Нагарджуна, курс 3 — Мудрость Арьи Нагарджуны, курс 3: Пустота мантры (2021, Аризона), занятие 7

[Speaker 1]
Okay, welcome to Nagarjuna Course Three. And we are going through five years of Nagarjuna. And I always wanted to translate his greatest book, which is called Wisdom or Pradyumna.

And so I just decided that during the Lam Rim times, maybe I would give you guys some dessert. And you know what happens if you get too much dessert? You get crazy.

So we've been filming Nagarjuna number three. It's going to take five years to finish Nagarjuna. And we're on the third year now.

And it's going well. We are working on Choney Lama's commentary. Two good things happened yesterday.

You guys going to ask me what they were? Number one, we found the scan of Choney Lama's commentary that got lost 20 years ago. That came from his own monastery, from Choney Monastery.

And so now I can actually check things. And it was the only copy in the world. And we can talk about that someday.

And secondly, you ready? Peace Tree Cafe got all its permits from the county. After...

After one and a half years of fighting, I almost had a heart attack. I don't know why they did it, but God bless them. Okay, so I'm feeling good today.

I thought that since a lot of you guys are listening, first of all, I'd like to thank you for being the ACI volunteer team and working all over the world and making things happen for ACI. And I'm really, really grateful. Say again?

Oh, we got medicine group volunteers too. So I was thinking, what's a tasty dish to serve up from Peace Tree Cafe for ACI volunteers and Medicine Buddha volunteers together? What's something delicious that I can give you?

Because that's what a cafe owner has to do, right? So I thought a lot of you are in the gold clubs. A lot of you are helping to support the project to save the ancient books.

It will take about 700 years to save all the books. And it will take about, I don't know, just one book that we started this year is going to take 51 years to finish. I don't know what's going to happen.

So we've been working like that. And I thought that since a lot of you are involved with ACLL and how to save the books, I thought today maybe it would be fun to start out with describing to you how I use it. So I use this database about two or 300 times every day for the last 35 years.

And without it, it'd be very difficult for me to teach. And what I'd like to do, and we're sorry our tech is not too high today. I'm holding one computer on my lap and I'm facing it to this other computer.

But I thought you'd like to see what the database looks like because a lot of you guys are raising money for producing this database and maybe you've never seen it in use. And I sort of want to tie it into nāgārjuna today. So this is a special nāgārjuna class.

And during this version of nāgārjuna, which is very, very difficult, we are tying it into why does Medicine Buddha work? Why do the mantras work? How does that tantra work?

And if you understand how the mantras work, how the practice works, then it's going to work a lot better. It's like a computer system. If you understand how it works, it can work better.

And if you don't understand how it works, you could end up holding a computer on your lap to try to get the other screen to show. And so obviously it's really useful to know how something works. So if you understand how the Medicine Buddha practice works, then you can do it a lot better and you can get better results from it.

And we had a big discussion about it. Some people were saying, it doesn't matter how it works. Just teach her how to do it.

But I do believe that if you know how it works, it's more powerful. If you're like an old grandma somewhere and you just want to do mantras and you don't want to know how they work, that's okay. Like I'm thinking about my mom, she's 95.

Maybe I can't explain to her how the mantra works. I can just tell her, just do the mantras. But if you understand how things work, they work better.

Okay, so here's the database. Here's what it looks like. Let's say, I wanted to show you something about Nagarjuna.

Of course, Nagarjuna's thing is to explain emptiness. Nagarjuna's most popular thing of all time is to explain emptiness, of course. And here's what the database looks like on my computer.

And here's the different parts of the database that I use every day. And I wanted to take you, I don't know, let's go to the tenure. This is 5,000 books that were translated into Tibetan.

And the translation, it took 700 years, and they finished it around the time of Jetsamkhapa. And it was 4,600 or 700 books. And the first goal of ALL 35 years ago was to input all their ancient books from India, which is all the sutras and all the commentaries and all the tantras.

And the only problem was there was no copy in India of them. They all got burned or destroyed. And so the first job we had was to, we actually contacted this ancient, ancient monastery that still had some blocks.

And we actually got into the library and we had the blocks, we had new pages printed from the blocks. You're talking about 310,000 blocks. 310,000 blocks to print all the things from the Kangyur and Tengur from ancient India.

And we did it. We finished, it took us about 10, 12 years. And we typed about, it's about 310,000 pages and we did it.

And so we have that, so here's Tengur. These are all the commentaries from ancient India. And I wanted to show, here's all the categories of the Tengur here.

For example, there's Perfection of Wisdom, Middle Way, there's Mind Only, there's Abhidharma, there's Vinaya, there's Logic, there's Medicine, there's Architecture, there's Grammar. There's books about how to do practical things like run a government. Or there's even a book in here about how to grade gemstones.

Which I saw is always fun for me. I wanted you to show you this category, the second one here, which is called Vajrayana, the Diamond Way. And as you can see, it's almost, well, it's 78 different volumes, which means 78,000 pages of ancient commentaries to the tantras.

The tantras are about 500,000 pages. But here you've got about 78,000 pages of commentary to them. And these are divided.

And by the way, the arrangement of the Vajrayana was secret. And me and Venerable Jigme figured it out using an ancient commentary that we found. And it was really a big, big deal that after, I don't know, this was carved 300, 400 years ago, somebody figured out how they put the tantras in the order that they are, which is really awesome.

And I don't know if you can see, but here are the four classes of tantra. There are four different levels of tantra. For example, Medicine Buddha is the fourth level.

And highest level is called Anuttara, first level. And let's go to Anuttara. Here's, I don't know, 17 different categories of different Anuttara tantras.

For example, Chakra Sambhara is here. Kala Chakra is here. One part of Tara is here.

And perhaps the highest tantra is called Guhyasamaja. And this was the favorite of Jatamkala. And this is also the one that's used for the tantric college where my teacher was the director, assistant director, in 1955.

And if you go inside of the Guhyasamaja secret books, there's five huge categories and hundreds of books. And the first category is called Lodrup Lupa, which means the system of Nagarjuna. So people ask me, hey, did Nagarjuna know about tantra?

Hey, the highest part of the highest tantras is Nagarjuna. And it's all dedicated to him. It's 50 volumes dedicated to Nagarjuna's interpretation of the Diamond Way.

And he's the first person mentioned in the tenure. So he's the greatest expert, not only about emptiness, but he's the greatest expert, as you can see here, in the secret teachings. He's number one.

He was the highest teacher. And his system was recorded and used in ancient India. And there still exists a couple thousand pages of explanation of his version of the Guhyasamaja, which is, again, Tsongkhapa's favorite tantra that he used himself.

So there's the books from ancient India. And the first great emphasis of the secret teachings, of the highest class of the secret teachings, is Nagarjuna's system, Nagarjuna's presentation, which is very, very beautiful. Now, suppose I want to see, if I'm working with the database and I want to see, well, what did the Tibetans, the Tibetans made a thousand years of commentaries, what did they say about Nagarjuna's treatment of the secret way, the Diamond Way?

So then in the database, I would go to Sumbu, which means here's all the Tibetan books. And I don't know, we have something like 50,000 books finished. And here you can see I clicked on Lojong.

And on the right, you can see all the books. Actually, it's all the shelves of our digital library that have Lojongs. There's about 150 Lojongs there.

And by the way, it took 35 years of really hard work, first of all, to find the books, then to input the books. And no one in history has cataloged them, nobody. And we cataloged them.

And it took about 30 years of work. So we don't talk about it much. You guys probably never heard about it, but it took thousands of hours of work to put the library into order, to put everything on shelves, to say, oh, the Tantra's over here, Middle Way's over here, Abhidharma's over there, and then to arrange all the shelves.

It took many, many thousands of hours. So let's go to Tantra. Let's just see, how did the Tibetans deal with Tantra?

So it happens to be, and by the way, you can see all the categories here, Vinaya. There's lineage trees, there's history books, Middle Way, comparative philosophy, Abhidharma. So let's go to Tantra, which is called Gyut.

And on the right, you can see all of the different Tantric systems. And there's 130. Medicine Buddha is one.

And there's 129 others that we have preserved. So you can see here, for example, Manjushri, White Manjushri, Chakrasamvara, Amitabha. And we have cataloged, and we have saved 130 different schools of Tantra.

So Medicine Buddha is just one school of Tantra. And then there's 129 others that we have identified and we have recovered. So if you look here, let's go to the Garjuna's presentation of the highest Tantra, which is called Guhyasamaja.

And it's right here. And then you can see on the right here are all the different categories of the Guhyasamaja. And commentaries, how to move your mind on after you die, how to do the Guru Yoga, how to do retreat, how to do the empowerment, how to draw the mandala, how to make the dharmas, how to do the mantras, how to do the confession, how to do the four powers according to Guhyasamaja, how to do the fire offering.

And many, many categories like that. So that's just Nagarjuna. That's just Nagarjuna's Tantra.

And let's check. There's a way, look. Let's see how many pages are there.

So it's seven million bytes. Seven million bytes. Call it, I don't know, if you transfer it into pages, it's 7.5 megabytes. Just on Nagarjuna. It's about 5,000 pages. 5,000 pages of Nagarjuna's explanation of the secret teachings.

Why are we talking about all this? Well, as maybe you noticed, Nagarjuna made the ritual that we used to take our bodhisattva vows. And without that ritual, or without some ritual for the bodhisattva vows, you're not allowed to study Medicine Buddha.

You have to take an empowerment. And then you have to take the vows, at least the vow to try to be a bodhisattva. You have to go through that ceremony.

And we used Nagarjuna's ceremony. And now today, we're going to jump into the swimming pool called Nagarjuna. And it's extremely hard.

And we're going to be jumping into his teachings on emptiness. Geshe-la, what's that got to do with Medicine Buddha? Well, here's the search program for the database.

We invented this search program and I thought you'd like to see how it works. I'm going to search 5,000 books from ancient India. I'm going to look for any presentation of Changchukyi Sem, of Bodhichitta.

And I just used a part of the name because it's faster. And then I'm going to look at it near his name, Naga. Did Nagarjuna write anything about Bodhichitta?

Why, Geshe-la, why are you off to Bodhichitta now? Because I'm irritated. Why are you irritated?

Because I'm aggravated. Why are you aggravated? I talked to somebody yesterday.

They said, oh, we went on to Medicine Buddha. We don't need Lam Rim anymore. We're advanced now.

We don't have to do Lam Rim. And I'm like, argh, I got aggravated. So the person who wrote 8,000 pages of commentary based on him, and some by him, on the highest teachings of Tantra, did he study Lam Rim?

Did he think Lam Rim was still important? Or did he just go on to Medicine Buddha? Well, here it is.

You can ask the database. Hey, database, sorry. Did Nagarjuna think Bodhichitta was important?

And then you can look. You're going to search, I don't know, a million pages in one and a half seconds. You ready?

Are you watching? Here we go. One, two, three.

Found. Found it. It took less than a second, I guess.

And there it is. Lodro means Nagarjuna. And here's the book called, BYANG CHUB TU SEMS BSKYED PA'I CHO GA Yes, he wrote a ritual for taking the bodhisattva vows.

And it's in the ancient books. Did he write anything else? Yeah, he wrote this, a commentary on how to get bodhichitta.

He wrote a commentary on how to get bodhichitta. Where is that commentary located? In the Tantras.

Nagarjuna's commentary on how to get bodhichitta is Tantric. It's in the Tantras. I didn't say so, they said so.

So now you've got 8,000 pages of Tantric commentaries and root texts about Nagarjuna's system on Tantra. Maybe he understands medicine Buddha. Or maybe he thought it was important to take your bodhisattva vows as part of Tantra.

He wrote the book. He wrote the book. So I just wanted to impress on you guys, there's a huge connection.

You've got to study Lam Rim if you want to study Tantra, medicine Buddha. And especially the part of the Lam Rim that deals with compassion and love. And especially the part about emptiness.

You've got to understand emptiness or the mantra doesn't work. You can sit and do mantras all day, but if you don't understand how something works, it doesn't work. It's weird.

You can say mantras, it's okay. You get a little bit karma because of your motivation. But if you go and fight your way through Nagarjuna's presentation of emptiness, then you're really going to understand medicine Buddha.

So we call this program the emptiness of medicine Buddha. And let's jump into the emptiness of medicine Buddha. And I say it's the only way to make it work for you really well.

And I don't know, I'm excited to share it with all of you volunteers. Because I figure you're the most serious people in the whole world. And I like serious people.

There's a lot of people that if I say, let's fight our way through Nagarjuna's most difficult book about emptiness, because he understood tantra and he knew it was necessary for medicine Buddha. In fact, it's got 8,000 pages about his understanding of tantra in the database already. Let's dig through it.

So I trust you guys won't get confused or go crazy. We have to fight our way deep through emptiness. In the monastery, if the teacher can make you confused about emptiness, they think it's progress.

If you think you understand emptiness after half an hour, you're wrong. It took me about 20 years or something. So here we go.

We're going to go to our actual text today. This is our deep dive class number seven. And here we go.

All right, Uncle Tim, are you ready with the... All right, this chapter, let's go to the chapter name. By the way, we're well into the text already.

This is called chapter 13 and it's an investigation of factors. Now, those sharp, sharp guys among you, you should tell grandpa, wait, we already did that in chapter one. Well, what was the name of chapter one?

An investigation of conditions. RKYEN BZHI, the four conditions. Now, they're 12 chapters later, he decides to cover factors.

Well, what's the difference between a factor and a condition? Okay, let's go back. Can you bring it up again?

Yeah, BDU BYED means things that make other things happen. Oftentimes, BDU BYED means secondary causes, which is why I translate it as factors. For example, what's the main cause of a tree?

It's the seed. That's called nirneng gi gyu. That's called the immediate cause.

And then you have BDU BYED, which means contributing factors, like water, sunlight, fertilizer. What's BDAG PA mean, you guys? This is the chapter, investigation.

Oops, how do you say it in Sanskrit? BAR IK SHA, BAR IK SHA. Okay, looking all around the question.

BAR IK, like periscope. IK SHA, which came into German as ALGA, which came into English as E-Y-E. That's why there's a Y in the English word for your eyeball.

Okay, so each chapter of the 27 chapters of Nagarjuna's most difficult and most important work called? BAR IK SHA No, his book. BAR IK SHA Just wisdom, okay?

And that's so Nagarjuna. He didn't say a discussion of the details of wisdom. Somebody asked him, what's your book name?

He said, wisdom. Yeah, but what? Wisdom, but wisdom.

And that's so Nagarjuna. He's a man of few words. Okay, so we're going to investigate how does one thing cause another thing?

But this particular chapter is not named in an obvious way. In this case, factors means illusion. So what's the connection between one thing causing another thing and the idea of an illusion, maya, maya, an illusion?

So really, he should have called this maya-pariksha. It's not really discussing the different kinds of factors. He did that already in the first chapter.

By chapter 13, he's talking about how do causes and conditions, how are they involved with illusion? Okay, so here we go. Put on your seat belt.

And by the way, he's not satisfied with covering illusion. At the end, he covers STONG NYID KYI STONG PA. STONG PA NYID KYI STONG PA The emptiness of emptiness.

So you guys, this morning you have bad luck. You got on a rocket ship. We're going to talk about the emptiness of emptiness by the time we finish today.

And I'll keep coming back to the Medicine Buddha practice and showing why, if you understand emptiness, your mantras will be more powerful and your practice will be more, and you just be Super Medicine Buddha guy. All right, here we go. First verse, Mr. Tim. ,BCOM LDAN BDE GYIS CHOS GANG ZHIG, ,LU BA DE NI BRDZUN ZHES SOGS, ,RDU BYED THAMS CAD LU BA'I PHYIR, ,DE NA DE DAG BRDZUN PA YIN, ,CHOM LDAN BDE GYIS CHOS GANG ZHIG, The Buddha said, every single thing in the world, LU BA, cheats you. Everything in the world cheats you. The mantras of Medicine Buddha also cheat you.

What? Then everybody said, why? Why?

Because BRDZUN PA, they lied to you. They lied to you. Everything in the world is cheating you.

Why? Because they lied to you. BRDZUN PA'I TSUL, said the Buddha.

Now there's a very... Okay, I'm just going to get you ready. If you ever get to the monastery and you're ever debating in Colloquial Tibetan at 2,000 words a second, somebody might bring up this favorite topic.

SANGS RGYAS KYIS BRDZUN GSUNGS It says here, CHOM LDAN BDE GYIS BRDZUN GSUNGS The Buddha spoke lie. The Buddha spoke lies. So the Buddha doesn't follow the Ten Good Deeds, right?

What do you mean? He broke number four. What's number four?

He's lying. The Buddha spoke lies. And if you want to have a fun debate with one of the 12-year-olds at the monastery, this is good for like an hour and a half or so.

[Speaker 2]
I'm really perfect. Yes, really perfect. ,LAS GANG YID BLO DANG GAL, Buddha spoke lie.

[Speaker 1]
Here's where he spoke lies. In the Garden of the He Spoke Lies. But what does it really mean?

He said all things which have causes are lying to you. So he just mentioned the word lie, he didn't speak a lie. He spoke lies, but he didn't say a lie.

Got it? It's a joke. All right, if you're ever debating with a 12-year-old, just note it.

,RDU BYED THAMS CAD DU BA'I PHYIR, Everything that has a cause, or everything that is a cause, is lying to you. Therefore, sorry, everything that has a cause is cheating you. Therefore, they are liars, dzunpa, they are liars.

This is how Nagarjuna starts the chapter. And that's why we had Tim and Grandpa in the picture at the beginning of the class. And the idea is that, I don't know, the employee is cheating the employer, I guess, and he got caught.

So the idea is the employee is cheating the employer, and therefore he will have to lie to the employer. So there's a connection between cheating and lying. He stole the money, which is cheating, and now he's going to have to lie about it to keep the money.

All right, so just get in that mood. We're talking about illusion. We're talking about somebody lying to you.

All right, let's go to the next verse, Tim. ,GAL TE LOD CHU GANG YIN PA DE RDZUN DE LA CI ZHIG LOD, ,BCOM LDAN DE GYIS DE GSUNGS PAS, ,SDONG NI YIN GZUGS BSTAN PA YIN, Look, okay, I agree. So suppose everything's cheating me.

,DE RDZUN DE LA CI ZHIG LOD, Then what's it lying about? How do things, including Medicine Buddha practice and including Medicine Buddha mantra, how are they lying to me? How are they lying to me?

,BCOM LDAN DE GYIS DE GSUNGS PAS, Look, he said they are lying to you and that got him into the subject of SDONG NI, emptiness. Wow, what do you mean? Well, the honesty of that employee's transaction don't exist.

He's cheating the company. How much honesty is in his transaction? How much honesty is going on at that desk at that moment?

Zero, and that's called emptiness. Got it? When somebody lies to you, there's no reality there.

Then the situation is empty of reality. When someone cheats you, they lie to you. When they lie to you, the truth is gone.

And that's a kind of emptiness. If it's not real, it's empty. Buddha said things that cheat you lie to you.

Everything around you is cheating you. Everything around you, including Medicine Buddha mantras, is lying to you. And therefore, it's all empty.

There's no truth there. Nothing's real there. Okay, got it?

All right. Then I don't know, when I... Okay, I was trying to find a picture about lying.

Here it is. All right, it's a Gucci bag that you buy in Thailand on the street. Okay, for $2.

There's a place in, oh no, it's in Beijing. There's a special market. My friend went crazy.

My friend from Israel, he went crazy. He went to this market. He bought like 30 Gucci bags for all his relatives.

And they're each like a dollar. And I don't know, you pick them up and the handle falls off and stuff like that. So it looks like a Gucci bag, but it's a fake Gucci bag.

And the Buddha said, everything around you is like that. Everything's lying to you. All right, let's go to the next verse.

Oh, sorry, I'm going to throw a quotation in that's not in your... Okay. So when did the Buddha talk about lying?

Supposedly the Buddha has talked about lying. So can you show me the quotation? And Choney Lama takes the challenge.

And he says, I'll show you the quotation. I got a quotation where Buddha talked about it. And it's called MA GROD PA'I ZHUGS PA LAS.

MA GROD PA means a special lake that will never dry up. GROD PA means dry up. MA GROD PA means can never dry up.

Anavatapta, in Sanskrit, Anavatapta, which means, sometimes it's called not warm, but there's a Naga living in the lake. His name is MA GROD PA, Anavatapta. And sometimes they call it not warm or warm.

And he's having a conversation with Lord Buddha in this sutra. It's the Sutra of the Naga in the Lake. And he says, Buddha says, ,GANG ZHIG RGYEN LAS SKYES PA'I DE MA SKYES, ,DE LA SKYES PA'I RANG BZHIN YOD MA YIN, Anything that comes from conditions, there's our conditions.

Anything that comes from causes and conditions like seeds or water or fertilizer, anything that's born from water and seeds is never born. Anything that is born from water and seeds is not born, Buddha said. It's all fake.

It's all a lie. ,DE LA SKYES PA'I RANG BZHIN YOD MA YIN, There's no nature of being born there. Nothing's being born.

There's no, the slightest bit of being born there. ,SKYES LA RAG LAS GANGS TE STONG BA SHES, I tell you, anything that's mixed up with causes is empty. It's a lie.

The truth is gone. ,GANG ZHIG STONG NYID SHES DE BA RGYUD YIN, Anybody who really understands that can do stuff well like Medicine Buddha practice. BA RGYUD YIN You know BA RGYUD means like a newborn, like a new red woman or something like that.

It means they are skillful. They are living in the right way. Anyone who understands emptiness is doing a good Medicine Buddha practice.

Who said that? The Buddha said that. Why?

Because they understand the illusion there. They understand that there's emptiness there. And that's where the Buddha described lies.

Anything that has a cause is lying to you. If you get it, then you can live a good life. You can have a good practice.

Got it? All right, I went and found it for you. I'll put it in the translation when I finish it.

By the way, translation is already 400 pages and it's tough. It's really tough. We're going through it at about 110 miles an hour.

It should take like 20 years. All right, here we go. Next verse.

It's really a verse and a half, by the way. And what did I say is tricky about reading Nagarjuna? What did I say could trip you up?

[Speaker 2]
You never know whether he's using the right reason or the right thing.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, sometimes he sprinkles in the other guy's comments and he doesn't warn you. There's no warning. And you need Choney Lama to tell you, yeah, no, no, this is not Nagarjuna.

This is the other guy. So here's the other guy. ,SNGON NANG NGO BO NYID MED NA, ,GZHAN DU RGYUR BA SNANG PHYIR RO, ,SNGON NANG NGO BO NYID MED MED, ,GANG PHYIR RNGON NAM STONG PA NI, ,GAL TE RNGON NYID MED NA, ,GZHAN DU RGYUR BA GANG ZHIG YIN, Okay, here's the other guy.

,RNGON NANG NGO BO NYID MED NA, If stuff doesn't have a true nature of its own, if things don't have a true nature of their own, Nagarjuna says they don't, by the way, right? He says, if things don't have a true nature of their own, ,GZHAN DU RGYUR BA SNANG PHYIR RO, then why do they change? By the way, the example is going to be when you use milk to make yogurt.

And in India, the way you make yogurt in the market is you get a bowl of milk, hot milk. You put in the yeast from the last yogurt, and then you hang it up in your shop and the flies cover it for the whole day. You can't even see the white color, it's all black.

And then they serve it the next day. Yeah, and when I got back from India, the doctor told me I had 17 kinds of parasites. And so anyway, the milk transforms into yogurt.

Can you tell the difference between the yogurt and the milk? Yeah, it's different. It tastes different.

It's much, it's sticky, right? Then he says, the other guy says an interesting thing. He says, look, if things that have causes have no nature of their own, then how can they change?

If the milk was not, if the milk didn't have an identity, then how did it drop that identity and become yogurt? Got it? Got it?

So according to you, Nagarjuna, if everything's empty and it has no nature of its own, then milk can never change. Because it has to have a nature to change. It has to be something before it can change to something else.

If it's not something in the first place, how can it become yogurt? GZHAN DU RGYUD BA SNANG PHYIR RO We can see things change. DNGOS PO NGO BO NYID MED MED Therefore, it's not true that nothing has any nature of its own.

MED MED It's not true that things have no nature. GANG PHYIR DNGOS RNAMS STONG PA NYID Okay, say things are empty. GAL TE NGO BO NYID MED NA If the milk doesn't have a nature of being milk, GZHAN DU RGYUD BA GANG ZHIG YIN Well, how can it become yogurt?

How can it drop its former identity and take on a new identity if it never had an identity? This is the other guy. Talking to Nagarjuna.

All right, and if you don't know it's the other guy, you're in trouble. Okay. All right, and I found a picture that I like.

It's leaves, green and different colored leaves. It's, I don't know, it's springtime here. We're thinking about leaves.

If the leaf wasn't green, how could it turn yellow? Got it? If the leaf wasn't green, how could it turn yellow?

In Nagarjuna, you said nothing has any nature of its own. Okay, I did. So leaves aren't green.

What's it got to do with anything? Well, if they're not green, how can they turn yellow? Then how can you say turn?

Okay, they must be green. Those green leaves are green, right? They have a nature.

They're green. If they didn't have a nature, they couldn't become yellow. It makes sense, right?

Got it? Yes, you're correct. Thank you.

All right, here we go. Next verse. ,GAL TE NGO BO NYID YOD NA, ,CI LTA BUR NI GZHAN DU BSGYUR, Nagarjuna's answer is, no, if things did have a nature, how could they change?

The other guy said, if green leaves aren't green, how can they turn to yellow? Then Nagarjuna says, if green leaves were green, they couldn't turn to yellow. Your argument defeats yourself.

If green leaves are green, they can't become yellow leaves. They're green. You can't call a yellow leaf a green leaf.

Come on, if a green leaf was really green, it couldn't become yellow. So don't give me this stupid example that because things changed, they must have had some nature because you couldn't say they changed if they didn't have a nature in the first place, to change from. Got it?

You okay? Just keep nodding. You guys at home, just keep nodding.

CI LTA BUR NI GZHAN DU BSGYUR So he uses the argument back to the other guy. If green leaves are green, then they can't become yellow leaves because they're green leaves. Got it?

He uses the same argument back to the guy. Here's the picture. This picture was easy to...

Okay, if green leaves are green, they can never be yellow leaves. Duh. If green leaves had a nature of being green, they could never become yellow leaves.

The other guy said, if they don't have a nature of being green, how can you observe a change in them if they drop that nature and become yellow? Got it? So they must have had a nature.

All right, now, Choney Lama uses a very beautiful word here and I want to use it for our Sanskrit lessons. So every Nagarjuna class we have, we're going to do a mini Sanskrit lesson. So you got to learn a little bit of Sanskrit.

Don't worry, it won't hurt you. It's like 15 words for the whole course. But since you have to speak in Sanskrit later, after the Medicine Buddha practice, which has no nature, makes you a Medicine Buddha, you're going to have to speak Sanskrit.

So you might as well get used to it now. It's like you're going to Guadalajara and might as well learn about five words. It makes the taxi driver so happy.

Okay, all right. So here we go. You got that one for me, you guys?

This is our little Sanskrit lesson. This is a word called, by the way, I misspelled it there, Tim. Is it too late to fix it?

Prakriti. It should be K-I-R. This is an old mistake that everyone else makes.

Okay, prakriti. And those of you may have heard it. You've probably heard this prakriti.

It's a very famous word in Hindu yoga schools. It's a very famous idea. In Tibetan, it's called shiluk.

Shiluk, say shiluk. Shiluk. And that shi is a very unusual word that means the primordial nature of something.

Shi. And it happens to be used in a famous expression. Dashi de le.

Dashi de le. Which means, are you having a good primordial nature? Okay, dashi de le.

And that's how you say hi in Tibetan. You say dashi de le, which means wonderful primordial shining nature. Okay, dashi de le.

Like when you say thank you in Tibetan, what's it mean? THUGS CA'I PHYIR Your great heart. Your great holy heart is how you say thank you.

And how you say good morning is a shining primordial nature of happiness and goodness. Which used to be the expression for Happy New Year. And then it became so common that people started using it for good morning.

All right. Prakriti comes from pra, the prefix letter pra, and then kriti. And by the way, people say prakriti and it's wrong.

The pronunciation is wrong. Prakrit. People say prakrit.

And that's like saying, it's like your German friends who say, I went and bought a jeep and drove it home. It's just a mistake of pronunciation. All right.

So pra means forward or very much. Kr is the verbal root that means to make or to do. As we spoke about pra many times.

Kr we spoke about, it's found in serial, create, and karma. And the C in serial used to be K. It changed around the time of Shakespeare.

And then ta makes it a past tense. And I think it came into English with E-D. May did, or I don't know, I created it, did, did.

So prakriti means that which was made from the beginning. And it means the original nature of an object. In Sankhya philosophy, in ancient Hindu yoga philosophy, they will juxtapose two things, mis-kassika, prakriti and?

Kassika. Purusha. Purusha.

Prakriti and purusha. So purusha means the person. And it means God, the person, capital P, who made everything.

And then prakriti is the nature which was made by the God. So in Hinduism, especially in the ancient yoga philosophy, prakriti is nature and purusha is the creator. But in Buddhism, prakriti means the nature which things cannot have.

The original nature, green leaf, green. Green is in the leaf, like that. So try to remember that.

That's called shigung. And Choney Lama is very skillful to use the word. So now today you learned a new word, what?

Prakriti. That which was made in the beginning, prakriti. And the nature of things.

When Michael was made by his parents, was he made with a nature built in from the factory? Did he have a nature, prakriti, in him from the factory? From my mom's factory.

All right, here we go. Next subject. ,DE NI LA NI GZHAN GYUR MED, ,GZHAN NI LA YANG YOD MI YIN, ,GANG PHYIR BZHIN DU MI DGA' STE, ,GANG PHYIR RGYAS PA'ANG MI DGA'O, Now the gardener, he's calm.

He just jumps on it. Hey, you guys talk about change, right? Green leaf changes yellow, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Does that have a nature? Does the changing have a nature?

Got it? Forget the leaf now. Did the green leaf have a nature?

We say no, they say yeah. They say it had to have a nature because it changed. If it didn't have an identity, how could it take on a new identity of being yellow?

How could milk drop its old identity and become yogurt, right? If it didn't have an identity in the first place. Now we say, by the way, you guys want to talk about the emptiness of change?

When the milk becomes yogurt, when the leaf turns to yellow, what's the emptiness of that? ,DE NYID LA NI GZHAN GYUR MED, If things have a primordial nature, Prakriti, GZHAN GYUR MED, they cannot change to something else. ,GZHAN NYID LA YANG YOD MA YIN, If things are self-existently separate, they can't have a nature.

If things are self-existently separate or other, is the yellow leaf different from the green leaf? Yeah, it's yellow. Is the yogurt different from the milk?

Yeah, it's that different self-existence. That's this GANG GZHER GZHON NUS MI DGAL TE Young people don't get old and old people don't get old either. That's Nagarjuna.

Young people don't get old and old people don't get old either. Now let's do the second one because it's easier. Do old people get old?

No, they're already old. Okay, we got that one finished. Now the big question is, do young people get old?

No, because they're young people. Okay, listen. Do young people get old?

No. Why? They're young.

Yeah, it's different. It's totally different. Do old people get old?

No, they're already old. Do young people get old? No, they're young.

Got it? Quit fooling around with the words. I'm not fooling around with the words.

I'm trying to demonstrate to you that words are messed up already and you don't notice it. Young got old. What are you talking about?

Young, old. An old young person? What do you mean?

Something's wrong. The mantra cured the cancer. The Medicine Buddha mantra cured the cancer.

Well, what's the connection? The mantra never touched the cancer. How could it cure the cancer?

Are they separate or not? ,GAL TE DE NYID SHING RGYUR NA, ,'O MA NYID NI ZHOG RGYUR RO, How does milk become ZHOG? ZHOG means yogurt.

If you ever need... If you're ever hungry, ask for some ZHOG. But say low-tone, ZHOG.

Don't say ZHOG. ZHOG means dice and it means you want to play some, you want to lose some money. Don't say, I'm hungry, I need some ZHOG.

ZHOG, ZHOG. ,'O MA NYID NI ZHOG RGYUR RO, ,'O MA LAS GZHAN GANG ZHIG NI, ,ZHOG YIN DNGOS PO YIN PAR RGYUR, Is the milk separate from the yogurt or not? Are they separate things?

Yes or no? I'm not tricking you. Here's Nagarjuna, typical Nagarjuna.

Hey, I'm not tricking you. Just answer the question. Is the milk the yogurt?

Are they separate? Yes. Do they ever touch?

Cannot. Why? The milk was yesterday.

The yogurt is today. They can't overlap. If they touch at any point, then yesterday is today.

It's not possible. Milk cannot turn into yogurt. It's not possible.

Something weird is going on. Medicine Buddha mantra cannot kill cancer, but it does. And that's how we get yogurt, right?

How many times have you had yogurt? Must be something to do with it. All right, next.

Oh, I have a picture of a grandma and a granddaughter. The granddaughter is not getting... The granddaughter is not old and getting old.

And the grandma's not getting old because the grandma already got old. And the daughter's young. All right, go figure.

Next one. Ooh, this class is going to... Now, according to Choney Lama, who's guiding us, and by the way, we haven't gone through the commentary.

The commentary would take about 20 years to teach, really. And it's beautiful. But he warns us.

Choney Lama says, STONG NYID RANG BZHIN GYI RGYUD PA'I GRIB BYED RGAG PA'O I'm going to prove to you that emptiness doesn't have a nature of its own. I'm going to prove to you that emptiness is empty. And that's his big thing.

The next verse is one of the most famous verses of this whole book. And it's kind of an honor that we have all our Medicine Buddha and ACI volunteers here today. Because we hit maybe the second most famous verse from this whole book.

And it's just cool that you're here. Because in five years, it's only going to happen once. So here we go.

GAL TE STONG MI'I CHUNG ZAD YOD STONG PA'ANG CHUNG ZAD YOD PAR GYUR STONG MI'I CHUNG ZAD YOD MI NA STONG PA'ANG YOD PAR GA LA GYUR GAL TE STONG MI'I CHUNG ZAD YOD If there's anything that's not empty, if there's the slightest thing which is not empty, STONG PA'ANG CHUNG ZAD YOD PAR GYUR you could have the slightest thing which is empty. If there's the slightest thing which isn't empty, then you can have the slightest bit of emptiness. STONG MI'I CHUNG ZAD YOD MI NA If there isn't the slightest thing which is not empty, STONG PA'ANG YOD PAR GA LA GYUR how could you have emptiness?

You need the opposite to define a thing. If there's no such thing as not being empty, how are you going to recognize emptiness? You recognize things by comparison to other things.

How do you know something's blue when it's not yellow? If blue was around you all the time, if everything in your world was blue, you wouldn't see the blue. I mean, you'd be looking at it, but you wouldn't see it.

So this is a very, very famous proof that emptiness has its own emptiness. Now, how is that? Let's look at this picture.

This is a glass of water which is completely full. It's definitely not empty, but there would have to be some part of non-empty if the emptiness came from its own side. If emptiness came from its own side, there would have to be part which is not empty.

Therefore, that last statement was, who was talking? Sounds like the other guy. Sounds like the other guy.

Okay, Nidrarjuna, so must be some stuff. If things don't have an identity of their own, then the only way you're going to recognize it is by looking at the opposite. Therefore, there must be some things in the universe that aren't empty, and you can compare them to the things that are empty and you can tell they're empty.

Otherwise, how could you ever see if emptiness didn't have its own nature? If it were only empty by comparison. All right, okay, here we go.

If you're not confused yet, we'll work on it. Let's go to the next verse. ,RGYAL BA RNAMS KYIS RTOGS PA'I NYID, ,LTA KUN NYES PAR BYUNG BAR GSOL, ,GANG DAG RTOGS PA'I NYID LTA BA, ,DE DAG GRUB TU MNYAD PAR GSOL, This is a very subtle verse.

It takes a lot of work. I'll introduce it to you. And what my teacher said was, you have to cook it.

Rebecca used to sit with my teacher, right? The teacher, cook it. We said, no, no, we don't understand.

He said, cook it, goddamn, cook it. I said, I'm going home. I should try that.

Okay, ,RGYAL BA RNAMS KYIS RTOGS PA'I NYID, that the victors stated about emptiness, ,LTA KUN NYES PAR BYUNG, This NGES BYUNG first principle path is renunciation. But it also means to rip something out. To rip something.

NYES PAR BYUNG, pull it out. Pull yourself out of the homeline. It's called renunciation.

But here, the Buddha said that emptiness rips out LTA KUN, LTA, LOG LTA, LOG LTA, wrong views. If you get emptiness, it will renunciate your wrong views. Pull them out of the house and get out.

This house. So, ,GANG DAG RTOGS PA'I NYID LTA BA, This is very subtle. Whosoever sees emptiness, whosoever thinks they see emptiness being from its own side.

Okay, that's the trick. Whosoever sees emptiness, ,DE DAG GDUG TU MED PAR GSUNGS, This GDUG means fixable, repairable. MED What's the biggest mistake you can make in life?

If you think that emptiness has its own nature. Then you are hopeless, truly hopeless. Who said that?

GSUNGS, the Buddha. If you think the mantra is going to work from its own side, you are hopeless, totally hopeless. Like, it's better you didn't hear the mantra.

If you're going to grab onto the mantra as working from its own side, and you don't need to save life for the mantra to work. If you think the mantra is going to work from its own side without saving life, then you're going around saying mantras without saving life. Good luck, you're hopeless.

Who said that? Buddha, GDUG TU MED PAR here means you are broken and no one can fix you. Why?

Because you're using the Dharma already, but you're using it wrong. So you're the worst kind of broken. And I can't do anything for you.

I can't fix you. Who said that? Buddha said that.

Pretty heavy. Okay, so that finishes our class today. Again, it's a special treat class, suffering for those of you who have been helping so much.

And I know I helped my Lama for 30 years. I washed dishes for 30 years. Me and Ellie found a picture of us shoveling snow outside.

When it used to snow before the global warming. That was the whole day, it was like that. So I got to tell you that being a volunteer is the coolest, smartest thing you can do.

Really, honestly. I'm not just selfish. And I did it for 30 years.

And I look back at those times. Some of my friends from Princeton used to say, that guy's taking advantage of you. You're working all day for free.

And you could be a big lawyer, or you could be a big government official. They're all dead now. Or they got cancer and they write me letters every day.

All day. Help me, help me. I don't know what to do.

Teach me something. And these guys told me when I went to my teacher, you're a fool to spend all day volunteering for your teacher. But I look back at those...

Where? I look back at those days, and I was really, really happy. Those were the happiest days of my life.

So you're very smart to be a volunteer. And keep going. And you'll look back at these days and you'll say, oh, that was the best time of my life.

All right, see you later.