Как выполнять ежедневную практику 11 — Личная практика дома (1998, Нью-Йорк), занятие 1

[Speaker 1]
This is sort of a fun class. This is not like the other classes where you have to learn anything. The function of this class is two things.

We'll be, over the next few weeks, covering how to do your daily practice. And then, towards the end, I'll stop and give you a chance to ask some questions. And the questions will be about anything you like.

If it's about what I taught, it's okay. And if not, any question about Buddhism that you're curious about. So, while I'm speaking in the next half hour, you can be thinking about if you have any questions that you wanted to ask.

And I don't care how off the wall they are. And I don't care if they don't relate too much to what we've been talking about and stuff like that. So, anything you want to know about a Buddhist subject, we can talk about.

So, I'll give about a half hour presentation of how to do a daily practice. I see most people in this class have been in the class before and should know how to do a daily practice. But, it doesn't hurt to hear it again, if you haven't, okay?

The main activity at this school is that we have classes and people study the great classics of Buddhism. All the classes are direct from the original books. So, I think the average age of a book in this class is about 15 centuries old.

And so, you get a lot of the original books, a lot of the original teachings, and that should be pretty clear. There are two other elements that you have to have in Buddhist practice, or it doesn't make any sense, okay? Just reading a book about it, or just getting intellectual teachings about it is not enough.

You also need two other components. One is your daily practice, your meditation. And then the other is, it's very useful to have a job or something like that, where you go there and every day you get to practice Buddhism with all those other irritating people there.

I did it for 16 years. I lived in a monastery for 8 years and didn't go outside much. It wasn't such a challenge.

There was only one or two other monks to get irritated about. But then I went to work in New York City and there were a thousand people in my office towards the end, and there were lots of people to get irritated about. My lama made me go to New York City.

I didn't want to go. He said, No, you go because you've studied now, but you have to put it into practice. I think you need all three things.

You need intense study. You need a daily practice, meditation at home. And then you need to be around other people.

There's a very famous text that says, DANG NYID SEMS CAN THAMS CAD LA YI SHES NOG PA LAS LHAG PA'I DON CHOG DUG PA'I SANGS PA'I DAG TU BYED PA RDZUN PAR ZHOG which means, may I learn to be around other people because they can give me the ultimate goal. In that sense, other people are like a wish-giving gem. So it's good to be around other people.

I think you need all three components. What I'm going to talk about today is how to do your personal practice at home. You must do that.

The books on Buddhism, as the Abhidharmakosha starts out, CHOS NAM SAGS CES BSAGS PA MED LA MA RTOG PA'I DU CHOS NAM SAGS CES GANG GI RDE DAG LA SANGS KUN GYI RGYUR MI GYUR which means, they start dividing all the things in the world into good things and bad things, clean things and impure things. Then they say, the pure things in the world are only certain ideas that you can have in your mind. Those are called SAGS MED.

SAGS MED means, the only very pure things around us are certain attitudes that you can have in your heart. In Buddhism, those are called paths. We recognize five great paths or five great levels of spiritual realization that every person will have to go through.

The first one is called SOGS LAM or path of preparation. Sometimes they call, I'm sorry, accumulation, path of accumulation. At that path, you've learned to be tired of this world.

Things in this world are not going very well. Like you finally wake up one morning and realize that the best thing that can happen, the very best thing is that you find a nice spouse, you have some nice kids, you buy some nice appliances, you have a nice job, you have a nice body, you eat well, you exercise moderately, and then one morning you wake up and realize that you're going to lose all that anyway. First of all, it's impossible to have all those things.

Nobody does. Everyone's having trouble. You don't think so, but they are.

And even if you could get all those things, they would all degenerate over time and you would lose all of them. You will lose your health, you will lose your eyesight, you will lose your ears. Whatever good looks you have, you will definitely lose.

Wife, house, and appliances. You will eventually lose them. There's no question.

And then one day you just wake up. Usually it takes a shock. Usually it takes someone dying in your arms, or you see a car accident, or your mother dies, or some big shock has to happen for you to wake up.

But one morning you wake up and realize that. When you get very serious about it, that's the first of the five paths. The second of the five paths is called Path of Preparation.

Path here, by the way, means level of mental realization, level of spiritual realization. And you get to a point where you begin to study Buddhism seriously, and especially emptiness. So the second path is when you've got pretty good at understanding Buddhism, and especially emptiness.

Path number three is where you see emptiness directly. It's called the Path of Seeing. And this is an intense experience of under a half hour, where you see ultimate reality directly during deep meditation.

Path number four can sometimes take seven lifetimes, typically. And during the fourth path, during that period, you're having to work out your bad thoughts. You're slowly overcoming all your bad emotions, all your negativities in your mind, and your mind is becoming more and more pure.

At the end of that process, you become enlightened. By the way, path number four is called Path of Habituation, because you're getting used to having seen emptiness and what it implies. And then path number five is Buddhahood, if you're on a compassion track, which you would be anyway.

The reason I'm bringing up those five paths is they say that to move between the paths, especially as they get higher, you must be in a state of deep meditation. You cannot make progress in those five levels of spiritual realization unless you are in a state of deep meditation. So you cannot graduate from one path to the next.

You can't get to nirvana or Buddhahood unless you know how to meditate well. So, the daily practice becomes totally necessary. You can become a great theoretician of Buddhism and understand everything about Buddhism, but if you don't do some daily meditation, you cannot enter the five paths, and you cannot move between the five paths.

You see what I mean? You'll never get to the goals of Buddhism just by studying. They also say that you can't meditate without studying.

So they support each other. In other words, if you don't study seriously what to meditate on, you will never be able to meditate. So study and meditation are quite necessary.

So far we've covered two of the three activities I spoke about. Coming to classes, learning intellectually, for example, what emptiness is about. And then secondly, having your own daily meditation.

Must have those two. Where does the third one come in? Third one being having a regular job, meeting regular people, dealing with your family, dealing with the people at work.

You know, the Buddhist laboratory of your real life. That's the third component that you must have. There's something interesting.

The reason I bring it up is that if you want to learn to meditate, both of the other two are necessary. So you have to study how to meditate in order to meditate. But there's another part of it.

You must have that daily life stuff in order to meditate well. You must be interacting with other people in a normal setting, such as an office, in order to meditate correctly. Why is that?

I mean, a lot of Americans say, I'm going to escape samsara and then I won't have to go to work anymore. And a real bodhisattva would say, I have to work overtime so I can meet more irritating people to sharpen my meditation. You see what I mean?

So it's very interesting. In Buddhism, especially the bodhisattva version, you need to be around normal people who are not Buddhist in order to practice the Buddhist way of life. You need them.

You have to be around them. They would encourage you. My lama forced me to go to work.

I had an inheritance from my parents and I didn't have to go to work. He said, go to work. You have to encounter normal people.

And it's by keeping your Buddhist line, whether they know you're Buddhist or not. It's better if they don't know, by the way. But keeping it at work, keeping it during your business, keeping it with your family, keeping the Buddhist way of life quietly, secretly, with other people that makes your meditation successful.

So you got to get used to that idea. You can't meditate well unless the other 20 hours or 22 hours of the day are spent in contact with other people doing the right thing from moment to moment. From minute to minute, being tested in the workplace, on the streets, in the subways, by your family, and then doing the right thing.

And that gives you the spiritual energy to meditate well. So what I'm saying is you need all three components. You need to, for your daily practice, you need to study in a formal way.

Secondly, and it has to be the great books of Buddhism. It can't be some new idea or some new cooked up thing. It must be the great classics of Buddhism.

Then secondly, you need to be around normal, irritating, trying people to improve your spiritual energy. And it's that friction which makes your meditation great. I always think of...

Lennon and McCartney was a big thing when I was a kid. John Lennon and Paul McCartney. And every four or five months they'd come out with a new album.

And it would be totally different. This is The Beatles. It would be totally different than the last album.

And everybody would freak out for about a week. And then all the songs would hit the top of the charts. You know what I mean?

Like Sgt. Pepper, I remember. Totally, totally different. And then it just went straight to the top of the charts.

And I think the reason was the friction between McCartney and Lennon. There was this tension between them. And it made everything great.

After they split up, they both put out albums. One of them is still going. And they're the most boring songs.

And the most dull music. You know, anything like that. You can't get great spiritual energy unless you're out in the world being tested and tried and challenged by other people.

So you need that. And that will be what will make your meditation sharp. What I'm trying to say is that you study the bodhisattva's way of life.

Like turn the other cheek and things like that. Think about other people more than you think about yourself. And if you do that for 20 hours a day in your outside life, then when you go in your room to meditate and do your daily practice that I hopefully I'll get to tonight, then it's a success.

Then it works well. So what I'm trying to say is the daily practice is not divorced from the rest of the day. It's the energy of being around other people and being in a trying situation that makes the meditation successful.

So that's the first requirement. Try to find some irritating people to spend your day with. And then your meditation will be much more powerful.

If you keep your Buddhist way of life. If you break it, your meditation will be worse. But if you can maintain some kind of purity of your mind during the other 22 hours of the day, then the meditation takes off.

And you can't, you don't know if you're going to maintain it unless you're exposed to people who challenge you and who test you. So you have to go home and pray to meet these people. We have, as you'll see, part of the preliminaries of meditation, one practice is to pray that you will meet people who will test you.

And then when you meet them you can't complain. You can't whine about it because you prayed about it in the morning. You asked to meet these people and then kindly they've come to you.

And then you have to take advantage of the situation that they offer you. And this is the real key to meditation. If you want to be a great meditator, then you take that energy home.

You had a trying day. People challenged you. People were doing all sorts of weird things to you.

And although it was tiring and although you didn't do it perfectly, you kept your Buddhist line. Generally you were compassionate. Generally you were patient.

Generally you were helpful to them. Generally you tried to take care of them and not worry so much about yourself. And the reward is, the next morning you'll have a fantastic meditation.

So you've got to be out in the world. If you're going to be a great meditator, you need that challenge. Now we'll talk about meditation a little bit.

How to do your daily practice. And I'll only get part way through it and then we'll continue through the other classes. The very first thing to remember is that it's good if you can do it at the same time every day.

It doesn't generally work to say, I'll meditate at nine tomorrow and then the next week I'll be busy, I'll meditate in the afternoon or something like that. If you do it at the same time every day, your body will just get used to it. Personally, my main meditation I do from 10.30 to 12. And at 12.05 I eat a bowl of Cheerios. So at 11.45 my stomach starts to growl. You see what I mean?

And that's good. You see, when I was working in corporate life, 16 years, the lunch break was the same at one o'clock. So even if I was on a one month vacation, at one o'clock every day my stomach would start to growl.

And what happens is, if you meditate at the same time every day, your meditation stomach will start to growl. And you'll feel like meditating, you see? If you do it at the same time every single day, it'll become like a habit and you'll just want to sit down and meditate wherever you are at the same time every day.

So the important thing is to do it at the same time. It doesn't matter whether you do it in the morning or at night. Most of my students find that they are fresher in the morning.

Most people's homes are quieter in the morning. But I do have students who work night jobs or they have strange schedules, or they are night people and they like to meditate at night. And meditating at night is supposed to have its own blessing.

There's supposed to be a blessing of the midnight hour, you know? There's supposed to be some big blessing about that time. So either one is fine.

Personally, I find that I'm very sleepy at night and morning time is better. So you pick a time, you get up. They say it's very important to have a clean mouth when you meditate.

So it's good to brush your teeth or gargle or whatever. They say it's very important to clear your nose out. And in the monastery they teach us to turn on the faucet, lean over the sink and go like that and just blow as hard as you can.

It's not the same as tissue paper. It's a lot more thorough. And I'm not trying to gross you out.

It's actually important that you have a steady... that the airflow is open and good. You have to breathe through your nose when you meditate.

You can't breathe through your mouth. If you have a really bad cold, they say you can breathe through your mouth. But otherwise you should breathe through your nose.

So they encourage you to sit there and blow everything out. And it's kind of gross, but don't worry. You wash your hands, wash the sink, and it's all cleaned out.

Then they say it's good to drink something before you meditate. It's bad to eat. If you eat you'll get sleepy and it doesn't work.

But it's very good to have something light to drink. So that you are watered, that your body is well watered. So you have something to drink.

Then you go prepare your meditation space. The scriptures say that it's better if the meditation space is a dedicated space somewhere in your house. Most New Yorkers don't have the luxury of an extra room.

So it's important to partition off a corner of your room. I know some students who hang a sheet from the ceiling. I know some that buy those screens, those oriental screens or something.

But the important thing is to create a partition or a separation in the room. It's not good to meditate on your bed. It's not good to do your meditation in a space where other vibrations are filling up that area.

So you shouldn't try to... Don't try to sit up and start meditating in bed. Because that bed is all full of sleep vibrations.

And it'll put you to sleep. Unplug the phone. Forget the phone.

If the phone rings, you're not going to answer it. Try to remember to plug it back in later. That's useful.

As far as a meditation space, it has to be a beautiful space that is spiritually uplifting. People come into your room and they say, what do you got behind that screen? And you say, come back and look.

And they walk in there and they see this space and they say, ooh, this must be some kind of sacred space. It should be beautiful and conducive to meditation. Something just, when you walk in, you say, oh, this must be where somebody's meditating.

It should be very clean. In the scriptures, you should clean it every morning. Before you meditate, you go through this exercise of cleaning the smallest lint off the floor and any kind of tiny dusting and things like that.

While you're cleaning, you're supposed to think that... This is a metaphor for what I'm about to do. I'm cleaning the floor before I meditate.

And during my meditation, I'm going to be cleaning my mind. So you're not just supposed to thoughtlessly or mindlessly clean the place. You clean the place as a symbolic act.

This represents cleaning my mind. You're supposed to think that as you clean the place. Then you set up an altar.

Personally, I find it's better if the altar is not too far out of my line of vision while I'm meditating. So if you're going to be meditating on the floor, it's very inconvenient to have your head bent back like that trying to see the things on your altar. It should be something higher than your level of sight.

They say out of respect for those beings that are represented on the altar. But not so high that you crick your neck looking at it while you're meditating. So you set up an altar.

There's a lot of components on a typical altar. In Tibetan, an altar is called a kusum tukten. Say kusum.

Tukten. Kusum. Tukten.

Ku means enlightened actions. Sung means enlightened talk. And tuk means enlightened thoughts.

These are the three parts of a Buddha. They're called the three diamonds, or the three parts of a Buddha. The idea is to get them all up there on the altar somehow.

You want representations of an enlightened being's actions, an enlightened being's words, and an enlightened being's mind. So, ten, by the way, means station, like a space station or something like that. This is a station where you're going to park the holy body, speech, and mind of an enlightened being.

So on your altar, there should be a physical representation of an enlightened being. It could be a painting. It could be a sculpture.

Something like that. Either one. It's very, very important to realize that you are not praying to these statues.

I think maybe that's why in Islam they say you can't make statues of Mohammed or whatever. The idea is that you're not putting up a Buddha on the altar who suddenly got chubby and short and is sitting up there and you have to make offerings to this guy or something like that. We don't believe in Buddhism that the statue is a person.

It's just a very poor representation of a totally glorious enlightened rainbow body of a real Buddha. It's very bad to think of that as the person. It's not the person.

It represents an enlightened being. It's also bad to think of them as mythical characters, like Tara or Manjushri or Shakyamuni. These are not mythical beings.

They were people that you and I related with sometime in our past lives. You have been with them. They were normal people back then.

They studied harder than you did and they meditated harder than you did and they got enlightened before you did. You just got to play catch up. That's the way to think of them.

The idea in Christianity, which I grew up a Christian, and a good Christian, is you put Jesus up there or you think of God up there, but there's no idea that you could become them. In Buddhism, you're putting up a Buddha statue partly to represent what you will be. There's a thing called result refuge, which means it's actually one of the most important acts of prayer in Buddhism is to imagine yourself up on the altar the way you will be, because according to Buddhism, you inevitably, every person in this room will become a Buddha.

So you actually can think of yourself as looking at a picture of what you're going to be. This is Michael Roach in Seven Lifetimes or something like that. You can just look at it and appreciate it and think of it that way.

That's called the enlightened body, a statue. If you have a root lama, use that. If you don't have a root lama, use a Buddha picture or use a picture of the Dalai Lama or someone that you personally find to be a holy person.

If you don't have anyone like that in Buddhism, it's fine to use Jesus or Moses or whatever you're comfortable with, but it should be somebody that you consider to be an enlightened being or the closest person in your mind to an enlightened being. Secondly, you put some kind of representation of enlightened speech up on the altar. We usually put a book, like the Heart Sutra or the Diamond Cutter Sutra or some kind of holy book up on the altar.

We have CD-ROMs with a thousand Buddhist scriptures on them. It's coming out April 5th. It's free.

Practically. Those are cool to put on your altar. That's a thousand Buddhist books in a little plastic thing.

That you could use for the speech of the Buddha. We believe that any one of those books could get you enlightened, so it's very important to have one up there. Then you have a representation of the Buddha's mind, like an enlightened being's mind.

Now, minds are invisible. They don't weigh anything, they don't have any shape, they don't have any limits. They're totally ineffable.

It's a custom in Buddhism that you put a stupa on the altar to represent the mind of a Buddha. These are these little things that look like a little temple like that. You have to try to get a hold of a stupa somewhere.

Those three elements should be on your altar. Next, every morning we put out some offerings for the Buddhas. I think it's important to talk about the offerings.

We don't believe that Buddhas can come and eat them. If you've ever put cookies on your altar and unless you snuck them or somebody else, they just stay there until they get old. Then you have to throw them out.

Apparently, they don't eat them. Does that mean that you shouldn't do it? You see what I mean?

By the way, once you get enlightened, you don't have to eat anymore because your body has changed dramatically. Your body has turned into... It has shape and it has color, but it's ineffable.

It's made of light. You don't have inner organs anymore. You don't need to eat or pee-pee or poo-poo or anything.

So enlightened beings can't eat whatever you put out for them to take. So why do it? There's a couple of reasons to make offerings.

If enlightened beings exist, they can come and be there the minute they know that you want them there. If they're enlightened, they know it a million years ahead of time that you're going to want them there. It's interesting.

From their side, they don't need any sign from you. They don't need you to say something like, please come here. They can read your mind as easily as they can see the color of the sky.

It's not a big deal for them. But when you put out offerings, you are saying from your side, I can't see you right now. I know if you want, you can come.

I know if I think about you, you will be here. And this is an act of faith. I'm putting out this...

I'm wasting this wealth, okay? In the world, if you put $100 bills on this plate and you lit it and said, this is an offering for you, people would say you're crazy. Normal people would say, don't be radical.

Don't be extreme. Just put out some cookies, okay? Don't go burning $100 bills.

This is silly. This is too extreme. You're an extremist.

You're becoming a cultist. You're becoming a fanatic. But if you think about it, if you have a choice of burning a couple hundred dollar bills as an offering to the Buddhas, or you go out and buy food with them, which is more intelligent?

What's a better use of the money? When you burn them, you're saying something very powerful. You're saying, I believe in you.

I believe that you exist. This is a sign of my belief. This is a true offering.

A true offering should be secret. Other people shouldn't see it. And a true offering should be substantial.

I had a lady came to me with a diamond the other night. She found it on the street, a diamond earring. She said, what should I do with it?

By the way, it wasn't that big, okay? I'm being honest. I said, go to the East River or the other side, I don't care.

I don't know what's on the other side. Throw it in. In your mind, make an offering.

And she was going away muttering, I don't know if I'm going to do that. I think she did actually, or she intends to. But anyway, that's a true offering.

That means, I believe in you. And it also recognizes the real truth of life, which is that, yeah, you can sell that diamond and feed some poor people. That won't stop their suffering.

Is it important to give money to poor people? Very, very important. Should every Buddhist spend much of their day trying to help people who are sick or hungry or need a place to stay?

You should, you must. But throwing the money away or burning it is a statement that you should make every once in a while. I'm not saying burn all your money tonight, because you need a little bit for tomorrow.

And a Buddhist is supposed to take care of their needs also. But if you can afford it, once in a while burn some money and offer it to them and say, this is a true recognition of what's important in life. Because anything else I could do with this money is not as important as getting to enlightenment.

It's a very interesting exercise. If you hesitate, you don't get it. If you keep that money and you buy something with it, the best you can get is to die a little slower.

Okay? If you make a true offering with it, you're making a statement. I believe in enlightened beings.

I'm proving it by burning this money. And I want you to be there and understand it. I want you to be here when I meditate.

You see, this is a whole exercise of getting them to come from your side. From their side, they knew millions of years ago you were going to ask. And they're there already.

But from your side, it's a statement. When you put out milk and cookies at the bottom of the chimney and you believe it, you're making a statement. I believe Santa Claus is coming.

And at a certain age, people don't do that anymore. See? So this is a statement.

Offering is a statement. It's not like some kind of exercise. It's not like you're not a good Buddhist unless you put seven offering bowls out there.

And anybody who puts out six is a bad Buddhist. It's not like that. It's a statement.

I believe you're there. I'd like to be able to meet you someday, face to face. And so as an act of faith, I'm making these offerings.

Can they drink them? No. Do they eat them?

No. Do they need anything you have to offer? No.

Should you put out the best that you can? Yes. No contradiction.

That's the idea. Sometime we'll go through the traditional offerings. There's a tradition in Tibet to put out seven bowls of water.

And we can go through them. I'll go through them roughly with you now. These represent the six senses.

Offerings of the six senses. And they represent the offerings you would make to a great king who walked into your hut in ancient India. Okay?

First thing you would do is offer them something to drink. So, you lay out seven bowls. And the first is going to, on the left, on your left, is going to be filled with water.

And that represents offering something to drink to a great king who's going to come to your house. The second bowl is filled with water. And it means I would wash your feet for you.

So, in ancient India, when somebody came into your room and they were hot and dusty, it was considered a holy thing to wash their feet. Also, it's very humbling. Like, a king would never wash the feet of anyone else.

That was why the big thing about Jesus when he washed his disciples' feet. It's a statement that he was humbling himself. So, that's the second one and the third one is some water.

The third bowl represents flowers, which appeals to the sense of smell. The next bowl represents incense, sweet smell. The next bowl, you put, you can either put water or you can put some light, or a little candle or something, and that represents light.

The next one is water again and it represents perfume that you're putting on the body of this holy being. And the next one is called nidhi, which means food. You usually put some cookies out, something like that.

It's considered auspicious to put out white cookies or red, something red. And it's considered inauspicious to put out something brown or black. Just an association of the colors.

White and red represents life. The blood of the mother, the semen of the father. And it represents growth and something beautiful happening.

And then it's considered that black and brown might represent death or something like that. So, better to have some life there. Sometimes they'll put out an additional bowl that represents music, making an offering.

So, you have all these offerings which are what you would give to a visitor to your home in ancient India. And that's how we do offerings. And this is all...

People ask me, can't I just sit down and meditate? And the scriptures say, no, you can't. Sitting down and meditating cold is like running a hundred yard dash cold and it doesn't work right.

We say you have to do some kind of spiritual warm up. And that begins when you start cleaning the room and preparing the altar and putting out the offerings. This is all a necessary exercise before you meditate.

If you don't do it, the meditation won't go well. This is all has deep subconscious effects on you. And then when you start meditating, everything goes right.

I know a lot of Americans who have tried to meditate for many years and I meet many, many Americans who say it doesn't go very well or I'm not improving or things aren't changing or it gets boring or I get sleepy or I start thinking about my job or I have to go to work and I don't get very good at it. And I say, well, do you know the warm up? And they say, what warm up?

Or they say, yeah, yeah, I heard all that but I just want to meditate. You can't do that. You've got to put yourself into a psychic mood.

You have to put yourself into a spiritual space which is sacred. And that begins with cleaning the place, setting up the altar and putting out the offerings. Offerings should be changed every day.

There are some long-term offerings you can do. Rock candy, okay? You can keep that longer.

Water, it's a custom to change every day. At the end of the day, before you go to sleep, it's a custom that you dump out the offerings. Once those things have been offered, they're considered sacred goods.

You can't throw them in the toilet bowl. You can't throw them into normal garbage or something like that with other garbage. They should be treated like sanctified material.

And you have to find a good place to throw them out. It's a custom to throw them into water, like a river or an ocean. If you're offering water, then to put it on some plants or something like that.

Something like that to use it. Personally, I consider it very bad luck or something inauspicious to take any of it yourself. Then there's some kind of self-interest involved when you buy the offerings.

Like, I like this kind of cookie, so let's offer that one. You know what I mean? Knowing that you're going to eat it afterwards.

It corrupts the offering. You should make the sweetest offering you can and never ever use it. You see what I mean?

It should be thrown out afterwards. And it should be thrown out in a clean place, in a nice place. This is a very good kind of offering.

If you burn the money, you don't have to worry about it. It's just this black stuff. And try it once in a while.

You'll say, oh, that guy's crazy. I'm burning money. He got me to burn money.

And that's a good place for your mind to be. Because you'll be saying, why am I doing this? What's more important than money?

You know what I mean? Or what's more important than buying something and feeding monks or something like that? I say that burning it is even more important.

And you have to think about it. So that's the act of offering. We'll stop there.

I don't know if we have refreshments here. No, I guess not. One lonely bag of chips.

I don't want to start a fight. We'll do something else. I'll take some...

What I'd like to do is continue next time. I may look different. You know, I'm empty, so I look different every time.

But I think next time we'll do some questions and answers about that. And we'll also do a little bit about the proper posture for meditation and the way to set up your seat. These are art forms.

To sit right, to have a good seat, to position the seat correctly. And then there are seven or eight details of the posture that you have to learn. The correct way to sit in order to meditate well.

We'll do that next time. And I don't mind to stop this class a little early, but I do want to take any questions. And by the way, the floor is totally open.

It can be anything about anything. And I don't care if it's relevant or not. You're welcome to ask.

She asked me if morality is empty. Morality meaning in its most basic form the exercise of not hurting anybody else. Is it empty?

When she says empty, she means in a Buddhist sense, is it empty? Empty doesn't mean meaningless in Buddhism. Empty means is it self-existent?

Does it exist from its own side? And then I would say no. And she said, well, what do you mean when you say it's empty?

What we mean is that for example, if I hold up some fruit like a pear and I say, hey, does everybody in this room like pears? There'll be like one or two people who'll say, no, I don't like pears. And then there'll be some more people who'll say, yeah, I do like pears.

And I wouldn't mind if you leave it on the table because when you leave, I'll eat it. Emptiness means that whether you see it as good or bad is not a quality of the pear. It's coming from you.

Empty means pears don't have quality of being good and pears don't have a quality of being bad from their own side. That's coming from you. Like, if your mind likes pears, you'll like the pear.

If your mind doesn't like pears, you won't like the pear. But it's not that the pear is good or bad from its own side. You see what I mean?

It is empty of that quality. It is devoid of that quality. Now, why she asked me is morality empty or not, I got to ask.

But that's what we mean. What do you mean?

[Speaker 2]
Well, I don't remember what the question was. You can't throw a lie. You can't throw a lie.

You know people, the moral life is going to be frightening. You know, real frightening. So I was just wondering if Buddhism is about emptiness, then how can you say that?

Like, how can you talk about moral things and not think emptiness? You know what I mean?

[Speaker 1]
Oh yeah, I think you're saying this. Like, I hope you're not asking this question, because this one's really hard. If the thing about the pear being good or bad is empty, then what about killing somebody?

You know? What about stealing something? Like, could stealing be empty in the sense that sometimes it's not wrong?

You know? Is it just our perception that it's wrong, that makes it wrong? Or it doesn't have some wrongness inherent in it?

You see what I mean? And the answer is this. Stealing is empty in several senses.

Is stealing necessarily a bad thing? No. Under certain circumstances, under special circumstances, a Buddhist is allowed to steal.

And under other circumstances, a Buddhist is required to steal. Okay? What are those circumstances?

If I see a guy with a gun, and I know he's going to shoot some people because he's angry, and he sets the gun down next to me, should I steal it? You know? Of course.

And in fact, if I took bodhisattva vows, I'm required to steal the gun. You see what I mean? Do I collect bad karma from it?

The book says, no. You collect fantastic good karma from it. The book says, boundless good karma from stealing the gun.

You see what I mean? So in that sense, yeah, morality is empty. It's not necessarily true that an act is inherently good or bad.

There are many other circumstances that might make it a good act. How do you know? I mean, by the way, how do you know?

She says, how do you know? You have to deal in the realm of your current knowledge. Okay?

Maybe that guy with the gun is a Buddha who's about to shoot Hitler in his teens. You see what I mean? And when you steal the gun, you're going to screw up everything.

It's very possible. But you have to deal with what you understand at that level. You have to deal with your current level of knowledge.

You can't sit there and speculate about that the guy he's going to shoot might be Hitler, and he might be an enlightened being doing the world a big favor. You can't think like that. Given what you know, given your current knowledge, you have to deal with it.

And that's how you know. You might be wrong, ultimately speaking, but according to the laws of karma, you're doing exactly the right thing. By the way, the implication of that is that two different people might be doing exactly the opposite thing and both of them doing excellent good karma according to their best current knowledge.

And there's no contradiction there. Yeah?

[Speaker 2]
So, it sounds like...

[Speaker 1]
I'm going to repeat the questions because they lack them on the tape. She says, well, it seems to be what you're saying is that a lot of the morality or what you choose to do as a moral person depends on your perception of the situation at the time. Absolutely.

There's four elements in karma. She, sampa, jowa, tattu. Say she, sampa, jowa, tattu.

She means, who is it that you kill? Sampa means, what was your intention and how did you perceive them as you killed them? And what mental affliction did you have?

Those are sampa. Jowa means, did you undertake to kill them? Tattu means, did you succeed and did they die and did you think, ha-ha, I killed them.

Good job. Owning the deed. To have a full karma, all four have to be present.

One of those number twos I mentioned, sampa, is that you recognize the object for what it is. So, for example, a person who engages in an abortion, truly believing that that fetus is not a living being, doesn't collect as much bad karma as a person who does understand it to be a living being. Yeah, they still collect...

Right, those other three elements. You see what I mean? Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
No, but, I mean, take Tibet. Take a Chinese communist who's coming from China.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
He believes that. And he believes he's been liberated.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. She says, well, what about a Chinese communist who comes in and truly, we're saying, and they said it in the Kumbum movie, kind of nice I think, because there was one of the guys, the Chinese general, truly believed he was doing the Tibetan people a favor, liberating them from the shackles of the Dalai Lama's henchmen. You know what I mean?

And he truly, honestly believes it. If that's his true intention, that's about... Intention, we say, is about 90% of our karma.

So it's true. That person may even collect a lot of good karma from their intention. But there is a quality of hurting other people when you kill them, or burn down their monasteries, or things like that, that we call RANG BZHIN GYI GANG NA MA THOB.

It is a bad deed by the very nature of hurting someone. You see, whether you think you're doing something good or bad, if they are hurt, then you have collected some bad karma. If they experience hurt from that.

Yeah?

[Speaker 2]
Pray for yourself to pursue the Dalai Lama in your long life?

[Speaker 1]
He's asking about, what's the situation of prayer in Buddhism, okay? And I always say, I was 10 years old, I was a good... I was an altar boy for 15 years.

I was in the choir for 10 years. I went to the church. They said, pray for Aunt Joyce, you know, she's having trouble, she's dying of cancer.

I went to the church, I sat down, I prayed, prayed, prayed, prayed, prayed. As well as I understood, you know, I just like asking God mentally, you know, could you spare her life? And then she died anyway.

And then after a certain age, you stop doing it, because it doesn't seem to work. And then you give up that belief system, you come to a Tibetan Lama, you say, do you guys believe in prayer? And they say, sure.

And you say, well, how am I supposed to pray? They say, get down on your knees or cross your legs and pray for the long life of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. And then you say, well, if I pray, does it affect him directly?

You say, I mean, can I transfer karma to His Holiness the Dalai Lama? Can I say, I'll give you 5% of my long life karma. Will you live another 5 years?

In Buddhism, this is unheard of. There's no such thing. You cannot share karma.

What's the proof of it? You're still suffering. People say, what's it got to do with it?

They say, are Buddhas enlightened? Yes. Do they know that you had a headache this morning?

Of course they did, they knew it a million years ago. Do they have compassion? Sure.

If they could take away your headache, would they do it? Absolutely. But I had a headache this morning.

Ergo, they can't. There's no such thing as taking away another person's karma. You can't do it.

And you can't give them any karma. It's impossible. So, I mean, karma is something that's committed and whose results are experienced within a single mind stream.

It'll always be that way. Mind streams can't mix. So why should I pray for the long life of the Dalai Lama?

Because there's no God to listen to it. And even if there was no God, but if I could transfer karma, I'd be okay, but I can't transfer karma. What's the use of praying for the Dalai Lama's long life?

They say that the good karma of wanting the Dalai Lama to be alive, the good karma of praying and praying and praying that the Dalai Lama stays, makes you, changes your karma. And then your world changes, and in your world the Dalai Lama lives longer. Okay?

So you can pray for the Dalai Lama, and you can make the Dalai Lama live longer. How it works is a little weird. It's not what you expected.

There wasn't God giving him some more life, and it wasn't that your prayers transferred 5% of your karmic account to his. It's that your virtuous wishes accumulate in your mind stream, and they force you to see the Dalai Lama living longer. And so you can make him live longer.

And in fact, there's no other way to make him live longer. Very interesting. So prayer does work, and you should do it, but you should understand how it works.

[Speaker 2]
Okay?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah? He asked a question. There's a practice called tonglen where you visualize taking all the pain out of another person, and you visualize giving them all your happiness.

And by the way, we put together a course about tonglen, and you can study it. It's a whole notebook. And we took the great writings about tonglen from all over the centuries and put them in one book.

And in there they asked a question. Should you do tonglen for your lama? Can you meditate on the Dalai Lama, see all his bad karma in his heart as a black smoke, suck it in towards you, and destroy it with the light of goodness?

You see, that's tonglen, right? And they say, ridiculous. They say, come on.

Could your lama have a bad deed? Impossible. Impossible.

The same question comes up in Shantideva's, Master Shantideva's, Bodhisattva's Way of Life, and it says, if my lama is threatened by somebody with a gun or a knife, what should I do? And Master Shantideva says, don't hurt anybody. And if your lama is an enlightened being, they don't need you to protect them.

They don't have any bad karma. They can't be hurt. You might see him getting hurt, but he's not being hurt.

If your lama is not an enlightened being, he's going to get hurt, because he's got the karma to be hurt. It's very interesting. So you're not allowed to do violence, even for your lama.

Even on behalf of your lama, you're not allowed to be violent. And it's the same question. You can't do tonglen on your lama, because they don't have any bad karma.

And if they seem to be sick, that's your problem. People ask me, what do you think about the controversy between the Dalai Lama and this other lama? What do you think about this controversy?

Who's right? And I say, they're both right. And I'm wrong.

Because I collected the karma to see these two high lamas fighting with each other. You want to fix that problem? Start treating your own lama better.

And then suddenly this problem will be over with. It's a very interesting thing. It's a very interesting thing that's causing that.

And it's us. It's your bad karma. Each person who sees it going on has collected the bad karma to see it going on.

And if you want it to stop, fix your own karma. That's a very delicate question. Any other questions?

Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
You said that eventually everyone's going to become a lama. And that's what you're looking for. So, if that happens, or when that happens, then what is everybody going to do?

And if there's no beginning to the cycle, or whatever suffering that's happening, and if everybody's like, if I'm seeing it going in a certain way, like that everyone's slowly becoming enlightened and people are going back, and if I see it in that shape, but then I say there was no beginning or there's no end point, I'm just, I'm...

[Speaker 1]
No, I get you. I'll ask, I'll express some of your questions, okay? First question is, you know, in classes and in scripture they always say every living creature is going to get enlightened.

Anybody with a mind can get enlightened and will be enlightened. The ultimate evolution of all life on the planet is that each being will be enlightened. First.

Second, your mind has no beginning and your mind will have no end. Okay? Why?

Because a mind is... any particular moment of consciousness grows out of a previous moment of consciousness. Okay?

Any particular moment of consciousness grows out of a previous moment of consciousness. So you can't pinpoint a time in the past when your particular mind was not functioning. If it's functioning now, it was functioning five minutes ago.

If it was functioning five minutes ago, it was functioning ten minutes ago, and so on. You can't come to a beginning of the mind, okay? So if the mind is infinitely old, and if the mind is going to go on forever, her first question is, what the heck are all these enlightened beings going to do hanging around each other?

You know, what do you do when everybody gets enlightened? I had another guy tell me this week, boy, that'd be boring, you know? All the challenges of life would be gone.

I think it'd be boring to be happy all the time. It's not. It's a lot of fun.

Okay? And that's just some weird American idea. I don't know who thought of it, or it's a popular thing to say, and it's really dumb, you know?

Of course it'd be fun to be enlightened, to be ultimately compassionate, to be ultimately knowledgeable, to be able to emanate on trillions of planets at the same time. You tell me that's not fun. It'd be wonderful, okay?

Wouldn't it be boring if everybody was enlightened already? No, not at all. I mean, no more than to be enlightened yourself.

Okay? No problem. I think the question you should have asked me, which I can't answer very well, is if my mind is infinitely old, how come I'm not enlightened yet?

Because given all the permutations, even if getting enlightened is one chance in a zillion, I've had lots of zillions already. So why ain't I a Buddha already? This has to do with the nature of cause and effect, and it's a little obscure to me, but I think the thing is that you haven't had the right, despite the time that you've had countless chances, you haven't had the right combination of teachings yet to do it.

Then the last thing they say in the monastery is, well, what's the proof that everybody will get enlightened? And you say, knowledge is greater than ignorance. Knowledge, sooner or later, your knowledge will overcome your ignorance.

Sooner, the knowledge of emptiness will always win out. When knowledge encounters ignorance, knowledge always wins. Based on that, every sentient being will get enlightened sooner or later.

Every living being will get enlightened sooner or later. Somebody asked my Lama that question 25 years ago on MacDougall Street, I remember, I was in the class. And he laughed and laughed and said, I guess they'll all just retire.

You know? Something like that. Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
Since in our lives, or at least in my life, anger and jealousy and irritation and depression arise almost unmanifold so quickly that it's hard to stop it before it starts. If you, at least in the moment of having it awkward, as an almost a time when you have that feeling no one else needs to have it. Yeah.

Is that a step?

[Speaker 1]
She's proposing the following practice, okay? She says, I have trouble controlling my own emotions. You know, I'm trying to be a very sincere Buddhist.

I'm a good Buddhist. And then given certain circumstances, I'm tired, I just had a cup of coffee, three people yelled at me already. And then I meet Mrs. Smith, you know, at work. And suddenly I go into this uncontrollable rage or jealousy or something like that. I thought I was doing so good. And then someone can set me off in 30 seconds.

Does it at least help a little bit karmically if as that uncontrollable anger arises, I offer it in a way? In other words, I say, okay, by the fact that I have to suffer at this moment, may no one else in the city of New York have this anger for the next half hour. Is that a useful prayer?

That is, okay? That's a kind of tonglen. And ultimate tonglen, the ultimate practice of taking on others' pain is called chikai tonglen means at the moment of your death, okay?

So if you're a good tonglen-er, then you practice dying. Like every once in a while, you sit down in your bed and get real quiet, you know, stick your tongue out, roll your eyes back and say, okay, I'm pretending I'm dying at this moment. And I take, there's supposed to be a special pain that comes to you as you die.

There's supposed to be this sharp pain in your body that's unlike any other kind of pain. And you practice taking that pain and saying, I'll sink all the bad deeds and all the pain of everybody in the world into my pain as I die. And by that act, may no other person feel this kind of pain again.

And this is the ultimate tonglen. And it seems like there's a precedent for it, okay? But it's a very holy practice.

Yeah, so I think on that basis, that that would be a useful practice, okay? Yeah, yeah. She said, clarify the idea of tonglen in light of sharing good karma.

It's a very, very beautiful question. And I think it's the first penchant lama who wrote the book on tonglen, who says very clearly in his book, you see, tonglen is a practice where you take other people's pain into yourself. Very importantly, you destroy it the moment you get it, okay?

That's very important to understand. Some people think you're supposed to take their pain into yourself and leave it there. That's a wrong teaching.

That's a dharma rumor, okay? You're supposed to take it into your heart and destroy it with an atom bomb of light in the first second that it reaches your heart, okay? So it's not like you're supposed to keep it in you, and it's very unhealthy and inauspicious and karmically dangerous to think that you're keeping it.

You're supposed to think you've destroyed it, okay? Can you actually do it is her question, you know? Does it do any good to imagine that you're taking other people's pain and bringing it into yourself and destroying it?

First question, given what I've said tonight, is it even possible to do that? Not at all, okay? When I get to this point, a lot of people lose faith in me.

They say, I can't believe this guy, you know? He's teaching this weird idea that chong len is useless. I didn't say that, okay?

I said it doesn't work the way you thought it would, okay? There's no such thing as the old kind of prayer that you had in your mind. That doesn't work.

When Aunt Joyce died when I was 10 years old, it was proved to me, you know? That kind of prayer doesn't work, okay? So is it useless to sit there and imagine that you could take pain away from another person and help them that way?

Not at all. This is one of the holiest practices to take away the pain of the whole world, but it's an indirect process, okay? Meaning, the wish to take the pain of all the people in the world gets you enlightened.

And when you get enlightened, you can emanate trillions of bodies and help them remove their pain by teaching them about karma, for example. So doing tong len is the smartest thing in the world and tong len doesn't work, okay? And you got to get used to that.

Some people freak out when I say that, but the Panchen Lama, Losang Chukgyi Gyeltsen, that's how he taught it. He never said that you were going to be able to take other people's pain away. You can't.

If you could, then you would never have a headache. Or else Buddhas are lazy, you know, or incompetent. You know, they can't cover all the headaches in the world or something, you know?

That's not the case. The idea is that by practicing, by going through that exercise, that very, very holy exercise, that you get so holy that then you actually become able to emanate all over the universe and help people directly. But not right now, it doesn't help the other people.

It helps you more, actually. Last question, okay?

[Speaker 2]
If there's a Buddha, he can emanate. He must also emanate.

[Speaker 1]
My, I can't remember, too. I don't see why, I don't see, no, I don't see why that falls at all. Someone has to be emanating those.

What's emanating the things that are harming people? Oh, okay, good, good, good. He's saying, you know, if Buddhas emanate nice people, then somebody must be emanating all the bad people, you know what I mean?

That's not necessarily true. I mean, the theory is that there's a certain number of people in the world who aren't enlightened. Some of them are bad.

A Buddha cannot emanate a bad person. Now, let me clarify that, okay? I was in a big argument or debate.

I was invited by this very good businessman to come to his boardroom and debate Buddhist philosophy with him. And it was fun, and we did it, you know? And he said, what about those tantric deities like Yamantaka who raise this holy anger in their heart, and then they're like growling and ripping up their, eating the hearts of their enemies, you know?

And what about them, you know? And I said, if there's a tantric deity that's capable of anger, then they're not a tantric deity anymore, you see what I mean? Because you've got to be enlightened to be a tantric deity.

And enlightened beings are not capable of having a bad thought. There's no such thing, okay? When a tantric deity roars and eats the heart of somebody, it's a metaphor for sweetness and holiness, okay?

This is how love looks to hatred, you see what I mean? How did Mahatma Gandhi look to Winston Churchill? Did you ever read it?

He said he's the most evil person he ever imagined, you know? He called him a naked faker, wearing this thing around. And I've seen pictures of the Dalai Lama in the Beijing airport, public enemy number one, you see what I mean?

So what I mean is those fierce aspects are just to represent how goodness looks to badness. There's not that idea that they're really evil people. Buddhas can emanate something tough to teach you something, and they do all the time, but they can't really be angry, you see what I mean?

So maybe then we're not thinking about emanations, but we've talked once before about tap su. Yeah. Good examples, right?

Yeah, harsh ones and easy ones. Yeah, tap su means extraordinary, special means to get a student into a state of enlightenment, okay? And what it means is that sometimes it'll be necessary or helpful to a student if the teacher hits him on the head with a stick.

I've had it done to me by my teacher. Sort of a sweet punch. And the point is that this is the holiest, this is the most effective method to help that person at that moment, okay?

The caveat, the important thing to remember is that at that moment, the Lama has no anger at all. You know, it's the emotion of a parent who pretends to be angry at a kid to get them to do something, to not put their finger in the stove. You see what I mean?

Like sometimes you have to say a really fine parent might have to pretend to be angry and horrible and screaming and just to get them not to do it again. But in their own heart, there's nothing but compassion. And that's the idea.

Yeah, under those circumstances, a teacher is allowed to do something extreme to help a student if they're sure it's going to help them.

[Speaker 2]
Something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Speaker 1]
Okay, that's all. We'll do a prayer. And then, is it next week in the class?

Yeah. Sojourn? Is there anything next Sojourn, I think?

Okay, there will be a class next Monday. It'll be a special class. Okay, here we go.

GURU GIRJU SHRI MEDHAGARA GURU HIRAM HIMSIN NINNAH YANNANI SANGYE SHINDU MIN PRAYERU ADI DURGUN NAMNA SINGH NA CHOD PAR SOG NAMGURU NAMAN NALAKANAYA Namo Buddhaya Namo Buddhaya Namo Buddhaya Namo Buddhaya