Нагарджуна, курс 6 — Заключительные главы (2024, Аризона), занятие 4

[Speaker 1]
We had the three princesses up. Remember with the crown? So I figured the safest thing about Q&A is to do it before I start talking.

So my wife reminded me, other people reminded me that we had a question that the other guy said, sad, if everything's empty, then there's no four truths. And if there's no four truths, there's no four actions, or four things that you do with the four truths. Yeah, yeah.

And then there's no four results that you get from the four truths. And then there can't be any sangha. And then there's no dharma.

And that means there's no Buddha. And that means there's no three jewels. That means there's no three jewels.

There's no goodness. And there's no, parlance means the language of the world, the normal language of the world. People can't communicate.

And we were going to, you guys were going to meditate on it and tell me why those last, I mean the progression of the first five, six things, it's clear. But then it gets weird, right? If there's no three jewels, there's no goodness.

And then there's no language of the normal world. So who wants to take a shot? I think Haso was considering it.

Do you want to try? Okay, go. From the Peace Tree World News Desk.

Wait, talk into the microphone. Guess into the microphone. Okay.

[Speaker 2]
So my thoughts go into this idea that language itself is also empty. Words are empty. They don't have like intrinsic meaning on themselves.

So the only way we can load them is because they are empty. And that's why we can communicate otherwise. I don't know, just a miracle that when I say water, it triggers a certain mental image in other people's mind.

But then, because in Spanish, let's say I can say agua and trigger the same mental picture in other people. It's like the sounds of the world are empty. The only way for the language to really work is because it's empty.

[Speaker 1]
Anybody else? Thank you, I think it's good. Talk into the mic.

Why there is no morality and then there is no language? First, for the language, I think it's the age too. The Buddha used to teach for us in the Dharma.

And then the 64 qualities of the Buddha's speech is the most expensive seeds. Then it all comes from morality. So if there is no morality, then there won't be the 64 good qualities of Buddha's speech.

And then no language can be taught to the people. Cool, okay. Want to try?

She cooked, she and Adriana cooked this dinner the other night. And I want to say it's one of the nicest dinners I ever had. Thank you.

Yeah, please thank your mom. She gave the recipe. I think that there's a certain amount of love and harmony needed in order to agree on what a word means.

So perhaps that's the link. If we didn't have love, we wouldn't be able to have love. And I think language helps us do that.

And it's also the reason we have some language. If we don't have enough love, perhaps. Yeah, cool.

Thank you. Yeah, talk a little louder. Good one.

Language must be a huge common result of seeds of infection. But if there are no three truths, and therefore no causes and effects and consequences, and therefore no morality, then I just take what I want. I just live on my own.

And there is no need to infect. Therefore, I'm not sure. Therefore, I don't think I can use this.

Nice. Thank you. Thank you.

Yeah. Language connects the deceptive reality to the ultimate reality. There's words that have the link for the Dharma to be understood by people in our world.

Cool. Okay. Maybe one more.

[Speaker 2]
So, yeah, kind of similar to some of the previous answers. But language is a social construct, and it takes a certain amount of collaboration to agree on a grammar and vocabulary. And if there's no morality, you just kill or steal to get what you want.

You don't need to cooperate with other people. You have no need to communicate with them.

[Speaker 1]
Cool, I like it. By the way, the word in the book in the native language is, parlance in English means the usual language that people use in the normal world. And so, our yinnegarjuna uses this word.

So, I think everybody's on the right track. It takes a kind of shared seeds, shared karma to even be able to communicate with each other. And when those seeds are not there, then I think you have war and violence and confusion.

When the seeds are there for, because of your goodness, as everybody said, then you can communicate peacefully with each other. That's cool. But just to say that, the last thing I'd say is that for Arya Nigarjuna, the normal reality called talking, world, people in the world talking to each other, for him, that's 50% of the reality.

Because he says the Buddha cannot communicate higher ideas to us without that language. So, even for a Buddha, they need that, the normal words of the world, they need it. And it's necessary for Buddhas also.

If it's necessary for Buddhas, it must be helpful for us. Okay. We still have about five minutes.

We could do some other Q&A. Any kind of Q&A is fine. That's one good thing about the Geshe courses.

They don't tell you the debate topic when you get to the debate ground. They surprise you. Hey Geshe-la.

[Speaker 2]
Recently, you mentioned a few times about Maitreya is closer than you think. And can you elaborate it more? And are you based on the scripture or anything else?

Or how to make a connection with Maitreya when he's show up in some prayer teaching and we can be there listening?

[Speaker 1]
Oh, good question. I think I have to leave that one. Okay.

But Maitreya is closer than you think. All right, next question.

[Speaker 2]
I'm still thinking about words class yesterday, that when all the mental afflictions and misunderstanding is gone, what's left? And I was thinking, for example, when I try to get rid of my anger, this spot is taken up by patience. So is it even possible to get rid of the negative ones without the positive ones showing up?

[Speaker 1]
Right. There's a question like that. By the way, there was something around your neck that you...

You got it back. Okay, good. I just was thinking.

There's a question like that. And there's a question like that in Buddhism. Are things relative?

In other words, can you have light without darkness? Could you have knowledge without ignorance? And some people have said that dependent origination means you cannot have light without dark, and you cannot have enlightenment without samsara, or like that.

And they say that's the meaning of dependence. Relativity, we call it relativity, is the meaning of dependence. And then there are sections in the scripture which we call in English debunk.

Debunk means they prove that that's a silly idea, that you couldn't have light without darkness or something like that. You could live in a world that had two suns and it was light all day, all the time, and all night. You see what I mean?

And so they say relativity is not the meaning of dependence. You see what I mean? It's not that you have to have evil to have goodness in the world.

You could have goodness without evil, and you would still recognize it, and you would still experience it. So that's that. I like that.

There are sections in scripture that get into that. They debunk relativity in favor of seeds. If you have the seeds for it to be daylight all day on your world, it will be daylight all day on your world, whether or not there's any darkness.

Cool. We have some more time. So Geshe-la, here's a question from someone online.

Yes.

[Speaker 2]
The question is about time and emptiness in time. If there is not such a thing as a partless moment of consciousness, when we're thinking about time, how does this relate to the law of karma in the sense of when you plant a seed, there's a time delay between the planting and the ripening? And how could it help us?

[Speaker 1]
Okay, cool. So we did a program a long time ago, anyway. In that film that they showed from DSEU, we had an interesting class at the Institute for Advanced Study, which is a little bit off of the Princeton campus.

And this is where Einstein and Oppenheimer went to make the bomb. The university sent them off the campus, and it's a kind of a highly guarded campus. And that's where they developed this thing.

And it's still that way. It's still considered kind of secret, or kind of you're not supposed to walk around there and stuff like that. So of course we went there, and we walked around.

I think it was Edmund's idea. And we actually went to the director. It's called Institute for Advanced Study.

And they said, okay, you can have a class. It's a beautiful day. We had decided to have the class under a big tree, and it was the perfect weather.

And I remember a fox, a red fox, slowly walked through the class. We're like, what's that about? So, and then, so that's where Einstein was.

The house where he lived is nearby there. We should have gone there, Edmund, next time, okay? Take some pictures there.

But he had this theory that time is relative, right? Or time can be, time can be curved, space can be curved. And I never understood it, and I never wanted to understand it.

You know, it wasn't that important to me, but then I was going to teach the emptiness of time, and the emptiness of space. I was going to write a book called A Better History of Time. But the editor of A Brief History of Time got upset at me, but that's another story.

And here's the idea, and then you can brag to people that at Diamond Mountain, you understood Einstein, okay? He said, if the gravity of something is very, very heavy, then it will change the path even of light. So he had this idea that light was made of something that could be affected by gravity.

Somehow it had mass. Even though not much, it has some mass. So in general, when you drop a cup and the mass of the earth is greater than the mass of the cup, not the size, but the mass, which is almost the same thing.

But basically, if you drop a cup, the smaller thing will be attracted to the bigger thing. So if there's light passing from some object in the sky coming here, then that has some mass to it. It has some substance to it.

And then if there's some real fat thing off to the side, that light should be attracted, it should bend. Okay, that's easy, right? So the light from a planet, for example, Mercury, which is the smallest planet, it's spinning around the closest to the sun.

Since he's so close to that fat boy called the sun, then light from Mercury that gets to earth, it should take a little bit longer to get to earth because it's attracted by the great gravity of the sun. It should go in a curve, which is what curved space means. So the light coming from Mercury should take a little bit longer to get to it.

Einstein predicted that, but he didn't have the tools to prove it. They didn't have the instruments to prove it. And then later, they proved it.

So they waited till the Mercury passed behind the sun. And just when Mercury came out from behind the sun, and they calculated the time that the light should take to reach the earth, and it was a slight delay, which means that that part of space was curved, which also means that time is relative, which means that different people could experience time in different ways. And that's very much against the early Greek and Roman and Buddhist presentations of science.

Abhidharma says that things are made of tiny particles and time should move at a certain rate. Time as judged by seconds of the human stream of awareness should always be the same. Everybody should experience time the same way.

An hour for me should be the same as an hour for you, because we're living in the same world and the hour is passing at the same speed. That's proven by the lack of Q&A. So anyway, that's a basic early Abhidharma idea.

It's a basic early Greek idea. They split time, especially as measured in the consciousness of a human being. How do you experience time?

And then they cut it into little pieces called seconds and then milliseconds. And then they run out of language. They run out of words.

And then the Abhidharma, it's very cute because they start making up words like quarks and... No, I'm sorry, no, that's Western science. So they call horse particle, bull particle, chicken particle, mouse particle, flea particle.

They give the particles names and it's beautiful. They go down to the 10 to the 60th power. 10 with 60 zeros after it.

And they say that's the smallest point of it. That's the smallest measure of time. And if you got smaller, then the beginning of the moment and the end of the moment would be in the same place.

And the same with an atom. If you split an atom, then the left side would touch the right side. And then there would be no atom.

You can imagine it, right? And then the later Buddhists said, come on, you can always split it further. No matter how small a particle gets, it still has a left side and it still has a right side, which means you can always be closer to the left side and farther away from the right side, which means even the tiniest atom can be split.

And that's what basically quantum physics says also, that you can keep splitting the atom. It may lose its elemental identity, but you can still keep splitting. So there is no ultimate particle of time.

There is no set period of time. A second is different in each person's experience and an atom is different in each person's experience. There is no base reality.

There is no fundamental measure of time. All time is relative, Einstein. And all space is curved.

And it could take longer for things to happen to you or to me, and I will have a completely different experience of reality than you because there's no building blocks. There's no smallest amount of time and there's no smallest measure of space that exists. And then there's this thing called, what's this called?

Eisenberg's paradox. If the observer moves, the behavior of light changes from a particle to a wave. It's weird.

Even quantum physicists, part of quantum physics is that if the observer changes their direction, the behavior of light and matter is different. It behaves differently. So there is no standard behavior of time and there is no standard behavior of space.

And Buddhists would say, Nagarjuna would say, that's because you have your own seeds and I have my own seeds. And time goes at a different speed for me and time goes at a different speed for you. So therefore, end of question.

Buddhism, the highest schools of Buddhism, which is Nagarjuna, reject the idea of a smallest particle of time and of a standard particle of time and a standard particle of space. They say no such thing. Impossible.

Which means that each person's experience is objective. In time, the time spent listening to Geshe-la could go very slow for some people. And they're like, when's he going to finish?

Okay, got it? Cool. All right, let's get to, we got to go on to our next class.

Okay, ready? And I'll do some more questions. So here's what happened.

Chapter 26, can I say? Am I right? Yeah.

Chapter 26 is an investigation of the 12 Links of the Wheel of Life. And here, you got to understand historically what's going on. Lord Buddha gave a talk called the 12 Links of the Wheel of Life.

He gave a famous talk about the 12 Links. It's short. It's like two pages.

And he gave that talk. And then, it's kind of beautiful. On three different occasions that I've found in the sutras, Buddha had a reason why he couldn't give a lecture to someone directly.

And there weren't any tape recorders. So, he, by the way, and the one that I like the most is a princess in Sri Lanka, which is far, far to the south of India. So Nagarjuna was probably living in a place called Patala in South India, near, not far from Mysore, India.

And then he was, sorry, Nagarjuna. Buddha was up in North India, near Varanasi and Rajagrha. And then there was a queen in Sri Lanka.

And there was a lot of trade going on. There was similar to the Silk Road. So there was a trade route between Sri Lanka and India.

Very, very common to go across. And she met some merchants from Varanasi, or North India, who knew Lord Buddha. And they told her about Buddha.

And this queen, due to a past life, she's called the Lady of Pearls, by the way. And she had a past life experience with the Buddha. And then he sends her, after listening to the merchants, he sends her a painting.

He puts the 12 links into a painting. And he wants to communicate with her. It's a tape recording, got it?

Of his teaching. Because he can't send a tape recording. So he sent a painting.

And that was the 12 links of the Wheel of Life. So in his penultimate chapter, in the next to last chapter, which must be a place of great importance, he covers the 12 links. And we have a 12 links master.

It's the Mayor of Rimland. Sugeng finished a book, a very important and very difficult book about the 12 links. And it's in interminable editing right now.

It's being edited. Don't say three years, it pains me. Anyway, it's coming out very soon.

And it's done. The book is done. We just haven't put it out yet.

And I'll probably just force it out, okay? Like, what do you call that? In the hospital C-section.

I'm going to do a Geshe Michael C-section. So anyway, he's translated one book and then he started on a second book that was written 1,700 years ago by Master Vasubandhu, which is an explanation of the Buddha's teaching on the 12 links, okay? Now, today, we have this, I'm going to do two classes on chapter 26.

Yeah. And it's an explanation of the 12 links. But I want you to get a feeling historically what's going on.

And I think Sugen will appreciate it more than anybody. We are struggling through an explanation of the 12 links by Vasubandhu that we discovered in the ALL project, okay? And there's no commentary.

And there's no oral tradition. And the manuscript is probably very messed up. And it was translated by a guy who was drunk, I think.

So, and that's all we have. We have no other tools. So me and Sugen, we're like, yeah, let's try.

Because no one has touched that book in 2,000 years, 17 centuries, okay? So we're working on it. And we're doing okay.

I'd say we're struggling, but we're making it. We're going to make it. Now, the cool thing here is we have somebody 100 years before that, okay?

And that's the cool thing for Sugen, is that we have someone, Nagarjuna, who's 150 years before Vasubandhu. So he's got the raw teaching on the 12 links. He's got the raw teaching of the Wheel of Life.

And then what's his take on the 12 links? Because this is the first take of any Mahayana teacher, of any Bodhisattva teacher. This is the first Bodhisattva to explain the 12 links.

And I started reading it, and I was like, oh man, I don't know how I'm going to make a class out of this. It's 12 verses. Everything else is like, Chandrakirti would take 300 verses.

Nagarjuna's got 12 verses on the 12 links. And he doesn't even use all of them. So I'm like, I don't know if this is going to work out.

And then I read it, and I was like floored. I was like astounded. And it's unbelievable.

And it's an understanding of the 12 links that I have never seen after that. So I'm like, wow. So I thought, I got inspired, and I stayed up almost all night.

Couldn't do other people's work, all right? So you understand. And I translated the verses, okay?

So I'd like to teach them to you that way. Okay, and we'll start. Okay.

Okay. And it will take more than one class. It'll run into the next class, I think.

Yeah. Okay, so, by the way, we did a book with my teacher 45 years ago of The Wheel of Life. And I had a print in my possession that was done somewhere in the Himalayas.

And I bought it from a guy that walked out of the Himalayas. And I was 23 years old. And I gave it to my stepmother.

And she passed away, and she gave it back to me. And I have it, so it's cool. And anyway, it's a very fine Wheel of Life print.

So what I did was I took the pictures of The Wheel of Life off that print, which I think is the best print I've ever seen. And I gave them to you. Okay, here we go.

26.1. Next one. Yeah, okay. And I'll give you the images or something, but we're going to start the 12 verses of Arya Nagarjuna's presentation of The Wheel of Life.

And it's unique, and it's special, and it's amazing. And I added the drawings. Okay, they were cleaned up by a lady from Guadalajara who's a genius graphics designer and a super clean person and just serves people all day long.

Her name is Gina. And years ago, she cleaned it up for me. And then I had some, I wanted it adjusted, and then I asked Rosa van Grieken, and she did some more adjustments for me.

So the drawings are pretty good. Okay, so anyway, that's the first two links of The Wheel of Life. That's why they kind of curved like that.

You got to imagine the left-hand one on top of the right-hand one. And what's the image for misunderstanding? Yeah, a blind person.

And the stick is supposed to indicate that the person is blind. That would be not understanding that a bad driver that you run into on the road from Phoenix to Tucson is coming from you. And if you get upset at them, you just created 10 more bad drivers.

Okay, that's a kind of blindness. So that's the blindness. By the way, that's one of my remaining bad habits, is to, I have an AI problem with other drivers, if you know what I'm talking about.

Anyway. Something happens to my fingers. And then second picture is, by the way, Sugeng confirmed it.

People love that when their self-existent perception is confirmed by another person. So when Sugeng and Shinten bought their new car and they drove it, and Sugeng said, Geshe-la, now I understand about Arizona drivers. I said, I told you.

Okay, so there's misunderstanding. What's the second picture on the right? Yeah, making fresh karma.

Making fresh karma. Fresh karma. DU BYED KYI MED, sanskara.

Okay, here's Arya Nagarjuna opening comments on the 12 links. To him, it's important enough to put at the end of his book, of his most important book. And he says, blinded by misunderstanding, we collect together the three kinds of fresh karma.

And this is the karma that makes us go where it is we go, which is gatim gacchati in the Sanskrit. It sounds cool in the Sanskrit, gatim gacchati. That's why you go where you go.

So that's okay. This part's okay, right? We don't understand what's going on.

What's the three kinds of fresh karma? Easy. Good karma, bad karma, neutral karma.

The only one that's kind of hard to understand is neutral. Most of the karma we do is neutral. And so that creates the background world, like the dirt outside.

You don't stop. I mean, my wife does, and say how beautiful the stones are. When we first built Diamond Mountain, my teacher was still alive.

Everybody used to pick up heart-shaped stones and take them back to New Jersey. And then finally, my teacher said, no more heart-shaped stones from Diamond Mountain. I understand there's heart-shaped stones there, but I don't want them piled up in my house.

That's neutral karma. It just makes the background stuff. And so there is a lot of neutral karma going on.

We just don't appreciate it. There's nothing that's not made by karma. Even stuff that you don't feel good about or you don't feel bad about, or you don't even notice, is still made by karma.

So that's okay. This part, by the way, where you go in Sanskrit and in Tibetan means your next life. When they say go where you go, it means your next life.

It could also mean whether or not breakfast is going to be tasty, which is a big concern of mine. But normally, when you see gacchami or gaten gaccha, gati, it means birth, rebirth, where you go in your rebirth. So that's okay.

And by the way, I think Sugeng and me both, I don't know about you Sugeng, but me personally, it's kind of disturbing to me that the wheel is not in order. If you really understand the wheel, it goes like boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. It should have been dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee.

And it's not really. And why does it jump around? And can the gardener help us understand why it jumps around?

That would be sweet. So let's see if he does. So first verse, you're okay, right?

Everything's kind of easy. The Sanskrit, it reads quite sweetly. By the way, if you are interested to learn Sanskrit, memorize this book.

If you're interested in Sanskrit, memorize this book. He writes perfect Sanskrit and he writes it in a simple, simple way. He believes in the simplest words are the most powerful words.

The gardener is the simplest writer in Buddhism and the deepest. He uses simple words in a deep way. If you want to memorize Sanskrit, if you want to learn Sanskrit, learn these verses.

The nice thing is it's in meter, so it's easy to memorize. BU NAR BHA BA YAG SANGS RGA RANG Eight. AA BAD NYA NUS PAR BSTOD DA Eight.

And it's all like that. Why did they write it in eights and eights and eights? Because if you forget something, it turns out six or four.

And then you know you forgot something. Got it? If the beats don't work out.

So if you're, and by the way, Christina Casica, where are you? She's teaching a Sanskrit course that goes on at the same, it flows all year like the mixed nuts, like the Shenzong Tarot Class. If you're interested in Sanskrit, you can learn from her.

I don't emphasize Sanskrit myself because 99% of Sanskrit was destroyed. So out of the 4,600 books from India which survived, they only survived in Tibetan. They don't survive in Sanskrit.

There's only a few. This is one of them, by the way. But if you're going to spend the time to learn a foreign language, I would suggest Tibetan because you got 300,000 books.

In Sanskrit, you have maybe 100 that survived and it's not enough to really master it. See what I mean? So it's good to know it in case you run into a problem, you can check the Sanskrit.

In this book, in this book, the people in the last 20 centuries have mixed up MING and MIG. I and MING. And then there's a very common expression, MING GZUGS RNAMS BA RUG PA name and form, which is the fourth, I don't know, right?

Fourth link. And someone wrote MIG GZUGS, which means I and form, instead of MING GZUGS, okay? And I corrected it, and then I checked the Sanskrit and the MIG GZUGS was correct.

The mistake was correct. So if you have the Sanskrit, you can avoid fixing something that's not broken. You avoid changing the Garjuna, which is helpful.

Anyway, that part's easy. Let's go to the next verse. Da-da-da, 26 point, oh, sorry.

26.2, right? Okay, triggered by fresh karma, consciousness makes beings make their indents. And by the way, if you think I'm just being repetitive with the MIGs and the MIGs or something like that, he does it.

He's cute. He likes to be cute. He says, we go on our goings and we make our MIGs.

Okay, I didn't invent it. And then he says, so consciousness makes us make our entrance. Once consciousness is settled, then name and form are formed.

Then he's making another pun, right? He's making another pun. So triggered by fresh karma.

So that's kind of a problem, Sugen, that the link between second link and third link is not that clear. Because you think you should go through link number eight, nine, sorry, nine, 10, and 11. It should go to nine, 10, 11, three, right?

Rebirth, strong desire, weaker desire. But this is how Nagarjuna, who's the first great commentator on the 12 links in history, he says, no problem. Link number two goes to link number three easily.

You don't have to jump to link number eight, nine, 10, okay? So it's cool. If you're a real life specialist like Sugen, you're like, ah, finally someone's following the wheel around in the wheel order, okay?

All right, so triggered by fresh karma, consciousness makes beings make a difference. So the first link is misunderstanding. We're not going to say ignorance anymore because it is a false understanding, misunderstanding.

And then that causes you to make karma. Fresh, well, let's say karma. And then that causes you to have a mind that's headed towards your next birth.

That makes sense. If you explain the 12 links this way, it makes sense. The wheel is moving in a wheel.

And we haven't seen that really. That's his version, which fits the order. Then what happens next?

And by the way, you got the picture here, the two guys in the... Yeah, on the left you have the monkey entering the house. And that's your mind entering the womb of your mother.

The monkey entering the house is your mind pushed by your karma across death. By the way, when you get to my age, you start thinking about it. And it's nice that you have a teacher who's planting it in your mind when you're so young because you'll need it later.

You'll be curious later. When it gets closer, you'll be saying, how does that work again? Because I might have to go through that next week.

So here it is. Your mind survives death and then your mind looks for a new place. That's the monkey looking to the window.

And then on the right you have what? Yeah, you have body and mind. It's called nama rupa, name and form, but it means body and mind.

And there's two guys in a boat. And that represents... Then he says once consciousness is settled, and you never see that language used in our commentaries.

And it's so cool. Once consciousness is settled, where? In the womb.

Yeah, okay. Beings make their entrance into the mom, into the womb. And then once they get settled there, once the monkey gets settled, he develops into, he or she develops into a body and a mind in the womb.

NUR NUR PO. LAR LAR PO. It's called peace of spirit, and then peace of gooey spirit, and then peace of sticky gooey spirit, and then these are the stages of gestation in the womb.

So that's cool. That's maybe the first time we've seen the wheel go in the right order. And it's a plausible explanation so far.

What he's going to do when he gets to later, I don't know. So already to me, it's helping my understanding of the original Wheel of Life, and it makes more sense. We have never had anyone explain it this way.

And he tends to do that. Nagarjuna tends to do that. With many topics, he gives the earliest and the best explanation.

All right, let's go to the next verse. Yeah, once name and form have formed, you see how he's playing? Once name and form have formed, the six doors of sense make their arrival.

And based on the six doors of sense, contact makes its perfect appearance. Nagarjuna never uses an extra word without great meaning. Why?

He says perfect appearance. By the way, the history of Buddhism is trying to figure out Nagarjuna. And there are hundreds, there are thousands of books to explain his emptiness teachings.

But he, well, he wrote commentaries. He didn't write formal commentaries. He wrote poetry.

What I'm trying to say is this is all you get. You got to figure it out. And I think he intended it that way.

I think he wanted, I think he's giving you clues. And he says, you figure it out, Columbo. The older people will understand.

My Lama had an addiction to Columbo. It's a murder mystery detective guy that every week for like 10 years, he solved a different murder. Okay, all right.

Here's the pictures, all right? Check out the pictures at the top. On the left is which number, Sugeng?

Number five? Yeah, number five is six. That's how you can remember it.

Number five is the six doors of sense. And the Heart Sutra gives them WU YAS BU. Eye, ear, it goes down.

Eye, ear, nose, tongue, skin, and mind. So those are the six doors of sense. They're pictured as empty windows.

They're pictured as buildings with empty windows. It's the senses developing in the womb. It's the child's sense organs, the eyes.

Why didn't it come before body and mind? They take time. Yeah, it takes time to develop.

The eyes are not fully developed, I guess, until you come out, really, or something like that. So there's empty houses, which means there's a window, but there's nobody looking out the window yet. And there's nothing they're looking at yet.

Your sense organs are developing. And in Buddhism, we include the thought as the sixth sense organ. In English, we normally don't include the thought as a sense.

In Buddhism, we say six senses. All right. Now, then the monkey comes to the window.

The monkey's inside the house. The mind goes to the window. For the first time, the eyeball is formed.

The eye is working. Then the mind, you can picture the mind and the skull behind the eye. And then for the first time, the monkey looks out the two windows and makes contact with the outside world.

And that's called, what's the picture? It's the contact of a man and a woman in bed. And it's meant to symbolize the monkey looking out the window and making contact with things that they see.

You see, it's cool, right? And so to make it intimate and to make it strong, Lord Buddha used the image of two, of a man and his wife in bed, that they are touching, making contact with each other. But what it means is, the monkey of your mind is looking out the window of your eyeball and making contact with colors and shapes for the first time.

The baby opens their eyes and then they see. And that's called contact. And for Nagarjuna, it's crucial moment.

It's a big moment. He says what? Perfect appearance.

He, and by the way, he uses perfect three times in the verse, in the Sanskrit, right? Kristina? He says, Sambhama, Samsparsha, Sambhravartate.

So he's emphasizing perfect, perfect. What's it mean? Now you've got to, with Nagarjuna, you can read 18 commentaries on it, but what do you guys think it means?

Why is the contact perfect? Relate to birth, coming out of the womb. So really, your school, by the way, this is how all the schools started, with Nagarjuna, basically.

So her school, which is some kind of mind-only variant, says when I make contact with the outside world, this is perfect. Something like that. Full, full experience of karma.

Anybody else? I don't know. But somehow, for Arya and Nagarjuna, the contact is crucial.

[Speaker 2]
I think that maybe the observer appears at this point.

[Speaker 1]
Say again?

[Speaker 2]
The observer appears at this point. So someone, something was observing.

[Speaker 1]
Okay. First contact with the outside world. First observation of the world.

Cool. I would guess that the world that the monk experienced is perfect. The illusion is so real, but the fact of reality is very real and perfect.

Yeah, it seems, we can almost say that's the first quote, reality, because it's so concrete. You're seeing colors. You're smelling, smelling, smelling smells.

One more guess, and then I'm going to read you the next verse, which proves you're all wrong.

[Speaker 2]
It's the moment before the mind starts to discriminate. Therefore, it's perfect.

[Speaker 1]
That's okay. That's a little tricky. Okay, let's go on.

Let's go on. We're going to go on. By the way, this was too ambitious to teach you all the verses of this chapter.

That would take a whole, this course was supposed to take six months. This is year number seven. Okay, so we got to get moving.

All right, 26.4 is next, can I say? Yeah, and by the way, here's something, Sugeng, that we don't have, and here's something that we don't have, right? And by the way, there's no picture.

He hasn't gone on to another link yet. He's making a comment about the first contact with the outside world. And he says, you can only have contact with the outside world if there is an instrument of perception, the eye, if there is something to see, the colors or the shapes, your mom, okay?

And if there's what draws them together, which Choney Lama says, YI LA BYAS PA, which means attention, shifting attention. You shift your attention to what you see. At some point, the baby, when they come out and open their eyeball, then you can imagine their mind shifts to the window.

Their mind swings to the window and looks out the window, okay? And he calls it what draws them together. It could have a deeper interpretation.

What draws the mind to that particular object? Karma. Why did you meet the, I mean, the irritating person?

Okay, got it? So I think when he says what draws them together, he's being cute, which is very Nagarjuna, okay? You know, he loves to drop hints and be funny and wear a weird hat and stuff like that, okay?

All right, what draws them together? Thus it is that consciousness arises dependent upon name and form. SGENG should be irritated.

Why? Good. Yeah, now he's gone one, two, three, four, three.

Okay, it should be irritating. I'll say it again. He's saying, once you look out the window and your eyes open for the first time and you make contact with objects, then you can be aware.

But awareness came before that. Awareness is the monkey that was looking to get into the mom's womb. We had awareness already, Nagarjuna.

Why are you going backwards? Yeah, I think by definition it's a different consciousness. This is a sense consciousness.

The other one is your mind in general entering the mom's womb. That is a big difference. Your mind as it perceives the outside world and your mind as it enters your mom nine months before that.

Yeah, so GENG says, Geshe-la, they're not talking about the same consciousness. This consciousness is not the same one that's link number three. Okay, good.

Okay. I didn't put a picture because I agree. Okay, understand?

Okay, all right, next verse. Luckily my wife had a long phone call last night. She helps people.

Then I get to work. Okay, all right. Now let's look at the picture.

What's the picture here? Yeah, it's the grossest picture in history. We went to Singapore airport one time.

To land in Singapore is so amazing. At least from some gates. To get to the baggage area, you have to walk through the butterfly zoo.

Right? Is it still there? Park.

Yeah, you go through a special area where it's all very kind of humid and lots of orchids, which is the definition of Singapore. And then they keep a butterfly museum, a butterfly zoo, a butterfly park. And they're flying all around you as you're trying to figure out which baggage belt your stuff is on.

And it's kind of cool. Okay. So here he's got first person having feelings after contact.

Contact leads to feeling. What was the contact? With the outside world.

You have your first contact and immediately that creates an impression. Oh, that's pretty. Or that's ugly.

Or I don't care about that. Either way. You start to have the three kinds of feeling right away.

He says that coming together of the three of I and form and consciousness, meaning the I and the colors and shapes and the awareness, that's contact. That was the man and the lady touching each other, which is the most primitive, primordial kind of contact. And then that contact of the mind and the outside world leads to feelings.

And Arya Nagarjuna adds, when he adds words, pay attention. So he added all. When he got to feelings, he added all.

Why do you think he added all? Anybody have an opinion? He didn't say, he did not say you make contact with the outside world, you get feelings.

He said, you make contact with the outside world, you get all your feelings. Why did he add all? KUN DU BYUNG SEMS PRAB BAR BSTAD TE SEMS, SEMS. Maybe because there's no other way that feelings occur or it's negative and possible. Oh, so they all have to occur that way. Exactly. Anybody else?

Somebody's, either she has to go to the bathroom or she wants to say something.

[Speaker 2]
Maybe because there were already feelings when the child is in the womb, it already has feelings. And when it opens the eyes, then really all feelings are there.

[Speaker 1]
Like not just inside feelings, outside feelings. About outside feelings, nice, okay. That's cool.

By the way, you're all still wrong as usual. Anybody else want to be wrong? Stanley likes to be wrong.

I think he's referring all three kinds of feelings, good, bad, and neutral. Yeah, that's possible, that's possible. Behind you, one more opinion.

Maybe because the child, when it sees the outside world, it sees it's coming from its own side and that misunderstanding triggers other feelings. That's a very sexy Nagarjuna idea. If he wasn't thinking of that, he shouldn't have been.

Okay, let's go to the next verse, see if it clears up the mystery. And we are on a time frame here, and you're going to go into retreat for three days, right? Wednesday, Thursday, two and a half.

So we kind of got to keep this, I got to finish in how long, Tim? With or without Q&A? Without Q&A.

We did Q&A. Okay, all right, let's rush on to this next picture. Then we got what we call the, I call it the two desires.

Initial desire and strong desire. They make two different links of the wheel of life with desire. There's starting to want something, and then there's strongly wanting something.

Initial desire and then strong desire. Initial desire and then strong desire. Eight and nine, right, Sugai?

Link eight and link nine. What's seven? Feeling.

What's six? Contact. What's five?

Doors of self. Okay, good. Here's his commentary.

Feelings are the trigger for initial desire. Initial desire is meant for those things that we feel. And once we have initial desire, there comes advanced desire in the four forms of this desire.

So, the important part of this verse is the first part. And what was the question last time about feelings? All the feelings.

Yeah, and now in my opinion, what he's saying is, what keeps the wheel moving at this point is that you have those feelings. You see what I mean? His definition of desire is you have desire for the things you feel.

You see what I mean? You have to feel first, and then you want it. You have to taste candy first before you get addicted to candy.

And that's his, he wants to draw a strong connection between link number seven and link number eight and nine. Sugeng, why is link number eight and nine so crucial in the wheel? Why is desire so crucial?

They are almost at the same place at the misunderstanding as the first link that will cause the wheel to turn. Some of the journey. At link number two, you plant karma.

And I always give the example of my wife teaching me to plant watermelon seeds. She's like, let's go gardening. She said, do you know where watermelons come from?

This is when, 10 years ago. She said, do you know where watermelons come from? I said, yeah.

She said, where? I said, from the back of the store. Somehow they grow them in the back of the store and they bring, I always see them come out the door with the watermelons.

There must be something back there making watermelons. She's like, no. They grow on these vines and you have to plant them.

Then it was cute. I don't know if you remember, we had a bag of seeds, which is ridiculous because every watermelon has 10,000 seeds in it. Then you buy a bag of seeds.

They give you 12 seeds for $6 or something. So I'm like buying the seeds. And then I said, well, how do you plant them?

She says, duh, lick your thumb, stick it in the ground. Okay, what next? Put the seed in the hole.

Okay, what next? Cover it. Then what next?

That's all. Then I sat there and I was sitting there and she said, what are you doing? And I said, I'm waiting.

And she's like, you're going to wait until October. This is April. She's like, they don't come out.

And I always, I'm fascinated by the idea that for some reason, when you put the seed in the ground and then you get it wet, the factory opens. All the workers wake up. All the machines start, dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum.

And they're all running around saying, let's push a sprout out. Let's push a sprout out. Somehow they're all sleeping in the package.

And then when the water touches it and the sunlight and the ground, and then suddenly they all wake up and they start saying, we got to get this sprout out. We got to get this sprout out. And then the sprout comes out.

So anyway, link number three? Sorry. Two.

Link number two is the watermelon seed in April, when you push it under the ground. And that's called, can I say sanskara? Sanskara.

Yeah. And then when it gets wet, when it gets warm, when the time has passed, then the sprout's ready to come out. That's what link?

Ten. That's link number ten. Raibhkarma.

Raibhkarma. So try to imagine the difference of a watermelon seed between April and October, or April and June or something. You put the seed under the ground, it's just sitting there, it's not doing anything.

Then somehow the water wakes up all the workers. And then somehow they run around. And then it's ready to burst out with a sprout later.

Something happens inside the seed. I think it's fascinating. Somebody woke up in the goddamn thing and they're running around going, we got to get this sprout out.

We got to get this sprout out. Something has changed inside. So Buddhism distinguishes between the seed in the package or the seed when you first stick it under the ground, and then they distinguish between that and the seed at the moment that it's ready to produce a sprout.

What makes it ready to produce a sprout is link number eight and nine, the two kinds of desire. Desire. But what Nagarjuna is saying here, which to me is very exciting.

He's saying it's the feelings that create the desire because you want to feel good. Human beings want what makes them feel good. So what opens the karmas in your mind is you want to feel good.

So he's big on the connection between seven and eight. He's big, he's very big on it. Like, wow, how do you go from feelings to desire?

Duh, feelings is what you desire. Got it? He's very big on that.

He wants you to focus on that. Your karmas can't open if you don't have mistaken desire. And that desire cannot come unless you can feel things.

And that cannot come unless you can contact the outside world. And that cannot come until your sense organs are formed. And that cannot come until you enter the womb.

And that cannot come until your mind moves through the bardo. Got it? Cool.

Cool. All right. What's the four forms of desire I forgot?

I'm sure Choney Lama, Choney Lama said it, by the way. Let me see. I may go with it.

Well, I'll give it to you next time. That's why you have Choney Lama. Let's see, I'm going to take this one.

Let's see. DOG PA DANG BA TSUL SHES BDAG TU MA'ANG Yeah, anyway, I think it's similar to the four negative emotions in your book yesterday, which are supposed to be residents in the messed up consciousness, number seven. And here's the list that Choney Lama gives if you're interested.

Regular desire, philosophical views, TSUL ZHUGS is difficult. What was the third one in Moon's book? Was it praying?

Not sure. Anyway, Choney Lama says staying in the place. It could be a carbon mistake.

And then the fourth one is believing in the self. So anyway, those are the four. They can start then.

What verse are we on? What's the next verse? Number seven?

Oh, he's kind of, he's not following the verses. 26.7, right? Am I right?

Okay, good, yeah. There's no picture here. When there's advanced desire, the existence of the one who desires will flower.

When there is no advanced desire, we are liberated, and then no suffering life will come. It's kind of a description of nirvana. It's kind of a description of nirvana.

If you have link number 10, right, again? Advanced desire? No, nine.

If you have link number nine, then 10 will come, existence, will flower. If you can stop your desire, which is seeing things as not coming from you, which allows you to get irritated at people. As long as you remember this person's coming from you, you will avoid perpetuating them.

Okay, as long as you understand a person is, an irritating person is coming from you, you will stay cool, because you don't like them. Okay? The way a Buddhist fights with another person is to not cause them to come back, which is what usual fighting does.

Got it? How do you fight an irritating person in Buddhism? Just be happy.

All right? How do you make them come back? Again.

Yeah, get angry at them. Okay, all right, good. So where there is no link number nine, there is no rebirth and there is no suffering life.

We are liberated. So he takes this point between nine and 10, he takes that as liberation. When we talk about the Wheel of Life, we try to talk about a place where you can break it.

Okay, when we talk about the Wheel of Life, we try to talk about a weak point where you can attack it. And by the way, I had this question since two days ago. I was going to ask Master Segen.

If I tell you that in this class, which finishes in 30 seconds, we don't have time to finish all 12 verses here, if he's already up to rebirth, let's say he's already up to link number 12, but he's not done with his 12 verses. As Master Segen, Wheel of Life expert, you probably got your own house called Wheel of Life house, and you're the master of it. What's he going to spend the rest of the verses on?

Like if he's got 12 verses total, by verse eight, he's covered the 12 links. What else is there to do? I think we'll focus on, for example, like the feelings, for example, about why it's...

Because in order to stop all this, it looks like... I'll give you the Tibetan, lungjung lung dok. Oh, how they trigger and how we stop and trigger.

Yeah, yeah. When you teach the Wheel of Life, you traditionally teach it how you get into trouble, and then you teach how to turn it back on it. So the rest of the verses are basically how to get it to turn itself back.

I didn't have time in this class to cover, you know, rebirth is easy. Gashi, getting old and dying, those are easy. I mean, we'll cover them, but...

And then wisely he tells you how to turn the wheel back on. How to shut down the wheel. And that's the rest of the verses.

And we will cover them. I want to go through all of them. Then I thought I would make a nice appendix in your next book or something.

Okay, yeah. I don't think anyone has translated this, but it's kind of cool. Or no one's really gone deep into it, I think.

I had one more thing. What was that? Yeah, he's going to talk about...

What was that? Oh, that's the... What's the classic question, Master Sugeng, about the twelfth link?

What's the classic question that new people ask about the Wheel of Life? The name of the link is gashi, which means gawa dang shiwa. Why old age and death are in the same link instead of different links?

Yeah, the twelfth link is called getting old and dying. And there's many, many questions for 2,000 years. Why the heck aren't there 13 links?

Why did he stuff two things into the twelfth link? That's the classic question. Any opinion?

The cat has an answer. I'm sure it's correct. Maybe because we do not necessarily get old before dying.

Nice, that's the classic answer. That's a $100 answer to a $0 question. Lord Buddha purposely put getting old and dying in one link so that you would ask the question, how come he stuffed two things into one link?

And the answer to the quiz is some people die in the womb. We don't know. And then that's supposed to make you appreciate that people die out of order.

Sometimes the old Buddhist teacher keeps living longer and the young student who was concerned about their last surgery dies in a car accident on the way to the airport. Understand? So we all have to imagine that we could die at any moment.

It doesn't matter your age or it doesn't matter if you're healthy or not, your life is going well or not. You can die anytime. Therefore, he stuffed the last two into the twelfth link.

Some people don't get, many people don't get the opportunity to get old before they die. Cool? Not cool, but we're stopping it.

We're stopping the Wheel of Life. Why he put it here at the end of his book, what he's going to say about it, I think that's worth thinking about in your retreat. So this, I'm trying to give you things to think about in your retreat other than what's for dinner, which is always a favorite retreat meditation.

And good luck in your retreat. And it's my experience in retreat that if you're going to get distracted, get distracted about people you know who are sick or people who are having personal problems with their marriage or something like that. You can never waste your time in retreat if you're distracted to thinking about helping other people.

That's never a distraction. Okay? So if you're having trouble with distraction, go to that distraction.

Okay, start thinking about people you know who need you and start thinking about them. And then that's never a distraction. Okay, cool?

Have a nice retreat. See you later.