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78

20130923GRAAETB29

00:00

Good morning and welcome everybody to today’s talk. I am very happy to be back here after weeks that you have been seeing pre-recorded tapes. I am today back in Ann Arbor after the tour I had to take. We began with visiting Malaysia, friends and Jewel Heart Malaysia. I did a number of teachings and everybody is well and doing good. More or less we did the short lam rim of Jamgön Lama Tsongkhapa (Tib: lam rim du dön). Then in Singapore I was requested to teach on the 37 Practices of the Bodhisattvas. That was written by Geylse Thogme Sangpo, the person who also wrote a famous commentary on the bodhisattvacharyavatara. He is from the Sakya tradition. So I did that teaching in Singapore, reading the words and giving explanations, based on certain commentaries.

Then finally, I had about a week off, a nice little holiday and then I went to India, mainly to attend a Buddhist conference. This was an interesting and good conference. It is the second meeting of that kind. The first time we also met in Dehli, two years ago and at that time HH Dalai Lama attended and a number of big well-known lamas attended too. If I remember correctly the meeting was very good, but the procedures were a little chaotic then. This time they called it “Second Executive Meeting” or something and a number of “His Holinesses” were there, but His Holiness the Dalai Lama didn’t attend. But there a lot of “His Holiness this” and “His Holiness that” and everything, and not only from Tibetan traditions, who had a lot, but also from other traditions, like from South-East Asia. I never knew they addressed their leaders as “His Holiness”, but now they all do. After a little while, people who address the gathering have to say “Your Holinesses” and that’s about it. Otherwise they would have to keep going for half an hour saying different names. This meeting was also very chaotic, extremely chaotic. But the meeting went very well, because people attending the meeting were actually very good.

But the procedures were very chaotic, you had no idea what was going to happen next. Yes, we do that here too, but we don’t change like they do. They would announce that something was going to happen hour by hour. Something that was supposed to happen at 9 am was still not happening at 11 pm, but then happened the next day. Like that, it was completely chaotic. But everything happened somehow. They put too much agenda into too little time. There is no extra hour and you would get a couple of people who would speak and then the hours would go, naturally. So one thing didn’t get done and the next didn’t get done and so on. So it became a day’s delay and each and every speaker was saying that “this was supposed to done yesterday morning and now it is 2 pm the next day.” But anyway, it was good and there was also an interfaith meeting attached to this and that was very interesting and had a lot of good religious leaders, great Hindu sadhus and Muslim imams and Jewish and Christian leaders, like I think there was somebody called the archbishop of Dehli. I am not sure, but all of those attended and it was very interesting and a very open and very fair discussion. Very nice.

All the religious leaders seemed to support each other very well, although there was also a tremendous amount of tension between the Hindus and the Muslims and the Muslims versus others. But the leaders very sincerely tried to bring all of them together on something they could all agree on, rather than focusing on what they disagreed on. They did a very good job.

There was one Muslim leader, the chief imam of a couple of thousand imams – I forgot the numbers. Maybe it was even 25,000 or something. He was great and explained wherever he had tried to solve difficulties with Hindus and he even kept some Hindu people in his house, when the Muslim public tried to beat them up. He really was great. But he also had a complaint against the Buddhists. I thought it was great, because he openly said it. He said that he had supported people from other religions everywhere. There was some monk from Ladakh in the conference who he asked to get up – which he did – and he told us that he had some difficulties and the Muslims had chased him and he went to this imam’s house to take refuge and the imam said that he had protected him.

0:11

Then he complained that there was tremendous trouble going on in Burma, now called Myanmar, between Muslims and Buddhists, including Buddhist monks. He came up with a huge number of Muslims that were supposed to have been killed by Buddhists. Others in the conference contradicted those numbers. The imam had referred to certain videos. One of the organizers of the meeting, Lama Lobsang of Ladakh, got up and told this imam, “You and I have been good friends for 50 years or more and we know each other well. If you look into these videos very carefully you will see that a lot of the footage is actually from the 2010 earthquake in Tibet in the Sichuan area.” So many people died then. The dead bodies were carried together and the monks were pushing them together and because of the circumstances they could do nothing. People brought the bodies together and they had to have mass cremations. And Lama Lobsang pointed out that footage from these earthquake videos ended up in the videos of Burma where Muslims were being killed by Buddhists.

However, in my opinion the complaint of the Imam is still genuine. He said that none of the Buddhist leaders had condemned the killings in Burma. That might have been true. I said it a couple of times during my Sunday talks, but I don’t want to get up and say, “Look, I condemn.” So I kept quiet, but I think his complaint is genuine. And even this conference meeting didn’t bring a resolution to condemn [the violence].

0:14

Another issue was the feminine principle in Buddhism. It was not raised as a feminine issue, but as a gelong ma issue. There are the full-fledged bikshus or bikkhus (Tib: gelongs) and then there are female bishuni (Tib: gelong ma). That has been going on for a while. It is absolutely true that the situation with females in the Buddhist tradition right from the beginning has not been what we wish and what we want it to be, due to the 2600 year’s old Indian culture and society, which was very, very male chauvinistic and that culture has influenced Buddhism. Buddha himself said clearly that the vinaya rules should go according to the time and place. So the culture was like that in those days and the feminine issue in Buddhist societies is a huge issue and a huge problem, whether many people acknowledge or not. But there is definitely a huge problem. We have noticed that right from the beginning here in Jewel Heart. We try to keep that issue always in mind. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Jewel Heart is almost the only place where there are no Buddhist monks and nuns – if you look at the Buddhist centers in the United States. That could be a reason. However, this is a big issue. You only have to look at the panels in this very conference.

Actually, they asked me to lead one of the panels, but I quit and said, “No, please forgive me, I am too old and I don’t see and hear well and I don’t walk”. In actual reality I thought I wouldn’t be able to manage well, honestly. So I excused myself, and then one of the big Kagyupa lamas called Tai Situ Rinpoche led the panel. But on every panel you would only see one woman or no woman at all. The panels are from here to there – it’s a huge hall. Maybe there is one or two women and then somebody would say: “So and So is here and she is female” and all the nuns and females would start laughing hugely at the back of the hall. So I think that is a big issue.

Another big issue is the ordination of Buddhist nuns. That is for the gelongmas, the bikshunis. That issue has been taken up to HH Dalai Lama for a number of years. I have my own opinion about that, which is not a general Buddhist statement or anything. So in my own personal opinion His Holiness would really like to accommodate whatever is possible, so much so that now we have female geshes. There are one or two so far and there are going to be more year after year. That indicates that His Holiness is willing to do whatever he can. But in my personal opinion I don’t think anybody can make a decision on the full-fledged bikshuni ordination.

The biskhu – and bikshuni ordination and that of the male and female novices, as well as the male and female upasakas and upasekas – all of these 8 vows were directly created and given by Buddha himself. All other vows are continuations of the vow given by Buddha, from one living human being to another living human being all the way back to Buddha. You can trace them, without any doubt, without the shadow of doubt, you can trace them to Buddha. Yes, in between that, people break the vows and go out of the order and I am an example of that myself. I was a full-fledged bikshu and then I broke and I went out of the order. Some people go back in but I am don’t. The reason why I don’t want to go back is because it creates some kind of funny look. It seems that then sometimes you are a monk and sometimes you are not. In Thailand and other places you can become a monk for one month or two months or a year or two. They have that system, and that has also continued from Buddha onwards. So these are vows continuously given from Buddha onwards by individual persons to persons. Each person has somebody who they can call “my abbot”, not necessarily an abbot of a monastery, but an individual abbot – whoever has given you the self-liberation vows.

0:24

But the female bikshuni vows were only give once by Buddha in his life time to 500 female Buddhist practitioners. Thereafter he may have happened a couple of more times, but I don’t know, we don’t know, history doesn’t know. That is not recorded. There are many things from Buddha’s period that are not recorded, but then somebody recollected and restated that afterwards. But there is no such recollection in this case, as far as I know. There is another bikshuni system from Taiwan and they burn five fire supports on your head and hands and they call that taking the vows. Certain groups of people accept that and a large number of people don’t accept that. There are two reasons why they are skeptical, as far as I can see. One is that the vows perhaps cannot be traced completely back to Buddha and the other is that this ordination involves violence. Burning parts of your body is slightly violent and any Buddhist vows can’t have violence. There are the 24 hour Mahayana vows where you don’t eat for 24 hours and as part of the self-liberation vows the monks don’t eat in the afternoon. But besides that any cutting or burning of the body is not Buddhist and the difference between early Hinduism and Buddhism is that some Hindu traditions have violence and Buddhism is supposed to be totally non-violent. All these are the reasons. So there are these two different issues of the female bikshuni issue that get mixed up with the feminine issue. The feminine things can be done and people like His Holiness along with the other Holinesses can come out with statements saying that Buddhism is absolutely equal and you can sit together and do whatever [practices] and you can have everything equal. That is possible. But when you try to mix that up with the bikshuni issue and try to make everybody a bikshuni – this in my opinion – none of them can do and so they have to just sit and watch it and then we may also lose the opportunity of the feminine principle making it. His Holiness comes out with a statement after consultation with all these Holinesses that everybody in the Tibetan tradition will buy, but certain traditions may not buy it immediately but generation after generation it will make a difference.

0:28

So in my opinion these are two different issues. If you confuse them together we are not going to get anything. I think the feminine issue is one thing and the full-fledged biskhuni issue is something else. These two are separate in my opinion and if you deal with them separately the results will be better. Otherwise, if you mumble-jumble them together, none of them may get done. The bikshuni issue may not be possible to be changed, because there are certain rules and regulations in Buddhism. These were made by Buddha. There is a system of changing rules, but it is almost like when you want an amendment in the constitution, for which you have to have either a two third majority and or in some areas you need a filibuster-proof majority of 61 per cent. It is even more difficult than that. Particularly when vows are concerned, these are coming from Buddha. Otherwise it would be a made-up story in between. If there is no lineage available, then what are you going to do? Cook up one and just make it?

0:30

I don’t know whether that would serve any purpose. It may fulfill the emotional feelings of a few people for a while, but whether it is really going to be anything different in people’s lives and in terms of benefit and disadvantages, I don’t know. So that was one of my opinions and then sometimes there are lot of misunderstandings. Some people pointed out that particularly tour guides cause those. Some tourist groups, a bus full of people, like 50, ask the tour guide, “What is the difference between Hinayana, Mahayana and Vajrayana?” This is very funny. The tour guide says straight away, “One meal per week is Hinayana, one meal a day is Mahayana and all the meals all the time is Vajrayana.” The tourists are satisfied and this is apparently a normal explanation by tour guides in Bodhgaya. That is interesting!

So much about the conference I attended and other Jewel Heart activities in Asia went quite well. Our good old friends were there, except for Peng Khong in Malaysia who passed away more than a year ago and almost everybody is well and good. There are always some little pickery things within the individuals and that is human nature and is always there, no big deal.

0:33

I haven’t talked my subject yet, which I should, because I won’t be here again for the next couple of Sundays. But it will be recorded and you will have that available. I will be going to California where for the first time we will be doing something as a retreat and it will be the Three Principles of the Path and a White Tara initiation, on Sept 27, 28, 29 near San Francisco in Menlo Park. If you have friends around there, tell them to look it up and see what we do. Maybe there is some usefulness for them – or not. Then I have to go to the memorial service for our friend Elizabeth Coleman in New York. That will be Sunday, October 6. Then we have the Garrison retreat. I was told the registration for Garrison is so low this time, somehow, whatever the reason may be. So we have come to the point of considering cancelling it. For the time being we are not going to cancel yet, because people may come up more – or not, I don’t know. I don’t know whatever the reason is, it never happened that way. It is always a minimum of 60 or 70 and maximum of a little over 100. Almost all our retreats are like that. So I don’t know what happened to the Garrison retreat this time. So that’s taking place. In any case, the Garrison Sunday I will be talking to you live from Garrison. Then that is followed by the Ladakh trip. I am planning to go.

When we did the Bhutan/Northern India tour a few years back I was honestly planning to go, but I didn’t get an Indian visa. The day I finally got the Indian visa, the tour people already left India and were already in Bhutan. They covered Darjeeling and all these areas and were already in Bhutan. Then, even if had gone then, I would have got there at the last day of the Indian leg of the tour. On the other hand there was some understanding that the tour should also go without me too. A side of my mind was thinking that. That is honest. Many people picked up this side mind and said, “He was planning not to go right from the beginning.” So some people got upset. Many people were so kind and did not upset. I think Tony was one of them that time. So that was not my intention, I just didn’t get the visa. I always have visa problem everywhere, throughout my life. That is part of my karma. I should have never had a problem with an Indian visa, because I lived in India for a long time. But in my American passport they put in: Birthplace: China. The moment they did that, India can’t give a visa by law, unless some special sanction comes.

So it is funny. I was caught in that. When they look very carefully they get it that I am not really a Chinese Chinese, but a Tibetan refugee, who by U.S law is treated as part of China. Indian law then prevents you from getting a visa. So I got caught in this little pocket.

[ACTUAL TEACHING STARTS HERE]

0:40

Now I need to clarify something. I listened to the last recorded Sunday talk last night and when I was listening, there was nothing wrong in that, but many thing were not clear to me, even after I said it. Some clarification still has to be done, particularly on the important point of the definition of the mind. I was explaining the mind’s lucidness when perceiving things. The definition of mind in Tibetan is sel zhin rig pa, and sel means ‘clear’. I explained that sometimes clarity means when it is too dark and you are unable to see that when more light comes in it will become more clear. That is also clear and another meaning is cleaning something up and making it clear. The mind being clear means that it is lucid by nature. When it is lucid it means that there is no mistake. I don’t mean that there is no mistake in reality, but that there is no mistake in how the mind takes it. Whatever is presented or projected to the mind and whatever mind perceives, in between these two there is no mistake. Whatever you perceive is clearly becoming it within you.

0:42

Now that is confusing. Maybe I don’t know good enough English, it is a lack of my English. But when I was listening to my talk myself, at the end I was thinking, it was not clear. I kept on talking so much, bla bla, bla, but at the end didn’t really get it. Clear and lucid – the idea with that is like a photograph. When you take a photograph, the photo picks up whatever thing you see – not the mind aspect of the individual, but the physical aspect, which is whatever the eyes can view. It is almost like the bird eye view, whatever the two eyes can see. That picture has been picked up and kept – like a photograph. Let’s not talk about old style photographs in terms of negative and positives, but that is really what it is. We may say, “yes, it goes into your memory bank and it is part of memory.” That is true, but it is also what your mind is keeping. Mind is keeping that picture. Why? After many years the same person looks different, but in your own mind you have that other picture which you took 40 or 50 years ago of the same person and then you compare that and say, “Hey, you have grown older” or “You haven’t got much older” or “You look the same” and all of those judgment is made by the mind on that basis. So we may call that picture “memory” or whatever. It is sort of a duplicate copy of what your eyes saw and that is maintained in your mind. So whatever things you see is not necessarily seen by your eyes, but seen by your mind.

0:46

So mind accepting that picture is not like a photograph here. In a way the photograph analogy works, right, but here the camera sees something and it clicks and then it becomes part of that camera, honestly. So here, likewise, mind perceives that and then it becomes part of that mind. The mind becomes that. The whole mind does not become that, but it becomes part of mind and that influences the mind and that’s why when you expose yourself to the virtues, then you become a better person. When you expose yourself to non-virtues, it affects you worse. You become contaminated by those non-virtues. They become part of you. I don’t think the statement of last Sunday made that clear. I don’t even know if it is becoming clear today. I am not sure. Normally I never look back or listen to whatever I say or do. Honestly. Once done it is done for me. But I realized last night and was thinking all night that I should listen back to each one of them, because I noticed that I put in my best efforts, trying to explain, but when I think about it afterwards, it doesn’t explain anything, just keep on yelling all the time with this funny voice going on.

So when I say “Like a photograph” and “becoming of it”, the whole idea is that when this is being projected to the mind, the mind perceives that and the way it perceives that is by making it part of it. If it is like a photograph alone then you get the camera, click and leave the camera there or transfer the image to a computer or print it out and you can leave it aside. But the mind doesn’t have that gadget. The only way to keep it is by becoming part of it. Mind doesn’t have a storage room and it doesn’t need it. But it is part of it. Maybe the computer is the same, I don’t know. I don’t know about the hardware and software business. Probably it is becoming part of it. That is where the memory is drawn from. That’s why the individual can improve and can also get worse. Both is possible for human beings.

0:50

It is happening and it is happening in our personal experience. We see it and that’s why it is possible for the mental state to become better and better and better and also get to the stage where it can no more get better, the ultimate best, whatever is possible. That is what we call the state of “no more learning”. All of that is possible, because of this. The mind is like that by nature. Whatever is perceives it perceives clearly, and when it is not clear, the mind can’t take it and we get confusion and you leave it out, try to sort it out and you study and do more, try to clarify and when you can’t get it clear after a little while, what do you do? Leave it out. You can’t do anything more than that. The mind is lucid, whatever they take has to be only lucid and clear. Unclear confused things can’t go in. Mind will filter them out. When they go in they become part of your mind. Then it changes the reality of the mind a little bit, individually, every different time it changes. It either improves or decreases. That’s what happens. Improvement comes because of a variety of reasons, like more information, more clarity. Also being better and more healthy corresponds with the mind’s ability to understand.

Some people may say that health has nothing to do with the mind and that’s not true. It is true to a certain extent but it is not true. How do we know? When the health decreases, the mind’s capacity also decreases. That will show you. If health improves mental capacity improves. It goes up together and it goes down together. That shows you. That’s why mind has better functioning and worse functioning depending on so many things. If the individual is very tired or exhausted or stressed, then their mental capacity becomes weaker. It can’t function that well. We know that by our own personal experience. Becoming part of the mind is also changing it. When it is changing [for the] better it can also change [for the] worse. When it is changing [for the worse] it can also change [for the] better.

0:54

That’s how it is and when the mind improves on the virtuous level the mind becomes virtue. That influences you and everything becomes virtue within you. Everything. That gives you the opportunity to increase, decrease, purify, become pure, become contaminated, uncontaminated and all of that is possible because of that. I am repeating this because it didn’t make sense to me what I heard myself saying on the recording. It does make sense to me actually because I am trying to say something. But that language I used doesn’t express what I meant. That’s really what happened.

I don’t know whether today’s little talk has contributed to that or not. I am not so sure. But this is the basis of all your spiritual practice. People who do spiritual practice really, this is your base. It is not something nice and fun and fancy. It is not the clothes you wear and the words you say and it is not even a mala. That’s a piece of wood or whatever material it may be. But the real spiritual is this: the mind. I am pointing to my chest. That is the Asian culture. You people should point to your head. Improvement, and the opposite of that is all happening every minute and every second. That’s why we have an opportunity, we can do it, we can make a difference and that’s why everything is in our own hand. Everything is in our own hand. That’s it.

0:57

I would also like to say that the theme we have been talking about so far is that verse of Buddha:

Avoid negativity, build positivity, tame your mind. This is Buddhism.

A number of people were talking about the same verse in the conference too. They quoted the same verse, it was repeated by everybody, one after another, every speaker. So they are saying the same thing.

It looks like we have covered most of this verse. We have not really told you how to tame your mind. First we have introduced the mind. Then we have to tame it. Then the last sentence says: this is Buddhism. I think there are two ways of looking at that. “This” can refer to the other words before that. You can do that. Also if you look separately and say “this is Buddhism” then “this” can refer to Buddhism itself. Then the question rises: what is Buddhism? Forget about the “ism” part. That is something else. But what is Buddha’s message, his teaching? What did Buddha do? How did he become Buddha?

1:00

All of those are the last sentence: this is Buddhism. So both interpretations can be done. We need to explain that because taming your mind depends on that. Actually, avoiding negativity and building virtue, tame your mind shows that there is nothing better than that to tame your mind. But how does one individual get that? Keep on looking for the virtues, keep on looking for the non-virtues? Or somehow will you know by the time opportunity comes and you are engaging and then you say: this is virtue, I enjoy doing it and this is non-virtue, I don’t want to do it? What basis are you going to make that decision on?

So that is the basis of Buddhism. Maybe I will try to speak to you about “this is Buddhism” over the next couple of Sundays. I guess that’s it and it is so wonderful to see you all nicely here in Ann Arbor, great. So I guess that’s it. Now let’s do the Four Immeasurables.

1:02: Chanting of Four Immeasurables 1:04:17