Dependent Origination — 2015-08-09

# 01-150809_1539 3.mp3

> **Collection:** Audio Recordings — Dependent Origination
> **Duration:** 61.5 minutes
> **Words:** 6,656
> **Model:** Deepgram Nova-3
> **Corrections:** 8 Buddhist terminology fixes
> **Transcribed:** 2026-03-02 19:56

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Please. Well, know the way to trigger questions. Jampa Ingyen has a couple of really sharp questions for you. So if you have no questions, we will have an improvised examination. And I’ll see how long before the first question.

Please. So in the cases of reincarnations of body, speech and mind in more than one body, I understood that the mind resides in the central channel at the heart. So how can you have an incarnation of speech without the mind? Well since brought the topic up, I’m sure he will be delighted to provide an answer. You can make a presentation in terms of Yogachara and the winds.

You can make a presentation in Yogachara in terms of the winds, the operation of the various winds for the various activities but I am personally rather hesitant about the notion of the reincarnation of body, speech and mind unless it’s understood metaphorically. Well, it happens with many teachers, you know, then whether it actually reflects something in reality is another question. That’s another question. What is very possible is for a fully enlightened being to have numerous manifestations. Technically in the Mahāyāna, every part of the Buddha’s body is fully enlightened.

That’s far removed from our topic. I would say I think really it is the study of Stevenson’s cases certainly for modern Western Buddhists is a way forward. I mean, it’s unfortunate that Stevenson has passed on and there’s very little additional material which is being gathered. And unfortunately, the data processing seems to have stopped as I was telling Jerome. They had a team at the University of Virginia which was collating Stevenson’s data.

They seem to have just run out of funds, if I understand correctly, after the GFC. Then we have partial collations of data. So it’s very difficult to do a lot with that material. Then Jim Tucker, Stevenson’s successor is collecting more data from western cases, but nowhere nearly the type of volume of data Stevenson had. And it is not being, I think, processed in the same rigorous, obsessive, gargling on sawdust type of approach which was Stevenson’s which makes working through his it makes working through reincarnation of biology a marvelous practice for those who suffer from insomnia, you know.

You you work through a few pages and you’re just gone. But for yourselves, for myself, it has been extremely helpful during the presentations here since 02/08 to take cases and try to crack the case in the light of the Buddhist presentation of karma and causality. Then we have the books in the library. You can order some. Some of our students have ordered them already.

This is very good. Then in the strong cases, you try to account for what’s happening. It’s always completely possible, but this generates a level of conviction in the process which one does not get just through attending teachings. Then when I was talking with Geshe Yama Rinchen at Sarah, I mentioned to him and he he was very much in agreement that I felt really the traditional arguments substantiating the distance of past and future lives are no longer arguments which carry any weight with Western students. So I’ve presented him here several times.

Benjamin gave a very articulate presentation of them yesterday. I remember presenting Shāntarakshita’s argument to the Sangha, which I thought was beautifully put. And it felt completely flat. It was like I went through the whole process and then I went back to Gelstein and Gelsenstein’s interpretation of Kalupahana and you could have felt heard a pin drop because no impact on them. Then that is those are things which happen, you know.

Societies change, people change, sensitivities change. But Stevenson’s material elicits a reaction. Perhaps because as westerners we have a a naive faith in science. Just as our ancestors had a naive faith in the monk or the guru. So we have to work with what there is.

Sorry, Elliot. My question pertains then to Helen Wombash’s work around the multiple regressions of large groups and specifically what we just spoke about before around the entry into the embryo. In a significant number of cases, they report entering and leaving the embryo or the fetus several times. I wouldn’t want to comment on what we think the validity of her work is. Well I presented her work at TBI some six years ago before I knew it in detail.

And then after studying her work in detail, I became quite dubious about her methodology. She was a professor of psychology at the University of Iowa and she basically would regress large numbers of her students, volunteers, and then try to proceed to a statistical analysis of the correlation of their experiences by time period. So for instance, some of her correlations are very interesting like she she found and you would not expect someone to construct something like this that the diets her students recollected upon being regressed to a given period of time corresponded statistically to the mean diets at that period. For instance, if you regress a group of 1,000 people to let us say 700 BC in Greece, you do not expect to find seventy percent of them having a meat based diet. You expect to find, let’s say ninety percent having a cereal based diet and 10% or less having sufficient protein in the diet.

And this is what she found. But the problem is her later work became quite odd and then I must recognize I withdrew because I was not quite sure how reliable her early work could have been. I think the basic idea is very interesting, but the problem is obviously she uses hypnotic regression and we spoke yesterday of the problems with hypnotic regression, which is induction of memories. So you could easily prompt, you could easily induce memories in subjects. I’m going to regress you in ancient Greece.

Tell me what your diet will be. It doesn’t matter if it’s really poor, I understand. And the subject is already primed, you see. As if that’s the problem. She She is doing multiple regressions of multiple cases so some of her students would remember ten, twenty, 30 lives then whether these are actually ten, twenty, 30 lives or ten, twenty, 30 fantasies, we don’t know.

Nothing was verified. What made her work interesting was that when you analyzed the experiences statistically, they fit with what historians tell us. But that’s all you can say. From what you just said, Ilya, about presenting Buddhist material to a Western audience and there was you could have heard a pin drop and there was no reaction, what were you wanting to see? And my reason for asking is because silence is sometimes people are individuals, but silence can be boredom.

It can be that’s so unfamiliar I don’t know what to say. It can be what time’s lunch? It can be any it can be that collectively nobody’s speaking. So which is not to there must be some reason for why you’re saying that so it’s clear and important. Well the silence was one of complete absence of connection with the material, you know.

I I one student here asked me why I had adopted this presentation and I told her when I first came to TBI, I had been basically pretty much weaned on Je Tsongkhapa’s when I was young and I just presented Jitsongapas, you know. I thought, okay. But she said, you know, I should talk about these topics and I took Je Tsongkhapa. I remember one of my first talks was Karma and Cusality, then I just took Lamrim Chenmo, you know, and I freshed it out, you know. And I had some very, very hostile reactions from older students.

Someone said to me, I think I can almost remember it actually. He said, I don’t come to TBI for this type of scholastic stuff. You know? Then I thought, okay, you know. Clearly, if an older student is reacting in this way, then something is not clicking.

Right? And this didn’t happen once but many times, you know, in one way or the other. And people are often quite polite about it. So you present the topic and people have that glazed look on their face, you know, here we go again, they’re talking about someone in eighth century whose name I can’t pronounce, you know, like that, you know. Then you make a joke and they’re once again back on earth, you know.

And then that’s not the goal of what we do here. Right? So it was something I found very difficult to accept, you know. For me, it’s quite painful to think that Dharmakīrti’s Pramānavārttika is no longer something which resonates, but with the Western audience, I don’t think it does. You know, Gyaltsab Je’s works do not.

Candrakīrti’s Chatuhshataka had a big impact on me, then I tried to encourage people here to read chapters. It never happened. So I just dropped it, you know. I mean, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work, you know.

And then I thought, how do I how does one connect, you know, with these students? Then you have to find what resonates, not what we would like to resonate, but what actually does resonate. So I tried Western philosophy. That was that was a catastrophe. Like, if you pronounce the name of a German philosopher here, you know, the temperature just drops.

But I was interviewed for the newsletter, you know, and they wanted to know my early experiences, you know, what led me to Buddhism. You know, I was honest. So I said to Grant Cameron, I said, well, you know, basically, I was heavily influenced by Fichte, by Schelling, by Hegel, by Nietzsche, by German philosophy. Then he managed to lose the entire interview. They had to reinterview me.

He made it really clear that, you know, he didn’t want to hear about a German philosopher. I had to modify things, you know. So this just was a biases of the of the culture. Right? So then I dropped Western philosophy and then I noticed that the one thing everyone resonates with is science.

Not science as it’s taught in the universities, but popular science. Like everyone basically has a sort of naive face. It was summarized by one of my neighbors. I had a neighbor in in Underdale and very nice Australian old man, Bob, you know. He used to be a carpenter.

He made some tables for me. And he wanted to know what I was doing in Australia. And I told him, I’m a Buddhist scholar and a Tibetan translator. There’s this big pause. And then Bob who was in his eighties told me, well, I’m a former Anglican but I believe science will explain everything someday.

That is promissory materialism we talked about yesterday. That’s a faith statement in promise free materialism. And I thought, okay, Bob is my template. So how do I connect with Bob? Well, science, right?

So if we can stretch a bit what science shows to show that there’s possibly a link, right, with Buddhism, then we give Buddhism credibility, you know. And normally, like much of the work I do with Stevenson is actually a bit tentative because really we don’t know what these if these cases are true or not. We don’t know whether the person in their previous life had for instance craving or appropriation of the nature of the ones I described. I don’t have access to the mental continuum. But it’s just to show you that this is not just an Asian narrative, fantasy, something that Tibetans say which is not really relevant to your lives.

Because I became convinced that the reason we had ninety ninety five percent attrition rate at this center and in almost all the centers in the West to a lesser degree but still, is just because the students really don’t believe the teachings are true with a capital T. They don’t think this is real. They go through the motions. And they go through the motions for one year, two years, five years and eventually, quite sensibly, they say why on earth should I be going through the motions? I mean, I don’t believe any of this and they leave.

I’ve had long students, very long students who told me, I neither believed in common or in causality. Then I didn’t know what to say. He said, why have you been coming all these years? Makes no sense, right? So the goal has been to try to bridge that gap and it’s obviously successful because whenever we have a symposium where something is linked to science, attendance is good.

And the one time I tried to give a conference on Madhya Mika, which I really thought we’d had presentations on tenants, I thought we’re gonna give the history of the Madhya Madhya Mika school and maybe some basic presentation of the view. We had eight people, I think. It was it was miserable. And then there’s no point, you know, there’s no interest, you know. That’s a long answer to your question, but basically, when you have trainees, in our case, you know, in my case, I’m not a teacher, but but you asked me to continue with these activities, then you have to see where the student is.

What is actually the student’s personality? What is their bias? Where do they come from? What do they like? You know?

And that’s how you basically can help them. If they love beer and you start by saying, you gotta take levals and there’s no beer from now on, buddy, then it’s not gonna happen. Right? So you let the beer ride like his holiness in France. His holiness put it very beautifully in France.

He said, well, yes, in general Buddhism is opposed to alcohol but one glass of wine is okay. Simply, you’re dealing with an audience where everyone drinks. Right? And drinks all the time. So if you want anybody to practice something and you start by saying no wine, then it’s not gonna happen.

So that was a little bit the reason, it’s a long answer to your question, but it’s what eventually led me to this approach, and it seems to be working. It seems to be working. I apologise in advance for this question. I’ve attended quite a few of your talks and it seems that you quite consistently and diligently spend about ten minutes criticising TBI students, some might say harshly. Or actually, you know, you yourself mentioned that it was a bit harsh on one occasion and the, you know, even want to go up on the website.

It was a bit too harsh. And I’ve listened to this and for the life of me, I can’t see the logic of it and I can’t see the benefit of it. But I would like to ask you what is the logic of it and what is the benefit of it? Well, maybe I should stop then. I mean, Tenzin has commented about students here.

She was sensitive, very sensitive. Maybe we shouldn’t have any criticism. And if I offended it, even my apologies. I really get similar similar response from people that they they think that I’m rude. Well, we have to adapt to our audience and at a certain point I’m afraid from my standpoint the question which has arisen over the last year is whether I should continue to be at TBI.

So my resignation is basically hovering in the air because there’s a number of difficulties I experienced here. I already told Tenzin, then we see. We see. I feel very difficult, a great difficulty in connecting to the students here, great difficulty. And then I stayed mainly because Rinpoche asked me to.

I don’t know what to answer to you. You see, if it is not possible to say anything and maybe it’s better to stop. Maybe it’s better to stop. Ilya, the Pabongka Rinpoche in Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand is very straightforward and critical of the idea of having any attainments as a way of encouraging students to be very honest with themselves. When I was at CERA when Rinpoche gave the teaching on three principal aspects of the path, I ducked my head as he resoundingly, you know, criticised the audience for their lack of practice.

And I thought, well if he’s saying that to the Geshe’s, then where do I stand with this? But in the context of the teachings, seems it as if that’s an important part of if you love and care, then you’ll speak the truth. And it’s only our self cherishing that doesn’t like that. And I think it’s, you know, if we are encouraged to examine everything in the light of the dharma, well then the upset is a necessary part of the path. And I thank you for your honesty and certainly it does cause myself and obviously all of us to reflect, which is the whole point because the default position is ignorance and we want everything to be in a certain way, which is we are learning is completely the wrong way.

See things existing which don’t and vice versa. You see, the question we have to ask is one of benefit. And that question is one which is difficult to answer. So since I am basically under obedience to Rinpoche, then I do what Rinpoche asks me to do which is I give these presentations. And Rinpoche told me to give them the way I give them.

In other words, said hit them on the head. Then, those are the words he used actually, then I do. And then I have never liked dishonesty, insincerity. So it is my personal temperament, it’s maybe something which is a bit at odds with aspects of Australian culture when one tries to preserve the niceties as much as possible. And I think for the important things, one must be clear, one must be honest.

And it has to be useful. Then I said to Tenzin this morning after some of the events which happened yesterday here, I have never been in a center for which I feel I have struggled as much and in which I had such difficult experiences. It’s a sad comment. I’m sorry, Jobinian is here to listen to this but I was translators at the Jefferson Tibetan Society in Charlottesville then I was translator in Switzerland for Geshe Rabten in France. But it’s very surprising here, you know, very surprising.

I’ve never been in a center where I’ve had to go to my teacher, Khensur Rinpoche, to complain about how things were being handled. I’ve never had a situation where Ketsu Kampuche had to go in public to make statements, you know, encouraging people to behave better. Then I don’t know exactly who you are. I don’t know what’s going on. But something like this is a meeting of two freedoms.

You have the freedom to come, I have the freedom to leave. And as of last year, it’s a freedom I reserve the right to use. So there has to be some benefit from the side of the students to justify what we’re doing here. And more importantly, there has to be some type of connection. So I am not sure that with my own background which is a demanding background, I am a good teacher for you.

So Liberty asked me to become the director of TBI. I refused. I refused for two reasons. First, because it is not good that one person do everything. Secondly, because I am not functional with your culture.

Yours is an easy going culture and it’s often a culture of compromise. You know we’ve seen this many times at TBI. Many many times, you know. Then, you know, it is not good if the director is very forceful and the students don’t want that. Then from my standpoint, the question at a certain point is, can I communicate with you or not?

You know? Then if I can’t, someone else is better. Someone else more helpful to you and I have more time for my own work. So really I will take what you say on advisement. I will take it on advisement.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot because there have been some very negative reactions in the last year especially. Then that’s not the goal and maybe if you know what I’m doing is not helpful or rubs you the wrong way, there are other teachers who can do a better job. So we have to see. Traditionally, this is my last year. So traditionally, seven years is a maximum duration of tenure for any function.

I started in 2008, I should finish at the end of 2000 and And Rinpoche formally asked me to stay and I accepted. But there’s a reason for which seven years is a tenure. Right? The reason is for Ting. Right?

So I have a good offer from Istituto Lama Tzong Khapa in Italy. You know, maybe it it might be nice to go to Italy. You know? So you think from your side, you know? For my side, I am committed for this year.

At the end of this year, we will see, Now do you have other questions on the topics we covered? Do people who appear to have an Asian appearance have a stronger karmic connection with the activity of meditating? This is going to sound ridiculous but the action of meditating because they have almond shaped eyes. Well, has a gift for basically relaxing the atmosphere, I doubt so. But maybe jumping in has a separate outlook.

It’s simply because the Dalai Lama taught and wrote, I think it was in the eye of new awareness that the body follows the mind and one of the instructions, at least in this tradition, is to narrow the eyes slightly. It’s my intention was not to just simply relax and make everyone feel good. It was to think about karma in, in, ways that have questions where you feel really stupid asking them. And, but something about, because the closest thing I have as a Westerner is intergenerational trauma. So, yeah.

My question’s for Jampa Ingyen, but thank you both for your brilliant presentations. Earlier today, you spoke about separating love and attachment in your daily life. Jampa Ingyen, could you elaborate on what you tell yourself when you feel the pull in either direction? One, actually sorry. One is of great benefit to us, and one is of great harm to us.

There is a debate also that some forms of attachment are neutral, especially if one’s attached to the welfare of others. Some argument I remember in Sarah getting into debates on attachment and whether there is, at any stage, a type of attachment that is not harmful. And some would come up with this possible scenario of that. If you’re attached to another being’s welfare, or even your own welfare, it might you know, there might be a case for saying it’s a neutral mental factor. It’s not quite attachment in the normal sense.

But generally, other than looking at these small cases or this small category, that there might be some less harmful forms of attachment. Generally, it’s non virtuous attachment, whereas love is virtuous. Beautiful answer. So are you saying be cautious that your love is not just projection onto the object? With love, don’t be cautious.

It should be the opposite. Just love without any caution whatsoever because it cannot harm you or any being. As long as it’s not your car. You can’t love your car because it’s an inanimate object. But we say that.

And that’s the degree to which, in a sense, attachment has overcome or has imposed itself on our idea of love, which is a great it’s very unskillful. We shouldn’t use the word in that sense. But we do. It’s just part of the common language. That’s more attachment.

That’s more attachment. If it’s conditional and if it’s an interest, interested in one’s own what you’re getting out of a relationship and so on, then it’s more than just wishing the other being be happy. It’s a wish that has conditions applied, this fine print. So that condition that is placed upon that mental attitude affects it. And then it’s a question of whether it is, in fact, love after all, or whether it’s attachment.

But they’re very, very close and they almost mix together. Just as in the Desire Realm, non virtue and virtuous states tend to be mixed because our mind is just not trained in Samādhi. But how they mixed is another issue, whether in fact one arises and then the other arises and so forth. This is a very interesting question. I have a question that’s slightly off topic.

I’m just wondering if would be okay to ask. I was just wondering about the paths available to us to study the dharma, you know, monastic or non monastic. And is the monastic path only the Geshe degree? And what are the fruits of Geshe study and so forth? Actually, for those of us who are studying in the Gelupa tradition, it often seems that becoming a monk or a nun is, in fact, for the purpose of engaging in Geshe studies, to eventually become a Geshe and so on.

And that, in a limited way, is okay. But it’s not the only option and it’s not the only option for Tibetans either. And in fact, many monks, for instance, in in the past have gone into tantric colleges and focused on the major tantric traditions, memorizing the text, memorizing rituals. And so there’s other options. And there’s also other monasteries that engage in more specific practices, some that engage in meditation on Lamrim topics, for instance, that are in semi retreat for long periods or a full retreat over long periods meditating, for instance, on Lam Rim.

And other texts are also used. So traditionally, from the Tibetan point of view, there are different options that are possible. And they these different traditions arise because of the need perceived need of beings in particular times and places. And I think as Westerners, we’re still at the very beginning of the tradition and working out what is the best, you know, like curriculum of study for westerners. Is it doing the traditional Geshe studies or is it a mixture, more of a mixture?

Is it that we should be doing the ngondro, the preliminary practices first? So this is something that we have to really examine closely, and it’s gonna take time to establish these new traditions in the West. They would definitely come, because in any place where the Buddhadharma has spread, China initially, Sri Lanka, all the early places where Buddhism spread, they developed their own traditions. They took interest in certain aspects of the dharma and developed those. You can look at it in China with the 10 different traditional schools of Buddhism in China, all the way through to the Chan tradition, gave rise to Zen and so forth, which is quite famous.

And schools in other regions also tended to mirror the needs of the local population and what they are interested in and what they wanted, what they liked doing. Basically, it comes down to that. What we like doing, we will do. And Westerners are still yet to discover what we like. But once that becomes clear, because you need to like it, otherwise you have to put effort into doing it.

When you like a particular practice, you will do it effortlessly. But we still don’t have enough history in this new tradition yet to really begin to establish suitable traditions for Westerners. His Holiness is encouraging people to look at these issues and adapt the traditional teachings to conditions in the West. And, of course, this is common sense, and that’s something that will happen. Isn’t there a danger in that adaptation?

Is, you know, a danger in that adaptation that meaning can be lost? And looking at, for example, what I know of some American Dharma centers and publications, many of them don’t believe in past and future lives. So, know, you can read some of the magazines that come out and they don’t mention from one cover to the other, from one edition to the next, past and future lives just are not there. That, I would say, would be isn’t adapting. It’s adapting to the West to the to the American culture.

This is a false form of adoption of Buddhism, I would suggest, because there’s no way that you can accept Buddhism without reincarnation. There’s utterly no way. Because Buddhism is the four noble truths. And the first two truths are just the expression of the 12 links of of dependent origination. And reincarnation is there.

It’s the very fabric of the 12 links. So if you accept the two truths, the truth of suffering and the truth of origin, then you accept reincarnation. If you don’t accept reincarnation, you don’t accept the first two truths. So if you don’t accept the first two truths, you don’t accept the second set of two, the path, any path or any result. There’s no if the causation is not established, there’s no result.

So I think this as Eliot pointed out with conversations with Stephen Batchelor and so on. And Stephen Batchelor, unfortunately, is notorious for presenting this idea, this engaged Buddhism as something appropriate for the West. But it’s not a solution. It’s like trying to present the Buddhadharma without the four truths. Without the point.

Without the point of it. Exactly. It becomes pointless. And I’ve also met others from I was once in Bodh Gai and I met a scholar, a westerner, who was doing a PhD in Japan. But he was following Zen.

And he was a very interesting person to speak with. And we talked about Prajñāpāramitā and, oh yes, he was talking about that tradition in Japan. But he didn’t want he went on to say that, of course, reincarnation is a Hindu concept that somehow became involved with Buddhism at a certain point, which was unfortunate and it’s something that needed, you know, to be addressed. I found that really quite remarkable. And so we debated the point for some time and then agreed to disagree.

So, you know, there are many people with that sort of a view. But in the end, it renders Buddhadharma quite ineffective and pointless as you mentioned. I’d like to actually answer both your questions because they’re linked in a sense. Also answer Lily’s question as well. In a sense, can analyze the situation of Western centers as one of offer and demand.

What is the demand and what’s on offer? The demand is that of some type of belonging to a community in a society in which people really are very, very lonely and some type of meaning for life but something which is not too demanding. At the same time there is a fascination for extremely advanced and demanding practices, it’s a very contradictory demand. Then certainly in the Gaelic tradition, I think in all Tibetan traditions with a couple exception, what is on offer is a very traditional presentation in which Tantrayāna and to a lesser degree I was trained. When these two meet and Alan Wallace wrote an excellent article on this, you have a recipe for misunderstanding on both sides and Wallace pointed out that it is quite interesting that the Tibetan teachers for thirty, forty years felt that if something was presented traditionally and the students attended, they had received it traditionally.

It came as a very big shock to see that this was not the case and I remember very clearly the period when many great Tibetan masters understood that what they had presented traditionally with ceremonies for taking refuge, bodhisattva vows, tantric vows, commitments and whatnot which from their standpoint had turned a group of westerners into Tibetan disciples had actually not been received traditionally but had been received in a state of suspension of disbelief. In other words, you know, with a very big grain of salt. This has created a very major problem in the transmission of Buddhism to the West where most western disciples are now viewed by, I’ve seen this change in my life, viewed by the great Tibetan masters as fickle, unreliable and I’m sorry to use such a term but perhaps hypocritical. And I refer you to Wallace’s article, this is certainly not something which I alone have noticed. It’s come to a scale where in the monasteries if you ask a great teacher to teach in the West, there’s this big pause, right?

If you ask them to teach in Taiwan, it’s obvious. If you ask them to teach in the West, I ask, there was a big pause. Is it really worth it? It’s not that people don’t come, it’s that they’re not stable and that they go through the motions so one has the impression they are stable and then within a couple of weeks or couple of months they’re gone. And this has been going on for twenty, thirty years.

The result has been quite catastrophic. The result to put put it quite bluntly is that certainly now in the monasteries, if you’re westerner, you’re only taken seriously if you speak Tibetan. That’s the standard. If you speak fluent Tibetan, you’re considered as someone who has passed the test. If you don’t, you you’re considered as someone who’s here today and gone tomorrow.

And there’s many like that. Then the monasteries just in the last fifteen years have completely switched their orientation. The focus now is on the Asian communities. Singapore, Hong Kong, even Mainland China, Japan, traditional Buddhist societies where things are presented traditionally, they are received traditionally and both parties understand each other. You have taken refuge, you are a Buddhist.

No. You’re not half a Buddhist, half a Christian. No. You can’t believe in the Virgin Mary anymore. I show I show you the statistics.

You have taken Bodhisattva vows. No. You can’t go around practicing martial arts anymore. It’s not possible. You’ve taken Tantric vows.

It’s for all your future lives. You have to practice with that in mind. Your commitments are through the end of this life. No. Not as many students hear once every two days, every day.

So this has caused huge problems. Then to answer Andy’s question, you were ask asking basically where one could get serious training. Universities universities don’t provide training in a Buddhist religious context. The closest I ever found was Jeffrey Hopkins’s program at the University of Virginia and that was not completely rooted in a Buddhist context. It was very close.

Then after Jeffrey left for a variety of reasons, that changed. It’s no longer the same thing. Most universities train scholars who may or may not Buddhist, it’s be Buddhist. It’s generally an asset not to be a Buddhist, I think if you’re Buddhologist, right? It’s big asset.

It’s considered as a sign of objectivity and who will quibble over whether Chandra Kirti lived in the sixth or the seventh century or was it really the eighth century and the dating of Bhāvaviveka and this is not really what you’re interested in. The training in the monasteries is for monks and the closest we have for something which provides a training you’re interested in in India used to be the school of dialectics. The school of dialectics now is a pale reflection of what it used to be. Then in the West, Tashi Choeling where I was trained and now it’s Istituto Lama Tzong Khapa are probably the closest. In Australia there’s been tentative study programs.

It’s been very difficult to create something stable which led to results. We’ve been trying to do that here. It’s unclear what it will lead to. It’s unclear. Then for yourself if you’re seriously interested in studies you can certainly start studying here.

Then at some point I think you may want to think about going to Italy. That’s where it is now unless you want to learn Tibetan which is a difficult language because what you’re interested in is a study of Buddhism within a religious context, within a spiritual context. There’s not a lot of offers and the sad comment is there’s not a lot of offers because there is basically no demand. If there was a demand, there would be such centers all over. If you have no more questions, maybe we shall stop here for today.

Jampa, Ingyen and Ilya, thank you so much for giving up your time. Sorry. I was just thanking Jampa Ingyen and Ilia for giving up their time and especially for the many hours of preparation for Jumper, Inion to fly over and stay with us. We obviously have a lot to contemplate at many levels. Certainly the dharma is always challenging and that’s how it should be.

And as I said yesterday, thank you both for your example of the manifestation of Rinpoche’s love and care for us by being such faithful exemplars of the dharma. And certainly, I think the challenge, Ilya, for us to be seriously examined, the question that you posed yesterday about what inhibits us, what are the barriers for us to deepen our practice is something that I know I, for one, and all of us will be continuing to contemplate. And I would also say that, Ilya, you have been and are a great benefactor for this centre. And on behalf of all the students, those that are here and those who attend regularly, you know, I think from my heart and on behalf of all of us, we would thank you and wish and pray that you continue to remain among us for as long as that is possible. I know it’s our responsibility to create the causes for that.

And so thank you for reminding us that the teachers only abide independence upon the qualities and the effort that the students have to put in. So again, that is food for thought for all of us. Thank you. Just a very small token of our appreciation. Haigh’s chocolates purport to be of ethical, you know, the chain of dependence in terms of cocoa beans and labor all the way through to Yes, that’s right.

And so there’s a little pamphlet to explain, in fact, the ethics of chocolate. So this one was even especially packaged for Jampa Ingyen for travelling purposes. So it’s good to see that a commercial organisation was keen to promote its ethical status. So thank you, everybody, for coming. And, of course, there’s a lot of work behind the scenes, especially for the nourishing sustenance, the substance for the body.

Thank you, Tenzin. I think he appeared. Of course, the Geshe’s who assisted Tenzin in helping to prepare such delicious food. And Carol and Mandy and our sound and recording people, as you know, and Sam, because this can be broadcast beyond this weekend. If anybody would like to take some of the wet details with them and wash them, that would be appreciated.

And then as I mentioned before, there is a pooja at 06:00, if those of you can manage it. So once again, if you would like to join with me to thank Ilya and Jampa Ingyen in the traditional manner. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Thanks, Chris.