«Дар освобождения», курс 43 «Современный бодхисаттва», занятие 1

[Говорящий 1]
So I was thinking about what to teach this morning. We'll be going through the Lam Rim. We've been doing it about 13 or 14 years.

So my teacher taught me the Steps to the Path for three times through the book, which took 30 years. And so I was trying to do it once with you guys. And we're about, we're doing really well.

I think we have maybe a few months to go. And the theory before I started this Lam Rim was that all the Lam Rims end in the last two perfections, meditation and emptiness. And when I taught this Lam Rim, I decided to do the meditation and emptiness first.

So we went to the end of the book when we started. And I taught meditation and emptiness. And then we started from the beginning of the book.

And we're almost reached the part that we started with. And so we're finishing the book. But I promised to do one more meditation and emptiness section from another Lam Rim.

And I was thinking the Lam Rim Chenmo of Tsongkapa, which is the great Lam Rim. And it's 1,000 pages. He spends 500 pages on emptiness and meditation, which is why Pabongka Rinpoche did not spend many pages on it, because he said, what's the use?

And then I've been working on the Mixed Nuts books. We just finished the 11th one last night. And there's a book I started about nine years ago called Gompa Rabsel, which is the true intent or something like that of the Buddha.

And it's Tsongkapa's greatest work on emptiness. It will be about 1,500 pages in English, I think. And so I started it and I never had time to finish it because I'm too busy.

I'm about halfway through, so I thought I would pause working on the Mixed Nuts books. I'll still do the translation classes, but I thought I would pause for about six months. Usually I work all day on their books.

And I would like to finish the Gompa Rabsel, which is the greatest book ever written on emptiness. And then I thought it would be fun to teach that instead of the Lam Rim Tsemo Emptiness, because it's actually deeper. It's much deeper about emptiness.

And no one's really translated it yet. And I don't think anybody will or can. So anyway, I'm thinking about that.

So last night, pretty much last night I finished this book. This is Seiji's book. And we finished it, kind of, I'm doing the table contents last night.

And it's a famous book on Lojong. Lojong means, well, we'll talk about it, but it's basically compassion teachings, how to develop a good heart. And this is a teaching on a Lojong that was taught a thousand years ago.

It was basically the first teaching that came from India to Tibet, and a thousand years ago. And it was called Sunje Khorlong, which means the crown of knives, the crown that cuts your head open. And that was a famous Lojong text about a thousand years ago.

So I thought, I'm kind of in the mood for this, because I just spent about four months working on it. And it's amazing. It's a commentary that was given about 200 years ago.

And it's amazing. And so I thought I would tell you a little bit about this book, and then I'll leave it up here, and you guys can look at it. Our publishing team is a little behind, like three years.

So I don't know how soon it's going to get out, hopefully soon. But it's a beautiful book. And so there's a, I wrote an introduction, it's about 100 pages, and it's good.

And it's the history of Lojong. And this Lojong, Lojong means, so I'll tell you what it means, because we're in the middle of it, in Pabongka's Lam Rim. So we just are going through the Lojong part in Pabongka's Lam Rim.

After 14 years, or 13 years, we've reached the Lojong part. So here's what Lojong means. 1,000 years ago, there was an Indian master called Atisha.

His other name is Dipankara. Sometimes they call him Jowoje, which means the Lord. And he lived in India 1,000 years ago.

He was attending a monastery named Vikramashila. And Vikrama means damn good. Shila means morality.

Probably they wouldn't say that if they had good morality, but it's the name of the monastery. That and Nalanda are the two great Buddhist monasteries in ancient India. So he was a master there.

And he, people would go to Vajrasana. Vajrasana. Vajra means diamond.

Asana means seat, like under your ass. That's really where the word comes from. So anyway, Vajrasana means seat of the diamond.

And it's the old name for Bodhgaya, which is where Lord Buddha was enlightened. And in fact, the first time we finished the Diamond Cutter Sutra translation into English, the first time I ever taught it was sitting under the Bodhi tree at Bodhgaya. And it was awesome.

That was 100 years ago, right? And anyway, so people used to go there and walk around the stupa for good luck. And so Atisha went there.

100 bucks, if you can tell me the Tibetan for Atisha. Yeah, punsok. So Haggerty, pay Haggerty $100.

Left hand to right hand. Yeah, he's got it ready. Yeah, punsok.

So Atisha means the perfect, perfect? Perfectly good person? Perfect Atisha.

So anyway, he was walking around the stupa at Bodhgaya and they say he looked up in the sky and there were two ladies talking. One was younger, one was older. And one lady, I don't know, it doesn't seem like he was too worried that they were sitting in the sky.

He's like, oh, you know. And the one lady said to the other lady, if you wanted to get enlightened really fast, what would be the best way? And the other lady said, SEMS SBYONG, SEMS SBYONG.

Say SEMS SBYONG. Okay, you got to say twice, SEMS SBYONG. Yeah, and then that's all.

Then they like disappear and Atisha's like, SEMS SBYONG, SEMS SBYONG. SEMS means mind. SBYONG means to practice something until you're good at it.

It also means to purify something or to clean something. So SEMS SBYONG means that. And they repeated it twice.

And then he said, well, I got to find out how to SEMS SBYONG. So he asked around, who knows about SEMS SBYONG? And somebody said, oh, there's a great master named Dharmakirti.

So Dharmakirti already dead for 300 years. And Atisha said, well, he's been passed away. I'll slow down, Translator.

I can already see you're stressed. Dharmakirti lived about 350 years before Atisha and he's the great logician and you don't want to meet him because it's very difficult. In fact, I moved one of the translation classes out of this week so you wouldn't have a breakdown.

And so we're going to do Vinaya instead, morality. But anyway, so they said, no, no, that's not that Dharmakirti. There's two Dharmakirtis.

And he said, well, who's the second Dharmakirti? And they said, oh, he's living in Indonesia. He's a great master in Indonesia.

And this is called Sumatra, an island in Indonesia. I think there's over a thousand islands in Indonesia. One is called Sumatra.

To get to Sumatra in the old days, a thousand years ago, Chinese masters used to leave from what's now Guangzhou. They used to leave from the port there in Guangzhou and then they would sail to Sumatra and study there. And there was a thousand monks there at a place called Palombar or something.

So if you wanted to go to India to study, because people were inspired by a monk called Shensang. 400 years before that, he went to India. He walked to India across the Gobi Desert and then down through Afghanistan, walked through India, 17 years, and he learned Buddhism.

And then he became a great debater. He beat a huge bunch of Indian monks at Nalanda Monastery. Then he came home with a thousand Buddhist books to Xi'an, which was then called Chang'an.

And there was a tower there that Tang Taizong, the emperor of Tang Dynasty, gave him a tower. I get stuck with this two-story building. Shensang had a tower, like 20, 15 stories, I went there.

But anyway, so he basically helped start Chinese Buddhism as we know it now, with a thousand different translations from his team. And then about 350 years later, monks were going from China to Indonesia and studying there. And then they would learn Sanskrit, roughly, and then they would take the sea journey around Indonesia, Vietnam, all the way to Burma, to Bengal, and then they would walk to Nalanda Monastery.

And that's where the real study was going on. But they had to kind of prepare in Indonesia first. So anyway, there were some great monks teaching in Indonesia.

One of them was named Dharmakirti. Sometimes Indonesia, or Sumatra, was called the Island of the Gold, Suvarna. Dvipa, say Suvarna.

Dvipa. Suvarna means good color. Varna came into English varnish, which means the paint on a table or something.

Suvarna means good color, golden. And dvipa, pa means water, and dvipa means split the water, which is what an island does. So dvipa means island.

So Suvarna Dvipa is the Lama from the Golden Island. And people told Atisha, if you want to learn SEMS SBYONG, if you want to learn the mind, to purify the mind, study the mind, you got to go to Indonesia. So he took off on a boat, 13 months at sea.

And he had, I found out later, he had 125 students with him. Like to take two students is a pain in the butt. And I don't know how he survived with 125.

And when Atisha later went to Tibet, he only took one or two students with him. Probably he learned. But anyway, and there's a beautiful story.

And he got to Sumatra, and he met Suvarna Dvipa Guru, the teacher from the Golden Island. And he said, will you teach me SEMS SBYONG? Will you teach me, by the way, which means bodhichitta, which we can say compassion.

And the teacher said, yeah, I can teach you, but it takes a while. Are you ready to commit? And he said, well, how long is a while?

And he said, 12 years. And Atisha said, that's fine, I'll do it. And he stayed in Indonesia for 12 years, and he studied SEMS SBYONG.

And then when he got back to India, he met, he had three great teachers. He had 157 gurus, three greatest ones. And one of the other ones was named Maitri Yogi.

Say Maitri? Yogi. He was a great master of Lojong.

So all three were great masters of Lojong. And Maitri Yogi's famous story is that he was giving a public lecture in a town square in India. I think he was standing on a soap box.

This is an American thing. You stand on a wooden box to talk to a group of people in the old days. And somebody in the back was hassling with a dog.

If you've ever lived in India, there's dogs, wild dogs running around everywhere. And the dog sniffed at the man, and the man took a stick and whacked him three times. And then Maitri Yogi, Atisha's second teacher, he goes, ah, ah, ah, like he could feel the stick.

And then the guy's like, ah, come on. You're just pretending you can feel the dog's pain. And Maitri Yogi says, oh yeah?

And he turns around and he lifts up his robes. And you can see his bottom. And there's three red swelts across his butt.

And he says, see? The guy's like, okay, I believe you. So that's his story.

He taught Lojong to Atisha, two people. Then he had a third teacher in India named Dharma Lakshita. Did I say Dharma?

Lakshita. And he was a great master of Lojong also. And he saw that, he started teaching Atisha Abhidharma.

And at the time there was the great exposition of Abhidharma. So Abhidharma was popular after Buddha for about 700 years. The Abhidharma guys took over Buddhism.

And they were amazingly dull and boring. And I know I studied Abhidharma with my, that's the first thing I studied with my teacher. Usually in the Geshe course you study it last.

But my teacher was teaching it to somebody. So I did 12 years of Abhidharma with my teacher. And it's very dull and very boring.

So anyway, they kind of took over Buddhism for 700 years, these guys. And so they had these huge books, like thousands of pages. And Dharma Lakshita was teaching it to Atisha.

So Atisha was getting fed Abhidharma. And Abhidharma teaching on emptiness is very strange and not very sophisticated. It doesn't help you a lot.

It's extremely similar to modern science. So the Abhidharma system of understanding reality and modern science are almost exactly the same. So that was 2,000 years ago.

So he was getting fed this long, slow book of Abhidharma. And his teacher, Dharma Lakshita, went to town and there was a guy dying. There was a man dying in his home.

And there was a doctor taking care of him. And the doctor announced that the only way this guy is going to survive is if somebody cuts a piece of human flesh off their body and feeds it to him. Otherwise he'll die.

So Dharma Lakshita's like, okay, I can do that. And he took a knife and he cut a big piece of steak off his leg, off his thigh here. It made a terrible wound.

And they fed the meat to the guy and he got better almost right away. And everybody was amazed. And then Dharma Lakshita had to go to bed because he couldn't stand anymore.

And he went into a dream. And Maitreya came to him and said, hey, something happened to your leg. And Dharma Lakshita's like, oh yeah, I had to offer some of my meat to somebody.

And Maitreya puts his hand on his thigh and cured him in the dream. And then Dharma Lakshita woke up and he looked and his leg was all fixed. And then suddenly he said, why am I wasting time on Abhidharma?

I can't do emptiness that way. And because of the blessing of Maitreya, he actually became a mind only. He started to follow the mind only school, which is like really good.

It's not the ultimate, but it's really good. And so Dharma Lakshita studied mind only. He became a mind only master.

And he taught that to Atisha and like that. Then he said it was the blessing of Maitreya that caused him to change his school to that. So that was the background of Atisha.

Later Atisha got teachings on Nagarjuna and the six books of Nagarjuna. Sometimes they say five books and he became a great master of emptiness also. Then there was kings in Tibet.

They wanted to bring Buddhism to Tibet. There had been some Buddhism came to Tibet with individual yogis like few hundred years before. So Buddhism came to China like 700 years before Tibet.

But in Tibet, it was around the time of Atisha that the main teachings reached Tibet. And Atisha was planning to go to, he was asked to come to Tibet and teach by the king. And the king was trying to fundraise, as I can appreciate, to get Atisha to Tibet.

And then he was fundraising in a neighboring kingdom. And that king imprisoned him and said he would kill him unless his people gave him gold. And there was a big fight and the king actually died in prison.

And then his nephew decided to try to invite Atisha to Tibet. And they sent, it's a long, long story, but they sent a team to India to try to convince the abbot of Vikramashila to release Atisha. And eventually they made a deal that Atisha would stay for three years in Tibet.

And he would teach for three years. Atisha was already 57 years old. In those days, the average age was 40, 45.

You survived to 40 or 45. He was already like 12 years over maximum age. And nowadays he'd be 90 or something.

And so it was difficult for him to travel, but he agreed to go. And he went to Tibet and they met a strange man on the way, single man traveling. And they said, he said, oh, you guys look like you're going somewhere important.

You look like you're on a mission. And they said, yeah, we're trying to bring Buddhism to a new country. This country doesn't even have an alphabet.

This is a country of yak herders and warriors. They don't have books. They don't have writing.

And we're going to, he says, wow, that's going to be hard. I'll teach you some prayers. And he taught them some prayers to say about compassion.

And there's a tradition that that was Dromtenche. So Dromtenche was the first Tibetan to receive teachings from Atisha. And by the way, I put all the stories in the introduction.

It took me a long time and I had to read a lot of ancient books and it was fun. But Dromtenche, he was born in Tibet, Central Tibet, around 1000 AD. And it's interesting because normally in the stories of the great teachers, they don't tell you any information.

They just tell you he was the most wonderful and the greatest. And they go on like that for 100 pages and then there's no information. And there's a few historians who will tell you the truth.

So I found one. And he said, Dromtenche was born, his parents were bunpo. Bunpo means shamans.

They were both shamans. They were not Buddhists. So at that time in Tibet, most people were shamans and they worshipped the sky, Tengri.

And it's a long story, bunpo. So we know from their personal names that they weren't Buddhists, they were shamans. And they had this boy.

And then, I don't know, after, like when he was 13, his father took a second wife, which was common in Tibet at that time. Or two brothers would share the same wife. And so he didn't get along with his stepmother, which is very rare.

And he moved out, which is also very rare. And he went off and he met some Lama. And the Lama, he asked the Lama to teach him.

Because he heard the Lama was going to go to India and study there. So he thought, I'll attach myself to this Lama and maybe he'll take me to India with him. So he did.

And the Lama said, look, you're too young for me to travel. Take you traveling, because people will say I stole you from your parents or something. I guess 15 was the driving age or something.

He said, wait another year or two and you can travel with me. And then he went to Nepal. He tried to.

He met some Indian masters. He did a, what do you call it? Clairvoyance contest?

Who can read the other person's mind? And the Tibetan Lama won. And then he said, ah, why waste my time in India?

I think I'll go back to Tibet. And he went back to Tibet and he took Dromtönje. Drom, by the way, Drom is a place in Tibet.

Tön means teacher from wherever. So when you say tön at the end of a person's name, it means tönpa, which means teacher. So you know, you could call Arizona, Arizona, Arizona tön, would be the teacher from Arizona or something like that.

So he's Dromtön. And his monk's name is Gyelway Djungne, which means the source of victorious Buddhas. And so anyway, the teacher told him, look, I have to go to East Tibet, which is called Kham, and you can travel with me.

It's a thousand miles, you know, on horseback. And you can come with me, but you have to do whatever I say, or else I don't need the trouble, which I also appreciate. And so he's like, Dromtönje's like, I promise, whatever you need, I'll do.

And so he got stuck with watching the horses all night. What do you call it, horse guard? And in Tibet at the time, that involved picking thorn bushes like cactuses with your hands and setting them around the cattle so they couldn't get out and people couldn't get in.

So he had to be pulling cactuses up with his bare hands all evening. And then during the day, his teacher made him crush barley powder because of Tsampa. They need to eat it in their breakfast, right?

And my Lama did the same thing to me. And I know what it's like. And you take a, there's a thing called a ding.

It's a heavy, heavy piece of metal pipe, this thick, with a bottom. And then they give you a heavy, heavy metal rod. And you drop a few barley corns in there and you smash them.

And then you take them out and you smash more. And it takes like four or five hours. And my teacher insisted it.

It was the only way that Tsampa would taste good, if you did it by hand. So I went through that. I did many, many, many hours crushing barley.

I said, let's use a machine. He's like, no, it puts oil in the barley. It ruins the taste.

So apparently, Dromtönche's teacher said the same thing. And so he was crushing barley during the day. He was watching horses at night.

He didn't get any study. He was frustrated. But then people asked him later, did you feel upset at the Lama?

And he said, well, actually, no. I thought it was an honor to serve my teacher. So he didn't complain.

Finally, some of his teacher's friends said, why are you wasting his time? He could be a great Geshe. He could be studying.

Why are you wasting his time guarding horses and smashing barley? So they were passing a lot of monasteries. And he had been teaching him.

And he said, okay, sometimes you can go in the monasteries and debate with the monks. And this way, Dromtönche became a great debater. In the meantime, Atisha is trying to get over the mountains in Nepal into Tibet.

And Tara comes to him. By the way, the two ladies were Tara and Vajrayogini in the sky. And Tara comes to him and says, keep your eye out for the upasika.

Upasika means a layman, layperson, with lifetime vows. So Dromtönche is famous. He was the first great Tibetan Buddhist, but he never became a monk.

He was a layperson. And he never went higher than taking his five vows or eight vows. So he kept those vows his whole life.

And he, so in Sanskrit, it's called upasaka or upasika. And Tara told Atisha, keep your eyes out for the upasika because he's going to help you in Tibet. And so Atisha entered Tibet through Nepal, which is West Tibet, and a province called Ngari.

And it's the far Western side of Tibet. Dromtönche was smashing barley and picking thorns in the East, a thousand miles away. And then one day, and he was learning to debate.

And then one day he decided he would like to learn Sanskrit because if he ever met an Indian teacher, he could talk to him. So he found a teacher called the Dayat Serma, which means thorn of Sanskrit. It means he was a tough teacher, like nail.

And he taught him Sanskrit. And then Dromtönche asked his Sanskrit teacher, are there still any great teachers left in India? And he says, well, there's Naropa who could teach you Vajrayogini, but he's getting really old.

He may have passed away already. And then Shantipa, who's similar. And then there's a new young guy named Atisha.

He's pretty good. And when Dromtönche heard the name Atisha, his heart starts going crazy. And he's like, oh, that's my teacher.

I got to meet him. And then he heard that Atisha had climbed over Nepal and entered Ngari, West Tibet. And he asked his teacher, and he was afraid because the teacher, he thought the teacher might be jealous.

We have a word for that in Tibetan. Like professional jealousy. Like there's a word for that.

And so he said, would you mind if I, I've served you for 13 years, could I just go meet this other teacher? Because my heart beats fast whenever I think about him. And he says, yeah, go for it.

And here's a horse. And he says, well, the horse is all loaded with boxes. He says, yeah, I got it ready for you.

What's in the boxes? Scriptures. Have a nice time.

Read them on your way. And so he took off to West Tibet, Drom Tseng Je, riding as fast as he could. And there's a beautiful story that he stopped in a place called, he stopped in an empty place, kind of like Diamond Mountain.

And there was a manor house, like a large house. Fancy mud house, right? And there was a lot of partying going on inside the house.

And he's thirsty and he's tired and he needs a place to sleep and maybe some food or something. And he says, what's going on? And they said, well, that's a guy named Kabir.

Kabir is, Kabir Jr. and Kabir Sr. are the two owners of this area. They're the big ranchers. They're like, what's those ranchers named next door?

The Klumps, they're like the Klumps, okay? May you never meet the Klumps. I met them once, they had all these guns.

I'm like, what's the guns for? And they said, we shoot rattlesnakes. I'm like, okay, just rattlesnakes, right?

And anyway, they're like the Klumps of that area. And they're, by the way, they own the marble quarry. So we're actually getting along with them.

And so anyway, he said, they're the big shots around here. He says, I'm really thirsty. I'll take a chance.

He walks into the house. Younger Kabir is there, spoiled rich kid. And he's like, where are you from, East Tibet?

They talk funny. People from East Tibet, they talk really funny. So everybody else knows where they're from.

And they're like, you talk funny. You must be from East Tibet. He's like, yeah.

He says, oh, okay. He says, well, if you want something to drink or eat, you're going to have to prostrate to me, says the younger Kabir, the rich, spoiled rich kid. And Drom Tungje says, I don't have a problem with that.

What kind of prostration do you want? And the kid said, I want the vomiting fox prostration. And you go down like this, and then you stretch a long way, and then you put your head down, and then you come back, and then...

It's like a fox vomiting. And I found one on YouTube, and it's just like that. Somebody took a video, I don't know how.

You can look it up. But they go. He did the fox vomiting prostration to Kabir Junior.

And then they sat down, and they start having refreshments. And then after a while, Kabir says, you wouldn't be that Drom Tungje, would you? From East Tibet.

He's famous already for debating the monks in the monastery and beating them. And Drom Tungje is like, yeah, that's me. And he goes, oh, I'm so sorry.

I didn't know it was Drom Tungje. And he takes his seat, and he gives it to Drom Tungje, and he, I'm so sorry about the prostration thing. And Drom Tungje is like, don't worry about it.

Like he's a very chill guy. And he's like, don't worry about it, it's okay. And they start talking, and Kabir says, by the way, I'm really rich, and I'm going to build another large house here as a temple, and I need a temple keeper.

And would you be interested? And Drom Tungje is like, first of all, by the way, Drom Tungje's got this mission. He can see what Atisha's going to do in Tibet.

He can see what's going to happen. And he's already thinking of how to fundraise, right? And he's like, well, if it was a big temple, I might be interested.

And the guy says, well, I'll make it pretty big. He says, no, I mean like a castle. And Kabir's like, okay, I could do a castle.

And he says, okay, you build a castle, and on my way back, I'll stop, and I'll see if it's big enough, I'll stay. And on the way back, 17 years later, he's got this big castle, and that was Radreng Monastery. That became Radreng Monastery, that became Drom Tungje's, that became the first great Tibetan monastery, and Atisha and Drom Tungje taught there.

And that's where the Lam Rim was first taught. And that's where Lojong was first taught. And that's where Tsongkapa had the vision to write the Lam Rim Tsongkapa.

And if you know The Source of All My Good, that's where he spoke those words. So, Radreng is a very important place. And they built it just for Atisha to teach, you see?

Anyway, then he had Drom Tungje heads off to the west. He's still, Khabyar gives him a new fresh horse, like a really beautiful horse, as a gift, and he's galloping, and he runs into a war. And there were lots of local wars going on.

There's a joke in Tibetan. There's a, ,MAG MTHIL MO CIG RGYUN GYUR NAS, There's somebody's having a major war. I think three people died.

Anyway, so he couldn't get to West Tibet on the road. It's called the North Road in Changlam. And he had to go through the forest, and he got lost in the forest.

And then he found a deer. He ran into a deer. And I was doing retreat in Flagstaff many years ago, like 25 years ago, and a deer, I met a deer in the forest, and we just like ran into each other.

And I thought, I'll sing the mandala offering to him and see what happens. And he just stayed there, and he was like, wow. And so he met this deer, and the deer is like, you know.

So he followed the deer a long, long way, and he found the house where Atisha was staying. And they say that, some people say the deer was Tara, and then other people say it was Pahar. Pahar is a protector deity.

Not the protector deity, okay? Who helped Padmasambhava two or three hundred years before that. And they founded a monastery called Samye, which is very important for Atisha and Dromtomje.

So anyway, this deer took him to Atisha's house, and he went in the house and he said, you know, he's all dirty and crazy and sweaty, and he says, where's Atisha? And they say, he's been waiting for you. Tara told him, you're on the way, and you were supposed to be here this afternoon.

Tara said you would be here this afternoon. And then you didn't show up, so Atisha went to do prayers at somebody's house. And just relax and have something to drink, and he'll come back.

He's just doing prayers at somebody's house. And Dromtomje is like, are you crazy? What if I die in the next 10 minutes?

I'm going to go find him. He runs out of the house, and he's running down the street, and he runs into Atisha, because Atisha's like 57, he's old, and he can't walk very fast. And he starts prostrating to him crazy, and Atisha blesses him, and then they go to the house of the sponsor, and Atisha says, this is the guy that was supposed to be here earlier, and I told you to make an extra meal for him.

And the sponsor said, yeah, yeah, I remember, I got it already. I got a big hunk of Tibetan bread and a big butter, ball of butter. So Atisha gives the bread and butter to Dromtomje, and then they do the prayers, and then Dromtomje decides to eat the bread and save the butter, because he has an idea.

And he goes back, they go back to the house, and Atisha's been keeping a tantric vase near his pillow for three days, because Tara said the guy will be here in three days. The upasika, right? So Atisha gives him tantric initiation immediately, and then Dromtomje burns the butter, clarifies the butter, makes a ghee, and offers a butter lamp to his teacher.

And he did that every night for the rest of his life. He offered the butter lamp at the pillow of his teacher. And then they started, and Dromtomje's like, so you're going to teach the Tibetans Buddhism, right?

And Atisha's like, yeah. And Dromtomje's like, well, they don't know anything. And they're really rough people.

And it's not going to be easy. Do you have something kind of easy for them? And Atisha says, yeah, the two angels told me.

The two angels said, SEMS SBYONG, SEMS SBYONG. I got SEMS SBYONG for you guys. Let's call it LO SBYONG.

LO and SEMS are the same thing. So he said, let's call it LO SBYONG. I brought you a LO SBYONG.

So LO SBYONG is like first introductory Buddhism. And if you're going to teach a whole country of crazy people, like Americans, then you might want to start with LO SBYONG. And my teacher used to start with LO SBYONG.

And the first thing he taught me was LO SBYONG. And there's a famous LO SBYONG in eight verses. DA NI SEMS CAN THAR BYED LA YOD SHING SDUG PAR LAS LA LA'I RGYUN CHOS GRUB PA'I SEMS PA'I YID BDAG DU BYED PA'I SEMS PA'I ZHUGS So he taught it to me.

That was the first teaching he ever gave me. They asked me here on next Saturday. Is it Saturday?

We're going to have a 20th anniversary? Or of what? Dai Mong.

And they said, well, you teach something. And I said, let's do the LO SBYONG. The eight verses.

LO SBYONG SRID RGYAS MA The teacher is called Dorje Senggye, which means Diamond Lion. And it's a very, very profound LO SBYONG because it covers both SEMS SBYONGs. SEMS SBYONG, SEMS SBYONG.

And it covers both aspects of LO SBYONG. So, by the way, so Atisha started with LO SBYONG. And he didn't do the eight verses.

He did the Crown of Knives, which is what this is. This is the Crown of Knives. The actual LO SBYONG is 100 verses, roughly.

The commentary is 800 pages. Okay? So, he taught that one.

His teacher, Dharmaraksita, gave him that LO SBYONG. He taught him that LO SBYONG. Which was, at the time, it's called Asidhara Chakra.

So ASI means, ASI means steel sword. DHA RA means holding a steel sword. And CHAKRA means a crown or a wheel.

So Asidhara Chakra is the ancient name for a weapon. And Stanley found me the Chinese version, which is called Blood Dripper. It's like a ninja thing.

What do you call it? Say it again. Shedit?

Shedita? Anyway, it's the same thing. You draw it like this and it spins.

It has blades on the outside, like a helicopter. And it has blades on the inside. And it cuts the person both ways.

And that's called the Crown of Knives. Sometimes it comes down on your head. And that's what happened to me and John Brady.

No, I'm just kidding. We got it to go back up quickly. It'll cut your head from the inside and then it cuts you from the outside also.

So it's, the name of this lojong is the Crown of Knives. And the idea is that your karma comes back to you like a wheel of knives. So whatever you do to other people comes back to you like a crown of knives, like a crown of knives.

There's many beautiful stories in here. One cool one is the guy who makes a sword on his anvil, a blacksmith, who makes a sword, fancy sword, for a special rich guy and then carries it, finishes it, and he carries it to the rich guy and he trips on the way and he stabs himself through the heart. And they say that's the lojong.

Got it? Like you intend to hurt somebody and you get all ready to hurt somebody and maybe you hurt somebody, but then it comes back and it hurts you. The other example in this book is Poison Arrow.

When this guy is going to battle and he coats the arrows with poison and then in the middle of the battle he's really going fast and he cuts himself and he dies in the middle of battle. And they say that our life is like that every time we want to hurt somebody. Every time we get ready to hurt somebody it backfires on us.

And that's the idea of the wheel of knives or the crown of knives. The ancient story, where we found the Sanskrit, is the story of Maitri in the Karma Vibhanga, which this is a sutra by Lord Buddha 1,500 years before Atisha. And it's a story about a young man who goes to sea.

You know the story. And his mother asks him not to go and he insists on going. And then finally he's on his way out to go to sea.

His mother's holding onto his leg and he bumps his mother's head. And then he goes to sea. At sea the ship sinks.

Everyone dies except for the young boy. And there's a long story, but the karma of hurting your parent is that he's got the wheel of knives on his head. Later the wheel of knives comes to his head.

But Maitri, just as the wheel is descending onto his head, he makes a prayer that he should take the pain of the knives and it should cause his parents to never have any pain. See what I mean? By the way, I'll take the pain of all living beings on myself.

And he welcomes the crown of knives. Therefore, the crown cannot, it stops in midair and it won't come down. And so the translator was Seiji.

And at the time he was, well, he was like five years into the book and he had his son. And he named his son Maitri in honor of the boy in the story. Okay, so, and back in Indonesia around the time of Atisha, or a little bit earlier, they were building a pyramid, a grand pyramid called Borobudur.

And there's a, it's got like, I think it has 1,200 panels, the size of this wall. And they are carved. Famous Buddhist stories are carved into the panels.

And there's a carving of the story of Maitri. But unfortunately it's on the first level of the pyramid and it's backwards. Like you walk around the pyramid, circumambulate clockwise and the panels run backwards.

Something like that, okay? And they only make sense if you're walking around the pyramid in a certain direction, okay? So anyway, we found a drawing of the crown of knives there.

And by the way, those particular carvings were covered up about 100 years ago. The pyramid was collapsing and so they bulldozed earth. They buried the first level of the pyramid, which happens to be the story of Maitri.

But someone, some crazy Indian photographer took pictures of it first. So we have the pictures. And we drew the crown of knives and you can see it in the book.

But the idea is of this LO SBYONG. Why he said LO SBYONG, LO SBYONG, SEMS SBYONG, SEMS SBYONG is that this practice of LO SBYONG has two levels, okay? The practice has two levels.

And we've been talking about it in the Lam Rim. By the way, Lam Rim, so you take a new student or you take a new country and you teach them LO SBYONG first. So Atisha's teacher gave him this LO SBYONG and said, teach that to Tibetans first.

And when they calm down a little bit, you can teach them Lam Rim. Start with LO SBYONG. Teach them LO SBYONG for about a year.

And that's what my teacher did when he got to the crazy land called America. And he taught LO SBYONG for about a year. And then second level, you teach Lam Rim.

When people are ready in a new country or something, first you do LO SBYONG, because it's short and it's complete. And then you teach Lam Rim, which is long and complete. And if the people are serious, then you teach them the five great books.

The five great books of philosophy. So that's kind of what I've been doing for the last 30, 40 years. So do LO SBYONG, then Lam Rim for the busy people who have phones and stuff.

And then the serious people, we do the classics, the five great books, which is the Geshe course. And it takes like 20 years, 25 years. So that's what we're doing in the translation classes.

And if you want to go deeper, but the topic of all three is LO SBYONG, SEMS SBYONG, SEMS SBYONG. First one means, try to feel the intention to treat other people as well as you treat yourself. Try to treat other people with the same love that you treat yourself.

Try to reach a state where you take care of other people with the same interest and the same passion that you take care of yourself. That's the first LO SBYONG, where SEMS SBYONG means try to treat other people with the same kind of interest that you take care of yourself. And by the way, we all take care of ourselves better than we take care of other people.

And that's just human nature. If you're on this planet right now and you're not Vajrayogini in disguise, which you may be, I don't know, because you're disguised. But everyone else of us, me, we take care of ourselves better than we take care of other people.

And that's just human nature. And it's why we're here. Because this is kind of like the back of the class.

This planet is the back of the class. But we're not supposed to shut up, you guys. Five more minutes?

I got to time this right. Tim? Serious?

Wow, okay. Oh. Five, 10 minutes more?

So half an hour more. Oh, how long is the class? Huh?

Okay.

[Говорящий 2]
It's another world.

[Говорящий 1]
Okay, good. So the first SEMS SBYONG means, I'm going to turn on, I have a phone. No, I got a phone somewhere.

Hang on. I don't trust Dime Mountain Time. People are in another world.

Okay, 7.15, am I right? Okay, right. So the first LOD SBYONG, first SEMS SBYONG means practice the state of mind where you try to take care of other people with the same passion that you take care of yourself.

Try to equal it out. And that is called deceptive LOD SBYONG or first level LOD SBYONG. And there's two practices that help you reach that level of LOD SBYONG.

Okay, there's two famous practices. And they've come from Shantideva. They come from 1,300 years ago, 300 years before Atisha.

Okay, and Atisha was trained in Shantideva. So he knew about it. And Shantideva's approach is two parts.

It's called BDAG GZHAN MNYAM BYAS, right? Say BDAG GZHAN MNYAM BYAS. BDAG means me.

GZHAN means other people. And then MNYAM BYAS, people call it exchanging self and others. It's not correct.

Okay, it's a big boo-boo. So it's actually two different practices. MNYAM and BYAS.

BDAG GZHAN, me and other people. MNYAM BYAS. So MNYAM DANG BYAS.

First MNYAM, then BYAS. Not MNYAM BYAS. Okay, got it?

So here's what the MNYAM is. There's basically, MNYAM means equal. MNYAM means equal.

For example, there's a famous MNYAM PA NYID which is emptiness. Equality of all people and things is their emptiness. There's nothing in the universe which is not coming from your seeds.

There's nothing in the universe which is not coming from your seeds. MNYAM PA All things are equal. Okay, why?

Everything you ever see and everyone you ever meet is coming from your seeds. And I don't know, this week I was having an operation on my hand, operation number two, and people are chasing me around town. I need a meeting, I need a meeting.

I'm like, I'm sorry, they're cutting up my hand. I mean, you could come in the room, but I might not be conscious. And they're like, ngak, ngak, ngak, ngak.

Then I'm like, okay, what do you need? I'm having trouble. I'm having trouble with my wife or my husband.

I just say, think about the pen. Think about the pen. They're like, no, but I need more.

And I'm like, I don't have anything else. That's all I got. Really.

And that should be enough. If someone irritates you, you know, nyam, one meaning of nyam is everything in the universe is equal. It's all coming from you.

People around you, even your husband, is coming from you. If you don't like something, say things. In you, because it's all coming from you.

Then you don't have to worry about anybody else. And you don't have to tell Geshe-la about anybody else. Because I don't care.

Because I know the problem and I know how to fix it. Just fix your sneeze. I don't care about this other thing.

I don't have anything else to say. I can stretch it out as long as I can. Anyway, all things are equal, nyam bar.

All things are coming from you. The person who's giving you the most trouble in your life is coming from you. And people beg me and yell at me and call me over and over and say, I need more.

And I say, I don't have more. Just fix it. It's coming from you.

You fix it. I can't fix it. You have to fix it.

There's nothing that's not coming from you. So, you have total control over the situation. Just, if your wife or husband's an asshole, stop being an asshole.

Okay? By the way, if my wife was here, I wouldn't say that. So anyway, that's the truth.

Anyway, that's one kind of equality. But the one here is that everyone has an equal right to be happy. That's nyam.

When you say BDAG GZHAN NYAMS RJES nyam means every living creature in the universe has an equal right to be happy. And I don't have more right than you to be happy. And you don't have more right to me than me to be happy.

We all have equal right. Everyone has an equal right to be happy. Okay, that's nyam.

And then you just have to keep thinking about it. We used it, by the way, in DCI for training business managers. Like all the people on your work team that you're trying to get to work for you, they have an equal right to success as you do.

Okay, you're the boss. You want them to work well. But they have the same right as you.

They have the same right. They also want to be successful. So nyampa means everyone has equal right to be happy.

No person in the world has more right to be happy than another person. And it sounds obvious, right? But it's hard to do it.

It's hard to act on it. Then RJES is very tricky. They say exchange self and others.

It's not that easy. Okay, you're supposed to sit in Barren's place and I'm supposed to switch with you. You're supposed to be in my body.

I go into your body. I get in your body. I look through your eyes at me.

And then I try to imagine how Barren's feeling about Geshe-la, which Geshe-la usually doesn't worry about. And then suddenly Geshe-la is like, whoa! So that's what Geshe-la looks like.

Okay, got it? So the RJES part means, it doesn't mean, oh, your happiness is as important as mindless exchange. It doesn't mean that.

It means I put myself in your body and I look back at Geshe Michael and see how's he acting? How's he treating people? So I try to imagine how you feel, yourself treated by Geshe Michael.

How do you feel Geshe Michael's treating you? It's RJES. It's the RJES.

So NYAM means you have an equal right to happiness. RJES means I put myself in your body and look at Geshe Michael and then I see how it feels to have how Geshe Michael treats you. So I think about how Geshe Michael's treating me, which is you.

Got it? And then that helps you with the first SEMS SBYONG. That's the first SEMS SBYONG.

I don't know if it was Tara or Vajrayogini. I suspect it was Tara. She said SEMS SBYONG.

The other lady, SEMS SBYONG. So the first SEMS SBYONG is those two practices. BDAG GZHAN NYAM RJES That's the first SEMS SBYONG.

And by the time you finish the first SEMS SBYONG, you're supposed to have an overwhelming desire to help people out of trouble. You're supposed to have an overwhelming desire to help people get out of trouble. That's the first SEMS SBYONG.

Now, you got to read this someday. A lot of lojongs were kept secret. And that fascinates me.

This is like first grade Buddhism. Kindergarten Buddhism. And some of these lojongs were kept secret for 800 years.

They were passed down secretly. If you guys, you YSI guys, if you know Virupa, is one of the great mahasiddhas, one of the 80 great yoga practitioners of ancient India, is Virupa. And he often, by the way, VIR means, in this case it means defective.

And Rupa means his personal appearance, Rupa. And Virupa means Mr. Ugly. And he's like one of the most famous yogis of all time.

So who are you Geshe-la to call him Mr. Ugly? Hey, somebody else named him, not me. It's Virupa.

And he's called deformed because he had a third eye. And he looked weird. Okay, got it?

People just met him and said, you look weird. You know, he's like, blink, blink. Okay.

And that's Virupa. And he, there's a tradition that I found in my research that says some of the lojong started with him. That's 300 years before Atisha.

Then I'm like, first of all, I didn't believe it. And then I went and checked all the books by Virupa. And there is a lojong.

It's not called a lojong, but the main topic is SEMS SBYONG SEMS SBYONG, which makes it a lojong. And I'm like, wow, that's unbelievable. So why did they keep it secret for 300 years up to Atisha?

And the lojong dunpa dunma, which the Mexico teachers taught, partly in Guadalajara, that was kept secret another couple hundred years, 500 years. Why keep the lojong secret? By the way, it took 12 years for Atisha to learn a lojong that you can recite in 47 seconds.

I tried. BDAG NI SEMS CAN THAG CUNG LA YIN GYI BZHIN SNAM PAR LAS LA BZHIN GYUR BDUG PA'I SEMS NYID NYID BDAG TU SBYONG PA SEMS NYID NYID Like that, I timed it, 47 seconds. He spent 12 years learning a 47-second prayer.

What's there that you can spend 12 years on? And why do you keep it secret? Ah, that's the second semjong.

Yeah, that's the second semjong. The second semjong means practice the perception of emptiness because otherwise you can't help other people. Practice the perception of emptiness.

Semjong, semjong, because that's the only way you can carry out bodhichitta. That's the only way you can become a Buddha to help other people is the second semjong. And that's where the peacock comes from.

So there's a very, very famous the second lojong that Atisha was taught is called maja dukjong. Say maja dukjong. How the peacocks destroy poison.

And you know the story that supposedly peacocks can eat poison plants. I'm thinking poison ivy. Have you ever had poison ivy?

It's wonderful. You touch the plant on your skin. I mean, we don't have it in Arizona, which is, I mean in this part of Arizona because nothing grows here anyway.

But I've had it for three, four months. It's in New Jersey, in Jersey. And it's this red thing.

And they love to eat it. The peacocks love to eat it. And they eat the poison ivy.

And it makes them beautiful. It gives them these beautiful colors. And there's this whole idea that we're going to talk about all week that peacocks, we should be like a peacock, which means we should look for trouble.

We should look for trouble. If you're going to be a professional Buddhist, you should look for trouble. Every time you see a bad situation or a problem, you should peacock it.

You should jump in. And most people, when they see a problem, they kind of, well, they don't make it obvious. They just say, oh, that's interesting.

And they don't, usually they're too busy. There was an interesting study. They took people who were applying to seminary, applying to become a priest, and they gave them an interview date and time.

And then they faked a car accident in front of the interview building. And most of them just ran, ignored the person bleeding and didn't want to be late for their religious interview. And that's what we do.

We don't, we see trouble and we just avoid it. We go the other way. And a peacock, a bodhisattva, is supposed to seek out problems and eat them.

And they get sustenance, vitamins. Problems are vitamins for bodhisattvas. Somebody says, Geshe-la, we're having a fundraising problem.

Then what I really want to do at that moment is take a nap. And they're like, Geshe-la, we need to raise more money. And I'm like, all right, peacock time.

And I try to jump in and help out. You know what I mean? Like that.

So that's peacock. But I believe you cannot do it unless you understand emptiness. I believe that it would be dangerous to run around eating poison if you don't understand emptiness.

If you keep jumping into people's problems and making them yours, you will die. Like the crow. There's a famous story of the crow.

He saw the peacock eating poison. He says, I want to have those feathers. And then the crow eats the poison and they die.

I think the reason they kept it secret was that, and they did not encourage people to jump into all the problems they see, is that they would have a breakdown. Or they would just get overwhelmed and they would freak out. They'd end up in a crazy house.

If you actually jumped into every possible problem you saw to help, you would go crazy. Unless you understood emptiness, which means you understand that the problem is coming from you. Then you can peacock.

Got it? Like then it's your problem. It's not like you're trying to help out somebody else.

Who made the problem? Oh, Geshe-la, pens come from people, but not problems. Problems come from their own side.

And then if you're still at that level of blaming other people for their problems, like I just did at the beginning of class, if you're still at that level, you can't be a bodhisattva. You'll get overwhelmed and then you will quit the problem business. You will give up and you'll never do problems.

So I think my extensive research, the printer was like, I can't print it in one volume. I said, how about two? She said, I'll try.

Then she said three. Then she said four. I said, do I have to pay the same price?

No, four times. 120 bucks. Okay.

You know, that's why it was secret for like 800 years. Until the students could catch up on the emptiness side, it would be a disaster to encourage them to jump into people's problems because they would get overwhelmed. They would believe that they were other people's problems and they're not.

They're your problems. If you perceive a problem, it's coming from you. Then you have the power to fix it.

You see what I mean? It would be unfair to send out all these peacocks, crows, to eat up everybody's problems because you'll have a breakdown unless you understand where it's coming from. And then you can handle it and then you can help people.

Okay? That's why the two ladies said SEMS SBYONG, SEMS SBYONG. The second SEMS SBYONG is practice the state of mind of emptiness.

Otherwise, you're going to get in trouble. You're going to get overwhelmed. You're going to have a Dharma breakdown.

By the way, people who have a Dharma breakdown are hopeless. They get really mean. They're like, yeah, I tried to help everybody, Geshe-la.

They're all assholes. You know, I gave that up. Oh, that was the old days when I was trying to be a Buddhist.

Forget that. Okay, got it?