Would you want to do this, or not today? Sure, let's do it. Let's do it today. All right. Let's go for it. So tonight, because it seems that some of you perhaps were not here last night, I see some new faces. Tonight, mainly, Rinpoche is going to talk about monasticism in Tibet, seen from an insider's

[01:08]

perspective, from someone who was brought up in the system of Tibetan monasticism. And that's the principal subject for tonight, but I thought first I should spend a few minutes relating that discussion to our general sort of theme that we set yesterday. And just briefly to do it, it sort of involves kind of a vision of monasticism and a monastery as a place wherein evolution transcends itself. Somehow where the struggle for survival, the struggle of self-preservation, or the struggle of the drive, this root of all evil in Buddhist thought, which is the root of all evil being, really actually the drive of self-preservation, of what the Buddhists call self-cherishing based on the false view of self-reification, you could say, or self-absolutization. And so where this sort of evolutionary drive of self-cherishing transcends itself is where,

[02:13]

within a certain species, after beings have evolved up – I'm sort of thinking of this because we were talking about biology earlier at dinner, you know – where species evolve in this drive of self-cherishing, where even though they can identify with a certain range of other beings, maybe within a family, within a certain time, their ability to universalize their sense of identity is very, very limited. But yet it becomes a little more limited in the animal species and enough to become human. And then in the human species they get that moment of where they can identify with all, with the whole. It's only out of the human realm that they can identify with the whole consciously, where In other words, where the habit of self-identification, of self-cherishing, as it's called, becomes other-cherishing, becomes universal cherishing of others over self, which is simultaneous with the realization of emptiness of self, which is simultaneous with enlightenment. So that in the, for example, all these words we use about monasticism, when we translate it to English, the Buddhist terms of monasticism are all totally misleading.

[03:14]

For example, we talk about ordination, but the word in Sanskrit and in the Asian languages for ordination is nothing to do with ordination. Ordination means putting someone into orders, under rules that means, under a certain kind of controls. But originally what the word for so-called ordination in Sanskrit meant was putting someone into liberation, coming, literally graduation was what it meant. When you get to ordain it's like graduating, because when you enter into the monastic universe you leave the cycle of biology where you're identified with your narrow home, with your struggle for self-cherishing and cherishing of your near ones, fighting against your neighbor, sort of crowd out for more space against the neighbor, the sort of struggle like that, so-called struggle of survival, and you enter into a world of freedom. You graduate out. All the words having to do with entering into the monastic order from the Asian cultures are all filled with joy, with escape, with relief, with getting out of lots of duties

[04:15]

and problems and burdens. No more taxes. We didn't go into this, but we mentioned about this, the early songs of the sisters, of the nuns in India. Those songs are such a simple, uncertain, there are some very transcendent kind of ones, but there are others on a very, very simple level. There's one wonderful one about a great sister, she's saying, Oh Buddha, I love you so much. Here I am sitting quietly under a tree, and I just had a nice lunch of rice given to me by a pious layman, a layman's household, kindly as I walked in town, and all I have to do is just wipe out my bowl and tuck it back into my robe. And in the past I had to sit and scrub all so many dishes for my horrible old mother-in-law and my children and my horrible hunchback husband, and I had to pound the rice ahead of time, and I had to struggle, and only there was the dishes and the mean husband and the horrible pestle that I had used to pound the rice, and then my husband's horrible pestle with which he pounded me, and the mother-in-law's horrible tongs with which she pounded me. And then, Buddha, I escaped and I graduated into ordination, into being a bhikkhuni, and

[05:20]

now I've just had a totally nice lunch and I'm sitting here and all I need is to sit under this tree and contemplate my own liberation and perfection. Thank you, Buddha, so much for getting me out of that awful kitchen duty. It's sort of very funny and beautiful, kind of, on that level, you know, the level of escape and ordination. Anyway, so this view of the monastic precincts of entry into the sangha as an exit from a certain world of struggle, as a relief from so many kinds of burdens, then begins to make intelligible the history in Asia of why the Asian nations, the people of the Asian nations, so loved monasticism. Every third generation, for example, of Chinese emperor had to confiscate back the lands from the monasteries because so many people had given so many lands to so many monasteries and there were so many people running out of the rice fields, you know, planting rice for the emperor and for the army to become monks and nuns, that they kept losing their labor base, their land base, their tax base, and they had to purge the sangha every third generation in the history of China.

[06:20]

So this sort of, generally, we communicated yesterday, this vision of monasticism, and today, and therefore, when it came to Tibet after several centuries, starting around the year 800, a little before the year, in the 790s, when the first monastery, a real monastery as opposed to a temple, was completed in Tibet, the Tibetans also, the Tibetan culture as a tribal culture, as a sort of ecological unit, as a sort of group, struggled for its niche there in the middle of Asia, found a place, found the level of freedom as a whole to put a place of total useless freedom, of self-transcendence, a place where those drives could self-transcend, namely a monastery in it. From that time, the Tibetans had great reverence built around the concept of a monastery as this kind of, like, valve of liberation within the center of the society, as this doorway of escape into another dimension, into another universe, into the vast Dharmadhatu universe, the universe of ultimate reality, sort of the doorway to become free into that universe

[07:23]

of ultimate reality, out of the universe of the self-cherishing struggle of survival. And so the Tibetans cherished this very much from the very beginning, once they got into it, and they slowly developed this monasticism. They had a sort of revulsion against it, the tribal deities, as it were, freaked out in the 9th and 10th centuries, but then when it came back, they went really strongly on it until finally from the 12th and 13th centuries, the monasteries themselves kind of took charge even of the... people became so focused on this freedom of getting out of things that sort of nobody was paying attention to how to run the worldly ship, so to speak. And so the monastery hierarchy bureaucracy, you could say, like the managers and the ones who were managing the cook and the land and the fields and the things, they had to take over and manage the whole society, so to speak, just the practical matters, which was very good actually, because they only managed it to the extent that the society worked to allow the monasteries to thrive as escape routes for people, so that the whole nation was living to preserve these kind of gateways of entry into the transcendent for as many people as

[08:27]

possible who could enter that gateway. So this then enabled this Tibetan culture to live in this delicate ecology in a very stable way for many, many centuries without famine, without war, without violence, peacefully sort of also balancing against the war of others and actually exercising international influence of balancing and keeping peace amongst the very violent and powerful Mongols and Manchus and Chinese and Nepalese Gurkhas and so forth, many people, only being overwhelmed finally by the more violent, most violent, our good old buddies, the British, who finally did invade and start to make a mess there, the first ones to really invade with them. And so this is the vision sort of fitting into the overall historical pattern, anyway, of the Tibetan Muslim. Tsongkhapa in particular, for example, in the Tibetan Buddhism is known as the sort of Buddhism sometimes called Lamaism or sometimes tantric or tantricized Buddhism or Vajrayana esoteric Buddhism. People say, even Tibetan Buddhists, modern Western Tibetan Buddhists will say, oh we are Vajrayana Buddhists, that's a thing they will say.

[09:29]

And that's a little misleading because although of course the tantric literature and the tantric lineages and tantric meditation was an important part of Tibetan Buddhism, the Tibetan Buddhists never considered tantra even a faintest possibility without a very strong practice of monastic Buddhism, what we would call Hinayana, or Buddhism of individual liberation. And they considered the tantra just simply the esoteric aspect of Mahayana Buddhism, what we would call technically in English the messianic Buddhism, the Buddhism of those Bodhisattvas who vow to save the whole world or the whole universe. And then the Vajrayana is only like an inner or esoteric element of that Mahayana. The Mahayana itself, its base, its very fiber is the Hinayana, without, in other words, without a vehicle of individual liberation for the individual to liberate themselves, it's foolish and hypocritical and impossible to talk about liberating the whole world. Because liberating the whole world means making it possible for each individual to liberate themselves. Therefore you can see how the Mahayana or universal vehicle of the Bodhisattvas is integrally connected with the individual vehicle of monastic Buddhism for the individual to liberate themselves.

[10:33]

It can't work without touching the ground, without having the individual vehicle. So in fact, in Tibetan Buddhism, the monastic was always considered the root of the Dharma. The place where the Dharma was planted in historical reality was through monastic Buddhism, through the monastery. And for example, just as an example, the synthesizer or the man who, the emanation of Manjushri at least in the Tibetan Buddhist view, Manjushri, there were a number, of course, emanations of Manjushri. There were said to be three great emanations of Manjushri, the Sakya Pandita, the Kuntya, the Longchen Rabjambha, and then third, Dzongkapa, from the 11th, from the 12th, 11th and 12th until the 15th century. And these three great Manjushris culminating in the third one, Dzongkapa, then made the great synthesis of the great teaching of Lamrim, of the integration of tantric and sutric esoteric and exoteric practices, systematizing the overview of all the Indian scriptures as organized in Tibet, development of the monastic university or educational curriculum, all the sort of hard sciences of Buddhism, the inner sciences, and connecting them with the spiritual practice.

[11:36]

Most amazing kind of system that he created, overview of the dharma in the Tibetan view, a kind of renewing of the dharma to last another 500 years from the 15th century. Anyway, this Dzongkapa, among his four great deeds, one of them in 1402, which he's not so well known for, was his convening of a great Vinaya assembly, where he brought all the leaders of all the four schools or four or five schools of Tibetan Buddhism in his time, the different orders, and he brought them together to go over all the whole Indian Vinaya and see how their monastic practice in Tibet measured up to that Vinaya and throw out certain kind of habits that had crept in and renew certain kinds of forms and habits and bring in this and that kind of new, renew certain things and get the monks to fold their towels in a certain way and maybe brush their teeth and do this and that, you know, stop picking their teeth. There were certain little things that were very, very important that the Buddhist masters always thought were real important. And he was therefore, he himself, was most proud, almost, of that he felt that anything

[12:39]

he might do in the level of these very exalted tantric teachings which he made and so forth would be completely ungrounded and useless if he didn't establish monastic Buddhism on a very, very firm, founded footing. And there even is the most extraordinary, to me, the most extraordinary story about Dzongkapa has to do with the fact that he achieved his highest enlightenment in his own body, now seeing him more as a human and less as a mandastri, he achieved his highest enlightenment in 1398. He had, like, the experience of perfect emptiness. But yet another level of experience of that emptiness is integrated with relativity from the tantric way of seeing it, where emptiness and great bliss were perfectly integrated. To do that, following the Indian pattern, he should have to, like Shantideva or some of the Indian siddhas, abandon the monastic role and enter into a sort of siddha role, sort of trans-institutional type of role, and sort of reconnect with sensuality in a certain way and reconnect with the feminine in a certain way and so forth.

[13:42]

It's sort of essential at this very, very high stage. But he chose not to do that and, as I said, he didn't go further into that kind of integration, the bliss-void, indivisible experience, until the between state, namely until death. And it was the only two ways to go further from where he was in 1398, was either through union with the consort or through death, the dissolution of death. Those were the only two ways of dissolving his connection with his coarse body. And he purposely postponed, for 19 years, his next set of personal attainment, because he said, he thought to himself, if I do so, then people who haven't actually reached this level of attainment will just think, oh, the big thing to do is to forget being a monk. Who needs a monk? Who needs a monastery? And they'll run out and sort of indulge themselves and think that's the high, far-out thing, that's the great perfection, that's the ultimate integrated state, and we don't need any of these monastic forms, and that would be a terrible, historically that would ruin Tibetan Buddhism. So I will just restrain myself and live a little short of perfect enlightenment in order

[14:46]

to benefit others in this field for hundreds of years, for these 19 years, knowing full well where he could have stepped, even the next week after that time in 1398. That's a story that to me is most astounding and most extraordinary, actually, to me. But anyway, so this is an example of the kind of personal sacrifice, in that case, sacrifice of a certain kind of great bliss integration, that the Tibetans have maintained all along in order to cherish the jewel of the Sangharatna, and in the centre of that jewel of the Sangharatna, the true monastic monk and nun, Sangha, the core of the fourfold Sanghas, Rosh Chino Roshi said yesterday, of layman, laywoman, and monk and nun, this fourfold Sangha, where the monk and nun part are the essential, those two central components of it. So with that general kind of introduction now, to put it all in context, we will now turn to Rinpoche, and he will give us a sort of interior view from the Tibetan view of

[15:51]

the monastery and the monastic institution in Tibet, as tomorrow the Roshis will give us that view in East Asia, the same kind of a view in East Asia. Right? I hope you checked that out at lunch. I hope so. I started checking that out. You started checking that out. Good. So anyway, I just launched the Roshis into it. I hope it will be all right. So now, Rinpoche, Lola. Now, if we talk about the Tibetan way of seeing the monastery, I feel that it's something

[16:54]

very beautiful. Now, I have the confidence that the sort of historical sense of the way in which monasticism came from India and sort of grew in Tibet and flourished eventually in Tibet, the way Tenzin La has explained that, the way Bob Thurman has explained that to you, I'm sure is clear and concise, and so I don't need to go into that. Does it say? But I want to give also a version of it just from our Tibetan way of, our own traditional way of explaining it. So maybe there might be some redundancy.

[17:54]

There's a danger of that, so please bear with it. So I'll try to make it concise, but hopefully maybe repetition will give you some further impression. Now, our teacher, the Buddha, the Lord Buddha, Shakyamuni, from a youth, he did nothing but sit and think one-pointedly about how can I benefit the living beings, how can I help them. Finally, he reached the stage wherein even his inhalation and exhalation was only for the benefit of other beings and never in order simply to take air into his lungs for his

[18:59]

own desire of having air. Only for the benefit of others did he even inhale. He reached such a stage. And therefore, what is called monastery, the monastery is something that arose from his own inner thought and inner intention to benefit beings. And so, his invention of this monastery became something that was of great benefit to all beings in general, and in particular, wherever it was created, it became of tremendous benefit to all the beings in that particular environment and region, including the human beings. Including all the other species, other even than human beings, that institution, that phenomenon became of great benefit to every living being within its environment.

[20:01]

And therefore, it's definite that a monastery is something which has a great virtue and a great benefit, and therefore, something of great importance. And now, the teacher, the capital T teacher, Shakyamuni, was not just some ordinary kind of person, but was the crown prince of a great kingdom, the kingdom of, known as the kingdom of the Shakyas. He was, therefore, And therefore, even when he was a youth,

[21:16]

before he had achieved sort of formal Buddhahood, he was most extraordinary as a youth. And when he was a middle, as he became a middle-aged and reached maturity, he was extraordinarily amongst mature persons. No. No. And so, for the people of that country, he actually had the duty of becoming a king. No. And so,

[22:20]

No, no. And so, therefore, in his, he therefore learned, or since he was to have become the king of the Shakyas, he was trained and learned all the methods existing in the political science of his day, of how to benefit all of his subjects and all of the citizens of that kingdom. What was the most proper way of running a kingdom and administering a kingdom for the benefit of all of his subjects. He learned everything to be learned about royal responsibility to the people. No. No. Even though he learned all this and he saw how it was applied and he sort of studied the whole art of statecraft and so forth, all of the great lore, and we never know,

[23:32]

in modern times, people still don't know how sophisticated actually Indian statecraft was in those days. But in fact, it was extremely sophisticated, but he noticed in spite of the best technique, if you will, and the best technique of how to run a country and how to benefit the subjects, the Buddha noticed that in spite of the great wealth of that country at that time, the Buddha noticed that still it was impossible to really solve the problems of his subjects, and he noticed that the people always somehow didn't work out. There was always some problem and some shortages and some sufferings, and never could, by mere political administration, by environmental management, never could the country's people become happy and their problems be satisfied. And so he clearly came to realize, from the point of view of royal responsibility, of

[24:34]

feeling the sense of being a parent of all of the people, of all of the creatures in the entire kingdom, he noticed that the only way of developing a sensible, sane, and beneficial lifestyle amongst all these people was for there to be a certain development of the minds of the subjects. The minds should reach a certain kind of inner development. This was the only way of solving the external problems. He noticed that. And therefore it became, now he then let it be known, and it becomes clear to all of us ever since, that if we want happiness that we seek, if we wish to be happy even ourselves in this life or anyone that we know, the real only way of gaining happiness is for the individual to develop a way of controlling their own mind, of properly arranging their own inner circumstances in their inner mind, and this is the only way for the individual to achieve happiness. Similarly, even if one has the strong motive to try to help others, realizing that the

[25:58]

only way for them to be truly helped is for them to develop the free mastery of their own minds, in order to even begin practically to do that naturally, the person who realizes that and who has such an altruistic drive obviously becomes obvious to them that in order to do that they must first develop a mastery of their own mind by taming and understanding their own mind. So therefore, with this consideration and this motivation, the Crown Prince Buddha, Siddhartha, left his subjects, his family, his children, his parents, and went into this process of intense interior study in order to try to develop at least the mastery and the taming of his own mind. And so in doing that, after some years of struggle, he finally went under the tree in Vajraasana, as it's called, and then he attained perfect Buddhahood, the perfect enlightenment

[27:01]

of Buddhahood. And having therefore achieved that perfect freedom from fault and perfect happiness and bliss of enlightenment, he then, from his own experience, was able to help all other beings from wherever they happened to be located in their own evolution to achieve their own happiness by having, and knowing the method was sure because he himself had traversed that, made that progress and reached that goal. And so we feel also an ordinary, from the level of ordinary perception, perceiving the

[28:02]

world under ordinary dualistic perception, it seems as if, well, the Buddha went here and he talked there this time, then he didn't say anything, he walked over there, then he talked and taught that sutra here and there in the other place. Actually, in the extraordinary non-dual perception, the Buddha, from that time forward, always teaches the Dharma. He's constantly teaching all different kinds of Dharma. From all kinds of living beings, at all times, he's constantly emanating the teaching of Dharma in all kinds of directions, in all levels, to all spheres of evolution, in the extraordinary perception. In the ordinary perception, however, his first teaching, in the ordinary history, that is, in a sense, in ordinary time, his first teaching was near Benares at the Deer Park in what is now called Sarnath, where he turned the wheel of Dharma for the first time. I only wish to emphasize this is in the ordinary time, ordinary history, in the perception of ordinary dualistic persons. In the extraordinary non-dualistic perception, there never was a time from his enlightenment

[29:03]

when he was not constantly teaching the Dharma in all directions, when it was not constantly pouring out of his every pore. No. No. No, no, no. No, no, no. And therefore, for the benefit of living beings as a whole, he realized that he had to create a space of freedom wherein those beings who wanted to uphold his teaching to the total exclusion of other goals of their lives should have a place of refuge and protection whence they could freely exist and uphold his teachings.

[30:04]

And this space that he created became the space we know nowadays as monasteries. And therefore, what the monastery was, was a kind of center in which that essential energy of freedom, which was essential to the benefit and the happiness and peace of all beings, could be produced, so to speak, or manufactured. We could sort of see them as, therefore, factories of inner peace. Yes. And therefore, as this then exercised its benevolent influence throughout the history

[31:13]

of India up for 1,200 years, or 1,100 years, then it became known to the other nations of Asia, through their charging hither and thither, and their seeking to find what they needed to benefit them as a nation. Finally, the Tibetans began to realize that what they needed precisely were this kind of factories to generate the energy of peace and freedom in their country, and they realized the great value of these facilities, these peace factories. And so they made tremendous effort and suffered tremendous hardship to struggle down to India. In those days, there were no airlines, there were no railways, there were no cars to drive and no roads, and they had to struggle over the Himalayas and down through the fever-ridden jungles and so forth to India to get precisely the blueprint of these factories, the production schedule, the engineering things, all of the things to get these kind of factories and bring them and create them in Tibet to generate the energy of peace and happiness in Tibet. They suffered greatly over the centuries to do this. And actually, the Tibetans did a hell of a good job in getting full-scale blueprints

[32:20]

and building full-scale factories because the Tibetans were kind of very stubborn, tough and rough-and-tough type of people. And because of this toughness and stubbornness, when they turned their energy to try to get gentleness factories and peace factories, they also did a very good job. And so what they wanted to get, of course, was the three jewels, any sort of form of

[33:23]

the three jewels. So they struggled very hard and they went hither and thither and made great effort to obtain the great images, the very precious and great images of the Buddha, the representation, sort of the channels and the vehicles of evolutionary inspiration of the beings realizing the form of the Buddha, not just to benefit the human beings but to benefit all kinds of sentient beings. They went and got these images of the Buddha, these bodies of the Buddha, to give beings that sort of evolutionary impulse that there is the love, there is where evolutionary perfection lies in that form. And then to get all of the Buddha's speech, they made also great hardship and they sent down all the great translators and they brought in translators and they struggled with the languages and they created the alphabet and they studied all the studies and went to all the Indian universities and struggled and suffered in bad climates and so forth to get the Buddha's speech in its fullest possible form. And then they made also the effort to get these factories to produce that kind of energy, namely the precious Sangha jewel, the proper environment, the proper residences of monks

[34:23]

and nuns and the monasteries. And so they brought these three vessels of the three jewels, namely the vessels of the Buddha, the images of the Buddha, the vessels of the Dharma, the texts of the Buddha's teaching, the vessels of the Sangha, the institutions and the persons of the monks and nuns. When we used to go around in Tibet before the great destruction and saw all of these incredible images of the Buddha, these giant vast statues, many of which were brought from Nepal and from India and so forth, from very, very ancient times, we sometimes wonder how did they ever carry them? Huge, like enormous kind of Buddha statues that came from China, way down from China or way from India. We are always amazed and we always wonder how did they ever bring them in those ancient times? The one statue brought from India, the one famous image of the Buddha brought from India

[35:44]

is the Jhor Rinpoche, is still there, was not actually totally destroyed even in the Cultural Revolution. The other major image, the first image brought to Tibet, the one which according to our history was originally brought from India to China and then was brought up from the Tang by one Tang dynasty princess from China to Tibet. This one was broken in half at the waist in the Cultural Revolution, the other part smashed and then only recently rebuilt again. And nowadays they say that this statue has been reconstructed and that somebody went around and found the head over here lying in this garbage heap smashed up by the Red Guard and that part of the trunk and this arm and finger here and they somehow reassembled it. But Tibetans are very skeptical about it, but we don't really know. But something has been reconstructed by the Chinese, museum collectors.

[36:46]

There's a hole in the back of this Buddha and also we don't know what kind of important treasures and mystical, magical things they sneaked out of the back of the Buddha, the communists. It seems as if some of the communists were a bit like monkeys. They like put, they sneaked in and grabbed out little things here and there. Now when some of the Tibetan lamas, even the penchant lama within Tibet, the Dalai Lama without Tibet, informally and privately negotiating scolds them that you allow this kind of disaster to happen and that kind of disaster. It seems, at least on the private, non-face-losing level, they seem to accept these, that they are great errors. They do accept. Anyway, inviting these great images of the Buddha, they built these places to locate

[37:56]

these images in the proper setting known as the great cathedrals or the chapels or temples. This we call deity house or we might say temple. Then those places where the representations of the Buddha's speech, the Buddha's endless and infinite speech are collected, namely the texts of the Buddhist, the Buddha Dharma, the written Dharma, are collected. We call them, well, usually that word is translated cathedral, but it also could be translated like library or even university. Because the religious and educational elements are so mixed in the culture, neither term will fit quite, but you have to say, I guess, cathedral university. And then the third major institution was that institution wherein the actual practitioners

[39:06]

of that Dharma, those who kept polishing it and refining it and casting out error as it would grow onto it, sort of the barnacles of confusions and errors that would come generation after generation, continuously cleansing it by investigating and re-realizing it anew in each generation. That is to say, the sangha, the monastic and lay practitioners and students, monks and nuns, and their residents, which we then call monastery or gomvayin, Tibetan. So this we have to call kind of factories of the energies of enlightenment. And these are the places, just a metaphor, but it's like these are the places from which are generated, these are sort of the power generators, the generating stations, where it is generated, the energy of freedom and liberation, that with the energy that gives people the source of turning against their own habits and developing some sort of freedom from their own drives and compulsions, and hence is the source of peace and happiness

[40:10]

within any society. So therefore in Tibet, this kind of institutional facility, we can say, known as a monastery, developed. Therefore Tibetans are fully aware in the Tibetan culture, the cultures, structures of the culture are built around the knowledge shared by all, that that kind of institution wherein the essential root cause of people's peace and happiness is fabricated, so to speak, is the monastery. This is known by everyone. And so everyone uses that institution to learn how to control their own minds, to learn that source and key element of their own happiness, either as individual or as society, which

[41:11]

is the controlling and the calming of their own minds. No. No. No. Therefore there is no area of Tibet, no area of its landscape, no ecology, no environment anywhere in Tibet, even the tiniest little village where two or three families have come together to form the tiniest village, where there also is not a monastery, not anywhere throughout all of vast Tibet. These small monasteries serve as sort of places of primary education, but in order to develop further education, anybody who wishes to, monk or nun, goes to sort of large provincial center monasteries, which become like the universities, the regional high schools and

[42:12]

universities, you could say. And in the largest universities in the center of the country, say in Lhasa and so forth, for example in my monastery, Debong Monastery, in my college of Debong Monastery, the Losalien College, every year would come to there from all over the country, several hundreds of new students, so to speak, of new students would come from all around the country to do their higher education. And when they finished there, they graduated from that process of higher education, of learning, reflecting and debating and then meditating, only then would they return back down to their own regional country, to their own local temple to again teach and instruct and inspire others. No.

[43:16]

No. It was such a long and elaborate system of education, of course, that it was actually rare that anyone ever finished it completely and achieved all of its ranks and degrees. It was at least a 30-year process to finish the Buddhist education process of the spiritual master in Tibet. At least a 30-year process. There were many ranks, of course, of achievement, where in terms of wisdom and meditative achievement and concentration and stabilization, and therefore there were many degrees of way of graduating that everyone reached the same degree of wisdom and ability of stabilization and concentration. Those who achieved the highest achievement would become then abbots and leaders of other

[44:25]

monasteries throughout the country. Because he or she would have the responsibility of teaching those in those regional monasteries and seeing those who had promised and sending them up through the system, so to speak. So there was this kind of sort of network within the monasteries, educational, you could say, network, spiritual educational network within the monasteries in Tibet. No. No. From the time of the fifth Dalai Lama, from the 17th century, the actual government of Tibet was more or less taken over by these great monasteries, these central monastic universities in Lhasa, had actually sort of taken over the administration of the country. But that government didn't have really too much to do. It only maintained, basically it maintained this monastic system.

[45:29]

Mainly all taxes that were collected by the government throughout the whole country, the whole sort of focus of the economy was the maintenance of this monastic educational system. Therefore, the Tibetan nation seems to have been unique, from what I have seen, in its cherishing and valuing the monastic institution as the most valuable prized element of its whole existence. And so therefore, also it was so that within these monastic institutions, anything needed to benefit the people, if they were sick, if they were troubled, if there was mental

[46:31]

illness, if there was some sort of disturbance or disaster, always from within the monastery it was that the methods of helping these various problems emanated. People were trained to help on various levels. All the people from within the monastery, the monastery was looked to as the source of help and benefit by all the people. And therefore, all the people felt very much that their main source of refuge and source of assistance in their life and lives was in fact these monasteries. Furthermore, all the sort of virtuous activities of the lay population, recreational activities,

[47:35]

sort of daily entertainment, the monastery served as the sort of theatre for the people, it served as the mental hospital for the people, it served as the religious centre for the people, it served as even the sort of physical exercise theatre for the people, because that's where they would go to prostrate themselves, to circumambulate, to go around on pilgrimage, to make a hundred thousand bowing, in which they preferred to jogging in Tibet, for example. And they went there for seasonal theatre. They went there on the eighth day and the new moon day and the full moon day and the twenty-fifth day and then the birthday of this great lama and that great saint and this great thing. They went to all kinds of other lambs. They went there to pray. They went there to consult and get psychological advice. They went there to get sort of ritual advice. They went there to monitor their own practice if they were into practicing themselves. They went there to find doctors and medicine in case there was some sickness and so forth. So all these different levels of service, so to speak, and all these different functions were served by the monastery. It was the very centre of all of their community life and all of their inspiration in life. They also came for sort of lectures and inspiration and great masters would teach them and inspire

[48:48]

them and give them sort of the higher vision of the purpose of their lives and this type of thing. And so it was sort of like a kind of cultural centre for them. Even if there were no special sort of big lectures or big ceremonies or initiation or something, they always had still their own sort of spiritual counsellors, their own therapists, so to speak, different lamas that they would go to consult who knew the history of their families and this kind of thing. They would go there to consult them even on a personal basis. Sometimes they would invite great lamas from elsewhere to come and give initiations or give great teachings in the different monasteries in the different regions. So therefore, there was a beautiful relationship between the people and the monasteries in all spheres of the people's lives. Now within the monastery itself, the sort of discipline and regime followed by the monks

[50:02]

and nuns in the monasteries were according to the prescriptions within the ancient Vinaya or discipline. There were also many nun monasteries for female monastics also run on those ancient rules. In my country where I'm now living in exile in the Mun area of the northeast frontier area of India, north of Assam, which really is part of Tibet known as the country of the Mun people or Mun Yul, in that area from when it was Tibetan, since it is ethnically Tibetan, there are five nunneries in that area that have existed there for centuries, five major nunneries just in my area. They have excellent monastic discipline that they preserve there. No.

[51:03]

No. No. Nowadays their studies had suffered somewhat in past generations, recent generations, because the British had taken that territory away from Tibet in 1913 and so they were in a situation where their sources of renewing their teaching and sort of their visiting lamas and visiting scholars and so forth, the access was cut off because they were artificially included in the British Indian Empire and hence the frontier was closed to Central Tibet where the great masters used to come from. But now they have greatly benefited by the exile of the major Tibetan teachers and the fact that monasteries like the Gyuta Monastery of Lhasa, my monastery, which was rebuilt there in a refugee camp there, they now are able to again re-invite the sort of Central Tibetan masters and in this generation, ironically due to the exile, their study and their scholarship as it were, and their meditation has been greatly repaired or greatly revived or revitalized.

[52:14]

Therefore, if we talk about the actual monastic regulation and discipline that they maintained, the monasteries in Tibet were generally extremely excellent in that. It seemed that most of them were upward of 200 nuns, many throughout the country. Some of them, of course, in Tibet in general, our largest monastery had over 10,000 monks. According to the Vinaya, to maintain monastic discipline of the monks, the monks had to observe 252 or 253 rules. Furthermore, the Buddha made provision within the original Vinaya for there becoming certain

[53:38]

kinds of special rules for different sanghas in different monastic settings, in different political, social, technological, and so forth, climates and customs, local kind of monastic customs. Therefore, there was a very excellent way of living of the monks. During the time before we all had to flee and the Chinese openly would set out to destroy all of our institutions, there were 10 or 13 years when we lived together with the sort of gradual encroaching presence of the Chinese army and officials and so forth. During that time, there was quite a bit of deterioration of the monastic practice. The Chinese seemed to approve of the worse our discipline became, the more they liked it.

[54:45]

This then supported their sort of general contention and argument that these institutions were useless, harmful, destructive, parasitic, etc. And so, our discipline got much worse during this time. And so, our discipline got much worse during this time. Now, to talk a little bit about sort of the day in the life of the Tibetan monastery, if we take the monastery of Drebung, for example, where I live, the largest monastery, actually

[55:50]

the largest monastery in the world of any religious group, where there were formally supposed to be 7,700 monks, but there were about actually 12,000 monks in the latter part of the monastery. Every morning before dawn, all of the monks of all of the colleges would assemble in the great assembly hall. The sort of active ritual monks, you know, sort of senior monks, or upwards of about 6,000, these would assemble for what was known as group tea and prayer. Group tea and prayer would assemble in the central assembly hall every morning before dawn. This general tea lasted... They would gather from, say, 4.30 in the morning or 4.00 in the morning until around 7.00 in the morning, during which time, in the midst of different meditations and chants and ceremonies and prayers and so forth, they would have at least four rounds of tea.

[56:52]

They would have, with the tea, at a certain one of these, which was sort of like breakfast, they would have their dzampa, which they would bring with them in a bag, this dried barley flour, and they would have that with it. They put it in a bowl, and then they'd pour a little tea in that bowl and moisten it and make it into little balls and eat this sort of dzampa, sort of morning oats, that is, barley, morning barley, kind of roasted barley flour, little cakes that they would eat. The older senior monks would get a really good kind of dzampa. Why is that? Because in the tea, the tea, as you know, was filled with butter, with melted butter. Therefore, since the older monks would be served first, down these vast long lines, remember, 6,000 or 7,000 monks were served tea to them, by these running little acolytes who would run up and down with these huge pots, the older monks would get the tea first, and since the ones who got the tea first would get a little heavier or more amount of butter,

[58:02]

then their butter would mix nicely into their dzampa, and they'd have very moist and delicious little dzampa cakes that they would make. And so by the time it got down to the new monks, they would be getting almost like straight tea with no butter, and it would be a little bit dry when mixed with the dzampa, and they disappointingly get kind of clear tea in there with their dzampa without any oil in it. And the tea was not like, not feeble like American tea, delicious, powerful brick tea. When you smell the smell of it as they brought it in from outside, you just would be tripped out on the smell. So this was the morning routine, like this?

[59:03]

Some who were a little better off or older, or for others they would bring in little cheese or different kinds of things to add to the dzampa. So there would be very good dzampa breakfast. The prayers and the recitations of these things. They would recite things like the Heart Sutra would be recited, many, many prayers for the benefit of beings would be recited, certain rituals, confessional rituals and prayers and things, Mahayana sutras would be recited, this sort of thing would be recited, but in this monastery there would be all sutra things recited, no tantric ceremonies or tantric

[60:16]

visualizations would be used during these morning recitations, nor would there be much group meditation, since meditation, although some people would sometimes meditate, they would sort of space out or something, but basically meditation was something done in solitude in this exoteric university monastery. No. Some people who would be into particularly a stage of meditating would still come to the central morning assembly, but they would not participate in the chanting, instead they would meditate. They would do Tara, there would be Tara prayers, Samantabhadra prayers from the Kabhatamsaka Sutra, there would be Chakyamuni prayers, there would be the 35 Buddha of confessional prayers, there would be general benefits in human beings type of prayers.

[61:18]

They would recite sometimes the entry into the central way, the great philosophical texts, they would recite the ornament of realizations, the Abhisamaya Lankara, the systematic yoga, teaching about the Prajnaparamita Sutras and so forth. This kind of text they would recite, philosophical texts. Prayers directed for the benefit of individual families or regions or even the nation as a whole. Every day there would be a certain sort of quota of requested prayers of various kinds. There would be a leader, a chanting leader, for example. The chant leader would have a long list of problems around the nation for the day, like morning news thing, like there was a flood in Tennessee or there was a flood in South Asia, we should pray so and so much this prayer and that prayer for the victims of that flood. There was a famine over here, there was a mountain slide over there, we would pray for that one. Every morning the morning news was delivered to the chant leader and he would therefore

[62:22]

direct the energy of the chants of the six or seven thousand monks to send good vibrations to this or that area to calm the Nagas or the earth deities or the cloud deities in those regions. Were all the monks doing the same thing at the same time or different groups? Yes, yes, all six or seven thousand did the same thing at the same time. All memorized? All from memory. All of them memorized. Hundreds of pages they had in their memory. Hundreds, thousands. Oh really? There might be some younger ones who hadn't yet memorized everything and they were just going to go. There was a person who was really sick for example? Yes.

[63:52]

When someone was sick for example they would send in like a petition you know so and so is very sick or so and so is dying or so and so is having a baby or something like that and then the head monk would get up and read this thing saying in a loud voice you know to be resonating through this great hall which thousands and thousands of monks would say so and so is sick and they've got like a terrible pain in the back and blah blah blah they've got this and that you know they're going to die tomorrow so everyone please pray for them. There were thousands that resonated with a rumbling voice or something like that. And they would proceed like that. Then one by one all the different local complaints or far off people or regions would send in like this. Sometimes a patient who had recovered really well and was happy would sometimes send in some really delicious breakfasts. Butter.

[64:56]

Really melted butter and different things. Good Zamba. Best quality. Aged Zamba. 75 year old Zamba was considered a speciality. So this might happen. I don't know. Unfortunately because Tibet was the country where meat was very prevalent the donors would sometimes send in especially dried yak meat and I regret to say that the Tibetan monks very prized the dried yak meat and there was no rule that they couldn't send in the dried yak meat. So when some good like you know like Westphalian ham or something like that it was like prosciutto or something. When the good dried yak meat would come in the monks would begin to really get excited. Melted butter was also very helpful. People would send in huge tubs of this melted butter, clarified butter too.

[66:04]

And then people could take some home. What they couldn't eat they'd slip into their little sacks and fiddle at their own and take them home. What a really good day. It's just water. Very often lay people or the government itself would distribute small amounts of cash as well. So then there would be small like donations, a few sang or what they call the Tibetan money would be given out here and there with the donors listed and mentioned and so on. Now after they finished these morning assemblies after dawn they would then go down to what

[67:11]

is known as the Dharma Gardens basically. Literally. Now In the Los Alin College, my college within the Dragon University there was special focus on the entry to the central way of Chandrakirti, this great text of the central way. And so most often the main subjects for the Dharma Garden which would be therefore the debating sessions would be mainly usually drawn from this entry into the central way basically on the topic of Shunyata, the wisdom of selflessness. Then everyone had to debate. Every day in this area outside of the Los Alin College in this sort of outdoor area there

[68:18]

would be at least over a thousand monks in little groups and knots within this sort of great host of monks within little knots of four and five. There would be these very powerful and heated formal debates on the subject of, you know, how deeply do you understand Shunyata? Is it personal selflessness or not? And there would be this sort of ocean, this roar of these arguing debates between these different thousand people all like that, deeply focused on Shunyata, deeply arguing and debating upon that in little knots of three to eight to ten monks and so forth for thousands of them all around. This would go on all morning until the college would have its morning assembly. This would be therefore for about one hour or hour and a half from say 6.30 or 7 till around 9 and then the college would assemble as a whole after the debate when everyone was exhausted with Shunyata. Then again we had no more tea after that heavy debate. Then there might be brunch.

[69:23]

Because there were other than patrons of the college, not the whole huge monastery but now the individual college. Now there were four main colleges in Drebong but the largest of these by far was the Losaling College and that had around 7,000 monks in it. Back to the Zamba again. Zamba. We're right this is a mainstream event. You all really should learn about Zamba.

[70:38]

It's tremendous stuff. It might be the way of supporting the economy of Zamba. Sweet tea please. You've been having such a lot of talk we better all have some tea. You all have cups please, go ahead. Really Zamba is good. I personally must say. When I first went to Dharamsala in 1964 I first encountered Zamba. And I really loved Zamba. I realized why I was drawn to Tibet, you know, mystic gold. No, it was Zamba. Actually Zamba tastes a little bit, Cheerios has a little bit.

[71:41]

From a child I loved Cheerios. I only realized why when I got to Dharamsala. I got to eat real Tibetan Zamba. It's just like a kind of delicious toasty roasty Cheerios. I was Cheerios, I was always a Cheerios fanatic. I still love Cheerios. Little did I know. It was from all of his many breakfasts probably in some form of life. Endless eating, endless imprinting on Zamba, you know. Proof of form of life. Because of the high air, clear, very pure air and the big cold, we had a terrific appetite. We believed that the better Zamba was like hundreds of years old.

[72:49]

People would inherit Zamba. The climate was such that you could keep in a stone tower Zamba for 150 years. It would not rot at all, no mold, nothing. It was so dry and so pure, so few bacteria that it didn't mold. It was, the taste got better and better the older it was. Aged Zamba. Older Zamba is better. I don't know. It gets more and more powerful. It's the six thousand monks praying for better Zamba. Using it with Samadhi power. Also the barley of Tibet had its own particular flavor and power. It was a larger barley than you find out there. It was not like, you know, measly like American wheat or barley or like Indian barley, not at all.

[73:58]

It was a certain kind of big barley. In America, your grains to me seem to have become a bit impoverished and that's why American food they're never happy unless they're mixing up lots of different things to disguise the fact that the original substance is maybe not quite so delicious and whole in itself. Tibetan, the grain just as it came right out of the ground, just roasted up a little bit and just have it by itself and it was like completely like a feast. Now the Tibetans say, however, the quality of their grains has somehow gotten worse. The quality of the soil has been ruined and exploited. The culture has been wrecked by the invasion and occupation. The Tibetans who come from Tibet, they can't bear to eat the meat or a lot of some of the Indian foods.

[75:03]

They don't like it. The Tibetan yak meat is a particular delicacy. We haven't got to noon yet. I'm not yet to lunch. Now he says, I've been talking so much about dhampa, I have a real craving for dhampa. I had to. I was used to mules because I love dhampa, but some Americans don't like it. They feel so dry. The college's own assembly would last an hour, an hour and a half.

[76:09]

Also prayers and so forth of different kinds and recitations, things are memorized. Special monks who had sort of like exams would give group memorization. They would recite like a two or three hundred page book by heart to get a certain degree. Then there would be a second debating session that would be carried on after this assembly from about eleven. Around eleven o'clock we reach now, no? No. Now around twelve, after that was over now, then people would go and reassemble in the smaller houses of the colleges. The small ones, the smaller parts, the sub-colleges of the monastery. Tea. More tea. Lunch. More prayers.

[77:17]

Otherwise some would return to their own quarters at this point. Then there was no free time depending upon the, during the whole rest of it until the evening. In other words, which were individual activities. Then the next six hours, the afternoon then was the time when the students would gather and the earlier level students would memorize long, like you know, there would be a regular rhythm, an intelligent student was considered to be able to memorize about fifteen to twenty pages of verse text a day. Then those more advanced students who had already all the major texts memorized would go to their teachers and would analytically study these texts, would read this into the commentaries, would debate the meanings with the teachers, would study them, there would be long several hour classes with different teachers, sometimes two or three during the afternoon. And then the most advanced students would then meditate upon the deeper meaning of these different texts or upon whatever deeper meaning their mind was most focused on,

[78:21]

and would spend the time in solitary, more solitary meditation in their own quarters. So these were the three major pursuits done in this sort of private time which was most of the afternoon. Now, then there would be an evening assembly around sundown, which would not be the whole monastery again, but would be the college, the large, and not the sub-college, but the large college. That first of all, everybody would do the twenty-one, twenty-one Tara prayer. It was beautiful to hear many thousands of monks recite the praises to the twenty-one Taras, twenty-one forms of the Mother Tara. There would be about an hour of different kinds of prayers. There was a tremendous chanting would go on in the evening.

[79:24]

After that, there would be debate. Some people might go to debate, some people might go to study with the teacher, and so on. Some people might go to memorize. Again, this was more or less individual time in the evenings. Or some people might meditate. There was no evening, there was no dinner at all, which is, I guess, why the appetite was so good in the morning. No evening dinner. This kind of individual activity, depending on the three levels of memorizing, debating, or meditating, debating and studying, and meditating, these three levels, this would go on then until eleven, twelve at night. We had twenty-three different sub-colleges in our college of Lusseling. They would have a small assembly with a little bedtime tea

[80:34]

in the small colleges around eleven at night. Not everyone would go, but some of the best would go. Not all of the small colleges would have this tea, only those that were a bit better off, there was some economic disparity between them, those that were a bit better off would have this eleven o'clock night tea. So this routine was followed rigorously in one month in each of the four seasons. In between that there would be periods of fifteen days where there would be much less frequent general assemblies.

[81:36]

Or twenty-day periods. Even six-week periods. Those were the days when people would do retreats, or special concentrating study on a particular thing, or special concentrated memorization of particular texts. There would be more free individual-type level practice. Then there were ways where individual monks who had longer kind of retreats or were at special stages of their study and practice, they would get special dispensation not to attend even these larger sessions, so that they'd have two or three-year retreats and that kind of thing. But they had to have special dispensation, they couldn't just not go, not show up here and there. And they had to make special...

[82:40]

in other words, they had to make special account of their different activities. It's very structured. There were some monitors who would arrive at your place if you didn't go without special permission, and they'd be looking into where were you going, where are you, type of thing. There was an internal disciplinary squadron. This was bad news, they brought kind of a little stick in their hand. Like the Zen Kyosa. People were scared of them. Certain senior monks, of course, had more freedom and they didn't have to account for their activities.

[83:41]

Exceptionally. The older the monk, the senior the monk, the more freedom and exceptions they were allowed. The oldest monks, they had the tea and the Zampa brought to their own place, they didn't have to go anywhere. And others would take their shares for them, of the general distribution. Now amongst the exams of the different levels of study, there were certain kinds of exams relating to how much monks had memorized. Then there were certain kinds of exams that had to do with large-scale debating in front of hundreds of people, with judging, and being assaulted and attacked by many of the best minds of the monastery. They didn't have written exams. With oral and memory. No, this was how they did. The abbots of the monasteries, the abbots of the colleges and sub-colleges

[84:51]

would attend these exams. Then some special outside experts would be brought in, like PhD committee type members. And from there, in front of them, the exams would have to be taken. The most extensive exam consisted in those demonstrating their memorized mastery of about 3,000 folios, of Tibetan pages. 3,000 folios of Tibetan pages, if you translate it, of these root texts, like Nagarjuna's Mula Madhyamaka Karka, the root text of that kind of density and that complexity. 3,000 folios of these would translate into about 7 or 8,000 English pages, if you translated them into a volume, a normal printed volume of English.

[85:53]

7 or 8,000. They would have to demonstrate their memorization of that. All of the works of Nagarjuna, all of the works of Maitreya Nagarjuna, many different sutras, Yoga Charabhumi, many, many texts. Yes. So those who mastered these levels were very honored and prized. Knowledge. Knowledge. This was the way. A little bit about how that worked, no? Now, if those who passed all of these studies of 30 years or so

[87:03]

and demonstrated the deep meditative insight as well as the wide analytic insight as well as the extensive scriptural memorizations of all those who achieved this highest rank of these studies would then move into the tantric monastery study routine. They'd move to the special tantric monasteries and they'd enter into this tantric study. And from that point, some would stay as abbots or instructors in the tantric monasteries or they would return back as teachers in the great monasteries or they would decide to devote the rest of their lives to meditation and drop out of all of that establishment and go and become recluses and meditate in hermitages the rest of their life on that basis of knowledge, depending on their sort of karma, their level of knowledge. Depending on their karma and their inclination and their abilities, they would choose one or another of these paths at this point. Behind Drebong Monastery, for example, there was a great mountain up there.

[88:10]

Behind that, there were caves. There were thousands of caves. These thousands of caves were ideal because monks would go up there for either memorization retreats or reflection or meditation retreats, either one. By the way, while we're talking this, I want to pass around this picture of not the Drebong Monastery but the Ganden Monastery and the way it was, as Rinpoche is describing, is on the left and below there is a sad picture after it was destroyed. To give you an idea, some of you have never seen such a picture. This was a monastery of a mere 5,000 monks, the Monastery of Ganden. It was about half the size of Drebong. That's a picture of it. I'll pass it around to give it to some who have never seen such a thing. While we're talking, it can slowly go around. Sometimes monks would go individually and all alone to this kind of hermitage. They would go up there for a while and they would stay as long as their bag of Zamba would last,

[89:27]

their butter and their tea. They'd make a little tea, like a little campfire or something. And they'd study or they'd meditate or whatever. It was really cozy. Sometimes three would go together for a kind of retreat. Sometimes about 10 or 15 would go into a larger cave or set up caves in a party with their teacher. So the monks considered this very comfortable, very pleasant, very delightful. Now, as I remember it, I think of some very happy times of retreats in these caves up behind Drebong in the summer. Of course we had our delicious tea, our good Zamba. Sometimes we had also rice and also wheat and things too.

[90:33]

The reason that those who were really into study or meditation, real practitioners were especially fond of Zamba is that Zamba was kept in a form where it required very little preparation. Just get some hot tea and mix it in with the Zamba, the roasted crude flour, and in a bag and just mix a little tea and then you could just eat it. So you didn't have to fuss around with pots and pans and cooking and scraping and washing dishes and things. Just get the Zamba out of the bag, pour a little tea on it and boom, that was lunch, supper, breakfast, whatever. So they didn't want to waste time with this kind of thing because they had so much to memorize or meditate upon. There was a family who lived up in a particular set of nearby, in a particular set of caves where we used to go. They used to have a lot of cheese, what we used to call cheese soup, which is a kind of residue after taking both butter and cheese out of milk,

[91:41]

out of dough milk, that is yak milk or dough milk. This we would go and make from them, which normally they didn't keep. It's very thin, what we call cheese soup. We monks loved it because it mixed so beautifully with Zamba. I'm really getting hungry. So this is a little bit something about the way we used to live in the big monasteries in Tibet. But nowadays... In those days, the monastery did not at all resemble an ordinary household.

[92:56]

Nowadays some of our monasteries in India are sort of like a single family household or something. in the reconstruction or in the exile but in Tibet the monastery was a completely different kind of institution and it did not resemble at all a single family institution the monastery is the way they worked even down in the country that each family who would give a son or a sister or a daughter to the monastery who would send a son or a daughter to a monastery or nunnery they would then be responsible for the quarters and the upkeep of that son or daughter themselves individually so that son or daughter would have a certain private base of support

[93:59]

and then only would gather in group for certain of these group activities but also therefore have their own private kind of support this was the way and then that this private this would then increase the monastery by that much and so there was the monastery always had its base in a whole host of families around the county or in larger ones around the province or in the national ones around the whole nation this isn't like a number bag the best zamba bag is made of leather jack height sometimes the more fancy monks would have leopard skin

[95:15]

or jaguar was the the want of a dinner because of some observance of restraint or sorry the want of what dinner yes the fact that there was no dinner was this uh an observance of you know restraint or an economic event no food after 12 o'clock is an ancient vinaya precept so no food from 12 o'clock of one day until dawn of the next day is the ancient vinaya precept and this is observed in but it should be observed in all buddhist monasteries and the reason for it

[96:18]

given by the buddha in originally promulgating that rule is that if your energy is not tied up in digestion during the evening afternoon evening then your mind is clearer and your faculties are sharper and if you're meditating your meditation is more penetrating and if you're studying your intellect is clearer and so forth and therefore to develop keep the mind more clear for practice it's better not to be digesting at any time during the evening and therefore this was the reason for the uh the no food afternoon which was an ancient vinaya precept yes it seems to be sort of opposite of our concept that that we do the meditation in the early mornings they be meditating into the afternoon the evenings making major effort meditation at those times they go but they are in the

[97:29]

low low uh no it's not it shouldn't be thought of in that way of opposition in the sense that those who were focusing at the stage of where they were into basically meditating or more most importantly meditating they also would take the mornings for their main meditation because it's generally believed that whatever you're putting your greatest energy in the best energy is the morning energy and so those who are considered meditators who had reached that stage would meditate in the morning and would not attend these general assemblies uh those who would attend them would be those at an earlier stage or those at a graduated stage of beyond meditating and not meditating who were involved in sort of praying for the people and this kind of thing and who were keeping up the general routine of the monastery so it shouldn't be thought that there was sort of a a notion that it's better to meditate in the evening that isn't the case those who are basically focused on meditation phase of their of their training of their education they would do that meditation mainly in the morning also those who for some reason wanted to attend the general assembly but yet were very deeply involved

[98:47]

in something they were meditating on in the midst of it all would then be sure to get up several hours at least before the morning assembly and have that time for themselves for their own meditations yes you had a question back there yes i'm talking about the relationship to the guru uh when your individual meetings uh The first of the Law of the Law was written by Nege Lama. Really? Yes. The Law of the Law. Yes. The Law of the Law was written by Nege Lama. He wrote the law to be able to make a living. Yes. [...] He wrote this law. He wrote this law. Yes.

[99:47]

As far as I know, he was the first person to write the law. Yes. Yes. Yes. First, according to the Vinaya, there is a certain kind of teacher known as preceptor. The preceptor is a kind of, we could say, the preceptor is the kind of teacher who one looked to in relation to one's ethical discipline and to whom one would go sort of to confess infractions in the bimonthly purification ceremonies involved with infractions of the monastic rule, who would ask permission for exceptions to rules due to certain circumstances. There was one figure who would be kind of one's Vinaya discipline guru. There was a second figure who would be one's instructional, sort of textual instructional guru, one's master of a certain textual subject. For example, if we take the Tantric monastery, there first was a teacher to whom one would

[100:48]

go to ask whether they could be admitted to the monastery, one's sort of first sponsor teacher. Then there was a ritual teacher or a discipline teacher who would organize one's attendance in the General Assembly as one went to, you know, how one would keep one's robes and things in the, and this is like in the Gyuta monastery. Then there was a teacher about the ritual and ceremonial and also practical implements of that monastic regime. Then there was a textual teacher who would speak from the Guhyasamaja Tantra and from the different scriptures, the meaning of the things. So there were at least these four major teachers for a monk of the Gyuta monastery, the Tantric monastery. If something went wrong with the sort of monk's spiritual progress, they would go to that

[101:58]

first sponsoring lama, core teacher. He had a very powerful sort of moral relationship and spiritual relationship to that practitioner. Then there was the sort of furniture or furnishing teacher who would see to the quality of all of the furnishings. Then the disciplinary and the disciplinary teacher, he would attend to him for those purposes. Then the textual teacher was there. Upon all of these teachers, the abbot of the monastery, in the case of the Tantric monastery,

[103:12]

the abbot of the monastery would be the usual source of having conferred various initiations and concentrations and transmissions. And that abbot who would have no direct involvement in these daily disciplinary measures or practical measures or even like sort of moral ethical measures or textual measures, but who would be the one to confer a certain kind of transmission, that would be the one to whom the disciple or practitioner would be most into sort of visualizing as perfect Buddha and pure and sort of invoking in their morning visualization of the lineage and so forth and would be reminded of that transmission. That would be a fifth, in this case, a fifth preceptor and one who would actually not be involved in these daily practical matters too much, but would therefore be completely sort of kept in the realm of the pure spiritual transmission area. And then sometimes such a practitioner would say, again, let's take the Gyuta monastery, the monastery in which Rinpoche spent most time as an abbot and he spent nine years as

[104:14]

its abbot and the many years in its, which is after that textual monastery which he was talking about first. And then other than the actual abbot of that monastery, many outside great lamas such as the Dalai Lama or other great teachers of the Dalai Lama or very high special lamas who were masters of certain particular tantric teachings, certain particular meditative transmissions would come and confer transmissions on the monks of the monastery who had a certain stage as a whole and they would treat each of those lamas who might be far from, might come only once in their life to that monastery on a visionary plane as a root lama for that transmission, you see, and they would visualize them and they would be... And there even is a precept, there's a kind of popular saying in Tibet that the sort of

[105:19]

highest lamas, sort of, whom one gets the most important transmissions from, the lamas from who then one, in a sense, one visualizes as the sort of immediate historical manifestation of the Buddha to one, has a better smell if kept a little further away, not sort of being the one to give the daily orders and this and that sort of business and daily thing but sort of a little more remote and like unable to therefore less to have to purify and what they call the purifying of perception, not seeing that lama as ordinary with ordinary false and things and it's kind of better if it's sort of the Dalai Lama who's far away somewhere in the palace and comes only in the ceremonial time and you only see them when you're visualizing as that Buddha this and that. It's sort of the smell is best when they're a little far away, in a sense. You get the transmission then you don't mess with them daily, mix with them daily. There's this kind of precept about, proverb about this to keep very separate these things of like sort of charismatic orientation and then daily disciplinary orientation and then

[106:19]

ethical orientation. These things are very carefully thought out, in fact. But in the monasteries, of course, the abbot of the different, in the bigger monasteries, the sub-colleges or in a smaller monastery like the Gyutu, the abbot of the actual monastery is, of course, a very central figure in the life of the monk. In the history of the Gyuta monastery, from its foundation in 1474, there have been 116 abbots. Every day the Gyuta monk must recite the lineage of these 116 abbots as well as those who preceded them in the transmissions that the monastery has preserved in the form of the monastery for this 500, over 500 years.

[107:20]

Therefore, the abbot is very crucial in the spiritual life of the monk of the Gyuta monastery. Is there anything else to question about or talk about? Yes. I'd like to know about the nunneries. Were the nunneries a separate time system or were they controlled by the monastic hierarchy? No, they were completely independent. They had their own abbots. They had their own internal discipline. They had their own transmissions and so forth. Yes, they had their own transmissions on the different levels of transmission. Yes, but although, just like the Gyuta monastery or the Drebong monastery or monasteries,

[108:37]

the reason would be that they would tumble all over each other to be able to invite, like the Panchen Lama or the Dala Lama or some of the other monks, one of the great incarnations, to come and give certain transmissions and certain great teachings or spend periods of time like that. The nun monasteries would also invite in people, great outside lamas, for particular teachings of which they were considered what they called lineage holders of this or that kind of transmission. There were many different kinds of these transmissions in Tibet. Therefore, there were also outside transmissions. Just because your main thing related to your abbot of your monastery, you and the abbots would join together to invite in some great outside lama who would come in and bless the whole monastery with a certain kind of transmission. Everybody, including the abbot, would orient themselves in their own spiritual prayers and devotions to seek to practice that one. Or those who wouldn't make a major practice out of it would keep it as a kind of blessing and part of their daily recitation, thinking maybe in a future life I'll practice it or maybe at a later time in this life. So there would be that outside interconnection as well. Did female abbots visit other monasteries and have their expertise shared among the monks?

[109:42]

Not in the esoteric monasteries. There was not much of that. For example, in the teaching of the textual, you know, the more textual prasanna parameh, this kind of thing, that almost never happened. But some of the great female reincarnations, like the Vajravarahi reincarnation, some of the famous female reincarnations, they would be invited to different, especially esoteric, practicing monasteries because of the particular lineages, the particular spiritual esoteric lineages, tantric lineages that they held. They would be invited. But on the sort of textual level, there was not such a practice, no. There was this kind of, not that practice. In general, was there mobility amongst the lower levels? Would someone go to one monastery and then move to another monastery? What mobility? And then also, sort of following her question, for the visionary level of lamas in the female lineages, was it a male manifestation in general or a female abbot, a role model kind of thing? It's a question of curiosity, too.

[111:11]

Yeah. No, no. I'm just in my mood at the moment. I'm just wondering which planet I'm on, what country, what language I'm speaking in. It's a question of my mood. I must need some time for myself. Yes, yes. Monks who wanted to switch monasteries or whatever were allowed to do so,

[112:31]

but this happened very rarely, especially once they reached into the great central monastic universities. There was so much variety within the university. I mean, you have 12,000 people in the community with hundreds of different sub-colleges. You go from teacher to teacher within there. It would be rare that you would still seek something outside, except when you got to the level of special esoteric transmission. There you might travel to some other place to get a particular teaching if you were drawn by a dream or by whatever it may be, your karma or something like that. That's the first question. The reason there would be few... The reason this would be rare also is that within the large monasteries particularly, these large monasteries had, the sub-colleges of them, had particular connections to particular regions. There would be one sub-college that would particularly draw its candidates from the Kham region, the strict region of Kham, and another one that would draw from Mongolia, and another that would draw from Ando,

[113:33]

and there were others that had Chinese visiting monks from foreign monks or from other orders, from Kadyupa orders or Sakyapa orders and so forth. They had different, different sort of bases of support and catered to different people in different regions of these different colleges. No. But you could go. You could, of course, go. Certain people did in certain occasions go wherever they wanted to go. But those who had... Oh yeah, those who came from a region which was not represented in the sub-college, they would go wherever they felt affinity or wherever they were accepted. But those who came from a certain region would tend to go to the monastery, the sub-college within the monastery that was from their region. For example, there was a monastery, there was a sub-monastery of my own home area of Kham. There was a river in my home area with a bridge in the middle of it.

[114:34]

All the monks from families who lived on this side of the valley, on this side of the river, would all go to Drebung. Those who lived at Drebung Monastery, if they would go through the system up to Lhasa, those who lived on this side of the river, they could all go to Sera, which was the monastery that had about 9,900 monks in it, nearby Lhasa. If there was someone from those regions, of course, who wanted to go to Ganden or some completely other monastery or Tashilumpo, they could make arrangements and do so. There was a time when there was no monastery, [...] there was no monastery. In the level of esoteric transmissions

[115:39]

of the meditation of what are known as the Yidams, or the divine forms of Buddha, in the tantric practices, the nuns would meditate on different kinds of embodiments of the Buddha, and they would sometimes meditate on male forms of the Buddha, such as Vajrapayadava or Vajrapani or something like that. They would also meditate on female forms of the Buddha, self-identifying, as you say, as a role model, female forms of the Buddha, such as Vajrayogini or Vajradakini, and so forth, Tara. And sometimes they would meditate on male and female, simultaneous, also Saraswati, the divine form of wisdom, the female form of Manjushri. Or sometimes they would meditate on, self-identify with forms of father-mother forms, as they are said, male-female union forms, of both sexual identities in ecstatic union.

[116:43]

And not only would the female nuns have these three modes of sexual role models, but the male nuns also, depending on which particular Yidams they were focusing on, they would meditate themselves, self-identifying, as male forms of Buddha, female forms of Buddha, as Vajrayogini. For example, the males would meditate in sort of visionary meditation of themselves as females, or as male-female in union as well. So both male and female would meditate in both kinds of sexual roles, plus the combined sexual roles, which is an interesting one, if you think of trying to visualize that one. Bob, I think we should conclude with that possibility. That's a beautiful place to start. Our discussion will continue. This is good. He said that's good, because this will give everyone something new to think about. Yes. Our discussion will continue,

[117:46]

and please bring your questions when we get together again tomorrow night. Tomorrow is East Asian monasticism, right? Yes. Tomorrow evening. Yes. Tomorrow morning, for those of you who are doing part one, we will meet at nine o'clock. Thank you very much. What's the verse? God is essential.

[118:09]

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