Thank you, Miyasan. That's about all the Japanese I can remember. How is everyone? So nice. I think an old friend of mine died today. Is that his name in the back there? Michael Sawyer is his last name? I had forgotten his name was Sawyer. And Maybe it's suspicious that he died. Certainly this month, I know this is the fifth month, or this is not the Vaishakha month, Buddha's Enlightenment month for East Asian, South Asian, but for Tibetans, this is the Buddha's Enlightenment month and the waxing enlightenment for moon because Tibetans insisted on having two-third months this year in their lunar calendar. Every once in a while they have to correct the slippage of days, you know, and they have an extra month.

[01:06]

So we had two third months, and this is the fourth month, which is Buddha's Enlightenment month. And it's a good month to die in this time as the moon is waxing. And also, I was reading some New Age astrologer, and there was all this lineup of Tripader and Venus and all of these things who are all Dharma protectors in Buddhist cultures, you know. And the planets are beings. So they're all lined up and they're there in a lineup that is conducive to maximum transformation. And time of death. There is a tradition in Tibet that is very strange, which is that the human beings in Shakyamuni Buddha's era, where we still are, are fortunate. For being unfortunate. Buddha said it was so much fun. It makes everything into something.

[02:09]

We're unfortunate because in the Shakyamuni Buddha's era, he vowed among the thousand sons of a particular king in another aeon, billions of light years ago, beyond as many aeons as there are grains of sand in 62 Ganges riverbeds, he He said, when we, me and my 999 brothers, we're all going to be Buddhas. And we're all going to be Buddhas in one universe. And we're going to have a great universe. But there will be one period in that universe that will be the worst period. When the human beings are violent. They kill each other all the time. They only live 100 years. They die all the time. And you guys can go when they live 50,000 years, 20,000 years. 500 years, and they sit there and they have ample harvest, and they're 11 feet tall, and it's all organic, the whole thing. And you guys are a bunch of wimps, my 99 brothers. You can do that, but I'm going to go when they're really mean and tough.

[03:14]

That's when I'm going to go there. So Shakyamuni Buddha was praised by all the Buddhas for taking up this planet in a very tough period, the era of Donald Rumsfeld and Genghis Khan and this and that. But there's another tradition that we are particularly fortunate in his world because he also taught esoteric teaching. And not every Buddha in a thousand Buddhas does. And that gives us the ability to understand the process of life and death and birth and death in a special way. Particularly at the time of dying and being reborn, the bardo period, as they say, when you're... detaching, when your subtle mind detaches from your coarse body, and it goes through many transformations, but you can make tremendous quantum leaps in progress. In fact, you can, if there are many traditions where people attain perfect enlightenment in the bardo, in the between state, when they didn't quite manage in life fully to do so, because it's a time where

[04:18]

you know, the mind and body and sort of finitude and infinitude, there's like an event horizon there. If someone has trained in some samadhi and they have some stability of mind, and particularly if they have the wisdom not to identify with any state they may be in as the state, projecting and wrapping their ego around it and saying, this isn't me, the real me, and they realize they're me-less. then they, in that time, in that event horizon, they can find their infinite connectivity that a Buddha finds, where wisdom and compassion are the same thing, and nirvana and samsara are the same thing. So Michael, you better be on the balls, free of the brain that wasn't working well. And if any of you people knew him here, which I presume many of you did, some of you may be from outside, It is a very good time to focus on the mutual interpenetration of transcendence and imminence.

[05:24]

Because nobody's gone. It's a wonderful thing in the funny movie that I was involved in with no fault of my own. Somebody came to interview me and so on. And they went on to make this movie, but they interviewed one person who was a medium, a woman, and she was a medium of some transcended saint, someone from a different dimension. And so they asked, they were always asking the same question about oneness of everything, but they asked this one, like, well, what is dying like since they were talking through the woman to a person who was aware of the death process? And so... Welcome. And so she changed into her medium voice, which was pretty mediumistic. It was kind of very, like, oh, I started talking like that instead of her normal English housewife, you know, to have a cup of tea voice. And then I said, oh, death.

[06:28]

A little bit like Yoda, but female. Oh, death. That is like when you've been underwater too long and you come up for air. And it was so beautiful the way he said it. It really was good. It's the best thing in that movie. Like, you know, relief. Especially if your body is not working well and you're sick and tired of it. And you think that death will be choking and no longer drawing breath into these lungs that are decrepit and not functioning. But then actually your subtle body-mind draws a different breath. A breath of being aware of the... non-duality of self and other and being made of the pure energy of the universe. Fully satisfying. I'm sorry to digress. I know this is a book talk. But it's really tough to do a book talk with a bunch of Zenis looking all concentrated and serious in a temple. And I used to give Dharma talks here in different times.

[07:31]

And this is a wonderful place. This is an oceanic place. It's a place of a great, many people have expanded to feel connected to a great ocean. And some have been waylaid by the confusion of thinking that that ocean was bereft of living beings, some sort of vast empty space, and that's where we're heading. And therefore, we're sitting here dogged, unmoving, concentrated, until the great moment arrives when we disappear. And then, the biggest appointment at the end of the session, we have to go out and feed the parking meter. Feeling that we missed something. Meanwhile, nirvana includes the parking meter. There is a nirvanaic way of feeding the parking meter, and there's a samsaric way. Anyway, it's typical, but...

[08:35]

Ocean is good because it connects very well because the Dalai Lama Dalai means ocean because the Mongolian king Altan Khan in 1578 who met the 13th Dalai Lama I mean I'm sorry the third Dalai Lama who came later became known as the third Dalai Lama who rode into his camp summoned in the way Mongolians in those days before they were Buddhists used to summon someone which was Big lama, come to my camp, or I kill all your monks. So he came over there. But on the way, he was joined by these special things they have in Tibet, these, like, the myo-os. In Japan, you have the myo-os, you know, some of you may or may not know, like fudo, achala, you know, like fierce, fierce buddhas, fierce bodhisattas. But in Tibet, they ride horses. And actually, it always reminds me of the scene in The Lord of the Rings, where the king goes and bragoons the ghost army under the mountain, remember?

[09:41]

And then he rides to save his friends with the ghost army, you know? Remember that? So the Dalai Lama came with this angelic, huge host of what they call yakshas, nijins, sort of demon, you know, dharma protectors. And he rode into the camp, and the Mongolian king had a shock. his army and he had like enemies head on pipes you know and they used to sacrifice the prisoners and things the mongolians when they were shamans and shamanistic you know and i believe there's a story that he had gout to that particular mongolian king and he did what they did mongolian cure for gout for a hangover is you slaughter a mare and then you put your legs in the warm belly of the mayor and you hang out So he was there on a throne with a dead horse with his legs tied. And they say that the Dalai Lama came in. And he suddenly had the impression of being surrounded by a vast army, like this ghost army. And then the Dalai Lama looked at the horse and said he drew a circle on the horse.

[10:48]

A horse is like a belly, you know. It's whatever the belly in the horse. And... And the Mongolian king looked in that circle and he saw himself in hell. He saw hell there, you know, and he saw himself on pikes and burning and this and that. So then he said, whoops, pulled his leg out of the mayor's belly, saluted, released the prisoners, and he ordered all the other Mongolians, we now Buddhists. And he was so overwhelmed by the presence of that Dalai Lama that he calls him the Dalai Lama which means Ocean Lama because he felt he had sort of melted into an ocean an ocean of life an ocean of connectivity so my book this is not really a book I mean it is a book luckily but what it is is me being sick and tired of people Buddhists especially but also others

[11:54]

everyone in our world and in our society. And we go around and we think that nothing good can ever come of it all. And maybe for Theravada Buddhism, that's sort of appropriate. It sounds like Buddha agrees with us. Samsara, you know, it never works out. And so we are content, or rather we're resigned, or rather we're despaired and hopeless, and we think that there's always going to be stupid people calling the shots. So we hide out in Green Gulch, Zen Center, in Samadhi, in Menla Mountain Retreat, in the East, somewhere else. And we kind of go vote and we kind of look at the news and then, oh no, one moron after another. And we feel despaired, actually. As Thoreau said a century ago or more, the mass of us today lead lives of quiet desperation. We are depressed. And in the Tibetan movement, people will go out and they'll go, free Tibet!

[12:59]

Then you go ask them, you say, do you think it will be free? Oh, no. Can't be. China's so big. You know, nobody will help them. Dalai Lama is really nice. I love him. He's so great. I like to listen to him. You know, I don't really understand what he says, but I like it. But he doesn't know anything about politics. Nonviolence, so he'll never get anywhere with that. Poor fellow. Poor disappointed Dalai Lama. Then, when they hear that Dalai Lama expects any day now for Tibet to be free and is even willing to give it away to China to make them happy about it. Give it if they let the Tibetans be free on their own plateau where no one else can really live 14,000 feet. And they just think he's like, if they really, really realize that that's what he really thinks, they think, oh no.

[14:03]

Being an ocean, being a reincarnation, being like having lifelong meditated and known everything about Buddhism and meditated deeply and profoundly and long retreats makes you crazed and you don't understand your world. Because this is a world where you render under Caesar and the good people get strung up. which is the way we are conditioned to believe. Maybe you are not. You live in California. I am, from New York, emotionally conditioned like that. And all the more lately that we have a propagandized media where we have two kinds of conditioning, two kinds of meditations in our media. The commercials stimulate the meditation of discontent and greed, and they wish to get a different car, or a different girlfriend, or a different boyfriend, or different clothes, or different face, different body. And in the news, we're conditioned to be terrified.

[15:09]

We're going to be mugged, murdered, blown up, destroyed, and therefore, we need morons to protect us. And these are the two things, fear and greed, and hatred, and so on, that they condition us in. So I got tired of that. Because I do see things as the Dhalama does. I see us on the brink of a revolution. Of course, I've been seeing us on the brink of a revolution for some time. And I admit, it could be next life. It could be a century from now. But the point is, it will definitely happen. And actually, now logically, I believe in the case of China and Tibet, I think it will happen sooner. And I think actually, actually, I think the Chinese are not more childish and foolish than we are, even the communists. I think they are better than we are. I have finally come to see that the fact that the Europeans, the Euro-Americans conquered Asia to be a clear proof of the inferiority of the Euro-Americans and the superiority of the people they conquered.

[16:24]

Because I believe that civilizedness, superiority in the scale of being civilized, has to do with being gentle and being less violent. I believe. Right? Does anybody think that the biggest bully on the block is the most civilized? I don't think so. We might tell them, oh yeah, you're great, not to be beaten up. But we don't think they're the most civilized. And in fact, the European people were the biggest bullies. Chinese had invented gunpowder and didn't use it for war for centuries. Just firecrackers and New Year's displays. And I believe that although now they are in the last phase of mental invasion of the West, where they were invaded by Marxism, they first got rid of the Manchu Empire and then pushed off the European empires, which really hadn't ever really fully gotten to them. And then they were imperialized by Marxism and materialism, You know, the stupid idea that everything is nothing ultimately and that all you have to do to get out of these problems of life is to die, which I hope no people in the Zen Center entertain that American materialist idea or think that emptiness means nothingness.

[17:40]

I hope so. I hope that you don't think that because that's not a very rational idea. Nothingness luckily means nothing. And therefore nobody is going to become nothing. Because it isn't something you can become. It's nowhere where you can go. It's not a space. It's not a dark place. It's not the ground of resistance. It's nothing. The eureka moment is to realize that nothing is nothing. Therefore none of you are going to get to be nothing. So don't count on it when you die. My slogan there, my favorite one is, nobody gets out of here a dead. You're stuck here forever. This is Groundhog Day Zen Center of Bill Murray's. And you're going to get it right like a Bodhisattva or a Buddha, or you're going to keep here the same old thing.

[18:44]

My favorite thing to alert Americans is... You're all going to remarry all your exes again and again, life after life. Until you really get it on. One after another. I have an ex too. So, okay. So the Dalai Lama is this Kuan Yin, you know, his Kannon. Emanation of Kannon. At least that is how he's believed to be by... the Tibetan Buddhists, the Mongolian Buddhists, and many Chinese Buddhists, actually. And Vietnamese Buddhists nowadays, no Dalai Lama was much thought about by non-Tibetan or Mongolian Buddhists previously, but now they all think so. They go nuts when he goes to any country. When he went to Taiwan, it was unbelievable. It was like a beard. They were all weeping, falling on the floor. People come to see him from PRC, and they also do it. Maybe it's somewhat people's projection.

[19:44]

They wish for a savior. Bodhisattvas are savior, messiah figures. That's what bodhisattvas are. They're not just like some weird guy with a funny top knot. They're saviors. You are bodhisattva when you say, I'm going to save all beings from suffering. And you better not be running around this entity saying, beings are numbness, I'm going to save all of them, but actually when I die, I won't exist. Because how are you going to have time to save all beings and what kind of vow are you taking then? The only way you're going to save all beings is that you're ready to spend an infinite amount of time to do it. They're not seeking to cop out or run away or drop dead or become nothing. Or thinking that by dropping dead you become nothing. I hope so. I'm sure that's so. I shouldn't get all worked up. So Dalai Lama is like this ocean. And then in the first part of the book I'm telling all the things he did which are amazing. He's like a scientist. He's like a Peacemaker, he's a prophet in the sense of prophet, not of predicting the future, but in the Old Testament sense of prophet, speaking truth to power, writing a letter to George Bush.

[20:52]

Don't you do violence. I'm sure you'll make a wise decision. That was maybe a little flattery, but you know that violence will never help, he told him. At least he hadn't got to say it. He told the European Parliament the 21st century war is over. Anybody still pursuing them is defeating themselves. No war can be won any longer. And they're not fully listening to him, the world is, but he knows all of them. He met them when they were minister of education and minister of bicycles and whatever. I listen to all the dignitaries he's met on the planet since he had the Nobel Peace Prize. and surrounded by water waves to show the ocean and he's a friend of all of them and they all like him and they're all a little bit inspired although they don't really implement his thing because they're in the hands of the corporatist state in most of the countries but he doesn't give up as he persists and he also loves the evil doers as much as the good doers which is what Bodhisattva does do they don't hate the evil doers

[22:01]

It's like Jesus said, you know, I don't care if you love your friends, your relatives, anybody does that. I'd like to see you love your enemies. He said, love thine enemy. He didn't say, bomb thine enemy. And Buddha said the same thing. So, that first section I talk about that, and the only people who don't know the Dalai Lama are the rulers of China, strangely. And they're the only ones who think he's their worst enemy. And this huge country with big military, millions of soldiers, huge economy, all of our mortgages. They can render us all homeless. Those of us who are rash enough to pay off our credit cards on the second mortgage. They think they're afraid of this simple Buddhist monk. It's like so silly. And meanwhile, he totally wants to be their friend. And he, like, listen, if you can like George Bush personally, you can like Hu Jintao.

[23:10]

Hu Jintao, at least, hasn't killed 1.3 million Iraqis and rendered 4 or 5 million homeless in the last 6 or 7 years, thinking it's a good old day in Texas. Not to mention whatever else. He's just crushing a bunch of Tibetans and Uyghurs and Scrushing down his own people to try to keep power in the Communist Party. But, you know, he's not quite as awful as we are at this time. As a nation, I'm saying. None of you, I'm sure. And certainly not me. Although I don't dare not pay my taxes to these morons who are spending it that way. I don't dare. I should, but I'm too chicken. So that's the first part, is showing the ocean of the Dalai Lama through history a little bit and through bringing his speeches together to sort of really show what he really thinks and his prophetic thing of speaking truth to power in this wonderful book he wrote, Ethics for the New Millennium, which I think is going to be, you know, they're going to follow it.

[24:23]

We're going to have to, our leaders. And then the second part is now how can the Chinese take advantage of this? to change their policy, and to take advantage of it. And here is trying to kindle hope. It's a candle to kindle hope. Showing that my goal is not, I'm not predicting, not pretending that I know exactly what will happen, and I'm not predicting what will happen. But what I want people to know is that for China to be generous and kind and have enlightened self-interest in relation to Tibet, and therefore the rest of the world, is easy. It's not a loss of face. It's not a loss of Tibet even, territory. It's not a loss of money. It's easy and it benefits them. And therefore, it's like when you see something that someone could easily do and would benefit them, And then you know, well, they might not do it, but you can sort of be there as a person.

[25:25]

You know, you could easily do this. You don't get carried away with despair. You don't decide, I have to shoot them because they'll never do it. You don't close your mind that they'll never do it and then excuse yourself for not doing anything about it, which is what everybody is doing about this and all of these scenes. You know, or I would know, you know, why do 50% of our country men and women not vote? in these elections, so they can win with half the voter base. These, like, idiots. And then we say, oh, well, the nation is all a warmonger and they're all stupid, so I'm going to my Zen center and I'm not going to vote. Why? Because we're convinced that nothing will help. So that shuts off our creative energy. It shuts off our vision. And then look what we got. We got destroyed in seven or eight years. Our life and the life of many people was destroyed. We have the power not to allow it to happen, but we didn't. Because we were convinced to be despaired and hopeless.

[26:27]

So, I want to show how it could easily be done. And I want to all... The Japanese are translating and publishing in four and a half weeks. I'm so pleased. Kodansha, big publisher. Chinese translation I'm doing, I'm going to put on the net and they'll all steal it. The, you know, Spanish... Portuguese, Dutch, and I hope to Germans soon, and Russians. I'm hoping to get it, because I want everyone in the world to have an image of a free Tibet with, never mind politically part of China or not, but internally in its own life free. with the Tibetans able to have all their many zendos. Do you know how many zendos they had in Tibet before the communists wrecked it? They had six, in a country of six million people, they had over 6,000 zendos. Do you realize, well, you know the effort you've gone through here to scrape together this zendo? How many zendos are there here in Marin County?

[27:29]

Actually, there's relatively quite a few. A few Tibetan centers, some vipassana places, but millions of thousands, this and that, everybody's all nervous and We were all busy and nobody's just having a free lunch here in this Protestant No Free Lunch Society. Meanwhile, everybody in San Francisco should be allowed to go on like a hundred sessions or a lifelong session if they want. At least they won't be running over anybody on the visitero. Even if they're just gold-breaking and eating like vegan brownies. An intelligent society likes people to be at leisure. But Mr. Fuller said it. He said everybody who wants to should be on a research and development fellowship for life. And three people will find and invent and discover something that will support the whole thing. If only three. And what is this? What are we producing? Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times, Industrialization. What are we producing?

[28:30]

Somebody's getting rich from what? We exported this to China. We invaded their minds with capitalism. The latest thing we presented to the poor Chinese. Sweet Chinese are waiting for Kuan Yin and instead, what do they get? Walmart. And Walmart won't even allow their government to make even a fake government started a labor union. They said, you guys make a labor union, we're going to Vietnam where we can have more slaves. That's pathetic. So, okay, so... So the point is, the point is, yes, we can. Yes, they can, is the point. I guess Obama's not running for president of China, but he should. And who's in doubt should say, yes, we can. We can settle with the Tibetans, with the Uyghurs, with the things, and therefore peacefully settle with the Taiwanese. And we can make Hong Kong really rich again. Hong Kong is kind of a fake storefront.

[29:32]

Because the Hong Kong guys took their money out to Vancouver. and Los Angeles, because they are not trusting that the communists won't change around and grab all their money again, which they did 50 years ago. So Hong Kong is like a funny experiment, but they haven't lured people back, really. Not the big Taipan money, no. They have a kind of storefront there, you know? They lure it in like Gucci. Good old Gucci. So the point is, first step, So I have a five-step plan for who? For who? For who? You know the joke about Bush and Condi Rice? Every Zen person must know that. Don't you know, you don't know that joke? What have you guys been doing? Meditating on that? Well, it's a few years ago, you know, but Condi comes into the Oval Office. Mr. President! Who's the president of China? He says, yeah, Connie, who is the president of China? She says, no, Mr. President, who's the president?

[30:32]

He says, no, I'm asking you who it is. I don't know who it is. She says, but who's the president, Mr. President? He says, yeah, but I'm asking you, Connie, who's the president? Who is the president? He goes like that. That goes on. That's how our government works. And then finally he says, oh, I know who will know. Coffee animal know. Get me coffee. And she says, cream and sugar, Mr. President? You don't know that joke? So I like that because who is going to liberate Tibet? That's my question. And how does he do it? I have a five-step plan. First step, he reunifies the Tibetan plateau into the one Tibet autonomous region. And this is a little known fact, but the Chinese, you know, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, who actually ran the... Deng Xiaoping actually was in charge of conquering Tibet. the minute the communists were in power in 49 in China. He was in charge, not Zhou Enlai, not Mao, Deng. And so Deng got the hold of Tibet very quickly, in two years, and he considered it a great achievement of his life.

[31:34]

And that's why he was relentless in any negotiating about Tibet, in fact, although he pretended to come over here and be cute and acted like a panda with a 10-gallon hat and we're all capitalists and all that. But he was a really tough communist. And from Sichuan, so that's why he wanted Tibet so much. He came from Sichuan, where they just had an earthquake, which half of Sichuan is the Tibet Autonomous Prefecture of Sichuan. But they didn't think they would get central Tibet, because they didn't think the British and the Indians and the UN would allow that, because they weren't allowing them to take Korea, which they also claim ownership of, didn't allow them to go and destroy Chiang Kai-shek on Taiwan, and so they thought they would block them in the West as well, which... To their amazement, Nehru said, forget it, you guys can have Tibet, we don't care, which was the biggest blunder of his life. It ruined his life, actually. It ruined India's economy for the last 50 years, actually. It gave it really trouble. So, therefore, because they didn't think they could get central Tibet, they divided that off as the Tibet Autonomous Region, and they carved up two-thirds of Tibet, or three-fifths of Tibet, maybe more accurately,

[32:38]

into the Tibet Autonomous Prefectures of Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan, and Yunnan. And then, for example, the earthquake occurred in the Tibet Autonomous Prefecture of Sichuan. That's really Tibet, because Tibet is very volatile geologically, because it's where the Indian plate is smashing and crunching and still pushing up the Himalayas and crunching into the Asian plate, tectonic plate. And so the whole thing is very prone to earthquake. It's amazing they haven't had more of them, actually. But two-thirds of the Tibetans live in that eastern part, which are also called Tibet Autonomous, so it isn't really a big revelation. And so he has to unify all of that so Dalai Lama can make the deal for all the Tibetans, not just one-third of them. That's the first step. And that's easy. It's just, you know, it's a bureaucratic stroke of a pen. All Tibet Autonomous is one region. Boom. End of story. Nobody to debate with. That's all. That's very easy. Second, then... Hu Jintao saves a huge bunch of money from that whole area.

[33:42]

He removes the people's armed police and lets the Tibetans have a, there are Tibetan communists, he lets them have their own police. So that there's no Chinese, no racial colonial thing of Chinese police putting Tibetans in prison, beating them, torturing them, you know, just crushing them. So that saves a lot of money. You don't have to garrison millions of Chinese troops in Tibet. He can kick them on the frontier. Dalai Lama is saying, keep them all to guard. They're very frightened, they say, the Chinese. They've been so harmed and so bothered over the centuries that they're afraid that all, after one Kumbha Mela, 80 million Indian sadhus are going to run up and conquer Tibet in their loincloths, smoking their ganja, going ram ram. What a joke. But anyway, they can keep their troops on the border. No problem. They keep ownership. But they get them out of interior. It saves them a fortune. You have to pay troops, send them food. It's a big pain. And the nice thing is they made a train.

[34:43]

And so the colonists who are uncomfortably up there subsidized and can't breathe because it's half oxygen of sea level can get on the train and go home. It's a very useful train. And then Tibetans can get back in their own houses and they will have their own police bugging them. Tibetans will be nasty policemen too. They're not going to do a lot of nasty things. They have their own police. So that's the second thing. It removes the colonists and the whole colonial apparatus that is oppressing the Tibetans and making them upset. And actually, it's unique in China nowadays. But in Tibet, the people in charge are acting like it's still the cultural revolution. Because they decided 12 years ago or 15 years ago, in 1993, that the reason the Tibetans weren't happy members of the Chinese motherland is that their culture with this Tibetan Buddhism made them think they were Tibetans. So their culture and Buddhism is seditious and therefore had to be crushed and destroyed.

[35:47]

Language, that means language and religion, you know, and the Zendos have to be crushed down again like they did in the Cultural Revolution. So what the Dalai Lama says, cultural genocide, that's what he's referring to. And actually, they have acknowledged it. They have statements. And they say, you can't worship the Dalai Lama. You can't have a picture of him either. That's destroying their culture. Their culture is based on Guan Yin is their leader. You know, it'd be like if the Baptists had their own country in Alabama or something, or Georgia, or West East Texas, You know, and they had their leader was Jesus, not just Pat Robertson or Falwell, but Jesus himself. And then you said, you can't worship Jesus. Well, how would they feel? What would they do to those guys? They'd go nuts. Right? They would. James Hagee? You try to take Jesus away?

[36:49]

What would he do? He might shoot John McCain. So... So they can't live without Kuan Yin. So therefore, that apparatus has to be removed. But that saves China money. That's not face, the loss of face. They can blame some... They say, oh, gee, there were some cultural revolutions that hit up there somewhere. We cleaned them out in the rest of China. We didn't like the Cultural Revolution. That was the 30% mistake that Mao made. And they've hit up in some caves in Tibet, and they've been over-oppressing the Tibetans. We're very sorry. We didn't realize that. We thought they were helping the Tibetans, but actually they were making them mad. So we're going to fire them all, and we're going to stop that. That's easy, third step, and save a lot of money. Fourth step, or is that third step? I forgot. Fourth step is one country, two systems. It makes sense in Hong Kong. It can make sense in Tibet. They let the Tibetans have their own government. They promised it in 1951, actually, what is called the 17-point agreement, that they would never interfere.

[37:50]

In the Chinese constitution, it says, minority region has to run their own affairs. And you can't overwhelm them with Han chauvinism, but that is putting too many Chinese people there because they know they have a lot more Chinese people. And that's in their constitution about their minority nationalities, what they call. So that isn't even asking them anything special. And then the fifth step, if I reach to five, is really what I love. Hu Jintao then declares that the whole of the Tibetan Plateau is an environmental, national and international environmental preserve. And he just goes way ahead of Al Gore there, and definitely way ahead of the United States. It would be like Dick Cheney declaring the whole of Wyoming an environmental preserve, and no more like natural gas pumps destroying the land of the wooded, feathered, groused Hopper, chopper, whatever it's called. And then they could go up and shoot a few instead of shooting his lawyer. But he didn't do that.

[38:53]

But the Chinese can show the way by making it. And then they do have the Tibet Autonomous Region, which is, as I said, two-fifths of the real Tibet. They proudly proclaim lately that, yeah, we were very destructive up to the late 80s. or we cut too many trees, and we made too much desert in the steppe, and so on, and we polluted rivers, but since then we're trying to clean up, so 40% of the surface, of course the most valueless 40%, but anyway, 40% of the surface of the Tebedo-Talamus region is an environmental, national environmental preserve. They proclaim that. Although they don't have the money to have guards, they don't really protect it, and people still grab out the precious herbs, and they still cut the trees, and they still kill the animals. Whereas if they did it in this way, The World Wildlife Fund, International Environmentalist, the European Union, could really fund them to guard these things and really restore Tibet and restore the headwaters of China's own rivers, not to mention the rivers of all of Southeast Asia and all of India. About 4 billion people are watered by the rivers rising in Tibet.

[39:54]

It's the water tower of Asia. It should have low use, low impact environmental conservation, which the Tibetans have been doing for thousands of years very successfully. Thank you very much. That's the last one. Those are the five things Hu Jintao does. He gets medals all over the place for doing that. And saves him money. Then in response, the Dalai Lama, he comes back to Tibet, and the Tibetans have a huge be-in. And they just dance with joy, and the radiation of joy goes around the world. Incredible thing. And they can't do that with Chinese troops there, because Tibetans have such a high energy, individual personal energy is so high, they start flipping out and getting all emotional, And the Chinese police will get completely freaked out. They're like afflicted with Wilhelm Reich's emotional plague. When they see somebody manifesting intense joy, they will think it's dangerous. And they'll start beating them with sticks, and it won't work. So they have to leave first, and then they'll have a big bee-in in Tibet. Second thing, Dalai Lama and his gang, which includes Desmond Tutu, Elie Wiesel, Nelson Mandela...

[41:00]

Betty Williams, Physicians for Nuclear Responsibility, and on and on. And I'm sure even Henry Decay will stagger in there and try to pretend he doesn't have any war crimes to his name. And they will all nominate the ruler of China for a Nobel Peace Prize. And President Hu can share the Nobel Peace Prize with the entire Politburo. They can all go to Norway and drink schnapps on December 10th and have a concert. And Brangelina can go and congratulate them. And Bono. And they can all have a song and they'll be Gorbachev without having to give up power. That's the second thing the Dalai Lama will do. The third thing the Dalai Lama will do is, and this is most important to China, is that the Dalai Lama will call together his new government, local government that is, they're under China, and they will organize a plebiscite. And they will have Jimmy Carter come and check it out to make sure it's on the up and up.

[42:00]

And in the plebiscite, the Dalai Lama will campaign to have the Tibetans all vote. And anybody who knows how they feel about him and what it's like, he will definitely succeed. And they will vote. We volunteer and we freely and voluntarily have decided to become a part, an autonomous region of China. And this will give China true legitimacy in Tibet, this plebiscite. It will be a process of self-determination. And they will finally own Tibet, instead of some fake thing that Genghis Khan gave them Tibet, that the Manchus gave them Tibet, Manchus are not Chinese, or that anybody else gave them Tibet. Instead of the fact, the real fact, which is, it's like Saddam Hussein, they invaded annex that have been occupying and crushing Tibetans ever since. So they are sensitive about it because they know they do not have legitimacy. They keep claiming, oh yeah, Tibet has been ours for thousands of years. Before 1950, not one Chinese person lived in Tibet. They couldn't take the altitude.

[43:02]

None of us could live there. You know, the Tibetans have special element, chemical, genetic chemical element in their blood. High percentage of nitric oxide. That apparently combines with a little... Unfortunately, it's not nitrous oxide. I'm so sorry. But that nitric oxide combines with a little bit of oxygen in the air there, which is less than half of what we have at sea level. It's average altitude of 14,000 feet, almost between two and three miles altitude. And that nitric oxide spreads the oxygen somehow. It combines with it in some way and catalyzes it so they can live just fine. But the sea level people, the women miscarry, the men get... what they call CMS, chronic mountain sickness. The right chamber of the heart gets all weak and fibrillated, working too hard all the time, and after five, six years, they get heart attacks. It's just impossible. If millions of sea-level people could live in Tibet, there would have been tens of millions of Chinese there 300 years ago. It isn't because it isn't next to them.

[44:05]

It isn't because they can't walk up a hill. They would be there, but it's too high. You can't live up there unless you adapt over a long period of time. Now, it's a little better if a Chinese man marries a Tibetan woman, then the offspring, like what the Tibetans call a zoo, a cross between a yak and a cow, and they give good milk at high altitude. So that offspring can do it, but as long as they're the enemies of the Tibetans, the Tibetans hate them, they won't marry much. So, you know, there could be more Chinese there in the future, and they could get into bread a little bit, and you could have some zoos, some milk-producing Chinese. But up there, happily, you know, it could increase. It is very sparsely populated, this huge one million square mile thing with only six million Demedians, and they could somehow slowly intermarry, and a few of them get up there if they were friendly with the Demedians. Demedians wouldn't mind. But they do mind now, and they're not intermarry, even though there's all kinds of weird strategies the Chinese do. They employ women, but they don't employ the men. They sell cheap liquor to the men. They saw Western movies about firewater and they're dishing out the firewater and the pool tables to the men and don't give them jobs.

[45:09]

So they're purposely trying to but they're not getting anywhere. So that third thing is really important. That's one of the things China wants is legitimate sovereignty in Tibet and they would get it that way. They wouldn't have to go into these contortions of history by pretending Genghis Khan was Chinese. For example... That's the third thing the Dalai Lama does. So they have, the Dalai Lama has made the Tibetans really happy. He has gotten Nobel Prizes for the Chinese leadership. He has given the Chinese legitimate sovereignty in exchange for his own autonomy within there. Then four, he's a massive feat of memory for the Demented old 67-year-old. He then, the fourth thing is, yes, he becomes a national teacher for the Chinese. That is to say, the Chinese rulers realize that the bind they're in now is a very dire one.

[46:12]

They had no religion for 50 years. They crushed it. Because the state was the religion. And Mao was the god. Then Deng bagged that because he wanted to get rich. So now they're capitalists. And yet the Communist Party has... Dictatorial power, no multi-party system, no sharing of power, no feedback from the people, really, just crushing them down. And they're trying to crush down 1.1 billion poor and angry peasants and migrant laborers. 1.1 billion. They have maybe a couple hundred million, 30 or 40 million very rich Communist Party members, a couple hundred million so-called middle class, not too rich. But like a professor or something, semi-poor, you know, living with a devalued currency. But still, something they can buy one or two items from Walmart before sending it over here. And... sitting on top of this huge billion volcano of a billion dissatisfied people.

[47:18]

That's why they're whipping up this nationalism to make them think they have enemy so they get all hemmed up about China and America's trying to take away Tibet or India and the yogis are going to steal Tibet or I don't know what they think. Whoever's local, Japanese did something, whatever it is. Like Hitler made enemies, right? When you're crushing down your own people, you have to have a lot of enemies, internal, external. And then they don't notice that the real enemy is the government. They don't notice that. That's an ancient strategy. So the Dalai Lama, however, what the Chinese emperors did in this similar situation over centuries, millennia, is they sponsored the national master, the great Xi'an masters. They sponsored the great teachers. You know, Fadzang, the great Huayin master, the Tiantai, Buddhism. They sponsored Taoism. They sponsored Confucianism. They sponsored whatever it might be that gave the people some spiritual outlet and satisfaction. And, of course, what those masters teach the people is cultivate contentment.

[48:20]

Live on little. Be a vegetarian. The Buddhists, in China, they're great vegetarians. The Buddhists are better. They're not. The Japanese are no good. They're eating whales. Tibetans eating yaks. Sri Lankans and those eat fish and all kinds of chicken and weird things. But the Chinese were great vegetarians. Chinese Buddhists were the best vegetarians. The most vegan of all Buddhists were the Chinese Buddhists. So rekindle that. Dalai Lama, who would be a better person to travel in China and re-empower with all the different Chan masters and pure land masters that he knows from Taiwan and everywhere and they all go around and they stir up 700 million, 800 million Chinese Buddhists. who are all waiting to get out there and have Kuan Yin come to save them from the Communist Party. And the Communists could keep power this way, but they would sponsor this. Right? Then they begin to become more popular. They get less paranoid. The real thing the Chinese leadership is afraid of is their own people, of course. Especially when the Russians, they hate Gorbachev.

[49:22]

I sometimes say, who can be the Gorbachev? But they really freak out when they say that because they think Gorbachev destroyed Russia or something. But actually, Gorbachev opened the door for Russians to be more happy, at least a few of them. They'll get back to partying a little bit instead of clomping around in a gulag. Chinese like to party. And then this fake thing Sinologist will tell you. Chinese are different. They don't like to party. Oh, they love to work all the time for Walmart. For no pay. And oh, they can't lose face. which means they're like 10-year-olds, you know. It's so racist, that thing that sinologists say, oh, Chinese, they can't lose faith. What about George Bush? What's he would do with his face? John McCain, Cheney, we're getting victory in the Middle East. Victory over what? Who's the enemy? Where's the enemy? I don't see an enemy there. They were standing in the middle of a civil war we stirred up with 5 million refugees we created, we killed over a million.

[50:28]

We're going to kill all of them? That's the enemy? That they're human beings in Iraq? I mean, that's ridiculous. And how can we listen to it on the news or think about it? Well, somebody's not surrendering or not seeking victory when there's no such thing as victory in such an atrocity. It's absurd. Victory is easy. Victory is get on a plane and get out of there. Revoke the tax cuts for the multimillionaires, especially the ones in Texas, and send reparations to rebuild all that we destroyed. That's the victory. That's the only victory. And begin to try to start, make a martial plan to reconstruct Iraq that we destroyed. We've met the evildoers and they are us. But, you know, we should have sympathy for evildoers. Most sympathy. Buddha has most sympathy for the evildoers. More than the people who they evil on. Even if they propagate evild on, they might be in a happy mood.

[51:29]

They get reborn happily and nicely and come to the Zendo. The evil doer dies all paranoid and gets reborn as like some kind of like a scorpion living under the Zendo. With its tail and poison. From having lived like that. So, okay, so what do we do now? Yeah, we rekindle spirituality in China. And my friend Alex Berzin had a great thing. This will help China's budget, the grain budget. Because the middle class so-called in China is now eating pork every day, twice a day. And therefore they're developing feedlots for pigs because they like pork. And all the grain, they're importing all this corn from Kansas and feeding it to the pigs. And it's costing them a lot of money. It's not good. So instead they would get back to being Buddhist vegetarians and the pigs would be happy even. The Dalai Lama will make the Chinese pigs happy. And then the fifth thing that the Dalai Lama will do... is he will become China's ultimate goodwill ambassador.

[52:30]

Better than Louis Armstrong. He will go around, and when China has a problem with France, because China is trying to make air buses in action, or making air buses cheaper, and they're no longer, French are no longer hoping, or the Germans are no longer hoping to get air bus contracts from China, but they're being told to buy air buses. Their own airlines are buying Chinese Airbuses, which is going to happen in the next decade or two. All this fantasy of the Chinese market. Our markets will be China's market. And our corporations will stop being nice to them, and it will be a big problem. And who will know the elites of all the countries and can talk to them and mediate but Kuan Yin. The Dalai Lama, everybody likes him. Even Morong Bush likes him. And so that's the fifth thing that he does. This is my 10-step program for who and for His Holiness to do. And once China does this, then a member of the Dalai Lama is the world leader in anti-militarism.

[53:39]

Inner disarmament, outer disarmament. And China will behave like this and everybody in Asia will relax. the whole tense Pakistan-Indian border, the Burmese generals, China will make a grant to me. And I have long wanted to make in the Maldive Islands a big zendo and a sensitivity training center and a spa for ex-dictators. And the Chinese will send the Burmese junta there. And once they're not supporting Burmese into it, it's gone. And Aung San Suu Kyi can come and fix up Burma. The North Korean guy is gone in 15 minutes if China opens their border to North Korean refugees. And he's gone. He'll come to the Maldives. And some of you, we will actually, like some of you are Osho and everything, we'll borrow some of them. You go there to the Maldives and teach them mindfulness and meditation. And then some other kinds of psychologists will come and show them like Holocaust movies and all kind of sensitivity training to stimulate their conscience and so on. In addition... And you can have them meditate. Or they can go to Hawaii the next day, Mel DeMarcos, that doesn't matter, wherever.

[54:45]

And everything will relax there. Then we really will be at the end of the Cold War. There won't be any more candidates, you know. Bush 1 promised us a peace dividend, remember, when he was trying to beat Clinton in 1992 at the end of the Cold War. But nobody gave us, even Clinton didn't really give us a peace dividend. Nobody did. Of course, Clinton laws control right away. But we should have a peace dividend. Why are we spending a trillion dollars in Iraq when we need schools? You need a new Zendo. There should be a Zendo attached to every high school. The military bases should be turned into Zendos. And also Buddhist universities have to learn little studies. Suzuki Studies Center is not just Zendos. Some learning, some ethics, some philosophy. Have to learn. And then you can do your Zendo. And this is what we need. We don't need to go bombing places and waste this huge trillion-dollar defense thing. And so the whole planet will start relaxing. And then Al Gore will get Wyoming, too, and Colorado and Utah into, like, a zone of environmental peace.

[55:54]

Don't you think? We'll want to compete. Why would the Chinese be the most moral? They'll be the Marshall Plan of the 21st century. They'll stop raping and ripping everything off. They're destroying Africa now. They bought the rainforest in Indonesia. They're on their way into South America. They're using the age-old colonial technique of building mansions for the dictators. Remember, they were sending guns to Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, which luckily the South Africans wouldn't unload. But they're doing that in many dictatorships in South America. And they'll stop doing that because they won't need all those resources because they're not selling stuff to us. They're not really getting that for their own Chinese people, cutting all those forests and making all that wood and making prefabricated bamboo floors and things like that. They're doing that to sell it to the West to build up more money because they somehow think that's what they need to do. They're infected by supply side or I don't know what kind of market-driven insanity of economics, the dismal science. the erroneous science that doesn't include ecology as part of economics, and therefore destroys the environment and throws waste into it, and uses up its resources, right?

[57:03]

You guys all know that, all Zen people know that. Okay? And China leads the way. And don't you think that, huh, that Li Bo, you know, what is it, Huang Bo, and the great Mumon, you know, you guys have Japanese names for these guys, Yuan, whatever their name is, Yuan Wu and all these different great Zen masters would be happy to see China actually stand up and really show that they really are a great Asian civilization. They're not a pseudo bunch of capitalists. They're not a pseudo bunch of Marxists, a pseudo bunch of imperialists. They actually have some sort of strand and current of enlightenment in that they recover in their culture. Confucius himself was very enlightened. He was a little bit male chauvinist, unfortunately, because he didn't yet, you know, he wasn't Buddha. He was a little bit too macho, you know. But he was a brilliant, genius bodhisattva. He was a monjubosatsu, actually, from the Buddhist point of view. Doing the best he could with the rather backward Chinese at that time, compared to the Indians, who were the most civilized.

[58:04]

Okay? So that's my plan. And in the last part of the book, I have real fun, in which I prove, at least in a fantasy way, how the Tibetans... would make much more money out of Tibet for the Chinese as their investors and silent partners, and actually having sovereignty over the land, they would make much more money managing Tibet properly than the Chinese are going to ever make out of Tibet mismanaging it and spending money oppressing the Tibetan people, wasting a lot of money repressing Tibetan people, and ruining their reputation in the world by doing so. So, you know, business by business, tourist business, Banking business, integrative medicine business, spa business, herb business, you know, every kind of business. Eleven different businesses. I show them. So when you finish reading that book, if any of you happen to, then you should become an agent of hope in the Buddhist community.

[59:06]

When somebody says, oh, those poor Tibetans or those nasty Tibetans, you say, oh, that's not so bad, that'll be fixed up And they say, oh, China won't because they'll lose so much. Oh, they won't lose anything. They'll gain everything. And they'll wake up to that. They're clever. They're good in business. They'll see where their advantage lies. Their enlightened self-interest lies eventually. And you'll be like optimistic. And then you'll go, well, China can do it. We can do it. And then you'll get out and vote. Yes, we can. And you'll go in the coffee shops. And the people go, I don't want to vote for these bastards. Where's Ralph Nader? And you'll say, forget you. Get out there and vote. Register. Cut it out. We need the whole Congress and everything. We need to repair this mess right away. And you become your fruit of your devoted, fantastic Dharma meditation, your Mahayana non-dualistic meditation. You will be agents of hope, which means you will be living at least some aspect of nirvana within the samsara.

[60:10]

Nirvana and some Nagarjuna said, and you have to listen to Nagarjuna because he is a great patriarch of the Chan tradition and the Zen tradition, right? He's a 27th patriarch or something. Nagarjuna is, right? So you have to listen to him. And he said there's no difference between samsara and nirvana. So that means you have to live in nirvana yourselves. And that means then that we don't want to have nirvana run by, ruled by a bunch of warmongers. We don't want nirvana to become a military Rambo camp anymore. We want to experience nirvana now. But you're not going to experience it by getting away from the world. You're going to experience it by seeing the world as made of nirvana. And a world made of nirvana should have happy people in it. And the one person who you can really work to be happy is yourself. So you can be a bunch of cheery Zenies.

[61:15]

That's right. A bunch of greeting Zenies. Tick not on is very good on that. You know, if you're feeling really glum, if you force your cheeks like this, it releases endorphins in your brain. If your butt and your knees are hurting and you roll like that, as long as Osho doesn't see you, it'll give you a whack. Your endorphins will go and ease the pain in your butt. Even your mind is saying, I'm so miserable. And Michael Sawyer, he has a moment when you die and every night when you fall asleep you can practice dying because you're losing consciousness. And get out of this American idea that the base of reality is a blank dark space which is called nothingness. There's no such thing. There is unconsciousness, but beyond unconsciousness is the realm of pure, luminous, infinite, nirvanic energy. Bliss, it's called. Bliss void indivisible is the name of it.

[62:21]

And when you die, that's what greets you, is bliss void. If you don't shy away from it, what we do is we're used to being here and there, but it gets too bright, we put on some shades. And we're like, we'll go in the dark and sit somewhere. Don't do that when you die. Don't look for any dark place that you never know what it's going to turn out to be. Go for the bright. Just give yourself to the brightness. That's what the world is made of. It's made of light. The world is made of infinite light. A light that's so infinite that there's no shadow. It doesn't shine on one thing because everything is made of it. Therefore, it's called a gray light. It's a pre-dawn gray light. That's what you discover when you die. But if you're so, I have to do something. Get somewhere. Do something. Then you run right over it. You don't see it. You have to practice doing it as you fall asleep. But you guys are very fortunate. It's an honor to speak to you because you meditate. And you work on it. But don't think you're getting somewhere in some state by shutting down your mind. That's not right.

[63:23]

Yes, you're learning to focus and to be more mindful of the most minute things. There's a wonderful thing in the Samadhi Rajas Mahayana Sutra. And it is said, he or she who understands cause and effect. how things are interrelated, understands voidness. And then this really surprises you. And he or she who really understands voidness, which means it maintains alignment, becomes mindful of the tiniest little thing. Completely mindful of every little thing. Because of the infinite interconnection of every little thing. So, when you turn your mind in the Zendo, away from some, ooh, I can't stand it anymore, to... Yes, I can. You're casting a million votes for yes, we can. You're sending out a resonant, morphic resonant energy that makes people feel hope. Instead of apathy and despair and I can't do anything and therefore I won't do anything but hide in my high security residential condo and hope they don't get me until I die and become nothing, don't have to worry about it.

[64:37]

the American way of escapism. Please don't be like that. So, I don't know what. Actually, does anybody have a question? Any question? We can more or less stop. Yeah. You're supposed to hit me when it's 8.30 anyway, so you've got six minutes. But if you don't have any questions, that's all right. You don't have to ask it. It's all right. There's a question? Okay, what's the question? But you have to speak loud. I'm semi-deaf. Yes? I'm sorry, what? Oh, thank me, thank me. Thank you very much. And I hope that what you say comes true. However, I'm so afraid your book is just going to hit the shelf and get dusty, unfortunately. But just recently, and I haven't heard a word about it, but just recently I heard that the Tibetans were indeed negotiating with the Chinese, but been absolutely quiet.

[65:52]

I haven't heard... Well, that's fake. That one is fake. That's the stalling the Chinese have been doing. The Iron Rice Bowl people who don't want to come to a solution are pretending to negotiate to shut down the Western... heads of state and the Japanese from pressuring them. Pretend they're going to talk. But the only way it will be real, the only thing to watch for, and the thing to project in your mind when you think about it, is the leadership has to cut past these inherited employees and face to face with the Dalai Lama, handshake to handshake, belly button to belly button, as Sasaki Roshi would say, and talk it out, hara to hara, And then that will be the huge change. That's the one. But you know, there's one other thing. I mean, maybe you want to say more. I'm sorry. Well, I'm sorry. I mean, I have spent quite a bit of time in Tibet. And I mean, I can't even imagine they would let somebody who's written a book like you even anywhere near the country. I mean, I don't know if you... I've been there many times. Great. You know, I've spent a little bit of time on the ground.

[66:53]

I spent a little bit of time sneaking around the alleys. I spent a little bit of time in the tea room that you're talking about. I've seen... picked up on the Chinese police several times. And obviously, just as long as you've used it. Did you notice how unhappy those policemen were? Yes, they did. They're all pinched in like this. They have their gun. They're like miserable. They have emotional plague, as Wilhelm Reich called it. But I just want to say what you may have said. Mayweather, thank you for your statement. And thank you for thanking me. But I didn't really do anything. I'm more demented than anyone. I'm getting too old about it. But I really like Allen Ginsberg. And the late Allen Ginsberg. And he's probably reborn as a Jewish princess in the Hoboken by now. And he's shopping till he drops. And he's wired on the internet and so forth, writing poems on YouTube. But he's writing poems on YouTube at the age of six. But... At one point in the Vietnam War, there's one poem of his, I think, the nuclear jukebox, something on the road to Omaha, something like that, going to Amarillo to where they had some nuclear weapons.

[68:00]

And he said, I just decided the Vietnam War is over. And it's just going through some motion, but it's over. And it was about a year before we fled Vietnam in disarray, you know, the more foolish people. So this is the thing, you know. Tibet actually is a free place. It's what Jonathan Schell calls it is the high roof of the unconquerable world. Nobody can conquer anybody anymore. It's impossible. Because, you know, you can. In the old days, you could beat somebody's army and go and intimidate a population and they would sew up some brocade field. You know what I mean? You could be a colonial, you know? Tend in some administrators and whatever. But you can't do that anymore because they don't. They kill all the civilians. They destroy the entire country. The weapons are so powerful. And then the few people who survive are terrorists because they're so furious they just as soon die and kill you back. So nobody conquers anybody. The world is unconquerable.

[69:02]

Don't be fooled. Tibet will never be conquered. You can see it. You've seen it in the bar corps. Five Chinese policemen and two or three plainclothes Tibetan collaborators who are staring like this. looking all miserable. And, you know, the only thing that they can keep going day to day is they run to the nearest brothel two or three times, then run back and stare angrily. Because they, like, don't get any satisfaction, really. Because the girls don't really like them. And there's no real love. And then there's some guy who's crawled on his hands and knees and prostrated himself a thousand miles from Kham over mountain passes. His teeth are gone. He's been beaten. Face is all weather-beaten. And he's like... Bowing on the round in the Kavarkora. And he looks up at you. And there's like joy in his face. He has a true shit-eating grin. Dust-eating grin. And he's like alive with energy. And he's in touch with Nirvana. From the dirt.

[70:03]

And even from being beaten down. And the police are so jealous. They want to kill him. But they want to kill an energy that they feel in him. Of inner bliss that they can't kill. So Tibet is free. It's just a matter of us demanding that the people acknowledge reality. Don't you know what Buddhism is? It is not a religion. You Zen people should know this. Buddhism is realism. It is looking cold and hard at reality. And that's not because you're just some sort of masochist and you're giving up a nice ignorant bliss. That's because reality is nirvana. Of the four noble truths, only the third is reality. First, second, and fourth are illusion. They're illusory. Suffering is illusory. Cause of suffering is illusory. Ignorance. The path is like dealing with pathetic ignorance and ignorance and get rid of it. Nirvana is the reality. That's what Buddha discovered. Why do you think he's grinning? Do you think Buddha's grinning because like, oh yeah, I'd like to be barefoot or something? Or because I'm Indian or what?

[71:06]

He's grinning because he looked at reality inside and outside. The atoms, the subatomic energies, everything. And he discovered that reality is not nothing, and it is bliss. And it is bliss that then enables you to tolerate, without flinching from your incredible cheerfulness, your total interconnection with everything else. And of course, the first thing you get interconnected with, you know what it is? A bunch of people who are also bliss. Every cell and fiber of their being is made of the same bliss. And they're like all freaked out. It's like blitz contorting itself into like a theater and a drama and an illusion of misery. And you're the Buddha, and you also can experience what their illusion is. So you simultaneously are aware of their bliss, and then you're aware that they are thinking that it's misery. So then what's left to do? Compassion. And then you can't. What do you do? You run up and hug them, then they get paranoid. Buddha's hugging me. He must want, he's going to pick my pie when he hugs me.

[72:08]

Ooh, Buddha, I don't want to be hugged by Buddha. He might, like, do something weird to me. Like, can't wait for me, Buddha. Don't hug me. So you can't do that, so what do you do? Buddha does a little dance. Oh, yeah, be miserable. Misery is it. Be miserable, but then look for your misery. Is it? Where is it? Where's the self that's suffering? Oh, look for that. Oh, you didn't find anything. Who's miserable? Oh, Oh, then suddenly there's nothing here to clamp off the bliss that wells out of my heart. There's no... My bliss, not your bliss. Don't come get my bliss. You can't have... Buddhists do a dance. The life of the Buddha is called Lalita Vistara. In Mahayana Sutra, Lalita Vistara means the greatest show on earth. Howdy is Piti Barnum, Piti Buddha. How do you spell it? B-U-D-D-H-A. Okay, I can go on and on.

[73:11]

Good night. Thank you very much. If you want a book, I'll sign it. If you don't, that's okay. There's a consolation. I have something called a consolation prize, which is really I award to myself. Because I'm, you know, and it always comes up when, you know, when I have a nice time with people talking about the Dharma. Because when you talk about the great thing about talking about the Dharma and the great privilege of being a teacher, supposedly, is you can just talk about the Dharma as your job, you know, which is really nice. Of course, in academia, you have to pretend you're not talking the Dharma just about it. This weird thing that's in a museum glass case under a microscope, you know, because a bunch of arrogant... Anglos think that if they didn't discover it, it sucks. Since everything they discovered does suck. Bunch of genocides and a bunch of ignoramuses who go around discovering nothing and wanting Nobel Prizes for it.

[74:16]

So people sometimes are in danger of thinking that I'm enlightened, which my wife would quickly correct them or any of my children. So I have to jump in ahead and correct them. And I have to assure them that I'm probably more miserable than they are. Which some of them will find incredible. Since they're very wrapped up about their misery and wanted to be respected. Respect my misery. Don't... whatever. So, but what I tell them is what I have discovered over 45 years of study and a tiny little bit of whatever. practice, meditation, although I'm sick of practice. I don't want a bunch of practice from my fellow Buddhists. I want performance. There's been enough practice. It's time to perform. Definitely. And so what I have discovered is this. Nirvana is not a state. For it to be the absolute, the true reality, or the truthless truth, whatever, you know, all kind of neat things,

[75:26]

we have in Buddhist thought. In order for that to be so, it has to be here now. And therefore, when we say the expression, realizing nirvana, which seems to be something that some people do, and I hope to do so someday, it's one of those things that when you come to understand it, you realize you always knew it. It's not a new thing. It can't be new. Because it's always been there. So it's a matter of removing the obstruction to what has always been there. And so it's like, oh, I always knew, you know, sometimes you learn something, oh, I always knew that. You remember, you know, we have that kind of thing that happened. This is the ultimate, oh, I always knew that. It's nirvana. It isn't a state. It's becoming aware of what everything is, right? So therefore, although I'm totally miserable today and overworked and tired and hot and I need to go home and sleep, And so do you. And if someone tells me this is nirvana, I'm going to be annoyed.

[76:29]

However, my consolation prize is that when I do attain nirvana in whichever future life, then I will, like Buddha did, remember under the tree, he remembered infinite of all his previous lives. And in fact, they all became totally present to him, equal to the present. This crap about being in the moment, being in the now. The now, when you're enlightened, is every now. So at that time, when I do attain nirvana, I will be aware, and so will you when you attain nirvana, you will be aware that you were in nirvana and were aware of nirvana right now, today, July 6th, 2008 of the common era in the Zendo at Green Dutch. So you will enjoy this moment fully without expecting to get to a better one, Retroactively. And that is your consolation for the misery we are undergoing. Okay?

[77:31]

Thank you.

[77:32]

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