Вопросы царя Милинды, занятие 1

[Говорящий 1]
Tonight's talk is about an ancient book. It's called The Questions of King Melinda. The Bhantis are very familiar with it.

Are you from Sri Lanka? Thailand. It's very popular in Thailand also.

And I don't know how to start it. Let me see. Well, basically it's a story about a great king who lived 150 years before Christ.

And he met a Buddhist sage in India in a place called Sakala. And they had a conversation, which is a very, very... I think it's like an extraordinary conversation where the king asks the Buddhist sage about all sorts of things.

It's a long book. And then that conversation is written down. And it's been preserved in the Pali scriptures of Thailand.

And it originally came to Ceylon, Sri Lanka. And then it was later translated into Siamese originally. And then into...

It's very popular still in Ceylon, Sri Lanka and Thailand. The book also reached as far as China. It was translated into Chinese and became part of the Chinese canonist family, the Nanjiao Canyon.

And then it was translated from there into Korean. I never made it into Tibet. And the Sanskrit is missing if there ever was one.

So we don't have any record of it in Tibet. And we don't... It's rare because 5,000 scriptures were translated into Tibetan.

Almost everything that was there. So... But I feel this scripture is extremely important for us.

Because it's the first contact between Buddhism and the West. You see? This is the first time when West really bumped into East.

You see? And there's two huge cultures. I see them like icebergs sometimes.

Like crashing into each other. Or sometimes... Do you know this theory about the continents?

There's a theory that... The earth used to be one piece without oceans. And then it split up.

And then oceans filled in the holes. And one of the reasons they say that... One of the supporting evidence is...

You know, I was in the diamond business, right? And if you hook up the great diamond centers of South Africa and India and Brazil, point to point, and you squash the globe, they all touch. You see?

So... Like the ancient diamond pipes were all together. And then when it split, one was carried to Brazil, pieces were carried to South Africa, and then to the tip of India.

So that's like evidence that... It used to be one world. And then it split.

You see? And then the Indian subcontinent wound up against Tibet. And the Himalayas were created.

You see? So I see this thing where East and the West... You know, in our case here, it's the Greeks and the Indians, before Christ, that are kind of like this.

And then they smash into each other, and then these ideas explode, you know? And I see it like the Himalayas, you see? And to me it's very exciting.

To think that maybe... Maybe like Buddhist ideas came into our culture long before we ever knew it. You see?

Maybe we were thinking Buddhist ideas as early as 300 B.C. when Alexander the Great reached India. You see? Because Alexander...

We'll talk about him tomorrow. And there's a big movie coming out, okay? Just by coincidence.

There's a... Alexander brought back yogis from India. He was just amazed, and he was very impressed, and he brought back yogis with him, you see?

And we'll talk about that tomorrow. But, you know, I was sort of obsessed for a while about how Buddhist and Hindu ideas, yoga ideas, and Buddhist ideas, might have reached our culture before Christ, and even affected Christianity, you see? So I was like starting out...

That's why I started poking into this, you know? Then I had an idea friend, suddenly. Where is he?

He's hiding, as usual. He's over there. So he said, Michael, you might want to check out and see if maybe Christian ideas affected India.

And I'm like, no, I don't think so. This was all before Christ, you know? And so the more I looked into it, the more it became very clear that Greek ideas, and Roman ideas, and Christian ideas, also came to India, and affected the Buddhists right before Tibet.

You know, I'm going to try to draw a timeline for if I have time, but Tibet would be up here, and my Buddha would be down here, and the wind was around here, you see? All Tibetan Buddhism is only this, you see? From the time of the Buddha.

And so the... I mean, what he didn't think about, what suddenly predicted, so he does that every once in a while. Very interesting things that...

It seems we can speak about definitely Greek and Roman ideas and Christian ideas coming to India. And we'll talk about that on the third night. That'll be Sunday night.

For example, the two kings who went to see Jesus' birth, one of them came from a Buddhist center in India. St. Thomas, the Apostle Thomas, after Jesus' death, came to India, and brought ideas to India. And we have historical records, and we'll be talking about those.

So, why am I interested in this, right? I grew up a Christian, right? I was...

I grew up in Phoenix, not far from here. I went to All Saints Church, you know? And I loved it, you know?

I was in the choir for 12 years. As soon as I got out of Sunday school, we got together with the big people into the church, and I got to listen to all the sermons. And we had an extraordinary priest, you know, minister.

He had been a trapper, a hunter in Alaska. And then, he's just this tough guy who could care less about religion, you know? And one day he got snowed in to a cabin, and the snow just covered the cabin, and he's going to die, you know?

And he knows he's going to die. So, he prayed, you know? He said, If you save me, God, I'll become a reverend.

I'll become a minister, you know? I'll become a priest, you know? I mean, because he never got to lose, you know?

And so, this guy shows up with meat and Simpson, you know? And then, he's like, Wow, I made a promise. So, that was the minister in my church, you know?

And he was brilliant. Like, he was really, really knew his stuff. His name was Paul Urbano.

And, I don't know. So, I had these extraordinary contacts with beautiful priests, you know? And I loved the church, you know?

It was like, wow. And, you know, when I went to college, I joined the church there, and it wasn't popular in the 60s. We didn't have that many people went to church, because we're all hippies, you know?

But, even my last year in college, I stayed in the parish house. I lived in the parish house, and served the family of the priest, you know? And, it was a very beautiful time.

And I was signed up for seminary. Then, I bumped into Buddhism, right? No, I mean, I ended up going to Brahmasala, and, basically, I never came back, you know?

And, so then, I don't know, 25 years later, I go back, and I'm... There were times when I was younger, when I felt some sort of competition with the Christian church, you know? I was like, well, now I'm a Buddhist, and we're going to, you know, we'll convince everybody that Buddhism is better than Christianity, you know?

And I remember, Ken Lubitschek was invited to Georgian Court College, interfaith. Like, Pope Paul or somebody said, you've got to have some interfaith stuff. So, just for political correctness, we were invited one night.

Many of us turned out. And, you know, okay, we did our thing, okay? But, I remember thinking, I hope Lubitschek wins the debate against the priest, you know?

And, no, I was like, everybody has to understand, Buddhism is better, you know? Like, it was very important to me, at 25 or something, that, oh, you know, Buddhism should, like, sweep the country, and everybody should be convinced that Michael Rush wasn't crazy when he went to this dumpy little town in New Jersey, you know? And, you know, I really wanted that.

And I remember, now, lately, we were in England this summer studying some things. And we had the honor to study, we studied ancient Greek, New Testament Greek, so we could speak with authority about the New Testament. And it's some project that some of us are working on.

And so we had an Oxford man, a very famous Greek teacher, a very fine man, clergyman, of the Church of England. And we went out to dinner, and I remember in Marlow, it was regatta night, it was wild. But anyway, that's another story.

So we went out to dinner, and I said, how's the Church of England doing, you know? Because I heard strange stuff about the Episcopal Church that I grew up in. And my church comes from the Church of England, right?

So, here I got a Church of England priest, you know? And I said, how's it going, you know? And he said, it's dead.

It's dying. Completely. You know, not just less attendants.

I said, I heard in the United States that the church I grew up in only has the people come anymore. Like, it's 50% less than when I was young. And then he said, it's worse in England.

90% less. You know, just empty. The churches are empty, you know?

We go, I go and do my service, and maybe 3 or 4 people come. And not one person under 70 comes to church, you know? Nobody.

And then you feel that tension in England, you know? We were there on regatta night. There was a party, you know?

It's like a rolling earth, and then all the young people come, and they drink a lot, and they party, and then they're like paddy robbers, lined up on the street, waiting for fights to break out. And there was this tension. You could feel the tension in the air.

And the police knew there'd be fights. And it's because there's no, there's no spirituality there. You see?

There's no religion, really. And there's no incentive to be kind or, you know, the only thing they could think to do was to get drunk and fight, you know? And the police were ready.

They had like, we said, what's wrong? Is there a bonfire or something? They said, man, this is a Ramesside event tomorrow.

You know? And the kids are going to start bashing each other with beer bottles and cutting up each other. And, because they don't, I think they're just hungry.

There's no religion. You know? There's no spirituality.

So then I'd come back, and I'd start to feel bad, you know? Like, oh, maybe my bad wishes for the church worked out. You know?

And, no, I felt like some sort of, they looked down on me. Basically, you have to think about, what would happen if the Christian church just disappeared? You know, what would happen if Jesus' words just disappeared in the world?

And, you know, I'm of an age where we grew up on that. And this culture is built on that. Judeo-Christian culture.

Anything about our culture, America, and England, and Germany, the places we came from politically, they depend on Jewish and Christian ideals. You know? I mean, what would happen?

I give talks now sometimes in yoga centers, right? And they'll be all under 35. And I'll quote the Bible, and I'll wait for a reaction, and I'll just get this dumb look, you know?

You know, did Madonna say that? you know, you know, they never heard of that. You know, I'll say, you'd have a good news.

And I'll just get this dumb look. and then it dawns on me that there's a whole people who never heard that. You know?

Who never went to a church. You know? And I'm like, and then I get this weird feeling, and you can think I'm crazy, right?

I'm supposed to be a Buddhist monk posing as a Hindu yogi, right? But, but it dawned on me. I had this, I had this realization.

If Jesus' words died in this world, it'd be a great loss. Right? I think so.

It's not for everybody, right? Well, the guy, the first time I ever saw him, he said, everybody needs something different. Some people like sugar.

Some people like mint chocolate chip. Some people like vanilla. But for one kind of ice cream to go to 30 flavors from 31 flavors, you know, this is loss.

Something's lost. You know? I believe that the teachings of Jesus should stay in the world.

There are many people who would benefit from them. Not maybe us, or we could benefit also, but it may not be our part. But it's something precious.

It's something very wonderful. You know? And, so then I just started, I wake up in the morning at 4 o'clock thinking, well, what's wrong with the church?

What happened? I asked him. I asked the priest.

Then we went to Canterbury, which is the center of all the church in England. But it's where I, it was like Mecca for me. You know?

Or like the Vatican if you're a Catholic, right? So I went to, we went to Canterbury. And, and we stand with the priest, you know, and I'm like, what did you guys do?

What happened? You know? Do you know what happened?

Do you know what happened to him? You know, he's 70 something. So, it was under your guard that the place fell apart.

What happened? You know, like I'm, what happened? And he's, you know, and they're like, you know, we don't know.

But things aren't so bad. Our church is okay. And I said, well, you know, and the guy really believed it.

And I said, he said, well, how many people come to church? Oh, 10, 15 sometimes. You know?

And, well, how old are they? Oh, you know, it's around 70, but they got a lot of faith. no, and then we were like, he doesn't even, he's living in Canterbury.

He's a priest in Canterbury. And he, and he missed it. You know?

Something happened. And, and so, I think, I don't know, in, so my, my idea for tonight and the next two nights is to talk about, in, in Buddhism, we say there are three, three paths, three main ideas, three main principles that you must have as a person, as a religion, and as a civilization, or else you won't be happy. It can't happen.

You know? You won't be happy as a country. You won't be happy, you won't work as a faith, or religion, and you won't be happy as a person if you don't have three, like, ideals that, that are deep in your heart and in your life.

Okay? So I'd like to go through those. Alright?

We're going to go through, it's called the three principle paths. Those are the Lamsa Lamsa in Tibetan. Right?

And really, you'd be like a doctor with a very sick cancer patient. Right? On terminal ill, almost dead.

And say, what happened? You know, what's wrong? Then you would check these vital signs, three vital signs.

You'd say, how's their first path? How's their second path? How's their third path?

And I propose that there's a direct connection between the health of a religion and the health of a civilization and the health of a person and these three paths, these three ideals. If you have them, you're healthy. If you don't have them, you're in trouble.

Okay? So then I got thinking like, we got to check it out. You know, did Jesus teach these three things?

A. You know? And are they still around now?

You see what I mean? Okay? And then I'm going to tell you another myth.

Okay? This is the last thing. Okay?

Remember that Buddhism says that everything you see in your world comes from yourself. Okay? Remember that, according to Buddhism, everything you ever experience comes from yourself.

If you get hot in the back there, you can whine too. Yourself. Okay?

No. If you get bored a while from now and your butt's sore, you can whine. Yourself.

Okay? If there's a great, important, precious teaching in your world that suddenly starts to disappear. And I'm talking Judaism also.

Half the synagogues in New York have closed in the last, I don't know, 25 years. We have a friend who just takes photos of closed synagogues. That's his project.

No, he does. In the East Village. There's only, like, a few left and there used to be like 90 synagogues in the East Village in New York.

So it's Judaism and Christianity both, you see? So what is it that, you know, why did that happen? And then, you have to be aware that the punchline on Sunday night at the end is that if a great faith disappears in your world, if a Dalai Lama is getting old in your world, if a Pope is getting old in your world, it's because you haven't had enough goodness.

You see? You haven't been good enough. To keep him here, you see?

That's a, the bottom line is that, you see? According to Buddhism, if we lose something precious in our world, like we're losing the oceans, right? We're losing the air.

We're losing the land and the trees and the animals, right? And we're also losing these holy bees and these holy ideas. Ultimately, it's your fault and my fault.

You see? So I'm not blaming the Christian Church for not being on their, on their toes or something. I recognize that it's coming from me.

You see? So, really as we go on and we read Malinda's questions, you have to ask yourself, you know, how did I not have those three paths? You see?

How is it that I failed in this teaching? Because what I see is a mirror of my own heart, my own soul. You see?

So it's a very, you know, how do we stop losing precious things, like the earth or the seas or the trees and these great religions, great teachings, great lamas, right? It's our fault. We don't take care of them.

We don't value them. We don't practice them ourselves. So karmically, we will lose them.

You see? So, we're going to study those three great ideas, one of them each night. And then you've got to be in this mode, like, let's save it in this world.

And then you're going to want to go out and make a campaign somewhere. Where should you make it? Okay?

It's not like going to church and wearing a placard and saying, you don't have path number two, you know? You know? If you change it in your heart, then some extraordinary thing will happen, like the Pope and the Thailand will do some beautiful thing together.

You know? Something weird will happen. Something great could happen.

You know? I see, like, yoga and Christianity and Buddhism and... We'll get into Islam later, okay?

But there's no reason why there can't just be one faith that people practice in different ways. You know? It's all one faith, and people are practicing it in different ways.

So, we're going to talk about how that's true. It's true on three levels, okay? Historically, there are historical contacts between Judaism, Christianity and Hinduism and Buddhism, okay?

We're going to talk about how physically these ideas went across Persia and reached India and they banged into each other and they melded in the form of Malinda, okay? That's really cool. Malinda is a Greek king who became a Buddhist, okay, in India.

So that's kind of cool. That's a historical level. You can also say on a revolutionary level, you see, there's two levels here.

On a revolutionary level, Jesus came to certain realizations and then Lord Buddha came to certain realizations. When there was ever any historical contact, you see what I mean? Like just people, when they get to a certain level, they get certain ideas and they start teaching them.

So, on a second level, you don't need this historical contact stuff. By the way, I want to teach the whole historical contact stuff. Why?

Some people, why, for better? Okay? Now, if you talk to somebody, Christian person, and you say, I got this cool idea.

You should try it. They say, no. And you can say, well, historically, it was introduced by Christians, or from Christians in India, you know, and then you can talk about that.

You see, that's okay. Some people relate to the historical thing. They call it facts, right?

Like as if evolution is not a fact. You know? So anyway, that's a basic level.

If you're going to be useful in the world, you should have all three in your toolkit. You know, you're like a doctor. You say, you can't tell a person, I just do hearts, you know?

Your liver's sick, sorry. You know, you got to know livers and hearts and lungs. Okay?

So, first level, you should know the historical stuff. You know, you should be able to say, oh, Menander, Alexander, you know, and, and, and Caucasus, Alexandria and the Caucasus, it's all textile. You know, you got to be able to talk about that stuff.

On a second level, holy beings have certain ideas come to them, and wherever they live, you know, Moses got it, got it. Jesus got it. Buddha got it.

And maybe there was never any historical contact. It's just three smart guys, in the room. Okay?

That's, that's level number two, evolution. And, and if we evolve to that stage, we'll get the same ideas. Okay?

Then there's a higher level, okay? This is tantric level. It's all the same person.

It's just one person. You know, we believe that, we've been talking about it in yoga class, right? The, the original purpose of yoga was to change your body into light.

Why? So you can appear on a billion planets at once and serve everybody on those planets. Okay?

That's why we go to yoga? Yeah. Okay?

Fifteen bucks you get that, right? Whatever. Okay.

No, really. Really. No, yoga is just a clever way to get into that.

Okay? So it's silly to think that, that a person who could emanate a billion bodies, called Father and the Holy Ghost, doesn't matter, couldn't emanate as a wimpy three people. You know?

What's that, what's the big, what's so hard about that? Three people? Emanate three people?

Everybody on this room can be an emanation except me. I'm the same person. The whole five billion people on this planet could be the emanation of one enlightened angel.

And I'm just the only person who's not there. No, it's very possible. It's not impossible at all.

Okay? Every person you ever met is the same person. And it's just one enlightened being is filled up this planet with people to straighten you out.

You know? How are they going to do it? Some will teach you knowledgely.

Some will fight with you. Some will murder you. You know?

But through that process, you'll get to where you have to go. Okay, so three people, on a tantric level, third level up. No problem.

Three enlightened people on one planet at the same time. That's a no-brainer for them. So three levels of that.

So I'm going to start. We'll go into... Let's do historical stuff, okay?

I need this thing. Maybe it... Wait.

Would it work here? Can we scoot? We have this map in your book, I hope.

In the back. Is it? Oops.

That's okay.

[Говорящий 2]
Is that okay?

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah. Can you guys see that okay? Is that okay?

I'm going to put a pen on this map. Let me see if I get it right. Like, roughly, India and Pakistan are divided right there, right now.

But up till the British decided to split it in 1947, it was... India came all the way out to here. Okay?

Like, India traditionally has been all the territory through Pakistan up to part of Afghanistan. Okay? So, up to these mountains, called the Hindu Kush, right here.

Okay? Tomorrow we'll talk about how the Greeks got this far, but there's a big mountain range here. And there's only one doorway.

There's one road pass. What's it called? Khyber Pass.

Okay? There's the Khyber Pass. So there's only one convenient way to get to India from the west.

Okay? From Greece, or Italy, or Egypt, or wherever you happen to be. Palestine.

You go across what's Iran and Iraq now, and part of Afghanistan, and you have to cross these mountains. There's one pass where people traditionally break down into India. Okay?

And then you come down and you reach India. So, like, I don't know, 5,000 years ago, the first wave came. I mean, the first wave we know of.

There were probably countless waves before that. But they called them the Aryans. Okay?

And these were a race of people who came from around the Black Sea. And we'll talk about it tomorrow. But basically, they're important to us because their language and their customs spread throughout most of what we think of Europe and India and the Middle East.

Their language, which we call Indo-European or Proto-Indo-European, became the basis of all Western languages. Every Western language from India to Iceland and from Russia down to the Middle East came from one language. It's Sanskrit.

It's like a mother of Sanskrit language. Okay? So, the reason we feel comfortable with European people, Indian people, is because we all spoke the same language at some point.

There was a huge invasion of many countries into Greece, into Italy, into the Middle East, and then into India. Okay? So they came down, of course, to the same mountain.

And we'll talk about that tomorrow, how the Greeks got there. But anyway, we've got this Greek king named Melinda. And he was born in...

Where is this place? Yeah, right here. Alexandria of the Caucasus.

Okay? Caucasus. Do you see it?

No? He's on that little thing. There we go.

You see it? Alexandria of the Caucasus. So, everywhere Alexandria went, he founded cities.

And guess what he named them? Everywhere from Egypt, the Alexandria in Egypt, up to this Alexandria, there's like ten of them, okay? And there were a lot more before.

And his troops thought that this mountain range, the Hindukush, was an extension of the Caucasus mountains. So they misnamed the town. But that town is important to us because Melinda was born there.

Okay? So, this is probably like a fifth generation Greek in India. It's not like he came to India.

He was there for five generations, since Alexander, 320 B.C. So this is like 130, 140 years after Alexander. It's already been like five generations. So he was already there, living there, his family for five generations.

And then he was born in that town. And then, I don't know, at some point he became a great king and he decides to attack India. See, there's a line right here.

That's as far as Alexander the Great got. He stopped there. He was never beaten, okay?

And we'll talk about it tomorrow. He was never beaten. He was never defeated.

And he took over the whole world. But when he got this far, which is where everybody thought that not about this far, the ocean had ended, the earth was. Okay?

So when he got this far, his troops all said, that's enough, we're going home. They had been on the road for 11 years, okay? The whole trip took 12 years.

And they just said, wait, what do you need more countries for? You know, what do you need for more? We're going home.

You know? And they just said, we're not going any further. And they had a democratic vote.

This is a good thing, right? And they voted to go home. And he held out for two days, and they said no.

And they said, okay, well, we won the vote, we'll go home. Then they made boats out of trees. And they came down the Indus River, and they went home.

So that's as far as I've ever gone. But people like Melinda, they were like, we want more. We want to be able to say we've got, we've attacked India.

We've got all of India. Okay? So he went on this campaign, and he came down Taxila here, right here.

Peshwa is really cool. Peshwa is really cool. What's his name?

The guy in New World Music. What's his name? Our favorite guy.

[Говорящий 2]
Nisrab Fakianaka.

[Говорящий 1]
Nisrab Fakianaka. Okay. Anyway, he was from there.

Taxila right here was a great Buddhist center. It was a great Buddhist university there. Out in the middle of some dry, no-good, God-forsaken land.

Okay? They built this huge university in ancient times, and that became an important study center there. Then he got his father, Sakala.

You see Sakala? This is where this book took place. The book that we're going to study.

This is where the conversation took place. Even coming out of going in, I think going in, he meets up with this Buddhist sage. And it was a tradition for group kings to hire philosophers.

We even have records of Indian kings writing letters to group kings. And they say, could you send us three things? What?

Olives. What's the second thing? Wine.

What's the third thing? Send us some philosophers. Okay?

And there's a record of what was sent. Olives and wine. Okay?

No, no, send a note. And they said, we don't give up philosophers. Philosophers were important to them.

So it was very much a tradition for group kings to have conversations with yogis. Alexander talked with Jain yogis and took some home with him. And we'll talk about that.

But at this point in Sakala, Miranda stops his campaign. It was fighting a war. It's like George Bush going to Baghdad to have a conversation with a Muhammad, a Muslim cleric.

You know? It's that enlightened. You see?

We're attacking a country. We're killing all the people. But I want to know the truth.

You know? I want to know, you know, how did life start and what's the meaning of life? And they would stop.

And they would have a conversation. And it was recorded. So that's what happened at Sakala.

Women got as far as Delhi, Mathura. And then there was a prediction by the Buddha that he would reach Pataliputra all the way over here. Those of you who went to Bodh Gaya, we took a hundred people to Bodh Gaya before 3rd year retreat, 1990-something.

And we stopped at... We flew into Patna, right? We flew out of Patna.

Nowadays it's called Patna. In the old days it was called Pataliputra. And Lord Buddha predicted that King Malinda would reach Pataliputra.

So he said, I got to reach Pataliputra. And he did. And he built a huge stupa there.

Somewhere between Sakala and Pataliputra he became a Buddhist. Like somewhere between there and there he switched. And he became a Buddhist.

And then he built this beautiful huge stupa. And then Patna became very famous. Why?

A few miles out of town you got Malinda Monastery, Vrakamaśīla Monastery, and Bodh Gaya. You've got all these amazing Buddhist universities growing over the centuries. Now this was the center of Buddhist learning at the time.

So it's important. The younger you are studying, whatever system you're doing, has come from this area. It didn't went to Nepal.

It went to Tibet. It went to Kashmir. Naropa studied in Kashmir.

Naropa went back to Taksila area to study. Goraksha, who is like a very famous yogi, a lot of our yoga comes from Goraksha. He went all the way to Afghanistan and taught yoga.

There's still yoga being done in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India. You see? All these traditions.

Hatha Yoga Padipika was written here. And then it all comes back down to South Indian tradition through Brahmacharya, who studied in Nepal. Okay?

So it's very interesting. Everything ties together, okay? So we're going to start the conversation.

And what I'd like to do is ask Kristi... We're going to take a break about half an hour or two. How are we doing?

What time is it? You know half way means in these kind of teachings, right? 8.15?

Yeah, we go. I'd like to ask Kristi to talk a little bit. She's going to talk a little bit about the title of the book.

And I asked her if she could specifically talk about how Greek language, Greek words and Sanskrit words, they're almost the same language, you see? And to talk about that and to talk about how that came into our language. So we'll be looking for things throughout the three days of our connection with Greece and India.

Okay? So, why? Because that's where Judaism and Christianity came from.

Through those means. The two religions which are the foundation of our country. Now you can say I don't care about religion or I don't like Judaism or I don't like Christianity.

That's okay. You are living in a Judeo-Christian culture. All your beliefs are Judeo-Christian.

Whether you think you're a Christian or not, your country runs by those principles. And those came through Greece and India. So, we're going to talk about just the language and how it all ties together.

Okay? Like the great ideas of this country. Democracy.

These have come through Greece. Law and order and morality came through the Jews. Judaism, you see?

So really, the comforts you enjoy, the privileges you enjoy, the safety and peace relatively of your country are based on spiritual principles that came from Judaism and Christianity. So, you can reject them if so. But you are.

That's what you are. You see? So, it's good to know where it came from.

And Christy is going to talk a little bit about connections. Greek, Buddhist, and then Christian-Judaic connections. Okay?

So, I will do that. You ready? You need this?

You want a switch? You want me to open it? Can we put this?

Can we put this in? Okay, I have to open it. Okay.

I don't know. We can switch it. Up to you.

[Говорящий 2]
I'm left-handed, so it's really, it would be a little awkward. When you show over here.

[Говорящий 1]
When Geshe Thubten Rinchen taught us Naropa, he leaned over one day and said, My God, she's left-handed! Laughter He was happy. What an easy way to please your Lama, you know?

Like, you were just born that way and they're all happy with you. It was really great, actually. Alright.

So, No, this is, Oh, the recorder. I'm going to go through the title. Say, Malinda.

Malinda. Prashna. Prashna.

Yeah. Prashna means questions. And it comes from the root prach, which means to ask.

And the word preach comes from this in English. And that's because when you ask a question, you're actually inciting a response, like a preaching, a teaching. You're inciting a teaching from someone you ask a question.

And then, Malinda is really interesting. It's actually, that name is actually a corruption of the word Menander. And that's why Gishon Michael was saying Menander, oh, I mean Malinda, when he was talking.

And, we're not actually sure how it's spelled in the Greek. But, this is obviously related to man. And this is related to Indra.

Like, the god Indra. It comes from the root And in Sanskrit, which means to send down. And that's because Indra was the god of rain and he sent down rain upon people.

They prayed to Indra when they had droughts. And he was supposed to send the rain down. And we get all sorts of words in English that have to do with wet and, you know, like undulate, like a wave.

And inundate, which means you're completely saturated with something. And, winter, because that's the rainy season. And then, man is a root in Sanskrit, which means to think.

And, manas is mind in Sanskrit. And so, man was actually the thinking animal, the one who thought. Is that?

Yeah. So that's... So, Mananda is like the god or the king of men.

I don't need the coin. Can I just mention it? Yeah.

We're going to do one quick thing and then we're going to take a break. How do we know about Mananda's history? The Greeks popularized the use of coins.

And then they were invented by the Persians, double-sided coins, but the Greeks popularized it and they became the best at it. But there are many coins that have been found even in the last hundred years of Mananda's... Mananda's name is on them and his picture is on them.

And, one side is in Greek and one side is in Sanskrit. Okay? So, and these coins have been found in Wales, England, as far as China, all through the Western world.

So if a coin can get to Wales an idea can get to Wales. You see what I mean? So Kristi and I are going to go through a little bit about what is on the coin because I think it's kind of cool.

And it kind of impresses on you that our culture used to be connected with Indian culture very closely. Two sides of the same coin. Okay?

So, thousands of coins have been found in Mananda's. Okay? So, this is the first time I get to actually show off the fact that we crammed in two weeks of Greek over the summer.

If any of you were not already too inundated with Sanskrit and Tibetan, here is a new language that you have to now, you know. It's pretty close to English, so. So the first side of the coins of Alexander usually, I'm sorry, Mananda, usually say Basileus.

And Basileus means king. And, in the, in the Bible teachings we took this summer, in the gospel of John, Pilate asks Jesus, Ukun Basileus esu? Are you a king then?

I mean, they say you're a king. Are you a king? And he uses this word, Basileus, you know.

So it comes directly through our biblical tradition.

[Говорящий 2]
the Sanskrit word is Vas, which means to will or wish.

[Говорящий 1]
And we get wish from this. And, that's because a king gets whatever he wishes. The other side of the coin, a lot of the coins that they found had the word Charmeraja, which means what?

King of, king of the Dharma, right? So it had a, it had a Greek front and like an Indian back, you know. It's very interesting.

Dharma comes from the word Dur, which means to hold. Do I? There we go.

And we get the English word, where it's truth comes from this because it holds fast. And tree, anything that's firm, you know, to hold firm, solid, and throne, and of course Dharma. And, I think that's all, yeah.

Yeah. Everyone get that? Yeah.

I'm going to ask Christina, can you put a pen on Taxila? Can you see it? There you go, right there.

Right, right here. We just mentioned that Taxila was a big center of Buddhist learning. right to the other side of the, you see the Himalayas, right?

There's a kingdom called Ladakh. Okay? Now this is a weird place.

It was part of Tibet, okay? Ladakh was part of Tibet. But unfortunately, it's on the other side of the mountains.

So when India was formed, they just took it. And then the Tibetans weren't strong enough, they didn't have an army, they just let it go. And in Ladakh, they speak Tibetan.

And they have John Brady Railroad. John, are you ready to, do you have your film thing ready? Start it up.

I'm going to do a pitch. They just said, we sent a crew to Ladakh this summer. John and Mercedes, where's Mercedes?

Yeah. Along with about five other people. We've been working for 20 years to save the ancient books of Tibet.

Okay, we've had monks in refugee camps and women in refugee camps. Typing the classics of Tibet for the last 20 years. We started this project about 20 years ago.

They've typed in, they've saved about 300,000 pages of manuscripts. Okay? And there's a belief, there have been several studies done that Jesus, during the years that he was missing, like we don't know where Jesus was after he got back from Egypt, from where Alexandria, and that's another story, for up to the time of the New Testament, up to the time he was about 30.

We don't have any record of where he is. There's a belief that perhaps he visited India and specifically Ladakh. And it would have been very natural for him to travel through Taxila into Ladakh.

And many Greeks did that because it was our one kingdom up until that time. We'll talk about it. But he could have walked to India and not change languages.

You see? He could have spoken Greek all the way to Taxila. And there's a tradition in India that he did reach India, Kashmir.

And he's known as Yishu. And in Tibet he's known as Yishu. And there are traditions that he reached Ladakh and studied in Ladakh with Tibetan Lamas.

Okay? With Buddhist teachers in Ladakh. So and there's supposed to be scriptures that confirm that.

Okay? There are also scriptures there Hevaja Tantra if you know Hevaja Tantra that reached Pakistan, Peshawar and became holy books for the Muslims of Pakistan. Okay?

So Buddhist scriptures were translated into Arabic and became scripture for the Islamic population of northern Pakistan. so there are those books have been found in Ladakh. And in obviously incredibly valuable Sanskrit yoga texts many texts are there.

so so he sent a crew there to get we got permission from the government to catalog just preliminary to start working on 54 monasteries there. So I asked John John's in charge of that project and the and the whole input project I think most of you know about it but I asked him to show little clips of the books that they found just because it's interesting I think. So do you Yeah.

[Говорящий 2]
Yeah. Okay. We spent about two weeks in Ladakh in mid-July and as Geshe-la had spoken earlier the texts that are in Ladakh are well first of all the monasteries are 900 to 1,000 years old.

They were not destroyed. And so out of the 53 monasteries I would say 14 or 15 are anywhere near 800 to 1,000 years old. This is a a monastery we visited called Likhir Monastery and as you can see the libraries are that's the original library that was built in 1160 or 1200 A.D. And a lot of the texts are possibly not the originals but we don't know because a lot of them are sealed and are not allowed to be opened for reasons why to be determined. I mean there are reasons why they are not. This particular text is a hand scripted text not woodblocked which is the traditional way. So it's an earlier text.

And it's Sanskrit. And it's Sanskrit. And again we're there for many reasons to preserve these texts to catalog their collections and then also scan them to have a you know a digital record of them so we can translate them and we can bring them into the world in different ways in different languages so we have a crew with us our director and one of the representatives going tediously through each day in different libraries in Ladakh to see the text and to see what exactly they have.

There are no catalogs. There are no records. Most of them are from Tibet.

We know that. And they're you know the range of texts are original commentaries on very ancient and older Sanskrit texts so they're precious and they're vulnerable very vulnerable. Earlier on you saw the footage where there was there was just disheveled pages and that's common.

If something gets insect infested not necessarily in Ladakh because it's 15,000 feet above sea level but if it gets infected they throw it out. It's just gone. And we find that all over India constantly.

So we think you know there are texts here that have extraordinary value to our operation but primarily to the world. And we need to save them and we need to digitally database them and we need to empower the monasteries so they have records of these texts for their reasons and for their purpose. So we started training four monks actually they're going to our southern India office for two months in training each representing the different sects of Buddhism.

The Galupa, the Nyingma, the Kagyu and the Sakya. And they're going to be going back to Ladakh and working on their monasteries. Cataloging each library and then inputting them into a digital database so we can access them and give them to the world.

And as you can see they're so fragile and they want us to do this. The Ladakhi world is an association where the monasteries have their own infrastructure and they're building us a beautiful room to house our computers and to actually be settled into the center called lay. So we're very excited about it.

really it's just a dream come true in many ways. It's very difficult to do this and this is going to make a difference in all of our lives in this room I think. In a profound way.

[Говорящий 1]
Cool. So I would expect to find perhaps records of Jesus's visits to there. And definitely the records of Muslims and Buddhists working together and the Greek kings there.

And the yoga that you were taught today, if you were in the yoga class, a lot of it was based on a manuscript that John's people found in another library like that. They've cataloged 100,000 books already. The 95,000th book after 12 years of war was the book that you did today in class.

So it's not the idea just to find these old writing books and bring them to America so they can write here. It's like save them digitally. We give them away free on the web.

Anybody in the world can just click, take any book they want off the web. It's 300,000 pages right now. You can just take anything you want for free.

And we've always done that. And then the idea is interpret it and bring it to the real world. And it will be used for the 10 series of the Yoga Studies Institute.

That will be based on teachings we've gotten and ancient texts we've been using. So the idea is not just a library thing. It's a thing where we want to bring this stuff to real people so you can use it in the cool way that people did it in the old days.

And that's what Diamond Mountain University is about. And we'll talk about that some more But anyway, my pitch to you is, do you have any notes? I got this thing.

I forced John to do this. He didn't want to do this, okay? It's all my idea.

You can't blame him. This is the text from which we did the Yoga Sutra translation. We got an email from Doubleday today.

They said, it's like the most beautiful thing we ever saw. We want it. They want photographs with the cover.

That's based on this palm leaf manuscript. It's written on a leaf. And it was rotting in my soul.

And his people saved it. And then in a year it's going to be out in America and thousands of people will be using it in their yoga studios. That's the idea.

Look, you've got a choice. I'm giving you guys a choice. Especially those who are in the yoga class.

If you're new tonight, we're not trying to hit you up. This is the people in the yoga class especially. Because you had a chance to do it, you know it's worth something.

You sign up with Brady over the next two days to give the amount of money you'd spend on movies every month. Now, some people that's going to be a lot. But you say, okay, I'll give five bucks a month or something.

And you can take it out, and you help them. That's your first choice. I'm giving you five choices, it's not like I'm forcing.

Or you can just give them one big thing. Somebody in New York gave them like $5,000. But I don't know, this is not New York.

I made him write this one, he didn't want to write this one. I'm going to take John Brady to lunch with one of my wealthy friends. I'm serious, it happens.

Now, I had a chance to meet David Packard, he owns Hewlett Packard. He said, you've got 15 minutes. And I had a suitcase of texts with me.

And I opened it up and he canceled all his appointments for the day. And he paid for the first 10 computers when we started 20 years ago. So, something happens, things can happen.

I will volunteer to just stand there and scan a book for you. Because there are books in the University of Arizona library, there are books wherever you live, we need them, we need them scanned. They get scanned, they go to India, the Tibetan refugees type them in.

And then they give them away for free. So, if you're totally broke or totally stingy, you can just say, I'll just go to, he's going to be in Tucson, he's setting up an office here, I'll stand there and I'll just, it's like Xeroxing, right? I'll just stand there and Xerox stuff for you.

Then the last choice, you can check it off. Everybody gets one of these, okay? You want me to know?

Everybody's going to get one of these. The last choice, you have to check it, okay? I didn't let the text rot, okay?

Okay? Yeah, yeah. I made it right.

So, it's not like a guilt trip or anything, okay? And, you have to check one, everyone's going to get one, okay? You promise?

Mazal. Mazal means, I promise, in Yiddish, okay? So, my students know, it's a diamond dealer thing.

So, I promise, I'll check one of them, okay? You can always check the last one, we don't put any pressure on you, okay? We did this in New York, I think about $6,000 came in that night, which is enough to keep the Tibetan refugees going for about two months.

So, if you guys do one month or something, that's okay. And, I think you should do it, okay? You can't let this precious things disappear in the world.

What you see, all the yoga you ever did is just 1% of what's there. And, extraordinary things can happen to you and to other people if we save these things, and we get them to people, right, to real people. So, take a break, I ask you all to see John at some point, okay?

We'll take, like, a 15-minute break. If you just want to come up and say hi, like, if I haven't had a chance to see you the last few days, or you have some burning questions, come on up. If you're going to see us, Kristi and I, in the next few weeks, you don't have to come up.

Let the other people come up, okay? So, please have a break, stretch your legs, have some refreshments. We'll see you in 15 minutes.

I don't know where it is right now, but you get one after 20 years or 25 years, right? You're allowed to wear it whenever you want. I mean, sometimes you get to wear them during ceremonies even if you're a baby monk, but then they take it back.

But that hat, according to the Tibetans, came from the Greeks, okay? And just so you know, this is Achilles, right? This is like the Trojan Lords, right?

And it means that we have been connected for quite a while, okay? Like 500 BC, something like that, alright? Okay, we're going to start on the actual reading, which is page 2 in your text, okay?

And the way the Malinda Paha goes, prashna, right, is that King Malinda will ask a question to the Buddhist monk. The Buddhist monk is called Nagasena, okay, so Nagasena. Are you going to do that or what else are you going to do?

Can we do it then? Okay. So Nagasena still is kind of cool.

I want to tell you this history, okay? This is not the first Buddha to appear in this world, So Gautama Buddha, you know, the person we call Va-Buddha is just a Buddha, okay? And there have been thousands and thousands of Buddhas before him.

There will be many, many Buddhas afterwards. We will all be in the line, right? Sooner or later, we will all be one of them, okay?

If you're not already and I don't know, you could just be humoring me, right? Which I enjoy. But, thank you.

But Gautama Buddha is not the first. The Buddha before that was named Kasyapa. Say Kasyapa.

And we still hear this name in India from time to time. But in the time of Kasyapa, according to the opening pages of Melinda's questions, there was a, there were two monks, okay? An elder monk and a junior monk.

And the elder monk asked the junior monk to sweep the floor, okay? And then the junior monk said no, okay? So the elder monk, which really happens, I've done it, I mean, I've had it done to me, beating up with a stick, okay?

In my monastery they use a rosary. I'll show you what a rosary is really for. That's okay.

She got a bunch of them. Anyway, when you walk around the monastery you hear this whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. And then this kid comes out with this dots across his forehead, you know.

And you say, ah, you got the dots, you know. And everybody gets it, you know. My teacher, he thought that the rosary was too easy and he started carrying around an extension cord.

But anyway, so the elder monk made into the younger monk, which is just a good monastic custom. I'm sure in Thailand it's similar. I saw it in Sri Lanka also, by the way.

anyway. Then the younger monk went away and he was talking to himself and he said, you know, I did a really bad thing, I shouldn't have refused to do the garbage and the and I hope I can learn to be a better monk, I hope I can learn to like teach people and be a better person and maybe I can learn to like, you know, be a good influence on people instead of the way I am. And the other monk heard him, right.

This is a story, he was listening, right? And then he said, uh, that's really cool, you know, here's this young monk, he got, just got disciplined, but he's now already making this prayer that he should later, in his later lives, he should be a great teacher of Buddhism. I should be like him.

I pray I should be like him. So then there's this story in the Melinda, it says, they wandered too many lifetimes, okay? Sometimes they met each other, sometimes they didn't, you know?

And there's an ancient Lamrim teaching in Tibetan tradition. If you have a student, and you're trying to make a common connection with them, so you shower them with love, you know, you should teach them over and over, you don't get any sleep, you're up with your goddamn laptop all night long, you know, and then you crank out the staff and you try to serve them, and then they're still nasty, you know? They say you should just punch them in the head, you know?

And, uh, and then what will happen is they'll get so mad at you that they'll create this common connection, you see? And then for many, they won't forget you for many lifetimes, because it burned into their memory, you know? So if anyone ever does that to you, or did it to you already, uh, you know what they're doing.

Anyway, uh, so he created this common connection. So for many lifetimes they wandered around, okay? And then they were reborn in India, and the younger monk was Melinda, and the elder monk was Nagasena, okay?

So that's this cool thing. Like, they have known each other for thousands of lifetimes. They've been, like, punching each other for thousands of lifetimes, okay?

And so we get to Melinda, uh, the king is in this town, Sakala, and, and he, on the whole road, he's not just been wiping out villages and towns and murdering people, but he's also been debating people, philosophy debates, and wiping them all out, you know? Like, beating all of them, because he said, the Greeks were no wimps as far as philosophy. I mean, they knew debating, and we'll talk about that tomorrow.

But anyway, he was so good that according to the Melinda, uh, tradition, the gods of the heaven of the 33 looked down and said, this guy's ruining philosophy in India, you know? He's just wiping out everybody. We gotta send down some big guns, you know?

So then they asked, uh, this god, this deva, you know, uh, would you, would you, would it be okay for you to go down and, and appear as a monk and, and debate with this guy? So he said, okay. So that's Nagasena, okay?

So Nagasena is just a Buddhist monk, uh, who goes down. Modern research indicates that Nagasena may have been a Greek, okay? A Greek Buddhist monk already, and there were lots of Greeks, uh, who had already become Buddhists, so we're not sure, uh, if the book wasn't written first in Greek, and then translated into the, the, the, the, the Indian language which was popular in that area at that time, which was Pali, because there was a, this huge connection between Sri Lanka and the Greek kings, and then Thailand.

So Buddhism went from the Greek kings to Sri Lanka. They sent, uh, embass, ambassadors, Buddhist ambassadors to Sri Lanka, and then they carried Buddhism to Thailand and Burma, and, and that's a tradition of our bantes here. Uh, so that's the story.

So we have the Pali of this book, we don't have the Sanskrit. So we've translated it from a, a Sanskrit version of the Pali, okay? Anyway, uh, here's the Sanskrit here.

So what you have here is Sanskrit, and, uh, we translated it. So the king is asking Nagasena, he says, where did the three times come from? Where does the past come from, the present, and the future, okay?

And then Nagasena goes into this two-page reply, right? There are basically twelve links to this reply, okay? Any, anything ring a bell?

Those of you who have studied the courses, the ACI courses, um, you know, six hundred years later, uh, it gets written down in the Vinaya Sutra, okay, which you studied, and in the opening lines, uh, he says how to draw the twelve links. Uh, and I forgot to bring one. Anybody have a real life in Tucson?

No? Okay. Yeah?

In Tucson? A big one, or a little one? You just walk around with them like that?

Okay, can you bring it tomorrow? Okay, we'll bring it tomorrow. But anyway, it gets written down, like, uh, much later.

Great. In the, in the, and it's in tradition in Thailand also, I saw, uh, they draw it on the front of every temple. And there are big three-dimensional ones in Bangkok, uh, very beautiful.

But it's the, the wheel of life. Uh, and, and on the outside, if you've ever seen it, death is holding you, right, in this circle. And then there are twelve steps around the outside of the circle.

So here, uh, Melinda, uh, is asking Nagasena, the monk, what caused all the pain in the world? Okay, where does the pain in the world come from? Where does the things come from?

And this is the first of the three ideals, okay? If you're going to have a healthy religion, if you're going to have a healthy country, civilization, planet, and if you're going to have a healthy personal life, you've got to have this first one, which is what? You've got to admit that life is painful.

Okay? You have to wake up. Okay?

My best students, you know who they are? One of them is a lady, she had five children. The first four were boys, okay?

And she's like, I gotta have a girl. She tried one more time, she had a girl, okay? Uh, this is Peg Brennan in Washington, okay?

Those of you who know. And, uh, so finally she had a girl. And, uh, her husband and the girl were walking at a highway rest stop, and a semi-truck backed up on the girl, and killed the girl and, uh, hurt the husband for his whole life.

Um, so then she became a serious student, you see? Uh, because she recognized something. So she woke up that day, you know, and then she started asking questions.

You know, why is life like this? You see? Anybody in this room is going to die, you know?

We're all just headed, it's a dead end, you know? We're all going to, it's like they put you in a car when you're born, and they say floor it, you know? And then there's a wall.

Maybe the wall's ten feet away. Maybe the wall's a hundred feet away. Maybe you didn't hit the wall for 30 years, 40 years.

But you've got to hit a wall. And they just keep telling you, your civilization, your civilization, this great America, you know? They sell it, they sell you, you bought it, you know?

Work, work, work. Push that pedal harder, harder. Push that pedal down.

Faster, faster, faster, faster. And then boom, you hit the wall, dead. The kids sell the house in six months, all the stuff you live for.

Then just spend the money, come on. You know, really, really. And it's nothing else.

That's all you got to do. They just brainwashed you, really, really. This whole TV thing, it's so nice to be in India, right?

There's no ads, there's no god awful ads, you know, bombarding you. It's just porn, you know? And they're not asking you to buy anything, you know?

And it's so affectionate, you know? There's nobody trying to convince you that you need 14 kinds of shampoo. Your shampoo's not good enough.

It doesn't have tetraphloxacin, you know? And there's a girl that didn't have tetraphloxacin there. And when you went out and did it, they got you into it.

They got you. You're working 15 weeks to have two weeks vacation, so you can wash your clothes, you know? And no, really, they sold it to you.

And we bought it. We bought it big time, right? So, wake up, you know?

There's nothing here. There's nothing here. We go on retreats.

We went on two-year retreat. We didn't have electricity. We didn't have a toilet.

We didn't have running water. We didn't have anything. And that's what we are, you know?

That's who we are. We don't have anything. You can't tell me you'll own this shirt tomorrow.

You can't tell me that we'll be at the Goodwill tomorrow, after you die. You can't tell me that. Wake up, you know?

Wake up. Things are bad. Things are serious.

We all have to die, you see? And if you're a conscious, like, seller of this thing, oh, yeah, you know, get through a touch of force of wrath with shampoo. You gotta have it.

And if you even think about it, if you even look at that, then you wasted your life, you see? Precious time that you have to figure out what to do. They got you sewn up, you know?

They say there's no devils in America. Nobody in America believes in the devil. Why?

They're leading you along. You're right where they want you, you know? There's no reason for a devil to show themselves in America.

They're already where they gotta be, you know? There's no temptation necessary. They're already gone, you know?

They're already, like, they're just wrapped up in these cars and houses and new trinkets, electronic trinkets, you know? It's like beads for the Indians, you know? Just take this thing, you know?

Be happy, you know? Give us Manhattan, okay? And, man, you're like that.

You bought it. You re-bought it. You bought into it, you know?

And what this is saying is wake up, you know? Like that lady. Everybody gets a wake-up call.

Sometimes it's a divorce, okay? Sometimes you get cancer. Sometimes somebody you love dies.

It's always like that. I don't have a single good student who didn't have a trauma, you know? I don't have a single good student who didn't come from some horrible, horrible thing.

And, you know, everybody says, ooh, that's so bad. But, come on, it happens to everybody, you know? Everybody has some story to tell, you know?

Everybody has a story to tell. Everybody here, you wouldn't be here, okay? There's some story.

You saw something, somebody died, something bad happened. And then you're here. You wanna know, can you do anything about it?

So the first, in the Buddhist tradition, if you're gonna have a healthy religion, if your religion is gonna be healthy, they gotta talk about this. They gotta wake people. You gotta tell people.

People have to be, have to hear, at least a few times a week or something, look, you're gonna die, you know? You're gonna be in a box, right? Do something, you know?

And you have to think about it. People are suffering, you know? People in our world, it's not just the Iraqis who are dying today.

It's the Americans who are sitting here and dying today, you know? When you walk out of here, you're two hours older than when you got here. And it just adds up and you die, you know?

There's nothing else happening here. It's a bad place to be. It's a broken world, okay?

And you gotta do something. You can't just sit there like a sheep and let them slaughter you, you know? If there's anything you can do, you gotta find out.

Is there something I can do? So that's the first path. And if a religion doesn't give it to you, if a culture doesn't give it to you, if you don't have it in your own heart, you're gonna be unhappy.

You won't be happy. You can't be happy, okay? So how does it apply to our life, to our civilization?

How are we doing? What kind of score do we get for realizing what's really going on, you know, like death? How's Americans about death?

We just hide it. We just hide it, you know? As soon as you're dead, I had a monk die.

I was with a monk. He was in New Jersey. He's a great Geshe, Lama Geshe, from Kalmykia.

And he's lifting up a roll to his mouth, and he died like that. I watched. I was there.

You know, he just died. His heart broke open, right? And he stopped like that.

And we're like, Geshe-la, are you okay? And he's like, not answering. And then we couldn't get the arm down, right?

So we take him to the hospital. And they say, he's dead. I said, well, could you just look at him?

Could you just check, you know? Did you take a pulse or something? And they said, no, no, dead, dead.

We can tell he's dead. So I had to fight, you know? And then they said, we're going to put him in the cold storage, you know?

And I said, we got to do prayers. The mind is not gone yet, you see? The mind, the spirit is not gone yet.

We have to do prayers. They said, no, no, Arizona law, New Jersey law, you know, 36 minutes, he's got to be in the cold storage, you know? And you can't do the prayer.

You know, I had to fight. Then finally they let me go in the cold storage with him. Really.

They got to be out of sight within 36 minutes, you see? They got to be out of sight, because Americans don't want to see it. Americans don't want to think about it.

It's very impolite to ask somebody, you know, to mention some, you know, you're going to serve a person in a hospital. They got cancer, you know? So like your church, you know, you go and you say, are you ready to die?

And then the relatives are all like, what did you say that for? You're going to upset them, you know? They got cancer, they're going to die in 3-4 days.

I got to ask them this stuff, you know? I got to find out if they're ready. No, no, don't talk about death.

Don't say death. Death's a bad word. You know, don't get sad, you know?

But if you don't do anything, then you'll get sad. You see what I mean? You got to talk about it.

You got to face up to it. And then you got to do what you can do, right? So how do we score on the death rate?

We're like the worst civilization that ever existed. In India, you die, they tie you to the top of a taxi and drive you around town. That's the first dead body I ever saw in my life.

I was 19. I didn't see a dead body until I was 19. I had to go to India to see a dead body, you see?

And they were driving around this person on the top of a cab and I saw my first dead body, right? So you have to realize that this world is something wrong. This world is painful.

Before you can do anything about it. They say if you don't know you're in jail, you're not going to break out, right? You won't want to break out because you're just happy in jail, you know?

So there's this long story, we don't have time to go through the whole thing. It's the Wheel of Life. If you want to know about it, John Mickey, did you know that?

You and Bonnie Jones, is Bonnie here? No. Anyway, we're talking about doing something in Houston or Nashville or something like that about the Wheel of Life.

You have to study this subject. Not knowing how life works, not knowing how the world is created causes pain. It's just a not knowing thing.

It's like somebody explains it to you, then you're out. If you get a good explanation of how this stuff started, you can get out. You can bust out of jail.

What jail? Getting old, getting senile, and then dying. Oh yeah, you're telling me that you know how not to die.

Yeah, I do. So how come you got a bad spot? You know, how come you're getting older?

You know what I mean? You don't have to ask like that. That's what a Greek would do.

That's what Socrates would have said. That's why they poisoned him and killed him. Because he wouldn't let up.

So, then I say, well, how come? How come you're like that? And you gotta ask, okay?

So yeah, there is a way not to die. Yoga is a big part of it. Yoga practice is a big part of the method.

And yoga was meant to change the channels, change the body, and then you would transform into light. So where's all the people who did it before? Where is they?

I mean, if I saw three or four, I'd be convinced. Just show me one. You know, like, show me at least one.

And then you have to study why you didn't meet them. We'll talk about it. We'll talk about where they are and why you didn't meet them, maybe.

If they exist. So anyway, that's the first thing is just to realize this place is broken. This world is broken.

This world doesn't work. It doesn't matter what you do. It doesn't matter how big your waistline is.

It doesn't matter what kind of vitamins you eat. In a normal yoga class, it doesn't matter if you can stand on your head or not. Nothing's gonna help you.

It doesn't matter how much money you have. It doesn't matter what relatives you have, what position you have. It's not gonna help you, you know.

I mean, in England, they're like wheeling Margaret Thatcher around in a wheelchair, you know. She's like Sima, this great powerful leader, you know. And everyone's like making fun of her now.

It's very sad. And we all be there. We're all headed there.

So anyway, this first part from Melinda is the classical Buddhist answer. And it's the first part here. Because of ignorance, we collect new karma.

It's because of ignorance, okay. Abhidhyan. We don't understand.

And the Yoga Sutra says the same thing, okay. Abhidhyanmula karmāśyāya dūṣṭhā dūṣṭha janma vimanyā. Okay.

The root of everything is not understanding. Someone explains it to you carefully, you can get out. The Yoga Sutra says exactly the same thing, okay.

So part of our goal is just, this whole first two pages, just admit that everything is what Mother Sena says. We are born once again. Everything else begins again.

We begin to age again. And we die. And we live in misery.

We cry out in pain. We suffer. All this weeping in the mind, you see, mental sadness of this life.

This is his answer to the king, you know. And then he says you can't point to the beginning. This has been going on forever, you know.

And the king is just blown away. He's like halfway to Patna, right? Pataliput, whatever it is.

Patalipatana. He's like, that's why they shortened it to Patna. He's like halfway.

He's like halfway to Patna. And here's this guy. And he's saying, you've been here forever doing this.

You have lived over and over and over and over again in this kind of pain. Wake up. You know, wake up.

Then the king says, you are so cool. You know. The Sanskrit is like, it's hard to say.

It's like, kanyas means wow, that's cool, you know. Tell me more, you know. So you can feel the king is starting to get turned on, you know.

The king is starting to say, somebody finally told me the truth. Probably all the people in the court were telling him how handsome he is and how what a great warrior he is and how he needs another brand of spear, you know. And now one guy comes up and says, you're going to die.

And by the way, never sin has no root, you know. He like takes on the king. By the day third, you're going to see him telling the king, you're a liar.

You know, you're a liar. He tells the king to his faith. They were getting killed in the old days, you know.

And he's like, you know, he asked the king some counter questions. The king can't answer him very well. He says, you're a goddamn liar, you know.

And no, like, never sin is a tough guy. And here the king is like, man, finally someone's talking about something that means something, you know, about my death. Maybe I can change things.

Maybe pain can be stopped, okay. So that's Melinda. We're going to go to Christy.

All right. The people who were in the yoga class, how Geshe-la just dropped that thing on me that he was supposed to talk about. And now, you know, he did it again.

You just saw it. He does, I don't know. It's like he thinks I'll get, you know, too nervous if he tells me 15 minutes before.

So he tells me, like, right on the spot. And we'll see how I do. So, so fun.

I think he's enjoying it. So we went to England and memorized the parts of the Gospel of John, because this really kind Oxford minister, his name was John, and he loved the Gospel of John. And so, so we picked John first.

We were going to start with Matthew, but, you know, the gods told us otherwise. So here it is. This is the, this is the second verse we memorized from John.

The first, the first one here is, So I'm supposed to discuss some of these words, first of all. Kata is really interesting. It's, it sounds like Kata Ioannine.

Kata Ioannine. Kata Ioannine. And Ioannine is John in Greek.

And Kata, it, it means the way that John saw things, you know, the way John saw it. This is the story of Jesus according to, it's the according to John, you know. And this is really interesting because already in the Bible, we're getting references to emptiness.

We're getting references to the fact that there's four different guys telling this story, and all four of them are different, you know. And this is the one according to John. This is the version, this is John's version.

And John's version actually happens to be quite different than the other three versions. If you've ever studied the Bible, like, the last dying words of Jesus is totally different, you know. It's like, instead of Jesus saying, you know, I can't take this suffering, why did you do this to me?

You know, he's like, yeah, in Matthew, he's like, why have you forsaken me, God, you know. And then in John, that's just totally not there, you know. The last words of Jesus are just these beautiful, yeah, it's, go ahead.

Oh, it's like, whatever you want, you know. Yeah, it's like, oh, Father, I do exactly as you asked me to, you know. And these two guys were both there, you know.

And there we have, like, the basis of this whole religion founded on something that's, that has two totally different stories, you know, according to John. So that's kata. It comes into Sanskrit as kata.

And this is like, this comes into English, into Indo-European as kva. And then all the question words, like what and where, come into English from kata. How it was, according to, you know.

Then going to the verse, Gaganemnon. Gaganemnon here is born. And we see this part of the word in words like genesis or gene or something that comes into being.

And it comes into Sanskrit as jan, which literally means to be born. And pneuma here means spirit. And it comes from the Sanskrit word van, which means to blow.

So it's connected to things of the air. And we get words in English with that, that p-n-e-u start, you know, it's silent. But like pneumonia, which is a disease of the air in your body.

And pneumatic, like the pneumatic tube that they use in the New York library. They still use it. I'm so excited that they don't go computer on you, you know.

They still send the little request of your book down this little tube and down to the basement and get your book. And they, okay. It's exciting to me.

And the pneumatic hammers that they use to drill the streets. They use air, they use air to drill the concrete. This also comes into English in things like fan.

And by you in Sanskrit, which means wind. And nirvana, which has this reference of just blowing everything out, just blowing it out, you know. It's the big blowout.

So Geshe-la is going to talk a little about this verse. I'll just say a few words, then we'll stop, because I know it's getting late. So if we are a Judaic Christian culture, you know, forget what religion you are, it doesn't matter.

Your culture, American culture, and most of Western civilization, has grown up out of Jewish and Christian beliefs. And that's how our government works, that's how your personal values, your movies, your books, your own mind, reflects those ideals. Whether you accept those religions or not, whether you go to a church or a synagogue, it doesn't matter.

Your mind has been, what do you call that, Ted, in the computers, pre-wired, what's it called? Yeah, you're hardwired that way. You don't even realize it.

You see, it's so difficult to work with worldviews. It's so difficult to talk about worldviews. Because we're talking about something that's hardwired into your being.

Like you think you're some kind of reasonable, well-thought-out person. You just believe everything they fed you when you were a kid. You really do, 95% of what you think is important, or you think is good, is just what TV told you.

And you think not, you see, you think you're independent of that, but you are a product of that. So it's so hard to get out of yourself and look at yourself and say, I'm a person who believes in X and X and X, just because my mom told me that. Or Mrs. Melvin, do you know Mrs. Melvin? First grade teacher, Melvin Elementary School, Phoenix, Arizona. This big bun hairdo and the far side glasses. And then, if you're really strict in a Socratic sense, right, if you really investigate your own mind, all of your values come from what you were taught as a kid.

Like how you relate to this thing in Iran. Or Arabic thought, or Arabic people. That's all hardwired into you, you see.

They have a different belief system. They were taught by Mrs. Melvin Lasky or something. You know, L.

L. L. Melvin.

And they were taught different things, and they just believed that. So you think they're dumb because you were hardwired a different way. It's just worldviews, you see.

It's not inherent in you, and you can change it. You see, worldview, how you believe the world works. It is hardwired into you.

But if you're a really honest, hardworking, spiritually hardworking person, you can get outside of yourself and look at yourself and say, maybe I don't need to believe that. You know, maybe that could be different, you see. So really, there's this big struggle.

When one culture bumps into another culture. When Melinda bumps into Nagasena, there's this huge cultural bang. You know, like someone's got to give.

You know, like two ideas of how the world works are banging into each other. And then you get outside of yourself, you see. They say, I saw a Tibetan Lama yesterday on a film.

He said, the greatest thing that ever happened to Tibet was that the communist Chinese murdered all of our people. You know, one million people. And destroyed 5,000 monasteries.

Best thing that ever happened to us. No one would have ever heard of us. And the Dalai Lama says, I would have been isolated.

I would have been sitting in the Potala Palace, 15 floors off the ground. Nobody would ever see me. That's the best thing that ever happened to us, you see.

Because we got out and we banged into your culture, your civilization. And then this interchange takes place, you see. Only if they bang into each other can you have some exchange.

And then you get new ideas, you see. Ideas are more powerful than everything, you see. Bombs, nuclear weapons.

What do they call them now? There's a word. Since I was in retreat.

Mass destruction things, or whatever. That's a new catch word, right? That's nothing compared to ideas.

You see, tiny little idea can blow up 20 countries at once, you see. Little tiny ideas are much, much more powerful. So when the Greeks meet the Indians, when the Americans bump into Tibetans or Indian yogis, ideas get leaked.

There's leakage both ways, you see. And that's the cool thing. There's leakage that happens both ways.

So we're saying that if your culture is going to be healthy, if your civilization is going to be healthy, if a religion is going to be healthy, and if we're going to be healthy, we got to think about our death, you know. We got to face up to what's really important. So these are three quotations by Jesus.

We did an interesting thing. We went to this guy, you know. He started us out on...

Do you remember? Enarche entolago. He's like, in the beginning was the word.

I said, I don't want to know about it. I don't want to learn that. He said, I'm your teacher.

I said, no, we want to learn just what Jesus himself said. We don't want to hear what people stuck in later, you know. Just teach us the red print, you know.

And that's all you're going to see here, you know. This is stuff that Jesus himself said, and not what people added on or, you know, interpreted, right? So he said, look, there's body stuff and there's spiritual stuff, you know.

Your body's going to rot. You know, don't spend time on your body. You know, don't worry about 15 kinds of conditioner, you know.

It's not the point of your life. Your life is something more. Don't worry about your body.

Worry about your spirit, you know. And the second quotation says, and the word for meat here is really just food, okay. But in King James' time, food was called meat, okay.

Don't work so hard for stuff that's going to rot, you know. Don't work so, don't spend your whole life like sweating for a house that your kids are going to sell in six weeks. You know what I mean?

People need excuses to work like animals because people want to work like animals. So they say, why do you work 15 weeks a year and have 2 weeks off? In the diamond deal, they said, Moshe, that's a bad deal, you know.

What? You're going to give somebody 50 bucks and get 2 bucks back? It's just dumb, you know.

You're going to work 15 weeks, you're going to have 2 weeks off? It's dumb, you see. Well, I'm working for my kids.

I want to leave something for my kids. They're going to splurge it, come on. I did it too and you probably did it.

You know, my mom passed away, I had that money spent like nothing, you know. That's an excuse. You just don't want to face up that there's nothing else to do.

You see, if you work hard enough, you won't think about how useless things are. You see what I mean? People keep busy because they don't want to think about.

So Jesus is saying here, don't work for something that's just going to disappear in a few years. Work for the spiritual stuff. That stays, that stays, you see.

Stuff that you finish, stuff that you accomplish in your heart stays forever. And stuff that you accomplish with the house and money and cars and kids and all that, it doesn't stay. You will lose it.

You must lose it. Did anybody tell you that? No, you must lose everything you are working for.

You must. You know, the coolest thing you've done, your intelligence, your looks, your body, your strength, your ears, your eyes, your nose, your toes, you must lose them. You must lose them.

Wake up. Do something else. Work for something that means something, okay?

That's the second one. Third one. Wow, big mistake in...

Oh yeah, no. Yeah, if you get too attached to your life, you're just going to lose it. But if in this life you can just give up, on the real big things, right?

Okay, you should make money you shouldn't grub off of people. Have an honest livelihood that brings you in enough to live simply, quietly, modestly. You should do that.

You can't go out and meditate in the desert. We tried it. No, better have a nice comfortable apartment, a decent livelihood, honest, clean, doesn't hurt anybody, modest, home, good family if you want a family, everything nice, enough clothes, not too many pairs of shoes.

Just comfortable. You should have that. Yoga should have that in America.

Because then you can practice. Then you can do yoga, you can do your meditation happily. You feel good, you're not grubbing off anybody.

You should be like that. But, don't get attached to this life. Look for something bigger.

Look for something bigger, okay? Don't get attached to that. That's just the ship.

You got to get into the ship, get to the other side and dump the ship. Don't get attached to the boat, they say. Right?

So, yeah, you need a body. You can't do yoga without a body. You should do yoga.

It gets you into enlightenment faster. You need a body. A body is precious.

Take good care of it. Feed it wisely. Exercise it wisely.

Yogaize it wisely. With the idea that you're going to get out of it. You see what I mean?

You're going to change it into something else. As it is, it's a dead end. It's death.

This one will kill you. There's a joke in Tibet. It said, what kills...

What is it that kills a human being? Car accident? No.

Cancer? No. What is it?

You were born. You see? There's a joke like that.

All it takes to kill you is what your mom did to you. You see? It don't take a car.

It don't take cancer. Just popping out is what kills you. You see?

Once you popped out, you'll be killed. You must. You see?

Unless you do yoga to its ultimate meaning. Okay? So, there you are.

You have three... If you hate your life in this world, meaning, okay, I have my house. I have all that stuff.

I'm comfortable. But I'm not attached to it. I'm working for something higher.

I want to do something higher with my life. I believe there's something higher. Then you're going to get something that lasts forever.

He calls it life eternal. What's it called? Zoran Ionian, right?

Zoran Ionian. Life eternal. Yeah, yeah, I heard the life eternal thing.

I turned on the Christian TV all day. It's like, life eternal, you know? It's true.

Okay? It's true. There is such a thing.

You don't have to die like an animal. Okay? You don't have to live like that.

There is such a thing. They're right. Okay?

But you need the right method to get it. There is a method to get it. Jesus stands there and says...

Last thing, I promise, I'll let you go home. He stands there and says to them, There are those of you among us who will enter the kingdom of heaven before you die. You see?

You don't have to enter nirvana after you die. That's an old mistranslation of the text. Okay?

You can enter nirvana tonight. You can enter paradise tonight. If you practice properly, according to the instructions, and yoga is a big part of the advanced stage, if you do everything right, just calmly, gently, quietly, every day, do it right, you can enter what he calls life eternal.

There is such a thing. There is such a thing. And the instructions are very clear, and you can do it.

Okay? So... So that's all.

The first of the three paths. Just wake up. Don't let your culture brainwash you into thinking that there's something here.

There's not anything here. Okay? It doesn't matter how good your food is, or how good your car is, or what kind of hairspray you use.

It doesn't matter. Get on to something more enlightened. Okay?

You were meant for more. And don't let your culture sell you something less. Okay?

And whatever your religion is, it should have that teaching inside of it, or else that religion will die. You see? And that country will die.

Okay? And that civilization will die. And that planet will die.

Without this knowledge. You will live in a dying place. And I think you have to think about it.

Who made it, by the way? Who made the world this way? We did.

Okay? You've got to remember that. Okay?

Why is nobody talking about important stuff nowadays? Because I made bad karma. Each one of us.

Okay? Why is it that there's 463 kinds of conditioner in the grocery store at Safeway? You know?

And there's not one mention of death in a whole week. You know? Why?

Why is that? We created it. We created it.

Okay? So don't go pointing fingers at any religions or or anything like that. We created.

Karma. Right? We wasted time.

We wasted time on things that didn't mean anything. We bought into it. We sucked into it.

And then it comes back out. Karma comes back out. And then you live in a world where there's 463 kinds of conditioner and no one ever mentioned that you could get out of dying.

In a reasonable way. You know? Nobody ever spoke to you in a convincing way that you didn't have to die, that cancer doesn't have to exist.

Right? We created that. Okay?

So that's the first part. We'll do a little prayer. This is good karma.

Okay? Just to mention the word death. Out in the open.

And then to say, you don't have to do that. It's a mistake. It's a booboo.

You don't have to die like that. You don't have to get cancer. You don't have to get old.

Just to hear somebody say that, he's some cuckoo guy. It's okay. Just to hear somebody say that is really good karma.

So we're gonna give it away. Why? Best way to keep it.

Okay? Okay, here we go.

[Говорящий 2]
Before we give away the good karma, we have a tradition where we thank the teachers for these holy teachings. And we offer a mandala. And some of you know how to do that with your hands.

If you do, make the mudra or place your hands in front of you. But most importantly, it's what you think when you do this thing. So try to think about something really beautiful that you've experienced in your life.

The most beautiful thing. Maybe it was a sunset or the moment you saw your child for the first time or your loved one. The moment that you met your teacher.

And just offer that up as thanks for this holy teaching. And we'll say the Tibetan short prayer. Sashi Pukhi Jokshin Mekto Tram Rirab Lingshin Nyende Genpadi Sangye Shindu Mikte Uwarki Drogun Nam Dakshin Latu Parshok And then we'll Idam Gurudatma Mandala Kamyata Yami And now we're going to give away the karma.

So think of some special purpose, some holy purpose to give the karma to. Let's give the karma away to this holy place. May this holy place stay here forever and continue to bring these teachings.