The Dalai Lama's Teachings on the Spiritual Path (2 March 2012)

0:01 black tea would be the best. Black tea with milk and sugar, black tea alone. Alone. Report an error in the passage at 0:01 Highlight the passage at 0:01

0:18 Okay, I doubt that will be necessary. Report an error in the passage at 0:18 Highlight the passage at 0:18

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1:09 We're overflowing into the office. nights in San Francisco are terrible days for parking, so just letting you know that we will have people walking in late. Report an error in the passage at 1:09 Highlight the passage at 1:09

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1:14 people like to use chairs. Report an error in the passage at 1:14 Highlight the passage at 1:14

1:20 You have to sit all the way around the corner. Report an error in the passage at 1:20 Highlight the passage at 1:20

1:25 We Report an error in the passage at 1:25 Highlight the passage at 1:25

1:39 still have two minutes. We're early. I'll just start Okay. Report an error in the passage at 1:39 Highlight the passage at 1:39

1:53 keys, so you've been stopped with T, and you're locked up, so then I just have to get the key from you before I go back upstairs, okay. We'll keep you locked. Bye. I'll ask permission. May I go to my room? You have to stay here. I'll have to keep talking until you give me the key. Report an error in the passage at 1:53 Highlight the passage at 1:53

2:26 Yes, thank you. Report an error in the passage at 2:26 Highlight the passage at 2:26

2:46 welcome you all tonight. Report an error in the passage at 2:46 Highlight the passage at 2:46

2:51 Professor Newland, if anybody heard it two years ago, you know. We'll be able to confirm that he's a literary social book, Report an error in the passage at 2:51 Highlight the passage at 2:51

3:06 he's heard recordings, or he's heard him on our archives, and those of you who are the chair of the Department of Philography and Living at Franklin and Michigan University, and we'll talk about Michigan, something about Michigan, and then we'll go. Report an error in the passage at 3:06 Highlight the passage at 3:06

3:28 And he's got there since 88, so it's a long time. I know, I know him through his book, and some of you are familiar with this Report an error in the passage at 3:28 Highlight the passage at 3:28

3:43 to Professor Newton, who had the translator for us. you can buy that at our bookstore also. These are the cheat foods, some of my favorite things. Report an error in the passage at 3:43 Highlight the passage at 3:43

4:04 Introduction to Emptiness came after that. Yes. You don't have that. Report an error in the passage at 4:04 Highlight the passage at 4:04

4:13 Yes. You have to restock. I'm sure Snow Lion is waiting for your order, is what I'm going to be talking about. It isn't quite out yet. Report an error in the passage at 4:13 Highlight the passage at 4:13

4:29 Okay. Well, thank you, Teresa. Yeah. In a way. Yeah. What do you think? Is that okay? I have a pretty loud voice. Okay, if you have the prayer book, on page 34 there's the taking refuge. I just want to, in English, do the refuge three times as indicated and then we'll start. Report an error in the passage at 4:29 Highlight the passage at 4:29

5:09 I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Supreme Assembly by my practice at giving and other perfections. May I become a Buddha to benefit all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Supreme Assembly by my practice of giving and other perfections. Report an error in the passage at 5:09 Highlight the passage at 5:09

5:32 May I become a Buddha to benefit all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Supreme Assembly by my practice of giving and other perfections. May I become a Buddha to benefit all sentient beings. Report an error in the passage at 5:32 Highlight the passage at 5:32

5:55 Yes, thank you, Teresa and David. Report an error in the passage at 5:55 Highlight the passage at 5:55

6:03 Can you pick me up? Okay. I'm happy to be back here and see all of you again. Report an error in the passage at 6:03 Highlight the passage at 6:03

6:20 I'm a Buddhist, but not a real Buddhist teacher. I'm a Buddhist and a professor of Buddhism also, which are two independent things, independent variables, and neither of which add up to being an actual Buddhist teacher, if you understand what I mean. So that's the way it stands as far as my credentials are concerned. Report an error in the passage at 6:20 Highlight the passage at 6:20

6:51 I wanted to start by sort of... I don't know, as Teresa mentioned, I have something that I'm excited about to share and that I was very fortunate to stumble into a situation where I got to be the translator of a new book that will be coming out this year by the Dalai Lama. Report an error in the passage at 6:51 Highlight the passage at 6:51

7:21 It was just a very interesting set of circumstances where this text, Lamrim Chemo, that I'd been involved in translating, that His Holiness came to teach at Lehigh, and then they said, well, why don't you take the teachings that he gave and make them into a book in English? And so then I was able to do that about three years ago. And since then, we've been having various problems with... Report an error in the passage at 7:21 Highlight the passage at 7:21

7:48 Other sort of complicated legal things which ultimately have been wrapped up and the book will be coming out this year. So we don't have it to look at, unfortunately, but it does exist and I gave you your handout there. Report an error in the passage at 7:48 Highlight the passage at 7:48

8:08 I'll just go over what's in there as an overview. First, I just made a quick overview of the topics from... just to show. Report an error in the passage at 8:08 Highlight the passage at 8:08

8:15 The text that the Dalai Lama was teaching, Tsongkhapa's Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path, by going through the topics as they're outlined in the back of each of the three volumes of the English translation. And it's a rough outline. Then there's the prologue or salutation from Tsongkhapa's text, which we're actually going to be looking at as we go through what the Dalai Lama taught. Report an error in the passage at 8:15 Highlight the passage at 8:15

8:41 Then there's a sort of an outline of... Some of the things that the Dalai Lama talked about over six days at Lehigh when he tried to teach the great treatise and stages of the path to enlightenment, and he did teach it in a very distinctive and creative and unusual way, as I'm going to explain. And then I just have the title page and the table of contents and my own part of my preface from the book. And then that part where the Dalai Lama is actually talking. Report an error in the passage at 8:41 Highlight the passage at 8:41

9:10 I have it, but I can't give it out yet because then Snow Lion would be very unhappy since they're counting on selling copies of it. Report an error in the passage at 9:10 Highlight the passage at 9:10

9:20 So it's an interesting question to start with. What is the most important book ever written in Tibetan? So that leaves out all of Nagarjuna, leaves out all the Shastras. You know, the great Indian masters has to be written in Tibetan. You know, I think if you ask a lot of people, they said, well, Tibetan Book of the Dead, you know, or something. And maybe, right? Report an error in the passage at 9:20 Highlight the passage at 9:20

9:49 But I would think that wouldn't necessarily be the best nominee. Certainly a case, a strong case can be made that it's Tsongkhapa's Lamrim Chema or Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment. First of all, if you're part of the Dalai Lama's type of Tibetan Buddhism, which is called Gilukba, and that is the type of Tibetan Buddhism that this center is also affiliated with, then this book, written in 1402 by Tsongkhapa, is the kind of definitive, and is the first and most definitive and comprehensive exposition of the views of... Report an error in the passage at 9:49 Highlight the passage at 9:49

10:35 The philosophical views and it covers the whole path and it not only does that but it tries to show why this way of explaining the path is completely convincing and justified in terms of all kinds of quotes from Indian sutras and shastras. So it's like there can be lots of other books that go into detail on specific points and present it. Report an error in the passage at 10:35 Highlight the passage at 10:35

11:00 Present the path or pieces of the path in different ways, but this is kind of the first and most definitive presentation of the path from a Gelukpa point of view. So I would say that if you take the Gelukpa point of view, the point of view of the Dalai Lama's home sect of Tibetan Buddhism, you probably have to say that that is the single most important book that's ever written in Tibetan. Report an error in the passage at 11:00 Highlight the passage at 11:00

11:22 And you could even make a case if you step back, you know, if you're a partisan of one of the other orders, you might have another book that you prefer to put in that place. But when you step back and you look at, you know, look at it from the outside, from the whole range of Tibetan history, I don't know if any of those books would have a good case to measure up against the great treatise on the stage of the path to enlightenment as the most important book. Report an error in the passage at 11:22 Highlight the passage at 11:22

11:51 Because a lot of the arguments that other people make are in some ways responsive to or derived from or trying to cope with this force of the argument that Tsongkhapa made. In other words, the force of what he did in 1402 in this text was so great that everybody had to take account for it. Everybody was influenced by it. Report an error in the passage at 11:51 Highlight the passage at 11:51

12:17 Both in a positive way, that is stealing the things, incorporating the things that they liked out of what he did into what their sect was doing. And also reacting against it and saying it's just horrible that you're doing this thing. But now they're talking about the thing that he's doing. So in that way I'd argue that in terms of the books that are written in Tibetan. Report an error in the passage at 12:17 Highlight the passage at 12:17

12:36 That this is probably the most important book ever. And I've looked at some like Western sources that are just sort of giving a broad survey of Tibetan Buddhism. And this is the book that, you know, serious books are most likely to mention. It's sort of representing, you know, a kind of, this is the sort of thing you find in Tibetan Buddhism. So here we, and then we have the Dalai Lama. Report an error in the passage at 12:36 Highlight the passage at 12:36

12:58 Obviously the preeminent Buddhist in the world, although, you know, not everybody. Not everybody's cup of tea, but more people's cup of tea than anybody else you can name. He's the preeminent Buddhist in the world and he's been on the global scene since the 1970s, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. Report an error in the passage at 12:58 Highlight the passage at 12:58

13:23 He's taught this text, which is the foundational core work of his type of Buddhism, ten times. But he had never taught it in the West until 2008 and all that time. And there's good reason to think, well, there's some reason to think that he may not do it again, that this may be the time that he teaches that whole book. Report an error in the passage at 13:23 Highlight the passage at 13:23

13:51 So why did he not do it for all that time and why did he choose to do it on this particular occasion? Well, I think one of the reasons, the most obvious reason he doesn't do it is because until then, Available in English in its entirety, only portions of it were. And basically, you know, the people, Joshua and Diana, who sponsored the translation, just asked him, he said, basically, you know, we're going to get this whole book translated and if we really do it, will you... Report an error in the passage at 13:51 Highlight the passage at 13:51

14:23 Come and teach it when we do. And he said, yes. And so then they said, here's the translation. And so then he, of course, agreed to follow through on his commitment and came and taught it. Report an error in the passage at 14:23 Highlight the passage at 14:23

14:36 And I think it's important to, so they organized this event at a major university in a wrestling arena that held 4,000 people. And it was packed for six days. And now there were a lot of saṅgha, there were a lot of monks and nuns from all different types of Buddhism from all around the world who were with him up on the stage. Report an error in the passage at 14:36 Highlight the passage at 14:36

15:08 But then there were thousands of Westerners. And you couldn't say for sure how much the average person in this audience actually knew about Buddhism or whether they'd just come because the Dalai Lama was giving a talk or something like that. So it was a decidedly mixed audience to which he had to present through a translator in a limited number of sessions a book that is 1,000 pages of dense writing in Tibetan. Report an error in the passage at 15:08 Highlight the passage at 15:08

15:44 you know, three volumes in English translation. He couldn't really explain the whole thing and he had this challenge of multiple levels of audiences going on at the same time. So what I want to try to do first to start with is sort of say, well, what did he do with that situation? What do we see as the distinctive features of Tsongkhapa's text? Report an error in the passage at 15:44 Highlight the passage at 15:44

16:12 And what did the Dalai Lama in this particular context of his time of teaching this in the West do with that situation in terms of what he chose to explain. This is just a preview overview of that and then we're going to go through and I'm just going to sort of hit some high points section by section after we give you this sort of preview. Report an error in the passage at 16:12 Highlight the passage at 16:12

16:39 First of all, the distinctive feature that's talked about over and over again of the lamrim or stages of the path way of teaching is the idea of integrating all of the Dharma teachings so that they can be practiced by a single person sitting on one cushion. That's the phrase they use. That is, they're not to be seen as contradictory. Report an error in the passage at 16:39 Highlight the passage at 16:39

17:05 But as appropriate for a single person as they progress through different stages of development. So this is what we say the distinctive feature of the lamrim way of organizing things, is that you get all of the teachings packaged together. And that there aren't any that can be left out because they don't appeal to you. It's just maybe not the ones that sort of fit with where you are right now. Report an error in the passage at 17:05 Highlight the passage at 17:05

17:39 But they're all for you. All the Buddha's teachings are for you. It's just at different stages of development. That's the basic idea of the lamrim way of organizing. And Tsongkhapa really hits this theme hard. And the Dalai Lama follows through on that theme very hard, I think, in the way he presents. And we'll talk about that a lot. Report an error in the passage at 17:39 Highlight the passage at 17:39

18:00 Second, really as opposed or distinct to many of the other lamrim texts or lamrim-like texts that you see in Tibetan, this work, the Great Treatise, is called Great, I think, because it's really packed, not just with pithy practice instructions, but extensive citations of Indian... Texts showing why this is the right thing to do rather than something else based on Indian sources. So Tsongkhapa packs the book. Report an error in the passage at 18:00 Highlight the passage at 18:00

18:37 He shows his mastery of all of this Indian Buddhist literature and he shows why having read it carefully and thought about it carefully and tried to sort out apparent contradictions in order to figure out what makes sense, he's come to these particular conclusions and that they're more Cogent than other conclusions that other people have come to before. It's in that sort of vein. And the Dalai Lama, in taking this, you have to think of, okay, that was Tsongkhapa's situation in 1402 in Tibet when he laid this out. Report an error in the passage at 18:37 Highlight the passage at 18:37

19:11 The Dalai Lama is now in 2008 in Lehi. He doesn't have the same situation. And so it's a very, very different situation. And so he also... It just fills his presentation with all kinds of references to Indian Shastra, Indian treatises, Indian Buddhist texts of all different sorts. But he first of all doesn't limit himself to the ones that Tsongkhapa quoted. He doesn't even seem to emphasize the ones that Tsongkhapa quoted. He's kind of like showing his own way of seeing how all this material fits together in surprising different ways that aren't even in Tsongkhapa's text. Report an error in the passage at 19:11 Highlight the passage at 19:11

19:53 And he does this for a different purpose, I think, than what Tsongkhapa is doing. Tsongkhapa is trying to show why this is the right way rather than these other confused ways that other Tibetans have had. Whereas the Dalai Lama's concern is to find common ground with other Tibetan Buddhists rather than to try to show that his way is the right one. Report an error in the passage at 19:53 Highlight the passage at 19:53

20:14 And so he pulls out all these different quotes in order to find Like common themes of how the stages of the path approach goes back to Nagarjuna, goes back to Arya Deva, goes back to people who are the common Dharma ancestors of all Tibetan Buddhists, of all Buddhists around the world. And thereby, like instead of saying this is why the Gelukpa way is the best, the force of it rhetorically is always to say, yeah, this does go back to India. Report an error in the passage at 20:14 Highlight the passage at 20:14

20:45 And India's... The common ancestor of all of us Buddhists. It has this common thing of tracing it back to India with Tsongkhapa's original text but for a completely different reason as I read it. Report an error in the passage at 20:45 Highlight the passage at 20:45

21:00 Another subtext that occurs to me is that of course the Dalai Lama lives in India. And he's in exile and he doesn't have, you know, of course at this point he could probably live other places if he wanted to. But, I mean, that's been his home for all these years. And these people, you know, rescued him when he didn't really have any other place to go. And there's a really palpable sense of gratitude when he talks about India. Report an error in the passage at 21:00 Highlight the passage at 21:00

21:27 He says basically everything that we have to teach in Tibetan Buddhism comes from India. There isn't anything that we've made up in Tibet. It's all derived from the Indian tradition. And so he says, of all the different people that he teaches about Buddhism, he says he always feels the deepest sense of happiness when he has Indians who come to him and ask him to teach him about Buddhism because he's saying, we got all this from you and is just so happy that we can now give it back. Report an error in the passage at 21:27 Highlight the passage at 21:27

22:04 Yeah, there's a subtext there, which is the implication that he might be a little bit less happy to be talking to people in America that he's actually talking to when he's saying that. But we'll come to that later. I will get back to that. Anyway, another related point is that... In the later parts of this book, The Great Treatise on the Stage of the Path to Enlightenment, Tsongkhapa has a powerful, unique and in the history of Tibetan Buddhism controversial way of showing that reliable knowledge about conventional distinctions between right and wrong or table and cat or up and down hold up and are completely fit with the idea that everything is completely empty of any intrinsic nature. Report an error in the passage at 22:04 Highlight the passage at 22:04

22:54 Not all the different Tibetan philosophers agreed with Tsongkhapa's interpretation and he certainly thought that they were wrong in their interpretations and that sense of trying to make distinctions and show why he's right and the other people have gone to some extreme is very sharply drawn in Tsongkhapa's work. Report an error in the passage at 22:54 Highlight the passage at 22:54

23:18 He doesn't call anybody names and in fact he never names specific Tibetans that he's attacking. But he attacks specific wrong points of view very sharply. And these points of view do represent the points of view that are held by other Tibetans, not just at the time, but down to today. And so the Dalai Lama doesn't do like that. Instead, even though that's like a major way that the book reads, when the Dalai Lama is teaching it, He focuses on this idea of dependent arising. Now dependent arising, of course, from Tsongkhapa's point of view is the way to understand how, is part of the argument of how you reconcile conventional existence and emptiness, is in terms of the teaching of dependent arising. Report an error in the passage at 23:18 Highlight the passage at 23:18

24:09 But when the Dalai Lama talks about dependent arising, he constantly does it in terms of finding common ground between the different... Types of Tibetan Buddhism between all the different kinds of Buddhism and then beyond that in the broadest sense, especially in the beginning of the book with everybody in the world in terms of seeing connections between things. Report an error in the passage at 24:09 Highlight the passage at 24:09

24:27 So it's always focused on saying, look, this is what I believe. I'm not, you know, backing away from that. But on the other hand, he doesn't like ever doing it in a way that's like making it so that the other person's wrong. Instead, he's like trying to find the common ground. Between what he's saying he believes and what's also true and what others are saying. That's not just in this teaching, but I see that as like everything. Report an error in the passage at 24:27 Highlight the passage at 24:27

24:55 Like I went back and looked at kindness, clarinet, insight, which are his talks from the first time he came over to the United States. And that's the same thing in there. That it's this just determined search to figure out how to be. The Dalai Lama of all Tibetan Buddhists, not just the partisan representative of Tsongkhapa's particular lineage of Gilukba. Report an error in the passage at 24:55 Highlight the passage at 24:55

25:20 And not everybody likes that about the Dalai Lama. We'll talk about more, but that's the way he is. And he's pretty stubborn in his quest to find common ground, you know, rather than be a sort of fundamentalist of... Report an error in the passage at 25:20 Highlight the passage at 25:20

25:39 A certain way of looking at things. And I would say finally, the last point, that Tsongkhapa's book very, very repeatedly and heavily emphasizes the need for logical analysis. That meditation isn't spacing out, that enlightenment isn't a process of just stopping thinking. Nor is it the fact that you can just analyze things and realize that things are empty and then never do any more analysis again because you finished with that and now from then on it's just setting your mind in open spaciousness. Report an error in the passage at 25:39 Highlight the passage at 25:39

26:17 Tsongkhapa is relentlessly going after this idea that meditation includes analysis that it's essential to analyze in order to realize emptiness. You have to understand emptiness and apply that analysis to your own. I mean, he's... Report an error in the passage at 26:17 Highlight the passage at 26:17

26:33 Introspectively to your own sense of self and realize emptiness analytically and then later on do the same thing again and again and again until it becomes deeply habituated and not everybody liked that to say the least. I mean I could just think of Koranbar for example. There's lots of like great scholars from other sects of Tibetan Buddhism who are either advocating that we just ease off on all this conceptuality. Report an error in the passage at 26:33 Highlight the passage at 26:33

27:04 Or that we do a little bit of analysis and then once we see how things aren't findable, then we never analyze again. These are very important, popular practices and teachings that are part of Tibetan Buddhism that really go against the grain of this emphasis on analysis. And Tsongkhapa pushes very hard on this. And so the Dalai Lama on this point, he seems to... Report an error in the passage at 27:04 Highlight the passage at 27:04

27:31 To frame things in an interesting way, I've just sort of been rereading and rereading until I think I've sort of figured out what he's doing on this point. Because he can't, he believes this, right? I mean, he thinks that's right. He agrees with Tsongkhapa. There are no points on which he disagrees with Tsongkhapa. Report an error in the passage at 27:31 Highlight the passage at 27:31

27:48 It's just the question of how you say it and what you're trying to accomplish. Are you trying to prove the other people are wrong or are you trying to bring people together? It's not like he's changed his views from what Tsongkhapa says. Report an error in the passage at 27:48 Highlight the passage at 27:48

28:00 So what are you going to say with this one? Well, he talks about logical analysis and reasoning. And instead of saying this is what makes my sect better than your sect because yours are too spacey, he says this is the basis of our whole tradition. It's like this doesn't go back to Tsongkhapa, this goes back to Nalanda University in India. And all of the great masters, you know, and he's always... Report an error in the passage at 28:00 Highlight the passage at 28:00

28:28 I don't know if you've read his stuff about the 17 Nalanda masters, but he wrote a poem in the book The Middle Way. Thuptanjimba is the translator for that book, a book called The Middle Way. In the back of that, the Dalai Lama has a poem, praise to the 17 Nalanda masters. So he names 17 great Indian Buddhist masters of the Nalanda Monastic University in Bihar that was one of the great... Report an error in the passage at 28:28 Highlight the passage at 28:28

28:56 Monasteries, great libraries and universities in the world between the 5th and the 12th centuries. And he says, all of what's great about Tibetan Buddhism comes from these Nalanda masters. And by that, he means all Tibetan Buddhism. And he always mentions Shantarakshita. Shantarakshita, he had an important role in bringing Buddhism to Tibet. Report an error in the passage at 28:56 Highlight the passage at 28:56

29:20 But he brought it to Tibet way before Atisha and the beginning of the Dalai Lamas. When you look at the great Nyingma philosopher of the 19th century, Mipom, he looks back to Shantarakshita. So every time I see the Dalai Lama make a point of bringing Shantarakshita, I'm thinking, well, why is he talking about Shantarakshita? It has nothing to do with this. Report an error in the passage at 29:20 Highlight the passage at 29:20

29:43 Oh, he wants to make sure that the Nyingma tradition is understanding that they're... Their sense of what they're taking as Buddhist philosophy is being included in what he's talking about, not just Chandrakirti, which is more what Tsongkhapa would prefer to talk about. Report an error in the passage at 29:43 Highlight the passage at 29:43

30:03 Anyway, that's been a huge issue. You could talk about other things. For example, you could say all Tibetan Buddhism comes from the Tantric Mahasiddhas of India. So, um, Report an error in the passage at 30:03 Highlight the passage at 30:03

30:05 for the... Report an error in the passage at 30:05 Highlight the passage at 30:05

30:17 He doesn't say that, right? He could say that, but he doesn't say that. He says, we're all in debt to the great Nalanda masters of India. This is a very, this sort of dawns on me that this is like an extremely clever thing, right? Skillful, right? Because on the one hand, by saying that, he's saying what's essential to our tradition is logical analysis that goes, looks into the nature of reality and doesn't quit. Report an error in the passage at 30:17 Highlight the passage at 30:17

30:44 And on the other hand, he's saying that's what's common to us all. Instead of saying, you're wrong because you don't do it. Report an error in the passage at 30:44 Highlight the passage at 30:44

30:56 I already explained the general setting and I've given you a preview of what kinds of themes I'm going to hit on. I just want to talk about some of the specific things that he said. He started the first day getting there late. All right. Okay. Report an error in the passage at 30:56 Highlight the passage at 30:56

31:17 And just off the plane and jet-lagged and immediately started giving fantastic talk, starting by talking about his three commitments. And by way of introducing himself as the teacher to this audience of people maybe who hadn't ever heard him speak before, these commitments he talks about all the time. Report an error in the passage at 31:17 Highlight the passage at 31:17

31:40 He has a commitment to helping the world generate a sense of global responsibility, a commitment to religious harmony. And a commitment to working out a better relationship between China and Tibet, finding peace between China and Tibet. Those are his three commitments. They're on his website. He talks about them all the time, those three things. So they're kind of circles. Report an error in the passage at 31:40 Highlight the passage at 31:40

32:05 The first one is the biggest one. You know, global responsibility, in which he doesn't even think of himself as a religious person, but just a person. And then the second one is like, okay, well, as a religious person, I have a responsibility as a Buddhist to promote good understanding with other religions. Report an error in the passage at 32:05 Highlight the passage at 32:05

32:23 And then the last one is the smallest and most specific that, you know, as the, up until then, still, you know, head of the Tibetan government in exile, right, and have the responsibility to work on. The human rights situation in Tibet vis-a-vis the People's Republic of China. Just briefly, on the first one, he says, the things that, so the first one, global responsibility, doesn't have anything to do explicitly on the surface with Buddhism. Report an error in the passage at 32:23 Highlight the passage at 32:23

32:55 He says, look, we're on this planet and we have certain ways of living with each other that are sort of vestigial. He doesn't use that word, but it's like that. They're left over from Ancient times when everybody was disconnected each other. Everybody was in their own valley separated from everybody else in the next valley. And now we have like massive population growth. Report an error in the passage at 32:55 Highlight the passage at 32:55

33:17 Instantaneous communication with anybody, anywhere almost. We have this modern global economy where stuff that's happening in one place immediately affects what you can do somewhere else. And then we have these common environmental problems which are all over the globe. These four things saying our ways of thinking about who we are and what constitutes our welfare are completely outdated. Report an error in the passage at 33:17 Highlight the passage at 33:17

33:42 And so people have to realize It's very difficult for us to change quickly, that it's no longer the case that we can achieve our welfare at the expense of the people over in the next valley, but that we're all truly interdependent, not just theoretically interdependent in terms of how the world works. Report an error in the passage at 33:42 Highlight the passage at 33:42

34:05 Essentially, he argues that people don't really want problems, they want happiness. he said, well, it was like... Report an error in the passage at 34:05 Highlight the passage at 34:05

34:10 But they have a way of acting that's unrealistic. The philosophy is Buddhist, but he's not even saying unrealistic. It doesn't even just mean emptiness, but it means not taking into account the actual facts of the way the world it is today. But see, at the same time, that sort of means that everything's interconnected, and that in turn means that nothing exists in and of itself, and that in turn means that things are empty. Report an error in the passage at 34:10 Highlight the passage at 34:10

34:35 But he doesn't say that's a layer beneath what he's saying. In this regard, he says Buddhist teachings aren't really something that he wants to push as Buddhism per se, but just as something that could be helpful to some people in thinking about having a more realistic attitude about the world. Report an error in the passage at 34:35 Highlight the passage at 34:35

34:57 He has one suggestion, which I hadn't actually thought about, and that is that people get overwhelmed when they think about trying to That their welfare should involve like six billion. That my welfare, somehow the welfare of six billion other people is related to my welfare and I have to take them all into consideration if I'm pursuing my welfare. Report an error in the passage at 34:57 Highlight the passage at 34:57

35:22 And he said, well people just throw up their hands and give up as soon as they hear that. But if every day they sit and meditate on wishing for the happiness of infinite beings on infinite planets. Then when somebody says, oh, you have to worry about six billion people on one planet, it's like, ah, it's no problem, you know. I can do that before breakfast, you know. Report an error in the passage at 35:22 Highlight the passage at 35:22

35:43 So, yeah, he doesn't say it quite like that, but he makes exactly that point. And then he says, oh, that's number one. Second, religious harmony. Promote religious harmony. He said, look, I am a staunch Buddhist. And then in those terms he talks about the Nalanda tradition, the tradition that comes down to us to these very, very sharp scholars at Nalanda University in India who analyzed everything. Report an error in the passage at 35:43 Highlight the passage at 35:43

36:08 They analyzed even Buddha's own words and they were very critical and analytical to find every weakness in the views of the non-Buddhist philosophical positions. And I, the Dalai Lama, am like this, he says. I really want to investigate and tear things apart. Report an error in the passage at 36:08 Highlight the passage at 36:08

36:25 But at the same time, and without contradicting the first point, he says, all the great religious traditions have value. And I see that value and I'm just, you know, he says, extremely sad to see that there's been so much conflict in the name of religion and so many people suffer as a result. And so insofar as one's a religious person, he's really saying, not just I, but... Report an error in the passage at 36:25 Highlight the passage at 36:25

36:53 So far as anyone thinks of themselves as a religious person, they have a responsibility to see that religion isn't somehow implicated in more harm, right? Conflict between this religion and that religion. And in this regard, he's focused on conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims, at least in 2008 he was. Report an error in the passage at 36:53 Highlight the passage at 36:53

37:18 And he had gone. He had just came late to this teaching because he'd been at a Sufi Muslim pilgrimage in India that was like a huge event. And he was there praying with all of these Muslims in the middle of the night from 2.30 a.m. to 4.30 a.m. before he went to the airport to get on the plane. He said his robes were still damp with sweat from the ceremony in India. Report an error in the passage at 37:18 Highlight the passage at 37:18

37:51 So he said, look, some people might not be comfortable with a Buddhist robe and a Muslim cap for prayer. Maybe that makes people uncomfortable, but if we're going to take harmony and understanding between world religions seriously, we have to go to each other's ceremonies and talk to each other about... Report an error in the passage at 37:51 Highlight the passage at 37:51

38:13 How you know other religions that aren't ours not because we're thinking of converting to them but just so that we'll understand other human beings you know that we're living with other religious human beings and he talks particularly about September 11th as being that since September 11th it's become especially important for any religious person who's not a Muslim and that would include you know all the Buddhists to reach out to Muslims and that's what he's like making a very special effort to do and talks about. Report an error in the passage at 38:13 Highlight the passage at 38:13

38:42 How all the Muslims in Bodh Gaya, maybe their ancestors came there to do some mischief, to do some harm. But they're the sweetest people in the world and they always are extremely hospitable to them. And that's the present day reality. Report an error in the passage at 38:42 Highlight the passage at 38:42

39:01 And then finally, the issue of China and Tibet, his third commitment. He says, until there's a mutually beneficial understanding between the Tibetans and the Chinese, I have a moral responsibility to speak up for the Tibetans. Unfortunately, this talk was being given just a few months after a very bad incident in March of 2008. Report an error in the passage at 39:01 Highlight the passage at 39:01

39:26 Now we're having more bad incidents. But in March of 2008, there was an uprising in Lhasa. A lot of people were killed including a number of Han Chinese who were killed by angry Tibetans and so this made many Chinese people extremely angry toward the Tibetans and the Dalai Lama was finding that when he would go and try that actually the premier of People's Republic of China specifically blamed the Dalai Lama for the uprising. Report an error in the passage at 39:26 Highlight the passage at 39:26

40:03 And the Chinese Xinhua news agency claimed that Dalai Lama had a terrorist training camp outside Dharamsala where he was teaching people to make Molotov cocktails and so forth. And it's like, you know, it's like this is just so absurd. But then everybody's reading it in the newspaper in Beijing and a lot of people are just believing it because that's what it says in the newspaper. Report an error in the passage at 40:03 Highlight the passage at 40:03

40:27 So many people were like extremely... I was extremely angry. I actually met a reporter from Xinhua News Agency at this teaching in 2008 and when he heard that I was being introduced to him to sort of represent the Dalai Lama's point of view, he wouldn't look at me, let alone talk to me. He wouldn't make eye contact with me. And the Dalai Lama... Report an error in the passage at 40:27 Highlight the passage at 40:27

40:52 With reports having had the same experience that he tried to speak to Chinese people about what had happened in March of 2008 and he said that only a couple of people would talk to him. Most people wouldn't even listen to what he had to say because they were so angry. So what he suggests is that there be friendship groups. Report an error in the passage at 40:52 Highlight the passage at 40:52

41:21 is Specifically, he's talking about between Chinese people and Han Chinese people and Tibetans. And that in communities where there are both, that a point should be made to form groups which include both groups of people, getting together, doing things that they like and talking to each other about their perspectives so that they know each other as human beings. Report an error in the passage at 41:21 Highlight the passage at 41:21

41:48 And then when a problem comes up, the idea is that they won't just... See that as, oh, those other demons, of course, they would do like that, but they would understand the other as perspective and understand them as other human beings. So he makes that argument that that's the only way to do it, that if you don't actually know the other people as humans, that there isn't going to be any hope when your emotions overwhelm you in the midst of a problem. Report an error in the passage at 41:48 Highlight the passage at 41:48

42:17 But he doesn't, he's speaking to mostly Westerners here, and he makes a point of saying, you know, in the end, this isn't really up to, you know, anybody in America to solve. The Tibetan problem has to be solved between the Han Chinese and Tibetans, he says. And then he says a really remarkable thing, which I'll just read this short paragraph. Report an error in the passage at 42:17 Highlight the passage at 42:17

42:40 We Tibetans extend our right hand to our Han Chinese friends and our left hand to our Western supporters. Of these two hands, the right hand is more important, and we're extending this hand to the Chinese government. But as long as this hand remains empty, our left hand will accept help from other people who are sincerely concerned for us. This is only logical and natural. Report an error in the passage at 42:40 Highlight the passage at 42:40

43:04 But when the right hand gets some concrete result, Then the left hand will withdraw and say, wave goodbye. And when he, you know, he was waving at the audience with his hand when he was doing this, yeah. So, yeah, I thought about it. It was very strange to be saying that to almost all Western audience. And people didn't react at all. Report an error in the passage at 43:04 Highlight the passage at 43:04

43:28 But the way I was thinking it is that he was really sending a message to the Chinese government, you know, by way of giving that talk in that way at that time. You know, there was a reporter from the Jinwan news agency there. Anyway, all right. So I think then continuing in his sort of opening remarks, he makes some comments about, which I think are sort of addressed to the Saṅgha from around the world. Report an error in the passage at 43:28 Highlight the passage at 43:28

44:00 And then he makes a different set of comments that are sort of focused on the fact that there's so many non-Buddhists, thousands of non-Buddhists here. Getting ready to hear a teaching on a really complicated Buddhist text. In the first case he says, we the Tibetans are the junior students in the Dharma. Report an error in the passage at 44:00 Highlight the passage at 44:00

44:19 That is that the senior students of the Dharma. are the Pāli-based traditions, that they are the elder students, and so we have to pay our respects to them. And there are people there from that tradition, and he has them do chanting and so forth before he starts talking. So they're the senior students in the Dharma. Then within what he calls the Sanskrit tradition, by which he means Mahāyāna, but he doesn't say Mahāyāna because I guess that would be... Report an error in the passage at 44:19 Highlight the passage at 44:19

44:45 Implicitly derogatory to the non-Mahāyāna, so he calls it the Sanskrit tradition, meaning the ones that has the Sanskrit-based scriptures rather than the Theravāda with the Pāli-based scriptures. The Sanskrit tradition, he says, the senior students in the Dharma are the Chinese because the Chinese got the transmission of the Dharma way before the Tibetans, hundreds of years before, even though Tibet's so much closer to India, the Dharma was transmitted to China way before. Report an error in the passage at 44:45 Highlight the passage at 44:45

45:13 Trade routes, right? Silk routes. So he's saying we have to always pay our respects to the Chinese as the senior Mahāyāna above Tibetan Buddhism. And then he goes on to say, yes, but sometimes the junior students are better. And then he goes on to pretty forcefully argue that in this case the Tibetans are better because, first of all, they're heirs to the Nalanda tradition. Report an error in the passage at 45:13 Highlight the passage at 45:13

45:43 Once again that is this this but that when Buddhism was being transmitted from India to China initially Nalanda hadn't even been built and that the what Tibet received was this the full sort of full flourishing the total corpus of thinking and work and culture from Nalanda was transmitted to Tibet whereas China only got the sort of very early end of that. Report an error in the passage at 45:43 Highlight the passage at 45:43

46:12 And he says the effect of that is not only that we have a lot, we have this sort of full body of Indian Buddhism is preserved in Tibet and not elsewhere, but also that we inherit from Nalanda this tradition of being extremely rigorous and systematic in the way we study texts. One had to think, not like we're doing here with all these Westerners, right? But in the, like, he's thinking debate courtyard. Report an error in the passage at 46:12 Highlight the passage at 46:12

46:40 We memorize the root text and then we debate about it. There's a very systematic interrogation and internalizing the meaning of the text and not just having a general idea of what it might mean. And so he argues that this really sets Tibetan Buddhism apart. Report an error in the passage at 46:40 Highlight the passage at 46:40

47:02 And then he mentions in passing though that if you compare this Nalanda tradition as it existed in India to the way it was preserved in Tibet, it was better in India. Why? Because in India, all the great Buddhist scholars had to always argue with non-Buddhists. And that made their arguments much more comparative, much more richer, much more complex. Report an error in the passage at 47:02 Highlight the passage at 47:02

47:28 And they had to defend... They had to defend positions that in Tibet people would just take for granted and then start from there. All the Tibetan writers just assumed that everybody was Buddhist, and so they never had to defend Buddhist ideas per se. Report an error in the passage at 47:28 Highlight the passage at 47:28

47:45 Okay, so those were his kind of Saṅgha-oriented comments. And then he has a long section that was, I think, very aware of the fact that he's about to give a big Buddhist teaching to a bunch of people, many of whom might not be Buddhists. Report an error in the passage at 47:45 Highlight the passage at 47:45

48:01 This sort of tagline, I think, is that reality is neither Buddhist or Christian, which is good, you know. It's like that this is something that could be accessible from, it implies, I guess, that this could be accessible through either tradition, that it isn't the private property of one particular religion. Report an error in the passage at 48:01 Highlight the passage at 48:01

48:19 But what he really talks about is the fact that throughout the planet, this is what he says, There are so many different religious traditions and each started in a certain area and is mainly suitable to the peoples of that region. So I'm not arguing that, I'm just saying this is like his position, that there are certain religions that are adapted or suitable for not every person in a certain region, but for the majority of the people in those regions. Report an error in the passage at 48:19 Highlight the passage at 48:19

48:48 And that conflict implicitly comes up when the people of the religion... of one area that the people in that area try to go somewhere else and impose their religion on the people from another area, have a different disposition. There's lots of different kinds of people, there's lots of different kinds of traditions that are appropriate to them, and it is safer and better to keep to your own religious tradition. Report an error in the passage at 48:48 Highlight the passage at 48:48

49:12 That's what he says. Now, he gives a number of examples. The first one is, they may cut each way. The first one is an example of, A Polish woman who renounced Christianity, became a theosophist, moved to India, helped the Tibetans in India, was very involved with the Tibetan community. And then when she was old and she was dying on her deathbed, she just felt terrified because she felt that she'd abandoned God and that she needed to turn back to God in the face of death when her whole life had been about something else. Report an error in the passage at 49:12 Highlight the passage at 49:12

49:50 And he is very moved and concerned that this could happen to people who are coming to hear him as the Dalai Lama talking and are, you know, he's so charismatic. And that they might find themselves confused and alienated from what's good in the home tradition that they're part of, you know, where their roots, their spiritual and cultural roots are. Report an error in the passage at 49:50 Highlight the passage at 49:50

50:11 And then he tells another story the other way. And I think this is, you know, of course, the kind of thing that would be very close to his heart. A Tibetan woman who was widowed with small children and she got by with the help of Christian missionaries and then she was so grateful to them that she felt that she had to become a Christian and she went and told the Dalai Lama that she was sorry but she felt that she had to be a Christian for this lifetime but she promised she would be a Buddhist in the next one. Report an error in the passage at 50:11 Highlight the passage at 50:11

50:46 And it's like, he, I can't imagine what he would say. Here's a blessing. Christians don't have next lifetimes to be Buddhists. It's clear that you haven't really gotten the idea. He's saying this is just a clear example like the other case where people have maybe been too quick to think that they could uproot themselves from What's good and rich and helpful in the tradition they're part of. He sort of goes along that line and says that as a result of that, he gives the example of Tibet. Report an error in the passage at 50:46 Highlight the passage at 50:46

51:30 He says in Tibet we had a few Muslims and in the 20th century we started to have a few Christians. That makes the point for him that it's not that everybody in each country has to have one religion. He's not saying that. It's fine as long as you don't have, he's implying, People from one country sort of saying, you guys have to all switch over to our religion because ours is better. I think he's really, really concerned that he'll be perceived that way, say, by the local ministers of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he's preaching or something that he's trying to get people to stop being Christians. Report an error in the passage at 51:30 Highlight the passage at 51:30

52:05 And he doesn't want that coming the other way, right, from the Christian missionaries to the Tibetan community either. So he says, when I teach about Buddhism in the West, I always feel this hesitancy. And that's exactly what it is, you know, that it doesn't want to be in the sense of saying, you know, you would be better off if you got with the true religion over here with us. Report an error in the passage at 52:05 Highlight the passage at 52:05

52:32 You know, it's like, well, it's not so clear from a Buddhist point of view, right? Especially since, you know, there's multiple lifetimes. Maybe that you'll really be better off if you stay with a religion that you're born into in this lifetime. And maybe integrate a few Buddhist practices into it without trying to uproot yourself and replant yourself. Get root shock, like transplanting. Report an error in the passage at 52:32 Highlight the passage at 52:32

52:55 Root shock. That's what he's talking about. Root shock. Report an error in the passage at 52:55 Highlight the passage at 52:55

53:04 In the end, he talks about when you practice... Any religious tradition with a sense of dedication to the well-being of others, then you will feel fulfilled because this is the purpose of our life. What is the point of having merely a luxurious way of life and spending lots of money while on the same planet others are facing terrible difficulties and even starving, helping others and serving others? Report an error in the passage at 53:04 Highlight the passage at 53:04

53:34 This is the real meaning of life, Buddhist or otherwise. That's his point. And so then he goes on to conclude his opening little talk by giving an idea about a serious practice that is, of course, for him, based in Buddhist ideas of training, but is applicable just universally. And that's the idea like this, that you get up in the morning and you think about What your deepest values are, what it is you really think your life is about and what's important in your life and what you want to commit yourself. That's what you do when you first get up. Report an error in the passage at 53:34 Highlight the passage at 53:34

54:11 And then you make a commitment that for that day, not forever, but for that day, you will do your utmost to live according to those values. And then throughout the day, you watch with one corner of your mind, sort of monitoring how well you're doing and living up to those values. Really understanding that you're not always going to be perfect, but doing your best and watching. And then at the end of the day, you check in and see how well did you do. Report an error in the passage at 54:11 Highlight the passage at 54:11

54:43 And rejoice to the extent that you feel that you've really lived up to the values for that day. And allow yourself to feel a sense of regret for those incidents. And think about what are the causes and conditions for my not living up to my... My commitment and then recommit yourself to try to do better. And then keep going like that, right? And it's sort of like actually practicing living up to whatever religious values are part of your tradition day by day through making a commitment each day to try to actually live those values, not just mouth them. Report an error in the passage at 54:43 Highlight the passage at 54:43

55:19 This is a very good, and he gives an example of a situation where a teacher is... Trying to counsel some Palestinian students who have difficulty becoming agitated and angry when they have to go through Israeli checkpoints. And the teacher says, well, each time that you see a guard, remember that this person is made in the image of God. Report an error in the passage at 55:19 Highlight the passage at 55:19

55:49 And so when you think practice that, it's not easy, but actually doing the practice, not just saying everybody's made in the image of God. oh, those damn guards. But actually practicing that is what he's talking about and just gives that example. So if you keep practicing in this way, then it is certain over time there will be real change within your mind. Report an error in the passage at 55:49 Highlight the passage at 55:49

56:14 It's impossible to change in one session of prayer or meditation. But improvement definitely can come by constantly watching our minds in this way and carrying out the practice of living up to what we believe in day by day, year by year, decade by decade. And this understanding is common to all religious traditions. So isn't that interesting? So he's basically taking what would be a Buddhist kind of mind training. Report an error in the passage at 56:14 Highlight the passage at 56:14

56:43 You know, discipline, cultivating systematically your mind. He's saying, no, this isn't something that's distinctively Buddhist at all. All religious traditions have these spiritual practices. They're not always foregrounded in the theology of different religious traditions, I might say. But his idea is, you know, this is part of, you know, your religious tradition from your home country, which, you know, he's assuming that a lot of the people are Christian and a few are Jews. Report an error in the passage at 56:43 Highlight the passage at 56:43

57:09 Actually, I think there's a fair number of Buddhists there as well. You couldn't pick them out from the stage, I guess. Report an error in the passage at 57:09 Highlight the passage at 57:09

57:22 Let me go on to talk about the next little bit of things that he talks about. He introduces the actual text, the Great Treatise, which he's been getting around to talking about. He starts by saying a very peculiar thing. This book, The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment, was, of course, written by Atisha, an 11th century Bengali who came to Tibet, which it wasn't. Report an error in the passage at 57:22 Highlight the passage at 57:22

57:54 It was written by Tsongkhapa Lo Tsongkhapa, a Tibetan in 1402. So why does he say it was written by... Well, because that's actually what Tsongkhapa says. It's a very strange thing. It's not some traditional thing to say, my book... About a great white whale was written by Captain Ahab. No, Melville didn't write that in Moby Dick. Report an error in the passage at 57:54 Highlight the passage at 57:54

58:22 He didn't claim that his book was written by somebody other than who was writing it. And it's not a Tibetan tradition either. In effect, what Tsongkhapa claims is that his book is, he in effect claims that his book is a commentary on Atisha's lamp for the path that was lit. And it isn't really a commentary on it, but he's making a point, which is that this book doesn't exist except insofar as we get this concept of the three types of beings, the beings of small capacity, the beings of medium capacity and the beings of great capacity, comes in from Atisha in the 11th century and it gives us a way to organize. Report an error in the passage at 58:22 Highlight the passage at 58:22

59:07 All the Buddhist teachings in terms of those that are appropriate for people who are starting out and just thinking about how to get to a better lifetime. Those who are truly seeking liberation from... Sickly existence for themselves and then those who are dedicated to the welfare of all beings. And we can use that framework to put together all of the different teachings and not say, discard some as being for low people, but think that everyone progresses through these stages of development and uses all the practices, uses all the teachings at different stages of spiritual development. Report an error in the passage at 59:07 Highlight the passage at 59:07

59:43 So that's the meaning of this as I understand it. I think some other people have said like that. Then he says something that I'll just maybe come back to later, how he gets the authority to teach this. He says, I received transmission on these teachings from the great treatise from his two tutors, Trijong Rinpoche and Ling Rinpoche. Trijong Rinpoche had received these teachings from his teacher, Pabongka Rinpoche. Report an error in the passage at 59:43 Highlight the passage at 59:43

1:00:11 Ling Rinpoche had also received them from Pabunka Rinpoche. Pabunka was like the great lamrim teacher of the early 20th century in Tibet at the time of the 13th Dalai Lama, extremely charismatic. And then he throws in Ling Rinpoche. In addition, besides getting these teachings from Pabunka Rinpoche, also received these teachings from the 13th Dalai Lama. Report an error in the passage at 1:00:11 Highlight the passage at 1:00:11

1:00:37 Now that may sound like something not even worth mentioning, but it turns out that it's kind of important because Pabunka and the Chijang Rinpoche were devotees of this spirit, Dorje Shukden, and whereas Ling Rinpoche was not. Report an error in the passage at 1:00:37 Highlight the passage at 1:00:37

1:01:03 Nor was the 13th Dalai Lama. In fact, the 13th Dalai Lama tried to discourage Pabonga, limit the influence of the Shukden cult. Report an error in the passage at 1:01:03 Highlight the passage at 1:01:03

1:01:16 I take it that he's trying to make the point that he has the authority to teach lamrim through a lineage that goes back not through Pabonga, but to the 13th Dalai Lama instead. so, Report an error in the passage at 1:01:16 Highlight the passage at 1:01:16

1:01:29 And we'll come back, if you don't know what I'm talking about, we'll come back to Shukden later. But anyway, I think that's important. So then in the Tibetan, first he starts out, he says, the first thing, the greatest treatise, and this is in the little handout where it says prologue. Report an error in the passage at 1:01:29 Highlight the passage at 1:01:29

1:01:49 This is, you see, this is, he gives a little brief commentary. The next little bit is a commentary on Nagarjuna's salutation here. It says, Homage to the Guru Manju Gosha. Well, this is written, this is translated into English, but in the original text, this was written in Sanskrit instead of Tibetan, even though it's a Tibetan text. Report an error in the passage at 1:01:49 Highlight the passage at 1:01:49

1:02:13 He said, why do they do that? It's a Tibetan text. Why are they suddenly, you know, writing the first line in Sanskrit? He said, that's in order to make the point that I'm trying to make here that this all goes back to India. That's why they're writing in Sanskrit here. To show that this is part of the Nalanda tradition. Then he says, I bow my head to the chief of the shakyas whose body was formed by ten million virtues. Report an error in the passage at 1:02:13 Highlight the passage at 1:02:13

1:02:40 Very important point. Goes on about this for a good while. That Buddha is not some eternal being. Buddha is not some causeless being. Buddha was once a person like us. I'm basically quoting Dalai Lama. Buddha was once just like us. And then became radically different through certain causes and conditions, through the process of dependent arising. Report an error in the passage at 1:02:40 Highlight the passage at 1:02:40

1:03:10 And Buddha's body, through accumulating certain causes, was transformed into a body of bliss and compassion and wisdom. So the attainment of Buddhahood is the result of something. It doesn't come out of nowhere. And he points out that Just that Dignaga, the Indian logician, makes exactly the same point in the opening stanza of one of his most important texts on psychology and logic, where he says, Buddha has become a reliable person. Report an error in the passage at 1:03:10 Highlight the passage at 1:03:10

1:03:47 He doesn't say Buddha is intrinsically a reliable person. He has always been a reliable person. He says Buddha became a reliable person through thus and so kinds of practices. He pulls that out and says, this is the key idea here. Everything's arising from causes and conditions, even the Buddha. So then he goes, in the next line he says, whose speech fulfills the hopes of limitless beings. Report an error in the passage at 1:03:47 Highlight the passage at 1:03:47

1:04:17 So he says that just like he talks about the body in terms of its causes, You know, the collection of formed by 10 million virtues. Then he talks about the speech in terms of its effect of fulfilling the hopes, which means the welfare of all these limitless beings. So Buddha's speech is seen as being the main way that the Buddha acts to help others. This is taught by the Dalai Lama here, but also in other sources that he cites. Report an error in the passage at 1:04:17 Highlight the passage at 1:04:17

1:04:49 And the main, and for example Tsongkhapa says in his, He prays to the Buddha for teaching dependent origination, that the Buddha's speech is the greatest of his body, speech and mind, and that within his speech that the greatest part of his speech, greatest aspect of his speech is his teaching of dependent arising, which of course is what the Dalai Lama is doing at the same time that he's explaining this as he's teaching dependent arising. Report an error in the passage at 1:04:49 Highlight the passage at 1:04:49

1:05:17 So anyway, he gives that little commentary on the first verse. It was kind of surprising, but it was kind and. Report an error in the passage at 1:05:17 Highlight the passage at 1:05:17

1:05:23 then Skip over a little bit. And then he goes on to say, talk about the last part, starting of this, where it says, nowadays those making effort at yoga and so forth. He says, look, the reason that I'm implicitly writing this text is because people in Tibet these days don't know what the heck they're doing. Report an error in the passage at 1:05:23 Highlight the passage at 1:05:23

1:05:51 And they don't know in the following ways. First, some of them are great meditators, but they don't study anything, so they don't really know what they're supposed to be meditating on. Report an error in the passage at 1:05:51 Highlight the passage at 1:05:51

1:06:05 And then there's people who study all the time, but they can't actually practice, or maybe they practice a little, but they don't have any depth of experience of putting what they've learned into practice. Report an error in the passage at 1:06:05 Highlight the passage at 1:06:05

1:06:21 And then there's a third category, which is to say people may do some study and practice, but only of a piece of the Dharma. So they like emptiness, or they like monastic ethics, or they like to learn about compassion or mindfulness, right? Or Abhidharma, that's even some people who like Abhidharma the best, right? Gareth Sparum, for example. I mean, it's like, who would like that the best? Report an error in the passage at 1:06:21 Highlight the passage at 1:06:21

1:06:48 Gareth Sparum. It's like, whatever you find, some people are like, that's just what they really like. And then, that's the problem. It's like, well, now you've got that part of the Dharma mastered, but how does it fit together with everything else? And so that's his point, is that there's these kind of, what? Different kinds of lopsidedness. Lopsidedness between study and actual meditative practice, and lopsidedness in terms of picking. Report an error in the passage at 1:06:48 Highlight the passage at 1:06:48

1:07:17 Like only certain pieces of the Dharma that you find attractive. And he said in order to like integrate on the basis of thorough study of all of the scriptures, actually practice in all of the aspects of the Buddhist teaching, you know, that's why I'm teaching this Lamrim Chema. That's the idea. That's the motivation for teaching the text. Okay. Report an error in the passage at 1:07:17 Highlight the passage at 1:07:17

1:07:47 So there's a long discussion, there's a long tradition that when you set out to teach a text like this that you're supposed to praise the author and praise the text, the teaching itself, apparently in order to inspire people to listen and pay attention. So they'll have, you know, be interested in what you're going to say and think that it's important. So, you know, for example, Tsongkhapa goes on for... Report an error in the passage at 1:07:47 Highlight the passage at 1:07:47

1:08:16 In the English translation, at least eight pages of single space about Atisha and everything he did and why it was so amazing. Report an error in the passage at 1:08:16 Highlight the passage at 1:08:16

1:08:27 Dalai Lama completely glosses over this. He doesn't really seem to have any interest. He just simply mentions that Atisha has lineages that derive both from... and talk about I mean Report an error in the passage at 1:08:27 Highlight the passage at 1:08:27

1:08:37 Nagarjuna's teachings on emptiness and from the Maitreya Asanga lineage on the method side of practicing compassion and loving kindness and that these two lineages converge in Atisha that he holds both these lineages. But then he just stops. He doesn't go on and on about Atisha's life and all the wonderful things he did and why we should want to know more about him. Report an error in the passage at 1:08:37 Highlight the passage at 1:08:37

1:09:02 And instead the Dalai Lama seems more interested in going back to talking about the teaching itself. Report an error in the passage at 1:09:02 Highlight the passage at 1:09:02

1:09:10 He goes on to say that when Atisha started the, brought this, you know, teaching of the, that there's these beings of, that you can talk about the path in terms of stages by thinking of beings who have, who are just focused on, beings of small capacity, who are thinking about having a better lifetime in the future. Report an error in the passage at 1:09:10 Highlight the passage at 1:09:10

1:09:31 Beings of medium capacity who are mainly concerned about getting out of sickle existence and beings of great capacity. That when he brought this idea to Tibet, that since then all four sects, all four schools of Tibetan Buddhism basically developed teachings of the path that were based on that. Very pointedly, in fact, he even then goes on to cite specific texts, non-Gilukpa texts that he sees as being Sort of the parallel of Tsongkhapa's great treatise. Longchenpa's Mind at Ease, Sakyapandita's Tuba Gongsel, or Clear Elucidation of the Buddha's Intent, and Gampopa's Jewel Ornament of Liberation, which Gunther translated a long time ago. Report an error in the passage at 1:09:31 Highlight the passage at 1:09:31

1:10:20 All these books are in English. And you can get them and you can see, yeah, they are like lamrim. They're just a little bit different. But it's much more the same than different. So anyway, that's just obviously an example of what I was talking about. He's trying to find the common ground instead of draw the distinctions. Then he does something interesting. Report an error in the passage at 1:10:20 Highlight the passage at 1:10:20

1:10:46 He says that this whole idea of having these three capacities of beings and that we gradually sort of move up the stage in terms of what we can aspire to, it goes back way before Atisha. And he talks about Nagarjuna. He says, Nagarjuna's precious garland says, well, there's two kinds of things. People who aspire to higher rebirth and then people who aspire to what he calls definite goodness, which means liberation. Report an error in the passage at 1:10:46 Highlight the passage at 1:10:46

1:11:22 So that's only two. But then he says, yeah, but within the people who aspire to definite goodness, you have... People who aspire to definite goodness for themselves alone and people who open up and aspire to definite goodness for all living beings. So once you take that idea and say there's these two kinds of aspirations in Buddhism, aspiring to have a better rebirth and aspiring to be free from all rebirth, and then you subdivide the second category into those who are focused mainly on themselves and those who are focused on everybody. Report an error in the passage at 1:11:22 Highlight the passage at 1:11:22

1:11:57 There you have the same list of three that you end up with Atisha. So Atisha is in the 11th century and the garden is probably born in the second century. So he's like saying, look, this idea goes back to the beginning of the whole Nalanda tradition. It's much more ancient than something that Atisha made up. Report an error in the passage at 1:11:57 Highlight the passage at 1:11:57

1:12:18 And then he points out, look, how do you get, if you're mainly interested in a good rebirth, how do you get it? You have to do Good, good actions. You have to cultivate good karma and you have to believe that that will make a difference in terms of getting a good rebirth. So you need to have what you call faith of conviction in dependent arising of karma. Report an error in the passage at 1:12:18 Highlight the passage at 1:12:18

1:12:47 And on the other hand, if what you really want is to escape from cyclic existence altogether, the most important thing, although it certainly helps to have good karma, most important thing is to realize emptiness. And of course, the very meaning of emptiness is dependent arising. So he makes the point is that whether you're interested in getting out of cyclic existence or getting a better rebirth in cyclic existence, both of them come down to understanding the meaning of dependent arising. Report an error in the passage at 1:12:47 Highlight the passage at 1:12:47

1:13:12 In one case, it's the effectiveness that what I do makes a difference. That, you know, things just don't come and go out of nowhere, but that actions give rise to effects. That's dependent arising. And on the other hand, when you're trying to get out of cyclical existence, it's dependent arising in the sense that, look, nothing exists in and of itself. Report an error in the passage at 1:13:12 Highlight the passage at 1:13:12

1:13:33 Everything exists only in so far as it depends on causes and conditions. Therefore, I can't grasp onto things as having their own intrinsic nature. They're completely dependent on other causes and conditions. See, in both these, like, Constantly through the book. This is the point I was trying to make is that Tsongkhapa brings in dependent arising in the last part of the great treatise when he's explaining how emptiness is compatible with conventional existence. Report an error in the passage at 1:13:33 Highlight the passage at 1:13:33

1:14:01 But what the Dalai Lama does is show how this idea of dependent arising is implicit through the whole book from the very beginning. Whether you're talking about going for refuge or you're talking about the Four Noble Truths or you're talking about cultivating compassion, he connects every single topic in the lamrim to the idea of dependent arising and that's the way he knits the whole thing together. Report an error in the passage at 1:14:01 Highlight the passage at 1:14:01

1:14:33 Okay, now maybe we'll just do a little bit more and talk about Shukden and then we'll have some questions. Report an error in the passage at 1:14:33 Highlight the passage at 1:14:33

1:14:44 So one of the... Points that I was making about why Tsongkhapa set out to write the book was because of people being unbalanced between study and practice. And the people who are more on the practice side don't really want to read big treatises with lots of quotes in them. They want to have little handy practice manuals, right? Report an error in the passage at 1:14:44 Highlight the passage at 1:14:44

1:15:07 And Tsongkhapa is like not, you know, Initially, at least, very sympathetic to that. And he's sort of saying, you should take all of the Buddha's teachings as personal instructions. Even the ones that are really complicated, like the distinction between prasanga and phatandrika and so forth, that you should regard these. Report an error in the passage at 1:15:07 Highlight the passage at 1:15:07

1:15:30 Now, they're all personal instructions. It doesn't mean that there's something that you can necessarily practice and understand right now. Because that's the whole point of lamrim. They're not all things that you'll... Be able to actualize right at that moment, but they're all to be taken to heart, you know, and to be practiced at some point as you progress. Report an error in the passage at 1:15:30 Highlight the passage at 1:15:30

1:15:52 Things that seem to make no sense and to be troubling at one time, then later on, you know, over time, then they may come to seem like the most important thing of all. So there's this tendency, I think, to make a division between the class of texts Buddhist texts that are for scholars and the other ones that are for actual practitioners where you take all the complicated quotes out and so forth and just do like this. Report an error in the passage at 1:15:52 Highlight the passage at 1:15:52

1:16:23 And he says, this is completely unhelpful. You should practice on the basis of text. Make it clear what it is that the justification and the full. So he really, this model of the scholar yogi, the yogi who's seriously practicing because they've understood what's in the scholarly text and then they're focusing their mind and meditating on that, not because they bypassed the scholasticism is the model that Tsongkhapa puts forward. Report an error in the passage at 1:16:23 Highlight the passage at 1:16:23

1:16:54 He really emphasizes that actually in the first volume of the great treatise. He says, some people will brag about the fact that they've only read one book, and some people will be ashamed of it and try, they mean one Buddhist book, and other people will be ashamed of it and try to cover it up. It doesn't matter. Report an error in the passage at 1:16:54 Highlight the passage at 1:16:54

1:17:15 In either case, you'll never be a Buddha until you've read a yak load of books. And that's an old Garamba master that he quotes in volume one of the English translation. Report an error in the passage at 1:17:15 Highlight the passage at 1:17:15

1:17:32 And finally, before we get to the Shukden business, one of the advantages of this approach, he says, is that you avoid the error of rejecting Buddhist teachings. It's a grave error to reject Buddha's teachings or reject the Dharma. And Tsongkhapa cites all kinds of different sutras where the Buddha says that a practitioner must study and understand and actually practice all aspects of the path. Report an error in the passage at 1:17:32 Highlight the passage at 1:17:32

1:18:01 If you really aspire to help billions of living beings who have different kinds of mental dispositions, that is not enough to just do what seems most immediately appealing to you personally. You have to understand and practice many diverse teachings and approaches, and this is what prepares you to be able to guide others. Historically, there's been a tradition, this is the Dalai Lama, among Tibetan masters to study and also to practice all the different lineages, Sakya, Kagyu, Geluk, Nyingma, and Jonang as well. Report an error in the passage at 1:18:01 Highlight the passage at 1:18:01

1:18:33 And this is an excellent model. We should adopt a non-sectarian approach, not just studying all of these lineages. But also putting their teachings into practice. So the Dalai Lama is saying we should study and practice not just his kind of Tibetan Buddhism that's being taught in the text that he's teaching here, but study and practice other kinds of Tibetan Buddhism as well. Report an error in the passage at 1:18:33 Highlight the passage at 1:18:33

1:19:02 First time I got to speak with the Dalai Lama was in 1985 in India. And as I was being shown in... A Nyingma Lama was on his way out having given His Holiness a little lesson, reading something together. So he's been doing this for a long time. Now, this is the last thing when we'll have some questions. Report an error in the passage at 1:19:02 Highlight the passage at 1:19:02

1:19:32 4,000 people inside. Everybody's sitting on the edge of their seat listening to the Dalai Lama talk about this stuff. And outside the arena, there are two groups of protesters. A small group of angry Han Chinese protesters who were upset about the incident in March, which was just a few months earlier in Lhasa. Report an error in the passage at 1:19:32 Highlight the passage at 1:19:32

1:19:58 And then a very, very large group of mostly New Karamba and other, I guess, assorted Shuktan followers. So these were Gilukbas, you know, who were protesting the Dalai Lama. And they weren't... They were protesting in a very vociferous way. That is, I think they were taking turns. There were a couple, maybe a few hundred, and they would take turns, maybe a hundred at the time, screaming, Dalai Lama, stop lying, as loud as they could. Report an error in the passage at 1:19:58 Highlight the passage at 1:19:58

1:20:31 And even screaming as loud as they could, you couldn't hear it inside the arena, but when people would come out of the arena for a break, then it was very disturbing and confusing to people. Like most people had no idea why there would be people in robes and all these different Buddhists who were like calling the Dalai Lama a liar and obviously very inflamed and angry people. Report an error in the passage at 1:20:31 Highlight the passage at 1:20:31

1:20:59 And so eventually the Dalai Lama took some questions and one person asked, Your Holiness, I feel agitated to hear and see the Shukdem protesters outside the building, and how will I help myself? Please address this issue, as many are misinformed about this. Okay, so I thought maybe I would just like read you a portion of his answer, and then I'll try to explain a little bit. Report an error in the passage at 1:20:59 Highlight the passage at 1:20:59

1:21:27 It's like a long story, but I'll just explain a little bit, and then... Some of you already know some of the story and then we can have any questions about that or anything else. We have had this problem for 370 years and it started during the time of the 5th Dalai Lama. From 1951 until the 1970s I myself worshipped this spirit. I used to be one of those practitioners. One of my main reasons for abandoning Shukdam worship Is that much of my efforts are directed to promoting non-sectarianism, especially within Tibetan Buddhism, which is the point that he just made. Report an error in the passage at 1:21:27 Highlight the passage at 1:21:27

1:22:11 I always encourage people to receive teachings from the teachers of all the diverse traditions. And this is just like what the fifth Dalai Lama did and many other great lamas who received teachings within many traditions. Since the late 1960s and the early 1970s and down to today, I've been practicing in this non-sectarian way. A Nyingma teacher, Kunu Lama Rinpoche, initially gave me teachings on Shantideva. Report an error in the passage at 1:22:11 Highlight the passage at 1:22:11

1:22:38 This Lama was very non-sectarian and having received innumerable teachings from many different traditions himself. After that, I wanted to receive from this great Lama a certain teaching that is distinct to the Nyingma tradition, and I asked my tutor, Ling Rinpoche, pointing out to him that I'd already received some other teachings on Shantideva from this Lama, But now I wanted to receive teachings on a Nyingma Tantric text. Ling Rinpoche was a little bit cautious about this because of Shukden. Report an error in the passage at 1:22:38 Highlight the passage at 1:22:38

1:23:09 He himself had never worshipped the spirit, but he was cautious about it. My other tutor, Trijong Rinpoche, was very close to the spirit practice. The rumor was circulating that if a Giluk Lama takes teachings in the Nyingma tradition, Shukden would destroy him. Ling Rinpoche was a bit frightened for me. Report an error in the passage at 1:23:09 Highlight the passage at 1:23:09

1:23:29 And he really warned me to be careful. The Shukdem worshipers have a tradition that one must be extremely strict about one's own distinctive Gilukba tradition. Report an error in the passage at 1:23:29 Highlight the passage at 1:23:29

1:23:40 Actually, I think that this standpoint deprives people of religious freedom, preventing them from taking other teachings. In practice, discouraging a standpoint that deprives people of the freedom to choose is actually an affirmation of religious freedom. A double negation is in this sense an affirmation. Around 1970, I was reading the life stories of many great lamas, mainly from the Gelugba tradition, with the idea that if Shukden is really truly reliable, then most of the great lamas who tutored the Dalai Lamas must have practiced Shukden worship. Report an error in the passage at 1:23:40 Highlight the passage at 1:23:40

1:24:17 And it turns out that this is not the case. So I developed doubt, and the more I investigated, the clearer it became. In fact, I found that according to the fifth Dalai Lama, the function of Shukden is to harm both the Buddhist doctrine and living beings. And when I realized this, I found that it was my moral responsibility to make the facts clear. Report an error in the passage at 1:24:17 Highlight the passage at 1:24:17

1:24:38 Whether you listen to me is entirely up to you as an individual. From the outset, I told both Tibetans and some of our other friends what I had come to understand, and they're free to listen to my advice or not. It's an individual right to accept religion or not accept it. Accepting this religion or that is entirely up to the individual person. But my opinion is that shukdham worship is actually not a genuine practice of Dharma. Report an error in the passage at 1:24:38 Highlight the passage at 1:24:38

1:25:03 It's worshiping a worldly spirit. This is another aspect of the problem. From what I have taught, I think you can see that Tibetan Buddhism is a continuation of the pure lineage of the Nalanda tradition, which relies on reasoning, not blind belief. So it's very sad that certain Tibetan practices could cause this profound and rich tradition to become a sort of spirit worship. Both the 5th Dalai Lama and the 13th Dalai Lama were gravely critical toward this spirit. Report an error in the passage at 1:25:03 Highlight the passage at 1:25:03

1:25:33 And since I am considered a reincarnation of those Dalai Lamas, it is only logical that my life should follow theirs. One could say that it proves that I'm a true reincarnation. Report an error in the passage at 1:25:33 Highlight the passage at 1:25:33

1:25:47 It seems that these people outside chanting are really fond of worshiping this spirit. Okay, it's their life. I have no problem if that's what they want to do. When I taught in Germany, there was a group of Schuchten followers outside who shouted for at least three or four hours, and I felt great concern about how their throats would be affected. Report an error in the passage at 1:25:47 Highlight the passage at 1:25:47

1:26:08 Okay, so this is a very difficult problem that he's describing, which is the paradox of liberal tolerance in a sense. It's like the problem of when... When the local neo-Nazi party wants to have a parade and it's like we want free speech and on the other hand we don't want to have hate speech. And so the Dalai Lama in effect sees, he sees himself as promoting non-sectarianism and he sees Shuktan as sort of representing a kind of gay lupa fundamentalism or hyper... Report an error in the passage at 1:26:08 Highlight the passage at 1:26:08

1:26:48 Purity, which is explicitly intolerant, like saying Teresa, that it's sort of the feeling of moral obligation, the moral obligation to maintain the purity of the Gilukba tradition by being intolerant of any Gilukba who would do what the Dalai Lama is doing and recommending, and that is studying anything that's outside of the Gilukba. Report an error in the passage at 1:26:48 Highlight the passage at 1:26:48

1:27:14 The Dalai Lama is going and praying with the Sufis. Teaching Bible classes even though he doesn't believe in God and, you know, for real, you know. I mean, he writes a book about, you know, so he is extremely broad-minded. At the same time, he doesn't seem to get these things all mixed up and fuzzy in his mind. He's a pure, you never find him disagreeing with anything Tsongkhapa said. Report an error in the passage at 1:27:14 Highlight the passage at 1:27:14

1:27:44 He actually agrees with it all. And then within that feels that the most skillful thing is to be extremely inclusive and look for common ground with all these traditions and see everything of value that they have to offer, not just pointing out faults, right, and making divisions between people. That's the way he is. And he just finds that Shukden as a spirit embodies exactly the opposite spirit. Report an error in the passage at 1:27:44 Highlight the passage at 1:27:44

1:28:09 It's the spirit of saying, if you as a Gilukba, you know, study something that... Sully's, the pure lineage of Tsongkhapa, you come to physical harm. Report an error in the passage at 1:28:09 Highlight the passage at 1:28:09

1:28:26 So the story is convoluted and complicated, but he mentioned that this is something that may have started at the time of the fifth Dalai Lama. I mean, there had been a lot of terrible, there had been a war at the time of the fifth Dalai Lama, basically. Kagipas and their allies and the Gilukpas and their allies and the Gilukpas had some tough Mongols on their side and they won. Report an error in the passage at 1:28:26 Highlight the passage at 1:28:26

1:28:53 And then the Dalai Lama wanted to bring people together and he was taking an extremely inclusive approach and was probably practicing Dzogchen on the basis of Nyingma. At the same time, he was the head of the Gelugba order. And not everybody liked that. The whole situation is like, are you the president of all the people or just the leader of your political party? And the fifth Dalai Lama and the thirteenth Dalai Lama and the fourteenth Dalai Lama are people who very, very determinately and self-consciously said, we're the leaders of all these people. Report an error in the passage at 1:28:53 Highlight the passage at 1:28:53

1:29:35 We can't just be like... Partisans of our own particular lineage. And then, of course, what happens when you do that is you have people within your lineage who are very angry and see you as a traitor to the purity of your lineage because you're being inclusive of these other ideas. Well, that happened at the time of the fifth Dalai Lama. And often Tenzin Gyatso refers, talks about this. Report an error in the passage at 1:29:35 Highlight the passage at 1:29:35

1:30:04 Close spiritual connection he feels with the fifth Dalai Lama. He had a rival, the fifth Dalai Lama. This rival, probably this man, he was somebody he debated with when they were young and maybe there were actually rivals for who would be named the fifth Dalai Lama and this guy lost. And then... According to the story, you know, one day this guy was debating with the Dalai Lama, the fifth Dalai Lama, and supposedly beat the fifth Dalai Lama in debate, and then was found with a cut-up silk scarf, you know, stuffed down his throat. Report an error in the passage at 1:30:04 Highlight the passage at 1:30:04

1:30:46 And then there was, after that, you know, nobody knows how that happened, but there he was. And then this created, like, a lot of disturbance spiritually. Politically and psychologically for people and there was a feeling that, you know, there was a haunting going on and then people began to then associate the spirit of Chokpa Gyeltsin who was dead with this earlier very minor spirit, Turlgyel and that became identified as Shukten and in the role of sort of protecting the purity of Gyelukpa being appeased. Report an error in the passage at 1:30:46 Highlight the passage at 1:30:46

1:31:28 Against the, you know, tendency of the Dalai Lama to be more inclusivist. And so that seems to have been the very beginning of this. But it was really kind of a minor thing. It wasn't like a really big popular thing. But it went on, you know, among Gilukbas, right, as like some Gilukbas wanting the purity of Gilukba protected against other lineages. Report an error in the passage at 1:31:28 Highlight the passage at 1:31:28

1:31:54 But it wasn't really a big thing. Apparently, Pabunga's mother, though, was a devotee of Shukden. Pabunga was not like a connected guy. He wasn't like somebody who was from a really rich family or a high Lama family. He was a guy who rose to be one of the most important teachers of the early 20th century in Tibet by the force of his own teaching ability. Report an error in the passage at 1:31:54 Highlight the passage at 1:31:54

1:32:27 You can see his Lamrim book down to today is one of the really great teachings on Lamrim. Report an error in the passage at 1:32:27 Highlight the passage at 1:32:27

1:32:39 So people were moved by him. He had a lot of influence on lay people in the way he could teach Lamrim with lots of colorful stories and depth of feeling. So he drew a lot of followers to him. Report an error in the passage at 1:32:39 Highlight the passage at 1:32:39

1:32:56 For some reason, he thought as part of this that it was important to initiate, re-initiate and promote the cult of Dorje Shukden. And some people have said that he was always very non-sectarian until he visited eastern Tibet. And he saw that in the late 19th century, early 20th century in eastern Tibet, that the Gilukbas were losing out. Report an error in the passage at 1:32:56 Highlight the passage at 1:32:56

1:33:24 That all the smart young people were joining the Rimei movement, which is a non-sectarian movement of Eastern Tibet where the Gilukbas had been, had the upper hand, but then the Kagipas and Nyingmas and Sakipas got together and said, let's all, you know, kind of collaborate in a non-sectarian movement. Report an error in the passage at 1:33:24 Highlight the passage at 1:33:24

1:33:47 And nominally it included Gilukba as well, but the political effect of it was to sort of create a kind of, A groundswell of intellectual energy that sort of pushed the Gelukpas back into second place in the eastern part of Tibet. And some people think that it's when Pabongka saw that, that he came back to Hlasa and said, we need to have Shukten to make sure that Gelukpa isn't contaminated by this non-sectarian movement. Report an error in the passage at 1:33:47 Highlight the passage at 1:33:47

1:34:17 And then other people have said that... Maybe it had something to do with the 13th Dalai Lama being so interested in connections with the West and opening up, modernizing Tibet. The 13th Dalai Lama tried really hard to have Tibet not be isolated and not be so cut off from the rest of the world to try to have a more modern army, to send young men to England to be educated. Report an error in the passage at 1:34:17 Highlight the passage at 1:34:17

1:34:48 There was a huge resistance from the monasteries. Ultimately, he got his way for a little while and then his reforms were shut down because there was so much political pushback against it. It may be that this is also related to that. There's kind of a, let's keep true to our pure traditions that we've received from Jai Rinpoche rather than chasing after. Report an error in the passage at 1:34:48 Highlight the passage at 1:34:48

1:35:17 You know, modern, newfangled things. And anyway, in the face of threats from the Rimei movement and the threats of, you know, gosh, there is a modern world out there and Tibet's not, you know, keeping up with it, this was kind of the antidote, was this huge enthusiasm within Gilipa for worshipping Dorje Shuktan. Report an error in the passage at 1:35:17 Highlight the passage at 1:35:17

1:35:38 And obviously, Pabunka then was the teacher of Trijong Rinpoche and Trijong Rinpoche was one of the tutors of the Dalai Lama. So the Dalai Lama was... You know, started himself from when he was 16, like worshiping Dorje Shukden himself. And it was, as he described, it was only when he realized that that would prevent him from taking teachings from people in other orders that he started questioning it and ultimately rejecting it. Report an error in the passage at 1:35:38 Highlight the passage at 1:35:38

1:36:05 And then once he rejected it, which he did after a long process of analysis. He went public with the fact that he had rejected it. And then this became the basis for all kinds of difficulties. And usually people don't like to talk about this because it's such a painful subject. And most of the difficulties are among Tibetans. And you could say, well, just let Tibetans worry about it. We don't have to worry about it at a Dharma center in San Francisco. Report an error in the passage at 1:36:05 Highlight the passage at 1:36:05

1:36:34 And it has caused terrible, terrible difficulties among the Tibetans. There's no doubt about it. But I don't think it's completely true that it has nothing to do with the United States. You know, having been at Lehigh and seen all the people at different sides of the orange barricade fence. And also the fact that, you know, you have two really big international Gelukba organizations in the West. Report an error in the passage at 1:36:34 Highlight the passage at 1:36:34

1:37:03 And one's FPMT and one is NKT, you know. And they, one is Dalai Lama, right? And one is Shukdan, and against the Dalai Lama, right? And this is an FPMT center, right? So it's like a picture of the Dalai Lama up here. I don't see Dorje Shukdan's picture anywhere. It's like if you go over to NKT center, then there'll be a picture of Dorje Shukdan up right when you go in, and no picture of the Dalai Lama anywhere around. Report an error in the passage at 1:37:03 Highlight the passage at 1:37:03

1:37:33 They call him a lot of bad names, and they have actually a new book up. Out about just how awful the Dalai Lama is in every possible way. Yeah, so my point is that innocent people, this is just my point, is that people, like say Oak Park, Chicago, I happen to know personally. Report an error in the passage at 1:37:33 Highlight the passage at 1:37:33

1:37:55 If somebody's living in Oak Park, Chicago and they say, hey, check out that Buddhist center, you know, and they'll go over there, they don't know. That they're going into a center of people who will teach them to hate the Dalai Lama. Actually, they're teaching in terms of their doctrines about emptiness, the exact same things, exactly the same things, all the lamrim. Report an error in the passage at 1:37:55 Highlight the passage at 1:37:55

1:38:14 Geshe Kelsang Gyatso's explanations are spot on, so good, so clear. Report an error in the passage at 1:38:14 Highlight the passage at 1:38:14

1:38:24 Okay, that's enough to go to see if you have some questions. Yes, you, Peter. Report an error in the passage at 1:38:24 Highlight the passage at 1:38:24

1:38:39 What's the possible advantage of Shiptun worship? Do you get a Mercedes? I mean, what is the thing that would make people adhere to this? So what are the definite advantages of worshiping this spirit that Report an error in the passage at 1:38:39 Highlight the passage at 1:38:39

1:38:57 would make people so vociferous about it? I haven't gotten on the inside of it. I do have an acquaintance who... Okay. I see it in terms of... This is, you know... grafting across traditions as a religion scholar but I think that it may be helpful not to say that it is but The concept is that fundamentalism imagines itself as going back to pure original roots. Report an error in the passage at 1:38:57 Highlight the passage at 1:38:57

1:39:33 But, of course, the fundamental Fundamentalism didn't exist until the early 20th century in Christianity as a reaction against the fears and complexities of the modern world. There was a constructed idea of some pure original roots and the idea is that this allows people to have something that they can feel sure about, that they can hold on to. Report an error in the passage at 1:39:33 Highlight the passage at 1:39:33

1:39:54 And feel safe and secure in the face of all of the complexities. And it's not just the complexities of the modern world, it's the complexities of all the different kinds of Dharma within the world that you might have to deal with. So these people like have one thing that they know is absolutely right. And what they really, really don't want and what they really fear is that it will be contaminated. Report an error in the passage at 1:39:54 Highlight the passage at 1:39:54

1:40:17 Like you must have read some books, I'm not going to name any books, but you must have read some books where you think, well this is... Not really representing any particular tradition, but as sort of a mishmash of different things. Well, this is the way, see, I don't think the Dalai Lama falls into that fault. Report an error in the passage at 1:40:17 Highlight the passage at 1:40:17

1:40:38 But I'm sure that he's perceived as being the very embodiment of that fault by people from within New Karamba tradition point of view. What he actually does, I've tried to describe as much. He constantly maintains for his own point of view exactly the teachings of Tsongkhapa while taking the most charitable, the most generous, the most seeking common ground approach to everybody else in the world that he possibly can. Report an error in the passage at 1:40:38 Highlight the passage at 1:40:38

1:41:11 And this whole thing with Nalanda, he keeps talking Nalanda, Nalanda, Nalanda. This is a perfect example of that because he's picked out... You say, all of you Tibetan Buddhists are heir with me to the great Nalanda tradition. But on the one hand, that's including everybody and finding legitimate common ground with them. Report an error in the passage at 1:41:11 Highlight the passage at 1:41:11

1:41:34 But on the other hand, it's implicitly emphasizing, bringing back to the fore, Tsongkhapa's idea emphasis on analysis as part of the practice of the path. You see what I'm saying? Which might not actually be emphasized in the other schools as much. When you go and hear what those other schools are saying about themselves, they might not be saying Nalanda, Nalanda, Nalanda. Report an error in the passage at 1:41:34 Highlight the passage at 1:41:34

1:41:51 They might be saying, oh, you know, the great Mahasiddhas. Report an error in the passage at 1:41:51 Highlight the passage at 1:41:51

1:41:57 So that's my point. I don't think that he's just... He's doing this... He's trying to be... He is skillfully finding a way toward peace by looking at... common ground rather than stirring up trouble by by pointing at different And he does that without ever actually giving up his own position, which is Tsongkhapa was right. That's my point. Report an error in the passage at 1:41:57 Highlight the passage at 1:41:57

1:42:26 You don't have to give up the position that Tsongkhapa was right to take other people seriously and listen to what they say that could be helpful. And that's what he does. And other people don't want to do that because they're afraid that this will lead to Tsongkhapa being polluted. Report an error in the passage at 1:42:26 Highlight the passage at 1:42:26

1:42:40 Well, that actually feeds into the comment that I wanted to make, which is that it seems like this idea of taking all of the Buddha's 84,000 teachings as personal instruction is even more important now, because in the West, our form of Buddhism often takes the form of pick and choose Buddhism, where people will like hearing teachings about compassion, but will completely throw out teachings on sexual misconduct, because it's not convenient with a Western viewpoint. Report an error in the passage at 1:42:40 Highlight the passage at 1:42:40

1:43:07 Instead of just putting it away and then maybe dealing with it later on. It seems like that's the danger with all this in the West is this kind of yuppie Buddhism that's a mishmash of various traditions with the peace and love movement that doesn't end up kind of like being anything at the end. Yeah. Well, I don't know what's going to happen. You're right. That is a problem. I see it as part of a... Report an error in the passage at 1:43:07 Highlight the passage at 1:43:07

1:43:35 From within the tradition that I'm talking about here, that is absolutely a big problem. If I look at it as a scholar of religion, I'm thinking, well, this is just a natural part of the process. You have a really complicated situation here where people are trying to figure out what it means to be American and Buddhist and not to try to become Tibetan when they're not. Report an error in the passage at 1:43:35 Highlight the passage at 1:43:35

1:43:59 And not everybody's sure, like, the Dalai Lama has told people to do that, but what he hasn't given is, like, a road map on how to be an American. You know, it's, like, good thing, too, right? I mean, we don't really want him to do that, but that's a problem. Like, I just read in Tricycle that, what is it, this Brazilian Gelugpo Lama, was it, Seguro Rinpoche, he said, we're not going to prostrate anymore. Report an error in the passage at 1:43:59 Highlight the passage at 1:43:59

1:44:27 That's Tibetan. Yeah. That's just an example. I mean, this guy is like, you know, he's got really good teachers and he's like well established and so forth, but he's like, he's made a certain, you know, he's reached a certain conclusion about that that's different from what a lot of other people have thought. Report an error in the passage at 1:44:27 Highlight the passage at 1:44:27

1:44:47 So that's a difficult, I mean, look at what happened when Buddhism went to China, you know, they, when Buddhism first went to China, they, I think this is the best test, it's the most analogous case. I mean Buddhism going to other When Buddhism went to Sri Lanka or Buddhism came to Tibet, the people who were there were illiterate. Whereas when Buddhism went to China, they not only were highly literate, they thought all the Buddhists were barbarians and why should they even listen to them. Report an error in the passage at 1:44:47 Highlight the passage at 1:44:47

1:45:18 So it took a long time before they first started listening and then thinking, oh, maybe there's something interesting and then them wondering what the hell could that be. And then a long time before they actually... You know, started to figure out what it was a few centuries. My point is that you can't, you know, I don't want to be too hard on where we are. Report an error in the passage at 1:45:18 Highlight the passage at 1:45:18

1:45:42 I think we've gone a long way in a short amount of time. Report an error in the passage at 1:45:42 Highlight the passage at 1:45:42

1:45:54 Yeah, any other questions? I can talk more if you want. Yes? Report an error in the passage at 1:45:54 Highlight the passage at 1:45:54

1:46:09 Would you agree, though, that in the very beginning, when a person's first studying Buddhism, It might be more advantageous to stay within a certain one of the four sects to get the basics. Report an error in the passage at 1:46:09 Highlight the passage at 1:46:09

1:46:31 I personally would agree. I think it is very confusing. That's a good point. I think it would be if you just start from the beginning going around to all the different ones and you don't get a clear picture of anything in your mind. It takes a while to get a clear picture of one system in your mind. And then I think if you understand, I think this is the way the Dalai Lama did it, for example. Once he, you know, he started studying lamrim, this text that he's teaching here, he started studying it when he was 16, right? Report an error in the passage at 1:46:31 Highlight the passage at 1:46:31

1:47:04 And it wasn't, as he describes it, you know, as he describes his own life, it was not for a couple decades after that before he got into this conflict over. Whether he should be allowed to study enigma tantric texts. You see what I'm saying? He understood Tsongkhapa's system well before he started thinking about studying these other things. Report an error in the passage at 1:47:04 Highlight the passage at 1:47:04

1:47:33 When you understand one thing really well, then you have a situation from which to make sense out of what's similar and different in the other traditions. That's been my experience, too. Report an error in the passage at 1:47:33 Highlight the passage at 1:47:33

1:47:50 I wrote the, Teresa held up the book on the two truths, and I studied the two truths, conventional truth and ultimate truth, and how they were presented and argued about by different monastic colleges within Gilukba for a long time, which seemed like that would prepare me to understand nothing else. Report an error in the passage at 1:47:50 Highlight the passage at 1:47:50

1:48:10 But then I somehow found that I could actually understand Zen koans better than I could before. Do you know what I'm saying? And it's like all kinds of other things just started to make a little bit more sense because I'd understood that one thing really well. Report an error in the passage at 1:48:10 Highlight the passage at 1:48:10

1:48:35 Is that suitable? Should we stop there? Or are people ready to... I Report an error in the passage at 1:48:35 Highlight the passage at 1:48:35

1:48:42 don't know, fine. Well, the next chapter is a little shorter. I don't either. All right, I'll do a little bit more. Okay, I'll do a little bit more. The main point of the next chapter I think I can make without so much length than the previous. Chapter 3 is called The Heart of Buddhism and I think what it really is about is what makes Buddhism Buddhist. Report an error in the passage at 1:48:42 Highlight the passage at 1:48:42

1:49:12 And he makes the argument, which won't be surprising to those of you who've done this sort of thing before, that what makes Buddhism Buddhist is wisdom knowing emptiness. that compassion doesn't make Buddhism, Buddhist, you know, because other religions have that and ethics doesn't make Buddhism Buddhist and so forth. He starts out by saying that some say that Buddhism isn't really a religion but a science of the mind. Report an error in the passage at 1:49:12 Highlight the passage at 1:49:12

1:49:41 And I was very curious about after he said that whether he's going to agree with it or not. And he kind of went down the middle by saying there is a sense in which this is true, which sort of says is like saying, well, I don't completely agree with it. it. Report an error in the passage at 1:49:41 Highlight the passage at 1:49:41

1:49:55 But there is some point to it. And the point is that Buddhism, he sees, is all about understanding how one thing arises from another. And in this case, how mind influences future mind. Effects arise from causes again and again, dependent arising. And in this case, in Buddhism, we're very much concerned with suffering, pain on the one hand, happiness and pleasure on the other hand, and these things are all feelings, experiences in the mind. Report an error in the passage at 1:49:55 Highlight the passage at 1:49:55

1:50:26 So he's making the argument that we want to understand what are the causes and conditions for people being miserable, and what are the causes and conditions for people being happy, and how can we promote the latter and undercut the former. Report an error in the passage at 1:50:26 Highlight the passage at 1:50:26

1:50:44 In particular, Buddhism argues that the main, unlike say Marxism, Buddhism would argue that the main causes for people being happy or miserable are in the mind itself. Now there are other causes and conditions too. It's not that the mind, you know, previous moment of mind is the only thing that determines how you feel in the next moment, but that Report an error in the passage at 1:50:44 Highlight the passage at 1:50:44

1:51:14 The main causes for suffering, pain, worry, sadness and fear ultimately depend on our mental attitude. That's what it's called. So obviously we can think of, you know, and he likes to talk in some of his books about how miserable people can be in the midst of affluence. And yet you see cases of people with extreme deprivation. Not always, but sometimes you see cases of people who seem to have an extraordinary sense of peace even in the midst of deprivation. Report an error in the passage at 1:51:14 Highlight the passage at 1:51:14

1:51:46 And so he's saying, how can you account for that unless you consider the fact that while other outer causes and conditions matter? That they matter in terms of how they affect the mind and that the substantial cause that gives rise to mental happiness and mental misery is mental, right? That's a basic point of Buddhism. And then it says, look, when you look at causes and effects of happiness and misery, that you have the four noble truths in two sets of cause and effects. Report an error in the passage at 1:51:46 Highlight the passage at 1:51:46

1:52:17 That the second noble truth is the cause of all the problems and the first noble truth and the... Fourth noble truth is the cause of peace and happiness and the third noble truth. These two sets of cause and effects. Report an error in the passage at 1:52:17 Highlight the passage at 1:52:17

1:52:37 To bring about the kind of transformation that we want, the cause of the third noble truth is going to have to be not just a belief or faith in karma, but it has to be a strong conviction about how things exist. Basic nature of reality that arises out of analytical meditation in which we see for ourselves how things are. So the point of human existence is to use our intelligence the maximum extent possible. Report an error in the passage at 1:52:37 Highlight the passage at 1:52:37

1:53:15 This is like a little implicit dig at the just withdraw your mind from conceptuality point of view. Report an error in the passage at 1:53:15 Highlight the passage at 1:53:15

1:53:28 So wisdom is the key. Wisdom can be sometimes referred to Knowing conventional things and sometimes refer to knowing the ultimate things. Knowing conventional phenomena as they are and making proper distinctions is a kind of wisdom, but usually when the words used in Buddhism it more often refers to knowing the ultimate truth. Report an error in the passage at 1:53:28 Highlight the passage at 1:53:28

1:53:51 Actually Tsongkhapa makes a huge point in the great treatise, and it isn't Dalai Lama's point here, but he makes a huge point that wisdom cannot always be wisdom that analyzes the sea. Report an error in the passage at 1:53:51 Highlight the passage at 1:53:51

1:54:06 Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to say, think about the reasonings that would lead to understanding emptiness because those reasons themselves aren't, you know, aren't, you know, they're only conventionally existent. If you have to think of this reason versus that reason, you're making a conventional distinction. That reasoning is part of realizing emptiness, but you've had to make a conventional distinction to make the argument, right? Report an error in the passage at 1:54:06 Highlight the passage at 1:54:06

1:54:30 Or, you know, how are we going to decide whether to be Generous or not. They're both equally empty and so forth. So you can't really have the practice of the path without having wisdom that makes proper distinctions without reducing everything to its ultimate nature of emptiness. You have to have a conventional wisdom that operates too. It's a huge point for Tsongkhapa. Report an error in the passage at 1:54:30 Highlight the passage at 1:54:30

1:54:58 But here the Dalai Lama's point is mainly to say that the most important meaning of wisdom that he's talking about here is what we say prajnaparamita or wisdom that's transcendent, wisdom that knows the ultimate nature of reality. Report an error in the passage at 1:54:58 Highlight the passage at 1:54:58

1:55:15 Talking about wisdom as the perfection of wisdom or prajnaparamita, he says wisdom means... This sense of wisdom implies that there is something to which we can go that is far beyond where we are now. That's a nice phrase, you know, it's like really suggesting that it's sort of beyond our, you know, I don't know. Report an error in the passage at 1:55:15 Highlight the passage at 1:55:15

1:55:41 I try to think of it like, think of examples that everybody can see, like if you watch somebody like twirling a baton and throwing it up 30 feet in the air and catching it without dropping it. Or you watch somebody who types 100 words a minute when you don't know how to type or even want to, you know what I'm saying? And you see things like, well, that doesn't really seem possible. Like, how can a human being do that, right? Report an error in the passage at 1:55:41 Highlight the passage at 1:55:41

1:56:03 You know what I'm saying? But actually, you're seeing a human being do something, and you don't actually know how it could be, right? And it's sort of like that. It's like, that's what he's saying. There are kinds of wisdom, you know, that go deeper than what we can really, like... Easily imagine what it could be like to know something so well. Report an error in the passage at 1:56:03 Highlight the passage at 1:56:03

1:56:27 And then he talks a little bit about how to guide people into this wisdom. First, he briefly touches on the qualities of the teacher, something that comes back later. Basically, the teacher's motivation for giving a teaching has to be pure. Report an error in the passage at 1:56:27 Highlight the passage at 1:56:27

1:56:47 The most and many good qualities of a teacher, he doesn't go through all of them that are in Tsongkhapa's text, but he says the most important of all the qualities of a good teacher are teaching appropriately and living by the ideals that you teach and making your life an example. But then he goes on to say that the teacher also has to have the skill to adapt the teachings to the level, the need and the specific circumstances of the listener so as to be most effective. Report an error in the passage at 1:56:47 Highlight the passage at 1:56:47

1:57:15 And then... He gives an example of that from Nagarjuna and he basically tries to show that in The Precious Garland, Nagarjuna teaches emptiness in a way that starts out talking about basic things, about karma and rebirth and gives all kinds of practical advice on living and then only after a long time gets around to working into the idea of dependent arising and then by the time you get... Report an error in the passage at 1:57:15 Highlight the passage at 1:57:15

1:57:44 Farther into the third big section of Precious Garland, you have a full discussion of emptiness. But it comes only on the basis of a lot of other gradual ground laying that's done in terms of other practices. That's because this is advice to a king, not to an advanced yogi. And he's like... Guiding him through other practices before he's explaining emptiness. And then he contrasts that to another text by Nagarjuna, Bodhicitta Vivarana, or I guess we translate it, Essay on the Spirit of Enlightenment. Report an error in the passage at 1:57:44 Highlight the passage at 1:57:44

1:58:22 It's called Essay on the Spirit of Enlightenment, or Essay on Bodhicitta, but it starts out talking about emptiness right at the very beginning, without any warm-up or preliminaries whatsoever. And he says, why? Because we understand this text to be a commentary. On the Guya Samaja Tantra and that the appropriate trainees for this have already like advanced practitioners who will know what you're talking about. Report an error in the passage at 1:58:22 Highlight the passage at 1:58:22

1:58:45 And then after talking about emptiness for a while, Nagarjuna in this bodhicitta text eventually gets around to saying, well, you know, when you've understood emptiness in this way, then you will have compassion for living beings. And it's like... Well, that's like completely different from how it was taught over in your Precious Garland. Why? Because Nagarjuna is teaching a different kind of person. Report an error in the passage at 1:58:45 Highlight the passage at 1:58:45

1:59:08 He's not teaching a king. He's teaching a yogi. So the point is that there's lots of different kinds of texts. And when you think about how a text is set up, you have to realize that... It's not that because this text is set up this way and that one's set up this way that one's necessarily right or wrong. It's like they're addressed to different audiences. Report an error in the passage at 1:59:08 Highlight the passage at 1:59:08

1:59:34 They're formulated by, even the same author can make, formulate things completely differently depending on who they're writing for. That's why you use Nagarjuna for both of these, show that Nagarjuna himself taught emptiness in completely different ways depending on whom he was teaching him. Report an error in the passage at 1:59:34 Highlight the passage at 1:59:34

1:59:53 Then, He comes back to the focus on the idea of emptiness itself. Look, we want to have an aspiration in the short term to get a good rebirth and long term to get out of cyclical existence altogether. If we're focused on getting a good rebirth, that means we have to understand, have confidence in dependent arising in terms of karma. Report an error in the passage at 1:59:53 Highlight the passage at 1:59:53

2:00:17 But there's a lot of things about karma which we can't understand. Report an error in the passage at 2:00:17 Highlight the passage at 2:00:17

2:00:23 It seems that that's a challenge in terms of getting some conviction about that. So the idea is that, well, to have faith in the teachings about karma, you have to have confidence in the teacher, Buddha. And the way that you can get confidence in the teacher, Buddha, is by studying emptiness. That is, if you study emptiness and understand emptiness and get confidence in the fact that Buddha was right about emptiness, even though everybody else in the world basically said something different. Report an error in the passage at 2:00:23 Highlight the passage at 2:00:23

2:00:53 Which I think is true, right? Everybody else was saying, no, there's something completely different. And Buddha was saying, no. Then you can say on that basis, say that other things that the Buddha taught about karma and so forth can be reliable, even though we can't fully directly know them ourselves until we're enlightened. Report an error in the passage at 2:00:53 Highlight the passage at 2:00:53

2:01:18 So that was an argument that Dharmakirti gave about why emptiness is important. To think about even at the beginning of the path. And so then he goes on to make the argument in terms of the four noble truths. So first he's saying here that, you know, if you want to have faith in karma, you should meditate on emptiness. Then he says, if you want to understand the four noble truths, you have to meditate on emptiness. Report an error in the passage at 2:01:18 Highlight the passage at 2:01:18

2:01:42 Why? Because it's only because things are empty that it's possible to attain nirvāṇa. And if Buddha is just like going to talk about how miserable everybody is in the first noble truth and then there isn't any actual possibility of eradicating the kind of grasping that's the root of all this misery because in fact things really are graspable, right? Report an error in the passage at 2:01:42 Highlight the passage at 2:01:42

2:02:04 You have to have emptiness in order to have nirvāṇa and you have to have nirvāṇa in order to understand. Why it makes sense to talk about the first noble truth and the second noble truth. So you don't really understand the four noble truths unless you understand emptiness. He makes this argument. So he's like, you don't understand karma unless you understand emptiness. You don't understand four noble truths unless you understand emptiness. Report an error in the passage at 2:02:04 Highlight the passage at 2:02:04

2:02:29 Then it turns out that you're not really taking refuge unless you understand emptiness. He says, the purpose of the teaching of emptiness is the attainment of liberation. Report an error in the passage at 2:02:29 Highlight the passage at 2:02:29

2:02:42 If we confine our understanding of the Dharma to practices like guru yoga, relying on a spiritual teacher, awareness of impermanence, taking refuge in the three jewels, following precepts, and we're not seeing these within the deeper context of a purpose that's quite specific to Buddhism, and that is the attainment of liberation, we could be practicing any religion. Report an error in the passage at 2:02:42 Highlight the passage at 2:02:42

2:03:05 So he's not saying that that's bad necessarily. He's just saying, look, if you want to know what's Buddhist about it. There's good things about other religions, as mentioned before. But he's saying what's distinctively Buddhist is connecting these different practices, which are fundamentally shared with other religions. What's distinctive about Buddhism is the degree to which you connect them to the idea of the basic nature of reality and the way you realize that to become free from sickly existence. Report an error in the passage at 2:03:05 Highlight the passage at 2:03:05

2:03:32 And that's not common. to other religions, right? Individual practices of any sort, when not tied to the ultimate aim of the Buddhist path, are not in themselves uniquely Buddhist. Report an error in the passage at 2:03:32 Highlight the passage at 2:03:32

2:03:51 What makes a particular practice uniquely Buddhist is its connection to a motivation to attain liberation. This is the whole purpose of the teaching of emptiness. This purpose derives from understanding the truth of cessation and recognizing that it's possible to end suffering and the origins of suffering. Nirvāṇa doesn't mean transcending the world into some other place like a heavenly realm. Report an error in the passage at 2:03:51 Highlight the passage at 2:03:51

2:04:15 It's the empty quality of the mental state of a person who has cleansed away the stains of grasping at inherent existence or true existence. When a religious practice is complemented with this sort of understanding, Then it is a distinctively Buddhist practice. So if there was any doubt that he was like becoming un-Buddhist with all his going to pray with the Sufis, he makes up for it in that chapter by showing his staunch, staunch Buddhistness. Report an error in the passage at 2:04:15 Highlight the passage at 2:04:15

2:04:56 Well, that's the first three chapters of the book. And next, tomorrow we'll start by... The Dalai Lama will take us through a demonstration of the impossibility of there being God, followed by a discussion of the nature of the enlightened mind and then more things on the Four Noble Truths and how they relate to the Four Seals. Report an error in the passage at 2:04:56 Highlight the passage at 2:04:56

2:05:33 More just generally getting into the... Actual lamrim stuff. And then later in the afternoon tomorrow, I think we'll get around to talking about compassion and bodhicitta. And then I guess that will leave Sunday for everything about emptiness. But that's the nature of this thing. When I was here before, I did emptiness the whole time and we still didn't really cover it. So this is just, you know. Report an error in the passage at 2:05:33 Highlight the passage at 2:05:33

2:06:06 It can't be in that depth because of the breadth we're covering. Yeah, I've got it on. It was very interesting. I was at Lehigh and listening to you and repeating the Dalai woman's words, some of it came back and it's like you were starting to explain layers of levels of meaning and I'm like, wow, I didn't get that. Report an error in the passage at 2:06:06 Highlight the passage at 2:06:06

2:06:30 And I'm just curious for you as a scholar, when you're sitting there listening to it, are you getting these? You go back afterwards and you, oh, he said that, wow. I didn't actually get it at the time any better than you did, I would say. Are you okay if you did? You're a scholar. No, I didn't. Every once in a while I got a sense of what kind of a thing he was doing, but the thing is, I mean, I spent a lot of time with this, and after a while I started to see more and more things. Report an error in the passage at 2:06:30 Highlight the passage at 2:06:30

2:07:04 It's just amazing to hear what else he was, What was going on that we didn't get? Well, you wonder about, for example, why he says something. I threw out that example, but sometimes there'll be a sentence about Shantarakshita and it doesn't seem to fit. And then I started to realize that that's why he's talking about Shantarakshita is because he wants to show that long before Atisha, there were already Madhyamakas in Tibet. Report an error in the passage at 2:07:04 Highlight the passage at 2:07:04

2:07:39 With the enigmas, right? And that when Mipam then, you know, makes it really clear that there's a enigma, Madhyamaka philosophy in the 19th century, he doesn't base it on Chandrakirti. And so, you know, when, you know, he doesn't always have to say, he doesn't, he never says the word Mipam, but, you know, he's like, he says Shantaraksha does say, to me, it's, it's, it's a way of including. Report an error in the passage at 2:07:39 Highlight the passage at 2:07:39

2:08:06 It's not that Shantideva is distinctively Nyingma, but Nyingma, that's a way of tipping his hat and making sure that everybody's being included. There's all kinds of things like that. I definitely found, I would go over the text and I would sometimes have no idea why some things were the way they were and I'd just have to leave it and then later I would... Report an error in the passage at 2:08:06 Highlight the passage at 2:08:06

2:08:31 It would start to become clear to me that he actually had some reason for saying those words at that time. There's still some things I'm not really sure why he said them just the way he did, but a lot of it gets clearer if you just go over it more. Report an error in the passage at 2:08:31 Highlight the passage at 2:08:31

2:08:50 Yeah, I'm glad that I was helpful. Report an error in the passage at 2:08:50 Highlight the passage at 2:08:50

2:09:00 I'm not sure that I missed the point. The thing that makes Buddhism distinctly Buddhist is dependent arising in the view of emptiness. Yeah, that's what he says. And that's not unique to this teaching. Report an error in the passage at 2:09:00 Highlight the passage at 2:09:00

2:09:17 You know, the idea of the three trainings, right, for example, in ethics, meditation and wisdom, the general idea is that the practices of ethics Are not distinctively Buddhist, that they overlap in all different kinds of ways with ethical teachings of different religions. And the teachings of, like Buddha learned how to practice meditative stabilization, according to the traditional story of his life, from non-Buddhists before he was enlightened. Report an error in the passage at 2:09:17 Highlight the passage at 2:09:17

2:09:52 So it would be problematic to claim that that was some unique thing to Buddhism. Buddha learned it from Udraka and Aradha Kalama who were already there but when he was not awakened yet. So then it has to be within the wisdom aspect of the training that Buddhism claims its mark of differentiation from the other traditions. Report an error in the passage at 2:09:52 Highlight the passage at 2:09:52

2:10:16 And it's clear that that specifically has to do with the idea that... The ultimate nature of things is ungraspable or is an emptiness, a lack of any inherent existence in things. That things exist only insofar as they're interconnected in a lot of complicated ways with other things. That things that appear and disintegrate depend on causes and conditions. They don't just exist in themselves. Report an error in the passage at 2:10:16 Highlight the passage at 2:10:16

2:10:49 Thich Nhat Hanh says, there's a cloud in this piece of paper. Which is, oh, great, right? Great thing to say, because it's like, you know, being a little poetic, but it's just making the point that if there wasn't a mother for the logger, then there wouldn't be a piece of paper. If there wasn't sun in the sky, there wouldn't be a piece of paper. It's like all these things that aren't evident, but are absolutely indispensable for each thing to be here. Report an error in the passage at 2:10:49 Highlight the passage at 2:10:49

2:11:19 Lama Yeshe, like... He says in Introduction to Tantra, he said, well, emptiness is very difficult to understand, but you can start by just when you look at things, think about how they're dependent arisings. They don't look like dependent arisings. They look like they're set up out there. They're self-instituting, just set up on their own side. But you can stop to think, oh, somebody had to put all this stuff here just like it is and build this place. Report an error in the passage at 2:11:19 Highlight the passage at 2:11:19

2:11:47 You know what I'm saying? It wasn't like... Just sort of naturally there, waiting for me to come. You know what I'm saying? It was like all put together, like bit by bit. And not just like the physical bits, but just, you know, making a kind of society in which such a thing could be put together. You know what I'm saying? There's so many causes and conditions for there to be a school, for example. The school is a good example. Just when you think about all the money and all the... Report an error in the passage at 2:11:47 Highlight the passage at 2:11:47

2:12:20 All the politics and all the history and all the physical labor, it's just, it's very, you start to see, just like with a piece of paper, like there's this vast matrix of things that are absolutely indispensable and completely invisible, but without it, there's nothing there. Report an error in the passage at 2:12:20 Highlight the passage at 2:12:20

2:12:37 And so that's like causes and conditions. I mean, Lama Yeshe points us at that because it's so, it's very profound and yet accessible at the same time. Report an error in the passage at 2:12:37 Highlight the passage at 2:12:37

2:12:50 Anything that tapes up space or time can be seen as imputed or just ascribed to a collection of parts that make up the east and west of something in space or the beginning, middle and end of something in time. It's not irreducible substance there. People keep saying, now we've finally found the real The basis of reality is the microstring or something, you know, I don't know, whatever, something that's inside the quart that's smaller than, you know, it's like we never actually get to the thing that takes up space, but, you know, can't be broken into parts if it takes up space. Report an error in the passage at 2:12:50 Highlight the passage at 2:12:50

2:13:38 Anyway, so that's the problem. Everything that takes up any space is made out of parts, doesn't exist in itself apart from the parts, anything that comes and goes in time and depends on clauses and additions. And then everything that we see is involved with our participation and recognizing it or designating it as such and such and sort of thing. Report an error in the passage at 2:13:38 Highlight the passage at 2:13:38

2:13:57 So because things don't have any other way of existing apart from their interconnections in this way, then they're empty. And that's like not something that you found taught in that way in other traditions. Other traditions do talk about things being interconnected. It's not that they don't. It's that they don't go from the conclusion that things are interconnected to the idea that therefore they have no essential nature of their own. Report an error in the passage at 2:13:57 Highlight the passage at 2:13:57

2:14:30 Actually, people tend to assume the opposite. Because things have some essential reality, that's why they're able to be effective in forming relationships or working to affect other things. Report an error in the passage at 2:14:30 Highlight the passage at 2:14:30

2:14:46 fact many There's some different interpretations of that exact idea within Buddhism. Report an error in the passage at 2:14:46 Highlight the passage at 2:14:46

2:14:59 I tend to find myself thinking, yeah, this thing's related to that thing, because they're each real, and then they can hook up. But then the problem, of course, is that you're assuming a priori that each thing was able to be there on its own, and that turns out to be. you know, we tend to think. Report an error in the passage at 2:14:59 Highlight the passage at 2:14:59

2:15:16 It completely collapses when you start to look at how that thing's there. There isn't anything that's there on its own. Report an error in the passage at 2:15:16 Highlight the passage at 2:15:16

2:15:26 And people know that in Christianity, too. They'll say that there's only one thing that exists on its own, and that's God. Report an error in the passage at 2:15:26 Highlight the passage at 2:15:26

2:15:36 Everything else is contingent. So there has to be this one non-empty thing, at least, for anything else to exist. So the Dalai Lama is very sensitive about that because... He doesn't want to harm the faith in God that some people might have that's helpful to them spiritually. But on the other hand, saying things that are harmful to that faith is kind of, from his point of view, the very essence of his religion. Report an error in the passage at 2:15:36 Highlight the passage at 2:15:36

2:16:06 I think that's something that puts him in an awkward spot. As he says, I have some hesitancy talking to the Western audiences that are not necessarily Buddhist about emptiness. Report an error in the passage at 2:16:06 Highlight the passage at 2:16:06

2:16:25 Yes. Report an error in the passage at 2:16:25 Highlight the passage at 2:16:25

2:16:31 Okay, so I have a question about the talk that you're giving, and I really appreciate it. It's kind of like, well, I'm understanding something here. And I'm just wondering if this explanation, if I read the book, if that's the level that you're explaining in the book, are you giving another level of explanation to the explanation in the book? Report an error in the passage at 2:16:31 Highlight the passage at 2:16:31

2:17:00 I am giving another level of explanation. You can see that sometimes I'm reading directly from the book and sometimes I'm telling you why I think he's saying some things in the book. Report an error in the passage at 2:17:00 Highlight the passage at 2:17:00

2:17:20 I didn't want to just sit here and read the book to you. Having written the book in some sense, which doesn't mean authored it, but I made it out of... Various recordings. I have an idea, you know, what I could say about it, but that I can't put my words into the book. So I'm giving them to you. I put footnotes, but the footnotes don't explain everything I think. Report an error in the passage at 2:17:20 Highlight the passage at 2:17:20

2:17:52 They're just like giving you, telling you more about what I think, you know, what he refers to so many texts. That's what's extraordinary. I mean, he doesn't. He refers to texts from all different traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, all different kinds of Indian Buddhism, and he doesn't in any way limit himself to the texts that Tsongkhapa is quoting, even though Tsongkhapa quotes many dozens of texts. Report an error in the passage at 2:17:52 Highlight the passage at 2:17:52

2:18:17 He quotes the things that he makes his own, he makes the whole thing his own, and in a way he does it you know. It has to similar effect that is showing how this is rooted in the Indian Buddhist tradition. But for him, as I was saying, this is not about proving the rightness of it in the way I think it was. Report an error in the passage at 2:18:17 Highlight the passage at 2:18:17

2:18:48 That's exactly what Tsongkhapa was doing. He wanted to prove that he was not just some Tibetan making some stuff up. These other Tibetans had it wrong and he could show the right way to interpret these texts. But the Dalai Lama is doing that, I think, because he wants to show that the core ideas of Lama Rinpoche from his point of view are the common heritage of all Buddhists and not just the Galupa. Report an error in the passage at 2:18:48 Highlight the passage at 2:18:48

2:19:13 That's why he does it. So he picks different texts because he's trying to make a different argument. Report an error in the passage at 2:19:13 Highlight the passage at 2:19:13

2:19:23 Yes? Report an error in the passage at 2:19:23 Highlight the passage at 2:19:23

2:19:30 It seems to me that they have totally different purposes, really, in that Jay Tsongkhapa is founding a tradition. Right. And His Holiness the Dalai Lama is not founding a tradition. Right. You know, the purpose is completely different. Exactly. That's right. No, that's exactly the point. I mean, and it's, you can see the same thing. Like if you look at Tsongkhapa versus Nagarjuna, look at the treatise on the Middle Way. Report an error in the passage at 2:19:30 Highlight the passage at 2:19:30

2:19:58 You know, Nagarjuna is concerned about the people. He's mainly concerned about people who have. A reifying view of certain categories or dharmas that things can be boiled down to. Even if there's a dependent arising, even if there's no self, there are some things that are real and substantial, which we will break them down and show you what these categories are. Report an error in the passage at 2:19:58 Highlight the passage at 2:19:58

2:20:23 And Nagarjuna is interested in sort of relentlessly taking all of this apart and showing how none of it holds up under analysis. He's not interested mainly in the Treatise on the Middle Way. His focus is not on protecting people against this extreme of nihilism, although he does give a way to be protected, but that's not the focus because the purpose is in the opposite direction. Report an error in the passage at 2:20:23 Highlight the passage at 2:20:23

2:20:50 And then when you read Tsongkhapa, it's very clear that he thinks that with some exceptions, one very important exception, that most of the earlier Tibetan interpreters of the Madhyamaka tradition have gone to nihilistic extremes. And so when he writes, he considers that he's completely agreeing not only with Nagarjuna but with Chandrakirti who is considered to have the sort of most radical interpretation of Nagarjuna and yet at the same time his purpose is to push back against nihilistic misreadings of Madhyamaka. Report an error in the passage at 2:20:50 Highlight the passage at 2:20:50

2:21:27 He phrases things in a very different way and he explains and tries to justify why it's appropriate to put in adverbial qualifiers and not say nothing exists ever at all but say nothing ever exists inherently. He shows very well how even in sutras which appear to say hundreds of times that none of these things exist. Report an error in the passage at 2:21:27 Highlight the passage at 2:21:27

2:21:51 That it will be said at some point nothing intrinsically exists or nothing inherently exists. And the idea is that you should understand the force of that as carrying over. That it couldn't possibly mean that nothing ever exists at all in any sense. Because then you wouldn't have any Buddhist teachings. So he makes an argument that it's reasonable to understand this is not intended to be nihilistic. Report an error in the passage at 2:21:51 Highlight the passage at 2:21:51

2:22:13 But it's intended to push back against people who have this reifying extreme. When you have a reifying extreme, which we all do innately, then it's very difficult to tell the difference between something existing and something inherently existing. And so it can be a skill and means to tell people that it's not there. Right? Because the it is, for them, indifferentiably the real it and the conventional it. Report an error in the passage at 2:22:13 Highlight the passage at 2:22:13

2:22:42 And this is the same point. It's just a different example. The way people... Talk depends on their context and of their audience and what they're trying to accomplish. And I think my point in part was, I was making the point that you are, but a little more specifically trying to say that it's not just that he, to found this. Report an error in the passage at 2:22:42 Highlight the passage at 2:22:42

2:23:05 What you said about Tsongkhapa is right. To found a sect, he has to draw sharp distinctions and differentiate himself from the other people. He's saying that this is the correct idea and this is why it's different from what other people have said. The Dalai Lama doesn't have that responsibility and his responsibility as he sees it, he lays out his three commitments, instead is to find as much common ground as is findable. Report an error in the passage at 2:23:05 Highlight the passage at 2:23:05

2:23:29 He doesn't fake up, fake common ground. He doesn't pretend that it's there. He doesn't try to make it that all these religions are saying the same thing. He never says things that he doesn't believe in order to just phony some common ground. But he's just sort of relentlessly determined to focus on, focus his energies in that direction rather than in the make difference, drawing sharp lines of superiority. Report an error in the passage at 2:23:29 Highlight the passage at 2:23:29

2:24:00 I think that's because he sees that and he makes that very clear as the path of peace among Tibetan Buddhists and between religions and then in the world as a whole. Report an error in the passage at 2:24:00 Highlight the passage at 2:24:00

2:24:27 a night and start again tomorrow happy to do it Report an error in the passage at 2:24:27 Highlight the passage at 2:24:27

2:24:41 reminder, in the morning there's a drop-in meditation, so be sure to pick up all your belongings. Report an error in the passage at 2:24:41 Highlight the passage at 2:24:41

2:25:01 This is an extra copy. Okay, it did. Thank you. Report an error in the passage at 2:25:01 Highlight the passage at 2:25:01

2:25:15 Amen. Report an error in the passage at 2:25:15 Highlight the passage at 2:25:15

2:25:32 Thank you. Report an error in the passage at 2:25:32 Highlight the passage at 2:25:32

· · · silence, 1 minute

2:26:45 hours, three hours. Yeah. That's pretty good. Report an error in the passage at 2:26:45 Highlight the passage at 2:26:45

2:26:53 Thank you. Report an error in the passage at 2:26:53 Highlight the passage at 2:26:53

2:26:59 I know it's a good idea, but I was just like, here's a good one. No, no, no, no. dead Buddhists. Report an error in the passage at 2:26:59 Highlight the passage at 2:26:59

2:27:36 throw you down a little bit. This stuff's all on me. I knew that something. I knew that something. I knew that something. Yeah. Report an error in the passage at 2:27:36 Highlight the passage at 2:27:36

2:27:48 Thank you. Report an error in the passage at 2:27:48 Highlight the passage at 2:27:48

· · · silence, 1 minute

2:28:25 Thank you. Report an error in the passage at 2:28:25 Highlight the passage at 2:28:25

2:28:36 it's a long way, yeah. Report an error in the passage at 2:28:36 Highlight the passage at 2:28:36

2:28:51 Thank you. That's okay. Report an error in the passage at 2:28:51 Highlight the passage at 2:28:51

· · · silence, 1 minute

2:29:31 I'll be here in the non-existent disappearing box. Yeah. Yeah. We're not going to work on it. This is nice. It'd be another. Thank you. Report an error in the passage at 2:29:31 Highlight the passage at 2:29:31