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19940125GRKA

0:00:02.9 We are talking here about karma. Out of the four most important characteristics of karma last week we covered that karma is definite. We gave various examples. The examples given here, since it is a traditional teaching that came from India, during the Buddha’s life time, the stories – or rather incidents – we are giving you here are traditional Indian stories. Sometimes they are relevant for modern times, sometimes not so much. However, the point that is raised from this is very much relevant and doesn’t change at all.

0:01:34.6 As far as karma is concerned, whatever the effects of karma on the individual’s life, as much as there were effects before, that much we have effects today. Particularly, the karmic points are so funny these days. We have a saying in Tibetan: earlier karma took life after life to go round. Nowadays in modern times, it takes just as long as to go round your finger tip. It comes very quickly. One reason is that I think everything functions very fast in modern times, compared to earlier times, as we know. Another thing is that traditional religions, particularly Buddhism refer to our period as a degenerated age. In a way it is strange to call it degenerated. We are all very much developed and our awareness is much more than it used to be.

0:03:18.8 Our understanding is far better, whether it is spiritual or scientific. Even the spiritual understanding and awareness is much more than before. Still, it is called a degenerate age. There is truth in it. As much awareness we have, that much opportunity there is of negativities rising within us - as well as positivity. Since our habitual patterns and addictions whatever you like to call it, will bring negativities more than positivities within us. We have no problem of creating negative karma. We do have problems creating positive karma. The problems we face today are not like the traditional style. Traditionally, not knowing or that kind of thing was the problem. But today we create much more negativity in the disguise of wisdom, or rather in the form of wisdom, in the form of analyzing. In many ways we do create negativity differently than we used to.

0:06:08.0 Traditionally we did it either on the point of attachment or hatred or things like that. Today we create them much more differently. It is still attachment, but not the traditional attachment. There is not so much hatred. It’s much less than it used to be. Still, our negativities today are more powerful than they used to be. That’s what we do. If we watch ourselves, if we read the traditional teachings, we will notice this. Traditionally, we get attached to people, just because of attachment or attraction physically, mentally or emotionally. I think the way we create negativity as compared to the old times is totally different. In other words, it has become sophisticated.

0:08:11.0 To tell you the truth, it has become very sophisticated. Our way of approaching has become sophisticated. The way we create negativity as well as positivity has also become sophisticated. That’s what it is. It might not even look like negativity. It might not even look like attachment or hatred. It looks like analyzing. That’s why from the beginning I tried to go around saying that is disguised in the form of wisdom or in that manner we create much more these days. The negativities we create these days are much more sophisticated than traditionally.

So the karmic consequences are also more sophisticated. As much as we create karma sophisticatedly, that much the result comes out the same way. When we try to deal with that we have to deal with it accordingly. That’s why the Vajrayana way of dealing with negativity is very much suitable in today’s world, rather than the more conventional way. Normally we talk about the Theravadan tradition of avoiding contact or a little bit of the Mahayana tradition where maybe you can handle it, but proceed with caution.

0:10:30.4 When you drive through rural areas, sometimes when the road is comfortable you can pass other cars and if the road is not that big there will be signs that say: pass with caution. Then in some areas you can’t pass at all, you just have to keep following the cars in front of you. Very much in that manner, the way we handle the negativities is also very much like that. Since we are creating karma in a very sophisticated way, the way how to handle that has to be also a little more sophisticated, rather than simple black or white. I have been accused of not having room for gray, when I first came to the United States. It had to be either white or black. There was no gray. So now, yes, I think there are a lot of grays there.

0:11:54.6 No matter how sophisticated it might be, the principle of karma as being definite, fast growing and not meeting the result if one did not create the cause, as well as if one has created the causes, then no matter what, one is bound to get the result. These four principles are applicable. They were applicable 2500 years ago and they are still applicable today. So when you look at karma, in a way it is simple. It is cause and effect. Whatever cause you create, you will get a similar result. It’s as simple as that. However, you have to see how these principles are functioning.

0:13:07.8 Last week we covered the principle that karma is definite, through certain old traditional examples. Today I would like to cover that karma is fast growing. Those of you who have read the Liberation in the Palm of your Hands, I am quite sure there are a number of examples in there.

Audience: Maintaining a way of life that involves creating negative causes on and on in an unconscious way, the example I remember is that of a butcher. It’s his livelihood and he needs to live, so he has to kill over and over and he is getting much less aware over time that is committing non-virtues.

0:14:46.3 Rimpoche: That is another problem. If your livelihood, the method you pay your bills is by nature negative, like being a butcher, which means killing animals, that is a negative action. If you have such a nature, if your profession is such, what would you do? That is another question. If you can, you should definitely change. I do know one person, Papa Max. You probably heard about Lama Yeshe. In the late 70s and early 80s he was travelling around, giving a lot of teachings and he helped a lot of people. Now they have huge centers everywhere around the world. Among his people I know two persons. There is Australian guy called Papa Max and one American black lady, called Mama Max.

0:16:51.1 Papa Max is a very, very nice guy. I came to know him in Delhi and he came and listened and took teachings. He was a full-fledged monk or bikshu, very nice person. Later I came to know his background. Earlier he was a butcher in Melbourne, Australia. Lama Yeshe was on tour in Australia and gave teachings and I think he was talking about karma. Papa Max happened to attend that lecture and came for a couple of days. He could afford to sell his business. He had made enough money. So he sold it and went to Nepal and did retreats and meditated for a while and a year later he became a monk and he is still now a monk now, for 14, 15 years. So he is an example of having given up that livelihood. He could, because he was quite well to do. He then also used his wealth for good causes, particularly saving lives and things like that. So any project of that kind, saving lives in particular, is good. You can buy fish from the fish market or chicken that are meant to be slaughtered. So Papa Max always carried a bunch of Indian rupees and kept buying and saving animals. That’s one example.

0:19:37.5 One has to have respect of life, but on the other hand, if your profession is such that it is creating difficulties and suffering for others it might not be worth it for the individual to keep doing it. From a Buddhist background we always have to think not only about the life from birth until we die. This is life after life, reincarnation. That is long and strenuous.

One of my teachers Gen Yungdrung Rinpoche was my first teacher who taught me the Tibetan alphabet and how to memorize things as well as the Lam Rim meditation. He was a great guy and student of Pabonghka. He had very few students, like four, five and they all were great teachers, with the exception of me. When Gen Yungdrung Rinpoche passed away it was during the winter. I was a kid. They said he was very sick and I didn’t really know. The day he passed I was in Drepung monastery. He was in Lhasa. There was a very wealthy noble family called Shatar. That is the family that used to sponsor Tsongkhapa way back in the 1400s. They are very wealthy. In the 1400’s and even before that they were one of the traditional big families. So Gen Rinpoche was sick and living in their house and then he passed away. The day he passed away we saw him in Drepung.

0:23:15.5 One of teachers was with me for 24 hours. I was naughty, so I had to be scared of him and he sat there all the time. Even when he was not there they used to put some kind of pillow inside his blanket and left it there. And in the dim light you couldn’t see and it was not really sure if the person was there or not. That’s why still now, I like bright lights. So Gen Peljor was living with me and I was sitting there and suddenly Gen Yungdrung Rinpoche walked through our room. I got up and Gen Peljor got up and Gen Yungdrung Rinpoche walked by and looked at the statues in the altar room. He took his hat off and respectfully looked at the altar and then he looked at me and smiled and looked at him and smiled and then went away. I went looking after him outside, but he was not there.

0:24:22.2 So that was actually the time when he passed away. The reason I am telling you this is that when he was sick for a long time he couldn’t speak. He had a stroke and couldn’t speak for a long time, while living with this particular family. Then the day before he died he spoke. He got better and spoke. The members of that family were not there at the time. They were in India. They had a lot of managers for the eastern, western, southern and northern areas of their properties. There was a council of managers. The family are almost like prisoners, because the council controls everything to the point of telling you what to eat today. So Gen Rinpoche called the council of managers in and spoke to them, “I am sick. It is not my personal problem, but that of this family. You all have to be very careful. When you really have to experience this on your physical body and mind, then that is strenuous.” That’s all he said and then he said, “I prayed to Buddha, Dharma and Sangha that I would be able to speak and tell you this and they have given me the opportunity to speak and that’s all I have to say.”

0:26:50.2 That’s why I remember that word. So sometimes our profession is very important. Of course paying our bills is absolutely important. However, if it is a wrong profession and when the karmic consequences come, they come not only in one life, but through this reincarnation period it goes a long way. When we have to experience it personally, physically or mentally, I believe it is very strenuous. That’s why it is worth to check and pay attention to what we do.

0:28:21.1 Even if it is not our profession, we need to pay attention to the things we do. Karma is something so strange. We call it karma as though it is a completely separate department somewhere over there. But unfortunately it is not. It is with everybody, in every part of our life, whether you are young or old, child or teenager, grown up or old, whatever it is; whether we are playing or serious, whether it is our job or just a casual activity, and particularly, when we act through body and speech. The mind is way beyond that. In our mind we create so many things. We kill people so many times and we overrun, push them aside, paralyze them and do all sorts of things in our mind. It is negative in nature, but not as much when we actually act out, either physically or through speech. I think it is slightly different. It is not free of negative karma, but we it is not a complete negative action. If we kill someone in our mind they don’t die. We don’t have the actual negative karma of killing or destroying somebody in our mind.

0:30:54.9 The mind is like a monkey. There is no control for whatsoever. It will keep on thinking. I am sure each one of us is familiar with our own mind. When we get angry we wish those people will drop dead. All of this we do. That is mental killing. It is not good, it is negative. I think there is some kind of negative karma, but we did not act it out physically or verbally.

0:31:31.1 When it becomes action, it becomes something. So we have to pay attention. It doesn’t have to be serious, both negative and positive karma don’t have to be serious at all. We do a lot of things quite casually. That’s what we have to be careful about. The point of the subject today that we are supposed to talk is the quality of fast growing. I do have a couple of traditional, old style stories. On that particular outline in this particular book, there are about 102 different stories on just that point.

I don’t know the title of this book. We used to call it the Mongolian Lam Rim. Yes, it is a three volume Mongolian Lam Rim. One Mongolian lama collected all the different stories from the different sutras and tantras and kept on telling them. The Mongolians are very difficult people to convince. Mind you, Ghengis Khan is from there. He was a really wild person. A couple of years, Steve Kronenberg wanted to study Tibetan and ended up studying Mongolian and Siberian, because of the department, which was not University of Michigan.

I know he said, “I came here in the hope of studying Dharma, but I ended up studying the Barbarians.” So the Mongolians are like that. I don’t mean the Mongolians are Barbarians, please, but they are. I am sorry. So the way they were taught by their Mongolian teachers was through stories. They only gave examples and stories, genuine stories quoted from the sutras. So on this particular point, the first one shows how a tiny, little karma can grow very big.

When you go into these sutra stories they will talk to you about the Buddha before ours and the one before that and so on. So this was during Amithaba Buddha’s official period. In this fortunate eon we are supposed to have 1000 buddhas – official ones. So I call it a tenure. We are right now under the tenure of Shakyamuni Buddha, the fourth official Buddha of this eon. Three others have already passed and there is another 997 to go. So the Buddha before Shakyamuni Buddha was Amithaba Buddha. In his period there was a king called Titi who built a huge stupa. And there a worker who worked on that stupa.

Later, in Buddha’s period that worker was reborn as a singer who had a tremendously beautiful voice but had terrible looks. She ended up giving concerts from behind a curtain. People couldn’t look at her. They had to turn around. So they put up curtains and she was performing behind the curtain.

0:36:53.5 She had such a tremendous voice. So people asked what happened. Buddha said that in her previous life the worked on that stupa and was cursing all the time while it was being built. But in the end when it was finished, he liked it and out of his salary bought a little golden bell. As the result of that he got reborn as the singer. Many of you will have heard that story and I am sure it is in the Liberation in the Palm of your Hands.

There is another story. During that period of Amithaba Buddha, when this particular stupa was completed, a person who worked there bought a lot of gold and make an altar type of decoration on the stupa outside made of pure gold. That also had a little image of the Buddha of that period. He put it in there. The decoration was put on the top of the stupa. In those days gold may not have been as expensive as we think of today. That little karma then grew. During the period of Shakyamuni Buddha a child was and that child was known to have gold hands. The family became very wealthy since the birth of the child. According to this ancient story hundred thousands of gold [bars] grew because of the child. So they became extremely wealthy. That particular child gave away everything to everybody, whoever came and asked. Nobody in the family could stop him. He gave everything away all the time and the more he gave away the more he would have coming in – all the time.

0:40:20.9 Gradually, that person met Buddha and he sponsored him and his disciples for a couple of months. He provided the food for Buddha and all his retinue and attended the teachings of Buddha and became an arhat. So simple – almost like that. So the disciples of Buddha asked, “We have to work very hard to get any insights. How come this one quickly becomes arhat, just like that? What’s the cause?” So Buddha relayed the story that in the time of the previous Buddha this guy had been a worker on that stupa and the karma of buying that little gold ornament on the top of the stupa had created so much good karma for this person in this life time. So even when just staying home he became so wealthy. The moment he started on the spiritual path, without any efforts he became an arhat. Just a simple little karma can do different things like that.

0:41:56.3 Another story: There was a very powerful king in India at that period, 2500 years ago called Gyal po Sa kye. One poor person in his kingdom had nothing, in the sense of not having any title, prestige and was subject of that particular king. There was a child born to that poor peasant family and along with that child an elephant appeared in the house. I am telling you ancient Hindu-Buddhist mythological stories. That elephant happened to be a golden elephant, ok, that’s a funny story. Whatever dung this golden elephant produced was also gold. So the family became very wealthy.

At the same time, the king’s wife gave birth to a daughter. She became a beautiful princess. When she was grown up the son of that family passed through some kind of garden and the royal family was passing through the same garden. They saw each other. He saw her and thought, “Wow, she is fantastic.” She saw him and according to this book, their eyes locked and they couldn’t take their eyes off each other during that period.

0:44:50.2 However, their social status was so different. They couldn’t talk to each other and couldn’t even get near each other, but could only see each other from a distance. He went back and told his father the next morning, “Our king has a nice daughter.” The father said, “Yes, that’s Princess So and So.” The son said, “Is it possible that I marry her?” The father said, “What are you talking about? Forget it, we are in this condition and category and the caste we are part of is not the appropriate caste for the royal family to marry. But you are a different person. You have different karma. What do I know? But otherwise it is not possible at all.”

0:46:05.2 The son said, “So how would I proceed?” The father said, “First you have to get close to the king and then from there you will probably see it’s not possible. But you may have different karma, so who knows?”

0:46:18.9 The son said, “Then I would like to give the king some extraordinary gift, so that he will have to see me.” He thought about whatever he could think of the king already had it. Besides that, in that period they would say, “The king owns everything in the kingdom anyway.”

So he couldn’t find anything. He went to his golden elephant and asked, “Can you spare your golden tusk? I like to give it to the king.” The elephant said, “Yeah, ok.” So he got this gold elephant tusk to the king and told him, “I have an extraordinary gift for you.”

0:47:18.8 End of recording (way too early, in the middle of the story)

Liberation in the Palm page 436-437: Kanakavatsa was an elder of the Sangha. At the time of his birth seven elephants appeared spontaneously in his family’s treasure vaults. All the elephants’ droppings and urine were gold, so Kanakavatsa was well provided for. Seven times King Ajatashatru had the elephants stolen, but this did not succeed, because the elephants would sink into the ground [and return to their owner]. This was said to have been the result of a past life when Kanakavatsu had restored and gilded a clay statue of Buddha Kanakamuni’s elephant mount.