Важные идеи древних школ буддизма (2019, Нью-Йорк), занятие 1

[Speaker 1]
Thank you very much. We had a teaching this morning, right? And...

it's about what the translators are doing. And we split all the translation work up into nine translators, primary translators, because there are about nine kinds of Buddhist language that a Geshe has to learn. And...

so I thought for this fundraiser's luncheon, I would go through one idea from each school, from each translation. These are the translations. It's about 2,764 pages' word.

And... this is the work that the translators have done in the last two years. And they are on schedule to work...

some of them are scheduled for 20 more years. The Abhidharma translation is scheduled for 20 more years, and things like that. And I...

I just thought I would go through the... one idea from each school, from each translation. And...

Tim was brave enough to carry them here in a suitcase, and we'd like to donate them to the Three Jewels. Okay. And we didn't have time to finish it this morning, which is kind of frustrating for me.

So I want to finish it. And then the rest of the talk from last night is one of them. So I thought I could...

kill two birds with one stone, so to speak, and just do the whole thing. Okay, I think you could spread out a little bit. Is that okay?

Is it legal?

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, it's legal.

[Speaker 1]
Just spread out, because make yourself more room, okay? Use up this space. Come on.

Yeah. And be more comfortable. You can come up a little bit if you want.

I don't know if it's... if it's more comfortable. So I'll go through those...

nine or ten ideas, just because I have it in mind and I... Tim asked me to finish it sometime, which is never going to happen. So I thought I'd just do it now.

And then I'll try to, at the end, give some inspiring... message to... for the ACI...

Global Summit, which is happening tomorrow. Okay? And I'll inspire you to carry the message to the globe.

And I... I asked to have these printed about twenty minutes ago, which is typical. And they're coming, okay?

From... or always bringing them, okay? So, you're going to have...

You okay? You have... You have some...

Are you projecting?

[Speaker 2]
Oh, we don't have a projector. Do you want the projector on?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, this morning. I'm going to continue from this morning, because Tim Lonehow asked me to. Is that trouble for you?

Obviously. No, I'll figure it out. Okay, take your time, and I'll just start, okay?

So... This is a reading, which you are going to get in about ten minutes. It's being printed as we speak.

And it was the reading for the sponsors this morning. And... I didn't get to finish it.

And I... I'm really attached to it. So, here we go.

So, we have nine main translators. We have about... I don't know, a hundred secondary translators.

If you count China. We have... We're training about 80 translators in China.

And the idea is that these books will be translated into another 35 languages or something. Also Canadian. It's a book.

That Earl's going to do it. He's going to change all the abouts to a boot.

[Speaker 2]
And... Stuff like that.

[Speaker 1]
Whatever that is. One day I asked my boss in the diamond company how many grams in a kilogram. And he said, he said, only an American would ask that.

Okay, so anyway, I'll go... I'll just start and you're going to get the pictures shortly. Okay?

And I'm starting from the bottom school and I'm working up. Okay? So, one of these books is Abhidharma.

And as we talked about, there was kind of a dark ages in Buddhism from 500 BC to 200 AD. Seven centuries are considered sort of a dark ages. And I don't know why and it's kind of depressing to imagine why.

But right after Lord Buddha passed, his teachings on emptiness were immediately misunderstood in a much lower version which we call the Abhidharma school. And... So, the teachings on emptiness just immediately got corrupted and became a very elementary...

And they didn't really work as well for seven centuries. So... And interestingly, in the monastery you don't study that school till the end of the Geshe program.

The last two years you might spend some time on Abhidharma. But my karma was that when I showed up at the monastery my teacher was teaching it. So, he taught it to me for 12 years.

And we translated the first Dalai Lama's commentary which is a very famous commentary. And... So, it's kind of dear to my heart.

It is the basis of DCI. So, most of DCI's stuff... somewhere you can find in the Abhidharma especially that the fourth chapter which is on karma is accepted by all schools as being...

Nobody wrote a better chapter about... a better presentation of karma. It's complete and it's accepted by everyone.

So, the foundation of the four steps and all that comes from Abhidharma. And here's your reading from Ori We should thank him. You okay, Tim?

Did I stress you out? He thought he was keeping up with me. Okay.

So, the first one... The translator for Abhidharma is Stanley Chen. He's from Shenzhen, China.

He's an amazing young man. 28? 29?

Something like that.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. And he's also in charge of our China Soft Power program which is teaching very... very advanced...

Chinese business people these ideas. And... He's just like kind of a...

Mozart? Wunderkind. Auf Deutsch.

Yeah? Okay, Wunderkind. He's a Wunderkind.

And... The quotation I put... I put one quotation from each school.

And the quotation from that one is called ,,SAGS CES SA PA MED CHEN NAM,, ,,LAM MA THOB PA'I DU CHEN NAM,, ,,SAGS CES GANG PHYIR,, ,,DE LA LA SA RNAM KUN DU RGYAS PA RGYUR,, ,,SA MED LAM GYI BRTEN PA DANG,, ,,DU MA CHEN NAM SUM YANG,, ,,DE NAM KA BRTAN NI GOPA GNYI,, ,,DE LA NAM KA MA GYUR BA'O,, Very famous opening of the Abhidharma. And we have to memorize it in the monastery. It's about 150 pages or something like that.

So I've forgotten the rest, okay? But I don't... And the whole Abhidharma starts out with all things in the world can be divided into two types.

One is ,,SAGS CES,, which means, has stains. Yeah, ,,MALA,, and ,,MALA,, as I mentioned this morning, means... It came into English as malevolent and...

Who's that Disney character? Maleficent. Yeah, yeah.

So it means bad. And then, if you find a person who's extraordinarily pure and free of that, you would call them ,,VIM MALA,, Right? So, that means no more ,,MALA,, And so...

And it's... You know, I studied it for 12 years and I... And I...

I'm just appreciating it now. And what it says is, 99.99999% of all the things in the world will cause you pain and will hurt you, okay? So, it's basically, Abhidharma is a list of things that can hurt you and things that can help you.

And the things that can hurt you are 99.99999% And then he divides all things in the universe into changing and unchanging, which is the same as saying things which have a cause and things which don't have a cause. Existing things which don't have a cause, okay? Like space...

Give me some word. Space... Cessation meaning, the end of anger in the human heart, for example, cannot change, will never change.

[Speaker 2]
And...

[Speaker 1]
Emptiness itself. Yeah, empty space. These are the famous ones.

So, out of the whole universe, there's only one changing thing which will not hurt you. And that's the study of the Dharma and the understanding of emptiness. It's the only changing thing which will not hurt you.

Your body will hurt you. Your eyes will hurt you. Your nose will hurt you.

Your friends will hurt you. Your city will hurt you. Everything will hurt you in the Abhidharma system except for what you do at the Three Jewels.

Seriously. You can say that every other activity in New York City will hurt people. So, you know, I know you kind of maybe see yourselves as a weirdos in a white room on Fifth...

Third Street? Fifth... Third Street.

I forget what street we're on. We started like two doors down. And...

But actually, you are the only thing in New York that won't hurt people. It's going on here. And so, you know, from a...

from a... I don't know. From a point of view of the whole universe and the point of view of America, what's going on in this room on a daily basis is the only thing that won't hurt people in New York, you see?

So, you should have a little bit... In Buddhism we call it ngagyal. You should have a little chutzpah about who you are.

You are very special. What you are doing here is very special. And you are the only changing thing in New York that won't hurt people, okay?

This is Abhidharma. This is basic Abhidharma. Then...

DUM MA'I PHYIR RNAMS ZIN YOD NA NANG DKA'I DANG NI DGOS PA NI There are three unchanging things which will not hurt you, okay? One is space. And that's...we're going to talk about it maybe later if I get there. But basically, the place in which you are sitting, the place you are occupying with your body, which will still be here when you walk out. And will still be here if the planet is destroyed when Trump blows up everything. There will still be a space here.

That doesn't change. And it doesn't hurt people. You see, you can walk through it.

It's always there. And then cessation. What we call cessation.

One is called SO SOR DANG GO and SO SOR DANG MIN GYI DGOS PA Say SO SOR. DANG GO SO SOR DANG MIN GYI DGOS PA DANG MIN GYI DGOS PA The end of negativity in the human heart is permanent. It will never change, you see?

And it has two versions, okay? One comes from a lesser understanding of emptiness and one comes from a direct understanding of emptiness. So, if you teach the pen correctly, then a person gets a lower understanding of emptiness, an intellectual understanding of emptiness.

And because of that understanding, certain negativities begin to become impossible, okay? And we often do the two husbands... Peter did a famous two husbands video that went viral in Russia or Germany or both?

I don't remember. And this is where we demonstrate in a funny skit that the husband who yells at you at home doesn't exist, and you are angry at something which doesn't exist. If you understand that intellectually, you start the process of being a person who cannot be pissed off.

No one can do it to you. If you start to understand that the husband who's not coming from you is impossible, you start to... you start to travel towards nirvana, which is the end of anger, for example.

So... And it doesn't happen the first time you hear the pen. You know?

It doesn't happen that you go home and your husband yells at you, and you're like, oh, I know you're coming from me, honey. Everything's cool. It takes time.

But in time, in intellectual understanding of emptiness, which means that your husband's not coming from himself, okay? That's emptiness. Double negative is emptiness.

Without the double negative, it's dependent origination. He's coming from you. There are flip sides of the same coin, okay?

So, he's coming from what you did in the past. You yelled at someone at your job, and tonight your husband's yelling at you. If you really understand that pen thing, you will get less and less angry each time, okay?

It doesn't work the first night, trust me. Don't feel depressed if you forget, okay? But in Abhidharma terms, that's called SO SOR GTANG MING GI SGOG PA SO SOR GTANG MING means it does not depend on the direct perception of emptiness.

It can be produced by an intellectual understanding of emptiness, okay? Then, the final thing in Abhidharma school which is... which won't hurt you, which is unchanging, is SO SOR GTANG SGOG.

Say SO SOR. SO SOR GTANG SGOG $50 word, SO SOR. In this case.

One by one. What? Elimination of each bad deed.

No. I'd save my money. I don't know, when he gets to New York, he...

He's very expensive in Sedona. He costs me like $400, $500 a day, really. Okay, anyway.

SO SOR in this case means individually you see the four higher truths, the four arya truths, mistranslated as noble truths. It's a very bad mistranslation. The word means arya.

The word means there are four things you understand when you see emptiness directly. And because of that, you can't have certain negativities in you. And you start to become a Buddha.

You start to reach nirvana, okay? So, these are unchanging things and they cannot hurt you, okay? And that's basic Abhidharma, okay?

I finished the lowest school because we have to move. And to teach a major text in each school takes... We did 72 classes in January, in two weeks.

And each one takes five hours of prep, six hours of prep. I mean, it's intense. We're doing a few minutes on each school, okay?

Second school. And the translator for the second school is Alison Zhou. She's also from Shenzhen.

She became Stanley's partner due to our intense translation work together, which is convenient for me because they always travel together. I don't have to invite them separately. And she's translating...

One of these books here is The Ancient Vow of Morality, Vinaya, okay? Which is considered part of the Abhidharma school. And...

What she's working on right now is very, very cool. There are 364 nuns' vows, full nuns' vows. And they were lost a thousand years ago.

The lineage was broken in Tibet due to an evil king who killed all the monks and nuns. It takes 12 nuns to make a nun and he killed them until there was 11. So, there hasn't been a recognized lineage of full nuns in Tibet.

There have been in other countries, China, Thailand, Burma, I guess. Vietnam. But we're restoring the version of the monks' vows, the nuns' vows which came to Tibet.

So, there are 18 different versions of nuns' vows. 18 different schools of Vinaya. And the one which came to Tibet has been broken for a thousand years.

And we're rebuilding it. And it's very, very cool and very exciting. And so...

And it's extremely difficult. The literature is very ancient. It's the oldest language of Buddhism.

And the books are all corrupted. They've all been broken. The blocks are smashed, burned, missing.

And we... John Brady, God bless him. Let's give him a hand.

And Christina Kasica, who's sitting here. And Vimala, who Nora is helping. They've been recovering the ancient books.

John's been working for 31 years on it. And we have enough ancient books recovered that we are able to piece back together the vows. And it's very, very beautiful.

So, what I talked about this morning with the sponsor group, the VIP group, was a certain concept that we happen to be working on right now. It's kind of mid-level vows. Mid-level nuns' vows.

They're defined by serious enough to have to confess, but not serious enough to get kicked out of the monastery for a day. And... And the vow we're working on, right, just by...

I just took things at random. Is that you're not allowed to stand with a man in a place where people cannot see you. Both, you know.

So, you can stand with a man out in an open field or something like that. That's okay. But you can't go behind the trees where somebody cannot see you.

And then that whole thing relates to an ancient teaching from Abhidharma called ngotsa and tell you. Which word is going to translate definitely? Ngotsa.

Ngotsa is shame meaning not doing bad deeds because of how you think of yourself. And tell you is consideration meaning not doing bad deeds because of how others would think of you. Yeah, okay.

And that comes from this vow, teaching, these particular vows. So, one is where tell you is easy. You control yourself in public.

You don't want people to say, Geshe Michael did this thing, I saw him. You know, so, when you're in public you are very righteous. That's called tell you.

And it's still a virtue. According to Abhidharma, every time you do a good karma, you have both of these going on in your mind. And it's very interesting.

Buddhist psychology, for 51, right? He translated it. 51 mental functions going on at the same...

in the human mind, capable in the human mind. Basically, 51 different functions. Two of them are always present if you're doing a good karma.

One of them is tell you, which means you care about how others feel. And that can be a good thing too. Like, you don't want to hurt...

It's not just others impression of yourself, but you don't want to upset other people. So, you try to control yourself. You try to be a good person.

I was reading the book, Nur. A friend of ours wrote a book about honor... honor killings in Pakistan.

And she's a big advocate against that. And she's talking about honor. Though I read the introduction last night.

And the whole thing is a sense that you don't want to embarrass your family, especially your father. And that's honor, you know. And that's a good thing.

That can be a good thing. That you don't want to hurt the people around you. You want to be a nice person because you don't want to upset the people around you.

That's called chal yu. It is present in all cases of good karma. Somewhere in your mind you are thinking that you don't want to hurt the people around you, okay?

The other one is more subtle and it has to do with the open walls. Ngotsa. Ngotsa means...

even if you were by yourself in your room alone and you had a chance to do something bad, which is mainly pornography on the internet, etc. You control yourself. And you avoid it because you...

because of your own self... What do you call it? Your self-image.

Your self-esteem. How you feel about yourself. And you know, you get ready, you turn on, then you're like, wait, this isn't what I want to be.

This is not who I want to be. And you... you know, you control yourself.

And... And that's a pure... See, these two things go together.

Every time you do a good karma, these two thoughts are swimming around in your mind somewhere. And that's a very, very important teaching from this second example of the lowest school. It's an Abhidharma version, which is vinaya, which is morality, vowed morality, okay?

We finished the first school. Yay! Okay, we're trucking.

You're doing the Geshe course in one evening. Okay, the third school, which is... By the way, I put their pictures in here.

And I got a good picture of Adam. He's really handsome. I married him and his wife, I don't know, last summer in France.

And... you know, and they're having a baby pretty soon. Okay?

And... he's doing a book called... you know, you call it Buddhist Logic.

It's called Pramana. Say Pramana. Pramana means...

a correct perception, accurate perception. So, in Buddhism, you're not drunk, you're not crazy, you're not overwhelmed by jealousy and you see things that aren't there, okay? Like emotions...

or motion? Like you're at the red light and the two cars next to you go backwards and you have a misperception that your car is sliding into the intersection. So, Pramana means you don't have any of these things affecting your perception.

Your perceptions are correct, okay? And then, it's a whole school of Buddhism. It's the second school called...

Sautrantika. Which means followers of Sutra, okay? And they say, we don't agree with those Abhidharma guys because they're not following Sutra.

They're following a book that was put together by 500 scholars after Buddha died. And admittedly, they messed it up. Which all committees do.

So, that's why we don't do translation by committee, frankly. We pick one specialist, we train them for 10, 20 years. That's our Vinaya specialist or that's our Sutra Sautrantika, okay?

So, Adam's doing a book called... by Dharmakirti, called... Pramanavarttika.

Which means commentary on... How do you know when you're having a correct perception? You see?

And how do you... When you look at a cow, how do you see a cow? You're looking at arms, you're looking at legs, you're looking at horns.

How does your mind make a cow out of these pieces? And this is the big subject of their school. And he's into a very cool...

subject called yul yul chen. Say yul? Yul chen.

Yul means all the possible objects of perception. And yul chen means... all the...

Those, by the way, those are called desha in Sanskrit. And it came to mean a place, like Bangladesh. There's other deshas, right?

No, no, no. Anyway, it came to mean country. Or a location in a country.

But it means... So, in Buddhism, this is very cool. Desha means the object, and de shin means the state of mind holding the object.

So, the object and subject, okay? Which already means that the idea that when you see emptiness directly, the mind becomes the object, is wrong, okay? It is described as pouring water into water, but you definitely have a state of mind going on.

Otherwise you couldn't be there, you couldn't see emptiness, okay? So, non-duality, water into water, it doesn't mean your mind disappears. And the word itself for object and subject means it has to be that way.

Your mind never turns off. Ever. Your mind has gone on for countless eons.

Billions... Countless billions of years you've had a mind. And you cannot turn it off.

You can take drugs, you can shoot yourself in the head. No, you can do anything. You cannot turn off the human mind.

It will continue forever. And it has been forever, okay? And...

Then, he's doing this cool thing, levels of objects, levels of deshas. And there's many many beautiful terms. Say, mig yu?

Shen yu? Zhin tang gi yu? Ngu yu?

Shu yu? Yeah. Five levels of...

of objects, okay? Five levels of objects. So, if I'm looking at Ori's face, handsome face, I mean...

It's all karma. No, I mean, the color and shape of his face, he called mig yu. So, it means, what am I looking at?

The object I'm looking at, okay? And for me right now, it happens to be also, ngu yu. Ngu yu word for $50?

Da da da da da da da... Uh-uh. Nice though, I said high tone.

I'll give you $25. Ah, okay, $25. If it's not high tone, it's...

it's what he said the first time. If it is high tone, it's what he said the second time, for a half price. Yeah, so ngu yu means, right now I'm having a direct perception of his face, you know, and tomorrow on the plane to Tokyo, I will have an indirect perception of his face, okay?

A memory, okay? So, that's ngu. Ngu means direct.

Shu means, you know, somebody says, is Ori in New York? And I say, yeah, I saw him yesterday, he wasn't planning on going anywhere. And then I have a...

his face becomes an indirect object. Why is it important in the study of emptiness? Tie it to Abhidharma.

$50. Accept word. Now people come to depend on him and...

What's it got to do with seeing his face directly or seeing his face indirectly, with what I said about Abhidharma? It's the main cessation that you want from a direct perception. Yeah, nice.

Emptiness can be a ngu-yu or a shu-yu, okay? Ngu-yu means... By the way, I owe him $50.

Rebecca, are you on it? Okay, she keeps record. I pay her extra if she forgets somebody.

So, shu-yu... Ngu-yu, yeah, shu-yu means, when I teach emptiness with the pen, you have a shu-yu. Emptiness is a shu-yu.

You are understanding emptiness, but not directly. You are figuring it out, okay? From what I say.

Then, one day you have a... It becomes a ngu-yu, okay? It becomes a direct perception.

So, it's a big difference between... I like to say, hugging your friend or thinking about them when they're 10 miles away. You see what I mean?

Ngu-yu is much more satisfying than thinking about... No, it is, right? And it's much more satisfying to hug emptiness directly than to, you know, think about how it would have been, and don't ask me questions.

I can hardly get through this stuff without questions. Okay, watch. Wait, you cannot ask a question with gum in your mouth.

Okay, just swallow. Rinpoche would have hit you with a rosary, I'm telling you.

[Speaker 2]
Okay. Why are directed to the emptiness, but you have many realizations?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, yeah, shu-yu.

[Speaker 2]
Are those also similar to that?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
Are those categorized as intellectual?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
Because they're not direct perception?

[Speaker 1]
Exactly. And there's three versions of it. One is logic.

You can use logic to perceive it. One is called the convention. And if I say the big black or something like that to refer to emptiness.

And then, based on that, you get some concept of emptiness. That's the second way. What's the third way for $50?

Even word. Taught in DCI level 7. Okay, stop.

Pratyaksham... Yeah, who said that? Damn, you're hot tonight.

Was that $100? Yeah, so three kinds of indirect perception. They can be figuring it out yourself, from Geshe-la talking about the pen.

Geshe-la uses metaphors, like the big black or, you know, the eternal space or something. And, or... which is called convention.

Or the third option is called... authority. Okay, you trust the person.

You don't understand what Geshe-la said about the pen. Exactly, but you just take it, because you like him. Or you have established that he doesn't like to lie in public.

Okay? Like that, okay? So, anyway, those are three.

When you perceive emptiness through any of those three methods, it's called shugyu, indirect. So, so far we have migyu, which is... or his face.

And tonight it's a nguyu, it's a perception... direct perception face. But tomorrow will be a shugyu, when I remember, or logically what I recall where he will be, something like that.

And then there's a dzintanggyu. Say dzintanggyu. Which, how do you take his face?

And in the deeper studies, it's become shengyu. I'll say shengyu. Shengyu means a feeling I have about him, which is mistaken.

Okay? Shen means mistaken. We have shenpa shidro, for...

fifty dollars, not word, or this guy from Canada. Shenpa shidro. Okay, cancel that one.

Yeah, it's one of your lojong texts, in... what is it, course... fourteen.

Yeah. Freedom from the four attachments. So, shengyu means how I feel him to be, and the implication is wrongly.

Wrongly. I feel like he's coming this way. If he says, Geshe-la, that was really stupid talk tonight.

You know? Then I will... I'll get upset, because I'll think he wanted to say something bad about me.

So, then I have a shengyu. Shengyu means, I want to think of him as coming this way. Okay?

And you can call it zintang giyo, it's the same, but shengyu is more evil. Okay? Shengyu means, I feel like Ori is coming this way.

Okay? Where is Ori coming from? Yeah, he's coming from me.

Okay? So, when you cut the shengyu, you understand Ori. When you stop thinking that the pen is coming this way, a certain kind of pen is...

is removed from the equation, between you and the pen. An imaginary pen that you made up, called the pen which is... coming from the pen.

You see? When you remove that one, you start seeing the real nature of the pen. You see what I mean?

So, we have all these layers of... of interpretations of Hector's face, or his face, which are false. And we build them.

And we never see the real one. Okay? Got it?

Like that. Which is the migyu, which is the one I'm really looking at. So, this is...

This is school two. We're not even up into the higher schools yet, but it's sexy. And you can see why, school number two, the study of logic and perception, is called the key to emptiness.

Unfortunately, ACI 13 is the key to emptiness. And... When I taught ACI 13, okay, now since I'm among historical ACI, it's kind of the theme this weekend.

Where has ACI been, and where is ACI going? It seems to be a crucial weekend in the history of ACI. But just so you know some...

I mean, there will be stories about ACI a hundred years from now. Here's one for you. When I taught ACI 13, I lost half my students in one night.

She was there. Or maybe you weren't, I don't remember. But...

You know, it was... I started logic. I started the second school, and people freaked out.

And I was kind of disappointed, you know. People fell off like flies. And...

So then, when I finished ACI 13, the people who were left, I said, we're going to do love. Something fuzzy and warm called lojong. You know, ACI 14.

So, hang in there. Come back next time, you know. And then we went on to these poems about love.

And I... Then they all came back. Slowly they all came back.

And... Then people said, there's a reason why the logic was number 13. Okay.

That's... Now you graduated from second school. Okay, but you get a feeling for...

what's the point of the second school. It's those layers of false objects. Okay?

Which is what Adam is translating this week. Okay? The next school is mind-only school.

And as I said this morning, we made a big mistake. We wanted to cover all the schools, so we... we picked the most important book of the mind-only school, which is a book by Tsongkhapa called, Difficult Points of the Mind-Only School.

Semtsongpa Kanne. And it's a bitch. Okay?

I'm sorry. You gotta say it for what it is. And...

We got... How many pages into it? We got like three pages into it.

And we like junked it. We said, we can't do this. And...

I'm in a weird stage in my life. I don't know anyone who can help me. I'm not aware of anyone who can help me.

Art Engel can help me sometimes. But if I can't figure it out, I can't call anybody. There's nobody else.

So I'm like, we need help. You know? We need divine help.

So I asked Word to look through the collection of ancient scripture scans which have been worked on for over 30 years by a group called Tibetan Buddhist Research Center, now called BD or something. And I'm pleased that tonight we have the director, the man who directed it for many years, Jeff Laman. And because of him and his work, his dedication, he just retired and we stole him.

He's just been replaced, I think, in the last few months. He... I think he wanted to kind of do something even more fun.

But... they have saved... 8 million?

13? How many? 16 million pages of ancient books.

And then, very, very kindly, without charge, they have given them to our project for, I don't know, 30 years. So what we type is their scans. And without them we wouldn't exist.

Without the typing, the translation cannot happen. So, we should give them another hand. So, I asked Word, you know, go dig around their stuff.

You know, you don't know how we talk about you. We're like... I say, yeah, go dig in their stuff, see if you can find something.

And... he found a very beautiful commentary. What's the date of the author?

I know, I forget.

[Speaker 2]
1875?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. Not too old. Like two...

150 years old? And this is a lama who explained Tsongkhapa's commentary and he did a good job. So, we're working through that.

We're translating that. And it's very exciting. Master Word Smith is there.

He's our most amazing Word Rememberer. We call him the human computer. And I'd like to give him a hand for working under my wing.

And I'm very... apologize, I didn't have a chance to say hi to your dad last night. And I tell him I apologize.

And I hope he didn't freak out too much from the class. Like, disown you. But he probably did already.

Okay. Okay, so here's a cool thing about mind-only. And I explained it at lunch today, but, you know, probably forgot already.

So... They say the human... Do you want to...

Are you in the mood? Now, what I want you to explain. Okay, this is your examination.

It's the two extra parts of the mind. And what you're translating this last week. You know, so...

What happens when this part of the mind figures out that part of the mind and what's left of this part of the mind. Okay? Go.

Loud, is that okay? Or you want to come up, stand up? Here.

Quick, quick. Okay. Do you mind to stand up?

Yeah. No, I don't like this one. Okay, clip that to me.

Talk loud. All right. Mainly to keep people awake.

I know, mind-only, right? Hi, New York. Hey.

Hey. Okay, so mind-only school. So as Geshe-la explained, we're doing this text.

It's called The Difficult Points in Mind-Only School. And that is not a figurative name. It's a really difficult book.

And it goes into some of the most technical points of the most technical school in Buddhism. So the book, the original book by Jason Kappa, who's the founder of our tradition, is called, in Tibetan, say, Yi Dang Kun Shi. Yi Dang Kun Shi.

Yes, there's more, but let's stick with that. So those are the two extra consciousnesses in the mind-only school. So usually in Buddhism, there's six consciousnesses.

The five senses. Right? And the mind.

But in the mind-only school, they add two extra consciousnesses. And it's super confusing. And so, as if it wasn't confusing enough, Jason Kappa named the book.

He didn't name the book the two extra consciousnesses. He named it Yi Dang Kun Shi. Yi just means mind.

So for 600 years, people are like, mind and foundation consciousness. But that has nothing to do with the book at all. As if it wasn't hard.

The title is difficult. So what the title means is Kun Shi, which is foundation consciousness. I'll talk about that.

And this thing called Nyun Yi. Say, Nyun Yi. Nyun Yi.

Okay. Nyun is short for Nung Mong. And Nung Mong means klesha.

Afflicted, negative state of mind. Anything that disturbs your state of mind. Klesha.

Right? And so the whole book is basically divided into two parts. The part about Kun Shi and the part about Nyun Yi.

Okay? And not in that order. No, in that order.

Not in the order of the title. Okay. So we just went through a long section on Kun Shi, which is foundation consciousness.

That is in the Mind Only School. Let me talk about the Mind Only School for one second. Okay.

Because it's really confusing. The Mind Only School is basically the school that the Buddha taught at the end of his career. There's three turnings of the wheel.

Hector taught course 15. Right? Very lovingly.

And in that course, they talk about the third turning of the wheel. Basically, when Lord Buddha first started teaching his five disciples and so on, he taught about suffering, about the heaps, about the consciousnesses. Very, like, clear stuff.

And people were like, oh, okay. Sounds good. We like that.

And then he started saying wild stuff. He said, nothing exists. You have no eyes, no ears, no mouth, no tongue, nothing.

And people were like, what? Right? He did that on Vulture's Peak and the Heart Sutra and the Diamond Cutter Sutra, some of the most famous Buddhist texts.

And they're still boggling people's minds. People don't know what these texts mean anymore. That's why we got a Geshe-la.

That's why we got a Geshe-la. Okay. So then this bodhisattva comes along.

He's like, it's like a Buddhist joke. So bodhisattva walks into a teaching. He's like, Lord Buddha.

He's like, first you say, everything's real. Then you say, nothing's real. Which one is it?

Right? And so that's when the Mind-Only School was born with that question. He said, hmm, some things are real, some things not so real.

Right? And this is the ancient tradition of Buddhism where you always give a teaching to the level of the students. You don't just start spouting emptiness to newbies and they're like, ah, nothing exists.

And they run out of three jewels. You know? Okay.

So, the way he explained it. Did you do that, Geshe-la? So the way he explained it is he added two extra consciousnesses.

One is called kunshi. Right? And that's where all the seeds that we collect, all the karmas, say bak chak.

Those are the seeds. Those are the potentials in the mind. And they go into what we call the kunshi.

And somehow, you don't want to know how, trust me. You know. You can read my book.

It's going to sell like five. Okay? Those seeds become your experiences.

That's the basic. They become blue. They become, you know, Geshe-la.

They become New York. Okay? That's enough.

So, you don't want to know. So, and then, now we're in the second part of our book, which is nyonyi. So nyonyi is, they explain how we have bad thoughts.

Basically, because Buddhism is also all about suffering, right? Pain. How do we get rid of our problems?

So, the point of the second half of the book, which we arduously and laboriously got to, is about that. Okay? You got it?

Okay. Good. So, now, they're talking about, actually, very important subject.

Geshe-la just talked about Abhidharma, and he talked about cessations, right? Sosotangigok. Sosotangigok?

Yeah, and Sosotangmingigok. Right. How do we end our problems?

That's, that's what it means, pretty much, right? Okay. So, in the book, they're saying, okay, there's this thing where all our problems are kept, right?

And with it are all these other problems. Like, not only do you have, like, bad things happen to you, but, you know, when you do it, you feel bad, you think it's bad, when your mind touches it, it's bad, and so on and so forth. And they go into categorizing that.

It's really annoying. and you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and you, And it's amazing, but it's, it's annoying. Okay.

And so, they explain all that, but then they ask, it's like a trick question. Cause you gotta, you gotta remember this about what's the thing with all the other schools? They're wrong.

Yeah, they're not, they're not complete. They're perfect for the student, but there's another one that can take you the whole way. You can't get enlightened with them, right?

So, the question is, if it's true that you have this part of your mind that's broken and it's accompanied by all these other parts of your mind that are messed up, when you reach a stage when you've seen the ultimate, like emptiness directly, and you're supposed to never have to come back to the desire realm, this place where we just want food and sex, that's how the first Dalai Lama defined it, not me, don't look at me like that, once we reach that stage, what happens to that mental function in our mind?

And to get rid of it, do we need to have a full lobotomy, or can we just pull that crap out and then go along and be cool and like end samsara? Yay! Yeah, when you cut the tumor out, do you also cut the brain out?

Abhidharma says yes. You disappear in nirvana, okay? And in his school, where he's at in his translation this week, because I want you to feel how exciting it is, you know, we don't know how the story is going to end, but, you know, they're in the operation and the doctor says, should we take out the brain or not?

And then the term ended and we don't know. Okay, next school, we reached the fourth school, which is? Middle Way, and the Middle Way school has two parts, okay?

The Middle Way school has lower Middle Way and higher Middle Way, basically you can say there's five schools if you look at it that way, okay? And one of the great teachings of the lower half of the Middle Way is a Sangha's presentation of the Wheel of Life. RTEN JIN...

DE NAS ZEN GYI RNAM GYI'IM PA'I RTEN GYI RDZIN LA MYONG ZHUGS NAS RTEN JIN DEL BYUNG LUG THUN DANG LUG MI THUN LA RTOG PAR BYED Very famous. Study the Lion's Dance, master it, and you will come to see dependent origination as it's expressed in the Wheel of Life, okay? Which I'm sure you're learning at the Three Jewels.

He connects the Lion's Dance meditation directly to understanding the Wheel of Life. How do you... then there's a picture here, how do you stay in the Wheel of Life, how do you get into the Wheel of Life?

And this is being translated by one of our students from Indonesia who lives in Singapore, who's of Chinese ancestry, and his name is Sugeng Shi. And it's a beautiful story about Sugeng. I was giving a talk in Singapore to about 1,200 people, and there's this...

and it was one of those audiences that goes up, you know, like I'm on the level of the second half of the audience, and then some of the audience is up there, and there's one intense guy, and he's like... you know, and I keep looking at him, and there's 1,200 people, and I keep looking at him, you know, and I'm like... Then the director of Singapore, Jenny Wong, came on the stage of the break, I said, go find that guy, go get that guy, he's important for you.

And she went and got him, and now he's the director of Indonesia, he has eight cities, he has 31 Three Jewels equivalents in Indonesia, and he's translating these ancient books, and he's intense. And his wife is equally intense, so they're two intenses. And...

so anyway, he's translating this ancient commentary to the Wheel of Life. And I'll show you something we just figured out. So, and you're kind of a Wheel of Life expert because of his presentation, Hector's presentation of the Wheel of Life, I use it all the time.

How he did it graphically was groundbreaking. So, you don't appreciate him, but I do. So, there were...

there's twelve links, as you know, like twelve o'clocks, in the Wheel of Life, and they start, number one is what? You misunderstand the pen. Which means you misunderstand your husband when he's yelling at you, and you think he's coming this way.

And only because of that misunderstanding can you do link number two? You call him... I almost said a bad word.

You call him a bad name. Yeah, you make fresh karma, you make karma, okay? And then the wheel starts to spin, you see?

And it ends with... death, old age and death, okay? And...

and you know, we learn the twelve links, and in your mind, you feel like this, okay? You feel like the twelve links goes like this, like a clock. And I've been doing twelve links, I don't know, for thirty years.

And when I think of it, I think of a clock, right? And then what happened in our translation class, it's like, oh wow! Buddha says, no, no, it's three wheels, it's always three wheels.

And the first wheel goes, kik, and the second wheel goes, vik, and the third wheel goes, krak, and so it's, zik, zik, gone. And it's always... it's always like, this cog moves, and that moves this cog, and this moves this cog.

So, in this life, you misunderstand your husband, you answer him when he yells at you when you get home, no, I'm not stupid, you're stupid. Then that connects to link number three of the second wheel. And then you get reborn, because you have karma.

And you live a whole life up to link number ten. And then, that triggers the third wheel, eleven and twelve, and you're born again, and then you die again. So, it's really one...

You can't think of it like a clock anymore, you have to think of it as, rik, rik, and then vyu. Okay, and I want you to translate it that way. Then it got deeper.

And he said, you know, and who told me, Connie, I think it was, so, Jacqueline, Jacqueline said it today at the table, it's quite nice. It's really, it's not going this way, and it's not even going this way, it's going this way. You see?

And it's, you're looking at the wheel from above. She said, you said it at lunch, it was brilliant. I mean, sometimes.

But, yeah, it's not rik, rik, rik, it's rik, rik, rik. And it goes, and then the third one connects to the next first one. Rik, rik, rik, rik, rik, rik, rik, rik.

And you're just going down, you keep going down, and you keep... Crap keeps happening, because it keeps spinning. One spins two, two spins three, three spins one, one spins two.

And it's a, it's a very beautiful idea. So, you know, you have to figure out the graphics. Maybe you do it, you do it as a clock first, and then you teach it that way, and then say, you know what, maybe it's like this.

And you do the three graphically in a linear fashion, and then you make it bird's eye view, and something like that. And then that would be more accurate, okay? So, that's what we learned last month in our translation.

We got to, we got to the technical presentation of that great green green, okay? I'm just telling you how exciting it is to be in the room, you know, in that room, in Sedona, during a translation session. It's like, it's like, you know, everyone's making a discovery every ten minutes or something.

It's cool, okay? Alright, what, how should I do this? We need a break?

But what do you think? Should I take a break in about 15 minutes, how's that? And then we come back and I'll give you a pep talk for the tomorrow's thing, okay?

Alright, next text is by Nick Lasha, who many of you know. He showed up at Diamond Mountain when we were getting ready for the first three-year retreat, and, I mean, the second one. And he just built cabins.

Whose cabin he built? Grant's cabin, yeah. And he just quietly came and he just labored like that.

But his story is very beautiful. He's from New York. He taught like that.

You want a coffee? And his story is very, to me it's very beautiful. He was a hippie, he was in trouble with the law all the time, in some borough, like Brooklyn or something.

And he got in a fight in a bar, on New Year's, I think, or something. And a guy hit him over the head with a bottle, and broke the bottle on his head. And they said he would die.

He went to the hospital and they said, they told his parents he's gonna die. And he had this intense night. You know, I don't know, triggered something good in his mind.

Lots of seeds probably over on this side. And he had this intense night in intensive care. And he walked out mentally a Buddhist.

He survived. And he didn't die. And he came and he started meditating.

And it's amazing. It's a beautiful story. And now he's the director of the translation team.

And he's a very talented linguist. His Spanish is... I can tell it's good even though I don't understand it.

Yeah. Anyway, and his Tibetan is really good. So, he runs the translation program.

So, anyway, when we were splitting up texts, we decided to do a Nagarjuna text. And... we chose kind of a difficult one, which is called the 60 verses.

I'll tell you the last verse of the 60. You ready? gewa dee kye wo khan sanam yeshe tso tso she That's the last verse.

That's where it comes from. It's very beautiful. It was written by Nagarjuna.

And it's the last verse. And he said, these Abhidharma guys and these logic guys, they're always criticizing our emptiness ideas. And they say Buddha never taught them.

And they say, yeah, Buddha taught them during the second turning of the wheel, which is two famous sutras mainly. Hard sutra. And the diamond cutter.

My Lama called it the hard sutra. But they say, they don't agree that the Buddha gave those teachings. They say Buddha never gave those teachings.

Buddha taught these basic sutras about the Wheel of Life and about the Four Truths. But he never taught these emptiness teachings were not by the Buddha. They are written by other people, okay?

So, you know, here's Nagarjuna. 700 years. After 700 dark years.

These are the dark ages of Buddhism. And he's like, these are cool. These are correct.

Because he saw emptiness directly. So, we call him the Arya. Sometimes he's just called the Arya.

And he saw emptiness directly. And he said, those second turning of the wheel is the right one. Those sutras are awesome.

But how can I convince these Abhidharma guys? And then he had this really Arya idea. He said, I will use their books only to prove to them that those books teach emptiness.

And I will not refer to the second turning of the wheel. I will restrict the game. The game will be played in the first turning of the wheel.

And I will only use first turning scriptures. And I will use those scriptures to prove to them what is emptiness, what is nirvana. And that's the game.

Nick's text is this extraordinary game where somebody proves the second turning of the wheel is correct without referring to it. And he only uses the lower school scriptures. And it's really awesome.

And then, Je Tsongkapa's main disciple, Gyaltsab Je, Gyaltsab means the person who got the throne from Tsongkapa. The second person in our lineage. And by the way, we are at Tsongkapa lineage.

And people come to me, how's the Three Jewels in New York? Are you happy with the Three Jewels in New York? I said, I don't know.

But if they're teaching Tsongkapa, I'm happy. And if they're not teaching Tsongkapa, I'm pissed. What does it mean to teach Tsongkapa?

Just emptiness and karma. So, I've been assured that every teacher here is teaching emptiness and karma. You don't have to call it that.

You can call it fish and chips. I don't care. I don't care, you know, how you package it.

And I agree that, you know, apparently it's important to package things different ways for different generations as in the three turnings of the wheel, you know. Who am I to say Buddha shouldn't have taught second and third turning? You've got to change the language.

You've got to keep up with your city. And New York moves, you know. New York's the moving target.

So, yeah, do whatever you have to do, but keep that message in there, okay? Or I curse you forever, okay? Like, keep the husband in there.

The husband... the yelling husband thing. That's going to be current forever.

And just keep that part. I don't care. Then you can do, you know...

And no ayahuasca, okay? But everything else you can do, okay? Like, teach it on your head or...

I don't care. I really don't care. And if ACI proved anything, it was that a different packaging for each generation is a beautiful thing.

And I'll tell you something that occurred to me the other day. And I mentioned it to the Three Jewels stuff. We are the largest international Buddhist organization in the world.

Okay? By accident. You know, you teach 20,000 people a year.

DCI teaches 30,000 people a year. There's a couple other groups going on. Call it 75,000, 80,000 people a year.

By accident, because we're presenting it in a modern way, we have more people coming than any other Buddhist organization in the world, including the Tibetan whatever you... the monastic system, which I'm a graduate of. But, you teach more people than any other Buddhist organization or person on the planet, you know?

And we don't think of it that way. We don't go around bragging about it. But the DCI presentation, the Three Jewels presentation of Buddhism is Buddhism now.

Okay? And I get calls. Bertha Velasquez.

She got a call from the Dalai Lama's office in Mexico City, can you come and teach us how to teach business and Buddhism? Okay? And Anton, who's Moscow, he got a call from the Dalai Lama's office in India saying, can you come and teach us how to teach business and Buddhism?

And it... You are... You are Buddhism, okay?

You are the living Buddhism. And there's a monastic Buddhism... The numbers are shrinking, frankly.

It will be like the Catholic Church in America. It's hard to find an American Catholic priest. They're importing Filipino priests and stuff like...

It's just... It's not happening. And I don't know, now you're all scared, I can feel it.

You are Buddhism in the world. This is Buddhism. There's not some other Buddhism somewhere that's more authentic or more old or...

or more traditional. You are Buddhism. This is Buddhism.

You are keeping Buddhism alive in the world here at Three Jewels. And your presentation to modern people is where it's at right now, okay? And it's kind of cool.

And it's also kind of scary. Okay, don't get nervous. Alright.

So anyway, Nick's text... To go back to his text is... This is difficult.

Nagarjuna said a famous thing. He said, things don't come from themselves. Things don't come from something else.

Things don't come from both. And things don't come from neither. And this is very Nagarjuna.

Apparently, if you've seen emptiness directly, you have this cool style teaching. And he's like, listen, dude. Nothing comes from itself.

Nothing comes from something else. Nothing comes from both. And nothing comes from without a cause.

Okay? And that stood up for three, four hundred years. You know?

Confused people for three, four hundred years. By the way, he marks the end of the Dark Ages. That announcement marks the end of the Dark Ages in Buddhism.

And since then it's been light again. The real understanding of emptiness has survived. Come back from the Abhidharma Dark Ages.

Since that day. Up to this moment. In this room.

Where... The real teaching of emptiness has survived. Okay?

That light is in the world. Okay? But there was a danger moment around three hundred years later.

Somebody said, I think Nagarjuna was trying to make meter in the poetry, so he left out some words. And everybody... His name is Bhavaviveka.

And they said, well, what did he leave out? He should have said, things don't come from themselves. Which is obvious.

You know, like... A car doesn't start itself. You know?

Somebody else starts a car. A tree doesn't... It takes a seed to...

to make a tree grow. Okay? There has to be something else than the tree to start this tree.

That's okay. So, obviously things don't start from themselves. A tree cannot grow without a seed.

And a tree can't grow with no cause. They don't just pop up. You know?

And... But the big question is, do they or do they not come from something other than the tree? Does a tree or does not a tree come from something other than the tree?

You tell me. Yeah. Yeah.

Everything comes from something else. Okay? Coffee comes from coffee bean.

Okay? Coffee bean comes from coffee plant. Coffee plant comes from coffee bean.

Unless, you know, it goes on. So, Nagarjuna said something wrong when he said, things don't come from something else. Because they do.

So, Baba Viveka said, you know what he really meant? He meant to say, from their own side. He should have added, from their own side.

And he started a new Buddhism called, lower middle way? Svatantrika. Which has the word tantra and it has nothing to do with tantra.

So, don't think that. The word is Svatantrika. It sounds like Sautrantika, which is the second school.

Don't confuse that. It has nothing to do with tantra. It just means, he said, that statement cannot stand on its own.

You got to say, things don't come from other things, from their own side. You know? The husband who yells at you is not a husband from his own side.

The pen... No, no, Baba Viveka's place. Please, add from its own side.

Otherwise, you sound nuts. Of course, there's a husband in the kitchen. Don't go around saying, there's no husband in the kitchen.

You got... Nagarjuna, you got to add these words, from his own side. Don't go around confusing people saying, there's no husbands.

Because we can see there are husbands, okay? So, he insisted on that. Now, one of the most exciting moments, I don't know if you remember it, but I remember it.

So, we have a student working on this. We have several students working on this school. One is...

Utpala. Venerable Utpala. And...

She's doing a special kind of book called Tatti. Say Tatti. Tatti.

Meditations on Emptiness. So, we have added that as a separate subject. You know, we've given it the status of the mind-only school, of the Abhidharma.

We've created a separate practice segment of the translation team. And she just translates emptiness meditations. And this is a special genre of literature called Tatti, which means emptiness meditations.

So, here's this. She's swimming in emptiness meditations all day. And she's doing this huge book on emptiness meditations.

And she's sitting there in her quiet way. And... She's like...

Baba Viveka... She's translating Baba Viveka section right now. And Nick reached the same thing in his book, which is happening.

The books are starting to have incest. You know... His words book bumped into her book recently.

The mental functions. Buddhist psychology has already come up in two of them. It's already been translated twice.

And we have these cool interactions. Internetwork happening. So anyway, she's sitting there and she says, Geshe-la, do I understand this right?

And I'm like, what? You know, I'm like, why are you interrupting me in my mind? But I...

I said, what? She says, so the problem is that... Baba Viveka wants to fix Nagarjuna.

Nagarjuna says, things don't come from others. There's no husband in the kitchen. At all.

And then the lower middle way says, no, no, come on Nagarjuna. Say it correctly. There's no husband in the kitchen who's not coming from you.

Because you yelled at your kids last week. Say it correctly. You know, she said, do I have it right?

I said, so good. So far, so good. Yeah, that's correct.

Baba Viveka wants to add from its own side. And there's no husband in the kitchen who's coming from his own side. Nagarjuna should have added from his own side.

And then she says, I think what Gyaltsabje is saying is that you don't have to add those words because if you add them, the person will think the words come from their own side. And I'm like... I'm like...

I've been debating for 25 years in the mind. I'm like, wow. She just cracked the middle way score, you know.

Right here in this room. I don't know if you remember. Like I was stunned at that moment.

I was like, damn. You know. She just said something more clear than thousands of pages of Baba Viveka, you know.

If you add those words, if you have... If you're Nagarjuna, you say, look, there's no husband in the kitchen. And either the person gets it or they don't get it because that person is coming from you.

Logic has no... Logic is empty. You see what I mean?

Reasons don't have an existence from their own side. So, it's no use to tell somebody, there's no husband in your kitchen who didn't come from you. Because they won't get that if they didn't get the first one.

Got it? Because they're both coming from you. The person you're arguing with is coming from you about their husband.

And it's so cool, you know. And she cracked anyway. I thought it was cool.

That's the lower middle way. And that's the kind of thing happening in the... in the room at that moment, okay?

Now, she also gets on to a subject which is called the borders between things, okay? And that's what I was teaching last night. And I only got to the very first subject.

And I didn't finish. I'll finish in ten minutes, okay? Is that okay?

If you have to pee-pee, just get up and go. I hereby allow, okay? If someone has a...

drank a lot of coffee just before you got here, okay? Don't be shy. Just stand up in front of everybody and...

head over there. This is... Her book is where we get into the cracks.

Something weird is going on. I have a problem in my house. I invented a sprinkler system from my backyard because I wanted to grow clover because I wanted to grow bees.

And they like clover. So I have a... I had a beehive.

And... I invented a sprinkler system where I tie... cheap Walmart sprinklers to concrete blocks and move them around the yard.

And I thought, man, I'm so cool. And I saved like $10,000 and... But it kept hitting the side of the house because the water pressure changes in my town if there's any water pressure because it's a small town.

And... So it was getting on the side of the house. It leaked through the door and then the floor went bad.

So I hired a... A lady was advertising in my town. My town has like 500 people or something.

And... She's a veteran. And she had a single mom.

So I thought, well, I'll give her a try because it would be patriotic. Thank you for your service. And she came and she ripped up my floor.

And then she left. And... Then mice started to get in, you know.

And I'm like, you know... It smells funny in my bedroom, you know. And I'm like, I don't know.

It just felt... It started to smell funny, you know. And then bananas started going bad on the counter in the kitchen.

You know, like little holes in them. And I'm like, that's weird. You know, and...

You know, then at night I started to hear these weird things like... And I'm like, hmm... You know...

These are cracks in the airplane. Okay? And you start to get a suspicion.

No, you start to get a suspicion like, hmm, stinky. Bananas disappearing. Chewing noises at night.

And... No, and then... I was sitting in the kitchen and this mouse crawls up my leg.

I said, I got mice. That's the direct perception. Okay?

But before that you have... This suspicion grows. Nagarjuna wants you to start having a suspicion about reality.

You see? He wants you to start having suspicion about things ain't working the way you thought. And he starts with parts, okay?

A thing is not its parts. A thing is not all the parts together. A thing is not something else.

A thing is not nothing. Okay? Same pattern.

Very Nagarjuna. And same book. Same first chapter of Wisdom.

And... By the way, they give all kinds of names to his books. Forget it.

It's called Prajna. It's just called Wisdom. Because that's the way an Arya would name their book.

Something sexy. Not foundational verses on the middle way. Okay?

Forget that. Okay? Really.

On it. So anyway... He says, things is suspicious.

Let's go through all the things in the world. And that's where we stopped last night, okay? You are not all your parts, okay?

Physically, you are not all your parts. You can say your energies, or you can say your parts, okay? Then we gotta go on to mental things.

And what he's saying is, the line between things is suspicious. The line between things is suspicious, you know? Like, where does your arm start?

Where does your body... Where does your arm stop, and where does your body start? He goes there first, okay?

I'm doing last night's reading now, okay? From my head. Then he goes on to suspicious lines in your mind, okay?

As I spoke tonight, hopefully... The lack of understanding of... The lack of appreciation of the eight schools.

Really, it's eight schools. Or nine if you count Tantra. That lack of understanding...

is like the dark when the sun comes up, right? So, the line—what do they call it? Umbria?

The line between the light and the dark should be moving across your brain, I'm hoping. You see, the light gets more, and then the...at dawn. And then the darkness recedes.

But it's in your own mind, you see? Parts of your mind are understanding the... the schools better tonight, by the end, than when you started.

And it didn't happen like that. There was a line of light, like the line of dawn coming across the land of your mind, right? And then, the Garja is like, where's the line?

What's the line? You know, at what point did you understand 25% of the schools? And at what point did you understand 30% of the schools?

And where exactly in your brain was it? And where's the meeting place between the, I don't quite understand all the schools, and now I understand all the schools? And you can't find it.

There's something weird going on. There's crunching noises going on. You see, I mean, you gotta start to get like, wow, this is weird.

Yeah, where is the line, you see? When did I understand the mind-only school? At what point, in words eloquent, I don't know what happened.

At what point in his eloquent description did you start to understand the mind-only school? At what moment? At what syllable?

At which sibilant in the syllable? Thuh or uh? Or brr?

You know, like... No, this is the Garjana. It's suspicious, you know?

He's talking. At some moment, you can say, I understand the mind-only school better. But what moment was it?

And what syllable was he on? Or was he at the beginning or the end of? Thuh, brr, thuh.

And you cannot find it. You can't find the place, you see? And the Garjana says, it's suspicious.

Some... Some stuff is going on here. He's like, some stuff is going on here, okay?

So now we covered mind, and we covered physical stuff. We'll save the person for later. And now we'll...

What's the other demon... Huh? Yeah, you can say that.

Let's go to... Yeah, well, we covered the three kinds of changing things. We covered physical.

We covered mental. We're gonna do people. We did people at the talk last night.

Six elements in the body. Stuff like that, okay? We covered people.

And then... Utpala's text, okay? And I'm sorry you're tired and I don't care.

Because I like to talk about it. Her text, the author, who's Choney Lama, who's unbelievable. He said, let's do...

let's go on to the emptiness of all the unchanging things in the universe. Let's look at the parts of all the unchanging stuff in the universe. Empty space.

The end of anger in the human heart. And then let's do emptiness. Okay?

Like he's... Let's talk about those boundaries. And we're all like...

We're already confused and we're already like drowning. He's like, let's go deeper. Let's look at the lines in all the stuff in the universe that never changes.

Okay? And then he says, let's start with coffee cups, you know? Empty space, okay?

You ready for that? I'll set you up, okay? And you better get it right.

To discuss empty space, he takes a coffee cup. He takes a kailasha, a vase, right? A water vase.

Water pitcher. Because there wasn't plumbing in ancient India and every room had a water pitcher. And the teacher's like trying to point to something that's in every room.

So, it's always the water pitcher. Nowadays it's a coffee cup. And very confusingly, to discuss empty space, he takes the...

the cracks in empty space, he takes a coffee cup. Why confusing word for $100? Or did I just save $100?

No. Tim got it... 50-50.

Hannibal and... Hannibal, come and give it to me. Yeah, good.

But Tim, give me the other half. Good. Say it more clearly.

[Speaker 2]
Good.

[Speaker 1]
Empty space is not the distance from one side to the other. Forget that. That's not space.

That's not space in Buddhism. Okay? But Choney Lama, to confuse everyone, takes a coffee cup.

You see? And because he's gonna talk about the emptiness of empty space. Okay?

And he's like, let's take coffee cups. And then half the people in the room already misunderstood him. Because they're thinking the space between the...

the two walls of the coffee cup. That's not the emptiness of... That's not the empty space.

It's the space that the... coffee cup is taking. Whether it's full or not, whether there's any edge, it doesn't matter.

So, 50-50, okay? Actually, Tim did 75 and Hannibal just went... But he's new, so I'll give you 50.

Okay, got it? And then he says something cool. So, here's the...

here's the saucer, okay? And here's the coffee cup, okay? Do they both have empty space?

Yes or no? I mean, I heard a couple mutterings. Come on, take a chance.

No, they both have empty space. They both occupy empty space, okay? Got it?

Now, does the empty space occupied... occupied by the coffee cup touch the empty space occupied by the saucer? And where's the line between them?

You see? Where's the line between the copper atoms? Where's the line between the understanding of words, text and the...

didn't talk about it yet? Where's the line between the emptiness of the saucer and the emptiness of the coffee cup? You cannot find it.

And that's a crack in the wing. Something weird is going on. I can smell something fishy.

I'm hearing... You see what I mean? It's very cool, okay?

And who's gonna go there to the emptiness of empty space? And he says, I'm not done with you guys yet. He says, I'm not done with you guys yet.

Let's talk about the anger you're never gonna have after you understand where your husband's coming from. Let's say it again, okay? I'm not talking about the anger.

I'm talking about the anger you're never gonna have again once you understand the husband thing. Once you understand the emptiness of your partner, you cannot ever get angry again. In theory.

Okay? Once you understand that any irritating thing your partner says is coming from you, how can you be irritated at them? Okay?

Got it? Can we say there's such a thing as irritation at your partner? Occasionally.

Yeah, okay? Can we say that the partner that you're irritated at is coming from their son? No, you cannot say that, but that's human nature.

That's why we're still in the desire realm, okay? That's why we're still in samsara. Can we say that there's actually no partner that you're irritated at that's coming from their side?

Got it? Okay. Can we say that an irritating boss— Sorry, I'll take it back.

Yeah. Can we say that an irritating boss that you meet when you go to open the coffee shop in the morning, I mean, once in a while, is coming from you or coming from them? Can we say there's one that's not coming from them?

Can we say— Yeah. Every irritating boss is not coming from them, okay? Now, what's the line between the absence of irritating boss that's coming from their own side, and the absence of irritating partner who's not coming from their own side?

Where's the line between those two emptinesses? And where's the line between the lack of anger that you feel towards the two? Because you can't be angry at something you created yourself.

Got it? Okay? That's where he goes.

He goes to— What's the line between the two emptinesses? Okay? Then he goes deeper.

He says, and what's the line between the two things that aren't there? And then he goes deeper. And he says, where's the line between the anger that will never happen towards the boss, and the anger that will never happen towards the husband?

Where's the line between them? He goes deeper. Where's the line between the anger that you'll never have with the boss, because you understand the boss is like the pen, and the anger you'll never have towards the husband, because you know that the husband is like the pen, as perceived directly, in the state of seeing emptiness directly.

Where's the line between those two empty people? Relative to the direct perception emptiness. And where's the line between the anger you'll never have, because you saw the emptiness of one directly, and you saw the other indirectly?

Okay? Where's the line between the two angers that you'll never have? Again.

Which is called? Nirvana. Okay?

Where's the line? And you can't find it. So he says, you ready?

Here's the ultimate. This is where we're at in Nick's text, if you recall. Somebody says to Nagarjuna, what's the definition of nirvana?

And he says, the direct understanding of samsara. And he says, you figure it out. He's like, you know, and it blows up the lower skull.

They go crazy. They go like, what? You know?

Nirvana is when you disappear. You know? No more pain.

Everything's gone. He says, uh-uh. Nirvana is when you understand samsara.

The emptiness of samsara. Okay? And that blows up this text.

We're at the point in Nick's text where the whole thing blows up. Because Nagarjuna wants to define nirvana as understanding the emptiness of samsara. Okay?

Got it? And it's very uncomfortable for the lower skulls. Okay.

I'm not done yet. We got two more. Okay?

Just two more. Then we'll take a break and then I'll— you'll pee-pee and after that I'll give you an inspiring talk about how to keep this going. How to have 1,003 jewels around the world.

3,000 jewels. Okay. Uh, this is kind of cool.

Okay, Ben Kramer, he's our resident nude-nude guy. And, uh, he won't let anything go. He's like, unbelievable.

He can't— I can't get anything past him. He'll say, Geshe-la, that's not really correct. Or, you know, it doesn't make sense.

You know, and I'm like, I know, but I was just, you know, trying to finish the class. He's like, no, no, no. So, he's doing a text called Siddhanta.

Say, Siddhanta. It comes from Siddha and Anta. And it means the study of all the schools of thought.

Buddhist or non-Buddhist. The study of all religions. And so, it's a traditional subject in the Buddhist literature called the study of all religions in the world.

And modern Siddhantas include Christianity, for example. Okay. Like the ones written since 1750 or something.

1800. You can find them in the TBRC database. These modern Siddhantas treat science and, you know, Christianity.

And once you get past 1750 or 1700, they just treat Indian schools of thought. And they compare the beliefs of all the schools on this paper and 20-something Hindu schools. Like different kinds of Sankhyas.

Okay. And different kinds of Jains. Different kinds of Vaishnavites.

Different kinds of Shaivites. And every possible idea about emptiness. So, cool...

cool literature. You know, what do they think is emptiness? Not just Buddhists.

But what does the soul mean to— and the lack of a soul mean to non-Buddhists in India? And it's very, very beautiful. And it's tempting, as you go through his book, to try to categorize our beliefs.

You know, I grew up Christian. I still go to church. And I grew up believing in science.

I was taught— at school I was taught science. In the church I was taught Christianity. And where did those beliefs fit in these 30 belief systems?

They're below the first one. Science is below the first one. Science is more primitive than the lowest school treated in Siddhanta.

Okay. And it's kind of shocking when you're like, oh my gosh, I grew up in a— in Buddhism they call— okay, $20, because I'm afraid you might know it. Lalo?

That's Lalo. $20. Give Rebecca $20.

Yeah. My beliefs that I grew up with, what I was taught in my school, is called, in Buddhism, barbarian. Which comes from Barbaru.

Which is an old— what do you call it? Insult to people who can't speak your language. Buh-buh-buh-buh-buh.

Buh-buh-buh-buh. And Berbers in Morocco became called Berber. And that's a long story.

Ask Mr. Romi, which is his real name. Gomi. Rom.

Anyway. So, we're down below the lowest school of ancient times, you know. And part of that classification is because we are not taught to think clearly.

Okay? Part of that classification, as you study that book, is that we lack the basic tools of logic. We are not trained in what makes sense, formally.

We're not trained in how to make a statement, how to make a reason. HCI 13. The one you hate.

Okay? But that's the one that's gonna graduate you to sit down. Then at least you'll be in the ballpark.

Okay? If you can think clearly. Okay?

Anyway, his book has a big emphasis on chakya shi. Chakya shi. Chakya shi.

Chatur mudra.

[Speaker 2]
Oh, the four seals.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, the four seals. And it's seals of approval. You know mudra has many meanings.

This is mudra. Argam, baddhi, bhupe, dupe, alage, gendhi, nudhi, shepta. These are all called mudra.

In tantra, mudra is your partner. Your tantric partner. It's called mudra.

But, it also, it means seal. But in, in siddhanta, it means seal of approval. If a book has four qualities, you should read it.

And if it don't have four qualities, you should ignore it. Okay? If a movie has these four, you should watch it.

If it doesn't have these four, you should only watch it if you're really tired. Okay? It's true.

What are the four? And I listed them here, okay? Number one.

If a, if a teaching doesn't point out to you that you are dying at this moment, that you are two hours closer to your death after this talk, then don't go to the talk. Okay? If it's not directly stated or implied that you are dying as we speak, don't go.

It's not relevant to your life. Okay? Got it?

That's the first one. Second one. Everything is pain.

Okay? Pain is pain. We did, with Coco, that's a great yoga class.

You're a great yogi. I enjoyed your class. We had it here.

It was so pleasant. I learned from the back. It's very good.

Anyway, at the end of class we said, Shanti, shanti, shanti. This is from the Upanishad, which means sit down at the feet of your teacher. Upa, near.

Ni, down. Sad, sit, your butt. Sad, Upanishad.

And it comes in the Upanishads. Shanti, shanti, shanti, which we say at the end of yoga. It means, look, three kinds of trouble going on.

Number one, obvious trouble. Backaches, headaches, irritating friends. Second, pleasant things.

Okay? We're gonna, you know, if you had a nice dinner, in Buddhism it counts as suffering, because you will get hungry the next night. It can't stay.

Suffering and change. Third one? Yeah, everything's suffering, you know.

We are dying as we sit here, you know. We're dying, we're all dying as we sit here. New York is dying as we sit here, you know.

So these are, if a teaching doesn't inform you that you are in trouble, don't go, don't listen to it, okay? If something, if someone doesn't try to tell you, you're in trouble, you gotta do something now, while you're in this piece of meat, do something with it, because you ain't gonna be here very long, okay? And those of us, like John and me, who have air conditioning, we can tell you.

I mean, we were just here, yesterday, the Three Jewels was opening. Ani Palma, who now has cancer and is having brain treatments as we speak, it goes, things go, okay? If the teaching doesn't talk about that, it's not the Three Jewels.

Okay? Second thing. Third, these are the seals of the Buddha.

Let's do, well, selfless means it ain't coming from its own side. It ain't coming from its own side. Got it?

The situation is not coming, your body is not coming from its own side. Okay? Who made it mortal?

You did. Okay? You weren't kind enough to other people.

For every meal you eat, you must be giving two, or you will die. For every meal you eat, you must be giving two to poor people, or you will die. That's the arithmetic.

Okay? And if you go to a center and they're not teaching that, it's not the Three Jewels. And it's not ACI.

Okay? It doesn't have the seal of approval. Last one.

By the way, you don't have to keep repeating these to every single class. I'm just saying that institution, that white room, should be teaching these four. And if you are, I love you.

And if you're not... Alright. Okay.

Last one. Peace. Peace means if you figure it out that the pen is coming from you, eventually, you'll become a Buddha who can serve countless beings at the same time, in the same hour.

You can serve billions of people. You open up three billion jewels at the same time. And if an institution, if a space is not talking about these deeper things, it's not a Buddhist space.

And I want a Buddhist space. That's all. That's all I really want.

How you do it, you know, call it Bowling and Emptiness. I'm good with that. I actually tried it in New York.

I told Hector. We tried to do Bowling and Emptiness. It didn't work out.

But you got to try everything. Okay, last one. I love this one.

Then we'll stop and we'll take a pee-pee break, okay? Seiji, who's an amazing guy, that's his photo. His ancestors are Japanese and he was born in Guadalajara.

And they moved, I think after World War I, they moved to Guadalajara. And... so he looks Japanese, but he's...

and he was brought up in Mexico. But he was trained in Sweden, I think. No, Sweden and Australia.

He has a degree in economics from Australia. He's amazing. And he's helping to run DCI and to run the college for DCI teacher training.

And he's just a brilliant guy. And one day he said, in addition to my other duties, can I become a translator? I'm like, yeah.

I'll take you. And we were digging around for books for him. And we were in Austria and Germany.

There's very smart people there. Right? We're going to be there.

We have three of them here. Three or four of them. Five.

Thank you for coming, by the way. Bernd, Piotr, and Birgitta. And Uta.

Where are you? Anyway, thank you for coming. Anyway, we're going to be there next week in Vienna.

So anyway, I had a very crucial moment. We had already decided the eight translators. We had already divided up the eight schools.

And then they came to me. Two Austrians. Norbert and Renate.

And they said, we need a book on karmic correlations. You know? I love all your books.

Very nice. Very cool. But we need to know what to do.

You know? Can you just translate a book that says, do this, get this, do this, get this, do this, get this. You know?

Is there any book like that? It's called Karmic Correlations, right? And there's two famous books.

One is called Karma Vibhanga. It was spoken by Lord Buddha. And it's very cut and dry.

He says, what do you want? And somebody says, financial independence. He says, okay.

Karma is this. Okay, what's your next one? And somebody says, I want to be beautiful.

And he says, oh, do this. And then somebody says, I have a back problem. Oh, do this.

You know? And it's all... He asks a question, then he answers himself.

And it's like the hundred most common questions that he got. And it was collected into a sutra. And so we're translating that.

And then there's another book by Dharma Rakshita, who's the teacher of Atisha. And when Atisha left for Tibet, you know, his teacher gave him a poem. And it's called Sunje Khorlo.

Yeah. The Crown of Knives. It's mistranslated as Wheel of Sharp Weapons.

[Speaker 2]
And...

[Speaker 1]
And it refers to a story in the first sutra where a young man is disrespectful to his mother. And it gets worse and worse, and eventually he accidentally kicks her in the head. And then, it's like a science fiction story, but in the end, he's in a dark castle at night.

And a wheel of knives is descending on his head like a helicopter blade. And in the moment before it descends, he says, May I take on the pain of all beings? I'm okay with it.

I kicked my mother in the head. It was by accident, but I'm okay. Cut my head.

But I take on the pain of all beings. And then the wheel stops. Okay?

Anyway, so, Atisha's teacher called his book, The Wheel of Knives, and it refers to this story from the first karmic correlation book by Buddha. And it's a whole list of karmic correlations. They were plagiarized by, for no dollars, Geshe Michael, in a book called The Diamond Cutter.

Okay? 46 correlations or something. I just took them one by one out of Atisha's teacher's book, okay?

They're all ripped off. And... So anyway, that's Seiji's text.

And then I'll finish, okay? The thing that we just reached, which was so sweet, was... I don't know if you remember, but it was...

Then by the way, this is how you tell the guy had a llama. This is how you can tell the author had a llama. He says, What's the karma when you work your ass off for your llama, and you do everything possible to make them happy, and they still are pissed off at you?

You know? They still never satisfied. And they keep complaining and criticizing you.

You know, you try to make Hector happy. You do everything he gave you to do. You know, you make the space for everybody.

You work your ass off. You lose your job. Everything.

You're living on nothing. And people are complaining about the water cooler. You know?

And then they say, What's the karma for that, you know? What is the karma for that? You're trying to please the public, and you just get more criticism.

Or, you know, you're trying to please specifically your teacher, and they keep saying it's not good enough. And I had this for 30 years, okay? So, I understand.

And it seems to be a common karma, okay? Like you're trying so hard to please the public, to please the students, to please the people. You know?

You dedicate your life to it, and all you get is criticism, you know? And then he says, Of course, it's your fault. Well, okay, just tell me what I did so I don't have it in my next life, you know?

And he says, You disturbed other people's holy work. You disturbed other people's meditation. You disturbed their study.

You criticized their teachers. He has a list of things that you did, you know? And it's mainly disturbing your fellow students.

Peace of mind. Or, you know, they're trying to meditate, and you're making noise outside. Or, you know, they're trying to study, and you say, let's go to a movie instead.

You know, you disturb other people's stuff, and you disturb your teachers. You disturb the attempts of the Three Jewels to serve New York. And that's a specific karma, that no matter what you try to make— do to try to make other people happy, they criticize you, okay?

And what I enjoyed from that presentation, I don't know if it hit you the same way it hit me, but he said, and never criticize— never blame it on the person who's hassling you. Never ever. My Lama used to say, never ever blame it on the people writing things about you on the internet.

No responses. No eloquent defenses. You know, it's not them.

Okay? The criticism is coming because you disturbed your fellow students in their meditation, or you upset other people at the center. And don't bother defending yourself, okay?

You created it. And don't make extra trouble for yourself by criticizing the people who are criticizing you. See what I mean?

It's very— It was very moving to me that he said, and don't— and don't ever get the least pissed off at your Lama who's criticizing you all day because it's not them. And then you're just gonna sansaraize it? It's just gonna continue, you see?

So, it just struck me very powerfully. A, understand that it's coming from you. B, never ever blame someone else.

Even the person who's criticizing you. Like, chill. Chill out.

Because that's— A, it's not where it's coming from. And B, if you even blame them mentally, you're creating more. Okay, got it?

Take a break. All right? You just covered all the Buddhist school.

Okay? I propose 15 minutes of questions and answers if you're in the mood. And then, then I'll wrap up and, you know, try to get you excited about tomorrow.

Can I answer a quick question that everyone has? Please, yeah.

[Speaker 2]
Sorry about the smoke in the front. It was a piece of insect that was in the planter and I burned some soil.

[Speaker 1]
Yay! Okay.

[Speaker 2]
We nearly had a fire offering.

[Speaker 1]
That's typical out of good teachers. That means it was a good teaching. Anybody else?

Any question? Any subject, I don't care. Silly or serious?

That's okay. But loud.

[Speaker 2]
I hope I didn't misunderstand, but it sounded like Nagarjuna was saying that the direct perception of emptiness is nirvana. Yeah. Is that what you said?

[Speaker 1]
He did say that. And that takes us to a higher school. You ready?

Yeah. Okay. So, there's two kinds of nirvana.

One, for zero dollars. That seems to be working tonight better. Natural nirvana?

[Speaker 2]
No.

[Speaker 1]
With remainder, without remainder. No, but you're right. That's also—it's also that.

So, there's two kinds of nirvana. One is classically called Lhagchenyamde, which means with something left over afterwards. And then Lhagbenyamde means nothing left over afterwards.

And in the lower schools, in all schools of Buddhism, you reach nirvana. It's not enlightenment. You reach nirvana when you cannot have a negative emotion.

So, anger is stopped forever. You get there by understanding that the people who piss you off are coming from you. Okay?

Which is how emptiness cures your negative emotions. Okay? That's all.

So, once you understand that the partner who irritates you once in a while is coming from you, then slowly your anger— the first time you hear it in a class, the anger is cracked. And it can't be as healthy as it was before. You see, that's the great thing of the Three Jewels.

Even if people go home after one night, hit them with that. Do the husband in the kitchen. If you need, I'll leave Peter here.

And... Were you the husband or the wife? Okay, I thought so.

I heard he had a wig on, but I'm not going there. Anyway, the minute someone hears that the people who irritate them are coming from them, whether they believe it or not, whether they understand it or not, it cracks the ability to have full-scale anger. You are cursed from the moment you hear emptiness once.

You cannot be fully angry ever again. If someone suggests that the pain is coming from you, then any fool will apply it to their personal relationships. You see, and then after that you can't be as angry as you used to get.

You'll still get angry, but not... not as good as you used to do, okay? And if you keep working along those lines, you keep coming to Three Jewels, you keep meditating, you hear the pain over and over and over again, you see the two husbands skit over and over again, at some point, it's so internalized, you cannot get angry.

It's not possible to get angry, okay? And that's called nirvana. In the lower schools, that's called nirvana with remainder, because you still have your body which was created by negativity.

You still have a mortal body, and it will still cause you suffering. So, it's not the end of pain in the sense of the end of pain of the body. You still have pain, but you are not creating new pain.

You see what I mean? So, there's a... The first argument in the first Dalai Lama's Abhidharma text is, is it true that an arhat was killed in a bordello?

Bordello? A whorehouse, you know? You know, and a bars or something.

And they say, yeah, it's true. He was. Arhats still have remainder.

They still live in the body, okay? Then they walk around for 10 years, 20 years, and then that body dies, and then they're free. That's Abhidharma, okay?

That's nirvana. So, first you achieve nirvana with something left over. Still some suffering there, but you're not creating new one.

And then you achieve nirvana without remainder. Now, highest school. Word, you wanna go there?

Are you ready? You gonna do it right? I trust you.

[Speaker 2]
$3,000. Not from me.

[Speaker 1]
He took $3,000 of my money in one day.

[Speaker 2]
Worth it.

[Speaker 1]
Highest school as opposed to lower school, they still have nirvana with remainder and nirvana order is switched.

[Speaker 2]
Yay.

[Speaker 1]
First you experience nirvana without remainder, okay, but that is a code word for direct perception of emptiness.

[Speaker 2]
Nice.

[Speaker 1]
What's the remainder that you don't have at that moment? Yeah. It comes back.

So, it's rebirth, yeah. That's the—yeah, that's cool. But if you pushed a highest school person, they would still say, that guy's not in our heart.

It's not real nirvana. You see what I mean? Because that comes long after you see emptiness directly, and seeing emptiness directly speeds up the process of not getting angry at your husband.

If you get to like the 8th bodhisattva level, isn't that also— is that nirvana with remainder or is that nirvana without remainder? Ask him. Hot question.

Hot question. That is hot. 8th level bodhisattva level out of 10 levels is nirvana on the bodhisattva track.

Very nice. With or without remainder? Well, by that time, I think you can see emptiness at will.

So, you could say both, I guess. No, actually, it would be without because at the 8th level things no longer can appear as coming from your own side. And then 8th, 9th, and 10th are called dak-sa, darpa-sa.

Yeah. And his text— Okay, for $50, what's the special mind-only word for those bodhisattvas? Damn!

[Speaker 2]
What's it mean?

[Speaker 1]
40, 30? Yeah, okay. Okay, pretty good.

They have a special name. There's a special name for them. Power achievers.

Okay, other questions? Wait, you already had one. Never start a question that way.

Just add it.

[Speaker 2]
Would you please, please, please try to get back to New York every six months or so?

[Speaker 1]
I'll see. I'll see. I miss New York.

I really do miss New York. I miss the coffee shops mostly. We have one.

Yeah, yeah. Now that you have one.

[Speaker 2]
I'll try.

[Speaker 1]
But I do miss New York and it's kind of weird to come once a year.

[Speaker 2]
Especially only in winter.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, that really sucks.

[Speaker 2]
It's like spring and summer and autumn.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, I'll try. But my time is, you know, my time is really, really crazy. Like every five minutes, every ten minutes is broken.

Really. It's very weird. My life is very weird.

But I don't have five minutes. Anyway. Can you clarify Prabhupada Viveka's opinion about the emptiness of the emptiness of mind?

Yeah. Like if the fact of emptiness is self-existent in a sense. Yeah.

There's response in the origin of it. Yeah, okay. I got it, I got it.

Do you want to— What is it that Chandrakirti refutes when he smashes— Do you want to try to do the magician thing? Sure. You sure?

You want to do it together? Okay. Okay.

You start. Now, you can understand the lower middle way from the example of a magic show. And you probably heard it somewhere in some of my classes.

But you go ahead. Oh. Okay.

So in India, there are people who are trained to do illusions. And I've heard they're actually quite good at it. So they'll train for years to do these illusions and they'll gather crowds and they'll do the illusion and people give them money and that's how they'll make their money.

So one such crowd was gathered, right? So this is the whole metaphor slash scenario. And there was an illusionist.

And the way it happens is he either throws a stick. Dewey, right? Dewey.

Dew, dew.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, dew, yeah.

[Speaker 1]
He throws like a stick down. And when he throws— Like this big. Yeah, a little stick or twig or something.

And he throws it down. And then he says some words. Abracadabra, shramabra.

Which is the original meaning of the word mantra. Right. Magic words by a magician.

Abracadabra.

[Speaker 2]
Yes.

[Speaker 1]
In Arabic? Persian.

[Speaker 2]
Persian?

[Speaker 1]
I think so. Okay. And then that stick appeared to everyone who was there when he uttered those words.

And threw the powder. And threw the magic powder. The stick then appears to be a cow or a horse or an elephant or whatever which one you pick.

We'll say it's an elephant because that's more grandiose, right?

[Speaker 2]
So everyone's like, right?

[Speaker 1]
And all of a sudden there's an elephant there, right? And so while he's performing the trick someone's walking by and he's like, he's like, what's the, what's all the, what's the hustle about? Yeah, what's the hoo-ha about?

So he goes through and he's like, it's just a twig. He's like, why is everyone so excited about a twig? And they're like, it's an elephant.

What are you talking about? And so the first school of the mind, Middle Way, says this explains three things, three levels. Arias, people who are having the direct perception of emptiness, people who haven't had the direct perception of emptiness, and people who have had the direct perception of emptiness but are not currently having the direct perception of emptiness.

Nice. But which is which? So the people, that's the easy one, right?

The people who are fools. I always have trouble with this, so you explain. So the people, okay, so the magician, let's do the magician.

The magician throws the stick down and he knows it's a stick, even though it appears to be an elephant hand.

[Speaker 2]
Good.

[Speaker 1]
So he is an aria after...

[Speaker 2]
Nice.

[Speaker 1]
Now we're getting it nailed down. Yeah, okay, good. And so the villagers, the stick gets thrown out and they think it looks like an elephant to them, and so they're...

So it's okay, those are people who haven't had direct perception of emptiness. Because they see it as an elephant and they think it's an elephant. The husband appears to come from his own side and they believe it.

Yes. And then the person who walks up afterwards... Yes.

Is... It's like the aria in the direct perception. In the direct perception, that's the only one left, right?

Because they... Because they... It looks like a stick to them and it is a stick.

So they are seeing things as... Yeah, or it's not appearing any other way. It's not appearing any other way.

Okay? But, the difference above a viveka is the stick, is the raw data. Right.

There is a stick there. That's the big difference. He would say...

You can call it the 50-50 school. The data is coming this way. You created an elephant, but there's got to be a stick.

And his whole thing is the stick. So this metaphor is a lower middle way metaphor. They use it.

They're the guys who use it. Because... Because they need the stick.

That's all. They don't care about the rest. They need to say...

The color and shape of the husband is coming from the husband. And then your mind is interpreting. Your mind is seeing yelling.

But the sounds are coming from here. And your mind organizes them into criticism of you. But there are sounds coming from the husband that are not coming from you.

And that's lower middle way. Oh, you're saying that emptiness is emptiness-ess? Whoa, whoa.

What?

[Speaker 2]
Like that emptiness itself is the colors and also has colors and shapes.

[Speaker 1]
Well, they would... What they would say is, in the kitchen, when the husband yells at you, the sounds, the sibilance, the vowels, the consonants, those are not coming from you. That's raw data coming from the husband.

Then your karma is organizing those into criticism. And if a person walked in who didn't have that karma, they would say your husband is correctly chastising you. You see what I mean?

That's all. You can call them the 50-50 guys. It almost sounds like lower middle way is lower than mind.

Because mind only is saying everything is coming from your mind. And lower middle way is saying it's 50-50. It almost sounds like lower middle way is like lower than mind only.

Well, Neljor Chöpe Umarangyupa. What's that for $50? The Svatantrikas that lean towards the mind only school.

[Speaker 2]
Damn.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, there are... they overlap. There are guys who...

they're called the mind only-ish lower middle way. Okay? Cool.

Yeah, go ahead, Bonnie. We missed you. How are you doing?

Where's your man? Tell him he's a loser for not being here. But maybe he has something else to do.

I don't know.

[Speaker 2]
I'm not sure.

[Speaker 1]
It's a good question. And it came up in Nick's text, the 60 verses. And I did this brilliant thing where I counted them and there's 61.

You know? And I was like, Geshe Michael is going to fix Nagarjuna. You know, it's not 60 verses, it's 61.

Because I was trying to figure out the last verse. And I counted and I kept counting and it's 61. And...

it turns out the first verse doesn't count. Which is the praise of the Buddha at the beginning of the text. And it says, I praise the Buddha who taught emptiness in light of cause and effect.

You see? With... and then Tsongkhapa who wrote the praise of the Buddha for teaching dependence, right?

He says the same thing. So, you can't really praise the Buddha for teaching emptiness if you don't praise the Buddha at the same time for teaching where your husband comes from. You see?

You got to teach both. And those... the fact that Nagarjuna in that famous, you know, book, the first thing he does is praise the Buddha for teaching where the husband comes from, A, and then what the husband is not.

And you have to teach them together. And... so that's the answer.

You get more points for teaching it that way. You get more points for teaching emptiness in light of karmic seeds. Which is why Three Jewels teaches the marriage of emptiness and karma.

Is that a question or you just kind of... Okay.

[Speaker 2]
Okay. So... as you start to meditate on it...

[Speaker 1]
Did Tim help you with your hair? Just kidding. I'm just...

I'm just jealous. Okay. I'm coming over like this.

Okay, no problem. Me and John are just jealous, okay? Just understand.

[Speaker 2]
I know where I'm headed. Headed. So...

literally... So as you start to meditate on emptiness more and more and you're using analysis to deconstruct the gotcha to have a Vipashyana experience. The insights have a dualism to them.

There's a... attention focused on a lack of self-existence to an object. And...

that cuts a hole in your mistaken belief in the way things exist. So... the goal is to not have the insight over there and then the person perceiving the insight.

So that dualism. Do you have a suggestion on how to close that gap?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, it's cool. Because, you know... I was telling Hector, my teaching has improved on tour which I start tomorrow morning at 6.30 or something. Because I'm struggling with translations all day. You know, all day. So...

there's some beautiful discussion of that. And it's called Nyi Nang. For...

20... it's only worth 20. Discrepancy.

Yeah, the discrepancy. Capital D. 20 bucks more.

It's called the discrepancy. So, what people translate as dualism is a kind of a mistranslation of a word Nyi Nang which means double appearance. It really means discrepancy between what you see and what's really there.

Okay? So, when we say dualism, it does not... it does not...

and it does not... refer to the dualism between the observer and the object. That's not what dualism means in Buddhism.

Dualism means the object... the husband appears to be angry. He...

he decided to criticize me. That's the appearance. And the reality is my mind is creating a husband who's criticizing me.

So, there's... what appears and what's real are not the same. There's a discrepancy.

It looks like your husband decided to criticize you but what really happened was you yelled at your kids last week. You see what I mean? So, there's a disconnect.

And that's the meaning of dualism in Buddhism. Now, in the direct perception of emptiness, vipasyana... and by the way, vipasana is a corruption of the word vipasyana in Pali and...

and I... I studied it. I studied it from Goenka who invented it in 1973.

Okay? And... before you were born.

And... it doesn't mean watching the breath. Okay?

It means the direct perception of emptiness with shamatha, with the deep meditation. Now, when you're seeing emptiness directly you can only perceive that. You cannot perceive an...

a changing thing. You can... you are...

you are having communion with an unchanging thing. So, during those 20 minutes it's impossible to perceive a changing thing. Therefore, a person who's seeing emptiness directly cannot be aware of themself.

Because Michael is a changing thing. You see what I mean? And when they say that the subject disappears it's not literal.

It's just that you can't be aware that you're there. Because if you were it would kick you out of emptiness. If you have the thought, Michael, or if you...

the most dangerous thought is, I did it. You get literally kicked out of the experience. So, you actually...

in a way you're trying to sustain the non-perception of me by staying in emptiness. You see what I mean? So, that's all.

You're not aware of your mind but the mind is there. But you can't be aware of it. You see what I mean?

That's all. That's all. That's the subject-object thing.

Okay? There is a subject. There is an object.

The word for subject is object-holder. De-shin and de-sha. So, people who say that there's a subject...

no subject. It's foolish because to say that in Sanskrit is impossible. Okay?

It's not possible. The word for subject is object-holder. Okay?

Anyway, I want to wrap up. And... So, tomorrow there'll be a big conference which I praise Tim and Hector for deciding to do it.

I'll tell you just a little bit about the history of ACI. So... And the Three Jewels is really ACI in New York.

So, I... I don't know. I taught the 18 courses, foundational courses, non-tantric courses up to 1999 or something.

And then I made an announcement. It was a famous night, I remember. It's kind of shocking for everybody.

And... We went past the Quaker Church which is where we did it. I think we had 85 people.

And we had worked so hard to get up to 85 people. And they went to the... We did the 18 courses.

And then I... You know, I made this big announcement. I'm going on three-year retreat.

And the whole place kind of blew up. And... You know, it was hard for all of us.

And... So, me and John Stilwell, we had a meeting. I think I was telling these guys, down in Wall Street, my last day in New York before going on three-year retreat.

And I... I had a meeting with him and I... He said, I have two questions, Geshe-la.

Number one. Okay, I said, what? He says, we got to put this online, but I don't know anybody who...

who can do it. Because it was, you know, when the wheel was still not invented yet. And...

I said, don't worry. I have a woman. She does IT for a large company.

Her name is Joanna. You're going to like her. And...

So, anyway, I put them together. They got married later. They had kids.

I take credit. In fact, we just had some time together. And...

Then the second thing I said, I said, so you promise, once a week at the Three Jewels, you'll collect all the students together and play my recordings of the 18 courses. And he said, no. And I'm like, I'm leaving.

You got to do what I ask. He says, we're going to teach it ourselves. And I'm like, oh.

You know? And... And they did.

And they taught. They started teaching the 18 courses. John started teaching the 18 courses at Three Jewels.

But he said to me, and you should know the history. He said, Geshe-la, we will have ACI. And at that time the policy was, anyone who takes a course can teach it.

Once you finish ACI 1, you're allowed to teach it after that. And he said, that policy has to go. You know?

And there will be no ACI home office. And I said, what are you talking about? He says, I don't want the liability.

If a student harasses a woman in the class, or someone steals money, or someone doesn't pay their taxes, I don't want to have the legal liability that people are going to come to me and sue me. You know? I have a family.

I have... He had a Wall Street job. Shishi job.

Until my own...

[Speaker 2]
That's another...

[Speaker 1]
Anyway, he said, I don't want the... I don't want the responsibility. There will be no ACI home office.

If you're okay with that, I'll do it. And I said, you know, you're the only guy I got, so I guess it's okay.

[Speaker 2]
And...

[Speaker 1]
And that's what happened. And so, ever since then, if you took an ACI course, you could teach it. And I encouraged people to teach it.

Now, it has happened in days gone by that teachers abuse students, either emotionally, sexually, or financially. And... I think we all have felt that it's come time that we have to have a home office.

We have to regulate who teaches. We have to make sure they are following... We call it the four legs of the table, if I don't forget.

First one, you got to know your stuff. Nobody knows their stuff like ACI. Nobody.

In the world. That's okay. We don't have to talk about that.

Secondly, you have to learn how to present. You know, you have to learn how to speak in front of the public. We have to give you some training.

You know, how not to stutter, how not to say, uh, all the time, how not to say bad words in the class. And... Stuff like that.

Okay, presenting. Thirdly, we have to teach you management skills. Because, running a Three Jewels is much different from teaching ACI.

Teaching ACI is easy. Running Three Jewels is impossible. You know, finding the money, renting, signing the contracts, you know, getting people here, you know, not going bankrupt.

It takes management skills. Advertising, marketing, relationships, all kinds of business stuff that a modern yoga teacher or a modern Dharma teacher should know. Or you will not be successful.

You can be a nice teacher, you can know your stuff, but if you cannot organize a Three Jewels, you will fail. You will never teach a lot of people. You see?

So, you kind of have to be a business person. You have to be a good speaker. And if you're not naturally those two, our goal is to make you.

You see? That's different from the Three Jewels. It's ACI teacher training.

So, A, you have to know your stuff. Every ACI student knows their stuff. They pass their homeworks, they did their quizzes.

I had one guy, he did all the courses in one weekend. And he wrote out every single answer off the internet. By hand.

It was extraordinary. And we still failed him. But, you know who it was.

So anyway, first, you got to know your stuff. There's not a question here. You all know your stuff.

We're talking about stuff they don't debate in the monasteries tonight. You know, you are already going deeper than the way a Geshe candidate goes. Already, tonight, we went there.

Okay? So, that's okay. We got that.

But secondly, you know, you're either a born teacher or you're not a born teacher. If you're not a born teacher, does that mean you can never teach? No.

We should have a good training where people who are— feel nervous, are people not comfortable with presenting, but who are very fine people. We just teach them how to teach. You know?

So, they've got to have that. Second thing, right? Then, third thing is management skills.

You know? Advertise your class. There are many, many extraordinary teachers, yoga teachers too.

Nobody comes to their classes because they don't know how to get the word out. They don't know how to attract people. I heard about a cool model today.

What's it called? Yoga for the People? You got to have these kind of ideas about how to manage your— your business, you know?

And your business is to help people and lose money. Trust me. Okay?

No, I mean your business is— We are not in business to take people's money. We are in business to save people from death. You know?

And if that means you have to spend your own money for the rest of your life, I don't have a problem with that. But, if you learn the third thing well, the place should run itself financially— it can sustain itself. Okay?

You're not begging rich people for a few dollars like I did this morning. And you're not— You know, the place is— is sustaining itself. We need to train people to do that.

A yoga teacher training that doesn't have these two is not going to be successful. I heard 80% of people who take yoga teacher trainings never teach. Okay?

Only 20% become successful teachers. So, I don't want that here. You see?

We want to teach people the content. Teach them how to teach. And it doesn't mean you don't have your own style.

You know? I'm not going to do the wig that Peter did. I don't have the courage.

You know? I'm just saying we all have our own style. Whatever system we have for teacher training should not crush people's individual style.

Hector has a certain flair. I don't have that flair. I have a different thing.

And you should teach within your own style. We shouldn't be like... like this, you know?

So it's a balance. We want to teach people to teach within their own style in a cool way. Okay?

Or in a boring way if that's their style. And then... Okay?

No, really. Some people are really dry and they're very popular. Okay?

So third one is... you know, how to get the word out. And there's many, many yoga teachers who are very, very good teachers and no one...

no one knows about them. One of the most irritating moments in my life was in Phoenix not long back. And I gave a...

I gave a... three, four days... I gave a week of classes at the Jewish Community Center, Lam Rim.

And then I went to a yoga class and this guy goes, I go, Oh! You're here! You're in Phoenix!

I said, Yeah! And he said, Are you gonna teach in Phoenix? I just finished ten days.

This was the day after. And I'm like, I just taught for ten days. He said, I didn't hear about it.

And my own teacher, he was very dear. He never took money from a student in his life. When I offered him my bank account book the first day I met him, he threw it at me.

He hit me on the head with it. He threw it back at me. And he said, I don't want your money.

And he refused to take money for thirty years. He taught every day, four or five hours, refused to take money. She knows.

So anyway, there's... there's people who can't manage, okay? You gotta...

you gotta manage a class. You gotta have this, okay? These are the three things.

You gotta know your stuff, be able to teach, and be able to manage the three jewels, okay? And if you don't have those three, you're gonna get in trouble, okay? His policy was, I don't want to be famous, but I don't want a single person in the region who wants to come to not hear about it.

You see? I don't want you pushing me on people. I don't want to be in the magazines.

I don't want to... He refused to travel, for example. He said, let the student come to me.

But he said, if it happens that a student in New York City who wanted to meditate didn't hear about the three jewels, you failed. You know? We were like, oh God.

You know? So that was his policy. And he kept to it his whole life, okay?

Anyone who might want to come should hear. That's all. But we're not selling it, you know?

We're not trying to push people. That was the third thing. Now the last one is what we call professional behavior.

And it boils down to sex and money, okay? As so much of life. Don't abuse the students.

Don't take advantage of students. Sexually, you know, respect people this way. How you touch them, how you teach them.

Yoga is especially delicate. You know? Respect people that way.

And pay your taxes. Keep good accounts. Be accountable to your sponsors.

When they say, how did my money get spent? You go... Within an hour you can say, here's where your money went.

You know? If it were me, I would have your books online, live. If it were me, I would have your books online, live.

And let people criticize you. You know, Hector bought a coffee. Yeah, I bought a coffee, okay?

But at least everyone knows I bought a coffee. You know what I mean? If it were me, if I had the choice, your books would be live online.

And open to the world. Anyone can see how you spend every dollar here. And I think that would be the coolest thing.

And I keep trying to find someone to program it and... I don't know. Probably we could do it.

Okay, so those... Professional behavior, okay? Financial responsibility, accountability, personal accountability, okay?

And we have to train people to do that. Okay, so for me, ACI teacher training, which we will embark on tomorrow. Post John Stilwell, I don't want the legal liability, okay?

I mean, what we're trying to do tomorrow for the first time really, is to say we do have ACI. We are responsible for our teachers. And we train them well.

And we don't release them on the world. Now, I think there should be a grandfathering process. John Brady shouldn't have to come back and do the 18 courses again.

Okay, there should be a process by which you select senior teachers. Because you got to have somebody to start with. Hector is probably okay.

And you got to have... You got to have a base. But then, other people should go through training.

And these are the elements you're going to decide on tomorrow. And I think it's exciting that I won't be here. And I just want you to think about those four items, okay?

And how to... I believe there should be some kind of... My partner Veronica is a massage therapist.

She has to do... I think it's 30 hours a year of continuing education units, CEUs. And I think we should have something similar.

Because I think there should be some way that senior teachers check back in with the home office from time to time. They get updates. I've had people who studied with me who have not come to a class in 10 years.

And they're hopelessly out of date. Because this is a moving target. This stuff changes every afternoon.

And I think there should be... In the system, there should be some way that... And there should be some kind of evaluation.

Without being too Catholic Churchy. What do you call it? Imprimatur.

There shouldn't be someone leaning over your shoulder making sure you say the right words. You know? You got to be Ori.

And you got to use your own language. If you want to say coffee, you should say coffee. You know?

That should... It's a delicate balance between fostering creativity and preventing abuse. You know?

So, good luck. Yeah, question.

[Speaker 2]
So, tomorrow will also... Because it's the first time the international community for ACI is coming together. We don't just produce teachers and teach ACI content.

ACI is also responsible for the container which all these things are held online. Or the way that is presented. Or the way that is marketed.

For some non-profit work like...

[Speaker 1]
108.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah. Or the retreats. So, ACI as an identity is more than the courses and the teachers.

Tomorrow we'll focus on that. Courses and the teachers. But we should also use the opportunity since we're all together to identify what were all the facets of current ACI.

And where should we go forward. Can you share what you would see? Because we need financial sustainability.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
We need a good PR, good presenting. But can you share with us what you would like us to become?

[Speaker 1]
My habit is to try to do too much. As you may have noticed. So, I would say tomorrow limit yourself to what you can do successfully in one day.

If you get too spread out nothing will happen. So, do some core thing. Have some core goal.

Whatever your core goal is. I think it's teacher training. You know.

Focus on that. Nail it down first. And then go to other things like what is our charitable work?

Or things like that. But I think... My tendency at these kind of conferences is to throw a hundred things out and then what happens is nothing happens.

So, I would say try by the end of the day to come to a consensus on what you would like teacher training to be. And then after teacher training we can go deeper. I think...

We don't exist in a vacuum. You know. The 108 Lives Project or things like that.

DACA. These are... ACIP.

These are a big part of what we should be. But I'd kind of like to hear what you want. And what you think.

Because you actually have more contact with the American public than I do. And... I think...

I'd like to see what you guys come up with. But what I'd like to do is get a teacher training going this year. I don't want more discussions in 2019.

I want something to happen in 2019 where we begin to certify teachers and take responsibility for the teachers. And the teachers know what they're supposed to do, you know. So...

I think that's... That's my... That's my feeling.

And then I hope it continues. I hope the... I hope this stuff continues.

One more thing. I mean it's a big issue in DCI right now. We took ACI to foreign countries where people are not Buddhist and they don't want Buddhism.

And some of the best ACI... DCI teachers... I can think of the Bulgarians.

Georgi and Ivan. Georgi Kadyrev and Ivan Iliev. They don't want to be Buddhists.

And they are two of the best DCI teachers in the world. And they told me, we don't want to be Buddhists. We're happy being Greek Orthodox, whatever.

But we love DCI. We love the ideas. We want to teach DCI.

So, I... There's a... There's a challenge at DCI right now.

Is... We have to be strictly secular. We cannot mention Buddhism.

We cannot confuse the audience. And we are attracting... The president of Argentina, Macri, Mauricio Macri.

We had a program for him. And... When he was mayor of Buenos Aires.

And... He would not come, if he thought we were Buddhists. DCI.

So, I... There's a... There's another issue, for me, which is how to keep DCI and ACI separate, but still keep ACI available to DCI people.

Because if ACI leaks into DCI, people like that will not come. And we would never have a chance to teach the current president of Argentina. It would never happen, if it was Buddhist.

You see? So, I need to... And it's a very, very difficult job to be Buddhist but not mention Buddhism.

You know? And we teach in many Muslim countries. We teach about 5,000 Muslims every year.

I just wrote a major book with a Muslim author. And it's in Russian, right? You translated it.

And... We taught in Dubai. If we had mentioned Buddhism, we would have been thrown out.

And there's other countries that are even more strict. So... You know, just keep in mind, and Tim knows the issues.

Just respect... Try to figure out how we... keep that.

You know, that we're not raiding DCI's people and kind of ruining that gig, which is a business gig. But at the same time, the funnel allows for... There's DCI people who want to become nuns, for example.

And they did. Right, Sunim? So...

You know, it happens. But it's a delicate... It's an issue that you have to...

It's going to be difficult. But you have to try to respect that our mission is bigger than Buddhism. And...

And the ACI... They kind of have to be kept distinct from each other. And it's going to be a challenge.

It's a major challenge. So, that's one of your impossible... That's the second thing I'd say.

You know, I don't think ACI should be limited or Three Jewels should be limited to the ACI courses. They are very... Looking back at them now, they look almost...

I don't want to say prehistoric, but I just taught level... What was it? Seven.

For the first time in 23 years. Eight. Yeah.

I haven't looked at it for 23 years. And I'm thinking, this needs some kind of modernizing or something. So, the basic courses are beautiful.

The information is beautiful. But I think you've got to get more creativity going. And...

And then, when you go to do a business program, you've got to change your suit. You've got to change your clothes. And as a teacher, you've got to be good at that.

Okay? It's as if you could teach eight different schools at the same time. You get the point?

Yeah. So, be brave. Be adaptable.

Don't go to a corporate gig and start talking about Buddhism. Okay? Alright?

And don't do an ACI program and teach something from DCI that I'm going to teach four years from now in that city. You see what I mean? Don't ruin my gig.

You see what I mean? So, you've got to... It's going to take a lot of wisdom.

Peter. Good luck. ACI teachers should know the DCI language.

Yeah. Is that still valid? Yeah.

And don't hassle me about... I mean... Yeah.

It is. But don't mix them. Don't mix them.

Don't... You know, it's going to be difficult. And you will get blamed either way, okay?

Get used to it. We just talked about the karma. But...

But... Obviously, yeah. And you should know that DCI has a separate language for Buddhist principles.

We just taught the teacher training in Sedona to people from 27 countries. And... they call the direct perception of emptiness touching the diamond world.

And they're not allowed to call it the direct perception of emptiness. It's like that. There is a separate language.

But... there comes times when you're teaching ACI when you might want to call it touching the diamond world. And...

I don't have any brilliant wisdom about it. But in general, be aware that in a country like Argentina where DCI becomes all yoga students, it will fail. And...

and you won't... you won't touch 3,000, 4,000 people. You will touch 20 yoga students.

You see what I mean? So... just be aware, you know, that you have to...

be adaptable. And you have to keep... I believe you have to keep them separate.

And it has happened in some countries that the businessmen left because the yogis showed up. You see what I mean? And...

and we never would have talked to the current president of Argentina, never would have studied the pen with me if we had not kept them separate. You see? How you do it is God bless, I don't know.

But just be aware of the issue and try to respect it. And... do your best.

You... it won't be perfect, there'll be failures. But we're trying to...

in Russia, in China, in Dubai, we're struggling to not mention Buddhism. We're struggling not to be a Buddhist organization because... because not everybody wants to be a Buddhist.

And then you lose them. You see what I mean? You got to have two identities.

And it's uncomfortable to wear those ties. Last question, because these people want to go home. I think the current thinking, and it might change, is that...

and I think as Hector has pointed out to me, probably, we're going to have to have a hybrid of in-person stuff and online stuff. ACI teachers are not paid. They will never make money from ACI.

DCI teachers, they're on a track to make money. So, you can't ask ACI teacher trainees to spend $10,000 a year to come to a location, which is what the DCI teacher trainees do. So, it's going to have to be some kind of hybrid.

We're talking about a point system maybe. You get so many points. When I took a gemology degree, I did much of it by correspondence.

There was no internet at the time. But I had to come to New York to do the lab work in person. And I got graded here, in person.

So, there was an in-person element and there was an online element at the time. How much I will teach... I'm booked for 10 years.

Completely booked. Really, honestly, to the half hour. Honestly, I'm not exaggerating.

I rarely exaggerate. But... I'm booked.

I'm totally booked. But, me and Tim talked about a way that I could teach many... I could teach much of the ACI courses during a Diamond Mountain retreats twice a year for teacher trainees.

And I'm happy to do that. And I think that would be good.

[Speaker 2]
But...

[Speaker 1]
But... No, it's fine. But...

But it's gonna be more you guys than it would have been 10 years ago. Because I... You know, people write me emails, they say, Geshe-la, why didn't you answer my email?

I have 67,000 unanswered emails. Okay? And they say, Geshe-la, I just need 10 minutes of your time.

Yeah, but there's 30,000 people who want 10 minutes of your time. So, 30,000 times 10 is 50,000 hours. And I don't have it.

I can't do it. And people say, No, Geshe-la, I'm your old friend. We used to hang out.

I said, those days are over. You know, I don't have 5 minutes. I don't have 10 minutes.

You see? I can't answer every email, so... That's why we're having a teacher training.

Gee.

[Speaker 2]
Okay. I guess that there's something from what I've at least observed that's so beautiful. It's very lineage-based.

It's passed down. And so, it's different to me than, let's say, a DCI teaching or a yoga teaching for which you can subscribe to it and ask or be admitted to it even if it's application-based. But the teachers in this lineage have been something where you have a relationship with your teacher and it was passed down that information to you.

And by the grace of your teachers and the blessings of your teachers within the lineage is how in which you can then teach. And it seems as though what we're talking about is institutionalizing DCI, but then where does that relationship with your teacher happen? And how do we kind of quality control in terms of keeping, you know, a touchpoint?

Because, like, for me, when I have questions, I still go back to Lama John. And I have those questions, and I can have that. And it's very special that I can have that relationship.

And if we then start to open it up, where does that fall into play? Or does it fall into play in the future?

[Speaker 1]
It's a good question. I'll give a couple answers, okay? One is, maybe we want to allow a living room track where someone who took the course can still teach it in their living room, but they are not our legal responsibility.

Even in the last year, I have lost $50,000 on legal fees for teachers who did not treat the students well. And I'm not interested in going there. So, we have to have some kind of structure.

If we decide to teach teachers, we need some kind of accountability to an organization. At the same time, how can you have guru yoga, you know, which is the cornerstone of this whole tradition. I feel like, like you will still have your relationship with your personal teacher, and it will be passed down that way.

It's like in the monastery. The geshe, there's a hybrid. And then we'll stop, because it's getting late, and I know people have to go.

There's a... two things. We have a geshe course.

There's 60 students in my class, freshman class. 60 guys started the first year. And that's institutionalized.

You have to do certain exams. You have to do certain debates. But, your choice of teacher is your personal thing.

And we... I had 12 teachers until I found my one. You see what I mean?

And then we... we created a bond between ourselves. So, I think it might work out like that.

It'll be a hybrid. And in the monastery, 60 guys have 12 different teachers, from which they are responsible to learn the same basic information. But they create a different bond with their teacher.

And that's fluid. You can switch, you're allowed to switch teachers, if you find one that fits your personality, and you want to be devoted to them, you're allowed to switch to that teacher's classes. And that's the way the system goes in the monastery.

That way all the geshes have a similar qualifications, but they still have guru yoga. They still have their personal teacher. So, maybe it would be a hybrid like that.

I think it's gonna work out like that. And I think it has to be that way. You can't have all guru yoga, and you can't have all institutionalized.

And I think the compromise they make in the monastery is kind of cool. We all proceed roughly at the same speed, not always the same, with our personal gurus. So, we all have the same curriculum, roughly.

And then there's a process of debate, four or five hours a day, spent with students of a different guru. And then there's a bond created between the students of different gurus. And that's also a beautiful thing.

So, I think it's gonna be those three elements. One, there's an institutionalized order at which you have to go through the material. Two, you choose your guru.

And three, the students of different gurus exchange notes, and you learn a lot from the students of a different guru. And what's cool in the debate ground is that you can identify a guy's guru from his debating. Like I've debated people from other monasteries, and I'll say, your teacher is so-and-so, and they'll say, yeah.

So, there is a bond. And that bond lasts beyond the Geshe course. That lasts for life.

Or life, okay? Let's do a dedication. Thank you.

Good job. It's a beautiful play. I can't get out of the country without going through New York.

That way. Okay, good night. I'm sorry to keep you late.