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 Dai Lama's cultural center in America. All best wishes have a great day.
Speaker 3 00:00:49 This is episode 320. The three jewels in India, China, and Tibet.
Speaker 1 00:01:18 Hinduism remained with its base in the village, in the lay family. Bram Buddhism disappeared. It has a space in these, in this machine here, the society, outside society. Islam would not tolerate that because of the total authoritarian trip of Islam being a western religion like ours, same as ours, really and destroyed. China was one of the last bests, communism, destroyed it, invented by a German Karl Marx, Judeo-Christian, German <laugh>, destroyed Buddism in China where they had trillions of nuns, Southeast Asia with the OR impetus gone from India, which was its sort of seed origin source country. They pretty soon shut down all their Aries and there's no nuns in Salon and Birmingham, Thailand gone for center. Just, you know, the soci, the authorities and the society asserted themselves, the male chauvinists people dominating the societies, and they blocked this avenue of freedom and education and peace and quiet to the women.
Speaker 1 00:02:22 Tobet never received the nun in ordination, they said, but they did have hundreds of thou not hundred, maybe, maybe hundred and 50,000 nuns, maybe 200,000 nuns. The males were about five or six thou, hundred thousand males. And it was a problem, actually. There were so many more males, nun monks than nuns that therefore in the villages there were too many women. I mean, there were, they had trouble finding mates. And uh, that's a big embarrassment to Thema. But the dependants we have to remember, came from being a Jenas Khan like Warrior Empire, only around 800, 700 AD they still were that. So they're almost sort of new and they, they're know, they haven't had, as Buddhism has not spent as much time in Tibet to today as it spent in India before it was destroyed. You follow me. And the last period of Buddhism in India was a time when the women were very powerful.
Speaker 1 00:03:12 There were many women's sitan, there were many great nuns. There were, it was like, I feel that that culture was the most liberated culture that has ever appeared on the planet. The Pollad dynasty culture and the post post Gupta Pollad dynasty, the, the culture in India from around 700, 600 AD to around 1100 ad it was so advanced and so gentle and so exquisite. And there was such a lot of orgone energy radiating from that culture, more or less that it drew down all these Turkish invaders and Islamic invaders. And of course they totally like rammed it back into camel driving hood, you know, and it's never, I don't think California has reached that yet. In fact, for all its show and surface, it's not really reached what that culture was, in my opinion. And that was the culture that spread itself to Tibet and planted its deepest seeds.
Speaker 1 00:04:01 But it couldn't, it didn't mean that it could sort of bring in all of its urban, all of its sort of elements into this tribal, very ferocious warrior society right away. And when you go in a warrior society, you have to stop the males first. And how do you stop the males in a warrior society? You turn that macho conquest energy into self conquest, which is what the monastic machine does. Instead of like killing the enemy, they're gonna kill the inner enemy. And you know, that's what the Shoguns did. That's why Zen becomes a popular in Japan. The Sjogrens use in Zen. They put all the unemployed samurai to it. That's why it has that samurai flavor, you see? So it doesn't mean you're, it doesn't mean that you're, I mean, in that it means in that society that the society is oppressing on women.
Speaker 1 00:04:43 It's not an equal society. Uh, and it means that the, the thing is going to try to civilize the men, at least to start with, those are the people who are in power there. It doesn't mean that there's anything correct about, so what we have to do today, they say in America, what has to happen is that America being a country where women are having a new chance, at a certain level of equality, then they can create a new type of Buddhist institution where there will be a better balance. And then this, this will see an Florence, a Florence in America. And many laas I know who are not too traditional bound than who look those creatively at society say that the female orders in America will be more, much more powerful. They especially like to tell that to the men, <laugh>, Jesus, the women will be the heaviest practitioners and be the most successful and be the most powerful.
Speaker 1 00:05:34 They do say that in America. So anyway, but, so this is the subject of the sang. Anyway, so the, the point I, the only point I wanna make is that as the jewel of the sang, you see, if you are struck, you have to realize Buddha was in a situation where he had, he was in a social circumstance where his field was such that people almost would just meet him and they would suddenly realize their higher calling and really what was to be done with life. And they would even become frightened to continue in this stupid, stupid, normal pattern of wasting 90% of their energy, of their life investing 90% of or 95 or 99% of their energy in life in a total losing concern in the body, in its clothing, in its property, in the bank account. All of these things which were lost at death, which is a very short time from now.
Speaker 1 00:06:23 From that end, it may seem a long time from here, but when you get there, it is become a very short time. Every one of us, when we are on our deathbed, the time, we will remember from then, and may it belong for all of you, but when we remember it at that time, when we are dying, choking, rattling, can't breathe anymore, finished, I'm sorry, it will happen to every one of us when we remember this night. It will seem like a moment before, one moment. It'll just be a rush of image like that. And we'll remember back to this night, even if it's a hundred years from now, it will seem like that. So to invest 99% of the time and effort and funds between now and then in what we will lose, then totally is a stupid waste. Now the Buddha had the ability, not just to say that, but he had a kind of feel where people saw that.
Speaker 1 00:07:12 Once they saw it, then they felt as a rational thing, not a faith thing, or I better use my time. Like I loved it. I flipped in the New York Times book review that, that Bishop of Milwaukee, on his holiness's biography, he wrote, he titled his review, we Must Change Our Lives. I thought it was marvelous. I couldn't believe it. That is the line, you know, that Rka said when he saw Michelangelos David, do I must change my life? That's what it refers to. But that's the feeling. Now when you say we must change our lives, then you can get in a lot of trouble. Your relatives won't go for it. Your landlord won't go for it. The tax man won't go for it. A lot of beings won't go for it. And you get a lot then you've really trying to get free and you, you have to do all these obligations and you'll get more stressed done before it can happen.
Speaker 1 00:07:57 That is why there is the sun guys considered like a precious jewel. It's a community where the individual who wants nothing but freedom, they may also want the freedom of all other beings if they're on the bo side of things. But even the bo the <foreign> wants that. The bottom line is the bod has to get first freedom themselves to help others to become free. And yet where there is the generos, the Sanga means of society, where there is the generosity to support a community where the beings are totally devoted to freedom. In history, the Sanga existed because some people recognized that freedom was the purpose of life and therefore for any individual to get it is the greatest thing that a society can do. It's like, you know, okay, you're a Rockefeller, then you, when you finally make more than you can use, then you think of what other great values and what you all, you build a church, you start a foundation, you build up some hospitals.
Speaker 1 00:08:53 What, what do you make some monuments, some statues. What actually do you do? Are you sure that's really what's great? Maybe the greatest thing that you could, that the greatest thing that a society can produce is a free person. Maybe that's by far greater than somebody mumbo jumbo in a church. Somebody wandering at a monument, somebody like applying for a grant to a foundation, maybe a free person. One free person is the greatest thing. The height of a civilization is to produce one free person, not some building and some cathedral and some place for people to go and celebrate something. But actually just a free person, if you realize. So it's not just merchants, it's merchants who have the insight to decide that that's what is the greatest thing that they can buy with their generosity. And the greatest merit is to create such a being to support such a being. The greatest thing for yourself would be to become such a being. If your role has not been to become that, if you haven't got the, if you haven't been able to, if you haven't seen yourself, where it's only rational thing is to put your whole life that way, yet you have enough intelligence to see that for others to do it and for you to support them to do it is the greatest thing you can do with your success.
Speaker 1 00:10:05 And so it's not just that it needs merchants also needs merchants with this kind of generosity, with this kind of insight into what freedom and individualism means. So, because what now, once you have this, you see, once this open space has opened inside a society, it filters everywhere in the society. I was thinking the other day in a monastic society where you are a father and you have a daughter. Now if that daughter has nowhere to go except to husband who you arrange for her, and basically you tell her to <laugh> and you show totally in your power. Now if you're nice, that's nice, but you know, if you're not that nice, it's not a good life for her, really. She's not gonna have a happy time. And if you're in pain, you're gonna pick a husband who'll be in pain. And if he's in pain, he's gonna see to it that his sons are pains.
Speaker 1 00:10:55 So the poor thing will never have a decent time. And there's no way out of that, like suicide or running to the bushes, eaten by a lion. There's no way out if, if there is across the street a big mony with total religious veneration, total sacredness. And where the abba abbots of that nuy is a powerful force in the society and the king and the police and every, and the judges, everyone respects her. And anybody who shows genuine desire for freedom can go over that street. If you, you can't oppress this woman anymore, even if she doesn't become a nun, you cannot oppress her. It tempers your interaction. They, there have manners of equality and different things between age and youth and they have all kinds of a higher order of interaction cuz they're working all the time to purify their responses cuz they're developing through meditation.
Speaker 1 00:11:45 But it infiltrates back into your family life. You have to be more gentle, you have to be more considerate. It sort of seeps across the street. So then when you begin to realize that if you grew up and you know your father was beaten up by his father, then you were treated nicely by your father in a merchant's family because your father knew you could run and join the monastery and he couldn't stop you if you want to. So he was actually nice to you. Then you think, wow. And you support that when you are the merchant, maybe you don't become a monk, but then you support them cuz you're grateful. And this good influence and good vibration spreads all through the society. And in fact, it gets to be too good from a worldly point of view, as I believe it did in India, around a thousand ad as I say, which this is my personally quirky and Ayn Socratic idea about the history of Asia, but around 1,080 d similarly in China in, because it, it spread to China from India.
Speaker 1 00:12:41 Actually China is always a little more backward than India, but it's still spread from to there. And you had the tong and the song there, you know, really the height of China really, after that I was downhill a bunch of mongolians and mans and things. But the height of it was tung. And during those times, but especially in India, China never got as far as India because China was always more oppressive on the women. They still don't have the freedom to the women that the Indians did. They didn't have very mother goddesses and things. That's the digression. Anyway, it got so much so that people were too gentle. They wouldn't, didn't want to go and fight the Muslims. They became gentle Genelle. And oh, they want to conquer, all right, let's have some more barfy as Indian candy. Let's go down to the temple. Let's pray, let's do this, do that.
Speaker 1 00:13:21 You know, let's say, and they became vulnerable. They became esque as a society. And then they were conquered for a thousand years. First by the Muslim Westerners and then by the ju Christian Westerners. They only got free 50 years ago. So they're reverting, they're gonna refine their original glory only slowly, but I think in modern, with modern way rather more quickly after a few more traumas. So that's correct. So, so in other words, this, although it is, as you say, a luxury in a sense, it is a luxury. Those who understand what freedom means in relation to society and the meaning of life and the value of life, it becomes a vital necessity in a way, ironically, while presenting itself as something outside of the society, based on the sort of surplus, it becomes the heart of a society eventually. And this is what happened in Tibet.
Speaker 1 00:14:12 In Tibet, it became a totally monastic society. Anyway, monastery began to run the government, the monasteries began to run the corporations and they created a form of sort of responsible spiritual modernity in Tibet, I will argue that is very important, much more important than the small population of Tibet would make appear. It's something, it's the last piece. Tibet, Tibet, Mongolia is the last piece of this Buddhist community experiment. This Buddhist social engine that the Buddha planted on the planet that is, that is there to be available to us. And it is essential to us, in my opinion. It's like the essential core aspect to reinforce our verbal ideal of freedom that our country is based on, but which we socially have nowhere near realized. We have not begun to realize socially in this country, my opinion. We, as I said, I don't think we can really argue that socially we are a free country.
Speaker 1 00:15:14 When I said luxury, I only said that it could get started in, in, in the world, in the most wealthy place in a way. Because while Plato Socrates would've loved a monastery, he would've loved this kind of academy being just totally given total tax deduction and permanent freedom. And he would've loved not to have to have a hemlock milkshake, you know, and loved to have all the students he wanted to sit in ducks, discuss philosophy forever. He would've loved it. But the Greeks didn't have the economy to support him or the insight to understand that he needed it. So they killed it. Confucius would've loved it too. India was able to sort of start it experimentally, I say, because they were more rich, hell of a lot more rich than the Mediterranean or the China. And so that's why it started there. I'm saying, I don't actually say it's a luxury, I say it's a, it's a, it's a necessity personally because individual, the human being is a kind of being that needs to have a sense of meaning.
Speaker 1 00:16:03 And you know, by this time from the fifth century of bc, from the beginning of urbanization, the old myths and this cave bear business and Klan of the cape, I mean this wasn't working, you know, it just wasn't working. And without given meaningless, human beings will despair. They won't produce, they'll despair. Look at the communist countries. No meaning is sitting around tornadoes, man, you know, production work for the people. Nobody works. It's a disaster area cause nobody does anything cuz it's so meaningless cuz they've been brainwashed with an ideology of total meaninglessness material, which is materialist. So I don't say it's a luxury first. Second this thing about everybody becoming it. So what in Tibet, a lot of people became monks. Then you have monk garbage collectors, you have monk. What do you mean? Monks can do a lot of things and nuns do. And actually, you know what, they have to bed a balanced population.
Speaker 1 00:16:55 Zero population growth. Hey, how's our population doing? Is that a problem for us? 40 billion people 20 years from now, you think it'll be a little bit of a problem here? Damn right. It'll be a problem. And what is, how, how, what are we doing man? Figure out ways to kill the children. How to kill them. Cause there's so many people are ready to see them killed China. They're infants sighting right and left in our country. Another, you know, it's arguable the whole, I wanna get into that issue, but it's arguable. There are some who say there is a slaughter going on and it's very arguable. So, you know, then Tibet, they had no defense budget. They didn't build any roads, no fords, no insurance companies, no gas stations. Yaks carry things here and there. They got their tea from China and they're silked from India on the backs of yaks.
Speaker 1 00:17:48 And they, they live quite peacefully in a sort of intermediate technology economy. No pollution. The, the monastery is would produced. One thing was large mound ska <laugh>. And that was taken and processed by Tibetan Swedish toilets from 400 years ago and spread all over the fields. Dry climate of Tibet. It wasn't even, it was not hot weather, it was like less unpleasant than other countries. They didn't pollute the water. No, it's a very, it was a very intelligent, nice society, balanced in harmony with the earth. And the major priority of all the people was freedom. Now in our country we say life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. What do we can say in our, what about if everybody thinks they're free and they won't pay taxes? I'm unhappy. I don't wanna pay taxes. I mean we could, you know, you could make that absurdity sort of argument about any ideal.
Speaker 1 00:18:43 The point is freedom is what everybody wants because freedom means that you can then bring out some inner sensitivity in yourself, which might give you some happiness in life. And the purpose of all the nuts and bolts that you're talking about is nothing but human happiness. However, too much attention to nuts and bolts by a society that became confused and lost all spiritual meaning is destroying the planet, much less the society and nobody is getting happy from it. I mean, you know, look at the whole road system. I guess I enjoy stepping on the accelerator zoom, you know, going off there, that's like in my total history of relations with the car. I have like one second zooms every like five years that are memorable. Rest of the time I'm buying tires, paying insurance, worry about the gas. My child might have to go to die in Iraq to get the gas, the pollution in the air. I'm gonna get cancer from the lead. And now I'm gonna pay a huge fortune in Texas where the morons building roads and ruining the land with the roads and parking lots. And in the whole calculus of my whole experience with the car, I wonder if the nuts and bolts of it has really made me very happy.
Speaker 1 00:19:55 We aren't we looking to how to revert to some sort of inter, that's why I say, and then I'm jumping ahead here, that this sang in its furthest permutation, which was in Tibet. Something was, although that's been destroyed at the moment, it's potentially not destroyed because the defendants are still alive and it's in their, their beings, they'll just build it again. The stones and the buildings are less important than the being's achievement of dedication to social freedom. And so it's still there in a way, this is the element that we need to combine with our juggernaut of a distorted and confused way of living with which we are brought the planet to this brink that it is at. So I think that in the context of, you know, how can we worry in the context of population explosions, mothering everybody in their own excrement within 40 years pollution, disaster within 20 nuclear threat and you know, gas crisis within two weeks.
Speaker 1 00:20:55 I mean, how can we worry about if everybody was not doing nuts and bolts, if they all would just get off the nuts and bolts right away. It would be a greatest blessing we ever saw. So this blessing in a way is the jewel of the sang. And we've talked about the three jewels, the Buddha, <unk> and the sang. This is the jewel of the sangha, the jewel of the community that is truly based on the individual's true freedom. And those that jewel is something that is even hard to see. It's so mysterious to us. But we think of community. We are so caught in a certain kind of tribalistic, collectivistic, not notion about community in spite of all of our rhetoric and Thomas Jefferson's promptings and Franklin's promptings about freedom, freedom, freedom. We are so caught in collectivism, we just never dare. We're like sheep.
Speaker 1 00:21:49 We watch the tv, some guy with a howdy duty faces, it'll be all right one another 60 billion and we, oh yeah, fine. That's just fantastic that we would be so dup, so sheep like someone says, that guy's an ass and we think they're being rude. Oh, shut, feel embarrassed, embarrassment would be the worst. We all live in terror, being embarrassed. That's how Hitler guy came into power. You know, nobody wanted to be embarrassed by saying, this guy is talking about the master racing. He's an ugly little jerk with a funny mustache. Gee, whi nobody would say it. That's suddenly they found himself in the grip of a monster. Last three weeks we did the Buddha Dharma and sang just to recapitulate. We covered some sort of basic introduction to the Buddha, the Dharma, and sang the three jewels of Buddhism as they're called, three rare and precious things.
Speaker 1 00:22:42 And, um, which is a very ancient and uh, sort of venerable framework for all of the issues of Buddhism to put them into the Buda. If we know what is the budk, then we sort of know what is Buddhism. And we did that also within the framework pretty much of, um, monastic Buddhism as I call it. Uh, which during the first 400 years or so after the Buddha's life was the most widespread form of Buddhism in India. India saw during that period a widespread, uh, mons of the countryside and the institution of the monastery and the nuy became very important institutions. And, uh, they provided a, a safety valve and a sort of liberation escape valve for millions in uh, people. And, uh, changed the whole countryside really of India from a sort of warlike collectivistic society to a much more individualistic, much more open, much more education oriented society.
Speaker 1 00:23:43 It was like a sort of burgeoning of open centers, uh, lifelong open centers all over India. As I described this a little bit last time, so I won't go into detail, but this is sort of what you could say the first 400 years, uh, was mainly about. And so at the end of the 400 year or after 200 years, as I think I said the emperor of yeah, which had become a, um, an emperor by then Northern India at least, uh, most of India, uh, proclaimed the Sanga or these monastic communities, these open centers to be sort of the major institution of the country. And in a way sort of gave over the entire li land symbolically gave it, they didn't keep it, they gave it back, but symbolically gave the entire land, made the national purpose coincide with the purpose of liberating the individuals in the open centers in the monasteries.
Speaker 1 00:24:34 So in a way, India was to a certain degree sort of tamed by these open centers, these monastic and nary, uh, male and female monastic open centers during these first 400 years. Now, after that time, uh, the, the Buddhist were so well established in that sense of these islands within the society where if you dropped out into those islands, you could suddenly change the tenor of your life and change the ethic which you lived by and change the sort of way in which you related to other people and so forth. And the Buddhist didn't, weren't satisfied with that after 400 years because that was well established. So using those islands, monastic islands as a sort of like beachhead or something, if you look at it in military terms, uh, they began to move out from those islands and began to penetrate the actual mainstream society, the lay society, much more deeply than they had already done.
Speaker 1 00:25:29 And they began to teach a more social, what you could call a social gospel or a social teaching teaching of love and compassion, a teaching of a more active altruistic ethic that did not just depend upon being in retreat sort of, and sort of leaving so that then they began to create the option of people to radically change their ethic and change their etiquette and change their way of interacting and dealing while staying within the society and maintaining a role or a profession or whatever. And they expanded that option. That option had always existed during the first 400 years. They had had what is called a poss posse key, the male and female laid, ordained person. But uh, it was not emphasized. The monk and nun role was emphasized, but now they began to emphasize this lay role and the concept of a bohi sattva, what is called a bohi sattva, B O D h.
Speaker 1 00:26:21 Uh, I don't have a board, I forgot to ask for that. Nevermind. B O d H i S A t t v A, bohi, sattva, which which means a, um, kiro or heroin for enlightenment. And the Bodhi option became to the fore. And it isn't, of course some monks who also were bodhisattvas and some laypeople that didn't require that you were lay to be a bodhi. Some gods were buddhi, some animals could be Bodhi Bova was considered a different kind of person who had come to a realization about the purpose of evolution and the purpose of life. And due to having come to that realization, had sort of invested through having, taking a vow all of their spiritual energy into the goal of becoming a Buddha, in order to perfect the universe for the benefit of all living beings, they took what is called, they developed what is called the buddhi aspiration or the will to enlightenment.
Speaker 1 00:27:11 And then they went beyond that and took the vow, vow to enlightenment and thereby became buddhi. And, um, this then follows you then once one achieves that moment in one's evolution where one decides to live for the rest of the universe in a certain way, a sort of vow of altruism, not excluding yourself, but you yourself, and equally more the rest of the universe is there are more other beings in the universe than there, than you are a being. Uh, when a being has come to that, ironically we would think that being motivated for everyone else, in addition to ourselves would be endlessly cumbersome and be a lot more trouble <laugh>. But apparently when you're motivated that way, even though you may not do a great deal for other people right away, everything is much easier for some reason. And, uh, things become much more effective and spiritually one develops much more rapidly, they say, and this goes on from life through life.
Speaker 1 00:28:06 One has once one has conceived of the as, as I call it, the vi security conceived of the spirit of enlightenment or conceived the will to enlightenment, then with whole quality of one's evolutionary existence changes Dr. Drastically. And it sort of opens up in the inside in a certain kind of a way, which we'll talk more about today. But anyway, this came more to the fore. And along with that, a vast hoard of literature, huge bunch of of texts appeared in India around that time, around 100 BC uh, or bef is more polite to say 100 b c e 100 before the common era is a more polite way to say it, less western chauvinist. And, uh, many of these books appeared and, uh, western scholars consider that they were written by the new Buddhist movement, sort of social movement at that time. The Buddhist scholars, uh, traditionally consider that these mah teachings were taught by the Buddha as well as the monastic teachings.
Speaker 1 00:29:03 These universal vehicle, as Maana means, or what I call messianic teachings, were taught by the Buddha, but he taught them sort of esoterically as far as the human beings were concerned. He taught them to vast assemblies of Budds who came from other universes, who beamed in from, uh, different galaxies and universes to listen to these teachings, to gods, to dragons, to all sorts of supernatural beings, to ferries, to titans. Uh, he taught all these creatures and the us were a number of human beings that he taught in his mah teachings or universalist teachings were much more limited, and he's predicted at that time that due to, to the nature of the society at this time, these teachings, these universalist teachings I am teaching will not be very widespread for about 400 years. The ones that will really be of interest to people be most useful to people will be the monastic teachings, the individual vehicle teachings, the universal vehicle teachings are, are sort of therefore to be kept a little bit quiet, he said.
Speaker 1 00:30:03 And actually the legend is that they were not really preserved well in the human realm, but they were copied by the dragons and by the gods, and particularly the dragons who live in the kingdoms under the ocean, particularly like them. And then the legend is that a great, uh, master of the monastic Buddhism named Nagarjuna was living in India in around 100 before the common era. And some dragons came to his class <laugh> one day, and he dragons have the ability to appear to be human when they want to go. So they don't disturb people with the long scaly things in breathing fire. So they look like humans. But he was clairvoyant being a master light master. He saw that they were dragons at the end of the class, he called 'em over and said, Hey, how come you guys are up here from the ocean kingdoms?
Speaker 1 00:30:48 What, what's happening? And they said, well, we heard about you a nagarjuna, and we came to take you to our kingdom because in our kingdom we have some things we think would interest you, some teachings of the, of the Lord Buddha, that we have been saving it for just this moment, and we think you'll find them really interesting. So Naga said, okay, great. And, uh, do you have an aqui along or something? They said, nevermind. We have magical power. So they took him down to the bottom of the ocean with them, and he dwelled there in the dragon kingdom for 50 Earth years. It has said during which time he ransacked the libraries of the dragon king, which were filled with these vast hoards of scriptures from the Buddhas time, which were known as the mah sutra or the mah scriptures, the, the treatises, the uh, the oceanic treatises of the universal vehicle and a marvelous ocean.
Speaker 1 00:31:37 They are actually quite a marvelous ocean. It said he brought them back to India and then he began to spread them in India, and, uh, people recited them and copied them, and they became a part of this major new wave or major new movement of Buddhism in India from about 1,100, uh, before the common era, which was the spread of the universal vehicle in Buddhism. Now, the, the text that I recommended that you read in, uh, our introductory class as an introduction to the mah literature is this holy teaching of the ur, which is particularly useful to us because it happens to have been translated by me, and therefore it's a good translation, uh, not to really be too proud, but in fact I think really a lot of the older fashion translations by people are really pretty botched up. You know, they're really not very good either theologically.
Speaker 1 00:32:26 In other words, the people were not that really good in the language. And also philosophically they had some sort of simplistic idea about Buddhism. For example, the great Edward Kanza, bless his heart, who did a great labor of love on what translating what, what are called the perfection of wisdom Sutra as he translated it, or as I would translate the transcendent wisdom sutra, which are a vast bunch of marvelous, very crucial foundational universal vehicle texts. But in translating them, he had a preconceived idea that Bo Buddhist Asiatics were sort of non-rational and they weren't into linear thinking. And so really the whole message of the whole long president parameter was that don't think anything, and if you say anything, don't try to make sense. And anytime the anybody ever did say anything, it didn't really make sense. And so these long, huge scriptures are just there to sort of rub your nose and the fact that words don't make sense.
Speaker 1 00:33:17 So therefore he kind of blew it when he translated the book because he thought aari, that the book was useless because the book says, of course, that, you know, transcendent wisdom cannot be expressed. He says transcendent wisdom should not be grasped as it's something he threw that can be grasped via a formula. Transcendent wisdom is not something that is known by the, it is only known by the mode of non knowing. It has all kinds of strange expressions in it, you know, and then there's a short one says things like there's no eye, no ear. The realization of reality is that there's no body, no person, no eye, no ear, no nose, no <unk>, no human, no bud enlightenment, no non enlightenment, just a bunch of negations. No, no, no, no, no, no, everything. And so people have a hard time reading his work. I mean, his work is flawed because on, on the other hand, hand, although the transcendent wisdom is this very profound, deep philosophical vehicle that goes beyond the superficial levels of philosophy and penetrates to an area of openness, an area of truth and freedom that is truly remarkable, the way beyond reason, but it's also beyond unreason.
Speaker 1 00:34:27 And in fact, the only way to get there is through reason. It is sort of reason catapults you beyond reason in a valid way. Really, unreason is not beyond reason, it's just unreasonable. You know, beyond reason means really where you've taken reason to the fullest degree and then gone beyond into something else, which, which I mean any kind of understanding in fact is beyond reason mean, we reason our way. You know, we, we reason our way to decide that that door is a door and that's a wall. So we can walk through the door and we can't walk through the wall. When we actually walk through. We've gone beyond reason <laugh>, we're actually going through it. But that doesn't mean we are unreasonable. If we're unreasonable, we walk into the wall. So the former generations of translators influenced by half-assed understandings of zen and half-baked understandings of en of, you know, mystic statements by various masters, sort of, they thought they had it all boiled down to, well, you know, these are people brought up in the west with too much mathematics and too much scientific education and too much, uh, too much brain work.
Speaker 1 00:35:27 And so they thought, here in Budd we have a, we have a rationalization to have to stop thinking and then we'll be happy and thank God after all that 12, you know, 15 years of college and graduate school, and I can just sort of just turn my brain off and someone will tell me that's enlightenment and therefore they're no good. So, so anyway, luckily I don't suffer from that problem. So my, when I, when I got to difficult passages in the female security, which are paradoxical, one just doesn't surrender by saying, well, it just means that it's meaningless, which isn't, isn't what it means. Each paradox, each dichotomy is intending to catapult the reader or the thinker or the meditator beyond the situation of the dichotomy, but not just to simply collapse the dichotomy one way or another. You see? So I think the, the book is valuable to read, so I recommend that we read it.
Speaker 1 00:36:17 And today we're gonna talk about the, introduce the whole subject of the universal vehicle from the point of view of the vi ur referring to the vi ur. Now it's kind of a good Oman, I, I almost feel it's a good Oman that, uh, this movement which arose from the depth of the Indian ocean, whether it was una's inspiration or whether it was real texts that were discovered somewhere by Nagarjuna and other discoverers who discovered these texts, new wave of way of unpacking the Buddhas teaching and its specialty had to do with the teaching of wisdom, the moving of wisdom beyond the wisdom of personal selflessness. In a way, the essence of the monastic vehicle was that the individual, the individual should extract him or herself from the senseless waste of the precious human life in sort of just earning a living and through feeding and clothing and, you know, bearing, uh, children and so forth, and then just die and not waste the precious human life in this, uh, way, really just sort of feeding the body, but uh, and extending the body, but should use it to achieve freedom and therefore in its individualistic, in thrust, the monastic vehicle.
Speaker 1 00:37:33 And then the institutions were opened up where this individual who realized that could have a, a lifelong free open center where the society would support them in their process of self liberation and the way of the, the real way of achieving self. Now, there were some ethical grounding of that, of not nonviolence, not killing, not lying, and not having false eti ideologies and false views and examining the nature of reality and so forth are all of this physical verbal and mental ethical foundation. And then there was a meditational regime that sharpened the mind to be able to really get to a depth of understanding. So it just didn't wander uncontrollably. But the major mode of liberation, in fact, in that monastic vehicle was wisdom. And it was particularly the wisdom of selflessness, the wisdom that realized the personal lack of a independent self-sufficient self. This realization when you achieve it frees you from the majority of your suffering.
Speaker 1 00:38:31 And it gives you, you achieve, in fact, you, your suffering is blown out niver, you know, it's nirvana. You become nirvana and you are completely gased out. Apparently it's amazing. We would think it would go, it's not a particular kind of food, it's not some sort of wild sex, it's not a marvelous aesthetic experience. It's the meditative and spiritual experience of selflessness, but it's considered the greatest bliss and pleasure in the universe. And that was the goal of the individual vehicle now. And it was left in, and that was done, that was taught within a kind of a dualistic framework. The dualistic framework was that the samsara is this sort of <unk> response, sort of reactive, mechanical way of being robot-like automaton type of being has no positive thing. And it's, so everything, every pleasure in it even is really a suffering because it doesn't last because it's egocentric, because it causes harm in the process of enjoying it and so forth.
Speaker 1 00:39:25 And because it's, uh, it's unstable and unreliable and the majority of the time of a self-centered being in the universe versus the universe, so to speak, as we have discussed, is spent in suffering the blows and the stings and our slings and arrows of the universe. And so that's one side. And then if you achieve the realization of selflessness, if you extract yourself from this as an individual, you achieve nirvana. And this sort of feeling that nirvana is, is a sort of state outside of the embeddedness in life is, is allowed, is kind of encouraged. And therefore the person is sort of encouraged to think that they can somehow get out of the universe into a state of total and permanent bliss. And that is monastic vehicle is kind of based on that. Just as the monastic institution operated within the context of society in a dualistic way, it created a society within a society, a higher society, a free society within the bound society.
Speaker 1 00:40:19 You could just sort of cross the boundary and you had moved into this other world of the SGA where no one could molest you, no one could boss you around, no one could ha ask you to do anything that wasted your spiritual time and they were there just to learn and to open yourself up. Whereas the other one you were working or was for some collective goal. So there was a social dualism like that and this, this transcendent sort of space with you could just, society caused a slow opening up of the society itself, but that was kept invisible and they were presented as two separate realms at the same time. Meta, physically, there was somes nirvana presented as a duality, you see? And your idea was to go from some za two nirvana, which you could do as an individual. And when you got there, you really were so happy that it was really quite groovy.
Speaker 1 00:41:07 Now, however, though in the mayana wisdom is carried a step further, the all important, all liberating wisdom, and by wisdom we have to be very clear. We don't mean just some sort of like experience, like an old timer knows, wise old timer knows where the caterpillars are gonna go and what the, what kind of rain is and where the, what Chuck said yesterday, this kind of thing, this kind of wisdom ideas, not the kind of wisdom that is meant by wisdom is something really, wisdom could be translated genius or something like that. You know, like we think of Einstein as a genius. We don't just think of him as wise, some of us may think of him as unwise, but a genius in that he had a special intelligence for understanding the nature of reality. Now, according to the, according to the universal vehicle, or even according to a monastic vehicle, every single big brained human being is a genius.
Speaker 1 00:42:02 Actually, there's no non genius. Even the IQ of 80 is a genius that IQ is matter of social conditioning, cultural conditioning, you know, there are certain guys with stops and blocks put there. And so this fantastic computer, fantastic wetwear of the human brain is just not operating for that person. But everyone has this fantastic, you know, 4 86, you know, sx, you know, or even beyond, you know, supercomputer. Everyone has super connection machine in their brain. Every human being does. And therefore every human being is potentially a genius. And if the blocks are removed, every human being's brain is adequate to understanding the nature of reality fully and directly. As we would think of, you know, only a genius would do. We would sort of think since we are conditioned ourselves to think of ourselves as having very, very partial type of intelligence, there's many blocks in our society to us having real experience.
Speaker 1 00:42:56 We really are predisposed not to think that we could, if we ever had a moment of experience where everything in its totality suddenly seemed crystal clear to us, we are taught to think that's some sort of delusion. We've gone megalomaniac, we better go get some Thorazine. We better drop out, we better like run and find a shrink and get shrunk back down because we've got to be wrong because no one can really know. Whereas from the birth point of view, every human being can know everything about their situation. Actually, all they have to do is become enlightened. So wisdom is pushed like this in the Maya, another concept of wisdom is opened up to what I would call transcendent wisdom rather than just wisdom. You have Nia rather than just pres, which means intense knowing to pr, para intense, knowing that has gone beyond or transcendent not cons, translates perfection.
Speaker 1 00:43:45 But I don't like that transcendence of wisdom, transcendent wisdom. It goes beyond what we would expect, even wisdom beyond ordinary subject object. Knowing that is to a kind of knowing where your mind becomes one with all objects of knowledge, a certain kind going beyond the egocentric dilemma to really realizing the nature of reality and in order, this is expressed philosophically by saying that selflessness, which is still the ultimate reality, still the object to be realized. Selflessness is not the only the selflessness of persons that is your psychological selflessness. It is the selflessness also of things, of objects, of entities, of any sort. They are also selfless. And we might say, well wait, what does that mean? How do you say the piano is was, well, it is, I realize it's a little strange use of the word selfless, but we do say the piano itself, don't we?
Speaker 1 00:44:39 We can use the reflexive particle self with a knob object with the house itself, the room itself, the open center itself. So we know that self means something like an essence, some sort of thing that, you know, the reflexive lands on about a thing. You know, the floor itself, the self of the, sort of the actuality of the floor. We say the floor itself. So the fact that the floor lacks a self is a way of simple way of saying that the floor lacks this kind of intrinsically objective, selfe established essence. And that in fact the floor too, like the human person is nothing but a relational entity, totally relational entity whose nature is somehow never exhausted. Actually, there's no limit. It's nature is unlimited in a certain way. It is trend. It eludes any of our concepts of it. It's beyond any sort of pedestrian linear description of it.
Speaker 1 00:45:30 It is in a way any like, like ourselves. We are this kind of amazing thing and we are in a way very present relationally, but we can't really pin ourselves down as to what we are. We, you know, we discussed that in terms of personal selflessness. If you look for yourself, you will not be able to really find yourself, you know, this I that you feel is sort of solidly refers to a solid core in your own self. When you look for it, you can't find it when you look for it and don't find it. And you know how to sustain that. Not finding contemplative and philosophically so as not to allow it to become a nihilism. That's how you attain personal selflessness realization. That's how you achieve liberation, right? We've gone through that. I think in terms of the dharma we, we somewhat went through, that's the way of achieving freedom.
Speaker 1 00:46:15 But now with the case of the objective selflessness, one turns that same sort of diamond cutting analytic critical wisdom on things, on objects and for example, what better object to turn it upon than the objectified idea of Nirvana itself. The objectified idea of samsara itself, the world itself. We begin to see that the world is selfless. We begin to realize that nirvana is selfless. When we realize that nirvana is selfless, how can we then continue to sort of leave hanging there a kind of escapist dualism that Nirvana is some sort of state or place outside of the world. The world is selfless. Nirvana is selfless, right? That doesn't mean that the world doesn't exist, that Nirvana doesn't exist.
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