Гибсон Чан — Книга 1: Песнь моей духовной жизни (шаги пути), занятие 4

[Speaker 1]
This is the cool part, where we are looking at all the ancient layers of this tradition, an amazing tradition of wisdom for two and a half thousand years. We're looking at each step in the tradition. And I really hope you guys appreciate how the mixed nuts, the diamond-cutter, we are covering every single generation, every single era of the great wisdom.

I think it's a real achievement. It's an amazing achievement, because each layer in history has its own language. And you cannot really understand the classics if you don't study each layer.

We have 14 different layers, and to be honest, as you saw this morning with Abhidharma, each layer has its own unique language. The words don't mean the same thing if you're in the logic school, or you're in the middle way, or you're in the Abhidharma. The same words mean completely different things.

So really, if you're going to train a translator to study the classics, to translate the classics with sensitivity, and with skill, and with an appreciation for the different shades of meaning, you really have to find somebody who will teach you 14 different languages. And that's what's happening with the mixed nuts, and I'm very proud of it. And we are covering, as we saw, let's blow this picture up, we got 27 different books covering all the eras, all the generations of wisdom for two and a half thousand years.

We're working on 27 different books, 27 different texts. And so I hope you appreciate that this translation team is... I'm pretty sure it's the only one in the world which is covering all the ancient languages.

It's like 14 different languages, and we're covering all of them. And I hope you appreciate that. So we have books that the oldest ones were written 2,500 years ago, and the newest ones were written 20 years ago.

And we're covering the whole span of history. And then today, what I wanted to appreciate and what I wanted to take you through is what we call snow on the mountain, which means, look, you didn't get these 27 books covering 2,500 years of different generations. You don't go to the library and say, can I just have 2,500 years of books?

You can't find them. Who keeps a book for 2,500 years? I mean, you got to be crazy.

Like if you go looking for Christian manuscripts, for example, or Islamic manuscripts, it's extremely difficult. There's only four real commentaries, for example, on what Jesus taught. There's only four Gospels.

And they're very rare to find one. And here you're talking 300,000 commentaries. 300,000 commentaries on these ancient books.

So you're talking what is surely this Indo-Tibetan stream of knowledge is the greatest in the world. It's the largest in the world. And there's a big movement at my university at Princeton, the Classics Department, where I used to spend a lot of time, because that's where you learn Sanskrit.

Traditionally, they only teach Latin and Greek. And maybe you study Sanskrit because of Greek, not because of Sanskrit, because it's the source of Greek. But there's a big movement nowadays.

There's a big, big movement in the world that says, what about Asia? What about these 300,000 books? Is that classics?

And duh, of course it's classics. It's more classics than the other classics. So we have exciting Diamond Cutter Classics translation team translating everything.

And today what I want to talk about is, look, you have to appreciate, not only is it unique in the world, in history, to cover all 14 generations of wisdom language, 14 different languages. That's not the only amazing thing. It's amazing to find the books in the first place.

So you have to understand that the mixed nuts couldn't exist without A-L-L. It's not possible. Hey, we got 12 amazing people here, men and women translators of ancient texts.

Yeah, they're amazing. What are they translating? Oh, we couldn't find anything.

So we don't have this problem. We have an effort. We have a project that's 35 years old this year, and they have located 100,000 ancient books.

John Brady, Indiana Jones, traveling around the world to weird places. You're talking the 12,000 foot high, 4,000 meter mountains in Ladakh, and John Brady's wandering around. I was there once with him, and he was throwing up from altitude sickness the whole time.

It's amazing that you have a group of dedicated book finders called Asian Legacy Library. Today, what I wanted to show you was the story behind each of the 27 books that the mixed nuts are translating. By the way, those 27 are just the beginning.

That's just the first years of the first generation. We want to add many more translators, hassle, and we want to add many more books. But those 27, I thought it would be fun for you to see where did those books come from?

How did we find them? Because if you don't find them, you can't translate them. Again, the purpose of the translation program, the Mixed Nuts Diamond Cutter Classics, is not to translate books.

The goal is to bring great, great ideas into the modern world, where people can use them for their real life, like for business innovation, for new ideas. We call it new ancient ideas. My boss in the jewelry industry used to say, when you advertise, always have a contradiction.

Like modern classical look. This jewelry is modern classical. That's pretty much what we want with these translations.

We want classical, innovative, creative, usable, modern wisdom that you can use for spaceships and internet systems and new marketing ideas and new finance ideas and new creativity, innovation ideas. The purpose of translating the books is to throw them into the modern world and use them. That's kind of been my life story.

I used the ancient books as an experiment, as a laboratory in New York City to build the world's largest diamond jewelry company. I say, if you understand the ancient books and you use them, you can have an incredible life. You can have all the money you want.

That's just the beginning. Then you can have all the beautiful relationships you want. You can have extraordinary success on the outside and the inside.

How did we find these books? Today we're going to talk about that. Here we go.

Again, I put it in a picture here, in an illustration. The black colors, diamonds, are meant to form a snow mountain. ALL's kind of identity is like a snow mountain.

The snow falls at the top of the mountain. The snow melts. The snow turns into water.

We have snow on the mountain today, here, just by coincidence. Just this morning, right? Not yesterday.

The snow falls on the mountain, which means we find the books. Then the snow starts to melt, which means we translate the books. Then the water comes down the mountain.

Then the normal people in the normal world, and it's not religion. It's just great ideas. It doesn't matter what religion it used to be or what country it came from, or what language it was in.

It's just cool, usable wisdom, no matter what country you live in, or what language you use, or what race you are, or what religion your parents... It doesn't matter. The books can be used by anybody, and they have been used throughout the world.

The Diamond Cutter Sutra, for example. Okay, let's get through this, or otherwise Geshe-la is going to run out of time. I'm going to go down to the sutra era.

Let's begin at the beginning. The Mixed Nuts have been working on six different sutras. Let's look at where each of the sutras we're translating came from.

Where did they come from? How did ALL find each of those sutras? I'll just start down in this corner here.

Our translator Yang Teng, Teng Teng, has been translating the Sutra of Vimalakirti. Oh, where did you guys get that? It was located by ALL at a Mongolian temple in New Jersey, near New York, in 1987.

How many years ago? 35 years ago. That was one of the first books we found.

It's funny because those books... I'm going to tell you a little story of each book. Probably I'll run out of time.

Those books were wrapped up in golden silk cloths and no one ever opened them for 20 years. They were sitting there for about over 20 years. We poked in, we opened up the cloths and ALL found the Vimalakirti Sutra there.

The first book of the 27 that we're talking about today was found in a tiny Mongolian temple founded by Mongolian refugees after World War II in a tiny little town in New Jersey in the United States. Very exciting discovery. The next book which is...

we're going to describe... This is also a book that's being translated by Yang Teng, Teng Teng, and one of her colleagues. This is called Lapis Lazuli Sutra, the Blue Stone Sutra.

Sometimes you can call it Medicine Buddhist Sutra. We found... The Sanskrit was found by our Sanskrit ALL team led by Ayesha Nguyen.

It was found in a gilgit. Gilgit is a weird Sanskrit dialect that is part of Afghanistan now. There's a huge pile of rocks there.

Some idiot, I don't know why, dug down at the bottom of the rocks and found a box. In the box was the sutra. It was the only copy of the Medicine Buddhist Sutra in Sanskrit.

Then our team found the... There was a book published like 150 years ago. That book was lost long ago.

Our team, our Sanskrit ALL team, which is a very exciting team, they go all over the world, they find these books. They found this manuscript and we used it, and we published it. It's already published.

It was finished last year. That tells you how hard ALL is working for all of us. All right, the next sutra here, also by Tongtong and her scholarly collaborators, is called All the Kinds of Karma, Karma Vibhanga in Sanskrit.

They dug around, dug around, dug around, and ALL located the Sanskrit in a French publication. Which I think is also over 100 years old. That was located by our Sanskrit manuscript team.

We found it. It was input by our Sanskrit input centers in Varanasi, India, and Kathmandu, Nepal. We have it, and it was put into the book two years ago.

That book is coming out in the next few months. We're just finishing the illustration. Our Guadalajara team of illustrators, led by Gina Rivera, amazing illustrator, is being finished now.

The illustrations are being finished now. The illustrations were found in Indonesia, and they were discovered underground. The wall was buried, and they dug out the wall, and ALL team located these illustrations that are meant to accompany the book.

The illustrations were done a thousand years ago. They were carved into walls. ALL is finding all this cool stuff too.

All right, the next one here. This is Geshe-la's translation of Nagarjuna's Wisdom. I am using the Sanskrit that was found by our Kathmandu team.

It's called N-I-B-S, right, John? Mirosh and Shakya. They found the Sanskrit of Nagarjuna's text, and we're using it.

It's being used for the translation. ALL found the Sanskrit that was written 1,800 years ago. I have to say it's a clean input, and it's a clean Sanskrit version.

It's very exciting having Nagarjuna. Okay, the next book we have here is Nick's 60 Verses of Arya and Nagarjuna. I didn't include it here, but we are using a manuscript that was put together in Beijing, China by a great university scholar there, and he's been very kind to share it with us.

So a lot of Nick's 60 Verses are missing. They have never been found. But this scholar from China put together a version which has all the verses which are available, and he's been very kind helping us to get those verses and insert them into Nick's book.

Very exciting work. Next book is Ben's Jewel of the True Thought. This is probably the best commentary to Dharmakirti ever written in the last 1,500 years.

This is probably the best commentary ever written in the last 1,500 years, and it was written 20 years ago, 30 years ago. It was written 30 years ago. It's extremely rare that a modern person can write a commentary which is the quality of the ancient commentaries.

We're very fortunate, a great scholar named Geshe Yeshe Wangchuk from Tibet, living in Lhasa, wrote this extraordinary commentary. It's two huge volumes. I had the honor to work on it with him.

This is the first edition in history was discovered by the ALL team. The first publication in history was done by ALL. It was a handwritten manuscript.

He wrote it by hand, and he carried it over the Himalayas. ALL discovered it, input it, and Ben is translating it. It is the greatest commentary in the world to one of the most important books in the world, which is Dharmakirti's commentary on accurate perception.

Okay, good. Now we have Adam Andrade's Chichedok, quality and characteristic. Extremely important book for the understanding of emptiness.

What's the story of that book? A rare manuscript recovered by ALL in Inner Mongolia, which is part of mainland China, in Ulaan Oodha, which is the capital of that province, Inner Mongolia. We found that manuscript was delivered to ALL by a Geshe.

We believe he's the last surviving Geshe from Inner Mongolia, Geshe Ngawang Gelman. He brought the manuscript and gave it to ALL, and we input it. Tse Ngawang Dashe is the author.

It's one of the greatest textbooks for learning the great ideas of the logic schools. It's very exciting. In fact, I was there when he handed it to us, and it was amazing.

It was amazing. He died shortly after that. The last Geshe from Inner Mongolia delivered it to ALL, and he died within a few days after that.

He was very, very old, and he said ALL should have this. We're translating it. Adam's book is going to come out in the next few months.

It's so exciting for me. I don't know about you guys. When you read these books, when you get the e-book from Rosa or Venerable Ching Ming, you should appreciate the hard work that went into finding them and then translating them.

Writing them, forget it. That's another hard work. Tim's book, which will take 60 years to finish.

I wish you a long life. It's eight different books. It's a set of eight different books on the perfection of wisdom.

Where did we find those? That was the first book that ALL ever input, if you don't count the Catalogue to the Congress. That was actually the first, first book.

But those eight books, what's the catalogue number? Zero, zero, zero, zero, one. I remember the catalogue number.

Zero, zero, zero, zero, one. I was there when we started inputting it. Those eight books were the first books ever input by ALL 35 years ago.

Those books were so rare that they were copied by hand on a natural lithograph. Lithograph is an old printing process where you write the book on a flat stone and you put ink on the flat stone. You write it with a special pen on the stone and then you cover it with ink and you put paper on it and you press it into the stone.

That first copy was a lithograph. It was done in a tiny little village in the jungles of the Himalayas. The eight books, you're talking about 2,000, 3,000 pages.

They were done page by page, writing it on a stone and pressing the paper into the stone. Then recently, I mean not recently, but 20 years ago, which is recent for ALL, we found a complete set. When ALL went to St. Petersburg, Russia to the library of the Russian Oriental Library there, of the government of Russia, which is part of the Academy of Sciences of Russia, we found a set there carved, a very rare carved set. We are working with that library. ALL cataloged 141,000 books there in that library to sit in the coldest city in the world. It is the coldest large city in the world, St. Petersburg. It's only a few months of the year that you have daylight all day. John Brady's team sat there for 14 years and cataloged 141,000 books. We found these eight books there.

God, this is an adventure story. We should make a movie, right Osiris? All right, okay.

Gangs, I'm going to take some time today. I apologize. Gibson said it was fine, right Gibson?

Okay. It may take the whole class, I'm sorry. But we got to finish today.

Gangs' Wheel of Life. Don't forget Sugeng is doing two books on the Wheel of Life. One is a more recent publication, maybe written about only 500 years ago.

Okay, by K. Dup Tenpa Dargye actually. Where did we find his book?

It was missing completely, okay? It's a textbook, Seramay Monastery, which was founded 600 years ago. And the textbook was written 500 years ago, and it's been missing.

Okay, guess who found it? John Brady's team found it. And I'll tell you something cool.

This was the first book ever published from ALL data. So ALL found the book. ALL input the book.

And ALL published the book. And this book was missing in the whole world. And ALL found it.

It's a very valuable book on the Wheel of Life. ALL found it. And ALL brought it back into the world.

Very cool. And by the way, that book is finishing this year. It'll come out this year.

So that's how you're going to have it. And it's so valuable, the Wheel of Life. A real teaching on the Wheel of Life is so valuable.

Venerable Utpala's Emptiness Meditation, which came out several months ago. And if you don't have a copy, you are an idiot. It's an extremely valuable book.

Emptiness Teachings, 500 pages. Ancient meditation manuals included. For free, for dessert.

And this was one of the first great collaborations between BDRC, Buddhist Digital Research Center, and ALL. And under the great Gene Smith, who has passed away, but he was one of the greatest scholars and book finders of ancient Asian books in history. By the way, he's the great-grandson of Joseph Smith, who founded the Mormons.

And it's kind of funny, because he was probably the greatest Buddhist scholar in modern history. And he collected an extraordinary amount of books, thousands and thousands of books. He published them, and he donated them to the universities of China.

He donated them. His huge personal collection is found in the Chengdu University, donated to the government of China. And it's an amazing collaboration between ALL and Gene Smith to find this book and to publish it.

And that beautiful relationship has kept going all of these years between BDRC and ALL. It's a great, great collaboration. I got to tell you the story of how I met Gene Smith.

He was a big director at the Library of Congress. He was in charge of buying all the Asian books. I was 22 or something, and I begged him to put his name on my application to the National Endowment for the Humanities to do a project of translating the classics.

So that was 47 years ago. Geshe Michael wrote a project called Mixed Nuts and tried to get money and didn't. But he said, come down to the Library of Congress and meet me, and I'll be happy to help you.

So I went to his office at the Library of Congress, and he wasn't there. And his secretary said, sorry, are you Michael Roach? I said, yeah.

He said, look, Gene's never met you. He understands you're a sincere young man. And he went home.

He's already at home. So he said, here's his address. Please go meet him at home.

He's already gone home for the day. So I went to his house. His house had thousands of books.

Every wall is covered with books. Three deep. Three books deep.

Thousands and thousands of books in this huge apartment. And there's 25 of the world's greatest Tibetan scholars on the floor eating dinner together. And this is Gene Smith.

Unbelievable. And he says, oh, welcome. You're Michael.

I said, yeah. He said, what are you up to nowadays? I said, well, my teacher's teaching me Abhidharma.

He said, oh, Abhidharma. I got a book for you. And he ran into another room, and he pulled out this rare Abhidharma manuscript.

He said, here, take it. And I'm like, well, I'm in a bus. I don't have a car.

It's dangerous to carry the manuscript. He said, no, keep it. Just take it home.

Keep it. And that's how ALL started with BDRC. It's a very cool story.

And that was Gene Smith. He's so big-hearted, so generous. And ALL and BDRC, that's the philosophy.

The books are for everybody. The ALL database, $15 million of work, 35 years of work. It's free.

It's online for free. And that's what this legacy is. John Brady.

All right. So anyway, Utpala's book includes the stages of meditation poster, which ALL discovered in 1995 in a small Mongolian temple. Pretty awesome.

And that poster is included in the book, and the whole translation is there. Very, very cool poster for learning everything you need to know about meditation. It's all there.

Discovered in a Mongolian temple by ALL. Thank you, John Brady. John Brady's here.

Thank you. We love you. Seiji Arao's Crown of Knives, Lojong.

It'll be ready in about two years. Sorry, next year, one year. The story of that is so cool.

So Tibetan books were always carved. Sanskrit books were always written by hand. The older Sanskrit books were scratched on palm leaves with a needle.

So look at how printing has developed. The earliest ALL books are palm leaf manuscripts scratched on palm leaves with a needle and then smeared with charcoal dust. And those happened to last for about 2,000 years.

It's much better than paper. Apparently bugs don't like the taste of palm leaves. And even in a wet climate, they survive.

So those books were... Seiji's book was certainly written on a palm leaf. And then later it was carved.

And then for the first time in around 1960, cold type, cold metal type, which means cold metal type you got to understand. A, click, screw, click. B, click, screw, push.

D, that's how you make a word. You put each letter in by hand and you tighten the frame. And then it's called drop the pie means the frame pops out and 10,000 letters are on the floor.

So you're sitting here screwing in for Tibetan. SA, KA, TA, KA, YA, TA, KYA, ZHES PA'I RGYU One letter is four pieces of metal. And the first time ever, the first book ever done that way was recovered by ALL in 1990.

And that's where Seiji's manuscript comes from. Unbelievable. We don't have the palm leaf, it's lost.

The carving is lost. All we have is this book that some guy, some guy named Tujang Rinpoche suffered and put it together. Sorry, Gibson, I'll give you an extra class later.

I'm translating Tsongkhapa's famous book on interpreting the ancient schools, which is our next generation here. And the first publication of that book was done in 1980. This is after 99% of all wood carvers in Tibet were gone.

By 1980, 99% of all carvers were old, were already 70, 80 years old. And that was lost. The carving of books was basically lost by 1980.

So we discovered offset printing. Offset printing means, this is before computers. You don't have computers.

You don't have ALL typing things because there's no computers. And so we are photographing with film these ancient books of Tsongkhapa. And that's where this book came from.

This is one of the first books ever created by film process in the world, in Tibetan books. And that was paid for and started by Khen Rinpoche Gyatso Losantarchen. 1980.

1980. Then we got Ben Kramer's book on Siddhanta, The History of the Schools. Where did that come from?

By the way, it's coming out this year in October. OM MANI PADME HUM OM MANI PADME HUM means, I hope so. This is an extremely rare manuscript copy of Choney Lama, recovered by Jason Dunbar of ALL who took buses across China and went to Choney Monastery and begged for a copy.

And they let him copy it. Okay. Unbelievable.

Those books were lost forever. They were gone. We couldn't find any copies.

And he got on a bus. He went on this cheap, terrible countryside bus ride and he found a copy at Choney Monastery in 1994. And that's why Ben had a book to translate for you guys.

So try to appreciate what John Brady has made possible. What ALL has made possible. All right.

Sorry, Gibson. Okay. Song of My Spiritual Life, which is being translated by a great scholar named Gibson Chang.

Okay, Gibson Chang. And this again was a rare copy located in 1999 at the St. Petersburg Library. And that library during the whole Soviet Union time was locked shut.

No one could enter it. And when the Russian Federation was created, within the month, ALL was there. And they were begging, begging, begging, begging to catalog the books.

And we got permission from the government. And it took 14 years of hard work. And we found Gibson's book there.

All right. Venu Udpala's new book on emptiness, which is deeper than her first book on emptiness, which seems impossible, but it's true. If you've been in the classes, you know it's deeper because we don't understand anything.

All right, just kidding. The notes for that book, without the data... Okay, you got to understand, the database, it's not just a database of books.

It's a search engine. It's a search engine. It's 16 million pages of books and you can search them in a batch file.

You can search all of them together in one second, two seconds. You can search two and a half thousand years of books in two seconds and find what you want to find. So you could not do these translations without that database.

It's not enough that they saved all the books. That's not enough. They input them in searchable data.

You see, there are other projects that are taking photographs of the books, but you can't search a photograph. It's just a pile of photographs. But what ALL accomplished, which no one in the world has done, you're talking hundreds of thousands of pages, searchable.

Without that search program, Gopher, you couldn't use the books. It doesn't matter if you have a hundred thousand books. What, are you going to sit there all day and look for something?

Which is what you do with film or what you do with PDFs or images. What's revolutionary about ALL is they created data entry centers staffed by poor people, hungry people in the Himalayas. That's unbelievable.

That's just unbelievable. It's not that ALL saved all the great books of Asia. It's that they saved hundreds of poor people in villages across Asia who didn't have work and they didn't have homes and they didn't have food.

ALL has been paying them for 35 years. What's cute is that kids are now grown up and they're working together with their mom at the ALL centers in these poor little villages. Can I tell you another story?

Anyway, I'll tell you a quick story. We did a fundraiser in New York for ALL. I stayed at John Brady's nice apartment, which later he sold and donated the money to ALL when we were short of money.

Anyway, we were doing a fundraiser at... What's that place called? The hair...

Yeah, Bum Bum Bum Bum. I wanted to have some orange juice in the morning. I went to a store.

It was like midnight. I said, John, is there any fruit store around here? He said, there's one weird store.

It stays open all night. I went there and I was picking out some oranges and I heard two ladies speaking Tibetan. The ladies working there were speaking Tibetan to each other.

I was like, whoa, what's going on? I didn't say anything. I got the oranges and I went back there.

I said, well, here, I want to buy these oranges. The ladies were okay. I said, wow, you guys look like you're from another country.

Where are you from? They said, oh, we're from Tibet. We're from the Himalayas.

I said, well, how did you get to New York? What's the story? They said, oh, it's an unbelievable story.

We were in a little tiny poor village in the Himalayas. There's this American project called ALL and they built a data entry center in our village. We're just normal village people, but we learned programming.

We learned how to program at the ALL data center. We got so good at programming that we got an American visa. We were so good at programming that we were given a visa to come to the United States.

That's how we got here. I'm like, whoa. Did you ever meet the guys in charge of this project?

They said, no, they're real busy guys. I went outside and started crying. I said, wow, this is so amazing.

They said ALL saved our families. ALL saved all the families in our village because we had money, we had income. For 35 years, ALL has been paying people a good salary and they feed their families.

ALL has saved many families. I'm doing terrible on time, I know. Okay, 10 more minutes.

Okay. It wasn't supposed to go this long. Shining from the top of my head?

Reflections. Jiggy, you got to try to be quiet, okay? All right.

It wakes up people. Heat. Ready?

[Speaker 2]
Five? Nope, too early. Okay, this is where I start thinking about my nap.

[Speaker 1]
Okay, five, four, three. The next book here is something I'm working on. It's a 10-year project called Illumination of the True Thought.

This is probably the greatest book on emptiness ever written. It's by Tsongkhapa. And the story of this book is that we are getting extensive help from scholars in mainland China to get the original Sanskrit of the Uma Lajupa, which is called the Madhyamaka Avatara by Chandrakirti.

And we're getting big help from scholars in mainland China through ALL. And that's really exciting collaboration, I think. The next book here is called The Angel Debates the Devil.

This was a cool collaboration between the Institute for the Advanced Study of World Religions and ALL in about 1990. That organization is no longer active, but it was funded by a very wealthy Chinese businessman. And they actually collected all of...

They collected tens of thousands of great books. And John Brady met the gentleman, and they worked for, I don't know, 10 years together. And we were very fortunate that we were able to find the original manuscripts for this Losanchuki Gyantsen, which is about 350 years old.

And we were very, very fortunate that ALL... John Brady worked really hard with this library, special library, to find those. And in fact, a new edition is being input this week.

And we found one of the old photocopies from that library. We found it this week, and it's being input as we speak. And without that, we couldn't do that book.

All right. Here's another book by Grandpa, which is Master Kamalashila's commentary to the Diamond Cutter Sutra. These original wood-carved prints were recovered by ALL from East Tibet in West China, East-West China, okay, in 1988.

And that was a long time ago. And China was not the economic leader that it is now. And it was hard.

It was very hard to find the woodblocks. We had to arrange for them to be printed off the woodblocks, find ink, find the paper, in times that it was very hard in those days. There wasn't good transportation.

There was no good telephones. There was no banking that was easy from that area. It was difficult to travel there.

And we found the woodblocks, and we got them printed from there. And that's why we can do Kamalashila's commentary to the Diamond Cutter. Okay, Sugeng's second book, which is deeper, deeper book on the Wheel of Life, the story behind that book.

This is an unfinished story. So I thought it would be interesting for you guys to know that many of these stories are still going on. This story is not finished.

This story doesn't have an ending yet. We cannot find the Sanskrit, okay? We have the translation into Tibetan.

We don't have the Chinese translation. We don't have any other Pali, for example. All we have is one translation.

We have no commentaries, no supporting books, nothing in 2,000 years since Vasubandhu. We have nothing. We just have one translation.

I think the guy was a little weird, to be honest. The translation is a little difficult. I think he was drunk, not drunk, but the translation is extremely difficult, and Sugeng's book is extremely difficult.

There are no commentaries. There's no help from anywhere. I'd like you to get the feeling that we haven't finished our work.

ALL is a work in progress. ALL, we're not finished for 700 years. It will take 700 years.

We've only done like 10%. We still have 90% to go, and there are books that we haven't found yet. We have teams walking through villages.

You wouldn't believe, we have a crazy guy named Dr. Ramachandran walking through villages on a false leg. He got in a car accident. He has a wooden leg, and he's walking around the villages of India looking for these old Sanskrit manuscripts, and he has recovered 15 million pages of Sanskrit manuscripts, but he didn't find this one yet.

I just want you to get the feeling that this project is not done. We have a lot of work to do. We have hundreds of years.

We have just scratched the beginning. The 27 great books you see, they're just the beginning. We're just beginning.

It's like 10% finished, and there's many, many books we are looking for. And we have people walking through jungles in West Bengal. We have people climbing in Ladakh, the mountains, looking for manuscripts.

You got to feel what... We got people wandering around Inner Mongolia. We got people in Siberia, Yakutia, looking in little libraries there, and it's an adventure story.

It's a beautiful story. Okay, next book I want to talk... I know I'm running out of time.

I don't care. Master Yen's book, very, very famous book from the Tang Dynasty, the biggest book ever written in the Tang Dynasty. Tang Dynasty, you have to understand, until the great success of the Communist Party of China in the last hundred years, it was the greatest era of the greatest country on earth.

You're talking about the greatest empire ever put together in this world. Tang Dynasty, cultural empire, an empire of wisdom and great books and great learning, and great learning as part of the government. So Tang Taizong, the emperor.

Okay, so that book, where we found it, we found a rare translation of it in Tibetan, and it has been input in 1993, and that book's going to take at least another five years to translate. It's huge. It's eight volumes.

It will be eight English volumes, if we have time to finish them. If you guys fundraise and grandpa can focus on the translation. Okay, Alison's String of Precious Jewels, this great Vinaya text, the story behind it, is that for the first time in modern history, we have recovered the teaching on the 364 full nuns' vows.

And we can only do that because we have 16 volumes recovered by ALL from two and a half thousand years ago, a hundred generations ago. Okay, we have the great corpus of Vinaya literature in the Kangyur recovered by ALL and input by ALL, and without that database, and without that search program, that nuns' tradition would be lost forever. It has been lost for a thousand years.

Xiaoping has translated, already finished that section. And it's only possible because of ALL. Okay, Adam's new book by Khenpoche, Banishing the Darkness of the Mind, first recovered in 1991 in the inter-monastery debate competitions.

Okay, where did ALL get this extraordinary valuable book? Grandpa was in the Olympics of debate. And some guy started talking about, he was pulling out quotations from this book.

I said, what the hell? What book are you talking about? He says, it's a rare book by Khenpoche.

I said, I never heard of this book. He said, I said, God, it sounds amazing. You're wiping us all out in the debates.

He said, come to my room. I'll show you a copy. And that's how ALL got that book.

It happened in the debate ground where you're not allowed to take a book. So he memorized parts of it. And he was beating all of us with this book.

I said, God damn, I got to get a copy of this book. He said, come to my room. And that's how ALL got it.

And it's like the secret weapon of all wisdom books. Thanks to Je-bung. By the way, it was the Gerong College of Bible, which is our sister college.

We have a relationship. That's the only way I got it. Okay, Word's new book, Word's new mind-only book.

This is an exciting book because the research that was done for Word's mind-only book all depends on the new catalog, the 2021 catalog to the National Library of Mongolia. So ALL has been in Mongolia for 33 years. I remember, 1991, we started.

Sorry, 31 years. And we had already written the introduction to Word's book. We had already written it.

And then we got the copy of the new catalog, which is pouring out of the National Library of Mongolia, over 100,000 books. And we got the catalog. We were almost ready to publish Word's book.

And we looked at the catalog and we said, oh my God, throw out the old introduction. This is amazing. This is the story of his book is there because when ALL catalogs a book, they type in the last five pages, the whole last five pages.

And that tells you where it was printed, who was the guy, what was he doing that week? And we got all this new information about Word's author, who's called Rigpe Rinpoche, sort of debate or something like that. And we threw out the old introduction and we wrote a new introduction in like a week, based on...

And this, by the way, if you are helping with the Gold Club or you're involved with ALL, that introduction exists because of you. If we didn't have the money to be cataloging in Mongolia now, the team now, today, working there for how many years? 31 years.

We wouldn't have Word's book, you see? Try to understand. We threw out the old introduction.

And the editor was like, what happened to the introduction? Where did the introduction go? We said, oh, we got a new one because we got the new catalog.

So we're using stuff that you guys have sponsored this week. It's changing every day. Stanley's book called Abhidharmakosha.

This is exciting because ALL was assisting a team of Chinese scholars to create an input Chinese database of the classics. And I'm happy to say that Stanley has been using the great commentaries from China in the Chinese language because of the database that was created by ALL collaborating with a group of Chinese scholars. And that database, ALL helped start that database.

And now it took a life of its own. It's already a huge database. I believe it's free also, right?

It's free. And the reason that database exists is because of ALL, because of the collaboration from the beginning. So you're talking about a second database, almost the size of ALL, okay?

Inspired by ALL. I'm almost done. Don't worry, you guys.

I also want to go back to Ben. Me and Ali did a translation of a Heart Sutra commentary. And the story of that book, I told you when we started yesterday, it was missing completely.

It was gone. And somebody said, there's a copy in Beijing. And we're like, wow.

We sent guys to Beijing. You got a copy? Yeah, we got a copy.

Can we take it? No. Can we make a copy of the copy?

Yeah. So you're talking, these books are this long, you see? So you have to stand there on a cheap photocopy machine in 1993 in Beijing.

Everyone's riding bicycles. It wasn't Lexus cars and BMWs in those days. It was all bicycles.

And you're sitting there, Xerox the page in three pieces, get some tape, glue them together. And that's where the commentary came from, okay? Same with the commentary to the Diamond Cutter Sutra.

Same manuscript. Standing at the copy machine in Beijing, 1993, which is not like Beijing of 2022, trust me. Okay, all right.

China has come a long, long way. Okay, we're almost done. I like this book called What I Really Meant.

It's a sutra by the Buddha. It's two and a half thousand years old. And we are translating that as part of a business program, an elite business program in South China called China Soft Power, a very successful program to try to revive the concept of yinsi.

Yinsi? Yinsi. Yinsi, which means the gentleman scholar of Confucius.

So in Confucian times, there's this very valuable idea of a business person who knows the classics and uses them. Jinsa, sorry. Jinsa, sorry.

So jinsa means like Renaissance person, okay? Renaissance person. And this means a businessman who really knows the classics and uses them for innovation, for creativity, for new ideas, new ancient ideas, okay?

And that program has been extremely successful. And it's all based on this ancient book called What I Really Meant. Okay, last one is the...

[Speaker 2]
Hold on, let me take a look.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. Guess I was talking too much. How are we doing on time?

Oh God, I'm perfect.

[Speaker 2]
What's the time?

[Speaker 1]
Oh, 10 minutes only. Sorry, Gibson. One more minute.

Okay, last book here is being translated. Oh, we talked about that one. Yeah, actually we're back to where we started, okay?

We're back to Yan Tang, one of our translators and her collaborator doing the book of Vimla Kirti. Again, located at a Mongolian temple in 1987. So there you see the whole picture.

Here we go. We got the core, the central channel, Jong Mai, the 14 eras of great classics, starting with the sutras and up to 1990, okay? And then you've got 27 books on the left and right hand channels being translated by the great mixed nuts, diamond cutter classics.

And it wouldn't be possible without the snow melting from the mountain of the Asian legacy libraries, hard work for 35 years. So I'd like to thank ALL. I'd like to thank the translators and I'd like to thank the 100 generations of people who got us here.

Yay, thank you. Yay. See you then.

Use the books for your modern life. You will have an amazing life. I can tell you, it works, okay?

All right, see you then. Thank you Geshe Michael. Thank you, thank you so much for stories.

I don't know if you can hear me, but that was awesome. Okay, Geshe, next time. So just so you all know, we have yoga today with Alex Roland.

Scheduled to start in four minutes. Are you there, Alex?

[Speaker 2]
Yes.