BDW 3 «Суть волшебной жизни», занятие 7

(0:12 - 0:58)
Well, well, so far on this magical journey we've heard teachings of 16 steps of how to prepare yourself for the next life. Also, we've learned about the main tool, how to make it happen, how to make it possible. Also, we've listened to the stories of the living example of those teachings, which is really important for us. 

So we are yearning to listen to the conclusion. Thank you very much. Let's welcome Geshe Michael Roach.

(1:09 - 2:25)
Hello. Hi. Okay, first I'm very sorry I'm late. 

I had bad traffic. I'm from the country, so we're not used to traffic. It's a guy walking out of a door, Brian. 

You good? Okay. So we're going to go back to the angel, the Devil Debates an Angel by His Holiness the First Panchen Lama. And there's a verse here, I'll read it to you. 

It's actually a couple of verses. As you perform even the slightest accidental movement of your body, you stay without moving an inch. If you go like this, you actually don't move. 

Even as you stretch, bend your legs and arms and the like, you never stretch and you never bend. A hundred dollars, right away, it hasn't been one minute yet. You Vajrayogini guys, he's purposely using a very familiar phrase called stretch and bend.

(2:27 - 3:30)
Stretch and bend. Close. What's the Tibetan? Kyang kum. 

Yeah, nice. It's not Kyang kum [?]. Wait, my assistant. 

Hey, Ibai, let's wake up. Okay. Yeah, it's called kyang kum. 

Say kyang. Kyang. So in the Vajrayogini Diamond Way, which is the one we will be studying, if you wish, she's got like, this is her. 

Okay. So he's being cute. In English, we say he's being cute.

(3:30 - 3:42)
He's showing off, which I never do that. And he's saying, even you kyang or you kum [?]. Okay.

(3:44 - 7:35)
And it has a big meaning in Vajrayogini, kyang kum. You never stretch, you never bend. As you go, you never go. 

As you stay, you never stay. When you lay down, you never lay down. When you fall asleep, you never sleep. 

Okay. When you awake, you never wake up. When you eat, you never eat. 

And you can drink and drink and never drink. You dress, but you are never dressed. Okay. 

That's the first Panchen Lama. You know, what's he trying to say? He's trying to say that if things are coming from seeds in your mind, if when you raise your arm, you're not raising your arm, the arm didn't move, right? The seeds changed. And you're seeing a new result of seeds. 

Okay. It's not that you decide to raise your arm and the arm goes up. There's a day that will come in your life when your arm will refuse to listen to you. 

Okay. Which is very frustrating. If you've ever sat with dying people, which I have, they get very frustrated. 

You say, get up. And they're like, I can't. You say, okay, just sit up. 

No, I can't. Put your head up. And they're like, I can't, I can't. 

And then they get very angry, actually, some of them. And there will come a day for each one of us when we cannot raise our hand. We cannot raise our hand. 

Okay. And it's very frustrating. And you feel angry. 

It's strange how a person who's dying will feel so angry, but it's very common. And the body doesn't listen to you. What she's saying to the devil is that seeds are opening in your mind. 

Seeds are opening. Pictures are coming out. A new picture comes out of your hand up. 

And there was a picture before that of your hand down. And it's just one picture after another picture. Okay. 

You are not raising your hand. You are not raising your hand. And that's so uncomfortable for all of us. 

You're like, Geshe La, I want to raise my hand. I will. Look, watch. 

Go up. Oh, go down. Good boy. 

You feel like you are in charge of your body. And he's saying something very radical. He's saying, when your hand goes up, it's not because you wanted it. 

It's because your seeds changed. The different seeds are opening in your mind. You are not raising your hand. 

Who are you then? That gets complicated. Okay. Who are you? If you're not the person who's driving this body like a car, then where are you? And who are you? And listen, it's kind of amazing. 

You are your seeds. You are the opening of your seeds, which means that you are how you treat other people. That's very radical. 

Okay. And literally, you are your seeds. You are not a guy [?] who decides to raise their arm and jiggle and smiles. 

It's not you. It's your seeds shift. And then your hand is up. 

Okay. And that means there's no real you of the kind that we used to think about. There's just newer seeds opening.

(7:35 - 8:53)
Okay. You do not have any self-control. Well, we knew that, especially with dessert, right? Asking my wife, she said, by the way, she's always trying to get me to eat better. 

And somehow the salad disappears and the cake shows up. I don't know what happens. Somebody asked me how many students you want in your life. 

I said 365 with different birthdays. Okay. But you don't, they said, okay. 

But I guess, Michael, that means I'm not me. That means I'm just the opening of seeds. And that's correct. 

You are just a pile of seeds. And those are how you treated other people. So it's not that you act a certain way to other people, and then things happen to you. 

It's not that karma is happening to you, and you're responding to old karmas opening in your mind. The responder is a seed opening. The things that happen to you are seeds opening. 

You are just seeds opening. Okay. And you don't really have a choice about a lot of things.

(8:54 - 9:51)
And I think, I have a lot of Asian students, and I love them, and it's amazing, and I feel very happy from all countries, many countries of Asia. But I often get a question, and I think it must be in those languages, especially Chinese. People will say, Geshe La, what about fei? What's the Chinese one? Bing yi? Bing yi, yeah. 

What about fei? So there's a big thing in many countries that when you're born, like in India, they'll ask you, they won't ask you what's your birthday. They'll say, which planet were you born under? And then you say Saturn, and they go, oh, sorry. You're supposed to have a hard life if you're born under Saturn.

(9:52 - 11:04)
And many people ask me, what's the place of fei in this Buddhism, in this correct presentation of Buddhism? Where is fei? What's the place of fei? And we can say there is no fei. We can easily say there is no fei. And if you were born in a country or in a system of your cultural system that told you, oh, you were born on Saturday, you're always going to be having headaches, or something like that, you can just forget it. 

There's no such thing. You are in complete control of your destiny. Your only destiny is what you decide. 

But you have millions of old seeds. You have millions of old seeds. So your whole you, there's no other you than your seeds.

(11:04 - 14:00)
And that's the emptiness of the person. That's a big part of the emptiness of a person. We talked about the emptiness of the person and the emptiness of things, which means the parts of the person. 

It doesn't mean glasses and buildings and things like that. That emptiness means it's not happening from its own side. It's coming from your seeds. 

Everything's coming from your seeds. Well, Geshe La, that means there's no fei. That's correct. 

That means no one can help me. That's not correct. You can help yourself. 

If you massage your seeds, if you work on your seeds, then you have power to do what you want. You have power to make what you want happen. Because you are seeds opening and nothing more, you have ultimate power. 

But you have a lot of tendencies, which are hard, engraved. They are very engraved. You have a thousand seeds for being jealous of someone in your mind. 

If you're that kind of person, it's going to be more difficult to not be jealous. But because the jealousy is coming from seeds, you can change it. Everything's changeable for a Buddhist. 

And by the way, for everybody else, they just don't know about seeds. And that's why if you're going to have two great books about Buddhism, you might want to have one that tells you how the seeds control your life. And you might want to have another one that tells you how to be a good person, moral person, so that you make good seeds. 

Yeah. That was slick. Who did that, Brian? That was slick. 

We didn't plan that. Yeah, so you want to have Stanley and Xiaoping's books. And I, you know, I like them. 

We work together a lot. I'm happy that they are successful in their translated work. But it's not only that. 

It's that the two books they chose long ago, Grandpa chose for them. They are very, very important for what we're talking about. And you can understand a lot more if you get the books and you read them. 

A hundred bucks. Hi, Wes [?]. She's fine. 

Actually, Veronica loves to give away money almost more than I do. So it's lucky we married each other. What was the question? I can't remember.

(14:00 - 14:17)
When I say read these books, what do I mean? Read half a page before you go to sleep. Yeah, good. Thank you.

(14:17 - 14:29)
Hundred bucks. That's Mike Hoffman, right? Yeah. You played amazing piano last night.

(14:37 - 15:08)
Almost as good as Nick Sue. Yay. Who is almost as good as Anatole's piano. 

But the best one of all was Kitty. Thank you for that. We have lots of piano players, but we have a guitar player shortage.

(15:13 - 18:46)
Okay. So I have a picture here. Where's that other picture, Brian? The one before. 

Yeah, the guy stepping out of the door. It's not the guy stepping out of the door. Who's stepping out of the door? His seeds are stepping out of the door. 

How much control does he have over this? I like to call it me and my teacher. So 50 years ago, we both moved to a Mongolian temple in New Jersey. We were both guests. 

We were not Mongolians. It was a little hard there. Everyone spoke Mongolian or Russian. 

He was a guest. I was a guest. And we were not part of the community. 

And the community was a very tight community. It was hard. It took many years for us to be accepted in the community. 

And so we had to do a lot of the work ourselves. I built his house by myself, mostly, and the classroom. And then in Buddhism, if that classroom and that house are close to the temple, there should be a circumambulation sidewalk around both. 

You don't split the temple from the priest house or something. So we had to put a sidewalk in, and nobody would help us. So, you know, my teacher is 60 years old, and I don't know anything about cement. 

And we did it. We went to the library. There's no internet, okay? Diamond Mountain was built from YouTube videos. 

That's why people poured the cement down their shower drain while it was still wet. And we had interesting things happen. But, you know, we had to screen it. 

We had to figure out how to lay the cement and all this stuff. And I became very familiar with cement because we really messed it up for a few times. We built a special cement platform for fire pujas. 

And teachers from all over the East Coast used to come and do their pujas there. So there's three kinds of cement. One is wet. 

One is setting, you know. And you can scratch it, but you can't really screen it. You can't make it flat. 

You can scratch it. You can write your initials, but you can't change how it looks, okay? And then when it gets harder after another day or so, you can't affect it at all. You could just crack it. 

So cement goes through this process of being wet. And then it gets hard but scratchable. And then it gets hard enough that you can't change it unless you break it. 

And good cement, the reaction, the chemical reaction, which is a very valuable thing in human culture, it will set for two or three years. It takes two or three years for the cement to reach its hardness. It's a chemical reaction on the inside. 

It is hot. It's warm. And if it gets cold, if winter comes before it sets, then it will never.

(18:47 - 19:02)
So your seeds are similar to that cement, okay? Your karmic seeds are very similar to that cement. In the early days, they are very movable. They are very changeable.

(19:02 - 20:14)
As after a little time goes by, you can work on them, but it's hard. And then there comes a time when they're so hard that it's almost impossible to change them. But they continue to, what's the word for cooking? Pachete. 

They continue to cook from the inside. So it's important to know, people often ask me, I got cancer, can I fix the cancer? And then I'm like, well, can you tell me is it a wet seed or is it a dry seed or is it a hard seed? What kind of seed is it? What kind of cement is your seeds for your cancer? And then, of course, they'll always say, I don't really know. Who knows? They could be a thousand years old. 

I don't know. So there are all kinds of seeds, all seeds. But something important to say, no matter how ripe, no matter how long your seeds have hardened, it's never too late to change them.

(20:14 - 21:31)
It's never too late to change them. You can always change them. There's still some cooking process on the inside that you can change. 

Are the decisions you make sitting in your chair to move or not to move, to nod your head or not nod your head, this decision about your eyelids. I'm just kidding. Afternoons are bad. 

My wife asked me, why do you have your classes in the afternoon? And I'm like, well, we like to do yoga and meditate in the morning, stuff like that. So I take this time with my classes. The point is you can change your seeds anytime. 

Some seeds will be harder to change. Certain diseases, certain events in your country, there's certain seeds that are difficult to change, but all seeds are changeable because all events happen from seeds. If you know the four powers, you can always change a seed.

(21:31 - 22:15)
You can, and you should try, and you should not give up. You should keep trying. All right. 

To summarize that process, if something bad is happening to you that you don't want, then the most powerful thing you can do is to try to regret what you might have done to plant those seeds. I don't put a huge amount of emphasis on that. I don't want all my students going around grumpy and telling themselves what a bad person they must have been.

(22:16 - 24:14)
I don't think it's that helpful. I think a positive approach is better. The antidote power, of course, you're supposed to regret that you might have hurt someone else. 

You might have made someone else sad or something like that. But I believe more in a very positive, active antidote, what they call antidote power. Do something especially sweet, and do something especially helpful to other people. 

You can sit and be guilty about your bad deeds, and you can feel like you're a bad person. I don't think that's as helpful as the fourth power, third and fourth power, where you choose good things to do, new good things to change the cement. That's a very important teaching. 

You should decide, no, your seed should decide to help other people joyfully, and then you can fix all your old karmas. So when I see people really grumpy and telling me about all the people they hurt in the past, I'm like, no, you're supposed to be happy that you have all these chances now to help other people and do sweet things for other people. That changes the cement much faster. 

Personally, I'd rather concentrate on that. I'd rather concentrate on being sweet to other people to cancel my bad seeds. I like that. 

I don't like to sit in a chair in a dark room and think about how bad I used to be. I don't think that's as powerful. I know it's not as powerful.

(24:14 - 25:17)
All right. Yeah. Okay, so even stepping out the door is a pile of seeds going on. 

Next one. Yeah, this picture, I was trying to accomplish something. We tend to think of our life as the major events of our life. 

Like you say, where did you grow up? What was your favorite activity in school? Where and how did you meet your husband or your wife? Something like that. When we talk about the karma of your life, then people tend to think of the big things in their life. This is the day I met my wife.

(25:18 - 28:56)
This is the day this happened. This is when I had my first child. People remember these dates and then they talk about the car. 

This is the day we had the car accident. I hurt my neck and it still hurts or something like that. When I talk about seeds that have happened in your life, seeds that have opened in your life, you tend to think about the big things that happened in your life. 

The next part, the angel is reminding the devil that there's time in between those big events. There's a couple of years between when you met your wife or your husband and when you had your first baby or something like that. There's all those minutes between the major events of your life. 

The angel is encouraging the devil, don't think of seeds as something that goes off every three to four years and something big happens in your life. That's not the point. If you walk from here to the bathroom, you're just using up a whole stream of seeds. 

The stream of seeds opening from the day of your birth to the day of your death is constant. It's 65 per second. Even you sleep, even you, I don't know, fall asleep in class, you're still using up seeds. 

You're still using up seeds. And it never stops. The seeds opening is what makes time pass in your life. 

If there were no seeds opening every second, the watch on your hand would stop. That makes time pass for you. Seeds make time pass for you. 

Seeds are going off all the time and you really can't stop them. They are going off all the time. It's a mistake to think of karma as a bunch of stuff that goes off every two years or something like that. 

Every time you get a major sickness, every time your work changes dramatically, and you tend to think, oh, I have seeds opening. No, they were opening the whole time. Between the time you got married and the time you had your first child, you were using up seeds every second, every millisecond. 

And so it's important to be sensitive that what the angel is trying to say is, when you blink an eye, that's a huge pile of seeds used up. And that process continues throughout your life. And it should be a source of hope for you. 

Because every second of your life, between big events in your life, is also coming from your seeds, then you're the boss of your life. You can change your life. You can change everything about your life. 

You can't complain. Once you know about karma, once you know about the four steps, you have power to change your mind. And you have power to do anything.

(28:57 - 29:23)
But you have to know that in order to do it. It's never too late to do anything. Karma doesn't respect limitations of time. 

Somebody tell you, you can't build a house in three weeks. If you have the karma, you can build a house in three minutes. We did it at Dragon's Head.

(29:24 - 29:47)
Right? We did. It should be we buy the land and we build a classroom. We bought the land and the classroom suddenly showed up. 

And I was like, man, Kat, we should have known that back in the Diamond Mountain days. We worked so hard. When I go to Diamond Mountain, my hands hurt.

(29:47 - 29:57)
All right. Then it gets into an interesting thing. Okay, next picture.

(29:59 - 30:47)
I asked the AI. I read in the news this morning, OpenAI just invested $80 billion in another AI company. Microsoft laid off 2000 people as a result. 

And I'm like, I don't care if you have 80 gigawatts of power running your AIs. Can you just put five fingers on the guy's hand? Or can you get his face straight? I said, can you put a guy standing on his head? And this is what I got. Which is logical, but not correct.

(30:49 - 31:28)
Which is a big difference in Buddhism also. Then I was looking at it and I was a little bit irritated. But I told you, you want me to teach Diamond Way. 

You think I'm going to teach you Diamond Way after these classes. AIs don't make mistakes. In a Diamond Way world, there's no mistakes. 

Then I looked at the picture and I said, Vajrayogini sent me this picture. Now, how do I use it is a different question. And then I was thinking about it and I like it.

(31:29 - 31:36)
It's pretty good. Say NYON PA DANG. By the way, very useful, Tim, in your text especially.

(31:36 - 32:20)
NYON PA DANG TSOD PA MED NYON PA DANG TSOD PA MED Okay, this is a debate ground expression. A lot of the debate ground expressions are unique. They are not normal to them. 

In fact, in our monastery, in the debate ground, we will have about 500 guys debating at the same time. The local farmers will come to watch. It got to be a little bit too crowded because we were slapping and we would keep hitting farmers with your hand.

(32:22 - 34:00)
Then they made a rule that they had to stand behind the wall. They made a special wall only waist-high. They could stand outside the wall and then we'd debate close to the wall so they could hear. 

We made this agreement with all the farmers around, the Tibetan farmers who wanted to come and listen. Then they figured out they couldn't understand anything anyway, because we debate. The language we use for debate is 1,000 years old. 

We debate in 1,000-year-old language and it's very difficult and it's fast. SEMS ROL NYID MI YIN PA LTAR MA YIN PA LTAR ROL NYID MI YIN PA LTAR MA YIN PA LTAR ROL NYID MI YIN PA LTAR MA YIN PA LTAR ROL NYID MI YIN PA LTAR MA YIN PA LTAR MA YIN PA LTAR Like that. For someone just learning Tibetan, there's a whole special... I don't know how to say it. 

Timothy, doth you thinkest that unchanging material entities should change to changing material entities if they have the requisite karmic causes of those 13 kinds? And then you can say, I almost said a bad word. But then there's these common expletives? New word. It's like, something like that.

(34:01 - 34:25)
And we use them in debate. Doth thou knowest the postulate for the 14 unanswered questions? What the hell are you talking about? So you mix, how do you say? Disrespectful, funny language between 1500-year-old words. You see what I mean? So this is one of them.

(34:25 - 36:08)
NYON PA DANG TSOD PA MED It means, I refuse to debate with an insane person. There's no benefit. NYON PA is the ancient word for to go crazy. 

NYON PA means, we have English, batty? Lose your mind completely. Lose your mind completely. And then there's a tradition in the monastery. 

If a guy refuses to be logical over and over and over again, you give him logic and he's like, I don't believe that. And then you say, okay, is A B? Yes. Is B C? Yes. 

Is A C? And he says, no. And then you're like, let me repeat. Is A B? Yes. 

Is B C? Yes. So is A C? I don't know. I disagree. 

And then you say, NYON PA DANG TSOD PA MED. And it's a very beautiful word and it's a beautiful rule in the debate ground that you have the right to walk away from a debate anytime. You're in front of 500 geshe candidates and you're in the middle of a debate. 

If your opponent refuses to be logical, you can pull the NYON PA. It means, I love you. I'm sure you're very intelligent, but you're just not being logical. 

Did I prove the first thing to you? Yes. Did I prove the second thing to you? Yes. So is the first thing the third thing? No.

(36:09 - 36:54)
Okay, look, man, you keep going. I'll be over on the other side of the debate ground. If you decide to be logical, come over and let me know. 

It's an accepted strategy in the debate ground. You can say to another person, you're just not being logical. I can't talk to you anymore about this topic because you refuse to be logical. 

It happens between husbands and wives a lot. Not my marriage, but you see it happen between people who are very close. I wanted you to know that there is this custom which you would never guess.

(36:55 - 37:53)
In a very serious monastic debate, it could be deciding whether you will get a geshe degree or not. You have the right to bail out if the other person is not being logical. I think we're in the middle of an argument between wisdom and misunderstanding. 

We're in the middle of an argument, 598 verses, argument, between wisdom and misunderstanding. Then there's certain points in the debate where misunderstanding refuses to be logical. She, the angel, she sweetly says, I love you. 

I'm sure you're a good person. You're not being logical. I have better things to do.

(37:55 - 39:24)
There are several examples in the text where the angel says, I'm sure you're a good person. I like you. We had some pretty good debate. 

We proved a few things. Now you're getting crazy. Now you're not being logical. 

Then what is the proper Buddhist thing to do? Now we're talking about when you're talking to somebody about karma or something like that, and they just get to where they refuse to think logically or to be logical. I think all of us have been in that position, especially with family members, things like that. The tradition in our lineage is to let it go. 

Don't stand there and say, you're not being logical. If you were logical, you would accept my seed thing right away. The people in your life, including yourself, will not always be logical. 

Then you have to relax, and you have to understand when the point has come that people are not being logical, and you have to be compassionate, and you have to let it go. You can't keep fighting or arguing. Let it go.

(39:25 - 43:08)
Tell them you like the shoes they have on. Where'd you buy those? God, those ninja, those shoes, something. Just change the subject gracefully and just let it go as a Buddhist who's correct. 

Talking to a family member who is undertaking a course of action which could kill them, you got to be graceful, and you got to be calm, and you have to let things go sometimes. There's just times when it's not going to work, and you have to, in your heart, you have to say, NYON PA, NYON PA DANG TSOD PA MED. This person is not being logical, but that's where they are right now. 

So you can't get upset, you can't get angry. Who made them illogical? You did. That's such a hard logic. 

So this person, they're being contrary, they're saying everything opposite, they're standing on their head. In English we say they're standing on their head. It is kind of ugly, but I don't know, it's okay. 

It represents being illogical. And there comes a time in a Buddhist life when you have to say NYON PA DANG TSOD PA, let it go. You have to let it go. 

And it might be years you have to let it go, and you have to be graceful, and you have to realize where it's coming from. You have to relax, just relax. Don't get into these big Dharma arguments with NYON PA. 

Just let it go and move on. Come back when they're ready. That's what Buddha did. 

Come back when they're ready. Be ready to come back when they are ready. Don't give up on them, but come back when they're ready. 

Oftentimes when there's a tragedy, people are more willing to listen to new ideas. So that might be the time. All right, next. 

I go to 4.15, is that correct? This is how you started 10 minutes late. Are you going to add the 10 minutes? Okay, we'll do Q&A in nine minutes, okay? Any Q you have, I will A. Unless you're NYON PA. Having said that, if someone's truly not being logical, and you're trying to help them, you're trying to say something, and they're just not being logical, then in our tradition, back to the time of the Buddha, you let it go, and you be sweet to them, and you take care of them, and serve them, and make them happy, and then you wait for the day when it's the right time to talk about seeds or something. 

And then you let it go, gracefully. Because we have been there also. The Buddhas waited a long time on us also.

(43:11 - 44:20)
It's just recently that we started to listen. But having said that, back to the time of the Buddha, there's a tradition in our lineage of arguing, logically. There's a tradition of ripping apart ideas and fighting logically, intellectually, with each other. 

And it's very disturbing. I had a guy, he was the head of the Asia Division of New York Public Library. And I kept going in my lunch hour, my office was two blocks away from the New York Public Library, John, with the two lions out the front, just like a Tibetan temple, on 5th Avenue, there's two lions out in the front of the library. 

And I used to go there to read the Tengyur. They had a copy of the Tengyur, which is the scriptures, and I used to go to read it. And I got to know him because there's not a big demand for Tengyur.

(44:21 - 44:48)
And he was sort of interested that someone would come and borrow these ancient books and sit there and read them. So we got to know each other pretty well. And he asked me, eventually he said, could I come and see your monastery? Could I come and see your monastery? And I said, yeah. 

And I set the whole thing up. It was a big deal. He's an important person.

(44:48 - 44:59)
I want to make sure he doesn't get diarrhea too bad. So I got everything ready. We went together.

(45:00 - 45:24)
And then after two days, he said, I'm leaving. And I'm like, I did all this work to get you here. I got you into the monastery. 

You had to have a special pass at that time to enter a monastery. And you had to have a government permission. And sometimes it would take six months or a year to get it.

(45:25 - 46:12)
And so I went in, I took him in, and he said, I can't handle the debating. Everything else is fine. The monks are sweet. 

The prayers are nice. The meditations. We get up at five, we meditate together. 

Three thousand people meditating together. And he said, that's so sweet. The morning prayers, they're beautiful. 

Everything's cool. But the debate disturbs me. It seems too violent. 

And it seems too much the opposite of meditation. You are attacking each other. You are looking for ways to attack each other.

(46:14 - 54:18)
And then you're doing these very violent motions. By the way, in 25 years in the debate ground, I never saw anyone hit anyone. There's a limit. 

There's a half a centimeter rule, in that you never actually hit the other person. You would be thrown out if you hit another person. But you're supposed to taunt them, and yell at them, and tell them how stupid they are, and scream all night. 

You get big cuts between your fingers, and then the blood spurts in the guy's face. If you're having a good debate, his face should be covered with blood. So then he said, it disturbs me, this kind of aggression in the debate ground. 

That disturbs me. And he left, and he never came back. And it disturbed me too. 

When I first got there, it was disturbing. But then I did it for 25 years, and it's actually quite noble, and it's quite uplifting to be able to prove your points under pressure. The idea is that if you learn to defend your positions logically, calmly, under pressure... By the way, the attacker is supposed to be insane. 

Jump up and down, smash your feet, slap your heads. And the respondent is supposed to be, duh, my, suck. You're supposed to sit there like, huh? What? You kidding me? Like that. 

The respondent is supposed to be super chill. And then the debater is supposed to be crazy. But you switch during the debate. 

You switch positions. You always switch positions. You have a chance to be the aggressor, and he has a chance to be the peaceful one. 

So you have to learn both. Why am I saying that? In Buddhism, for two and a half thousand years, there is a place for being tough in an argument. Especially about dharma. 

There is a time, there is a place when you should stand up for what you believe, and you should hold it, and you should be tough, and you have to be hard as diamond. There is a place, and there is a proper time. I think especially if someone's hurting someone. 

I was studying in the Himalayas, and I was also learning sitar at night. I'm not sure my teacher approved of it. I don't know. 

But I would walk down the mountain to the sitar teacher's house, and then walk back up the mountain every evening. And then that time there were a lot of refugees coming to the Himalayas, and there was a lot of tension, racial tension. So I was walking down, and I saw a big group of Indians beating up a Tibetan refugee. 

I was above, and I was walking down the mountain, and I could see them really beating him up and hurting him. So I got my sitar ready, and I started running down the mountain, and then I hit them with my sitar. And like ten guys are like, boom, and the whole thing just exploded, and the sitar was all smashed up. 

But they stopped hitting the guy. And my sitar teacher got really upset. He heard about it before I reached the school, and he was waiting for me. 

So there is a time, there's a proper time and place when you should resist, and you should insist. So this represents, if you have a close friend, and if you care for each other, and they're doing something karmically which will hurt them a lot, then there is a place, and there is a time to be tough, and to stand up and say, that's wrong. You shouldn't be doing that. 

That's a wrong thing to do. Like war, there's a time when you should stand up, and you should say, I disagree. This is wrong. 

You should not do this. So there is a place, Buddha, we have like six holidays, Buddhist holidays every year, major holidays. It's called Duchen. 

Duchen means big time. One of them is the day that Lord Buddha attacked his opponents, and he went into battle on the debate ground, Lord Buddha, two and a half thousand years ago, and it was a bloody day. Nobody really bleeding, okay, but it was philosophically, it was a bloodbath. 

Of course, our side won, but what I'm saying is there is a time and place, if you love another person, and you think they will listen, if you fight, if you argue, if you stand up for the idea of not hurting people, or something like that, then you should, as a Buddhist, you should jump into the fray. We call fray, new word for you, battle. We should jump into the battle, and we shouldn't be afraid, and there is a time when you should stand up for what you believe. 

There's many cases, I think, in Christianity, where a Buddhist has been asked to, recently, hundreds of cases, where a Buddhist was asked to hurt their teacher, and they refused, and they fought back. There is a time and place for debate. If you think there's a chance the other person might change, then go at it. 

If you're close to the person, and they trust you, and you love them, then kick their ass, philosophically. Don't let them put up with sloppy thinking about karma, and things like that. Stand your ground, and be tough. 

There is a place for that. There's also a place for, NYON PA DANG TSOD PA MED, you go out in the corner and argue with yourself, I'm out of here. You're not listening to anything. 

Just gracefully say, look, you know what always works for me, with the kidney thing? I'm sorry, I got to go to the bathroom. I'll debate with you when I get back. Don't worry, we'll go at it. 

Then I just never come back from the bathroom. There's time for that. Then there's a time to fight.

(54:19 - 57:54)
All right, we have time for a Q&A. Who wants to Q? Can I ask something? That's the whole idea. Two days ago, you said something that confused me. 

You said that the direct perception of emptiness is a projection of the mind. That led me to think, okay, well, if it's a projection of the mind, are you watching a seed that's ripening? If that's the case, how do you distinguish between a seed that's ripening as deceptive reality and a seed that's ripening as ultimate reality? Or is that projection of the mind, you're witnessing something that's not a mental seed at all? I didn't understand. That's a good question. 

It gets very delicate. In the Geshe course, then we'll say, the teacher will say, oh, that's delicate. That's a delicate question. 

It means very difficult to understand. During the direct perception of emptiness, you... And by the way, it comes in the angel debate, in the devil angel debate. It's a big, big topic. 

It goes on for probably 50 verses or something. It's a long, long topic. Supposedly, when you see emptiness directly, it's not like when you're looking at a tree, for example. 

When you look at a tree, your seeds are opening into... Pictures are coming out of your mind, and they are creating this tree, the image of a tree. And you are watching pictures that floated out of the back of your mind through your madhya-bhuvah [?], bhuvah madhya [?], and then it created the tree. So Bill's question is really good, because in the direct perception of emptiness, supposedly you are seeing only the absence of anything else. 

Could a tree come any other way? Could a tree be any other way? The answer is no. How many trees don't come from people's... I call them seed pictures, personally. I like to make a new word called seed pictures. 

How many trees don't come from seed pictures? Zero. When you see zero, is it also opening from a seed? That's the question. And I think you have to say it is. 

There's no existing thing in the universe which is not opening from a seed. But Geshe La, that implies this kind of curve. That implies the seed opens, picture comes out, picture gets firm, you see the thing, and then it wears out. 

That's why we get old, for example. The seeds are wearing out. So then you're implying that emptiness can change.

(57:55 - 59:01)
And the answer is no, it's not true. Emptiness cannot change. Emptiness exists, but it doesn't grow. 

Emptiness exists, but it doesn't decrease. You see it. But to say that it's not coming from a seed is a problem, because that would mean that it didn't have dependent origination. 

By the way, the origination word in the native language is not the word for growing. It's the word for coming into being. Big difference. 

So that's a valid debate. It's a very famous debate. Geshe La, are you then having conceptual thought during the direct perception of emptiness? You say no. 

But are you perceiving a result of the process of something coming out of your seeds? You'd have to say yes. You'd have to say it is. You'd have to say that.

(59:03 - 59:12)
And that's why you come down out of it, for example. The seeds wear out. It's a difficult point.

(59:13 - 59:48)
You can say this. Your seeds are producing the image of something missing. That's okay. 

We can say that. Your seeds are producing the image of something missing, which never changes. Is that because emptiness is always associated with something that's positive, with an object, but it's an emptiness of an object? You could have the emptiness of the lack of enough money to pay your bills.

(59:50 - 1:00:58)
And that's an absence. So you could have an emptiness of an absence, but you could have the emptiness... Obviously, you can have the emptiness of a positive thing, but you could also have the emptiness of a negative thing or an absence. You can also have the emptiness of things that never change. 

Otherwise, you'd have to say that the fact of space to accommodate objects is contradictory to emptiness. See what I mean? It's a delicate question though, and it's a very, very good question. The process of the perception of normal reality and the process of the perception of emptiness are completely different. 

You can say that, but they're both still caused by seeds. Well, they come about through seeds. Something like that. 

They are not experientially, they're completely different. It feels completely different. All right, next question.

(1:01:01 - 1:02:00)
I'll leave it up to the microphone nurse. Thank you, Geshe La, for your teaching. You said different times, students, and sometimes you had to wait until the time to come to listen to the pen story, something like that. 

And sometimes you had to fight them, such as you broke your instrument, and sometimes you had to debate your idea. How do I know what's the time to question? Sometimes they make me annoying. Okay, thank you, Geshe La. 

Basically, his question is, is it correct? Am I being a good Buddhist if sometimes I just let it go? I'm debating something with somebody. I'm trying to convince them of something. And then they just refuse to be logical.

(1:02:01 - 1:02:55)
They refuse to follow logic. There is a time to walk away, happily, with a smile. And then there's a time to not walk away, and there's a time to fight. 

Of course, the judgment of whether to fight or walk away depends on how much do you love that person? How much do you love that person? The decision to fight or walk away should be determined by love. If you love them enough, and if they're ready, then fight. And be willing to cause a disturbance, and be willing to get their hatred back.

(1:02:56 - 1:03:01)
And that may happen. And then you still love them. It doesn't change your love for them.

(1:03:03 - 1:03:37)
And then if you love them enough, then fight. Or if you love them enough, let it go. But the decision has to be what will help them. 

And I think many of us... By the way, until you are an Arya, you never do a selfless thing in your whole life. Until you see emptiness directly, you never do a selfless thing in your whole life. Not a single thing.

(1:03:39 - 1:04:41)
After you're an Arya, you do selfless things once every hundred years or so. Big difference. But what I'm saying is, until you touch emptiness, the basis on which you make decisions is always faulty. 

You're always making some... There's always some self-existence there. And it's never pure. The decision to fight, or the decision to let it go for another 20 years, is all selfish. 

It's all a selfish thing. Until the day you see emptiness directly, you never do a good deed selflessly. 100% selflessly. 

You never. There's always something self-interested. That's why Jesus said, don't advertise your good deeds.

(1:04:44 - 1:06:56)
Don't tell anybody about your good deeds. So anyway, I think if you really practice lojong, I think Sergey's [?] here. His book, you should get his book. 

It's 900 pages on how to be a nice person. And why we need 900 pages? Because it's so hard. It's a masterpiece. 

His book is a masterpiece. And you should get it. But in the end it has to be, whether you fight, whether you keep arguing, or whether you say, let's talk about it later. 

It's okay. We'll talk about this more later. The decision is made on what will help the other person, what will help this person. 

And that's hard to do, especially when you're having an argument, or something like that. It's hard, it's really hard to think, what will help this person the most? And we have to say one thing, right? There will be days when your judgment is wrong. There will be days when you decide to fight, and you should have given it up. 

Or there'll be days when you give it up, and you should have fought, because the person dies the next day. And then, by the way, nothing feels worse than that. I had a chance to convince this person, and they were close, and then I gave it up, and then they died the next day. 

And then, it could be thousands of years before you meet again, so again, it's a judgment. But I think you, like all other moral judgments, you have to do your best. You have to try to love the other person intensely, and that'll help you make the right decision.

(1:06:57 - 1:07:33)
And you have to be ready and brave enough to make the wrong decision sometimes, because you will. And don't get all personal about it. Don't give up talking to other people, because one person got really angry at you and won't talk to you. 

Don't give up teaching just because you have one bad experience. The moment you teach, you will attract demons. The moment you start to teach somebody, you will attract intense negative energy.

(1:07:34 - 1:08:34)
And you got to understand that ahead of time. The moment you start to build a retreat center, or a five-house [?] organization, stuff will happen. And you have to be graceful, and you have to be, what do you call it? Funny. 

You have to be in a good mood. You think, how's it going? Tim, how's it going? You say, God, we don't have enough money. 20 people just quit. 

The contract fell through for the hotels. And it's, man, it's so much fun. So, you got to have good humor, or you can't be in this dharma business. 

You got to be able to have bad things happen, and you keep your smile, and you just keep going. They say in the dharma books, a good dharma person should be a donkey. Just be a donkey.

(1:08:37 - 1:09:02)
You hit them, and they're like, and then you push it, and they're like, and they just keep going at their own speed, right? You got to work with donkeys. Then you can handle dharma students. I'll see you in half an hour? 4.45. Thank you.

(1:09:04 - 1:09:05)
Thank you.