Speaker 2 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 dial Lamas cultural center in America. All best wishes. Have a great day.
Speaker 3 00:00:48 This is episode 293, the jeweled treasure of Tibet, an overview and introduction to Buddhism.
Speaker 4 00:01:14 Welcome everyone to this retreat. And it is a retreat on the stages of the path of enlightenment teachings, which are common to all the forms of Tibetan Buddhism, and which I would say Tibetan Buddhism has taken from all kinds of Buddhism, especially as preserved and developed in India over 1500 years before it came to debate and made into a systematic method for people to practice and to perform, to become perfectly enlightened in this life or in a short number of lives, starting from wherever they start and what we're gonna be doing in the next few days as a retreat. And I always try to remember the main person on the retreat is myself. The main person who is trying to learn what I say, even though I may be saying it is myself. So therefore you're joining me in this retreat for which I'm very thankful. I don't pretend to be a great teacher. Although I do claim this is a great teaching. It is the jewel treasures of Tibet.
Speaker 4 00:02:17 Why we love Tibet, why people admire Tibet, why they're fascinated by it is because Tibet is the guardian custodian, preserver developer, and the utilizer of this great teachings, which came originally from what the DBEs call, the noble country, aria Barta, the country of the noble beings, the beings following in the Buddhist tradition, who achieved nobility in the spiritual sense, nobility in the sense of realized the meaning and the reality of selflessness and therefore were selfless beings, beings who did not live as enclosed within their own personal egocentric perspective, but lived within a multiperspectival world where the perspectives of the others were as important or more important than the perspectives of the self. This is how a noble person is defined by the Buddha, not in terms of social class or race or nationality or any such thing or gender or religion, but in terms of whether or not you perceive things only from your own perspective or whether you perceive them simultaneously from all the perspectives of others.
Speaker 4 00:03:28 So we are gonna be on this retreat. And what we're gonna try to do on this retreat together is we are going to go from the kind of beginning of the Tibetan path to the end of the Tibetan path. And we're going to rehearse various little meditations, and we're going to learn about what that path is, so that we understand it so that you can do this retreat yourself again and again. And I can do this retreat myself again and again. In fact, I find very often I listen to tapes in the car, so we don't wanna do any kind of meditation that would have us run off the road. So we always have to keep an element of our perspective on the ordinary reality, we have to develop the cognitive dissonance, the subtlety of consciousness, and not just get all fascinated or obsessed or entrance with one particular thing as we go along.
Speaker 4 00:04:19 Now, I'm also gonna do this in a way in which hopefully people who are not Tibetan Buddhist, people who are not even Buddhist, would be able to follow along with, I follow his holiness, the dah Lama, I could say right away. He's my main teacher, my guru, my mentor, and I follow his view that we don't want in the world today. Millions and millions and millions of Buddhist. We're not competing with the Christians, the Jews, the Muslims, the Hindus, we're not competing for market share for population explosions. We are looking to the quality of people's lives. We are hoping that people will become more enlightened, whatever their religious affiliation, whether even secular humanist, we are not competing for them. So conversion is not the goal here. And therefore in teaching a teaching like this, which we hope the public will widely use. Uh, we wanna make it accessible to as many people as possible. On the other hand, if we teach it in the completely bland and watered down way, then no one will really have much inspiration to use much.
Speaker 4 00:05:23 I love the Dharma, which is the teachings of the Budha. And I love the Budha and I love the Tibetan version of it. And I love the Tibetan version of it that was perfected by Z kapa who lived in the 15th century. And which is the teaching that the Dal Lamas have practiced since then the current Dal Lama, the 14th is Len DGA. And then therefore that's where I will focus is on a teaching by the pension Lama, actually called the Gudo Puja, the offering to the guru offering to the mentor or worship of the mentor. But in each case, I will veer away from my own narrow understanding of that. And I will encourage those of you who meditate, who may be SoFi, who might be Christians, who might be another kind of Buddhist, whatever it is to figure out a way of doing the same type of thing of focusing on the same type of inspiration of dwelling for a time retreating to a kind of jewel space, but to populate that jewel space in your own way.
Speaker 4 00:06:27 Now, I will begin by reading the very first verse of this work that is gonna perform what the DBEs would call the root text or the sort of backbone of our time together, the mentor offering, or the mentor worship. And the first verse reads as follows. This is by the fourth pen mache who lived in the 17th century. And now you can go into just a momentary meditation mode through the great bliss state. I myself become the mentor deity from my luminous body light, raise shine all around massively blessing beings and things, making the universe pure and fabulous perfection in its every quality end of short meditation. Now I will explain the great bliss state is the state of reality. It is not some elaborate place far away from where we are. The wonderful thing about the Buddhas revelation. The Buddhas insight is that this reality itself is the great BLIS state.
Speaker 4 00:07:40 What he came to call another context, bliss, void, indivisible, what he called initially Nirvana, the extinction of all suffering, the extinction of suffering and the achievement of perfect happiness. And the reality of perfect happiness is the reality of our world. This was the Buddha's good news. This is what he realized under the Bodhi tree. The original wish granting gem tree. It is not that we have to create some artificial world, a world apart from this world. It is that we have to understand the nature of this world and the nature of this world. When we do understand it will be revealed to us through our understanding, not from some other person, just showing us something, but through our own understanding, reveal to us as the great bliss state of emptiness or openness and super bliss intertwined and indivisible. So from the great BLIS state, therefore the first line mentions the reality upon which Buddhism is founded, the reality, which the Buddha awoke to 2,500 years ago, and which is the reality that millions and hundreds of millions of Buddhists over the centuries have awoken to.
Speaker 4 00:08:55 And it is also undoubtedly the reality, which the great founding teachers of other world traditions also experienced and tasted in their own ways and also made available to people either through understanding or sometimes through faith or sometimes through experience of different kinds. It is the same rate state because it is the same reality. All beings dwell in this reality, sadly, they are not aware of it. They think they're dwelling in a reality of insufficiency, a self-centered reality, where they are pitted against the world and the world is pitted against them. And therefore the world is always suffering and always causes them frustration and always overwhelms them. And so the Buddhas good news was that actually, Hey, take a break, relax, ease back where you are is actually perfect. But of course, unfortunately just by my saying it, you can't know it because you're so caught up in your stream of not knowing.
Speaker 4 00:09:55 So I have to provide you a method of education and the great teachers in all traditions provide you methods of development and education, where you can come to awaken from the world of delusion, in which you feel you must suffer to the world of reality in which you are automatically free of suffering. The second line then says, I myself become the mentor, deity the guru, God. And this is fascinating to put right away at the very beginning of the teaching, which we think of as ourselves as rank beginners I myself, although I'm talking to you, I'm the vessel through which this teaching is coming in a certain form toward you. I myself don't understand it fully by any means. I'm also suffering still in the world in which I'm struggling with the world because of my distorted perspective. However, when I say I myself become the mentor deity.
Speaker 4 00:10:45 When you yourself say, I myself become the mentor date at the beginning of your practice, what you are doing is imagining yourself at the goal of awakening. You're imagining that you actually are a Buddha. You have become a Buddha, you have awakened, and you're imagining what it feels like to awaken. You're imagining what it feels like to know that your reality is a great bliss state, indivisible and uninterruptable and undestructible, and that in that great BLIS state, then you become for others, a mentor and a divine mentor, a mentor that is always present to all others in whatever form they need from my luminous body. Your body no longer is a body of heavy flesh and blood obstructed and filled with gravity and old age and sickness and limitation and obstacle from my luminous body light raise shine all around because once you become aware of the great bliss state, which is the nature of reality, once you become out of compassion, willing, therefore, or automatically to wishing, to manifest yourself as a mentor, the, as that is to say, it's an educator and a divine one who is therefore present to everyone.
Speaker 4 00:11:59 Once you have done that, then your body itself becomes a teaching. It becomes a light vehicle. It becomes a lens through which the light emerges from the natural state to all other beings and opens them and blesses them. The fifth line, massively blessing beings and things, blessing them by bringing that light to them, the light of awakening, causing them to look up from their treadmill, from the tunnels of desire and frustration and aversion and hatred and anger and confusion that they are charging down endlessly, round and round in an endless maze and circle. This light shines on them. The light of reality, the light of bliss, and they look up for a minute from their preoccupation, from their obsession. And they feel blessed by that moment of freedom. A moment of looking up, making the universe pure and fabulous perfection in its every quality, meaning that you see the universe as helping the beings.
Speaker 4 00:12:58 You see even the tunnels down, which they run as radiating to the beings, the light of reality, the light of freedom. So you begin at this very end point, actually, and this is another one of the greatnesses of Tibetan Buddhism. Tibetan Buddhism is not a national thing. Something made in Tibet, something combined with some local traditions in Tibet, Tibetan, Buddhism, and Buddhism itself. What is Buddhism? It is the response of awakened beings to unawakened beings wish to become awakened. That is what it is. When you become awakened, you realize you're oneness with other beings. When you realize your oneness with them, their suffering becomes your suffering. Their delusion becomes your delusion. You feel it just as they do. You don't imagine how they're feeling it the way we normally do from within our self enclosure. You actually feel it when you feel it, then you automatically respond to help alleviate it.
Speaker 4 00:14:08 You recognize of course, that there's nothing you can do by sort of force. There's nothing you can do by magic. There's nothing you can do to automatically just relieve them of that and sort of BLIS them out instantaneously, like in some sort of explosion, no matter how intense your own feeling is within yourself of joy and freedom and relief and relaxation, you can't automatically just force them into that mode. In fact, if you approach them with a very high energy of your own bliss, they will perceive that as a little bit pressure and they will then constrict more and they will feel more pressured and they will suffer more. You realize that the only way you yourself awakened and opened was to realize your selflessness, to realize that you were not an isolated, separate, absolute being cut off from other beings, but that you yourself were nothing but a nexus of bliss.
Speaker 4 00:15:02 You were empty of any intrinsic reality, separated identity, fixed static personality. And by being empty of that, you therefore didn't become nonexistent. You became completely interconnected with all other beings and nexus of relationality with all other beings, with nothing resisting the delicate intimate tends of relationality. Once you realized that you realized that that infinite realm and web of relationality was bliss. And once you realized that as bliss, then you had nothing left to do in the universe. Your life was over in a way life defined as yourself as isolated and separated from the world and struggling with the world to achieve a good position, to gain some sort of power or control or security or safety, or if even flight from that interconnected universe, instead of that, you become the universe. Then, then nothing is actually wrong in that universe. It is perfect, but others don't see it that way. So the one thing that is lacking is they're seeing it the way that they could see it so that they would feel perfectly at ease within it. Then you automatically wish to free them. And then your only frustration would be if in an initial glimpse of this awakening, you lack the compassion, you lack the skill and liberative technique. You lack the art to really open to others, the world, as you see it, their own reality is a reality of bliss.
Speaker 4 00:16:28 Originally, the Buddha found this under a tree. He went there, he met with the gods. He spent six years after having been a prince. He talked to them, he asked them the nature of reality. After some questioning, they revealed that they weren't sure what it was quite. We asked him to go find out and to let them know if he found out he then investigated and explored more and more finally, after much investigation and exploring, he discovered the nature of reality, which he called selflessness, which he called profound peace, which he called Luminos radiance transparency, which he called uncreate reality as it is in itself. And when he discovered that he said like an elixir is this reality and Elixia of imortality, which I have found. And he was ecstatic and joyous first, he said, I don't think I will show anyone this reality, no need to bother because they will not understand it.
Speaker 4 00:17:29 So instead I'm gonna stay in the forest and not speak to anyone. However, in doing that, he was already speaking something and he was already leaving a teaching for beings. And the first thing he was leaving in that teaching in a way was silence. The reason that he could afford to be silent in a way is that in that perception, he did perceive all beings as completely free of suffering. Even beings that themselves thought of themselves as hell. He saw that their ultimate reality was freedom from suffering. Even hell is a great bliss state in its reality that doesn't ignore of course, that in its reality, the way the beings in those hell perceive it, it is hell. But that reality, luckily is less real than the reality, which is bliss. So the silence of the Buddha was not a silence of abandoning beings. It is not a silence where I have something that I don't have to talk about, which you don't, it's a silence, which affirms that you and your deepest being whatever theater of pain you have fascinated yourself by you are caught up in you're habitually, delighted with in some odd way, your deeper, deeper reality of cells of subatomic energies.
Speaker 4 00:18:50 Your reality of your deeper sensitivity is in fact freedom.
Speaker 4 00:18:57 And the silence in the way is the Buddhas great expression. It's the Buddhas great teaching. What the Hindus call you are that, and the punishes us of that in the punish HUD, meaning you are the ultimate reality. You are AER. They say, but the Buddha's way of affirming that is by being silent. Because if you are that after all, you know, it yourself Buddhism again, as merely a set of responses to the needs of beings develops as they need it. It is in some system that emerges as a thing in itself. Out of some reality, it is not a dogma, a structure built up on the basis of reality. It is actually simply an endless series of methods and arts of opening doors to reality, which therefore fit with any particular person's location in place. It can emerge as Christianity. It can emerge as Judaism. It can emerge as humanism. It can emerge as nihilism, even in some case, it can emerge as absolutisms of various kinds. It isn't that it's in some right view, which is Buddhism.
Speaker 4 00:20:03 So therefore the beginning of Buddhism in India, the Buddha emphasized to people, to individuals that they needed to break away from conventional society, conventional society at his time was not the enlightened beautiful luminous exquisite India that we know is the remnant of today. India was a militaristic country like ancient Greece or Iran or Egypt, a country of city states with armies and armor with rigid class system, with people in enslaving, exploiting other people with people fighting and killing and conquering other people with nature, being exploited by the early era, part of the agricultural revolution, cities and excessive wealth being built up by some people, power being sought by vain, glorious warrior rulers, but himself was born in such a warrior ruler. And it was predicted even that he could conquer that whole world. Should he turn his mind to worldly power and wealth and dominion?
Speaker 4 00:21:08 Fortunately for the world, he didn't do an Alexander the great number. And instead he turned to conquer himself to conquer reality, but India was like that. So in an India like that, would've felt first to emphasize individualism. Really? He said, why should you live your life fighting and struggling and producing and sling? Why shouldn't you just leave the world? Why shouldn't you fulfill yourself? Imagine what you would do. You were a person you went and sat under a tree. You suffered, you struggled, you analyzed, you meditated. You came to a deep understanding of the essential blissfulness of every element in cell and particle of life. And even the bliss in the rocks and the bliss in the earth and the bliss in the volcanoes and the bliss in the stars. And then you saw these beings running around madly chasing these ephemeral goals, power and dominion, which they would only die from.
Speaker 4 00:22:06 And then after death, they would suffer from the negative X. They had committed against others in order to get that power and dominion, even power and knowledge like becoming a sor or a ma or a scientist, and then dying and forgetting that and having caused this and that disaster in the process of trying to get it. Even Yogi's aesthetically seeking heaven, to become a God and then becoming a God, a God of the form realm, a God of the formless realms, gods of the desire realms, and then falling from those divine stages and becoming again, a dear caught in the headlights, some future world, you would feel a way of how can I break them out of these routine patterns, this social collective that they're caught in that tells them to do this and do that. And God wants them to and go from birth to death without ever looking up from the groove down, which they're preordained to follow and never realizing that their own heart is an engine of bliss.
Speaker 4 00:23:02 Their own brain is an instrument of deep wisdom where you would emphasize individualism. You would say, don't just follow these conventional traditional ideas. Even religious ideas, don't follow them. They are just fitting you into some other scheme. You yourself can be, God, you really are. You yourself are reality. You yourself are Buddha. So don't follow these things, withdraw from them, seek your own reality. Look inside yourself with mindfulness, look inside yourself with analysis, minimize your negative activities and evolutionary actions and don't harm other beings and become more helpful. Or at least since you can't become helpful right away, based on the diluted motives, at least cease to harm. And then Buddha did a marvelous thing. He invented the monastic system. He invented being ordained as a monk or a nun so that people would be supported by the collective to escape from the collective. It chose India because India was the wealthiest place then, and there was enough surplus where people could afford to have people live outside their collective, where people had the generosity to support the nonconformist, the individualist.
Speaker 4 00:24:23 So Buddha invented the monastic orders. The Sanga, the renunciate the transcendent community. And this caught on like wildfire in India because people had this wish. Every human being knows that there's some higher happiness that they should be able to get. No religion can conquer their allegiance without promising that for them, at least in the afterlife and at least to taste it in a ritual, even in this life, but mainly to defer that achievement for them to some afterlife heaven, the happy hunting ground, even shamanism does that indigenous, you know, tribal non-literate religions and the great religions all have to do that. Secular humanism promises that, but they only promise sort of a blissful oblivion. They don't have a very colorful heaven, pretty quiet, dark one, but quiet, heavenly rest <laugh>.
Speaker 4 00:25:23 But Buddha saw that as possible to everyone here and now. So he created an institution that celebrated that possibility. That became a doorway within society. I like to say also, it's like he created holes in the cheese of society. Like he Swiss cheese to society and the holes were the sunga the community, the renunciate institution where people would go for lunch and they would be fed lunch to keep their body going by the lay community. And then they would spend their whole life energy liberating themselves, seeking freedom, not having to produce anything for anyone, not doing any agricultural work, not doing any military work, not doing any social work. Initially after 400 years in India, this institution became so prevalent and such a useful educational institution in a way, a sort of institutional intervention in the routine lives of Indians, that it became a kind of establishment thes that the community.
Speaker 4 00:26:22 And at that point, then the Buddha planted teachings earlier, which then ripened at that point and people came to use them known as the MAANA, the universal vehicle or the vehicle of society, really the social gospel. And those institutions began to reach out into the society and actually change the routine way of living in society. At first, he very intelligently and very practically avoided, challenging too much. The routines only enough to gain some space for the individual. He didn't say to the Kings, well, you better stop doing this and you better not do that. He did, but he didn't expect them really necessarily to listen to him. He said, it would better. If you don't have war, if you don't make violence, he gave a list of ethical things of not killing, not stealing, not committing sexual misconduct, not lying and so forth, like a 10 commandments, but 10 recommendations rather than commandments, but he didn't expect them to follow him after four or 500 years when the institution had produced many, many free people.
Speaker 4 00:27:22 And these freed people in a feedback loop were beginning to make possible more freedom within the routines, by the lay. People then unfolded the sort of social dimension of that teaching and began to change the social ethic of India and devotional began to arise. Cutting across the class system. Vegetarianism began to arise cutting across the sacrifice system pacifism, and non-violence began to arise cutting across the militaristic system and India advanced enormously and gloriously and developed the most glorious culture of the ancient world. A culture where the pursuit of pleasure even was developed to a very advanced degree. The pursuit of wealth created the legendary wealth of India that even had Columbus drooling at the mouth 1500 years later, which brought Alexander the great to India, which brought all kinds of central Asian conquerors to India, eventually brought the Muslims and eventually brought the Europeans to India.
Speaker 4 00:28:21 That tremendous wealth began to develop in this time, as that began to expand more and more, then people who couldn't wait for society to develop over a long period of time who felt they couldn't wait as Bova as heroes or heroines for enlightenment for many, many lifetimes of their own to achieve freedom. These people decided they would achieve this perfect freedom and perfect ability to help others achieve freedom in a single lifetime. And this was very, very esoteric. At first in the Tibetan view, it emerged at the same time as the MAANA emerged around 100 before the common era, but remained completely esoteric for 700 years without a single book being published as an esoteric tradition of people living on the fringes on the margins, magical people, the magicians, the SIDA, the adapts, but then after about 500 years, they began to emerge into the public because so many people were ready for them that there was no need for it to remain secret. The Kings were so gentle by then relatively speaking, the militar was so subdued. The violence level in India was so relatively tamed that this deep exploration of the unconscious that is the Vare, the adamantine vehicle, the Treana, the weaving vehicle continuum vehicle was safe to emerge.
Speaker 4 00:29:53 So these were the three main stages in Indian history through which Indian society developed and which therefore the awakened response developed in interaction with India, with the people of India, as they became more and more open, more and more vulnerable, more and more ready to experience their own bliss to accept their own reality, the less and less afraid of joy they became. The aim. The problem with that, of course, when a society adopts this kind of a view is it becomes vulnerable in Western historiography of the 19th century and the 20th century. And even the beginning of the 21st is that a society that becomes thus vulnerable and thus gentle is called decadent is something wrong with it? Its military guard is let down. It is no longer violent in the family, violent within the individual against themselves, violent within the family, against their families, disciplined in the schools, disciplined in the military academies and therefore capable of powerful violence to be inflicted on neighbors in conquest or in defense, the whole militaristic structure of life and of the individual heart mind, soul body.
Speaker 4 00:31:07 This structure when weaken creates decadence from the historiography of the west. But we must remember that historiography is a historiography of a militaristic society. We are the most militaristic society history has ever seen. We have nuclear weapons, germ warfare, incredible instruments of violence. And our culture is permeated with that violence and our minds are permeated with that violence. Even our physical structure is permeated with that violence, but from an enlightenment world history, the decadence that India had reached was in fact civilization, it was gentleness. It was something like a social paradise heaven on earth. It's kind of the new Jerusalem in India temporarily, but of course it could only be temporary in a particular country at that time because most of the world was still seething with violence and conquest and hoards and uh, great invasion, armies and PHS, and what have you seething with it? So it would be inevitable that in that era, some culture that would become gentle would be swept over would be overwhelmed by hoards of fierce warriors, actually themselves of course, only looking for that gentleness and that joy and that bliss and that peace and that S cease of suffering. But of course, thinking that they had to conquer it and that somehow they had to conquer it by violence naturally have to conquer. And in that process, thereby destroying in fact what they were seeking or destroying its surface manifestations.
Speaker 4 00:32:47 But however, fortunately in India at that time, the great Sid does the great enlightened beings. The walking, living Buddhas, they foresaw this. They realized that central Asia was filled with potential yogis who were still doing the yoga of seeking bliss, but thinking wrongly that it could be conquered by violence. And they recognized that many of them would sweep into India and top all this gentle civilization burn the monasteries in the libraries and the temples to the goddesses and the male female union icons, which frightened the most of all primal scene deities. So foreseeing that they looked up and they said, aha, which among all these central Asian barbarians might be the ones we can turn to saving this, where it won't be destroyed. And they looked and they saw a Tibet and in Tibet, we're also barbarians. At this time they were conquerors. They were fierce, violent emperors and warriors, but there was one saving grace they had in Tibet.
Speaker 4 00:33:54 Their appetite for conquest was not limitless. It was not infinite, but an accident of their geography, nothing to do with any racial superiority, nothing to do with anything of the kind but having to do with their geography. Why? Because Tibetans like to live at two to three miles in altitude, therefore when they would conquer China or the central Asian silk crude or Northern India, they would feel a little too much oxygen, too much humidity. And they would seek to go back up to the high clear altitudes. So they didn't ever wanna stay anywhere. Once they unified the great giant plateau, large as all of Western Europe, they were happy on the plateau. So they were sort of ready for some sort of more steady state development and the great a saw that they could go to these people and they could turn them around from external conquest to the idea of internal conquest, self conquest, reality, conquest, Dharma, conquest, Dharma, and its highest meaning, meaning reality.
Speaker 4 00:35:00 So partner Sababa in the eighth century, Sara Hapa might DEPA in the ninth and 10th centuries. The greats began to send emissaries up there. Many of them even incarnated up there earlier, who then became the disciples of these Indians who came up and they took up their, their great treasury, their wish granting gem tree with all of its wish, fulfilling gem fruits of the monastic vehicle of the universal vehicle of love and compassion of the Vara vehicle. The a adamantine vehicle of depth, psychology, and inner yoga and subtle energy yogas. And they took them up there one by one and text by text and tradition by tradition. And they've dealt with Tibetans one by one, and they turned these ferocious individualistic seminoma warriors into the great yogis. Although at first there was tremendous resistance. The Tibetans did not just say, oh yeah, great. Let's all be yogis and meditate. Forget about that conquering stuff we were doing. Not at all. The legend is that Padma Samba had to wrestle and fight with all the mountain fierce Savage, military deities of Tibet. And one by one in mountain by mountain. He moved not like a shaman, but like a super shaman.
Speaker 4 00:36:21 And he went and he dealt with each day at he and wrestled with them and overwhelmed them and impressed them by the one thing that the Buddhist day he wrestlers always do. They never drive them out. They never take those da and eradicate them or kill them. They never chase them away somewhere else. What they do is they wrestle them down and then when they could deliver ACU de grass and the da knows that they start having retreats. Of course, at first, these DAS need to be kind of pinned down or they would run away. But once they pinned them down, they don't hurt them and they give them endless lectures. And after a century or two, the data gets sick of the talks and the da says, okay, I guess the Dharma is useful. Buddhism is helpful. I guess I could rather be enlightened than conquer another country or two. Cause they're used to animal sacrifices, even human sacrifices in the most ancient period. And the Buddhist always make them into vegetarians in rituals and things. The dates are a little disgruntled about that at first, but then they get used to it that they lose a little weight. They feel better it's okay.
Speaker 4 00:37:34 So in this way, from the seventh century to the 17th century, the Tibetans were approached in a way by lighten beings in all various manners and ways men and women AEPS and simple people because enlightened beings, once they become enlightened, they gain the ability to manifest in whatever way anybody needs a manifestation, the buds believe. And after about a thousand years of self struggle of self investigation of self insight, the nation as a whole achieved what the Indians had achieved in about 1500, they became demilitarized. They became gentle. They became monastic size. They became ized. They became socially, internally, compassionate and emphasized. You could say, but it took a thousand years. That, of course, that doesn't mean that individual Tibetans, even in the first century, even in the first decade, didn't achieve enlightenment. Although the depends themselves, they kind of like to say that Miller REPA was the first Tibetan to achieve perfect.
Speaker 4 00:38:42 Buddhahood in a single life Miller REPA who lived in the 11th century after 400 years of effort, going through the evolutionary process from being an ordinary sort of criminal actually of murderer. He was to becoming a perfect Buddha. The previous Tibetans who somehow became enlightened, the Tibetans felt were somehow people who were emanations or incarnations of enlightened beings and therefore then manifested enlightenment as Tibetans, but they weren't ordinary Tibetans ever. They were reborn already as potentially enlightened at a high level. And as the great a in India who were there at the full flower of Indian civilization from five, 600 of the common era to a 900, a thousand of the common era before India began absorbing the great second millennium in waves of invasion, up until the British invasion, beginning from the Iranian Muslim invasion to the British Christian invasion. These as predicted saw the institutions melt away in India, they didn't disappear completely.
Speaker 4 00:39:39 They were kind of absorbed as Hinduism into the sort of village social religion of India underneath the oppressive weight of the Islamic conquerors. But its formal institutions disappear. The monasteries, the libraries, the temples, the S stupas. These were all sacked and destroyed basically. And all evidence of Buddhism in a way was wiped completely out of India, which also goes to show you that Buddhism is not some institutions. It is simply the response of enlightened beings to help the unenlightened. Once the Tibetans had achieved this ability in the 17th century is the time when we can say that the culture sort of caught up with the very advanced beings before that, so that the culture as a whole reflected the enlightenment civilization, so to speak or the enlightenment traditions. And in the only instance in all of Buddhist history, the people of the culture, the Tibetan people themselves, the war Lords themselves, the, the warrior Kings themselves turned to the monasteries and said, when we produce governments, we fight each other.
Speaker 4 00:40:47 We rival each other for power all the time to have a lasting piece. Why don't you guys take responsibility for the government? Speaking to the Lamas, speaking to the monks, we are gonna have a bureaucracy. Now we're gonna have a, cracy a, cracy no longer a war. Lord. Cracy no longer feudal. Militar will run this country. This country will run by Lamas by enlightened beings. We hope please be enlightened and run our country for our own individual. Good for our own liberation, let us found a polity based on the individual aspiration of every individual within it that each being should have maximum opportunity to unfold their enlightenment to the maximum degree in this life. And so that's when then the Tibetans in celebration of this achievement, they build the Potala starting in the 1630s and forties and finishing in the 1690s, 50 years, they spent building that amazing building that everyone is familiar with.
Speaker 4 00:41:50 The Potala is a Fort, but within the Fort, there is a monastery and the dominant activity within the Fort is the monastic activity. And within the monastery is a mandala of the bohi Sava of a Lova, the bohi Sava of perfect compassion. So that sort of three levels are fused in one, the individual vehicle level of the individualism, withdrawing from the social routine to achieve individual freedom, the social level, where a Budva runs the society in a certain way. And the ethic of compassion is the dominant ethic of the society. And then the magical level of the Vore, the magical cosmology, where time is collapsed and where the individual can achieve. Perfect enlightenment can evolve to perfect, but hood even within a life where evolution can be accelerated to achieve budh hood in a single life, rather than in three incalculable Aons of lifetimes evolving over millions of years to develop the compassion, to develop the embodiment of Buddhahood not just the mentality of Buddhahood.
Speaker 4 00:42:57 So around that time, this work is written, which is the basis of our retreat, which simply codifies, what is present into bed. And in India, in fact, all through this history of Buddhism, namely the path of enlightenment, the body Pata, and this path of enlightenment is like a great conveyor belt. Like you have an airports that anyone can get on it, except this is a conveyor belt without rails. So anyone can get on it anywhere and then it will take them along and they can even walk on it to go faster. Like you do in airports when you're rushing for your flight, this great sort of escalator toward enlightenment religions, try to sort of defer gratification. They say, well, yes, you'll be at the throne of God. You'll be with the angels in heaven. If you be right, if you work hard, if you give gifts, if you do this and that you'll be with the Buddhas in the pure land because they feel if people somehow even imagine too much the goal, if they tasted too much, then they'll drop out and they won't serve the collective.
Speaker 4 00:44:04 You see, there's this fear within authoritarian societies, within scarcity societies, within militaristic societies, people won't fight and die. People will want fulfillment for themselves now, and then society will collapse. But to bet in the 17th century reached where the society was organized around people wanting fulfillment. Now, ironically, even if you organize a society where anybody theoretically, who wants fulfillment now could strive to do so and would be supported by everyone else to do so many people are afraid of that idea. They sort of get a certain quality fulfillment. Then they kind of postpone the dependence, have a little tradition developed by the Rema, the nonpartisans movement in Eastern Tibet, where the Lamas decided that the orders of Tibet and Buddhism, the four main orders and some minor ones were getting too competitive with one another. And therefore they were wanted to remind everybody that they were all really providing methods and arts of people to go in the same way of opening up their own inner awareness, their own inner freedom and joy.
Speaker 4 00:45:16 They came up with what is called the nonpartisan movement. People say nonsectarian, but I don't agree that word because these Tibetan orders were not sex. There was no sense among them that the other one was not a Buddhist. The other one was not on the same path. In fact, the real Buddhist vision is that people of all religions and even with secular humanism, all of these people are on the Dharma path. The path to reality, the path to their fulfillment, the path to happiness. There is no such things really as being saved by being a member of some group that is simply not correct. Being a member of some group actually is simply a reinforcement of egotism and egotism never can bring salvation because egotism is itself. Doom. Egotism is ignorance is MIS knowledge is the cause of suffering. So therefore by empowering the cause of suffering by egotistically becoming a Buddhist or egotistically, becoming a Christian will never produce happiness. You'll be like a miserable, frustrated SoFi or YMA or Buddhist or humanist, whatever it is, you'll be miserable because simply being an egotist is key to misery.
Speaker 4 00:46:29 Tibetans came to believe that we could still become perfect Buddhas. They reversed the usual sense of the decay of, and the degeneration of that is the process of history that most people and most religions have. Well, well, there was a Buddha back then, but nowadays we can't really become Buddha. Maybe we can become a Saint. Maybe we can become a Budd Sava in a future life who may be born in a pure land or in a world ready for a Buddha. We could become a Buddha after billions of lives of evolution, but Tibet based on its the gift to Tibet of the trich insight in the acceleration of evolution came to feel that people could in this life become Buddhas and that many had, and they developed the unique institution of the reincarnation, the formal reincarnation, all Buddhists believe and Hindus and most people in the world actually believe in some sort of reincarnation.
Speaker 4 00:47:22 In fact, early Christians did, they called it trans migration. So they believe that there is a continuity of life that we've been born before. We've born after and we'll be born again. And again, endlessly, there are different versions. Sometimes we'll always be humans. Sometimes we weren't born before, but we were born after sometimes there's many, many variations on this in other world teachings, but almost everybody subliminally and instinctively recognizes the infinite continuity of life, including individual life, as well as collective species life. This particular form of rebirth or reincarnation in Buddhism was a widespread foundation of what's called karma, which is Darwinian evolution with an individual twist. Basically it is no different. It is scientific. It is not some mystical idea. It's a scientific description of the continuity of life. And it has an individualistic twist by involving the soul in that Darwinian evolution rather than making it a material thing with only genes with only species collectives and no individuals, which is the way that materialist scientific Darwinism does it.
Speaker 4 00:48:30 So that's general in Buddhism, it isn't Tibetans invented that in fact, that teaching that evolutionary perspective, that vision changed Tibetans tribalism in egotism and race egotism and clan egotism tremendously. They didn't invent it, but they took it to the level because of their sense of the imediacy of the possibility of Buddhahood embedded in their culture where so many beings became perfect Buddhas and as perfect Buddhas, they didn't wanna leave their people with whom they're helping develop their own Buddhahood. And therefore they developed the conscious reincarnation. So it's not to lose progress, lose continuity. It's a very ingenious thing that Tibetan society invented such as, you know, the Dal Lama, the Lama, many, many of them. And of course all those great beings were reined many times in other ways where they weren't formally recognized. So this is a brief introduction, an explanation in a way of the mystery of why, how a teaching that could be done even as an elementary teaching begins by reminding ourselves of the goal and reminding ourselves that we will be at the goal ourselves and lets us imagine ourselves being at the goal to give us kind of a, an imaginative taste to inspire us to achieve it.
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