Course 6

The Diamond Cutter Sutra

(RAW TRANSCRIPT)

presented by Geshe Michael Roach

Bendigo, Australia

Sept. 1998


DIAMOND CUTTER SUTRA

GESHE MICHAEL ROACH

ATISHA CENTRE

16th September 1998

Class One

I really want you to learn this well. I’m not just giving a public lecture and then you’re going to forget it in two days or something like that. I taught that way for ten years in New York and then I noticed nobody was learning anything. And after that I started this system and it works very well. So this is not one of those teachings where you just feel good for two days and then you forget everything. I really want you to learn it well.

There’s another reason to learn it well and that is that you now become holders of this lineage. Westerners have this idea that if you’re not Tibetan you can’t pass on a lineage or if you’re not a monk or a nun, you can’t teach. That’s not true at all. The way it goes in Buddhism is that you have to learn this very, very well. And then it’s your responsibility to get it straight and to pass it on to the next generation. So I would hope that one reason to force you to learn it well, is that you can pass it on to other people.

Otherwise it doesn’t spread. So everyone in this room will become a lineage holder of this teaching. At the end of the teaching we’ll do a Lung. Lung means, ‘it’s the oral blessing of the teaching’. An oral blessing of this teaching that’s been going on for two and a half thousand years and has never been broken. I got the Lung from my Lama. He’s the former Abbot of Sera May Monastery and he was the Assistant Abbot of the Tantric College, in Tibet in 1958. So, this is a blessing, a lineage blessing and you have to pass it on to other people.

We’re going to be studying the Diamond Cutter Sutra. I’ll give you the name of it in Tibetan.

Say DORJE repeat.

By the way, I’m going to ask you to repeat it, even if you have no intention of learning Tibetan. I’ll meet you next life and I’ll teach you Tibetan (Laughs). So I’m just planting seeds now.

Say DORJE CHUPA repeat.

Dorje means, ‘diamond’. Dor means, ‘stone’ or ‘rock’ and Je means, ‘the lord of’. ‘The lord’ like in Je Tsongkhapa. Dorje, this is the Je in Je Tsongkhapa means ‘lord’, so Dorje means, ‘king of stones’, which is a diamond. Chupa means, ‘to cut’. So the name of this book is Dorje Chupa. It means ‘diamond cutter’. ‘Diamond Cutter Sutra.’

There have been people who have translated it as ‘Diamond Sutra’. That’s a really lousy translation. It’s not the ‘Diamond Sutra’. It’s the ‘Diamond Cutter Sutra’ and we’ll explain why later.

In Sanskrit it’s: Say VAJRA CHEDIKA repeat.

Vajra means, ‘diamond’, like Vajrayana means, ‘diamond way’. It’s another word for Tantra. And chedika means, ‘to cut.’ It’s the oldest printed book in the world. There’s a copy in the British Museum in Chinese. The oldest printed book that exists. It spread … was taught by Lord Buddha 500 B.C. Two and half thousand years ago. And it’s in the form of a lecture. Somebody’s asking some questions and He’s answering questions. So it’s like two people having a conversation. It became one of the most printed books in the world. It spread throughout China, Japan, Korea and other countries. It’s become perhaps the most popular Buddhist book in those countries.

The subject of the Vajra Chedika is emptiness. And if you want to learn what emptiness means or you want to study emptiness, this is one of the best ways to do it. This book is the manual for studying emptiness.

My goal in this series is that you understand emptiness well by the time we finish. There are a lot of strange ideas about emptiness. I remember the first time I heard about it I thought they were talking about some black thing in your mind. Or they were talking about some ... you’d close your eyes and you’d sit quietly and maybe after a while your mind stops. Or something like that. And you just go into some floating thing and that’s emptiness or something like that. And that’s really what you think when you hear the word. You know, you’re a Buddhist, you have to study emptiness. Nothing like that. Nothing to do with that. So the goal of this book is to try to understand emptiness.

What’s the use of understanding emptiness? Suppose you just sit on a meditation cushion and you think about emptiness; how is that supposed to help you? This is a very interesting thing. Buddhists go through five levels or five stages in their spiritual career. Somewhere in the middle, here in the third level, the third path, you see emptiness directly. You’re in deep meditation, you’re meditating about emptiness and you see it directly. According to Buddhism it takes millions of years. Actually, more, to get to that moment when you’re seeing emptiness directly. It takes millions of years; if you believe in past lives.

The whole direct perception of emptiness takes perhaps twenty minutes. You’re only are seeing emptiness directly for, like, twenty minutes. But there’s a power to emptiness. When you see emptiness directly and then you come out of that experience. Let’s say you see emptiness in the mid-morning , or something like that; when you come out of that experience you begin to have direct realisations of many other things. For example, you see the day of your own enlightenment, directly. You see, directly, the day that you will become a Buddha yourself. That’s one of the things that happens to a person who can see emptiness directly.

You see your future lives. For example, very typically, after seeing emptiness directly, you might have to live seven more lifetimes, but you see them directly. And you are aware of what’s going to go on - in a general way - during each of those lifetimes. So try to imagine a person walking around in Australia who has seen their future lives for the next seven lifetimes. And then they know that they are going to become a Buddha and they’ve seen it directly. They see all those things directly. That happens when you see emptiness directly.

If you study this subject for the next five days and then you go home and you meditate on it, if you can perceive it directly, this happens to you. This will happen to you. Those seven lifetimes are very pleasant: good teachers, good health, intelligent, good, good family, surrounded by Buddhism, surrounded by very fine Lamas and then finally, becoming enlightened. You can see these things directly, just after you see emptiness directly.

Even before you reach that point you can remove forever your negative thoughts. Never get angry again, never get upset again, never be depressed again, never be unhappy with another person again. All of these happen to a person who has seen emptiness.

If you don’t see emptiness directly - according to Buddhism - you cannot remove those states of mind; impossible. You cannot stop anger, jealousy, anxiety, depression, low self esteem, whatever. You can’t remove those things from your mind without seeing emptiness directly. You have to see emptiness directly.

And then many other things happen on the day that you see emptiness directly. You become directly aware of a Buddha. On the day that you see emptiness directly - and you come out of it - you meet the Dharmakaya of a Buddha directly. And you know it. And you know you’ve done it.

All of these things happen to a person who has seen emptiness directly. You can’t see emptiness unless you study it first. All the books say the same thing. You must study it. From somebody who knows about it. Then you can see it directly unclear.

So that’s the purpose of this class, right? If you do well in this class, if you understand what we’re going to talk about well, and if you go home and meditate on it, then you can see emptiness directly. You’ll be able to see emptiness directly. Like a twenty minute experience, and then after those twenty minutes, all of those realisations come to you within the next few hours.

Those realisations, by the way, are grouped together into four different groups. When you come out of the direct perception of emptiness, you see all those great ideas you have. You meet Buddha directly, see your future lives directly, see your own enlightenment directly, know what’s going to happen to you for the next seven lifetimes. And then you know what’s going to happen after that.

All of those ideas that happen to you, we’re going to talk about them on Friday night. You must come Friday night. That’s the most important class. Even if you skip out, never bring your homework and quizzes, you must come on Friday night. Friday night we’ll talk about the direct experience of emptiness.

But all those ideas you have after that are grouped into four basic categories. And those are called the Four Noble Truths. That’s where the word Four Noble Truths comes from. ‘Noble’ is a bad, bad, bad translation of the Sanskrit word Arya. Arya in Sanskrit means, ‘anybody who has seen emptiness directly’, is called an Arya. Anyone who has gone through that twenty minutes of seeing emptiness directly, is called an Arya. So when you talk about the ideas that a person has or the realisations that come into your mind, right after that, for the whole day after that, those are grouped into four categories and called the Four Arya Truths. ‘Noble’ is a bad translation of a word that means, ‘a person who has seen emptiness directly.’

I’m going to go into a little bit about the history of the Diamond Cutter. In the monastery they don’t do this much but I think as westerners, we like to know what we’re studying. We like to know something about it. We like to know a little bit about the book.

In the monastery, they just start teaching you and then somebody asks you, ‘What are you studying?’ You say, ‘Diamond Cutter’. They say, ‘Who wrote it?’ ‘I don’t know’, ((Laughs)). So Diamond Cutter itself is a discussion that Lord Buddha is having with one of his Students.

So one of the Students comes to Lord Buddha and starts asking questions at the beginning of the sutra. Who is this guy? The guy asking questions is called Subhuti. This is a Student of Lord Buddha who’s ... I have a few of these in New York City. They’re always asking stupid questions and interrupting the class. I’m half way into a sentence and they’re like, ‘Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! … I need to know about that!’ And there’s a hundred, two hundred people there and they’re all like, ‘Oh just shut-up!’ This person’s interrupting the class, over and over again. This is Subhuti. Subhuti’s like this ((Laughs)) Laughter.

The Buddha’s sitting down, there’s twelve hundred monks or something. There’s a lot of monks there; twelve hundred and fifty monks and he’s about to give this big lecture. And then Subhuti comes up. Actually, he’s not so impertinent as an American. He actually comes and he bows down properly and he takes his shawl down properly. Even now when we debate in a Tibetan monastery, we take our shawl down in a certain way. And we pay respect to the person just before we start arguing.

And this is Subhuti. He comes and he does this and he asks the Buddha a question. So this is really a conversation just like another famous sutra which is, which? Like the Heart Sutra. In fact, in the Heart Sutra it’s not the Buddha at all. It’s two of his Students talking to each other under his influence. He goes into meditation at the beginning of the sutra. And they are like puppets and he’s running both of them. Then at the end he says, ... what’s the only thing he says in the Heart Sutra? Lak so, lak so, which means, ‘Oh good job, you guys are so smart’ laugh Laughter. That’s all he says in the Heart Sutra. In the Diamond Cutter he speaks a little bit more than that. So that’s who’s speaking.

There are about four and a half thousand ancient books that came from India and that reached Tibet. They are divided into the books where the Buddha spoke directly, which is about a thousand. And then there are about three and a half thousand ancient, ancient explanations of those books. So they are divided into two parts.

In the commentaries there are only three explanations of the Diamond Cutter Sutra. So I’m going to write the names of those Lamas who taught them. This doesn’t have much to do with the meaning but I want you to appreciate your lineage because now you are the next Lama in the lineage.

If you take this and teach it to someone well, you are a Lama. You don’t have to be a monk to be a Lama. You don’t have to be male to be a Lama. You don’t have to have a thousand Students to be a Lama. If you go to work tomorrow and talk to someone about this Sutra, you just became a Lama. Some of the greatest Lamas of Tibet were not monks. Some of the greatest Lamas of Tibet were women who were not monks or nuns.

Say LOPPON YIKNYEN repeat.

Loppon means, ‘master,’ like Buddhist master. It’s considered impolite or improper to refer to great Lamas like, ‘Hey Yeshe. Hey Zopa’. You give them some honorific name like Lama Zopa or Lama Yeshe. In Sanskrit it’s Loppon or Acharya. Master.

Yiknyen is the Tibetan for Vasubandu. Vasubandu is most famous for writing what book? Abhidharma Kosha. There are seven great books of abhidharma starting from the time of the Buddha. Master Vasubandu collected them together into a book that he called ‘The Treasure of Abhidharma’. So that was Abhidharma Kosha. But he also wrote a commentary or explanation of the Diamond Cutter. We have it in Tibetan. It’s really hard to read. It’s really hard to read. We’re not going to use it. I just want you to know that he wrote one.

The Abhidharma Kosha became the bible for all of the southern Buddhist countries in Thailand. In Sri Lanka this is the main book used. This is the primary book used for the study of Buddhism. He wrote that book. When did he live? About three fifty A.D. There’s another Loppon named Karmalashila.