Нагарджуна, курс 4 — Мудрость Арьи Нагарджуны, курс 4: Тайна глав (2022, Аризона), занятие 5

[Speaker 1]
Hi, welcome back to Nagarjuna, and we are now starting the fifth class. We're going to start this class from the Sanskrit as we've been doing. They say, by tradition, that when you become an enlightened being, you always speak Sanskrit, and that other people hear their own language.

SA BA RUG PA BUD DAS GNYENG YOGA SUTRA People hear their own language. This also happened with Jesus, I think, where people would hear their own language when he spoke. So it's traditional to cover some Sanskrit just to put a seed in your mind.

So this whole class is going to be about the question of Tim and Tim's, apostrophe S. Tim, me and mine, okay? And I don't know, when I was growing up, there was this song, I mean mine.

And it's kind of important for this class, the idea of me and mine. Misunderstanding who is Michael and what belongs to Michael is the source of all trouble. In the end, it's the source of international competition, corporate competition, war, personal conflict.

It all comes from a misunderstanding of who is me and what is mine, what belongs to me. And we're all deeply invested in me, and even at the cost of ignoring others. And we all do that.

I don't think anyone can claim to really care more about someone else than themselves in the end. So we are, by nature, selfish creatures. And that's not exactly the problem, but that's a manifestation of the deeper problem, that we don't understand who is Michael and what belongs to Michael.

And if we couldn't fix that, then the selfishness would be fixed automatically, and then there would be peace in the world. So Nagarjuna, Arya Nagarjuna wants to start with the question of me and mine. And again, Arya itself is a Sanskrit word.

It was misused by the Nazis to mean superior race or something like that. And it's an old Sanskrit word which means specifically someone who has perceived emptiness directly, which is very rare. Maybe once every 500 years or something.

So Arya Nagarjuna, sometimes he's called just the Arya, because I would say he's the most famous Arya of all time in our world, in our history, in the last couple thousand years. He's the one who stands out as an extraordinary Arya. So here's some words that he's going to use a lot in this class, and I thought it would be good luck for us to go through the Sanskrit.

When you go through Sanskrit, it's called a generative language, which means it acts according to certain rules. There are 800 roots. If you know the roots and you know the rules, you could speak Sanskrit and write Sanskrit without ever seeing Sanskrit, because the rules are perfect.

It's a perfect language. Sanskrit means the perfect language. Sanskrita means the perfect language.

It means you could predict the whole language just from the 800 roots, because it's perfect. All forms are perfect. So we're going to go through, when you discuss Sanskrit words, it's fun to look at the root.

It's fun to see how it's generated, how the word is generated. And then all Western languages, from Iceland to Iran, come from Sanskrit. So kick out the Semitic languages, like Hebrew or Arabic.

Kick out Chinese, and I don't know, Alaska and Navajo or something. Then the rest of the world's languages come directly from Sanskrit. So if you can, and Latin and Greek were derived from Sanskrit.

So English is basically derived from Sanskrit. So when you want to understand a Sanskrit word, it's fun to look at the cognate. Cognate means, give me some English words that come from this root.

And I always tell people, if you really were into it, you could pick up the New York Times and see the Sanskrit, which is kind of a fun exercise. You could see the whole page of Sanskrit that it came from. So let's try that.

The first word I'd like to cover is aham, which is A-H-A-M. And it's the Sanskrit word for me, I. And the Tibetan is nga.

By the way, Tibetan is totally off the charts. No linguistic connection to any language in the world. There's a tradition that it came from outer space or somewhere, higher beings.

Linguistically, it's believable because there's not a single word connected to any other language. But anyway, aham means me. And it's the root of the word ego.

H and Gs are pretty much interchangeable. And As normally become E in English. So the word ego comes from aham.

So that means me in Sanskrit. Probably me comes from aham. And then nga yiwa in Tibetan means mama in Sanskrit and mama means mine.

So aham means me and mama means mine. And that's going to be important for us. You can obviously see how the word me and the word mine are cognates that come from the word mama.

Then there's an important new word made from both of these two words with the root kr. And the root kr, which is K-I-R in pronunciation, means to make something. And we have the word karma comes from that because karma makes the world.

English cognates for kr are cereal, which is the grain which is made by the earth. And the C used to be K. And then K changed to an S sound.

In some, after, just before Shakespeare or something, a lot of Cs became, like city, became, changed from K sound to S sound. So kr and create comes from that with the same C. So I want to talk about ahamkara and mamakara.

Ahamkara and mamakara. So if you connect me to kara, it's making me. You're running around making me.

And mamakara means you're running around making my, mine. So ahamkara means making me. And mamakara means making mine.

And that's an important idea to think about, that you are running around the world. You are defining me and you are defining mine. And the way you do it so sloppily causes a lot of conflict in the world.

People start disagreeing about whose is mine and which is not mine. The M in aham changes to N before K. So you wouldn't say ahamkara, you would say ahamkara.

Try ahamkara, ahamkara. And that long A is ah instead of a. So ahamkara, ahamkara.

Say ahamkara, ahamkara. Then mamakara, so you say mamakara. All right, the real correct translation is ngan dzin.

Ngan dzin and ngar dzin, which means to, ngar dzin, which means to grab onto me. And then ngar dzin, which means to grab onto mine. So these are two emotions that we all have that are the root of trouble in this world.

If people could remove this ahamkara and this mamakara, then the world would be a beautiful place. What do you call a beautiful place, world? In Sanskrit, mandala.

And the Spanish word mundo comes from the same root, means the world. It actually means a disk. That's a long story, but a perfect world, a perfect mundo is mandala, okay, mandala, okay.

There are some, you know, I enjoy going to churches. I enjoy going to ashrams. I spent 10 years going to one ashram where they teach Hindu philosophy.

And I used to go there and listen. And I recall that they had an ahamkara in the Sankhya school. So this is one of the most important schools of Hinduism.

Probably the main school of the ancient traditional yoga schools is Sankhya. And they had this idea about ahamkara, which, you see, Buddhism was prevalent in India for a thousand years, and then it died out. It waned, and then it came back again.

And when Buddhism was collapsing, a lot of the words got borrowed by other traditions. And then they took on some really weird meanings, okay. So this ahamkara is a good example, okay.

Grabbing onto me and grabbing onto mine. I'll give you the definition from the internet, okay. Which is always a trustworthy source.

The ahamkara are a mysterious and powerful species of shape-shifting, wish-granting creatures that first appeared in the solar system after the traveler arrived. And so this very basic, important, beautiful, precious ideas about who am I, they got totally weirded out in India. So I just, why I'm saying that is not to criticize other traditions, but to encourage you to be careful when you are attracted to a tradition.

Then try to dig into it, try to look at it, try to learn it carefully, try to see if it's authentic. And the tradition that we're teaching today is 2,000 years old. It hasn't really changed in 2,000 years at all, which is why I can sit and teach you a text which is 2,000 years old.

The language is the same, okay. You ready? ,BHAG DA LTA PHRAD LA, ,WITH HIS SHORAS SOGS PA DAG, ,DROG TU MAR CHAGS, ,PHYIR ZE LTAR DO RTOG, ,BAR DER PA'I RIG PA'I YIN, ,ZHU ZHIG ZHIG BKUR, English, 500 years ago, Chaucer.

So take, Nagarjuna's 2,000 years old, five, four times older, but you can easily read it. It's a very strict tradition. It's kept very tight.

So I encourage you to, not to spend your precious irreplaceable life hours without checking if a tradition is authentic. Otherwise you might run into solar system travelers and all this kind of thing. All right.

We've reached an interesting point. He says, look, we discussed Tim and we discussed Tim Tzu, but how do you use that in your real life? Come on, let's get real.

Nagarjuna is sensitive enough to the student that he doesn't just keep pouring philosophy on your head. He'll say, now he pauses and he says, well, how are we going to use that? How's that supposed to improve your life for you to understand more about me and mine?

How's that going to improve your life? And then we have the next section here. It starts here.

BDAG DANG BDAG GIS ZHI BA'I PHYIR, SNGAGS DANG SNGA YON GZIN MED GYUR, SNGAGS DANG SNGA YON GZIN MED GANG, DE YANG YOD PA MA YIN TE, SNGAGS DANG SNGA YON GZIN MED PAR, GANG GI MTHONG BA'I MI MTHONG NGO I'm going to read these two paragraphs verbatim because the two paragraphs of explanation, because I think they're very beautiful. SNGAGS DANG SNGA YON GZIN MED GYUR, BDAG DANG BDAG GIS BA'I TSE MA NYE BAR ZHI BA'I PHYIR, Your idea of who you are and your idea of what belongs to you will melt when you truly understand the contradictions of how you think about yourself. ZHI BA'I PHYIR, MNYON SBYOR PA'I SNGA RANG BZHIN GYIS, GRUB PAR BRTZIN PA DANG So what does a MNYON SBYOR PA do?

What's the Sanskrit, Tim? MNYON SBYOR PA Yogi, okay. So really, in the old days, yogi meant a person who understood reality.

And in Tibetan, the word is, the person who applies their meditation perfectly is the translation of the Sanskrit yogi. MNYON SBYOR PA So how does a great meditator view me and mine? SNGA RANG BZHIN GYIS GRUB PAR BRTZIN PA DANG SNGA YID BA RANG BZHIN GYIS GRUB PAR BRTZIN PA'I JI LTA SPANGS They have eliminated a misunderstanding of who is me and what is mine.

I think it's easier if you start with mine, things that are mine. And I don't know. When you pick up this green bottle that we talked about before, we instinctively feel, with our deepest instincts, that it's coming from itself, that the bottle is presenting itself to me and it's appearing to me.

And no matter how many times you talk about it, it's an almost unstoppable habit of human beings and all sentient creatures to believe that things are coming at them. Like if I hold up this green bottle, you wouldn't say, oh dang, I should have made a red bottle. You don't assume that the bottle's coming from you.

You think, oh, this bottle came on a truck. It was made in a factory. They got the water, they poured it in.

But if you really understand the Garjuna, the bottle did come from you and the bottle is coming from you. And the green color is coming from you. All of these are...

And by the way, if your meditation gets really good, you can catch yourself making it green. If your meditation gets really, really good, you can watch yourself, your mind painting it green. And then you're like, oh my gosh, then all the troubles in my life are coming from me.

And then you become a much more pleasant person because you don't blame anybody else for your problems. It doesn't mean your problems go away, but it means that whole persona of a person who blames the world for things, even bad drivers, stuff like that, disappears. You don't blame other people for stuff because you know it's coming from you.

And just imagine if you got that part of your mind back, if you got that much of your mind back, the part of your mind which is blaming other people and things for life, if you got that time back, how would you change? And how would your attitudes toward people change? How often could you get upset if you knew all the crap in the world was exact, was precisely produced by your own mind?

Then you would just fix your mind. You would focus on that and already you'd be an incredibly happier person. You'd be a much more pleasant person.

So anyway, RANG BZHIN GYIS GRUB PAR BRDZIN PAS So he's talking about a yogi who has overcome the feeling that things are not coming from them and they understand that things are coming from them. For example, Tim is coming from Tim. And Tim was not a name put by his mom on his body and mind.

His body, the way his body acts, the way his mind acts are coming from seeds in his own mind. And he could adjust his body and mind infinitely, if that's true. SNGA YIN PAR RANG BZHIN GYIS GRUB PAR BRDZIN PAS JIG RTA SPANG NAS So let's suppose you have overcome the habit, the natural instinct that things are coming this way, and suddenly you understand that they're flowing out of your mind.

You are making pictures and then you're giving them names. By the way, it doesn't mean they're not real. I used to teach this in New York.

She was there. I'd say, a student, you say, oh, and nothing's real. I'd say, go out and stand in front of a taxi on Fifth Avenue and tell me what happens.

You break your leg and you get a not real hospital bill and you stay on a not real hospital bed and they put a not real cast on your not real leg. It's real, but it's coming from you. Which is cool because it's real, but it's adjustable by personal effort.

All right, JIG RTEN GNYIS KYI GZHAN YONGS MED PAR RTOGS PA'I YANG RTAG PA'I DOD LA ZHUGS PA'I PHYIR So they have overcome their habit of misunderstanding themselves, where they come from and where the world comes from. You got this picture here? I don't know.

It's a girl with a book, I think. A young lady with a book. Yeah, I don't know.

I saw this picture. I said, I got to use this picture. She's like meditating.

And what you're supposed to meditate on when you try to meditate on emptiness is to try to understand the emptiness, not of unrelated things, but the emptiness of you and the emptiness of mind, the things that are your personal possessions, things that you own. Okay, so I thought it was a perfect picture because you can imagine she's meditating on who is she? Where did she come from?

And she's meditating on where her possessions came from. And the book, I imagine the book is by Nagarjuna and it's telling her where the book came from. Anyway, DE DAG DANG DE NAS GZHAN MI NGANG BRDZIN PA NA NGAG YOD BRDZIN PA'I MED CING PO BA GANG YIN PA'I GNAL GYUR BA DE YANG NGO BO NYID KYIS YOD PA MA YIN TE But then he says, let's consider the person who understands me and mine.

Now, don't focus on how they understand themselves and don't focus on how they understand the things that they own. Focus on the person who understands. Let's see if we can understand the person who understands themselves and what they own.

GANG YIN NGANG BRDZIN PA'I NGAG DANG NGAG YIN BRDZIN PA'I MED PA'I PO BA'I NGAL GYUR BA NGO BO NYID KYIS YOD PO NYAM DU MTHONG STE If you believe that that person comes from themselves, if you believe that that person is coming from them. So you are observing a person who understands who they are and where their stuff is coming from. But now you're observing that person.

And if you think NGO BO NYID KYIS YOD PO NYAM DU, if you think they are coming from themselves, if you look at them and think that the yogi is coming from themselves, if you look at the person who understands me and mine and you get the feeling that they must be coming down from themselves, if you look at it that way, he says, if you see it that way, MTHONG STE, MTHONG, like MTHONG LAM, right JB? DE KHO NA NYID KYIS DON MI MTHONG Then we can say you don't see anything. It's very cute.

If you think you could lay eyes on a person who understands all this stuff, you don't see nothing. The Nagarjuna is really rubbing it in. Hey, did you ever meet a person who understood me and mine?

Oh yeah. Yeah, did you look at them? Yeah.

Yeah, well you didn't. He's like that. It gets very frustrating.

And this gets into, by the way, we're going to go there. We're going to go directly to the Diamond Cutter Sutra, the emptiness of the Diamond Cutter Sutra. And I like to tell my students in Asia who are very devoted to the Diamond Cutter Sutra, as I am, who wrote it?

You did. And when you read the Bible or you see Gone with the Wind, according to these ideas, you made them. You made the Bible.

And you made Gone with the Wind, and you're the director. And every time you turn a page in the Gospel, your mind is laying down the words one by one. And it's so quick that you don't notice it and you don't see it.

But you are actually, you are the author of your own salvation. You are the one who's writing the religious book that finally calls to you and pulls you out of this problem. And it's a cool idea.

God comes from you. Jesus comes from you. Buddha comes from you.

How can I create a being who knows so much more than me that they can pull me out of trouble? That's the cool thing, because karma escalates. Karma tends to multiply on itself.

A small understanding can become a, if it's well handled, a small understanding can become a blanket understanding of the whole universe. And these divine things, angels, God, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, they're all coming from you. If you live in a world where these people walked, you're the one who brought them here.

And that's cool. And if you think not, then you don't understand what they were talking about. That's beautiful too, right?

So anyway, that's the point that Nagarjuna's making here. Here's the boy. I don't know, I put those who see do not.

That's the theme. This theme in Buddhism is called those who see don't. Those who believe that the people who came into this world to teach the deepest things, like Jesus, like Buddha, like Mohammed, if they believe those people came into this world and didn't come from us, then they have never met those people.

It's very interesting. If you think that's where these people came from, then you don't understand what they're trying to tell you. That you can be perfected.

That you can make yourself perfected. Cool. All right.

Next verse. ,SNANG DANG PHYIR ROL GNYIS DAG LA, ,BDAG DANG BDAG GI NYAMS SE NA, ,NGES BAR LEN PA'ANG GANG RGYUR ZHIG, ,DE SRED PA'I NA RGYUR BA ZAD, He's starting to get into practical applications. The important word here is NGES BAR LEN PA.

Which one is it in the Sanskrit, Christina? It means to take something. It should start with UPA.

No, I don't think so. I think it's the UPA DA NA. Yeah, UPA DA NA.

NGES BAR LEN PA means to take something. To take something on. And it's going to be crucial to this verse.

The most classic reference of this word is what happens to your body and mind when you're born. You take it on. You assume a body and you assume a mind when you're born.

So he says here, you can stop your grasping or you can stop your grabbing. If you understand that me and mine are coming from you and not from the outside. Then you can stop grasping to things.

And it's kind of obvious in the sense of money. And I don't know, over my life, my relationship with money has changed. I didn't have any money when I was a kid.

We were even getting food from the food bank and stuff. Then I was brought up in a culture that said, don't focus on money. I was brought up in the God bless hippie culture, which said you are not defined by how much money you make.

So I kind of avoided money for a long time. Then John Brady's project got in trouble. We were borrowing money all the time to save the ancient books.

And I was thinking, well, maybe I should use the philosophy to make some money. So I did. And the diamond company we built is now the largest in the world.

And it was bought by Warren Buffett in 2009. And I think it's useful to have money because you can use it. And we support hundreds of poor people, hundreds and hundreds of refugees.

We have 532 kids in our school, which we build. We feed them, we clothe them. And his project costs millions of dollars every few years.

Although he doesn't take a salary properly. But why am I talking about that? The idea of grasping to money, nyerwa lempa.

The idea of grasping, that's not what it means. So it doesn't mean if you're wealthy or if you know how to acquire money and use money, that you're a bad person. It doesn't mean that.

And Buddha never meant that. So here's the word of grabbing that people misunderstand. It says, don't grab.

But it doesn't mean money. In fact, it means the opposite. If you were grabbing to money, if you didn't understand where money was coming from, if you wanted a lot more quickly, you would have to hurt someone or rob somebody to get it.

You see what I mean? If you thought money was not coming from you and you thought money was coming this way, then automatically you'd be vulnerable to hurting people to get money because that's the only way you could get a lot of money quick if you had to support John's project. But if you understood that money is flowing from you, like the green, this other green, if you understood it was flowing from you, then you could easily plant money.

And it would be kind of an interesting test to make the largest diamond company in the world to see if your ideas are correct. It'd be sort of a laboratory, you see? So why are we talking about that?

In this verse, Nagarjuna is talking about the idea of grabbing, nyerwa limpa, upadana. Is it my correct? Did you look it up?

Yeah, upadana. So grabbing to things. And he says, if you really understand that things are flowing from you, it's going to protect you forever from grabbing.

Then you don't get angry, you don't get selfish, you don't hurt people to get the things you want. You just create them and they come. And you make more money.

And you give it away. And then you make more. And it's fun.

It's kind of a fun... It's fun to prove day by day that these ideas are correct with such a normal thing as money. So I wanted to talk about...

He says, the people who understand the real nature of me and mine, they overcome grabbing to things in the sense of thinking or feeling that money comes from itself, or that the green bottle is coming from itself. So they overcome grabbing. And in Choney Lama, he's kind of cute.

He says, hey, you know, there's four classic grabbings. You want to know what they are? And we're like, yeah, sure, Choney Lama.

Tell us what are the four kinds of grabbing. And I thought it'd be cute if I gave them to you. And what's cool about having a database of 16 million pages, which is our 35th anniversary this month of inputting, you can just ask the computer, what's the four kinds of grabbing?

And it tells you in exactly nine seconds or something. I used to flip through the books page by page. Now that would take about a week to find this answer.

Now we can do it in about less than 10 seconds. So we can search 16 million pages in less than 10 seconds. As long as we stick to the input code created by Grandpa.

Otherwise it will take quite a while. Okay, anyway, here we go. I thought you'd like to know the four.

First one, YOD YI'ONG BA LA HAG PAR BYA'I DUS BYA'I DANG PO Common grabbing, which is the pursuit of desirable objects. That's called common grabbing. Plain old grabbing is the pursuit of desirable objects.

Is it wrong? Not if you do it the right way. I mean, money is helpful, but he spent $15 million.

He's expensive. And we wouldn't have the 16 million pages. So money can be useful.

So anyway, but this means wrong kind of attachment to pleasurable objects. Okay, first kind of grabbing. Grabbiness?

Shall we translate it that way, Tim? Grabbiness. All right, second.

By the way, Tim, this explanation comes from your book. I just thought you'd like to know. So Tim, I chose 10 translators.

I said if anyone shows that they're really serious I'll take a new one. It took five years and then he proved he was serious. And so about a couple months ago, we decided here we'll translate something, which is a big commitment for me.

That's a 10, 15 year commitment. And his book is called The Perfection of Wisdom, which is really middle way school. And this is from your book.

I just thought you'd like to know. Okay, second one. DANG NGAN LA HAG PAR BYA'I DUS BYA'I Second kind of grabbing is grabbing to unhelpful ideas.

Hurting people. Ideas that hurt people. And I would say one of the big ones in this world is competitiveness between companies, between people, between countries, inside of companies, between employees.

And it's this kind of sick idea that, it's a very sick idea that I can improve my life if I make your life worse. Or that we should compete for resources or something like that. And by the way, that's the way not to get resources.

The smartest way to not get the resources you need would be to compete with someone else to get more from them. Then that would assure that you will be short of resources later. If these ideas are correct.

Then the opposite, sharing resources would be the way to increase the market of resources. Those countries which share oil and natural gas will have more oil and natural gas discovered in their country. And there's a beautiful story about that, how we discovered natural gas in shale oil, fracking.

That's a long story. THANG NGAN PA LHA So attachment to these sick views, I would call them sick viewpoints. I can get more money.

Zero-sum game? I get more pizza. There's only eight pieces of pizza.

And if I don't take one from you, there won't be more from me. Instead of the idea of buying a second pizza. Which is what Buddhism would say.

If you buy infinite number of pizzas, maybe there'll be enough pizzas for everybody. Okay, third stupid view is to believe in a self or a me. And now you know me means a thing which is not coming from me.

Does the phone have a me? Depends on how you look at it. If you think the phone didn't come from sharing phones, then you are grabbing to a me of the phone.

If you think that you always get a phone by sharing phones, I didn't pay for this phone, it just keeps coming. I didn't pay for the computer. They just come.

So if you are generous and you help others with the right understanding of me and mine, they tend to flow back. Well, they inevitably flow back. Okay, fourth one, THUL SHUGS NGAN PO LA BHAG PA CHAGS PA This is a special kind of grabbing that Buddha was particularly offended by, which was religious practices which would hurt people.

So in his time, for example, sacrifice of cows, bulls was common. Gandhiji talks about it. He was, one of the heaviest moments in his life was when he observed an animal sacrifice in Varanasi.

And it changed his life. So this idea of religion being, that religious practices that focus on hurting other people or hurting other creatures would be religious is the fourth kind of grabbing. Okay, so those are the four kind of grabbings.

We covered CHEN NAS LAMA. I've got some here for you, a picture. I don't remember the picture.

Oh, so I don't know. I thought this was a cool picture for grabbing. Okay, and they're grabbing, okay.

And by the way, yeah, okay. Let's go on to the next verse. I'll read the verse, okay?

LAS DANG, oh, Christina, you have the verse. You want to do the Sanskrit for fun? Go slow, go super slow and pronounce it correctly.

[Speaker 2]
LAM ,GAR MA GLAS ZHAGS ZHA YAM, ,MOG ZHAG ,MOG ZHAG ,GAR MA GLAS ZHAGS, ,YI GAR PA DAG ,YI GAR PA DAG Yeah, if you say DAG HA, you ruin the meter.

[Speaker 1]
,DE RAG PANG ZHAG RAG PANG ZHAGS, ,DU ZHUNG NYA DAG YAM, ,DE ROL DBYA STE LAS DANG NYON MONGS SES PA'I THAR If you want to achieve nirvana or freedom, you're going to have to stop your negative emotions and the harmful actions that those emotions inspire. That's the first line. First half of the Sanskrit line.

LAS DANG NYON MONGS NAM STOG LAS Where does karma, where does it come from? Where do negative emotions and karma come from? They come from NAM STOG, wrong thinking.

And where does that come from is SPROD PA. SPROD PA is a very difficult word. That means mental constructs.

Wrong thinking comes from mental constructs and leads to negative emotions, which forces you to hurt people. I'll say it again. Wrong thinking comes from, when I say wrong, wrong ideas lead to negative emotions, which cause you to hurt other people.

The root of those is some kind of wrong idea of where things are coming from. STONG BA NYID KYI RGAG PAR GYUR All of this chain reaction of trouble is stopped when you understand emptiness. That's the last line.

Does that remind you of anything in the ACI courses? We had a quotation of a commentary to a book by Maitreya, which is called Uttara Tantra, which is not a tantra. It's just a normal book called The Higher Line.

There was a lovely description of the chain reaction that causes the trouble in the world. There was a lovely description of the domino effect that leads from not understanding emptiness up to war or physical suffering, death in the world. I love that section, so I went and got it because it's based on this.

Maitreya is about 150 years after Nagarjuna. He's talking 150 years after Nagarjuna. I thought we would devolve, since we have so much extra time, to that explanation by Maitreya, ultimately by Maitreya.

Maitreya is who? The next Buddha. The next Buddha in this world.

Very, very near. Unexpectedly near. I went and got them for you.

Again, this is from your author, Tim, which is why I chose him for you, because he's so sexy. I'll just read it and we'll go through it. RGYUD LAM MA TZAM DE'O BSGOM PA THAR TU YIN TE Here's the ultimate intention of the next Buddha.

BDAG RDZIN GNYIS KYI BA CHAG LA BRTEN NAS DE NYID KYIS The trouble starts when you enter this life with seeds in your mind from your past life, which automatically inspire you to think that the bottle's coming from the bottle. So that's not your fault. That was Joe.

Who's Joe? I like to call your previous life Joe. I don't know what his or her name was.

But it's a joke. It's an inside joke. I asked a good friend of mine, why is he such a good person?

He said, yes, that wasn't me. It was Joe. It was my past life.

So you're at a disadvantage when you enter this life, because you enter this life, according to Buddhism, with the seeds in your mind that automatically make you feel instinctively that the bottle's coming towards you, that it came from a factory and it's not coming from your generosity of offering water to other people, which is where it's really coming from. But you have to re-educate your mind. Your mind assumes, because of seeds that you carried here from your past life, that the bottle is coming from the bottle.

If we succeed in this life, if we use this life correctly, by the end of this life, our instincts will be the opposite. Oh, wow, I love this Pellegrino. I'll have to make sure to give some water to someone today, because I want to keep it running.

Then that's such a pleasant way to live that you're thanking the world for all that you have, and you're aware that it comes from your kindness. Then that's the whole feeling of your life, that you want to keep it going. You want to keep being kind to other people.

Anyway, he says, unfortunately, we walk into this life with these negative seeds from the past life, and that's why automatically, without thinking, since you came out of your mother, even an infant, even an ant, is automatically thinking, things are coming this way, and not left to yourself. I like to call it, it's like the kids I met in Mongolia. I used to go to Mongolia a lot.

We have a project there that's trying to save 600,000 books, currently saving 300,000 books. John's going to do that deal. One night, coming home from the library, I saw a sewer cover lift up, and an animal ran past me, like a wolf.

I was so freaked out, because there's no electricity enough for lights on the streets. I just felt this animal rush past me. I asked this friend, this Mongolian with me, I said, what is that?

What's that animal? What kind of animal can lift up a sewer cover and run down the street? He said, Geshe-la, that's not animals.

Those are kids, feral kids. I'm like, what? He says, their parents died.

I said, well, what are they doing in the sewers? He says, that's the only warm place in Mongolia. If you don't have any money, you live in the sewer.

You crawl down in the sewer and try to stay warm next to the warm water. I'm like, ugh. He said, don't get near them, Geshe-la.

They'll bite you. They'll bite you, and they're very dangerous. They'll give you rabies.

I'm like, whoa. Can't you talk to them? He says, they don't know language.

They never learned language. They didn't have parents. They never had parents.

They are feral. They are animals. There's a lady who got a Nobel Prize by trying to take care of them.

We used to help her. But anyway, why am I saying that? Left to yourself in this lifetime without any other competing thought system, you would believe that this was coming from itself and you would fight to get them when you wanted them.

In the end, if push came to shove, I was in Hawaii surfing when the gas thing happened, the oil embargo happened. People were in line to get gas every other day. People had guns.

People were shooting each other for gas. You think you're so civilized, but if push came to shove and it was the last bottle of water and you didn't understand that it comes from you, you would hurt someone else to get it. So we are feral.

We're born feral because of our last life. We come into this life thinking that the water is there and that it's not coming from how I treat other people. We are feral by nature, number one.

Two, then you start to believe that the thing exists out there. Do the seeds in your last life. You start to believe that things exist out there and that they're coming this way.

Then your seed, what do you call it? Your selection of seeds in your mind makes you perceive some things as desirable and some things as undesirable. Like this is nice water.

I don't personally like the La Croix water. So that's also your seeds operating. Due to that comes up, this water looks good to me.

That canned water doesn't look good to me. Due to those two misperceptions, thinking that the water comes this way, I start to want one and not want the other. That's a natural reaction.

When one water looks nice and the other water doesn't look nice, I would rather have the one that looks nice to me. Then you get this thing called liking and disliking. What do we call it?

Ignorant liking and ignorant disliking. That triggers karma. Why?

You fight for the things you want. You fight to get away from the things you don't want. That's karma.

That creates karma. Due to that, you plant seeds for next time. So then it starts to become a cycle.

So what Nagarjuna is explaining in this verse is that same cycle. If you never figure out that things are coming from you, you will repeat. What do you call it?

Reboot? Repeat. You will just keep going like this and this and this.

Your life will continue to be a downward spiral and it will end in the inevitable death and poverty. The ultimate poverty where you even don't own your body. So anyway, he's saying that's the typical cycle.

Can we break it? Can you break it? That's coming up in the next class, which you have to come to if you want to know how to break it.

[Speaker 2]
Okay. See you then.