, Master Elephant Hide had just had this profound experience inside the skeleton of the elephant, he said, I'm going to focus on emptiness. I'm just going to teach the king emptiness. Do you already get where this is going? Yeah, he didn't judge the king's capacity correctly, but he was excited because he just had a lot of great personal experiences with emptiness.

So he decided to teach which bodhichitta first? The ultimate one. Instead of the, he should have started with pre-dream, which is the good heart.

So he went straight to the emptiness one. RGYAL PO SEMS LA SDING MUN GSUM DE YOD PA RNAMS KYANG MED And the king said, this guy doesn't have anything MUN GSUM to show. Do you remember MUN GSUM?

Pratyaksha, Pratyaksha, in the Yoga Sutra. Yeah, direct, yeah. He's not showing me anything practical.

He's talking all theory. It's all some kind of philosophical constructs about emptiness. He doesn't have anything concrete to show me.

He's not teaching me anything practical. He's going off on this emptiness thing all the time. MED RANG SHAR LUGS RANG SHAR LUGS Judging from the appearance of this guy who's unable to give me any practical suggestions, spiritual practice, LA BSTAN NA, MTHUG BYA BU PA LTA BA'I BYAS TA I think he's a Jain who's into some kind of nihilism.

So I guess in those days there were Jain scholars, or Jain monks, who were into saying nothing's real. He said, this is one of those Jains. And by the way, the Jains are beautiful, beautiful, extremely beautiful people, and very kind, and very knowledgeable, and very wonderful people.

They're still around today. But the king was like, oh, this guy's no Buddhist. He's teaching some kind of extreme view that nothing exists.

BSTAN NA, MTHUG BYA BU PA LTA BA'I BYAS TA ZHIG RNAMS PA'I LOB POR DU RDZUS PA YIN RDZUS PA means he's fake. He's a nihilist posing as a Buddhist. He thinks emptiness means nothing exists.

He's teaching emptiness wrong to everybody. YIN DUG PAS DE'I ZHAG NA If I make him the national master, NGES SNGAGS PA'ANG My people, the people that I'm responsible for in my kingdom, RNAMS NA DGE BA CHOS PHYIM LTAR BA MIN DUG They will ignore the ten good deeds and they'll go straight to emptiness. They'll say, oh, this is so much more sexy.

This emptiness thing. Who needs protecting life, telling the truth, respecting other people's relationships, et cetera? Who needs that corny old morality?

We got emptiness. He says, I'm afraid he's going to mislead my people. He is a real Dharma king.

Therefore, now he proves himself not to be a Dharma king. DGUL BYED He cut the guy's head off and drove, and killed him. He had his head removed.

To protect his subjects, he had him executed. He executed and saved. Mr. Elephant Skin got executed. DE NAS DNGOS PA'I GZHAN ZHIG BSTAN PA'I Then he took another teacher and DE SNGA NI BSDOD PA LA MIN DGA' SNGA NI BSDOD PA LA MIN DGA' He said, I have overcome my desire for material possessions. GZHAN BSDOD PA LA RGYAS PA NGES GYIR GYI LA CHEN MI YON And as long as, Mr. King, you still have attachment to your Teslas and your fancy houses, it's not going to work out. I cannot be the national Dharma master with a king who's so obviously attached to possessions.

It's not going to work. ZHES PA LA SOGS PA'I BSDOD PA'I GNYIS PAS BSTAN PA NAS And he started teaching the king that way, from the point of view of over-concentration on your possessions will detract from your spiritual life. You won't have time to meditate because you'll be taking your Tesla to the car repair place.

Okay? Which they tend to do. The more stuff you have, the more time it takes to fix it, take care of it.

And I like a Tesla. I enjoy a Tesla. I like driving a Tesla, but I don't want one.

If I already have a usable car, I don't want another thing that's going to suck my time. I just see it as a time sucker. So I'm like, okay.

But I like, I enjoy them. I think they're very nice. If I didn't already have a car, I would buy a Tesla.

MI RGA, but I have one to take care of, it's enough. NA NI DGOS PA LA MI RGA So he said, RIM GYIS, this second teacher started him off on the problems of Teslas. Started him easy.

Don't eat too much. Don't buy too much stuff. Couple pairs of shirts, it's okay.

Tinay taught, and then after months, don't need them. Then he taught him emptiness. So he got him to emptiness gradually.

He didn't just pop emptiness on him. He started with DOD CHEN CHOG BSHAD, Abhidharma. Enjoy the old stuff you have.

It's a cool thing. DOD CHEN CHOG BSHAD is the Abhidharma meditation technique beginning. Enjoy old jeans.

They're softer. They don't cost so much. They're more fun.

I was wearing, did you notice I was wearing the same jeans since I got here? I changed them last night because they were a little fresh. But they're soft, and they're comfortable, and they're old.

It's okay. Enjoy the stuff you have, and don't worry about new stuff until you have to throw out the old stuff. It makes your life so easy.

So he started him there, and then finally he took him to emptiness, very gradually. RGYAL PO RGYANG STONG NYID RTOGS RGYAL PO STONG NYID RTOGS The king saw emptiness directly because he took him there gradually. He took him there gradually.

Then the king, SNGAR GYI LOB PA'I SRED PA LA RGYAL PA GRAB PO SKYES Then the king, after he saw emptiness directly, was, oh, I killed an Arya. I executed an Arya. I executed someone who saw emptiness directly.

Big mistake. ZHAG PA He confessed. He did lots of confession.

He did lots of purification. LOB PA'I LAM PO CHE'I SKO BA PA DE STONG NYID RTOGS PA'I STOBS KYIS And the Mr. Elephant Skin Master, because he had seen emptiness directly, was able to come into the MONG BZHANG of the Wangdi. Wangdi the MONG BZHANG.

MONG, Wangdi the MONG. He came into the dream of the king because he was, even though he got murdered, he was still an Arya. So he purposely visited the king's dreams.

MI LAM DU BRJOD NAS GYUR TE TZAM DU BRGYUD NA If you really regret having murdered me, then I suggest you have someone do a painting of me that you can remember me in. And pay respect to the painting and think of me in the right way. DE DGOS PAR GYUR DU GYI'I SBYONG GSUNGS PA'I RGYAL PA KYANG DE LTAR BYED The king agreed, and after he woke up, he had a painting done of Mr. Elephant Skin. We should try to find it. Maybe it is that guy. DE SDIG BSDAG PA'I LTAR MA BYUNG BAR And he kept confessing to people what he had done until he got the proper signs that it was purified.

DE LTAR BLO BPON DE NYID GYI STONG NYID RTOG BSKYANG Now here's the commentary by Gyur Tsang, remember Jay? From? St. Lee. If you think about it, both of them saw emptiness. Both of the masters, both of the teachers had seen emptiness. But, DU BYANG LAM LA PHYI KHYEN MIN GYI DBANG GIS RANG BZHANG LA PHAN NAS But you can see the difference in the trouble, the level of trouble that came when the first teacher was impatient to teach emptiness too early.

He was all excited about emptiness, and he taught too early. He didn't respect the, he didn't try to ascertain the disciple's level. He didn't care about the disciple's level.

He wanted to teach something sexy. So he went straight to emptiness, and it hurt him. It caused a lot of problems for everybody.

What's the moral of the story? If you have a choice of teaching ultimate bodhichitta or cream dream bodhichitta, check your student first. Figure out their capacity, and then make the wise choice.

You might want to start with, come on, have a good heart. Yeah, they're attacking your country. They also got kids.

They also have grandmas. They're also going to die one day. They're also human.

They're doing the wrong thing. They're all confused. Have some compassion for them.

My dad went to war at 17. He never recovered. He killed people, directly.

He never recovered. He was an alcoholic, violent alcoholic, his whole life. People don't recover from that.

You shoot a person, you never recover. Never. The real people getting hurt are the soldiers.

So he said, if the people aren't ready yet, just teach them, come on, these people are also going to die anyway. And you think it's fun to kill somebody? Boy, you ever gone to a meeting of American veterans?

My nephew was a psychologist for the veterans. They are messed up. They're in such pain.

They're in such pain about having what they saw. They are really, really terribly hurt. So anyway, let's have some compassion for them.

And don't tell people what. They're coming from you. Those guys are coming.

I mean, it may not be the right time yet. Maybe you want to start with, come on, have some compassion for these guys. All right, I'm almost done, Tim.

The enterprise is slowing down. LO RGYUD DE'I GIO'I RGYAG DGOS NAS RNAMS TE Atisha himself brought the elephant skin teacher's story from India as a gift to the land of snows. And he taught it to the yogi named Gunbawa.

And I'm passing it on to you. Okay, cool? P'I CHENG, bye.

All right, sashimi. Sashimi? Japanese food?

Sashimi? Sashimi, okay. All right, we'll see you guys tomorrow.

And I'm sorry for going over a little bit. So just the moral of the story is, judge your audience and teach appropriately. And otherwise you might hurt somebody.

All right, see you tomorrow.