Жить просветлённой жизнью: уроки Чже Цонгкапы, учителя Первого Далай-ламы (2010, Анн-Арбор), занятие 1

[Говорящий 1]
It's an honor to be introduced by Gareth. I think he was very instrumental in translating the Lamrim Chömö, right? It's just the greatest work of Tsongkhapa.

It's a great book on the steps and a great translation. First I wanted to thank Jewel Sander for inviting me and Gele Grumpache. We call him Nyagri I don't know if you know his other name.

I met Gele Grumpache when I was maybe, I don't know, 1976 something? And he came to our temple in New Jersey. Then at that time, my Lama, we didn't have a very big place.

We just had a one room little, you My Lama is Khen Rinpoche Geshe Losantarjan. So Rinpoche came, Gele Rinpoche came with another great teacher and we all had to sleep in the same kitchen together on cots. So there were four of us in the kitchen on cots and we had a really good time that night.

He had come to Texas to work with a healer, a cancer healer, and we had a really good time. I thought I would show you a really nice picture. The oldest picture I have of my teacher is one that he took with Gele Grumpache.

So I thought, you know, don't tell him I showed you, okay? It says some picture on the ... it's in the same file folder.

It's the only thing that's not a PDF. It says a couple Rinpoche names on there. Anyway, when my teacher came out of Tibet, he came out at the same time as Gele Grumpache.

That's it. Gele Grumpache is on the right, and when they came out of Tibet, the really great Lamas, everybody went to a refugee camp in in Bengal named Bokso, and my teacher, and Gele Grumpache, and Jampel Sengi who's in the middle, who taught Professor Tucci, they were brought to Dharamsala by His Holiness, and asked to write textbooks for the Tibetan schools for the refugee children, many of whom didn't have parents, so maybe three-quarters were orphans, and then His Holiness wanted them to have a good training in, you know, real Tibetan language, and they were afraid they would lose their language and their culture.

So he assigned Gele Grumpache, and my teacher, and Jampel Sengi to write a series of textbooks for the grade schools and the high schools, and they did, and they're beautiful little textbooks that we studied. I grew up on those textbooks, they're very very beautiful, and they spent 12 years writing those books. One year my teacher, in Dharamsala they didn't have any money right?

They were refugees, and it was very cold, it snowed a lot, my teacher fell ill, very very ill, and then he said he would have died, but Gele Grumpache moved in with him, and nursed him for like six months, and didn't do anything else, he just took care of him, and he said he would have passed away if Grumpache hadn't helped him, you know. So for me, it's an honor to come to Gele Grumpache Center, and give some talks, and you're very lucky to have such a great Lama. In India, Je Tsongkapa's works didn't exist, they were lost, there were no copies that made it to India, and then Gele Grumpache found copies, and he photocopied them, and then he printed them, and the first copies we have of Tsongkapa's works were recovered by Gele Grumpache, and published in India, and that's why we have them now to work with, and then the second edition was done by my Lama, of a different carving, and so these two great Lamas shared a deep interest in Je Tsongkapa.

So tonight, I'll talk a little bit about Je Tsongkapa. I really love Je Tsongkapa, I know Gareth must love him if he spent so many years working on his work, and once you read some Tsongkapa, you're addicted probably, you can't study anything else, you can't read ... people took me to Barnes & Nobles you know, recently, they said you can buy any book you want, I said I don't want any book in this store, I want Tsongkapa, you know, and once you've read him, you're kind of spoiled.

So I thought it would be nice, I grew up, I was trained partly in a small Mongolian monastery in New Jersey, and you know, I was the baby monk for 15 years, everybody else was in their 70s and 80s, and we would go to this small temple, and we would recite, you know, the prayers for the congregation. This is a Mongolian community of refugees that came to the United States after World War Two, and you know, oftentimes all the other monks were Geshe's, and they had memorized all the prayers, and they would just take off for three, four hours doing prayers, and I had no idea what half the prayers were, so I would just do wah-wah, and then when I got ... sometimes they would really skip around, like I would find the right prayer, and then they would skip to a different prayer, and I would get upset, you know, I'd get angry, so I wanted to protest, so I'd close my book, you know, and just stare at the ceiling, you know, and you know, kind of to tell ...

I was 20, they were 80, you know, and just to say how mad I was that they were skipping around and not telling me where they were, because they memorized everything right? Then one day I was staring up, and there was a steeple to this temple, a very high steeple, and I saw way up in the steeple there's like 15 really beautiful thangkas, you know, these beautiful ... later ...

there are these beautiful paintings, you know, and I couldn't, you know, really make out what was going on in the paintings, they were like 30 feet high in the air, you know, and then my Lama, in the summers he used to have a retreat, like a 10-day retreat for people, like a hundred people would come, and so one day he says ... the steeple had windows at the very top, like 30-40 feet off the ground, and he calls me into his room, he says, you open those windows, you know, I'm like Rinpoche, how? He says, we have a ladder, just get up on the ladder, you know, and I had to drag this ladder in, an extension ladder right, with a rope, and then it didn't ...

it reached about 25 feet, and then I had to get up on the top rung, and then like, try to open up the windows, and he made me do that every morning, and close them every night, because it was so hot in the temple in the summer, and then ... so I'm climbing up, and then I said, oh now I can look at those thangkas, you know, so I'm halfway up, and I stop, and I'm looking through the bars of the ladder at these thangkas, you know, and I said, wow, they have writing on them, you know, there was little tiny writing on the thangkas, you know, and I was like, oh I want to read this, you know, so I'm like sitting up on the ladder for hours trying to read these thangkas, and then I went into Rinpoche, I said, what are those thangkas, you know, up at the top? He said, that's Tsongkapa's life story, in 15 thangkas, okay, so it was a tradition in Tibet to paint the story of Tsongkapa in 15 different thangkas, and there are little tiny captions, I said Rinpoche, I can't read half the captions, he said, well that's because artists don't know how to spell, you know, and it's not like it's secret or anything, in Tibet the thangka painters didn't learn to read, they couldn't read, so they would just copy it from the older thangka, you know, and I said, you know, I said where did these come from? He said, I don't really know the story, but what happened was, you may know that in 1959 the Potala Palace of the Dalai Lama was bombed by Chinese armies, the people of the city Lhasa heard that the palace might be bombed, or that his holiness might be kidnapped, and then the whole population of Lhasa came out and stood around the Potala Palace to protect his holiness with their bodies, they didn't have any weapons, they just said, if you're gonna hurt his holiness you have to go through us, you know, and the whole population of the city came and camped out, it was like Woodstock in front of the Potala, and they said, you know, if tanks come we're just gonna put our bodies in the way, you know, and inside the Potala his holiness and his family were, you know, making plans to escape, and they were trying to decide what would they take with them, you know, like if you're the Dalai Lama in this 900 room palace, you know, what are you gonna take with you to run to India, you know, and they chose these 15 paintings, okay, they grabbed these 15 paintings and they ran, and he dressed himself in disguise, and you know, the rest is history, he got to India, but they carried the paintings with them, these 15 paintings, when they got to India they were all refugee camps, and they said these paintings are gonna get lost, so we'll send them to some Tibetan organization outside of India, you know, at that time one of the only ones was this Mongolian temple in America, so they they shipped the Thangkas to this temple, and they had no idea what they were, and they just put them up in their steeple, you know, and they were there for ... from 1959 to about, I don't know, until the 70s, 75, something like that, I came in 1975 and started to work on them, and then somewhere later I found the manuscript that was used to make the paintings, so that ... the paintings were first designed in the 1700s by someone named Jangyong Shepa, who's a very famous scholar from Debung Monastery, so he designed a series of paintings about Tsongkapa's life, because he thought, you know, to tell people about Tsongkapa's life is sort of boring, but if you make ...

they didn't have video or audio, you know, like this, so I think if he had lived now he would have made a ... like a ... what do you call this?

A YouTube video or something, you know, like a rock video or something, I still want to do that, but anyway, so he decided an interesting way to present Tsongkapa's life would be in paintings, so he wrote directions on how to make the paintings, and I found this manuscript, so I was able to figure out what the artist had done wrong, and the artist had also shortened the captions because it was too much to paint on the painting, so I found the manuscript and then I worked on it for about 20 years, you know, and we translated ... you have the book? Can you bring one?

The red one? So we finally, I don't know, we printed the book a couple ... maybe two years ago, and I worked on it for like 20 years, and we made a book of all the paintings, and we broke out each scene, there's 210 scenes or something, and we cut out all the scenes separately and then put the translation of what's going on in each scene, you see, and if I taught that we would be here for six months, and you would die of boredom, because like, he started the Mun Lam Tsemo, the great festival in Lhasa, so the biography says how many butter lamps he offered, how many yaks were there, you know, all this stuff, so kind of ... I can't go through the whole thing with you alright, I'll show you the book, this is the book, we printed the book ourselves, and we are donating all the money to that temple. That temple is an old, old Mongolian temple that was built after World War Two, by refugees who came here, and they became Tibetan Buddhists in the time of Genghis Khan, which is about 1200, 1100, so when they came to America they were the only Tibetan Buddhist group in the United States, and so they're like, you know, they're all old, and they're all like World War Two veterans, and they don't have any money, so I did this as a fundraiser for them, and we gave them all the money.

We've raised $70,000 so far, which is ... they never had more than $130 in the bank before. There was some debate about not giving them the money, because they would have a vodka party, but we've been doling it out to them, every time they have to fix the roof or something.

So, there's a whole part about how I found the paintings, and the history of the paintings throughout history, and then there's a ... at the end you get every ... you get every scene chopped out separately, and you get the Tibetan, and you get the English translation of what's going on in each scene, you see.

Then in the ... I thought, well if you just have a book that tells about Tsongkapa's life, it's ... people get bored.

I mean, if you don't know the books he wrote, or you wouldn't really appreciate him, you see. So, in the middle, I tried to write ... things that he did in his life that would be an example for a modern American person, who's not a Gelugpa monk in Tibet in the 1500s, you know.

Like, how can we use his life story? You know, how can a normal American person appreciate Tsongkapa, and maybe emulate Tsongkapa, right? Like, how can we be little Tsongkapa's in Detroit, Michigan?

So, in the middle we summarized all his ... all the important activities of his life, especially things that you and I could do in our own life, that would be ... yeah, how can we be ...

how can we emulate Tsongkapa? What are things that Tsongkapa did that you and I can do? You know, in our present situation, okay.

Then, I was supposed to do this in New York at a museum, and I thought, well, what I'd like to do is kind of reorganize the paintings, and by theme, you see. So, instead of ... the paintings go from Tsongkapa's birth up to his death, right?

They basically go like that. They're numbered this way, but then I thought, why don't we put together all the paintings that talk about, you know, what he wrote, and then we put together all the paintings that talk about the yoga that he used to do, and then we put together all the paintings that talk about the dance. He used to do sacred dance and music, you know, and why don't we arrange the thangkas by theme in activities that you and I do?

Or, you know, what would be ... I tried to ... I started with 18 and my friends told me it was too many, so I cut it down to 12 activities that Tsongkapa did that we can ...

that we can do, that we can emulate, okay? And then I wrote this little thing which you can read sometime, when you have time, alright? But I call it, 12 Steps to a Joyful Life.

So, if I had to summarize Tsongkapa's life in two hours, you know, which is totally impossible, I'll just rush through 12 things that I think you can do with your own life, as a Dharma student, or as a ... anybody, you can do these 12 things yourself, and then you can sort of ... live the life that Tsongkapa lived in modern times, okay?

So, we're gonna start ... I did these posters, and I'm gonna ... I'm just gonna take you through these posters that we did, and I forgot to bring the posters okay?

Like, I ... that ... what I thought was, sort of, if you know the Christian tradition of Stations of the Cross, I had this idea to have 12 posters around the room, and then people could walk from one poster to another.

So, if you're really into it, and somebody's serious, talk to me afterwards, and I'll send you the posters. We made these huge thangkas, like very huge thangkas, and we put ... it's cool, but then you could keep them up here for a month or something, and then when people have time you can wander in and look at ...

this is the guidebook to the ... to the 12 posters, and you could just leave the ... I'll send them to you if you want, and you can leave them in the center here, and just when you have an afternoon, you come over and you look at the poster, and then you ...

this tells you what's going on in the posters okay? So, if you like, talk to me afterwards, and I'll ... I think they're in New York somewhere, okay?

So, I would say that the most important message of Tsongkapa, of the 12 messages that I want to talk about, I would say the most important ... if you ask Tsongkapa, what's the most important thing for a spiritual seeker? Then it would be, find your heart teacher.

I mean, that's number one job for ... for anyone who wants to follow a spiritual path. You must find a qualified teacher.

You can't get anywhere without a heart teacher. You know, you must ... you have Gelug Rinpoche, which is good.

A lot of places I go, they don't have anybody, you know. So, you must find your heart teacher, and you must devote yourself to them, and ... and give them everything, and ...

and serve them, and then ... I lived with my teacher for 23 years, in the same house. I cooked his food, I built his house, I watered his garden, I got beat up every day, metaphorically, sometimes actually, and he trained me, and this is how it happens.

So, in our lineage, the most important single activity for every person is to find the teacher who moves your heart. Doesn't have to be a monk, doesn't have to be a Buddhist, doesn't have to be a man, you know, and you will find in your life, somewhere in your life, you have Gelug Rinpoche as the leader of your group, but you may, in ... in the course of your life, come across a special person.

It doesn't have to be ... it could be an elementary school teacher, it could be a grandmother, it could be a dog, okay really. Buddha has ability to emanate as all those things.

So, in your life, your number one job is to find the one person who's your heart teacher. I found mine when I was 16. They're not Buddhist, and I still keep that teacher, and they brought me to Buddhism, but I still honor this teacher, you see.

So, think about that, try to find a teacher. I'm gonna go through some of the scenes. So, Nyingpo can ...

well, let's talk about one thing. Can you blow up the Gelug Rinpoche on either side? I would say try 50, yeah, and go down to the middle.

Yeah, so this is ... can you put Je Tsong ... no, the other Je Tsongkapa.

Okay, you want this one, I'll take this one. This is called, say ... I'm gonna ask you to say Tibetan words, because it's good luck, okay.

Say nga ... dawa, ngan dawa, ngan dawa. So, during Tsongkapa's life, he lived ...

he was born in 1357, okay, and during his life they actually made a statue of his face during his life. So, we're very lucky that during his life they made a statue of his face, and this is the ... the one in the black and white is the statue.

It's in the Jokhang of Lhasa, and it's called Ngan Dawa. Ngan Dawa means, hey, looks like me, and that's what he said when he saw it. He said, ah, Ngan Dawa.

So, they named the statue, hey, looks like me, and it was in the Potala ... I'm sorry, it was in the Jokhang, the main temple of Lhasa until 1959, and then it was destroyed during the ... during the Chinese invasion.

I was fortunate, I found an old photo of it in a Yugoslavian travel guide. Some Yugoslavian guy had wandered in and taken a photo of it, so we do have a photo. There's a replacement in Lhasa which my mother took a photo of, and it's not the same, it doesn't ...

it's not Ngan Dawa at all. It doesn't look like me at all. So, they've kind of faked it, they faked some statue now, but this is the original, and it really ...

he did really look like that. He was criticized by his ... he had many many critics in his life.

You know, he wasn't like the great teacher at the beginning. He was ... he came from East Tibet, which is sort of like coming from Alabama or something, and ...

or Kansas, worse than that, and people made fun of him, and people criticized him, and called him Big Nose from the East. He was called Nagu Chompo, Sharchok Nagu Chompo, which means Big Nose from the East. In the beginning he was criticized quite severely by his contemporaries, but he did have a big nose and he had big ears, which is considered a good sign in Tibet.

How about the middle? Can you take me to the middle? This is the central ...

part of the first painting. Every one of the 15 paintings has Tsongkapa in the middle, and he's making a different mudra or hand gesture, holy gesture, like a teaching gesture, and then on each side of him are his major disciples. So, I think if you go either way Ningpo, an inch either way, yeah, and up a bit, I'm sorry, down a bit, yeah.

So there on the right, for example, you have Khetub Jey, which was one of his two great disciples. Down on ... in the right at the bottom, the monk at the very bottom is Tsako Wombo, Ngawang Drapa, for whom Tsongkapa wrote the Three Principal Paths.

So, if you've ever studied the three, that's a very common teaching in our tradition. He wrote that as a letter to Tsako ... Tsako Wombo, Ngawang Drapa.

On the other side, on his right hand, his right hand, would be ... that's Gyaltsab Jey, the main ... the main figure.

Gyaltsab means his regent, or the one who took over his throne after he passed away. So, these are his two great disciples. Between them, Khetub Jey, Tsongkapa, Gyaltsab Jey, they are considered the great three.

They're called Yab Tse Sum, which means the father and son, the father and his spiritual sons, and they've written over 10,000 pages of scripture, which are ... every one is like, I don't know, Shakespeare. Every single page is like Shakespeare.

In the monastery, in the winter debates, we debate Gyaltsab Jey's commentary on logic, 10 pages for a month, almost 24 hours a day, like we're debating about 16-18 hours a day, and on 10 of those pages you can spend a month with 300 of the best scholars in the world, you know, and still not figure out what he meant, and they wrote 10,000 pages like that. So, you can't really understand what a contribution it is. It will take centuries to really, for us to digest him.

Okay, I'm going to show you some more. Let's see, Nyingpo, how about bottom right hand? Oh, I snuck my teacher in there.

Okay, I have to hold it somewhere, hold this thing here, blind all the people, okay. That's my teacher, Khyentse Rinpoche, Losantarjun. Go down a little bit more.

By the way, the photo you saw, he had a little mustache, right? He tried to sneak that in. Then, right after that, he met the Dalai Lama's teacher, Khyentse Thuchya Rinpoche, and he criticized him very severely and said, you know, monks can't wear mustaches, and he had to shave it off, but here you see a monk with a mustache, and that's His Holiness the first Dalai Lama, Gendun Drup, who was a disciple of Tsongkapa in his later years, okay.

So, this is how our lineage began. This is how the Dalai Lamas began, and you're seeing here the first meeting between Tsongkapa and Gendun Drup, and he's about to get shaved off and become a monk I guess, and then he became a disciple of Tsongkapa. So, that's how our lineage started.

That's how all this stuff started. That's the moment of their first meeting in the paintings, okay. I think go up all the way to the right maybe.

Upper right-hand corner. Over here you see, this is, you know, I threw this in because this is one of the first lessons that Je Tsongkapa ever had. This is him with one of his teachers, but I think what's important is the body language of Tsongkapa.

He's not like standing there like an American saying, you know, I paid my $13, teach me already. You know, he's he's bowing, he's on his knees, he's begging for a teaching, okay. So, when you find your teacher, when you find your heart, try!

Our big job in our life is to find our heart teacher, and then when you find them, you know, surrender to them, and give them your devotion, and give them your life, okay. And all the people I know who really came out good, suffered with their heart teacher, big time, you know, over many years time. It's ...

a good teacher is going to push you hard, take you to places you can't take yourself, but you have to have some devotion for them, and love for them, and respect for them. So, this is very much a part of our of our lineage, and that's what's happening right here, okay. I think ...

so, your first job, if you get anything out of tonight's talk, it's find a teacher, find your heart teacher, preferably someone you can stay near, someone who's in your town. You know, my teacher, I was living in Del Mar California, because the surf was best there, and I met His Holiness, I went to Dharamsala, I studied for, I don't know, six months there, then I had an opportunity to meet His Holiness, and have an audience with him, and I said well, you know, I have to go back to United States because my mother's ill, and where do you think I ... where's a good Lama that I could study with?

He said, Oh Geshe Losantarchen. I said, good, where is he? He said, New Jersey.

I'm like, New Jersey? This is the armpit of the nation, you know, and he said, yeah, you have to go to New Jersey. I said, there's no surf in New Jersey, you know.

He said, go to New Jersey, you know, and I did, and I spent 25 years there right, just studying. So, I mean, the moral of the story is, when you find them, you go to them, right? Whatever it costs, whatever it takes, whatever you have to do, find them, and go, and be with them, and serve them, and this is how you ...

this is how you get amazing meditations, this is how you get amazing realizations, this is how you have a really, truly happy life, is to devote yourself to your teacher. So, you have GZHES LAS KUN PA'I PHYED, you can do that also, take care of his center, serve him, carry out his wishes, and then all the ... all the goals you want, everything in your life, my life I can say, has just come from serving my teacher, you know, doing what my teacher asked, even when I didn't want to, like climbing up in the temple, you know, and to have the honor to have a direct teacher who's still alive, and then serve them with your whole life, nothing can make a person happier in your life, and nothing can do ...

nothing can serve others more than finding your heart teacher and serving them. So, you have GZHES LAS KUN PA'I PHYED, you know, ask him constantly what are his wishes, and then carry out those wishes, and then you'll be a really happy person, and you will make others happy. This is the key to everything, if you learn nothing else tonight about Tsongkhapa, remember him kneeling to his teacher and asking, what do you want of me?

What would you like me to do? And you'll be so happy, your whole life will be happy. I'm so lucky, every day I think about how lucky I am from finding my heart teacher, and serving them, okay?

Alright, next painting, this one's called Save the World, okay? What do you call it in Buddhism, Save the World Mind? Bodhichitta, okay?

Bodhichitta. They call it Buddha Mind, it's a bad translation, right? Bodhichitta means, SEMS SKYES PA NI GZHAN DON CHER, YANG DAG RDZOGS PA'I BYANG CHUB DOD, this is the definition in the Abhisara and Anakara, it's the desire to save the world, SEMS SKYES PA NI GZHAN DON CHER, YANG DAG RDZOGS PA'I BYANG CHUB, the desire to become a Buddha so that you can save the world, is the definition of Bodhichitta, the classical definition of Bodhichitta, okay?

So really, I like to call it saving the world, because when you say Bodhichitta, people, either they don't know where the the word Buddha is, or they don't know the word Chitta. If you call it Save the World, it's pretty clear, right? So, your second job, after you find your teacher, you have to save the world, small thing, alright?

Let's blow up, let's start with the upper left maybe, ANYON MONGS. This is of course His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and I like, I put him in there, this is a photo that he sent with the Thangkas in 1959 to the temple in New Jersey, and he signed it, and we used to keep it in the temple, and really, I think he's been such a good example. The Dalai Lama used to be a very protected figure, he, the people in Lhasa only saw him once a year, it was like a rose bowl parade through the, through the city, it was led by a monk called Gelong Nyima Rinpoche, who did, it's called Mr. Slow, and he did a slow prostration through the city, and His Holiness was carried on a palanquin behind him, and it was like the rose bowl parade, and you would see His Holiness go by, and that was it, and that, for a whole year, that's all you would ever see of the Dalai Lama, and this Dalai Lama has broken that mode, you know, he has gone to I don't know, just about every country of the world, and he has taught people, and he has really opened, he's tried to save the world, he's a good example for us, you know, he's not bound by political borders, or he just goes everywhere, he teaches everyone, he helps everybody, so I think he's a great example. We have to really see the world, or the globe, as having no boundaries, and in a way he has broken down the boundaries, he's one person who can travel everywhere, and and teach everyone, so I think we should, we should emulate that in our own way.

I don't know which way to go, why don't you go down and see what's there? Oh, I like this one, okay? Je Tsongkapa got pretty famous, I think this one, I don't remember what year this is, 14 something, but in his time the most powerful person in the world was ...

the Emperor of China, yeah? You can't imagine how powerful he was, I mean, he could walk into your house and say, I like your wife and your kids, and I'll take them now, you know, and that's it, they go, you know, and you never see them again. This is what a real Emperor is, you know, and so he got a letter, these these are Chinese envoys delivering a letter to Je Tsongkapa, I think it's 14, I forget, it's in your paper somewhere, early 1400s, and they say the Emperor wishes your presence in Beijing, and he's going to elevate you to the Lama of China, you know, you will become the most powerful religious figure in the world.

I mean, the Pope had Europe right? The Chinese Emperor had ... the Mongol dynasty extended to Moscow, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Vienna, this was an empire, you know, and he's like, you can be the Lama of the empire, you know, and he wrote back a very sincere letter that said, I can't leave plaza because I have students, and I'm taking care of my students, you know, and he ...

but he wrote a very beautiful letter, he ... there was tension even in those times between Chinese and Tibet, and he wrote a very beautiful letter, and then he sent his main disciple, Jamjen Chodje, who was the founder of Sara Monastery, which is the greatest monastery in the world, and ... and then he ...

he wrote ... he sent his main disciple, and then he ... he said I can't come, but he wrote it in a very beautiful way, and he kept peace between the two countries, and I think it's a good example, he was an activist in a way, for peace, and he didn't allow there to be any international problem between China and Tibet, he was very careful.

Okay, I don't know which way you guys want to go, how about the middle? Oh, I like down, down in the middle maybe. How about down more?

Oh, how about to the right? I don't know, where are these guys? How about to the left?

No? Yeah, I like this one, okay? So, Tsongkapa's like, I don't know, this is like 14, 15 or something, and he's like, you know what we should do, we should start building monasteries, you know, like we should have a monastery, and ...

because in Tibet it was a little wild up till then, a lot of the centers were Dharma centers, they were run by families, like the First Sakya Monastery was a family ... later ... the First Sakya Monastery was a family operation, and it was passed down to the sons by the father, they weren't monks in the beginning, and then Tsongkapa said, let's keep the old Indian monk system, we'll build the monastery in the proper way, he measured all the cells, they had to be the right size, they did all the proper rituals, there's a ...

there's a ... dulway le gyel tsar means the the hundred rituals of Vinaya, of the monk's code, and he kept to all of them, he introduced them into Tibet, people became real monks in his time, and he built Gonden ... this is the building of Gonden Monastery, which was the first great Gelugpa monastery in Tibet, and the reason I put it here was that, if you're going to affect the world, if you're going to help the world, it's nice to have a place to work from, you know, I mean buildings tend to create stability, and they tend to ...

you can have a place for people to give a Tsongkapa talk for example, and like that, so I think Gelug Rinpoche, this is a beautiful place, it's like the most beautiful Dharma Center I ever saw, and to build a place like this, to have a place like this, it's good ... you can affect the world easier, if you have a place where people can gather, and people can have talks, and people can can meet together and learn, so that's an example by Tsongkapa. I don't know what else we have there, you want to go right?

I don't know, how about up? I don't know, oh stop, go down, Gareth will like this one, do you know what it is? Down just a touch, so Tsongkapa is doing a retreat at a monastery called Radren, and he's just been reading the Tenrim Chamo, which is a great book on the steps of the path, and written much earlier, in the 1100s, and then he was very much influenced by it, and he said you know, I should write a great book on the steps of the path, like let's call it Lam Rim Chenmo, and he goes into a vision which lasts for a month, it's like a one-month acid trip, he's doing prayers at the feet of a statue of Lord Atisha at Radren monastery, he's doing a retreat, he's fasting, and he goes into a vision that lasts for a month, for a month he's going in and out of this vision, and he's seeing all the great masters of the Lam Rim tradition from ancient India, so all the all the great teachers of ancient ... that's Lord Atisha, and then these are all the great teachers of the Lam Rim, of the steps of the path, even going back in ... there's a tradition that says the Lam Rim was invented not by Tsongkhapa, but by ...

or by Lord Atisha, but by the Buddha himself, and so he has this vision of all these teachers, and then he writes ... he knocks out the Lam Rim Chenmo in like six months, right there, the thousand pages, the greatest book ever written in Tibetan, I would say maybe in the world, and ... and that's the ...

that's the crucial moment when he ... when he begins to write okay, and that book ... I mean it's basically a guidebook to enlightenment, it's an extraordinary guidebook to enlightenment, and it's been translated by this great group of scholars.

I think the ... to me the greatest thing they did was that they actually got a group of scholars to work together ... no, which is a ...

which is a great achievement, and to agree on the terminology and to ... and to finish this book is perhaps the greatest contribution in our time to these teachings, and so you have that book, you should read it, and it's a guidebook to enlightenment, that's all you need. It's like, what do you call those maps, those Rand McNally maps to Michigan or something, it's beautiful, it's ...

it's all you need okay, and that's the moment that he ... that he wrote it to save the world. Okay, I think we'll go to the next one okay.

I think if you had to say what was Je Tsongkhapa's most common method of learning anything, or how did he come to be such a great thinker. I would consider him the greatest thinker in history. The answer is debating, he questioned things, you know, he wasn't satisfied to just sit in a class and have someone talk to him.

He would be the guy in the back asking, raising his hand every five minutes, and asking a question, you know, so this was his style, this was his ... the secret to his success was debating and questioning, Socratic dialogue, and it's interesting that Socrates' most famous disciple was who? Besides Aristotle, Alexander the Great, okay, who reached Kashmir in 327 B.C. or something, right after the Buddha, he came to India, he reached India, and his coming to India coincides with a huge shift in Buddhism, and beginning in the place that he reached, which is called Taxila, the Tibetans call it Dojok, this great city in what's now Afghanistan, Alexander reached there, and he brought this Greek custom of argument and debating in a Socratic style, and if you study, in a Tibetan monastery we debate three, four hours a day, and this is how we resolve questions, we ask, and we debate, and we argue, and we come to the truth of something, in a friendly, hot way okay, and through this process you really learn to think, and you learn to give answers. So, I thought we should have a little debate tonight, and on the plane I told my friend Ben Kramer, where are you? Can you come?

We're gonna debate a little bit okay? I'll give you a ... I just want to show you, because you see these videos right, of people in Tibetan monasteries screaming at each other, but you don't know what they're saying right?

So, I thought you'd like ... can you turn this mic on? Can you get this mic going?

Is it on? This one here? You sit here.

Okay, I'll show you how it goes. Like, I'm not in any rush to wipe you out or anything, and uh, in the very beginning, it's very respectful, that's the last respectful thing you do, okay? You say, this is called senpa, this is since the Buddha's time, when somebody asked the Buddha a question, they have to go like this.

This is like taking your hat off. Which means wisdom, right? Which means wisdom, mind.

So, you say, what do you think about this, okay? Aspirin is not a medicine!

[Говорящий 2]
Dama Drew, it's not true that aspirin is not a medicine.

[Говорящий 1]
Aspirin is a medicine.

[Говорящий 2]
Aspirin is a medicine.

[Говорящий 1]
Aspirin is not a medicine, it doesn't do any goddamn thing.

[Говорящий 2]
Dama Drew, if it's not true, aspirin doesn't do any goddamn thing.

[Говорящий 1]
That's right, it's not useless at all.

[Говорящий 2]
Dama Drew, if it's not true, it doesn't help a headache at all.

[Говорящий 1]
Let's talk about aspirin. So aspirin does help a headache. It does help people get rid of a headache.

It helps everybody get rid of a headache, right? No, aspirin doesn't help everybody who takes it. Aspirin is not a medicine.

Because it doesn't cure anything. What's that say?

[Говорящий 2]
Well, it cures some people.

[Говорящий 1]
Oh, some people. So, aspirin, let's talk about aspirin. It's a medicine because it helps some people.

Aspirin is not a medicine. Because it doesn't help some people. So aspirin is both a medicine and not a medicine.

So aspirin is not a medicine.

[Говорящий 2]
It's true also that it's not a medicine.

[Говорящий 1]
So for some people it's a medicine, and for some people it's not a medicine. So aspirin is empty. And that's what emptiness means.

That's the meaning of emptiness. Not a black hole. Not thinking about nothing.

Emptiness means aspirin is not medicine and it's not mad medicine. That is. So aspirin is empty.

It doesn't have a nature of being aspirin. From its own side. But it doesn't have any nature of being aspirin.

So why do we call it aspirin?

[Говорящий 2]
Because it helps some people.

[Говорящий 1]
So why does it help some people?

[Говорящий 2]
The aspirin must be different for some people than it is for other people, I guess.

[Говорящий 1]
Oh, so the power in aspirin doesn't exist inside the aspirin itself. And that's the meaning of emptiness. The aspirin is empty of being aspirin.

Got it? It's very beautiful. That's the meaning, okay?

Aspirin has no power in itself to fix your headache. Because it doesn't fix everybody's headache. So the power to fix a headache is not inside the aspirin, got it?

So the power to fix a headache is not inside the aspirin.

[Говорящий 2]
It's not.

[Говорящий 1]
So no aspirin has power to fix a headache.

[Говорящий 2]
Some aspirin has that power.

[Говорящий 1]
So some aspirin has power to fix a headache.

[Говорящий 2]
That's right.

[Говорящий 1]
Where does it get that power if it's not in the aspirin?

[Говорящий 2]
From the person taking it.

[Говорящий 1]
So everybody who takes an aspirin gets a headache fix?

[Говорящий 2]
No, not all of them. Why? Well, some of the people give the aspirin what it needs to help them, and some of them don't.

[Говорящий 1]
So what does it mean to give the aspirin power? How do we give aspirin? Whenever we get a headache, I would like my aspirin to work.

Can you enlighten us? How aspirin works? How can I get aspirin to work?

[Говорящий 2]
Well, you'd have to load it with whatever that special ingredient is that would make aspirin work for you.

[Говорящий 1]
What is the special ingredient that makes aspirin work for me?

[Говорящий 2]
That would have to be your kindness.

[Говорящий 1]
Okay, got it? He's saying there's nothing chemical in an aspirin that makes it work. He's saying that.

That's emptiness, okay? Got it? That's the meaning of emptiness.

There's nothing in an aspirin that makes an aspirin work. Aspirins work for some people, and they don't work for other people. And he's proposing that the difference is how much kindness I've done?

[Говорящий 2]
That's right.

[Говорящий 1]
What kind of kindness do I have to do to get my aspirin to work today?

[Говорящий 2]
You could give other people aspirin, preferably if they had a headache and also needed aspirin.

[Говорящий 1]
So in a sense, are you saying you have to load the aspirin?

[Говорящий 2]
You have to load the aspirin.

[Говорящий 1]
How do you load aspirin? How do you load an aspirin? What's the missing ingredient?

Ah.

[Говорящий 2]
You'd have to protect other people's life. You'd have to take away their headaches.

[Говорящий 1]
You have to pay attention to other people's pain, okay? So what do you call that loading? In Sanskrit language.

[Говорящий 2]
We call it karma.

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah. So that's karma. That's what karma means.

If you want your aspirin to work, every time, take care of other people's headaches. Got it? It's very beautiful.

Emptiness means aspirin doesn't have anything inside aspirin that works. It doesn't. Why?

Prove it. Why? Because it doesn't work for everybody.

If there was something in aspirin that fixed your headache, it would work for everybody. Got it? So it must be something coming from us.

And that's karma. So if you want your aspirin to work more often, take care of other people. Be nice to other people.

You hear somebody at work has a headache? Go give them an aspirin. Will it work?

If you load it properly. If they load it properly. You see?

Then you have to teach them how to load it. Okay, got it? We're talking loading stuff.

Stuff is like a stapler. Stuff is like a stapler. Most certainly.

Why?

[Говорящий 2]
Because you got to load it with staples.

[Говорящий 1]
So a stapler by itself is empty.

[Говорящий 2]
That's right.

[Говорящий 1]
Okay, got it? Life is like a stapler. The staples are empty, right?

Nothing inside. So how do you load a stapler?

[Говорящий 2]
With staples. I'm sorry, providing staples for others.

[Говорящий 1]
Aspirin is like a stapler, right? Does a stapler work? Does a stapler work?

Yes or no? If you load it properly. If what?

If you load it properly. Yeah. She gave a good answer.

She didn't say yes or no. That's not splitting the answer. If you load it properly, the stapler will work.

Will the aspirin work? The next aspirin you take, will it work on your headache? That's an effective way of aspirin.

Yeah. Have you taken care of others? Have you?

The last person who had a headache that you knew about, did you do anything to comfort them? Did you make them a tea? Did you ask them to sit down?

Did you fan their face or something? You know what I mean? And then that karma loads the aspirin.

You see, that's the active ingredient in aspirin. Got it? It's very beautiful.

That's the connection between karma and emptiness. All aspirin is empty. There's nothing there that will help you, because it doesn't help everybody.

There's something coming from us that loads the aspirin. And that's the kindness to other people who have a headache. Got it?

And then you can use that for everything. You want to find a partner? Help people find a partner.

Help lonely people. You want money? Give away money.

You know? You want to be healthy? Take care of sick people.

You can get everything, right? Okay? Alright.

I think we should give him a hand. So, that's the system that Je Tsongkapa used. And in this thangka, in the painting, he was a gunslinger, okay?

He left home when he was 15. Like, he lived in East Tibet. It was like New York City, right?

And then he walked to LA. And every place he stopped, every monastery he stopped for the night, he debated the guys there. And in those three years, he became the master who he is.

You see? By questioning. Like, you just learned more in ten minutes than I could teach you in an hour.

Because of that excitement, and the process of questioning, you know, like, debating stuff, right? You'll never forget the answer you gave. I'll never forget the answers I've failed on my Geshe exam.

Like, these little nerdy 15-year-old monks come up and ask me a question I can't answer, right? And ... I still remember those questions, right?

You never forget. So ... It's a great way to learn.

Question what you know. Okay? Tsongkapa was ruthless.

Tsongkapa was relentless. He would not accept any statement by anybody, even the Buddha. He wrote a book about what Lord Buddha said wrong.

Okay? It's called Changgye Lekshi Nyingpo. He wrote a book about how do you reconcile the things that Tsongkapa ...

that the Lord Buddha said that were mistaken. You know, he didn't take anybody's authority. He questioned everything.

So, if you really want to learn, if you really want to understand things, question everything. Question science. I was thinking last night to write a book on refutation of science.

You know, according to this idea, science is incorrect. There's nothing in aspirin that removes a headache. What's the proof of that?

Every single headache medicine ad you see says what? This one works. What's that mean?

It means all the other ones don't work. Right? Otherwise ...

I mean, nobody says this oxygen works to breathe. Right? Because it works, right?

When they say it works, it means that they don't work. Right? That's the truth.

So, question everything. Question what you grew up with. Question all the assumptions made by your culture.

Question everything. I'll tell you something interesting, then you get to have refreshments, okay? According to Buddhism, this room and these walls that are holding up ...

if I ask you what's holding up the roof, what do you say? What would you normally say? You'd say the walls are holding up the roof.

Tsongkapa would say you're wrong. The walls are not holding up the roof. Okay?

What's giving the walls their power? It's the same thing that gives the aspirin its power. Got it?

There are walls which fall down. People die in buildings, right? I mean, earthquake in Haiti, right?

Those were the same walls. They were nice walls. They were okay walls.

They were doing a good job. You know? They were ...

Buddhism says something very radical. Tsongkapa says something very radical. The power in the wall is not in the chemicals in the wall.

The power in the wall is not in the cement in the wall. The power in the wall is coming from how good you have treated other people. The wall is being held up by your love for other people.

That's a very, very, very radical statement. You see? It's karma that's keeping the wall up.

It's how well you provided housing for others who needed it. Did you help the people in Haiti? Did you send ten bucks?

Did you send twenty bucks? There are tens of thousands of people sleeping on the sidewalks, because they can't go into the buildings, because they're dangerous. Did you do anything to help them?

Right? And if not, then this will not stand. This wall will not stay here.

The walls of your house will not stay. Either they will pass or you will pass. It's very beautiful.

It's very, very beautiful. Okay? The walls are empty.

They have no power of their own. If they are holding up the roof, it's because you provided walls and accommodation and place to live for someone who was really desperate. Right?

And so we must help others. We must serve others. We don't have a choice.

If you want the walls to continue to work, you have to help people. Right? It's very beautiful.

The walls are empty. They have no power. They're not holding up the roof.

Your kindness is holding up the roof. Right? It's very beautiful.

Yeah. Their kindness ran out. A Buddhist would say ...

See, tonight I don't get to talk to Buddhists too much, okay? We would say mostly from their past life. Kindness in the past life has been exhausted, has worn out.

What wears out the karma in the walls? What causes them to wear out? Yeah, it's just used up.

You plant a seed, right? And a tree comes out. It dies.

After ten years, after fifty years, the tree dies. The power of the seed is exhausted. Your parents' blood, menstrual blood, and your father's semen has created a body, right?

It has projected a body into the world. The body lasts for seventy years, something like that. And it wears out, you see?

The power behind the seed and the blood finishes, you see? And you get old and you die, you see? So, all things left themselves wear out.

In Buddhism we say ... Famous Dharmakirti statement, what destroys a thing is its beginning. What destroys a tree is that it grew.

What destroys a person is that it was born, you see? What destroys this Dharma center is the day you started it. And no other thing needed.

You don't need a bomb. You don't need an earthquake. This center will fall down.

Definitely. Why? It was started, you see?

So, how do you get out of that? Okay, you don't get refreshments for five minutes. Okay, just in case someone sneaks away, which happens from time to time.

Is it possible to stop that? A certain force has created your body and your mind, and thrown it into this life, you know? Forces from your past life have created your body and mind now.

Must it get old? Must it ... Can that ...

Can the stapler be replenished before it runs out of staples? Can you put a new staple into a staple before it runs out of staples? You can ...

The point of Buddhist practice is to stop death. Buddha said, kye ga na shi. kye ga na shi.

I will teach you how to stop aging and death. The Heart Sutra says, marikpa me marikpa sepa mepa ne ga shi me ga shi sepa paru yang med do It means, if you can stop your ignorance, you do not need to age, and you do not need to die. That's from the Heart Sutra.

I didn't make it up, okay? ga shi sepa mepa ne ga shi me You can stop aging itself. You can stop death itself.

That's the purpose of Buddhist practice. This is the purpose of Buddhism. Can you stop the primary forms of suffering in this realm?

Can you stop death itself? Can you stop the process of aging itself? If you look at the aspirin, you know the answer.

If you think about the aspirin, you know the answer. I won't even tell you the answer, okay? Think about the aspirin.

Where did your life come from? And why is it wearing out? Why are you getting older?

Could you reload the stapler? And that's what tantric practice is, okay? That's what the whole system of these tantric practices is, to reload, to become a deathless being.

I mean, a Buddha doesn't die. A Buddha turns into light. They call rainbow body, right?

And the practices that Tsongkapa taught have only one purpose, to stop death and aging in this world. It's very beautiful. I mean, you're into a bigger thing than you thought.

You thought you were just going to learn to meditate or something, right? Now, if you really understand the practices, they are meant ... Lord Buddha meant these practices to stop aging and death.

Globally. We say he pretended to get people's rear ends in gear, you know? That his close disciples would say, oh, if even the teacher could die.

There are disciples who didn't see him die. That gets into another question. Why do some people ...

you really want to go this before ... you're going to deny them refreshments? I don't mind.

I don't mind, let's do it. That's the emptiness of Lord Buddha, okay? Some people saw Lord Buddha pass away.

Some people swore he didn't pass away. Some people saw Tsongkapa as a yogi with long hair and wearing a tiger skin. And some people saw Tsongkapa as a proper monk, you know?

And ... some people see aspirin working, and some people don't. No, this is the emptiness of aspirin, and this is the emptiness of Lord Buddha, okay?

Some people perceive his hoyness as getting old. Some people don't, okay? It's the same as the aspirin.

That's the emptiness of his hoyness. That's the emptiness of the Buddha. So, there's a tradition that says that if we were at a certain level, we would still see Lord Buddha.

People on a very high level still experience Lord Buddha as a sixteen-year-old Manjushri youth, you see? The same Buddha. Yeah, it's very beautiful.

That's the emptiness of the Buddha. If you understand aspirin, you can apply it to everything, okay? No, that's why we teach the aspirin, because you can relate to aspirin because you believe what I said, because you took aspirin and it didn't work for you sometimes, right?

Okay, alright. Now we really do get a refreshment. Whether it tastes good or not is up to ...

Okay, so we'll take like a ten-minute break. If you want to come up and say hi, and just bring me some cake or something, that's okay. Alright, if you just want to come up and say hi, come up.

Then we'll start in about ten minutes, okay? Alright. Let's get back to Jetsongkapa.

You ready? I don't have time to do all twelve. I should have a vote which ones you want.

Let me see. I wrote it on the back of my parking ticket here. What's the most benefit in one half hour?

Alright, number four, okay? It's a diamond thing or something like that? I call it Sita Diamond.

Diamond is a traditional Buddhist image for emptiness, right? And they say if you could see emptiness directly ... It's a long story.

You just saw emptiness of aspirin, okay? Why is aspirin empty? Empty means blank, okay?

I'm going to give you a five minute explanation of emptiness that's better than anything you'll ever get, okay? Aspirin is like this blank screen, okay? Aspirin is like this blank screen.

If the projector projects something onto it, you see something. You see what I mean? All life is like that.

Aspirin is like the screen. The projector is your own mind. The content in the projector is determined by how much kindness you have shown others, okay?

If you have shown concern for those who are ill or who are in pain, then your projector will project aspirin that works onto the empty aspirin. The aspirin is empty. It doesn't work and it doesn't not work.

Aspirin by itself is neutral. It's blank. Emptiness means blank or neutral, okay?

Aspirin is blank. If you've been caring for others, aspirin will work for you. If you haven't, aspirin will not work for you.

That's all. The aspirin itself is what? It's blank.

It's empty. It's neutral. It's nothing.

By itself it's nothing, okay? That's all that emptiness means, okay? So, you just perceived emptiness.

Through my explanation, you perceived emptiness, but not directly. We say indirectly. Through understanding, you perceived emptiness.

If you go into a deep meditation and you see emptiness directly, you can then deal with the forces that control life and death itself, okay? If you learn to meditate well, and if you see emptiness directly in a deep state of meditation, you can change the forces of life and death itself. You can easily make a quarter billion dollar company with no business training, okay?

I'm telling you from experience, okay? You can ... if you see ...

No, I have no business training. If you understand the forces behind reality itself, which is emptiness, then you can make anything happen. You can raise the dead.

You can not die. You can create a quarter billion thing. You know, they're all possible if you understand emptiness.

If you really understand. If you see it directly. So, what this poster shows is Je Tsongkapa's experiences with emptiness, okay?

Which I think is very ... is probably the most important thing you can study here. How about we focus on Je Tsongkapa at the bottom, okay?

Can you catch Manjushri and him? Yeah, like down just a bit. He'll fool around with it.

There's a scene in Je Tsongkapa's life, okay? He's been trying to understand emptiness, and he couldn't quite get it right. Then he did some prayers to ...

to Manjushri. Manjushri is the Buddhist angel of wisdom, and he taught Tsongkapa emptiness. He was his teacher, and he taught him about emptiness, okay?

So, what you see here is ... is a crucial moment in Tsongkapa's life when he met Manjushri face-to-face for the first time. Before that, he had a teacher named Lama Umapa who had direct contact with this angel, or this divine being.

And then Umapa taught Tsongkapa how to ... how to get into direct contact. And this is the moment of direct contact, and he's stabbing the sort of wisdom into Tsongkapa's heart, okay?

I have a young man, a friend, I don't know, he's maybe 30, in New York, and I asked him to repaint some of the scenes. He's a very fine painter, so he's actually repainted that scene in ... in sort of a modern ...

you can see it's a little bit different. He does ... what do you call it?

Spray ... He uses spray ... airbrush.

Yeah. And he's very talented. So that's ...

that's Tsongkapa getting the instructions on emptiness from ... from Manjushri himself. How about lower left, Nyingpo?

I forget what that is. Let's skip that. Let's go up above ...

upper left. This is beautiful. Tsongkapa had a dream, and in the dream he saw ...

he had a vision of a certain Buddhist book, Gareth will know, it's Buddhapalita. So he saw the text written across the sky explaining emptiness, and he was inspired in the vision to study an old Indian book about emptiness, and he got deep insights into emptiness. Now you know emptiness, okay?

It's not a black hole. It's not thinking about nothing. It's not ...

closing your eyes and trying to stop your thoughts. It's not that. Those are all very, very, very wrong.

It's not that nothing matters. It's not that you shouldn't think about anything. It's not that nothing counts.

No, those are all completely wrong. What is emptiness? What's the best example of emptiness that you heard tonight?

An aspirin. I mean, everybody can relate to an aspirin, right? Everybody gets headaches.

I have a headache right now, okay? I took some chocolate chip cookies, they didn't work. Okay?

I'm being honest. So, you can say that the ... the aspirin is ...

You see, if someone ever asks you about emptiness now, oh, you're studying at Jewel Hearts Center, do you study emptiness? Yes. What is emptiness?

Aspirin. What's that mean? Well, aspirin doesn't have anything in it that helps your headache.

That's empty. Okay? It's empty.

It doesn't have anything in it which cures your headache. Well, then why does aspirin work for some people and aspirin doesn't work for other people? Ah, some people have loaded the aspirin, and some people haven't loaded the aspirin.

Well, how do you load aspirin? You take an honest, heartfelt concern in other people's problems, and the karma of that loads the aspirin, and then the aspirin will work for you. Got it?

So, now you know a five-minute explanation of emptiness, which is better than anyone you will ever hear, I think. And it's more true, and it's more accurate. Okay, that's emptiness.

Alright? So here, Je Tsongkapa is having a vision about emptiness, and he's about to go into the direct perception of emptiness. Okay, upper right-hand corner.

Here he's having a vision of all the great teachers of the emptiness lineage, starting with Lord Buddha, Arya Nagarjuna, Chandrakirti, Buddha Palita, Shantideva. He's having a vision of these great teachers of emptiness, and then right after that, he goes into the direct perception of emptiness. It takes about 20 minutes, okay?

It's about a 20-minute experience in deep, deep, deep meditation. And he had that experience. If you have that experience once, you gain the ability to work with the very forces of reality.

You can make things happen, like amazing things. You can stop death itself. Okay?

That's the point of Buddhism, is to see emptiness directly. That's the whole ... and the whole point of yoga, if you're into yoga, yoga was invented by early Buddhist and Hindu practitioners to create certain openings in the chakras to allow you to see emptiness more easily.

And that's the point of yoga also, is to have this 20-minute peak experience, after which, if you have this experience, then you can ... you can actually change the forces behind reality itself. You can make anything happen.

Even ... you can even overcome death. There are realms, there are worlds, there are planets where people don't die anymore, and they don't have a word for death, because nobody knows what it is, because it doesn't exist there anymore.

You can say we're like on a retard planet, okay? No, we are on a lower evolutionary state. There are realms, there are whole worlds where people just forgot the word death, because there's no such thing.

So, if you understood emptiness properly, if you understood the teachings of Lord Buddha properly, you would see that the death ... death in this world is unnecessary ... unnecessary suffering.

It's not normal. It's not the way things have to be. It's a mistake.

And if people were just educated about how to stop it, as a planet, as a globe, we could stop death in this world. It's a mistake. It's a mistake of understanding.

And if you understood, you wouldn't have to die. And that's profound. The purpose of this center and the purpose of the teachings of the Buddha is to stop that kind of suffering in this world.

And we can. And we will. Okay?

It's very beautiful. So, that was Tsongkapa's ... that's what turned him on.

That's what he was doing. Okay? That's what he was doing with his life.

Okay? It's very, very, very beautiful, and it's all possible, and you can do all of it. You have to see emptiness.

You have to see emptiness directly. Okay? That's why the center is here.

And that's, by the way, why yoga was invented. You want to go to yoga? Some people doing yoga here.

Let's try yoga. That's number ... ten, I think.

Okay. I have to tell you my confession about yoga. Okay?

So, you know, I had a center in New York like 15 years ago, and a lot of my students were doing yoga, and I said it was worthless. And I talked a lot of them out of doing yoga. And then some lady came to our center and taught a yoga class.

I fell asleep halfway through. I woke up, everybody was gone already. And ...

I told everybody, this is the most useless thing, you know? And they said, don't you do yoga in the monastery? I said, no, we don't waste our time with that kind of stuff.

You know, we're studying, meditating, debating. We don't do yoga. So then I finished my Geshe, right?

And it's a beautiful process. You're examined for three weeks. Over a thousand people examined me.

They ask you that kind of questions, screaming at you, for three weeks. And then ... you graduate, you get that big hat, which I lost.

I don't know where my hat is. And ... they do this weird thing.

They take you into the abbot's quarters, where you're not usually allowed to go. It's on top of the main temple. And then they take you into this little secret room.

And the abbot's secret throne is there. It's like six feet high, right? And then they make you get up on it.

And they lock you in there. You know? And, you know, you're like sitting up there, like, somewhere where you're not supposed to be.

And ... you're not even supposed to know about this room. And you're just sitting there, you know?

And then they take you out, and they say, okay, now you can start your secret ... now you can start tantra. Now you can start the secret teachings.

Then they took me into a room, and some lama, my logic teacher, he said, okay, we're going to study Naropa's yoga. And I said, we don't do yoga. And he said, that's what you think.

You know? And he started teaching me yoga. Naropa's yoga.

Exercises, you know? And I said, well, I never saw anybody do this in the monastery. And my lamas used to say, there's lots of things you haven't seen.

[Говорящий 2]
You know?

[Говорящий 1]
And then ... we started to do exercises. After 20 years in the monastery, it's secret.

It's considered tantra. And, you know, they taught me ... you can see in the middle ...

can you blow up the black and white in the middle? This is ... Janglung Pandita.

He's a great author. Gelugpa author. He did a book of ...

in the middle on the right. Right there. Yeah.

Those are Naropa's yoga poses from one of our Gelugpa textbooks. And ... so they started teaching me the secret yoga, right?

Then I went to a yoga class in New York. I said, I'm going to see how the Hindus do it. You know?

And I walk in, and they're chanting Hare Krishna. I'm like, oh man. And then there's Ganesh ...

what do you call it? The guy with the nose, right? And I'm like, oh man, these guys don't know anything, you know?

Us Gelugpa monks, secret monks, we have yoga, you know? Then I went into a class, you know? I paid $15 and went into a class.

And they started teaching the poses. Every one was the same. You know?

The poses you are taught in a Western yoga class are exactly the poses in the secret 20-year-later thing, you know? I'm like, God, I could have spent just $15, and ... you know, instead of all this 20 years of work, you know?

And I went back to my teacher in the monastery, and I said, you know ... I said, you know this Naropa yoga thing, your big secret thing, you know? He said, yeah.

I said, well, there's people in America who know about it already. And they said, impossible, you know, you're the first American Geshe, you're the first one. I said, no, no, there's people, you know?

And he said, well, how many people? I said, well, I read in the Wall Street Journal, there's 50 million people I've tried to ... And he looks at me like this, you know?

I don't know if Gareth knows this word, it's a rare word, it's called pekyu. Pekyu means professional jealousy? Professional Dharma jealousy.

And I thought he was going to get pekyu. You know, I was watching him to see if he got pekyu, you know? And he started to cry.

And I said, oh, this is really bad pekyu, you know? And he's so upset that his secret got out, you know? And then I said, you know, it's alright, you know, they don't know why they're doing it.

And then he said, he said, no, no, you don't understand, you know? And I said, what? And he said, 50 million people in this world doing a high tantric practice, this world is on the verge of enlightenment itself, you know?

He said, that's a sign. He started to cry, you know? He was crying.

And he said, 50 million people suddenly drawn to a high tantric practice of yoga. This is a sign that we're ... that in this world, enlightenment is possible.

This planet can become enlightened soon. You know, they're all geshes. I said, no, they aren't Rinpoche.

And then he said, he said, no, no, they're all geshes in their past life, you know? I said, Rinpoche, come on, there weren't that many geshes. You know?

He said, no, no, many planets, many planets, you know? They're all here. They're all geshes are here, you know?

He said, anyone attracted to a yoga studio, anyone who has the karma to see Y-O-G-A on a sign in their city was a geshe in their past life. He said that, you know? He said, they're on the edge of enlightenment.

This is a very high tantric practice. And he was very overwhelmed, you know? He was very, very happy.

And so, one thing I guess to say is that most of the yoga you see done in America is very authentic. And it's all very, very good. I haven't been to a yoga studio where I didn't see good yoga.

So, all the system, anussara, ashtanga, jiva mukti, whatever, ayengar, they're all good. All the poses are good, and they're all authentic, okay? And they are meant to bring on the direct perception of emptiness.

They are designed to bring on the direct perception of emptiness. How that works, you know, the details of it, you have to ... you have to have a good yoga teacher who knows what ...

most yoga teachers don't understand what's going on, or why it helps you to see emptiness. But it's a very serious, high practice, and even if you have a teacher who doesn't know what's going on, you should still start yoga, okay? And it will soften your channels, it will make your chakras ready to see emptiness directly, okay?

It's a very high practice. Upper right hand. Right there in the right, Tsongkapa is having a vision of the 80 mahasiddhas, which are 80 great ancient yoga practitioners of the Buddhist tradition from ancient India.

These include Goraksha, Luwipa, Tilopa, Naropa, and if you study the great Hindu yoga classics like Hatha Yoga Padipika, it has the parampara, it has the list of gurus of the modern yoga schools, including Luwipa, Goraksha, Tilopa, Naropa, they're all there. It's very beautiful. There was a time when the Buddhists and the Hindus were doing yoga together, in the same shalas, in the same schools.

Hindu yogis and Buddhist yogis were practicing yoga asana together. You see? It's very beautiful.

There was a time when the two lineages were joined, and that's just in the literature. You can study, in Hatha Yoga Padipika, the first six verses contain a lot of these mahasiddhas. This is a vision of Tsongkapa.

He's having a vision of these mahasiddhas. One of the main mahasiddhas of the yoga lineage met Tsongkapa. Tsongkapa met him after the Munlam Chemo, which is a long story, which I can't tell you tonight, okay?

But the Munlam Chemo was the first great Dharma festival of Tibet, started by Tsongkapa, and it went perfectly, which is impossible for an important event in Buddhism, because there should be some obstacles by demons, right? And then he was out walking afterwards and he ran ... I think it was Virupa, I don't remember, or Goraksha, which the Tibetans call Bakhyon, and ...

and they call Virupa Birwapa. But anyway, he met him and he said, why did the ... Munlam Chemo goes so well, he said, are you kidding?

There were 80 of us protecting the city. You know, all these great ancient Indian yogis, we were protecting the city the whole time, and there were many attacks on the festival, and we stopped them, you know, so this is a beautiful ... I think ...

There's another beautiful scene, which I think is the last one I'll talk about. If you go down, just a little bit, and to the left. Right there.

Yeah. So, you see a bunch of people in a line, right? They're in a grassy field, and there's hundreds of women in a line.

And then, up above ... Can you go up a little bit? On either side.

Go up more. More. There, on the left, there's a divine boy, and on the right, there was a divine girl, angels, like very beautiful Bacchanal, Baca.

And this is a scene from the very beginning of the biography, where Jetsun Kapa's mother is having a dream about her son coming. This is before she gave birth. This is the night of the conception.

This is the Immaculate Conception, okay? Really. And she's having a dream, and she's standing in a field of poppies, with hundreds of women in a line.

And these two divine beings are going down the line of women one by one, and the boy turns to the girl and says, is this the one? And she says, no, not this one. And then they go to the next one.

So, this goes on for like hours in the dream, right? And then they get to Tsongkapa's mother, and they say, is it this one? And the girl says, this is the one.

And then he was conceived on that night. He came into his mother's womb on that night. It's a very beautiful story.

So, people ask me, you know, where does a family ... where does having a family play a part in ... you know?

People ask me, they come to me and they ask me. And what I say is that the example of Tsongkapa's mother is very important, I think. And it's a high tantric practice, okay?

When you are going to have a child, alright? When you decide to have a family. If you decide to have a family.

I mean, some people do better without a family, okay? I've found that. But if you choose to have a family, there's a practice that you can do, which is related to partner practice, okay?

When a child is conceived, from the time that you know that you're going to have a child, you start doing a special tantric practice where you decide that the child is a divine being. From the moment that you have your pregnancy test, and it comes out positive, right? Or whatever, negative, I don't know.

But then you ... there's a practice in high teachings of Buddhism where you decide ... you say to yourself, I have in my womb Tsongkapa, or I have in my womb Manjushri.

I don't have a normal baby. I'm ... a divine being has just come into my womb.

It's like what ... Je Tsongkapa's mother did this practice, okay? And then ...

and then you just observe when the child is born, and through the growth of the child, through the early years of the child, you keep a diary. You keep a journal. And each day you watch the child for unusual signs.

You know? I have a friend who did this practice, Winston McCullough? And he had a child named ...

the child was conceived during a diamond-cutter sutra teaching in a tent. I'm informed. And ...

the first time the baby was presented to me, he was in ... he was put in my arms, and he looked at me and he goes ... like that, you know?

And I'm like, okay. You know? And ...

so this is a high practice for those people who would like to have a family, where you ... from the conception, you think of the child as a divine being, and you treat them that way. Somebody asked me ...

somebody's doing this practice, right? After three ... they came to me and complained, you know?

And they said, look, Geshe-la, it's not working out, you know? And I'm like, why? And they said, well ...

how do you discipline a divine being? You know? Like, he's picking on his brother, but we don't want to say anything because he's a divine being, you know?

I said, well, it doesn't quite work like that. You know? I mean, he could just be a divine being testing you to see if you'll discipline him properly.

And ... like that. So you ...

a family, having a family, having a child, on the model of Je Tsongkapa's mother, she was devoted to him her whole life, and she saw him as divine from the first moment, and she never let go of that. You know? She died ...

she died ... still sending him little cookie packages from Kham, East Tibet, to Lhasa, and, you know, she would continually send him like, kapse, Tibetan cookie packages, and stuff like that. So, that's a high practice.

You can do that ... if you choose to have a family life, watch your child, keep a journal, see if they do things that are divine, and make that your practice. You know?

I have a lot of parents come to me and say, oh, I don't have time to meditate, I have these three screaming kids. I say, well, maybe they should be your practice. Maybe you should watch ...

watch them. And then this becomes your practice. So, these are high, beautiful practices where no part of a modern person's life is exempt from practice.

Okay? Every part of your life, your yoga practice, your family, your partner, your meditation, everything becomes practice. It's not just at the center, you know?

It's like your whole day, from when you wake up, and then you do dream practice at night. So, 24 hours ... 24-7 you're doing practice, you know?

Every part of a modern person's life can be as deep a practice as Tsongkapa ever did, and that's what he wanted, you know? You ... you are the monks of the modern age, you know?

Everybody here. You are ... you are meant to do these high practices all day, and that's the ...

I think that's the example that we can learn from Tsongkapa, okay? So, you know, I asked Rinpoche to keep teaching you about Je Tsongkapa. He's one of the great Tsongkapa experts of the modern world, and ...

and try to learn more. Try to study more of Tsongkapa. Gareth's book is a good start.

The ... the great book ... the great treatise on the steps to enlightenment, right?

And then ... then find your heart teacher, okay? I mean, that's the last thing I'm going to say, alright?

You can't do any of these things without a really, really good teacher who knows ... who knows the practices, and who knows the teachings. You can't get anywhere without a high teacher.

That said, your teacher might not be the one you expect, and Tsongkapa has emanated in this world in many, many unusual ways. The last thangka, which I don't have time to show you, okay, shows him on thousands of planets pretending to be a bus driver, you know, pretending to be your first grade teacher, pretending to be your aunt, pretending to be your dog. It's a beautiful thangka.

The last thangka shows him emanating on thousands of worlds in thousands of normal forms as normal people in your life. So look for Tsongkapa, okay? Like, fantasize about the first person you meet tomorrow at work as maybe Tsongkapa, you know, think about that.

Really. And try to find him. He's sneaky, okay?

He's in many places. He's not just some monk who lived 600 years ago. He's still hanging out in different ways, okay?

And then serve your teacher, pray for his long life, and try to find out what his true wishes are, and spend your whole life making them come to true. And then you'll be happy. I'm really, really happy.

I'm the happiest person I know. And just take care of your teacher. You have a good teacher, and take care of him, whoever your teacher is, your heart teacher, and him or her.

And... make their wishes come true. And really, you'll be happy.

Your whole life will be happy. You don't need to worry. Okay?

Good night.