Longchenpa

So of course, we can attain temporary goals and knowledge through this human birth, but we can also attain Buddhahood.

There's many, many practitioners such as Milarepa, Longchenpa, Lama Tsongkhapa, Sakya Pandita, all the different lineages, the Karmapas, who really took this opportunity and used it and attained realization, attained Buddhahood.

And when we look at their life stories, incredible benefit for the world happens because of that.

So if you don't know, you can go [laughs] seek some stories on that.

So you may have seen in the past few years in wisdom publications has been highlighting these, the translations from Malcolm Smith.

And they're generally in our present day and age, whether here or in Asia and Tibetan context, not something that are read or studied directly, primarily because over time, the contents of these 17 tantras were kind of codified and streamlined in a way by the omniscient Longchenpa.

So many of you have heard of Longchenragyam.

And I think that's like 1600s or so in Tibetan scholar and practitioner.

And so most of what we know today as the the categories and especially at the, the Upadesha or oral instruction class of Dzogchen comes from the writings of Longchenpa where he codified these and made, and kind of made them more, certainly more accessible, but more intelligible as well.

But in any event, these 21 sentence come from what's called the Tantra that like the Tantra of the reverberation of sound, which is kind of the overarching Tantra, the source of the 17, and also another one called the Nida Khajur, the union of the sun and moon Tantra.

And so they have, there's two lists of the 21 that are mostly the same, a little bit of variation.

from those.

It's that deep, deep confidence.

Longchenpa, the Nyingma master and great teacher, gives a fuller picture.

He breaks faith into six kinds and then shows how the six fit back into those three.

And I'll go through them one at a time because each one works a little differently in practice.

you're in the room with the Dalai Lama.

There's something so inspiring to see everybody kind of in one movement there to receive teachings.

The other one Longchenpa talks about is respectful faith.

And this grows out of a clear mind and expresses itself as care.