Сейджи Арао — Книга 2: Мастер Шантидева, занятие 1

[ШАПКА ДЛЯ ЦИТИРОВАНИЯ]
Курс: Seiji Arao — Book 2: Master Shantideva (Diamond Cutter Classics) — «Руководство к образу жизни бодхисаттвы» Мастера Шантидевы
Урок: занятие 01 — Fall '22 — Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life — Seiji Arao — Class 3 (начало книги)
Ведёт: Геше Майкл Роуч; перевод: Сейджи Арао
Дата и место: осень 2022; место не указано
Источник: YouTube, канал Diamond Cutter Classics, плейлист PL1KVm5jgTljSp6vDnCG3LZlYhA2STM3UR; расшифровка TurboScribe
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[Speaker 2]
Hey, Sainty. Hey, how are you Venerable Panna? Good, how are you?

Good, good. Did you get a text together? Or do you think we're going into biographies?

[Speaker 1]
Well, I talked to Geshe-la just before we went on a break, and he said he was going to check it out and we were going to start with that. So I think we, I don't know exactly what we'll do, but whatever starting with a new one means.

[Speaker 2]
Okay, could you send it to me just in case we're going to use it so I can quickly put it up on Google Drive for people?

[Speaker 1]
Yes.

[Speaker 2]
Okay, we're on.

[Speaker 1]
We're on. We're on. You're being recorded.

[Speaker 2]
I'm sorry, Seiji, we're losing.

[Speaker 1]
Without you here, we lost all the decorum. Oh, so I'm the party pooper. Okay, here we go.

Seiji is starting a completely new text. It only happens once every six years or so, or ten years, so you should give him congratulations. And make a strong wish right now that we can finish it, because it is probably a seven, eight year project.

As we go into it, I hope everyone will contribute their prayers that we can finish it. It's not going to be easy to finish it. Me and Seiji decided we would like to work on Master Shantideva's Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life.

I think what people may not realize is that it's considered a very high quality emptiness teaching. You think of it as teaching the six perfections, and he's talking about giving, and dak shen yam je, compassion, exchanging yourself and others. But in the tradition, in our Tsongkhapa tradition, it's considered one of the three or four greatest classics on emptiness.

That part of the book is very powerful, and very, very famous, and very helpful. We thought if the Mixed Nuts is going to try to translate some of the great classics of Buddhism in our lifetime, they say shindu pang ma, it would be a shame not to include the Bodhisattva Charya Avatar. We're going to go there and work on that text.

I'm not satisfied with any of the commentaries. I have read the commentaries that are available. There are four or five in the Tengyur, or more.

There are a few in Tibetan. There's a lot of partial ones that people didn't finish. Gyel Tsubje wrote a commentary.

He seems to be rushed. Or, I don't know, he was working on something else, but it's not... I used it for the ACI courses, but I wasn't happy with it.

It's not like him. Maybe he was distracted, maybe he was ill, I don't know. But it doesn't seem...

It seems like there's a lot more to talk about there. What we decided was, in Mongolia, there was a tradition to write commentaries on the great Tibetan translations of the Sanskrit books in Tibetan. These guys who grew up speaking Mongolian would write in Tibetan, and they would write extraordinary commentaries.

There's a few great ones, like Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche's Treatment of Vajrayana is a big part of the ACI Vajrayana course. In fact, we translated the whole book for the course. It's better than any other presentation in history of the whole tantra.

He's a Mongol, and he's writing in a foreign language. It's eloquent, and it's brilliant. I don't know, me and Seiji were like, let's write something in Tibetan.

Let's write a commentary. And Tibetan language has been damaged. It reached its peak in 1921, when Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche wrote down Pabongka Rinpoche's Liberation in the Palm of Your Hands.

Then it started its decline due to political problems and due to violence in the country. Now Tibetan has broken into two sub-dialects. One is no longer pure because it is so influenced by the Chinese language.

And then the other is no longer pure because it's so influenced by Hindi. Recently, I had the opportunity, recently in Japan, I met a Tibetan scholar who left 40 years ago. He came to Japan 40 years ago.

I had the opportunity to spend two days with him. We spoke only in Tibetan, and it was perfect Tibetan. Perfect, eloquent, and it sounded like poetry.

And that's because he's been in Japan for 40 years. He's still speaking the central dialect before it was damaged. And by the way, you can't fix a language.

Once it's damaged, it's damaged. So it's like if I'm speaking English and I'm throwing in Spanish every two sentences or something, it doesn't sound classical, and it will never recover. But I think it would be really cool to write a commentary in pure classical Tibetan, say from the 15th century, and that's the goal.

We're going to... It's called a fool's mission. I'm up for it.

I think it'll be fun. I'm really hungry to do it. I feel really hungry to do that.

And I also feel strongly that these classes, there's now 1,070 classes we have finished. 1,070 classes could be used by Tibetan speakers. And we have to really make sure that we have that available.

And Nick and I have been working on it, and we're going to be working on it. So what you're witnessing now is kind of a cool moment because we're trying to undertake a new ancient commentary to one of the three or four most important books in history of the world. Shantideva's entering the public now.

That's where I'm at. And we'll see how it goes. Since we got the necessary materials, especially the Sanskrit, we got...

And by the way, the Tibetan authors of commentaries, which again are not complete, there's no thorough commentary to this. That's not my grandson, right? No, okay.

[Speaker 2]
That's somebody else.

[Speaker 1]
The Tibetans who wrote commentaries did not have Sanskrit. They didn't understand Sanskrit. And the Sanskrit is...

It was written in Sanskrit, and it's highly poetic. It's a true masterpiece. And we're not going to try to write the commentary in Sanskrit because I personally don't have that ability.

But we can write a commentary in Tibetan, and we can reference the Sanskrit. And when he's making Sanskrit puns or he's using important Sanskrit words, we can include that in the commentary. So that's the task, and we have the commentary.

Aisha, our Sanskrit Indiana Jones person. And it's funny because Aisha... Our relationship goes back to early meditation and yoga classes in Argentina and Mexico, and playing music together with Anatole, playing jazz together.

And one day we asked her if she wanted to work on the Sanskrit and helping to find Sanskrit books. And it turns out she's a genius at it. Some kind of miracle.

And she's really, really good at it. So she's been working with a couple of Sanskrit scholars to find the best version of the Sanskrit. So our commentary is going to be based on the Tibetan translation mainly.

But we'll look at the Sanskrit and we'll study the Sanskrit. It's a great text to use for learning Sanskrit. And we'll make comments where Sanskrit...

It would be useful. We'll make comments in Tibetan where it would be interesting to talk about the Sanskrit. So that's the plan, and I'm excited about it, but I tend to get overexcited about new projects and then they turn out to be black holes, as Rosa knows very well.

So here's what I would do to start this project. And so I thought as a class I would show you guys what we have to do to start a project like this. And so Seiji's going to learn I think all the mixed nuts.

If you can watch what I do. And this is how we start a new book. And it's not that the book comes to us from heaven and drops into the computer.

It's a lot of work to prepare the text for translation. And this is all housekeeping stuff that grandpa used to do by himself. And it's time for you guys to learn how to do it.

So here we go. Thanks a lot Geshe-la. Thank you for...

I know Seiji, you're under very intense pressure with DCI. Luckily the intense pressure at home is largely landing on North's head. And so we're lucky that mom is taking so much pressure.

And we appreciate it. I really appreciate it. I know it's intense pressure to have a baby.

From my vast experience with children I know it's not an easy thing. So I'm really, really grateful. And Seiji's running two very large organizations.

DCI had 148,000 students last year. And he's got an incredible amount of work. So thank you Seiji.

And please don't wear out too fast. This project is going to take some time. So I'm going to show you some steps that I would take starting this project.

Here's the Tibetan. I went and got it during the break. During the 10-minute break I went and got it from John's database.

John's database is so well organized. And hopefully it doesn't get unorganized. That you can easily find a book.

So I went... Why are those... Who wants to make 50 bucks?

Why are those letters in red? Because there's a glitch in it. Go for it.

[Speaker 2]
There's a glitch in it. No glitch.

[Speaker 1]
No glitch. Okay, Kramer, I think you got the money here. Gopher doesn't have a...

I thought...

[Speaker 2]
Gopher does have a... But this wasn't that. These are just his searches.

[Speaker 1]
Gopher makes the search items red. What kind of search did I frame? You did a Boolean search.

You did a... Boolean, yeah. Either Pokedu or Chupalajupa.

Yeah. Good. Yeah.

Within probably two lines. Okay. One thing I would do just for housekeeping.

This class is a housekeeping class. I'm sorry. I know it's not sexy.

It's going to get extremely sexy. But I would have to change everything to black, for example. And there's certain massaging you have to do to a text that can save you hundreds of hours.

Okay? And that's why we can do seven... That's why we can translate 12 books at one time, which is impossible.

And there's certain tricks of the trade. Okay? So here we go.

First of all, if it's me, which it is, I would change the font to my favorite font. I know you may have your own favorite font, and I don't care. Command A to block out the entire text.

Go to the font. Change it to Palatino Limit Time. And change it to 12 point.

Okay? So now it's in Mixed Nuts. Manuscript standard, not final book.

Final book, if Rosa gets her hands on it or Utpala and they want to change the font, I'll consider it. This is an ASCII document. There's no formatting.

There's no... What do you call that? Justification, for example.

And why are there these double returns, you guys?

[Speaker 2]
Those are line breaks.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. We retain, in the data, in the ASCII, in the ALL data, we keep the line breaks of the original carving. Okay?

So here's the first page of the original carving. And it has one, two, three, four, five lines on the first wood block. Okay?

There's five lines of Tibetan on the first wood block. Each space you see here is a new line of wood block carving. Okay?

That's what these spaces are. That helps you find... Why do we even want to have it?

If we find a questionable reading, we don't want to go look through the whole stupid book and try to find it. We want... If I find a mistake in the third line here, I can go to the wood block and look at the third line of the wood block.

And I save myself huge amounts of time. So, the first job we have to do... And by the way, again, this is all boring stuff, but you cannot translate without doing it.

And if you do it well, you save yourself hundreds of hours. And you got to do it in the right order. So I hope Grandpa's got it in his head.

I'll tell you one thing I do immediately. I will save the document in Seiji's... where I keep Seiji.

I keep Seiji in a certain place. Here's translators. These are all the translators.

Here's Seiji. And I will start a new folder called... What's a good nickname, Seiji, for the whole book?

Something short. Don't give me more than one or two words.

[Speaker 2]
Bodhisattva.

[Speaker 1]
I like it. Okay, Bodhisattva. Okay.

So that's going to be our new folder. There's his Lojong Senje Khorlo, his crown of knives. Here's all the stuff we had there.

And these are all the steps that Grandpa will take before I start a new book. So I've got Bodhisattva. I might want to have a place where I put the original input.

And that's the Tibetan input that we received, and that's in our database. So I will put the original input there. I put it there before I mess with it.

I put it there before I start playing with it. And that's what we have so far. We have the original input, raw input, before I tried to correct anything.

So I'm going to say original input 10.5.22. And it's easily reached to 20.30, and we'll look back and say, wow, we started that eight years ago. If I mess up something in preparing the class, I can go back to this version. So I'm a pack rat.

I have saved every version of every text that we ever worked on. I have saved two per week, minimum, in five years and eight months. I have hundreds of backups.

And I don't trust anybody. I assume there's going to be a nuclear war. I'm sorry.

I just plan for it. Now I have saved the first input. I might use it again someday.

The first thing I would like to do with this, and I hope I'm not doing it out of order, but if I am, I can go back to the original input. I would like to take out these line breaks. I don't need the line breaks anymore.

Now I'm going to split the text according to sentences of English translation, and I have to get rid of these line breaks. Now look, I can go down here. I can go down, down, down, down.

Backspace, backspace, frontspace. Okay, how many keystrokes? Five, six, I don't know.

And there are hundreds of line breaks, maybe thousands. Wouldn't it be nice if I could automate it? This is something that Phil could do a lot better than me, but I do get by.

I'm going to go to the top of the file, make sure I'm at the top of the file, click on the top of the file, and I'm going to search for double returns. And in Word, here's how you search for a return. It's caret, lowercase p, caret, lowercase p.

Now I'm searching for those spaces now. That's the internal coding for Microsoft Word, for a double return. Then I go to this little booger here, which brings up a replacement screen.

What do I want to replace the double return with?

[Speaker 2]
Single space.

[Speaker 1]
God bless you, great. Okay, so I say, and by the way, Microsoft Word doesn't show you a single space. It's invisible.

But it's there. Where you see the flashing cursor here, there's a space in front of it. They should have had some code, but they didn't.

Now you pray, I hope it works. We're going to wipe out 543 double returns. You just think about it.

Am I doing this right? Yep. Okay, and you say replace all of them.

Okay. And there's no more carving line breaks, but there are hard returns that I don't want. Okay.

I would like the document to be hard return-less. So what's next?

[Speaker 2]
Single P, replaced with nothing.

[Speaker 1]
Single caret P. Replaced with single space. Replaced with a single space.

I still have a single space there, although you can't see it. Very important to remember. I have messed that up.

Yeah, and now we're making 1,644 changes. It's going to be hard to take it back. Are you sure you want to do this?

Hey, I'm up for it. You got to have some courage. Fortitude.

Okay, here we go. Replace all. And it did come out looking like that.

Okay, all right, cool. That's the whole thing. Now there's some more work you can do.

Now it's full of... Is it full of hard returns? Let's check.

You took out the hard returns, now we're going to do the verses.

[Speaker 2]
It seems we still have one hard return.

[Speaker 1]
We blocked out the whole thing, right? And I want to change the justification to full justification. There we go.

It's looking good. The text is looking good. It's kind of where we want it.

Is there anything else we can automate?

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, you can put the setting of having curly quotes instead of straight quotes, and replace all of those, boom.

[Speaker 1]
Okay, I'm going to search for those old quotation marks which were in the ASCII data. This, for example...

[Speaker 2]
If you first make your setting, then it's going to be curly quotes in your automated formatting settings in Word.

[Speaker 1]
You'd have to do that first. I have an easier way to do it. You ready?

[Speaker 2]
Okay.

[Speaker 1]
So I'm copying the old quotation mark into this find and replace thing. And I put it there. You can't even tell it.

This is how I would do it, not knowing all the stuff you know. I just hit one. And I got one.

[Speaker 2]
You don't even have to do that. You can just put another one in there, and it'll do it. Don't get that space.

[Speaker 1]
You can delete it in the line. There is no space. You had a space after that.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, it's got a space.

[Speaker 1]
You can delete it up ahead, up there. Oops. Okay, now, see, it's not there.

There was just an optical illusion.

[Speaker 2]
Oh, that's the paragraph return. Okay.

[Speaker 1]
So I'm going to search for all the old-fashioned quotation marks, and I'm going to change them to the modern ones. I'm not locating the old one, but let's see if it does it. No.

Yeah, it may. Okay. Cool.

[Speaker 2]
Oh, there was a space in there.

[Speaker 1]
Oh, there was. My God.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, undo.

[Speaker 1]
Apple Z. Okay. All right.

I don't see a space here. Look. Yeah, it's not showing it, but that's weird.

Probably just want to go a space ahead with the keyboard arrow and then backspace.

[Speaker 2]
I never use this find-replace dialog box. I use the advanced find-replace dialog box, and I tend to get better results than using this one.

[Speaker 1]
Let's try it one more time. I agree.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
Oh. It didn't delete it again.

[Speaker 2]
You know, it's because it's showing the paragraph break. If you hit the little paragraph button, it'll show them to you, and then you can select it without that. You see the little P paragraph on the toolbar directly above your cursor.

Underneath, tell me, and to the right. Up, up, up.

[Speaker 1]
Right, right, right. There you go.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, hit that. Yeah, totally. There's the bad guy.

There's the bad guy. Oh, okay. So how about I do it here?

Just backspace over him. You could do that, too. Yeah, either way.

[Speaker 1]
Okay. All right. Let's try this.

And I replaced this one, right?

[Speaker 2]
Yeah. Okay. I should do it.

[Speaker 1]
Did it?

[Speaker 2]
No, it did something weird.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, it did something weird.

[Speaker 2]
No, it didn't do it. I think it has to do with your automated...

[Speaker 1]
I'm going to leave him in for now, and you take him out for me. You can take him out for me, okay?

[Speaker 2]
Yeah. If I can do it before we start working on it, then it saves so much time.

[Speaker 1]
Let's not do it right now, okay? Now, some more stuff we can do. Any time there's two commas with a space between them, that's supposed to be...

This book was written in poetry. So it's supposed to... We've got to replace all the comma, space, commas with what?

Comma, return, comma.

[Speaker 2]
Comma, return, comma.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. Comma, hard return, comma, right? Except for the ones that end in O.

We can fix that after. No, it's all poetry, so we don't have to do that. We don't have to worry about that.

Here we go. Om mani padme hum. It helps to do mantra.

We're going to take all the comma, space, commas. By the way, make sure you do not have your caps lock on, or it will blow up. I'm just telling you.

Okay, so comma, caret, P, right? Comma, okay? This is going to change it all to poetry, I think.

Replace all. Yay! Okay, so I just saved myself how many strokes?

I saved myself 10,000 keystrokes. It's a miracle. By the way, when you see something odd like this wrong, that's a typing error by the input operator.

It's not... Now, when they put the page numbers in the typing, they put in... What's that called, an ampersand or an at sign?

Ampersand.

[Speaker 2]
No, that's not an ampersand.

[Speaker 1]
It's ampersat. Ampersat.

[Speaker 2]
Oh, sorry. I didn't understand.

[Speaker 1]
Now, listen. The front page of every Tibetan back and front, the front page only, and not the back, has these extra ornaments. Okay, these extra little squiggles.

We got to take them out without hurting the manuscript, okay? And what that's going to look like... Let's find a space.

Let's go to 3A. Where is 3A? Oh, here's another thing we can do right away, you guys.

What's this semicolon doing here? It's a little Tibetan ornament. Yeah, it's a Tibetan ornament.

Why is it used? Listen, when the letter is a single letter, and it's at the front of a line, they make a different slash after it. Because those letters tend to break off the blocks.

And it's a different slash. We got to take all those out, because they don't mean anything anymore. We got to take out all those slashes.

We should have done it before we did some other stuff, but that's okay. We got to take out all the semicolons before we translate anything. Otherwise, we think it's going to be messy.

It's the typical order you usually do it, Geshe-la. Well, yeah, something like that. And maybe this video would be helpful for future generations, so I replace all, okay?

I just saved myself 46 keystrokes, okay? Now, I'm going to go look at 4A or something. Yeah.

There's the squiggle. It was there before. I'm just wondering.

Let me try 6A. Yeah. Okay, let's go.

Now, if the page is the front page, after the number, we put A, okay? So if it says, for example, 2A, we want this to end up looking like this. We want it to look like this, folio 2A.

Okay? We want it to look like that. And there's stuff we can do.

There's stuff we can do to automate it. If you were good with wildcards, you could do the whole thing. I'm not.

So, we're going to look for this sign. We'll start with this sign because it's an easy place to start, okay? What do you call that?

Ampersand? Ampersand. Ampersand.

All right, we're going to replace them all here. Watch what I do. I'm going to look for all the ampersands.

Hello, ampersand. I'm going to replace them with the front end of a folio. Okay?

Square bracket F period space. Okay? And that'll save me 150 keystrokes.

Okay? And by the way, if you're working for 10 hours a day or something, you appreciate it. Okay?

So here we go. We did it. Now it'd be nice to put the right bracket, wouldn't it?

Unfortunately, you can't. Okay? Unless you know wildcards, and I'm no good at it.

So, this we're going to have to do manually, and we'll do it as we go. Okay? We'll change all these.

We want it to end up like this. Okay? Okay.

Can't you change it from one capital B to one lowercase B, like any occurrence of one? Yeah, but that'd be almost as slow as. No, no.

Cause it's only one. Oh, no, no. What am I talking about?

[Speaker 2]
Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
Sorry.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah. I would take nine moves.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. Nine moves. Yeah.

Something you can do, Nick. And I'm going to show you some. Let's look for three.

Actually, I have done it with the nine before. Okay. This is what three A looks like now.

And I can, for A's, for front sides, I can do a search and replace. Okay? I can do search for capital A.

Oh, I got to change it to case sensitive. Okay?

[Speaker 2]
Because the ornament.

[Speaker 1]
Change it to case sensitive. That's the case. Okay?

What do I do now? How do I keep that? I guess I just click over here somewhere.

[Speaker 2]
Click replace, and then you can just finish in that dialog box.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, you can do it from that dialog.

[Speaker 2]
Up above where it says find. Just click replace.

[Speaker 1]
Where is it? Where is it?

[Speaker 2]
At the very top.

[Speaker 1]
At the top middle of the box.

[Speaker 2]
Very top. I can't see it.

[Speaker 1]
It's blocked. Okay, I can't see it. Can you drag the box down?

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, right there. There you go.

[Speaker 1]
And I say replace all or something?

[Speaker 2]
No, no, no. Now put in what you want to replace it with.

[Speaker 1]
Oh, I see what you mean. Okay. So I got.

I got. But you have to put in what you're looking for, which is not looking for. Capital A star.

Capital A, yeah. Capital A space? Star.

Asterisk, right? Oh, yeah. No, there's a space.

Space comma, right? Yeah. Yeah.

I'm not quite sure. I think it's comma space comma, but we already changed all those. It's going to make some booboos, but I'll take it.

It'll still save me some work. So I want it to go like this, right? Yep.

Do I need a space after that square bracket?

[Speaker 2]
No.

[Speaker 1]
You shouldn't. No. Okay, replace all.

Wait, you got to do the mantra. That saved me 30 keystrokes, which is exactly half of 76, which is how many pages we have. Okay, cool.

That works. Now we got some little problems like this extra comma here. But we can, you know, that's not such a lot of work.

So, why do we have to put an extra comma here after G? I'm going to look for G space comma. Shouldn't there be two commas?

Shouldn't it end in a comma and then the next line should start with a comma? No.

[Speaker 2]
No, you don't do a shay after a qa.

[Speaker 1]
Because after qa, there's no shay. Or there's a space with a shay. There's no slash.

Slash is not allowed after G because it would look like more G. G ends with a slash. Ah, so could we take all the G space commas and change them to G hard return no space comma?

[Speaker 3]
No. Yep. Could you?

[Speaker 1]
No. You're going to hit all the NGs and mess them up.

[Speaker 2]
No.

[Speaker 1]
There shouldn't be blank spaces after NG. Yeah, theoretically, the comma would come right away. Theoretically.

Uncle Nick said so. Let's try it. So, we're looking for G.

Space comma. Space. Space comma.

And we want to change it to G hard return. Okay. And comma.

All right. Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
Should already have the second comma, right?

[Speaker 1]
No, I'm searching for the second comma. This one. Yeah, because he's going to take it out or whatever, yeah.

Okay, I'm going to save myself 172 keystrokes if it works. Yeah. Nifty.

Nice. And there you go. We're going to add to our document here.

Look, it's almost in poetry already. There's a few boo-boos here. And I can live with that.

Okay. All right, isn't that awesome?

[Speaker 2]
It's awesome.

[Speaker 1]
And we saved ourself a huge amount of work. Now, Seiji, if I'm starting a project like this, I will leave this. I've done about all the cleanup that I can, okay?

I can't do much more cleanup. And I'm just going to leave it, all right? And I'm going to go to the...

I want the Sanskrit cleaned up because I'm going to be inserting the Sanskrit because my commentary is going to turn people on to the secret cool things in the Sanskrit. Like we just had Loka Aloka, right? What was that?

The eye of the world. Loka Aloka. Loka Aloka.

Okay. I'm going to do that. But Seiji, I got something easier to do since we don't have a lot of time left.

A low-hanging fruit for you and me in this project. Let's go get the...

[Speaker 2]
Sanskrit?

[Speaker 1]
Nope. Well, we're going to have to do that, but I'm not going to do it tonight. We don't have much time.

[Speaker 2]
Commentary?

[Speaker 1]
That's something we'd like to get.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, that is a commentary.

[Speaker 1]
Root text? No.

[Speaker 2]
Independent?

[Speaker 1]
Already translated verses? If it's me, and I'm writing this book, I'd like to know his life story. He is sexy.

What's his nickname? Eat Sleep Poop. The three thoughts.

Mr. Eat Sleep Poop. I don't want to write a commentary to Bodhisattva Charmantara if it cannot start with a little insight into the author.

[Speaker 2]
Right?

[Speaker 1]
Now, I ask you, where's the best place to get it? And I don't, I'm not interested in five biographies. I don't have time.

And it's just, it would take us five years. I want a, I want the best basic, clean, storyteller biography. No, he's not a storyteller.

He's so dry. Mingzhu?

[Speaker 2]
Yongden? Yongden, Yongden, Yongden.

[Speaker 1]
Whoa. That doesn't sound dry. It sounds like he's on...

The Stories of the Lamrim Master? Yeah, the Biographies of the Lamrim Teacher. Okay.

We're going to go search there. Let's go find a sexy biography of a sexy guy. So.

Oh, Dinara made a good point that you could save as, so that you're not saving it as the original input. He may have saved over the original input. I have a thing on my left-hand finger.

No, I changed the date, Nick. So we're okay. Yeah, I could save it as, I could save it as Bodhisattva.

I'd say Bodhisattva root, okay?

[Speaker 2]
Five?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, 22. And then I'm going to create a new folder for it under CG. And we're going to say, oops.

We're going to say root text, okay? I'm going to say root Tibetan, okay? And we're going to put it there.

Good? Okay, good point, Dinara. Let's see, we got 10 minutes.

Let's see, we got 14 minutes. Let's see if we can find... And now, now I'll tell you a problem, okay?

This is sad. The author of the Lamrim Lama Biographies, which is 2,000 pages, okay? He didn't mark where they start.

The text runs into each other. Yeah, okay. It's like, there's no, it's as if you wrote a book and the chapters just float into each other, okay?

So what he will do, probably, is put four slashes instead of two. So we're going to look for shi-wa-tha, which is what? Shanti-shi-wa.

Shanti-shi-wa, peace, tha, deva. And we're going to go look for his name near four commas, which is sometimes helpful and sometimes not, okay? But this is the kind of desperate thing you do when you're a very busy person and 10 people are asking you for stuff.

So I'm going to look for comma, comma, space, comma, comma, okay? Near what? Shi-wa-tha, okay?

And he has an alternate name, shi-wa-tha, okay? How close? Two lines is fine.

Now, I can search the whole sungbun, 16,000 books at the present moment, times 50 is what? It's about a million pages. Or I could restrict my search to that book, which would be smarter.

That book. Yeah, so we're going to create a new search field called the Biographies of the Lamrim Masters. Okay?

And we're just going to restrict our search to the Biographies of the Lamrim Masters, those two volumes, by Yongzhen Yeshe Gyeltsen, teacher of the, I don't know, 10th mystery. All right, here we go. Add a search field.

I want it to be in the sungbun, okay? And this took a hell of a lot of work, many years of work, to organize it this way, okay? Many, many years of work.

You don't see it. Here's all the categories of all the Tibetan books that were ever written in history. And only A.L. Hell has done this work. Okay, you cannot see this on the TBRC website or something like that. They don't have it. This is all the subject categories of every single book ever written in Tibetan, okay?

If you go to Tantra, oh man, I was showing off. Come on. I'm sorry, hang on.

Okay, I got to get rid of this one. That was a boo-boo, that one. Okay, we're going to add a search field.

We go to, I keep everything under A because it's only one keystroke. That means all the Buddhist books in the universe. And on my computer, it's A, okay?

And I'm going to the sungbun, Native Tibetan works. Here are all the categories of Native Tibetan works ever written. And I want to show off Tantra, for example.

167 deities, 167 different Tantras, okay? You think there's Vajrayogini and Chakrasambhara, there's 165 others. If you go to Vajrayogini, for example, which is my favorite lady, which happens to be right here, we have in the database, oh yeah, get this out of here.

We have commentaries. We have the poa, how to move the consciousness. We have guru yoga.

We have retreat instructions. We have praises of her. We have how to give the empowerment.

We have how to do the mandala, how to do chö, which I can't explain, how to go into someone else's dead body if you run out of mileage. How to visualize Vajrayogini inside your body, her whole world, how to do offerings to her, how to do the proper hand gestures, how to do the secondary initiation, how to do all the daily practices, how to do the fire offering. It's just a fire offering.

We have this many books. One, two, three. It's about 20 books on how to do the fire offering.

When we do a fire offering in Diamond Mountain, it came from 20 books. It took years and years to prepare it. This is the sadhana, daily sadhana.

There's 20 choices. This is how to do the mantras, two texts on how to do the mantras, how to do Tse Tsu, which we did today, and how to do Tsog, which is very similar, even if it's not Tse Tsu. For Vajrayogini alone, it's a couple of hundred volumes.

Somebody had to put each one in the right place in the database. Nowadays, Nick and Ben and me are working on it together. We average about 500 books a year, and we're about 20 years behind.

We are 20 years behind. We can't keep up. The guys typing are going crazy.

Those Mongolian scholars, we can't keep up with them. And it's very delicate work. You put the book in the wrong place, no one will ever find it.

Every time we put a book in the database, we're like, is that sure, are you sure it's there? Yeah, yeah, it's there, okay. Now, why am I showing you all this?

We were supposed to go get the biography of Shantideva, and we only have, we got seven minutes, right, Nick?

[Speaker 2]
Yes.

[Speaker 1]
So I'm going to go in the way I know how to do it, which is I go to the biography section. These are arranged by quite different kinds of biographies. And I'm going to go to the one, the general biography, where is that?

Subject matter. Here's the biographies of all the Lamrim masters. Okay, here, okay?

These are the biographies of all the Lamrim teachers. So that's now my search field. I know the book is in that shelf, because I put it there, okay?

So I say open means now I have a search field. Now we're ready to look for Shantideva's biography, so that we can keep Seiji busy while we write the commentary. Understand?

We put him on, okay? I buy time, this is a story of my life. This is a story of my life.

You know, I'll buy a few weeks or something, okay? So here we go. Okay, what do you have to do?

[Speaker 2]
Find.

[Speaker 1]
All right, hope you find it. All right, mantra. I hope you put some commas next to Shantideva.

And I feel like, you know, I read an article today about the people who sent the James Webb telescope up, and this is how they felt when they pushed the button. They were telling, they were writing about how it feels to push the button, and either it blows up or it goes to the right planet. So here we go.

One, two, three, you ready? Uh-oh. You didn't put commas next to his name.

Let's try two commas. That's the only, they start the next biography on the same line. Put a few extra commas there.

They don't have a new chapter or something like that. Okay, let's try two commas. Somebody must have not done the mantra.

You ready? Okay, there's Gyelse Shivoha, the Bodhisattva Shivoha. And there's a double comma, one line above him, and that is a different teacher.

And he's just mentioned about, in that teacher's biography. It's not the one we want. It looks like this guy was the spiritual son of Shivoha.

Uh, no. Gyelse means Bodhisattva. No, no, look after that.

Gyelse, look above, sorry. Gyelse Shivoha Say, Shivoha Layi Say. Yeah, so in theory, Nick, if we were backwards from here.

But I'll tell you what, I'm really good at scanning. Just say, what the hell, I'll scan it. Okay, now I'm going to look for all the Shantidevas in the whole stupid book.

Mm-hmm, you ready? That's not, that's not, that's not. We got 28.

I've had searches with 400 people I've worked with.

[Speaker 2]
Hey, this is it.

[Speaker 1]
NAM PAR THAB PA NI, BSTAN PA THUB PA'I YANG Well, this says where he was born. Okay. DOR BYE'I DAN.

YUL KHOR MO SANGS RGYAS To the west of Vajra, Vajrasana. Yeah, this is his biography. There's no, there's no indication at all that it's starting.

Okay. Let me see. PHUN TU CHEN GYI YANG LA LA LA LA LA Yeah, it just starts by saying he was born.

All right. It starts on page 146. All right.

And where does it end? I don't know. Yeah, no idea.

Now, this is where you have to be good at scanning. Okay. I'll tell you some tricks I might use.

How do you refer to the passing of a great teacher?

[Speaker 2]
Reach there.

[Speaker 1]
YIN YIN DE DE LA DE PA Nirvana.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
That's a long story. You put me under pressure. Okay.

Somebody remember that the biography starts at 146 B. Geshe-la, what's the average length of one of them? Can't you just like...

No, it doesn't work that way. Yeah, that's what we're gonna look for. Some of those are like a half a page, right?

Okay. Starts fully on... What was it?

[Speaker 3]
146 B.

[Speaker 1]
In volume one or volume two? Volume one, it looks. Volume one of Biographies of the Lamrim Masters.

Okay. Now, ends at... Dun, dun, dun.

To be continued. But we do have a few minutes. I have one minute.

First, I gotta find out where to store this. I'm gonna store it for Seiji Bodhisattva. And then I'll make a new folder called Chantibaeo.

[Speaker 3]
Is the name of the kid's spelling of his name?

[Speaker 1]
Not usually.

[Speaker 3]
He's a shiwa. Shiwa.

[Speaker 1]
A shiwatha or shiweatha. God... Yeah, and by the way, I would say here, I would change it to Chantibaeo.

Okay. And I always put the date. It's just a habit.

Because I have separate and different. All right. We're gonna do some crazy thing.

We'll try a few crazy things. If it doesn't work, we didn't lose anything. We'll search.

Wait. Couldn't you just click ahead and do your shiwatha searches until there's a big gap? No, you can't do that.

You can't do it in Gopher. You gotta search for four commas. They don't even have it.

No. Really? Let's do two commas.

Okay, so I'm in the two comma territory, right? I got 308 of them. I'm gonna hold the return key down until I hit page...

[Speaker 2]
146B. I'm in 146B.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. See, I can skip down there pretty fast. Right?

This is a little delicate. And by the way, this is not a problem of the search program. It's a problem of how they did it in Tibet.

Oh, you guys, I got some good news for you. Look. There's a comma.

[Speaker 2]
You were right there within a couple of moments.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, apostrophe. Yeah, apostrophe. This will help us a lot.

Nope. Wait, maybe you did something wrong, because... I might've used the wrong apostrophe.

I'm gonna... Let's try this. That's good.

Oh no, that's hitting every single page. Oh, that's good. Okay, let's go down to where?

[Speaker 2]
146B.

[Speaker 1]
Oh, this is gonna... I think we're gonna be able to do it on time. Don't worry.

I'm not keeping you late, but I spent...

[Speaker 2]
Oh, we're getting close.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, you see, that starts all of the Lam Rim Lamas, and Shantideva is one of the first ones. Okay, now the next hit should be the end of his life. Right?

[Speaker 2]
This is 145B.

[Speaker 1]
I know, but this is where that started. Okay, OM MANI PADME HUM.

[Speaker 2]
OM MANI PADME HUM.

[Speaker 1]
That's the end of his life.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
Yep. Yeah. What page is it?

[Speaker 2]
151A.

[Speaker 1]
Now, I'll tell you some... We're done. We're out of time.

But I'll tell you some statistical stuff. Is this a reasonable amount of material to translate? You got to ask yourself that question at this point, before you do a 10-year project.

Do we have time to go through five folios of Shantideva's life story? That's 10 sides, and we average six sides per term. Per term.

It'll take one and a half terms, or almost two full terms. It'll take seven months to translate his biography. Is it worth it?

These are decisions I have. I say it's worth it. If the whole book's going to take you five years for the first volume, then okay, spread it out.

Do one class out of every term, and you'll finish the biography by the time you finish the book, the first book. So that's a strategy, you guys. And this way, we have something to do while also writing the commentary.

Okay, got it? All right, cool. Very cool.

That's kind of what it takes to start a book. Another thing I would do, Seiji, is I would create a folder with all existing commentators. From the where and the where.

Kangyur, or from the Tengyur and the Seungbum. Seungbum. Yeah, so that's another job we have to do.

That way, we can easily search for a word or an idea that we don't know. And then we're going to have to select a Sanskrit version, a Sanskrit version, on the basis of probable accuracy. And what?

Input accuracy. Our Sanskrit input team is still shaky, and they still make a lot of mistakes. So we have to make tough decisions about which manuscript we use.

And sometimes it takes me months to clean it up. Okay? So these are things you don't see.

Like, the Sanskrit took about two months to clean it up. Okay? And Aisha helped.

Aisha did a lot of the work, okay? All right, you guys. Vishal, is there something that I can do to save you time as homework?

That's music to my ears. Within my skillset.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
Not, you know, the best thing you can do to save me time is to take more responsibility for the SCIM applications. He says meaning. Meaning, I don't know, probably meaning we can't do much.

Let's meet in the next few days and do that, okay? All right? Okay.

I can't think of anything else. There will be stuff. But right now, that's all we can do.

You can help me move to a new computer. I still didn't do it. Oh yeah, we can do it together.

[Speaker 2]
Okay.

[Speaker 1]
All right. Okay, I don't want to keep you guys late. I'll see you.

Happy Seichu, by the way. Hey mom, keep sending me pictures. He's very, very popular with my wife.

[Speaker 2]
Okay, I will.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, she thinks, he puts her in a good mood for about two hours.

[Speaker 2]
Great. Sometimes I think I overdo it, but if you like them, I can. No, no, no.

[Speaker 1]
Fine.

[Speaker 2]
Thank you.

[Speaker 1]
Nick and other baby holders were, baby holders. Yeah, Adam and really, it's one of the things we enjoy the most is seeing those pictures. So please do send them.

Buma Zimpas. Hey. Chugu Zen, Chugu Zen.

Oh, you're too. All right, how do I get out of here?

[Speaker 2]
Good night, Geshe-la. Please rest.

[Speaker 1]
Happy Seichu. Happy Seichu. Thank you.

Thank you for involving us in this process of creating a new commentary. That's amazing.

[Speaker 2]
Thank you.

[Speaker 1]
Good night, everybody. See you tomorrow.

[Speaker 2]
Good night, Geshe-la. Please rest a little bit.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. Good night. See you guys tomorrow.

[Speaker 2]
Good night. Bye.