Нагарджуна, курс 6 — Заключительные главы (2024, Аризона), занятие 5

[Speaker 1]
Okay, so it's a big day today, you know, for me anyway. We're going to finish seven years of MIT. And so there's 27 chapters.

We're going to round up chapter 26, and then we'll go to chapter 27, okay? And as the mayor of Newmark knows, we're not quite finished with the little life. And here's our—we're halfway through this verse.

By the way, for $50 each, what a way to start the day. What are those two pictures? That's easy.

You got to raise your hand. You got to raise your hand. Why so slow?

[Speaker 2]
Too slow?

[Speaker 1]
Can you zoom in? I'll give you a clue. There's a lady giving— Number 11, giving food.

And language number 12, teaching a class. Yeah, it says—yeah. The rent is so high in Hong Kong this year.

What do you mean the rent is so high?

[Speaker 2]
That's why I'm raising my hand.

[Speaker 1]
Oh, sorry. Okay. But kanji's not as good as shinji.

Okay. Anyway, advanced desire is moreover the five different heaps. They are born from this desire.

Think then of aging and death and their grief and cries of pain and suffering. So he stops in the middle of the suffering. He's been talking about link number, advanced desire, ten.

No, nine. Nine is the water in the warmth that wakes up the sanskara at link number two and turns it into link number ten. Okay, good, yeah.

So it's kind of—I always want to go back to the watermelon scene. And you stick it under the ground and you wait for three or four weeks. You wait for seven weeks until it gets enough water and heat, which is desire for your body and mind in your own way.

What would that desire for your body and mind look like? Desire for the five heaps. What would it look like?

Simply put, you've got to raise your hand. You always get all the money. You've got to share some.

No, I'm kidding. It's okay. You've got to talk.

I don't know this thing.

[Speaker 2]
You've got to put it down your throat.

[Speaker 1]
It's a sign. No, go ahead. Just yell.

Say it. Say it pen-ly. Pen-ish-ly.

[Speaker 2]
Pen-ish.

[Speaker 1]
Which comes from— I gave you like $90. Yeah, which comes from your own saying. And don't come from my teeth.

Let's say—it's always safe to say no to somebody else's. Yeah, so if you get sick, you think you must have caught it from someone else or something like that. Okay?

And you don't realize it's coming from either treatment. Like maybe you eat meat and then you plant the seeds to see if your body's sick. Maybe you blame it on something else.

Some virus—poor viruses. That was getting the blame.

[Speaker 2]
Okay.

[Speaker 1]
All right. Then he says, may not do my sin. The last—no, it's English.

Say may not.

[Speaker 2]
May not.

[Speaker 1]
Just a lot of—say may not.

[Speaker 2]
May not. Dönpa. Dönpa.

[Speaker 1]
That's an ancient, ancient word. Ngak, as you know, means speech or mantra. May means trouble.

May not means sounds of trouble. Dönpa means to yell or to groan all the time. Like when Ben Kramer wakes up.

I'm kidding. No, I'm just kidding. So may not.

Dönpa. And it's really all the sadness that we hear in the world. People's parents die or, you know, they find out they got cancer or things like that.

And then they make noises, different kinds of noises. That's all called may not. This morning I decided on a new definition of may not dönpa, which is to sit with your friends at the dinner table and discuss all your medical treatments.

That's how you know when you're my age, because you meet your friends and you're like, wow, what's your doctor saying? I got a good one. We used to talk about girls and boys.

In fact, may not dönpa is so famous that there was, it's mentioned in the root suture of the Wheel of Life, which is very short, a few pages. And for a hundred dollars, see, Genghis, I got a lot of offerings yesterday. Genghis is going to tell us the name of that suture.

Roughly. Because there's an interesting part to it. The first principle at the Wheel of Life.

Right. The first principle at the Wheel of Life. The first principle at the Wheel of Life.

What's the first principle of a sungen? Nine. Yeah.

If this happens, that will happen. If this starts, that will start. And that's called the first principle.

It means everything has a cause. And everything is coming from you. It's called the first principle.

Okay. Nine. Yeah, that's almost enough to fly back to Suryavarman.

I'll try to do some more. I was very, one of the first debates in Sugeng's text, Sugeng is translating a very ancient commentary, The Table of Trophies, by Master Vasubandhu, which no one has ever touched before. And one of the interesting things in there, by the way, that's Vasubandhu coming out of the closet as a mind-only guy.

Okay. So he's known for Abhidharma. He wrote the Abhidharma Kusha.

But he comes out of the closet in that book, and it's, oh, wow. To hear him explain the Twelve Links with mind-only is amazing. But there's a debate, it's an interesting debate, and they say, some people say, that painful sounds that people make towards the end of their life, or when someone dies when they're younger, those particular sounds should be a 13th link.

And there's an interesting argument about it. Somebody says, I think it should be an extra link. I think there should be 13 links.

Oh, okay. Some people with good morality won't make those noises. Yeah.

Okay. Okay. By the way, I am in Garjuna, and he's being cured, I think.

And so this verse, number eight, it ends with, and. Okay, and. You can see in the Tibetan, it says, dan.

Okay, dan. And what's happening after that? Let's go to the next slide, you dudes.

26.9? Yeah. Cries and unhappiness and turmoil, all these come from birth.

Thus it is that all this, which is nothing but a huge amount of pain, comes to happen to us. There's a wonderful soliloquy by Shakespeare about these stages. I have a Shakespearean actor on the campus today.

I'm trying to get them to read it. If they don't read it, I'll have Ben Kramer do some more work. All right.

Okay. And unhappiness. Now, so he's on verse nine out of 12, and he's finished with the 12 links.

He writes again? No. No?

[Speaker 2]
Why not?

[Speaker 1]
We talked about the stopping.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
Any time you teach the Wheel of Life, you have to go, dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee. And then you've got to go, dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee. You've got to teach people how to turn it backwards, 12, 11, 10.

By the way, unfortunately, it's not 12, 11, 10, 90, okay? This way, we call it lungjung, which means the way it starts, is 1, 2, 3, 4. It's like a clock.

And hence again, it doesn't go counter-clockwise. No. It goes, stop 1, number 2 will stop.

Stop 2, number 3 will stop. Stop 3, number 4 will stop. So, we focus on stopping number 1, which is simply studying the parent.

Okay? So don't blame me for teaching. How many times?

Three. Three teaches us. How many times?

How many times? How many? Three.

Three verses. How many?

[Speaker 2]
How many?

[Speaker 1]
We are done. Okay. So anyway, he's got three verses left, and he's going to talk about how to shut down, how to shut down the wheel of life.

I took the time to take out the verses. I gave you the Sanskrit. I gave you the Sanskrit in diacritics, which means technical pronunciation.

And then I gave it to you in American pronunciation, if you want to do it in American pronunciation. So that's the second thing. So I think people say, oh, I want to learn Sanskrit, or I want to learn Tibetan.

The way you start is you memorize something. And you say it over and over again. If you want to memorize something, memorize these 12 verses.

It's very, very, very famous. The greatest Sanskrit ever written, in my opinion. Or you can memorize English, if you want to.

But it's good to have it running around in your mind. It's a very heavy good karma. It's heavy sea pleasure.

You're flying home when your plane starts squawking. And you're like, oh my god. Then that's the last thing you remember.

Good way to die. All right. So we're going to go to lung dok.

Say lung dok. Lung dok means how do you shut it down. How do you shut down a machine.

And here we go. It's got it. What is that word?

Sansara mula? Yeah. I think it's, I mean, it's kind of silly, but the root, what's the word for root here in the Sanskrit?

Mula. Which proves that money is the root of all evil.

[Speaker 2]
Anyway.

[Speaker 1]
The root of the cycle of pain is doing things. Thus it is that the wise do nothing. So there's a lot of wise people I've met in my life.

As such, those who are not wise take action. But not the wise, for they have seen the way of things. Arya Nagarjuna tends to make outrageous statements to try to wake people up.

So the root of the cycle of pain is doing things, right? What is that in Tibetan? Duche.

I could have written sanskarization in or something. But that's not what Nagarjuna wanted. He wanted something striking.

And he likes to write something that people will say, What? The root of all your pain is doing things. And he's responsible for a lot of bad behavior later in Buddhism.

18 centuries of bad behavior. People say... Nagarjuna said...

People like Buzuko said, Nagarjuna said the root of the cycle of pain is doing things. Therefore I should lay in my room and watch the internet. I don't like this thing of putting your electronics away.

And my... So this is doing things. And people do.

And then... I don't know if there's been terrible, terrible misunderstandings of Nagarjuna over history. He must have known it would happen.

I don't know. It's kind of mean. He doesn't want to say too much.

So sometimes I think he says too little. I mean, I like his style. I prefer his style.

But still, it has led to a lot of people staring at walls and stuff like that. People misunderstood for many centuries. And we're so lucky to be in a true language where they don't say, just lay down, don't think about anything.

This is emptiness. We're so, so, so lucky. You have no idea how lucky you are.

You're swimming in a lineage and you don't know you're there. For every lineage like this, there's a hundred lineages that say, just relax, don't do anything, don't think about anything. I still, at the age of 70-something, I still have people come up to me and try to convince me I should do nothing.

Oh, Nagarjuna said, I'm like, hmm, yeah, hmm, interesting. And almost every day, it's kind of weird. I have this karma because here's what Nagarjuna really said.

I'm like, oh, hmm, you should do nothing. Okay. The wise don't take action because they have seen the way of things.

The word for taking action is, in the Tibetan, is du-che-pa, du-che-pa, which is the word for the sanskara, which is the word for fresh karma. And it means put things together, to put things together, du-che-pa. So he's using that as a verb here, put things together.

They don't start things, they don't get things going, they don't do stuff. Meaning? For example, they might not yell at a person who is irritating to them because...

Yeah, they know it's coming from... I mean, if they yell at somebody, they go in the bathroom and they yell in the mirror. That's the only person to yell at.

So they don't du-che-pa, they don't sanskara, they don't create fresh karma. Because they know this person is themselves. They know that where the trouble is coming from is themselves.

In theory, if human beings were super smart and you taught them the pen one time, they would never get upset again, ever, in their life, in their whole life. I had this famous incident. In a Southeast Asian country, this duck was singing and this was poor.

And this guy says... I don't know, he's so cute. By the way, he was from France.

And the Singaporeans said, look, he's not from Singapore. And he said, Geshe-la, every time you come to Singapore, you teach this stupid pen thing again and again. It's so irritating.

And I pay extra money to come to your talk every year. Why I pay... Why you keep teaching the pen every year?

I said, you're just poor, you didn't understand. But he was like... But I said, I'm not making fun of parents.

I'm going easy on them. John Brady goes and doesn't invite me. John, right?

Admit it. I'm kidding. Like, last week, I said, tell me honestly, John, were you having an AML finance meeting or were you eating crisps on the corner?

And he's like... Again, next picture. Another one.

What's the picture, John? For $0, what's he pointing to?

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, good.

[Speaker 1]
Okay, good. By the way, all these, as I mentioned, all these illustrations are from a wood box of the Wheel of Life. It's like this big.

Some refugee walked out of the Himalayas in 1973 and I was freezing in a little stone hut and he walked up to my door and he said, do you want to buy this? I'm like, yeah, okay. It's priceless.

So I gave it to my step-mom and she passed away recently. She left it back to me. She gave it back to me.

I'm thinking of some way to fundraise with it, but I'll let you know. Probably for YSI. They always need money because her husband is in Paris.

Okay. Just kidding. Okay, here's number 11.

If you can stop misunderstanding, doing things won't happen either. A popular misunderstanding is to meditate with knowledge on suchness. Suchness just means emptiness.

That's our thing. Okay, I'm going to teach you how to teach emptiness. You've probably heard it before.

I don't care. By the way, every one of you should teach. Today is the last day of seven years of Nagarjuna's wisdom.

Maybe you didn't come to every class. That's okay. Did I cover every verse?

No. Because that would take 70 years. But you have sat through some of Nagarjuna.

In this tradition, it's therefore your responsibility to pass it on to somebody else. It's like COVID. Okay.

All right. Once you hear it, it's your responsibility to pass it on to somebody else. That's the deal you make.

That's the mazal you make when you come into this class. By sitting in this class, it's an unspoken promise that you will explain to another person or other people as much as you understand. There's always that small print in the contract.

As much as you understand. Like if they say, explain Nagarjuna to somebody else, they're like, and then they say, explain as much as you understand. Oh, that I can do.

That I can do. Just remember this verse. How to stop your misunderstanding is to meditate with knowing on suchness.

When you get to suchness, here's what you're going to do. Everybody raise your left hand. Point your finger.

Now, point to something in this room which is not coming from you. And then you, come on, you got to be dramatic. At the end you have to, what?

What's the final mudra? Okay. Okay.

All right. And that's called tattva, suchness. That's suchness, dekho nanyi.

That's suchness. And it's pure. And it's absolutely correct.

And it's better than 10,000 explanations that have been given in this world. It's absolutely correct. It's absolutely correct.

So who is there to be? Who is there to be upset at in your life? By the way, there's a special blessing of Nagarjuna.

When you reach the end and they give you the mudra, the special mudra, then on the way home to where you live, you will get really upset at somebody. It's a blessing. There's some kind of blessing.

Probably in the gas station, or the airport, or on the plane, you'll be next to this irritating lady. You go like, and then she'll go, and you'll be like, that's Diamond Way, okay? Understand?

We hired her. There's a thing at Diamond Mountain, there's an old thing, I don't know if you remember, it's called central casting. Central casting is the office where the movie people hire actors.

So there's a karma central casting. In fact, right now, she's getting on the plane somewhere, and she's going to connect to your plane. We worked so hard to get her in the seat next to you.

Then she's going to bother you. And then your Nagarjuna is going to fly out the window. Goodbye Nagarjuna.

And Diamond Way, if you want to know what's Diamond Way, everybody's asking me, please teach Diamond Way. I'm teaching Diamond Way. She is not a normal person.

She was sent from central casting. Okay, got it? What do you think?

These books survive for 2,000 years. Do you think a book can survive for 2,000 years if it doesn't work for anybody? Do you think people will keep passing it around and printing it and carving it and translating it if it doesn't work for anybody?

And if it didn't work for anybody, where are all these people? They're on the scene next year. I'm not kidding, that's Diamond Way.

You want Diamond Way? I just gave you the whole initiation, boom, empowerment. All right.

It's only the think-headed ones that you have to teach for seven years. Diamond Way. Some people you can do it in seven minutes.

All right, next. I think we're on the last verse, 12. Yeah, there you go.

When you put a stop to any particular one, then that other particular one will never happen. This is how we put a perfect end to what is a pure mountain of pain. Nagarjuna likes those cute expressions.

You can put a perfect end to the pure mountain of pain. It means each successive link. Stop link number one.

Link number two stops. Stop link number two. Link number three stops.

Stop link number three. Then you get up to 12. No death, no birth.

That's why some lower schools thought you disappeared. That's why they thought nirvana was disappearing, because you stopped birth and death. But it means suffering birth and death.

It doesn't mean you have to disappear. Then you stop 13. What's that?

No more crying. No more whining. I met this lady on the plane.

She's so goddamn weird. Then if you stop 12, you stop 13. You stop the 13 that was never there.

Now, you should give yourselves a hand, because you finished Arya Nagarjuna's 12 links. You finished the 12 links. You finished chapter 26, and you're ready to go to the final chapter.

Chapter 27. Now, some about chapter 27, which is cool. I was reading chapter 27, and I was working hard on it.

Then I had a satori, which is similar to sakura. Because sakura never happens, right? I'm asking Edmond.

If you don't make sakura happen this year, I'm firing you. We paid all this money to take my stepson, my godson, to Kyoto to see the cherry blossoms open. They were late.

They opened on the last day on the way to the airport. The Chinese friends said, Geshe-la, we're going to do a play. We're going to do a play on the last day.

I said, okay. Then they did this play, and they go, they dance across the stage, and they go, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee. They're supposed to go like this, you see.

Like the cherry blossom opening. Then they're like. It was really cute.

That's why they're coming here. Yeah, I've got to take the other stepson to find out. Now he wants to go.

I'm bringing him, okay? All right. Okay, so I was working on the last chapter.

Strangely, and we mentioned it at the beginning of this week, we said the last chapter is called an examination, pariksha, of viewpoints. Like what a way to end a book. He should say, it should be nirvana as the last chapter.

Why the last chapter? We're supposed to examine viewpoints. It sounds like something you should do in the third chapter or something.

It's kind of irritating. And it's longish. It's kind of long.

Oftentimes, scriptural scholars will say if the last chapter is too long and kind of dry, like Yoga Center, they'll say, somebody added this on 600 years later. Some stupid had added a chapter. So it's tempting to think like that because that real life chapter ends so, it ends very sweetly.

It should be the end of the book. And then he's like, let's talk about viewpoints. And you're like, what?

Why do you want to talk about viewpoints? Like you finished your book. And then I was reading it.

And there's a famous, how many viewpoints? 64 in the ancient sutras. Very, very ancient sutras.

I have a friend who for seven or eight years translated a book called Siddhanta, which means the different viewpoints of different schools in the last two and a half thousand years. And he worked and worked and worked and we found more schools, more schools, more schools. We found different references.

And it added up. At the end, when we were ready to publish the book, we added up all the viewpoints. It was 101, which is such a sexy number in the Western countries.

It's like ba, ba, ba in China. It's just a good number. 101.

It's like Dalmatians and stuff like that. So it was very, very cool. And that's Ben's book.

You should give him a hand. And people publishing it after 101 years, they're going to put it out. Is it out?

It's kind of out. Okay, we're working on it. It's done.

It's almost out. Is it out? It's out?

Oh, sorry. The e-book's out for a year. Okay, so 101 viewpoints.

And what happened was every year, I'm responsible to write a new DCI level. And I promised 12 levels. And then we finished.

And everybody's like, and I'm like, and they're like, okay, let's do 12 advanced levels. So we started another 12 levels. And then every year I'm like, oh my God, there's another.

That's what happened to my hair. There's another level. I don't know.

And so nowadays what I do is I see which book finished the translation. And then I create a level from that book. And we created advanced level three last year of DCI directly from Ben's book.

And it's an amazing level. It's miraculous. And it's completely different from everything.

And I was really, really happy with it. And I won't go into it much, but it's examination of your belief systems, which Nagarjuna calls viewpoints. You see what I mean?

So for me, and by the way, DCI is non-religious, non-religious. So when we take ideas out of a Buddhist book, we have to also un-Buddhify them. And so viewpoint became belief system.

And we have to do this game. So I call it, the whole thing was called belief systems or examining your belief system. And I think the sexy thing about that level, advanced level three, is that we did not draw a conclusion.

We did not give you the answer to the puzzle. We said, here's the puzzle, good luck. And I think that's really cool.

And there's no ending to that manual. The manual says, the manual teaches you to examine how you view the world. And it doesn't tell you what to do with that.

By the way, if you can't figure out what to do with that, you're stupid anyway. It's just like, wow, put your hand up, point your finger, point to something that's not coming from you. Now you met an asshole on the plane, what are you going to do?

You decide. Because that person was created in the past when you didn't understand this thing. So, we're not going to tell you what to do.

But maybe you can figure it out. Maybe go to the toilet on the plane and look in the mirror and say, when the lady is bumping you. So, what we did, I think it's a very, very beautiful level.

If you haven't studied it, you can ask Jasmine or other organizers here. Tina Liu is here. Who else is here?

They can teach it to you. They taught it for a whole year. It's amazing.

Then what I realized, Ben, was that I believe Nagarjuna is the source of this sadhana. I believe Nagarjuna's last chapter is the source of that examination at different schools. By the way, we talked already about how Shensang walked to India, through India for 17 years and found Arya Nagarjuna's library in South India, which was by that time 400 years old.

Nagarjuna was long gone maybe. He's the original John Brady, collecting all the books. He was a book collector.

That's why he had to Arjuna the Nagas. Not only was he a book collector, I believe he was a pioneer of this idea of trying to get people to self-medicate. Medicate yourself.

Give yourself your own medicine by examining your own viewpoints. I'm not going to tell you the punchline. I'm not going to tell you the answer.

I'll give you all the questions and then you figure it out. The last chapter, in my opinion, is Ben's book in the way that Arya Nagarjuna's library was ALL. See what I mean?

Who knows who's John Brady? When you have Nagas snake, cobras, rubbing your head all the time, it's a sign. Don't tell Jamie.

Anyway, when I looked at the last chapter, I thought, this is exactly what we did in AL3. AL3, we condensed all of the siddhanta and we condensed all of Nagarjuna's last chapter into nine questions. Into nine questions.

The advanced level three of DCI basically is how to ask yourself nine different questions. We don't give you the answer. We just give you the questions.

That's supposed to self-answer. By examining your own answers to nine questions, you're supposed to learn more about yourself and how you think about things. Normally in that process, you will, let me call it, you will find out something, you will identify some problems with the way you see things.

So we're not trying to, we don't go bang on a person's door and say, I want to talk to you about this paper I have and can I come in your kitchen? And by that time they're already halfway in your kitchen and they say, you should believe this. We used to have two guys who came to the Mongolian temple like once a month to convince my teacher to be a Christian.

Which is, with an old Geshe Harambe, it's not a very good idea. He's like, yeah, what about... By the way, my wife's a Christian and it's very, very beautiful and there's many, many levels and it's very, very fantastic.

I think there's a place where they meet. But anyway, instead of telling people what they should believe, you just ask them, what do you believe? Then when they give the answers, by giving the answers, they learn something.

They learn something. I'll give you an example. I went straight from Princeton.

I got honors. I was awarded honors. I proved it to Xiaoping's group, cum laude.

When we went to Princeton, I showed them the thing. Then I packed up. I didn't go to graduation.

I had to work. The next day I pack up, I went to stay with my teacher. I didn't know it's going to be 25 years there.

But I was pretty sure I was a smart guy because Princeton University certified it. I'm like, I'm going to come and learn Buddhism with you. You're so lucky.

So I start, and he didn't, he taught me every day. I was basically the only student who lived with him. He kicked out everybody else.

He was tough. Anyway, so he taught me every day, sometimes four or five hours. In many, many, 12 years, Amitabha.

He taught me and taught me. Then it was frustrating because the only thing he didn't know was English. By the way, he had a translator.

Yeah, English. They had a translator who translated his English into English. So anyway, he taught me and it was very, very frustrating because he never asked me anything.

He never needed me to explain anything. So here I am. I spent all these years getting smart and he's not interested in my opinion at all.

He's always telling me, oh, that's so stupid. I can't believe you think like that. Then finally, one day he says, what about this Zen Rigpa?

Zen Rigpa stuff, which is the new translation in Tibetan for scientist. He says, what about this science stuff? I say, well, you know, and I'm waiting for him.

He's a debater. He's the best debater. He got number one out of 5,000 monks.

I'm like, yeah, yeah. What about this science thing? It's a thing.

He's like, gee, I wish someone could explain it to me. I'm like, what? He said, we don't have that in the Himalayas.

We don't know about science. But you got these airplanes made out of metal flying around the sky. We never did that.

No Geshe ever did that. That's pretty cool. He said, can you explain science to me?

I'm like, finally he's asking me something. This is after a year or something. I'm so happy that he's asking me to explain something.

I'm like, okay, science. It's a whole way of thinking. He's like, what's the way of thinking?

I said, everything can be figured out. The whole universe. We can figure out the whole universe from, what do you call it?

Big thing, mega things. Yeah, galactic level stuff down to tiny little stuff. Then we compare them.

Quantum physics and gravitational theory. Two realities facing each other. Quantum physics on the tiny level and gravitational theory on the massive level.

Then they mirror each other. I start telling him all this science stuff. He's like, hmm.

Then he says, what's the one main principle of science? What would you say is the main principle of science? I said, the main principle of science is that everything has a cause.

You just have to investigate and be patient. It's called the scientific method. 14 steps of how to do an experiment.

We don't sit there in a room and say, oh, maybe this is how the world happened. We take 14 clear steps. There it's, what do you call it?

Peer reviewed. Your peer scientists check everything you say. All the papers you write are checked by other people.

Then they all come to an agreement about what caused something to happen. It's scientific method, 14 steps. That's how we make metal fly in the sky.

He's like, amazing. If I was older, I'd know he was setting me up. Because those big Geshes are like, oh, really?

I'm like, yeah. He says, so everything has a cause. Every cause can be explored.

Every cause can be found out. That's science. I said, Dad, you got it.

You really got it. He said, wow. Then he goes, how did it all start?

What was the first one? I said, oh, that's called the Big Bang. We got this Hubble telescope up there.

It looks back. It sees light arriving from the beginning of the universe. Then we coordinate it back.

What do you call it? We figure out from the angles of the dust moving where it must have started, where the explosion was. You go backwards from the angles.

We can even pinpoint in the galaxy where it all started. That's a Big Bang. All this stuff just flew out.

You and me are just parts of the Big Bang. He's like, wow, that's amazing. A whole theory that you can always find the cause of something.

Everything has a cause. You just work it out with the scientific method, 14 steps. Then you come to the conclusion of how things started.

He said, that's amazing. I said, yeah. He said, well, what caused the Big Bang?

I'm like, I'm getting uncomfortable. That's when you first realize they're setting you up. You're like, he set me up.

I said, well, the Big Bang, that was before everything. The Big Bang didn't have a cause. Then he goes like this.

This is when Geshe got you. He's like, oh, this definition of science is that everything has a cause except everything. Then I'm like, you didn't really want me to teach you this stuff.

Got it? What we're going to do in the 27th and final chapter of Arya Nagarjuna, we're not going to tell you what to think. He says, Viewpoint Pariksha.

We will just examine what your viewpoints are by asking you questions about your viewpoints. Then you draw your own conclusions. Oh, everything's a Big Bang.

Yeah, everything has a cause. Yeah, except everything. The point is, we're going to emulate Arya Nagarjuna's method of asking questions.

We're going to ask you nine questions. In the examination of viewpoints, we're going to ask you nine questions about your viewpoint. Then we're going to say, go to the airport, meet your lady, see you later.

Got it? No answers. No answers.

Answers that you arrive at yourself are the answers that you remember. Not the answers that someone else tells you. That's all.

We got three minutes, right? Am I right, Tim? 20 minutes?

We can do, I say we do Q&A. Then I'd rather do the viewpoints. I better start.

Otherwise, I may not finish. He has to thank 3,000 people. We're going to do the viewpoints.

If I finish the viewpoints early, I'll do the questions. Francisco, we should give Francisco and Gina and Mike and all those guys a hand. Marina, Marina.

It's really, really, really important to have a good tech crew, as you know. Since so much of it's online and stuff, if the tech crew is not first class, then there's always stuff breaking down and people don't get broadcast and I have to stop. Then I lose my train of thought.

It's really nice to have a really excellent tech team because then I can just flow. I appreciate it. I really appreciate it.

There's an idim. By the way, idim means idea image. There's an idim from the earlier classes that I didn't get to and it applies here.

Ta-da! 39. For once the AI did a good job.

You get the feeling, right? Like you could follow. In an earlier section that we covered, he discusses the idea of DA.

Say DA. DA. Now say BDA.

BDA. DA. One you kind of breathe, right?

DA. Then one you don't breathe. BDA.

BDA. They're connected very subtly. So DA, DA means the edge of a cliff.

DA means the edge or the line that separates things. My holy Lama's name was Lobsang Tarchen. Tar means go to the edge.

Tarchen. So he was Tarchen. He went to the edge.

The good edge. Then there's a bad tar. That's where you see things the wrong way.

You see things in an extreme way. For example, you might think that the irritating person on the plane is coming from them. Then we say ta.

You fell off the cliff. But my teacher's name, chin means gone like ita in paramita. Tarchen means reach the goal.

Reach the limit. So anyway, there's two kinds of tar. One's a good tar.

If you get there, you're done. Probably just eat peach tree cinnamon rolls for your whole life after that. Then the other tar is a bad thing.

It's a mistake. It's a way of seeing the world which is extreme. You go to an extreme.

Oh, this irritating lady. She promised she didn't have a good mom who taught her how to sit in a chair in the airplane. That's another kind of tar where you go too far and you say she's coming from her own side.

Then in Tibetan language. By the way, I'm kind of a linguist. I'm not a great linguist, but I studied many languages.

Tibetan doesn't fit into anything. There's no connection to any other language. There's a tradition in Tibet that their language fell out of the sky.

I don't know. Linguistically, it seems to make sense. It's not connected to anything.

It's completely unique in the world. This word, but if you breathe into a sound or you don't breathe into a sound, that sound has a connection. Like ta and ta.

Say ta and ta. Ta means an edge. This is the ta of the table.

My teacher's name was Went Past the Ta. This is called ta also. There's many ta's which are going too far and falling off the edge of the cliff.

I believe linguistically, it's related to ta, which means how do you view the world? Ta wa, say ta wa. How do you view the world?

I believe linguistically, it means how do you draw your lines? How do you draw your lines? This is real, this is not real.

This is true, this is not true. In Tibetan, that's all ta wa. Where you draw the ta.

Ta wa means where do you draw the ta. I think they're connected. Linguistically, I think they're connected.

Viewpoints. Studying people's viewpoints is to study where do you draw the lines? Where do you draw the lines?

How do you define something? See what I mean? Remember this.

Ta can be a good thing in Tibetan and it can be a very bad thing in Tibetan. We're going to explore ta's without going off the ta. We're going to tar chin without ta pop.

We're not going to fall off the cliff. We're going to explore where's the edge of our world? Where's the edge of your world?

Then I don't tell you where to go. I just say where's the edges of your world? Then you will know yourself without me saying anything.

You will know where to go. That's the very famous Nagarjuna approach as a teacher. He lets you explore and he teaches you to explore and then he lets you find out your own discoveries.

I think it's a beautiful way to teach. He doesn't tell you everything. In fact, he doesn't tell you anything.

He just asks you questions about what do you think and then you answer your own questions. I think it's a beautiful way to teach. It takes a little preparation.

You have to think about the right questions to ask. Like your kid asks you for some chocolate and you say, oh, chocolate. Is it yummy?

Yes. Is it great to hide in your school bag and eat during class? Yes.

Is it fun to go to the dentist? And he's like, no. Do you like the drill thing?

I mean, you know, whee! And he's like, no, Dad, I don't like that. Okay, but you sure you want the chocolate?

And then you don't tell the kid, oh, it's going to give you cavities. Don't eat chocolate. You let him go to the dentist in his mind and go to the drill in his mind and then he says, Dad, you know what?

You can have the chocolate. That's what Dad wanted all along. Anyway, okay.

Okay, now Q&A. We have 10 minutes and then we're ready to do the nine questions. How many answers?

That's up to you. That's up to you. And I think it's a beautiful way to end seven years of nirgaja.

Okay, all right. And by the way, any questions, okay. If you want to ask a question about your neighbor's dog, I don't mind.

I have one. I haven't figured it out.

[Speaker 2]
Oh, okay. I was just wondering, since yoga was developed to help with our meditation, in the five houses, will yoga be in the house of meditation or which house will that be kind of taught in for us to help the students of that house?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, that's a great question. So we have this new idea of five houses of ACI. And this kind of, ACI is so massive.

It includes so many things that it has become ridiculous to become an ACI master. The seven years of the foundation courses, seven years of the Diamond Way courses, 14 years of the Lam Rim courses, 28 years of study, just to say I took the courses, much less be a master. So what we decided is to split into specialties, like PhD specialties.

So I don't try to, and it was inspired by my trip to Princeton, back to Princeton, and watching all the beautiful departments. And people said, what's your department, Geshe-la? And I took them to 1879 Hall.

And I told stories. We stood under the tree where the Indian boys sat and talked me into going to India. And it was very beautiful.

So anyway, it'd be too much at Princeton to take a PhD in everything. It's crazy. It's insane.

It's too much stuff. And ACI has become too much stuff. And I don't know if you feel it, but I feel it.

I feel it, because I feel people going, ah, 12, 15. Their fingers look like AI fingers. So we decided to specialize.

We decided to have departments. And it's called the Five Houses. And they are, first house is Classics House.

That's traditional ACI foundation courses. Then? What's the second one?

Samadhi House. And that's under-taught in ACI, frankly. And we are developing 101?

Or 100? 101. 101.

I'm filming 101 meditations that I was taught in my life. I think we're up to nine or 10. And I try to do it once a week.

So that's Samadhi House. Then? Oh, and then there'll be a secular side, which teaches meditation at Google, in a non-Buddhist way.

Then third house? Oh, Mountain House. Yeah.

Which is basically go to Diamond Mountain and sit in a cabin and do retreats, learn how to do retreats. And after Five House World, fundraiser, where Grandpa put in $25,000. And I don't know, I haven't seen the numbers today, but I'm sure you guys have matched me.

Minimum. Nobody's jumping up and down. Huh?

You did. You did? Oh.

Well, anyway, I hope you can match me. I put in $25,000 with the help of the Russians. And you're going to, if you want to match me, match me.

But that's to teach normal people retreat. Then fourth house? Staircase House.

Lam Rim House. Then fifth house? Diamond Way House.

The question is, where do you put yoga? We had an organization called YSI 20 years ago. It died.

The director quit. The staff quit. I was too busy.

So it died. Then, I don't know, like five years ago, Connie came to me and said, can I serve you, Lama? Do you need anything?

I said, resurrect that dead body called YSI. Like, go to the graveyard, open up the box, pull YSI out. There's many courses.

There's 12 courses, I think. Something. 12 sections.

There's hundreds of pages of translation and homework. And she said, yes, sir, I will resurrect YSI. And she did it.

So I kind of leave that to YSI. There's some things that are being done so well that I don't think ACI has to do them. So I don't think ACI, we will have, we will always have yoga.

DCI has yoga. But I would like to, when I have a DCI yoga program or we have an ACI yoga program, I would like to call YSI, they are experts, like this lady. I suspect she's a YSI person.

I don't know for sure. But that's all. They're so good at it.

They specialized in it that I feel like we should leave it to them. It's a huge topic. It would take four or five years to get through it.

I think it's too much to add to another house. But I think every house should do yoga to stay healthy. Good morning, Geshe-la.

[Speaker 2]
When I was in Kyoto at CSC course, when I first heard you talking about Bhaja Yogini on the stage, I had a very strong feeling. And in China, I am doing a training for females. And after I feel that I have this mission.

[Speaker 1]
Venerable Geshe-la, thank you so much.

[Speaker 2]
When I first heard you taught me in Kyoto last December, I heard, first time I heard about the Bhaja Yogini world. And because I was doing a business focused on training the ladies entrepreneurs.

[Speaker 1]
So after hearing that, I was preparing for that. So Geshe-la, I want to ask you if I want to reach Bhaja Yogini's world in business.

[Speaker 2]
I want to build this Bhaja Yogini's world in reality. So Venerable teacher, what's your most important suggestion for me? Yes, thank you.

[Speaker 1]
Great question. It's a great question. And I will say Nagarjuna's emptiness.

My answer is Nagarjuna's emptiness. teacher's teacher's emptiness teacher's teacher's teacher's emptiness Very good. So anyway, when you're on the airplane and the lady next to you is irritating you, or if, by the way, if you're a lady, it's a fat man.

Okay, I'm talking to a guy. And when they irritate you, if you think about they are empty, and you can even do this. When they really irritate you, you can go.

You can do this mudra on the plane. You can do it on the plane. And then the next natural step, as we did it already, is to believe they came from central casting.

They are just the actor who came from the main office where they assign actors. So that's diamond ring. That's tantra.

That's tantra. Emptiness leads to tantra. And you can do it on the plane.

You don't have to do a fire offering. You'll get in trouble on the plane. You don't have to do all that stuff.

Okay, so here's how it goes. Irritation, then blame, and then catch yourself, self-awareness, and then emptiness, and then how many things not coming from me. Therefore, this lady must be special.

And she must be, she came from central casting because Arya Nagarjuna would not stay in this world for 2,000 years. Grandparents teach it to their grandchildren for 2,000 years, 100 generations. It wouldn't happen if it didn't work for somebody.

People don't pass on things that don't work. People pass on things that work. So if it survived up to now, 2,000 years, to this day, to this room, ending today, if it survived up to now, it must have worked for somebody.

And then those people must be Buddha. Got it? And that's Diamond Way.

To think like that is Diamond Way. So just work on Nagarjuna. And by the way, he's the first great Diamond Way teacher after Lord Buddha.

If you check the books written by Nagarjuna, I can teach you more tantric books by Nagarjuna than non-tantric books by Nagarjuna. And his ceremony for the bodhisattva vows is found in the tantras. Hmm.

Okay? All right. Yay.

Thank you.