And, on the other hand, we just live our life and nobody said, well let's do it like this or let's not or, you know, there's not exactly, it's not always laid out so like that, right? So this sort of interests me, so, and I want to talk about it. So, this also has to do, for me, and this is a little different, I think, talk than I usually give, but it also has to do for me with what is the future of Buddhism in America, which, I don't know, but I was at the, so I want to tell you a little bit about the Buddhist Teachers Conference, which was a couple of weeks ago, and all the different kinds of Buddhist teachers there are already, and then, you know, what are we doing here

[01:05]

and what will you do? I like Mary Oliver's question at the end of one of her poems about summer and looking at a grasshopper and spending a lot of time carefully, and she says, well, what should I have done? I spent the day looking at a grasshopper, and then she says, what will you do with your one wild and precious life? It's a nice combination, isn't it? Wild and precious. You wouldn't want to get stuck in just one or the other of those, or you could be a little too precious if you didn't also have the wild, or you could be a little too wild if you didn't have any of the precious, so it's quite a marvelous juxtaposition there.

[02:06]

What will you do with your one wild and precious life? So I like that, you see, for instance, rather than, I humbly say to those who study the mystery, don't waste time. So is one of those more Buddhist? You know, one of them comes from a poet. But one of them comes out of some piece of Buddhist literature. So is one of them more Buddhist because it comes from the Buddhist literature? Is one of them, you know, speak to people more clearly? You know, which one do you hear and respond to? And then if you're studying Buddhism, and then you say, okay, I'm not going to waste time. Well, then there's another Buddhist teacher, and I mentioned the other night, who said,

[03:07]

don't put another head over your head. It's up here saying, don't waste time. You're studying the mystery, don't waste time. Make every moment count. And then how would you know which moment counts and which doesn't and which is a waste of time or not? And then there's another Buddhist teacher, you know, who said, you know, if you spend much time thinking about what's a waste of time, you're going to be wasting a lot of time. So, what will you do with your one wild and precious life? And you know, Suzuki Roshi said to us, Suzuki Roshi came from Japan, he said, I will teach

[04:15]

you what I know, what I can teach you. What I know is the forms of Soto Zen. So I'm going to teach you the forms of Soto Zen, and what you teach in the future remains to be seen. You're going to have to figure it out. It's not clear, you know, really that Soto Zen will last much longer, the way that we do it. I personally like it that there's a place like Tassajara and people, you know, have robes and raksus and okesas and there's drums and bells and, you know, for me there's something incredibly reassuring about it. And it's, you know, for me it's my family now. But already in America there's the main Vipassana tradition here in America. All the original teachers here in America were Americans. Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield, and some of them trained originally as monks

[05:21]

in Southeast Asia. And when they came here, they decided not to be monks, they decided not to do chanting, not to do bowing, not to wear robes, not to do Buddhism as religion, to do Buddhism as mindfulness practice. And it's only fairly recently, like, you know, you can sometimes go to a Vipassana center and they don't even put up a statue of Buddha because some people might feel like a little put off. So they're already presenting Buddhism for mainstream America. So you don't even, you don't have to switch religions, right? You can study Buddhism as a practice and it's extremely effective, extremely useful. You can live, you can have your, you can have an ordinary lay life and do a ten day and then go and do a ten day retreat, the three month retreat.

[06:22]

You know, you can spend most of the year doing retreats at one place or another. Now at Spirit Rock, there's retreats almost constantly. And people who are doing Vipassana, because it's already something that doesn't depend on robes, bells, gongs, drums, all these things, it doesn't depend on any of these forms. They're also, you know, doing management workshops, you know, workshops for business, consulting. Steve Smith, who's a Vipassana teacher in Hawaii, did management workshops with Monsanto. And, you know, they did mindfulness practice. He taught, he was teaching them ethics. And several of the Monsanto executives resigned.

[07:24]

These are the people who have this genetically engineered seeds, you know, that if you put their pesticides out on the ground, their seeds are the only thing that will grow there. And their seeds terminate themselves and don't produce viable seeds, so you have to keep buying the seeds from Monsanto every year. At the Buddhist Teachers Conference, one teacher said, this is horrible, you know, this is evil, this is... and we should all be outraged and do something about it, etc. And Steve Smith said, well, I've been teaching them mindfulness and ethics, and some of them have resigned and they've terminated the Terminator chain. Well, I don't know, that's what he said. He said, I've been working with them, I've been sitting with them. So, it's hard to know, you know. Somebody I told that to said, it's more likely they terminated the people who were terminating the Terminator chain. But, Vipassana, and then, you know, you also have, like, John Kabat-Zinn,

[08:37]

who teaches body scanning, which is just to be, you know, mindfulness of the body and going through systematically each place in the body, noticing burning, aching, you know, heat, cold, pain, trembling, you know, tingling, itching. What is it in each place of the body? What's going on there? Are they systematically starting with the feet, going up through the body, and doing this in chronic pain clinics, and a lot of people stop having chronic pain? No. And then, he doesn't tell anybody that this is Buddhism. People who come to a chronic pain clinic don't come to learn Buddhism. This is interesting, you see. And, Dan Goldman wrote that book on emotional intelligence, that was just teaching people about Buddhism, but he didn't say, this is a book about Buddhism, he said, this is a book about emotional intelligence, and that you could have emotions without acting them

[09:41]

out, or certainly not acting the first thing that occurred to you, once you feel a certain way, that you don't have to act. You don't have to smash something because you're angry. You know, you don't have to hit somebody because you feel frustrated or disrespected. So, he taught, he was teaching people Buddhism without calling it Buddhism. Bob Thurman, who was originally, you know, was the first, he joked about it at the teacher's conference, because he was the first person, first Westerner ordained as a Tibetan monk by the Dalai Lama, and he said he was also the first person then to disrobe as a monk. And, the Dalai Lama still teases him. But, he was a Tibetan monk for a while, and now you know he's a professor of Buddhism, and he recently was in an interview in Tricycle, he said, Buddhism will have its biggest effect

[10:41]

in the West when it's presented not as Buddhism. And, that's already happening. If you teach this stuff in business, then you say, you don't just talk about mindfulness, you talk about the power of mindfulness. You don't just talk about wisdom, it's wisdom at work. So, everything gets into this certain context. And, at the same time, you know, there are people practicing as monastics, people in England, people here, people who are still taking all the precepts, all taking on the full practice of being a Buddhist monk or nun, eating only before noon, not handling money, and doing all of that. It's very inspiring. So, there's a whole range now of what people are doing in Buddhism.

[11:46]

So, obviously, people have considered this question, what will you do with your one wild and precious life? Which way do you express your heart, your life? What will you do to manifest what's in you? It's very basic, you know, that what's in our heart, we want to find some way to express our heart in our life, to express our, you know, self, or realize our self, actualize. Actualize our life. What will we do? And, it's different for each one of us. One of my friends was a priest at Zen Center for a while, lived at Zen Center for 12 or 15 years. You know, now he has a restaurant in San Francisco.

[12:53]

A few years ago, I invited him to Zen Center. Would you tell us, I had a little class, would you tell us what was important about that practice? What did you value about it? What happened after you left the practice? What are you doing now, and how does that relate to what that practice was? And he said that now he's decided just to live his life. He said, the other day I was listening, you know, I thought I'd get these tapes by this Jack Kornfield person, and I would sort of listen to them in the car on the way to work. And he said, after a while I was listening to these tapes, and I thought, why does Jack Kornfield think he knows more about my life than I do? He took them out of the machine, and he said, you know, he says, I go to work at 10, I leave at 3,

[13:59]

I want to spend some time with my family. I could make more money if I stayed longer, but if somebody wants to see me, they come between 10 and 3. I have a night manager. I have time for my wife and child. I don't always go to work on Friday. And he said, do you know why I can do this, why I have the confidence and faith and trust to do this? It's because I studied Zen. It's because I did Zen practice. This is interesting, you see. The confidence to live your life, to find your way. The Zen master Wang Bo once said to his teacher, Bai Zhang, how do we explain this teaching in future generations?

[15:04]

And Bai Zhang sat there without saying anything. So then Wang Bo said, well, if so, what will people receive? And Bai Zhang said, I thought you were a true person. That's interesting. I mean, that's sort of like, well, what is that? But maybe it's like, I didn't think you were just going to be a parrot. Were you just going to say what has always been said? Aren't you going to have it come from you? I thought you were a true person. I thought you got something from this. I thought you realized something.

[16:08]

I thought you understood your presence. And how you express yourself was the teaching. I'm not going to tell you how to do that. And this is the problem. Suzuki Roshi said the same thing. You know, the point of practice is something about realizing your big life, big mind, the absolute. But then you want to know, I have to, and you know, really, I just like being here and moving stones with you and eating, you know, nice food and taking a hot bath. This is pretty good. And we live together. But you want me to teach you something. So then I have to tell you this is right practice. This is wrong practice. And then you start believing it.

[17:10]

And then you spend your time trying to get it right. You know, but what are we going to do? What will we teach? How will we teach anything? So I like these forms. I like these practices. I find them useful. I found this particular style of practice very engaging. You know, it's not so dissimilar from, you know, Michael Murphy, who was the founder of, you know, one of the founders of Esalen. He said, I went to the first 300 workshops here. He said, after a while, I mean, you just said, I stopped. You can analyze yourself and go into depth this and psychologically that.

[18:19]

And you know, mom, dad, I mean, and dad and all this stuff endlessly and at some point it's just live your life or Gaudagiri Roshi used to say, let the flower of your life force bloom. hmm so the Dalai Lama came of course to the Buddhist teachers conference for a day and a half it was only slightly controversial the day before one of the teachers said Dalai Lama we don't need a Buddhist Pope and somebody else reminded us that and then all there's all this security now for the in Jack Kornfeld said you know if we make and oh the you know the protesters said you

[19:21]

know because of security you know everybody who was staying there at Spirit Rock was asked to leave their rooms at 630 in the morning so they could bring through dogs that sniff out explosives or something you know and so nobody could come back on and then you had to go back into Spirit Rock through metal detectors with ID badges so one person one Buddhist teacher said this is an outrage this is a sanctuary the military shouldn't be coming into Spirit Rock what are they going to find mollusks you know dirty underwear and and Jack Kornfeld said kind of diffused it he said you know if we make it and then this teacher said who's with me I'm not leaving my room come on come on so Jack said you know if we make it too difficult for the Dalai Lama to visit he won't come anymore please just cooperate it's not actually the military

[20:26]

it's the State Department okay so that was a bit strange I felt very safe I mean comparatively safe there are not only were there you know guards all around the buildings there or and anywhere the Dalai Lama went there was besides the State Department I think he has his own bodyguards you know the trouble with them people who come in like to the room and they're actually in the room there with you and they you know they either wear dark glasses or if they're not wearing dark less anyway they never meet your you know they will never make eye contact and somebody said they could see up their sleeves these little now they have these little stun guns so they can just they can just you know zap you electronically you know you're out so when so when at the end

[21:27]

when the Dalai Lama went down the line of people there's one or two or three security in front of him and then behind him and they and they are frantically watching everybody and you know I'm standing there with this white scarf over my hands I mean how do they know what I have under that white scarf in my hands so anyway the Dalai Lama is in this very unusual predicament of you know teaching non-violence and then having you know incredible security and you know people people generally for the most part you know are extremely respectful and revere the Dalai Lama and then suddenly you know there's 30 or 40 more people at the conference then there were the day before because if you're

[22:28]

just in this person's company for even a few minutes like this that's going to make all the difference guess so it was nice to be there with the Dalai Lama and he's quite intense and he said two things that struck me and that relate to my talk tonight at one moment and people were saying various things making sort of little presentations to him and to the group and then he had a chance to comment so Jon Kabat-Zinn at one point for instance explained how he teaches mindfulness and body scan and chronic pain clinics so he thinks of it he said is teaching the Dharma not the Buddha Dharma but just teaching the Dharma and anyway the Dalai Lama said two things at one point he said Buddhism is eliminating

[23:34]

afflictive emotions that's a pretty basic you know that's basic Buddhism on one hand but on the other hand that's not as simple as it sounds especially in Western culture and with all of the experience that people have had in the West trying to practice Buddhism so I'll come back to that in a moment the other thing he said was Buddhism is teaching human values so what are we you know what what are we going to do are we going to teach eliminating afflictive emotions or do we teach human values and so he's quite you know flexible about this he doesn't say it's more Buddhist to be a Buddhist and have robes and all of that or to be a Buddhist and teach Buddhism without teaching Buddhism you

[24:36]

know to if you can if you teach human values that's Buddhism and we should encourage people you know ourselves and others to teach human values but the question about eliminating afflictive emotions this is very very difficult you know interesting subject because it seems like in the on the whole here in the West when we've taken this practice from Asia Buddhism called Buddhism and we go to practice it we think Buddhism is eliminating afflictive emotions and then we don't have them and the way for the most part we don't have them the way we eliminate them is called denial or repression that's what some people call doing a spiritual bypass on your emotions and many people have commented on how after many years of Buddhist practice and here

[25:43]

at this conference is no exception I went to one of the small groups on Buddhism and psychotherapy there's 50 people it's like one quarter of the conference was in that small group Buddhism and psychotherapy and 30 of them are therapists as well as being Buddhist teachers and then there's all the questions of should your Buddhist teacher and your therapist be the same person is this a problem you know should your guru be your therapist some people had different answers about this but generally everybody agreed that in their experience of studying Buddhism there wasn't much work with afflictive emotions actually and that for the most part in the context of Buddhism they practice not having them and then oftentimes after eight years or ten years or 12 or 15 years they had started encountering extremely intense emotions and their

[26:44]

Buddhist teachers didn't know what to do and they started doing therapy as a way to work with their afflictive emotions intense rage intense lust you know anger grief sorrow pain you know abandonment betrayal all of these issues oftentimes you know abuse one well-known teacher Robert Hall who's a Vipassana teacher he practiced the Vipassana for 12 or 15 years he'd been a student of Fritz Perls as well disciple of Fritz Perls and and it was only after 10 or 12 years he started having intense emotions and it was only doing therapy several times a week he finally realized remembered that and then talked to his parents finally and they told him oh yeah when he was about three or four years old he'd

[27:47]

been abducted he'd been missing for several days he'd been sexually molested for several days on end when they finally found him he was he didn't speak after that for a month and then his parents never talked about it again they thought the best way is you just forget about it so here's somebody who goes on you know for years sort of feeling like who are these people can I trust them you know there's certain issues you have when something like that happens in your life and then it's not explainable and so it was only doing therapy that he uncovered this and then he talked to his parents and they said yeah you were you know abducted and they confirmed the whole story and they said

[28:49]

yeah well we thought it was best best thing to do is just not talk about it anymore that's not so unusual and you know even you know even more so if it's the parents afflicting the abuse inflicting the abuse you know they're not going to talk about it this is somebody else so it was only with all this therapy that he found out something about what was at the basis you know the real some real key to his life and in some sense worked through that or resolved that and is in a position now where he connects with people in quite a different way than he had before he worked with all that stuff and at that time at least he didn't find anybody

[29:50]

within the Buddhist tradition it was working with that kind of thing who could help him with all of that and many many people have this kind of story that they worked with Buddhism and then ended in the you know you know sometimes 10 or 15 years one man said he lived with his Buddhist teacher lived in the teacher's room for two or three years they had an incredibly deep sustaining meaningful relationship but they did not you know look at afflictive emotions together that's just not what the relationship was about and then subsequently you know he had to do this so it's not clear you know if somebody says Buddhism is eliminating afflictive emotions how do you do that so you know conceptually it

[30:53]

all makes sense conceptually you don't eliminate afflictive emotions by denial or repression oh no I'm not greedy I'm not angry oh they're angry over there I mean those people and anyway you know if you go to eliminate greed hate and delusion is are you gonna is that is that greed like you want to have a an afflictive emotion free state you really want it I don't want to have any of those afflictive emotions I want to be free of that and are you gonna do attached to that then that's called greed or are you gonna get rid of them by hating them I don't want them around I can't stand to have them around I really hate having them around I'm gonna get rid of them or is it delusion you know the basic idea of delusion is kind of indifference at that level of delusion is also I found out for the Tibetans there's a delusion you know

[31:55]

prior to that delusion which is of course the kind of delusion that you even think that there is such a thing as greed hate and delusion you know you because you have to or or that you even think that there's objects but things that you could either grasp and have or that you could get rid of and they go on existing like that right that's why we keep talking about things not in having inherent existence because if you believe they have an inherent existence then you start thinking about having them or getting rid of them or kind of ignoring them or being indifferent to them that would be this other delusion so how are you going to go about getting rid of greed hate and delusion without getting caught up in greed hate or delusion this is this is quite a challenge so then the opposite you know from repression denial is expressing

[32:56]

them you know you can get mad at people you idiot Marsha Rosenberg says you know after that he you know you go to it you get you get educated in order to develop your language so instead of saying you say you psychopath anyway so the opposite anyway of denial and repression is expressing that you express your anger you express your greed I'm going to take it I'm going to have it you express your sadness you you act out you know so so oftentimes that's a kind of useful step from denial or repression that there's something there's some chance of acknowledgement but you can't actually let go of anything without acknowledging it so somewhere often there's a kind of stage of acting out in order to be able to acknowledge and then

[33:59]

there then then there's a stage of if you're just acting out then the energetic patterning is just to as an emotion comes up you can't contain it you act it out in some way so Suzuki Roshi and various Buddhist teachers all point out you know this isn't Buddhism to act out whatever you feel and that to practice us and you know you actually have a chance to let emotions arise and actually appear it's not that you deny them or repress them but you let them appear but then you're sitting still you're not talking so you're not going to be acting them out and there's actually this so-called middle way of letting emotions arise and not feeling compelled to express manifest you know spew out some people call that acting out repressing down somebody else but rather

[34:59]

than repressing in yourself you shove it down somebody else but either repression or expression of emotions in this context is you know not being willing to just have the feeling and sit with it and be with it and be friends with it and get to know it and actually be willing to be a companion to your feelings because the feelings the feelings have been rejected you know distance you know for years now so the feeling of betrayal or abandonment or and this is finally it's the fundamental religious question or Albert Einstein said is the universe a friendly place and you know all these terrible things happen to us in our life very painful things things are bound to happen it's unavoidable there's no

[36:02]

nowadays you know psychologists are no longer talking about dysfunctional families you know they're saying and if every family is dysfunctional we don't need to put dysfunctional in front of family oh you had a family so we've had you know feelings that at one level or another or at another level or one stage of our life or another we decided you know we're unacceptable and it's actually very intense you know if I am I would rather you know we make

[37:09]

various decisions one is I would rather die than ever feel this way again it's so intense it's that intense and when emotions come up you know if you're not doing denial and you're not just expressing them and you you're going to in your intention is I'm going to sit here in the middle of this and be with this it feels like you could die you know it's that intense and it's that much of a challenge to actually meet you know and you know Westerners we call these emotions you know maybe traditionally Buddhism said demons Mara Mara's armies arrows spears you're getting stabbed you know you are getting assaulted and can you sit in that you know with being assaulted and and be with that and in the metaphor you know the arrows and things as they get to Buddha you know turn to

[38:09]

flowers and drop to the ground but we decide I would rather die or if I feel this I'm going to die and then there's the kind of question of you know if it's this intense what did I do wrong we have the sense that if something is painful or difficult like that I must be evil I must have done something wrong if we think if I did really good practice I did things right I wouldn't be afflicted like this so again I mean finally at some point do we trust the universe trust source God Buddha you know our life or is there some fundamental error do we actually

[39:11]

believe so at some point whether it's Buddhism or Christianity we're encouraged to have confidence or faith in our life Dogen says trust in your life that your life is already the Buddha way that means with all of its difficulties with all of its sorrows with all of its awkwardness and complaints and problems you know this is the path you're we're all on the path there's no way around that and sometimes we're trying though then to get onto this I think of it as you know the Buddhist freeway isn't there some Buddhist freeway you could you didn't have to stop in each little town and at each little stoplight down Main Street there weren't all these people the crosswalks all the time couldn't you

[40:19]

just get on the freeway and go some other life other than the entanglements right here so in sometimes you know in Zen you know Suzuki Roshi or you know any number of teachers will mention the difficulties are the path you know the problems we have this is the way challenges we have this is this is Dharma and you you there's no way you've established your practice where you are rather than thinking my life will be okay when I get it together when I get rid of this when I clear up that you know then I'll then I'll start to breathe easily I mean you could be holding your breath now for the rest of your life I mean somehow what we have to find you know if we're going to have any composure at all or composure or joy or you know it's not we can't wait until

[41:22]

everything we sort of fix everything so nowadays people are teaching no body scan you're in chronic pain you know you're not going to don't try to skirt around it see if you can bring your awareness right to that pain go through your whole body place by place what does it feel like and you actually can be with the sensations of your body you're not abandoning yourself you're not rejecting yourself you're not betraying yourself you can be with the sensations of your body as they arise you can be with your feelings as they arise and be with your thoughts as they occur and you're not trying to you know the big suffering is we try to control all of this and we have some idea of how it should be

[42:23]

you at the oh I wanted to mention you know one other of the Buddhist teachers at the conference a Ken MacLeod studied Tibetan Buddhism with I think color Rinpoche for many years he did two or three of those three-year retreats that they do you know three years solitary practice they bring you food I don't know exactly how they work you might I don't know if you check in with your teacher now and again or it's just like you're out there for three years but anyway he I he color Rinpoche sent him to Los Angeles so after a while he decided to set up an office like anybody else so he said I have an office in an office building with the therapist and the CPAs and I teach Buddhism I have

[43:42]

clients I charge a fee for service you know that appeals to people and you can you know this sort of business like anyway people are doing all kinds of things and I also wanted to mention what little experience I've had for instance with and it's not just you know Buddhists aren't the only one who are teaching Buddhism or mindfulness or awareness you know but I've also had but little like experience I've had doing theater improvisation people I've studied with are really amazing and theater improvisation I don't think is so different than Zen practice instead of like you can experience anything any feeling any thought because you're not going to do anything you're just going to go on sitting there with your mouth shut so anything can occur because you have

[44:43]

this container what in you know psychotherapy is called a container it's a big word now among Buddhist teachers well that's all established the container together shall we and the Buddhist teachers are getting a little better at it the last Buddhist conference Buddhist teachers conference I went to at one point you know there was so much talk about trauma and teachers molesting their students and so forth you know teachers having affairs with their students and then you know the students can't talk about it because you know you're not that would be criticizing your guru and you're going to end up in the 33rd hell if you do that sort of thing and and you're disrupting the harmony of the Sangha if you talk about the fact that you had an affair with the teacher the teacher having the affair with you apparently wasn't disrupting the Sangha but you know for you to talk about it is you know it's really one sided all these things there was at one point so much pain in the room that

[45:43]

somebody said let's sing we shall overcome that was the extent of you know what a group of Buddhist teachers could come up with but anyway theater improvisation you can feel anything because you're going to act it out and but it's only acting it you don't you're not going to really kill them you're just going to act out killing them you just go up and but you don't actually hit them you don't actually do those things it's just theater and the teachers Nina Weiss that I study with Nina Weiss and Ruth Sephora they are incredibly observant so they can notice like you were present here you were present there you walk from here to there you you weren't there

[46:47]

you you just you know you left because they can spot right away are you are you in your body doing what you're doing or not and they can tell you where were you and there's you know so you don't necessarily have to do therapy you can do theater improvisation maybe you can just do that in practice you know I don't know it's interesting you know that we each anyway have our path and are finding our way and I said as I said the other night one of the nice things about Buddhism here in America is you know that various whether it's the monastics or the Tibetan Buddhists or the Zen or the or the you know the

[47:54]

Vipassana or the therapists and stuff nobody's taking you know trying to take you know control the franchise nobody's trying to have proprietary rights Buddhism is only what we say it is Buddhism is only the form that we have and we've got the right one you know so this is quite nice finally anyway at the end of the retreat it was very touching the last part of the retreat the last thing was Jack Kornfield introduced Maha Gosananda who's a monk from Cambodia. Maha Gosananda had been there the whole week hadn't said anything and you know oftentimes the Dalai Lama will say I'm just a monk. People well you

[49:00]

guys went over with your skits last night I'm gonna go on another five minutes. You know the Dalai Lama is very funny you know people said to him well well what do you do if like if a student like you know has some projection about you and they actually had to like say it like in very simple English even though he's got a translator you know suppose a woman you know is lonely and she comes to meet you and then she she finds you very attractive how do you handle that and he said well actually that happened just not so long ago in Germany and this woman came up and she said you are so beautiful and you're so handsome and adorable and I really love you is that okay and he said yes I'm a bodhisattva I'm like the ground anybody can walk on

[50:00]

it I'm like the trees you know anybody can look at them and you're welcome to think of me in whatever way you'd like and he said on the other hand a woman came up to me you know a while back and she said I've really fallen in love with you I'd like to get married and he said that's a sinful thought because I'm a monk and you're asking me to break my vows my holy vows so that is a sinful thought so you can think what you want but don't ask him to participate in your little thought and actually like act it out with you but just be to think it it's fine you know he said because you know he'll let you do that he's a bodhisattva you can think of him and then you know he said and didn't somebody asked him so what do you do if somebody asked for a blessing and he says I don't know anything about blessings I just pray to the Buddha I'm just a monk people

[51:06]

don't realize I'm just this ordinary monk and people so but he said whatever people think okay you know God King you know scourge of the earth Chinese have all these things for him you know so he went through them whatever people think okay you know I will appear to them like that I don't have to argue about it anyway finally at the end Jack introduced Maha Goswami Nanda and Maha Goswami Nanda I think it was probably the most senior Buddhist there in other words in terms of Buddhist you know like he was ordained you know Buddhist traditionally is your seniority is your date of ordination she's actually senior to the Dalai Lama in terms of you know just this basic Buddhist sense of he's was ordained I don't know when but you know he's now in his 70s or something so he was ordained way before the Dalai Lama or any of the other people at this conference so he's been a monk for you know 50 or 60 years or something and this

[52:12]

is the the full monk with all the precepts and the rules you know not touching I I went to shake hands with one of the women you know monastics no no I can't do that so just bowed you know you can I think be touched by somebody the same sex you know because I noticed Arjuna Amaro was hugging several of the men so you can apparently touch somebody the same sex but you know and so following all the traditional precepts and eating only once a day before noon and eating only food that's offered and so forth and not anyway the whole thing and Jack explained that Maha Gosananda had you know had the good fortune to be out of Cambodia or at some point left Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge was there most of his associates companions Dharma brothers and sisters

[53:17]

were murdered by the Khmer Rouge and then at some point he came back and he started going to the refugee camps in Thailand and he'd gotten copies of the Metta Sutta and everybody had thousands of copies and everybody he met he gave copy of the Metta Sutta thousands of copies and the Khmer Rouge you know had been trying to eliminate religion so in the refugee camps then they started building a temple out of bamboo and they received a message from the Khmer Rouge that if anybody gave a service or attended to put a service they would be murdered they would be killed you know this is a refugee camp so the Khmer Rouge is not actually there but it's a threat like if you come back in the country or

[54:20]

if we ever get into the refugee camps or whatever you know we're going to kill you and 25,000 people came to the service and he gave people the three refuges and the precepts the five precepts and he then they had all these protection cords that the Dalai Lama had left and now we understand something about what that means and because of the number of people they cut the protection cords in half so they weren't as long as they'd been originally and then at the very end of the conference Maha Goswami passed them out so it was it was quite marvelous to be near him

[55:31]

so thinking of that anyway I'd like to many of you know the three refuges in Pali so I'd like to finish chanting them thank you in lieu of that other chant that we do at the end of lecture

[55:54]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ