«Дар освобождения», курс 40 «Магия пустотных медитаций и тонглен», занятие 5

[Говорящий 1]
There you go. Okay, that's where we are. Okay, SNGA PA means fifth point, fifth of the five points, which is we finally reached?

STONG LEN, okay, STONG LEN. All right, and SNGA PA DE LA BRTEN NAS The beginning there is very important because BRTEN means depending on or based on what? He says based on that.

Based on the four steps that came before that, okay? So based on the four steps that we've been through, which is what? Just for someone who's just tuning in.

What was the first step?

[Говорящий 2]
Equal rights.

[Говорящий 1]
Equal rights. Second one?

[Говорящий 2]
The disadvantage.

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah, it sucks to take care of yourself all the time. Third? It's fun to take care of other people.

Four? Yeah, put yourself in other's shoes, okay? And look back at yourself, right?

All right, good. And now we're ready to do STONG LEN. STONG LEN BSGOM GSOL means how do you meditate on STONG LEN?

And the Tibetan word BSGOM, there, B-S-G-O-M. What's the background meaning of that?

[Говорящий 2]
To get used to something.

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah, to get used to something. Okay, so the Tibetan word for meditation is to get used to something. So this week you should be doing those exchange of yourself and others on three levels every day.

Or it's not BSGOM, get it? You don't get used to it and it doesn't become part of your behavior. You have, the whole point of being in retreat is to do something over and over again artificially so that when you get out of retreat, it's natural.

When you change an attitude from artificial to natural, that's BSGOM. That's meditation. That's the meaning of meditation.

The Sanskrit word is even more sexy. BHAVANA BHAVANA So B-H-A-V means to be. The word be comes from B-H-A-V.

So BHAV means to be. The ancient Indo-European is B-H-E-U, to become. And then ANA means maker.

So BHAVANA means makes you turn into that. The word for meditation in Sanskrit means a practice which makes you turn into something new. It's very beautiful.

The Sanskrit word for meditation, bhavana, means makes you turn into something new. It's very cool. The Tibetan?

You develop a habit. The Sanskrit, you become a new person. It's very beautiful.

All right, gomso, nying je migpa tsel duk tu ne. Nying je means karuna, means compassion. What's the pieces of the Tibetan word?

Nying is heart. Je is like Je Rinpoche. King, king of hearts.

It's a beautiful word. The Sanskrit karuna comes into Russian. Russian is very heavily based on Sanskrit.

So krish, krish, aftamabil krish, dom krisha, the roof. Karuna means to cover somebody, or to protect somebody, and that's compassion. It's a beautiful word, karuna.

Nying je migpa tsel du ten means focus on compassion. When you're feeling compassion, it means you want to lend of tong len. What's the lend of tong len?

Yeah, that means take, okay? Take, so you want to take. The feeling in your heart when you're doing the lenpa part, when you're doing the taking part, it should be compassion.

I can't bear to see you in pain. I would like to take it away from you. By the way, it is never sacrificial.

It is never... So get that out of your head. It's not me or you.

It's not somebody has to suffer. It's better if I suffer. That's one of the most irritating, unfriendly practices.

When someone tells you, someone had to eat the bad doughnut and I took it, so you didn't have to. And you're like, Jesus, why don't we just split the good one? So it's not this kind of practice where you get to make other people feel guilty that you took the bad thing.

You're supposed to work it out like a good negotiation where both parties come out ahead. There's not this kind of, I will sacrifice what I want and give you what you want. That kind of thinking is primitive.

That's not helpful. Okay, so, DGON PA LEN PA And then what will be the aspect of the, or the feeling in your mind when you do the DGON PA? Yeah, it's love.

It's love. In Tibetan, it's BYAMS PA. In Sanskrit, Maitri.

Maitri comes from all these words, MI'KH, which means to mix things. MI SHAD in Russian. To mix with people.

Maitri, BYAMS PA'I MIG PA RTZEL DU BRTAN NAS RTZEL DU BRTAN means, it's a difficult word. RTZEL DU BRTAN means the flavor of the practice should be love. Or the flavor of the practice should be compassion.

When you're doing BRTONG, when you're taking, it's compassion. When you're giving, it's love. RTZEL DU BRTAN NAS STONG BA BYAMS BYAMS, what's, this BYAMS is the BYONG in LO BYONG.

Practice, practice. Get good at it. BYAMS means practice.

And then he says in Tsawa, STONG LEN GNYIS PO BAL MAR BYAMS Say STONG LEN STONG LEN GNYIS PO GNYIS PO BAL MAR BAL MAR BYAMS Okay, good. Tsawa means the root text. And he keeps quoting books and not telling you what he's quoting.

So luckily you have Grandpa Mike using Grandpa John's database. And I can find stuff in a few seconds. You can search three million pages in less than three seconds because of the way we designed it in 1987.

Okay, STONG LEN GNYIS PO BAL MAR BYAMS STONG LEN, you know, GNYIS PO means those two, giving and taking, those two. What's BAL MAR, we lost a beautiful nun here, the most wonderful person, BAL MAR, but that's a different spelling. That spelling is D-P-A-L, which means Sri, which means shining because of burning.

And my Lama named her for a specific reason, BAL MAR. But there's a different BAL MAR, S-P-E-L, which means to alternate. And those of you who have done the lion's stance meditation, we practiced BAL MAR.

We practice jumping between levels. Okay, that's kind of an advanced meditation practice where you jump between different levels of subtlety of the mind, okay, purposely. You come out two levels, go deep three levels, come back four, that's called BAL MAR BYAMS. Okay, what's it mean in STONG LEN?

Yeah, give, take, take, give. Give, give, give, give, take, take, take, give, take. It's like get used to switching, okay, get used to switching.

And that's called fluency in meditation. And that's a certain SHIN BYANG, right? SHIN BYANG.

So SHIN BYANG means like fluency in a foreign language where you speak it with perfect accent. SHIN BYANG means there's a skill in meditation where you don't just like a dumb ox go as deep as you can. There's where you can play between different levels of focus.

You can be creative at one moment, then switch to single-pointed, then switch to a feeling for all living beings, then switch between them quickly. And that's real mastery of your mind, okay? That's real meditation.

It's not the ability only to go deep. It's the ability to go where you want to go, when you want to go. And that ability leaks out into your everyday life.

Like if you're a programmer or something, you can quickly shift focus and go deeper when you have a problem. When you hit a problem, you can pause and go much deeper. And then extracting the mind from the problem and quitting the problem and moving on is also a meditation skill.

So basically what he's saying here is, BAL MAR BYANG means get good at it. Your mind should be, what do you call it? At your beck and call.

Your mind does what you want it to. I like to think of your mind as a puppy that you bought at the pet store. Or even better, you pick them up at the rescue, animal rescue.

And they're kind of untrained and they pee in the house and stuff like that. And then you train the dog. And your mind, before you learn to meditate, is very similar to a bad dog from the animal rescue.

And then the whole purpose of meditation is to train your mind and become like a good dog and to obey what you want and to listen to what you say. So your mind, when you start, is like a bad dog. And then the purpose of meditation is to make it more...

Why? Well, then you can be more creative in your work situation problem. And you can think of what other people need better.

And then the company itself starts to be more successful. If you get a cadre, a cadre means a small secret group inside the company. If you have a cadre of people doing tonglen, that company is probably going to be successful.

And they don't have to be Buddhist. Thelma, in fact, was a devout Christian. I went to many Christian classes with her when she started out.

And it's not the point to make everybody Buddhist. But the point is to get... If you can, in your company or in your non-profit organization, if they're all infected with this virus called tonglen, then the organization becomes wildly successful.

It's kind of beautiful. And if they don't have to... We're going to get a part here where he says...

He says, he keeps using the word anonymous. Let your tonglen be anonymous. Don't advertise it.

Don't go around saying, oh, I'm trying to think of what you want. It's hard. You're supposed to do it.

It is a tantric practice, sangwa. It's a secret practice. It's supposed to be done quietly.

The only way you can tell a person doing tonglen is that they smile a lot. They don't talk too much about it. Okay, shesungpa.

,DE NYID SNGA MA'I SANGS PA DE NYID BSGOMS PA'O THU BYED PA'O We are taking the steps we had before and we are magnifying them. He says step five, which is exchanging self and others, is an advanced version of the first four. It's the natural growth of the first four.

Then he, Pabongka Rinpoche, in his lecture, he's speaking to a lot of people who spent a lot of time. They didn't have cell phones, so they had to actually depend on their own mind. And they memorized all these books.

He just mentions a line and everybody knows what book he's talking about. We have to look it up. So I looked it up for you.

And here's the verses he's quoting. And I'll go straight there. He's quoting the LO SBYONG DON DON MA, which is the seven point LO SBYONG.

LO SBYONG means developing bodhichitta. This LO in LO SBYONG means bodhichitta. SBYONG means practice it, get good at it.

So LO SBYONG means, it doesn't mean mental training is an exceptionally poor translation. It's learning to think like a bodhisattva. It's called LO SBYONG.

That's all. Bodhisattva thinking? I don't know.

Like that. And the DON DON MA is a famous seven point LO SBYONG. The tradition says that it existed for many generations and it was practiced secretly.

And no one wrote it down. And then finally in the 12th century, it was written down probably around 1150 by a Geshe, a Kadampa Geshe named Chikawa. And he wrote it down.

And so here's the verse that Pabongka Rinpoche is mentioning. And I'll just read it to you. ,'DI LA YANG NYAMS CAD NYID LAS, ,NYAMS SHAGS DU NYAMS SU BLANG BA NI, ,STONG LA NYID PO'I BRAL MA BYUNG, This is the famous LO SBYONG text.

And it says, ,NYAMS CAD NYID LAS, If you're practicing equal rights, and what's the second step? Exchange. Equal rights.

And then put yourself in the other person's shoes. When he says you're practicing those two. And then you want to do a meditation practice.

NYAMS SHAGS. So NYAMS SHAGS. Go down a little more.

More, more, more. There you go. The big letters.

Okay. I always try to make the font size bigger for the one he's quoting. Okay.

So the second line here, ,NYAMS SHAGS DU NYAMS SU BLANG BA NI means, here's a good practice you can do in samapatti. For three dollars. Samapatti.

Balanced meditation. Right? Did you say balanced?

Okay. Between what and what? Between dullness and agitation.

[Говорящий 2]
Dullness and agitation.

[Говорящий 1]
Okay, I'll give you four bucks. All right. By the way, it's always like this.

You watch a guy crossing the Grand Canyon on a rope. You know, the big pole. He's not like just walking like that.

He's going, you know. Or you watch a person's hands when they drive. They're always moving.

In fact, you can tell if a driver is new because they don't move their hands and they tend to go off the road. So, you know, a person who can talk to you and drive like this, you know, then even if it's into a wall, they can, that's an inside Diamond Mountain joke. Okay.

So, like this, okay. So when they say samapatti, it's always like, it's like this. You're always, what do you call that?

Correcting as you go. NYAMS SHAGS DU NYAMS SU LA BA NI Then he says STONG LA NYID PO'I STONG MA BYANG Try to alternate between STONG BA and LEN PA. Sometimes give, sometimes take.

And get good at switching between the two. Get good at the switches. And then that's mastery of your mind.

That's SHIN BYANG. All right. Next picture, you guys.

They seem to have a challenge to get pictures out of these guys. It's a gift. 43.9. Yeah. That's Daniel giving. Okay. They're going to talk about STONG BA before LEN PA.

What's that mean? Giving before taking. You have an option.

You can take first, give later, or you can give first and take later. And it's a huge topic in the Lam Rim. There's a huge conversation for a thousand years.

And it's beautiful. It's nice to spend the day in those conversations. Personally, I like to spend a lot of the day listening to these conversations.

It's very inspiring. Way to spend your day. Unless people interrupt.

Here we go. The next paragraph. STONG BA DANG LEN PA GNYIS LAS SNGA MA SNGON DU BYAS PAR PHYI YID MANG PO LAS BYUNG YANG BLAG LEN LA PHYI MA SNGON DU BYA ZHING STONG BA MI BYAS PAR LEN PA PHYI'I DU BYAS PAR RUNG STONG BA DANG LEN PA He says, look, there's giving and there's taking.

There's giving and there's taking. A lot of PHYI'IGS, a lot of sources say that you should start with the giving. A lot of sources say that.

BYUNG YANG BLAG LEN LA But in actual practice, I think it's better if you start with the taking. Who's he? Who's I?

Pabongka Rinpoche. He says, I know there's an opinion that maybe you should do the giving first and then do the taking. I prefer doing the taking first and then doing the giving.

Which means which emotion before which emotion?

[Говорящий 2]
Compassion before love.

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah, compassion before love. STONG BA MI BYAS PAR LEN PA PHYI'I DU BYAS PAR RUNG Then he says, I would go so far to say that if you are meditating on any particular day and you never get to the STONG BA, it's okay. He says, I would even go so far to say that if you only do the taking people's problems and you never get to giving them happiness, it's okay with me.

Pabongka Rinpoche. By the way, he's from the greatest monastery in the universe, which is Seramay. There's 12 or 13 colleges at Seramay.

He's from the greatest college at the monastery, which is called Gyalrong, which is your college because you're my student and I'm Gyalrong. So you belong to the very house of the writer of this Lam Rim. So stick up with your house and never think about the other houses.

All right, DANG PO'I SDUG BSNGAL MA LAG NA DE BA STANG YONG MI PHAN PA'I He says, look, and there's a famous example of a kid who falls off their bicycle. You don't give them candy first and then put a band-aid on their knee. First you fix the problem and then you give them candy.

Because when you give a candy to a kid whose knee is bleeding, it doesn't taste that good to the kid. So generally it's a Lam Rim principle that you have to take care of other people's hurt before you give them happiness. It's logical, right?

They can't enjoy the happiness if they're still hurting. Better to take away the hurt first and then give them happiness. I think a lot of men tend to give their wives, try to give them happiness without trying to understand them or take away their pain first.

They're just like, oh, look, I got you a mink coat. And she's like, yeah, well, I was hoping you'd just come home once in a while. And something like that.

Okay, anyway, then he gets into razors. Okay, you guys, you got a picture here for me? Yeah, and he's going to make a razor.

He wants you, when you do the taking, he wants you to do a heart operation. He wants you to go into the other person's chest and go find the blackness. And in Pabongka Rinpoche's version, you cut it with a razor.

Okay, you imagine a straight razor and you cut the blackness out and you take it. So it has to be a surgical strike. You don't want to take out the heart.

You're just taking out the blackness. So it's a very precision thing. Go in and slice off the blackness.

And imagine that you are slicing it off. Okay, and if you're a man, a male, that's me getting a haircut like a couple of days ago. And this is my favorite barber.

His name is Mr. Robbie. And he gives haircuts out on the street in San Diego. And so it's outside.

He was a gang member in L.A. or something. And he learned to cut hair and he's really good at it. Even someone who doesn't have hair will look like they have hair.

And me and Veronica love to go there and we love to hang out with him. And he plays really good R&B mixes loud on the sidewalk. And you're in the sunlight and it's really fun.

But anyway, and I have, by the way, he's the best Ms. MBA. She goes, he's the best entrepreneur I ever met. I can say that.

He was living in his car and now he owns like three beauty salons, four Mustangs, has a beautiful family. So anyway, he's actually one of the most successful entrepreneurs I know. And so anyway, one day my wife said, give Michael a shave with one of those straight razors.

And I'm like, no, that's okay. And he's like lathers it up and then he goes. And when they get near the jugular, which is here, I get really nervous.

I don't know. Mr. Ravi says every man should have a straight razor shave once in his life. And I've done it once.

And did you ever do it, Ravi? No. It just feels too dangerous to me.

So I sat through the whole thing. It takes about 45 minutes or something. And anyway, when I think of this tonglen and I think of the lemba, the taking, I always think of Mr. Ravi. And so it's a surgical thing. You go to your heart. You go to the other person's heart.

You go inside their body. You go to their heart and you take the razor of your meditation and you slice off the darkness. Okay, got it?

That's the Lam Rim way. All right, DE'I SDUG BSNGAL THAMS CAD BUD GYI LTA SHAR BA BUD GYI means a razor blade, a straight razor. And by the way, they use them every day in the monastery because that's how you shave someone's head.

And it's a favorite thing for monks to go out and sit in the sun and your best friend shaves your head. And they lather it up and they shave and you talk about stuff. You talk about how mean is your scripture teacher and stuff like that.

And it's a pleasant way to spend like a half hour with your friend. Okay, DE'I SDUG BSNGAL THAMS CAD BUD GYI LTA SHAR BA means to shave. LTA RGYUD NAG POS RNAM PAR RANG GI SNYING RGAR CHEN ZIN LA BTIM PAR BSAM Take the, slice off their problems as a black light.

RNAM PAR is kind of a contradiction of terms. It's a black light. RNAM PAR number in the form.

RANG GI SNYING RGAR Take it to your heart and feed it to your RANG CHEN ZIN. Feed it to your selfishness. You want to get something from other people?

Here, take this. This is their suffering. You're always trying to get something out of other people, right?

Yeah. You want to take care of yourself, right? Yeah.

You want to take, take, take, right? Yeah. Okay, take their suffering, okay?

Here you go. And it's very cool that Tibetan is, feed it to your selfishness. You want something from other people?

Here, take this. It's very beautiful. The language is very beautiful.

Okay, now he's going to describe, and I'd like you to practice this meditation today, okay? So this is your homework assignment up in the valley. We have a special valley here, which is dedicated to retreat.

And by the way, we have a deal with the fort, which is a deal with the federal government and the county government. We cannot build more cabins there, legally. And so it will always be a retreat valley.

And there'll always be quiet, those beautiful cabins there. And they are really beautiful. So you're going to practice it today, okay?

All right. What kind of critter we got out there today? I don't know what that is.

Okay. What's that, Jiggy? Oh, it's a quail.

Okay. All right. Next picture, you guys.

This is a book, it was one of the first books I ever worked on. It was about the Wheel of Life. It's about a sutra that tells the story of when the Buddha first painted the Wheel of Life.

And I translated it with my teacher, I don't know, 45 years ago. And if you knew Robert Lacey, I don't think you guys knew him. He input the first book for ALL.

He typed the first book. It was the Catalogue to the Cumber. He typed it in a tiny apartment in the West Village, very dangerous apartment.

And so he did the drawing. And this was also the first time that Tibetan was ever done on a computer, printed on a computer, was this book. And it was printed on a dot matrix, a laser printer at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, a million dollar laser printer.

We snuck in at night and used it. So anyway, we're going to work through the realms. In the middle of the demon's hands are the five realms of existence, sometimes drawn as six.

Traditionally, the ancient instruction is BYANG RAB PA, which means make it in five parts, pancagata. And Sugeng has translated an unbelievable text about this wheel. And that's coming out very soon.

And we're just doing the last parts of it. But this is a good way to visualize the realms. And we'll talk more about it tomorrow, or sorry, in the next class.

But these are the realms of existence inside the wheel. So we're going to be working through the realms. And there's a wonderful treatment in Sugeng's book.

Sugeng finished this book two years ago. We've been cleaning it for two years. And he went on to a very difficult commentary by Vasubandhu, which no one has ever translated.

And if you know Vasubandhu, he wrote the Abhidharmakosha, which is the mother book of all Abhidharma school. This is the first of the four schools. The lowest of the four Buddhist schools.

And Stanley's got a 26 year project. He's six years through. That's why we chose a young one.

He was young at the time. And so we're working through that book. But Vasubandhu was actually a closet mind-only school.

He was actually one of the greatest thinkers of the mind-only school. So he wrote an explanation of the wheel of life from the mind-only school. And he's the only person who ever did that.

And we found it. John Brady's project found it. And it's long and it's extremely difficult.

So that's what Sugeng is chewing on now, like a piece of hard leather. Okay. So we'll be going into that meditation, how to do the taking of the suffering.

And rather than doing it here at Diamond Mountain or in this retreat online, rather than doing it with one other person, we're going to start out with the five realms. We're going to do it for each realm. And that takes some explanation.

And that's why you have to tune in for the next show in half an hour. So please take a nice break. And we'll see you guys in half an hour.

[Говорящий 2]
Okay, thank you. Okay, yay.