Живой ламрим: как жизнь Кхена Ринпоче отразила учение о ступенях пути (2005, Аризона), занятие 15

[Говорящий 1]
Okay, we've been talking about Ken Rinpoche's life and how he lived the Lamrim, and we're on the six perfections, and we're on the four perfections, which is effort, right? Joyful effort. Tsongkhapa gave that to us all.

Having a good time doing good things. And I remember Rinpoche, we were on this part in Master Shantideva's text, on sundru, right? On effort.

And there was an old monk out back, an old, old Mongolian hermit. He never came out of his house, except for prayers at the temple. So I never saw him out of his house.

And his name was Dzunguru. And I said, Rinpoche, what's Dzunguru? He says it's sundru in Mongolian.

That's how it's spelled, right? Dzunguru. So he was this really beautiful old hermit.

I never heard him say a word. He was this beautiful man. So then I said, well, what's Dzunguru?

And Rinpoche said, effort. And then there was a house that I think Andy and Julia bought. I don't know what's happening now.

Next door house. And there was a guy there with a broken down old car. And he used to go out every day and spend like eight hours trying to get this car to run.

Every day. Sun, shine, snow. Month after month, he's out there trying to fix this car.

And the place was a shack. The house was a shack. They tore it down, right?

They just tore it down. When they bought the property, they tore it down. So he's sitting there.

And Rinpoche said, you see that guy? I said, yeah, yeah, he's out there like eight hours a day. Day after day, month after month.

He's just working on this old junky car. It's never started running. And he said, that's not effort.

He was like, that's not it. It's not just to work hard. It's not working hard at something.

It's got to be something good. Working at something good. And then, when I think of his effort, Rinpoche's effort, I always think of his eyeglasses.

It's this weird thing. He showed up in America with these 1950 eyeglasses that the Dalai Lama used to wear, His Holiness used to wear. These old black rimmed.

And any time the Dalai Lama wears something, then all the Lamas have to get one. Now, this thing about Rinpoche's wearing sunglasses, it started with His Holiness. He got these flopped down things.

And then you weren't a Rinpoche unless you had sunglasses. And there was this big demand of sunglasses in the monastery. All the Rinpoches had to have these, exactly the same kind.

And you weren't really a Drukha unless you had these sunglasses. So, Rinpoche had these old, old glasses, just like the Dalai Lama's old glasses. And all the Lamas had them.

And then, I remember one of my jobs was taking him to the eye doctor, Dr. Brenner. And he was his doctor for 30 years. We started when he was a young doctor and we ended when he was an old doctor.

And so, we would go to him in Freehold and he would check Rinpoche's eyes and they were not too good. He couldn't see much without his glasses. So, he always wore these glasses.

And then, he would get a new prescription and then his eyes got worse. Every year something would happen and they would get worse and worse. And he'd still be reading these scriptures.

All day, he would have these scriptures piled around him, just piles, mountains of scriptures around him. And then he would just pick one and then he'd be squinting, you know, and trying to read it. And then we would go every six months and get a new prescription and then he'd complain about it and then we'd go get another one.

Sometimes we got three in a row in a week. And he was trying to... And he wouldn't give up reading.

He wouldn't stop. And he just kept reading. And then, I came in one day and his eyes are just like crying.

He's like crying, you know. I said, Rinpoche, what's going on? And he says, Oh, it's the paper.

You know, Tibetan paper. They make it out of this poisonous... It's a bush which has toxins in it.

And he says, These books make me cry. They have toxins in it. They are.

There's some special bush like rhododendron, I think, or something. And it makes your eyes tear. So he'd be sitting there and his eyes would just be crying, you know.

And I'd say, Can we do anything? He'd like wash his eyes. He'd say, Go away.

I need to keep... And he'd keep trying to read, you know. And he'd keep going.

And then as he got older and older, it got worse and worse. And then we got more and more exotic doctors. Then at the end they said he had glaucoma.

And this is like pressure inside the eyeball. And so he was taking these... Like he'd squirt drops in and then he'd be trying to read again and trying to learn more.

He already knows enough, right? He doesn't need to know more. And he just wanted to learn more so he could serve his students, right?

He used to prepare intensely for a class. He would prepare for months. Sometimes he'd memorize the whole thing, you know.

And then he'd be squirting the stuff in his eyes. And it's like, tsundru means like, you don't care. You just do what you have to do, you know.

If you got to do it, you do it. And you love it. You see, he just loved it.

He wasn't like, Oh, I have to do this or I have to do this. He's like, I got to do this. I love to do this.

And he didn't want to do anything else. And then at the end, his eyes got really bad and he could hardly see anything. And the doctor said, We'll try surgery, you know.

We'll shoot his eyes with lasers. Release the pressure, you know. So they tied him down.

They put all this stuff on him and then they shot lasers into his eyes, you know. And then the fluid leaked out for a couple of days. And then he's tearing off these bandages and he's trying to read some more.

And then he kept going until the end of his life, you know. He kept struggling to prepare for his classes. And he loved it.

He just loved it. Then I was at the monastery and they heard about this and they said, they said, kīrupaṃ padāgye, you know. And I said, What do you mean, you know?

And they said, Do you know kīrupaṃ padāgye wrote the textbooks for Sarāmi? And there's these mistakes in them. We've seen it in the class, right?

And everybody knows there's mistakes. There's spelling mistakes, right? And they say, I said, you know, we're going to reprint this book, Majjhimika Chidun, Uma Chidun.

And I said, we're going to reprint this book. We've got to take out these mistakes. They said, no, no, we leave the mistakes.

I said, no, no, they're obviously wrong, you know. Look, this is a mistake, this is a mistake, this is a mistake. No, no, we always leave those mistakes.

I said, why? They said, kīrupaṃ padāgye, who wrote them, 300 years ago, 400 years ago. I said, why?

They said, you don't understand, you know. He wrote these when he was really old. And his eyes were really bad.

And he would take toothpicks and jam them into his eyes, like this, to keep his eyes open, so he could see, you know. And so we always leave the mistakes that he made because he couldn't see, to remember his kindness, you know. So I had this flash that Rinpoche was kīrupaṃ padāgye, you know.

It seemed like that to me. Then meditation, next perfection. How do you judge a high lama's meditation, right?

I was trying to think of what to say and I don't know what to say. I'll tell you what I think. Rinpoche had a custom that he would not meditate in front of other people.

Very rarely we meditated together. So he considered... I mean, some lamas, Geshe Ngo and Dage, who was my first lama, he taught that if we meditated together it was more powerful.

And he used to say, like many pencils together, you can't break. But one pencil you can break, right? But Ken Rinpoche used to say that meditation practice was a personal thing and that we should practice it by ourselves.

And that he encouraged us. And I think they're both valid for different groups of students. But Rinpoche always encouraged us to meditate privately and to do our practices privately.

And I think that's sort of this yogi's thing where you don't show your attainments, right? But we can infer his meditation from his behavior, right? Like you can draw certain conclusions from his life.

One thing was that he absolutely did his morning practice up till noon. He never ever did anything before noon. Once in a while a tantric initiation or something like that, he might go in and do the preliminaries in the morning, something.

But aside from that, all the time I served him, like 25 years, I never saw him not do his morning practice. So up till noon, we just didn't go in his room. And we had permission, I had permission to interrupt him if it was an emergency.

Like maybe once a year somebody would call from Hasa. And I would go up and I'd knock on the door. So I got to see, I'd be like, what does he really do?

And oftentimes he was holding a mandala, he was doing his mandala practice. And he would move that, he had a little leather seat. I bought him like when I was 20 or something.

And he used it his whole life, this little leather divan thing. And he had it in front of his altar and he kept doing mandalas over and over and then he would be meditating. And really beautiful feeling, wonderful feeling in the room.

Then I think you can partly judge a person's meditation from their room. You see how their room looks? And everything was very orderly, you know like you can't meditate in a messy room.

It's impossible. And if your meditation is good, it will be reflected in your habits. So you will tend to be not an anally neat person, not like that, but you will be a comfortably neat person.

You know how you walk into someone's house and they're not, anal people have plastic over the carpet. You know? No, you buy a nice plush carpet then you have this plastic run over it so nobody can get it dirty, but then you can't enjoy the carpet.

So I call that like an anal sort of, he wasn't that kind of neat. It was the kind of neat where you walk in the room and it feels like a temple or something like that. And there's not junk laying around and garbage.

And he was very much that way. So his room was very warm, but it wasn't junky. And everything had its place and he was very adamant about it.

Like if you put a scripture back in the wrong place on his altar he would make you and put it back, put the one back and like that. So he had this sense of, I think it comes from a meditative state of mind that your room is like a mandala and the place where you meditate is like a mandala. So you definitely had this sense.

And he refused to be over, how do you say, overbooked. So he just refused. And I think that's a sign of a healthy state of mind also.

We tend to overbook things because it makes us feel worthwhile if we're busy all the time. And he absolutely refused to be overbooked. Like you would try to overbook him and he'd just refuse.

He'd say, you know, I'm doing this today and I'm doing this today and I'm not doing more. And then he had a curfew, a ten o'clock curfew. He would come down and yell at me if I was on the computer.

He'd say, ten o'clock, everyone has to go home, you know. And he was very strict about that. So he's like, you must have a happy, unfrazzled state of mind.

And the fact that he was so adamant about, he would never be led into circumstances otherwise. And you would try to overbook him with something and he'd just say, no, I can't do that. And he didn't care about getting famous or getting some invitation to some special place or anything like that.

He had no conception of that at all. He didn't need to travel. He didn't care about traveling.

He said, I'll just make a good place here. I'll teach people who come here. He got invitations constantly.

He just said, no, I have a program here. I have a schedule here. I do my practice.

I serve my students. That's all. And he had his whole thing.

And we used to fight about, I would try to do one more project. He said, no, no, no more project. That's enough.

He got up in front of Sarame Monastery. He got in front of 1,500 monks. He said, Michael's not doing any more projects.

No, he announced that. He said, no one's allowed to ask him to do any more things. He got up.

He announced it. He wouldn't let me do any more books for the monastery. He just said, no.

We finished the Umechidan. And then he said, that's it, no more. Because I stayed up till like 2 in the morning or something.

He said, no, you can't. You have to maintain your meditation state of mind. And his morality, I think morality feeds your meditation and then morality flows out of your meditation.

You see? So if your morality is good, if your behavior is clean, then your meditation is pure. Your meditation goes well.

And then you want to be clean. And then that feeds your meditation. So it's like an anti-samsara.

It's a non-perpetuating cycle. It's an upward cycle. And he very much had that.

He very much watched every facet of his morality. So I think from his personal and his eating habits, that's a sign of a person's meditation. If your mind is clean, if your mind is pure, then you don't crave things.

You just don't feel like craving things. So he didn't have any kind of attraction. He enjoyed food.

He liked to eat food. And he was absolutely a judge of ce. Se ke ce means where you should stop.

So he would like... Like my tendency is, if I have a hamburger there, I eat the hamburger. And he would just take like 12 bites and then set it down and say, that's it.

No matter if it was there. You know what I mean? If there was more there or not, that didn't matter.

It was whether he'd had enough to eat or not. And I grew up with three brothers. There were four of us.

We were fighting. We were competing for food. And if cookies were bought on Friday, it was who could sneak into the fridge on Friday night at midnight and get them.

Because Saturday, forget it, there wouldn't be any. So I had this thing. If I got six cookies, I have to eat the six cookies.

If I got seven, I have to eat seven. But he had this thing. There's a plate of food.

He eats until he... Then he'd just go like this. And he'd go, that's enough.

And he would just stop right in the middle of the plate, whatever the plate was, when he had enough. So I think these are all signs of a great meditator. I think he had a great meditation.

He had a great capacity of concentration. When he taught, when he studied, tokme, right? Asanga.

His mind would just cut through the subject. And no problem. At age 80, no problem conceptualizing difficult points or very complicated points.

Just very clean. So these are all like upward cycle, an anti-samsara, where a person's mind is good, their morality is good, their place is clean and neat and simple, and their food requirements are low, and they're not overwhelming themselves with stimulation and things like that. Just this whole healthy, integral state of mind.

So what was he meditating about? Where had he gotten in his meditation? How am I to say?

I don't know. But I think we can infer from all the signs that he was having unbelievable meditation. Last thing I would say about that wisdom, right?

Which is really seeing that that things are coming from you, right? And then I think you can judge a person's level of wisdom, of emptiness. You can judge it from their reaction to the world.

You see what I mean? Like I don't know what he saw or what he didn't see. I don't know.

How could I know? But you judge from a person's reactions, especially in, what do you call, crisis situations or difficult situations. What is this person's reactions to difficulties?

And just like many times I saw horrible things happen to Rinpoche, I remember once we went to look into a hip replacement or a knee replacement. And we went to this sports doctor, right? And first we discussed it with him.

And he said, frankly, it's so dangerous and he's a diabetic and it's so hard to heal the knee that he shouldn't do it until he's desperate, until he's just totally in pain all the time. Because then he won't regret whatever happens. If it works or it doesn't work, he won't regret it.

And then I said, well, can we at least do all the x-rays? So he did x-rays and then... Rinpoche had bald legs and the ligaments had worn out on one side of the knee.

So then he said, well, let's take the blood pressure. And he took the blood pressure. And I remember we were sitting in the waiting room and the nurse rushes out and she says, you must go to a doctor right now.

What's wrong? His blood pressure is extremely dangerous. You've got to go to a doctor right now.

He has to get some kind of blood pressure medicine now. Just leave right now. And I'm like, Rinpoche, this is a dangerous thing.

It's going to happen to you. And he's like, okay, karma. And he didn't have any reaction at all, just nothing at all.

Just like, okay, karma. Then I would come home. I was working in the diamond business and it was really hard.

It was like... the first year it was like... it was over 12 hours a day.

And then a three-hour commute, three to four-hour commute. And so I would come home and I'd be all exhausted. And I remember...

this is his worldview, right? This is how he saw the world. And I would tell him stories about difficult people at D.E. I said, this lady yelled at me today. He said, yeah, yeah. He knew all the employees there. He knew them all by name.

And he knew all the hard times they gave me. And I said, oh, this lady yelled at me and this guy doesn't help me and this guy's out to get my neck. And that guy didn't...

I was doing this shtick one night and he just grabs me. And he says, what do you think it's samsara? He says, that's samsara.

You don't like it, you stop it. Just stop it. You stop it yourself.

I don't want to hear anymore. After that he wouldn't let me talk ever again, not once. You know, like 15 more years, right?

He wouldn't let me talk about it. He said, that's your problem. You fix it.

You stop it. That's samsara. He's just like, okay, okay.

Like that. So I think he had this view. He saw samsara and he knew what the causes were.

And he wouldn't put up with this whiny worldview. And I just said, you stop it. And it was like that.

And I never... Not once after that I couldn't speak about it again. It was really weird.

So I think he had a very pure worldview. Like that.