Нагарджуна, курс 6 — Заключительные главы (2024, Аризона), занятие 1

[Speaker 1]
Okay, and we've been going through, it started as a Medicine Buddha program and then we started to do Arya Nagarjuna's book called Wisdom. Saw a shit of Mungo Prasanna. And we text on wisdom.

[Speaker 2]
Sometimes it has the nickname, $100, huh? Wait, you have to raise your hand and get the microphone.

[Speaker 1]
I'm not giving any money just to people yelling in the class. No? Did the mayor have an opinion on this?

No? Sure. Quick, today.

No, cancel that. Too slow. It's called The Middle Way.

His book is also called The Middle Way. The name Middle Way kind of started with this book. And then somebody else wrote a book called Entering the Middle Way.

And that's Master Chandrakirti. So Nagarjuna lived around, Arya Nagarjuna lived around 200 AD, almost 2,000 years ago. Almost the time of Christ.

And then 400 years after him, roughly, came Master Chandrakirti. And we're studying wisdom. And we've had six sessions.

And we are going to finish in this session. Okay? Yay.

So in Kyoto, we're going to finish 14 years of Lamrim. And here we're finishing. I don't know if it's six years or six sessions.

But anyway, it's probably around five years or so. And there's four chapters left that we have to finish. Okay?

He wrote his book in 27 chapters. And each chapter is called a pariksha, which means an examination. Not the Princeton kind of examination.

The checking about something. And so we're going to cover the last four chapters. 24, 25, 26, and 27.

24 is called an investigation of the Arya truth. The four higher truths. Truth of suffering, truth of source of suffering, truth of the end of suffering, and the truth of the path to the end.

Okay? And he's going to investigate those four. That's a pretty long chapter, 40 verses.

And I started it last time and I want to do it over. I want to start over again. So we're going to do the whole chapter.

Because I think we can do more about it. Okay, chapter 25 is called an investigation of nirvana. Okay?

And that'll be interesting to hear from the greatest Buddhist master after Lord Buddha. He's called the second Buddha sometimes. And there hasn't been anybody since him except for Je Tsongkapa.

Of the same level. Chapter 26, an investigation of the Mayor of Wimrocks. 12 links.

Okay? The 12 links of dependence. Okay?

That's chapter 26. By the way, it's somewhere all the Mixed Nuts books interact, they intersect. And chapter 27 is called an investigation of how we view reality.

How do we look at reality? And that's chapter 27. So we're going to cover all four chapters.

And then each day we'll do some Q&A also. Is the second class how long, Tim? 75?

So we'll do some Q&A. So in my Q&As are free for all. Free for all means a fight with no rules.

So if you, you can ask any question. I don't care. It can be whatever comes in your heart, you're welcome to ask it.

And then we're going to talk more about the five houses of ACI. I thought to, I have a presentation about the five houses each day. A little more detail about the five houses.

And I thought to do it at the end of this class instead of the beginning of this class, because if you think Sedona people are up right now watching this class, I don't think so. But maybe they'll watch it by, maybe they wake up by the end, I'm thinking. Okay, so I don't know.

If there's anybody left in Sedona, I don't know. Okay, all right, let's see here. Are you guys ready?

There should be a picture of a sunset and a sailboat, I think. This was taken out of my hotel window last week. What gives the sunset to the west of Manhattan that distinctive glow?

It's the gasoline factories for the whole country, are right there. It's called Cancer Alley. And I used to go through it twice a day for 19 years and on the bus.

So I was four hours on the bus every day. We went down Cancer Alley. But it gives a wonderful sunset.

And then you see, what is that Hudson River, I think? And then the Statue of Liberty is to the left, but I couldn't quite see it. And there's this beautiful sailboat mooring.

Here's all these skyscrapers and five million people coming and going. And then there's some fool out on a sailboat just enjoying the day. I thought it was a beautiful picture.

To me, it represents Arya Nagarjuna. The sailboat represents Arya Nagarjuna because he's unusual. He's very, very unusual.

And he only wrote short, poetic pieces. He didn't write long philosophy books. He wrote poems.

But they're pretty long, but they're... He expressed the deepest truth of emptiness through poetry. And after him, about 400 or 500 years later, there came Master Chandrakirti.

And he wrote a book called Entering the Middle Way, Majjhimaka Avatara. So, Getting Into the Middle Way. And then the Middle Way means Nagarjuna's book.

Nagarjuna lived 700 years after Buddha. There was a mafia that took over after Buddha. It lasted for 600 years.

It was called Stanley Abhidharma. And they were nice guys, but dull. Very dull and long.

It was the first subject I studied with my teacher for 12 years, 12 long years. And it was so dry. And they kind of took over Buddhism after Lord Buddha.

And they made it very mechanical and many lists of things. It's informative, but it's dry. You got to be tough to get through it.

And they didn't talk a lot about emptiness. They have a short presentation to emptiness, which is really interesting, which we've never talked about, which we could talk about someday, if you're in the mood. And then came Arya Nagarjuna.

And he also introduced the teachings on bodhichitta. So he introduced the bodhisattva ideal in Buddhism heavily. The Abhidharma mentions bodhisattva like one sentence or something.

But then for Arya Nagarjuna, it was his passion. So he's the greatest teacher ever of emptiness. And he's the greatest teacher of the bodhisattva path.

And actually, when we take bodhisattva vows here, we use his ceremony. We use the ceremony that he wrote, which still exists. And we recovered it.

John Brady's project recovered it. And we translated it and we use it. And it's very, very beautiful.

[Speaker 2]
He also was, he was simple.

[Speaker 1]
He taught everything simply, but very, very deeply. And also he had this traditional connection with the kings of India. And this was the ancient model of government.

You had a yogi or you had a great emptiness philosopher would be the advisor to the king. And we have several books. Like one is called Malinda Pinda in Pali, which in Sanskrit is minendra paha, which means the questions of King Menander.

And he was a Greek king who reigned in India for a long time. And Alexander attacked India 2,300 years ago and took over India. And then he gave the country to three or four generals.

And then he went home, but he died on the way. He died in Baghdad. So there were these kings who were used to listening to philosophers.

I mean, if you can imagine the next president of the United States, she's listening to Tim. She's listening to Tim, or something like that. I mean, that would be the similar thing.

And I'm just joking, okay? I don't do politics in public. So anyway, imagine if the king or queen of the country were...

And then, so we have some beautiful books by Nagarjuna written for kings. A king called Udayabhadra. And Nick is translating one of those and a beautiful commentary to it.

So the reason I wanted to show this picture was the difference between the two great emptiness teachers in history. And that's Arya Nagarjuna. Sometimes he's just called the Arya.

And generally, you get an Arya about every 500 years or something like that. And he's the big one after Lord Buddha. That would be 700 years.

6,700 years after Buddha. And he's so famous as an emptiness master that we call him sometimes the Arya. In the tradition, it's considered impolite to call him Nagarjuna.

It's like saying, hey, shin, kin. Like that, it's just disrespectful, kind of. Just so you know, if you're cool, you say Arya Nagarjuna.

And that's his real name. And I won't go into why he's called Nagarjuna, but that's a long story. If you're interested, I put, so Nick finished a translation of Arya Nagarjuna earlier called the 60 Verses.

And that is done. It went to publishing. Our publishing process is a little bit like the highways into Manhattan.

So there's too many books trying to get out of New Jersey. And we have a tie-out. We usually have a congestion.

We have a problem of too many books and not enough editors. So anyway, his book is done. There's a beautiful biography of Arya Nagarjuna in it, which was written by my teacher.

And it's quite good. It's hard to find a good biography. The reason I wanted to put this picture was, I'm working on a book about Chandrakirti and it was written by Tsongkhapa.

So I would say those are the three greatest emptiness teachers since Lord Buddha. And there's nobody close to them. I mean, frankly, there's nobody at their level.

There's three. It's Nagarjuna, Chandrakirti, and Tsongkhapa. And so Tsongkhapa wrote an explanation of Master Chandrakirti's explanation of Nagarjuna, Arya Nagarjuna.

And that was called the Illumination of the True Thought. And it's very, very difficult. And it's very, very deep.

And it's very, very complete. And so I started it 12 years ago when Veronica's mom was ill. I used to hang out in the coffee shop.

We used to go down and Veronica would take care of her. And then I would sit in the coffee shop and work on this book 12 years ago. And so I'm 1,300 pages finished.

And it will be about 1,600 pages. So we're almost finished. And just the chapter on emptiness, by the chapter on wisdom, by Master Chandrakirti, who follows the six perfections in his book, roughly.

That chapter is 300 verses. A typical chapter of Nagarjuna is 20. So think 10 times longer, 15 times longer.

Nagarjuna was a master of saying things deeply and briefly and mysteriously. And then Chandrakirti was more of a nerd. And he explained Nagarjuna, but it took 10 times more pages.

So we're translating both in this book. And then you have Je Tsongkapa's explanation, which is the best in history. And I'm not being, what do you call it?

Prejudiced, just because I grew up in the tradition. We are the only people saving those books in the world. And I've been working on them for 50 years.

And Je Tsongkapa's unbelievable and wonderful. So it's something we want to say before we go to another world. And we're working on that.

So I see it as a difference between, Nagarjuna is kind of like the sailboat. And Chandrakirti is like all the big buildings in Manhattan. Like Chandrakirti is complex and Nagarjuna is simple.

And I've been reading the Sanskrit lately because it's so old. It's 2,000 years old. There's a lot of things that are not clear.

The Sanskrit is difficult. I'd like to show off something I memorized in 12th grade, 11th grade? When I was a kid, when I met her.

One daughter of Prahlad, with her shawl of sulta, the dog from Mears had pierced it to the rota and bothered every being in which he could do engandered is the floor. What language? It's English.

It's English 500 years ago, Chaucer. Chaucer and early Shakespeare. So imagine what happened to Sanskrit in four or five times that length of time.

25 centuries, not five or four centuries. So it's difficult. It's really difficult.

And what I wanted to say is, what I've been learning is that Nagarjuna's Sanskrit is elegant and beautiful and short. And if you're interested in Sanskrit, that's where you should start. And then Chandrakirti is complicated and much, much longer, much, much more complex.

It's beautiful in its own way. But if you're interested to learn Sanskrit, I would encourage you to learn Wisdom. The book is called Wisdom.

And his style was short and sweet. And people since him have renamed his book. He called his book Wisdom.

And then root text on the middle way called Wisdom. People made it longer and longer. But his style, Nagarjuna's style, is so beautiful, short and sweet.

So if you ever have a chance, but that also makes it difficult to understand because he doesn't explain things. He just hits you with a mystery. He loves riddles.

And you can sit with one of his verses for a long time. And so I wanted to share some verses with you. If you're in a retreat, there's nothing more delicious than to take a verse of Nagarjuna and sit with it for a day or two days.

They're short and they're very, very deep. And you can go deeper and deeper and deeper. So I'm going to give you some verses.

You could even just take a photo when they come up. And by the way, to me, the difference between these three great masters of emptiness, Arya Nagarjuna, Master Chandrakirti, and Je Tsongkapa. You don't have to call Je Tsongkapa master because Je means master.

So the difference between them to me is kind of the difference between the five houses of ACI. I think you can find in these three ancient masters, you can find a parallel to the five houses of ACI. And we're going to talk more about the five houses at the end of class.

But to me, their style represents three different houses. And that's something we're going to talk about. Because the point of the houses, partly, is that there's a different house for everybody.

You see? Like if you're into meditation, then go to which house? Samadhi house.

Or you're into the classics, go to classics house. Guess what I'm into?

[Speaker 2]
Classics house.

[Speaker 1]
Or you can go to, what's the last one? Diamond house. Yeah, so we're going to talk about the houses as we go.

[Speaker 2]
And we're going to start with, we're going to start now, let me see, let me look at this, that one. Yeah, hang on. Okay, yeah.

You can take a picture if you want and you can meditate on it, okay?

[Speaker 1]
And this first verse of this famous chapter is interesting and it says a lot about Arya Nagarjuna because, who wrote the first verse?

[Speaker 2]
If you read it, who wrote it? I'll read it for you, okay?

[Speaker 1]
If all things are empty, if all these things are empty, then nothing can start and nothing can stop. According to you then, the four higher truths, which is the basis of all Buddhism, it's the first teaching Lord Buddha ever gave, could not exist at all. Who's talking?

Yeah, it's Kachi. Who said Kachi? Refreshing.

Oh, nevermind. It's just the news guy. Yeah, Arya Nagarjuna is starting off one of the most famous chapters of the most famous book on emptiness in Buddhism by allowing someone else to criticize him.

And that says something about Nagarjuna. You see, he's welcoming. And then the key word, you Americans, is civil debate.

Debate. Civil means polite debate, okay? He's encouraging polite debate.

And he's saying, he's like this, oh, did you have something to say? Please talk first. Something my wife is always encouraging me to learn.

You know, did you have something to say? You know, did you want to say something? And it's so bodhisattva to start out his chapter like that.

And it's so selfless. You see what I mean? He's thinking of the other person.

He doesn't say, let me teach you about emptiness. I know everything. He does.

But he starts out and he says, do you have any problem with emptiness? And the guy says, yeah. If everything's empty, nothing works.

If everything is empty, then nothing works. And as a ACI master, this is maybe half the classes you're ever going to teach, is people who misunderstood emptiness. Misunderstanding emptiness is a worldwide specialty.

And it's all over the world and all over history. You know, the last 2,000 years. Didn't you get people sitting and staring at the wall and trying to see nothing, you know?

And hitting, someone hits them on the back with a stick if they move. And it's such a BS, you know? Somebody's sitting, staring at a wall, trying to think about nothing.

It's so wrong, 100% wrong, foolish. It's so anti-Lam Rim. Why?

If you're going to die, the last thing you want to do is sit and stare at a wall. You don't have time. You don't have time to figure out life.

You got to think. You got to think about it. You got to understand.

You have to love other people. You can't sit in a house and stare at a wall. So anyway, very, very famous opening line.

Hey, Nagarjuna, he'll call him Nagarjuna, right? Hey, Nagarjuna, if everything's empty, then nothing works. And then the first teaching of the Buddha is canceled.

The Four Truths is canceled. Doesn't make any sense. If everything doesn't matter, if everything's empty, if there's no point of anything, then why did Buddha bother to teach these Four Truths?

[Speaker 2]
Why?

[Speaker 1]
That's a very famous beginning. But I think when you're meditating on it, maybe it's more important to meditate on the fact that he put this verse first than the emptiness. You see what I mean?

He allows his opponent to speak first, and he honors his opponent, and he's polite to his opponent, and he clearly states his opponent's position. He doesn't try to twist the opponent. There was a politician on the TV yesterday, and the interviewer asked this politician five times in a row the same question, and the politician avoided it five times, shamelessly.

Like, they said, what color is the sky? And he's like, I like fish. And everyone's like, huh?

And then she said, no, but what color is the sky? And he says, also pizza. And she asked him five times, and then she's like, okay, forget it.

But this is, so what I'm saying is, the way he starts this chapter, maybe it's more important that he was so polite to someone who's attacking his ideas. And he almost seems to love the other person. And maybe that's the message of the chapter.

Okay, I'm just proposing it. All right, next picture, you guys. I got to dig through them because I got so many.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
So, I'm sorry, my photo agency sold out to this guy called AI. The guys are handsome, so I thought the ladies would like the four guys. But they never quite get their fingers right.

I don't know what that is. I want to give them a finger, but never mind. So, to me, these four guys represent the four truths.

Okay, the four truths. And who wants to say them again? Suffering, cause of suffering, end of suffering, how to get to the end.

If you put them in order of time, if you put them in the order that they occur in real life, the order is different. What would the order be? The cause of suffering, like you are impolite to another debater.

Number two, you suffer. Number three, you practice a path to get out of the suffering. And then number four, you get out.

So there's two ways to order the four truths. By the way, Noble Truth is a bad, bad, bad, bad translation by some British guy in 1860. I don't know, the bad translations survive and the good translations fade away.

But it has nothing to do with this topic. It's a bad translation of the word Arya. These four principles are called the Arya principles because when you see emptiness directly, you understand these four directly for the first time.

All right, there's a traditional relationship between us and the four truths. There's a traditional relationship. So whenever someone traditionally, when they teach the four truths, they tell you four ways of relating to the four truths.

And that's a very important principle in the teaching of Lord Buddha. That was his first teaching. How long between when he got enlightened and when he taught?

Did he teach the next morning? He waited seven weeks, I think, 49 days. Stanley Nelson went with me.

Well, I went to Varanasi, to the Sanskrit University, and then they went to Deer Park. Which is where Lord Buddha gave this teaching, I think. And then, yeah, and then I remember we got out of the airport and our taxi was followed by an elephant for like a couple of miles.

And they were like, is that normal Geshe-la? And I was like, it's India, everything is normal. Yeah, okay.

So anyway, there's four things you have to do if the four truths are correct. And here they are. Number one, we call SHES PA BYA.

SHES PA BYA means, that's how you should relate to the first truth. What's the first truth? Pain, suffering.

Everything about your life is pain. And then you should, and excuse my language, but you should realize what the hell's going on. Okay?

Many people go through the whole line, get older, die, and they never figure out what the hell's going on. In Buddhism, it's like, wake up. Didn't you notice your grandparents die?

Didn't you notice your parents die? Didn't you notice, on the way here from Tucson, somebody died. We passed them.

We weren't them. We got here. But it happens every day, all the time.

Are you blind? Are you stupid? Are you crazy?

You're going to be on this. Someday people will be, oh, look, look what happened. It's just foolish to not understand what's going on.

So the relationship to the first Arya truth is wake the hell up. Wake up. Try to see what's going on.

No one's ever survived this life, except a few Buddhists, maybe. So, all right? So first thing, BSHAD PAR BYA means wake up.

Wake up. That was how we're supposed to relate to the first Arya truth. What's your guess?

You have to raise your hand, and I'm not offering a single dollar. What's your guess to how we should relate to the second Arya truth? The second Arya truth, by the way, was where's this stuff coming from?

Microphone. It's too long. It'll take too long.

It's figure it out. Figure it out. Number one, realize what's happening.

Number two, figure out where it's coming from. The classic example is your kitchen sink is leaking. There's water all over the kitchen floor.

You can keep mopping it up day after day after day, or you can fix it. Crawl under the sink. Why did I tell you it was important if you crawl under the sink?

Always wear nice underwear. And I never know a plumber who listened to this advice. They're always showing you.

Anyway, go look for where's this stuff coming from? Where's the problem coming from? Go be curious.

Go look under the sink. So the second action to be taken is look under the sink, stupid. Don't keep suffering over and over.

Okay, what's our relationship to the third Arya truth, which is the cessation, stopping the water or stopping the pain? Get it done. Get it done.

They say achieve. Do it. Do it.

Nike. Just do it. Do it.

Get it done. Stop the pain. It is possible.

It's not easy, but it's possible. If you work hard, you can do it.

[Speaker 2]
But it, and then that's why we're here. Number four, PAH, PAH.

[Speaker 1]
We would say follow it. Okay, so there's four, I would say there's, let's make it simple. Four single words.

Pain. Source. Stopping.

PAH. And the four actions are realize, discover, achieve, follow. Okay, four actions.

And by the way, what's happening in Arya Nagarjuna's book at this point is that the other guy is saying, I don't see how you can do it. I don't see how you can do those four actions because according to you, everything's empty. How can you realize?

Nothing. How can you discover? Nothing.

How can you achieve? Nothing. How can you follow?

Nothing. So first he says, the earlier verses in this chapter, which is called an examination of the Arya truth. So first the other guy comes and he says, look, if everything's empty, there's no four truths.

And Nagarjuna is like, he plays along. He says, why do you say that? And the guy says, well, if there is the four truths, what are you going to do with them?

Are you going to realize, discover, achieve, follow? Because they don't exist because they're empty. You're going to realize?

Nothing. You're going to discover? Nothing.

You're going to achieve? Nothing. You're going to follow?

Nothing. You're so cool, Nagarjuna, right? I'm starting to feel like that preacher.

Oh, my wife is... We listen to this cool preacher sometimes on the radio. Okay, so he's still criticizing Arya Nagarjuna.

Arya Nagarjuna doesn't... What do you call it? He's not a token objector.

He gets his space. Arya Nagarjuna, as we would expect of a bodhisattva, he gives him time to make his objections. He doesn't rush him.

He says, you got any other crit... We never do that, right? Someone criticizes us and we say, oh, that's wonderful.

You have more? You want to criticize me more? We try to change the subject.

And Nagarjuna's like, oh, really? Okay, yeah, yeah. I cannot see your point.

[Speaker 2]
Okay, next picture, you guys.

[Speaker 1]
I call it happy in the stream. Happy in the stream. For once, the AI got it right.

I think she even has fingers. Some fingers. Okay.

What do you think it represents, the American guessing game? Yeah, you can say entering the stream. GYUN ZHUG, we call GYUN ZHUG.

Say GYUN ZHUG, entering the stream. If you see emptiness directly, then you enter the stream. And that is a synonym.

You can say the person is an Arya, or you can say they are a stream enterer. $100? Who's paying all this money?

[Speaker 2]
What?

[Speaker 1]
When I teach for the university, I ring up the money because they pay. But in the Lam Rim, I pay.

[Speaker 2]
I forgot what I was going to ask. What?

[Speaker 1]
I was kidding, Ram. Why is it called entering the stream? Why is it called entering the stream when you see emptiness directly for the first time?

And you give the microphone to... There's a corruption that goes on. The microphone giver splits the money with the...

No, anyway, go ahead. I'm not sure, but I think the stream of all the Aryas before.

[Speaker 2]
Anybody else? Because there's no way back.

[Speaker 1]
Good, nice, $100. Yeah, it's like, we went to Manhattan through the Holland Tunnel. Once you get to the entrance of the Holland Tunnel, you can't turn around.

I mean, people have tried. People from New Jersey have tried. But you would just die.

You can't go back. It's a flow. You will inevitably, and soon, which means less than 490 years, you will achieve nirvana and Buddhahood.

You're on your way out. And nothing can stop it. And you couldn't stop it if you wanted to stop it.

That's cool. That's called stream entry, GYUN ZHIG. And there are four such levels.

What are they, remember? I don't remember. Entering the stream, one's returner, no returner, and then arhat, arhat.

So these are called the four fruits, or the four results. You enter the stream, you come back to this world once. You don't come back to this world, and you just go to a higher realm.

And then four, you just stop suffering existence. You don't have suffering. Called arhat, enemy destroyer.

Those are the four fruits. They're called the four fruits. HALA Of the four, those are the four fruits of the proper relationship to the four truths.

Four truths, four actions to take with the four truths, and four results of those four actions.

[Speaker 2]
Why is it mentioned here? Yeah, elegant.

[Speaker 1]
I'll say it. If there's no four truths, then you can't relate to those four truths in the four classical ways. This one is called Buddhism.

Four truths, the four actions are Buddhism. Okay. And then if you do relate to the four truths with the four proper ways, you reach the four fruits.

So now you got like 12. Four, four, and four. Who's talking?

The other guy is still going. Like, yeah, well, if there's no four truths, I don't see how you can have four actions, and then you ain't going to get to the four places you got to go through. Got it?

He's still, and the gardener's like, hmm, good point, good point. Okay, he's listening. All right, not like us.

And so he's like, he's like letting the other guy go on, which is a classical, classical method. This is a classical, classical method. Let the guy hang himself.

Oh, keep going, keep going. Okay, all right. In the vein, this is a classical method.

It's called THYANG RGYUD, prasangika. All right. Next, how are we doing on time?

By the way, in 15 minutes, we'll start Q&A, roughly.

[Speaker 2]
Or we'll see how it goes.

[Speaker 1]
I think it's a verse, you guys. Am I right? Is it verse five?

[Speaker 2]
Yeah. So this is an interesting point.

[Speaker 1]
The other guy says, according to you, there's no dharma, which means there's no four truths, because that was the original dharma. That was the first dharma ever spoken on this planet. Okay, Lord Buddha's sitting in the park on the grass and there's five guys around him who used to be tiger cubs, four cubs and one mommy.

And then he's saying, he's teaching them after being silent for seven weeks because he thought no one could understand. Maybe he was right, I don't know. But he's teaching for the first time, that teaching was the four truths.

If you practice that teaching well, you will reach the four fruits. And that's the real sangha. It's not monks and nuns.

The true sangha is people who have seen emptiness. That's the real community. That's the real Buddhist community, is the people who have seen emptiness, only them.

They're the real sangha. So here's the other guy still talking. We're getting pretty deep into the chapter and he's still letting the other guy talk.

He's being very patient. Giving the guy rope to hang himself. And he said, oh really?

And the guy says, look, I'll tell you something else, Nagarjuna, all right? I'll tell you something else. One, according to you, there's no four truths because they're all empty.

Okay, and if there's no four truths, no one can practice them. Okay, and if no one can practice them, no one reaches the four fruits. Okay, and that means there's no sangha.

Yeah, I see your point.

[Speaker 2]
And that means there's no Buddha. Dharma, sangha, Buddha.

[Speaker 1]
There's no Sambal. You're like the ultimate non-Buddhist. The definition of a Buddhist is a person who takes refuge in the three truths, which means emptiness.

Okay, a person who's trying to understand emptiness is a Buddhist. And if you're not, you're not. So now the attack got heavy.

What's he saying? Oh, if your ideas are true, Arya Nagarjuna, if everything's empty, which means nothing matters, I should sit and stare at a wall, right? Then there's no three jewels.

And there's no Buddhism. Okay, his attack is getting worse and worse. Now he's accusing the greatest Buddhist of all time after Buddha of not being a Buddhist.

Okay, got it? And by the way, Arya Nagarjuna went through this stuff with people. He had this...

And normally when a new thinker who's correct comes to a world, they get hanged or crucified or all kinds of stuff. People are like, what? I'm happy with my doughnuts then.

Okay, yeah, then there's no three jewels. The attack is getting worse and worse. Somebody just said Nagarjuna doesn't believe in the three jewels, which means he's not a Buddhist.

I'll go one more, I'll do one more step and then I'd like to talk about the houses and then I'd take questions if there's time.

[Speaker 2]
Okay, next picture. Yeah. No, huh?

Hmm.

[Speaker 1]
He says, now the other guy's still going, okay? And I'm sorry, you're going to have to leave the class with the other guy. And Arya Nagarjuna, if there's no three jewels, if there's no three jewels, then there's no morality.

Okay, somehow his attack is worse than Buddhism. Okay, it's worse than saying there's no Buddhism. He's going deeper.

He says, if there's no three jewels, then there's no Buddhism. If there's no Buddhism, there's no morality. Okay, and then here's his logic, okay?

If there's no three jewels, then there's no morality. Meaning, it's not true that if you treat other people well, good things will happen to you. And it's not true that if you hurt other people, bad things will happen to you.

The laws of karma are wrong. If there's no three jewels, the laws of karma don't exist in the world. And that would be a true global, that would be a universe disaster.

There would be no reason not to kill somebody if you liked their T-shirt. Seriously, you see what I mean? Then you couldn't sit in this room together.

You'd be like, you wouldn't wear a nice shawl. Someone might kill you. And there'd be no law against it.

Everyone would just kill other, when they want something, they would bomb the other side. This would be among true barbarians, among animals. It would be, if you want something or you disagree with someone, bomb them.

Try to kill them. Then that would be the result if there was no three jewels in the world. If there was no three jewels, the right thing, the smart thing to do when another country bothers you is to try to kill all of them.

That would be the best thing to do. You see what I mean? If there's no three jewels, then people should just kill each other when they want ice cream.

You know what I mean? Why not? Why not?

And then he says, so we got two things so far. If there's no three jewels, there's no laws of ethics, morality. There's no, nothing happens to you if you hurt somebody.

And you can get what you want if you can bomb more cleverly than the other people. And then third one, then he goes to another one. The other guy, right?

He says, the world could not speak to each other. There would be no languages. There would be no communication.

The world could not communicate. The world could not say things to each other. There would be no language in the world.

Now, I challenge you today in your meditations, in your retreat, what the heck, how does he get there? How does he get there? How does he get there?

[Speaker 2]
Okay?

[Speaker 1]
If the three jewels didn't exist. I told the AI, give me three ladies covered with jewels. And that's the best he could do.

All right, I'm sorry. If there was, three things would happen if there's no three jewels in the room. A, no three jewels.

B, no karma and consequences, no morality, no ethics in any religion. And then number three, no language, no expression, no way to talk. How does he make that leap?

How does the other guy make that leap? By the way, let me check something.

[Speaker 2]
Oh. By the way, that's the end of the other guy's rant.

[Speaker 1]
Rant means, like that's, he's finally finished. But the way he finishes is mysterious. And you guys have to figure it out.

And I'll give $99 tomorrow. But no, this afternoon, what is, no. Half hour is too short, right?

Yeah, tomorrow I'll give him $100 or two, whoever gives the best answer. What's the question again? He says, by the way, if you're going to be a really good student by tomorrow, give me the whole flow.

Give me the whole flow. Look, Arya Nagarjuna, if everything is empty, then there's no four truths. If there's no four truths, there's no four ways to do the four truths.

If there's no way to do the four truths, there's no four results of doing the four truths. If there's no four results of doing the truth, there's no Buddha either, which means there's no three jewels.

[Speaker 2]
And if there's no three jewels, then, what was the other thing?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, there's no cause and effect. You can kill and then nothing will happen to you. And if that's true, then there's no language.

Especially towards the end, it gets a little mysterious. And why does Nagarjuna go there? Why does Arya Nagarjuna go there?

We've got to talk about it. Okay, we'll continue in the next class. I'm at 6.7. I'm sure Tim will remind me. I don't always finish as much as I'm supposed to finish. Okay, we're going to talk about the three houses. Five houses, sorry.

I was just testing you. Okay, you got those pictures, you guys? Princeton, Princeton, yeah.

Okay, so those of you who weren't here yesterday or you were asleep, which normally happens towards the end of the week. So the MBA, EMBA University, we went on a field trip. We taught at Princeton, near Princeton.

And we visited Princeton and we went to the, we saw some of the classical houses at Princeton. And I was describing how beautiful it is, this relationship between the houses and the university. Okay, so the university is like this big thing that pays for everything.

And they have, how much did we say $31 billion? They're sitting on $31 billion. ACI is sitting on $31.

Now, but you got to have a, you have a university. They keep the money, they keep things running. They make sure everybody's doing their thing the right way.

And then there's departments or houses. And you specialize. You don't try to get 10 PhDs at the same time.

You go into a... So we're going to talk about this idea of ACI being houses because the original ACI Foundation courses, 18 courses, takes seven years to do properly. It has been done in one weekend by a certain naughty ex-monk, which is, anyway.

And he copied, he spent the whole weekend. He started on Friday afternoon and he copied the answer keys into the homeworks and turned them in. And he finished by Monday morning.

And then I said, I said, go to someplace. And anyway, it is possible, but it was designed to take six or seven years. And then after that, there was a Diamond Way course, which was designed to take six or seven years.

So now you got 14 years. If you add lam rim, steps of the path, then that's it. We took 14 years.

And I did it in my talkative way and I was not in a big rush. I think it should be done happily. My teacher did it for 30 years.

So I saved you half the time. And then you want to attack on a three-year retreat. So how many years?

We got 31 years now. And then what's the fifth thing we do? Meditation.

Okay, anyway, it's too much. You don't go to Princeton and get a PhD in everything. You get a PhD in one thing.

And there are requirements to go to other classes. Like in my religion department, I was required to take some psychology and stuff like that. Okay, so anyway.

What we're trying to do is allow you to specialize and become a master at one thing. And then of course you should have some background in other things. But what we need at ACI in the next generation, after grandpa, we need masters.

We need people who are masters of meditation. And then we need people who are masters of retreat. And then we need people who are masters of the classics.

And then we need people who are masters of lamrim. And then we need people who are masters of the diamond way. Because we need teachers for the next generation.

We need people. And it can't be impossible to be a teacher. It can't take 50 years to be a teacher.

Because then you only have one year to teach and then you die. So it's too much. So we're trying to create a way where you could join a house, grow up in a house, and then become a master in the house.

And then when somebody, even from another house, wants to learn to meditate, they come to you. And they come to Samadhi house and they say, I'm a classics master. I'm a retreat master, mountain master.

But I would like to know some of this other stuff. Can your master teach some classes? So that's the goal, is to create different masters.

We got to talk about how we do it. But the general idea is, there's a university that takes, basically they take care of the business stuff. They keep the rules and stuff like that.

And then there's five departments or five houses. And they specialize and they, the university takes care of the paperwork. We call it red tape, volakita?

How'd that come in my mind? I don't know. Short circuit.

Somebody else takes care of the weird stuff. And then you depart, you have kids. So you got to have a, Tim is up here and his staff.

And then we all have our separate houses. And there should be a nice balance. If we run out of money, Tim should be there.

If we have a program we really want to do, he should disappear. Right? So like that.

I mean, someone has to keep the standards. Next picture. Is that the order I gave you?

I don't know. Yeah, okay. I'm going to review the five houses quickly, just for people who didn't catch yesterday's class.

Because yesterday's class was technically a translation class. So here we go. You can join Classics House.

Basically, we'll talk about the requirements each day. But Classics House basically preserves the classics, translates the classics, and focuses on the classics. This is the 18 foundation courses of ACI.

This is the Baby Geshe course. And we'll talk more about it. I personally, what I'm encouraging you this week is think about these five pictures.

I find pictures are easier than blah, blah. Just remember the five pictures. Here's a wise looking guy with a book.

Is that what you want to be? Is that what, if I said you can be a master, you can learn to be a master, do you want to be this guy? Does that make you like, wow, that's really cool?

Or are you like, oh, too many facts? Next house. Next picture.

See? No, it's a samadhi house. No, there you go.

Do you want to be a meditation master? And do you want to help people to learn to meditate? Is that what you would like to do in your life?

Would you like to be a, basically, a meditation teacher? Would you like to focus on the meditation arts and get good at it? And by the way, we got the stuff.

If you're serious about meditation, you cannot learn it anywhere as well as you can learn it in ACI. Not possible. They don't even have the books.

They have no idea. They have no tradition. They just make up something.

You go to some yoga studio, they're like, close your eyes. Think of, you know, notice the donut in your stomach. And we have great, great, great tradition, real tradition.

And we've translated most of the books and we have a living tradition. Somebody asked me, how many meditations are you doing for? Tim, I said 101.

Oh, do you know that many? No, I had to cut it. Okay?

I mean, you meditate in the monastery for 25 years every morning for two hours or something. Then you don't do the same one over and over again. Right?

There's many, many beautiful ones. And that's a master. That's a master.

Okay, third one. Now, I call it mountain house. And that's a retreat master.

Would you like to be a retreat master? Is it attractive to you to come out to Diamond Mountain and go into a cabin and do retreat? Is that what calls to you?

And is that what you would like to be a master of? One thing I wanted to say is, I talked with Stanley. Stanley has a new organization called Innovation Retreats.

They are mostly focusing on retreats for business people or artists or writers or musicians. I'd say mainly business people. I can imagine a retreat master who has a dual specialty, double specialty.

So somebody comes to them and says, I want to do a retreat. And then they say, do you want a Buddhist retreat or do you want an innovation retreat? Or something like that.

They'll say, what do you want to use the retreat for? Do you want to get enlightened or do you want to build a quarter billion dollar business? Would you like to make new products at your business?

Would you like to learn how to be creative? So I imagine there will be both specialties. Two different kinds of retreat.

Next one. I call it staircase house. It's really a synthesized Buddhism.

It's deep, it's lam rim. It took 14 years for me to teach lam rim. It took seven years to teach ACM.

So it's supposed to be the short path. But it's deep. It's totally deep.

Don't blow it off. Don't think it's not important. In a way, it's more experiential than the classics.

You can get through the classics and still be an asshole. But you can't get through the lam rim and still be... I shouldn't use that language.

My boss is here. But you see what I mean? Lam rim changes your heart drastically.

And maybe that's where you want to go. Maybe you want to be a master of lam rim. And by the way, the audiences for lam rim are bigger.

Meaning more people will listen to lam rim than will listen to the Geshe course. I told Veronica, we started my Geshe class with 60 people. At the end, we had two.

You can't find people who are crazy to do that. My teacher taught lam rim for 30 years. More and more people came.

That's why. Okay, number five. Diamond house.

It's not so much focused on diamond as emptiness. It's more focused on diamond in the sense of... Somebody told me yesterday, you should call it hidden Buddhism.

And I kind of like it. I kind of like it. And the idea is that you work in a company for 19 years in Manhattan.

And you do all the things that an executive does for 19 years and no one knows you're a Buddhist. And you change 1,000 people in the building. And because of that, that becomes the most successful manufacturing business in the history of New York City.

Because it's all Buddhists who don't know they're Buddhists. Got it? And that's the real secret way.

That's the real secret way. And that's sexy. That's really fun.

So you choose what kind of master you want to be. If you want to learn to ring your bell at the right time, that's part of diamond way. But it's obviously not the main thing.

I can, it's part of the diamond way course that you will ring your bell at the right time. SDUG GI SNANGS RANG RNAM PAR DGOR DOG MO YANG YOD NA SA GYI RGYUD RNAM PA YI RIM CHO GSUNGS PHAG NAS SUG PAS SDUG GI SGO NAS ZHUGS PA RGYUR BA DAG DANG DRO BA RNAM PAR BGYUR DANG YIN PA'I ZIN PA'I RNAM PAR DU RDU NAS YIN PA'I ZIN PA'I NYON YON YON YON YON YON YON MA LA CI GYI BAR BA BRAL RNAM PAR BRAL BAR RNAM PAR That's what you learn at the tantric college. I think it's not enough.

I think it's not the full thing. I think you have to do secret Buddhism, but that's... So anyway, you're going to learn both.

All right, next picture. What is the next picture? Oh yeah.

It's a joke. For those people in the MBA program, no one has ever asked me to prove I went to Princeton. And when I got my job in the diamond business, I offered to show them my degree, and they said, we don't care, and we're paying you $7 an hour.

And I'm like, wait a minute, I got this piece of paper, and they're like, take it or leave it. That's the truth. Why I put this up here, when we went to Princeton, we were debating what language is on the degree, and it's Latin.

But the point is, at that class, I said, cum laude, in the middle, which means the best of the best. It means you got a super degree. And at the time, someone asked me, well, how many students get that?

And I said, one out of a hundred. Then I checked online, because I want to make sure I'm not lying to all my students. And there was a scandal recently at Princeton, because the cum laude, the honors, is decided not by the university, by the house.

The house decides honors. The university does not decide the honors. Whether you get a super degree comes from your immediate professors, and it does not come from the university.

It doesn't come from Tim. It comes from the director of your house, or the assistant director of your house. Cum laude.

And it got to 41%. And then the university said, stop. This is corruption.

And people would go to their professor and say, you're so handsome, or you're so beautiful, and can I take you to dinner? And then they'd say, oh, your honor's cum laude. And it became a kind of corruption within this university, because the university as a whole, ACI as a whole, wasn't watching the houses.

And the house went crazy. And the house said, everybody's a good person. Everybody gets honors.

Then I was really embarrassed. I told them I'm one out of 100. I'm 41 out of 100, which is almost half.

Then they had a big scandal, and the university put a number on it. I think now it's 10%, or something like that. The university stepped in and said, you're not keeping standards.

You're not running a good house. So I think there should, the reason I put the degree up here is you think about this structure. I think you need bull.

Sometimes the house gets out of control, and the university has to say, come on. And sometimes the university's too slow and boring, and the house has to say, we're doing something cool. We don't care.

I think there has to be this tension between Tim and the rest of us. So I look forward to that. With the house structure, we bring in more creativity, more excitement, but we also bring in the possibility of chaos.

So there has to be an overall structure, and especially for finances, for money, because in the end, if the department needs money, they go to the university. And who pays the department professors is the university. So the university maintains some order and some standards for the university.

And the house doesn't go crazy and do whatever they want. But then again, the house can do creative things because the university's boring. Okay, got it?

All right, which means, next picture. And I will stop in the next five-minute story. We propose to have a director and an assistant director of each house, which means we need how many?

10, five times two. We need 10 good people. And we're thinking that between now and Kyoto, which is December, we cook this project.

We cook the five houses idea. That gives us two months or something like that. And we cook all the ideas, and then maybe you come to Tim and you say, by the way, I have an idea for a director of Samadhi House.

And Tim says, who? And you say, me. Okay, and God bless.

Okay, do it. If you want to be, if you want to lose your hair, I mean, if you want to run a house or you'd like, you think it'd be fun to be a director of a house or help run a house? And by the way, in my idea, you can still do your other projects.

I don't care. I almost respect people. I guess I want to do a separate yoga master thing.

I don't care. That's your thing. You want to do, just don't get in trouble.

Don't do anything illegal, which means sex and taxes. Okay, those two things you're not allowed to do. But you want to do other stuff as long as you don't hurt anybody, I don't care.

But under the five houses structure, you can be a director, you can be an assistant. Okay, and I think it should be international. I don't think it should all be Americans.

There's no Americans who even do ACI very well, except a few. So, you know, it's up to you guys. I got one more picture, I think.

Oh, here's the bad news. Just when you were excited. Oh, there's the director and the assistant director.

You figure out which is which. Next. Oh yeah, this one.

You got out of the 18 courses, but you still have to take five. That's the bottom line. If you're a nice, intelligent young lady from Malaysia, this is what I'm saying, you still got to take the five courses, okay?

Otherwise, it's going to end up like this lady who's asking the French guy in Paris how to get to the third subway stop. He speaks French, she speaks American. English.

And they have a communication breakdown on the street. Understand? I mean, to some extent, we all have to speak the ACI language.

If you don't know the basics of Buddhism, I don't want you to be in a house. To get into a house, which is called member status, to get into a house, first you have to finish five courses. I took away 13 courses.

You should kiss my feet. All right? Minimum, five courses.

And that's to get into any house. You cannot get into any house as a member. The lowest level is member, which is already a high level.

You already can speak ACIanese. ACIanish? Anyway, you got to speak the ACI language.

Otherwise, we can't communicate. You got to do these five courses. And we estimate, me and Tim, we estimate that's about 18 months of work.

So if you can't do, if you're not willing to do 18 months of work to get into a house, then go somewhere else. Most of you have already finished most of these courses, I think. And we're not asking you to do them again.

We're just saying, in your life, you should finish these five. Or you can't speak Buddhism. You don't really know Buddhism.

All right, I'm sorry I ran over, which is very unusual. And I'm sorry I didn't get in the Q&A, which is extremely unusual, right, Shanti? And we'll do a Q&A in the next class.

So take a 15 minute break, pee pee break, and drink, okay? You're in Arizona, you're in the desert, you got to drink. When you drink, there's a cause and effect.

Okay, all right, bye. See you.