When I was young, when I was in school, I used to play with my mother's toys. [...] I don't know what to say. I don't know what to say. The Buddha's name is Tunggal. Tunggal is a Buddhist name. Tunggal is a Buddhist name. Tunggal is a Buddhist name. In the past, when we were young, we used to go to the temple to pray.

[01:12]

We used to go to the temple to pray. [...] In the past, we used to go to the Yangtze River, to the Yangtze River, to the Yangtze River, [...] to the Yangtze River. In the olden days, we used to go to the temple to pray to the gods. We used to go to the temple to pray to the gods. We used to go to the temple to pray to the gods. So, when I was young, I used to go to the temple to pray.

[02:17]

I used to go to the temple to pray. When I was young, I used to go to the temple to pray. When I was young, I used to go to the temple to pray. When I was young, I didn't know how to read and write. I didn't know how to read and write. When I was young, [...] I didn't know how to read and write. I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing. I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing. I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing. I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing.

[03:19]

I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing. [...] I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do. So, you mean to say that if you don't know the meaning of your mother's name, you don't know the meaning of your father's name? Yes, that's what I mean. So, if you don't know the meaning of your mother's name, you don't know the meaning of your father's name? Yes, I don't know. Do you know how to read Chinese characters? Yes, I know how to read Chinese characters. But I don't know how to read Mongolian characters. You don't know how to read Mongolian characters? I don't know how to read Mongolian characters. I don't know how to read Mongolian characters.

[04:19]

I don't know how to read Mongolian characters. [...] Are we having fun? Okay. To be historically accurate, The deities, as opposed to the gurus that you see depicted in Tibetan thangkas, are actually painted according to Indian models. So, again, that doesn't invalidate your question, but just to set the record straight, the forms of the deities were imported, as it were, from Buddhist India to Tibet, when Buddhism entered Tibet. If you see thangkas of Tibetan gurus of the past, historical figures such as Sakya Pandita, you'll see that they're dressed like Tibetans, but that's because they were dressed like Tibetans when they were around.

[05:32]

They wore Tibetan clothing. You'll see that the kind of robes they wore, the kind of clothing they're shown wearing in the paintings directly reflects the cultural conditions at the time of their existence, during their lifetime, what they would have looked like hundreds of years ago. In terms of the deities, though, the iconography is something that was more or less brought without adaptation from Buddhist India. The deities were already current in the tantric systems of Indian Buddhism and were simply brought to Tibet and left alone, and there was a certain sense of the sacredness of the forms where they were not tampered with consciously. You can even find that in the Texts, while the vast majority of words are translated from Sanskrit into Tibetan, so that it would be directly accessible to the Tibetan people, the mantras which are used were left in Sanskrit. A Tibetan script was devised for reproducing the actual Sanskrit.

[06:37]

which makes absolutely no sense in Tibetan. It has no grammatical sense in Tibetan the way it does in Sanskrit, but it was considered sufficiently sacred that it was left alone. Now, Tibetans are notorious for their mispronunciation of Sanskrit, but they at least tried to keep it in the form of Sanskrit. We must remember that the Dharma has been part of Tibetan culture and the Tibetan world for over a thousand years. there was a long process of assimilation and a very careful and methodical and patient translation of the ideas and concepts of Dharma into the Tibetan language and the Tibetan milieu. There will be that kind of assimilation process in the West, but there has to be patience. It won't happen overnight. It didn't happen in Tibet overnight. When Buddhism first came to Tibet, everything was in Sanskrit and everything was according to the Indian system. And the people in Tibet trained scholars, trained translators, invited Indian pundits to come and work together, and over a period of some several hundred years, gradually translated the whole corpus of the Dharma into Tibetan and assimilated it into their

[07:59]

religious culture. Now, although many teachers seem to have come in a very short time in the West, cosmically speaking, the Dharma has only just arrived. The Dharma is very, very new to this culture, and to expect it to immediately take on a Western form is unrealistic. Western Buddhism will evolve, but it will evolve organically and not because someone sits down and thinks, well, I think we should change this because Westerners need this instead of this. It really doesn't happen in that way, but rather through a long process of patient assimilation and patient examination of the teachings and the translation of them and the reworking of them into Western styles of expression and styles of practice, we will see a distinctive form of Western Buddhism evolving. Whether the forms of the deities will change remains to be seen. Again, it won't be a clumsy conscious process where one individual sits down and decides they're going to redesign the pantheon. it will be an organic expression of the needs and also the experiences and realizations that Western practitioners of Buddhism cultivate.

[09:06]

But we can see that what we are doing now, as the first generations of Buddhist practitioners in the West, is just establishing conditions for the future. This doesn't mean that our practice is not going to benefit us. It simply means that we are involved in a historical process that reaches far into the future. There are many translation projects which are currently going on. The very venerable Kala Rinpoche assembled, this winter in Bodhgaya, assembled a number of his Western students to begin the translation of a major encyclopedic work on Buddhism from the Tibetan point of view. Now, Kala Rinpoche is very old. He will likely not live to see the fruition of that project reaching far into the future. Perhaps this one text, but certainly not all the texts that he hopes through this project will come to be translated. He's not thinking of his own welfare or the welfare of just a few people who are alive now. He's thinking of the West in the future and what the West in the future is going to need to be able to evolve a viable form of Buddhism.

[10:10]

And so, for us as practitioners in the West now, there seem to be difficulties. It's all a bit foreign and these deities, I can't really relate to them and so forth. We can perhaps take heart from the case of one Sakya Lama in Victoria in Canada. whose name is Tashi Namjau, who went to see the Dalai Lama once, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and he said, you know, there's all this talk in the meditations of the different seed syllables, like kri for compassion and om ah hum for body, speech and mind and so forth. And Tashi Namjau said, Lama Tashi Namjau said, many people come to me and say, can I visualize them in English? you know, H-R-I or O-M-A-H-H-U-N-G, do I have to visualize them in Tibetan script?" And the Dalai Lama said, no, visualize them in English, that's fine. So we don't need to feel ultimately bound to one single language or one single form, but the process by which Western Buddhism will evolve will be a slow, organic, patient process.

[11:18]

exactly how it's going to turn out. Jetson Kersh says, I don't want to speculate. Whether this is going to change or this isn't going to change, I really don't know. But I do know that it will be the result of patient, methodical work by very learned people, very realized people, in response to the spiritual needs of the West. There was somebody over here first. Yes, I have a question about motivation. And it's based on my own observations of other people, questions I've had for a long period of time, and finally resolved themself. And my own experience within my own practice. And that is that some people who use the words of motivation for helping others, in actuality, are being very, very egotistical and selfish, whereas there are others that use extreme words of selfishness, but the way they exist in the world, everything they do for themselves, they are simultaneously doing for everyone else.

[12:28]

They can't do any other thing than that, because of what they are within themselves. Then, observing myself in my own practice, I have to go back and forth between those modes, because if I use the words at some stages of motivation for others, I either become very foolish, downright stupid sometimes, or I start fooling myself, which I don't like doing. At other times, to use the words of selfishness pulls me into selfishness, and I have to be very careful. But I have noticed among many other people that it sometimes suddenly switches back and forth. Observing even things that happen here, when a very highly reputed lama is teaching, and he is either overextended or ill, that some very humble person in the audience will have so much innate compassion that that person

[13:40]

takes care of the problems so that the Lama does not cause harm inadvertently. How are these issues addressed within Tibetan Buddhism at all stages? At the beginning stage of a person beginning to study? At the intermediate stages? Or even at the stages of the advanced Lamas? How do they monitor themselves? Who monitors them? Who looks at these issues? How do they look? Okay, the one place I got caught was the case of a high lama overextending themselves and someone preventing the guru from causing harm. Did I hear you right? Something like... I'm not quite sure what you mean. I don't quite follow. Yeah. I'm not asking for names and dates. I'm just wondering what the principle is. I'm a bit interested in the concept of a guru sitting, teaching, causing harm.

[14:45]

Because of the cross-cultural context, there are many, many ambiguities that happen. The lama will be ignorant as to what is actually going on here, but the person who is from this place And who is listening attentively will not be. And that person, I have observed many people doing it, not for long periods of time, where they take on the burden. So that the discrepancy between the cultures does not end up causing a bigger problem. It usually happens with either minorities or older women. I'm really sorry. I am. I'm not. Yeah. I'm not. I refuse to do that on a cloud because my words will end up being twisted by the combined demand lines. I'm sorry.

[15:47]

My mind does not work the way yours does. If you attempt to do it, I'll only be confused. I confess I am already. I'm sorry. Okay, then take the question before that. Yeah, yeah, okay. Of how they monitor it for the beginning people, how they monitor it ongoing. It is said that if you don't do this, you won't be able to go to heaven. So, if you think about it, if you don't know how to do it, then you can't do it. If [...] you don't know how to do it, then you can't do it.

[16:50]

If you don't know how to do it, then you I have a question for you. [...] So, I'm going to tell you a story. I'm going to [...] tell you a story. So, what do you think, what do you want to do?

[17:54]

What do you want to do? I don't want to do anything. [...] She said, could I ask you who your teachers are? Would you volunteer the information or do you feel that's indiscreet? I don't understand the question exactly.

[18:56]

You mean why she's asking you? I don't at this time follow a specific teacher. I wear them out too fast. I don't know how to read it. [...] I don't know if it's a good or bad thing, but I think it's a good thing. Yes, it's a good thing. I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but I think it's a good thing. I don't know if it's good or bad, but I think it's good. In terms of who can really tell who has true altruistic motivation,

[20:07]

The only final monitor is you yourself, whether you have, and this requires great self-honesty, you have to really know whether you in fact have compassion for others or altruistic motivation or whatever, because ultimately you really can't judge another one finally. You can look at a person and say, it seems that they do or they don't have a certain quality, but you can't make a flat statement being an unenlightened person, an unenlightened being. You can only really monitor yourself. Now, Jasangusa said, it seems to me that from what you're saying, you have had a number of teachers, you have examined a number of teachers, and part of your question seems to be how to decide whether a teacher is truly qualified. It wasn't, okay. Because she was going to say, better that you yourself keep examining until you're personally satisfied, rather than her telling you, this is how you do it.

[21:33]

No, I was wondering how it was monitored within the whole structure of teaching at various stages. So, you're going to make a fire and put water in it? Yes, I'm going to make a fire and put water in it. [...] I don't know what to say. I don't know what happened to him. I don't know what happened to him. I don't know what happened to him.

[22:36]

So, in terms of who monitors who, really you monitor yourself. And she said, it also seems to me, I'll just translate literally what she said, she said, it seems to me that you have a certain amount of doubt, and I would encourage you to remember that the Buddha did not demand blind faith from people. He always regarded doubt as something that the individual had to work through in their own way, and that that was a valuable part of their experience. And so he would always encourage his students, if you have doubts, work them through. Don't just believe it because I said it, work them through. She said, I think that's a useful principle for us all to remember in the face of having doubts, is that we need to address those doubts and work through them in whichever way we feel we can, rather than just assuming, oh, I shouldn't have these doubts, I should just believe in it all, or something like that, but to actually say to yourself, okay, I really am having trouble with this, and start working with that and working through it.

[24:00]

Two more? I just wondered how people actually go about the nuts and bolts of constructing. Say you've never done a visualization in your life. You sit down with a sadhana and there's this thing and then you sit down and you close your eyes and you try to do it. Where do you begin as an absolute beginner with the visualization? Nuts and bolts? Nuts and bolts. Untranslatable. I don't know how to translate it.

[25:03]

I don't know how to translate it. [...] I don If you don't like it, you can't eat it. If you like it, you can't eat it. In ancient times, people used to go to the temple to pray. But now, people don't go to the temple to pray. Now, people go to the temple to meditate. They don't go to the temple to meditate. Now, people go to the temple to meditate. They don't go to the temple to meditate. In the old days, people used to go to the temple to pray. But now, people don't go to the temple to meditate. In the old days, people used to go to the temple to pray. But now, people don't go to the temple to meditate.

[26:04]

In the old days, people used to go to the temple to pray. To begin with, don't close your eyes. You're not, you're not... imploding in that sense. You're simply calling an image to your mind which is, albeit a foreign one in the sense that you're not accustomed to using the visualizing capacities of your mind in that way. If it helps, when you begin working with the deity meditation, very often people will be encouraged to have a small photograph or painting or image of the deity. Thank you. I don't know if anybody in the audience did, but I wonder if there's a punchline to that?

[27:20]

I'm still doing great, I appreciate it so much, but I wonder if there's a bit that you guys could all share? Where do you live in New Mexico? Oh, I live in New Mexico. Oh, I thought you lived [...] in New I haven't seen it. I don't even have one. Okay, so if I don't shake it off, I just need to see if this is back in there.

[28:23]

And that's what we're going to do today. We're just going to pretend we don't have it. So, you know what we're going to do? Okay, we're just going to throw it off. We'll stack the whole thing. Well, give me a number. But it's okay. It's a great program. I know. I'm going to go ahead and start.

[29:41]

Thank you for watching. Thank you very much. Oh, oh, okay. I wasn't sure if she was over there. No, no, [...]

[31:14]

Okay. All right. Thank you very much. yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah So we kind of moved out of the conference.

[32:35]

I know he would explain it to her. Well, it's one of the reasons. It's also one of the reasons why we're here. And it's also one of the reasons why we're here. And it's also one of the reasons why we're here. Right now, like, you never did when you started out. So let's try it out. OK. So I'm going to give you some help. You're going to do this tomorrow, and you've got to just get up and do it. You've got to get into it and start doing it.

[33:56]

Oh, OK. Thank you. Oh, OK. Well, I'm going to give you some help. So you don't have to do it. Oh, OK. So [...] I'm going to give you some I don't understand. I want to get back on my feet. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, there you go. So, without further ado, it was a pleasure to have you on the program.

[35:14]

And what, I don't know, it's like, I don't know if it's just me, but [...] it's like, I don No, this is the last month. But for the next issue... I would very much like to do that. There's also a special team for that type of thing. When they get their vacation back, they're planning a tribal night.

[36:25]

I don't know. I don't know. Probably never. Thank you very much. We'll see you tomorrow. Yeah, that's cool. I'll get you a number then. I'll get you a number then. I'll get you a number then. I'm hungry.

[37:36]

I just wanted to thank you for sitting down here. I really like to sit here. I'm from Sacramento, California. I'm Chinese. My father is from Kaohsiung. My mother and I are from Kaohsiung. It would be good. Yeah. I'm from Thailand. Basically, I'm a young man. I'm from Thailand. I'm from Thailand. Basically, I'm a young man. I'm from Thailand. Basically, I'm a young man. I'm from Thailand. Basically, I'm a young man. [...]

[38:52]

Basically, I'm a young man. [...] Basically, I'm a young man Thank you very much. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to see... I don't know what to make.

[40:00]

Okay, so you know where I am. Yeah. [...] Thank you. help us communicate with people, other patients, constantly. It was wonderful to meet them, and I haven't had a chance to see them in person, because you're the first person I've ever met in person.

[41:23]

The experience was very different. Very different. It was very hard for me. After a while, she said, you are going to college this year. And I told him, he accepted it perfectly, and he said, sure, but he got it or not. And I didn't know. I said, no, then he didn't. He said, no. So I asked him, will you help me? He answered, eh? He said, no. Come here.

[42:29]

I... I... I... This is the one you made? Yes. I remember. It's for you. I remember that. Then I had to go and get it. Did you all pick them up? Yeah, I did. I did give to the Samoan island there. Yeah? I have it. I have it. Yeah? Good. So is it okay, sir? It's okay. A little different. But it's okay. You're beginning, first time. I did this one first time too. Nobody saw him in Vancouver. So then I said, oh, where the heck I saw him. Because I little bit saw him, something wrong, I take out and put back. My husband, I saw him. He doesn't like it. He says, not that. So I took out again. But then Mahatma said, I don't know, there is something to do. Then he came out again. So he is very careful therefore.

[43:32]

He told me many times that I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do. Thank you. How are you? Good job. I can't see you. Once I met him from the restaurant, not in front. He was sitting over there, and he gave something to me, to me. So I looked at him and said, I didn't know it was so difficult. So this will hang here tomorrow? I'm glad you got it.

[44:46]

Oh, me too. Thank you so much. This has a little Georgian in it though. Yeah, I know. I never saw one like that. When I saw it, I thought it was you. You were doing weaving last time. Weaving? PRABHUPĀDA And I admit, while I am still alive, I think to myself, what am I living here for? I don't understand. I don't know. I'm sure you're right. Oh, it's like.

[45:46]

It was really sunny and warm in there. Was your husband there for a month? No, no, no. It was really nice to see you. Lama Roswalla, when I was young, my father used to take me to the sea. Not the right place. Shri Mataji, Shri Mataji, Shri Mataji, Shri Mataji.

[47:17]

Chacha, [...] Chacha Mahāprabhu's name is Yama. This is the name of Yama. This is the name of Mahāprabhu. This is the name of Mahāprabhu. I am very sad at this moment. Alhamdulillah, I am very happy. Alhamdulillah, I am very happy. Now I am feeling like Baba.

[48:32]

You feel like Baba? Yes, I feel like Baba. I don't know. I don't know.

[48:53]

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