Нагарджуна, курс 5 — Мудрость Арьи Нагарджуны, курс 5: Будда Медицины и мудрость Нагарджуны (2023, Аризона), занятие 1

[Speaker 1]
All right, here we go. So welcome, especially people here at Diamond Mountain. Nice to see you, good morning.

Some people I haven't seen for a long time. Nice to see you. And everybody online, thank you for being here.

And I couldn't sleep last night because something was bothering me, and some new idea, of course. And I was thinking about the Medicine Buddha Mantras, and I was thinking about what was the most amazing mantras I ever saw in my life? And I thought you'd like to know, because I saw many high teachers do mantras, and many, many high teachers doing mantras and doing surprising things.

So it was 1996, and my teacher's baseball team, the New York Mets had, by the way, you guys are too young, but they were the worst team in history. I think they lost, they have a record still. I think it's 17 games in a row they lost, and they had the lowest record in history.

And my teacher decided to support them, and he was doing mantras the whole season. And they start winning, and then they're winning more and more. And then finally they reached the ALCS, the World Series Preliminary.

And so one of his favorite batter came up to bat. His name is Darryl Strawberry, okay? And I don't know, my teacher's going like this.

And I'm like, Rinpoche, that's cheating. And he's like, I don't care. He's like this.

And then he says, what's the farthest wall in the whole stadium? What would be the best hit in the whole stadium? And I said right field, at Shea Stadium, right field fence is built higher.

It's like much higher, it's like 30 feet higher. It's impossible to hit a ball over the right field set. He's like, right field fence.

And he's just counting his mantras. Then the pitch came. Yeah, that's the pitcher, very famous.

No one can hit his balls. And then he hit the ball and then, okay, if you look up at the ACI logo and you go to the right, you can see the ball, okay? And you can see they built the wall higher on the right side, you see?

That's extra wall. And nobody can hit over that, it's impossible. And the ball wasn't far enough to go over the wall.

And he's like. And then the ball is over the green sign and it just like goes. And it went over and he hit a home run and they won the World Series.

And impossible, totally impossible. So that's the best mantras I ever saw. And the most important ones also.

We're going to talk about this medicine Buddha practice. I think, I don't like superstition personally. I don't like Buddhism becomes superstition.

It's very irritating to me, and I don't like it. When people light incense and say, I hope my enemy breaks his arm tomorrow. I don't like this kind of stuff, and I don't believe in it.

But it's true, we are going to do Medicine Buddha mantras, and we are going to try to help people, cure people from sickness. And for me, it's difficult. For me, I don't feel comfortable with it.

I can understand doing mantras to stop the suffering of the whole world, or to stop your death, or something like that. But to say, I hope my uncle's cold gets better tomorrow, or something like that. And then to be disappointed when the mantra doesn't work for you.

I think, I don't know, the whole thing feels like superstition to me, and I never liked it. Frankly, I was never much attracted to Medicine Buddha practice. And so, my friends asked me would I teach it, and I do have an initiation from a very, very high Lama when I was quite young.

So I have that teaching, and I was granted that teaching. And I believe in the Medicine Buddha practice, but I think you need to understand it for it to work. I think if you do it as a superstition, it won't work, or it'll just be something superstitious.

And it just like, in America, if you have a rabbit's foot, you get good luck, or something like that. The poor rabbit doesn't get good luck. But, you know, can the Medicine Buddha practice work?

And I say yes, but for it to work, you have to understand emptiness. You have to study emptiness. So it's kind of like a marriage between Medicine Buddha and Perfection of Wisdom.

You can't practice Medicine Buddha. It won't work for you if you don't understand the Perfection of Wisdom, emptiness. And then if you try to do emptiness, but you don't care that people are sick, that's also strange.

So I think they go together very sweetly, and it's a very nice combination. And I'm happy that people ask me to teach it. So the idea I have is, we're going to continue.

Hi, Jenny. Thank you for everything. The idea is that, I asked Tim, how many Medicine Buddha classes should I do, and how many Nagarjuna classes should I do?

Arya Nagarjuna. Because we've been reading the greatest book ever written on emptiness, which is Nagarjuna's Wisdom. And I said, well, how many classes each?

And he said, well, I was thinking six Wisdom classes and four Medicine Buddha classes. So I started to prepare, and then suddenly I saw where, do you know that genetic helix thing? And suddenly I saw this thing where you could teach them together.

You could braid them together, and it would be very beautiful. So I feel there's a way that you could teach them intertwined. And so that's what we're going to do.

So instead of half and half, we'll just intertwine them. And we'll get a good dose of emptiness teachings, and a good dose of Medicine Buddha teachings. And I think it came out very beautiful.

I'm very excited about it. I threw out the first classes I had prepared, and I replaced them, which is how you drive Tim and Ale crazy. And it seems to have worked.

So I changed all the classes a couple days ago. And we're going to go through Wisdom and Medicine Buddha together, like braiding your hair or something, if you have hair. Okay, so we're going to go through that.

And we've done some wisdom already. We started, I think, four sessions ago. I'm using a commentary by Choney Lama Drakpa Shedu, who I think is one of the greatest commentary writers in history.

He used to have dreams about flying to the West and teaching emptiness in the West. That was 400 years ago. And he didn't know about America or anything, but he used to have a lot of dreams about it.

And he's a great, great writer. He has a Western style. He has a kind of style that is easy for us to understand.

So he wrote an explanation of wisdom. Wisdom is actually a long poem. And it's got 27 sections to the poem, 27 different topics.

And I think it's some of the greatest poetry ever written. But we've been using it recently. We are filming a thing called Peacock Parenting Project.

And that's Seiji Arao and his wife, Noor Ibrahim. And we were flirting with Rumi's poetry and some other poetry for two years. We taught it.

We had a big program in the Russian language. And then suddenly we had this idea to focus on how to be a good parent. And I thought that was good for me to teach because I don't know anything about it.

And so, now somebody said you've had thousands of kids. So it's probably true. But so this last month we've been filming some of the episodes and it came out quite well.

I'm quite happy with it. And we're going to have poetry from Arya Nagarjuna and then poetry from Rumi. He wrote in three languages, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish.

And Noor can read. She grew up speaking Arabic, so she's going to translate. A lot of his poetry, most of his poetry has been translated from Persian, Iran, Iranian language.

And she can translate the ones that haven't been translated yet. So we're working on those. And Khalil Gibran, if you know him.

And then Seiji's working on two poets, Dharmarakshita, who's Atisha's teacher, and Shantideva, Arya Shantideva. So anyway, we're working on, I've been working on wisdom lately, the book. And we are about 80% through the book, the 27 chapters.

We're on the 22nd chapter. In the last four years, we've covered the 22 chapters. So we'll be, sorry, 21.

So we'll be teaching from, I'll be teaching from wisdom in conjunction with Medicine Buddha. And I think it will help you, I think it will help your Medicine Buddha practice really work. So we'll be working on that.

And then Medicine Buddha practice, we worked really hard. We have a team that works really hard, our translation team. They've been together for about seven or eight years now.

And I designed a translation project when I was 22 or so, a hundred years ago. And I couldn't get funding for it. But about eight years ago, I got funding for it.

So I was able to hire some translators. We now have 12 translators. And we're doing all the great books of, we chose one great book from each Buddhist school in the last 25 centuries.

So we're covering 25 centuries of the classics. And it's going really, really well. We're going to have a class this morning from one of those books.

We used to have class every, I think three times a year. And we used to go for two, two and a half weeks. And I would teach five hours a day.

And it was too much. It was too much for me and it was too much for everybody else. We did 1,200 classes.

And each class is extremely difficult. We chose books from each of the great eras of Buddhism. And no one's ever tried that since Shensang, the Chinese master Shensang.

So we covered all of Buddhism. Each era of Buddhism has its own language. So the language that you use for the first few hundred years is completely different from the language for the next hundred years.

And we're doing all of them. Because I'm trying to pass on all of those languages, which I learned in the Geshe course and afterwards. So we're working through that.

And this morning we'll be doing a class with Dan Kramer. And he's translating a very difficult text on, you can say perceptual theory. How do we see things?

How do we perceive things? And it's a very beautiful class today. It's a very beautiful topic today.

So we'll be doing that after this class. But this class will go till like 7.15. Then we'll do Q&A for 15 minutes. And then we'll take a half hour break here in Arizona.

And then we'll start the, we call it Shensang's Tower class. He translated the classics of Buddhism in a tower in central China called Chang'an. And we're going to start, we'll switch over to his class, okay?

All right. So we're 22, we finished 21 chapters of wisdom. And the way I'd like to start this class is, and I have little pictures to help you remember things.

Okay, I call them idims, which is idea image. And the first one here is, yeah, connecting the dots, okay? So I want to start with wisdom.

I'd like to start, by the way, the book is just called Prajna. Say Prajna. Yeah, and it just means wisdom.

And then Nagarjuna was extremely economical in his words. He did not waste words. His poetry is very sparse.

It's very skinny. And he does not add extra words. And it's every verse of his poetry is like a koan.

It's like a mystery. Every single verse is like a mystery, and extremely deep. And you can read it your whole life.

And every time you read it, you find something else in it. So we're going to go through his verses like that, a lot of his verses. And the structure of his book is a mystery also.

Each poem, each verse is a mystery. There are hundreds of verses. But why he put the verses in that order is also a mystery.

And I thought maybe we could have fun here, trying to figure out the mystery. We're in the last quarter of his book. I don't think we'll finish this term, but we'll come close.

And then in the fifth term, which is probably next year, we'll finish his book. And then what we do, I don't know. From Medicine Buddha, our translation team translated the two Medicine Buddha sutras.

There are only two sutras that survive from Medicine Buddha. And one of them, we found the Sanskrit in a stupa, in a rock stupa in Afghanistan. And it's written on tree bark.

It's carved on the bark of a tree before paper, before the use of paper. And we found that copy. John Brady's project has been very important for us, for our project.

And Aisha Mulyan Skulfulus Anatole's wife has been very, very helpful to find the Sanskrit. So we found the Sanskrit. There are only two Medicine Buddha sutras.

We translated both of them and we published them together. And that was a lot of work. That was, I don't know, thousands of hours of work.

And we finished it, we published it. And it's a beautiful book, if you get it. It is the Medicine Buddha practice.

Then, how many years? 500 plus, about 2,000 years later, in Tibet, they say Medicine Buddha appeared again for the first time to the fifth Dalai Lama, who lived about, I don't know, 400 years ago, something like that. And he was a great master of Buddhism.

He wrote hundreds of books, hundreds of works. And he was interesting because he studied all the kinds of Buddhism in Tibet. He was a Sakya scholar, he was a Nyingma scholar, he was a Kagyu scholar, and he was a Gelugpa scholar, obviously.

And he built the Potala Palace, he and his assistant. And that's a beautiful story. I'm thinking to tell you that story sometime.

I just have to work on it, okay? It's a beautiful story, how he did that. The part I like is the last 12 years of his life, he was dead.

And his assistant found an actor who looked like him. And that's an interesting story. But he was a great, great scholar.

In fact, Nick Lasha and Ben Kramer are cataloging his books now. It took us about two years so far. And it's a tradition that he met the Medicine Buddha.

And the Medicine Buddha granted him a new lineage of Medicine Buddha practice. And then he was a great writer of Medicine Buddha practice. And his assistant, the one who hired the actor, which I'll tell you the story someday, Desi Sangye Gyatso, Prime Minister of the country, he also became a great medical doctor.

And his books on medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, are some of the greatest books in history. Tibet was in an interesting position because to the east is the ancient Chinese traditional medicine, TCM. And then to the south you have Ayurveda.

And then those two traditions mixed in Tibet. So you have a very powerful combination of Chinese traditional medicine and Indian traditional medicine in Tibet. And so there was a great, he was one of the greatest authors of medical texts.

And I had an opportunity to translate for two of the greatest, the two greatest doctors of Tibet for about 10 years. And so it's a very, very powerful tradition for Medicine Buddha from the Fifth Dalai Lama. And he wrote a new practice for the Medicine Buddha.

He wrote a new way to practice it. And we started translating, we found it, John Brady found it, and we started translating it about two years ago. And it's slow, it takes a lot of time.

It takes hundreds of hours. And we finished a new section for you. So you'll get a new section about this week.

And it's finished and it's ready. I don't know if they're translating it, I think, into different languages, right Tim? Something like that, in process.

But I only gave it to them like a week ago. So it's usually my fault. I think his Medicine Buddha Sadhana, which is the instructions of how to reach Medicine Buddha, Sadhana, it will be about three or 400 pages.

And we finished the first 200 pages. So we'll finish the rest of it for next year. So I'm kind of split it into three years.

And it's going to take me another year to finish it. But in the meantime, you get the next 100 pages this week. And you guys will be the first people to learn it for a long time.

And it's very beautiful. And so we're going to be working through the next section of Medicine Buddha Sadhana by the Fifth Dalai Lama. And by tradition, it says that he was, that Medicine Buddha came to him and granted him this sadhana.

And so it's a new lineage. And it's a very complex lineage. And we traced it.

The tracing took two of my San Diego vacations. My wife was quite upset. But we recreated the lineage.

And it was very, very difficult. But we did it. And so you have the whole lineage there.

And I'll be teaching you the next 100 pages this week. So we'll do the second 100 pages. And then every time we do some sadhana, which means a ritual for reaching Medicine Buddha.

How do you get Medicine Buddha, how do you bribe Medicine Buddha to come to your room at Diamond Mountain? There's a system, a bribery system. And that's called sadhana.

So we'll be going through the sadhana. But does it work? And I got the inside information.

Okay, like from the real mantra master who won the 1996 World Series with the worst team in history. Understand? Okay, so three lineages.

New York meds, Medicine Buddha, and Nagarjuna's wisdom. And we'll be mixing them together. So you'll get enough wisdom to see how the Medicine Buddha works.

And then you can use it to make the Medicine Buddha work. And then we'll actually be doing it in practice. We'll be practicing together.

And we'll be experimenting with it. If you have a particular soccer team that's really bad, you could try that. Okay, something like that.

All right, so I have a challenge for you guys. And oh, by the way, because I have to teach almost every day, I have to film almost every day of the year. And my filming for the next 15 months is already set.

Every day of filming for the next 15 months, the next 500 days is already booked. Every day is booked. Every film is set up for the next 500 days.

And I like to cross, what do you call it? I like to cross-pollinate. Because for time reasons, I have to put some of this class into some other class.

Just to have, because it's 500 days straight of filming. I don't have time to, you know, I don't have time to eat. So we're going to do an interesting thing.

The peacock parenting filming, which will come out I think in January or February through DCI. We used wisdom. We used nāgārjuna.

They said, what poetry are you going to use, Geshe-la? I said, I'm going to use nāgārjuna's poetry because I have to teach it in Diamond Mountain and I don't have time to do it. So I killed two birds, feed two deer with one apple.

Feed two deers with one apple. And I was struggling at the peacock parenting class. And that was this week.

I was filming in the nighttimes this week. And something strange happened to me a couple days ago. I filmed, I had to do three filmings in one day and it was really hard and I was tired.

And I did a class based on nāgārjuna's poem wisdom for the parenting course. And then I went home and I said, that was a bad job. I didn't do a good job.

And very rarely I'm not happy with a class, like once a year or something. And I just said, I don't feel comfortable with that class. It was based on the wisdom that we're going to cover here.

It was based on the chapters that we're going to cover this week. And it wasn't a brilliant class. It was a dull class.

And I just, I went home and I said, I'm going to throw that class out. I'm going to film it over again. So we're going to film it over again this week here.

So you get to have one parenting class. If you don't have kids, don't worry about it. Neither do I.

Okay, so, all right. And it'll be okay. Just in case you happen by accident or something.

We'll do the class together. And I was trying to use the chapters that I'm going to cover this week. And I was trying to find the thread of the chapters.

And I'm going to do it with you right now. So the way we're starting the Medicine Buddha practice is we're going to go through the names of the six chapters that we haven't finished yet. And those are the six dhanumma.

These are the climax of the Medicine Buddha. I'm sorry, these are the climax of Nagarjuna's greatest book. These are the climax of the greatest book ever written by the greatest emptiness master in history.

These are supposed to be the greatest six chapters on emptiness ever written on this planet. And I challenge you, okay? I'll describe the six chapters.

And it's a mystery why he chose those six. And that's what I want you to think about, okay? So the class doesn't end in this room.

The class goes to your meditation cabin. I want you to think about it and I want you to struggle with it. And I have struggled with it.

And that's why the parenting class came out so bad. I couldn't see the flow. I couldn't connect the dots, you see?

And I'm going to show you the chapters of wisdom that we're going to cover this week. But I think it's hard to find a thread. And by the way, Nagarjuna doesn't do anything by accident.

He does everything on purpose. Everything he ever did had a deeper meaning. Let's work on it together.

And then I'll ask you guys, we'll have question and answer period in about 45 minutes. And you give me your ideas, okay? Here's the question.

So these are supposed to be the climax. These six chapters are the climax of all emptiness teachings ever given in this world. And somehow he's leading to a certain conclusion.

And that's the end of the book. Chapter 27 is the end of the book. So these last six chapters are somehow, it's a mystery, but they are revealing the deepest understanding of emptiness.

And I'll tell you what they're about. And then I want you to think about, it may take a couple of days or a couple of years to figure out the connection. Here's the dots that I want you to try to connect.

It's a mystery. I also haven't decided myself what's the answer. And I think in my experience, when we work together and we talk it over together, I think we can come up with an answer.

So here we go. Chapter 22 is called, and by the way, each of the chapters is called an investigation, pariksha, which means he wants to check something out. He treats each one as a mystery.

Each chapter is like, let's investigate this. And 22 is, let's investigate the emptiness of a Buddha. Wangan nasa is Tathagata, Tathagata, a Buddha.

Let's investigate the emptiness of Buddhas. So that's chapter 22. And if you learn to investigate the emptiness of a Buddha, you can practice Medicine Buddha.

Got it? Medicine Buddha is empty. Medicine Buddha is not a Buddha.

And somehow it works. So, it's very important for us. If we're going to figure out how to save your soccer team, how to save your favorite soccer team, which is, after all, the most important use of this stuff, we have to investigate, what's the emptiness of a person who is already perfect?

What's the emptiness of a person who used Medicine Buddha practice until they became Medicine Buddha? What's their emptiness? Got it?

That's the first mystery. And we'll be covering it. And it's a deep, deep topic.

And it's a very beautiful topic. If you understand the emptiness of Medicine Buddha, you can do Medicine Buddha practice. And if you don't understand the emptiness of the Medicine Buddha, and you try to do Medicine Buddha practice, it's superstition.

And it won't work. Superstition doesn't work. There's a joke.

I don't understand your superstition. Superstition means to stand over. But I don't understand your superstition.

It's a funny thing. Chapter 23, it's not really an error so much as a clay shot. It's an investigation of negative states of mind.

Anger, desire, hatred, jealousy, pride, other specialties of myself and everybody. What's the emptiness of your... What's the emptiness of the negative thoughts that we have lived with since we were children, or longer?

What's the emptiness of those negativities? That's not so hard, I think, right? So going from the last chapter to this chapter.

If I say, what's the emptiness of a Buddha? And then I say, what's the emptiness of your negativities? It's pretty easy to draw the line between the dots.

They must be related to each other. You get to be a Buddha by removing your negativities, something like that. So we're going to investigate the emptiness of your negative thoughts.

We're going to investigate the emptiness of your anger and your desire and your pride and your jealousy. It's very interesting. He's never just investigating negativities.

He's investigating the emptiness of the negativities, which is more deep. And that's deeper because that's the only way to remove them. Only if you understand the emptiness of your pride can you remove pride permanently from your mind.

Nobody who doesn't understand the emptiness of pride could ever be free from pride completely. It's not possible. You have to understand the emptiness of your negativities to remove them.

And if you don't understand their emptiness, you could never remove them. It's very interesting. Okay, cool.

Third chapter. Let's investigate the four higher truths. Now, in my classes, lucky for you, I always make these $100 bets.

Sometimes more, sometimes less. But I like to, I don't know, just students try, they stay awake better if I make $100 bet every once in a while. People are like, right now, for example.

I can't even see Ward Smith, but I can see his face. So here we go. Here's a $100 bet.

Nobody can tell me the, A, I want to know, we're going to talk about the higher truths. I want to know, number one, what they are. And, number two, why is it true that you cannot call them the four noble truths?

Go. Teddy, Teddy's, two truths, or two? Wait, I'll say the question.

It's suspicious when they raise their hand and they don't know the question. Four truths, I want to know why noble is a bad translation. And I want to know what they are.

If you want to be fancy, you could explain the order. But you don't have to. What you like to suffer, you call it an ender.

Good. And why would noble be a bad translation? Why, they're called four noble truths in most books, which is a bad translation of the word I.

It doesn't describe the state of mind of the person who has traveled the path. Who saw emptiness. Who saw emptiness.

Yeah, that's all. The word is Arya, Chakdr Arya Sattva, the four Arya truths. So for, I don't know, a hundred years in English, people have mistranslated it as noble, which Arya can mean rarely noble or higher, but we call it higher truth.

But they're called Arya because they are seen directly by a person who just saw emptiness. All right, so a hundred bucks for you. Now, where do you collect?

Ellie, do you collect from you? Rob? Rob's going to hand out the money.

I hope we have enough. Just after we give you the money, we have all these fundraisers. That's how Cinnamon Meef worked it out.

Okay, no pressure. Okay, that's chapter 24. So, so far we got the emptiness of a Buddha, then the emptiness of negativities, and then the emptiness of the four truths.

And in general, it was the first teaching ever given by Lord Buddha. And by the way, he went through it three times. He, 12 repetitions, right?

And then most of his audience saw emptiness directly at that time. And that's a, so how does that tie together? We're going to check out the emptiness of a Buddha, medicine Buddha, and then we're going to check out the emptiness of their negativities, which they don't have anymore.

And then we're going to check out the emptiness of this logic. It's the ultimate logic. We are suffering.

We are dying. There's a reason why we're dying. You can stop it.

You just have to find the path to stop it. Those are the four higher truths. Is he emphasizing a person who just saw emptiness and then saw these four truths?

You see? Is he emphasizing that? Or is he emphasizing the first teaching that Buddha ever gave?

I don't know. That's up to you. And you don't have to decide in this class.

I'll take some opinions when we get to the Q&A. But I think it's a very useful, it's a good use of your meditation time in your retreat. To sit quietly at Diamond Mountain and think about these questions is the purpose of being here at Diamond Mountain.

And it's a beautiful, beautiful retreat center. It's my Ukrainian friends that we invited from Kyiv to come live in the greatest city in the world, which is called Rimrock. When they came here, they were like, wow, this is something.

This place is something. And it's a great place to meditate. And it's a great place to have a breakthrough in your own heart.

You've got, I don't know, nine, 10 days of silence. You have a choice to put down your cell phone for nine or 10 days. Do you have the courage to do it?

Or is your habit too strong? Are you addicted too strong to your cell phone? You have an opportunity this week to put down your cell phone.

And we don't force you. We used to turn off, we built the retreat center in a place that didn't have internet. And it was hard to find a place like that.

And we paid a lot of money. I call this the blood, sweat, and tears retreat center. We had a lot of trouble here.

We had a lot of suffering. We had a lot of work. It was a lot of money.

And now it's this beautiful retreat center. And if you come from a far away place in an airplane and come to Diamond Mount Retreat Center and sit down in your cabin and check your internet, it's kind of super silly. I mean silly, I'm being polite.

Bad idea. Okay. I'm not going to peek through your window, although I will walk around.

And I hope you guys can put down your phones for a week and just experience what it feels like. And think about these questions. And it can change your life.

We had a business class. We're doing an MBA course. I filmed that last week.

We were filming MBA courses. And we were talking about innovation. We were talking about some manufacturing processes, innovation in manufacturing processes.

And we were talking about some of the ones we did in Manhattan that Warren Buffett bought and the processes. And those came out of retreat. A lot of those factory processes that we sold to Warren Buffett came out of retreat, deep retreat.

So you have a choice. You can just stare at some YouTube video of a guy hitting a home run, which is what I did last night. Or you can turn off, just put your phone down and go into these deep questions of medicine, Buddha, and emptiness.

And I really, really encourage you to spend the week that way. I'm not going to babysit you. It's up to you.

You want to ruin your week, it's up to you. But I'll tell you something. We sold that company for a quarter billion dollars.

It became the largest one in the world for diamond jewelry. And those ideas came from deep retreats. And I think you might want to try it.

It's kind of cool. It's kind of really exciting. And obviously, I didn't spend all the time just doing that.

But I spent some time doing that and it was useful. All right, chapter 25, An Investigation of Nirvana. So, is he just ADD?

Who? Arya Nagarjuna. By the way, we never call him Nagarjuna.

We call him Arya Nagarjuna. He's the number one Arya in history. His book is the number one emptiness book in history in two and a half thousand years.

And we just finished a beautiful book by him called the 60 Verses on How to Prove Him to This. And it's 670 pages. Every single page takes, I don't know, 10, 20, 30 hours.

And we finished, it took seven years. Nick Lashaw finished his book. And it's amazing.

And it's almost 700 pages on how to prove emptiness. So, what's the connection? What's the connection between that and the three chapters we just mentioned?

Why, is he just ADD? And by the way, some people when they read a, when they see a structure like this, for example, in a famous yoga book, there's some questions about the structure. For zero dollars.

Which book? Come on, there's only two. Yoga Sutra.

Okay, the Yoga Sutra, the order of the chapters is strange, especially the fourth chapter. Why it comes there, why it's so different from the other three chapters. A lot of scholars have said, it's somebody later.

A hundred years later, somebody glued something onto the book. And so a lot of people, when they get to a book like Wisdom, they will say, oh, somebody glued on some chapters. And that's why it gets chaotic at the end.

And it's not true. It's all by Nagarjuna. You can smell Nagarjuna.

When you read Nagarjuna, when you work with Arya Nagarjuna a lot, you get to where you can recognize his work. We found 141 books by Nagarjuna in John Brady's database. Only 10 are known.

We found 141. And we threw out a couple. There were some that we didn't accept into the database because we think it's not him.

It doesn't sound like him. There's a few books by someone who has a name called Krishna Nagarjuna, like black Nagarjuna. And there's another one called pure Nagarjuna.

And like that, and those we decided to keep because they're obviously Nagarjuna. They are obviously written by an emptiness master. Okay.

Next chapter, 26. An Investigation of the Twelve Links of the Wheel of Life, which is Sugeng Shi's expertise. His book was just finished.

His first book on the Wheel of Life was just finished. And it's a very deep presentation of the Wheel of Life from 500 years ago. And then he wanted to suffer more.

And John Brady's project found an extremely rare presentation of the Wheel of Life 2,000 years ago by Vasubandhu. And we're translating it. It's extremely deep.

So Sugeng's working on that. It's an interesting book because Vasubandhu wrote the book for the lowest Buddhist school as a confession for criticizing his brother Asanga. And then Asanga said that, well, and then he apologized to his brother.

And he asked his brother, should he cut his tongue out? He offered to cut his tongue out because he had criticized his brother. And his brother said, yeah, I'll just keep your tongue for now.

But you could write a book about the school that you're coming from and the school you're about to dump. You could write a book about them because once you join up with me, no one's going to want to study that school anymore. So he wrote the Abhidharmakosha, which is the great, great presentation of the first school and it's a great book.

And then he came out of the closet and then he felt free to show that he was really a mind-only school. And he did that in Sugeng's new book. So it's extremely interesting and extremely beautiful.

And we were working on it last week, I think. Okay, so that's basically, I think he put that chapter in there for Sugeng. But why does he go in this order?

Why does he talk about Buddhas and then he talks about anger and then he talks about his first teaching and then he jumps to nirvana and then he gets into the Wheel of Life? Why? Why that order?

It doesn't seem very logical. Somewhere there's a twisted arya's logic there. And I ask you to unravel it.

Okay? It's a mystery. It's a mystery to me.

It destroyed my parenting course. That's why I have to re-film that class because I'm like, what? Okay, last one.

Let's investigate viewpoints. And Ben Kramer just finished his first book. All these books are coming out.

We had a wonderful sponsor. They basically fed the mixed nuts for seven years. It caused a weird phenomenon in their house and as a result, we have lots of babies coming in.

And they all, I don't know, we had four kids, I think, came out. Something like that. So we've been looking into...

Ben Kramer translated a book called Siddhanta and this was a hot topic about 500 years ago in the middle of China. Okay, strange. I mean, it's influenced by the Mongols and by others, East Tibetans, Central Chinese, Inner Mongolians, and what's that language, Denny?

Inner Mongolian. Manchurian and Uyghur. So it's a very strange time in history.

And sitting there in the middle of China, exposed to Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Islam, Nestorian Christianity, all these strange religions are sitting there in that area at the same time. Mongolian shaman beliefs, they're all cooking in that same area at the same time. And they got interested in comparative religion.

So they got into the study of different people's viewpoints and they started writing books about comparative religion. And they're amazing. They're incredible.

So Ben Kramer translated one of them and it presents 101 religions. It's a book of 101 religions. And it's amazing to compare 101 different religions over the history of about 30 centuries, sitting in a melting pot of the greatest philosophies of Asia.

Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Shamanism, even Christianity and Islam. In all sitting there, he translated it. And it's an amazing book.

It's an amazing, you should read it. It's amazing. Why am I talking about that?

The last chapter of Nagarjuna is an investigation of religions or different ideas. What is it about people that they create 101 different religions? By the way, some of those religions died 1,000 years ago.

We don't know much about them. We know their philosophy. But why do some religions, in the time of Jesus, there were over 100 religions current in Palestine and one survived, or two survived.

And what is it? Why did they survive? So that's the last chapter of Nagarjuna.

Here's all the different viewpoints that human beings come up with. And what's the emptiness of those viewpoints? What's the emptiness of all the religions that human beings have ever thought of?

It's a great question. It's very interesting. What's the emptiness of a human being's hunger to create a religion?

It's very interesting. And that's his last chapter. And then he's like, I'm done.

Now, how do those six chapters flow into each other? If you crack the mystery, I'd say you're ready to practice Medicine Buddha. That's what we're doing here.

We are practicing Medicine Buddha by examining spiritual wisdom from Nagarjuna. Because if you just repeat Medicine Buddha prayers and Medicine Buddha mantras, and you don't think about it, that will never work for you. It's not possible.

And then it's truly superstition. It's just superstition. And it really bothers me.

I don't know why. I want to yell at people who do that. It's really irritating to me.

I don't know why. It's like you're so close to the real truth and you don't even think about it and you just want to blah, blah, blah, blah. It's just really irritating.

Okay. All right. I'd like to review what we covered in the Fifth Dalai Lama's Dharma so far.

We have 15 minutes, and then we will do Q&A for 15 minutes. Then we'll take a nice, I call it a semi-breakfast break. I like semi...

I have a cafe. Some of you have been there. We have a first-step breakfast, second-step breakfast, third-step breakfast.

You can have breakfast there for about six hours. That's my idea of a good time. So we're going to have...

I talked somebody, meaning my wife, into sponsoring coffee, a green drink, and a fresh orange juice for all you guys. So we'll take a break at 7.30? 7.15, sorry. And then, right? No. Yeah, you're right.

Okay. No. No, we'll Q&A at 7.15. We'll stop class at 7.30. You get your first course of breakfast. Which is either coffee, orange juice, or green drink, or all three. And we'll do that every day like that. Next idim, you guys.

Francisco, it's the step. Yeah, we have finished four steps of the Medicine Buddha practice. We have already finished four different steps of the Medicine Buddha sadhana.

Sadhana means a practice that you can take to your retreat center and reach the Medicine Buddha while you're there. Sadhana means a practice that helps you reach a Buddha. So we're learning the Medicine Buddha sadhana.

Ana means it's a method. And sad means to reach. Sadhana means a method for reaching the Medicine Buddha.

Siddha, for example, comes from the same root. Like Siddhartha, which means the one who has reached the goal. All right, so we've finished four steps of the Medicine Buddha sadhana, by the fifth Dalai Lama.

And supposedly it was granted to him by Medicine Buddha. All right, here we go. Next picture.

I call this where we've gone already. So you see the back of the car. Like we've already covered some parts of the sadhana.

I'm going to repeat the parts that we covered. The sadhana reading that you all get for this week will have all the old parts in it also. So here's the old parts that you're going to see in there.

If you didn't come last year, for example, we'll catch you up. And we're going to review the parts that we covered last year. So here's the parts we covered last year.

You can skip the next one, which just says what we covered already. Number one, the sadhana in general. Next picture, Francisco.

Next one. Yeah, the first part of the sadhana covers general Buddhism. General Buddhist practice.

So the first part of your practice here, this week, is practices that you would cover in any Buddhist practice. General Buddhist practice. And here's a list of them for you.

Next picture. Yeah, these are the parts that we finished. For $100, what's hiding in that list?

I think it was Stanley, right, Henry? Henry? Seven minutes.

Which means what, like a tree?

[Speaker 2]
It's a preliminary meditation practice.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, it's good. Seven preliminaries for all meditation practice. Seven steps you should be taking every day this week to start your practice.

And so the Phetai Lama Sadhana starts mainly with those seven preliminaries. But calling them preliminary is a little misleading. And I'm not offering you $100 because this is going to get expensive.

Why is it misleading to call them seven preliminaries? Maybe I should take the $100 back.

[Speaker 2]
They usually do the dedication after the practice.

[Speaker 1]
Okay, now listen. Sometimes people give a $100 answer to a $0 question. Yeah, it always irritated me that people say, oh, it's seven preliminaries.

I say, yeah, but one of them is not a preliminary. You do it afterwards. Okay, got it?

Number seven is dedicating the good karma of your meditation sessions. Hopefully it's after the meditation session, or else there is no meditation. Okay, all right, so here's where he goes in his sadhana.

We finished this already. It's just a review for you guys. You got the whole sadhana, 200 pages of the sadhana.

There's 300 pages total. I'll give you the rest next year, I promise. Opening prostration.

Okay, and normally, normally someone who writes a Buddhist book will bow down to all the teachers of their lineage. And it's good luck to honor all the teachers who came before, because when you write a new book, you get lots of obstacles. And so to overcome those obstacles, normally at the beginning of a Buddhist book, we will bow down to the teachers of the past to collect special good karma to prevent obstacles.

All right, and then he honors the lineage. And we'll say more about that later. His lineage is unusual, very unusual for the medicine Buddha, because he was so eclectic.

And no one has been that eclectic. There's only two Dalai Lamas who have been that eclectic, who have been really embraced all the different religions and was open to all the different religions. The current Dalai Lama is the second to be so open to everybody.

Honoring the lineage, committing to the practice of renewal. That's called, what is renewal and purification in Tibetan? Sojong, yeah, sojong.

And so means to fix, or you can say renew. And then jong means to purify. And normally you do the jong before the so.

It should have been called jongso, but sojong. You may have heard the Tibetan word sojong. Basically, this whole list is sak jang, $100, sak jang.

Hmm? $100.

[Speaker 2]
That's $100.

[Speaker 1]
Good, $100 back there. Yeah, basically the whole warm up to your daily meditation. You shouldn't go into a meditation without sak jang, which is sojong.

Jang means first make some acknowledgement of your mistakes for the past couple days. And we all have them. We all have them.

And just be honest with yourself. Okay, I got irritated at Venerable Sunim and Tim and Angelo, like that. Like just admit, at least admit to yourself little boo-boos you made in the last, or big ones, in the last few days.

And then admit them. And then equal weight to, $100. Equal weight to, who said it?

Jenny? Gyaltsen or Jenny, did you say it? $50 each.

Okay, Gyaltsen and Jenny, yeah. Yeah, we always say equal attention to the good things you've done this week. And I'll tell you something we learned in DCI with the coffee meditation instructions.

People have a strange inability to admit how nice they are. It seems like really good people have trouble admitting that they're good people. It just seems to be human nature.

So, equal time before your meditation to appreciating yourself. And if you don't do that, then you can fail. Then you're a failed Buddhist.

If you don't appreciate what a good Buddhist you are, you're a failed Buddhist. How's that? Okay, if you're a Buddhist and you don't appreciate the good things you do, you messed up.

And you can add that to your confession tomorrow. Okay, all right. But please, you are required during this part of the sadhana, which is the warm-up for the sadhana, you are required to think of the good things you're doing.

And if you don't do it, the sadhana doesn't work. If you don't do it, the sadhana doesn't work. You can't leave out half of the preliminaries and expect the rest of the sadhana to work.

It doesn't work like that. You have to give equal time to appreciating all the good stuff you're doing. And everyone in this room is doing really sweet, beautiful things.

You just have to admit it to yourself. And you are required to do that. So you can beat yourself up.

You have every right and responsibility to beat yourself up. Then equal time. Okay, did I say equal?

Yes. Equal time on thinking about the good things you've done. And if you're like me, I don't know what it is.

When I get to the equal time on things I did well, like before I go to bed, I start thinking about mistakes I made. It's weird. They just push their way into the room.

And I'm like, oh, you guys come later. This is the time for the good people. This is the time to appreciate myself.

And they're like, yeah, but you were so selfish. And I'm like, I know I'm selfish. I already confessed that.

You know, I'm trying to find something good I did yesterday. So don't let them boss you around. Just say, come back tomorrow during confession time.

We're done with confession time. This is rejoicing time. And you definitely did great stuff today.

And it's not pride to appreciate the good stuff you're doing. It's wisdom. It's a kind of wisdom.

It's good reinforcement of your goodness. And you have to spend that time. You must spend equal time.

I'm looking at Xiaoping. I know you don't do it. It's like, oh, I didn't spend enough time on the MBA program.

And I'm like, you did spend enough time. Now shut up. Try to appreciate yourself.

All right. We got a few minutes. Let's finish this list.

Bow down. Bow down. After many years of bowing down in preliminaries, I realized you're just supposed to appreciate somebody who's a good person.

That's all. You don't have to get up and bow down. It hurts your knees and it's okay.

Mentally appreciating a good person in your life. I was with Rob Rossinger yesterday. Me and Seiji spent four hours doing finances with him.

He's a beautiful, honest, inspiring person. And when I bow down, I just think of him. He's one of the people I think of.

And that's it. That's all. You're not bowing down to somebody you've never met or something.

Okay? That time, that part of your preliminaries is supposed to be spent appreciating someone good in your life. And there must be somebody.

All right, making offerings. I always make offerings to that person. Rossinger likes coffee.

He likes three cups. Give him one, two, three. In my visualization, I offer him three cups of coffee.

And then confession. I do my confession. Then take joy in the good deeds you did.

Please don't short it. Please give it equal time. Then ask your teacher to teach in your mind.

Ask people to teach you. And the biggest lessons in life are the ones you get from the assholes in your life. So don't go looking for these holy people.

The people who irritate you are your greatest teachers. If someone can irritate you, you're not there yet. So the ones who irritate you have a special value.

That's why they have such an endless supply of you. All right. Then ask your teacher to stay.

Ask those irritating people to stay in your life. And they will anyway. And then after your meditation, dedicate to good karma.

And that's a very beautiful spreading of beauty. There's an opposite practice in Buddhism called, what's it called? Midupa.

It's called a disaster meditation. And you, starting with a hole in your skull, you imagine that the whole world is rotting. It's called an ugliness meditation.

And you put a little, what do you call, open sore here, and then it gets worse and worse. And it spreads, and it spreads to your whole body, and then it spreads to your state, and then it spreads coast to coast. You're supposed to reach the west coast and the east coast.

And the whole United States is like a nuclear bomb has just destroyed everything. All skeletons, rotting flesh. Then you bring it all back.

And to here. And that's called a, that's an old time Abhidharma sadness meditation. This is the opposite.

You're supposed to start here with beauty, like a flower, and then flowers, flowers, flowers, flowers, flowers, flowers, all the way to the west coast and the east coast. And then the whole country is covered with flowers. And that's the last one here.

All right, we're going to do Q&A. I have a rule for Q&A, three parts. Number one, a question about the stuff we covered today, which would be really refreshing, but no one ever asks.

Number two, a personal question we have, about your personal life. And guess what? Everybody online, everybody here has exactly the same problems as you.

And we appreciate it when you ask the question and we don't have to. Like, I have this girlfriend problem or something like that. And we all have it, but we don't want to mention it.

So, personal question. Number three, some people have some kind of burning philosophy question. Ever since Geshe Michael said something about emptiness, it's been bothering them.

And here's your big chance to ask, okay? So, go for it. I'll let Tim, Tim, can you choose people?

Okay.

[Speaker 2]
Hi Geshe-la.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, and by the way, any question is fine. I don't care. The whole point of the Geshe program is to answer difficult, immediate questions.

And anything you want to ask is fine.

[Speaker 2]
I have a question and I know that it bothers many people.

[Speaker 1]
Hold the box.

[Speaker 2]
I know this question bothers many people. Probably know that there is a war in my country. Kind of, we were practicing, we were doing something with almost two years, but it doesn't look like it is.

Even more, there is another conflict in Middle East. And, I mean, I have a personal question, what I do wrong, you know, like I really do, I think I do my best, but probably something is missing. And I know many people, they're practicing medicine, Buddha.

They were given by Venerable Jigme another practice that I don't have, but I know they are practicing Max Orma or something like that. So, is there anything that we should understand about it? Like, what is the, you know, like what we should do about it?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, okay, good question. Every time somebody asks a question like that, I think of the same thing. I was involved in an abortion when I was in college.

At the time, all my college professors and my parents, and they were like, it's okay, it's okay. Then I met my teacher and he said, oh, that's bad. And I'm like, well, how do I clean that?

And he gave me, basically he told me to teach a kids' class. And I was living in a Mongolian community near New York. So there were a couple thousand Mongolian refugees from World War II.

And the U.S. government brought them over after World War II and they were a couple thousand people. And they had survived the concentration camps. These are people who were tough enough to jump over the fence and get away, men and women.

And they were all traumatized. They were, all of them, badly traumatized. And so you're talking a couple thousand people.

And me and my teacher were living there and it was really hard. They were very traumatized. And a lot of them were on heroin or alcohol or still doing this.

Because some of them were captured by the Germans to dig the trenches. And a lot of them were killed in the concentration camps. So they were very, very seriously messed up.

And they were also very against anyone who wasn't Mongolian, which means me. And I was the only American living there. And then there's one Tibetan, which is my teacher.

And they were very difficult to live with them, really difficult. And they were very suspicious of us for 20 years, 25 years. And it was hard, it was really hard.

And there was one man who had an open mind. And he was the treasurer of the temple. And he was this very, I don't have his picture.

Do you have his picture here? I'll show you his picture. You should thank him.

His name is Hangor Socharov. And he reached out to me and he reached out to my teacher and he said, I'll take care of you, don't worry. You will survive here.

I'll do it. I'll take care of it. And we're like, thanks, because it was really, really hard to be there.

And everyone was suspicious of us and everyone was kind of against us. And he made a, that's his picture. He passed away recently.

So we're going to have a special ceremony for him. And his family's going to come from New Jersey. This picture was taken 50 years ago.

But he passed away a few days ago, a few weeks ago. And so we're going to dedicate the fire offering to him. I would not be here if he wasn't, if he didn't protect me in this very difficult community, I wouldn't be here.

I wouldn't be teaching, only because of him. So his family will come. And the kids, my teacher, the reason I met his family was, I taught the kids.

For 15 years, I had a kids class for the Mongolian kids. And his kids came, three kids. They're going to come this week.

They're old now. They're like 50, 55. I taught them when they were this high.

And that was my teacher's assignment for me to clean the karma of the abortion. Okay, grandpa's stories usually come back to the point. And at my age, sometimes I forget what the point was.

But the point, I do remember. I asked my teacher, how long do I have to teach these kids? How long do I have to teach the kids program?

And he looked at me and he said, until the karma's finished, you have to keep doing it. And I'm like, well, like a week, like six weeks? He said, until it's finished.

And I'm like, how am I going to know when it's finished? He says, you'll know. You will know.

And you have to keep going until it's finished. And I know I insisted, give me a date, give me a time, give me, when's the war going to end? What's the date of the last person to die?

And he's like, that's up to you. He refused to answer me. He said, that's up to you.

It's how well do you do your purification? How well do you teach your, his kids? And it took 15 years, and I did it for 15 years.

And it finished, then it finished. So, just have to keep going until it finishes. And don't think you're wasting your time and don't think it's not working or something like that.

Some karmas are very serious and they need a lot of work. He used to say, your karma is like cement, and we don't know how hard it got. So, it could be still soft.

It could be quite hard. We don't know. So his answer, his famous answer was, you keep going until it's done, and you actually don't have a choice.

So, that's my answer. But I believe, I'll tell you one last thing. I went to Vietnam.

When I was in college, I went to jail, working against the Vietnam War, I went to jail. And our army was beat by the Vietnamese army just because they were so brave. They didn't have 1% of the American money or the bombs or the weapons.

They didn't have 1%, but they beat the Americans. And the main leader was Ho Chi Minh. I, the first time I went to Vietnam to teach, I talked in Hanoi, which is the capital of North Vietnam.

And I got up on the stage and they put a statue of Ho Chi Minh next to me.

[Speaker 2]
And I'm like, you know.

[Speaker 1]
And we taught at a, I don't know if you guys remember. You were there, I know. But we taught at a place where the North Vietnamese army had dug tunnels underground to escape the bombing.

And we taught there. We had a retreat. Many of the participants were amputees.

They had lost legs. They had lost arms in the bombing. And we did yoga together.

And I'm sitting there trying to help this guy do yoga. He doesn't have a leg. And they were so kind to me.

And they were so beautiful. And so, no hatred, nothing. Just love.

And I was like, I'm supposed to teach you? You're teaching me? We did so many terrible things there, and here they are.

I almost went there. I almost was sent there. And here they are, being so kind.

So as an old man, I'll tell you something. Time changes all things. And there will come a day when we're all sitting having a class in Moscow or something.

There will come a day when we're all enjoying each other in Russia or in Ukraine, and everyone's just loving each other. There will come a day. Just be patient.

I've seen it. As an old man, I tell you, I've seen it. Okay.

One more question. Timothy. 30 seconds.

Why you talk so much, Grandpa? Why? Well, that's a long question.

I think we'll just stop. So at 8 o'clock, we will have a Mixed Nuts class. What I did with the Mixed Nuts classes, rather than, by the way, we've had 1,200 classes, 1,260 classes.

Rather than have a bunch of classes at the same time, we decided to have three classes a week. So we'll be having, and the theory is, no matter where I am in the world, we do the class. And so we're going to do the Mixed Nuts class this morning for Ben Kramer's book.

And then Monday evening, I think it's four to seven, we'll do two more classes. And we'll just keep doing that every Saturday and every Monday for the rest of your life. So Saturday morning is mainly for Europe and America, and then Monday night is mainly for Asia, for Tuesday morning in Asia.

We'll just keep doing that forever. So because of that rule, we're going to have a translation class in half an hour, and we'll take a break. Anything else, Timothy, I should be announcing?

See you guys at eight o'clock. Have a nice break, and we'll see you at eight.