Сяопин Джоу / Элисон — Книга 2: Самоцвет истинного намерения (Панчен Лодро Лексанг о «Виная-сутре»), занятие 1

[ШАПКА ДЛЯ ЦИТИРОВАНИЯ]
Курс: Xiaoping Zhou / Alison — Book 2: The Gemstone of True Intent (Panchen Lodru Leksang on the Vinaya Sutra) — Diamond Cutter Classics
Урок: Занятие 1 — конец Книги 1 («Нить драгоценных самоцветов», Гьял Кенпо Дракпа Гьелцен), начало Книги 2 («Самоцвет истинного замысла», Панчен Лодро Лексанг)
Ведёт: Геше Майкл Роуч, Элисон Сяопин Джоу (перевод на китайский)
Дата и место: 23.10.2023, Даймонд-Маунтин (Римрок/Седона, Аризона)
Источник: YouTube, канал Diamond Cutter Classics, плейлист PL1KVm5jgTljRBpdDsc-GnPM-ab-9EEPLy; расшифровка TurboScribe
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[Speaker 1]
Okay that should help you guys. Okay. Wait, stop, stop.

Don't do anything. Okay. It's good, it's good.

Can you read here? Can you hear? Okay.

Yep. Okay, give me online. Can I hear?

Okay. Okay, cool. This part is called the Colophon, and in a Tibetan book, the introduction is at the end.

Okay, so it's at the end that you find out all this information about the author, things like that. I see a mistake here in the woodblock. Okay, and here we go.

Maybe Sugeng and you guys can help. What's too soon? Yeah, the three times, and I like to translate it fully as past, present, and future.

We don't say the Buddhas evolved three times in English. We don't say that. We say the Buddhas of the past, the present, and the future.

So when you're translating this, I suggest you do it that way. It sounds better to an English reader. The material is hard enough already.

Don't make them learn new words. Okay, all right. And by the way, a translation is a translation, and it shouldn't be like the Buddhas of the Tathagatas came to the Siddharthas and they, you know, and there's just Sanskrit words with English and between each one.

Okay, a translation should be a translation. Okay, here we go. Sangye, Sangye?

Buddhas. Buddhas, Tamjey, Kun, all of them. Ngo means essence.

Okay, there's a certain person I'm thinking of who is the essence of the Buddhas in every corner of the universe. Okay, and he is a Kun Kyat, Kun, I'm sorry, he is a Rik Kun Kyat Dak. Okay, Rik Kun Kyat Dak.

This Rik refers to, we had friends who went to Nepal about a month ago on a fundraising trip for our input centers, and they had some Nepalese masters did a sand mandala for them, and it was a sand mandala of the five Buddha families, and those are called Rik. Okay, this Rik here means Buddha family. Okay, Rik Kun means all five Riks.

So, you know, normally when you take a diamond way initiation, there'll be a small mandala with the five colors of the five Buddhas, and traditionally you take a flower petal, each initiated person takes a flower petal and closes their eyes and lets it go, and then the flower petal comes down on the Buddha family that you have a connection to. But this teacher, his teacher is Rik Kun. Yeah, you don't need the petal with my teacher, he's all five Buddhas.

Okay, he's bragging about his teacher, which is really good. Kyat Dak means, Kyat Dak is an idiom, and it means the lord over a secret universe, the lord of a secret universe. Kyat means covers everywhere, Dak means boss, so the over boss of the whole mandala, the over boss of the mandala of all the Buddha families in the entire universe, my teacher.

Okay, all right, Dak Yi, he should have said my, okay, my teacher, Ken Rinpoche. Okay, and so his teacher was also probably a former abbot of a monastery, okay, Ken Rinpoche. Jetun means a high and holy one, okay, and his personal name was Koin Chok Jigme Wangpo, okay.

Koin Chok means three jewels, okay, his personal name is Mr. Three Jewels Jigme. Fearless one, and Wangpo again means power, powerful one, so lord, fearless lord of the three jewels, that was his name. And not just him, but also his se.

Children? Yeah, his sons or daughters, okay, so this is the high honorific, because he's talking about his teacher, he's using high, high honorific. There are several sub-languages in the scriptural language, so she's going to have to learn four or five different languages that are two and a half thousand years old, and it's very difficult.

So, Yab Tse means the father or the mother, and the prince or the princesses, okay. Here it means my teacher and his close disciples, okay, my teacher and his close disciples, okay. Shab means what?

Their holy feet, okay, or their foxy feet or something. High honorific, okay. What's du?

Du means dust, okay, can also mean atom, okay. Why shab du? The dust of their feet, and I think Jesus used to often wash his disciples' feet, and in the olden days, before there were shoes, people wore sandals, it was hot, people's feet were really dirty, there was lots of, there were no cars, there were horses and cows and elephants pooping everywhere on the street, and people's feet were dirty, and so he said, I happily put my head on the du of my lama's shab. Yeah, I happily put my head on my lama's feet, okay. Shab du.

Chiwa means my top of my head, this is called chiwa, okay. I am very pleased to put my top of my head in the dirt of my lama's feet, okay. Chi du.

Denpa means I'm happy to put it there, okay. Who is me? Okay, and he didn't say his name yet, in the whole book he didn't say his name yet.

It's Gyel Khenpo, say Gyel Khenpo. Yeah, that's his nickname, okay, it's Abbot from the land of Gyel, okay, he's called Gyel Khenpo. His personal monk name is?

Japa Gyeltsen. Japa Gyeltsen, okay, Japa Gyeltsen, which means victory banner of wide fame, or something like that, okay. So that's his, he just signed the book, he just signed the book, okay.

Okay, please read another paragraph. Now listen, this is the last paragraph of the book. I have some personal notes after that, we're not going to read them.

This is the last paragraph of the book. When she finishes the last syllable, SO, you have to break out into wild applause, which can be heard by the Buddhas of the ten directions, okay, and there's supposed to be something else walking in at that moment. You ready?

Oh yeah. Okay, here we go, get ready. Okay, let's translate.

Dampa means holy ones. Kongma means teachers of the past, okay, Dampa Kongma Nam. GYIS GSUNGS LAS GYUD TE.

GSUNGS means their speech, okay. GYUD TE means I put this book together from many other books. I collected pieces from the great Lamas of the past, okay.

GNYEN CHEN KU LAS LHA ZHUG DBAN NAS. And there's a special statue in the city of Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, there's a special statue there, Kud Lai. It's located at the foot of the Potala Palace, and that's called Shul, okay.

Shul means there was a very famous printing house at the foot of the, at the bottom of the hill in front of the Potala Palace. Very wonderful carving, one of the greatest carving centers in the history. It was destroyed completely during the Red Guards.

There's not one brick left, but that place, he was there. DBAN NAS BSGUNG LDAN RANG RGYAS SNYING. I finished writing this book near to the printing facility at the foot of the Potala Palace, okay.

That's where he was. They usually write where they were when they finish the book. She was at Diamond Mountain.

And then there's always a little note at the end. IKET PA means the poor guy who had to write it out by hand, because there's no computers, right. Some junior student had to write out, and it's very, very slow, because he has to write it out in beautiful calligraphy, and then they will carve the block from that.

They will put it, they'll glue it on top of the wood, and they'll carve the block. So some poor guy was the calligraphy guy, okay, and his name was, thank you Losang Dargay, okay. His personal name was Losang Dargay.

Ta-da, we finished. And it's a great contribution to the world, because now monks and nuns will know the rules they're supposed to keep. And there were many schools, 18 major schools of monks and nuns, so it's very important to have the, it's important to have that record, and it's important to keep them.

And you can't keep them if you don't know them. That seems to be the case. All right, okay now, that was extremely difficult to translate.

I gave you an example yesterday. There's the funniest example I like. There's a nun's vow against wrapping your spice, spices in little paper packets with thread, and asking a monk to help you.

So apparently there was this naughty nun, she's famous, and she was in the marketplace, and she was buying tiny packets of pepper or cardamom, and she was tying them up in leaves, right? And then she was pretending that she couldn't tie the string, and there was a big handsome monk next to her, and she's like, oh, I have trouble with the string, and he said, that's okay, I can help you. And eventually they got in trouble together.

So there's a vow about not asking handsome monks, no one ever asked me, to tie your strings. So, and we, when we translated it, we're like, we don't know what the heck this is about. And then we had to use John Brady's database.

John Brady's database is three million pages input so far, 12 million pages preserved, 12 million pages photographed. The input is behind the process, it takes a long time to input it, but once you input it, it's searchable. You can search it.

So we, all we have to do is ask the computer, give me strings near spice, and it will find the day that that happened. It will find it in less than two seconds. It will search three million pages in less than two seconds.

And we started to notice something, every time we got the answer to a question in the database, it was the same book. There are probably a hundred Vinaya books already input in the database. They go from two and a half thousand years ago to about 1400.

And we kept hitting the same book. So out of many thousands of pages, we kept finding what we needed in the same book. And finally, we thought, wow, somebody should translate that book.

Because it's really, really beautiful. And so we started to research that book. And Nick and Ben and other people found us scans.

We got scans of the book and we sent them to our input center. Our input center is so amazing that they can input a thousand page book in one week. And they type it twice.

Well, they type it. There's five steps to putting input. One person types the whole book.

Then a second different person types the whole book. Then a third person compares every single syllable of the first two typers. A fourth person repeats that work with the first two typers.

And then a fifth person compares the two comparers. And so the data is highly, highly accurate. And so that's why we spend so much money.

There's probably 60 people typing that book like 20 hours a day. They work really hard and they're really, really extraordinary people. And they've been doing it now for 35 years.

And we have a lot of cases where the original ladies are sitting with their daughters who are now mothers themselves. And they're typing together. And it's really beautiful.

It's really amazing. So if you ever see John Brady, he's got the shiny head. You should thank him.

And so we asked him, if we find these woodblocks, will you input it for us? And he did. And so let's go to that text, okay?

And let's talk about that text. Now usually when we start a new text, I like to do a study. I like to estimate how much work is in how many years.

My estimate is that it's 225,699 words, okay? Which makes it just less than 10 times longer than the last book. The last book took seven years, okay?

So call it 50-year project, okay? It's probably going to take about 50 years, okay? It's going to be 3,224 pages in English, okay?

And I think you should just go ahead and do foolish stuff like that, you know? Let's start and see how far we get, okay? And nobody else is going to do it.

And that's the truth of this project, okay? There's nobody else in the world who can do this project. And we just have to do it until we stop, you know?

And there's nobody else is going to do it. Nobody else is foolish enough to spend 35 years and 15 million dollars inputting these books. And they're free online.

We don't charge anything. So, you know, nobody else wants to do it. We have no competition.

So, it's kind of a good business. All right, so we're going to start the second book. And let me switch over to that book.

It's called The Gemstone of the True Intent. I like the word gemstone. True intent means what did Buddha really mean, you know, in the Vinaya, okay?

The author's name is, say, Penchen? Penchen. Lao Zhu?

Lao Zhu. Next time. He's not a Penchen Lama.

A lot of Lamas are called Penchen. It means Pandita Chimbo. It means in Sanskrit, Maha Pandita.

And that just means a really smart guy, okay? Great master. Maha, say Maha?

Pandita. You got to curl your tongue back. Maha?

Pandita. And it means great master. So, he's a Penchen.

He's not a Penchen Lama, okay? But he was given that title because he was so amazing. We don't have a lot of information about him.

In Sugeng's book, I did a small study of him. We don't even know his birth year or his death year. We can estimate from his teacher's years that he lived in 1550.

So, he lived about 450 years ago, okay? And he's just after Tsongkhapa. So, that's a hot time to be born, okay?

There was a revolution of wisdom going on and he was right in the middle of it, okay? I wanted to show you this picture. These are the scans that we're working from, okay?

These are the scans. These are the wood blocks that we're working from. And those of you who are learning Tibetan, okay?

I'll read the first line of the first block. These are two different carvings. Of the same book, okay?

I'll read the first line, okay? gen chok dunpa dun dzin nye war kor, dun dzin nye war kor, okay? gen chok dunpa dun dzin nye war kor.

Say gen chok, dunpa, dun dzin, nye war kor. nye war kor. So, at the beginning of his book, and by the way, you can say you were there on the first day.

I would estimate about 600 classes, okay? It will take about 600 classes, something like that. You were in the first one, okay?

You can always be in the second one. We have class on Saturday morning and Monday night, and it's free. And if you don't come, you're a...

what do you call it? My wife's here, I can't... there's a whole bunch of words I can't say right now.

So, gen chok means supreme guide, okay? The supreme guide. The best person to guide you through the mountains, gen chok, okay?

Who's that? Dunpa. That teacher, capital T, who's that?

Shakyamuni Buddha, okay? So, highest guide, Shakyamuni Buddha, I bow down to him, okay? Here's the second person he bows down to.

It says here, dun dzin. Dun dzin means Vinaya keeper, Vinaya holder. She's a dun dzin now, for about 10 minutes.

10 minutes ago, she became a dun dzin. She's a holder of the lineage. She's keeper of the lineage to keep it surviving in the world, okay?

Dun dzin. So, we've got one. So, he bows down to the first dun dzin, the first holder of the Vinaya lineage in this world, which is Nyewar Khor.

Nyewar is the Tibetan for Sanskrit upa, and then Khor is li. So, this is Upali, okay? Upali.

And Upali was a close disciple of Lord Buddha. He was very interested in the code of conduct of monks and nuns, and so he became the first Vinaya holder in history, okay? So, he's famous for being the first person in this world to hold that lineage.

There have been about exactly 100 holders since then, okay? She's 101. Seriously, there have been 100 in generation to generation, and she's generation 101, okay?

Dun dzin. The first dun dzin was Upali. I like this word when I first met my teacher.

One of his students, he was 55 years old. He had just arrived in the United States. He couldn't speak any English.

One of his sponsors offered to pay for him to take an English language class, English as a second language, ESL class, at Georgetown University in Washington DC. And we didn't know anybody, and we didn't have any money. We were all broke.

And somebody said, there's a Buddhist temple there, and maybe they will let you sleep there. And we got to know them. These guys are monks from Sri Lanka, and it was called the vihara, which means kind of like the small temple monastery.

They had five or six monks. And then there was a cook named Upali. This is how I learned the word, because every time he put too much salt in the dinner, the head monk on the third floor would go, Upali!

And then he'd come running up the stairs, and this word is burned into my mind. He got names from that. God knows where he is now.

Okay, that's the first line of the first block. Let's look at the same line in the second block. Here we go.

It's right here. Oh, it's going to be stubborn. Sorry.

Okay, I'll just read it. Say, nyi me nyen, dang dong dzun Upali. Okay, so he bows down to nyi me.

Nyi me means what? Nyi me, it means the son. It means the son.

And nyen means the friend. The long form of geshe is geway shen nyen, spiritual friend. So nyen means spiritual friend.

Nyi me nyen means the friend of the son. And this is an old expression for Lord Buddha, for our Buddha. His nickname is friend of the son.

Nyi me nyen. And dul dzin, that single word is the same. And then there's Upali, which is the translation of the first block, which says nye war kor.

It has the Tibetan. The second block has the Sanskrit. Someone's messing with the blocks.

I mean, big time. They have changed four of the seven syllables in the first line, and the rest of the book is like that. Someone went through the first author's book and updated half the words.

It's unbelievable. It's like, I can't describe it. It's like someone took the New York Times and substituted words for words, and they mean the same thing.

The meaning didn't change. He's still bowing down to Buddha and to the Vinaya holder named Upali, but six or seven of the syllables are different. Somebody went through the first manuscript.

First of all, someone wrote a book. Then they carved it, and that's extremely expensive. In my life, I've only carved one book, and it was a short book, and it took about 10 years to finish.

I didn't carve it. I mean, I hired two brothers to carve it. They were the last carvers who survived the loss of Tibet.

They were the last two carvers, and they died. They're gone. Nobody can carve now.

It takes a lot of money, and it takes many years. Those carvers can't read Tibetan. They carve backwards.

They carve Tibetan backwards. You see? Because then you put the paper on it, and you print.

They cannot read what they're carving. To them, it's just a piece of... it's a drawing.

It's not a book. Somebody went to the expense of carving a huge book. I mean, you're talking 15 years of carving, or hiring 200 carvers for six months or something.

They carved the whole book, and then someone got a copy and rewrote the whole book, and carved it again. Somebody carved it again. It's unbelievable.

It's totally unbelievable. I've never seen anything like it, and I believe it was the author. I personally believe it was the author, because the new version is excellent, and the first version was excellent.

That's the frustrating thing. They're both very, very good. They're both extremely high quality.

They're the highest quality Vinaya I've ever seen, out of thousands and thousands of pages. It's the best, and I think it's the same guy. I think he got a copy of his book and rewrote it.

Rewrote it. The whole thing. Like, he got it, I think, 20 years later or something.

He decided he wanted... I don't know. He learned that Upali was how you translate Nirmal Kaur, and he said, I'm putting a Sanskrit in there, and it's unbelievable.

I've never seen anything like it. We did an interesting thing. We were freaked out.

We didn't know, is this for real? Who would rewrite a whole book 20 years later with different words, but the same meaning? We worked really hard on it, and we decided to do samples, okay?

Why? Compare? Yeah, we compare samples.

We'll see if it's the same book. You see what I mean? So then, to decide which samples, we chose only the difficult parts that we used for her first book.

You see what I mean? Every time we didn't know the ten watchtower colors, we used his book, and we searched it on the database. You see what I mean?

So, we have a record of every time we went to use the deeper book, we have a record of... we keep a record of everything in the mixed nuts. We are anal, mixed nuts.

We keep a record of everything. We know every time we used the ancient reference book to find something that wasn't in her first book. We still have a record of it.

So, we said, ah, these are the most important parts of his book. Let's go compare them on the two wood blocks. It took like 20 hours, okay?

That's what grandpa does when you're not there. And he did the whole... throughout the whole book, he did the same thing.

It is the same book. And every piece has been rewritten, like, with the same meaning, okay? It's unbelievable.

We checked, we sampled the whole book, and it's the same book, okay? It's unbelievable. Then I thought, I had this paranoia.

I thought, I'm doing something wrong. There's something wrong here, you know? And then the title of the book.

Let's go to the title. In Tibetan, okay? Here it is.

We're going to read the title of the book. Okay, ready? And it's going to help us with our mystery, okay?

Here we go. We got time to do this? Yeah, please.

Okay, please read. Okay. Okay, you are witness that she started the book.

I don't know how to finish it. A Buddhist is not allowed to start a project and not finish it. You either die or you finish.

And there are books carved that stop in the middle of a sentence. The author died, but they still carved, you know? In the Tengu, in the Karma, in the ancient Karmas, there's still books that finish.

They stop halfway through the line. It's like, ugh. So, pressure.

Pressure. Either you finish or you die. That's the two choices, okay?

There's your choices, okay? Densha is going to be an important word in Tim's book, which we're doing tonight, later tonight. We're working on Tim's book.

Densha means... Classical commentary. Classical commentary, okay?

Normally, Densha refers to an explanation book or a commentary written after Lord Buddha died, up to the time that Buddhism reached Tibet. So, you're talking 500 B.C., up to 1,000 A.D., during those 15 centuries. If someone wrote a great commentary, we call it a Densha, or a Shastra.

It's called Shastra, okay? Shastra. If you translate all those books, and there happen to be 3,660 about, because we input all of them, we finish.

If you translate them, that's called gyur, okay? So, Densha Gyurwa is called Dengur. Dengur.

Some of you know the word Dengur. That's the whole collection of explanation books, not written by Buddha, written by later scholars, that survived from ancient India. There are 3,700, basically.

And the first job of ALL, our first goal was to input all of them, and we finished it about 10 years ago, okay? And it took a... You have no idea.

First of all, we didn't have a carbon, and we got one special way. We got one out of the place where it was, and it was not easy. Legally, okay?

Don't worry, we paid for it, okay? And nobody was using it, okay? And anyway...

And so, we finished it, and then we finished the Kangyur, which is 990 books by Lord Buddha, okay? How many of those are Tantra? Half, over half, okay?

So, don't tell me Tantra is some weird little thing, okay? Over half of the books ever taught by Lord Buddha are Diamond Way, okay? And I got a question from friends in other Buddhist countries.

They said, oh, is Tantra for real? Is Diamond Way for real? I said, well, there's, you know, 50,000 pages.

I can send you a copy, you know, okay? All right, so anyway, Dengur means classical shastra, classical commentary. That classical commentary is called dulwa dodzawa.

Say dulwa. Dulwa. Dodzawa.

Dodzawa. Dulwa means vinaya. Vinaya means the study of vowed morality, okay?

It could be lay people, it could be monks and nuns, okay? If you make a promise to keep a certain kind of morality, you are studying vinaya. You are a student of vinaya.

If you ever took one day vow, if you ever took the commitments in the one day vow, you are a vinaya student. You are a vinaya, okay? You are a part of the vinaya, okay?

Or if you took four monks vows the minute you turned 21 and kept them your whole life or something, then you're also vinaya. You have the same status. You are both vinaya holders, okay?

In a way. Okay, so dulwa means vinaya. Dod means sutra, okay?

Now, for $100, you guys ready? Whoa, three people woke up in front of me. It was loud.

I think there's some electricity in there. Dulwa-do is the vinaya sutra, but who can tell me something surprising about the vinaya sutra?

[Speaker 2]
Not a sutra.

[Speaker 1]
Come on, Sugeng. Okay, Sugeng was first. Go ahead.

Go ahead. Yeah, say it again? It's not written.

Say it again? It's not written. Yeah, it's a sutra which was not taught by the Buddha, okay?

The definition of a sutra is a teaching given by Lord Buddha himself or herself. And this is a sutra which is not a sutra, okay? Now, you can give him the money if.

What's that? Wait. It's too early.

Why they call it a sutra if it's not by Lord Buddha? It's short. Yeah, it's a short book, okay?

Sutra means short book, okay? The literal meaning of sutra is short. For example, the yoga sutra, okay?

Yoga sutra. If a book is written in poetry, short, you can also call it a sutra. And why that's a long story, I'm not going to go into it, okay?

Dulwa-do sawi chi dun. I'm going to give you an overview of the dulwa-do, the Vinaya Sutra, okay? Vinaya Sutra was written like, I don't know, 600 AD by Gunaprabha.

It's a shastra. It's not a teaching by Lord Buddha. But in the Geshe course, the Geshe course is five PhDs, okay?

The Geshe course is five PhDs. You spend five years on each topic. It's equivalent to a PhD in five topics.

And for each topic, you study a special book, one special book. So there are five great books in the Geshe course. Each one, five years.

And this one is the Vinaya Sutra. So in the Geshe course, which is going to be a topic in these books that we're studying, we use one shastra from each topic. We don't use the sutras.

We don't use the tantras. We don't use the original sutras and tantras. Why?

Difficult. They're difficult, but they're also stories. They're just stories.

And you have to squeeze out the topics. Like he'll tell a long story about some nun who was in the marketplace with her strings. And then a hundred years later, somebody made a rulebook about strings.

Okay? Like that. So actually, we study the shastras because they are organized.

Very, very, very carefully organized. Normally, we memorize each one. You're required to memorize each one.

CHUN NAM SA CHE SA PA MED LA MA DOG PA'I DU BYAS NAM SA CHE GANG PHYIR DE DAG LA SA NANG KUN PA'I RGYUR BANG YOD SA MED NANG GI RIM PA DANG DU MA BYAS NAM SU YIN DU YIN NANG DANG DANG NI DGO PA'I PHYIR NA NANG DANG MA DUNG DANG That's the Abhidharmakosha. It takes about an hour and a half to recite it. If you want, we can do it someday.

No, just kidding. She didn't. So you memorize the shastra, okay, in the Geshe course, normally.

Then somebody wrote a tika on the Vinaya Sutra. Okay, what's a tika? Tika.

Say tika. Yeah, tika means commentary. In Indian language, tika.

Okay, tika means commentary. Okay, you have to go like that, commentary. Okay.

Jack even gave me some really delicious Indian snacks, and I had them just before class, right, Veronica? You did something to my neck. Okay.

Now here's the title of our book. Here comes the title of our book. This is a commentary on the general meaning of the root text on Vinaya Sutra.

Okay. And our book is called what? Rinchen means what?

Rinchen means jewel. Chenwa? A garland?

String, like a garland. Okay. So it means like a string that you wear around your neck or something.

Okay. Gong gen. Okay.

What's gen? Ornament. Okay.

And here's the thing. When you see the word jewelry used in a title in Buddhism, a hundred bucks, tell me why.

[Speaker 2]
It's beautiful, but it makes it more beautiful.

[Speaker 1]
Give beauty. Rob, give beauty. The mind-only school, when they're proving that the mind can see itself in a single instance, says that a knife can cut itself, and a person can ride on his own shoulders.

And that's proved by Rob Haggerty, paying Rob Haggerty. Okay. So gong gen means, what he means is the Vinaya Sutra is already extremely beautiful, like a beautiful lady like my wife.

And I will give you some earrings, and you will be extra beautiful. Okay. So the name of this book is Extra Beautiful.

It means he's going to take the Vinaya Sutra, which is already exquisite. And look, I can't improve on the beauty of my wife, but I can give her some earrings. And it's just like, you know, extra beauty.

Okay. The name of this book is Extra Beauty. Okay.

Like that. Good. And he threw in gong.

Gong means the extra beauty I will give you, is I will give you the secret meaning of the sutra. Okay. So it's a very sexy title.

Extra meaning, jewelry, earring, beautifier, sir, for the original Vinaya Sutra. Okay. Something like that.

I call it a gemstone of the true intent. He's going to tell you the real meaning of the Vinaya Sutra. We forgot you the title.

Here's my take on the first two verses from the two carvings. These are the same verse. Okay.

The four lines here and the four lines here are the same verse. Okay. Someone has rewritten them.

All right. Every single verse in thousands of, in a 3,500 page book, someone bothered to go through and reword it. Okay.

With the same meaning. Geshe-la, so we are going to use the second version. Ah, now.

That's the question I want to hear. Which one should we use, Geshe-la? You know, because they're both valid.

I checked. I did samples, core samples, throughout the whole book. And it took me a long time.

And they're both valid books. They're both okay. Okay.

We could take either one. Now, the carving of what I would say is the older one is sloppy. Someone has made a lot of mistakes in the carving.

Okay. It's going to be a big headache to clean it up. Okay.

I told you those guys can't read. And they make silly mistakes. And you know, in the Mixed Nuts, we just fix them as we go.

Hundreds and hundreds of mistakes. Okay. But I would say that what I believe is the older version is a worse carving.

And the newer version is an excellent carving. I'll go for the newer version. And it seems to me that there are signs that the author learned more stuff and was using it for the second version.

For example, most Tibetan monks don't know that Nye Warhor is a translation of Upali. And very few Tibetan monks know that Upali was the student of the Lord Buddha who collected the vinaya. See, I mean, we're not taught that normally.

So, I think he learned more for 10 or 20 years. And then I think he went back and... People haven't studied Sanskrit in Tibetan monasteries for 700 years.

They have not studied Sanskrit in Tibetan monasteries for 700 years. But somebody found out the Sanskrit. Somebody learned Sanskrit.

Some Sanskrit. I say I'll go for the Upali. Upali.

Okay. And it was a sweaty decision. I was like, you know.

And we'll keep both versions. We have input one already. And it's going to take a month to input the second one.

I'll go for the Upali. Okay. You were there when I decided.

All right. All right. There's some more stuff.

These are samples that I did, okay? All of this. These are samples.

I'm trying to date the carvings. Okay? I'm trying to date the carvings.

Check this out. This carver inserted pictures in the first four or five pages. This carver inserted pictures.

He started with nam den shepa gyalway ni me nyen. He started with Lord Buddha, who is called the fourth guide of our planet. He's the fourth Buddha on this, in this planet.

Okay? So he, sorry. He puts him here.

And there's his two main students. Okay? Who is that?

Okay. Over here. Hey, guess what?

There's Upali. He couldn't cook then, and he still couldn't cook later. Okay.

That's Upali. Then over here is Munaprabha, who wrote the Vinaya Sutra 1,000 years later, after Upali. Okay?

He wrote the main book on Vinaya that we study in the Geshe course. Okay? Yeah, Vinaya.

We call Vinaya the short, short book on Vinaya, not the sutra on Vinaya. Okay, good. Now, then he's got other lamas, and they go up to a certain date, and therefore we can date the carving.

They go up to the 1830s. Okay? He's got carving, carving, carving, carving, carving.

We can quote, we can date the block. It's Upali or Munaprabha? This is Upali.

Sorry. Yeah, this is the Upali.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
Geshe, you mean they put the painting, which can... Because they have... I didn't show you all the pictures.

There's about 10 pictures. The last lama in the last picture is 1830. So that, that's 300 years after the author.

Okay? It means it... it means someone thought it was a better carving.

Someone thought it was a better version. Someone paid to have it re-carved in 1830... 1832.

Okay? So anyway... And then the carver edited the photos?

Yeah. Yeah. Or some lama said, carve somebody who looks like a bad cook.

By the way, they are very fine carvings and we can use them in the book. Okay. Okay.

All right. I'll show you another funny thing. Where is that?

Here. Let's check this out. Somebody wrote on the...

somebody wrote on the... on the publication page. Someone wrote on top of the word block.

Okay? And this is called Kyuk. Kyuk means calligraphy, Tibetan calligraphy.

And it's very difficult. And I learned it. I learned it when I was young.

And so it says, Lord Tashi Tsumbo Gunshuk This is to celebrate the republication of this woodblock at Tashi Tsumbo Monastery, which is the pension lamas monastery in South Tibet in 1997. It's dated 1997. Somebody found it in an ancient building and photographed it and republished it.

And on the photograph they wrote, you know, they said, we hope everyone enjoys the book. Gyelag pal means I hope everyone enjoys the book. So anyway, it helped us to date it.

All right. Now, another mystery, okay? And we only have about five more minutes.

Then we will go... every Mixed Nuts class, every Shensong's Tower class, at the end of the class we do a 15-minute discussion of, did you learn anything today that you could use in your real life? Was there any subject that we talked about today that you could use in your real life?

Unfortunately, we didn't cover any content today. But maybe we did learn something. Okay, I think we did learn something.

And Xiaoping will lead a discussion with the people here. If you guys... so start thinking, if you have any ideas.

We call it diamond mining. It means, are there any beautiful little gemstones here that you could use in your real life? Okay, and we'll have a 15-minute discussion.

Then we'll have a 15-minute Peachtree World News Show. And that's... we have 20 organizations in our umbrella organization.

They're all doing cool stuff. And there's a problem that people in one organization don't know what people are doing in the other organization. So every time we have a translation class, we do a 15-minute news show.

And today they're interviewing a very interesting lady named Xiaoping. And somebody else, who else did... Sky Harvest and...

Oh, they're interviewing Kat. And John Brady. So Kat will be getting up here, and Xiaoping will be getting up here, and they'll be interviewed in the news show, so you can know what they're up to.

Okay, so these are the samples that I took. And I call it the Upalaya vision. Now there's another thing here, the title of the book.

Here's the title of the book. I'm going to put earrings that will tell you the secret meaning of a very valuable book, which is called the Rosary of Jewels, which is itself a commentary on the Vinaya Sutra. He doesn't say, I'm going to put earrings on the Vinaya Sutra.

He says, I'm going to put earrings on a book which explains the Vinaya Sutra. Now we got to go find that book. This is not a commentary on the Vinaya Sutra.

This is a commentary on a commentary to the Vinaya Sutra. And to save you the suspense, I figured it out for you. Okay, these are all the quality checks I did.

These are all the topics from our first book that I checked in the second two books. Yeah, here you go. This is from an ancient, from a very fine Japanese catalog done just before World War II by some very dedicated scholars in Japan.

We were walking through the marketplace in Kyoto and we found a copy. And there's this ancient bookstore. I think the owner was there since then.

And we negotiated and we got a copy. It's an excellent catalog to a collection that was carried out of Tibet by the first foreign Geshe in Tibet who was Japanese. And he disguised himself as a Chinese.

And he almost finished his Geshe. And then he got kicked out. They found out he wasn't Chinese.

Anyway, here's one of the books he brought back to Japan. Okay, ready? Please read.

lepa sungpe dang chok duwe do kongpa sawa chepa rimpo che chengwa shechawa Yes, so here's a book which clarifies the meaning of the Vinaya Sutra. And the name of this book is The Garland of Precious Jewels. So he's putting earrings on the necklace on the lady.

He's putting earrings on the lady who already has a necklace. How's that? Who's the lady?

The Vinaya Sutra. Who's the necklace? The commentary.

This book, which was written by the first Dalai Lama. And he was a student of Je Tsongkapa. He was a young man when Je Tsongkapa died.

He was one of the youngest students of Tsongkapa. And he wasn't the first Dalai Lama yet. He was just a greenhorn.

Greenhorn means baby student. And later when he grew up, he wrote an extraordinary commentary on the Vinaya Sutra. And our author took that commentary and made it more beautiful.

Got it? So the lady is the Vinaya Sutra. She's got a necklace by the first Dalai Lama, which itself is thousands of pages long.

And then our author added a few thousand pages of earrings. Got it? And then I thought, maybe he just collected quotations from the first Dalai Lama.

So I did a check on that. I did a comparison of the two books, which took me another 10 hours. And he did not.

His work is original. And his work is truly a great addition to the Vinaya studies. The first Dalai Lama's work is a great, great addition to the knowledge of Vinaya.

But this author's earrings are even better than the necklace, I would say. Okay. Isn't that exciting?

Okay. So he did not just copy the first Dalai Lama. It's a totally original book.

He did not take any sections out of the first Dalai Lama. But he quotes him a few hundred times. Okay.

And he says, look, I'll give you more information on the first Dalai Lama if you want. Or then, I'll give you more information than the first Dalai Lama did. And he does.

Okay. It's very cool. And it's beautiful.

It's a stunning commentary. And it's like the best Vinaya commentary in the whole world. I think so.

Okay. So that's what this young lady started today, okay. We were supposed to get 10.

I made a deal. Oh, okay. It's coming.

Okay. Is there anything that you learned today that you thought you could use in your real life? And then can you open up the discussion?

Okay. So today I will start. There are so many things.

Louder. Yeah, I will start. So there are so many things.

There are so many things I learned today. I'll just share some of it with you. And then I would like to invite more to share how you want to apply in your life.

So two things. Briefly, first is about dedication. It's a 50 years or more project.

And I think for me, I learned a lot from how Geshe-la chose this book and how it would take us 50 years, even more. So one thing I learned is that don't be afraid to do project, which will last for many years. Like university, I'm going to talk about later, it takes decades, but it's very meaningful.

So if there are certain things in the world, which is very meaningful, like translating these books or helping to support this project, this kind of project, then we are making, each of us, we are making contribution to pass it down. We are all the holders of this wisdom, this lineage. So for me, I'm very honored.

And I want to bring it back to my work and to my life, is to have this kind of devotion. Always remember this kind of devotion or commitment in my daily work, when I work on all those projects, to think of the long-term goal and the importance. So if something is worth it and is meaningful, then it is worth all those years of our life.

That's the one thing. Second thing is, Geshe-la once taught us one word called Arate. Arate means excellence.

So I learned this from this author. It's great. Arate means excellence.

So goal, pursuit of excellence. So this author, after he, we believe that after he learned, maybe after 10 more years of study, he was already excellent, but then he kept learning, he keep improving himself, and then he has more to offer. So one thing I want to take home on my work, on my life, is to keep improving myself and become more mature, become wiser, and more to offer to the world.

When we are teaching, or when we are doing other work, or when we are leading our lives, we have something more to offer to others. So that's the two things I learned. One of the, two of the things I learned today, and I want to bring it back home to apply in my life, in my job.

So now I'd like to invite some other friends who want to share. Can you raise your hand? Hello, this lady.

Okay. Talk straight into the box, like kiss it. Yeah, okay, perfect.

I really like the system of checks that you are doing with these blocks, with the wood blocks, the five layers of check of one text. And I think that we must apply this to all the translations that we make, and that it should be done by different people, and also in agreement, and to check it so thoroughly that there really is no mistakes, and no corruptions of the original, that the translations are completely accurate. And usually that would take not the effort of just one person, but the effort of a team of three, four, five people, and then we would need, we would make the translation as accurate as they must be, because corrupting these teachings, we all know that it's not what we want.

Okay, cool. Yes, thank you. I'd like to invite Shugan.

Talk right into it. Yeah, I learned one thing about being hara. Louder.

I learned one thing about being hara, looking at how Nishimaiko ensure that the wood blocks that they are using is accurate and correct. I learned about this when I was in university, or before university. My senior told me, because there are so many books in the market, in the bookshop, he told me, Shugan, just find a reputable publisher, find a reputable author, and just read those books, don't waste your time reading all other books.

And I looked, and I noticed that Geshe Michaelis is also always telling us about that, and I'm so amazed at how you spend those, how many, 20, 30, 40 hours, just to ensure that the wood blocks that we are using are accurate, and the latest, and so that we won't waste our time. Otherwise, imagine we do 50 years down the road, and we will have to stop, we will be a big disaster as well. One thing I learned is from Upali.

So is it from the first to the 101? Upali is the first one after, he was a student of Buddha. So he was the first student.

So Upali to Alison, it takes 101 generations. This inspired me that great things take time and effort, and to pass on through generations. So how this inspired me, and how can I take home, because sometimes when I want to do something, I want to rush for it.

So it inspired me that good things really take time and great effort, and we need to have the responsibility to make it well, and it will be with a high to pass it down to the next generation. The thing I learned is it's never too much beauty in the winter. The first Dalai Lama's commentary is already stunning like necklace, but also give more beautiful earrings.

So it reminds me like we already have Gautama's incomparable wisdom, Alison, teacher Alison, but all of us here can do something, and I'd love to put more earrings, and we go on, we keep promise on the road. One more, then we'll go to Peaceful World News. I'm sure you guys are ready.

I was listening to Alison classes for a while. It was my favorite book, sorry other translators, and I learned something from this book that you always should go deeper and look for answers like why did he do this, what was the real meaning, what was the real reason, like don't hesitate to go deep. That's it, thank you.

Hey, Francisco, Ale, Mr. Tim, Mr. Rivera, are you ready to go to Peaceful World News? By the way, Peaceful World News time, two important things happen. You find out what's happening in the whole world, and the local people here get to go to the bathroom, and that's your chance, or eat cake, or do both.

[Speaker 2]
Okay, hello, everyone. Thank you for your class, Xiaoping. Congratulations on finishing the first book.

That's very cool, and congratulations to start a second book. So actually, this comes very convenient because it's actually with you to whom we're going to have our first interview. So maybe first of all, you can tell us how do you feel about that, about finishing and starting a book, and then also congratulate you for the first anniversary and the so-called project that is happening about mixing the two best systems of the East and the West together, and modern and ancient together.

So you can tell us a little bit about how it's going with DSEU, and congratulations again on the first anniversary of it.

[Speaker 1]
Thank you, Juan. Thank you, Peaceful World News, for the invitation. So now I put on the hat of Diamond Silk Entrepreneur University.

Before I put it on, I share a message, and I feel very honored and happy today to finish the first book and start the second book, which is maybe over 50 years. Before this class starts, on the way to the classroom, I saw Double Rainbow.

[Speaker 2]
That's your two books.

[Speaker 1]
Oh, two books. And today I saw Deer twice. That's Deer Park.

In your cabin, near your cabin, so I feel it is a special day, and I feel a deep touch in my heart. I feel that the lineage is going on, and then it's very honored for me to contribute even a little bit to pass it down. Yeah, so I feel very honored and touched today.

Thank you.

[Speaker 2]
Thank you for sharing, and also, as we were saying, it's not the only thing you are doing. It's only one of the many. Another very important one is DSEU.

Would you like to tell us a little bit how it's going and what's next? I know you are going to have something big on November.

[Speaker 1]
Oh, so Diamond Silk Entrepreneur University is what the new project that we are working on with our guiding founder is Kesha, and me and Stanley, we are founders, and I'm the president for Diamond Silk Entrepreneur University. So as Kesha mentioned, three or four years ago, one day during retreat, one idea came to me, and three or four years ago, I was doing a retreat. It's about building a special higher education institution in the world which can deliver the Asian wisdom, and now after three, four, five years, one month ago, we celebrated one year anniversary of our university.

So this whole journey to me is like, it is a large experiment of seeds and emptiness because deep down, our whole team are using the seed principles and applying with emptiness to work on this big project, and it will be like my new book. It will be a hundred years old project, so I guess I will work on it for dozens, for years, until I'm an old lady.

[Speaker 2]
So can you tell us as well a little bit on how can people get involved to it? I have a PTT presentation. Maybe if some people would like to sign in or to help somehow, what can people do?

[Speaker 1]
Okay, what can people do? I would like to welcome everyone. If you like, if your heart feels connection about it, then to make connection with this big vision.

It's just like this cake. It's like, I see our university, this vision as a karma cake, so I wish you can all taste it, taste it, and make coming connection with it and taste it. So I learned this idiom from Geshe, get your finger on this karma pie, on this beautiful cake.

So you could, we appreciate any kind of support. You could sign up for it, or you could become a donor, a sponsor, and any kind of amounts are deeply appreciated, because deep in our hearts, I really wish, we really wish that you could make connection with this vision, not only for yourself, also for your next generation, or for other families around the world. One of vision is to pass down the wisdom, also to bring world peace.

So it doesn't matter how the amount, it doesn't matter. It could be large, or it could be small. But in my heart, I encourage you, and we welcome any kind of support.

Bill, I myself, I did it. I learned with Geshe over like 13 years. So at the beginning, I, when I make donation, when I try to support all these projects, I start with small, but gradually the karma ripen, the karma ripen, and I can make bigger contribution.

So it really worked for me. So I just welcome and invite you to make connection with Diamond Silk. It's a delicious cake.

[Speaker 2]
Thank you. Thank you very much for sharing with us. We wish you the best on these and many other projects.

We will have you, hopefully we will have you soon back in the program, and you can tell us more about what's happening in November. Thank you as well.

[Speaker 1]
Thank you.

[Speaker 2]
We have another guest there with you in Diamond Mountain, who also wants to talk about their project. They have two projects that I'm aware right now. Actually, we have one guest online.

She's Alex Roland, and we have one guest in a stage live with you. So we're going to have two people at the same time. We, if we can give also a spotlight to Diamond Mountain, Venerable Kat is going to go to the stage.

Hello, Alex. How are you?

[Speaker 1]
Hi, Juan. Can you hear me okay?

[Speaker 2]
I do.

[Speaker 1]
Oh, great. Great. Thank you for having us on the show.

[Speaker 2]
Oh, thank you for coming. Tell us a little bit, what are you guys doing these days? I know Sky Harvest, I've been involved sometimes, but I hear now you have something else as well happening called Oasis Project.

Hello, Kat. Welcome. So you can tell us what's going on.

[Speaker 1]
Okay, I'm going to start out. Hi, Kat. I'm going to just give everyone an update on what's been going on, and then Kat's going to tell us what is coming in the pipeline.

In case some people might not know, Sky Harvest was started at the request of Geshe Michael to make habitat improvement for animals, to protect life for all the snakes and birds and all the different animals that inhabit the area. So we started at Diamond Mountain, and we have put in a beautiful demonstration garden that Kat helped to organize and design, and then the volunteers, you all came and helped to create it. It's very beautiful, and a lot of people have worked on it.

So I hope you get the chance to go walk and read the beautiful signs. The other big project that we're doing is catching water on the land. So volunteers are helping to make these rock wedge dams to slow the water down so that more things can grow and seeds can be planted.

So thank you all who have donated. I know many of you out there have already donated to our projects, and there's really great things happening. This is a picture of our recent education summit, which was called Reshaping the Earth.

Volunteers came, and we had speakers from University of Arizona and many other experts come and share their knowledge, and then volunteers were out working. That's going to happen again in 2024, probably near the very beginning of September. So please mark your calendar for that, and I just wanted to thank all the volunteers and all the donors, and I'm turning it over to Kat.

Well, thank you, Alex, for making everything possible. You're a great leader. Thank you.

I noticed you just showed a picture of Lama Anupama.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, we can do it again.

[Speaker 1]
Please do.

[Speaker 2]
Can you see it?

[Speaker 1]
And our next project started over 30 years ago when this beautiful woman applied for a job at Geshe Michael's Diamond Company. She was a recent immigrant from Barbados and quickly went up the ranks of that company. We know she was a sharp, sharp businesswoman, and she was actually ACI's first student.

So we have a lot to honor her for, being a part of our lineage for so long. She, of course, went through all the ACI programs. She went through the Tantra training.

She was the first three-year retreater with Geshe Michael's group. She did actually two three-year retreats, and then she lived in the town of Bui, which is just a few miles down the road from Diamond Mountain. And as Lama Palma was beloved in our community, she was the darling of Bui as well.

And after she passed a few years ago, her family donated Lama Palma's property to Sky Harvest. And Sky Harvest has promised to continue Lama Palma's wishes of community development, helping the people of Bui take care of basic water security and food security. And so our next project will be in Bui, introducing both water and food security.

And uplifting the entire town. And we welcome paramedic partners on this project. We're going to be inviting hardware stores and banks, department stores, schools, universities, local people to partner with the town of Bui in restoring that town to some level of glory.

Her property on the interstate bypass will be headquarters for Sky Harvest, and a community center where a large food garden will be installed, and bring the community together with education and with fun and games, gardening, building resources, and building security to live in that town. So I think there's a QR code up here somewhere. If you'd like to participate in any way, please contact Alex at Sky Harvest and help uplift the town of Bui and Lama Palma's memory as she wished.

[Speaker 2]
Thank you very much, Ben and Alex. Thank you very much. It's very cool.

I think what you're doing, I also had the chance to live for a few years in Diamond Mountain, and these last times that I've been there, it's just looking amazing. It's very uplifting to see how nature is thriving again there. So thank you very much for everything you're doing, and we'll have you again soon sometime.

So you report with us again how it's going.

[Speaker 1]
Is there a chance for me to say one other tiny thing Juan?

[Speaker 2]
Sure, sure.

[Speaker 1]
Okay, I meant to give an update. We were doing a project of the marble beads and making malas from the marble from the quarry that the stupas are made out of. So that's in the works, and I just wanted to let everyone know that that's coming along.

We have a prototype being made, and that's coming soon too.

[Speaker 2]
Thank you very much. We will get to know more about that soon. Okay, and finally we have our last guest, Paulina Garcia from Mexico, because she wants to share with us a very cool, interesting thing she just did.

Hello Paul, how are you?

[Speaker 1]
Good, thank you Juan, and hello everyone.

[Speaker 2]
Congratulations to all of you on Retreat at Diamond Mountain. I really miss all of you out there.

[Speaker 1]
So today I have a special gift for all of you. We are finally releasing a beautiful interview celebrated in Guadalajara with John Brady back in 2019, and it took us nearly five years to share it with the public.

[Speaker 2]
So this interview is more personal. JB shares his story, where he comes from, and what his teenage years were like. You're going to discover things you have never heard about JB before.

[Speaker 1]
For instance, how the Beatles were a game changer that guided him on his spiritual path, or maybe you didn't know that his first teachers came from India, and of course a lot about meditation.

[Speaker 2]
So consider this gift for all of you who support the Asian Legacy Library, and if you are not already doing so, please consider helping us in this important mission of preserving the ancient wisdom texts, so students like Xiaoping or Tim can translate them. So thank you so much, and I want to give a special thanks to the video director, Osiris Luciano, who helped us create this beautiful project. So I hope you enjoy it.

Thank you very much, Paulina. It's a very nice present of you both, you and Osiris, to have done this for us. We will watch the interview, and for those of you who want to watch it, I just placed a link, the YouTube link on the chat, so you can watch it there, and if anybody else needs more information, contact Paulina, Osiris, or Peachtree World News, and we can help you find the materials.

Okay, thank you very much. We have to go, because next class is about to start. Paul, thank you.