«Дар освобождения», курс 40 «Магия пустотных медитаций и тонглен», занятие 2

[Говорящий 1]
So we're in the middle of the third of the five meditations. Who can tell me the first one? Right.

Second one? Yeah, problems of trying to take care of yourself. By the way, again, I repeat, you can try to keep doing that and it's just not going to work out.

I can save you a lot of trouble and time. It's not going to work out to just take care of yourself. It doesn't work out.

And you can either figure it out younger or you can figure it out later. But you might as well save yourself the trouble. It just doesn't, it never works out to just pay attention to what you want.

It just will, it will fail. Third one? Yeah, beautiful things that happen when you really take care of...

And yourself. Okay, good, all right. My teacher used to say, you're supposed to take care of all living beings and you are a living being.

So don't think it has to be you or them. That's not the name of the game. The game is everyone has an equal right to happiness and you also have an equal right to happiness.

So this Buddhist, what do you call it? Buddhist self, this self-suffering Buddhist is not Buddhism. Hurting yourself to make others happy is a dumb idea also.

That doesn't work out either. You also quit after a while. So you might as well just take care of everybody, including yourself.

I have a lot of friends who are good Buddhists and they don't take care of themselves and they overdo it and they overwork themselves and then they quit. Then they quit or they get sick and they can't continue. So you got to take care of yourself.

You got to stay healthy, by the way, and then otherwise you can't take care of other people. All right, we're going to go to the text. You ready, Tim?

RGYAL PO'I PHAL GYI BDE So that, I like to go through the Tibetan. Don't worry, you can ignore it. And I'm just planting seeds for next time.

So you don't have to learn the Tibetan. Try to pick up a few words, it's okay. So PHAL GYI BDE means Sri Sena, Sri Sena.

And that single line, we taught in Kyoto for, I don't know, a week or something. So we went and found the story of King Sri Sena. And I'll give you a picture.

Who's doing the pictures? This is my brother. He's 72.

And he has a project in Montana that he works for and they cut firewood for poor people. So they have a gang of, what do you call it? Like guys who like to use big tools and mess with stuff.

So they cut wood once a week for poor people who just have stoves, wood stoves. And it's a perfect picture of what they did to Sri Sena. They cut his body in half, basically with a chainsaw.

And he offered, I think it's kind of significant that he offered 50% of his body. And the story is he offered the lower part of his body and he allowed, he begged people to cut his body so that he could give his legs to a person who didn't, the lower half of his body, 50-50. And we did that story in Kyoto.

And basically because of his desire to share his own body 50-50, his body was restored and he was physically happier and better than when he started. And we paused the Lam Rim. We did one line in a whole retreat and Tim was going crazy.

No, because he saw it would take a thousand years to finish the Lam Rim. And, but the story was so beautiful. So we translated the whole thing.

It's available somewhere. I don't know. You can read it if you want.

But it's a beautiful, beautiful story. And it just seemed to really fit Kyoto. Kyoto, by the way, we chose that city rather than Tokyo because Kyoto was laid out as a Tang Dynasty city in around 1,400 years ago when the Tang Dynasty was big in China.

And that's when Buddhism was spreading like wildfire in China, central China. So Kyoto, because of the Cultural Revolution, Kyoto is the last Tang Dynasty city in the world. It's more Chinese than China.

And a lot of Chinese people go there to see, there are seven, I think 70,000 temples in the country. There's a lot in the city. And it's a classical Buddhist city.

And it's very, very beautiful. So if you have a chance to come to the programs in Kyoto, the visas are extremely easy for almost all countries. And it's just a beautiful place.

The weather is really beautiful. The people are very gentle. We were there two weeks ago during Sakura, which is when the cherry blossoms open.

And all the 20-year-olds and 15-year-olds dress up in kimonos. And I don't know what's the guy's kimono called. Looks like Kung Fu outfit.

But it's so beautiful and so graceful. And to be in a city where honoring the cherry blossoms is as important as the Super Bowl is for Americans. So imagine a whole country that gets excited about the cherry blossoms at all ages of people in the same way that Americans get excited about the Super Bowl.

It's really beautiful, extremely beautiful to be there. And it's a great place to study. So ACI will be doing lots of programs there.

You're welcome to come, big ones and small ones. I think the small ones might be more sweet than the big ones. So anyway, we finished that line.

And now Tim, we're going on. So we're going to start Sukhna. He gives examples of other people who made similar sacrifices in order to advertise how fun it is to take care of other people's needs.

And that's the section we're on. We're on the third section. Once we get through that, we'll be ready to start exchanging ourselves and others.

Sukhna rinchen kyi ulg tsuktor kyi norbu ku shak le yinluw su che de shen la nawa This is about a bodhisattva who had a tsuktor, a natural, fleshy bump on their head. Good one. And they cut it off as an offering to someone else.

Okay. Tsuky norbu means the jewel that was naturally growing out of a bump on their head. Shen la nawa, made a gift of it.

The next one. RGYAL SRAS SNYING RTOGS CHEN POS BDAG MO THEG PA RANG GI BU LA SAR NYE BAR ZHIG GI LUS BYIN PA This is a very, very famous story. People ask me how ACI started.

So here's the story. I guess it was 19, probably 1991 or two or something like that. And I was in New York and some people from a Kagyu tradition, a different tradition than Tsongkhapa, they asked me, there was a group of about 20 of them and they asked me to teach them 15.

They wanted to learn Tibetan because they were going to do a three-year retreat and their Lama asked them to be able to do the prayers in Tibetan. So they asked me to teach them Tibetan. And so I thought, well, since it's another tradition, I should teach them a sutra because those are accepted by all traditions.

So I thought nobody will get upset if I teach a sutra. So I taught the Golden Light Sutra, a Suvarnabhava Sutra, which by the way is the National Book of Mongolia, just about. And there's a story there called BDAG MO LUS BYIN.

BDAG MO means female tigress. And LUS BYIN means to give your body. And the story is of a great bodhisattva who's called Nyingtob Chenpo in Tibetan.

And that's Mahasattva in Sanskrit. And he was a Mahasattva, a great being, but his personal name was also, hey, Mahasattva. And Great Courage.

His name was Great Courage. And he was a prince. He was out in the forest.

He came across a tigress that was starving. And she was sick and she couldn't eat. And then she had four babies, four cubs.

And they were trying to drink milk, but she didn't have any milk to give. And he saw that they would die. And the way it's stated in the Lam Rim is interesting.

He says, BU LA SAR NYE BA BU LA SAR NYE BA means because she was desperate, because she was about to eat her own cubs, she was coming close to a situation where to save one cub, she would have to eat another cub. So it's interesting. I've never seen it written that way, but she was close to eating one of her own cubs so she would have milk to feed the other cubs.

And Mahasattva, this prince, stopped and decided to give her his body. And so he laid down next to her and he took his shirt off and he said, eat me. And she couldn't.

She was too weak. And then there was a dead tree nearby. And he went and pulled a branch off and he cut open his chest with the tree branch.

He scratched his chest. He got his chest niced and bloody. And then he laid down next to her and let her lick the blood and then gave her his body.

And as he was dying, he said, but we're making a deal here. And if you eat my flesh now, when I become a Buddha, you have to be my first students. You five have to be my first students.

And then he died and she got strong and she fed her babies. And then later, they were the first five students of the Buddha. He became this Buddha, Gautama, in this world.

And in his first five students, the eldest or the senior of the five is called Kalvinya. And he taught them the four higher truths. He repeated it three times and they saw emptiness.

Because of that hard connection they had to him. And the tigress was Kalvinya. And this is the story.

That's the first teaching Lord Buddha ever gave. He didn't teach right away after he got enlightened. He waited some weeks because he thought no one would understand.

And as you guys teach more and more, which I hope you will, Hargudi, as you teach more and more, you will have this experience, right, Shinten? That nobody understands anyway. But you keep going.

So Lord Buddha, after he got enlightened, he waited. He wasn't sure it would help anybody. And he refused to teach for some weeks.

I think it was seven weeks. And then he said, well, what the heck? Maybe somebody will understand something.

And he went and started teaching. So that's the story of the tigress. I think that was before I started recording stuff.

I don't know. But anyway, those students, we went through the Golden Light Sutra. We went through that chapter about this story.

And I taught it to them. And then I was excited about the classes. And I said, look, I'm hungry to teach emptiness.

I'm hungry to teach higher subjects. But I grew up in a different tradition. I'm Tsongkapa tradition.

And I said, but I'd rather teach some serious classes. And ask your teacher if it's okay. And if not, I'm sorry, but I got to teach emptiness.

I can't teach tiger stories for the rest of my life. And so half of them had to quit. Their Lama said, no, I'd rather you didn't go learn another tradition.

But half of them, I kept them. So I lost half my students in one day. It was very traumatic.

So I had six or seven students. And that's how we started ACI. And we started in a kitchen, somebody's kitchen, and sitting around the table like that.

So that's the story, how we started ACI. So if you're interested someday, it's a beautiful teaching from the Golden Light Sutra, the whole story. But I'm not going to tell the story or Tim will kill me.

Okay, ,LTA DGOS KYI U YIN PA SOGS KYI RAB DGE BAR GSUNG NAS, So LTA DGOS is Chandraprabha. This is a famous person who gave away their head to somebody else. RAB means kirab, and it means these birth stories.

Okay, jataka, jataka stories. Former lives of the Buddha. Okay.

So DGE BAR GSUNG means, our Lama, in that 24-day teaching, which this book is a record of, he taught those stories in detail. How he did that in 24 days, I don't know. Maybe they didn't have coffee breaks.

Okay. Next paragraph. ,STON PA THUG BYED CHEN DE, DE'I DE DANG MDZAD LA, ,NGES TSER RANG BA ZHIG MA GTOGS SANGS RGYUD MED PA, ,DE'I DE DAG DKA' YANG SMOS RNAMS GZUN, ,BTAB STE BYONG DGOS, STON PA THUG BYED CHEN means our teacher, meaning Lord Buddha, who has great mahakaruna, great, great compassion.

Look, this is how he got to be Buddha. And by the way, Sri Sena, right? The king that we studied in Kyoto.

These are all former lives of Lord Buddha. ,DE DAG MDZAD LA, ,NGES TSER is an old word, Tim, for Ngatsa. Nowadays they'll say Ngatsa, which means us guys.

,RANG BA ZHIG MA GTOGS SANGS RGYUD MED PA, Say RANG. ,BA ZHIG MA GTOGS SANGS RGYUD MED PA, RANG means ourselves. ,BA ZHIG means only ourselves.

,MA GTOGS means nothing else. ,SANGS means we think about, we focused on what we want. ,NGES TSER RANG BA ZHIG MA GTOGS SANGS RGYUD MED PA, So for people who only are focused on what they want, these things would be DKA', difficult.

If your habit is to take care of yourself first, then things like giving your body away would be very difficult. ,YANG, but, ,MAN LAM GSON DAG, What's MAN LAM? Yeah, you can always, at our level, as you're doing your retreat this week, you can hear these stories about people...

By the way, I wouldn't call it a sacrifice. I would call it sharing the body they had. So I don't want you to think that King Sri Sena was giving up his body to another person.

That's not the point. And that's not why they cut him exactly in half at the waist. He didn't offer his legs to another person.

He recognized that other people had the right to 50% of his body. Equal right. And it extends to your money and your time and your body.

And that, it's just a sign that other people have equal right to your time and your money and your attention. It's very significant that he didn't give his arm or his leg or something like that. He gave exactly 50% of his body because he understood that his body, there was equal rights to his body.

I did my three-year retreat in the next valley over and there's nothing there. There has never been anybody living there. And the animals there are strange.

And the insects are very strange. And we had a butterfly, a moth, like this big fluorescent green, would fly around. And we're like, ah, ah, ah.

But there were silver mining there. And a tombstone is near there. That's where they had all the cowboys shooting each other because they had rights to this line.

This is your silver mine and this is my silver mine. And Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp and all these guys. And Wyatt Earp was digging near my retreat cabin.

And so the line was very important. That line is very important. Where does me stop?

Where does you start? And what they're saying is, even as you're meditating this week, there's no way you can actually cut your body in half happily and do that. But you can pray for the day.

You can pray for the day. And by the way, there's a thing called attention-grabbing bodhisattva attempts. I'll give you an example.

My teacher taught this story of Milarepa, who went off in his 50s to Diamond Mountain to meditate for the rest of his life and gave up his business. And so my teacher taught it. We had this young man in the class.

So he packed up all his stuff and he moved across the street. There was a small forest there. You know, like a few hundred yards of forest.

New Jersey, I mean. And in between the superhighways. And he went to live in this little patch of forest, because he heard Milarepa's story.

And my teacher said, let him go, he'll be back in about three days. It took two days. And he came back.

He said, that's hard. It's cold. And my teacher's like, yeah.

It's kind of easier to meditate in a house, isn't it? He said, yeah. And so don't do these grandstands.

They call it grandstanding, right? Don't do this, oh, Buddha cut his body in half. I'll cut off a few fingers.

I've tried it. It's not the way to go. I tried something like that.

It doesn't work out. Just slow and steady. The point is not to do something spectacular, so that people pay attention to you or something like that.

The point is to quietly share yourself with others. And the people who are the best at it, do it invisibly. You don't know they're doing it.

But my wife is a perfect example, right? Okay. So he says, just this week, just pray that you could reach a point where you really recognize that other people have an equal right to your time and to your attention.

And then slowly you'll start to accommodate their rights. And don't try to do it all in one day. It doesn't work.

Just do it slowly. And again, you have to expand your capacity and you have to use emptiness or you cannot serve all beings. If you understand emptiness, if you see emptiness directly, you can personally affect every living being in the universe directly, face to face, at the same time.

So don't try it before that. You just go nuts. Okay?

There will come a day when you can serve every living being directly at the same time. And that's what we're working towards. But you have to see emptiness directly to do that.

So these people say, oh, I don't want to study emptiness. I want to study compassion. That is compassion.

You can't be compassionate. By the way, now there's quail outside, if you're interested, who have this thing on the top of their head. And they always walk around in families with about 15 kids.

They're very beautiful. They got this thing on the top of their head. I don't know what that is.

How that leads to survival, I'm not quite sure. Okay, so here's a picture of a tiger with her babies. Just think about it sometimes.

This week, when you're doing your meditations, there will come a time, if you study emptiness well, that you can accommodate everybody equally at the same time, and you have no limitations. Instead of going crazy, to try to accommodate 10 people with your limited body, try to do it from the other direction. Get a million bodies, and then try to accommodate three people.

And it's a lot easier, and it's sustainable. Don't try to do it with a limited body. You cannot serve more than a few people.

But pray for more. So the idea is, during this week, think of the story of Sri Sena. If you don't have the story, I'm sure Tim can accommodate you to get the story.

I translated the whole story, and we handed it out for free.

[Говорящий 2]
It's free download from Diamond Cutter Press.

[Говорящий 1]
Oh, go to Diamond Cutter Press. Diamondcutterpress.com? Okay, learning platform.

Okay, ACI. And read it and just say, yeah, that sounds good. I would like to be able to do that.

Okay, that's enough right now. And try to be sensitive that other people have an equal right to happiness. And there's sort of a radical interpretation of that, is that they have an equal right to your time, as you do.

So think about it, just cook it for a while, and you'll get good at it. And it's wonderful. That makes you happy, because then you are doing what you know you're supposed to be doing in this world.

Why did you come to this world? We call it, we did a meditation in Kyoto for a classic soft power, this group, business group from China. And it was called Mushroom Meditation.

And it's a reference to the dark. Mushrooms grow in the dark. The dark means, where were you before you came to this world?

And where are you going afterwards? And the dark is a lot longer than the light. You have a certain number of years between the two darknesses, but there's a huge darkness in the past, and there's a huge darkness in the future.

And so you only have this time, short time, in the light to do something, to do something with your life. And you will run out of time. Time will run out.

It doesn't matter how much yoga you do, or how many green drinks you drink. I mean, the time is limited, and time will run out. So do something good with it.

Do something worthwhile with it. The attempt to serve your own immediate needs is hopeless. Your body will give out.

You can't satisfy those needs. You might as well share yourself now while you have a choice, because later you won't have a choice. So between the mushrooms, between the darkness before you came here, duh, where were you?

Or after you leave here, duh, where are you going? You might as well share yourself while you're here. You're not here that long.

You're not going to miss out that much stuff. You might as well make everybody happy. Why not?

It's logical, right? All right, now he has another argument for you. And we're going to start at GZHAN YANG.

GZHAN YANG, GZHAN BYAS PA GSUNGS RGYUD TE GZHAN BYAS PA GSUNGS RGYUD TE means look, it makes, RGYUD PA means it makes sense to take care of other people. GZHAN BYAS PA GSUNGS To have this kind of cherishing or sweet thinking about doing what other people would like rather than what you would like. He says, if you think about it, it's logical.

RGYUD means it's logical that you should do, you should take care of other people, not just yourself. It's just logical. And he says why?

DE means I'll tell you why. BER NA, BER NA means for example, BYE BU PHUN ZAD SOGS PA SKYE BA'I SHING SA LTA BU DANG When you, how do you say? SHING SA means the field where you grow crops.

Me and my wife drove to San Diego. We passed through all these fields. The fields used to be close to Phoenix.

Now you got to drive an hour to see a field. But BYE BU PHUN ZAD SOGS PA SKYE BA'I SHING People are like your field. If you want to grow, they're clearing some land over here.

Did you see? Unfortunately, I don't know what's going to happen, but they're going to try to grow some orchards and a dairy, I think. It's a foreign company, I think.

And they have cleared the land here, made it nice and flat and boring. And so you need this kind of a sweet, open, rather fertile soil to grow things. You need that.

We spend a lot of time every spring to prepare our garden. It's tiny. You can walk across it in 10 or 15 steps.

But it takes about two weeks to prepare it for the summer. It takes about two weeks to prepare the soil. So think of the soil like that.

Well-prepared soil. SOGS SKYE BA'I SHING LTA BU YI SHING KYI GNOR MO DANG BRAL BAR Then he says CHIN TU MANI, which is what? Yeah, a wish-giving jewel.

And this is, the full story is in Lojong. SIGS SKYE MA, the eight verses. There's a beautiful description of a wishing jewel.

And this is a jewel that you find in a stream, for example. Then there's a ritual. You have to wash it.

You have to put it in silk cloth. Then on a certain time of the moon, you have to tie it to a flagpole and you have to do special prayers. And then it becomes an Aladdin's lamp.

It'll give you anything you want. That's called CHIN TU MANI. Who's a CHIN TU MANI?

And who's the field? It's other people. Other people are your ticket to success.

Other people can give you everything you want. Other people are like a good field. Or other people are like a jewel that will give you anything you want.

There's an excellent Aladdin's lamp joke, which I will share with all the boys, that I learned in the locker room in high school, that I'm not going to teach the ladies. And if you ever tell Veronica I taught it to you... Anyway, I will cut your body half.

No, okay, say good stuff, Jack. Anyway, there's this idea that whatever you want in your life, you can have it. But you have to rub the lamp of other people.

You have to take care of other people. And then everything you want, you will get. And I can personally say, I'm not great at doing it, but I've tried to do some of it.

And it's made my life like a miracle. Every aspect of my life is a miracle. Everything, financially, friends, my work, everything is extraordinary.

So if you can just do a little bit of this equal rights idea. Focus this week on the idea that other people have equal rights to happiness. The result of that thinking is extraordinary.

It's really extraordinary. Like weird, it's strange. It's super strange.

And you will have a fun, happy life. I'm not so worried about happy, but I want to have fun. And I don't know, when people promise you happiness, it just seems kind of boring.

But fun, I'll go for fun. It's fun to have equal rights with other people. It's just really fun.

And your whole life will be sexy. GNAS SKABS KYI SRED DGOS KYANG SEMS CAN LA BRTAN NAS He says, LOS. Even in a not spiritual sense, you get everything you get in your life through others.

Through others' hard work. Other people are serving you all day. Whatever you get just sitting here is coming from other people.

So you kind of just paying them back for what they've already given you. So he says here, GNAS SKABS KYI SRED DGOS KYANG The clothes you have on right now, the green drink and not the delicious juice, you drank this morning. SEMS CAN LA BRTAN NAS SBYUNG Has come from other people.

SUGANG BRTAN NAS SBYUNG BRTAN NAS SBYUNG The base and the arising? The dependence and the arising? Yeah, dependent origination.

Sugeng's whole book, by the way, it's up to about 500 pages also. He says there's a dependent origination here. Why?

There are other people are giving you everything already. Forget compassion and forget trying not to be selfish. You owe everybody already.

Why? Because you had breakfast and because you're wearing underwear right now, okay? I hope.

Somebody had to plant the cotton or pump the oil for those polyester. Somebody did a lot of work to get you what you're wearing right now. Forget equal rights.

You already owe everybody. You have a debt by having eaten this morning or having had a drink of a green drink or wearing clothes. Okay, you owe somebody.

SOGS KYANG SEMS CAN LA BRTAN NAS SBYUNG ZHING SEMS CAN GYIS RANG CHAGS PA'I AA MA BYAS PA'I SRAS DRIN CHEN PA'I RGYAL BAR MA ZAD And by the way, you owe people like your mom. God, I don't know. When I, I guess it was, I had to be 70 to notice, but the decision to have a child, it's unbelievable.

I mean, now when I look at it, I realize you're talking 20 years, right? It's an investment and no, and I mean all your attention. I gave up trying to get work out of these people.

It's just a kid, you know? And it's like, no, seriously. And SEMS CAN RANG CHAGS PA'I Somebody in your life spent all their time and money.

They sacrificed the prime of their life. And a woman is giving up her body. Whatever your body was like before you had kids and after you had kids, you are offering your body to the children and your body becomes a milk factory on purpose.

And you're happy to do it. It's very, very, you're giving up your whole, you're giving up 20 years of your life and you're giving up your body. AA MA BYAS PA'I TSE DRIN BYAS PA'I KYA MA MA ZAD Not only did people, not only have people done this for you in your past lives, every person you ever meet has been your mom.

Every person you ever meet gave up their life for you to take care of you. And they, my wife was talking some nonsense yesterday. What was that?

What was that? Yeah. Oh, someone we know got pregnant again with their fourth or fifth child.

And my wife says, well, she just wants to be happy. And I'm like, what? And she said, having a baby is the happiest thing that can happen to you.

And my wife had two kids. And I'm like, what? And she's like, yeah.

She's just having another baby because it's the best thing you can do. And I'm like, wow. So here, AA MA, every person you meet has been your mom.

And GNAS SKABS NANGS, even AA MA MA BYAS PA, so that's a little tricky, okay? The Tibetan of the next, yeah, AA MA means mother. I was trying to get into a Tibetan language class.

I had had three weeks of Tibetan. I was trying to get into a year class on the Bodhisattva's Way of Life. I was trying to get accepted into the class.

There was a board of three lamas that were supposed to decide whether I was qualified to join the class, if my Tibetan was good enough to join the class for a year. And it was in the Himalayas. And I'm like, well, I can't pass.

I only know like five words of Tibetan. And my teacher said, he was on the board. He said, you just come.

Come to the exam. And I'm like, okay. It's an oral exam.

And I sat down in front of this board of, he's a very high lama. He's in the Vajrayogini lineage in Los Angeles lineage. And I sat down and these three lamas are like, and I'm like, oh man, this is going to be bad.

And he says, I'll take this one. And they're like, okay. And he says, okay, I'm going to ask you Tibetan words and tell me if you know them.

And I said, okay. And I'm like, this is hopeless. And he says this word, ama.

Ama. And I'm like, mom. He says, you're right.

And then he says, apa. And I'm like, dad. He says, you passed.

So this word is important to me. Ama means mom. Okay, ama.

But here's two ma's, why? Yeah, not your mom. Chepa means they were not your mom.

He says, look, you have an obligation to treat other people's happiness equal to your own. They have been your mother countless times. You owe them.

And then he says, even ama ma, even when they weren't your mom, you still owe them, God dang it. It's like, okay. Khab nang, dey dak gi jinko ni rang chak tso.

They have been, tso is a beautiful word. The Sanskrit is rakshita. And it means to take care of someone's needs like a child.

Like dress them, feed them, clean up their poopoo. Pay for them, right? Cat's probably still doing that.

The cost of having a kid keeps going up every week, I think. But he says, look, everyone's been your mom countless times. But even nowadays, when there's eight billion people sitting around, only one has been your mom, but the rest are taking care of you all the time anyway because you're wearing clothes right now.

And you ate this morning and they're still taking care of you. Forget this past life mother thing. We don't even need to think about that.

You owe everything that you have on right now. And you owe the continued existence of the bag under your ribs, your stomach, to other people. Just normal people.

Forget the past life mom thing. And it's very beautiful here. Then he says, DPER NA TZAM PA KHUG MA GANG YANG DPANG POR SEMS CAN RGA ZHIG GIS SMOD DRIN RGA ZHIG GIS CHUD DANG RGA ZHIG GIS CHUG BYAG DGOR BA ZHAG BSKA BA SPAGS MED CHE DPER NA means, for example, what's TZAM PA?

Tibetan oatmeal. It's great, by the way. It's very nutritious.

You can buy it nowadays on Amazon. The best one is Yarlung. Yarlung, okay.

I don't own any of the company. I just tried them all. And TZAM PA, KHUG MA means a little bag of TZAM PA.

So Tibetan monks, on their belt, they wear a little bag of pre, what do you call it? Pre-roasted barley flour. And it takes about two spoons to have breakfast.

So when we're studying in the Geshe course, we're so busy, there's so much pressure that you don't have time to eat breakfast. So you carry breakfast in a little bag on your belt. And when you get time, if you get like three minutes, you mix it with water and you eat it with your hand.

You just go like this and you're like, oh my. And it tastes delicious if you wash your hands before. That's why you use the, anyway.

So he says, cook just a little bag of barley cereal. And by the way, if you have a busy life, it's really helpful. I use it all the time.

Me and my wife learn to cook it. Kayan, it's good in a blender first, by the way. That's a Tsampa trick.

SEMS CAN DGA' ZHIG GIS SMOD DANG Look, whatever you had for breakfast this morning, number one, SMOD DANG means someone planted the field. And when you drive through these rural areas of Arizona around here, you see what it's like to work on a farm. And it's hard.

It's really brutal. It's brutal work. I worked for the farm workers for a couple of years in my college days and it's brutal work.

It's extremely difficult. And it wears you out in a few years. Somebody made your food.

Someone grew it. And you can have machines and all that, but it's brutal work anyway. It's really, it's brutally difficult work.

SMOD DANG DGA' ZHIG GIS SMOD DANG Then somebody went out and watered all these crops and that's brutal work. DGA' ZHIG GIS CHUG CHAGS KOR BA CHUG CHAGS KOR BA is a funny word. In India, in the rural, in the village roads, you see people rush out in front of your car and throw wheat stalks on the road.

And then you drive over them and it separates the wheat from the chaff. And then they get some fans and they blow the chaff away and they collect, they try to sweep up the wheat before the next car comes. And it's very dangerous.

And so, CHUG CHAGS, CHUG CHAGS means in the old days, you used to lead a cow in a circle over the grain and then it would crush the grain and separate the chaff from the wheat. So somebody did that. Somebody prepared the grain for you to eat.

So DGA' BA BAG MED BAG MED in Sanskrit for $25. Say BAG MED, say BAG MED, say BAG MED. Are you, are you, are you Amitayu?

Okay, Amita means, BAG MED means immeasurable. Like Amitabha, measureless life. Amita means not measurable.

So why does it come here? Yeah, the work that people have put into your food and the clothes you have on your back. If you've ever been in a sweatshop in Hong Kong or something, unbelievable, just unbelievable, Bangladesh.

Somebody's there in Bangladesh sewing your clothes. They didn't pop out of a machine. Somebody had to do it.

And it's brutal work. And people live and die in those factories. And you're wearing it.

And somebody squeezed them for a dollar so you could save a dollar on Amazon. So the clothes on your back are the result of great suffering. Forget this past life mom thing.

If you're wearing clothes right now, I think everybody is as far as I can see. I can't see all the online guys. Me and Seiji, we're going to design a suit based on Maitri, his son's onesies that you could use for Zoom calls.

And it's got a tie and a coat and then you just wear your underwear. And the problem is sometimes you have to stand up. But we're working on it.

Somebody has sewn all your clothes and it's hard, brutal work. You already owe people. They already have a stake in your body because your body is alive because you wear clothes and you eat.

And in a sense, they already deserve part of your body because they made it and they keep it warm. So, why are you hassling them? They already have an investment in your body.

So I put a picture of a... Well, let's do one more paragraph. Is it Sugeng is doing the Tibetan?

Oh, three people. MI NYID KYI BAR LA RTZA CHAGS If two people try to... Anyway, okay.

Pick up a vase, it will get broken. All right. BDE NAS DE YANG SEMS CAN GYI DRIN DE The place where you're sitting right now, whatever house or apartment or temple you're sitting in, SEMS CAN GYI DRIN That's the DRIN in?

KHAR DRIN KHAR DRIN is the long form. DRIN is the short form. And it means the kindness of other people.

KHAR DRIN means the kindness of other people. By the way, the book KHAR DRIN, which is the prequel to How Yoga Works, was just published in Ukrainian. And I'd like to thank Rosa.

Yay! So now it's in Russian and Ukrainian. Our publisher in Russia has published it and our Ukrainian publishers have published it.

And the book is for sale in Ukrainian for $1.99. If you speak Ukrainian, you can get a copy. And if you're nice to Rosa, she'll give you one anyway. BDE NAS DE YANG SEMS CAN GYI DRIN DE MI DANG BRDUN DROB MANG PO'I SAK YANG Somebody says, the place you're sitting in, MI DANG BRDUN DROB MANG PO'I Many humans and many animals in Tibet, a hundred years ago.

SAK YANG, somebody did the excavation of the dirt to build the house. TSIG PA TSIG, somebody built the walls. SHING SOS, somebody fashioned the wood.

Somebody made the boards from trees. CHU SKYE BA, somebody was running back and forth with water to make the cement like that. SOGS LAS CHUNG, not just the clothes you're wearing, not just the breakfast you ate this morning, but if you are sitting in a place that you got to on the road, then you owe somebody.

You already owe them something. And that's the house you're living in. This temple was built by hand by the first generation here.

I remember Allegra. She was, how old was she at the time? 75, 80?

She was carrying bricks and we laid the bricks here. Everybody pitched in. So you're sitting, you owe the first generation.

If you're in one of these cabins, those were built and paid for by the three-year retreatants. Each one paid for their own house and each one built it, but with their own hands. Mostly.

If you ever meet them, you should thank them. Cat, Gyal Tse. Who else have you got here?

Like that? Oh, Jigme half a house. And they donated them.

They gave up all their money. They built the house with their own hands and they donated it. So if you meet them, you should thank them.

You already owe other people if you live in a house. Somebody built it for you. And that's unbelievably brutal work.

I did it for my dad. It's hard work. Somebody did it for my cafe, right Daniel?

It's extremely difficult work and dangerous work. Sooner or later you end up getting hurt. It's hard.

Then he says, SEMS SDI YANG THAMS BOR LUG MANG PO ZHIG GIS PHAL BSTOD DE BYAS RGA ZHIG GIS THAG RGA ZHIG GIS TSEMS THA LTA RGYUN CHOG TU RGYUR What's a SEMS for a Buddhist monk? Or nun? That's that shawl.

I think it used to be a sleeping bag. So it was a warm, long piece of cloth that you could wrap yourself in and sleep under a tree. And that was the ancient tradition.

And now it became sort of a ceremonial pain in the butt to carry around. In the monastery, there's a guy who walks around just to make sure you got your SEMS on and gives you a beating if you don't. And they're hot.

Anyway, so every monk and every nun has this shawl. If you're smart, you have a super thin one in the hot weather. SEMS SDI YANG THAMS BOR LUG MANG PO ZHIG GIS PHAL BSTOD In Tibet, it was cheaper to make them from wool than cotton because they couldn't grow cotton that well.

But they had lots of sheep. So he says LUG MANG PO means many sheep. PHAL means wool.

Somebody had to pluck, STON means pluck the wool from the sheep. ZHES RGA ZHIG GIS THAG Somebody had to weave it into cloth. RGA ZHIG GIS TSEMS Somebody had to sew it into a shawl for you.

THA LTAR KHYUN CHOG KHYUN means to wear. And CHOG means ready to wear. This is not MCHOG.

MCHOG means highest. This CHOG means ready to, allowable or ready to wear. He's just talking about your shirt that you have on right now.

That's already, you owe other people for the simplest piece of clothing you have on right now. I said underwear. The simplest piece of clothing that every person in this room has right now.

It's already required a lot of work to create it, to distribute it, to put it in the store for you, to keep washing it for you. All these things. We're going to do a little meditation here.

I'd like you to practice it today. We have one already. We already did an equal rights meditation which was to go review some of the interactions you've had in the last week or so with other people.

What did they want? What did you want? Could you have done it better?

You didn't necessarily have a fight or a disagreement, but could you have done it better? Could you have respected their right? Equal right.

Then the question comes up, do they have an equal right to you? To your time? We can all agree they have an equal right to their time or not.

Veronica, you can spend your time the way you want. I'm going to spend my time the way I want. Is that okay?

That's one question. But now it's getting more complicated. Do they have a right already to your time since you're dressed this morning and since you ate this morning and since you're sitting in a house this morning?

Maybe they already have more right to you than you think. That's one meditation you're going to work on. Could you approach meetings with other people with this idea that maybe they have some right to your time?

Maybe they have equal right to your time? Buddha thought so, right? Now we're going to do another meditation.

This is one that we do in DCI and we call it Khoslant meditation. It's just you take a simple thing in your room today. I don't know.

If you have a piece of toast or you have a green drink or you eat a fruit. Fruits are a lot of work to make. Take something this afternoon that you ate.

Let's say something you ate and then trace it back. Trace it back. Who brought it to your cabin?

Who bought it at the store? Who put it in the store? Who delivered it to the store?

Who built the highway that it was delivered on? Who built the truck that carried it across the highway? Who planted the tree?

Who watered the tree? Look at people how they work in Bui on the pecan trees. It's brutal hard work.

A single piece of food, that's going to be your meditation today. We're going to take a single piece of food and track it back. Track it backwards.

Then we're going to go deeper. There is a meditation called CHOS RGYUN GYING STIG YIN ZIN It's very beautiful. You do this backtracking meditation.

First, we're going to do a backtracking meditation with a physical object, like a piece of food that you eat today. When you do your meditations this afternoon, you're going to do a backtracking meditation on a piece of food, or on a piece of clothing. A lot of it is just imaginary.

Somebody somewhere brought it to the store. Somebody brought it to my cabin. Somebody planted it.

Then I want you to take the fruit back because the person who planted it was using seeds from an orchard that someone planted before that. Someone took those seeds from an orchard that may be gone many years ago. The fruits that you eat are a result of 50,000 years of teamwork.

The stupid banana or apple that you eat at Diamond Mountain, in this generation, it's a lot of work to get it for you. But someone planted the orchard that made the orchard. 50,000 years of people worked to get you an apple.

Some poor caveman figured it out. Since his time or her time, people have been caring for the seeds and caring for the fields to bring the food to you. It's not the last year.

It's the last 50,000 years people have been working for you. I just have one or one and a half employees at my cafe and the paperwork, workman's compensation, I mean it's hundreds of pages of paperwork. You got 50,000 years of paperwork.

You got people working for you for 50,000 years. Take it back. Let's do that right now.

How much time I got, Tim? 10?

[Говорящий 2]
You have 10 minutes, but we're going to pause for 30 seconds because we're going to stop the recording and kind of get started again.

[Говорящий 1]
Here we go. We're going to do a backtracking gratitude meditation and then we're going to go deeper. This meditation has two meditations.

Ready? Here we go. Let's start with 20 breaths.

Once a day I'd like you to do the seven limb puja. If you're not sure, ask Kat. So please take one piece of food or here at Diamond Mountain we've all, in the morning we all get a green drink or fresh juice and pick something.

If you're not sure, a juice or some piece of bread or rice or whatever. Who brought it to your home or to the temple here? Thank them.

Try to imagine what they look like. Then imagine where they brought it from, maybe a store. Try to imagine there's people working to put the food out on the shelves for you.

They are working all day. Hard work.

[Говорящий 2]
Somebody took your money.

[Говорящий 1]
Somebody made the money. Somebody made the paper money. Somebody made the credit card.

Somebody did the work for the programming, for the payment online. Hundreds of people maintaining that. Somebody brought the vegetables or fruit from the farm to the store.

I used to do that work in a truck in college and it's very difficult work. Somebody harvested that, those vegetables or fruit. Somebody picked them for you, packaged them.

Extremely difficult work. Somebody watered the field. Somebody fertilized it.

Somebody plowed it. Somebody cleared it. We owe them already our time and our body.

They have a right to some of our time. They have some right to what we do with our body. The thought to thank them, the thought that they have a right to some of my time, also has its history.

This is a second meditation that I'd like you to do today. This idea to think about the idea that other people might have an equal right to some of my time. How did that idea start?

What's the lineage for that idea? Oh, well, I heard it from the Lam Rim. Then I'd like you to trace mentally, not physically, the train of thoughts that led you to this point in time mentally.

Your mind is considering today the possibility that other people already have a right to your time. That we already owe them some of our time. If we respect the idea of people's rights, that everybody has certain rights in this world, then those people already have a right to some of your time because they are feeding you.

They are giving you their time. They are making your clothes. They are making your house.

Where did this idea come from in the first place? Who said they have an equal right? Why am I hearing this right now?

Oh, well, I heard about this Lam Rim. Okay, and then you had a thought, right? Yeah, I was thinking, I'd like to hear that course.

I'd like to hear more about that. What were you thinking before that? I was curious.

I was looking around. I feel like there's improvements I could make in my life. I heard about this Buddhism stuff and Lam Rim stuff.

Where did that thought come from? Well, I guess when I was in college I heard about Buddhism. I wasn't learning it, but I heard about it.

I was thinking about it. What happened before that? Well, I was thinking to go to college.

I was thinking to go there. Then what happened? Well, that come from my family when I was thinking about what my mom and dad used to say about going to college.

Then that was sort of an extension of my grade school times. I remember thinking about history and about the rest of the world in my grade school times. I can remember those thoughts.

I can remember the thoughts of going to the first classes in my school. I can remember especially things that went wrong in school. I remember how I felt.

I remember being curious about the books and about people, what they had to teach. I remember the first days before I was old enough to go to school. I remember what it was like to be with my mom or my dad, my family.

I remember things we talked about and thoughts I had tracing back my mental process. I remember a day in my crib touching a blanket and feeling how soft it was and being attracted to the softness. I remember thinking about the softness.

What I'd like you to do is two different meditations today. One is physically pick something you ate, something you wore, something you drank, a house that you stayed in and trace it back to the people who made the materials, who planted the... to the people who passed on the knowledge of building houses for 50,000 years and thank them.

Go back and find new excuses to thank more people. Thanking is a very healthy happiness-creating exercise. Then I want you to notice in a second meditation today, and by the way, that should be your fresh time.

Those of you who've done retreat, you know there's a prime time a day and you know there's a dull time a day. Prime time, for me it's mid-morning. Trace it back, trace back your thoughts and see how far back you can go.

If you work hard, you can trace back to the few years after you were born. You can trace back to when you were an infant, a baby. It's possible to trace your mind stream back and then eventually you can break through the current life and go back into the darkness of the mushroom places before this birth.

It's possible to trace your thoughts go in a flow. You never stop being aware. For all time you will be aware.

You have a recording in your mind of past lives. You just haven't tried to access it. While you're working on tracing back your house or your food or your clothing and being grateful, then as a deeper meditation, when you're feeling fresh, trace back your thoughts and see if you can trace your thoughts back.

That's a very, very deep meditation and it has big, big impact on being able to see emptiness. The exercise of tracing your thoughts back and you'll get better and better at it. The first day it's kind of clumsy.

It's like trying to ride a bicycle. Then after a week you should be much better at it. That has a lot of power in being able to see emptiness directly.

We're going to do two different kinds of backtracking meditations. One is a gratitude backtrack based on a piece of fruit or a house or a car. Then the other one is a parallel meditation where you backtrack your thoughts and try to see what thought came before the last one.

You can't trace back every single thought but you can trace back with gaps. You can say, oh, I had this thought 10 years ago and I had this thought 12 years ago. Then if you practice you can work back before this life.

It's a lot of fun because you remember all the Dharma thoughts you had. Okay, open your eyes. Take a stretch.

Take a drink. Timothy, any announcements? Yeah.

See you tomorrow, 6 a.m. World Central Time which is Bowie, Arizona. It's fun to be with you guys and thank you for coming online. I can see your smiling, beautiful faces.

Thank you. Especially thank you Francisco and all the staff. Thank you for working so hard, especially translators.

We'll see you tomorrow at 6 a.m. Bye.