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20140309GRAAETGB42

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Welcome to this Sunday talk today. Before we start, there are a couple of things I like to touch on today. No 1, I like to apologize that we could not start these Sunday talks till today. The simple reason is that there were a lot of other activities going out throughout Jewel Heart, particularly Jewel Heart Ann Arbor – till today. So today is the first open Sunday and that’s why we start the Sunday talks today. Once we start we should continue every Sunday at least for a while, otherwise it may not be that helpful.

No 2, today happens to be the 9th of March, which reminds me of a little funny thing that happened to me. Since it is not a political talk I hope it is okay. Marco Rubio, when giving his reply to the President’s State of the Union address last year he had to stop and drink water. Likewise here, I have to blow my nose. But since this is not a political show thing, I hope it’s okay. Now, what I am saying is that tomorrow is the 10th March. That is a very important day in my life.

It is the day in 1959 when the Tibetans could no longer tolerate communist Chinese torture and abuses. Particularly the Communist government led by the so-called Gang of Four. That really brought tremendous amount of torture to the Tibetans and not only Tibetans, but all minorities and not only minorities, but even to the majority Han Chinese. They all suffered tremendously. That was the link between a few years ago – before 1959, maybe 1956-57 they declared a war against educated people. That was the beginning of tremendous destruction and torture. That was followed in Tibet by the incidents of 1959 and then continued through 1960/61 with the Cultural Revolution, which tried to destroy every ancient – not only education, but any ancient civilization that ever was.

That was the period in which I left Tibet or was kicked out of Tibet. I ran away from my homeland, where I was born and brought up and educated in one of the greatest Buddhist learning centers, a monastery called Drepung, which had over 10,000 monks at that time. In 1957 I had done my own exams, a sort of graduation, where you make offerings to the monks who are studying, not only food and tea but also silver coins. I was able to offer one silver coin each for every monk in Drepung and that went over 14,000 silver coins. That means each monk got on, that’s over 10,000 and then those who had titles like Rinpoche or abbot or something they would get double or sometimes even triple. So makes another couple of thousand coins. \

So there were a little over 10,000 monks there for sure. 14,000 silver coins went and that was in 1957. The arrangement was for 10,000 and we were running out of silver coins while distributing. Our family used to have a jeep in Tibet, something that very few people had. So I do remember the jeep running to Lhasa, trying to borrow silver coins from those who had any. They came in boxes of 1000. In those days, the Chinese were throwing silver into Tibet. They didn’t want to use the Tibetan currency, so they used pure silver coins. They miscalculated a lot. The whole idea was that within the border, no matter whatever you do. But a huge amount of silver went to India, brought out by the Tibetans. So the first thing the Chinese did then was to block the silver going out from the borders. By the time I was doing my exam offerings, the silver going out to India was already blocked. So there were still silver coins available in Lhasa with different families.

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We knew who had them and we borrowed from them and we had to borrow thousands, which was not easy except from those who had them. When the monks lined up we started distributing and then suddenly noticed we miscalculated. So we short by 4,000. They have little tactics of slowing the monks leaving, by the chanting masters’s way of chanting. They will make the chants slow down, but other than that you couldn’t stop them. So thinking back, these were happy occasions I had in my life.

But 18 months later, the tragedy took place and we landed in India. It was almost like – I mentioned it in my book Good Life Good Death – being picked up by helicopter in Tibet in the middle of the 18th century, carried over the Himalayas and dropped into India in the middle of the 20th century. So 200 years gone just like that. That was the sort of change I came through. I survived that change without any damage to my personality, mind or emotions, although it was the most severe tragedy, not only for me, but but many of my contemporary colleagues and friends.

Look at His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He was the All and All in Tibet at that time and suddenly he was not just one of the commoners, but also a refugee with no status, nothing. But there seems to be, as you know, no damage, nothing. He is more or less as happy as ever. That tells us something. What makes that happen? Think about it.

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We did have enough wealth in Tibet. We were not rich as a nation or race, but we were not really the Tibet in the sense of pre ta as which the early Indians described Tibet, looking at the Himalayan regions of Tibet, not the whole of Tibet. That includes northern Ladakh. Pre ta is the hungry ghost land. So that shows you how poor that was. The word Tibet came out of pre ta. Pre becomes T and then the British pronounced that as Tibet. The early Indians used to call it pre ta. So we were not that poor in the 1950s, but still we were not rich at all. However, there was definitely sufficient wealth. You can’t say that nobody ever went hungry, but hunger was not something usually known. So it was a very comfortable life, materially and spiritually we were very rich. The Tibetans had sacrificed their very powerful military might, which almost was similar to Ghengis Khan and was able to challenge Ghengis Khan. However, Tibetans really thought carefully and considered the military solution would get them nowhere.

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Not only it doesn’t end suffering, but invites more suffering. Unfortunately that happens to be true in our life. We saw it, we have had so many experiences of war. Really, if you look back, we have fought wars after wars. Since World War II till today, how many wars were we engaged in? So many, but each one of them, who lost or gained, who knows? But we have carried with us a tremendous amount of scars and sufferings.

Very recently we had a war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Whoever won the war, doesn’t matter. I don’t think anyone won or lost, but somehow everybody had to stop because they could no longer go on killing. But how many wounded people we had, how many lives were lost and we call the wounded people heroes and give them a pat on the shoulder and we have to, because they deserve it very definitely, but it is suffering. Unnecessary suffering is added by war. What did we gain? Probably nothing. Out of the Iraq war, what did we gain? Nothing, honestly, nothing. We were just able to topple and kill Saddam Hussein, but he was going to die anyway. If we had left him alone, he was not going to live for a 100 years. He was going to go anyway. Or maybe he would have lasted a bit longer, like Fidel Castro in Cuba. Everybody thought he was going to die and he is still there. But other than that, more or less he was going to go.

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But how many people died for nothing. How many Americans, young kids, and most precious kids to their parents and in their neighborhood and county, so many of them were killed and others came back with one leg or without legs. All this is suffering. Violence brings that result. That’s what the early Tibetan realized, because of Buddhism. No matter who you may be, warrior type of people [that’s what violence does]. We have in Tibet the epics of Gesar, which are all about war after war, about the early times in Tibet, half history, half exaggerated. They are commonly accepted, Such a warrior attitude was completely abandoned and that brought joy and happiness to the people in that period. It also is very difficult to achieve results with violence. Anything you want to achieve, social change and so on, is much better achieved through love and compassion, through non-violence. It is difficult, but that difficulty brings joy to the people and removes suffering. At least it does not create additional suffering. That way it will give you a little harmony and peace and joy, at least materially. That’s what we notice.

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And that’s what March 10th reminds me of – both in the positive and negative way. The negative way: you can’t have anything worse happening to you than getting kicked in the butt and thrown out of the Himalayas. But on the other hand, there was tremendous joy, harmony and pleasure. When I look back at my life, the time that I had in my childhood was the best in my life. Maybe everybody has the same thing, but my childhood in the monastery was the happiest period. There were little worries here and there, but those were not the worries of getting food and clothes, but the worries, whether I could be naughty here or there. That’s all. That was my suffering. Then if you had been naughty they would give you little punishments. That was all the suffering I had until that huge thing happened, the Communist takeover.

Many of you don’t even bother about communism and don’t even know. But many of my age and my experience who have suffered tremendously under Communism find that it is almost equal to the suffering experienced under the Nazis, if not worse. So in one way, we had to leave our parents, country, family and friends, teachers, monastery, companions and everything. It is almost like you are singled out completely. But no the other hand, there are the memories of great and wonderful things. Most importantly, now we realize is the spiritual path.

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Everybody in the society I belonged to, that old Tibetan society [benefitted]. That is no longer there today, even in Tibet proper. In that old society, everybody was engaged with spiritual activities. Everybody had hesitation to harm anybody, including little insects and so forth. Yes, we did have butchers and killed animals, but in a very limited way. It was not the mass production of today’s economized market. Now the vegetarians become extremely important, not only because of health alone, but it reduces demand and we have a demand and supply economy, that helps in a little way to reduce the killing. But in those days it was not like that. Maybe we got a couple of chickens per month in the whole city or maybe one or two yak for a family. That would be the meat we ate. So, yes, there was killing, there were butchers and they did sell meat, a lot of dry meat and fresh meat, but in the fourth month around Buddha’s death anniversary – also that of his birth and enlightenment – in that important month killing was forbidden completely.

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That included the killing of insects and everything, throughout the whole of Tibet, every year, sort of automatically. If you killed any animal in that period you were punished by law. That society was a great society, a society based on compassion. That doesn’t mean there was no killing at all. We did kill animals for the need of survival, nothing excessive, not like the massive butchering. You roughly knew how many yaks were going to go this year. You could estimate how many yaks each family needed – or how many families shared one yak together. In that way it was very balanced. Killing was not completely forbidden, because it was needed for survival. But it was a compassionate, caring society. That was the good old society, which is gone and no longer there now. Tibet is still there, but today’s Tibet is very different from the Tibet pre-1959. Even the Tibetans in India or anywhere in the world now are very different from how it was in Tibet then. The good old spiritually civilized society is no more.

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Whatever is left out of that is a few bits of spiritual information, Buddhist, Bon and very few Tibetan Christians, as well as a very small Tibetan Muslim community. They were all functioning in Tibet for hundreds of years together, in harmony. I am sure they Buddhists were bullying them, no doubt about it, because they were the majority and they would try not to get into trouble, but whenever they got into trouble, they bullied them. It is not true that Buddhist don’t bully others. They do. Even in Burma today you can clearly see it. Buddhists are human beings too, just like any other human beings. They have self-interest and everything. That’s what it is. But they believed in - and I hope understood – karma, which means that if you hurt anyone you will be hurt and if you helped anyone you would be helped. We do somehow believe in that, because everybody who would like to have something good for themselves, will live that way. We may say, “For the betterment of everybody”, but you may not feel it. You just use the words, almost like lip service. But everybody will feel if it is for the good of themselves.

Honestly, 99% of people feel “it is for me”. I want to be good. I want to be right, I want to do right, I don’t want to suffer, I would like to enjoy, I would like to have the joy that has never known suffering.” That’s what we think and that’s why thinking about karma contributes tremendously to our morality, the morality of not hurting others, the morality of helping yourself as well as other beings, the morality of not doing the wrong thing.

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That tremendous moral base is karma. Karma is nothing more than self-responsibility. Whatever I did wrong, I am responsible. Whatever I did right, I deserve it, because I worked for it. That is principle for both, good and bad. Whatever good we did, the reward of that we earned. We deserve it. Whatever we did wrong, we are responsible. We have to face the consequences. One thing of making it right is by paying the consequences. You don’t change the past, you can’t. For the future you can shift the change. The present is the key to the future. The past is past. It is the base for learning and getting information. We can shape the future on the base of the past. Doing it right now will change the future. This is what karma tells you. It means that.

So karma helps us to hold our morality. Then, if you go beyond that, you know it is tremendously rich in the Tibetan tradition. You have heard the talks on Tibetan Buddhism now for two years. We will still continuously talk about this on the following Sundays.

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Today my purpose was to 1) apologize that we did not start the Sundays till today and 2) reminding myself of the 10th March and helping yourself by seeing what the Dalai Lama does today and how those Tibetans who lost a lot in 1959 were not damaged, neither their mind nor their emotions. They are continuously cheerful persons. By seeing that there may be something to pick up. Otherwise, from the point of view of loss, it was tremendous. Forget about us, but look at His Holiness. He lost all of Tibet. In the old society he was the total owner of Tibet. Every land belonged to him, every wealth belonged to him. He lost everything overnight. But by the next day he was laughing, smiling and joking – same thing. The whole country belonged to him, but when he got to India he didn’t have even enough money in the beginning, until the [United] Nations picked him up and supported him. Yet, he still remains cheerful. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t get upset or angry, it doesn’t mean that, but still, the principal person remains happy and joyful and appreciating. I may be blowing the horn for the older Tibetans, but they always have the nice, little kind gentleness. That’s the result of the spiritual path they practiced.

It’s not only the Tibetans who have that. All others do too. Indians, and any other individual spiritual persons. They have it, because it is the spiritual influence. Even those of you who come often and are associating here will have differences to the other people. The other people can be mean, particularly those conservative Republicans. I am joking. I am not supposed to say that, you know.

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Anyway, but there is a little softness, kindness and caring. It’s not that they don’t have it. Many of them do, but we do care, and that is because of our spiritual background. Nowadays, people don’t wear malas and all that. They used to do all kinds of things, right? That doesn’t make you spiritually softened or admirable. But the kindness and compassion and richness within yourself, being comfortable in your own skin and yet caring for all others, that makes you different. That is the spiritual result you get.

We hope that those of you who have it will grow it further and further, by contributing through these Sunday talks and those who don’t have it, may it grow with them and those who have it, may it not decrease but increase. And that’s what we wish and pray for. And I think we already said, “May all beings have happiness” so we don’t have to say it again.

So I just say thank you and see you next Sunday here.

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