Archive Result

20150830RTGR5P03

0:00:01.8 Gelek Rimpoche: Welcome everybody for this session. We have a wonderful teacher here, Professor Robert Thurman. I call him Ganden Tri Rinpoche.

R.Thurman: That’s such a bad joke

Gelek Rimpoche: You know why? It is not a joke. He is holding the Je Tsongkhapa chair. Whoever holds the Je Tsongkhapa chair is a Tri Rinpoche. So he is the American Tri Rinpoche. This is an easy job for me: he doesn’t need introduction. Everybody knows him and I am very fortunate to know both, Professor Thurman and Neena, right from the beginning, when I was in the United States, in the late 80s and early 90s, when I was just a stranger in the United States, and particularly in the field of the spiritual path, Ganden Tri Rinpoche and Nena – he was not Tri Rinpoche yet at that time, but was a professor at Amherst University – we have done a number of works in his residence. Then they took me around like a kid and took me to various workshops and spiritual gatherings everywhere, not only having teachings organized in their places, but also took me to Omega, to the Open Center, to various places, introduced me to people, as I mentioned last night.

0:02:28.9 He brought people to me and all of that he has done and I am very grateful. Thank you. Not only you, but Nena too.

R Thurman: That’s my guru.

Gelek Rimpoche: Your guru or whatever it is, yeah. So that’s fine, great. So also, when I requested him to give a teaching here, very kindly, without hesitation, not only he accepted, but even they had something scheduled to go somewhere and someone was waiting….

R Thurman: Burning Man……we cancelled.

Gelek Rimpoche: Okay, with all that, they moved their schedule around and made it possible. Thank you. Now, without further getting in between the great horse and you, it is my privilege to welcome you here and thank you and I will disappear.

Thurman: Thank you Rimpoche, now you are going to go rest, right? You don’t need to stay and folks think that Rimpoche should have a rest and I think so too. If he were to listen to me, then he would have a rest.

0:04:01.7 No, no, if you like you can stay a little while, but if you feel tired, just get up and leave and I won’t take it personally. Okay, if you like to stay at the beginning – especially tonight, if you stay at the beginning – so hello, everyone, good evening and thank you for rushing from dinner and coming. I am very honored to speak to all of you and in a way I feel very sentimental to be asked by Rimpoche to talk with you. He mentioned earlier about the Venerable Geshe Wangyal, Tenzin Ledru Ten Rimo Te - as you told me years ago to always say when I mention his name, and because Rimpoche has been in my life for so long. He originally took me to different wangs and teachings with Kyabje Ling Rinpoche, to Guhyasamaja and Yamantaka and different things and he was so kind to our family when we lived in Dharamsala and Delhi in the old days, before he came here and then I had some adventures in Texas with Rimpoche, in his early incarnation in America, and he introduced so many things to us and in a way we feel he is really a special lama and he is also so intelligent. That’s why I always notice about Rimpoche and I also like all of you and am honored to speak to you, because those of you who have studied with him – and I know a lot of you are sort of regular Jewel Hearters.

0:05:41.0 There are some new people too, but the ones who are, you really learn how to do it. What’s great about Rimpoche is that those who have been with him for a long time know how to do something. They are not just like “ Oh yeah, we like the Dharma”, but they have something to do with it, which is something that is really specially wonderful about Rimpoche. So, anyway, I am happy to talk to you and especially on an auspicious day like today, when we received the jenang, the permission initiation of White Manjushri, because that topic is very dear to my heart. It is so funny, by the way that Joshua and Geshe Thapkhe took today to talk about Vimalakirti, which is something that I have been involved with for a long time. I was asked to translate it in the 1970s and I had never read it. Tibetans don’t usually read that sutra, really. They read Shantideva, Chandrakirti and Nagarjuna and Je Rinpoche and they don’t really read that particular sutra and it is a marvelous sutra and I remembered the Venerable Wangyal, just to tell a story.

0:06:52.3 When I did translate it I think it was first published in 1976. I was shocked when I translated it. There are some big things in there that are really surprising and amazing, besides humorous things. I gave a copy to Geshe Wangyal-la, who didn’t read English books like that, but he kept it for the library at the monastery. I said, “ This is the Ji me me pai trak pe ten pai do and here is a copy for the library. I translated it.” “Oh”, he said, “You are beginning to study it.” I said, “No, I translated it.” He said, “Yes, you are beginning to study it.” And he repeated it three times. And indeed, that is true. I still am beginning to study it, actually even now, after translating it and then every year, in my classes with students, I would read it; read parts of it to them and discuss it, because it is such an amazing way of encompassing the Mahayana world view, the Vimalakirti sutra.

0:07:53.2 It has these shocking things. It shocks us modern materialist people in the way it reveals as the Mahayana in general does, the tremendous power of the Buddha, which is almost like God, actually, very close to God. But luckily not God, because not only does Buddha not claim omnipotence or that he created everything. But he even talks to the god of the day, Brahma and Brahma confesses to Buddha, “By the way, sorry, but I didn’t create the world.” Meaning he is not the creator in ancient India, which is a Buddhist thing. The Buddhists don’t blame any one being, even a very powerful god, with creating the samsaric mess. (laughs) And God very much likes Buddha and asks him to teach, “Please tell the human being that although I am very powerful and I am Brahma, I did not create their suffering. So when horrible things happen to them, their children die or whatever it is, really terrible stuff, it’s not my fault. I don’t have omnipotent powers.”

And neither does Buddha. But in the Mahayana vision Buddha has extraordinary power. For example, in the Vimalakirti sutra – Geshe-la didn’t mention it, but – in the first chapter the Buddha is talking about a Buddha land, a pure land and answering a question from a young yuppie from Vaishali, who asked, “how does a bodhisattva make a Buddha land?” When you become a buddha, and each one of you is going to do it, and you are going to do it quicker than others, because you are in Jewel Heart now and you know how to do something, when you become a buddha you won’t just change yourself, but also the society and the world around you, because a Buddha wants to bring everybody into Buddhahood with him or her – there can be female buddhas – and therefore they can change the whole environment and the whole structure.

0:10:07.3 The Buddha demonstrates that in the beginning of that sutra, because Shariputra is doubting it. Shariputra is saying, “If a buddha’s buddhaland reflects the purity of a buddha’s mind or a bodhisattva’s mind, then this Shakyamuni Buddha must have been one gold-bricking bodhisattva, because his Buddha land sucks.” Shariputra is looking at India and the planet in the 5th century BC and he was enlightened in his own way, in the dualistic Theravada way, and he thinks the world is horrible. So he is wondering why Buddha could say that the Buddha land reflects the purity of the Buddha’s mind and the bodhisattva’s mind.

0:10:55.5 Buddha looks at them and says, “What are you saying, Shariputra?” and also God shows up and scolds Shariputra for having a dualistic mind and then Buddha puts his toe on the ground and I guess it’s a ceremonial thing when he puts his toe on the ground like that (Thurman makes gesture) and then suddenly everybody in the audience sees the universe as completely perfect for them. In other words they say it’s like a jewel thing and they are made of jewel plasma. And the exact place they are karmically is absolutely perfect for them. It’s not like “Oh, well this is kali yuga and it’s a bad age and so on and I can’t really practice and I got to go make a living first and I’m busy doing other things and then later I’ll practice”. No, they realize that they are in the perfect place for them to do just what they need, to speed up their evolution as a bodhisattva towards Buddhahood with maximum efficiency and effectiveness.

0:11:51.3 And the Buddha’s skill in shaping the environment, therefore, the way it is, is perfect for people to develop not only wisdom and compassion. And then those incense bodhisattvas or perfume bodhisattvas who show up later on, as Geshe-la mentioned, they also are shocked about Shakyamuni Buddha’s world. They don’t get permission to come here from the perfumed universe, the Sarva Gandha Sugandha, as it is called, from the Gandha Kuta, the mountain of incense of perfume, which is the name of the Buddha there. They don’t get permission to come back with Vimakirti’s goafer, who goes out to get a few grains of rice to feed them from that Buddha land in that other universe. And they say, “Who would send for take-out to another universe?” (laughter). It must be a really far-out person. So we want to go and see this Saha world of Shakyamuni Buddha and we want to go and see Vimalakirti. Can we go?” So they ask the Buddha there and he says yes and they have this teleportation power. So they go.

0:12:52.0 But he says, “If you want to go you have to change your bodies. If you go there with your incense bodies, your perfumed bodies, when those lowly human beings on Planet Earth take one sniff of you they are going to go beserk, because they never smelled anything so delicious. They are used to sort of lowly things and not too much this and not too much intense of that. And when they get here to this planet – this was 2500 years ago – they went, “Oh, yes, this place really sucks.” And then Vimalakirti has to tell them and defend Shakyamuni’s thing and he says, “You guys are up there in Samadhi, just taking a whiff of the incense tree and the Buddha there radiates perfume to you and then you get into another Samadhi and you think it’s really cool. But actually, your progress to Buddhahood is much slower than the people here in Shayamuni’s world of Saha, with means “tolerable” – in the sense of barely tolerable. That is because here they can cultivate compassion. They are suffering nearby with them and they struggle. In that context they cultivate their compassion much faster than by just sitting around in Samadhi like you guys do. So this represents extreme skill in liberative arts and technique by Shakyamuni Buddha.” So then they become very respectful of Shakyamuni Buddha.

0:14:14.1 But in a way, what it does, what that sutra broaches is the Mahayana conundrum, which those of you who study religion know about. It is called the “ Theodicy Problem.” And the theodicy problem is the unstoppable irrational problem for monotheistis who have a creator God, in the sense of who created evil. If an omnipotent being is compassionate, how can evil come to exist? That’s the theodicy problem. Vimalakirti brings forth what I call the “ Buddha-icy problem”, which is when Buddha can shape the environment so perfectly, how come he doesn’t make the whole world into one big Jewel Heart? (laughs). Why is there all this crazy stuff going on all around, all this horror that is taking place? And their answer is similar: it gives people a chance to develop their compassion and everyone has to create this Buddha world themselves in their effort. It just puts them in a comfortable place for them, something like that.

0:15:16.5 Anyway, everybody has that vision and once they have that vision, then they feel there is no excuse that they shouldn’t do something. In that light, in the Mahayana world, that is the sort of overall view of the Mahayana people. That is actually what happened to Tibet. That is why Tibet is so extraordinary and that is why Tibet brought us such a huge gift, not only to America, but the whole world, while itself being smashed in a horrible manner, that is still in its being at this moment, but nevertheless it brought us this great thing. Why the dharma stayed so alive in Tibet is because of the presence of living buddhas in Tibet. Rimpoche – reincarnation. Tulku means emanation body of the Buddha. It doesn’t just mean Joe Blow from this corner reincarnated on the next corner and then we recognize him. Tulku means emanation of Buddha. So it means that Tsongkhapa was like a Buddha, Sakya Pandita was Buddha, Padmasambhava was Buddha. Living buddhas, that’s what Tibetans feel is there and because of the extreme high tech yogas of the tantras, each being has the opportunity to become a Buddha, even in one life, if they really go nuts.

0:16:31.7 If they go slowly, then it takes 7 lives or 16 lives, if they keep their tantric commitment. And that was developed in India, not in Tibet, but the Tibetans kept it, refined and they made it mainstream in their culture, in an extraordinary way and they are bringing it back to the planet in this time, when it does seem sort like the planet is going down the drain. Yet, in the Tibetan view, the view of Kalachakra, this is preparatory to the planet being in quite a good age, actually. Surprisingly, who knows. I often get accused by people of wishful thinking and a dreamer, but I stick with it. I do stick to it. The only thing is that I used to think that Shambala was happening next week and maybe it might take a couple more centuries, with the difficulties that we are facing in some of the societies here.

0:17:33.5 Today is Manjushri day. So by the way, as Geshe-la said, it is only Vimalakirti who agrees to go and see Vimalakirti, who is not afraid of being scolded and criticized for dualism by Vimalakirti. And Manjushri is what we are embodying and the inner Manjushri is as you all know, your own wisdom and intelligence. It is not just some external person or thing. But then there is the external Manjushri too, which is very amazing. Manjushri is an archangel, in a way, the equivalent of and he is a Buddha, but his is a Buddha who manifests as a bodhisattva in every world where there is a Buddha, in order to press that Buddha into the conversation about emptiness, about reality. And that’s my main topic today.

0:18:21.8 That’s because he doesn’t want people to fool around when the real source of liberation and freedom is the understanding of emptiness. Buddha was – and this relates to a talk that I would like to give nowadays, based on a book that I am working on, which I have finished, because I am doing too many things at once, but that is that Buddhism itself is fundamentally a science. This is my view and my argument. One of the reasons that we sometimes feel that realization is remote to us is that we have it in the category of religion. And we think that religion is great and powerful and we want to be spiritual and all of that, but we have a subconscious subliminal reality sense formed in us not by our synagogue or church or temple or whatever it might be, but formed in our school classrooms by scientists. We are small and young and they speak with authority and we think they have discovered reality. We think that materialist science is the most advanced science that ever existed on the planet and that Buddha was cool back in India, but you know, they didn’t have the 7th Avenue subway in Vaishali and they didn’t have Tesla motor cars and they didn’t have computers.

0:19:44.1 And they didn’t have this and that we are so advanced and we are so great and that is all the kindness of materialist science. When we get sick we are eating health food and taking Tibetan pills and getting acupuncture and exercising and dieting and so on, and when we great really sick we are off to the hospital and they guy says: do this and that and we go for it. They are the high priests that we trust our lives with.

0:20:11.9 So we have this reality sense and Geshe Wangyal, to mention his name here, once caught me meditating. He used to catch me. I was also very please by the Geshe-la talking about too much meditation without the right world view can be actually a trap, especially if you get really good at it. You can really quietize yourself and your mind and it’s just like a drug. You can just go quietize when you are having a problem. You can get mad at somebody in the market place and then go inside and “meditate” and then say, “I forgive you when I don’t see you, but when I see you I hate your guts and I will do this and that” and it can really create a dualistic thing. So Geshe Wangyal had this uncanny telepathic ability to tell in my early years of study, when I was about to separate from my body and go into one of the dhyanas or something, which I supposed it was – I don’t even know. But it was like leaving the body in a very happy way, feeling a different kind of bliss and he would inevitably show up and say, “Time for some yoga, what do you think you are doing?” “I am meditating.” And one time in particular, when I was already a monk, and had come back from India, at 2, 3 in the morning I sneaked out, hoping to get some time and I was in the temple meditating away. So he comes in at 3 in the morning, turns on the light in temple instead of the candle lights and says, “What do you think you are doing?” I said, “What do you think? I am meditating.” He said, “Why are you meditating?” I said, “What do you mean, why am I meditating? I am a Buddhist monk and I want to become enlightened.” So he says, “Oh, you can’t get enlightened, you are an American.” (laughter). I said, “What? What are you talking about? I am a monk and I speak Tibetan.” He said, “What gets enlightened is your mind and you Americans don’t think you have one.” So I said, “What do you mean? I know I have a mind.”

So anyway, he did interrupt me and we did some yoga and I debated with him and we argued for weeks and finally I realized that what he wanted to let me know is that my deeper reality sense was formed in materialist science classes, where they tell you that you are a brain and you are a physical body and when you die you don’t exist. That means, don’t forget, if any of you are still caught in that reality sense, you are nothing right now. Your sense of soul, your sense of your subtle-most self, your innermost awareness focus is nothing, actually. Just shoot yourself and you will be nothing.

0:22:59.1 That means you are reduced to what is your deeper reality, which is that your consciousness has no continuity and you become nothing. I am going to say something a little more rude than most Buddhist teachers do and His Holiness in all these science meetings backs off from this, when he says, “We don’t talk about karma and nirvana to those scientists. We talk to them and hear how clever they are and they do neuro-science and they tell us, “We are finding this lobe and that thing and the paraishle and the memedilla oblong gata and down in the memedilla oblong gata must be where have some embodiment and you know, the limbic brain really is a problem and we got to deal with it.” And he just listens to them, how clever they are and he doesn’t challenge them. And then I am always there and he kicks me out and shuts me up when I try to say, “Excuse me, Your Holiness, don’t we think that Buddha discovered the reality of nirvana and that actually the nirvana, of the Four Noble Truths, is the only one that is ultimate reality, which means actual reality, which means real reality and that’s the third one. The path is still superficial reality, it is getting out of the mess. The suffering is samsaric relative reality, the cause of suffering is relative reality. Ultimate reality is nirvana and ultimate doesn’t mean something somewhere else.

0:24:24.1 It means what this actually is. Didn’t Buddha actually say this and how can you say to scientists who are looking for reality, which is their job, their profession, that nirvana is just Buddhist faith or something? And let them continue in their delusion? Nirvana is reality from the Buddhist point of view. It is the discovery of this that is the engine of Buddhism, actually. That’s what Buddha discovered. Why is Buddha grinning? If Buddha only discovered suffering would he be grinning, unless he was weird? “Oh, it’s all suffering!” Grin. What? Is that why he is grinning? No he is grinning because nirvana unfolded the universe to him. He is in nirvana and actually everyone else is in nirvana and he is not abandoning anybody because he sees all of them as nirvana.

0:25:13.9 One lady came when I sat down and asked, “Can you say something about non-duality?” – that’s non-duality. That’s the Mahayana rubbing it in, because it’s already there in Theravada in what we can call “Dualistic Buddhism”. In the dualistic Buddhism or Theravada, it leaves hanging – for neurotic people – the idea that they can escape into a blissful place that is elsewhere. These people cannot imagine that this right is elsewhere - if they knew what it was. As long as we are under delusion we think that this is misery and we are having a terrible time. Why? Because “I am more important than you, but don’t agree. Oh no, how awful. I will never get enough attention. Mom didn’t pay me enough attention and even mom didn’t and the rest of the world doesn’t and then death tramples me, sickness tramples me, but I’m the most important. So how the hell can that be?”

0:26:19.2 That’s the suffering, right? You see it? But apparently, when you realize that you are everything, then apparently nobody bothers you and of course you couldn’t do that if you saw other beings, if you are everything, including lots of other beings, who are totally miserable. So this is logic. I don’t claim to understand this really myself, but logically you can understand this. Buddha has to have a double vision where he sees everyone as made of bliss – bliss-void indivisible as they say in tantra and as he said in the Third Noble Truth in original, so called dualistic Buddhism, beginner’s Buddhism, where he said, “Nirvana is the reality.” So everyone is made of nirvana, actually. Nirvana is everything. The ultimate reality is the relative reality. But then this double vision comes in, because he also, by being one with every being, is aware that because of their delusion, most of them – or not necessarily most, because there are infinite enlightened ones and infinite unenlightened ones, so who knows which is more – but a lot of them feel very deprived, very much suffering, because they are devoured by delusion and ignorance. They are stuck in a world where it’s them against everything else.

0:27:42.7 And of course in that world of you versus everything you are going to lose, you are going to suffer. Right? Isn’t that simple? It is really very simple. So he doesn’t rub in to these dualistic Buddhists that when they think they are getting out of the world and into nirvana, is that what they are getting out of is their sense of self importance and their psychotic sense that they have a self, an absolute self, inside their relative being, that is not connected to anything else and then they get into the pure disconnection, because they imagine their nirvana to be that ultimate disconnection. That’s why Buddha won’t answer when they say, “Come on, let us in on it. Is there a self after nirvana or is there no self?” They are worried that there might be no self, because if there is no self, who is going to have a groovy time in nirvana? And he won’t answer that, because there is no such place apart from the world. There is no such separated nirvana. That’s the last piece of the delusion, but what happens is their self leaves and they are ready to deal with reality here.

0:27:42.7 As the Dalai Lama said to somebody who was contemplating their second three year retreat – I recently heard the story – they had been on a three year retreat and were really gang ho about to do the second one and they asked the Dalai Lama, “Do you have a special precept for me, something I should do?” And the Dalai Lama apparently looked at them and said, “Yes, get a life.” And apparently they went off and started some aid organization to help starving children and refugees and things like that and became really quite happy, practicing the bodhisattva path, instead of locking themselves up for another three years.

0:29:26.2 So, what I want to really want to focus on today is out reality sense and this is something that only each of us can do. No one can do it for you with even the best argument. This was Buddha’s problem as a teacher. You know His Holiness always loves to describe the famous verse, where Buddha says,

Bikshus, wise persons do not accept my teaching out of devotion to me. They are like goldsmiths, who only buy the gold after testing it by cutting, melting and rubbing it on a touch stone and then accept. You should critically analyze and test with your experience, you should rub it on the common sense of your life and then if what I have said is valuable, then accept it, but not out of devotion.

His Holiness is always saying that, because Buddha is only able to help people as a teacher, by getting them by themselves come to an understanding. He did not come up like a religious founder, like a prophet, with the idea that by belief you can save yourself. Belief will not save you, only understanding. So that forced him to be an educator, actually, rather than be a prophet; an educator in the true sense of education, not a brainwasher, but someone who is eliciting a 0:30:54.4?? due carre? Who is bringing out of the student the student’s own wisdom, the student’s own inner Manjushri, which is what Manjushri wants to do.

0:31:03.5 You cannot really change the realistic world view and we translate the first branch of the eight-fold path, which applies to Mahayana and Theravada and everything, and even in Vajrayana the eight-fold path is still there, it’s part of the mandala usually, but the first one is realistic belief or world view and that is not believing that there is such a thing as a Buddha; it is not believing that there is some wrathful thing, but it is believing in causation. Believing in causation is a way of sneaking up on a psychotic ignorant person, in the sense that they are thinking they are something that they aren’t, and not really being there, because of being a separate self than their relative presence in the world; but by believing in causality then somehow you are touched by relationships.

0:31:52.8 The way you are, even that seemingly absolute self that you feel is in there, is affected by causality. So that’s realistic world view and once you have causality, then there is no first cause, no something out of nothing, so therefore the universe is beginningless, so therefore you have already done everything. You have been born in every conceivable way. So you might as well get down to becoming a Buddha now, so you don’t keep on being born in every conceivable way, because most ways you get born you don’t like to live that way. You are happy human Jewel Hearters in this life. But you wouldn’t be happy as a dog or cat. As much as we like to make our dogs and cats happy, they basically depend on us for their cat food, which is made by some crappy corporation and often includes rather unpleasant substances.

0:32:43.9 And they are more helpless than we are. The thing is this scientific thing. n Shariputra asked Ashvajit in the market place, before he met Buddha, when he was a seeker. He saw Ashvajit, one of the first five arhats and follower of Buddha, one of the five ascetics and Shariputra thought that guy was a little bit levitating and said to him, “You must have a great teacher. What does he teach?” And Ashvajit said,

YE DHARMA HETUN PRABHAWA

HETUN TESHAN TATHAGATA HE AWADAT

TESHAN TSHA YI YO NIRODHO EWAM WADI

MAHA SHRAMANAYE

All things arise from causes, what are the causes

and how to interfere with those causes,

that’s the philosophy of the greatest seeker (Buddha).

0:33:31.3 So he didn’t say he discovered God or that he believed in him or joined his cult or whatever. He didn’t say that. He said he teaches causation. That is a powerful teaching. So therefore, the first thing is the discovery of emptiness is physics. What do you think about that? Do you think it is a spiritual discovery and the quantum people and the other ones there making their A-bombs and their H-bombs, they are doing the real stuff and sunyata is just what you do in a dharma center? No, sunyatta, emptiness, is physics. It is the discovery that all things dissolve under analysis. Recently His Holiness said to me at a lunch that he was so happy. There was one scientist, but he was not worried about him, so he said, “I am so happy, the quantum physicists have finally caught up with us.”

0:34:34.5 That is really what he thinks – because it’s a fact. The quantum people from 1926 – 27, the Copenhagen interpretation of Nils Bohr and Heisenberg, they said that the deep reality, which means ultimate reality, is unreachable by concepts. It cannot be captured in a formula, either mathematical or linguistic, geometric or any kind. It cannot be captured. It is beyond our conceptual control. We only work on superficial surface reality, probability, statistics, the behavior of things at a superficial level. Even though it is micro-micro level, we only operate on that level. They said that because they discovered that things dissolve under analysis.

0:35:17.2 Also, the corollary of that is that you cannot pinpoint even what’s happening, even when they are just about to disappear under analysis, because your mind has interfered, your observation interferes with what you are observing. So there is no pure objectivity. As we would say in a Buddhist context, like thousands of years ago, by Nagarjuna: there is sverupadwa, intrinsic objectivity. There is no self-constituted objectivity. The objectivist, materialist scientist is deluded, because there is no such thing as intrinsic objectivity. Objects and subjects are inextricably intertwined. Therefore mind is a force in nature and inevitably so. Therefore, when Thomas Nagel, the NYU philosopher, says that the attempt to explain all of reality by materialist reductionism is bound to fail, because these guys with all their machines and all their observation and mathematics and all their theories, are in denial of the presence of their own consciousness in doing all of these observations and these theories and things. And they are considering that their mind does not exist.

0:36:30.2 it is not a part of nature. It’s an illusion – their mind. Some of them even think that Buddhism agrees, because of the concept of selflessness. They think that because there is no absolute, disconnected self, that the Buddha thought there is no relative self. But you guys have all been studying selflessness a lot and you keep bumping into that relative self, don’t you? It’s still there. It is like those Zen-nies that I like to talk to. I used to tease, when often I taught in Zen centers. You guys had a great seshin and even had a moment where you disappeared. Wasn’t it great? You don’t have to worry about your parking ticket! But the problem was you reappeared and here you are, oh dear. Now you have to go back and disappear.

0:37:26.1 I used to be a little with them and say, “But you know, you could just shoot yourself. You don’t have to go on a seshin. Just shoot yourself.” A lot of them are into thinking, “We are modern, we are scientific, Buddha agrees with us, we don’t need former and future lives” and there are even a few turkeys out of Tibetan Buddhism who try to pretend that you don’t need former and future lives, who I shall leave unmentioned, so that I don’t get riled up about it. But I am very riled about it. It’s so ridiculous. I mean that is Buddha doing with 5000 Jatakas, his former life stories, where he talks about, “In this former life I did this and I remember that, I was a father 0:38:01.3 ???? and I was Lassie and I was old Youwer 0:38:02.9??? and I was this and that, I was Bugs Bunny or whatever, I was a Bugs Bunny who fed myself to the wandering traveller who turned out to be Indra and put the bunny in the moon and so what is he talking about, there is no former lives?

0:38:15.7 And what is he doing under the Bodhi tree, even in Theravada, in every form of Buddhism, in this biography, where, before he attains nirvana, he remembers infinite previous lives himself and he remembers everybody else’s infinite previous lives, which means he is stuck with this horrendous vision that a Buddha has? This is not to discourage you, but it’s the horrendous vision where he looks out and sees all the sentient beings and he says, “Mom! Every single one of you is mom. Therefore I now have to be every single one of your’s mom.” That’s what they say about Buddha, right? What a horrendous thing. No wonder he splits himself into millions of emanations. What a nightmare job. Luckily he has bliss to ride on, so he is cool.

0:39:10.5 What does sunyata mean? You all know, that emptiness – or voidness, as I prefer to call it – is not nothingess; it is that each thing and person is devoid of any kind of intrinsic reality, intrinsic identity, intrinsic objectivity, intrinsic presence. You have no intrinsic existence yourself. But that doesn’t mean you are not there. It means that your existence is utterly relative. So, actually, it is the discovery or relativity. That’s what it is. 2500 years before Einstein. And it’s fully relativity, not the partial relativity of Einstein, where he still keeps the speed of light and this and that and he ran away from Nils Bohr and Heisenberg in 1926 and said, “God does not play dice with the universe” and “I am not going to have some sort of lack of ability to reach deep reality. I am going to make a grand unified theory”, which he failed to do. And no one will ever have a grand unified theory. Buddha already had a grand unified theory, which is that you can experience the unity of everything, but it’s not a conceptual theory. The only [possible] theory is the negation of everything being intrinsically real and even your realization is devoid of intrinsic reality. And that enables you to expand and become one with all relational things.

0:40:34.7 So it is the true realization of relativity – and the true realization of that double vision that Buddha has – and I am not being heretical and shocking; it is double vision. How do they express that double vision? They say that wisdom and compassion become the same. Nagarjuna said, sunyata karuna jar bam – voidness is the womb of compassion. Seeing the suffering of beings becomes the one part of the double vision, the non-dual double vision, as non-duality supports a double vision like that – and then compassion is because Buddha feels that everybody’s suffering is his own suffering. That’s why he is so engaged. That’s why Shakyamuni, the poor guy, is still here. One of the messages of the Vimalakirti sutra is that Buddha is here. Buddha didn’t leave. Buddha is not gone. The Theravadins translate Paranirvana as “final nirvana”, but pari doesn’t mean final. It means thorough, total. My Sanskritist 0:41:40.2 ?? is nodding dubiously, but is nodding permanently. Very good.

0:41:46.3 Total nirvana means that by leaving that body that seemed to be a separate thing, so people could relate to it, Buddha was one with everything as nirvana. So he is more present than ever. Shakyamuni is still responsible for the planet. Maitreya just sends dogs down for us to pet, so we will get a little more trusting about other beings and get a little out of our self-concern, so we have something to pet. That’s Maitreya’s activity mainly nowadays. But Shakyamuni is still responsible. He is here right with us and he is here in Rimpoche as nirmanakaya, he is here in Tsongkhapa, he is here in His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He is here. Therefore, you don’t have to sit around thinking, “Oh, if I was with Shakyamuni and studied sunyata, maybe I’d be enlightened, but I am just here in New York in the East lower village and I can’t get enlightened. This is kali yuga, the negro streets have drawn dawn 0:42:46.6 ??? and Allen ??? 0:42:46.8 is out there and so on, whatever. That’s no excuse.

0:42:55.1 Shakyamuni was with Allen (0:42:55.5??) when he packed. He noticed that actually. He was astounded and called everybody up and said, “Wow, I love Dharma because I am not scared. I am dying and I am not scared.” Shakyamuni can come as a female too. He emanates in all kinds of ways. But that’s not my main point. My main point is sunyata as a scientific discovery of relativity and therefore, this is a science that you can explore and investigate and you can meditate on it as a reality view, a realistic word view and then you can challenge and go down in your unconscious, like what I had to do when Geshe Wangyal told me that I couldn’t get enlightened, because I was an American and I didn’t believe in my mind.” And you can go down in your unconscious, your deeper subliminal layers, the layers of where you were conditioned as a school kid and find that materialism and find the fact that even though “Yeah, I am a Buddhist and future life, sure, it must be, Rimpoche mentioned it a lot, but I am not going to worry about it, etc, and I go practice Tara to help my in my future life and all this, but on some level I am still living only for this life, because that’s still my consensual American culture, modern culture, western culture reality view. That’s all I really have to be concerned with. Luckily, maybe I can use tantra and attain enlightenment in this life, but whatever happens to be will happen in this life.”

0:44:30.9 But that’s not the case. What you do now will give effects in future lives. Even if you attain enlightenment in this life, even then Buddha is still there. He doesn’t leave. He would break his bodhisattva vows if he left. He is there with everybody and in every cell of every being Buddha is there. You will be too, when you are Buddha. All buddhas are here. So that’s the first thing, that sunyata is physics. And it is ahead of nuclear physicists. Actually, Henry Stapp, another famous physicist, whom I met at a conference last summer, I was so delighted, but he told me that the Copenhagen moment in 1926-27 was definitive in modern physics. And mind did come back in the universe, but the materialist scientists didn’t know what to do with it, because they are too afraid of the soul, because the whole thing is based on fleeing the church and the inquisition and being burned at the stake and not just being dogmatically following the church, which I don’t blame them for and I am all for their materialism in that sense.

0:45:38.7 But when they make a dogma out of their materialism, then I have to protest. I think I was born in this society on this planet at this time to make the protest, actually, personally, that’s my mission, if anything: to challenge their notion of reality, which dooms human life, you realize. They all think – and you too and I too – we all have a deep belief that they are not going to fix climate change, that somebody will press a nuclear button, if it’s not W it will be Putin or somebody, a Chinese emperor; somebody will press it. There’s too many of those buttons. We all have a doomsday feeling. It’s one of the reasons for our spiritual lethargy. The point is we won’t have that, according to Buddha. But even if they do, even if they bomb the whole planet we’ll die and be reborn somewhere. If Obi-Wan was a Buddha, when he felt that disturbance in the force, when the death star destroyed a planet with 7 billion people on it, by the way, the exact size, he felt a shudder, remember, C 3PO went blibilbip and then Luke said, “What happened?” and he said that “Oh Death Star just destroyed a whole planet and 7 billion people were killed and there was a disturbance in the force.” But if Obi-Wan was Shakyamuni, if he was the Buddha he would have simply manufactured or manifested himself as another planet.

0:47:01.3 And they’d all be reborn on that planet. And they would all have to deal with their problems on that planet. And they would have to have a socialist economy and good schools and they would have dharma centers and the warriors would deal with the evil emperor and so on. Okay, so there is no escape, in other words and we have to find down there the roots of materialism in ourselves, even if we have conscious belief in reincarnation, like it was some sort of woo woo theory, but we are brave enough to adopt it and we take our health food and we do this and that, until somebody says, “You have a tumor” and then we run to the hospital, because they are backed up by “real” science. We take Prozac, we take weird things that shoot serotonin in and out of our ears with unknown side effects, because we believe in that. From childhood on, we do. And not that it’s all useless, some of it might be okay somehow, if you combine it with spinach or something. But they wouldn’t know about the spinach part. They don’t study that. They don’t think it’s worth studying.

0:48:15.6 So there is now the second science: biology. Thomas Nagel’s “Mind and Cosmos” is mainly focusing on biology. Biologists are neo-darwinians and desperate to avoid the mind. Sorry, I didn’t finish. Henry Stapp said that what happened is that quantum physics broke in two divisions: one is the working quantum physicists. They started allowing for the subjectivity and started dealing with the surface probabilities and they are making useful things and experiment and do things. But the theoretical ones went on a rebellion, led by Einstein and they went and tried to create more theories that would capture everything. They didn’t accept that they couldn’t capture a pure, objectivist reality with purely objective theories and they got into these 11 dimensions and multiple [universes?] and all these things which cannot be tested experimentally and therefore people like Sheldon Glashow at Harvard who is a working physicist says, “That’s not physics anymore. That’s some kind of theology-philosophy. I can’t say just theology, because that would be too rude to a fellow scientist, a fellow member of the guild, so it is philosophy.”

0:49:33.8 The working physicists consider that to be irrelevant. They are all those weird theories that you read about that make you think that there is something that you can’t understand and only some high priest can understand and they write in the newspapers and they get billions and billions of dollars to build subways under the ground in Switzerland where they can go to the surface while waiting for the calculations and have good Flagsdonna 0:49:55.4 cream puffs and expresso and they are building another one in South of France, they have gotten hipper, they are going to a better climate. And then they shout about Higgs Boson. “Now we got the Higgs Boson, so we are worth it. Give us another 30 billion dollars.” Meanwhile, if you go to the bottom of the Higgs Boson article, the Higgs Boson, that little dinky splink that had 14 secondary reverberations – they never even saw the Higgs Boson. It’s only 3 per cent of the yang part of the universe and you can see it wrapped in 97 per cent of the yin part of the universe, which is dark energy and dark matter, which is something only the 0:50:38.0 Medis or yetis??? Are aware of. In other words, hopeless, hopeless, as far as honestly encountering is concerned.

0:50:47.8 And then you are a Buddhist. You can and talk to one of your science friends and colleagues and says, “Maybe there is a future life” and they say, “What’s your evidence? What evidence do you have?” And they lean forward, glaring at you. Then you say, “Well, there is a lot of evidence like Buddha had the Jatakas” and they will say, “Oh, that’s just Buddha.” Then you say, “People do remember previous lives and Ian Stevenson chronicled many children and their previous lives, etc, and their like tons of evidence. But they say, “Oh, that’s not evidence, none of it is.” You say, “But did you look at it?” “No, I didn’t, because it’s not evidence.” “Oh, it’s not evidence to you because you didn’t look at it, but there is a pile of evidence.” And then you may say, “And further evidence is your second law of thermodynamics: no energy can ever be destroyed. No something ever becomes nothing. The law of nature is continuity of energy. So are you saying that your mind has no energy? There is no energy going on in your mind?” “Well, it is,” he is saying, because he doesn’t want to be pressed, because then he has to say that the mind is nothing, so yeah, it has no energy. So, not only does it not exist after death, but it doesn’t exist now. But they don’t want to say that.

0:51:55.6 They feel uncomfortable saying that. So then you say to them, “What is your evidence that you don’t exist after death? Did Carl Sagan show up at the American Academy of Science’s meeting, saying “Hey guys, I don’t exist. It’s cool, you can get rid of all those weird people that think they have a mind. I am not existing.” Did he show up and say that? I don’t think so. Why? Because he doesn’t exist. So therefore, in principle, you realize that you can never have evidence of the non-existence of human beings after death. There will never be such evidence.

0:52:44.4 I know a neuroscientist who says, “I have evidence. I put electrodes on a corpse and nothing was happening in the brain.” So I say, “Yeah, that person left town. They are not hanging in the thing, otherwise it would be alive, man.” “ha, it’s all right” he said. It was a latino 0:53:03.9????? “That’s my evidence.” The point is that in principle, they never can have evidence, so that means that the belief that you will be nothing at death is the most blind of blind faiths. It is just dogma. It can never have evidence in principle. And it violates the law of the conservation of energy, in case you think that your mind is some super-subtle form of energy, which of course Buddhist science says it is. It is energy, especially in tantric abidharma, the super-subtle mind, the clear light mind, and the super-subtle wind energy, is one thing, as you know, in the heart center. You know about that, right?

0:53:44.8 Everybody knows that. But His Holiness doesn’t like to say that in his dialogues with scientists because he thinks that they will think that’s making their triumphalist materialist reductionism valid. Because if mind and energy are same ultimately, then you can reduce a thing to just energy, which is matter. And they don’t want to look at the fact that you could reduce all energy to mind.

0:54:14.4 I am just working on the Kalachakra tantra, the fifth chapter, the wisdom intuition chapter, the ye she chapter. In there is a long argument by Pundarika White Lotus, the 8th king of Shambala, who wrote a commentary on the 5th chapter, proving that the Buddha body has no atoms. Isn’t that cool? And he uses things from sutra, like the Vimalakirti sutra, and the lotus sutra that Buddha wouldn’t have the transformative miracle power that he has to do the miracles that he does in the exoteric sutras, if his body was a coarse atomic body. So Buddha’s body is made of consciousness that exists on the level of the wave-particle paradox; as a wave function before the wave has collapsed. The wave collapses in loving Buddha bodies. That’s our physicist formula. Okay?

0:55:11.8 Moving from physics and the precedence of the Buddha scientists to Einstein, Niels Bohr and company, we move to biology. And that’s where Nagel claims that materialist reductionism will fail. He says that the reason the biologists and neo-darwinians keep it so strictly is that they feel that the only alternative to materialist reductionism is theism and they are scared of theism. They are scared of the rabbis and the ministers and the priests, that they become too powerful. So he says, however, there must be a way in which mind can be part of nature and part of biology, without it becoming some sort of God-controlled soul or divine soul. There must be some other way of considering mind. And when I read that I just went, “Yippie!” He is asking for the theory of karma.

0:56:05.8 Karma therefore is not a mystical theory. Karma is not faith. Karma is a biological theory and it’s a very good one. It’s very like Darwin, actually, in the sense of the interrelatedness of all animal forms. But it adds to Darwin all kinds of invisible forms, like hells and pretas and then titans and deities and a huge phenomenology of deities, all kinds of deities and the heaven knows what other sci-fi types creatures, but basically it shows the interrelatedness of them and that we are all chained together. All living beings are chained together. It precedes Darwin in that and the Indian people were not like people in Texas and Arkansas, afraid to be related to monkeys and males afraid to be related to females or people of different races afraid of being related to each other.

0:57:01.4 The ancient people were usually okay with that, except the Brahmins were a little uptight with Buddha’s interpretation. They always wanted to be reborn as Brahmins and Brahmin males, you know, but mainstream Indians followed that and then it’s more life-embeddedness than as a biological theory than Darwin is, because the neo-Darwinians are doing that no soul thing, where each individual being is ultimately nothing and it’s just the genes hopping along, you know, from life to life.

0:57:32.3 Genes are moving around, but no people. Therefore, selfishness is attributed to the genes and they are reified into some sort of animal entity by the theorists, you know. Selfish or unselfish genes. But Buddha’s Darwinian theory has you hopping around from life to life and you personally were monkeys. We were all monkeys. We are very close to monkeys now, but we are going to be monkeys again, if we monkey around too much.

0:57:59.1 And other animals too. There’s worse forms than monkeys. And we have all been all of them. And so, how did we get to be human? You get to be human by being ethical. Of the three paramitas or transcendent virtues, or transcendences, as I prefer to call them, you have generosity, morality (or ethics or even justice) and tolerance. And morality is the one that has to do with emphasizing with another being. And if you think about it biologically, mammals, those born from wombs, are already breaking the boundary of self and other biologically. So they evolved from beings who are less bounded between self and other – those born from eggs, or from moisture. Remember the four types of birth in Buddhism and biology has similar. You know, mom dumps the egg, dad comes and squirts something on it and takes off and doesn’t get charged for child payment.

0:59:00.8 But mammals have the babes inside and therefore the females have to be “other-regarding” at least. The males would never tolerate that. They are more self-centered by biological configuration, but the females are very, you know, altruistic. They have a little bodhisattva vow. It sort of sneaks up on them, of course, but still, they accept a total stranger living in their belly for almost a year. That’s kind of a harsh thing. When you are in the subway and someone comes and steps on your leg or something, you are going to be freaked. And the baby at first is a total stranger, unless you happen to have a reincarnation of something. Those Tibetan ladies always try to catch one. (laughs).

0:59:52.9 Therefore, that ethicality is what makes you more other-sensitive and more empathetic and then the human form elaborates. You choose when you are a mammal tiger, when you are a mammal warthog or something, then you didn’t quite like the other-connectedness that you had with the tigress or the male tiger. It’s like perpetual 1:00:17.5???? There is no fun, there is no foreplay, no nothing, that’s the fur 1:00:21.3 ??? and whatever you know, now and then, what’s the fun1:00:25.4, no real pleasure, you can’t really caress with claws. So you want more and you think, “I don’t just want to be cuddled as a baby in the womb and then licked a bit, you know, and then dad’s chased away, so he doesn’t eat me. I want to be an animal that is taken care of, so that even dad likes me.

1:00:40.6

And so these animals can’t think that and they can’t read the sutras, so they just are a little more selfless and a little more ethical and then they keep evolving and finally they come up with this weird human form, where we have these intertangled fingers and opposing thumbs. They think that the opposing thumbs are there so that you can hold a weapon. How about the opposing thumbs are there so that you can hold somebody you are giving a caress to? Giving a massage or holding onto some piece of the anatomy? How about that? They never thought about that, those tough male scientists. They never thought of that. Fingers are soft. They are not good for fighting. Fingernails break. You can’t claw somebody very much with fingernails. No, we are gentle people.

1:01:33.9 His Holiness does this magnificent thing, beyond religion, secular ethics, which is nothing new. That’s what Buddha did, the same thing. He does everything that Buddha did. He is just appealing to the secular materialist thing, saying that “even you guys, studying the human life form, realize that the human being is gentle”, because these kids have to be held gently for decades or they don’t survive or they have trouble in societies where they really can rebel as adolescents and they think they are independent. And they aren’t at all. Really, in older societies they acknowledge that they have to be taken care of even for decades by their parents.

1:02:16.6 So, wealth comes from generosity in previous lives. So when you get wealth, don’t be stingy. Another one of Vimalakirti’s incidents that he didn’t mention is that he goes and he scolds Mahakashyapa who always begs on the streets of the poor. Vimilakirti shows up one day and Mahakashyapa is begging there. That’s why he doesn’t want to visit Vimalakirti when he is sick, because Vimalakirti asks him, “Why do you always beg here? That’s discriminating about other people, the middle class and wealthy people.” Mahakashyapa says, “Well, I am going to the poor people, because they were stingy in previous lives, so I am giving them a chance to give me lunch, to give me a gift.” Then Vimalakirti says, “But the middle class and rich people have the danger that once they get wealth, they, although they were generous in previous lives, and now are well off, now they are likely to be stingy, because they have something. So you better go and beg in their streets. Live it up. Go and have some better food and that’s as truth in it 1:03:20.5???? and give them a chance to be generous as rich people. Otherwise, they will be like some Republicans, denying welfare to the poor and then they will be reborn as worse than poor. So don’t discriminate.” So he scolds him like that.

1:03:39.7 And then beauty. All you beautiful people come from your being patient and tolerant. The one that I really don’t know – I hope some lama will explain it to me, I never found the answer to that is that – wherever you live, your room, your desk, if it tends to become a huge mess, if your environment becomes messy, that’s because you have been a big gossip in previous lives. If someone can explain that to me I would be very happy. But they go down to that detail. In other words, right now, what you are doing with your mind is shaping your future life. So the mind is part of your biology. It’s not just what you do with your body and what your genes are doing, the epigenetics. The epigenetic atmosphere includes your mind and so mind is part of biology. And karma describes it beautifully. Now, I must say one thing that is also very scientific about Buddhist theories and that is the essential Buddhist hermeneutic, which is elaborated by Nagarjuna and followers.

1:04:43.6 And that is that all theories about relative reality are only contextual and relative. They are not absolute truths or dogmas. So even karma is a relational theory and there might be some context in which you want to a different theory or have it elaborated in some way, but the one theory that is, is the negation of selflessness and emptiness. That regards absolute reality. But it’s not a capturing theory; it’s an opening theory, because it’s a negation. It predicts that you will not find anything when you analyze it. That’s Manjushri’s wisdom. Why does he have a sword? Even the white one who is more peaceful has that book and on top of it is the sword with the flame thing on top of it and that is the sword of critical wisdom, which is analytic and analyzes these things.

1:05:36.9 When you analyze things with a fine enough concentration they will dissolve under analysis and everything will disappear and most importantly, the state of disappearance will disappear. That’s really important, so you won’t run around in some deluded and demented manner and proclaim yourself a big guru, because you realized emptiness. That would be a terrible mistake. Nobody realizes emptiness. They say you realize emptiness by the method of non-realization. You know it by not knowing it. They have all kinds of paradoxes when they get down to describing it. In casual talk they say you realize emptiness, but when they get down to it, you can’t realize what you already are, because the subject that realizes it is also emptiness.

1:06:20.6 So it is a non-dual state. You melt into emptiness. That’s what happens to you. So you don’t possess that realization. It possesses you and flings you into the realm of relativity, infinite relativity. And if you concentrate enough it makes you feel you are that infinite relativity and the boundaries of self and other completely dissolve. And you are every being, who pops back up in the state of disappearance. They all pop up: all those moms and they look at you like a little boogle, the little Buddha boogle and they say, “We are your moms, take care of us.”

Tsongkhapa’s way – and I discovered this only recently – there were some people in Tibet. Some would say it is sectarian but it isn’t just sectarian. There were some people in Tibet and most of them were Tsongkhapa’s huge innovation of the Buddhadharma standing on the shoulders of people like Rongdzam, Sakya Pandita, his own Sakya teacher Rendawa, Longchenpa of the Nyingma or the great Kagyu masters, the Karmapas and Drikung Cheng nga Rinpoche, etc, standing on all of their shoulders, he really brought everything together and he really came to see Shakyamuni. He felt Shakyamuni face to face, as the Zen people might say. He found that in that cave in 1398 and met him face to face. And he really understood this non-duality, that emptiness is the equivalence of relativity and those of you who know, the poem that Geshe Wangyal made us memorize of the “Praise for Relativity”, the ten drel töpa. I never say in that context “Dependent Origination”. It’s the same word, but Chandrakirti clearly says that it is paraspada apeksha. There is no utpada, there is nothing arising. It’s just interwoven-ness. So the “arising” is not good to put in the Madhyamaka context.

1:08:36.9 Anyway, in his Praise to Relativity he realized that Buddhahood is not being something above other beings. This is the key to the realization. Buddha is all the other beings. Imagine that you suddenly have an experience that you were everyone. Of course, luckily you have that as an experience of riding the wave of a melting bliss. The melting bliss melted you to be one with the infinite emptiness-relativity through bliss. You don’t know it through any conceptual thing; you melt into it through bliss. Bliss melts you, totally. It is the great death. Your dharmakaya is the great death that you become. You melt into that, but then that means you are everybody else. Who is around that is higher than the other people? They themselves are all in that same dharmakaya, the knowledge of dharmakaya, the jnana dharmakaya, the intuition dharmakaya. This knows that every other being is dharmakaya too.

1:09:34.4 Buddha feels that he is us. That’s his problem, because we are miserable by our ignorance. Some of you may be blissful, I don’t know. I am miserable, usually, except when my guru is nice to me and so Buddha is not above everybody. Buddha actually serves them all, all his mothers. He adds them. But then unfortunately, he can’t bomb them all into bliss void indivisible. There is no bliss bomb. The being thinks it has a boundary, warding off the universe not to eat it up. If it suddenly felt a wave of bliss engulfing it, it is like dying of bliss and it would freak out and get more uptight and it wouldn’t help. Only if the being is open to understanding that that is the nature of reality, does the being accept being melted by bliss. So that’s why Buddha has to teach them. But this is very key.

1:10:37.9 So why is Rimpoche so kind? Even when there is pump replacing his kidneys he is teaching away, running around all over, trying to help everybody do something, why is that? Because he is feels on some level that he is your servant. Sure, sometimes it helps you that he has a majestic gesture he inherited from Ling Rinpoche or Trijang Rinpoche or such and such a Rinpoche or whatever. And His Holiness too. But these people are servants of the students. Shakyamuni Buddha was servant of his sangha, not the master of the sangha. I don’t like that “master” word much, actually. That “guru” word is an Indian patriarchial father, high authority, family word. And it means “heavy”. “Lama”, the way the Tibetans translated it, has another actual meaning: that which is nothing is higher than. Of course, because that being is equal to everything. So nothing can get beyond it. The Tibetan translation is actually more hip than the Indian original word. The Indian is a sort of authoritarian word: guru, heavy. But Manjushri sits on your head or Tara does. He and she are not heavy. They are light, they drip bliss into you and lift you up. They are levitating and they levitate you, if you really deal with it.

1:11:58.3 They are not heavy, but you can’t get beyond them, because the doorway they open to you is the doorway to where you become equal with others. And everybody is equal, actually. And “lama” has that idea. It is really rich. Tibet is the greatest. It is. It improves on India, I am sorry, because Buddhism remained counter-culture in India. It became mainstream in Tibet, in spite of what some Tibetologists like to say, like, “Oh yeah, we were so funky, those Buddhist texts that think it is Shangri-la, but we are into the funk.” But you can be funky and enlightened, you know. That’s why the later people…I think the real reason is that there is a certain group of lamas after Tsongkhapas, quite soon after him, and they said all kinds of nasty things about him, because…

1:12:57.1 This became clear to me in a moment with His Holiness in Switzerland. I had to go there about something and I wasn’t really part of the teaching, I couldn’t afford the hotel and whatever, but I got to see him and then I got to sneak into one of the teachings. And in that teaching he was giving the analysis to 8 – 10,000 people in Switzerland in some place and it was some big thing. He was witting on a big throne, you know and mentioning that thing about the goldsmith who only buys the gold after testing, rubbing, etc, so don’t accept my speech out of devotion to me, but after thorough analysis, bla, bla, bla. That’s what wise people do, oh mendicants.

He was giving an analysis of that famous verse and he was saying that he could just see Shakyamuni Buddha, begging the member of his sangha, “Please think about what I am telling you. Chew it over in your mind. When I say selflessness to an unenlightened person, Buddha knows, that if they agree with it they become nihilistic. And they think, “Oh yeah, I don’t exist, phew, all my problems are over.” They nihilistically attach to that selflessness, like these modern American materialists who think that selflessness means that they don’t have a mind.

1:14:06.5 That’s what science tells them, “Oh how cool, it confirms my materialism.” But that’s not what it means. So he knows that with selflessness it is actually a challenge to the people to look at their feeling of having an absolute self and then put that statement that he has made, giving him enough credibility to at least test it out and see that when they look for that self they can’t find it and when they don’t find it, they come to understand selflessness.

And especially, if they are forewarned about the royal reason of relativity, and they don’t think that when they have an experience of disappearing, that they discovered their self and that nothing that they seem to fall into, some spacious nothingness. And that’s not the self. That’s just an experience of failing to find the self they thought was there, because that experience of space itself disappears and everything fills it up again, with all the other beings. That’s non-duality, right? You get that?

1:15:43.4 So when His Holiness was saying that to this crowd he was leaning forward, like a waiter in a Chinese restaurant, in the most humble, subservient way and he was begging the people, “Please think about what I am saying. Don’t just say that the Dalai Lama said such and such a thing, superficially. Take it in your mind, chew it over in your mind, reject it, if you think it’s wrong, but really think it over strongly and make it your own, by doing that. Here you have the one who in the world is probably the greatest authority in Buddhism, who is then empathizing with the founder of Buddhism, Shakyamuni, and he is begging the students, as a servant of the students. And I was on the side and I saw past him a whole bunch of gurus, masters, some Tibetans, and also other traditions.

1:16:41.7 That’s because His Holiness likes to invite them all. And they were looking distinctly uncomfortable. Of course they love what he said. It’s not that. They weren’t hostile. They were just uncomfortable, because they are used to being a daddy figure, an authority or guru on their people. Here he is saying that the real essence of it is the people. The essence of understanding is you to understand when someone teaches. It is not the teacher. The teacher should be learning, actually, when they are teaching. A good teacher is re-thinking whatever they are talking about. That is a true teaching. The one who sits back and thinks, “I know and people don’t” is not really the good teacher. They are withholding something. They think they have something that the others don’t, which of course they don’t have.

1:17:34.0 There is another famous thing in the Vimalakirti, which Geshe-la didn’t get too much into, but it’s so great, he worked on that, him and Josh 1:17:40.1 ?????. The famous moment of Vimalakirti is where 32 bodhisattvas, and one of them according to the Tibetan tradition is Nagarjuna’s previous incarnation in Buddha’s time, a guy called Priyadarshana, these 32 bodhisattvas give their view on non-duality, the dharma door of non-duality. They say things like virtue and sin and who goes beyond the duality of virtue and sin and that’s the dharma door of non-duality. Samsara-nirvana duality and who goes the samsara-nirvana duality knows the dharma door of non-duality. Then whatever they do, they go through all kinds of paired concepts. Then Manjushri, who is the last of them, said, “You guys said really great things and you sort of spiral down deeper and deeper into the sequence of the 32 different expressions.

1:18:30.9 Then Manjushri said, “You all said something really great and it was really good, but the problem is that you said something. And you can’t really express the dharma door of non-duality and then he turns towards Vimalakirti and says, “What do you say?” and Vimalakirti doesn’t say anything and this is called the lion’s roar of the silence of Vimalakirti and this is almost the most famous moment in that sutra and then the way they say the sutra is that 84,000 beings attained the next level of whatever insight or enlightenment or whatever level of the path they were ready to attain from that silence.

1:19:15.0 Then I always ask my students in classes, when I discuss this: there is another silence, when Shariputra, when Geshe-la told you, he maintained silence when that goddess who is challenging him and teaching him not to 1:19:30.4???? and asks him how long he has been enlightened. That’s because he had asked her how long she had been in Vimalakirti’s house, cause she manifests miraculously as she is a Prajnaparamita dakini and she wasn’t there earlier in the conversation, but she just shows up with the flowers and then she says, “Well, I have been in the house for about as long as you have been in enlightenment.” “Oh”, he says and then she says, “How long have you been enlightened?” and then he is silent. Then she says, - she is not enlightened by that – she says, “Well, now you are the foremost of the wise, Shariputra, you are Buddha’s main disciple, one of his main monastic disciples, then why don’t you answer the question, why don’t you turn to speak?” And then he says, “I didn’t know what to say, because enlightenment is inexpressible.” Because he did have some kind of dualistic or partial enlightenment of an arhat. So she says, “Do not point to enlightenment by abandoning speech. Enlightenment is neither inside, outside nor anywhere in between. Similarly, language is neither inside, outside or anywhere in between. The very nature of language is enlightenment.”

1:20:39.5 She belabors the poor guy like that, before doing a sex change operation on him. And then I always ask, “What’s the difference? Why is his silence not something correct and negative and why is Vimalakirti’s silence enlightening?” It’s the context, of course. Their answer is the context and also the vision. Vimalakirti, being an enlightened high level bodhisattva, an enlightened emanation, as it is told later in the sutra, of Buddha Aksobhya, from the universe Abhirati, the eastern paradise of Akshobhya, Vimalakirti,

in the time of…..you know, non-duality means that the double vision of a Buddha sees every being as already knowing non-duality; as already one with nirvana, as already made of bliss. He sees them that way. So, before not speaking, he saw what was on that side of the double vision. So he saw everyone into their own subliminal understanding of their own relativity, of their own bliss-made relativity, that which holds their atoms and cells and their bodies together and therefore they felt that kind of well up in them, from that silence. They felt that, a comforting and a confirming silence. Sometimes like that, rather than a depriving silence, that “I know something you don’t”, if you follow me.

1:22:04.6 So at the ultimate moment of feeling the understanding of the students, that is the key thing. That’s the lion’s roar of the silence of Vimalakirti. It’s really cool. And now, I am sure it’s late and I don’t know to what time this is supposed to go, but I know you were up practicing, so I will imitate Vimalakirti in my unenlightened way and I will maintain silence. Good night, thank you very much.

1:22:32.2 (clapping)