Robert Thurman on Buddha-Nature—Full Interview

[Music] welcome to conversations on buddha nature this is a project of cider foundation associated with the buddha nature resource website so i encourage you all to go and take a look at that if you haven't seen it yet this is a series of online interviews we will host with buddhist practitioners scholars and thinkers on the topic of buddha nature for this second event lopen dr kamakunso will discuss buddha nature as the foundation of freedom with world-renowned buddhist scholar teacher author and translator dr robert thurman affectionately known as bob bob held the first endowed chair in buddhist studies in the west the jaetong kappa chair in indo-tibetan buddhist studies before retiring at the end of 2019. educated at harvard he then studied tibet tibetan buddhism and asian languages and histories for 50 years with many teachers and was one of the first westerners ever to be ordained as a monk by his holiness the dalai lama he has written many substantial scholarly and popular works and supported many scholars in completing phds and publishing translations and monographs he founded the american institute of buddhist studies at columbia university and as the editor-in-chief of the treasury of the buddhist sciences series now published with wisdom publications one of the major commentaries on buddha nature teachings that represents jaitunkapa's views on the subject was published in this series and makes gyatsep dharmarinchen's detailed commentary on the gulama or uttara tantrashastra or ratnagotrovibaga available for the first time in english bob also regularly leads tibet house sponsored retreats at the menlo center in upstate new york and lectures all over the world in the public intellectual tradition with special concern for ethics and human rights in general he was awarded the prestigious padma shri award in 2020 for his help in recovering india's ancient buddhist heritage and lopan dr kama punto is the new recipient of cider foundation's writer and digital residence grant for buddha nature studies and will be our host for these conversations on buddha nature kama punso is one of bhutan's leading intellectuals and completed both monastic training in the tibetan traditions as well as a doctorate at oxford he is the founder and president of loden foundation in bhutan and his work is well known across the himalayas and in buddhist study circles around the world so without further ado please welcome dr robert thurman joining us from new york and karma punso joining us from tempu in bhutan thank you marcus thank you oh i can't hear you you're muted still com kamala you're muted yeah unmute okay oh there you are from temple before we get into the conversations uh let's spend a brief moment bringing our awareness to where we are and cultivate the right intention okay all right so to meditate for a minute okay okay thank you very much um um or bob i often call you welcome to the conversations on buddha nature it's a great honor for us to have you through these conversations uh it's our hope to develop a space uh for exchanging views insights and experiences on both the nature and related topics yes i often say this is a forum where we try to practice right speech mindful listening and wholesome exploration of meaning in life and existence as a whole so it's a great honor to have you talk to us and help us promote this ethos of buddha nature or innate goodness positive perception um i would like to actually given your very rich background now being a leading advocate and teacher of buddhism particularly of tibetan buddhism with such great stature and influence i've heard you speak so many times i've read many works that you have written i think with your stature i'm quite actually interested to know when and where you first encounter this concept of buddha nature and what kind of impression you had if you can recall yes well i think i thought about that question and i think the first time i did was maybe reading the lantabatara sutra where the buddha mentions the buddha nature and i think that context was the context of reassuring those who had a strong view of self of the reality of their self a strong belief in that reassuring them that there was something like that in the buddha's teaching even though the buddha's one of his main main teachings was the teaching of selflessness and i believe that's how i understood it as a kind of stratagem for uh reassuring people that the selflessness the lack of self had to do with a certain type of self self conceived as a as an absolute unchanging fixed identity within a person and so the idea that a person had a buddha nature was presented sort of as a as a strategy teaching strategy to to reassure someone who feared who would mistake selflessness for thinking that buddha was teaching nihilism that you don't exist at all and that's how i think i first encountered it and i appreciated it for that reason and then second i encountered it in um and thought about it more deeply when i was working for my phd at harvard working on the um but i was doing the work in india at that time in the 1971 and i was almost 50 years ago and i was seeing there that really it means emptiness i mean i got the idea that that's mainly what it means an emptiness in the sense that um a being is susceptible or to transformation into buddhahood so emptiness being the guarantee of the relativity of all things therefore one could develop and evolve to becoming a buddha even though one was an ignorant being to start with and so i left it there and then only at the um more recently i would say maybe eight ten years ago um one of my graduate students a chinese gentleman actually by the name of um marty jiang who got a phd with me from china and he translated the chapter long chapter in the uttara tantra on um the element you know the way in which the buddha nature is treated there and through translating into chinese and english both the um buddha nature theory in there and that is when i had my strongest sense of the buddha nature actually and i was so delighted i've been delighted ever since which is the idea that what the buddha nature really is is the buddha's mind in us because the dharmakaya of buddha is i i think the best translation of dharma in that context is reality itself so the reality body of buddha if we translate like that is everything that a buddha is a being who feels they are everything and that means everything including the beings and so a buddha completely empathizes with all the beings and feels he is them and somehow inconceivably simultaneously with being the buddha and and therefore buddha thinks he's you and me and marcus and all the people here and he's fully aware therefore from the inside so to speak of all our obscurations and this and that but because of his oneness with us from his point of view which is a better point of view than ours it's an enlightened point of view we have this oneness with him and his potential to be equal to him which he wants us to be he's he's unhappy as we are actually he's not unhappy at all but he realized that he's only he feels our unhappiness happiness he's able to feel our unhappiness by uh being fully empathetic with the way we feel so so therefore his presence in us as us is our buddha nature the way that yeltsin and the way that maitreya nata uh portrays it in that sangha's own commentary on that arya sangha's commentary so then ever since then i've i feel very happy with the idea of buddha nature in the sense of i feel the closeness of the shakyamuni buddha and all the buddhas of course because there's no difference between buddhas in the reality body level right although of course that's ultimately that that's just a bunch of language i just said and that is ultimately inconceivable naturally like the buddha's nature inexpressible you know which i'm very fond of buddha for that reason i'm fond of him that that he knows everything but then he admitted right away he couldn't explain it exactly he could only give you know perspectives i think we might have lost carmella marcus yeah he's he's still there supposedly but he seems to have disappeared i see okay let's wait one up here comes hilarious oh good handbag chris thank you oh good was your connection cut or did you just something else a little poor today but i'm back please okay good good so did you hear the last part of what i said yes so i uh heard about you talking about um um your chinese student doing a study of the radha both and asanga's commentary that you came across um in fact i want to ask you so you presented an almost sort of evolution of your understanding with the nature from first understanding it as a way to uh avoid a nihilistic understanding of selflessness and then moving on to our understanding and now have more sort of absolutist understanding presented in the ragna gotham do you think that was that's also the kind of face the western understanding of buddha nature as a whole has gone through or is this more impersonal well i don't know i don't think that um most western people i think most western scholars who study about it i don't think they think of it as as like the buddha's presence in one because i don't think they acknowledge or you know in other words i had read right now long before that but somehow it didn't click in my mind until i read that commentary i had to edit it in detail because my chinese student you know english was not his mother tongue and so on and he his translation into chinese was was stronger for him and so i had to do a lot of editing on the english and uh as the editor of the series we published it and in spending that time it suddenly came on life maybe it's also my age or i don't know i don't really know but i hadn't noticed it and i don't think people do feel it that way because i think that um you know the cataphatic as you as we say in you know apophatic and cataphatic and you know that kind of terminology from oxford you know the cataphagic approach to to buddhism in general is not that they don't get into it that much i think the um the the contemporary uh people who study it and they tend to think of buddhism as sort of skepticism and they think of madhyamaka as kind of really almost like the holistic and so on it still is the the the cliche or stereotype wrong stereotype about mahayana buddhism or buddhism as a whole uh in the west is that it's kind of world negating you know life rejecting world negating all these kind of terminology they have from max weber and others and so they don't see that and um which is too bad you know but um but i think they will slowly actually you know i'm tired of the i'm changing the name of my institute to before i die i'm changing the name to buddhalogical studies because i don't like buddhist studies because i was almost uncomfortable with it because it sounds like buddhists are doing studies or else it's the study of buddhists it isn't the study of buddha because i think the westerners don't want to admit that the buddha has a different consciousness than themselves you know and i have a joke actually that i make recently to western buddhist studies people i say you guys know very well that buddha couldn't have been enlightened and then they look at me and they say why do you say that and i said well because buddha didn't have a phd from oxford so he couldn't have finished you know you think of him as a pre-modern person you know from a prim you know underdeveloped culture so how could he have been enlightened you know in other words the prejudice of the modern people is like that i'm afraid you know so therefore budology i like it that's not used much in america but i like the word buddhalogy because then the logi part means the study of buddha not the study of buddhists but the study of buddha and that's what our primary studies should be i believe i believe you know because buddha is something something different from ourselves i couldn't agree more with that because even for a non native english speaker and student buddhist studies sounds like studying buddhist rather than buddhism that's right but then bob when you look at the uh reception of buddhism in the west you know including use of terminologies and then all especially introducing uh fairly advanced concepts of non-self of buddha nature um what has the reception been like in your experience because you have lived for much part of that transmission i think the reception is very good i think the reception but it's a strange reception you know it took me a long time because of course i was born in a family not which was nominally protestant christian although they were not very church-going although i did go to a sunday school as a child because i i sang in the choir and this sort of thing although i used to argue with the pastor because i didn't believe in the monotheistic creator and i didn't i had never heard of course of buddhism or emptiness but i i used the concept of infinity was my favorite concept and i used that concept to fend off the the insistence by the minister that i had to believe something that didn't make sense to me i didn't agree with that you know as even as a child and um and so i was delighted when i discovered buddhism but so therefore i really i love buddhism and buddha and um you know his holiness my teacher my second greatest teacher and presently my greatest living teacher he always insisted that he didn't want to convert anybody to buddhism and that people who were of course people who were born buddhist naturally he taught them as buddhists but he would always say every time he gives a lecture in foreign country he said anybody is not a buddhist don't ever think i'm trying to make you a buddhist by whatever i'm teaching you if whatever i'm teaching gives you something useful to think about some new understanding some better way of living makes you happy or something that's wonderful and you can use that within your grandmother's religion but i want everyone to keep their grandmother's religion so grandma won't be unhappy and also i think it's important that in the modern world where all the religions are pluralistically connected to each other in these every city you have every kind of temple in synagogue and it's important that we don't have inter-religious competition which could become you know violent among fundamentalists and so on and so therefore i think it's very important that we try not to try to convert other people so i always used to tell him that he wasn't converting me that i just chose it myself he said of course someone can decide they want to change but it's very difficult he said for them and it causes chef with their family often and it also on a higher level could cause fairly serious stress and he he used to say that he adopted that principle long before you know in the end around in the 90s we had this experience everywhere of sort of religious fundamentalism beginning to get involved more with politics you know worldwide sort of happened about 30 years ago but he did that from 40 50 years ago he had that attitude amazingly you know and i don't know if i completely agreed with him at first i was more into let's have lots more buddhas and and nowadays i completely do agree with them with him and actually i did before i did a series of lectures once in san francisco called buddhism without buddhism and that was before bachelor wrote that book because i i think we do have beliefs but we don't need the ism this was my idea and it was it was pretty popular but not with some of the new buddhists they didn't like it you know but uh but i think that's the way so that reception is very good of all sorts of things about buddhism i think but in a way when it's open it's like offering these the strategies the psychologies the scientific understandings the meditative altered states experiences and so forth and as a as an exchange of spiritual sciences i think the reception of buddhism is very very good very wide and will become more good in the future i think and therefore it's really important that the that the non-buddhist people like the christians and the jews and the muslims and the hindus that they understand that the buddhists are happy to share things but they're not trying to grab market share of people away from them they want people to use things in their own cultural setting in their own belief system setting although naturally it will it will involve some some theological changes i think if if people become more aware of buddhist philosophy buddhist science what i consider buddhist science they will they might change there might be theological changes with their own traditions i think yeah yeah and i look forward to that yes so i think when i i want to ask you if you uh also see this so when you look at the religious traditions anyway that the mainstream buddhist ideas of non-self and negation and renunciation may not be as commonly shared by other religious traditions as more subtle advanced philosophical topics like buddhi nature and you find many concepts across all religions which are very much similar to buddhism talking about the ground the perennial philosophy so while this may be a very good unifying force for religions or at least one buddhist concept that doesn't really go directly against other religious traditions in a very drastic way like yes i think so i think that i think that you know we do have the expression in in the ratnakota you find the expression of um uh you know uh daniel type of thing you find that parama atma expression for example in dealing in in dialoguing with hindus you know vedantin for example they have their parama atma idea and they're from the upanishads and um but we and we have the expression in the writings of the sangha and so forth and even in the in the tantras we have the supreme self of selflessness and so there's a way of understanding um that is really not in conflict or even the idea of the soul for example you know there's another phenomenon in the in in what tibet's gift the great gift of tibetan buddhism to world buddhism as well as the world i think one of the great gifts is the um more wide spread of tantric what was previously esoteric knowledge and the the sharing of tantric wisdom with the world sort of not totally formally in other words for initiation and high level you know sort of cultic practice not there's no intention to make that wildly popular but as a blessing or with a sort of general notion of what it is that there is this idea of the mischievous that the the tantras beautiful what i call tantric abhidharma that's a we don't have that expression in tibetan but you know you know we don't say that but in a way what um the many many sastras in the tenure on tantra which are not the root centres but the shastras of tantra they are like you know mahayana stopped calling abhidharma out of respect to the to the um you know et cetera you know the the 18 different schools of the monastic buddhism so they stopped using the word like habit so to leave it for their abu dhabi but still except the sangha wrote the one mahayana abhidharma but so we don't really use mahayana abhidharma that much and then sangagi mumba is a strange expression in tibetan language or even in sanskrit but it is what that is actually in other words it's the scientific organization of the theories and the science and the experiences and the and the methodologies of the esoteric advanced meditations and i think it's very fascinating how it interfaces with neuroscience personally the idea of subtle body chakra system salon etc and i think that's a dialogue that is unstoppable now because the cat is out of the bag so to speak and um and uh the danger of of it for some people there might be some danger in that but really i think the only danger has to do with someone who's never had a kind of experience of the resilience or transformability of the self without even any religious idea modern people because of the flood of information because of the pluralism of the societies and the ideologies they do have a kind of more split personality problem than they used to have which in one way they always moan about some of the more conservative ones get all upset about it but on the other hand it's also a kind of experience of the transformability and the changeability of the self that a strong self is resilient to change rather than is a fixed thing so therefore if they already have some erosion of the fixed self ideologies in the modern period the danger of the you know lying you know the self-identity as a buddha in the esoteric is much less i think you have less danger of them becoming megalomaniacs you know it's still a danger but i think i consider that the main danger about about tundra is the idea of adopting a new rigidity of the self based on sort of high initiation or some self-image of oneself as a buddha and then one becomes a fanatic you know but everybody is so shattered in their sense of self in most modern societies already that it's less of a danger i think one and two then the big danger of madhyamaka that nagarjuna warns us about has to do with the danger of people misunderstanding emptiness as nihilism as nothingness and that's not a danger anymore because everybody's already bitten by the snake of nihilism because they none of them believe in future life they don't believe in god they don't believe in soul already so they're already bitten by the snake of a misunderstood emptiness you could say or you know existentialism as you know very well so that's not a danger either so so somehow our advanced things things that were previously advanced i think this is i'm responding to your question in that sense things that were previously very very kept very if not completely esoteric at least hidden for the advanced people you know like you're a former illiterate farmer you wouldn't have been talking to them about tag me you know you because they're out there do you talk about jinba selflessness you know and so that's almost esoteric for the mass in an agricultural society but in an over-educated nihilistic materialistic society they're already ruined from a spiritual point of view in the sense of no future life and life is meaningless and you just get what you can in life and grab it and then you die and you're nothing and you if you were bad you have no consequence etc that's the general belief already so so and so the so sunyata now becomes like a a good antidote for nihilism actually and uh i think we have a responsibility to try to share it more widely so anyway i don't know i don't know if that answers the the question but that's those are my thoughts on those topics and and therefore coming back to buddha nature that's right so then you know as you know in like dog chan or this type of mahamudra teachings and in uh and in tantra philosophy the the idea of the michigan and um uh this kind of soul theory ideas it as a practical relational process of the dealing with the rebirth dealing with entering the clear light and the book of the dead type of thing uh this is already out there and um and uh i think therefore this will be helpful to people and whether they are thinking oh this is my soul and and where the clear light is god this touches within sufism within christian mysticism within judaic mysticism within hindu mississippi it touches on their idea of the potential you know experience of the divine in the human being by the human being and at least most of them have theories like there's a spark of the divine intelligence in the human being and in the old days they might have thought of that as a fixated soul that's like a fixed rigid identity and that would have been considered from buddhist psychology a weakness and they're a problem for them but nowadays you know they could be pushed more toward the mystical direction by learning about buddha nature i think and and at least if even if they misunderstand a little bit at first as they're thinking of it as a as a fixed soul um in any way it allows them to have a kind of sense of fellowship with buddhism and the and and at least they don't won't think that buddhism is sort of denying them their soul essence or something like that you know and i was really delighted i was starting a little bit to use the word for the super what i call the the shinto tama uh the shinto you know sam kikun shinto tamar jun you know so i was going to use soul process for that soul soul and then one time in the lecture of his whole interest in the late 80s i think in the 90s i he he said one time oh i think we can use that word why not he was saying you know because the old-fashioned translators of buddhism would really get freaked out if you use the word soul because they were taking atma a soul and so buddha had to be buddhism had to be soulless and then once you say it's soulless then the modern religious person thinks of that as as nihilistic or or or materialistic and then that's not that's the old cliff stereotype about buddhism that every you know everything doesn't exist so so the buddha nature i'm delighted you are doing this series of conversations on buddha nature and zadar is making a big fuss about it because uh i think it's very helpful its reception will be very helpful even on a more simple level in the world so if i may come in there you raised a lot of issues and um for me i was wondering now when we use words like soul or when we choose to go with a more absolutist understanding that's shared by also other religious traditions then um as we leave the religious of uh domains and say go into uh secular society into science there are lots of philosophical thinking there and there's rational egoism of moral egoism buddhism has been in some ways bringing a non-self antidote to egoism is the western society not going to sort of fall for buddha nature is also another sort of cornerstone to build further egoism is there any risk of associating that with senators there's a risk yes there's a risk of over assimilating it of course to to non-buddhists ideas that's always a risk but um but in a way at least for the religious people if it goes more in the direction that buddhists are truly spiritual and this connects to another issue which i'd like to raise it's a debate i've been having in the past with his holiness and um when he was invited to muslim countries once or twice he has been unfortunately sadly the the chinese too much tend to block the visa but he's he's been in a very good dialogue with muslims in different times and places as much as possible you know given the current situation in the world and um i i he there is that expression in india that buddhism and jainism are non-theistic and you know then hinduism is theistic and you know christianity islam they're all theistic right there's that there's a general usage like that in india that everybody understands and so his holiness goes he says he likes to say yeah we're the non-theists that we're one of the non-theistic traditions speaking in terms of what he's used to from in india but actually of course it's not correct because we have islam we have lots of deities and even in beginning buddhism you know in the in the legend of buddha's birth brahma and indra are waiting for him when he comes out of his mother's womb you know to steps out very painlessly and happily and luckily for the mom comes out to side and then brahma indra there you know giving bath and welcoming him and he goes through the heaven to teach his mother and then he comes back down at sankhasya with brahma and enjoys courting him and there are so many pali sutras where he's talking to deities all the time it's the only that there's no the buddhist buddha criticizes correctly i mean logically the idea of a single one who creates everything that's considered a mistaken view and correctly so and um even there's a wonderful thing in the brahmatya sutta where buddha says there's a certain type of person who's a fanatic monotheist and then he says that why can you never convince that type of person that god there is not a creator god and he said well when that person in a previous life recent previous life was brahma in a particular world he thought when he wondered where everybody was at the beginning of the world cycle and then other deities appeared around him he thought that his wish for them had created them so he thought he was the creator in that previous life i think it was such a marvelous thing i almost fainted when i read that it's in nepali you know and he that's buddha's analysis of why certain people are fanatic monotheists who can't change their view and i just amazing analysis i thought by buddha's clairvoyance supposedly and but my point is that um buddha so we are we are in a way relative theists you could say or or we are theists but not monotheists you could say or we're theist but not creator theists you know i was trying to encourage him you know we had this debate once here in america because he was going to a muslim country and he always says that he's from a non-theistic tradition so i was trying to say your holiness when you say that to a pious a muslim country where they're not used to seeing you know being out like in new delhi with all kinds of other world views or in new york and you say we're non-theistic somebody will hear that like you're a you're a demon you know you know you're like you know you should be destroyed you're evil i mean some limit subconsciously they will have that reaction the more educated ones will understand that you're speaking in terms of not a creator but the other ones will freak out so why don't you try to say we well we believe in deities we believe in spirituality we believe in life etc but we don't believe in a creator just say and he wouldn't agree with me he said no that's what we're saying in here of course we have a debate or something sometimes don't do we agree not to agree and a good tibetan tradition but then he said well what do you say and then i say well you can say infinitheistic i'm invinotheistic in that set of monotheistic infinitistic like infinite theistic or mystical theistic or say any other thing because you know the the the abrahamic traditions they are mystics like meister eckhart you know they they have experiences of merging with clear light which they consider god and they realize and they then teach that you can't say god is humanoid you know what i mean in the sort of popular way it's like a person you know sitting there like like like a chief or something and they they have experiences like that but they're suppressed in the more western countries in the history of them those people often were executed actually as being heretics by the official church whereas in india and therefore in tibet and in east asia the buddhists were able in more wealthy countries actually for the i believe as a reason less authoritarian countries they were able to get away with being oneness talking about being one with the divine you know so therefore they they didn't um execute you if you said oh i experienced godhood you know uh you know like uh tatwa mazi you know the brahmanas for example you know or and buddhists where you know you become buddha you know and you become a near monakaya you know are you a toku by the way yourself karmala get out no no i'm not well i suppose i haven't really but you're not officially for that i see you know there's a very funny i know but you probably are but the point is that you're not officially you know we had one geisha from ganda monastery who passed away a few years ago but he was very good sense of humor and one time his students asked him he was a friend of mine i wasn't particularly his student but some other younger ones were his student and they asked him they said oh geshela you're such a fantastic wonderful yogi and teacher and so kind and blah blah blah how come you're not a toku they said and then he said this he said well i always wanted to be but all the good ones were taken do you get a joke he said i always wanted to be but all the good ones were already taken in other words somebody else was you know naropa or taylor powers or whatever it was you know they were already there was nobody left to be the reincarnation of in other words he would say which i thought was marvelously funny anyway that's a joke that's a joke i'm sorry just telling a joke i i normally say you know people could always to be called somebody from sukhavati so even more important yes yes right from this world exactly exactly but about going back to buddha nature um one of the efforts that we are really putting in is also to take buddha nature as a philosophical concept or as a as a notion a practical sort of concept that can be used to promote uh positive thinking because we live in a world which is filled with uh negative bias no wicked world syndrome there's so much sort of negativity around and yes now if you go beyond religion um there is a sort of host of plethora of philosophical positions which are actually counteracting um ideas like buddha nature so what would be a good sort of strategy or pathways to get into this well i think that i understand that to me i think the the nowadays the way i understand first of all let me say it one other thing and that is that the actual original word right is tatargata garba or sugata garban and the word garbanzo in in sanskrit actually means a womb you know uh or it can mean even a fetus in a womb and um and then tibetans translate as ningbo which means essence more than nature and it's really the i think the buddha nature in english usage comes from chinese where they think foshing you know they use the word shing which means like nature and and um you know i'm very fond of nagarjuna's expression it's such a wonderful and tibetan both in tibetan and sanskrit and tibetan the sound of it is so wonderful it's a it's amazing it was like a favorite word of artisan you know tony ninja name he used to say and it comes from nagarjuna's naval of course and and so the idea of emptiness instead of being you know because we use a lot for emptiness the analogy or the metaphor simile of space so people when they say emptiness they think of an empty space but but that act force is not correct because you know form is emptiness emptiness is formed you know like in the hearts of it you know so so therefore matter is just as empty as the pace you know so emptiness is something more inconceivable than just space and although it's a good it's a it's a good way of starting to think about it as a kind of simile but uh and therefore the idea that shunyata is like a womb which is like a membrane of nurturing energy right like a womb is where we take our bodies when we're conceived and we attach to the wall of it and then we we get the nurture from the mother's bloodstream through that wall you know so it's like a it's like an unfolding of beings in something positive that is nurturing and protecting them and i think that we have to admit that all of the asian buddhist cultures were quite male chauvinist patriarchal so i don't think they were comfortable with this karma so tom you know uh descensible they didn't ever want to translate as they said or or desegmel you know the like actual word for a womb because a male you know monk ex-warrior but new monk mendicant doesn't want to have a womb you know and they want they don't mind having a nature or they don't mind having an essence but they don't want to have a womb so i'm just saying there's a funny thing in the actual original concept by buddha you know where prague paramitar right is a mother of all buddhas so that sort of female imagery you know of clear light you know and and and the vajrayogini kind of ideas are a little bit hidden i feel in the in the concept of buddha nature and um for me what buddha nature is so good about is it enables buddhists to feel that buddha's still with them that buddha is so close it's the buddha's like right in them or with them or as them it's even more inconceivable than something in you it is you in a way and um you know i'm very fond of um the vimala kirti sutra as i don't know did i ever give you a copy of my english version of that i don't know if i ever did um no i didn't receive a copy but i have been i will next time i promise i promise i will bring one i really you know i love that sutra and that sutra makes a very powerful argument about how the buddha this buddha is the planet earth you know this is a serbe we call it intimate what do we call it uh you know saha you know suja really to be tolerated you know saha the sahaba universe is this buddha's it's where we are now shakyamun is in his thing and he didn't leave you know the idea that his course body he withdrew of course in his pirate nirvana and then we even wrongly translate pari nirvana as final nirvana but party doesn't mean final yongsu does not mean final tama yongsu does not mean tama it just means total so buddha is everywhere here as the dharmakaya and we are still enfolded in his concern that we get to be buddhas ourselves as soon as possible you know we're very stubbornly not doing it but he wants us to you know and he's there with us so the idea of what they would call in the christian protestant theologians would say the pantheistic heresy you know the idea of the the pan buddhistic heresy like everything is buddha you know which is the vision of lotus sutra you know it is the vision of the in a way it's a vision of buddha nature it's really the highest vision of buddha nature and in a way it's what shentong is going getting at although i don't i don't agree with that way of doing it personally because i feel it can be kept very logical as long as we're being logical and to say that the absolute has properties to me is illogical because it defies the meaning of the term absolute and the whole thing of emptiness is the confirmation of the absoluteness of relativity if you will which is of course a paradoxical contradictory statement but nevertheless that means when you when logic takes you to the brink of where you know you have to recognize that no verbal expression can possibly express what reality is anyway so then you just drop drop out but up until then that that there should not be illogic up until that brink you know i i'm very strong about that anyway i agree with jaden boucher about that one but on the other hand i appreciate the shentong in that the shentong thing is wanting to say and i think doblapa's experience for sure was the complete imminence the presence of buddha in everything and as everything i get that i do get and i admire that i i feel he he gets that from his khala chakra vision a vision of coming out of the stupa the great stupa of uh of um that he made the great color chakra stupa that he built right and i feel that's wonderful i do but but when it's presented as a philosophical logic i i cannot i will always debate that that's all but but i love it for the feeling and so the buddha nature thing with or without the shentong thing either one is a wonderful thing i feel for people to cheer up you know in my old age one thing i have decided and i think i i i say is that people in almost every culture have been terrorized in history by their governments and by their religions which are connected often to the governments and they're terrorized in the sense that they're made to feel unworthy they're sinners they're ignorant and hell is waiting if they're a little bit careless and it's very dangerous life is dangerous so they need the protection of their guru they need the protection of the king they need the protection of the high priest you know so somebody needs to they need to be saved by somebody else you know they don't have the they're not reality is not safe and i think that leads to a lot of aggressiveness and fear in people and in a way it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy then where they then ready to fight all the time and so then they create conflict and then they do create a bad situation for themselves and so i feel that buddhas uh i i make a big fuss nowadays which people can say i'm just old and and um and sentimental that they can say that but i make a big fuss that even in the four notable truths in a way you could say he is teaching the closeness of buddha to people in his third noble truth because the only one that is really real is the third one the first second and fourth are relative reality they are paratantra you know and he says so right away and only the third is his discovery he didn't discover first when everybody knows about the first one he discovered the third one and then that enabled him to see the second one which was the cause of the first one that everybody knew and yes what he discovered was solution to the first one so the freeing people from fear is what he's trying to do in other words and so so that's why i i like shantong for its effort to free people from fear the idea that there's goodness in ultimate reality even when they say it's like it's almost like a relational thing in a way never mind fine no problem if it cheers people up because i just think people should be cheered up and you know there's a way there's a way that buddhists can use the first noble truth on themselves and on others as a kind of a little bit to frighten frightened people you know and get them and in a way sometimes you have to like a bandit or a robber you have to kind of get them to be worried if they keep behaving badly they'll have a bad result so you have to be a little cautionary to them so i mean there's a purpose for it i understand sometimes but ultimately i think the human being is ready for being cheered up is what shakyamuni discovered and i i want to honor that you know so that's buddha nature therefore i was so delighted when you honored me by inviting me to speak to you about this topic because i that's my my main thing nowadays is third noble truth although i don't claim i attain that at all i i'm i'm still wishing for it and i hope to attain it one of these days in fact i feel confident i will but maybe not in this life maybe in the future life that's uh that's wonderful uh to hear uh bob that you're confident that you will realize the third noble truth can you hear me yes i think um so now this is a fantastic uh sort of remark now as a closing because the theme we chose today was buddha nature as a foundation of freedom and here you are very clearly um illustrating how our own buddha nature the divine in us is actually the base for liberation and freedom and yes i must say i got that message also from your fantastic translation of the uh the malakitis sutra which i've been reading although i didn't get a copy from you i know i of course it's a fabulous translation thank you very much for that yes yes i would like to ask you one last question before we take the question from the audience who joined us i want to ask you if you do anything specific as a practice not necessarily a religious practice but a spiritual practice to put for years i try to sure you know i i tried to do this uh you know jaina mache wrote this thing denzel um denzel or something i forgot now that i'm forgetting the title that's a mild age you know but you know where you practice uh kdm and sorghum together in a session and of course i'm just playing at it you know i even have retreats with students who have initiation i never give initiation i don't i don't feel competent to do that and i'm not anybody's guru but i'm a kalyana mitra you know i'm not actually officially a geisha you in bhutan people very generously call me gishala they do but actually i'm not a geshe i didn't actually get the desi degree at all so i don't claim that but um i am on the other hand the meaning of geisha that it's kalyana mitra i feel i am a spiritual friend of people but when i do i say we are like children who have a little doll house and then they play house you know and they serve tea in a little tiny cup you know and they do like it so when we try to visualize the mandala of kuya samaj or something yeah we we're playing we're like children playing house you know just in order to get something to realize this marvelous magnificent tradition with its fantastic teachings you know not to claim that we're doing some big practice because we're probably not capable we're just really deepening our idea of emptiness and our idea of compassion and uh and our feeling of compassion but we don't pretend we can really do this but in the other hand we do we we play at it so i sort of play at that in some time like that you know i recite sadhana which too much often is just katan instead of gandan i just reread it you know i and i tried to do capture linear mache who was my second greatest teacher he he um insisted that i should always do it in tibetan even if i translated anything i should still recite it myself and tibet he insisted he was very firm about it and um so i do but um i you know i i will glance maybe sometimes at the translation or share it with someone else but i will read it to them and uh so i do that and then i um i even you know try to do a little yoga and actually you know there's a great new thing um um karma and pajay i want to call you rinpoche anyway and i'm calling you an input karma and so there's a great new thing rinpoche which is you should you are rinpoche to me and um and that is that um uh hata yoga which is so popular and this best way is taught where they don't lay too much heavily hinduism on top of it they teach it as a discipline to understand your body and even they get into a subtle body but it seems that hatha yoga comes from vajrayana actually and in between in the early second millennium common era millennium they kind of changed uh vajrasattva to shiva a little bit you know sanderson you're called you must have known sanderson well since you were at oxford i never i met him only once but i and i never debated him i i let him have his theory fine i refused to do that but you know he thinks it all came from shaiba but it turns out it may be the other way around but it doesn't matter because at the high level it doesn't matter you know as you know we've considered shiva emanation of tennessee so they don't yet have they think vishnu can be buddha but they didn't have an idea of shiva like that but he's just a shiva is just a yogi you know he's a hippie she was the hippie god you know from before the before the abu la lata you know so so anyway i'm just saying that um those yogis are kind of doing some aspects of true core you know for example and they really are doing that and they don't necessarily have the idea about the openness of self a little bit from vedanta they do but you know some of them don't so i think it's a very fruitful interconnection to do in a responsible careful way and i tried to do something like dumo you know like like some kind of yogas and thinking about this chakra and that chakra so i try but i consider it play i don't consider i'm competent to really do it and of course i and and i haven't had a result uh other than a little flash of a feeling about clear light must be there and uh this um thompson nancy near topson i have a strong sense that's there like book of the dead thing and also it's all grim that's all in zogrim as well as you know and um i'm trying to work on this gulu and also the dongsuk of the kala chakra i'm trying to understand that stuff i really love it and it ends up jan and and and chatcha and all of that too as well and uh so i like to play with these things and think about them and enjoy them and i i admire them to inspire me and anyone that i know to to try to develop the prerequisites the mundos you could say which maybe take a few lifetimes because they're so magnificent and the the horizon of potential possibility is so huge for the human being that to make a meaningful human life it's uh i think it's good that people have that kind of perspective put it that way so i try to do that yes and i i get terribly busy and i forget the time and nowadays by the way i'm almost 80 years old now next year i'll be 80 and one fact about being older is time goes more quickly and you get up in the morning and you try to do one thing and suddenly it's the nighttime you just there's no sense of time it's incredible and um and so uh so therefore you feel it's a little bit sense of urgency and um and you you you you try to practice what you can you know on the other hand i still lose my temper sometimes when somebody does something it makes me upset and i still feel this and that so i'm you know i know i have my cliches i'm still carrying my bag of flesh i would say you are the geshe in real terms give me singing no so you you're doing quite a lot to actualize your buddha i'm doing my best as you said time passes so fast we are already past an hour marcus are there any questions from other people okay yes yes we have a few questions coming in right now uh can you hear me okay we can but we can't see you marcus in your beautiful background instead we see you sitting on a couch oh there you are oh i love your background that's the ocean of buddha's behind you yeah so we have a bunch of questions coming in one question that just popped up is um would you say something about the different presentations of buddha nature between the early and later tibetan traditions and how we could bring them together in relation to practice i think that's a better question for you gala that's a big question you're better at that than me i'm not sure what they mean by the early and later no no we're not here what happened i i think uh like you said you have to give us the honor you would be willing i can't cheat what's in and the later translations perhaps so that they're sort of about that's a little bit above my expertise um uh uh no he's he's clarifying really he wants to talk about the difference between yin mukagi and geluka oh yes yes well that's the shinto well i don't think it's all nima i don't think so i think there's a variety within the schools and um and i can tell you that um i don't know in specific but um spell the ladakh issue who i worked with a lot over the years um here's a kachen actually from tashilumba rather than gives you what we call him also and um he has the kachin degree from tashi lumbo it's like a geisha degree and um he uh always used to say that even within the galoopa school that at different points in its history different scholars had sort of revelatory experiences you know of buddha and nature you could say uh that they or buddha essence or buddha element that they um interpreted in the shentong manner and then they were criticized within the the the um the galupa school so i think it's better to realize that these schools have pluralistic you know arguments within themselves it isn't like one school versus another then it can descend into a tedious sort of sectarian thing that is not a good idea and uh i think there's this diversity and and basically uh i believe that um for example dzongkhapam who and and geltzap who who wrote the commentary of the little yoga there and i think he wrote that based on zonggapa's teaching about the idea of the descent ningbo to try to give a cataphatic vision without going to the shendong direction logically because of his you know dongha very much was into trying to bring together the logic and the madhyamaka and he that was his special job according to the instructions he received from manzar sri was to pay more attention to conventional reality and so he he he didn't want anybody jumping off into sort of deep faith before they had used logic for in the sheer negation in the you know prasad of voidness of emptiness where they really hit clear light and they surrendered in a way to reality any any conceptual idea that they knew what reality is in some conceptual way that conceptuality could describe the inconceivable he didn't like that so he critiqued it but i but they appreciated the cultiphatic approach which is the approach of seeing you know buddha as greater than god if you will you know if you read punderica's verses in the bimala prabha the stainless light commentary of the kala chakra abbreviated chakra tundra which is the one we have kala chakra is presented as practically the creator of everything it's unbelievably theistic actually it's amazing you could easily see how someone would really feel color chakras everything you know and and mrs kalachakram my goodness vishwamata what i call the multifarious mother she is has no atoms she is pure energy like like chain reaction nuclear fission energy without atoms and yet more powerful than any atomic form and so talk about creative on the other hand they always want to not be responsible for creating suffering do you know the theodicy problem in western and theistic monotheistic religions is is always an inescapable problem where if the if there is an absolute force that creates the world it has to be responsible for suffering and evil and and then faith cannot be complete because there will be a subconscious suspicion if the if god is omnipotent and god is omni-compassionate what happened to me people will not be able to avoid that and the theology problem will not be solvable so the buddha gets out of that by going to the very brink of sort of infinite creativity of clear light and yet clear light doesn't do anything and in a way we can understand that if you think of clear light the way i like to think of it is clear light is an infinite energy but think about an infinite energy like this is more power like the vajrayogini stands on a solar disk which is not just a solar disk that's million degrees kelvin or whatever they call scientists very high temperature and but this is the the the the intensity of a supernova a dummy collageny du me the end of the world you know the supernova energy she just stands on it like it's a little disc like a pillow for her and that's a symbol that the mind three of atoms if you will the energy level below atoms is unlimited but an unlimited energy infinite energy will not do anything on its own initiative it doesn't have initiative why because everything is already done from the point of view of infinite energy there's nothing to be done so therefore people and people can draw themselves from the well of infinite energy who people who need to do something but some being that needs to do something and maybe buddha's compassion needs to help beings so they can shape forms like pneumonic hyacinths out of this infinite energy as many as they want infinite number of saviors they can send out that's genesic you know derma the point is that the infinite energy itself doesn't do anything so this is the same thing you have the idea of lundhip of buddha's finlay as being effortless and spontaneous and etc etc in other words not an effort you know too much eh so so in that area as as the great um what was his name dog chain representation not that chamber the other one who lived in seattle the great sakyapan and someone asked him about older shenton he said his answer was what's his name a wonderful llama he said oh what do i think about it here's what i think about it shendong wrongdong and i i like to think that's my attitude as well as well and that's yeah i think that's judith's attitude because he defended kala chakra you have to remember his sakya teacher rendawa said he was nervous about kala chakra what is this dongsuk we don't like tongsuk you know we're not empty empty void body or void image or avoid you know no adam's body we're not worried about that et cetera he had 14 different points he worried about khal takra and jaden which i love kala chakra and he respect kala chakra lineage from jonah but he doesn't agree philosophically about on the sort of exit regular level of reasoning he wants to be this idea that the absolute can have qualities he can't deal with that so but he respects completely he doubts or shows to the feeling of the complete imminence of the absolute wisdom voidness the womb of compassion and you know this relates to one thing i i just want to say one thing about it i'm going off on my own agendas but never mind and that is this there are some people nowadays who have been studying with the scientists about compassion and then they're into this thing that compassion and empathy are different and i'm sure their own compassion and empathy are different because this is not yet buddha's compassion but buddha's compassion is complete empathy it is not a withdrawal from empathy and then you bring up some other ingredient although in a way there is another ingredient which we would call bliss bliss great bliss is so powerful that you can be fully empathetic at the same time without losing the bliss which is inconceivable so i've said that and it doesn't mean anything i don't pretend that i just said it all but i'm pushing it to the point of where we realize that what a buddha is why he's inconceivable he's melted into orgasmic bliss embracing the entire universe like which is what mahamudra the great the whole universe is his consort if you will you know and and i use orgasmic instead of that euphemistic snow grovian innate plenty this is pomo so so i'm saying that and and yeah and that's so powerful that therefore when he feels bob thurman's or or or your suffering and my suffering rinpoche's suffering marcus is suffering he fully feels it the way we feel it and he could do it without me losing bliss but yet he also fully feels it and that's why he's if can help us because he knows he's like the doctor cat scan who knows exactly what your sickness is what is your cliche because he feels it he experiences your glacier so he knows what you need as an antidote to your cliche perfectly and the bliss enables him and it's like you and me sometimes if we're really in the flow we're jogging we're like freaking out or we're in love or whatever it is and then we bump our foot or stub our toe somehow well toe we will don't feel it but we we know it happened but we don't really get into it being painful and then later then it's ow you know but it's possible to feel two things at once in other words and this is the extreme of that the when the extreme of that means inconceivability of that so we can't settle shenton you can't settle either one so therefore joshua showed to both of them one of them one of them just means you go all the way to give up your selfishness and they although and you feel everything of everybody you open yourself to everything and the other one is you you're really happy you're so happy it's absolute so you can say oh the absolute is happy you can say no matter what that's great that leads into one other question we have here about could you advise us how to cope with depression and stress from uh the teachings of buddha nature from that point of view especially in this time of yeah yes i'll wait into that and that is the way you do it is the way that you use you know the seventh and eighth branches of the eightfold path you use combination of mindfulness and samadhi and samadhi being one pointedness mindfulness being like vipassana you know scanning discourage lag tong you know it's discursive meditation and what do i mean by that you put your samadhi on the idea that buddha is in you so you're already there and when you get there this is my consolation prize what i call it's what i what i i developed for myself okay i awarded it to myself and that's to console me for being a loser of after 54 years of studying buddhism 55 six years of studying buddhism no more 60 years of studying buddhism i still didn't attain nirvana so i but my consolation is that's because i'm still trapped in time and which is a horrible place to be trying to be in the moment when there is no moment it's just past meeting future like that the moment it's like has no duration really so you can never get there you keep trying to step in there and it's not there anyway i'm sorry so point is when i get nirvana in some future life i am going to realize i was always in nirvana that's why buddha was able to remember infinite previous lives two steps before nirvana under the tree remember he remembered all his previous lives why didn't he remember them before that because we don't want to remember where we thought we were suffering but he when he got when you get nirvana time was collapses and you're free at all time and you realize that the uncreated you were always in the uncreated because the uncreated is all this mess that's what it is and he realized that he'd always been there and and had not realized it he had always had the buddha nature was always him and so that's what we will do so the point is i'm not in nirvana now and we are not i presume here and maybe some of you are actually i'm not sure but the point is when we get to nirvana we'll realize we are in nirvana now and we'll revise our experience of what we are where we are now such as to realize it's really enjoyable even on zoom [Music] it's blissful it's made of bliss the whole thing so but i'm sorry that's i'm just indulging in that but what i'm saying to the depression thing is this you put your one point on buddha's good news that nirvana is everywhere everywhere it's the reality of everything so in reality if you only knew fully what you know deeply you're what your cells know let's say your subatomic particles or your sub atomic energy subparticulate energy knows is that everything is fine you're in the flow but um you then use your mindfulness to find the narrative in your mind that's telling you oh no bob this really sucks oh you said such a bad thing yesterday oh you have such a bad thoughts oh no oh hell oh god the republicans will win again somehow oh oh no oh they're still in oh mr mcconnell is still there it's like you know now etc in other words all these negative things will come in your mind because that's what your condition you've been terrorized by your culture to think everything is awful that reality sucks and you should be scared and being sensible is to be resigned to it and scared of it and defend yourself and hide escape from it even and and you have to review those things and then bring to bear then you have to learn more in between meditating and keep reading and create a new narrative read the sublime continuum read all those wonderful books of zadas on the on the on the uh buddha nature the beautiful books all those re-translations of all the maitreya books they're just beautiful brunholz those guys i can't they're hyperactive those guys i don't know how they promise and write so many things with so many footnotes it's fantastic and you have to read them and read them and read them that's meditating that's vipassana it's reading them because that's creating a new narrative for you and in the new narrative everything is fine and then you begin to the new narrative gradually replaces the old narrative reasonably it gives you reasons and you begin to see the holes in the old narrative for example it takes a long time you know i argued for years with people in the natural sciences about their nihilism nah there's no future life that's ridiculous bob come on what's your evidence they all go sneering around like that contemptuously and then you say well there is evidence and then they dismiss it although it's just religious fanatics superstition blah blah blah they go like that and then it took me 40 years to realize there's one overwhelming argument against them which is which one of you guys discovered the nothing who got the nobel prize for the discovery of nothing that waits for you at death which person who just tell me or maybe was it descartes or who who discovered nothing newton did he discovered einstein and of course they can't really point to anybody because obviously nobody is ever going to discover nothing except an insane person because nothing is nothing but you know to really figure out that that what that means frees you from fear of nothing or from fear of and then and then the whole idea that god in this western you know monotheistic culture that god is all-powerful and loves you like a son like a daughter but then it's got eternal hell waiting for you in case you had a little fun went to a rock concert or something or took a drug or i don't know what dance that your hell is waiting i mean that's just so demented why should you believe that so you absolutely should not so depression has to do with you're telling yourself that you everything is horrible and you have to retell it and you read the ecartola you know he was about to kill himself and suddenly he heard another voice which was his samadhi voice that said but moved into mindfulness and it said it said why are you listening to me to that voice that tells you everything sucks how do you know that don't listen to it a different voice of himself he found another voice a saving voice and he didn't kill himself and he became oprah's guru and he's a great guy he's really nice okay so that's that's about depression you have we're all depressed it's a depressing that we are just a this is a a bunch of weird bacteria we're a bunch of elaborated bacteria with a nice beard and a goatee and glasses sitting in front of some buddhas we're just a meaningless bacteria and we're understanding that we've wrecked a thing and we're about to destroy it completely by the by the planet and bhutan will be flooded with melted glaciers and everybody will be destroyed because we just keep turning on our all our like gas guzzling cars and trucks and do crappy agriculture growing crappy food and we're just going to destroy it and it's all meaningless anyway we're just all going to be nothing so not going with no hell don't worry it would just be nothing so who cares if we wrecked the planet as long as some people in texas remain rich until they're dead that's a sick depressing world view and that's the one you were brought up in and i'm brought up in rinpoche is not more than that he is brought up in a more positive country and he but he learned he knows about us he went to oxford he saw us and he's compassionate about us so he talks to us yes bob relatively speaking we are slightly better off here with the environment and with politics and whatnot but uh i think um you you basically touched the last question i wanted to ask you but before i ask that i actually want to chip in a little bit to the last two questions as well uh as uh bob you pointed out we have to appreciate plurality even within tibetan buddhist traditions themselves and i think the understanding of buddha nature is also very nuanced that we cannot use it broad brush expeditions within these schools [Music] your audio is slowing down okay yes so um with that now i think one of the things that people face [Music] uh you you didn't want to use the word init but some orgasm bliss but whatever we call it the positivity we have in us we hope will encourage people to think um good of themselves and i think particularly be grateful for the beautiful perfect world we actually live in i mean perfect perception of those imperfections yes the imperfections being perfectly imperfect yes of course so the last question bob is what book would you recommend people to read to really get further into buddha nature and i think we have really gone now one and a half hour so we'll wrap up after that well um you know the the the the books i would recommend your judge our books you know you brun holzel has his own translation i think of the um sublime continuum or the tantra whatever he called it i forget i have it over there but i've got it but i think i haven't so any of the maitreya books there's the mahayana sutra there's the uttara tantra those two i think most the dharma dharmata and the and the madiyante bhagava are not so so key uh but those two books if someone is very philosophically in kind of course they're very complicated and very philosophically inclined and they they would read those and i think the the sublime continuum in our series that will be coming out with wisdom in this next second edition but it's early one was from columbia press and um and then there's um the mahayana surgeon lankara we have a super mahayana switcholankara version also and so i would compare several versions and read them all and but i'm trying to think if there's a lighter book what would you recommend gishala is that if someone's not so philosophically overwhelmed with it you know not wanting to go into really technicality and massive footnotes etc like our books you know which are pretty highfaluting which which which books are like at a more simple level can make it very strong do you think do you have it did you write one yourself on the buddha nature that is a shorter one that's more certain you know simple simplified no uh i haven't written anything um long on buddha nature yet but and i would recommend certainly is to visit the sahara buddha with the nature website because we have a very yes created gradual uh introduction to buddha nature okay and that's that's to recommend that i have to i i get bad people send me website addresses and then i lose them and i i'd like to please send me the link marcus and i'll i'll get on there and look at that so i'd recommend anything on that website absolutely and but start with the start with the smaller simpler things and uh and then and then do it critically in other words you create the new narrative with your samadhi as your meditation and but check out your why you are sold on your old narrative because you didn't challenge it strongly enough so that you have to extricate yourself from the depressing idea that reality sucks if you want to open your mind to the idea that reality couldn't be pure love because after all you know emptiness is the womb of or has the nature of compassion you know the expansion of the heart so buddha has a heart for us not just a machine that tells you everything is empty and you can escape into that no buddha is is telling you that everything is empty means that everything loves you and everyone else and therefore you have you're like someone who can who is happy with your mother the reality is a mother that wants to embrace you you know and uh and that's what buddha is you know they say buddha is like a mother who considers every being and not just every human being every animal every being every sentient being every sensitive being like a mother considers her only beloved child that's what a buddha is and if buddha if what a buddha is is someone who who has experienced their whole body is the whole of reality which is an unlimited infinite relativity then that means that all buddhas are embracing you right now and they're in love with you and they're just they're not even frustrated that you don't realize that you're loved by everything because they know that you will they're that kind of determined mother what winnecon called the good enough mother that knows that you will reach there in your sense of time because your sense of time itself is confused and his his or her or its sense of time the mother's sense of time the mother parameter transcended wisdom is not confused and it knows that all time is always present so your future time will be your real time your your experiential time eventually that mother knows that she will not stop cradling you at her breast of dharma teaching at her breast of science at her breast of of of of literature and poetry etc she will not stop nursing you there until you're ready to digest it i don't know that's a weird metaphor never mind all the best okay but that's a beautiful way to end this session so uh let us uh sort of dedicate our merits let's wish that this conversation and whatever good we are doing and we'll do in the future bring lasting well-being and flourish in both health and spirit and uh thank you very very much for joining us today thank you very much everybody everyone who has joined us from all over the world thank you and good night from bhutan [Music]

Channel: Tsadra Foundation Media Channel

Views: 1,905

Rating: 4.9354839 out of 5

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Id: tvX20nYFM1M

Length: 93min 47sec (5627 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 30 2020