Archive Result

20150920GRAAST32

0:00:02.0 Welcome everybody and thank you John, because you kept people entertained for a while, because I was stuck in the toilet and couldn’t get out. Sorry to say that, but couldn’t get out. So thank you.

0:00:27.2 Today I would like to just talk to you a couple of things, because this is the last Sunday that I will be talking live for a while. Tomorrow I am supposed to leave for Hongkong and this is my first long journey since I began kidney dialysis. So hopefully everything will go well. I am supposed to be stopping in Seattle for one stop because I can’t make a long journey straight away, so I will be stopping in Seattle for a day or two. You don’t know when you arrive, so we don’t want to fly the next day. So I will be stopping one extra day in Seattle. And then I will go to Hongkong. That’s one non-stop flight and I am not sure if it’s 10 or 12 hours or something.

0:01:57.8 Then in Hongkong we do have a friend, a Columbia professor who is also very much involved in Thurman’s big translation project of the Kangyur and Tengyur in English and Chinese. The Chinese kangyur is already there, translated by Changya Rölpai Dorje in the 16th century. Also the Chinese have a Sanskrit version translated into Chinese as well. Apparently the Sanskrit version has about 10 more volumes than the Tibetan version. So that’s there, so he asked me last time when I went to Hongkong and every year he has been asking and I couldn’t go for a number of years. Last time I went there, there were about 700 Chinese from China attending the teachings, who came in the morning and left in the evening to go back. This time I have no idea. There are some dharma centers making a monastery in Tibet and a dharma center in Hongkong is making the arrangements. I don’t even know who they are. I only know Marty, the professor, so I am sort of going with that. Not too long. I am scheduled to give the initiations of Hayagriva and Chittamani Tara.

0:04:03.7 So hopefully I will be back by October 7th or 8th. However, the Tibet Fund in New York is somehow giving me an honor or award or something, so they have a dinner on October 14. So, although I will be back here on October 8th or 9th, but I have to go to New York to receive that. So I am actually back here by October 15 or 16. Until then I will be in transition. So there are about four or five Sundays. I may or may not be able to talk to you easily from Hongkong or everywhere else, so I thought these Five Paths and Ten Bhumis teachings, which we titled “Five Wisdom Steps to Enlightenment”, so whatever I talked there, that’s going to be divided into four or five different talks by Hartmut, Jonas and Bethany Locke and these will be presented to you over the next couple of Sundays. It is pre-recorded, but not specifically prerecorded for Sunday. It is the Garrison teaching. I was short of time for the last couple of days to pre-record five talks, so Kimba came to the conclusion that this needs to be presented and so we will utilize the time that way. That will be only my talks, not those of others.

0:06:29.5 Other talks were done by Thurman and Joe Loizzo and others. Joe Loizzo also gave a very, very good presentation, a comparison of the five paths with Vajrayana, which was excellent, actually. Thurman gave an unimaginable Vajrayana talk and all of them are going to be available on the member’s page. But they are not going to be on Digital Dharma but on the member’s page. Digital Dharma involves certain payment, right? And the member’s page doesn’t have payment. I don’t think it is a good idea to put these talks in the payment system, unless they do. That’s a different story. From our side we should put them on the members’ page, if they are not already there. They are not yet there.

0:07:56.4 Two Thurman talks are ready, and can be put up by tomorrow. So I hope you will all enjoy that.

The five paths that I talked, last Sunday I talked at the end a little bit, but that was almost at the end. There are five paths: path of accumulation of merit, path of action, path of seeing, path of meditation and path of no more learning. So they are really five that way. Path of no more learning is equal to full enlightenment, if it is the Mahayana path. The Theravada or Hinayana paths also talk about the same thing, with the same language, the same five paths: path of accumulation of merit, path of action, path of seeing, path of meditation and path of no more learning. They talk the same thing, with the same names and same criteria. But it’s all different.

0:09:41.9 My talk was based on the Mahayana path only. So I like to say that very clearly. On the basis of Mahayana, how do you know you entered the path? You enter the path the moment you develop bodhimind; not just develop bodhimind, but develop bodhimind chö ma ma yin pa, without correcting, without forcing. When it naturally develops you enter the path. That’s the first path of Mahayana. Until then we are not on the path, we are lay. Nobody makes the decision whether you are lay or on the path or anything. It is yourself. When you develop bodhimind without correction, without force, naturally developed, then you enter the path of accumulation. Most of the path of accumulation has two purposes: purification of negativities and building merit. Merit merit, not necessarily wisdom merit at this level. These are the major works.

0:11:30.5 When you are looking at the lam rim, from the guru devotional practice to wisdom, all these paths we go through, like guru devotional practice, embracing human life, the importance of it, the difficulty to find it, not lasting, impermanence, gross impermanence represented by death and subtle impermanence as moment to moment change and not only that, the moment we are born in the nature of human life we are born with the destructive mechanism together. So every time, the moment you are born with it, you are in destructive nature. It starts destruction. That’s because our physical body is a perishable commodity. It is going to get yellow and you have to discard it from the fridge. It is like perishable vegetables, very similar. That is because the moment we are born we do have that nature within us. We grow up, we mature and then we decay. They are all happening automatically, because it is subtle impermanence within that.

0:13:36.7 Then look at the future life: question one: is another a thing called future life? Is it there or not? Whether you are on the path of accumulation or pre-path, these are the efforts we put in, for achieving our spiritual development, as most of you are aware, Buddhahood is our goal. That is our purpose; Buddhahood. We don’t want to settle for anything less than best. We are not that type of people who settle for less than best. Whether we achieve it right now or not is a different question. But we should have this long goal. Sooner or later we are sure to achieve it. So since our purpose is not only simply to be free from pains and sufferings, if you are Hinayana or Theravada, your goal is to be free from pains and sufferings. That’s all. That’s why they call it small vehicle; a vehicle that will only take you to that extent. Yana is vehicle, hina is small. The people who practice that as their total practice don’t like that. They have every right, so we always try to explain it as Theravada, the self liberation.

0:16:29.5 However, when you are explaining the differences you have to emphasize it. That’s why I am saying what hina means and what yana means. Yana is vehicle and hina is small. Maha is big and yana is vehicle again. Vajra is indestructible diamond and yana is vehicle. Sometimes Chinese translations will talk about the diamond sutra. That is different. There is something called dorje chöpa mi, that may be the diamond sutra, but many of the Mahayana has been translated as diamond in Chinese versions into English. But whether you call it diamond yana or vajrayana it is the same thing. That also is part of Mahayana. It is not separate from Mahayana. The vajra part is the head. The Mahayana sutra part is the tail of it. So if you want the full body, you need both head and tail. If you only have tail and not head, it won’t work. If you only have the head and not the body, it also won’t work.

0:18:03.4 That’s why actually the Mahayana is divided into two: cause and result. The causal Mahayana is the bodhisattva way and Vajrayana is the result level. So there is causal Mahayana and result Mahayana and joining them together it becomes the full Mahayana. That is from the Vajrayana point of view. But there are a lot of people in the world, a lot of Buddhists, who don’t accept Vajrayana. There are a lot of Buddhists who don’t accept Mahayana either. It is amazing, because before the Chinese destruction in Tibet in 1959 it was sort of really a huge misunderstanding throughout the rest of the world. The Hinayana part will say that this was pure Buddhism and the rest of it was not. Chinese Mahayana and other Mahayana were considered by them to be something different, other than Buddhism.

0:19:40.1 And Chinese Mahayana and even Zen claims to be Mahayana. They don’t accept the Theravada-yana, which is found in Sri Lanka and South-East Asia as Buddhism. They think it is completely separately. The Chinese Mahayana will never accept Vajrayana. They call it “Benzang”, and they think it is something magical-mystical and not even a part of Buddhism. But what the Chinese did is one good thing: by destroying Tibet, all the Tibetan teachings and teachers, including His Holiness, have come out and the Tibetan Buddhism, which has the complete interpretation of all, Mahayana, Hinayana, Vajrayana, all combined together, has come out. People begin to understand and begin to look at it. So that’s one good thing that came out of the destruction of Tibet in 1959.

0:21:07.6

What happened is that the Tibetan leadership has so treasured Buddhism that they were willing to protect it under any circumstances. They were hoping the snow mountains will guard and protect them. They sacrificed their development, not contacting western people; not allowing western people to go into Tibet, though there were a lot of pro-western Tibetans in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. However, no one was really allowed to travel to Tibet, only Lord Thomas and his son and Colonel Young and his son. They came as the American President’s representatives. They could travel and there were a couple of British so called political officers. But it was the British Foreign Service or the British India Office Library Officers. A number of them were in Tibet. Other than that, what the Tibetans allowed were at most Sikkimese, Bhuthanese, Labchas and Lamas. There is a caste called “Lama” within the Himalayas. Of the northern Himalayan portion a few Ladakhis, a few Kinnauris and though these were not Tibetan citizens, they were allowed in, because they are not only friendly, but they are Buddhist.

0:23:59.0 That’s why the British Indian government always employed that type of people within Tibet. So Tibetans sacrificed their development by blocking the western people. They came in to train the army. They came in to educate, with language, with education, with arithmetic and mathematics and any educations. However, the Tibetans didn’t allow them to be there, thinking they were protecting the pure Buddhism.

0:24:39.7 They knew they were sacrificing their country. They knew they could not last that long, that something would happen, either an internal revolution or an external invasion. They knew that, yet they totally sacrificed that in order to protect pure Buddhism. And they did. In our generation, that’s when it went out into the world and today the world has opened their eyes and begin to know. Some of you are purely devoted and purely study and develop yourself. There are a great many scholars who would not necessarily like to develop themselves, but study, because it is a subject to be studied.

0:25:42.5 And then there are curious people who are curiously looking and all kinds of things are happening. What’s really happening is that the eyes of the world opened on Buddhism: Mahayana Buddhism and Vajrayana Buddhism, Theravada Buddhism. So it is quite new in this country, honestly. Theravada Buddhism came to the United States only in the 40s and has continued.

Although the idea of non-violence has been originated from Buddha, it has been adopted in the west even before the 40s. That was the principle in which Martin Luther King acted. That was of course traditionally there in the west. That very idea was familiar, as you people know. I know very little. I used to know the person’s name, but somehow I have a little mental faculty called forgetting and that eats up everything. I think it had it for dinner last night, so I don’t remember today. [transcriber: Probably Henry David Thoreau, (1817 –1862) : “Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.” wikepedia]

0:27:24.0 Anyway, the non-violence idea is almost like western tradition too, not only an eastern tradition. So that’s why the Hinayana and Mahayana are slightly different. The wisdom part of it is not different. The wisdom of emptiness in Hinayana and Mahayana and Vajrayana is the same wisdom. Superior, yes, inferior yes, but the same wisdom, no different. Love-compassion is called method in old Tibetan language. Method means what you do, what you apply, right? How do you handle it, what do you do? Is that called method? Right. So love-compassion is very different. The Hinayana path is: love me, care for me, me, I must be free. The Mahayana path says: you are silly; you can’t be free without freeing others. How are you going to get free without depending on others? You know those people. They are your mothers, they are your fathers, they are your brothers, they are your sisters, they are your wives, they are your husbands, they are your children. How can you walk away without caring? You cannot forget anyone. Everybody is connected and interconnected. Everybody is somehow connected one time or another.

0:29:37.6 Sometimes your husband, sometimes your wife, sometimes your kid, sometimes your mom, sometimes your pop, sometimes your grandfather, sometimes your grandmother. So anywhere, everywhere, somehow it is family and interconnected. How can you ignore them? It is not possible. You are shameless, if you ignore them. That is how Mahayana works.

0:30:24.6 So the principle in Mahayana is love and compassion. And bodhimind, the unlimited, unconditioned, ultimate love and compassion. When that bodhimind becomes natural in you – meaning effortless becoming part of your life – then you enter into the Mahayana path. But that also has three levels: small, medium and big. At the small level and even a little bit at the medium level, you are not so sure you are going to continue or reverse. Not so sure, not so certain. That’s the lower, smaller level. On the medium level you may continuously function, but there is still a chance you may reverse. And on the big level of the path of accumulation of merit you are never going to reverse. You are going to go for total enlightenment, for the benefit of every living being. It is absolutely certain, there is no change. It is completely solid.

0:31:53.6

Then that is really when you enter the Mahayana, and not only have you entered the path, but you entered the path very solidly. Then what do you do? I talked to you up to impermanence, remember? This is the ‘common with the lower level’ path you have covered. Then, if I die today, without having developed anything, what do I do? I take refuge in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. Why Buddha? Why not that little tree over there or that little rock or that little mountain? Why not that little lake? Because Buddha had personal experience just like you and me. He suffered through the same thing. He navigated and reached to the Buddha level. That’s the reason why we choose Buddha, rather than the rock or tree or this spirit or this and that.

0:33:36.0 Not only that, Buddha has unlimited, unconditioned, ultimate compassion and compassion to all of us. It makes no difference to him whether somebody is giving him a sandalwood oil massage or somebody is chopping off his flesh with a chisel. The love of Buddha sees no difference. That’s the second reason. There are 8 reasons why Buddha. When you choose the Buddha, you choose him as doctor, to give the diagnosis and to give medicine. Not Buddha himself, entering our chest like a ghost and functioning. No. We choose Buddha as a doctor. So Buddha gives the diagnosis and medicine. The medicine is Dharma. That’s why we also take refuge in Dharma, because otherwise it will be a doctor without bag.

0:35:07.6 So what is the use? He can look at you, touch you and you can look at him and touch him and shake his hand, but it will do no good. So Dharma is the medicine. Then you need some help and that’s why we have the Sangha too. That’s like-minded people, walking together towards an important goal. That’s what sangha is all about it, honestly. So taking refuge in Buddha, Dharma and Sanhga helps us to do the temporary work, in case death comes before we are able to do anything. Just remembering Buddha alone, Dharma alone, Sangha alone is good enough for you to connect with better karma. That’s natural law.

0:36:20.9 So if you are dying today and you don’t know anything, if you have faith in Buddha or Dharma, then think about Buddha. That is good enough. Buddha guarantees that you will not fall into the lower realms in your next life, if you die thinking about Buddha. That is a temporary measure. The permanent measure is when you deal with your attachment. Attachment is the glue to samsara. It is the target of negativities that Buddhism deals with very strongly.

0:37:20.4 Unfortunately, Buddhism came to India at the time when male chauvinism was functioning at its peak, actually. So many times, you notice in the ancient early Indian Buddhist texts that they talk about the subject of attachment to women, because from the point of view of a male chauvinist society, they are talking about women and actually they are praising women for how attractive they are, how wonderful they are, but they don’t do it the way we do today, measuring the body size from here to there and how long the neck is and how long the legs are. They don’t talk that way, but in a different way. The subject of attachment is used for that and that’s why you had in Aryadeva’s long text zhi gya pa (4oo verses), dealing with attachment. And that is simply that.

0:39:04.2 We now say that it is not only a one way look at women, but also women looking at men the other way round. But whatever we say now, the authors in those days wrote it in that way, so we can’t go and change it now. But his other points are extremely helpful. I didn’t realize you reached to that subject yesterday, until I talked to Gen Rinpoche Yeshe Thapkhe last night and he told me this is what happened. His interpreter/translator is a good translator and he told me that probably some people had difficulty, because he heard those long sighs and he tried to find out why. So naturally that’s why. And remember, this is not looking down on women, that is definitely looking down on attachment and it’s points.

0:40:19.9 There is strong influence of the male chauvinist Indian culture, because that was the local culture at that time. This is a very ancient, ancient text. Buddhism doesn’t look down on women at all. Particularly, in Jewel Heart I very often said it and we are the organization where the feminine principle is one of our themes. That’s because of the people who have been involved right from the beginning with me to set up Jewel Heart, Aura Glaser and Sandy Finkel. Both of them are very, very important feminists. So, they emphasize that very much and we did. We even changed the text of the Vajrayogini sadhana that starts out by saying lama korlo dompa yab yum, and so instead of saying Lama Chakrasamvara Yab Yum we say now Lama Vajrayogini and Lama Chakrasamvara Yab Yum. So the feminine is emphasized and one or our most important yidams is Tara, White Tara. There are lots of activities within Tara. So this is very definitely a feminine principle society and some ancient Indian text, when some teachers come and you read them, you have to explain accordingly what it is and that was written thousands of years ago. So today, no matter whoever and whatever the text may say, it is in our mind that we are able to take them as ornament rather than something a little adverse. So we should really take that as an ornament.

0:42:54.4 Sometimes even we are trying to set up the Tara practice in hip hop or rock form. A number of our important members have objected to me and explained to me, “You know where rock comes from?” I said I have no idea. They said, “From this way…[Rimpoche makes gesture]…one hand touching the wrong place and the other hand going on.” That’s what they explained, “It started that way. So therefore, many of us don’t like it.” I said, “It’s the opposite. Tara is a female deity and this is a female deity’s praise, sung by females as rock.” So the culture is completely reversed, if that is the true case. Then they were all very happy with it. It is the revolution within.

0:44:27.9 Similarly, all the traditional texts, those very old, thousand year-old texts, sometimes have that, because that was the Indian culture at that time. So take them as revolutionized within themselves. And our own culture, our own belief, our own things, should be added up. You don’t add text or you don’t add a message, however, how you take within you is revolutionized. Noam Chomsky has revolutionized the transliteration system and it works so well. We should also do that. That is the Tara Praise in rock singing form. You know why? They have the system of singing it in Tibetan (Rimpoche chants very quickly in Tibetan):

ཨོཾ་རྗེ་བཙུན་མ་འཕགས་མ་སྒྲོལ་མ་ལ་ཕྱག་འཚལ་ལོ།

OM JE TSÜN PAK MA DRÖL MA LA CHAK TSAL LO

OM! (I pay) Homage to You, Noble and Holy Tara!

1.ཕྱག་འཚལ་སྒྲོལ་མ་མྱུར་མ་དཔལ་མོ།

སྤྱན་ནི་སྐད་�

ིག་གློག་དང་འདྲ་མ།

འཇིག་རྟེན་གསུམ་མགོན་ཆུ་སྐྱེས་ཞལ་གྱི།

གེ་སར་བྱེ་བ་ལས་ནི་བྱུང་མ།

CHAK TSÄL DRÖL MA NYUR MA PA MO

CHAN NI KÄ CHIK LOK DANG DRA MA

JIK TEN SUM GÖN CHU KYE ZHÄL GYI

GE SAR JE WA LÄ NI JUNG MA

Homage to Tara, the swift and fearless, XE "Tara:manifestations" \i

whose eyes flash like lightening,

born from a lotus in an ocean of tears

of Avalokiteshvara, Lord of the Three Worlds.

0:45:44.1 It goes that way, very quickly in Tibetan, but you can’t do it the same way in English because it’s too long, so we need something shortened that people can say and enjoy singing and that maybe something better. So I like rock and that’s why I chose the rock system and I asked Sean Ike and a number of people tried. Dimitri tried and he made it into some kind of long singing form, which was not what I am looking for. But a number of people tried their best. Now I believe they are finalizing it. It took a long time, a long time. Sean did a beautiful job and then everybody added up and everybody was angry for a while, because that’s not their own version and then it gradually it is coming together and they there. We have so many great musicians and wonderful things to utilize here and that is really one of the feminine principles we do. Tara’s singing, even if it’s rock, if it is true this way and then it is revolutionized within that. You can do different hand gestures, whatever.

0:47:12.2 So that’s what it is. Not only that, not only impermanence and death and refuge, but also continuously on the basis of the Four Noble Truths seeing all existence that we encounter, as suffering. Sufferings are not here without cause. They are here with causes and conditions. The cause is karma, but the karma is the result of our negative emotions and negative activities. They are caused by negative emotions. So that’s why we are denouncing and renouncing all three root poisons: hatred, obsession and ignorance. Renouncing that. When you renounce that effortlessly you enter the Hinayana path. You really enter the Hinayana path. They don’t contradict, but you have not entered the Mahayana path, but the Hinayana path. The sign, the gateway to entering the Hinayana path, the line, is drawn at developing renunciation effortlessly. And the line drawn for entering the Mahayana path is developing bodhimind without effort.

0:49:21.0

As you say: bodhimind draws the line between Mahayana and others. Refuge draws the line between Buddhists and non-Buddhists. Just like that there are measurements. So that’s why we have these five paths. Then, when you enter renunciation you have freedom as your goal, what they call arhat in Sanskrit, which is the path of no more learning of the Hinayana path. So it is the small total knowledge, not the big total knowledge. We have even smaller total knowledge: I have two in my household. Maybe I myself am one. I don’t see my own problems. But I have two people in my household who have total knowledge. Anything you say they have an explanation, anything. One is here even right now. One is not here, but you all know who they are. Anyway, they are all nice people, kind, good, wonderful people, honestly.

0:50:52.3 So that is the small total knowledge and the big total knowledge is Buddha. That’s how it is and those five talks will be leading towards that; very specifically I talked from the pure sutra path, no vajrayana influence in that.

Okay, so that’s what it is and then I have another announcement I have to make:

0:51:33.5 One of our principles in Jewel Heart is transparency. We had that retreat up in Garrison and I asked our accountant people to give me the total. So it says:

Total attendance: 104, including staff and presenters

Scholarships: Jewel Heart Program Fee Scholarship: $3215

Himalayan Room and Board Scholarship: $3676

That is funded by Richard Gere and somebody else and some people have contributed to the Himalayan people, people from the Himalayan region

Garrison Institute Room and Board Scholarship: $2489.50

Total Paid by Participants: $77,710

Room and Board to Garrison Institute: $57,725

Jewel Heart Program Fee Income: $19, 985

Jewel Heart Expenses: $14,989

Net Surplus: $ 4,994.11

Jewel Heart Store is separate and I don’t need to read it here. Now I may not be able to read because Jewel Heart expenses are quite high at more than $14,000. Our account people gave me details here:

Promotion, Advertising: $4,197

Rimpoche Attendant travelling: $924

Van Rental Total and Gas: $1,675

Supplies: $191

Flowers: $88

Text Printing: $154

Staff and Presenters Room and Board: $1,809

Garrison A/V charge: $350

Speakers Honorariums: $3,600

So that’s the total. In a way, we didn’t lose any money and that’s good. On the other hand, I think Jewel Heart has something like 4,000 left, but we also put the whole office efforts in for three months to organize, arrange and promote this. If you have to have to put that against salaries and expenses for 3 months of the staff I think we lost. Anyway, this is to clarify and I hope we will do all the retreats in that manner, so that everybody knows what comes in and what goes out. We are a true non-profit.

Thank you. Hopefully see you in mid-October. Thank you

0:56:44.6 May all beings…0:57:44.7