Вступление на срединный путь (текущий курс, Аризона), занятие 13

[Speaker 1]
We had this thing where we found that the 400 verses referred was called the Yogi's Way but wasn't Yogacara. Then I went home and I recalled that I had found another nice quotation about that. And I just wanted to get it because it was better than Jetsun Kappas.

So if we wanted to look for that we'd say Yogacara, nearby the 400 verses. And then we'd look in the Sumbhum. That's not it.

I know the file numbers. Yeah, this is it. Let me see.

Yeah, this is a long discussion about... If you see at the top of the gopher screen, it says, Nel dor chokpe shi gyalpo shepe dun la. What is the meaning of that title?

See, that's the cool thing about the ACIP project. We can go through two and a half thousand years of texts and one guy explain why Yogacara is in that title. And this is it.

Why did they call it the 400 verses of the people of the Yogi's Way, right? And then it says, shi gyalpe dhartik le. One of the commentaries to the 400 verses says, thekpa chenpa rikchen nam nyam jor kyi chokpa nyam su lempe lam gyurinpa di.

This book is presenting the steps of the path for people who are practicing yoga in the sense of the greater way, Mahayana. You see what I mean? So it's not Yogacara as a mind-only school.

It's practicing yoga in the sense of practicing the yoga of trying to get enlightened so you can help other people. So then it's a much broader meaning of Yogi's Way in the title of that book, which fits the general era of that book, which is the times when Madhyamika had still not been split up into its different schools and stuff. It's just a general Madhyamika.

And then he goes on in that vein. He quotes other commentaries to support that idea. So I just wanted to stick it in the footnote here.

So we're on folios 30A and 30B of 303. And then we have to look up who wrote this book. So let's go to S03-03.

And you go to the... This is a commentary on Thangye, how to interpret the Buddha, by Jigme Dhammchugyatso from... It's pretty late, 1898.

Jigme Dhammchugyatso. I don't know much about him, but anyway. Jigme.

Jigme. And how to put Tibetan names into pronunciation. We've standardized it.

It's in the Release 4 user's manual. There's like a five-page shtick about how to write Tibetan words in English pronunciation because nobody has standardized them and they're all strange. So it gives the rules which are not easy to standardize because how do you show an umlaut?

How do you go from chöd? How do you distinguish between ga, ka, ka, ga, ga, and nga, and ga in English letters? And like that.

So we standardized it so that it's just easy. So it's not just my guess. Anyone can learn it.

So far about two people in the world have. Okay. Or you can put the Tibetan, in which case his name would be Jigme Dhammchugyatso.

And then you lose about 8% of your readers or something like that. And that's okay for scholars, but not for something that you want to reach normal people. So that could be a translation rule.

Put the Tibetan names or Tibetan words in normal English pronunciation without diacritical marks and be consistent. Do it the same way every time. And to do that you have to know Tibetan very well, spoken Tibetan very well.

Because you have to know, like, Gyaltsen has a prenasal, although it's impossible because it's a second column. Or Dorje has a pronounced head letter, although you don't pronounce head letters. And you know, you have to know Tibetan well to do that.

Okay. I thought we'd go a little bit more on trying to pronounce things from the Roman, because as you've seen, you really need to know that to use the database. And I told the monks in the monastery, you're going to need to do it this way for the time being, for example, because this thing called email is going to get big.

And you're going to want to email your friends in Tibet or America, and you won't be able to do it in Tibetan letters. So learn this, and you can just use Yahoo or whatever you want without weird fonts or, you know. And many of them did, and the people who are working in Russia and Mongolia and Nepal and India and India and America, they all communicate through this Roman letters, you see.

And later there'll be Unicode, but it's going so slow, it'll be after my time, which is a code that will have all the world's languages on your keyboard. But it's going so slow because there's so many fights about it, you know. So in the case of Tibetan, who has the authority to decide?

Is it the Chinese government or is it the Tibetan refugee government or is it the Library of Congress or, you know. Okay, so anyway, here we go. I'm just going to read and then you repeat, okay?

And you get used to it, and then later we'll get into the Tibetan script before the end of this course, this term. Say, drensel?

[Speaker 2]
Drensel.

[Speaker 1]
Le. Le. You hear the le?

Le. Okay, le means from or karma, and le means for the sake of or your brain. Get to hear the difference?

Le. Le. Le.

Cut short. And le means lazy, lelo, right? So here's three different les, ready?

Here's the short one, le. Le. Here it's kind of cut short.

That would have a da suffix. Le. Le.

For the sake of or your brain. Le. Le.

Which is lelo, lazy. And then this one is le. Le.

Karma or from. Or but, and that's another problem. Okay, right?

Disjunctive. Say, sangye? Sangye.

Gengi? Gengi. Rimny?

Rimny. Sorry, rimny. Gengi.

Gengi. Ne. Ne.

Ki. Ki. Getup.

[Speaker 2]
Getup.

[Speaker 1]
De-ni. De-ni. Because de means that, and de means group.

Okay? And de means happiness. And de means gone.

Okay, so, okay? Ludup. Ludup.

You hear the lu? Okay, so lu is a kind of rice from ancient India, salu. And then lu is a naga.

And ludup is nagarjuna. Okay, nagarjuna. Le.

Le. Ne. Ne.

Pa. Pa. Sorry, pa.

Pa. Kyabdak. Kyabdak.

Bounden.

[Speaker 2]
Bounden.

[Speaker 1]
Where's the N? It's the prenasal from a la-dattak. La-dattak.

La head letter over a da is always prenasal. As is la. Right?

Like ndawa, spelled Z-L-A. Okay? So those two are prenasal.

So this is why ganden is pronounced gan-den and not ga-den. Okay? There's a prenasal.

And bounden is very shrivat in Sanskrit. Bounden. Dorje.

Dorje. Where's the R coming from? Illegally pronounced head letter.

Okay? Alright? Dorje.

Okay? Semba. Semba.

Dute. Dute. Dawa.

Dawa. Hear a little bit of ndawa? Ndawa.

There's a little N. Ndawa. Ndawa.

Okay? Takpa. Takpa.

Sorry. Takpe. Takpe.

Rimshin. Rimshin. She.

She. She. Okay.

Everybody's sleepy. Okay. Me too.

I have a cold so I'm just experimenting. Drabadunso. Thank you.

He's saying this is moreover true, but what is he trying to prove? What was the last thing he's trying to prove? He's always trying to prove something, right?

And this is true because... Well, he said something kind of... Here.

Yeah. He said something kind of controversial, that Master Chandrakirti had studied directly with Nagarjuna. Okay?

Arya Nagarjuna. What's Chandrakirti mean? Did we talk about that?

Famous moon, but what does that mean? Yeah. Yeah.

How many people don't know about the moon? You see, I mean, as much as Chandra, he is Kirti. You see?

I mean, who doesn't know about the moon? It's like when we came out of Sriya Retreat and they found out we didn't know about 9-11 and all the newspapers wanted to interview us because we're like the only people on the planet that didn't hear about... And everyone's heard about the moon because it's just there every night.

So Chandrakirti is a cool name. Anyway, here we go. So somebody...

He's going to quote somebody else to prove that. What? Master Chandrakirti heard the root text on wisdom directly from Arya Nagarjuna.

Okay? I don't want to say clear light because that's Utsal and that's a tantric meaning, you know, of emptiness. You see?

That's Utsal. This is Junsal. Jun means a lamp or a lantern.

Any suggestions? I don't want to call it the clear lantern or something. It means a lantern which clarifies the road or...

It's like a headlight. That's pretty good.

[Speaker 2]
Illuminating lamp.

[Speaker 1]
Who said that? That's pretty good. The lamp of illumination?

Okay, how about it? This is tough. Certification.

Certification? It's a... Getap means to stamp a seal on something, like seal of approval.

It's like certification, but it's kind of... Certification doesn't sound too Buddhist here. It's like that.

It's a seal. It's like... Getap means to seal.

It doesn't mean that his teacher endorsed him. It means that... Let's put a...

I'll put this, okay? And then we'll come back to it when you see the rest of the sentence. In China we received...

Okay, now any ideas? It implies that they checked his comprehension and gave him a seal of...

[Speaker 2]
Truths?

[Speaker 1]
It's like approval or endorsement. You want to say endorsement or...

[Speaker 2]
That's...

[Speaker 1]
Sorry?

[Speaker 2]
Who gave it to him?

[Speaker 1]
You see, that he received the transmission is conveyed in... Received. There's the nye in the Tibetan, right here.

Yeah, but here it goes beyond... He received the transmission, but he was also like... Like in the Heart Sutra?

Sadhu Karmadat. You know, Lord Buddha confirms. Yeah, I like that.

Let me see. Who was confirmed?

[Speaker 2]
It's the same, like what you're saying. Like Genghis Khan sort of empowering him to go out and...

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Speaker 2]
Was he worthy to receive?

[Speaker 1]
I think confirmed.

[Speaker 2]
Was he worthy?

[Speaker 1]
Let me make sure it's Chandrakirti. Oh, yeah.

[Speaker 2]
He's confirmed to teach him.

[Speaker 1]
Just his ideas of his grant. That's good. He received the confirmation from Nagarjuna?

Yeah, sorry. I misstated it. Yeah, he received it from Nagarjuna.

Okay? It's a long sentence, but it is in Tibetan. So I don't feel so bad.

[Speaker 2]
Is it like a dated thing? Or are they saying like Nagarjuna came directly?

[Speaker 1]
Well, he's using this quotation to prove that he was a direct student of Nagarjuna.

[Speaker 2]
In the sense that he was around at that time or that Nagarjuna came directly?

[Speaker 1]
Oh, not as a vision, no.

[Speaker 2]
I don't mean as a vision.

[Speaker 1]
He was a direct disciple of Nagarjuna is the assertion of this debate. And then he's going to use three proofs. The first proof was, we had already, the quotation from Lord Atisha.

Now, Devadunsa, I think, is the Sinhabhadra. Let me check. There's a couple of Dunsas.

Sangye Kunky Rimnyi. And we'll take another piece of it. Let's see.

Neki Getap. Tengir. It doesn't seem to be in the Tengir.

Let's see if it's in the Sumbhum. We have a Getap in the Dake. It's a little difficult there too.

That's another thing. I think it's a seal. You know, like a seal.

I don't know. I don't see this quotation. Okay, the quotation is here.

In which book? Umicchino. That's the book we're in.

That doesn't help. Okay. The only person where that quotation appears is...

So, I'm going to leave that for a while. I'll work on that. Sometimes, again, he might be quoting an earlier translation that was current in his time and stuff like that.

I should put this one here. Oh, I don't know what the two novels are. I don't think it's the...

It could be. But given the fact that they're talking about his grasp of emptiness, they don't talk so much about Chandrakirti having studied tantra with Ayyanagarjuna. Ayyanagarjuna is in a lot of tantric lineages.

And that's one of the reasons why Western scholars have trouble dating him because he's like in a lot of yoga lineages also. But you don't hear about Master Chandrakirti having studied tantra with him. So, it could be the two...

the far-reaching side of the teachings and the profound... the emptiness and the bodhisattva trainings. Those two.

But we have to find it in a book and then there'll be a commentary on it and we'll look it up. Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
Is Chandrakirti the extension of...

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, looks like. That's a pretty heavy statement. And that verb is weird and it could mean a lot of things like...

It could mean... Duh, here. It could also mean that he got extended from bhajansattva which is...

could be Nagarjuna, you see. Could be anything, yeah. Could be.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm just going to leave it like that.

I have to find a commentary to really, you know... It's as obscure in the Tibetan as it is in the English, okay? Okay.

Let's read it together. Ready? Pandita.

Okay, so when you get one of these relatively rare in Tibetan retroflex, meaning you say the third row, right? Kacchattha. Ta, tha, dha, na.

There's another row in Sanskrit where you retroflex them. Okay, so just say ta. Ta.

And then note what part of your tongue is hitting the top of your mouth. Then, as we said before, hit the same spot in your mouth with the bottom of the tip of your tongue. Ta.

So it looks duh. Duh. Okay, ta.

And you should look like you're grimacing. Then you're doing it right. Ta.

And this is like the tan, tashi, dale. Okay. But there's a whole Sanskrit row that's retroflex.

And pandita is one of the words. You don't say pandit, pandit. You say pandita.

Yeah, pandita. Yeah, legally, correctly. Then the Mongolians call it bandit, bandit.

And we used to joke about that. And still in India you see a lot of people called panday or banday. And in Sri Lanka they're called banday.

You know, you see a monk, you say, oh, banday. And that's a corruption. They're all corruptions of pandita.

Okay. Pandita. Gyalden.

Takpay. Kyang. Tedak.

Nee. Read these two. Gyalden.

Okay, gyalden. Ludup. Ki.

Shell. Ngane ki. Luh ki.

Okay. Loma. Nee.

Got it? Nee. Okay.

Because nee is what? Jigneesun. It means two.

If you stretch it out, it's two. Nee. If it's cut short, it's nee.

Which means verily, like tomba nee. Shunye ta. Okay.

Neetu. Sosor. Tenki.

Yeah, even if you're not going to learn Tibetan, just recite it. Just repeat it. Because it'll get in your head.

Our Greek teacher, he didn't teach us pronunciation. He just screamed Greek at us. And we repeated it back.

And then like a month later, we're speaking it. It's really weird. So, gyupe.

Gyupe. Nee. Nee.

Mayino. Mayino. Xue.

Xue. Sungbe. Sungbe.

Chir. Chir. Okay.

It's still debate style. Okay. And this is true.

We want to call a pundit. I guess scholar, yeah. The master scholar.

I like master scholar. Kelden. I don't know.

Should we lay that on people in the... Kelden. No?

Can you recite that back to me? No, I lost it. It's doing that thing again.

I'm just going to close it and bring it back. Is that okay? It's doing that thing where it erased the last three words I typed.

Every time I... Okay. I'm just going to get out and come back.

Let's try this and see what happens. Whoa. Okay.

[Speaker 2]
Okay.

[Speaker 1]
You take your turn. Okay. Read that back to me.

No. It's still not going. How about we close down Microsoft Room and come back later?

I looked up Kelden Dakpa. Now it would sound like a Tibetan, right? He came up in Indian lineages.

So sometimes the Tibetans refer to some Indian master with a Tibetan name. And then we have to dig around and see if we can find his Sanskrit name. And sometimes you can't find it.

Let's try it. Since this is working. And I'll just show you where it comes up in lineage charts.

Let's actually try in some catalogs. You see, this is a book by the first Penchen Lama about lineages. And look at the top right hand.

Here's something coming down. This is stuff about Naropa. Comes down through Dorje Chang, which is Vajradhara, to Chagna Dorje, which is Vajrapani, to Ludu, which is Nagarjuna, to Aryadeva, and then to some other Indians.

You see, Shakyashinian, Dawa Dakpa, Chandrakirti, Ropa Dorje, Lalita Vajra or something, and then Kelden Dakpa. You see? And all the names are sounding pretty...

These are like Tibetan until you get to Sakya Pandita. So, based on that you'd think he's probably an Indian scholar, but whose name we don't know in Sanskrit. Here's an alternate lineage for...

Oh, it doesn't say. Yeah, these are like a Tantric lineage that came down through Tilopa. And he lists Chandrakirti, and then Lalita Vajra, and then Kelden Dakpa.

So those are just indications that it's an Indian whose name we don't know. Can we find it in Sanskrit? So it's not found in like, I don't know, 5,000 pages of Sanskrit dictionaries.

So I don't think we're going to find it. I'm going to put Kelden Dakpa. Okay, here we go.

Let's try to get back to the file we were in. Maybe I'll try this. Maybe it's having trouble with the macro.

Okay, can you read it to me again?

[Speaker 2]
These were disciples?

[Speaker 1]
That's it? That's pretty clear. Okay.

These were disciples of Nagarjuna who were each taught by him directly. It's not the case that they received the transmission through others. Gyutpe.

Yeah? Well, it emphasizes the gyut, which means... It always means like, like the way I've received Pabongka Rinpoche's teachings.

Like through two intermediaries or something like that. One, anyway. Yeah.

Okay. Can we find that? We'll take a shot, but I don't think we can.

Sosortengi? Is it? Sosortengi.

Birgit? Right? Okay, then we'll take another piece.

Let's try those two. Not in the tengyur as we have it. And I'm going to let that search while we do something else.

And I'll put this, which... I put this when I remind myself I have to do something here later. Okay, here we go.

You ready? Kacig... Nare.

What's kacig nare? Yeah, somebody says. Suppose somebody says.

And by the way, the verb is at the end. Ser na. Which means, suppose somebody claims.

He's not even giving him the says. Suppose somebody comes along and claims. Okay?

It's that feeling. Read this one for me. Good.

Read this one for me. Dawa. Sri...

Right? Still in India they call you Sri Patabhi Jois, right? Poundan.

And then dawa, chandra, chandrakirti. Read that. De...

Read it with me, okay? Ready? We'll go real slow.

Gun... Now read it with me. One...

Starting on gun. Very slow. One...

Because since everybody's reading, nobody will know if you mispronounce it. Unless everybody does. One...

Two... Three... Gun...

Pa... Lu... Ru...

Ki... Lu... Lok...

Yin... Pa... Mi...

Pe... Pa... Ha...

Chik... Sa... Le...

Gun... Bu... Nze...

Pe... Shung... Dham...

Lok... Me... So...

Dhyu... Ma... Shi...

Ne... Nyam... Pe...

Deng... Sang... Dhyu...

Na... Shung... Lu...

Sel... Po... Me...

Je... Sung... Pe...

Chik... Sana... Okay, so somebody's cheering on us.

They're like, you may cheer to us. Okay, yeah. Yeah, you guys did good.

Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I kept going like this.

Because, for example, if you say here, Chik, say Chik. Chik. And Chik.

Chik. Chik means a flea that got into your bed. All right.

Comes one place in scripture that I know of where Pabongka Rinpoche talks about the karmic exponentiality of karma. You crush one Chik, then the next day, if you don't confess it, the next day it's two, and the next day it's four, and the next day it's sixteen. You see, it's by powers.

Yeah. And this is Chik, which means a or one. Okay, got it?

And like this is... Well, let me give a better example. Sang.

Sang. Which means nowadays. And sang would mean pure or brass.

You see what I mean? Okay? So here we go.

Now I'm like superstitious. I think I have to do it this way. I had a macro and maybe that messed it up.

I don't know. You could do a style. I don't know the style thing.

You'll teach me. Now, I'm going to teach you something. I think we all feel like this.

And I think the debaters here will like this. There's two kinds of Tao. Okay?

Listen. Yin-ba-tao. And then there's Yin-ba-tao.

Hear them? Here, I'll do the first one again. Yin-ba-tao.

And then there's Yin-ba-tao. The first one is It is so true that... Okay?

And the second one is Are you saying it's true that... And they're both telling gyur, prasangika. Right?

It's that... It's like a sarcastic thing. Okay?

That's what the high school is named, right? Majimika. So, I'll say it again.

Yin-ba-tao. It is so... And then Yin-ba-tao.

Are you telling me... Okay? And you have to figure it out contextually if you're translating Tibetan.

It's a nasty, nasty thing. Okay? Did the guy go up or did he go down?

Okay? Now you tell me. I'll tell you what he's saying.

He's the opponent, okay? So you tell me whether he went up or whether he went down. You got to think about it.

Don't yell out. I'll give you a few seconds, okay? It's not true that...

And I'm using the cursor, okay? It's not true that the glorious Mr. Moon was the direct disciple of the protector Nagarjuna. Don't forget he's the opponent.

So I'll say it both ways in English, okay? It is so true... I'm sorry.

It is... It isn't the case that... It is not the case that Master Dharmakirti was Nagarjuna's direct disciple.

Or is he saying, are you telling me it's not the case that he was the direct disciple? It's the first one, right? He wants to say something to stir up trouble with us.

We believe that he was. So he's going to say, no, it's not true. Which in Tibetan you say, no, it's not.

Okay? Okay? Okay, so here it is.

So in English, instead of saying, are you telling me it's true? It can't be true. You see what I mean?

It can't be true that the glorious... And we'll fill in kirti because it sounds weird to call him Mr. Moon. It can't be true that the glorious chanting kirti...

I can't see the... Okay. Okay, Bill, we'll wait.

Got less? Or degenerated? Degenerated.

Diminished. The text didn't diminish so much as... They weren't taught so much or...

You see? So it's a tricky thing because it has to cover the books and the people. His disciples and his books...

Declined is good, I think. Okay. Now in English, it's not such a problem because it depends on what verb you use here.

After some great length of time, the great text that the protector has composed, if I say it that way, it sounds like he lives in my time. So we need an ambiguous way to say this. You see?

Who wrote clear words? Master Chandrakirti. This is his word-by-word explanation of Ayyanagarjuna's text.

He wrote two commentaries, and entering the middle way is his meaning commentary. Maybe it's illumination of the words I was using? Do you know?

Let's go look. Word? Yeah, we called it clear words before.

Okay. So in English, it kind of... I don't know how you say that.

You lose the drama. Sorry. Well, you see, if we say has composed, it's clear that he lives in his time.

If you say had composed, could it imply that he's no longer around? But I'm still his direct disciple? So it's still okay, I think.

Yeah, and the had is good because it could be misinterpreted to mean that I'm writing 400 years later.

[Speaker 2]
So what he's saying is that they were predicted that they would be quiet.

[Speaker 1]
No. What he's saying is that... This quotation makes it sound like the author who wrote this quotation lived a couple centuries after Ayyanagarjuna.

It's supposed to sound... But it's supposed to sound like maybe he lived a few hundred years later because the other guy is using it to back up his statement that Chandrakirti wasn't a direct disciple of Ayyanagarjuna. So we've got to translate it in such a way that a person just coming across this quotation would automatically maybe think that the person who wrote it was not a direct disciple.

So I think as it stands, it's okay. If I just told you somebody said after some great length of time the text that the protector had composed declined so that nowadays we don't have them, you would also think that he was not his direct disciple. And that's fine.

But we're supposed to be there. It's a debate.

[Speaker 2]
Can I fiddle with your computer for just a second?

[Speaker 1]
Sure.

[Speaker 2]
Geshe-la, can you just make a remark?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
Wouldn't it be...

[Speaker 1]
He doesn't seem to have written as much. Were they not published as much? Did people corrupt the spellings?

It's just... I don't think it can be more precise. The Tibetan word could mean not so many people read them.

There weren't so many available. They were not written nicely anymore. People didn't understand them anymore.

You know what I mean? It could mean like five or six things. So when you come across a case like that you have to leave it ambiguous.

You see? If you decide what he meant you might be wrong. So there's a place for intentional ambiguity in translation.

Just not to be incorrect. You see what I mean? We don't know in what way they declined.

You see? So we'll leave it. Let's see if we can find that quotation.

Hopefully. This should be easier. Is this spelled correctly?

This one where my cursor is? There's a G, right? There's a G.

It should be geshun, right? Yes. A principle of gopher searches.

If you think about it... Now this is a search thing. You have to learn how to search.

You have to learn how to do what I'm doing. Nobody knows how to do what I'm doing in the world. Leave off the front half of the word.

Why? I'll still get it and if somebody mistyped the first half of the word I'll still get it. And sometimes that happens.

Or if it was spelled differently a thousand years ago. You see? I can type in the second half of a word at the beginning of a string and I'm more likely to hit something.

You see? It's very interesting. Tibetan very much lends itself to search programs.

That's why we input it that way. And these are called Boolean search programs. Search for this near that or search for this instead of that or search for this or that.

Like Google's the best search in the world but it only does AND. You type six words and it searches for that and that and that and that. That should go into...

You can do some more. You can't do proximity. But anyway.

You can't do NOT searches, right? Oh, you can. Okay, sorry.

Anyway, let's try it. Yeah. Let's see in the tinger.

Yeah. And let's look in the Madhyamika. I think what you're starting...

Oh, here is something. This is not the same quotation. Okay.

This is not the same. This is not it. Okay, well.

That's pretty interesting because 6L is in there. A lot of times they're quoting a quotation from memory from the debate they had two years ago. Okay.

We'll have to find it. I'm not going to spend the time here. So I need to find that.

Yeah. By the way, thanks for the great dinner. He cooked a...

What do you call it? Raw foods dinner, which I'm very opposed to before I even tasted it. It was really, really good and there's a Shishi restaurant called Candle 79 in New York.

Somebody took us there and you've got to lay down like 80 bucks before you can get out. And it's exactly the same. You should go into business or something.

But anyway. Sorry.

[Speaker 2]
Thank you. Chandrakirti means the famous as a monk. So when he was...

[Speaker 1]
No, no. I mean, wise men did, right? But most of the great, like Jetsun Kappa or the Dalai Lamas, Naropa, they were bitterly attacked by people during their lives.

Most great scholars or great practitioners attract also intense criticism. Jetsun Kappa was called Mr. Big Nose because he had a big nose and people attacked him bitterly. All the monks at Naropa's monastery criticized him for leaving and becoming a yogi.

So yeah, lots of people have attacked him. But among Panditas, as famous as the moon, wow, Chandrakirti. Okay, so anyway.

Let's read it. Okay, here we go. Real slow together, okay?

If anybody says kyun, you can just kind of... Here we go. One, two, three.

Kyun, me, te, te, dun, gun, bu, gu, tse, nju, la, shung, su. Who said su? Silent, okay.

Su, dang, lo, me, tso, na, chung, se, nyam, pei, dun, yin, pei, ming, gyal, wei, jie. Okay, and we'll stop there. I like that.

That's going to work, I think. You think you're pronouncing it right and then you do after a while. Sorry?

There's no such problem.

[Speaker 2]
Okay.

[Speaker 1]
So that doesn't prove that, what? Yeah, Master Chodakiri wasn't our intercourteous direct disciple. It just means that later in his life, you know, there were fewer students around and fewer people could teach his texts.

Given that he lived 900 years, I mean, that's possible, right? I'll just point out one thing for you transcenders. Se means life, right?

Ayus in Tibetan, like ayurveda. And then ku means what? Holy body, right?

So this is an honorific for someone's life. You don't say the Dalai Lama's life, you say the Dalai Lama's holy, sacred life. But it gets a little cloying in normal English.

If I had said, during the latter part of the Protector's holy, sacred life, or can you think of a way to say it without being cloying? Yeah, flowery. I think Protector seems to say it.

Sometimes you got to overrun those things. Here we go again, ready? How do you want me to indicate?

I'll go prenasal, okay? This is prenasal. Okay, ready?

njuk pa rang drang che pe je su drang ne ten drang sab mu de ko na ni ten la ber pa je na njuk je u ma de ka njuk su ji ta bu she na Okay? Here you see, bu, happening after a da, it changes to u, as in uma. Here you see bu by a sa, as a second syllable of a two-syllable word, tabu, okay?

But those of you who are pretty good at Tibetan, unfortunately, if it's a naro, like ge wa di, ge wo kun, ge wo, it changes to wa. So, it's vowel-dependent, unfortunately. Really weird, okay?

So, ta bu, but ge wo, the same bi, okay? Depending on which vowel is on it. Okay, you'll figure it out sometime.

Yeah. By the way, why did I say you may ask the following question? Why didn't I say someone may make the following claim?

That was ser-na, and this is she-na. Okay? And you got to, you have to be sensitive to that.

Ser-na means, oh, suppose some schmuck comes along and makes this claim. Master Chandrakirti wasn't Arya Nagarjuna's direct student. But now it's just a reasonable question.

Somebody's coming up and saying, hey, I got a question. Respectfully, she-na, okay? No one may ask the following question.

Whoa. Okay, sorry. Oh, you're right.

Okay, I got to do this. Where is it? Oh, okay.

I was trying to make it like profound. Okay. Oh, yeah.

Still need an end quote, right? Oh, I'm leaving. Now I'm going to show you another book.

Hang on. Okay. Sound familiar?

That's the book we started with in the beginning last term. That's the book we're supposed to be translating. Okay?

So we've caught up to Jetsun Kappa. Okay, all that, you know, the last nine, eight classes, whatever, I don't know. We were just catching up to Jetsun Kappa.

We went to the monastic textbook and all that stuff was additional material, which is nice. The whole lineage of emptiness. We got the whole lineage, we got all the masters, we got probably the only explanation I've ever seen of how Nagarjuna explained emptiness, what books he wrote, how they interconnect with each other.

Now we finally caught up to Jetsun Kappa. Okay? How to publish this is going to be interesting because if it's side by side, you know, like 20 pages were just blank.

You know what I mean? If they're supposed to be running parallel. You see?

[Speaker 2]
Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
You can... We'll have to play around with that. You see?

It's a very interesting publishing question, you know, because the monastic textbook... Now I'm going to put them up side by side. How's that?

Which is not real cool, but anyway. On top you've got Jetsun Kappa's text. Ew.

Let's just ignore it and see what happens. And on the bottom you've got the monastic textbook. So don't forget that in Jetsun Kappa's text, which I'm going to blow up now, I mean expand, you know, there was a debate about what was the middle way that we were entering into, and it went on for some time, you know.

So let's go back to our other one. I'm going to close this down just so there's less to chew on for the machine. And you should go back and look over, you know.

You should like be looking at... When you don't have free time at Diamond Mountain, right? You could go back and look at how they compare.

How these... These are now... He's going to give a similar discussion.

You said, we're going to learn about emptiness by entering into the middle way. What is the middle way? And this is a very common question.

When I was learning Buddhism, you know, they'd say the middle way. And I'd be like, what's the middle way? The middle between what and what?

You know what I mean? And what's Madhyamika mean? And you ask people and like nobody knows.

It's like, okay, middle way, but what's that mean? If that's the highest system of all, what's the middle way mean? So here we go.

This is a peculiarly monastic textbook presentation and it's fantastic. You don't get this in the early texts. And it's just like LSD trip, okay?

Not that I ever... I never did do it. I can say that.

That's kind of cool, right? In the monastery, to cover your rear end, you have to say, if only nominally. Okay?

Say, re. Let's do the whole thing. Ready?

Very slow. Don't... Nobody say, bu ma.

Okay? Here we go. U.

Ma. La. Re.

Dje. Rik. Ki.

Go. Ne. Ye.

Na. Dje. Je.

Si. Ki. Ki.

U. Ma. Dhang.

Dje. Ja. Dön.

Ki. U. Ma.

Ni. Okay, good. And that's it.

Uma. Middle way. So, Uma can refer...

Madhyamika can mean the books. And Madhyamika can mean the meaning of the books. Okay?

But when you say, dje dje rik gi go ne, only nominally, it's a maingat, which means what? He's saying something else, which is what? One of these ain't real Madhyamika.

If I say, only nominally we can divide it, it means one of them ain't the real Madhyamika. Okay? It ain't the real middle way.

Now, which one's not the real middle way? Let's see. Is it the words or the...

or the meaning which is the real middle way? Okay? Ah.

Let's... I like this. Let's do it.

This is the Greek system. One. Two.

Three. Four. Five.

Six. Seven. Eight.

Nine. Ten. Twelve.

Thirteen. Fourteen. Nineteen.

Twenty-one. Twenty-two. Twenty-four.

Twenty-five. Twenty-six. Rik.

So. Druk. Ta.

Bu. Chi. Ma.

Yin. Be. Chi.

Okay? Yin. Be.

Chi. Okay. Then you got to do this way, you know.

Okay. How am I going to start this sentence? No.

Yin. Be. Chi.

And that's true because, you see what I mean? And it's going to get... the reader is going to wonder after a while, what's this?

And that's true. And that's true. and that's it.

What's he doing? And then it's to get the feeling of a guy saying, he puts forth his dhūkje ca, his assertion, dhūkja, and then he gives the thought. And when you give the thought, you go, bam, you know.

So you got to get that feeling of somebody giving an assertion. What do you call it in Western logic? Thesis?

Premise. It's your premise. And then he gives the reason for it, to prove it, the proof for it.

And this is true. Oh, sorry. Oh, we have to be ambiguous.

Sorry. Ngedungida. Ngedun.

Netarta. Netarta. In Sanskrit.

What is that? What's jange? Yeah, neyarta and netarta is called jange in Tibetan, jangdun and ngedun.

Yeah, so nge means literal, okay? So he's going to say, the first of these consists of the sutras which are literal, such as the more extensive, medium length, and briefer presentations of the Perfection of Wisdom. I'm adding that just because they're, they just call it brief, middle, short.

Brief, middle, long. Long, brief. Long, middle, brief.

What makes a sutra literal according to the highest presentation? Yeah, Lord Buddha directly talks about emptiness. Then he meant what he said.

And in no other book did he mean what he said. That's like a profound statement. That's like an unbelievable statement.

And I'm proud of Diamond Mountain, frankly. People say, oh, you have this emphasis on worldview. You're all hung up on worldview and emptiness and all that.

I'm proud of it. We're ngedun. No, I like that.

Get to the core of it. Get to what's going to liberate you. It's emptiness.

It's worldview. It's that you are projecting your world. Everything can change if you have that key.

That's why we can go and write books about yoga, Christianity, business, Buddhism, relationships is the next thing. Because the key is the same. The key doesn't change.

The key is, look, you're projecting all this stuff and you can change it. So you can bowl a better game if you just help other bowlers. You know what I mean?

Go teach a kids league or something. The numbers will go up or something like that. Okay?

Somebody has to write that. I don't think I have time. But I just love it.

I get chills up my spine when I hear, oh yeah, that's middle way. That's the middle way. That's what Buddha really wanted to teach.

And then everything else he taught, he was in a group and there were a couple of dumbbells there and he had to teach something else. Because he couldn't get to the core. He couldn't get to worldview.

And so he had to present something lower than that. Oh look, there's this, you know, no outer objects exist. Or there's this thing called self-perception.

You know, he got into other schools. So anyway, there we are. What was the former, by the way?

Right here. Yeah, the middle way in the form of the books. Okay?

And those can be divided into the sutras and the, sorry, yeah, the sutras and the classical commentaries. Okay? Who wrote that?

Who wrote those six? Arya Nagarjuna. What's the first of the six?

The root text on wisdom. Okay? So there's the words which express middle way.

Those are middle way in the form of words. Okay? Not when it's capitalized, it's okay, but you can.

Sorry? No, he said even the words have two divisions, which is the sutras and the classical commentaries. Now he's going to say, here we're getting into the real book, okay, which I like.

This is what I go home and like dream about or what comes up in the book gym class next week.

[Speaker 2]
Okay?

[Speaker 1]
The punchline's coming. We got time, right? Is this supposed to stop at 7.30?

Am I right? Okay. Middle way in the form of what the books talk about can again be divided again only nominally, meaning some of these divisions aren't for real.

I mean, someone really came up to me and said, is it real, Madhyamika? You'd have to say no, but it's pretty cool, Madhyamika. Foundation, path and result.

That's very common. Śīlaṃ devasūṃ. Say, śīlaṃ devasūṃ.

Like we have that in Tantra a lot. The original condition of the body, the path to change it into light and then the light body itself, which is the result. So oftentimes in Tantra, you'll get śīlaṃ devasūṃ.

Okay. I'm going to split these up just because they're so sexy. Let's read this together.

Ready? One, two, three. ca-nam-raṅ-siṃ-kī-me-pa-dhaṃ-bo-dhāṃ.

Okay, good. The fact that no object has any nature of its own is the foundation middle way. That's like some philosophical thing, right?

What it means is that fire is not hot. Fire doesn't have heat. Gas doesn't move a car.

Gas can't move a car. Fire can't burn you. Heat is not a quality of fire.

Is that true? Yeah, in a way, right? Can fire burn you?

Yeah, but does the ability to burn you exist in the fire? No, it's coming from you. And that's why people can pick up camphor in India, these pujaris, and they're just waving it around.

We touch it and it burns us. Okay, it's empty. Fire is not hot from its own side.

So if that's not itself from its own side, neither is anything else, right? Because that's so radical to say that fire is not hot. Then obviously the person who bugs you the most in the world is not coming from their own side either.

Okay, that's a little easier to grasp than fire. Okay, and more practical, more meaningful. Let's read That's three-year retreat talk for something to drink.

Gopi-gopi. Okay, anyway. This linguist wanted to interview us after a three-year retreat because we had this complicated language on development.

Okay, anyway. Path of seeing, direct perception of emptiness, divided into two parts, basically, paricchit-mellam and jeta-vyasi, right? Paricchit-mellam, pure, uninterrupted communion with ultimate reality.

It's called the uninterrupted part of the path of seeing. Then the next fifteen hours, twelve hours, when you're seeing the Four Noble Truths, for example, that's called the jeta-vyasi, the wisdom which is acquired subsequent to that. Why do you choose a listener instead of a bodhisattva?

Listener means a person who can't handle bodhisattva. They can't work for all living beings. They can listen about the idea of trying to help all beings.

They personally are out after a personal nirvana, I want to feel good, I don't want to have any more mental afflictions. What does it mean, nyanta or savaka? And sruti means learning or hearing or listening.

The traditional explanation is that they can go to a lecture about bodhisattva state of mind. They can grasp what the lecture is talking about. Oh look, you should get to a point where you can stand on billions of planets and serve all living beings and you should want to get to that.

They can report that to other people, listen and report, but they can't practice it themselves. So they're called listeners. That's the traditional explanation of sravaka or listener.

But I'm asking why this book is a bodhisattva book. I mean, we're on the most famous books about bodhisattvas. Why does he pick a listener?

There's this bodhisattva vow that you're not allowed to say that listeners can't see emptiness. Do you remember that vow? Those of you who do your book all the time.

Now what it means is that it was a hot topic throughout the centuries. If you still haven't reached an ultimate state of kindness or love, can you have the karma to see emptiness directly? Would you have the karma to see emptiness directly?

And they say yes, you could. You can see emptiness on a lower path and you have to even to remove your negative thoughts, much less to become a Buddha. You can't even get to nirvana or remove all your negative thoughts without seeing emptiness directly.

That's the point. Why did he bring it up here? I think we'll see.

I think we'll see. But why he didn't use a bodhisattva, it's kind of interesting. Okay, we'll see.

So why does he pick a non-Mahayana? Well, in theory, they'd never read this. Yeah, I think he's already criticized those people who claim that they can't.

Indirectly, he's already criticizing people who say that you have to have bodhicitta to see emptiness. Okay, anyway, here we go.

[Speaker 2]
There's also this argument that Hinayana sees a different emptiness.

[Speaker 1]
That's coming. Tonight, maybe. This is a monastic textbook writer, Kedrup Dhammadhargi, you have to say, the wise, the magnificent.

When you debate, you can't say Kedrup Dhammadhargi. You have to say, oh, the wise, the magnificent, the impeccable. I forgot to add, this is true.

I'm going to say, and this is so, because I'm getting tired of this, this is true. Okay. Now, you remember Lhagme, Lhagme, Lhagje and Yangbe, two kinds of nirvana.

One's something's left over, one's nothing left over. What's the lower school say nothing left over means? Yeah, like your body disappears and you fade away into nothingness, and that wrong idea got spread pretty deeply in the West already.

You go to nirvana and you just blink out. It's called vimrigyancepa, which means physical matter and mental states all blink out. That's called nirvana when nothing left, and then something left means they didn't get there yet.

In the higher school, do you remember? It's pretty subtle. You reacquire or you come back to mental afflictions or other obstacles.

So, in the prasangika system, nirvana with nothing left comes first, and then nirvana with something left comes after that. You see what I mean? Subtle.

So, this is a little tricky, this one. Is it different from this one? In the prasangika system, it's number three different from number two.

It's the one at the bottom of the screen different from the one on the top of the screen.

[Speaker 2]
Why?

[Speaker 1]
Right. From what I just said and what Vilma just said correctly, in the higher school, when you're in the direct procession of emptiness, you're in Lakme. You have nothing left over.

But is it nirvana? Yeah, good. That's a good question.

Avin said, does that also apply to the first procession of emptiness? And they say, yeah. Is that a real nirvana?

Yeah, it's not the end of your mental afflictions. So, when I say the title of the book we're going to study is Entering the Middle Way by Master Chandrakirti, that particular middle way, does it refer to the idea of the middle way or does it refer to some book about the middle way? Well, really it's both, right?

And we have this already, but we'll just translate this next little piece here. So, we didn't get past this first point from the first night of last term. If you're going to enter the middle way, what's the middle way you're entering?

Well, what it really means is we're going to get into Arya Nagarjuna's original text, the first of the six books. That's all that Entering the Middle Way means. We didn't get past the title yet.

I don't know if we want Beth's publishing this yet. I didn't get past the title yet. Okay, here we go.

Okay, yeah. We might have come across this in Jatakapa's book. So, let's go look.

It does come, but we haven't translated it yet, so we don't have to match anything, okay? Or a similar statement comes, but we don't have to match it, so we're not in trouble. Okay.

Those of you who are sensitive to it, the author was covering his rear end in the last paragraph. He's setting you up. He's a debater.

He said, middle way in the form of words means the classical commentary on the middle way, which refers to Nagarjuna's work. Is Nagarjuna's work the only classical commentary on the middle way? Right.

But he's already set you up. Of course, the classical commentary on the middle way is Nagarjuna's work, okay? And this is true, okay?

He's like set you up. In my mind, and in his mind as well, he's got to prove now that the classical commentary on the middle way is Nagarjuna's classical commentary on the middle way, okay? So here we go.

Then we'll stop. Let me see. Is that okay?

Okay. And this is true because in both the auto-commentary to what? Entering the middle way.

And in clear words, which is his other great commentary on Arya Nagarjuna's first work, Master Chandrakirti mentions each of the other five texts from the collection of six by their individual name whenever he quotes them to prove a point. But when he quotes the root text on wisdom, he simply says, and the middle way says, okay? So it's reasonable for me to say that middle way refers to Arya Nagarjuna's first book out of the six because whenever Master Chandrakirti quotes it, he doesn't say the root text on wisdom says, he just says the middle way says, okay?

Say again? Yeah, yeah, now that becomes a source that we can quote when we're in Saramaya Debate Ground, but not in the Debhugum Debate Ground. Why?

They won't buy a textbook from Saramaya. If you're debating in the winter debates, you throw out all your textbooks that you've learned and you go to Gyaltsabje, Kedrupje or Jatamkapa, you see? You just literally set them aside, you pull out those three guys because you're going to one of the three big Lupa monasteries.

It's like the Winter Olympics or something, you know? And then if Bumbos or Sakya show up, which happens a few times, you have to what? You have to back up to the Tengyur in the second case or the Kangyur.

And for the Bumbos, they show up with these blue Tungaks, their deity is blue. You have to use logic, you can't quote anything, you know? You can't even quote the Kangyur because they won't accept it.

So it becomes very interesting. Bumbos are the original shaman religion of Tibet. And they come sometimes and it's fun.

And they have a very well-developed system. And when we met His Holiness and told him about ACIP work, he said, are you inputting Bumbo works? And we're like, no, but we'll get right on it.

And he was telling us that for yoga and for channel work, it might be interesting to look into the Bumbo texts because they might have some information that's valuable. And in fact, there is a lot of information there. So that's kind of interesting.

Okay, we'll stop there. So now we know that the Middle Way, when you're entering the Middle Way is Ayya Nagarjuna's first book. Okay, that's all.

That's all. Yeah? Okay, so far.

Okay?

[Speaker 2]
It sounds like the Yama commentary is referring to entering the Middle Way by Nagarjuna? No.

[Speaker 1]
Entering the Middle Way is by Master Chandrakirti and the root text on wisdom is by Ayya Nagarjuna. And Chandrakirti's text explains Ayya Nagarjuna's text. And then the Atman commentary is his own explanation of his own entering the Middle Way.

So he wrote a book called Explaining the Entering the Middle Way, which is huge. And His Holiness taught it once at Sara. It's not very well, people don't read it that much.

But it's not that long. And it's translated from Sanskrit, so it's like a little confusing. So people don't use it very much.

But anyway, in both those books, he never refers to Ayya Nagarjuna's book as the root text on wisdom. He just calls it the Middle Way. Because it's like the city.

You're going into the city today. You know, people around in New Jersey and Connecticut say you're going into the city today. But that's why that confusion in the Middle Way.

And I used to get offended when people said the city. I mean, what, you think there's no other cities around? But this is the same idea.

The Middle Way. You know what I'm talking about? Is there any other Middle Way?

Is there any other city? I mean, it's New York. Yeah.

Town. It's a town.

[Speaker 2]
Okay. All right.

[Speaker 1]
Okay. Okay. Cool.

Thanks. Keep coming. Just yell that Tibetan out.

The Greek teacher, he did it too fast, and we like, every fourth word we said something, and it was wrong. But then after a couple of weeks, it just started coming out. So keep doing it.

Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
Sure.

[Speaker 1]
No, please.

[Speaker 2]
Tomorrow is the 49th day of the 10th Abhishek. And I've spammed everyone with email, but just in case you're not on my list, we're going to have something here. We're not sure when it's going to start.

We're coordinating it with Tao. And so we're going to have a speakerphone here. When they get to the Tso, the offering that they're going to do, we're going to tune in.

So we estimate 5 or 530, something like that. And everyone's welcome to come. You don't have to have initiation.

Bring offerings. It's nice to have offerings for the Tso. Also, we're doing an offering of a thousand butter lamps, and we have the butter lamps back.

Oh, they're gone. Anyway, they're here somewhere. And let's see.

We just bought four gallons of butter, which is potentially going to be ghee. And if anyone wants to help pay for that, please see what Gail. Are you the one?

I guess I am. Okay. It's a nice offering.

And also Giselle is organizing the butter lamps themselves, putting the wicks together, setting them up, putting the ghee in. You know, it's a big, big process. So anyone who wants to help her, please do so.

[Speaker 1]
It's a lot of work. It's a lot. It takes many hours.

Do you want to announce what time or where to meet you? Because it takes a lot of work.