Живой ламрим: как жизнь Кхена Ринпоче отразила учение о ступенях пути (2005, Аризона), занятие 5

[Говорящий 1]
We didn't decide a name for the book yet, right? It's Living Lamrim or something, or Lama, I don't know. But you know, how did Rinpoche walk and talk to Lamrim, right?

What section are we on? I'll tell you what we finished. You tell me what we finished.

The first one we finished was how to think about your Lama. Then we finished how to serve your Lama. Then we finished...

what was that? Yeah, yeah. How to use...

Leveraging your resources. Really, when I thought about it, nyingpo lempa, the Tibetan word, which is... people say get the essence, but really it's take advantage of what you got.

No matter what you got. Maybe you're not gifted, endowed so much when you're born, but whatever you're endowed with, you use the most... you get the most out of it.

That's nyingpo lempa. Fourth one? Death meditation.

So we finished those. What's the next one? And here it becomes logical, you know, like if I die...

Yeah, there's two ways to go. And then you discuss the Three Lower Realms, usually. Ngen tsong sum kyi dungyel sangpa, something like that.

Thinking about the suffering of the Three Lower Realms. How do you judge a person's... Some of them are going to be hard, right?

But I was really thinking about it. It was a really unique opportunity for me. Like I'm 20 years old or 19 years old, and I'm coming from a culture which does not believe in the Three Lower Realms, right?

And then I run into a man who totally believes in the Three Lower Realms. So it's like an iceberg hitting the... It's like it's two continents smashing together.

We talked about it in the Melinda teachings, like the Greeks hitting the Indians. It's like two cultures just smashing into each other. And it didn't feel like that at the time.

But how many... I mean, how often do you live with someone for 20 years who just totally believes in a totally different system, you know? Like totally believes in the Three Lower Realms.

And then you were brought up to think like it was just some kind of superstition or something. We studied Dante in high school because it was written well, not because anyone believed it. And Casper the Ghost was on TV.

And if you talked about ghosts, they made fun of you. They said, oh, you think Casper's here or something? So I grew up from that culture.

And then you go and live in a house with somebody for many years who totally believes in those things. So I wanted to... And we might lose those things, you see, as Americans we will make a very rational, logical Buddhism.

That's what I've been doing. And then when you get to stuff like hell or spirit beings, I think there's a chance of losing those things. We don't talk about them much.

So I wanted to talk about how Rinpoche, what it was like to live with a person. And I thought I'd go by realm, okay? And I like stories.

I think you remember people by stories, right? So here's the story about the hell realms. We used to go down to Washington once a month, except in the deep of winter.

And he did that for 10 or 15 years. And he taught Pabongka Rinpoche's Lam Rim. And then he taught Tantra.

And he took them very slowly through the whole thing. It took 15, 20 years total. And he repeated it in hell.

So I got to hear everything twice. It was really good. Because I was just his driver.

So we would drive down. Normally we'd stay at Dr. Taylor's at the beginning, and then later at Peg Brenner's house. Except there was this one lady.

She was a countess, okay? And I can't tell you her whole name. Some names I won't tell you the whole names, okay?

And she was a countess from Europe or something. And so she got very interested in Rinpoche's teachings. And she said, can you come to my house and do the teaching in my house this time?

And she lived in this shishi place out in Virginia. And we went there. And we got there.

And this is another lesson. I mean, she greeted Rinpoche at the door. And she said, I want to give you the house.

Rinpoche looks around, this house, beautiful house. And he looks at her and he says, no, you keep it. Thanks anyway, but you keep it.

And later we're in the car and I'm like, Rinpoche, we don't even have a car. You just turned down this house. And he says, she wasn't ready to give me the house.

She would regret it later. She's epsa sapo. Say epsa sapo?

Sometimes they call angsa sapo. It means, what do you call it? First blush?

Or, you know, like you first meet the Dharma and you get all excited and then you give away your house and then six months later you're like, what did I do, you know? And then the regret is a very bad deed. So he said, she might regret it later.

So we shouldn't accept it. We should just tell her, you keep it. And I thought that was very beautiful.

He didn't hesitate. And we didn't have... The car blew up like the next month.

Burst into flames on the turnpike. It was 200,000 miles on it. But anyway, so we sat down and he was preparing people for tantra.

And he said, I decided you're at a level now where you can start doing the tantric vows. I'm going to start teaching the tantric vows tonight. So he got all his papers ready and the countess lady raised her hand again and he said, yes.

And she said, I heard that these are vajra vows, right? He said, yeah, yeah. And she said, I heard this thing that if you break them you'll go to vajra hell.

And he just didn't hesitate. He said, everyone's going to hell anyway. He just looked at her in the eye.

He didn't even hesitate. He just said, no, you're all going to hell. Everyone's going to hell.

And she's like this and we're all like that. And he said, yeah, everyone's misbehaving. Everyone's hurting everyone.

Look at the world. Everyone's going to hell. But you, if you take tantric vows and then you break them, you'll go to hell.

And when you meet the other hell beings you can say, I'm not here because I killed people or committed adultery. I'm here because I broke my tantric vows. And you can be proud of yourself.

You're not like this other schmucks in hell. And he was very serious. He was like, we were all like, the room got very quiet.

He's going to laugh now or he's going to say something else now. And then he just went into it. He just started teaching them.

And he took it very, you know, he believes in the hells. Anyway, you can chew on that one. Then he, about pretas and local spirits.

And I think it's of great interest to a lot of our friends here, especially native people. How do we think about local spirits or tree spirits, place spirits? And there were a couple of cultural smashes.

One day I was complaining. I came from Arizona. I'd lived in San Diego.

I wanted to live and surf in, what's that place just above San Diego? Del Mar. It was my dream.

Then I met Rinpoche in New Jersey, the armpit of the nation. They call it that. If you had to pick the one worst place, the worst place to go to, he has to live in New Jersey, right?

So anyway, I'm sitting there in New Jersey and I'm complaining. I said, we were just sitting across each other like 1976 or something. And I can't believe it's raining again.

It's just so gloomy here. It just rains every day. You never see the sun.

He says, be quiet. Don't say that. And I'm like, yeah, Rinpoche.

No, no, don't say that. The sub-doc will hear you. And I'm like, what's a sub-doc?

And he says, you don't know about sub-docs? No, I don't know about sub-docs. And sub-doc is sa.

Sa means place, like rasa. And then doc, which starts with a ba, right? Ba-doc means self, right?

Like dokya, dogma. But it also means owner or lord. So sub-doc is the local spirit.

Like there'll be a primary worldly spirit in a certain location. And they're sort of like the honcho spirit over that acreage, right? And then they pretty much take care of the weather there.

They can make it rain. And he said, you can't get on their bedside. You don't complain out loud about the weather.

So the Tibetans' relationship with those spirits was, you have to understand, it's not a worshipping them. It's a staying in harmony with them, right? It's respecting them.

So we believe that they are not divine. They're not enlightened. But they are very powerful.

And they're very mercurial, like in the Greek gods. Like if they get in a bad mood, it's going to rain for three weeks. You know what I mean?

Like that. We saw it on the hike up the mountain, right? Yeah, like we weren't very respectful to the sub-dog.

And we got the worst windstorm, the worst rain that I've ever seen here. I had to crawl on all fours up most of that trip. It ripped my clothes off.

And it was like wild. And it hadn't rained for weeks, months. But anyway, so it's this thing where you, you have to stay in harmony with the local spirits.

And there are local spirits. And they're closely related to death spirits, people who died and haven't found their rebirth yet, or people who died and are still attached to this property. There was a lot of violence on this property between the native people and the military, U.S. military. So there are lots of spirits here. And Rinpoche was very mindful that there would be spirits in places. And then he would go out of his way to respect them and honor them.

He would always make the proper sub-dog dharma when he did a retreat. It's one of the three dharmas or four dharmas that you make for a lay-rung. And then he would always make sure that we took out the offerings carefully during Tse-Chu and took it seriously.

And he was very upset if we didn't put the dharmas... We had to make them right. It takes eight, ten hours to make them right.

And they had to be made right. And if they weren't made right, he would break them apart and start them over again. And I think Ura-la one day put the...

She asked me how to put the lightning thing. And I said, do it like this. And then Rinpoche came down and I...

No good, you know, redo it. And, you know, it's... He took it very seriously and he really...

You see, he really, really believed in the pretas and the sub-dogs and the local spirits, yidaks, right? When I first got to Hao, there were about ten karmic monks there. And there was one main one was named Ngawang Yambel.

And he was called... The Mongolians call him Haramba because he was like from Kalmykia, which is like near the Black Sea. It's like one little outpost of Mongolians that got left behind in the 13th century when the rest of everybody else went home.

So it's like coming from, I don't know, some Portuguese settlement in Africa or something and going to Harvard and then becoming head of your class or something. So he walked over Siberia, then came down to the Gobi Desert on camel and got the Hasa and got a Haramba degree. You know.

And then when the Chinese attacked, he came out to India and then came to Hao. And so he was special and he was blind when I lived with him. And he was such a great scholar and he got cataracts.

And then they operated and they told him leave the bandages on for two days. But he was impatient to read his books, so he took them off. And then it blinded him.

And so I stayed with him. And so he would come over to the temple and they would have prayers three or four times a month on the holy days. And then I would clean up afterwards and I complained to Rinpoche.

I said, these karmic, the other karmic monks were all like, I don't know how to say, rustics. Never heard of a big monastery. You know what I mean?

Wore their robes a little weird, couldn't read and write, you know, some of them. And they had a belief that you shouldn't take a bath in the winter. You shouldn't bathe until spring.

So it was pretty hard. And a lot of things like that, a lot of local superstitions. And then I was complaining one day, Rinpoche, every time when they come for tsok and we give them a meal afterwards, they leave this garbage all over the floor.

And he says, what do you mean garbage? And I said, I don't know. They take the bread and they make little things and they just dump it, you know.

He says, what little things? I said, it looks like you took bread in your hand, squashed it, and then dropped it. He said, that's not little things.

That's a preta offering, you know. And that's very important. And you shouldn't just throw those in the garbage.

You're so stupid, you know. And don't they teach you anything in this country? No, and he's like, of course you offer to the pretas after the meal.

Don't you know anything, you know? And these are preta offerings. These are for the spirits, you know.

And you squish it a certain way. You take the last part of your meal, like a roll, and you squish it up and then you crunch it in your hand. And then when you drop it, it looks a little like a spine, you know.

And then each indentation and each bump is an offering to a different preta, like nine different... There's a lady preta who had too many kids, like the old lady in the shoe. And then she had eight or nine kids, and no matter how much she fed them, she can't make them full, right?

And so, still in honor of this preta who Lord Buddha helped, her and her children, we still offer this thing, and you have to do that. And I was like... And I'd been desecrating these things, and I didn't know anything.

And it was all very normal for them. It was like part of life. There are spirits everywhere.

They're not like enlightened beings. You don't worship them, but you honor them and you respect them, and you must live in harmony with them or they can make your life miserable, like get you sick when you don't want to be sick and stuff like that. So, you know, and that, especially when you finish your meal, Rinpoche would always leave the last couple bites.

And then you... There's this thing. You do this mentally.

You drop the last piece, you know? Like we eat a piece of toast, and then Kristi drops the last piece on the plate, and it goes thunk on the plate. And then at that moment, you have to think the pretas are...

You offered it to the pretas. And then sometimes, if you're in the right mood, you can feel this huge rush to the... Thousands of beings rushing to get this essence of the...

Because they can. If you have a certain intention, and for a few seconds, in their whole lives, you know, they can suck some kind of essence out of the last piece of toast, the last little bite of toast. And, you know, if you're in a really good mood, sensitive mood, you can feel this huge rush of spirits towards this little piece of food, you know?

And they get... They suck some kind of essence out of it, you know? And then it's done, and then you throw it out, you know?

Like that. So anyway, it was very much... Those two lower realms, which we cannot see, Rinpoche very much believed in them.

And it was a big part of his life to take care of those beings. Animal realm, you can see. And there's a lot of nice stories about Rinpoche and animals.

I think... I mean, the one that impresses me a lot is there was another Geshe among the Mongolians. He was from Inner Mongolia, and he was very kind.

His name was Ngawang Kelnden. And he had been in the refugee camp at Baxa when they escaped from Tibet. They came to India.

And, I don't know, half of them got tuberculosis. He got tuberculosis. The Indian doctors would come in, strap him down to a table, cut out their lung, sew him up, send him back to the camp, you know?

And that happened to him. So, he always walked like this. And he taught me Abhidharma for a while.

And so, how to say? He gave me a radio one day, but it had been in his house for a long time. And so it was all packed full of roaches, and we didn't know it.

So I plugged it in. They were all warm. And then slowly they came out, and they spread all over the house.

And Rinpoche likes a nice neat house, right? So here are these roaches everywhere. And so, you know this story.

Most of you know. But I think it's worth it to record it somewhere. So what did he do about the roaches, right?

He noticed that they liked the dog food at night. You'd come in around midnight and turn on the light, and there'd be a hundred of them around the dog bowl, the dogs' leftovers. So he got this idea, and he would get a big clear trash bag and set it in the middle of the room.

And then when he was ready to go to bed, he'd set the dog bowl in the middle of the trash bag. And then he'd go to bed, and he'd set the alarm for two o'clock. And then he would wake up.

And he would have things put pressure on me, like, you're the chela, you should be doing this. And I'd be like, I've got to get up at six and go to work. I'm not going to...

It's too much. So he would come down every night, I think for about eight months or maybe a year. And at 2 a.m. he would get up, come down the stairs, turn on the light, run to the bag, pull out the bowl, and tie up all the roaches. And then take them outside carefully and let them go. The weird thing is that after about eight months, they were all gone, and they never ever came back. Like, people could walk in from New York with a suitcase full of roaches, and they just wouldn't want to stay there.

They would just go. And he never ever had them again. It was really interesting.

And one day, I remember, he left the bag out. Could I take the bag out? And I'm like, 6 a.m. I've got to go to New York for my job. Okay, I'll take the bag out. And I just let them go somewhere. And I came back in and he said, where did you let them go?

And I said, just over there, near the driveway. He said, that's crazy. It's cold outside.

Don't you know anything? He's really angry. He said, I always let them go on the chicken manure.

You have a big heap of chicken manure because it's hot, and they won't die. I said, what's the use of catching them if you take them out and dump them in the snow? Come out.

He drags me outside. He said, look at them. And they're like, no, they can't move.

They're dying. And he's like, you can't do that. You're just killing them.

So he had this very compassionate, even towards the animals, you see. And he had a squirrel that followed him around. He'd go outside, go to the temple every day.

And then the squirrel would bang on the door. It was very funny. Actually, like bang on the door.

And then he'd come out and give them some nuts. And, you know, like that. Then the birds there, the Mongolians would bring us borsig.

Do you know borsig? Borsig is like, this is how you make borsig. You take axle grease, and you put it in a pot, you know.

Then you take 14 pounds of butter or something, and all the white, like enriched, useless flour you can find, and you make huge balls out, and you throw it in the motor oil, and then you cook it for like four hours, you know. And then you eat like 12 of these things in one day. And you can't move, you know.

And it's very unhealthy. It's a lot... But anyway, they would offer us big bags of them, and then at night we would like take them out and throw them out for the birds, you know.

So, remember she was like, where did you put the borsig tonight? And I said, well, I threw it out in the back, you know. And he's like, well, did you cut it up?

I said, what do you mean, cut it up? He said, you have to mince it with the cleaver, you know. He taught me to use this cleaver with your eyes closed.

You just close your eyes, and you put your knuckles like that. And I said, what do you mean? He said, birds don't have teeth.

You're so stupid, you know. What do you expect? How are they going to eat the borsig?

You know, they don't have any teeth. Look at a bird. They don't have any teeth, you know.

It has to be broken up into this big and not bigger, or they can't eat it. They can't enjoy it. They just sit there pecking at it like they're all frustrated, you know.

So I had to sit there like hour after hour, you know, mincing the borsig, you know. Then he would come down and check if it was too big, you know. You know, because he loved the birds.

He said, this is very good for their fur. The oil is really good in the winter, because it keeps them waterproof, right? So he was adamant that it had to be there.

So he cared about the animals. The last thing is his dogs, you know. I want to say one thing about dogs.

There's three levels of monastic life, okay? One is called tsuklakang. Say tsuklakang.

Tsuklak is an ancient word for a book. And tsuklakang used to mean a temple where books were stored, like tsuklakang. Like in Dharamsala, there's a tsuklakang, if those of you have been in Dharamsala.

And so, tsuklakang is first-level Buddhist practice. It means a public temple, for the general public. So people come there, and it can be, normally it's in a city or a town.

And then you can come, and you know, in Lhasa it's the jokhang. It's the central temple of the city. In Sara, it's the temple in Belakopi, or Kushalnagar.

There are some prayer wheels there. It's where the lay people go, family people, business people who have other things, big families. Anybody can go.

You do prostrations. Sometimes the Dalai Lama will come and give a talk. In Dharamsala, it's the tsuklakang, right?

And that's what Rashi Gampaling is. That's a layman's temple. And they have a parish priest there, which is what Rinpoche's, what his assignment was from the Dalai Lama.

And then there's no rules about having animals or plants there, or things like that. So Rinpoche had a garden and dogs. Then there's a gunpa, say gunpa, which is mispronounced gunpa, and people think it's a temple, but it's not a temple.

Gunpa means, it's defined in the Vinaya, it's 500 gyan talks. It has to be dom, dom ngap gya. I think it's 500, dom means an arm span, a fathom.

And it has to be at least 500 fathoms from the nearest town. And in fact, we got the tax exemption at Godstow by quoting this to the township. We translated it, we wrote it out, we had it sealed by the Library of Congress.

We can't, we have to maintain this property here. It has to be integral. So that's a gunpa.

And a gunpa is like Sara Monastery in India, which is outside of the nearest town by about 500 doms or more. In fact, a great monastery is the one which is the farthest from a major city. It's called a great monastery, even if it only has 50 people.

You see? And then a minor monastery is one which has gotten too close to a town. So we're a great monastery, okay?

No, we are a gunpa. This is a gunpa. And that was the whole intent.

And in a gunpa like Sara Monastery in Tibet, you're not allowed to keep any animals at all. For three reasons. One, it makes noise and disturbs other meditators, other people practicing.

Secondly, it's kind of, it's unclean and it hurts the local wildlife. Like if it's a dog, it might hurt the local animals. If it's a cat, it might kill the local birds, like that.

And then thirdly, it would draw your attention. And someone else would have to take care of it when you're not there. You see what I mean?

And then you spread your, you're distracting someone else when you're out of town and like that. It's very strict. Rinpoche had an, he was very proud that he had a miksel.

Say miksel? Miksel means an exception from the monastic authorities. He had a miksel in Sara Monastery to have one potted flower.

You see? And he was very proud of it for his whole life. He said, I got a miksel for a potted flower.

Because they consider a flower the same thing. Somebody's going to have to take care of it if you're not there. You're going to be distracted.

If you suddenly go into meditation on emptiness for three days, you're going to worry if somebody's going to water your flower. You see what I mean? It's very strict.

So he was very proud that he had had a, and when he got to Hao and he was back to Atsiklokung, he was really happy because he likes gardening, you know, and he likes dogs. So anyway. Then there's ritu.

Say ritu? That's that rolled R. You want to do this one?

Ritu. Okay. Ritu means mountain.

Ritu means up in the mountains. And that's a hermitage. Ritu.

And that's third level. That's meditation. Absolutely no distractions.

Like minimum what you need to eat, minimum what you need to drink. No other stuff in the house. No reading materials.

No. It was like the three-year retreat. Absolutely nothing.

I made them throw out everything they owned before. They're still crying to me about it. I had this photo.

Don't tell me about this photo. That's the whole point. You don't have anything that's not totally, immediately needed for your, to sustain your body while you're in meditation.

So anyway. When he got to Rasagampaling, remember he had a student named Bill Lavery, who's a great man. He helped invent Telstar, which is the first satellite.

So he was like a rocket engineer. Literally. And he was a very funny guy.

He actually sponsored Rinpoche to learn English at, what do you call that place? Georgetown University. And he was very generous to Rinpoche when nobody knew Rinpoche.

It was just Rinpoche and like three students or something. And so he got assigned to a secret military base in Australia, which is TRWs. I'm not allowed to say.

And he couldn't have a dog there. So he had this little Scottish terrier named Muffin. And he said, Rinpoche, will you keep this for like six weeks?

I'll be back. And so Rinpoche said, yeah, yeah, I'll keep it for six weeks. And then he didn't come back for 12 years.

We got these letters. I can't tell you where I am. Like I don't know if the Australian government knew that they were there.

It was really weird. And they were tracking their satellites and stuff. And then one day we got this envelope and there were photos.

The first photo is Khalsa from three miles up. The next photo is Serra Monastery. The next photo is Rinpoche's house at Serra Monastery, the backyard.

And it's just, thought you'd like it, Bill, don't show it to anybody. Like he had been controlling the satellite and it was really cute. And this dog had a weird thing.

She was a very beautiful dog, very nice dog. But whenever it rained and there was thunder and lightning, she would just get terrorized. And Rinpoche would, she'd run under Rinpoche's bed.

And then Rinpoche would crawl under the bed and take her in his arms and bring her up on the bed and calm her down. And he said, you know why she's afraid? And I said, no.

And he said, she was killed by lightning her last night. So someone who really believes that the dog was a person, you see. And then she got really old.

And even in my family, we had a dog my whole childhood, the fifth brother, right? And named and Big Basset Hound, like really funny. And he got really, really, really old.

And then tumors everywhere. And then we went off to college and my mom quietly put him to sleep. This is something moms have to do, right?

And didn't want to. But when Rinpoche heard about this custom, he's like, no, no, totally wrong. You have to serve them until they breathe their last breath.

These are living beings. You can't kill them. And so with Muffin, she couldn't walk after a point.

Then she became incontinent. She would just pee anywhere or poop anywhere in the house. And he would just very patiently clean up.

And then he would bathe her every day. And then she lost all her hair and she got ugly. And he would still bathe her.

And then one day he was bathing her and she passed away in his arms. And he was very distraught. Then he took and buried her very nicely.

He was very proud. He would go out and put flowers on the grave. But he just felt this way about even animals, you see.

And then he had his three domas, right? Succession of Lhasa Apsos. And I think the second one got the same way.

By that time, Jampa was with us. Then Rinpoche would sit there combing this dog for an hour, getting every knot out of her hair. And then Jampa would bring up some food.

Jampa would cook a chicken for her. And Rinpoche said, No, no, too hard. Go back.

Take it back. Make it softer. And then he'd come up and then he'd say, Her teeth are getting bad, Jampa.

What's wrong with you? Serve her. Serve her.

Pick the chicken off the thing. Break it into little pieces for her. So it's like 45 minutes breaking the chicken off the thing and handing it to Doma, who's getting old.

And I'm going crazy. I need 15 minutes for ACIP. I can't do this for an hour and a half.

One dog. One day I just couldn't stand it anymore. And I'm like, Rinpoche, what's the thing?

How can you spend this much time on one dog? And he says, This was my mother in Tibet. She died.

This is my mother. This dog is my mother. You don't know.

So he recognized her as his mother from Tibet. So he had this vision of creatures that we just don't have. Creatures that you can't see, like spirits.

And then creatures that you can see, he just totally saw them in a different way. He had a different knowledge that they had been human. Maybe somebody we know.

Totally different relationship with animals. So that was his meditation on three lower realms. Like that.

Not more than that. I mean sometimes, but not much more than that.