Вступление на срединный путь (текущий курс, Аризона), занятие 1

[Speaker 1]
I think I started studying this subject with Ken Rinpoche in probably 1976 or something like that. He taught us the ceremony textbooks for this book, Gombaramsa, which is about Madhyamika. Madhyamika means middle way, right?

Which is really the highest teachings on emptiness, ok, the highest teachings on emptiness. He taught us without taking a penny. When he was healthy enough, he taught us every day, sometimes 2-3 classes a day for 20 years.

So we have to be grateful to the Lamas, because without them it wouldn't happen. Then at Seramay, I studied this subject with many Lamas, debated it with hundreds of friends over 20 years time. And then very kindly Geshe Thubten Rinchen, who is my main scripture teacher at Seramay, he taught me this whole book.

It's like 400 pages in the edition we used. It took 8 years. And he taught it to me privately.

And he's busy, he has like 500 students, you know. And he was kind enough to take me through every word of it, ok? I'm not saying I remember every word, ok?

I have tapes, actually, in Gazdo, hopefully, I don't know. I tried to tape the whole thing, in case any of you would want to listen to it, in Tibetan. But, you know, any mistakes I make are my own.

He taught it to me perfectly. I frankly don't have time to go back and listen to 20 hours of tapes for each class. But I believe I absorbed it ok.

So, that's your lineage, ok? That's who you're getting the text from. This text is the greatest text ever written on emptiness, in my opinion.

And, you know, different teachers will tell you different opinions about that. But in my mind, there is no greater text on emptiness that has ever been written, in India or Tibet. And the text goes through the six perfections.

It's based on earlier works about emptiness. And specifically Chandrakirti's Umalajupa, which means Madhyamaka Avatar in Sanskrit. Say Madhyamaka.

[Speaker 2]
Madhyamaka.

[Speaker 1]
Avatar.

[Speaker 2]
Avatar.

[Speaker 1]
Avatar means getting into. Madhyamaka means the middle way. Madhyamaka Avatar means entering the middle way, ok?

And we'll go into the history of it. But Chandrakirti wrote, he lived maybe 1300 years ago, 13 centuries ago, something like that. And he was explaining the books on emptiness by Nagarjuna, Arya Nagarjuna, who wrote 17 centuries ago.

And he's so good on emptiness, Master Nagarjuna, Arya Nagarjuna, that he's called the second Buddha sometimes. And then Chandrakirti wrote an explanation. He wrote two explanations.

One is called Ciksel. Say Ciksel. Ciksel.

Ciksel means clear words, which means he goes through it word by word. Madhyamaka Avatar, which is what the basis for this text. And the basis for all emptiness teachings in Galupa Tibetan monasteries, ok?

He got into the meaning of the text and not so much the word by word commentary. So this is based on Chandrakirti's explanation of the meaning of emptiness. And not so much the words of some former text, ok?

Although it's designed around those former texts. And it's very beautifully designed around the six perfections. But when they get to perfection number six, they go on like 80% of the book, ok?

Wisdom, how to understand emptiness, ok? I'd like to talk about how this class started, how this class got, how the idea happened, ok? I finished studying this text with Geshe Thubten Rinchen about six or seven years ago.

And then I didn't have time to work on the translation. And then I felt like it was disrespectful to my teacher not to translate it. Because that was one of our dreams, to translate the text together.

And I would never have time to teach it, to translate it. Because I rarely have even five minutes. We work in the car, we work from the time we sit in the car to the time we get out of the car.

We work all day, you know, we do good practice, we don't work during our practice time. And up till one o'clock we practice. And we're very strict.

And if you have a choice between doing this class and this homework and your meditations and your yoga and your memorizing, whatever your practice is, I ask you not to come to this class, ok? You should only do this class if you have time to do it, ok? And if it disturbs your practice, you should do your practice, ok?

So a lot of people are going to sign up for all the classes at Diamond Mountain. And then you're going to find out that you can really only take one or two, I think. So if you have any kind of a friction, what do you call it?

Conflict, yeah? Your practice comes first. Otherwise this doesn't help, ok?

I don't want to make a bunch of translation nerds who don't practice, ok? Then there's no meaning, ok? There's no meaning.

Practice comes first, ok? That goes for everybody online too, ok? Can't?

No, just kidding. No, I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding. On the other hand, no American has ever gone through this whole text that I'm aware of, ok?

Maybe a few people I don't know about. I know a few people have done some work on the text. You may never have an opportunity.

I definitely won't have another opportunity in my lifetime to go through this text with somebody. So, you know, it's a very historic moment. This text will become a standard for Buddhism in the West in the future.

So, from that point of view, you don't want to miss any classes, ok? And every moment you can hear, you know, come. And if you get lost, you know, I stayed in the monastery.

I walked in the first day. My first debate partner was the current, the past Abbot of Gyumri Tantra College. And we debated Madhyamika the first night, and I had no idea what he was talking about, you know.

And I sat there for year after year. And, you know, the first year I understood 5%. And I said, I went to the lamas, I said, I'm not going to stay in the debate ground.

I can't understand one word out of ten, you know. And they said, go and sit there. And just sit there and be lost, you know.

And so I did. I kept going. I wouldn't make any excuse to get out of debate ground, ok?

I really did. But something in me forced myself to go, you know. Every time I got out of it, I felt guilty and I'd like go back after half an hour or something, you know.

And so I just kept going and going. Then like the third year I could understand half. And in the fifth year I could understand 75%, you know.

And that's the way it's going to be. In Tibet, they don't believe in comfort level for students, ok? No, there's no such thing.

You don't worry about your comfort level. You sit here, the lama is saying something, you get 5% of it, 15% of it, but you get 85% seeds, holy seeds in your mind. Powerful seeds are planted in your mind.

At some point, you will turn on. And I remember the day in the debate ground. I was standing, I stood up in front of, I don't know, 2,000 monks at the winter debates.

And there's some guy in front of me. And I'm shaking. They called me Pik-Pik in the monastery, which means jello.

My legs are going like this. And I'm staring at this guy and I don't know what to say. The debate master behind me from Debu is like, he's about to make me sit down.

And then I looked up and there's Orion right over the guy's head, because it's dark in the debate ground. And there's Orion. I saw this sword, you know, it looked like Manjushri to me.

You know, then I came, you know. So it just comes, okay. So keep, keep trying, okay.

Like, you won't get a lot of it. And I'm not just working for this life, okay. Like, if you don't turn out to be a great translator in this life, I don't care, you know.

The point is that you are learning. Seeds are being put in your mind for many future lives, okay. So, so you say I'm no good with languages.

Or, you know, I don't know what you said the last ten sentences. I didn't understand anything and, you know, we go to debate ground and everybody knows what they're doing and I don't know what I'm doing. Don't get discouraged, okay.

I've been there. And everybody who ever started this class in the monastery, they've been there, okay. And it's the humble ones that win, you know.

It's the humble ones that succeed. It's the ones who are doing it for somebody else, okay. So, you're not here to make yourself comfortable.

You're here to learn something that will help millions of other people, okay. So, from the first night, don't have any thought in your mind about your own comfort, okay. Like when you do yoga, it's the same thing, you know.

Before you sit down, before you start your first asana, it's gotta be for somebody else, okay. You won't make it in this class if you're doing it for yourself, okay. If you wanna look good or you wanna be a big translator or forget that, okay.

By the time you are, you won't remember why you wanted to do it, okay. No, really. Just one day you'll be a translator.

But it'll be so many traumas later that you won't even remember that was what you wanted, you know. It has to be for other people. Every minute you sit in this class and hear another Tibetan word, the holy language of Tibet.

We study languages, right? Nobody can figure out where Tibetan came from, okay. Nobody.

It's unique in the world. It's not related to anything. They call it Burmo-Tibetan language, family.

But there is no, it's not related to Burmese because they just didn't know what to do with it, you see. I think it's a divine language, you know. Personally, you know, I think it's a divine language.

Sanskrit is the mother of all languages. It's the mother of all enlightened beings. We will study Sanskrit here a lot.

So what's the difference between Sanskrit and Tibetan? Most of Buddhism was written down in Sanskrit first and spoken in Sanskrit first. And then around a thousand years ago, Sanskrit Buddhism was wiped out in India.

Nobody studies Buddhism in Sanskrit anymore. Nobody. And no one can teach it in Sanskrit anymore except for maybe Ardengo and a few other people, okay.

No, really, it's dead. It's gone, okay. It was wiped out by the Mughals in India, okay, to the last person.

And the books were mostly burned. So we don't have, you know, the original manuscripts. And there is no living tradition that I'm aware of that has continued of teaching Buddhism in Sanskrit.

We would like to revive it here, and we will. And Krishnila's class is going to be based on the Sanskrit materials. And Brian Smith's class, we will be debating in Sanskrit.

And it will be like Hebrew. You know that Hebrew was lost as a spoken language. And then this crazy professor in Israel, I don't know, 1940s?

He came home one day. He's a Hebrew professor, ancient Hebrew professor. And he said to his wife, let's talk Hebrew at home.

And she said, well, nobody... Hebrew is dead. Hebrew is a dead language.

Let's try. And they had a child. This is a story I heard, okay.

They had a child, and they said, well, let's just talk Hebrew as well as we can in the home. Now Hebrew is a living language again. You see, now Hebrew...

God, you know, when a new book comes out in America, it's translated into Hebrew within like 10 days or something. Like they are intensely literate. And I don't know how to say it.

Eloquent, you know. And Hebrew has become a very deep... The songs in Hebrew are extraordinary.

It's been revived by a small group of dedicated people. Get it? Okay.

And Tibetan, which is what we're going to concentrate on here, okay. I'm not going to be referring that much to the Sanskrit. I'm not going to try to teach you two languages at once.

I don't think we can do it. I think we have to concentrate on Tibetan. Tibetan is dying, okay.

It's an interesting thing in your lifetime to watch a culture and a language die, you know. It's a very sad thing. It's like watching Navajo die, or watching a language like that die, Apache or something.

And the country was taken over. People were discouraged from speaking their own language. Tibetan monks come to Sereme, and we put them, not in the debate ground, we put them in the first grade, in the little kids school, because they can't speak or write their own language, you see.

And Tibetan as a language in India, among the refugees, is very corrupt now. It's like... I don't know, it's just very corrupt.

There's a lot of Hindi words mixed in, or wherever they live, there's a lot of other languages mixed in. And then in Tibet, Tibetan is becoming more Chinese. And so there's a lot of...

A Tibetan from China, from Tibet, can't speak to a Tibetan from India very easily sometimes, because there's a lot of loan words now. Languages have been corrupted now. So what you have here, Je Tsongkhapa, is the greatest Tibetan that has ever been, and probably ever will be, you see.

Unfortunately. This is the peak of Tibetan. This is the greatest moment in Tibetan.

You have Shakespeare, and Jesus, and Socrates, all in one guy. He is the greatest writer of Tibetan. And he's also the greatest thinker, and he's also the greatest saint, the greatest meditator, in my opinion.

Other traditions will tell you others. But I think it's generally agreed that his works are probably the greatest works ever written in Tibet. Certainly this is, in my opinion, the greatest work ever written on emptiness.

Parts of it have been translated, I think, into English, and been used in different people's books, or doctoral theses, or things like that. But we're going to do the whole thing. How long will this take?

I think six years. I think six years. And I urge you to try to make the whole thing.

Okay? Because then you'll get the whole seed in your mind. And my dream is that...

We'll talk about it later. I'd like to organize you into different combat units. Some people, especially the online people, they will be translating the work that we do each night into their own languages.

So I'll be translating into English. By the way, my second goal... One goal was to translate it, right?

But the other goal was to teach it at the same time. So I thought if I translated it online live, you could watch how it happens. And you could see the words coming up in English, word by word, you know?

So you would learn the text, and then I could tell you what I'm doing as I go. So it's sort of like sitting with Picasso and watching paint a painting, and then he's explaining to you, this is why I did this, this is why I did this. And then my hope is that you learn that way, okay?

And it's a very unique idea. I don't think anyone's tried it. But see, I feel like I'll never have time to do both.

I can't teach you the text and translate it. I don't have enough time to do both, you see? So the idea is very unique.

Live online, we'll translate the text, and I'll teach it to you. And whatever... If you never saw one letter of Tibetan, welcome to the class, it's for you, okay?

And if you're already an advanced translator with 20 years of experience, I think you might learn some things. And also, if you see a mistake, online or in person, live, you write in, and say Geshe Michael, you blew that line, okay? And I kind of think that's a cool idea.

It's like, as I work, I want to be criticized, you know? And if you're just a person in the back, and you never saw a word of Tibetan, and a sentence goes up on the board, and it sounds stiff, or poorly written, or uneloquent, or... You just raise your hand and say, why didn't you just say it this way?

You see? Because we want you for that too. We want your feedback, you know?

I want the thing to be available to normal people. So the big goal of this translation, and all the translation I do, is it should be easily understandable by a normal person, okay? Which brings me to my first principle, okay?

I'm going to talk about the principles of translation. During this exercise, which will probably go on for six years, during semester, okay? 15 weeks a year, 30 sessions a year, okay?

10 sessions per semester, or term. So we do three terms a year at Diamond Mountain, and there'll be 10 sessions per term, twice a week, okay? And each time, what I'd like to do is give you a principle of translation according to Roach.

Okay? And I want these recorded, and written down, and made into a manual, okay? So we'll split up the jobs later, okay?

But my dream is, somebody's working on the translator's manual, translation according to Roach. And my style is very unique, okay? I believe in it deeply, some people love it, some people think it's okay, some people hate it, okay?

But I want to explain my style of translation, because it's different, okay? And this is my first principle of translation, okay? First principle, define your audience.

Define your audience. Who are you translating it for? Who are you translating this for?

I'll tell you who I'm not translating it for, okay? It's not for the 25 professors in the United States who can read it, okay? It's not for them, okay?

It's not for university scholars, okay? I respect their work, they've done incredible work, and without them we'd have nothing, you know? But I'm translating from a very specific...

It's not for scholarly purposes, okay? I don't want to translate this book, have it put on a shelf at some university to collect dust, you know? I want this book to affect people, okay?

So who's the audience that I have in mind? You see, as a translator... So I'm going to talk to you as if you are master translators.

Maybe two of you will be. Okay, in this lifetime. That would be a good, I'm satisfied.

If I get two or three, that's fine. Stick around, other guys, you'll... I'm planting seeds in your head, okay?

But the first thing a translator needs to do, and I'm going to be talking about translators. In Tibetan, it's lotsawa, say lotsawa.

[Speaker 2]
Lotsawa.

[Speaker 1]
Means master translator, okay? Like they had lotsawas. They translated 5,000 of these texts.

Okay? No one has ever done that in the world. You know?

Nobody. It took them 700 years. Okay?

So if we can get this done in six, we're doing pretty good. Okay? This is like the longest and the most important text on emptiness.

Okay? So... So first principle as a lotsawa, as a master translator.

You must decide who are you translating for. Okay? Is it the scholastic audience?

No. Who publishes this stuff in the United States? There's only two, Snow Lion and Wisdom Publications.

Sometimes Dharma Publications and Shambhala. Four houses, four publishing houses. I met the president of Wisdom Publications.

He came to me and said, can we publish some of your books? And I'm discussing audience. I'm not being critical, I'm not bragging.

Okay? But I said... His name's Tim McNeil, I think.

And he came to New York and we sat down and he said, could you do some books for us? And I said, you tell me what's your maximum audience. You know?

What's the most books you ever sold? And as I remember, this was like seven years ago. He said, we have a book called How to Meditate by Kathleen MacDonald, I think.

And that has sold 5,000 copies. Over the last 10 years or something. Okay?

And I said, I want to reach people. You know? I want to reach more people.

And I love you and I love what you guys are doing, but I want to reach more people. 5,000 people among 300 million? You know?

It doesn't mean anything. You're not affecting your world. You're not affecting your culture.

And then the other books, similar presses, similar books, they have 1,000 sales, 2,000 sales. I'm not talking about money, I'm just talking about how many people can you touch that way? You see?

How many people can you reach that way? So like, we've been trying to work with Double Day, Random House. On the first day that the Diamond Cutter came out, 30,000 copies were sent out.

You know? We were in L.A. Christy and I were in L.A. visiting our parents there. And we walked into Santa Monica bookstore, Barnes and Nobles, just to pick up a cocoa or something, because who cares about books when you can get cocoa?

And there's a table like this at the front door, and it's stacked with Diamond Cutters. Just stacked with them, you know? And then you affect your culture.

Now the Diamond Cutter is the third best-selling book in Taiwan. It's been translated into Polish a couple weeks ago, Vietnamese, Portuguese, Spanish, German. You know, it's crazy.

It's everywhere. It's like 100,000 now around the world or something. And that's my dream.

So when I translate a book, I'm thinking about how can you reach humanity? How can you reach people? Because we don't have a long time.

Six years is a big chunk out of your adult life. You won't get that time back. Six years is all the healthy, intelligent, well-trained time that most people get in their life at the peak of their career.

Six years is very expensive. Six years is a big commitment. So we don't do it lightly, you see?

And you don't stop once you agree to start, you see? You don't stop. There's books in the Tengyur, written in Sanskrit, right?

Translated into Tibetan. The carving stops halfway through the book. And there's a footnote that says he died here.

The author died here, you see? Yogis don't stop, okay? You either die or you finish.

Two choices, okay? Like, I'm not going to stop, okay? Like, if I become incapacitated or whatever, okay.

But I wouldn't be here unless I intended to finish this book. And I don't care if there's nobody here in the last day, okay? Christy will be here, probably.

Definitely. You know, but I personally don't care. I'm going to finish, okay?

And yogis do that. I think this is the most valuable thing I could do as far as translation, you know? So, and the audience I want to reach is as big as possible, okay?

So that's all. I think first you should decide your audience, you know? And then your translation style.

How you translate. And very importantly, how the book looks at the end. Is there 400 footnotes crowding up every page?

Or is there lots of white space like those ACI courses, you know? I think it should be pretty. Like, how yoga works, right?

I think the book should be pretty. Now, how are we going to make this book reach a lot of people? My idea is this.

As I said, there will be translators around the world. When we finish every night, whatever work we do, they will take it and translate it within a week. It's probably only going to be three, four pages every night, okay?

Something like that. And they will take it and translate it into other languages. And then I'd like it to be posted.

We've got to have some kind of website, okay? Like, yeah? Okay.

Gomadobso website. And then that will be posted, and people can start using it right away. Then my hope, Betz Greer, is that six years is too long to wait.

I'd like to put it out. They're called fascicles. Put it out in sections, okay?

So we'll put out a sixth in printed form every year. And then at the end, we'll combine it into one book. But then people can benefit immediately.

Within the first year, people will benefit. I would like you all to have a place in the translation. I would like you all to contribute to the translation.

Personally, I like to do things in teams. Like, I always get the final decision, okay? But I'd like to have everybody contribute in different ways.

And I have like a hundred ideas. Everybody can do something, okay? And I'm not going to do it all tonight.

But in my dream, you know, a year from now, the first sixth comes out. And it's like we all worked on it together. We're all in there somewhere.

Our names are in there. And that's what I've done since I was like 20. If you saw those little homemade books in Howell, New Jersey, you know.

And it's just a cool way to do it, that we all work together and we're all in there, okay? So you can contribute to the world's knowledge of emptiness, okay? This is a huge thing in worldview.

This is an iceberg hitting America, you know. And you were there, and you helped, you know. You held up your hand in the third class and said, Geshe Michael, I love you, but that sentence just sucks, you know.

And I don't understand what's it mean, you know. It's not English. And that's what you're here for, okay?

And then I like to think of us as a team. And we're working on this. In the jewelry business, we would make a new ring.

You know, the designers would get together. The diamond people would get together. We'd price it out.

We'd figure out a new design. And we'd be done. It would be like three weeks of intense work, you know.

And then the first prototype would come off the assembly line. And we're all like, beautiful, man, beautiful. Oh, wow, this is going to be a big one, you know.

Then what you do, you do the secretary test, okay? You go to a part of the company where people don't deal with making designs or jewelry. And you find a secretary who knows nothing about jewelry.

And you whip out five other rings with this one in there. And you say, which one do you like? You know.

And then she says, I like this one, I like this one, I like this one. That one in the middle is so goddamn ugly, you know. It'll never start.

And she's a real woman in the real world. A real person going to buy this ring. And then it doesn't matter what all the designers said.

And it doesn't matter what all the experts said, you know. A person, the real person who's supposed to consume this translation or ring says, I don't like it, you know. So we're trying to think of your audience.

Okay, first translation principle. Keep your audience in mind, okay. Remember that you're translating for somebody else, not for yourself, okay.

We're not here to show how smart you are. If it's a well-done translation, it should be transparent. Like a well-done computer program, right.

Like you're not aware of all the stuff that the program's doing for you. It's just transparent. You don't see what the program's doing.

It just feels like an English book. Like somebody should pick it up and not even know it's a translation. It should read like a book that was written in English.

And it should hit somebody like a book that was written in English. Okay. And that's what we're shooting for.

So if during the next five weeks, online or offline, you guys see something that just doesn't sound inspiring, then it's wrong because Jetsun Kapa in Tibetan is extremely inspiring. So you have to say, that doesn't cut it. How about we say it this way, okay.

So we'll go on that and we'll develop our groundwork as we go. But audience, as far as audience, I'm thinking normal, possibly some college education, normal American. Okay.

And that's also the kind of English that I can't write, British English. And so by necessity, I'm aiming at the audience that I grew up in, which is American English. And then if it gets too American, maybe we can have Alistair adapted for British English or something, I don't know.

But anyway, I'm just trying to hit normal American people who may not be Buddhist. Okay. Who may never be Buddhist.

Okay. And frankly, this is not going to be a double-day book. They're not going to take an 800-page book on emptiness, no matter how well it's translated, because it can't reach that many people.

And then we'll talk later, but my dream is that we create secondary works. Okay. Derivative works.

And we'll talk about that.

[Speaker 2]
Okay.

[Speaker 1]
So we better get going tonight. So what's the first principle of translation? Yeah, like define your audience.

Decide who you want to read your translation. And then sculpt it for them. Design it for them.

Okay. And I say go for the biggest audience you can. Go for the biggest audience you can.

Can I close this command prompt thing?

[Speaker 2]
You can do whatever you want. It should just reflect on everybody's screen.

[Speaker 1]
Okay.

[Speaker 2]
Do you want to be on this screen?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, both. Can I be on both?

[Speaker 2]
Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
Online people, we're putting on the projector. I mean our projector. Is the sound okay?

Offline? Online. Is bigger better or is that fine?

It's okay like that? Okay. Okay, so my idea for this class, I did no preparation.

No, really. You are walking into a person who's just about to translate a text. So what I wanted was that you see the whole thing going on.

You see what I mean? You see everything I do when I start to translate a text. Also when I write a new course, this is everything I have to go through.

So as a translator, then you'll learn all the stages that we go through during a translation. So what I usually do first is I sort of plan out the translation. I sort of sketch out my plan for the translation.

And specifically in this context, my idea is I'd like to split this text into six good parts. So we can cover one-sixth of it each time. Okay, so first thing I'd do would be to go to the end and see how long this stupid thing is.

Okay, so control and you should all have a laptop eventually. We'll load them with everything you need. Okay.

And one thing about my translation style is I not only think it's the best translation style, I think it's the most accurate. Okay, why? No, you got to be accurate and you got to be readable, right?

A lot of people are readable and they're all fluff. Like they're not translated well. The first translation of Shantideva's work was that, out of Sanskrit.

Totally wrong. And totally beautiful. Okay, and then some people have the opposite.

You know, it's correct, but you can't read it. You know what I mean? So my goal is to do both.

I claim to do both. Okay, so what we have done over the last 20 years is type in 300,000 pages of text. I have 300,000 pages of text that I can refer to if I have a question.

Okay, so one big goal of this exercise is to teach you how to use that database. I don't think there's more than five people in the world who know how to use it. You know, I've been working on it for 20 years.

I use it hundreds of times every day so that your courses are more accurate. And I haven't been able to teach anybody to use it except Krishnila, maybe, and a few other people. Okay, so your work can be like a hundred times more accurate.

If you know how to go into the ACIP database, you know, you have a question, you have an idea, you have something you want to look up. That's what I'm going to teach you to do over the next six years. You're not going to learn it the first night.

But what I want to make sure is that I'll be giving Aliha and Ted the database itself on a CD-ROM and also the search program that I use. As you may notice, the database is in English letters. And we'll talk about that later, why that's true.

Now, what page are we on? Up there on your upper left, you see how many pages there are in the manuscript, in the Tibetan manuscript, 267 folios, okay? Folio, you have to double, okay?

You'll have to double it for the English pages, okay? A means front side of one of those long Tibetan pages, and B means back side, okay? And this at sign means page number in ACIP typing.

We have Tibetan refugee women for 20 years typing the classics of Tibet. And you're going to use one of them, okay? So, 267 times 2 is what?

534, okay? Divided by 6, it's about 100 pages a term. Sorry, a year, okay?

You want to do about 100 pages a year. So you have three terms a year. So let's shoot for 35 pages a term, okay?

Which is three and a half pages a night, which is a lot, okay? Three and a half faces a night, okay? And then I always build in like a 35%, you know, what do you call it?

Obstacle rate. Obstacle rate. So increase that by a third.

We want to finish five pages a night, okay? Five faces a night, or we can't get through it in six years. It's a huge text, okay?

It's an important text. So that's the first thing I would do. I would sort of, you know, I would space it out like that.

Okay, then I'd go back up to the beginning. You'll have this text, okay? I'll give it to Ali and Flashdisk.

Try to get a laptop if you can. Even if you don't use a laptop and you don't know how to use a laptop and you've never translated anything, you know, we'll start, okay? We'll start together, okay?

I want to make you a translator. You can't translate without a laptop, frankly. Frankly, okay?

I use the database 25, 50 times during a session, and you just can't translate. In my mind, it won't be really accurate unless you can check a few hundred other books while you're working, you see? So it's as if we had about 4,000 books on the walls here, and we were pulling one down and looking up this idea that we're not sure about, but we can do it in about three seconds, okay?

And that's the degree of accuracy that you can get, you see? It's much, no one's doing it, no one's done it, okay? And that's why we've been working so hard to preserve the text, okay?

And this is stuff you don't appreciate. We did this for the courses, okay, 18 courses. We look up something every third line out of thousands of books, you know, and no one's, no Tibetan or anyone has ever had that to work with before, okay?

Okay. So the first thing I would do is get the, and this can be boring for some of you, and you can go home if it's boring, okay? Not really.

I mean, I'm trying to teach translators, okay? If you sit here, even if you don't care about computers or translating, you will learn a lot, but I'm not working for you, okay? I'm working for the people who want to be a translator, okay?

And then other people, hang in there, during the technical stuff, which is boring, but you will be getting, this extraordinary text will be taught to you in the meantime. But the main thing I'm going for is the translators. When I do the other courses, I'm going for the non-translators, right?

And Kristi La, you know, we were talking about it. I'm trying to do books to reach a mass audience, you know, maybe 100,000 people. And we do do those books, like we're doing, a Yoga Sutra is coming out, then there'll be a book about Christianity and Buddhism, then there'll be a book about relationships, then there'll be a book about addiction, and stuff like that.

That's for 100,000 people. And then she's like saying, Geshe-la, you spend all your time on that, you don't really make any hardcore translators or hardcore teachers. You sort of have simplified the material for the ACI courses.

But what are you going to do about making some hardcore translators? So for that, we have to do work like this. So I can't accommodate both of you.

I'm going for the translators in this class.

[Speaker 2]
Defining your audience.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, I'm defining my audience. And there will be parts, I don't want to feel pressure from the rest of you, like, I don't know why he's looking for that word for the 14 databases. It's boring for me.

I'm not trying to entertain the other people, okay? Have something to eat, drink something when I'm searching for something. I suggest you stay in the class, because you'll get huge seeds in your mind.

But don't put pressure on me to entertain you, okay? It won't be. It's going to be a translation class, okay?

And then all my other classes I do are for you. All the other classes are... I've already done all this work.

You just get the end result. It's a nice little reading. This is what the work that goes into it.

For every hour you get a class, we do like 20, 40 hours of prep. So you're going to see the prep. And I say you'll be a better translator if you see the prep, okay?

But it's boring, okay? Probably. So first boring thing I'd do, I would clean up the pagination here.

So let me see here. Let me do it. Find and replace.

What I'm trying to do is take out all the dumb extra spacing and stuff like that. Okay, so I look for double... This is a double paragraphing.

I'm going to replace it with two dollar signs. And I'm going to replace all of it. In other words, the first job you have as a translator...

How many first jobs? I don't know. You've got to have a clean text.

You've got to have a good text, okay? And these texts... We'll be working with three different texts.

What are they? You should know, okay? One is called the Gurudeva text, okay?

Gurudeva is a great lama from Mongolia. He must be, I don't know, 85 now? He went back to Mongolia, but he was living in New Delhi.

And when Gene Smith and the Library of Congress wanted to save all the Tibetan books, they met all these Tibetan lamas and they said, would you like to help us save your books? So Gurudeva stood up, stepped up to the plate, you know, and he said, I'll help. And he's this really incredible rascal lama.

He can get anything done. The last time we were all in Mongolia, we went to his apartment. And he's this old guy.

He's only got one eye left, you know, and he's like, oh, oh, you know, and I said, what are you up to, Gurudeva? And he says, I can't hear you! You know, I'm like yelling into his ear, what are you up to?

You know, and he says, got electricity for the monastery. Which one? Way out in West Mongolia, it's like 500 miles from the capital.

Capital of Mongolia is the only electrical plant, right? I got wires, telephone poles, 500 miles of telephone poles, got it done, you know? How did you do that?

Congress, Mongolian Congress, got the Congress going on it. How did you do that? Whiskey, man, whiskey!

He's like a rascal. He knows, he just, you know, did what he had to do, and they got their electricity out in Western Mongolia. So anyway, Rinpoche, in the very early years, in Hao, he wanted to save Jetsun Kapa's books.

There was no copy among the Tibetans. There was no copy of Jetsun Kapa's books among the Tibetans. So he got a hold of Gurudeva and said, how about we save Jetsun Kapa's books?

Gurudeva says, Gurudeva, you're in India, I'm in here, I'm in America, I'll get the money, I'll send you the money, you get it done. Gurudeva says, cool, we'll do it. So they got it done.

Gurudeva got an addition out of Tibet. And then Rinpoche raised money, we raised money. And then we sent the money to New Delhi, and we said, print it.

So they, what do you call it? They did film plates on film. It's like the film that old printing used to be, before computers, right?

So you shoot a, it's photo offset. So you photo it, and then there were huge parts that you couldn't read. So they called Sera Mae Monastery, they said, will you send up three monks to draw in on the film the letters that are gone.

So they picked three guys that didn't know what they're doing. Which has been a favorite complaint of ours for the last 20 years. But anyway, they went to New Delhi, they wrote in the letters, and often times they did it wrong.

They wrote the wrong letter. And we had a joke, I had a joke with Rinpoche, I said, if I ever meet the guy who did this, I'm going to kill him. Because like, there's five, six errors on every page.

And one day I'm in Delhi, I'm up on the top of like a five-story building on the parapet, and there's this Tibetan guy out there, and we start talking, and then he says, you know, I'm the guy who did the final stuff, the offset print on that Tsongkhapa edition, you know. And I'm like, I promised to throw you off this parapet, you know. But I didn't do it, okay.

So anyway, there are problems. There's that edition there, and there are two other editions that have gotten out of Tibet since. We haven't had time to type them in.

I have them, but I only have them on scan. So know the text you're working with. Know which text you're working with.

So now we're going to go through and take out all the... Yeah, one is from Tashi Thumbo edition. I believe this is called Shulpakang edition from the Potala Palace.

And the other is I think Labrang edition. But I have them here, and we'll share them with everybody. We have two on scans from Gene Smith's Tibetan Buddhist Research Center.

Okay. Now we're taking out all the useless extra paragraph signs. This is kind of dangerous.

We'll see what happens. Go to 7-3. Is it done?

No. We're taking out all the extra hard returns. Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah. Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
No, there's three versions in the Tibetan. Jetso Kapas collected works were carved at three different locations in Tibet over the last thousand years, six hundred years. So we've got all three.

But we're working... The main one we have typed is the thick one. So that's just something I personally am aware of as I work.

As a translator, you have to know the limitations of your text. Okay. Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, you get the file. That's the whole idea. And you will get the search program, and you will get the database.

So all the tools that I'm using, I want you to learn to use. And we'll go through it together. We'll actually, you know, hit P, hit X, control Z.

You're going to end up being a textual nerd. Okay. It just finished throwing out all the extra paragraph returns.

Okay. I hope. Now what am I going to do?

Put back in all the good ones. So I'm going back and putting in all the real double returns. What's a double return?

When we type in one of those long Tibetan scriptures, the ladies who type... By the way, why are they all ladies? We had all monks working at first.

We were in like 20 monasteries. Then some ladies started working in the refugee camp. They were so much faster, so much efficient, so much more accurate, so much more dedicated.

We closed them all in the monasteries. And we opened up more among the refugee camps. Okay.

Sorry to tell you guys that. So it will be a double return now. Oh, yeah.

That's what I was trying to say. So each line in the Tibetan, when we type it in, we leave a space before the next line. Why?

So I can go back to the original. I know what line I'm on. So I'm leaving it in that format.

Now we've got double returns and no extra returns between every line that you see now. Every blank space there where the cursor is right now. That's a place where in the Tibetan scripture a new line is done.

So if I have a doubt about what's happening, I can go back to the original Tibetan scripture and I can check if I have a problem.

[Speaker 2]
We don't have a scan of the original.

[Speaker 1]
Okay. But I'll be following the other two scans with you. We do have the other two scans.

I don't want a scan of that original. Now I've asked John Brady about four months ago to type in the other two originals. I don't know if he got it back yet.

We have two in scans, which is just the pictures of the pages. And then this one is typed in. What's the use of having...

This is a big deal. This is why we spent 20 years typing them in. Why didn't you just photograph them?

You can't search it. You can't search a photograph. You see?

You can't search a photograph. Name any subject you like that we've talked about in the last week. Any subject.

Huh? Yeah, the channel that comes down. Which side?

The right side of your body. The bad guy channel on the right side. It's called Roma.

You can call it Tsa Roma. Let's call it Roma. Tsa Roma.

Okay, you ready? See how long this takes. We're going to search 300,000 pages for the name of the channel that goes down the right side, which might save your life if you know about it.

Might save your life. So here we go. Time it, somebody.

Hang on. Ready? I'll cheat.

I'll go to tantric. Ready? 1, 2, 3, go.

There's an explanation of Tsa Roma. Out of 300,000 pages. I use programs that bypass Windows.

I hate Windows. And it's a lot of trouble to install them on your computer. Ted's working on a system that will install on your computer.

Windows is a lame disaster. Frankly. Yeah, there's a Roma.

This is how to clear the Roma channel. That's how to do this correctly. Out of 300,000 pages.

And I want to teach you the power of that, how to use it. We've been designing it. Took us 20 years to get it in.

But nobody uses it because they can't use it. So what I really want to do is teach people to use it before I die. Okay.

Let me turn that one down. Let's do some before we have to stop tonight. We've got like 10 minutes left.

Just for good luck, let's do the title. And I'm going to do it. I was in England this summer learning Greek with Christy Law, Ancient Greek.

We had this cool teacher. He says, how long do you think it takes to learn Greek? I said, I don't know, probably 6 years, 7 years.

I have a lot of training. So he's like, no, Greek in a week.

[Speaker 2]
You know.

[Speaker 1]
He taught us in 2 weeks. Like we were reading basic Greek in 2 weeks. So I'm going to steal some.

I really admire his methods. So we're going to steal some of his methods. What is this?

We're just going to do the title together. I'm going to read out loud. You're going to read along as if you know it.

Okay. And you just keep going. Okay.

Like, I'll say, and you'll say, and we'll end at the same time. And we'll keep going. And you just pretend you're doing it.

Okay. We'll go real slow together. As a principle, you don't read those extra letters at the beginning.

Okay. And you don't need to know more than that. You're just going to learn by osmosis.

And it's much more fun and much faster. Okay. So I'm going to read real slow.

Those of you who know, read with me. Those of you who don't know, open your mouth, make some kind of noise. And it will be wrong.

And you will learn. Okay. On the count of 3, we'll go slow through this first title of the book.

1, 2, 3. ten-chu-chen-po-u-ma-la-ju-be-nam-she-gong-va-ram-sa-shuk-so. Okay.

We're going to translate the title in 8 minutes. Tibetan syntax is the opposite of English, unfortunately. We start at the end of the sentence.

Shuk-so, at the end, means, let's go to... Well, we'll do it in 26 point time. Where the heck?

Herein contained. Okay. Shuk-so.

It's an honorific. They say books are like a treasure chest. And you should honor a book.

Book is like a golden casket. So they say, enclosed, contained in this precious box. Is.

Herein contained is the illumination of the true intent. Okay. Say gong-va.

Ram-sa. I'll put my cursor on it. Here it is.

Gong-va. Ram-sa. Ram-sa.

Ram-sa means illuminate. Like turn on the light. Gong-va means...

Those of you who studied Chang-e with Winston Locke, for example. It was called what? What the Buddha really meant.

See, gong-va means, what did he really have in mind? You see, gong-va means that. What did this guy really have in mind?

So we call it the true... Actually I call it true thought, right? Illumination of the true thought.

[Speaker 2]
Ram-sa is illumination?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. Ram-sa. And then gong-va is what he really had in mind.

But that's a little too colloquial to get even into a diamond-cutter press. You can't call it the illumination of what he really had in mind. I don't think so.

We got to be a little literary. Okay, here contained is the illumination of the true thought. So what are you studying?

Gong-va Ram-sa. That's got to be a mantra. Say gong-va.

Ram-sa. What did Buddha really have in mind? Ram-sa.

Totally clear. Totally clear. Okay, Ram-sa.

An explanation, which is nam-she. Okay, I'll put the cursor up there. Nam-she, which is an explanation of the great commentary.

Okay, great commentary is ten-chu, chen-po. Shastra in... There it is up there.

Ten-chu, chen-po. Say ten-chu. Ten-chu, chen-po.

You got to be parents in here, okay? Ten-chu, chen-po. Okay, now there's two kinds of books in ancient India.

There's do and there's ten-chu. What's do? Sutra.

Yeah, what's the Dorje Chöpe do? Diamond-cutter sutra. Okay, then there's ten-chus.

Those are written by Buddhas. Ten-chus are written by people who didn't get there yet. Okay, that's the difference.

Okay, so this is an explanation of the great commentary. An explanation of the great commentary named Entering the Middle Way. What's entering?

Say jupa.

[Speaker 2]
Jupa.

[Speaker 1]
And then Uma is what? Middle Way. Why is this channel...

What's this channel called? Why? It's in the middle.

Okay, middle of what? The other two, the two troublemakers, okay? Sun channel, moon channel.

Then this is the Uma. I asked Professor Thurman, did you call her Uma for that? He said there's about three Umas, aren't there?

The Uma channel. Uma as Middle Way philosophy. And then there's a Hindu goddess named Uma, okay?

So anyway, I'm not sure which one. So here contained is the illumination of the true thought, an explanation of the great commentary named Entering the Middle Way. Should we say classical commentary?

See, ten-chus, if a Tibetan writes a commentary, that's not a ten-chu. Ten-chu means ancient India, classical times, okay? Can we add that?

Uh, you secretary satisfied with the English? Sorry, go ahead. Now, now you get into something else, okay?

You can't be a truly great translator until you know all the other words he might have used. And that just takes about twenty years. Okay?

And there's a way to say that. You see? And you don't know that.

You see, there's another word you can use for true meaning. Uh, there's another Tibetan way to say that. So, translation is partly illumination.

Uh, I know he didn't want to say true meaning, because if he had he would have said that word, which is dunloma, you see? There's a different word for that. And, and don't feel bad, okay?

Keep asking. You have to keep asking. Why did you use that?

You know? And why didn't we use that? And then half the time I'll say, because there's another way to say that in Tibetan, and he did not choose to use it, you see?

But you only know that when you know Tibetan really well. Okay? Yeah?

Somebody out here said true intent. I used to use true intent. Um, I thought true thought was more accessible to normal people.

What do you think?

[Speaker 2]
Intent implies what the person really means, which is what this really means. Whereas thought just means a thought.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah?

[Speaker 2]
He's trying to say this is to explain to you what the true thinking is, or is this to explain to you what the guy who wrote it really wanted to say?

[Speaker 1]
It's the latter.

[Speaker 2]
Intent?

[Speaker 1]
Okay. It's what he, in plain English, it's what he really had in mind. Intent?

Okay. Shucks, I like that word.

[Speaker 2]
Say again?

[Speaker 1]
In what way? That's a different thing. That's the motivation for writing.

It's not motivation, okay? It's like, what was he really trying to say? Is that okay?

Is true intent okay? It's what he was really trying to say. No, no, no, I like both.

Both are important. You've got to sell it, too.

[Speaker 2]
It's what he really meant. Yeah. Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
I agree. Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
I'm going with thought.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, it's the author's true thought.

[Speaker 1]
I'm going to leave it thought. By the way, one principal of this class, and everybody offline, online should know, I get my way. In the end.

I'm sorry. She knows. Tricycle magazine tried to cut three words out of one of my articles.

And I said, don't print it. And then they said, well, we can't, we have to cut it because we don't have room on the page. I said, how much does a page cost you to print?

They said $5,000. I said, I'll pay it. For three words, I'll pay it.

You know? And they thought I was crazy. But I just have this thing, when it says what I want it to say, I won't give that up for anything.

Not even if all of you vote against me, frankly. But I still want to hear. And if there's a big overwhelming thing, like, that's really dumb, Jesse Michael.

We know you want it, but it just doesn't work for us. I want that. I want to know that.

You know, in the end, I might outvote you. So don't feel bad. I think we'll stop there.

I couldn't figure out what kind of homework to have on you guys.

[Speaker 2]
I have a question. Just to be clear, how did it get into the Romanized? And what form are these letters?

Oh, oh, oh.

[Speaker 1]
It's a long story. I don't want to bug you. I invented my own.

And it's better than anybody else's. And I figured if we put out enough data, everybody else would have to change to our system. And they did.

Why? We have typed 1%. This thing's going to go on for another 200 years.

Okay? We want as few keystrokes as possible. Frankly.

We have limited funds. We have limited people. The Tibetan language is dying.

We have to finish fast. The books are rotting in the monasteries. I had to make a system by which a normal person working on a normal computer that we begged off of chemical bank could do quick input work that's as accurate and quick as possible.

So that's what this system is. And it works. And it's a really good system.

But it's meant that they don't have to learn a new keyboard. You don't have to have some exotic keyboard. They do it all on a normal...

We get used computers all over the world. And we ship them to India. And that's the only way we can fund the project.

We get old, junky, broken computers and we ship them to India. And then they use old English keyboards. We can't afford exotic software where in India dust, electricity is going out every five minutes.

Refugee camp. So we have hardy, old, cranky dust computers and they just type plain old Roman. And in this exotic software we have changes into Tibetan.

If you're interested, that's how you get your readings. But I want you to learn to work with the Roman. Because then you can do this thing here.

Right? When did he write that? That's how long it takes to find the only mention in 300,000 pages of where and when he was when he wrote it.

Okay? You can't do that with this weird exotic software. You just can't do it.

Sorry, Doss. She doesn't. Yeah, yeah, okay.

Isn't that cool? We can go look at the story of which cave was he in, how was he feeling, which god did he see just before that. You know, it's kind of cool.

Did you have a question?

[Speaker 2]
How come they can't scan the Tibetan text?

[Speaker 1]
Oh, they are scanning them.

[Speaker 2]
Can they just convert it?

[Speaker 1]
You can't do OCR. Optical Character Recognition with Tibetan. Why?

Every letter is carved. Every letter is carved. No two A's and no two B's are the same.

Okay? We've worked for 20 years on OCR and it takes more time to fix it than it does to scan it, you see, than to type it. And frankly, it's cheaper to hire two refugees to type a book than to have someone stand there and scan it, you see.

And it's the largest employer for the Tibetan refugee communities. It's the largest single source of income for many of the refugee camps. So it's kind of like it's more accurate, it's faster, it's cheaper, and it makes work for Tibetan refugees, you see.

So we'll keep doing it for probably 20, 30 more years until OCR gets really good. It'll catch up. Right now it's not there.

We're going to stop because we have another class running here in half an hour. Very good class. But you get a taste, right?

This is going to be cool. You're there. This is a historic moment.

I've never done this with anybody. I've always worked with one or two people. And it'll be really fun.

We'll do it together. And we'll get there. And the whole thing will be in your mind.

And all the great translators I have working with me are people who said they couldn't learn Tibetan. They were the exact people who said, I'm too old, I'm too dumb, I can't learn Tibetan. And they're the only people left.

All the smart, bright, charismatic people left. Almost all of them. It's the people who sit down and schlock through it.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist. I'm not saying everybody. I'm just saying it's the people who stayed with it and just page by page they struggled through it.

And they just worked hard. People say, how did you learn all this stuff? I just worked hard.

We do it that way. We'd like you to read the script eventually. We'll get there.

It's not my goal right now. The script is fast. You can learn the script fast.

Once you learn this, it's very easy. And I can put this in script on the page if you prefer. I could put both on the page if you like.

It's just a little more trouble. But we can do that. Then we'll get to sentences where I can't have the print this big and still have Tibetan and Roman on the screen.

So I'll probably be working in Roman. Why? Because you can search 300,000 pages in about 2 seconds with the Roman.

I'll keep trying to sell you this. People are working very hard to make search programs in Tibetan. But then you've got to shift 3, alt 4, get the...

It's just... It's a lot more work. I want you guys to learn to work under windows.

OK. Yeah. OK.

We've got to start. I'll give the text to... We'll just put the text online.

[Speaker 2]
Is it online?

[Speaker 1]
It's online on the bulletin board already. I suggest we put this one online now. Now that I've cleaned it.

[Speaker 2]
It's like basic.

[Speaker 1]
It's similar to basic. What's Anthony's question?

[Speaker 2]
We're not going to go...

[Speaker 1]
Hang on one sec.

[Speaker 2]
Hang on one sec.

[Speaker 1]
I want to get the... Here's the... This is the Roman and here's the Tuscan text.

[Speaker 2]
Do you have a web?

[Speaker 1]
Can you go to the web?

[Speaker 2]
I'll just make you a CD.

[Speaker 1]
We can make a CD now.

[Speaker 2]
We'll make a CD with the password up.

[Speaker 1]
Oh. Problem.

[Speaker 2]
We're done. OK.

[Speaker 1]
Maybe I just do them one by one. Let's do it later. I'll give you my computer during the break.

We're going to entertain one question from Australia. I'm not answering this question unless he tells me why he's not here. I don't quite get that.

I understand the offshoot book thing. This particular book?

[Speaker 2]
Oh yeah.

[Speaker 1]
Why don't I just excerpt parts from this and write a book for Doubleday called Emptiness and Something. Because I'm cloning myself. So in the short term I might get less work done.

In the long term, 10 of you end up writing what we call derivative works. You end up writing a book about emptiness in English. Is that a good answer?

Is that OK? Right now that's what I'm doing. Derivative works, you guys dream about it.

Emptiness and bowling. Emptiness and golf. Emptiness and...

[Speaker 2]
Rock and roll.

[Speaker 1]
Rock and roll. OK, you got it. We'll do a prayer.

Please tune in on...

[Speaker 2]
Friday.

[Speaker 1]
We'll try to do better Friday.

[Speaker 2]
May I just pass along some thanks from a fellow I guess in another country. He says, I'm very grateful after years of studying Geshe-la's courses. This is the first time I hear him live.

Thank you, Geshe-la. Yay! Yay!

[Speaker 1]
I strongly suggest you let other people know about it. Because if they come in 20 pages later, they won't get the same effect. This extraordinary chance to get the whole thing in six years.

Please email people. Try to get in on... Also, there's a time delay, right?

It's archived also. So if they're in India, monks could listen in. If they're in India or something, they can pick it up 12 hours later.

Same thing. It'll just be repeated 12 hours later. But they won't be able to be live.

[Speaker 2]
Would other classes be webcast from here and then also will there be audio so people can speak directly to their questions instead of somebody reading them?

[Speaker 1]
Eventually. And eventually video. We're just working on that.

We really want to do that. This is early days. This is pioneering stuff.

Here we go.

[Speaker 2]
Satsang with Mooji www.mooji.org