we rolling baby intelligent Interiors those of us who like our spirituality with they twist so we are here back again we were doing this little series on the three bodies of the Buddha one of the trickiest subject matters of Buddhist thought and so we're gonna do like we're in the midst of the series uh and we're going to talk today about killing the Buddha uh as Daniel pointed out great title for an episode for a podcast like ours that's right and then also like uh kind of a Trippy subject matter so we'll talk about that but first we got to acknowledge that Daniel is coming it was all the way from Italy yeah right now this on video he is uh you know across the pond and in the uh in the ancient uh in the ancient uh country yeah so how are things over there things over here are you know are interesting uh although by the time we record this I'll be back in the in the States but we're recording it live and I'm over here uh it's you know I haven't traveled outside of the country for seven or eight years so it's been quite a long time and you know very fortunate enough in in my life and in your life Eric too to be able to do some International traveling and you know see this beautiful planet that we're on and I don't know get in touch with other cultures and it really is nice to be in a place where there's multiple languages being spoken all at the same time and you see like living history so some of the buildings that are here are have been here for I don't know 500 800 you know like it's a really or a lot or older you know a really long time so you know you could see Humanity's growth even from an architectural standpoint you know and from an artistic standpoint too you go see some of the art that's still here are still available and I think um you know being in the US we don't have access to this at all it is not part of uh the Lexicon of our daily existence unless you go outside to see it or you might happen upon some Museum you know which one and we're located in Chicago so we're fortunate to have some really great museums there but that's they're few and far in between actually so a lot like uh beautiful nature but we don't have the like the ancient history kind of things like you'd have over there right yeah yeah so you're in Florence so yeah a lot of great art yeah yeah so it's nice to be immersed in this it it reminds you that like human beings have been here for Rel a relatively long you know short time but for us a long time um and to see the growth and to see how things you know have come uh it's cool it's a cool reminder it does something to mind trippy thing because I was in Rome twice in my life so far I have Italian friends who live in Rome uh so that's uh great friends to have friends that you can stay with and um the first time was after 9 11 but when the United States had invaded into Iraq and uh and it was like weird to be there at the time you know because you know there were lots of positive sentiments towards Americans and then it flipped like in the day there were a lot of like not positive sentiments to Americans right uh there were memorials on the street still to 911 and then when all this went down they all just disappeared in the day gone you know that was during the George W bush era and then I I was traveling around in Rome and I was like God you know Rome is a lot like the United States you know and we were talking like pre-show uh there's a great sci-fi writer Philip K dick and he just said like the Roman Empire never ended it just kept going on and on and on and now it's the United States you know the big Power trying to subjugate everything and then the next second time I was there it was during the Trump thing so it like sucked both times and each time I was like yeah you know it's like it's Rome and the first you know one was sort of more like one side of Rome the Imperial side of Rome and then the second time was sort of like the psycho side of Rome once Trump was there you know like uh Caligula who would like make his horse like uh a senator and like because Trump's such a Luna so anyways that was my experience share it a little you're going to Rome soon though right you've been everything yeah I've never been I've never been here before oh okay yeah oh that's right you were saying yeah all right well we'll look forward to the report next week you can tell us if you think that the Empire never ended you'll see the Coliseum and you'll be like God it's just like Soldiers Field in Chicago you know the football it feels like the exact same thing it's like yep people got together to watch people bash each other and you know yeah same bye yeah American football um all right cool so we're talking about what it means to when they have these like outrageous things they say in Zen killing the Buddha and all that so but give some quotes in a second I wanted like we usually think in the podcast it's better to have a little backstory yeah because it helps talk about how you know people come to what they think and all that so for me this goes back to my first love and uh you know we were together for seven years and we fought like hell but we also had like you know very awesome parts of our connection with one another and one of my Fascinations obviously on the podcast is how interpersonal relationship helps our spirituality so I think this was part of my idea of how I started thinking this way because she and I affect each other so much and you know she was connected to my my Buddhists uh you know reinvention in a very real way so on the shallow side she moved into the dorm and uh there was a guy in the dorm who was a Buddhist and she was like oh it's so cool he's such a Buddhist and yeah and I was like oh she's at the Buddhists so I was like mental note this chick like Buddhist so maybe I gotta like think about that that's not a very deep reason to be Buddhist but it's real you know I was in my undergrad whatever man whatever whatever so that was working the the Buddhist goddesses was working we're working to like lure me um and then um uh I think when she went down to Chinatown she brought me back this Buddhist statue so there was something going on around this that was karmically kind of interesting I don't think she was Buddhist herself but for some reason she was bringing this into my world which is very interesting uh I think karmically speaking right I think that does happen and then the big thing that happened was we would do like really nice things for one another you know we fought really bad but we do really nice things for each other too and so if one of us was behind in like our work you know we were both in undergrad at the time you know we'd help each other out so she was like massively behind in this semester she would like take tons and tons of classes that she really couldn't do and she'd get massively behind and she was very driven person which I respected but it was also a little crazy I was like okay I'm gonna help you out so she had she was taking this class uh on like like religion because she went to DePaul University in Chicago so you know religious place right and so everyone had to take some religious classes and actually dug out the old book that she used there it is ratings on comparative religion yeah yeah if you're like it's from by The Faculty of DePaul University [Music] yeah feedback back in my undergrad yeah so like decades ago so um so anyway she had to write these essays and one of them was on Zen and I didn't know anything about Zen and um it was done by this like Japanese philosopher who was like thinking about Western philosophy and Eastern philosophy a guy named uh uh and uh part of this school of thought that's called The Kyoto school which I don't know if this will come up ever again in this podcast but they were a group of like Japanese philosophers who are trying to integrate east and west but they were talking a lot about Zen and like Japanese philosophy and also about things that were more Western and I read this essay you know as I was trying to write this thing actually with my best friends from school we were all living together in undergrad and we were all sitting around our kitchen table we lived in this dumpy neighborhood called Bridgeport in Chicago out the window you could see where the Chicago White Sox play baseball which is one of the two crap teams we have who play baseball in Chicago and uh you could see it out the window um the White Sox if they ever hit a home run like fireworks go off and so occasionally fireworks would go off in the stadium and you could see them through our window anyways I was there and my friend and I were reading this stuff and it was just such a trip we had never read anything like this before in our life it's Americans and we were like this is the truthiest thing you know like just intellectually you know as undergrads and so he was the the this Japanese philosopher was writing this whole thing about this idea of like killing the Buddha and I was like wow so I'll give some quotes just to give it in the context right so uh I got the old book out in front of me here so it says wash your mouth after you utter the word Buddha or it says there is one word I do not like to hear and that is Buddha or it says Buddhas and Patriots are your deadly enemies or it says uh I have cut off Buddhas and Patriarchs kill Buddhas and Patriarchs I've been sharpening the sword when the wheel turns the no the void gnashes its teeth and I was like damn that's some deep sounding [...] so give the uh give the other one give the main one the main one we're gonna be talking about is from rinzai it was a real famous then master and I studied in the Zen School ultimately probably in the back of my mind influenced by the idea of um you know these words I had heard right um so uh there's a long thing from rinzai famous zen master and he says this thing encountering a Buddha killing the Buddha encountering a patriarch killing the patriarch Patriarchs are kind of like the Zen Masters right so it'd be like encountering the Zen master killing the Zen master encountering in our hot like a Buddhist follower kill the arhat encountering a mother or a father killing mother or father encountering a relative killing the relative only then does one obtain Liberation and disentanglement from All Things thereby becoming completely unfettered and free so it's you know quite a deep little thing it's very powerful right and I read this as you know like an undergrad that was in my like early 20s and I was like wow what are they saying here you know in this thing and it really hit me obviously they're talking in some ways and we're going to go to how this relates back to the three values of the Buddha a little bit but you know reading it as uh you know like a young man in my 20s I was like yeah they're trying to say something about um cutting yourself away from these Concepts of these things that are holding you back from Freedom that in a way like holding Buddha in your mind is too much of a concept or like a zen master or even your mother and father or some other close person like a relative ultimately could be a thing that will hold you back inside and I suppose psychologically that spoke to me kind of deep yeah there's also something kind of rebellious in it and I kind of grew up listening to like like the sex pistols and The Clash and stuff like that sure part of me that I kind of liked like the aggressiveness and the rebelliousness of It kind of spoke to me too it had a little Edge on it so I was like oh I never heard it religion is kind of edgy you know or uh like a philosophy or something like this yeah philosophy so I was like yeah this has some Edge and I like the edge I like the idea of like the sword being sharpened and the void gnashing its teeth and like you meet the Buddha on the road and you kill the Buddha or you meet you know something else that my inside of you hold you back so that's kind of the idea behind the quote on a very basic level right the trippy thing in the essay is that he goes on to talk about like they were interested in the school of thought of comparing like east and west so he took these things from yeah I was raised Catholic and so were you Daniel right so this he takes these things from the gospel too they go back to like the Gospel of Luke and um so here's the thing from Jesus if anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters and yes even his own life he cannot be my disciple Jesus and Luke which I can't remember anyone really making a big deal about that I think they skip over that when I was in church that part was skipped that part was glossed they never did like a reading from the Gospel of Luke and then the person's out there and they go if anyone comes to me and does not hate his own mother and father and wife and children and brothers and sisters and yes even his own life he cannot follow me amen this is the reading of the Gospel of Luke nope didn't happen in my church all of the patrons get up walk out to their cars by the way drive home everybody goes okay perfect lesson well take well well understood yeah they get into that Prius and drive home they would probably have to uh do the collection plate before that part of the reading for that Sunday so it was interesting because like obviously he was you know this Japanese philosopher was just from Japan going through these you know Western things and he could find the equivalent sayings sometimes that we use a lot but you could find them uh so G says another one like this he says truly I say to you there is no man who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children uh uh okay truly I said you there's no man who has left house or wife or brother or parents or children for the sake of the Kingdom God will not receive manifold more in this time and in the ages to come eternal life so he's basically it's kind of a similar Point happening where it's kind of like this idea like well all of these things will potentially be the things that will kind of hold you back you know this this is similar Eric to um a story I've given once before but it fits here there was a there's a guy he's a I don't know he's he's just he's an you know Indian of Indian descent um and he became a monk I don't ask me what tradition he was in I don't know but his given name that he took from the after the monastery was Don dapani so he goes by he's just you know kind of a spiritual teacher Don dapani and he has meditation courses and you know something like a sad Guru or something like this you know and not familiar with him but okay yeah I get that right so he left he did 10 years at a monastery and I don't know exactly where it was but um he left him honestly he was getting ready he wanted to leave and he was talking to his teacher and he's like you've been a very good student you know you've been here you've served 10 years we you know we appreciate everything if you want to go live your life you're more than welcome and encouraged to go do so actually that's how teachings live is by sharing not just by you know keeping and um he said well I wish you good luck because teachers said I wish you good luck however I only have one request of you you know besides keep up your practices and things like this don't go back to your don't move back to your hometown and he said well why why not he said well the reason being is that the people who know you will pull you back to the place that you were at before you came here I don't care who you are because they don't see you for the person that you've become they see you for the person that you were and those emotional attachments run to you deep from the beginning of your life and they will pull they will undo all of your training no matter how much you think that you've changed and so I feel like that is a you know a real tangible kind of lesson from a contemporary being a similar kind of vibe right a similar kind of idea going on I can't remember by thinking the Bob Thurman episode that we did you know with him he talked about like going back to New York where he came from and that was just hard for him because obviously he was around all these people who didn't know him as this like Buddhist monk wearing this Buddhist attire trying to be this other person right and then like and even if you go back I mean he did you know leave his first wife right and his kid I mean he did that thing I mean as he described it in the episode he didn't want to he wanted them to come along with him on where he went where he felt like he needed to go he invited you know they probably had the resources to do it but you know wasn't her inclination right and so they separated and so you get that you get that thing through this right yeah there's probably like if you go so I'm gonna say like that part has to do with like mothers fathers relatives you know people who are the people that you grew up with yeah I think there's parts of like renzai's talking about that right those that the The View that those folks have of you will probably be potentially come an obstacle right yeah yeah yeah and I can see this in uh treatment I think maybe I mentioned this like a few episodes ago but um you know there's a person who is going through kind of these Dallas chemical acupuncture treatments um um through one of those schools where I teach yeah I'm kind of doing the supervision on it it's kind of like a passion of mine so there's a student who wanted to do it coming in a patient who wanted to do it who's coming into the clinic there and you can really support before you go Eric I don't think we've given much context on this so maybe just 60 seconds or so yeah you know yeah we just kind of dropped it in and there's we've never talked about it on the show we'll probably have to have a separate episode like to really do a job for sure oh I'm running it right now on two people so yeah yeah yeah yeah it's kind of like uh yo so when I got into the Chinese macro world it's a funny world to be in because you could spend a lot of your time like trying to fix people's irritable bowel syndrome or trying to fix their you know uh diverticulitis or trying to fix their uh you know cold feet you know difficulty staying asleep all the all the issues urinary incontinence uh you know pain in their shoulder girl you know there's a lot of things you do that kind of medicine is obviously important it's part of like trying to treat human suffering I mean if those things are bothering you that's a major factor in that person's life so no no minimizing of that on the other hand uh you know I was interested in like Zen and taoism right I was interested in this sort of spirituality and I wanted to know how you could use tools of traditional Chinese medicine for sort of like spiritual transformation psychological transformation this is sort of like a fascination and so I think for me I had this background the Zen school I was in was very Taoist like I've talked about before on the podcast and I you know so I started working on these things and I learned from different people within the Chinese medical field around this I had that Dr I say with from China Master shangley Wong I studied things from uh Master Jeffy Wen who's kind of a very important person I went through the Dallas Classics I looked through you know the Zen things that are relevant it was just sort of a big project of mine over years of working on this and that's actually part of our our relationship and friendship because we got to know each other around this stuff too so it actually be kind of a thing of like you know you had an interest I had an interest we started sharing this interest and um so it's sort of a series of acupuncture protocols that can also have herbal things with them that you can kind of do in stages to kind of like mimic meditative experiences kind of right yeah yeah that's kind of what it's about and you know it's staged so kind of trying to match the kind of stages a person might have in their own personal kind of Journey and experience but sort of try and use the ACT acupuncture to be a little bit triggering of those things right it's the same way you do in a lot of times where you have meditations that are progressive you kind of walk through steps right and so it's trying to capture some of that and give people kind of the taste of these experiences and a lot of it's very cathartic and uh you know life-changing you know so to me I don't know that was an important time in my life and it was around the time we were getting to know with another too where this was sort of coming to a fruition at least for me uh it was like coming to a place of interest for you and um you know we shared a lot of passion around this a set of interests uh platonic passion that we shared um yeah that's for sure yeah so uh but yeah it was like sort of like what kind of bonded us in a way oh we both had yeah how do we use this field to cycle spiritually help people so that's kind of the gist of it yeah but the thing is like when you go through something like this and I can definitely say it was true for me going through my zen things and like at different times in my life where the people around you it's threatening for them yeah very threatening you start to change sometimes in ways that they're not entirely comfortable with and even if someone that you know and love just changes period it's still threatening even if it's positive you know because where's this person I used to know they're disappearing yeah before my eyes or sometimes the conflict is deeper like there's real like okay you like this old version of me but this new version of me you're not that into and we're gonna have some conflict around this until you adjust to this new version of me definitely can say I went through these things yeah yeah we've we've talked we've definitely talked about this before coming off Retreat or something like this coming up you know even yeah that's usually that's usually when it is I was gonna say maybe off a vacation too but usually not it's usually when there's some you're you're changing some of the software you know that people can there's a resonance to it that's like it's almost like something's different and instead of inquiring nicely what's different I'm going to argue with you I'm going to try to suppress this development in you yeah with every mechanism I can think of yeah anyway so yeah so you're patient so you're so you're running this this Taoist treatment on your patient you were saying I was just saying like you know like in this case you know it's a person who's hitting up against this where people in their life are like kind of like yeah no yeah and you can see for them they're like no there's this new person in me that has to come out you know and there's conflict you know and I empathize and that's rinzai or what you were talking about this you know this teacher was giving his advice to the student who was going on his own way now right yeah yeah yeah so that's that part of that I mean like as far as it goes you know uh again we share on the podcast my uncle passed away over the summer and I was doing a lot of caretaking around him with my brother my brother and I got to be closer over the summer because we finally admitted to him and admitted to one another that like the changes between the two of us caused problems in some level I changed as a person and this caused problems you know he changed too so it was a both sides thing I'm not gonna say it was just sure it was both of us you know there were ways and we had to admit to each other like uh you know each in our own ways we probably were slightly judging one another we probably saw you know like whatever our own things were towards the other person some of the stuff we imagined which was interesting some of it was just I thought you had more against this than what you do so we straightened that part out what other parts were like yeah you know and there had been sort of a tension I think whenever I would bring up anything that had to do with like my spiritual parts of my life my brother would immediately change the subject for like decades so I was like dude that's the reason I stopped talking to you because I felt like the things that were the most I mean we still talked but yeah broke up or anything but we lost the intimacy of our relationship with one another yeah you know around that issue because the things that were most important to me you don't want to talk about yeah because they make you uncomfortable so anyways that's that thing so that's the part about like uh uh encountering mother or father killing mother or father pretty strong language uh encountering a relative killing a relative only thus does one attain Liberation disappointment disentanglement from All Things thereby becoming completely unfettered and free so that's that part the other part is really interesting because it's a little bit more conceptual right it's the idea of the Buddha or the Zen master or whoever you know that holds this image in your mind right that ends up in a way like becoming an obstacle I mean that's an interesting thing too and it's kind of cool that they go there you know so the idea would be even the I don't know the Buddha that you hold in your mind or uh you know I don't know if you want to go farther the Jesus that you hold in your mind or um you know the Muhammad that you hold in your mind like might be a problem right it might ultimately be a problem for you and you have to like transcend those things otherwise even those things will like befuddle and be Dazzle and confuse your mind yeah I think it's I mean there so for me the way that I've always taken this is that like yes on one part so there's you know we're trying to do like multiple layers right so there's the one part of like just familial and you know I don't know friendly ties that you have to your community you know which can be good but can also be problematic as if we as we've kind of listed here when someone is doing some deep change you know and they don't have you know because we're we're what we're weaving things into our lives so we'll go on retreat but then you come back and you go to work it's not like you you know you do a retreat for a week or 10 days or a month and you come back and you have another month to kind of ease in a little bit whatever no you're just like right right back into the flow and so that people are butting up against your own internal changes and so there's probably some resistance even within yourself that people can sense you know um so you have this one kind of practical level of people on people but then you also have the con the conceptual level which is what you're talking about that these you know and the term patriarch actually is a really a good one is a really good term because it's used now a lot so you have these kind of like concepts of of power holders in your mind and even if they are Jesus or a Buddha or your parents we still have a concept of them that probably is only one tenth of one percent of what those beings are even if we've read stories about them or know them as intimately as our parents they still have a whole nother fast to them that we're unaware of so these are like living Concepts that we have to transcend you know and then I think it's also for me at least in my understanding of this this uh I'm not going to say need but this form of external validation whether it come from your you know Guru whether it come from your teacher your parents whomever it is that like in order to really transcend and become truly free and unattached to anything you have to let two let that go so when someone says if you see a Buddha kill it then it's it's the concept of a thing that you believe is the Buddha because you have to believe that thing first like Christ you know supposedly to the story that we've been told Christ was a person who walked around on the earth yeah but to some people he was a incarnate incarnation of the Divine Source itself and to other people he was some you know naughty naughty boy safe overthrow uh the money changers little uh tables and stuff right yeah then he was a pain in their ass so like you know I had a friend of mine asked me a couple years ago he's like well do you if Jesus came back what do you think would happen I was like nothing he's like come on man I was like well yeah who even when he was here before no but nobody believed he was the person who he says he was now you got internet and all that kinds of stuff like No One's Gonna even if there were Miracles performed who would believe it you know only people that were in that spot so I think in that sense like the Buddha has been you know that the concept the concept has been killed and and it's just a nice way of putting nice right but like it's a stark way of putting it it's like forceful and powerful and like yes it like hits cut right yeah yeah it's just like it's just like a well-placed cut from a blade like it did right in there because it gets here right I mean they're saying it's kind of like a conceptual sword our boy mondry Street one of our favorite bodhisattva's favorites figures of Enlightenment carries the sword and you cut through stuff so this whole idea that you could have an internal idea of things in your mind that will hold you back right whether it's like you want to impress your parents or you want to like try to like and press this Divine figure or yeah whatever you're trying to do with that yeah yeah I mean that it's even like it's even uh societal imprints which we talk about all the time I mean these kind of unconscious things that we do that work by the way I need those things in case it hasn't come up in a couple episodes I've never mentioned that before really tell you more about it we had to come up with the last two episodes so I feel like you know I'm overdue drop it in but yeah no I mean those are and to me this definitely touches on on that as well which is the beauty of you know really studying these kinds of philosophies is that it is not limited to just simply like one Viewpoint it always in my opinion always touches a larger audience it's just a larger audience doesn't really get a chance to hear it because it is you know it is kind of not subtle but it is subtle as far as my hatred of society and you know like uh uh you know when you when you read those well you don't hate electricity and like well-paved roads no no no no no no Organization no no it's a different it's a different problem but there's a question of being on fettered and free correct doesn't necessarily want you to be unfettered and free no so yeah that's the issue so the other thing is like even like the way that's described you might have like a societal idea where the Buddha is a master is or this is the idea what your mother or father or relative are I mean you could see that being connected back to that too because that's probably why you even heard about it well you would have heard about those things within the society in which you're living but no one like we said earlier no one read anything to me in my CCD class Catholic uh catechism class is about like if you have to hate your mother and father and your everybody and you know they didn't tell me that one they said love thy name well obviously it's so interesting because the point he's making there is like you have to break free of something you have to want to be changing your life and so you have to look at your life and say I want to change now of course the other part we're going to like talk real because we're you know we're trying to do uh uh Tantra in the 21st century is like you can still be around those people that you love of course you're just going to transform Tantra your relationship to them right and one of the you know the tantric tools is to go through and see you know uh your loved one as like a Divine figure as a meditation right and it changes your your feeling of being with them even though they're acting the same it changes your relationship to them by doing that right so this is like this thing that you can go through and you can still be around people but you have to transform that relationship some way or another Eric who's the there's a story of this monk who was um not an not an intelligent monk not one that they could give work uh books to to study but they had him uh greet people at the front of the gate this isn't this book that I read and I don't know if you know the story or not but he was kind of we'll call him simple you know for lack of better terms but he might have had some handicap I don't know there's a real person I forgot his name so apologies to whomever this is but thank you for reminding me of you in the story um he bowed to everything that walked by him okay yeah even the animals that every person homeless King with the same gratitude he bowed you know and they said that he recently he reached he attained Enlightenment before he passed because he saw the the Buddha teacher and all things or something like that yes yes and it's interesting I he came to me because I was walking you know from the train station to where you know this Airbnb where we're staying and um there's a couple homeless people begging for money but one guy and I didn't have any you know money on me I would have given it to him he just he had his his cup in front of his head and he had his head forehead to the cement and His Hands Palms up back of the hands on this on the cement yeah yeah yeah yeah he did not move and I saw him from like about a half a block forward and I turned around actually yeah and I turned around until I couldn't see him anymore and the second before I couldn't see him he had not moved and this is and it's crowded so it's not like I'm not like power walking with my little two pound weights you know what I mean like yeah I'm dragging a bag and I got a backpack and I'm with other people so it's a little bit of a long trip to get there you mean yeah yeah sure I mean okay let's be realistic three to four minutes he didn't move and it's not like this you know cement was just power washed you know these are old Cobblestone ground I've been here for you know hundreds at least hundreds of years you know what I'm saying and he didn't move his face it just reminded me of this kind of like you know deep bowing to the the Deep Buddha nature or the Deep Christ nature or the Deep Soul you know whatever and everybody and and seeing your partner in in that that way in their highest like their highest form or even higher you know is a practice in doing that I mean you can do a visualization like that you know which I think you really should do if you're doing like the kind of Buddhist Tantra that sometimes you go back to our home base but it doesn't have to be that at all where you can just kind of look into everybody's chest and just see like the Divine Light there correct yeah I mean that's that's just done that just you know when you're looking at your boss or you're looking at the co-worker or something you just make a point of like seeing you know that Divinity even if it's like a creation of your mind in the moment you keep doing it over and over again correct it'll change how you feel in your interaction with the world so it's a way around this killing thing right yeah you don't have to kill you have to like you know but it isn't a way a kind of a killing you know in the sense that you're going through and you're saying okay I'm gonna drop my conception of this person what they're doing I'm gonna drop my conception of this person honestly I'm in a new way being killed by internal image of who I think they are yeah you're killing the the uh the relative concept of their self-identification yeah something like that they're gonna be who they are that's funny right they're going to be who they are whoever they are they're going to keep being but from your side you're doing this thing right and you know that's they have the right to be whoever they're going to be but from your side you get like this thing where you can do this sort of technique that will just keep reminding yourself of the bigger picture question involved in all of this right well and they they have this in New Age terminology they have this idea of your you know your quote-unquote higher self you know the one that's fine right the one that's the enlightened version I mean so you know it's not a foreign concept you know you can certainly view people do this tantric thing do this shamanic thing where you see them as that version of their higher selves yeah and like if you look like listen to The Dalai Lama he had to do that with like Chairman Mao you know like taking over his country you know so he killed lots and lots and lots of Tibetans lots of them where you could be like okay I have to like see this person is having this inner Divinity even though in the relationship we're in now he's you know being like a destructive force you know so yeah so that's it right and I I think when you talked about you know he was doing the meditations around that the dalaiyama talks about this he was like well you know it wasn't like it changed his mind Chairman Mao's mind but it did change my relationship to him right and uh uh and so that was healing from the Dalai Lama side yeah yeah and you know we can do this with you know I mean Super practical because Capricorn right you know you could do this with your co-workers you could do this with difficult family members um if you're listening to this on a on a bus or some public transportation or you're sitting in traffic you don't have to interact with those people right right at the moment you don't have to interact with them like right now but you're totally within feet or maybe even inches of somebody right because I'm just thinking of when we spent so much time downtown you know studying and whatnot yeah we'd be around people all the time and I know there's there's students of yours who listen to this um you know who are sitting in classes with people and you know spending a lot of time around other people in a very kind of close New York over the weekend didn't like uh you know you're in the subway you're like right up close with a bunch of people who are strangers so in the Buddhist thing there's people you love there's people you hate there's people here kind of neutral towards you're around because people you're neutral towards but you can still kind of like do this exercise as you're so you can absolutely do that exercise so if you're listening to this right now do this exercise right like right right the second here's your reminder like you do this right now and the thing is like you can practice people you don't know it's so much easier because you don't have any attachment to them big who knows they could be God right there right in that person there's another Jesus right here or or Josephina or whatever you know I don't know yeah who are you Sophia uh-huh yeah there you go so yeah there she is she's just hanging out there she is she's right there and you know now she's dressed up with like black boots fishnet stockings you know kind of a mid-rift uh black skirt uh black eyeliner black lipstick and black nails but you know whatever got Sofia yeah that's it yeah so you're like but you know like that's kind of a thing you can do so this is like but I think when you get to the people that because it did help me when I got to the people who was like okay I love this person and yet they're kind of annoying me all right so what does this have to do with like the three coyotes as we kind of yeah there's three bodies so we've been trying to talk about these three bodies of the Buddha because you know that realized in prepping this episode and I think we'll come back to it depending on how we try to handle this little series that we're doing here how many times we want to do I think it's kind of cool to talk about these this terminology because it's going to be used all over the place so decide that you're interested in this stuff people are going to be talking in these words it's like language that's gonna be used all over the place but you know people don't always mean the same thing exactly right when they're saying this or maybe they kind of do it's interesting so just to have a whole series of things where we start talking about like when people use these words what do they mean because different people will probably have different points of emphasis in this right correct and because it's such a tricky subject and it's a little bit intimidating because you know there's Sanskrit words yeah they're kind of weird Concepts and you know uh just to go through and talk about these things in a way that like say okay these are words you're going to stumble across in your spiritual travels and here's a sense of how different what different people mean or how different people think about this when they use these words because we're going to get interested in anything Buddhist this is going to come up right yeah so anyways so we talked about this idea of uh what I'm I'm referencing best back to master Wong uh Kai Keat so you know he's the person who I was kind of using as the kind of basis for the discussion because I like the way he talks about it so I'm referencing him with this and um and so you know he like the whole idea is that you know like the actual appearance of a person in a gross level way around you is there either people say emanation body or he likes to say transformational body interesting right and so that's one way of thinking about this but when he talks about this idea of killing the Buddha uh he kind of says it a little bit differently so he says you know the transformation body is like all of the Myriad phenomena of the world around you is like a big transformation body right so everything you're experiencing through your senses is like one big transformation body around you and it's also kind of illusory in the sense that it appears to be permanent it's not it appears to be independent of your own experience of it but it's not your mind is projecting things onto us all onto it all this good stuff that we talk about with this thought right spiritual thought and it's not just Buddhist it's like if you're a shaman or if you're a Hindu you talk the same way right okay so there's this feature of like the transformational body as being the Myriad phenomena of the world but understood to be illusory okay and that's the idea that in Enlightenment probably the enlightened person is like connected to everything so they're appearing around you entwined with all the world [Music] the same way you could take an idea of like the Dao in taoism is all around you all the time in the world right or you know God is around you all the time if you want to make it more personal whatever floats you about okay so that idea right all the world around you is this emanation body and then he goes on to talk about this more subtle level of things that we talked about a few episodes ago which is the idea of either you call it the reward or the enjoyment body this is usually kind of visualized as the aspect of the enlightened person that kind of appears in a Divine form or something like appears like Tara or appears like manjushri or appears like Jesus or whatever you know but in like kind of an energetic form you might say like a more subtle energetic form so he says you know this reward or enjoyment body is the more subtle energetic level of personalized enlightenment uh they're Divine figures that may or may not be seen by everybody but if you do some training you do some meditating you make a connection you might see this person right in this way you might see this aspect of enlightenment so and he does make the comparison you know we've been doing a little bit of like uh figures who are trying to compare East and West Japanese and Chinese and he says yeah if you like kind of like work on this connection and this is a little bit more he says like uses the word like anthropomorphic right like you see God as Jesus in the west or you see God in a theistic sense appearing as some Divine form like you see Krishna or you see Tara or you see whatever it is but you have a connection like to that so you can see that and not everybody can but it's a reward for you and it's kind of enjoyable so they say reward or enjoying the body this is a second idea this I would even you know for me just because you know I have the shamanic twist I would even argue that like this could be some people's like like non-embodied Spirit Animals yeah I think it's totally good that like people would have that and I think you know not everybody has to study Shamanism to have heard those terms before you know like so I think this is kind of like a great Visionary Eagle appears to you you're like what are you seeing you're seeing a Divine form and in this way you're saying you're seeing as like a symbolga yeah right yep it appears like a big eagle because you're in it right yeah and and usually like when you deal with something in that realm it's known as Eagle you know or bear or dog or rabbit like it's archetypal almost yeah right exactly yeah yeah it's it's not like a rabbit like no this this is all rabbit here you go like this is rabbit kind of like means what rabbit Yes means spiritually or something like that right and like often and it's it's rare and you know it's like the attributes that that animal has sometimes it does imprint it to the person who's learning it but oftentimes it's a much larger actually you know but like it comes in a form that is agreeable that you have some karmic connection with like if you want to see some nice mothery Tara type looking figure like you'll see Tara and there are people who are into that if you want to see some like super hot Buddhist goddess or some super hot Buddhist uh God or something well then you're gonna be into that yeah yeah no and so it's like it'll appear again the idea is it'll appear in a way that like speaks to your inner like Tendencies proclivities yeah your nature right and and killing the concept of this before you even start or in order to break free from what you think you need is an important aspect to this because I will I will say from you know teaching the shamana course now for the last you know whatever eight or nine years it's the acceptance that this is here for somebody you know or that whatever there's whatever someone is seeing in these states these kind of like meditative states that they're not they're not making it up that this is real for them you know but like whatever comes for you is design right for it's designed right for you I can't I can't make this up it's your kind of thing um and people have a hard time yeah people have a hard time letting go you know of like looking something up online oh I saw I saw a dog let me go look up what dog means it's like looking up a dream of course you can do it but like that's that might not have the meaning for you that this thing actually has if you just simply interact with it versus putting your conceptual mind immediately on it and starting to break it down like leave your meditation leave your experience with this raw material and let that come up and don't be conceptual about it allow this to kind of like permeate through your life as opposed to just putting on definition upon definition upon definition yeah I think like I've gotten more and more I was talking with uh front of the show Justin key today and you know I've gotten more and more through doing this podcast you just get more you probably get this just through experience in general but this thing in particular gets you more and more open-minded is you just start to get to the attitude of like different things work for different people yeah right which is sort of no but the more you talk about it and we've interviewed different people about this and you know and we talk with one another and we share different Traditions you start to get this thing like yeah different things work for different people yeah different people will connect to different things in different ways and that's very sure comforting yeah so okay so when he gets to uh um the biggest part of this we got three bodies right this idea of their Monica emanation transformation this idea of subhoga Kaya uh reward or enjoyment uh you know about their points out this is related to the word for orgasmic too so sometimes like more than just a joints sometimes they'll use Bliss for this right and then you can get to the point of talking about what's called dharmakaya and the point that Master Wong is trying to make here is that this uh aspect he calls you can call it the truth body or reality body how you want to translate Dharma is always complicated right I think he likes to use the word spiritual but anyways this is the the ultimate ground level Cosmic reality undifferentiated formless Blissful if you're a Dallas person you get kind of close to dial there or something but this is the kind of ground of everything and this thing is secretly everything right around you right there's certainly like a line of spiritual thought that goes this way for sure everything around you is just this pure ground of being that's why Bob Thurman says in his book cheer the [...] up swimming in the sea of bliss um even though things of course like are serious in other ways you don't want to be minimizing okay anyways uh so this is kind of like an ultimate goal in Buddhism to experience everything kind of like that uh and also to experience that our deepest reality is that too right so this is this kind of reality body thing so then when you know Master Wong is getting to the point of talking about this thing from rin's eye his way of talking about this you know which is how we got into the episode in the first place which is you know interesting is this whole idea that um what all this killing business means is that you want to transcend all that relative stuff you want to transcend the harmonica part even though that's cool you want to transcend the simpoke cry apart uh even though that's cool and you want to get to the deepest Reality Part that's the dharmakaya reality of everything as this pure sea of undifferentiated bliss energy or something and uh Cosmic Cosmic reality is this undifferentiated thing without any form but all this part and so this is the way he talks about the meaning secretly behind this thing you kill these relative Concepts even the ones that are kind of nice they're Monica is so you can find your way back to this deeper level of reality and you know uh that's a powerful idea right as a way of talking about this so this is sort of I wanted like I had my mind doing this because I thought we were talking about these three kinds I was like okay cool so he's talking about this idea of killing the Buddha and all this kind of stuff well what does that mean and you can see it has multiple levels of like possible meaning you know yeah which good stuff is like that it like hits and differences right but in this case the idea is like okay there's all these relative levels of things so but when they say like you know kill the Buddha they're saying like get to this ultimate level of things don't get trapped and these more relative things until you can see this ultimate level of things and that's the point of the story so anyways that's a little exploration of like a little Cohan around these three bodies but I thought it's a cool way to present it too yeah if you have a vision of Tara appearing or Jesus or the mother Mary or you know Krishna or something you're experiencing or some ogakaya right when you get to the pure undifferentiated level of reality then you're experiencing this Dharma Kaya and in some ways it's good to be able to experience that ultimate ground and to do that you have to kill these other things cool way of talking about all right so that's my bid on it no I love it yeah I probably have to go yeah that uh uh I got like a a 10 year old son who's coming home no that's right this way home safely based on where I'm located in the world it's it's uh it's time for me it's probably bedtime too so you get up early tomorrow and enjoy the art of Florence right that's right enjoy I'll be in the enjoyment body uh yeah that's the plan I think that's the plan it's cool statue interesting yeah you think yeah so apparently with with that oh maybe I'll leave it for the next time but apparently um that David was supposed to go on top of the Dome oh really oh I didn't know yeah that was the original um that was the original Michelangelo had that planned which is why some of the um features in the David are so kind of like overdone and others are not so overdone you know because it would look from a distance or something like that exactly how it would look when you're looking up at it there's a weird SNL bit about like the fact that the genitalia is so small yes and for those they did this whole Saturday Night Live they did this whole bit where uh uh the guy who posed as the model comes into a party or something yeah everyone's like going like thinking okay and he's all proud but then they're like kind of looking at his crotch going you know dude this is yeah how real is this well and and actually you know David that David is from David and Goliath yeah and and he was a Jewish um model so he would have been circumcised by that point yeah and yet that David is not circumcised so yeah I know if I really checked that out that deep I saw the statue in person well the only reason why I know is because we were walking down the street just now and we saw some like underwear that just zoomed in right on the right on the cross you could see his uncircumcised penis with like ball hair you know and they sell it on there's a little ball here there I think I do yeah for that well they sell it on like men's shorts yeah yeah yeah yeah they sell it on like aprons you know cooking aprons so it's definitely this is David's junk on the cooking apron that's it just you know they also have like like little male like I don't know boy shorts you know where the junk is where your junk would be so yeah double chunk as they would say or as my British client would say Jewels not junk oh he says Jewels yeah yeah yeah he's literally Jewels the family that's right yeah yeah um it's an interesting statue just because of the way the face is I mean I don't want to ruin it but like you look into different angles and you're like wow there's completely different Expressions it's really interesting I mean check it out for yourself again I don't want to like you know it's your own experience like it's kind of like you sort of notice it and then you realize oh it's kind of a known thing so yeah yeah all right I better bogey episode for us I think in terms of talking about killing the Buddha yeah I agree yeah and how it relates to these three kayas so we're still kind of chipping away at this three kinds we are we are Eric as always thank you from across the world and you know local Midwest and uh thank you to our audience you know who's uh who's tuning in with us rocking with us now we've been you know rocking for a while so uh definitely appreciate all the feedback that we get from everybody uh hit us up on Instagram and gin and Tantra you know if you see us on the video on YouTube or something hit that like subscribe button share with people uh whether it be your social media or just you know spam them with our with text with some episode links you know that always helps out uh if you want to hit us up uh you can leave a comment on the YouTube channel uh you can leave a review on the Apple podcast which is probably about half our listeners at this point uh or you could send us an email at gin and Tantra gmail.com we do you know we do check we do love to get feedback from folks on you know know just whatever you've been enjoying or you know something you might want to cover or questions you might have on you know expanding on the material in some way or some references or something like that we always love to you know give this kind of information to people because you know it came from somewhere so um might as well go back to the source when you can I love that's right for Eric this is Daniel we'll catch you on the next one peace