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

[Говорящий 1]
Let's start with 30 breaths, okay? 30 breaths. Try to get settled.

Hi, Venerable Phil, nice to have you here. 30 breaths. Concentrate on the exhale.

Which nostril are you going to use? Yeah, inhale left, exhale right. Here we go.

What if your nose is stuffed up? Imagine. So the first of the Silky Nambakye, the first of the eight overpowerings, I'd like you to just picture the color red in your mind.

So it's just a color. And get used to seeing red color with your eyes closed. And it takes some practice.

And that's where you're going to start your meditation. If you're going to emanate something red, you're going to have to be able to picture red in your mind. Let's turn that to yellow.

So picture yellow color in your mind. Your mind is full of yellow color. Now let's do a white color.

So picture a white color in your mind. Now we'll do some shapes, and I'd like you to start. There's a big mountain.

It's the highest mountain on the Diamond Mountain property. And it's right behind the temple. It's called Makala Peak from the first director here and the person who signed the paperwork to create Diamond Mountain.

It was named Winston Makala. So imagine that mountain behind us. And I want you to shrink it and put it at the center of your mind.

So maybe it's only one inch high. Take that huge mountain, which is I think over 5,000 feet. It's about 2,000 meters.

Shrink it to a half inch in your mind. Bring it inside your mind and shrink it. Now I'd like you to take that little Mount Makala and move it out of your mind into your hand.

And it's still tiny. It fits in the palm of your hand. So in the palm of your hand, imagine that mountain has gone out of your mind, out of the center of your mind, and now it's sitting in the palm of your hand.

The whole mountain. Now I'd like you to, in the center of your mind, place a single hair from your head. So imagine one single hair from your head.

It's in the middle of your mind. You're focusing on one single hair standing up. Now send that single hair outside and put it behind the temple at Diamond Mountain, where the mountain used to be.

Now there's a single hair from your head, the same size as the mountain behind the temple here, at the end of the valley. A single hair, 2,000 meters high. Then imagine one of those beautiful Diamond Mountain, puffy white clouds in a blue sky.

Over the hair, like over the mountain, there's a large, white, fluffy cloud. Bring the cloud into the center of your mind. Shrink it to about one inch, like one or two centimeters, and bring it into the middle of your mind.

Cloud, huge cloud. Now dissolve your whole body into that cloud. So it used to be the cloud was in the middle of your mind, and now your whole body dissolves into the cloud, and there's just a tiny cloud, but it's you.

Now you don't look like a human anymore. You look like a cloud. Picture the hot hells, a vast iron floor, red hot, and real people, naked, running across the iron, red hot iron, screaming in pain.

Quickly bring the cloud, bring yourself to the top of that chamber, and quickly start to send down a nice, cool rain on those beings. The iron floor of the hot hells starts to cool down. The red color of the floor starts to fade.

The beings there, they can stop. They don't have to keep running. The rain is very gentle, very cool.

You are each drop. Each drop is you. You are the cloud, and you are each raindrop dropping, and these people are looking up with great relief and smile on their faces, and they're reaching out, and you are dropping into the palm of their hands.

You are dropping on their head. You are dropping, covering their body with cool, pleasant, clean rainwater, and they're just really happy. Then you decide to become a beautiful house where they can stay.

Personally, I kind of like a Diamond Mountain retreat cabin, but a little bit bigger, a little bit not fancy, but comfortable and beautiful, and become a house, because now they need a place to stay. In the hell realms, I kind of see this beautiful green grass, these beautiful little white cottages, and the hell beings are really happy, and they're walking into the door of these cottages, and furnish the cottage with your body. I'm a couch.

I'm a chair. I'm a kitchen table, and I am clothing. Now they have this beautiful, soft clothing.

Whatever is your favorite clothing, you can become that clothing. In my hot hell, all the hell beings get really nice cotton cowboy shirts, and they feel very comfortable, and they're starting to sit down on the furniture. You are the couch.

You are their clothes. Then you can become a teacher. Dharma teacher walks in, maybe just looks like a friend, walks into the house, sits down in a chair in the living room, starts to tell them about, maybe teaching them tonglen, and talking to them about tonglen.

You are the couch. You are the house. You are the sky and the clouds outside, and now you are the friend, just a normal friend teaching them tonglen.

Then imagine those hell realm beings, they start to cross their legs, and go into meditation. They start doing tonglen meditation themselves. Then they become a Buddha.

So on you, the couch, in you, the house, under you, the sky and the clouds, these hell beings in these nice clothes that are you, have become a Buddha by doing the tonglen that you taught them. Just enjoy the whole scene. Enjoy being the house, enjoy being the couch, enjoy being the nice clothes, enjoy teaching them, and enjoy the Buddhas that they have become in what used to be a hot hell.

Then you can put that whole scene, shrink it back, bring it back to your mind, you can bring it back to your heart. The whole hot hell, the whole sky, all the clouds, the beautiful houses, the furniture, the people, they all shrink to a dot at your heart. It's only the size of a piece of sand.

And it's become a Buddha paradise. Deep in your heart, the size of a piece of sand. Then you can open your eyes, take a stretch, Any questions or comments you guys have?

Somebody throw a box out. So we took the mountain and brought it into our mind and shrank it. And then we took that hair and put it out there.

[Говорящий 2]
What was the significance of that? What was the significance of our hair being in place?

[Говорящий 1]
It's just to get used to. In this special meditation called Silky Numba, overpowering meditation, you are showing that you have control over the size of things. So you're able to take a mountain.

There's a beautiful Hendricks song which I'm not allowed to play. When I'm standing next to a mountain, I chop it down with the edge of my head. So it seems like he's just standing next to the mountain, knocked the top of the mountain off.

He crushes it and he creates an island of sand in the song. What is that called? Buddha Town.

So anyway, it's to get used to controlling the size and the colors of things. So four for the colors and four for basically the size adjustments. And then that's your palette.

From there you can emanate things. But first you have to control colors and shapes and sizes. Other question, comment, Rony?

Wait, we need a box. I have four questions. You have to pay extra.

[Говорящий 2]
So this is the full meditation? On giving to the hell realm what we did now, this is the meditation we're supposed to do?

[Говорящий 1]
Start with the colors? Do all the realms.

[Говорящий 2]
And do all the realms, okay.

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah, the animal realm, the preta realm, the human realm.

[Говорящий 2]
Another question. Tonglen of ourselves, about ourselves. You said the future me.

Do it on the future. What about if I have a problem right now, how do I do that?

[Говорящий 1]
That's fine, you can do that also. There's a debate about the past and we're going to get to it. How much can you affect the past, that's another question.

[Говорящий 2]
Another question is when I take the tepein of others when I do tonglen, I don't feel nervous. Is it a bad sign? Because I know I won't be damaged of that, of taking that, so I don't feel scared.

[Говорящий 1]
That's fine, that's fine. You understand it so well you don't feel scared. I had a weird conversation with somebody here and they said I used to do their massage therapist and they said, I never do people who are hurting real bad.

And I'm like, I thought that's what massage therapist did. And they said, no, no, I don't want the bad luck of massaging a person who has like cancer or something. I don't want cancer to come through my hands and make me sick or something.

So they said, I always make sure the person I'm giving a massage is healthy. And I thought that was the stupidest thing I ever heard. Well, I heard a lot of stupid things actually, but that's pretty bad.

There's this feeling that if I take someone's, if I really take someone's emotional pain, for example, it might disturb my mind. But actually the decision to take it has the opposite effect. So you're right, and you don't have to be scared.

[Говорящий 2]
Okay, and another question. Can you plant seeds, karma, of taking your own pain? I mean, karma, usually you plant seeds by doing that something to other person.

Can we plant karma when we do stuff for us?

[Говорящий 1]
That's a really good question. Can you commit karma on yourself? Yeah, it is, you can, and it's a good question.

It's a really good question. My teacher used to insist that, my teacher constantly said, how many people does a bodhisattva work for? And then you say, SEMS CAN THAMS CAD, all living beings.

Do you know there's a joke in the monastery? We all get assigned to the kitchen. I spent eight years in the kitchen washing dishes mostly.

And there's a joke in the monastery. If someone does a lousy job and the dishes are dirty after they clean them, they say, DROL LA BPIN CHER. It means, he washed the dishes for all living beings.

It means, for all living beings has become a cliche in the monastery. Oh, everybody's doing everything for all living beings. Oh, I guess you washed those dishes for all living beings.

They're really filthy. It means that you don't even think about it. My teacher kept saying, don't forget you're working for all living beings.

And then this intense moment I had with him, I remember. We were at Princeton and he was asking me these questions about all living beings and a lawnmower came by outside. Somebody was mowing the lawn and he said, is that all living beings?

And I said, yeah, that's one of all living beings. The guy mowing the lawn is one of all living beings. And then very quickly he said, are you one of all living beings?

So he tricked me. He said, is the guy mowing the lawn outside? We couldn't see him, we could just hear it.

And I said, yeah, he's all living beings. And then quickly my teacher said, are you one of them? And I said, well, I didn't think about it, but I guess I am.

And then he says, well, then you have to be nice to yourself also. And he trapped me with the lawnmower. I remember, 1975, he trapped me, like December, like that.

So yeah, you are one of all living beings and you do get good seats by being nice to yourself. Because SEMS PA YI KYI LAS YIN NO Stand with me. SEMS PA YI KYI LAS YIN NO Yeah.

Say it into the blue box.

[Говорящий 2]
The definition of karma is the movement of your mind and what it triggers?

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah. It is karma. It's not karma because somebody is somebody else.

It's karma because you wanted to help them. That makes it karma. That makes it a seed.

Okay, another question? Anybody? Wait, you were going to ask me questions about this meditation.

Jack's here. I just had a technical question about... Can you change this to like a banana milkshake?

Never mind. When we are visualizing the colors and the image of the mountain, do we, when you say bring it into the mind, are you talking about we are visualizing the color in our heart or somewhere else in the body? Because I grew up in the West, because from my whole childhood I was told my mind is in my brain.

Personally when I do it, I see it in my head. Technically it's in your heart. There's a problem, there's a potential problem of doing these meditations at your heart chakra.

It's a very sensitive chakra. Oftentimes they will say, don't mess with your heart chakra. Keep things out of your heart chakra because you can get nervous.

It can make you nervous. It can make you shaky. If that happens, I mean personally I use my head, but they say if you are having a shaky day, do it at your navel chakra.

Move it down to your navel chakra. Two fingers below or four fingers below your navel, inside. It's very grounding.

If you are in retreat for two days or a thousand days and you start getting lungi, which means you start getting nervous because you are meditating too much, then keep things down in your navel chakra. Did you guys have trouble visualizing just swatches of color? I mean I had trouble with it, no?

It kept turning gray. So I think we need to practice. I think if you practice, I think that's why Lord Buddha, there's a list of like 20 drawings that he wanted in the monastery and there's a location for each drawing.

Like the debate ground wall has to have a certain drawing and the side of the monk's room has to have those swatches of color, just swatches of color. Then you have to get used to closing your eyes and seeing the colors because you need to master colors to emanate. Otherwise all your emanations are going to be gray.

You guys, she has the box. First question is about when you were imagining the color. You mentioned about the watches, but in the meditation you just let us.

We just think about the color, right? In English it's called swatch. It means a big piece of blue.

Like you painted the wall, like you painted two meters of blue and you're just staring at it. Then in this, should we just think of the color or if we use some format of color to help? For example, when you think of red, then I will think of the red rose because I was doing the flower arrangement before that and I think of red rose first but then later I make the rose bigger so I just focus on the red.

Is it working? Yeah, that's a good system. I personally have trouble thinking of red without a shape.

I need a square and then I paint the whole square red and then I can do it. I think you could start like that. Start with a red car or a red house and then go close and just have red.

Like zoom in. Zoom in. Quick question, I just want to confirm that in this meditation we imagine that we play with the color and shape and the size and then in the end you guide us to imagine that we are the chair, we are the house, later we are the Buddha and by imagining this are we planting the seeds so we could have the emanation capacity?

Yeah, that's why we're doing it. Okay, good. Thank you.

There's four bodies of a Buddha in the expanded explanation and one of them is called chukku which means emanation body and to do that, to emanate as a person for example you're going to need all kinds of colors, all different shapes otherwise you're going to be flat with no wings. You have to be good at shapes and stuff like that. Somebody had a question over there.

Ratana? I believe you said that on the wall hanging Lord Buddha had said there should be five colors but then I think you said that there's four colors in the meditation. Is there a missing one?

I'm going to look it up. Hang on. This is in Master Sugeng's book which is a really amazing book.

I'll give you the Vinaya Sutra. That's the source. Here's the Vinaya Sutra in Sugeng's book.

DVADI YAK SHANAM CHITRANAM VATRA DHARADI ASTANAM DVADI KOSHTIKE SANSARA CAKRASYA GANDA PANCHAKASYA KARANAM Vinaya Sutra. What's sansara chakra? Wheel of life.

Sansara chakra. That's the part where Lord Buddha says I want DVARAKYE, means the entryway. In the entryway of the temple there should be a sansara chakra.

GANDA PANCHAKASYA Should have five parts, the five realms. In the belly. By the way, the part before that says DVADI, which means in the entryway which is the root of the English word door.

DVADI In Russian? DVIR Yeah, so Russian is normally closer. DVIR YAK SHA Demon, monster.

The guy who's holding the wheel of life. He's called YAK SHA. CHITRANAM CHITRA here means various, but it refers to a painter.

So the word for a painter in Sanskrit is the many colored guy. CHITRA VAJRAD DHARA He should be holding a Vajra. He should be mean.

Put him at the door. That's Vinaya Sutra verse 212, 17th section. Go to verse 210.

Go backwards. You ready? And this is all from Sugeng's amazing book.

GAR NAM NI LA'ADI KARTS NA GAR NAM You should paint colors, kartsna, colors on the wall of the monk's quarters. NI LA'ADI ADI means et cetera. What's NI LA?

What's INDO NI LA? Sapphire blue. The word in Sanskrit for sapphire is INDO NI LA.

What's the Paruski? SINI Yeah. So he says, on the monk's quarter walls, who asked me the question?

I want blue, et cetera. Now, so I went and got a commentary for you, which John Brady discovered, and it's extremely valuable. It's the greatest commentary ever done on Vinaya.

It's two volumes. It's 2,000 pages, roughly. 16,000 pages in English.

And he says, I want to see blue, okay? He says, I want to see LUMBO, blue. I want to see SERPO, yellow.

And I want to see LA SOPA. Et cetera. Thanks a lot.

Now, but he does, let me get it for you. Hold this up and let me show you. Then he quotes, yeah, now here it's blue, yellow, red, and white.

That's Gunaprabha's own commentary to himself. The guy who wrote the Vinaya Sutra said, when I said blue, et cetera, I meant yellow, red, and white. He said, blue, yellow, red, and white.

That's the tradition for painting the wall. And supposedly that's enough colors to build everything up. Any other questions?

One more question. How about two more questions? Box, box, box.

How long should we be able to hold the object for? Is there a recommended time? For example, if I can imagine the mountain shrinking and expanding quickly, should I still prolong it?

Or is that okay? Yeah, if you notice that meditation, normally myself, when I'm doing a meditation that has progressive elements, I will spend five to, I time it in breaths. I do five to 10 breaths.

10 breaths is normal for me. If I'm doing a meditation where I have to do changing scenes, I like to do 10 breaths. I got used to the perfect 10 many years ago.

It's kind of natural for me. Then I hold it for 10 breaths and then I move to the next scene. If you feel yourself getting sleepy, move it faster.

If you feel yourself getting distracted, slow down. Take 20 breaths on each step. It's a balance.

You have to keep things moving or else your mind will get bored. But if you move them too fast, you'll start thinking about lunch, which is what I'm doing right now. Okay.

[Говорящий 2]
Thank you. My question is coming back to the visualizations. So when we are visualizing the house, the people running, and all those beings, I understand that we have to make it as precise as we can, but sometimes I cannot do it.

I just see some objects or something. And my question is, what seeds we can plant to make those visualizations as clear or as precise as we can?

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah, good, good. So she said, I know I'm supposed to be like a luxury apartment in the Hill Rose, but sometimes I have trouble getting all the details. And could I just kind of be a luxury apartment and move on?

That's okay. And then she asked a much more intelligent part of her question was, what's the seeds to be able to fill in the luxury apartment with all the right stuff? What are the seeds to do that?

And we've been spending a lot of time in Japan recently and they were deeply affected by Tang Dynasty China. So 1,400 years ago, they were deeply affected by truly classical Chinese culture. And they developed this kind of, so we were negotiating on a building for the university.

And buying a building in Japan is not an easy thing. And negotiating with Japanese is not an easy thing. It's very rude.

Right, Tim? To rush things. And so we've been going there month after month and having tea together and taking a long time on the tea and not mentioning why we're there.

But the whole tea ceremony has to be very elegant and you focus on it. Everything's clean. Everything is tidy and neat.

And Japan in general is kind of a Tang Dynasty mirror. Especially Kyoto. When you get out of Tokyo, outside of Tokyo, you have this elegance.

It's an elegance. And it's hard for an American. It's really difficult for an American because we're messy.

Like when we go home, I don't know about you guys, Tim, I just throw my clothes on the floor and get to bed. And maybe I pick them up tomorrow and maybe I don't. And in Japan you would...

Mindfully? There's this whole Zen garden thing. You rake the white gravel and you try to do everything mindfully.

And you serve the tea mindfully. You do the ikebana flower arrangements mindfully. And I think sometimes it can be too much.

But when you're there and you see the effect of that mindset, it's kind of elegant. And I think if you don't get too crazy about it, if you are careful to make your surroundings elegant. And I like the word elegant.

I don't mean just fold your clothes. I mean think about it and fold them sweetly and put them in a nice... What's that lady's name who does the boxes and stuff?

What's her name? Marie? You heard the scandal with Marie Kondo?

She got famous for telling people to clean up their houses. And I saw her videos and I tried. And Anjali helped me.

We got everything in boxes, right? And we even have a book that tells you which box your junk is in. And then recently, so she got famous, she got rich, she bought a house and she got married and she had kids.

When she got to her third kid, she made a public announcement that if you have three or more kids, forget my system. And then there's all these ladies who had three kids 10 years ago. And they're really pissed off that they were trying to put everything in boxes and manage three kids.

And then she told them 10 years later, it's not possible with three kids. So why am I saying that? There's still this Japanese sensibility of being mindful of small things like how you pour the tea and how you put things away and the condition of your bedroom, for example.

You can, the way I make a bed is like, sheesh, and I go. And they would smooth it out and make it look... And I think that kind of care, everyday care, which is a kind of samadhi, I think it's a very good thing.

I'm not very good at it, but when I am, I think it plants the seeds to be able to do the details in the luxury apartment in the hell rooms. I think that kind of samadhi about how you keep your house, how you keep your schedule, is the cause for the detail in the hell room. And I think that part of Japanese culture is really beautiful, useful.

I wish I could... I started to do a little bit of it, but not much. My computer blew up again, so let's have one more question.

Okay. Yes. Okay, so this is a question from Julieta or Julieta, I'm not sure where they're from.

What happens if I hear some, or see some bad news, something bad happening? Can I use this disturbing image that I have already seen in my imagination or meditation to turn it into a Buddha paradise? Yeah, I get that.

For me, it's... I never watched the news in my whole life, and I never had a television my whole life. And then during the last elections in the United States, I had to know what was going on.

And I got this bad habit now, and I do look at the news every day now. And it's a bad, I think it's a bad habit. I think you should be aware of what news is happening in the world generally.

But I don't think you have to read the same news four or five times. And that's what it has become for me sometimes. So I think you see disturbing images in the news.

They will show images of war or things like that, and it's very disturbing for your mind. And can you use it? Can it become useful?

We translated the Karma Vibhanga, which is a book that we finished last year, and it's called All the Kinds of Karma. And it's a good book. It's a sutra.

So somebody asked Lord Buddha, could you just give us a list of the basic types of karma that exist? And he gave a long teaching, and he outlined all the possible, basically the grand outline of all the kinds of karma. We translated the title as All the Kinds of Karma.

And we found it carved into a pyramid in Indonesia, Buddha Buddha. And then this lady named Gina Rivera, who's a genius from Guadalajara. Oh!

She did all the drawings. It took about a year and a half, I think. It was hard.

It's a beautiful, beautiful book. There's an interesting teaching in that book, and there's a drawing of it, of allowing children to watch violence, and talking about the karmic result of watching violence. Like my wife, Veronica, who's coming on Thursday, but here, Thursday and Friday, she will not watch violence.

I kind of like war movies. I don't know. Because I like to see, what's his name?

Brad Pitt drive the tank impossibly over 12 more mountains. I enjoy that kind of thing. But she just walks out, and she says, I don't want that image in my head.

And she just walks out. So I think there's, according to the Karma Vibhanga, you want to avoid those images. And then there becomes a skill that monks are supposed to develop.

I had to use it in New York for 19 years. We're supposed to keep our eyes down. So I would come into the Port Authority bus terminal every day.

That's like about a million people coming to that terminal every day. And I'm supposed to keep my eyes down and still make it to the right subway. And I'm not supposed to look at the cute ladies and stuff like that.

I'm supposed to keep my eyes down. And so there's a monk's practice to be able to move your eyes within half a look. Within half a look.

You see the lady and you get a, what do you call it? It becomes an instinct. You just look down.

And so you never see the whole image. You catch a glimpse and then you look down. And I think we could do that for images of violence.

So rather than eating it up, learn this monastic skill of turning your eyes away quickly. If you dwell on the image, it will get planted. If you can learn to control your eyes and look away instinctively, those images won't be burned into your mind.

Can you use an image like that usefully? Yeah, like there's many examples of that. You can imagine that you are throwing a bomb at your selfishness or something.

You did a hypersonic missile to your irritation with your friend. You can do stuff like that. You can use that.

You can use those images. But in general, wouldn't it be better to throw flowers at your enemies than supersonic missiles?