Speaker 1 00:00:14 Welcome to my Bob Thurman podcast. I'm so grateful some good friends enabled me to present them to you. If you enjoy them and find them useful, please think of becoming a member of Tibet House us to help preserve Tibetan culture. Tibet house is the D Dilemma's cultural center in America. All best wishes have a great day.
Speaker 2 00:00:48 This is episode 308, Mind or form, becoming the engine of happiness for all.
Speaker 4 00:01:21 Welcome back to the Wish granting gem tree field. Let's meditate for a minute Together. Sit in a balanced way, breathe gently. Let your ordinary reality not only your sense of body and location, but cosmos continent, planet era. Let it all dissolve. Don't think about anything. Feel that you're just a vast empty space floating there nicely. No division of self. Another no worries. This pure, sheer, lucid, voidness, mass space of freedom itself. And then arise from that. Suddenly in your most alert, perky, luminous, form your meditative self on the roof of the world, on a bluff overlooking Lake Monte Rar with an island in the middle of the lake out of it. Growing a giant tree made of Jules Agt and coral and diamond and emerald and rub and sapphire and topaz lights radiating everywhere. It's crown in the heavens with fluffy clouds and on the branches of the tree instead of the Christmas ornaments or the glistening lotuses and on the buds of the lotuses sit the holy mentors, the enlightened beings, the great teachers, the saints, the saviors, the goddesses, the gods.
Speaker 4 00:03:03 Your whole pantheon of enlightened beings sitting and looking down at you happily, blessing you. Rated in light ways to you. You fill up with a light breeze, you glow and you're energized with them. You're self doubt and your self limitation and your self defeating attitudes melting away, flowing out from you. Then you become so glowing with light that the light reflects around you to all the beings sitting around you on the green sword who don't know to look at the tree. They don't see the tree, they just see an empty lake. So they're looking at you wonder what you're looking at and how wide it is that you're starting to glow and your hum and you're levitating there in your energy field feeling so good.
Speaker 4 00:03:53 And then forget about the visualization. Just let it be there. You're in that field filled up with this rainbow jewel light ways. Then you salute them. Hail enlightened ones. Thank you for coming. Please bless me to realize the teachings sustain me. Bless all beings to realize the teachings, bless me, to help them realize the teachings. Then offering radiate the whole world to them. Pick up the planet in your hands. Hold it out to them. Say here you take the world. We're messing it up, polluting it, messing with the ozone, filling it with too many people, destroying too many species. You take it, have the universe and have the relief and the burden of putting the responsibility for the universe and the enlightened beings. Then think about your own actions, your negative actions of taking lives, taking what is not given sexual misconduct. Telling lies, making divisions between people, speaking harshly, speaking frivolously, meaninglessly, holding greedy thoughts, holding malicious thoughts, holding unrealistic attitudes. Those 10 negative acts. You think about whatever I did of them all my different lives. I sincerely repent.
Speaker 4 00:05:22 I'm sorry I wronged you whole and mentor beings, three jewels, enlightened beings. I didn't live up to your standard ordinary living beings. I'm sorry I wronged you, I harmed you, I misled you. I failed to attend enlightenment to help you. I'm really sorry I did that. I won't do it anymore. I'm gonna do the opposite, sort of virtuous wonderful things. I'm gonna save lives, I'm gonna give gifts. I'm gonna be sexually correct and helpful and sensitive. I'm gonna tell the truth. I'm gonna speak reconciling peacemaking. I'm gonna speak sweetly, gonna speak meaningfully. I'm gonna hold generous thoughts and detached thoughts. I'm going to hold loving thoughts and patient thoughts. I'm going to hold realistic views of the cause and effect of evolution, of the transformation of enlightenment, of the 12 links of dependent origination, a good process of causation, of the universe, of the four noble truths.
Speaker 4 00:06:23 Then next time I'm gonna rejoice in front of you or mentor beings. Let us rejoice in all the good deeds of all beings throughout the universe. Let us not feel a drop of envy, of competitiveness, of contempt. But let us sincerely congratulate every single one from depth of heart and rejoice with their good deals and wellbeing. Then no enlightened ones. Please bring your teaching. Make the darma reign of teaching of enlightenment upon me and upon all beings so that we can gain the understanding to be free of suffering and the cause of suffering to achieve happiness and the cause of happiness. And then or enlightened ones. Don't go be transcendent and drop out and float there in the truth body. Be sort of beyond and aloof. Don't just stick to your great bliss void vision, but see us specifically in our relativity, in our suffering. Help us stay with us forever. And finally, anything we do that's good here, let us dedicate it not for personal fame or profit or gain, but for Buddhahood total enlightenment for the sake of the happiness of all beings.
Speaker 4 00:07:40 So those are the seven limbs we do connecting ourselves within the refuge field. Then we turn our mind to the four themes within the arpeggio that reinforce our feeling of transcendence, our feeling of true self appreciation, our feeling of wanting to drop out from the rat race of the world and beyond. Vacation. Spiritual quests retreat lifelong mentally by achieving transcendent bendon. And these are the themes of the preciousness of the human life that we have endowed with liberty and opportunity. The theme of the immediacy of death, each moment is infinite. Each moment has infinite blessing. The theme of the inexorability of causal connection of the infinite continuity of life and the specific shaping of positive and negative experiences in life based on positive and negative evolutionary actions. And the fourth tone about the suffering, the universal suffering about every aspect of egocentric existence, even being a form realm, deity in the bliss heaven of braa, even being a formless realm, deity in the absolute crescent of infinite space, infinite consciousness, infinite nothingness, apparent nothingness and beyond consciousness and unconsciousness. The fourth state still being in those states, even as a deity of those states, living billions of aons in those states still suffering because it's still a temporary state still created, therefore is destroyed. Eventually.
Speaker 4 00:09:18 These four themes then liber us from any kind of ambition for anything short of total enlightenment, total liberation, total freedom, no mundane state of power or pleasure or even knowledge is worthwhile. Nothing about the egocentric life cycle is satisfactory. And when we realize these four preciousness of life, edia of death, infinity of causation, suffering of egocentric lifecycle, we achieve mental transcendence. We feel tremendous relief. We excuse ourself from all kinds of boring routine duties and obligations, and we focus upon the true meaning of our life, which is to attain perfect freedom and perfect awareness, perfect enlightenment. And then we come to the theme of the third session, which we quickly do as well. The theme that we are interconnected with all beings that just as we feel relief to achieve liberation and freedom. So all beings need that relief. And in fact, since we are indelibly interconnected with them, until they also have the relief, our relief will not be absolutely perfect.
Speaker 4 00:10:34 And so in that line, we'd resolve to conceive the spirit of enlightenment, cultivate the spirit of enlightenment, developed the spirit of enlightenment, whatever you say, plant the spirit of enlightenment in our mindstream evolutionary stream. And there we take the 11 step process, we create the ground of equanimity, sense of equal dedication and commitment and connection to all beings with no preferences, no special enemies and no special friends upon that ground. Then we recognize all beings as having been our mothers in the infinite life. Upon that sense of kinship and familiarity, we remember the kindness of the mother of this life and therefore all the mothers of all the lives. Upon that sense of deep affection, deep appreciation for the mothers, we then develops feeling of gratitude and wish to repay their kindness by making them truly happy.
Speaker 4 00:11:29 Upon that, we move then to the fifth thing of deciding to exchange self and others to give up our self preoccupation and to adopt the preoccupation with others. Adopt all of them as our children in a way, be the mother of all of them. And then moving to the next one, we then recognize that disadvantages, in fact, we reinforced that resolve to exchange self and others both being equal self and others being equal in that each one seeks happiness and seeks to avoid suffering. And we then think of the disadvantages of maintaining self preoccupation, how it has gotten us into trouble and kept us in an unsatisfactory state since beginning this time. We then move to the next step and we recognize the advantages of cherishing others, how all of them are dear to us. They are the jewel mind of our potential, virtue of our own bud hood.
Speaker 4 00:12:19 Without them we couldn't become Buddhas and have the perfect bliss. And then we move to the next state where we feel totally loving towards all of them. We see them in their happiness. We visualize their happiness, we determine that they should have happiness in the cause of happiness. We then realistically appraise their condition of suffering and we develop great compassion for them. We wish them to become free of that suffering and the cause of that suffering. And then the 10th stage, we realize that we must take responsibility for them. We develop the magnificent messianic resolve. That will be that one more Buddha in the universe that will see to it that all of the beings we are aware of in the universe achieve freedom from suffering, permanent and total fulfillment of enlightenment.
Speaker 4 00:13:08 And then the 11 step is where we recognize that all other beings, many other beings, infinite numbers of other beings have become Buddhas already. They're doing the utmost that they can for all beings and that therefore we must join their number to be able to bring those beings that we perceive as not having been fully taken care of, still all of our mother beings. And we must become a Buddha for the sake of all these beings. And this is where we then begin with today of having conceived that mind, that aspires to become a Buddha for the sake of all beings that turns the heart into making a purpose to evolution, to all of our continuum of future exists. However we conceive of that, whether it's through a system of reincarnation or a system of trans migration, or whether it's through a material system of the law of conservation, of energy, whatever our sense of being connected into the continuity of the future, we determine that whatever atom of us or whatever bit of our consciousness or whatever goes forward, we will not rest until we have become the engine of the liberation and the freedom and the happiness of all beings.
Speaker 4 00:14:18 We can relax from the more meditative thing, although we're staying within the Juul refuge tree and we're coming up to what I call mind reform, which is involved with the exchange of self and other teaching and others call mind training or mind transformation lojong on one, becoming a budva child, a son or daughter of the Buddhas. It's all in this border of resolving to achieve the spirit of enlightenment, resolving to be the bud Ava, developing the heroic conception of saving all beings from suffering. And in that is this wonderful mind reform method where one really focuses very drastically on the self preoccupation habit to really focus and see how all of our troubles in life come from being self preoccupied and how all virtues and all happiness and benefits in life come from being other preoccupied. Instead exchanging the self preoccupation for their other preoccupation.
Speaker 4 00:15:25 Seeing how seeking our own wellbeing exclusively we have harmed others immeasurable times over previous lives and by those negative comic acts or even thought that mentally harmed them, verbally harmed them, physically harmed them. And by those acts and words and DN thoughts harmed ourselves by adopting more negative evolutionary aspects and forms and becoming embodied in more negative evolutionary ways. And how in principle, by seeking our own self-interest, we never really will fulfill our own self-interest. So it's not just the self-interest element, but it's the inefficacy of this type of pursuit of self-interest through self reoccupation that we focus on in the mind training. And here I will just give a list of the commitments of the mind training, this kind of training where you reverse the normal behavior and the normal sort of self aggrandizing and self-promoting behavior. Because you're substituting other promotion for self-promotion, you're substituting other preoccupation for self preoccupation.
Speaker 4 00:16:38 So it's really like an opposite way from the people of the world. They say practice mind reform without contradicting other commitments. Avoid reckless behavior, avoid being biased. Make changes to your aspiration, intensify it while remaining natural. Do not criticize the faults of others. Do not contemplate others' faults. Purify your greatest delusion. First, abandon all hope for results. Abandon poisonous food, begrudging with your delusions. Do not retaliate to abuse. Do not wait in ambush. Do not pinpoint the weaknesses of others. Do not use others as scapegoats. Do not misuse the dharma. Never aim to be the quickest to the top. Do not turn a God into a demonn and do not seek happiness by causing others suffering.
Speaker 4 00:17:51 Each one of these has an extensive instruction, but they indicate a person who is on vacation. Basically this is the training of someone who has the mind of transcendence. They're on vacation from the normal mundane goals. They're not seeking normal success, normal status, normal ego space, normal victory. Therefore they're looking for something completely different out of all of their relationships. They're looking to transform the mind from being self preoccupied to being other preoccupied in every exchange. They're looking for the happiness of the other. Therefore, let the enemy have the victory. Let them win. Let them have it go ahead. Take the defeat oneself if they abuse one. Take the benefit of the abuse by building your tolerance in patience. And do not think of retaliating. Be only grudging about your own delusions. Be critical of your own faults and biases. If someone harms you, you should not pull this in mind and wait for an opportunity to take revenge. Strengthen your mind of patience instead, and find ways to forgive the harm done to you.
Speaker 4 00:19:02 Do not pinpoint the weaknesses of others in your actions. Be careful not to offend others, whether humans or spirits. Never humiliate them by pointing out their weak spots in front of others. Do not misuse the dharma. The mayana purpose of the dharma teachings and the mind training in particular is to gain enlightenment to benefit all beings. You should therefore avoid using the teachings just to promote yourself and gain wealth, reputation, or other worldly success. If I was giving these talks and we were doing this retreat with a view to trying to gain worldly success, that would really be the wrong thing to do. Far from getting that we would get all kinds of negative results.
Speaker 4 00:19:48 I do love the mind reform tradition as little as I'm able to practice it or perform it as I per like to say, because it really is so radical and so marvelous. It engages enlightened self-interest, not merely some sort of sentimental altruism. It really proceeds by recognizing the fact that if you are preoccupied with your own condition all the time, it will always be unsatisfactory to you and you will only narrow your being and make yourself smaller and close up more and more and become less and less enlightened. We listen to this voice within that. We identify as ourselves telling us constantly, Well now is that gonna make you happy? Is this gonna be nice? And what can you do for yourself today? What should you do for yourself today? Et cetera, et cetera. And we're constantly engaged in this inner focus and inner retention on our self situation.
Speaker 4 00:20:47 But then those times, if we reflect when we really feel happy, when we have a moment of relief from this constant inner griping and inner restlessness and inner discontent, it's when something has happened to us aesthetically sincerely or intellectually in an in engagement with others, when we are doing something really wonderful and another is really benefiting from it. Like we've given a gift and we are just temporarily distracted from our own inner self reoccupation by someone just jumping up and down for joy by someone feeling, Wow, isn't this great? Thanks so much. Or I'm so happy, this is really nice, and blah blah blah. You know? And we're just for a moment caught up in the joy like when you give a child a new toy or some type of special thing and they're just absorbed with it and they're just entranced with it. And then you forget about your own dissatisfaction and you just enjoy their enjoyment.
Speaker 4 00:21:42 And so this teaching recognizes that the essence of the happiness of those moments in life are that we are no longer thinking about our condition. The minute we have an experience and we stop to evaluate it and say, How fun was that to me? How much did I enjoy them enjoying their new toy? When we have that thought, then we completely lose the enjoyment. How great was that bango that I saw? And then it's never good enough. Since those times of other preoccupation are the times when we are happy ourselves. Let us just go straight to the other preoccupation. Let's not just be self preoccupied and then now and then find something. Some be surprised by something where we become other preoccupied and we're momentarily distracted from our cycle of inner despair and inner misery. Let us go for the other preoccupation. Let us focus on them.
Speaker 4 00:22:35 Let us always think of being there for sentient beings. What we are doing is for sentient beings. And forget about the result for ourself it is acting without focusing on the results of act, acting just purely out of the joy of the action, out of the virtue of the action and not thinking about any result. And this is the yoga of positive evolutionary action. This is what they call acting transcendently with the overlooking of the the three sectors of the act. That is to say, when you give a gift, you don't perceive yourself as the giver. You don't perceive the gift as a gift, you don't perceive the receiver as the receiver. Something flows from this part of you to that part of you. And so in a way you've done it without perceiving yourself, doing it, without taking note of it, without appropriating saying, Oh, I'm so great. I gave a gift. Or gee, it was a too big a gift I gave. Or gee, am I gonna miss that myself later? All this kind of thing, which ruins the transcendence of any gift or any act.
Speaker 4 00:23:48 Well this is the mind transformation teaching, the teaching of all of the great saints of Tibet acting in this kind of amazing unconventional way as Milarepa used to say, You know, people of the world seem crazy to the dharma person because the people of the world are seeking wealth and security and shelter and comfort and possessions and status and so forth. Everything that the dharma person sees as melting away, like due with the rising of the sun completely unsubstantial results. And people of dharma see the inner world of the opening of the soul to generosity and tolerance and wisdom and openness and freedom as the only thing worthwhile. And this can be enhanced sometimes by poverty. It can be enhanced, by accepting injury, by accepting defeat. If you do it in the right way, it can be enhanced by not retaliating, by not seeking to compete, only competing with yourself, competing against your self preoccupation, bringing other preoccupation to bear against self preoccupation. So then the way that the dharma person lives like mil Repa looks insane to the people of the world.
Speaker 4 00:25:05 For example, Mil Repa used to say most mothers and fathers have a big thing about giving wealth to their children. They wanna leave them a legacy, some money or a house possessions their social status. But actually all of those things simply trap the offspring into feeling that those are the worthwhile things in life. And then they might be deceived into spending their whole life seeking more wealth in status and fame in possessions. Whereas if one really wanted the full happiness, the total enlightenment of that offspring, one might give them teaching of dharma rather than material things at least give it in addition to some sort of material assistance that they're wrong with a certain degree of material assistance to leave people free of being preoccupied with only surviving, getting by. But to leave that as if that were the only thing and not to have a higher aspiration for one's child is in a way harmful to that child in trapping them deeper and deeper into the worldly concerns.
Speaker 4 00:26:09 That's a little taste of the mind transformation tradition. I have a a proverb for it in English. I say Buddha is as Buddha does, meaning that we shouldn't hold Buddhahood or enlightenment so far away from ourselves. Sometimes when you're too religious and you think, I've gotta concentrate, I've gotta be on retreat, I've gotta become enlightened so I can help all beings. And then meanwhile, I don't want to help this one being over here. I refuse to give a dollar to this being. I'm gonna squabble and quar with that being about who gets to sit where in the retreat we become less focused on the day-to-day mindfulness of our day-to-day being as we would be if we were Buddha. Once I am budha, then I'll be nice, then I'll, I won't struggle to the top. I'll perceive you as more important than myself and so on.
Speaker 4 00:27:04 When I am Buddha, that's the way Buddha's consciousness is. But until I get that, I better be more focused on myself to get to be Buddha. Ashanti Davis says, Buddha only thinks of the welfare of others. Buddha has no thought for him or herself because what Buddha, him or herself is utterly self-satisfied in total blissful freedom. So they don't need anything. However, they don't shut out of their awareness, the neediness of other beings and therefore the only thing remaining for them to do in the world is to satisfy the needs of the other beings. And of course, satisfying them ultimately doesn't just mean giving material things or palliating their suffering, but it means giving them the dharma teaching which will enable them to liberate themselves from suffering in its cause.
Speaker 4 00:27:53 Now we come to the bodde sub naval, not that we are gonna be taking the bodice naval in this retreat unless you already do have it. And then we can always keep retaking it because it's always good to renew. And here, in order to take the boat itself have to know what the boce vow is and there are said to be the 18 root vows of the Boce Boce vow is not only just saying I wow to save all beings, although that's the central gist of it, but the Bosavi vow has 18 root and 46 branch vows.
Speaker 4 00:28:28 What are the ways in which you determine to guide your interaction with others when you are born again in a mode of where you're living for others more than living for self or living for self through living for others, primarily having exchanged self preoccupation for other preoccupation. What is wonderful about this aspect also it's so like other world religions, the good aspects of all the other world religions, the aspect of the sermon on the mount of Jesus, the great compassion he taught, the great compassion, taught an Islam of ala la man of being compassionate for others. Confucius notion of being loyal and gracious with others and feeling true love for them run where students have translated as humanity, like being humanitarian with others because they have some sort of unemotional concept about Chinese civilization, which is wrong. The run means love, be loving with others and by being loving with others, then everything you do with them will be automatically gracious in they have the love of God bti and they have the my tree and all of the loving virtues of others, gentleness and non-violence, a himsa common human religion of kindness, a friendliness of love and compassion.
Speaker 4 00:29:58 Every human being needs love from others. They couldn't live without loving relationships with others and they would never be happy themselves unless they love others. And you don't need religion for that. It's a common biological fact. We are kind of a group being. And the Budd Opera vows do acknowledge that the first route downfall, for example, is to praise yourself and depreciate others.
Speaker 4 00:30:27 Not giving the dharma to those who need it or not giving material things to those who need them, not forgiving someone when they do sincerely apologize. Abandoning the universal outlook of the miana teaching, Abandoning the idea that all beings deserve full of happiness and full enlightenment. Making use of offerings given to the three jewels. Using them yourself abandoning the dharma, saying that this and that some teaching of the dharma that we don't personally like that is not like fit with my idea. Oh, that's no good, that's stupid or, but I couldn't have said that. Pushing mons or nuns to disrobe and go off and be normal worldly people by not really realizing what a great virtue it is to enter the vacation realm. The resort of the monastic sunga committing the five heinous crimes, killing father mother, a saint wounding ab Buddha or creating a division in the community holding unrealistic views, completely destroying towns and so on.
Speaker 4 00:31:41 The bombing of Yugoslavia was a little bit unfortunately too much like this civilian bombing in general. People who've done that, even though they were on the right to side, they were against the horrible genocide. Dictator Hitler, Sheey killing salam joza or genocidal milovich. But by going so far and doing this cowardly thing of bombings and destroying civilians and destroying entire towns, they are certainly oozing. They bova, although they're on the right side teaching voidness to the unprepared. And here the danger is of teaching voidness emptiness. This is something which I'm about to do. I hope I'm not losing my Buddhist at the value. Better be prepared everybody who's listening to this throughout all future time <laugh>, this is something in the Buddhist tradition where in the Vean tradition where they feel that voidness or selflessness is sort of a little bit like a secret teaching or of an advanced teaching because it could be confusing someone to realize that they have no fixed identity without being prepared in some other way of how to deal with that freedom.
Speaker 4 00:32:45 That is the teaching of freedom. But freedom is dangerous for someone, unprepared for it might freak them out. They're a little reserved about teaching voidness or emptiness or freedom and it's full form of wisdom. But I don't agree with it personally in the modern time. But I do believe that people in the modern world already have a kind of involuntary experience of identity lessness. The reason that it's dangerous for people in more traditional societies was that they were sort of quite comfortable. It's cultural matrices that they lived in and they didn't have this tremendous encounter with hilty or with nothingness that the modern people have.
Speaker 4 00:33:27 And we modern people, all of us already start out almost thinking that we are nothing. So it's not dangerous to us, it's considered dangerous for someone with the naive sense of identity to lose that and then mistake the loss of it for that they are nothing and become realistic. But all of us in the modern realm are realistic and therefore we need the medicine of emptiness and selflessness, I think as the critique of nothingness, as the critique of hilty, reversing others' aspiration for complete enlightenment. If someone decides to become a body self fund and wants to say, well being sort of persuading them that that's too difficult, why don't you just go and do this? There's some other thing. Don't try to do it causing someone to abandon individual liberation, Someone who is a monastic, whatever their particular ethical vow or level of discipline is to tell 'em that's useless and forget it and have a good time disparaging the monastic vehicle as losing of the boza.
Speaker 4 00:34:26 Val never think that the Boise Ava vehicle, the universal vehicle, is in any way against the monastic vehicle. It totally presupposes the monastic vehicle is totally essential that people have the mind of transcendence and the ethic of transcendence before they can begin have the mind of universal compassion and the ethic of universal salvation. Otherwise, if they don't have the mind of transcendence before that they don't really know what is the salvation they wanna make for everybody. They have no idea. They have not even experienced the first sort of relief of transcendence themselves. Just as the mind of compassion. To develop love for others, you have to first love yourself in wishing yourself to have freedom and not just love yourself in a fake way by wishing yourself to have comfort or wealth or security, all of which will be losery as compassion depends upon transcendence. So the maana depends upon the monastic vehicle, falsely claiming to have realized emptiness. If you don't really understand what is actual reality, but you pretend that you do receiving the property of the monastics, you know when someone else steals, destroys a monastery or some sort of icon or something like that and then you become the broker for that defense.
Speaker 4 00:35:46 If you're a yogi and you're doing retreat and you're doing intense practice and you're given gifts by donors to support your practice, your performance, and then you, because you're irritated with the donor or something like that, you give those gifts away to someone who's not seriously practicing. That's a root downfall. And finally, and the most importantly that 18th of them is giving up the spirit of enlightenment. Getting discouraged to someone really angers you. You feel very great anger or hatred for that person. You decide I cannot be able to stop, but I cannot say all bes because I won't save this one <laugh>. This one is just too horrible and I refuse to be embarked in the quest of but hood for the sake of saving this Hitler, this sonam hus saying this terrible creepy person who just did all these nasty things that one I'm leaving out. But if you leave out even ones engine being, once you take the vow to determination to save all beings, to then lose it by giving somebody up, some being up, it's considered not good. And that is why you shouldn't rush to take the body Salva vow. There is a ceremony, for example, if you eventually decide to do something like that at some stage you make a vow to try to learn to make the vow, you don't rush into it.
Speaker 4 00:37:04 On the other hand, of course, if you do have the vision, as I said earlier, which I think is the key to it all, the vision of the infinite continuity of life, your life personally, even though you'll change personality of course in other lives and the lives of all the other beings that you know and you recognize that we are in this together, we're in each other's faces for the infinite future. If you really have that vision, viscerally began the common sense feeling that that is the nature of reality. And that you're never gonna get away from these other people here, these other beings, even the animals, the bugs, they're all gonna be with you forever. Not always in the same form. The bugs will become humans. But once you feel that as a sort of visceral common sense thing, you feel that's the cosmos that you live in and you're bound to live in, even as a Buddha you'll be in, then it becomes actually easy and natural to take the Buddha Sava vow and really mean it.
Speaker 4 00:38:00 And you can't possibly lose it. You cannot give it up cuz you cannot give up the quest of making all beings perfectly happy. If you feel infinitely connected to those all beings where you can break it, you know, in a moment of anger or something, you can break about aab of vow and then repair it. But in order to break it where it's unrepairable, you have to think that what you did the break it was right, didn't have a fault. You have to have no intention of trying not to break it again in the future. You have to think what you did was right and breaking it. You have to even be happy that you broke the vow and you have no regret about it. Then there are many branch vows 46, which I won't go into because there are just too many, but they're very useful and wonderful.
Speaker 4 00:38:51 One learns the discipline of that and one can do it. And it's like a discipline of altruism. It's so sensitive and other sensitive. It's, it's like an etiquette almost. You know? You know, ethics and morals and etiquette are very interconnected in Buddhist discipline. You know, for example, in monastic discipline, it's like a kind of boot camp of gentleness being a monk or a nun. Now when you reach the point, of course where you want to take the Bud Salva vow, where you want to have the venturing mind of the buddhi salva, the activated mind at that time, you enter the space like this space of the wish granting gem tree refuge field. And you call to witness all the Buddhas and buras from all the universes in all the three times past, present, future, and all the 10 directions. Vast, huge, cosmic sort of feeling of all the enlightened beings from everywhere you call them to witness and invite them in a great host to the sky, like a close encounter of the third kind.
Speaker 4 00:39:58 And then you also must arrange very, very elaborate offerings like really voluminous flowers, marvelous cakes and cookies and fruits and bags of rice and whatever you can, and incense and lights and really a very big thing, a very lush display must make to offer to this, this invited assembly. I mean they obviously don't eat any of it, they don't use it, but it's the generosity, the feeling of offering of connection that you do. And then you solemnly sort of swear, I will become a Buddha for the sake of all beings as all the Buddhas did when they awoke from being individualistically oriented beings just concerned with themselves and self reoccupied beings. When they awoke from that to become other preoccupied beings, other cherishing bozas just as they did, and then eventually became Buddha. So I too will become a Bo Salva. I too will conceive the spirit of enlightenment.
Speaker 4 00:40:58 I too will travel the path of the buddhi deeds and become a perfect Buddha for the sake of all my mother beings. And you sort of repeat it three times and then you called the witness all the beings. And this is a wonderful thing that one can do. And then it is said, when you do that, that is when you truly are born in the family of the Buddhas as a child of son or daughter of V, the Buddhas, and you have a new kind of clan. You have a new gene, which is called your spiritual gene, your budva gene, which transforms your spiritual gene, which you take with you from life after life anyway. And you determine and you insist that your evolution and all of your experiences in life have the meaning that you give to them, which is that they are meaningful in that they are your way to buddhahood for the sake of all beings. And then you use everything, even the most adverse conditions, even excellence and disasters and sicknesses. You turn everything into a, an assistant on the on your path, everything into fuel for your vehicle, even sleeping, you're generating vast hosts of merit. Even you do the smallest thing with the view that I do this little thing. I give this coin to this beggar with a view to becoming a perfect Buddha so I can help this beggar become perfectly happy and give him the teaching and where he can become a perfect Buddha.
Speaker 4 00:42:27 Then having achieved the Buddha type of mind, you must be rejoiced and you must be delighted like someone who is born again actually, because you are born again. When you really take that Bos Atva vow, you have done something just truly magnificent. You have changed your life. You have changed your whole orientation in life. In the words of Shva, you say, just as the previous lords of bliss conceive the Enlightenment spirit, and just as they successfully lived by the Bos opera practices, likewise for the sake of all that lives, do I conceive the spirit of enlightenment? And likewise, shall I too successively follow the practices in order to further increase it from now on the intelligent to have vividly taken the spirit of enlightenment in this way should extol it in the following manner and congratulate themselves today. To each of us who takes that boce vow or even imagines or decides or determines that we want to develop to where we can take the boce valve, this is how we will greet ourselves.
Speaker 4 00:43:37 Upon doing that today, my life has born fruit, having well obtained this human existence. I've been born in the family of Buddha and now am one of Buddha's children. Thus, whatever actions I do from now on must be in a accord with the family tradition. Never shall I do anything to disgrace this holy faultless family, just like a blind man discovering a jewel in a heap of trash. Likewise, by some coincidence, I have found the enlightenment spirit within me. It is the supreme elixia that overcomes the Lord of death. It is the inexhaustible treasure that eliminates all poverty in the world. It is the supreme medicine that cures the world's disease. It is the evergreen tree that shelters all beings wandering tired on the roads of life. It is the universal bridge that frees beings from wretched lives. It is the rising moon of the mind that dispels the torment of addictions. It is the great son that burns away the misty ignorance of the world. It is the quintessential butter from the churning of the milk of Dharma. For all guests traveling the path of life who wish to experience the true happiness, this spirit will satisfy them with joy and exalt them in the highest bliss. Today, in the presence of all the saviors, I invite the world to be my guests at the feast of temporal and ultimate bliss. May God's humans and all be joyful.
Speaker 4 00:45:27 So that then concludes the spirit of enlightenment and anyone who's even imagined ever cultivating it, opening their heart and turning it inside out in this wonderful way and coming up with this marvelous, magnificent resolution to make all of evolution meaningful and they themselves make it meaningful by becoming a perfectly enlightened being, the engine of the happiness of all other beings.
Speaker 2 00:46:11 The Bob Thurman podcast is produced under Creative Commons, No derivatives license. Please be sure to like, share and repost on your favorite social media platforms. This recording is an excerpt from the Jewel Tree of Tibet, available through Sounds True Music for the Bob Thurman podcast is generously supplied by Tenzing Choal. To learn more about the work and music of Tenzing Choal, please visit his
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