Живой ламрим: как жизнь Кхена Ринпоче отразила учение о ступенях пути (2005, Аризона), занятие 14

[Говорящий 1]
We were talking about Ken Rinpoche's life and how he, how do you say, lived the Lamrim, right? And we were halfway through, we were part way through his practice of the first perfection of giving and that he gave the Dharma, you know, highest practice of giving. And then I thought it was good to talk about what he taught in each of the great subjects and then there was an underlying teaching going on.

You know, there was a technical teaching, passing on of data, information and then there was deeper levels of teaching going on. So there's two more things that, two more subjects that he taught. We finished the five great books and he taught also Lamrim.

And in the monastery you don't study Lamrim, you study the five great books and that's where the Lamrim comes from. But sometimes great lamas come, like His Holiness will come or Sri Jaya Rinpoche used to come and his teacher and they would teach the Lamrim. And then it's sort of like a holiday or it's like a break.

So you don't have classes for two weeks and they'll go through a whole Lamrim. But Rinpoche felt that it was very important for Westerners to learn Lamrim also. So he taught a lot of different Lamrims.

He taught, Arya Nagarjuna wrote a book called Surlekha-sitting, the letter to a friend, which is a letter from Nagarjuna to a king advising him about how to live his life and how to rule his kingdom. And this is basically, if you study it, it's like a very ancient type of Lamrim. So he taught that and then he and Art Engle translated it together.

And I came after that, but I got to work on editing it for two or three years. So that was the first one that I was exposed to. Then he taught Lamrim Sarsunma, which means essence of refined gold.

And this is by a Mongolian Lama. And this is a short Lamrim and it was a very good introduction to Lamrim, a very basic one. And we translated that and he donated the book to the Library of Tibetan Dharamsala.

Then he taught Lamrim Duden and a text called Lamrim Ding, Parts of Lamrim Chemo. These are three varying lengths of Lamrim by Jetson Kappa. And then Jetson Kappa's Nyamgur, which is like his song of my spiritual life or something like that.

So he taught all those Lamrims, but the main Lamrim that he was interested in was A Gift of Liberation, Liberation in the Palm of Your Hands by Pabongka Rinpoche, who had been his teacher in Lhasa. That Lamrim was so powerful. It was given in 1921, I believe.

It was so powerful. It was a series of lectures. And it was so powerful that it was an immediate hit.

People carved it right away. It was edited. His disciple, Sri Jaya Rinpoche, edited it.

He did an unbelievable job. It's perfect. I mean, it's just the perfect work.

People ask me what's the greatest book in Tibet. I think that. I think it's the greatest book ever written, maybe.

But it's just an amazing, beautiful, perfect Lamrim. And Sri Jaya Rinpoche was a consummate writer, poet. Composition, grammar was perfect.

So he worked on it for years. His teacher's lectures. It's a lecture.

It's lecture notes. It's just extraordinary. So Ken Rinpoche taught that.

He taught the whole thing twice in New Jersey, and he taught it once in Washington. It took about ten years each round. And I was fortunate enough, because I was his driver, so I got to hear both of them.

And it was just unbelievable, you know. And what I learned from that was he was teaching that Lamrim from having heard it from that Lama. You see, he was there.

He was there, not when that one was taught, but the next... Pabongka Rinpoche did another round of the same Lamrim later at Sara. And Rinpoche was there.

And so he heard the whole cycle from Pabongka Rinpoche. And you just got this... And whenever he taught that Lamrim, it wasn't a book anymore.

It was this blessing being carried on from century to century by living people. They're called shashe. You know, heard from the mouth of your teacher, right?

And it was this beautiful experience. Like, he wouldn't look at the book much. He'd just look and see what subject it was, and then he would, you know...

He knew what the book said, because his teachers had written it, right? And he had this... You had this sense that you were in the room with Pabongka Rinpoche, giving the teaching, you know?

So, I think what I realized from the Lamrim was the power of the oral tradition. You know, the power of the Lama's blessing. And how books are...

Books in Tibet are almost like a vehicle. They're just an excuse for the Lama to pass on. They're an outline.

And they might look at it, and they might not look at it, but an excuse to pour into you the blessing that's been poured into them. And it's just a vehicle. It's just like pancakes are for butter.

[Говорящий 2]
You know what I mean?

[Говорящий 1]
And... So, that's why we're late, and I'm sorry. We were kidnapped by Earl Burney's pancake makers in Buri.

You know, forced to eat a pile of pancakes for the youth center. And thank you for doing that. It's very beautiful.

It looked really fun. It looked good. So, that was Lamrim.

And that was the thing. It just felt like you were with Pabongka Rinpoche and getting this blessing. And he didn't think it was weird to go through it three times over a 25-year period, you know?

And it was just part of our life that every Sunday we would get this, you know? Then, the last subject he taught us was tantra, secret teachings. And he didn't do it easily.

He was very slow in doing it. First, he taught us jorca. Jorca is like the preliminary practices, like cleaning your room, etc.

But he took a long time to teach that. That was the first thing he taught as a preparation for tantra. So, that took, I think, two years.

And then he gave us initiations, and we didn't know what was going on. Like, he took us into this room and he gave us initiation. And I told you, like, we went...

There were some students there from other states. We had rented a YMCA camp for them to stay in. And it was like 45 minutes away under the Jersey State...

What's it called? Parkway? The Parkway.

The Garden State Parkway, yeah. It was like under and over. It was really weird.

And with a lake and forest and everything. And we went out there and we all sat around and said, what happened? What did he do?

And I remember that the dawn came up over the lake and we were still sitting there trying to figure out what the heck did... What happened? What did he say?

And all night we were just like trying to figure out what happened. What did he teach us? And then I thought to go on to the other perfections.

And then I actually thought we'll try to finish Rinpoche's Lamrim life by the end of this course. And then people are going to work on, I think, Betts and Alistair. Jim Day's been helping and Chinzon.

But we're going to make a little book, I think, out of the Dalam and Rinpoche's stuff and then the poetry of the First Panchen Lama. So they're going to make it into a coherent... Maybe throw out 60%, 70%, okay?

Simplicity is better. But I'll have to talk for two hours. So anyway, the next thing...

I was thinking about his practice of ethics, right? Morality. Which is the next perfection.

And I have stories. These are funny stories. I don't remember what stories I told him and what I didn't.

So you just be polite and listen, okay? So as far as morality, I was thinking about stealing and sexual misconduct. Stealing...

We had this thing where we didn't have much support, financial support. I mean, the temple in New Jersey is a lot like any typical small Christian church somewhere in a neighborhood, where the young people are not staying there anymore. It's an ethnic neighborhood.

It's a Mongolian neighborhood. And then the kids get 16 and they move away now. They don't hang around.

So then the population is getting older and older. I mean, the average age when I was there was 80 or something, you know, of the congregation. And so, you know, when I first got there, they had a custom of...

which came from Mongolia, where one family would feed the monks one day of the month. So somebody would say, I'm taking the twelfth of the month. So every twelfth of the month, they would come with a big meal and feed the monks.

Like Vietnamese do this and Burmese do this. It was a good custom, you know, like maybe most of the month was covered. Then, you know, by the time I'd been there 10, 15 years, they were all dead.

And we only got two meals a month or something like that. And there was no support for the monks, for the sangha. But people would come into the temple and leave money on the altar, right?

So that's a custom. And so people would leave a dime or five cents, you know, like this. And then Rinpoche would...

This is his level of integrity, right? He would carefully, like, every penny, he would put it in this big box, this big wooden box in the temple, you know. And he would lock it very carefully and he would keep it all very carefully.

And then he would fill up mostly pennies, okay? A few dollar bills, you know. So then, I don't know, I started working at $7 an hour or something.

By the end, I was making $300 an hour, something like that. And so at the end, he would still bring out this box of pennies, right? And he'd bring it into the kitchen.

And he'd say, okay, we've got to count it, you know. And I'm like, Rinpoche, it's going to take me two, three hours to count that. He said, yeah, I know.

I could make a thousand bucks for you in the meantime. You know, just let me go to New York for the day. And he's like, no, no.

This is dollar money. We have to count it, you know, this has to be counted properly, you know. So he dumped this box out on the kitchen table.

And I don't know if you ever... It was this huge pile of pennies, you know. And he'd just sit there all day counting pennies and put them into these rolls, you know.

And at the end of the day, you've got this huge stack of rolls. It's like $16, you know. And it was like that.

And then, Tibetans believe that the patina on coins is poisonous. They think it's toxic to touch money, even bills. Or they believe there's something toxic about it.

So we had to go through this big detox thing. And, you know, we had to wash our hands and do a ritual and get... I don't know if it's the karma many people touching it.

I don't know what it is. But it's something... You know, it was very dangerous.

And then you had to go wash yourself properly. And then we had to fill out in triplicate the $16.38. And then we had to call it... I had to walk to the temple treasurer with this big jola full of pennies and present it to him.

And then he had to sign. And then the president had to sign. And that was Rinpoche's thing.

And he didn't have any money. He's taking care of this whole place. And he never took a penny.

You see what I mean? He never took a single penny from the temple. So that's like his level of integrity.

But it's not about... I was thinking about... Oh!

Sexual misconduct. There's a story. We had driven to Jaipur for the winter debates or something.

And he got that right neck thing. He fell asleep in the car. It's a 12-hour...

It's a very frightening drive. You see lots of people die on the road. Indian roads are like crazy.

There's no lines. It's only wide enough for a car and a half. These huge buses come and run head-to-head.

And you see like 50 people die. And all kinds of animals are on the road. Cows, chickens, pigs.

People are going 60 miles an hour. And it's just... He's just asleep through the whole thing.

But he got this neck problem. And then we were trying to fix it. And one of my students from New York, I don't know, Janet Diamond?

She was like this professional masseuse. Like worked at the Sheraton Hotel or something like that. So she offered to come down and work on his neck.

So it was on a Sunday before class. And she said, I'll come like 15 minutes early. We'll do Rinpoche's neck.

So she came with this table, this collapsible table. And she set it all up in his room. And he said, he told me, you have to stay here.

She can't work on me without a monk present. So she said, well you have to take your top off. So he lays down on the table.

And then she starts to work on him. I've never seen him out of his robes. Once, when he went to the shore to go swimming.

He wore a swimsuit. At the car he changed. But I've never seen him out of his robe.

And so she's like working on him. And she's like doing all this stuff. Like this.

And then he falls asleep. And he's like blissed out. And it was very funny.

And then the students come up and knock on the door. It's time to start class. And I said, give us five more minutes.

And I don't want to wake him up. I don't know what to do. And he's just conked out.

And me and Janet are standing there. And he slept for like 45 minutes. And we're afraid to wake him up.

And finally he woke up. And he says, what happened? Oh, you've been asleep.

How long? I don't know. 45 minutes, an hour maybe.

What's going on in the class? They're waiting for you. And I said, how's your neck feeling?

And he says, it's cured. It's cured. And he says, I feel 10 years younger.

And I'm like, wow. And she says, so Rinpoche, I'll come every week and I'll do it for you. He says, that's enough.

That's it. And he never did it again. It was really weird.

It's like, that's proper. And that's enough. And that's like the sexiest day I had.

He's just pure. Totally pure. He took his robes at 7 years old.

And I never saw the least bit of any impurity that way. Nothing. You know, when you're around somebody 24-7, you should see something, right?

But nothing. Okay. So pure.

Then, I was thinking about Bodhisattva Vows. Dr. Shenmue Chinno Mitthichin. And there is a vow about how wrong it is for a Bodhisattva to refuse other people money and Dharma.

Right? Material help and spiritual help. And so whereas the Pratyamaksa Vows are mostly, don't do this.

You know, don't commit sexual misconduct. Don't steal the temple's money, right? Bodhisattva Vows are more like, you have to help the temple.

You have to do something for the temple. It's not so much negative as positive, right? So I was reflecting, you know, as we were building this temple, right?

He went to such great lengths to make a mandala for his students, you know? Financial and spiritual. You see what I mean?

So that Bodhisattva Vow, which to me typifies how he kept his Bodhisattva Vows, he just worked so hard to make that place a mandala for people to come to, right? And it was open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The temple, right?

And he raised all the money for the temple. You know, he personally took responsibility. He built, he built everything there.

You know, like the temple was there. There was a huge pile of garbage outside, construction garbage when we got there. There were no trees, no grass, no garage, no fence, no driveway, nothing.

It was a wasteland. And it just had big piles of toxic waste and junk piles of construction debris there. So he like went out himself.

He like cleaned it up. It took us like 3 or 4 years to clean it up. You know, we went on load by load in the car and the Volkswagen.

We took loads of crap to the junkyard, you know? And he just, he just did it, you know? He was out there for 3 years trying to get a tree stumped out of the ground behind the house by hand.

And he did, you know? And he just, it took like 3 years. And every day he went out and he worked.

When he was 75, I come home one night, he's out pouring cement on the, he's like mixed the cement himself. And then he's out pouring cement on the sidewalk. So I just thought I'd redo this piece of the sidewalk.

You know, I said, Rinpoche, you're 75 years old, you know? You know, and he's like got this shovel and he's like, he's mixing the cement. I found out, oh, I found some clay out back.

Look, you know, and he takes me out back. He's got this pit going and he found this clay and he mixes it with the cement. It's really good for the fire puja, you know?

No, he's like that. And he was painting until he was 80. He was painting the temple and stuff like that.

So he just took responsibility to make physically. Not that many students helped, you see. He just decided it was his duty to make sure that he took care that there was a beautiful place for people to study.

And you know, it is a beautiful place, right? It's a very, you walk on the grounds and there's gardens and flowers and the temple's spotless and he would clean it constantly, be up on ladders cleaning things. And he got this whole thing rigged up to clean the steeple.

You know, it's like four bamboo poles tied together and he's cleaning the steeple from the inside and like that, you know. And then, dharma-wise, he just took care of us, you know, everything. So, for that vow, you know, he's not only not withholding anything, he's like taking responsibility.

He would come down at 11 o'clock at night, midnight, and clean all the toilets, you know, constantly. People would just leave them dirty. So, he'd be down there at midnight.

And I'd be embarrassed, but I wouldn't, I didn't feel like I could come out, you know. In my room, I'd hear him cleaning them, you know. And so, that's 47 vows.

Tantric vows, I was trying to think of something special, right? Lama Nirmala Choksi Je. The first tantric vow of all is to have a proper view of your Lama.

And I don't have much new to say about that, you know. His whole life, the reason he came to America, the reason he stayed here, and what he spent his whole day doing was only what his Lama said, asked him to do, right? Dalai Lama and Sri Jaya Rinpoche.

So, he never did anything else. So, it was transparent. You didn't notice it, right?

But, for the 30-something years that I knew him, he didn't ever do anything other than that, you see what I mean? He didn't do anything else. It didn't even occur to him to do anything else, you see.

So, teaching us, translating the Lamrim, you know, passing on what he knew, under His Holiness's orders, right? That's all he wanted to do. So, I don't have much to say.

He just did it his whole life. Every day, he took his whole life. And he never thought of doing anything else.

So, that's tantric practice, right? Morality, tantric morality. So, that's his morality.

I'll do one more, let's see. Patience, right? I thought of a story about patience.

This was my introduction to Rinpoche's patience. I mean, his patience with me, but I'm not counting that. I think it was around 1975, and this guy calls us, and he says, I've attended some of Rinpoche's teachings, and I'm trying to get a doctorate, a PhD.

Rinpoche used to make fun of people like this. He said, oh, this is another PhD guy. He wants to come here and do a thesis.

He wants me to be the informant, the native informant for his thesis. He hated that. But the guy says, can I come and work on my thesis with you?

He's like, yeah, okay, come. And he arranged for him a special place to stay, out back in one of the houses. And he was very sincere, and he was very intelligent.

So he came, and he worked. He was going to do long-run applications to American education. And he stayed for a couple of weeks, three or four weeks.

And then he was trying to do special meditations, like bardo meditations, and certain practices. Rinpoche said, don't do that. Channel practices without training.

He read some book, like the Tibetan Book of Death. People read books, you know. Oh, I'm going to do this.

Rinpoche said, don't do that. Yeah, no, I want to do it. No, you can't do that.

Of course, he went and did it. And then he started to go cuckoo. And he was having problems with his wife, some kind of problems with his wife.

So he was already something wrong. Angry or upset when he got there. And then this just made everything worse.

So you could see he was just boiling, you know. And then he got sick. And he started to get...

Rinpoche tried to take care of him. He said, what's wrong with him? He didn't have any energy.

He's like sick. Oh, momos will take care of him. Momos, you know.

So we made momos. Chop a hamburger by hand. Chop a piece of sirloin steak into a hamburger.

Put in lots of butter for him, because he's got womb, you know. And then special spices. And then erma.

Erma is red pepper or something like that, you know. It helps with the heart. Calm down the heart.

So we made momos. You know, we'd be just down there making this guy momos for three hours a day. Feeding him special and making him happy.

And then he just got worse and worse. He started to get stomach problems. So I think Nancy...

You know M.T. Lama? M.T. Lama, right? M.T. Lama was...

Yeah, he's this old Mongolian. You see, in the old days, the doctors in Mongolia were the monks. And most monks had medical training.

And then there's this word in Tibetan called M.T. And the word spread to Mongolia, M.T. And actually, Rashi Gampaling was founded by a monk doctor named Sharn M.T. And Sharn means yellow, meaning golden robe. And M.T. means doctor. So he led the Kalmyks out of World War II trenches of the Nazis.

He got them out. He got them to Berlin by the end of the war. You know, they had like five wagons of Buddha images and paintings.

They wanted to bring furniture. He fought with them. He made them throw the furniture away.

All the paintings in that temple were brought on wagons by horse wagon out of Kalmykia across the Nazi lines, you know. And because of Sharn M.T., he's just this guy. He's this little guy, you know.

And then he passed. But M.T. Lama was at another temple. And he was this old Mongolian.

And he was a very skilled physician, traditional physician. And people would go to him all the time. So Rinpoche says, take this guy to M.T. Lama. He's, you know, he needs a doctor. So I took him there. And he gave him, he studied him.

He gave him all this medicine, you know. So we came home. And like we're spending all day trying to take care of this guy.

And then he just flips out and he just leaves, you know. One day he just leaves. And then like, I don't know, three weeks later we get this letter from the Indiana State Police or something that says so-and-so has filed, what do you call it, criminal charges against Ken Rinpoche for poisoning him, you know.

And can you respond to these, you know, this is just a letter of information. The charges are being filed. You know, we're like, Rinpoche, we got to get going on this, you know.

This is a big thing in America. You know, you can, no, you can go to jail. You can get sued.

Things can happen. You can lose the temple. Things can happen, you know.

And he's like, what do you mean, you know. And he says, no, he's filed a complaint. He's like, he's going to charge you with some crime, you know.

And you have to defend yourself. We have to go to Shyamji. We have to get the medicine.

We have to get it, you know, an analysis done in a laboratory. We have to get witnesses, depositions. We got to prepare.

We got to get a lawyer, you know. He's like, wait. He's my student, you know.

And I said, Rinpoche, he's going to, you know, it's going to be bad. And he's like, no, he's my student. I can't hurt him, you know.

You know, he can hurt me. He can do something to me. But I can't hurt my student, you know.

So just cool it, you know. Just let it happen. I'm like, Rinpoche, something's going to happen.

He's like, he's like, no. I can't hurt my student, you know. So we just waited basically.

Then a year went by and nothing came, you know. And then we get this package, this big package, you know, from this guy. I see his name on it.

I'm like, oh my God, this is it, you know. And I open it up and it's his doctoral thesis, you know. And he says, Rinpoche, could you, could you critique it for me and, you know, approve it for my, what do you call it, the examiner?

My advisors, yeah. They need your signature on it, you know. I'm like, Rinpoche.

He's like, what's wrong? And he said, I think you just burned it or threw it out or something, you know. And he's like, no, he's my student.

He's my student, you know. And there's two kinds of anger, right, in Tibet. They're called toa and kunzin.

Toa means the day that they attack you, do you get angry or not? You see, the day that the attack comes, do you respond? In the immediate attack, do you get angry?

Kunzin means, do you hold it for a month or a year or five years, you see. It's called, I don't know what you call it, Ben. It's like, do you retain this anger?

Yeah, like a grudge, but worse than a grudge, like something powerful. Do you hold this burning thing inside of you for the rest of your life maybe, you know. And he just didn't have either one.

You see, in that fire at the moment, he's like, he's my student. I can't do anything. And then a year later, he's like, that's good, he's got his thesis together, you know.

Let's sign off on it, you know. Let's read it together, you know. So he reads it.

And he signs off, and the guy got his doctorate. And he never came back. And it was such, you know, then I said, you know, this is patience.

This is real patience, you know. He didn't have any anger. And it's really beautiful.

So it's a good lesson, especially those of you who are teaching, most of you are teaching. Stuff like that happens, stuff like that will come. It's powerful, powerful obstacles when you teach somebody.

Stuff like that will happen. You know, you heard it, you know. It happened to Rinpoche lots of times.

If it can happen with him, it will happen with us, you know. So don't get worried. Be there.

Take that as a lesson of just patience, you know. And that's fine, you know. He's my student, you know, like that.

You take care of them, even under the worst of times. Then everything ends up happily ever after.