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Session 13 — Beyond Extremes: Nāgārjuna’s Progressive Teaching

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  • Buddhist Classics and Philosophy
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  • Gomde Germany-Austria
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John D. Dunne presents Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way as a progressive teaching that frees the mind from all extremes without replacing them with another fixed view. The session also begins to open the transition from emptiness alone toward later discussions of Buddha-nature and luminosity.

In this session, John D. Dunne returns to Nāgārjuna’s foundational verses and shows how the Middle Way frees phenomena from all extremes such as arising and ceasing, unity and plurality, or coming and going. He explores how Nāgārjuna’s method is not simply to assert a new philosophical position, but to undermine mistaken views and guide students progressively according to their capacity. The teaching emphasizes why emptiness must be introduced carefully, since misunderstood emptiness can easily collapse into nihilism or discouragement. Dunne also highlights that emptiness is the relinquishing of all views, not another doctrine to cling to. From there, the session opens toward later Buddhist developments by raising the question of how emptiness relates to Buddha-nature, luminosity, and the continuity between ordinary mind and awakened mind.

  • Emptiness, Luminosity and Compassion Nāgārjuna and the Madhyamaka Tradition Teachings by John D. Dunne and Khenpo Pema Namgyal exploring Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way and the relationship between emptiness, the luminous nature of mind, and compassion.
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So that, to begin our session, is the second thing I did was a... the first thing was like a and then the second thing was actually the first verse of the um, of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā of Nāgārjuna's text.
So that's this.
I praise the Buddha, the best of philosophers, who taught that interdependent origination, or interdependence. Pratītyasamutpāda. We've seen that word before, right? What is it? It is... it has no cessation, no production, no annihilation, no eternality, no plurality. Actually, this is the wrong order. I always get that wrong because for some reason in the Tibetan, it is in the different order. No unity, no plurality, no coming, no going. We just heard about coming and going, right? Motion, walking. He taught that it is peace, the calming of prapañca.
Alright? And then these various kind of things that he's mentioning are pointing to major concerns of the, the, the, you know the early Buddhist perspective. And, if we go to the chapters, like if we look at the table of contents, so if we look at the table of contents of the text,
so this is what I'm working on with uh, uh with, uh, this should say Jeremy, my ex-grad student Jeremy. He's going to be working at 84,000. You can see what are the things he's going after. Causation. Why causation? Because that's like, if you want to talk about essences of conditioned things, it's all about causation. Like what's the essence of a thing? It's defined by its causal history and its causal capacities. The sense faculties, the aggregates, the dhātus, right, conditioned things. So some of these are not like, you know, early Buddhists weren't obsessed with fire, but the fire and fuel is used as a particularly good example of a dyadic structure that is critiqued, which we'll look at in a second. But obviously suffering, right? Svabhāva itself, bondage and liberation, karma and its effects, the self, time, uh, you know, the Tathāgata, the four truths, nirvāna, 12 links, view, right? He's going after the things that like, oh, so that's what you think is real. Well, let me show you.
And then these are selections that I made available to you. And some of these are like dyadic, triadic, like motion is triadic, uh, time is triadic, right? Uh, but an example of a dyadic, two examples of dyadic analysis, where two things are defined in terms of the other, is one of them is, and this is like a thing that early Buddhists are very concerned about desire and the desirous, rāga is the word for in Sanskrit for desire, do chak དོ་ཆག་, and then rakta means something that has desire. So, chak chen, chen, right? So like a mind or a person who's desirous. Right? If someone desirous in exclusion from desire existed before desire, then desire would exist in dependence on that desirous one. Since that when there was the desirous one, there would be desire. How could there be desire without the desirous? The same analytical procedure applies to desirous in the case where there is or is not desire. So in other words, you've got two things that are defined in terms of each other. There's desire as a mental function, and then there's a desirous mind in which desire is occurring. So, how do you define what a desirous mind is? That it's where desire is occurring. How do you define what desire is? It's what's occurring in a desirous mind. Like, so, is it that, oh, the mind is desirous, therefore we can establish that this is desire? Like, we define the mind as desirous, and then in relation to that, we say this is desire. What's desire? It's what occurs in a desirous mind. So this again is where the identity of a thing is being defined in terms of something else. Remember that? Like, and so we're trying to say this is, or what's this really, is what occurs there. But what's this really? It's where this is occurring. So, if you can't say what this is, how can you say what this is? If you can't say what this is, how can you say what this is? And then you might say, oh, they're just occurring together. What's the problem? Well, the problem is, to say that they're occurring together, first of all, there's the one or many. That's also in this chapter, chapter six. Like, are they the same or different? If they're the same, then they're not occurring together, because things, one thing doesn't occur together with itself. If they're different, and also then the mind would be the same as a function, a piece of the mind, so to speak, an element of the mind. But then if they're different, then what's the problem? Well, then you have to say there's this and there's that, and they're relating. But how do you say there's this and there's that, if they can only be defined by each other? You see? You've got to say there are these two things, and they're in relation. But how can you say there's these two things, if the only way they can be... if they already have to already be in relation before they're defined as these two things? Right? So, since they are not established to exist separately, the occurrence with each other is not established. Which then exists separately, so you assert that they occur together. You see that?
Okay, so that's really key, and that's the same with fire and fuel. So this is this dyadic analysis.
So that is key, and you have these verses. You can think about them, and you can go through them, and we can talk about them tomorrow. They're just little bits. There's more to the arguments in each of these chapters. But I thought it might be useful, and we can go over them tomorrow in greater detail, or even later today.
Uh, and we went through these already. But then, of course, here's an older example of a dyad. That's especially good. na saṃsārasya nirvāṇāt kiṃcid asti viśeṣaṇam na nirvāṇasya saṃsārāt kiṃcid asti viśeṣaṇam There is not anything at all that distinguishes saṃsāra from nirvāna. Saṃsāra doesn't have a viśeṣaṇa, like a distinguishing characteristic, a thing that makes it different from nirvāna, like some essential identity. And likewise, nirvāna doesn't have some special characteristic that distinguishes it from saṃsāra. So this is that, so this also that kind of principle then, like the idea that somehow there's an essentially real saṃsāra, that means the only way you coul... that there, you know saṃsāra is essentially saṃsāra, so nirvāna has to be somewhere else. But again, there are two problems with that. One of them is, if saṃsāra is essentially saṃsāra, then you can't put an end to it. Right? As Khenpo la was explaining before. Because it's essentially, like this process, it's essentially real. You can't just flip your fingers and take away its essence. Causality, in other words, causality, the idea of putting an end to something is that you somehow stop its causes. Right? But we already see that causality doesn't make sense if we're talking about essentialized causality. So you wouldn't be able to stop anything. You also wouldn't be able to start anything. Or if you started something, it would last forever.
So causality, that doesn't work if it's essentialized. So that's one problem. But the other problem is, if you're kind of, you could say, if the paradigm of practice is about not escaping from the world but being in the world, then what enables that kind of practice and that kind of goal, that kind of ethics, the emphasis on compassion, is a world that's not stuck. Whereas saṃsāra itself can be transformed into the Buddha field. Okay? So that's also, as we said before, really necessary. And then these are some verses from chapter 18, which we've been talking about. We just looked at these first ones here. And then I wanted to mention something about this verse. I won't read the Sanskrit for now because I forgot my iPad, so. The Buddhas have, well we could, no I won't. The Buddhas have used the label self and they also have taught the selfless. So too, the Buddhas have taught there is neither the self nor the selfless at all. Okay? We should skip to 18. The sequential teaching of the Buddha is this. Everything is real in itself. Everything is unreal in itself. Everything is real in itself and unreal in itself. Everything is neither unreal in itself nor real in itself. Okay? And then 18 and not known through another, meaning you have to know it through your own experience, quieted, unstructured through fabrication, non-conceptual, non-plural. This is the definition of the ultimate.
Okay? So part of, what we're se... So what's going on here? So one thing that's going on here is that...
and I do kind of want to look at that...
Right? He taught self, not self, and so on.
I just want to go to this verse. Where did it go?
Everything is real. Everything is unreal and so on. sarvaṁ tattvaṁ na tattvaṁ ca tattvaṁ cātattvam eva ca naivātattvaṁ na tattvaṁ ca etad buddhānāṁ śāsanam But then especially this one. apratyayaṁ śāntaṁ prapañcopaśamaṁ śivam nirvikalpam anānārthaṁ tattvasya lakṣaṇam So it's very interesting to see the sequencing. This is the commentary by the way, by Candrakīrti that we're working on translating. It's very interesting to see the sequencing of these verses. Like, so first we get this, okay, you got to stop fabrication. And then what does Nāgārjuna say? He doesn't say like, let me tell you what fabrication is. He talks about like different modalities of teaching. Why do you think he does that?
What's the point there? Why would you tell somebody, if in fact all things are ultimately unreal, why would you say, Uh, you know... You just don't have a self, but there is all this real stuff
that you're mistakenly thinking is a self. And then later you say, there isn't real stuff. Why would you do that? Yes?
Student: Because it depends on where the person is in their understanding and whether it can be harmful for their spiritual path or not. Exactly. Yes. What would be the danger in teaching emptiness to someone? What kinds of dangers could you imagine? Student: Abandoning the path. Why? Student: Because they don't find it to be true um, or they feel unhappy. Yeah, so it could be. That's one and that's a good one. Like basically like, oh, what a bummer. You know, all of my favorite Netflix series don't really exist. Like, oh man, you know, what a bummer, dude.
I don't want to do this thing anymore. This Buddhist thing. Or maybe it makes you afraid. Student: Or more confused. Or you feel more confused. Or you become very sure that there's nothing. So that's a biggie. So one of the things that is really for this style of philosophy that's really important is not prematurely teaching people emptiness. Not prematurely teaching people anything that's in a sense too much for them.
And the main danger in prematurely teaching emptiness is certainly like abandoning path and so on. But one of the main, the biggest danger, not the only danger, but probably the biggest danger is that people will think it's nihilism. And you know, you even find Western, you know, scholars who have interpreted it as nihilistic. And certainly there were, you know, non-Buddhist philosophers in India who said, hey, you guys are nihilists. And hopefully by now it's very clear why it's not nihilism. Because nihilism requires the absolute affirmation of nothing. But nothing doesn't really exist. Nothing is not really nothing. Right? We got that part. So it's not nihilism for sure, but it could be interpreted that way. Uh, so part of what this is showing, and we'll come back, we'll circle back to that in a minute, but there's something else I think that's quite interesting about this kind of sequencing, especially number eight maybe,
which is, which of these is the true map?
None of them. Right? Remember that verse? It's the sāvratrṣṭinām niśaraṇam. Emptiness is the relinquishing of all views. So like he says, it's this, it's that, and none of these, you know, and even just the way they're kind of put together, it's clearly like, uh, if you think one of these is the right answer, you're missing the point.
We're just trying to get you to, you know, this place, niṣprapañca, not known through another. apratyayaṁ really means, again, that you are not, um, it's not a cognition that comes about through someone else. You've got to have this yourself, because it's got to be non-conceptual. It's got to be without prapañca. It can't be mediated by concepts. Or it can't be mediated in any way at all, actually. And then second, it's...
Right? It's unstructured through fabrication, which is what it means for it to be śāntam. That's the same words like śānti, śānti, śānti, peace, right? It's śāntam, pacified. And what's pacified is really the kleśas, suffering. But what it means to be pacified also is that it's not prapañcad by prapañca. It's not fabricated or unstructured or fabricated. We could do fabricated. Unfabricated.
And it's therefore non-conceptual, but it's the right kind of non-conceptual.
Right? This... So that brings us to one of the key here, issues here in terms of the non-conceptual. A non-conceptual experience is one in which conceptuality is not operating, but it's one in which prapañca could still be operating. Right? Remember how we said? Because concepts come from prapañca, but you could have prapañca, which means you could have prapañca without concepts. So you could be in a non-conceptual state. What would characterize that state? For sure, duality. But maybe also temporality, like a sense of temporal consciousness, a non-conceptual or a pre-conceptual sense of temporality, a non-conceptual or a pre-conceptual sense of space, a spatial location. A non... Right?
Maybe other kinds of pre-conceptual, other kinds of structures that are necessary for non-conceptual sensory experience that kind of, that still count as prapañca. Very interesting question to ask what those are. Certainly, clearly duality, space and time, but maybe there are other things as well? Interesting. Something for you to contemplate. So then the, the real you know, kind of... one of the questions then becomes, right, how do we, what, how are we going to... like after Nāgārjuna, there are certain kinds of issues that Nāgārjuna gets rolling. One of the things he gets rolling and many sutras that now become manifest in the human world, whether you're a Western historian and you say somebody like wrote them or you're a traditional Buddhist and you say they became, you know, manifest, even though they were taught 500 years earlier. Whatever you say, that this... what's clear is that these different texts start to become manifest, especially what are called the perfection of wisdom sutras. Because the kind of wisdom we're talking about here, in a way, to kind of distinguish it from the wisdom that's knowing personal selflessness. This is the wisdom that's knowing the selflessness or essencelessness of everything that's coming through not just the self-habit but the reality habit. And that's the perfection of wisdom, prajñāpāramitā, also embodied as a goddess. And the culmination of uh, the practice of the bodhisattva's six perfections, for example. Okay? Which all the others lead up to. Because that's what is going to enable one to cut through the ignorance that prevents Buddhahood. So, uh, that... So when all that gets going and Nāgārjuna is doing his philosophy, there are certain kinds of issues that come up. And one of these concerns, of course, is going to be definitely about nihilism.
Like, are we, you know, that there is in the Buddhist community as well, a kind of concern like, oh, there's, you know, we could fall into a nihilistic interpretation.
Along with that is going to be a related concern, which is how do we account for, which is not on the slide, but how do we account for or like, what does it mean to know emptiness?
If it's just not complete non-knowing, and Candrakīrti basically articulates it that way. And no, not very many Tibetan interpreters were very fond of that articulation. And so he was, it was reinterpreted in various ways. Like, knowing through not knowing can sound just like, again, nihilism. Just you're unconscious. But you're not unconscious. So what kind of knowing is it? So both of these emerge after Nāgārjuna in various developments. And we're going to look at one development now and then stop and take some further questions. And this development is about this idea, like, one way in which the tradition responds to what Nāgārjuna brings up, and what the perfection of wisdom text brings up, and the notion of emptiness brings up, is this idea of Buddha nature, or Tathāgatagarbha. And it's really kind of saying, there's a continuity between the ordinary consciousness, the ordinary kind of mind, of an ordin, the ordin... the mind of an ordinary person filled with ignorance, and the mind of a Buddha. There's something that is the same, you can say. At least conceptually. What is the same? Well, there's a kind of scale, basically. And here we're gonna, we're gonna borrow, actually, terms from Christian theology. So, when we talk about apophatic theology, it means, like Master Eckhart, actually, a kind of theological perspective that just refuses to say anything affirmative about the nature of God. And so you can have a perspective here as well, that is refusing to say anything affirmative about the nature of the ultimate, about the ultimate nature of the mind. And so what you, in a very apophatic interpretation, and by the way, this is coming from the works of Maitreya, and this is Maitreya said to be the future Buddha, this is a bodhisattva, this is a representation of Maitreya as a bodhisattva. And as you can see, it looks quite Greek, because this is from Gandhara, actually the same, generally the same region where that same Greek king several hundred years before that had that dialogue with Nāgasena about the chariot. So uh, it's quite interesting to see how there is that overlap. Remember that Buddhism was very strong all the way into Afghanistan, and some of the major, some major Buddhist monastic universities were in Afghanistan. Uh, so it's quite interesting to reflect on that. In any case, so a truly apophatic account of what's the continuity between uh, uh, your mind and Buddha mind is that they're both empty. That's not very apo, that's not just, you're not really affirming anything. And philosophically some schools that, but almost no one in Tibet really totally goes that apophatic. Even Candrakīrti doesn't quite go that apophatic. Right? Because if we go back to, for a second, if we go back to, no, I can't do it that way. If we go back to, you know what he's saying in chapter 18.
Uh, not singular, not plural, not annihilated, not internal, such is the deathless nectar that is the teaching of the Buddhas, the amrita, the ambrosia.
Uh, the, this, this... speaking of it as being Śānta, speaking of it in the verses of praise as being peace, śivam, which is also the name of the god Śiva. Right? It's like little bits, even in Candrakīrti, little bits of affirmation going on. So the really strong version of affirmation that can happen where you go, like, you can go on the other end of the scale. So there, you say there's just emptiness, and you could say there's a heck of a lot more than emptiness. So there are some schools that would even go so far as to say, so you know the Buddha has 32 major marks and 80 secondary signs that characterize his, what's called Nirmāṇakāya, the kind of body that a Buddha has that appears to, you know, people like us. And you can see the Buddha here in the back. The Buddha has an uṣṇīṣa, little crown kind of protrusion, which, you know, they say no matter how high you go, you can never see the top of it. Like it looks like it's just that high, but you try to go see the top and it's like... There's some great stories about the gods like trying to go up, wait a second, you know. And he's got long, these long earlobes, he's got arms that reach down to his knees, so he can give you a really good hug.
So there are all of these features that a Buddha has that are called these major marks and secondary signs. And, you know, there are some interpretations of Buddha nature that say somehow you already have all that. Some were like it's kind of in some latent form already in your mind, you have all this stuff in your mind stream. Okay, so that's clearly very... Most people didn't go there either. That's a little too much. But most have some... they want to say something, there is some kind of like affirmation that's going along with emptiness. And especially if what we're saying is that the affirmation, what we need for this continuity is that what it means to be a Buddha is in some sense to have primordial wakefulness, to be, to have wisdom. Wisdom is not, you know, the absence of awareness. So therefore, it's kind of one of the minimal things that people add, that the philosophers add, and that we see especially important in the Tibetan chak dzog, ཕྱག་རྫོགས you know, non-dual, Mahāmudrā, Dzogchen traditions, is this idea of luminosity, which we'll talk a lot more about tomorrow,
this basic idea of luminosity. But to talk about luminosity, we're also uh, where'd it go? Is this it?
Is that it? No.
We're also going to have to talk about the matrix,
just to prepare you. Right? So, you'll see why. And this is going to be related to a development called Yogācāra. It's a style of philosophy that emerges after the Bud... after Nāgārjuna. And it's like, what is this prapañca exactly? What is the experience of emptiness? You know, what are you knowing and how are you knowing it? And if you're... and if this is not an awareness of nothing, and if there is awareness, then there's something left over. And that's going to get combined with Mādhyamika eventually. And that's what goes to Tibet. That form of Mādhyamika goes to Tibet and is very important for these non-dual traditions. And uh... they're going to speak especially of this idea of not just emptiness, but luminosity. And luminosity in Sanskrit is prakāśa or prabhāsvara. They kind of get conflated. They're slightly different. And a very famous phrase that you repeated in various ways is uh, is in Dharmakīrti's version of it, who's a Yogācāra thinker, but maybe also in Mādhyamika is prabhāsvaram idaṁ cittaṁ prakṛtyā ’gantavo malāḥ Which means, this mind, by its nature, is luminous. The defilements are adventitious. They're not essential. So now emptiness is going to be involving definitely emptiness, emptiness of fixed identity, emptiness of those defilements of the kleśas. They're not essential to the mind. But an affirmation, what's meant to be a subtle affirmation of this sheer luminosity, which is like a metaphor, you can say, and sometimes also a description, of just consciousness itself. But obviously, what's the danger there?
Yeah, you essentialize consciousness.
Then we got a problem. Okay? So we're going to try to look at that tomorrow, and try to understand this idea of sel tong zung juk སེམས་སྟོང་ཟུང་འཇུག་ in Tibetan, the complete integration of emptiness and luminosity, which is kind of the next step in Mādhyamika. All right, we have a couple of minutes. We've been doing a little questions, but we didn't do a lot of questions today. But maybe everyone just can't take it anymore anyway. So... But if you have a question or two, or you just want to get out of here. Do we have a question? Yeah? Student: How is prapañca related to grasping? Yes, so uh, that's a great question. And this word, dzin pa འཛིན་པ་ in Tibetan, is used uh like, more in kind of oral discourse and so on, than in uh, than in Indian texts. They have the word graha. But dzin pa འཛིན་པ་ starts to have this sort of flavor that is um, kind of like really trying to point to some experiential features. And... And I think in some contexts, it's, they're really just the same. Yeah, they're really just the same. In some contexts, maybe grasping or fixation is another translation which I like, that you'll hear, is a, is a, is not as subtle as སྤྲོ་པ་ thro pa, as prapañca Actually you could maybe kind of be like... Grasping or fixation has a kind of almost behavioral feature to it. And certainly experiential. Like you're kind of... You know, the metaphor is like... Right? So...
You might say there's a kind of, let's say... And that's very dualistic. So maybe like the actual kind of conceptualization of objects would certainly involve grasping, dualistic fixation. But is the mere perception of an object grasping? Maybe? Then there's a theoretician... That's not the right word. There's a scholar, practitioner, you know, quite important for, at least I think for, you know, this tradition named Tsele Ngatsok Rangdrol, from I believe eh, like 16th... Is that right? I'm not good at the dating game. I think he's 17th century. And uh, uh... So he's pretty late, comparatively speaking. And uh, he speaks about this idea of དེར་འཛིན་ཀྱི་བློ der dzin gi lo. There may be something, some others before him talk about it. So it's like a cognition or a cognitive state, which is dzin འཛིན་, apprehending, holding something as that. Just like... Just as that. And that could certainly be conceptual, like, oh, that's a vase. But it sounds even just like object selection, like mere object selection. Then that would seem that, then, you know, like... is prapañca even subtler than that?
It's a very interesting, it's an interesting question. Right? Student: Early 17th century. Early 17th. Okay, thank you. Yeah, I thought so. Yeah. Bibi: There's an online question as well. Okay. Bibi: Could you review compassion in light of what we are discussing? Uh, yes. I was thinking we might do more of that tomorrow. But yeah, sure. So uh, the um, the basic here... So if we think about this in terms of the six perfections and like the Bodhicaryāvatāra, the guide to the bodhisattva's way of life, those six perfections culminate in wisdom. And in the ninth chapter, which is the wisdom chapter, so in the eighth chapter, which is technically the, the, about the perfection of meditation, the fifth perfection, uh, it's really a chapter about the cultivation of compassion. And uh, you know, so the previous chapters about giving and ethics and so on, those are, you know, giving ethics, uh, effort and, and patience. Those are um, you know, building toward, in a way you could see those as building toward compassion and then compassion culminates in the wisdom chapter. And in that, in the fifth, in the eighth chapter, um, where he's talking about the perfection of meditation, which is really just about cultivation of compassion, the uh, Śāntideva, you know, famously uses the, introduced the technique of the exchange of self and other as a um, as a method for cultivating compassion. And um... so compassion is, you know, clearly essential. It's one of the five uh, perfections. But it is, in the first chap... first verse of the ninth chapter, Uh... you know, he says, uh, all of the previous perfections that we've discussed are means for, for obtaining the perfection of wisdom. Okay? So this very important idea here, which is that you have... So one of the ways we talk about, um, like whenever we look at any of the Buddhist systems, we can talk about shi lam dre ཞི་ལམ་འབྲས་ The shi ཞི་ literally, like the foundation is the ontology. Like what is their account of reality? Lam ལམ་ is the path, and dre འབྲས་ or dre bu འབྲས་བུ.is the result of that path. So in the Mahāyāna, the ontology, like the basis, is the two truths, ultimate and conventional, that we've been talking about. And uh, the path is... And the result is Buddhahood in two aspects, the Dharmakāya, the mind of the Buddha, and the Rūpakāya, the form body of the Buddha, which has two aspects itself, the emanation body, the Nirmāṇakāya, and the celestial body, the Saṃbhogakāya. But the path is prajñā and upāya, wisdom and method. We already heard this before, when we cited a verse or paraphrased a verse from the Abhisamayālaṅkāra, the ornament of realization, which is the Buddhas are in unlocated nirvāna. Why? Because wisdom keeps them out of saṃsāra. That's key. If you don't... Compassion cannot eliminate suffering. That's really important. Cannot eliminate suffering. No matter how much compassion you have, you can't eliminate suffering. Because suffering is caused by ignorance. And so that's really important to understand. And, and sometimes because there is... Compassion is so important, sometimes we can sort of fixate on compassion as being the, you know, uh, as being um, uh, like somehow ultimate. Right? It's gonna... That's the solution. And this is in a, in a text called the ཆེ་ཆེན་ཉེས་དམིགས་རྒྱ་མཚོ che chen nye mig gyatso . This is called Compassion Arising as an Enemy.
སྙིང་རྗེ་དྲ་དུ་ལང་བ Nyingje Dradu langba. Uh, where we kind of get stuck in that perspective. But, if you don't have compassion, right? Great compassion. Great compassion. Compassion here is not just like compassion for some others. And what is compassion defined as? It's the motivation, the wish that another be free of suffering. Great compassion is the wish for all others to be free of suffering. Right? So like when the bodhisattva is practicing, the bodhisattva is practicing to relieve the suffering of all sentient beings. And the bodhisattva doesn't just have great compassion, the bodhisattva has... the, uh, the uh, when in Tibet it's called the ལྷག་བསམ lhag sam, the atiśhaya, the special intention to be responsible for that. It's not just like, oh, may all sentient beings be free from suffering, which of course is a very powerful and positive motivation, attitude to have. But it's like, and I'm going to do it. You know, whatever it takes, I'm going to do that. That's bodhicitta, the uh, the awakening mind, which is, is, which is, is, required to retain, uh, or it's technically conventional bodhicitta, is required to retain Buddhahood. So, if you don't have that, you could still have plenty of compassion, and certainly like non-Mahāyāna practitioners, arhats, they have compassion, love and compassion, no question. But the idea is that they don't have this special commitment to actually do that. And therefore they do end saṃsāra for themselves. They, their wisdom eliminates their ignorance. But since they don't have that special intention, the great compassion and the intention to actually do that, therefore they can't eliminate that second level of ignorance, which is the reality habit.
Why do you need to r get r... Why does one need, why does the bodhisattva need to get rid of the reality habit? Because... the bodhisattva needs to be, then becomes to become maximally effective, to become a Buddha. One way to think of what a Buddha is, maximally effective at helping others relieve their suffering. Which means completely able to inhabit the realities of other people. Completely. And not really having your own reality. Right? Because you're not, it's like you don't have this, you know. Not only, you know, do you not have a reality habit, you just don't have a reality. It's like you know, it's all everybody else's reality.
So, if you don't have great compassion, you don't need that. There would be no point, you wouldn't have any, you wouldn't have the motivation to do that. Right? So why would you bother? You wouldn't. But also, there's another thing, which is like, what is it that is that last layer of obstacle, what's called the jñeyāvaraṇa, the obscuration to getting to that point, which is described as a kind of omniscience, of kind of seeing all the multiple realities, conventional realities. You know?
What is it that's the obstacle? It's like kind of having your own thing going on in some fashion. Like, you know, your standpoint. You've got your standpoint. And emotionally,
one way to get past that standpoint is to value others, is to have, instead of rang che zin, རང་གཅེས་འཛིན་ self-cherishing, you have other cherishing. So like, the kind of affective or emotional process of compassion is not just a motivator, but it's like what sort of shifts you out of your standpoint, which is like part of what the reality habit is. Like, oh, there's reality. And I'm going to tell you what it is. Right? So being shifted so that the compassion practice is, is, is a method, you could say, but it also in a way is part of the result.
And so even though uh, there's a lot of debate, like should you include the compassion as a descriptor of Buddha mind in some ultimate sense, you know, in practical terms, it clearly is like part of what Buddha mind is. Because that's what's driving. So another way to say it is this. Wisdom gets us out... keeps us from being stuck in reality. All sentient beings, right? That's what's going to get people out of their, out of the prison of saṃsāra. Like in the Mañjuśrī prayer. Right? But what's going to rebuild? Like, what's the engine of saṃsāra? What drives saṃsāra? What's building the prison? Who builds the prison? The prisoners.
How do they build it? With ignorance. What's... once they're freed, what are they going to make? The Buddha field.
And how do they build that? What's the engine of saṃsāra? Ignorance. What's the engine, so to speak, of the Buddha field, of nirvāna? Compassion.
Right? So compassion is completely essential, but there's three levels of compassion. I'll stop soon. I'll try to be compassionate. Sorry, I just blah, blah, blah...
You can have compassion for people. Right? And actually that can be quite problematic, I'll be frank. That kind of compassion can be really problematic if there's no wisdom behind it at all. I'll tell a quick story. When my mother was, my mother lived for seven years amazingly with uh, stage four lung cancer and at a certain point she passed away in 2012 and had a very good life, those seven years were quite good, but there were times when she was hospitalized with pain and really quite difficult stuff going on. And the one time during a hospitalization she uh, there was a, you know, in the US you have chaplains in the hospital who were often also qualified as social workers and they come through and they see you and there was one and I happened to be visiting her, you know, I spent a lot of time with her during that period and she, there was this chaplain came in the room and like, you know, and my mother, I just saw my mother's face like, oh no, not her again. And she's, my mother's like, nice to see you.
Yeah, right. And so, you know, and the thing was this very well-intentioned person, but she was projecting a kind of suffering into my mother that my mother was not having. Like, oh, I hope you're okay today. I'm here to, you know, I really feel so much for you.
Right, that kind of compassion where you're like, oh, you're suffering and let me save you. That is not, that's actually not a good thing. Right, that's actually can be very, and sometimes can be even destructive.
Yeah, it's like pity, but there is like, oh, I'm going to help you. You're suffering, like, but I, so that kind of compassion does, can... you can have compassion for people, but sometimes you have, what you have compassion for is your model of the person. Not for the person. You don't see the person. And so you're like, project there your model of suffering onto that person, which was what was happening with my mother. My mother was suffering, but not in the ways that this person thought.
And so she just found it annoying and actually made her suffer more.
You know, like, oh, you, you don't believe in Zippy the Pinhead, I'm so sorry for you.
No Zippy fans out there, but anyway.
So, yeah, where was I? So then there's compassion for the elements. You don't have compassion for a person. You have compassion for all of this psycho, because there aren't really persons, right? Person is a convenient designation for a bunch of psycho physical elements, fizzing. You have compassion for that.
That's probably definitely better in a way than having compassion for persons.
And then there's the highest level of compassion is called anālambana or nirālamba, I think both, karuṇā or a ma migpe, ma migpe nyingje མ་མིགས་པའི་སྙིང་རྗེ
uh, objectless compassion. It's just compassion without, it's non-dual compassion.
Right? Completely like there isn't, you're not having compassion for something. It's just this energy that is relieving suffering wherever it is. This affective state, whatever you want to call it. Which is what Buddhas have. And high practitioners. So anyway, sorry I took a long time, compassion, but there you go. So maybe we'll say a little more tomorrow. Sorry about that. Okay, shall we uh, dedicate?
sönam diyi thamché sikpa nyi thopné nyepai dranam phamjé né kyega nachi balap trukpa yi sipai tsolé drowa drölwar shok jangchup semchok rinpoché ma kyepa nam kyé gyurchik kyepa nyampa mepa yang gongné gongdu phelwar shok
All right, thank you. That's from Śāntideva. It means through all this that I have done, through the, throught the merit, by means of the merit that I have accumulated through what we have done, may I become one who puts an end to all suffering.
In other words, a Buddha. Okay, thank you.
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So that, to begin our session, is the second thing I did was a... the first thing was like a and then the second thing was actually the first verse of the um, of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā of Nāgārjuna's text.
So that's this.
I praise the Buddha, the best of philosophers, who taught that interdependent origination, or interdependence. Pratītyasamutpāda. We've seen that word before, right? What is it? It is... it has no cessation, no production, no annihilation, no eternality, no plurality. Actually, this is the wrong order. I always get that wrong because for some reason in the Tibetan, it is in the different order. No unity, no plurality, no coming, no going. We just heard about coming and going, right? Motion, walking. He taught that it is peace, the calming of prapañca.
Alright? And then these various kind of things that he's mentioning are pointing to major concerns of the, the, the, you know the early Buddhist perspective. And, if we go to the chapters, like if we look at the table of contents, so if we look at the table of contents of the text,
so this is what I'm working on with uh, uh with, uh, this should say Jeremy, my ex-grad student Jeremy. He's going to be working at 84,000. You can see what are the things he's going after. Causation. Why causation? Because that's like, if you want to talk about essences of conditioned things, it's all about causation. Like what's the essence of a thing? It's defined by its causal history and its causal capacities. The sense faculties, the aggregates, the dhātus, right, conditioned things. So some of these are not like, you know, early Buddhists weren't obsessed with fire, but the fire and fuel is used as a particularly good example of a dyadic structure that is critiqued, which we'll look at in a second. But obviously suffering, right? Svabhāva itself, bondage and liberation, karma and its effects, the self, time, uh, you know, the Tathāgata, the four truths, nirvāna, 12 links, view, right? He's going after the things that like, oh, so that's what you think is real. Well, let me show you.
And then these are selections that I made available to you. And some of these are like dyadic, triadic, like motion is triadic, uh, time is triadic, right? Uh, but an example of a dyadic, two examples of dyadic analysis, where two things are defined in terms of the other, is one of them is, and this is like a thing that early Buddhists are very concerned about desire and the desirous, rāga is the word for in Sanskrit for desire, do chak དོ་ཆག་, and then rakta means something that has desire. So, chak chen, chen, right? So like a mind or a person who's desirous. Right? If someone desirous in exclusion from desire existed before desire, then desire would exist in dependence on that desirous one. Since that when there was the desirous one, there would be desire. How could there be desire without the desirous? The same analytical procedure applies to desirous in the case where there is or is not desire. So in other words, you've got two things that are defined in terms of each other. There's desire as a mental function, and then there's a desirous mind in which desire is occurring. So, how do you define what a desirous mind is? That it's where desire is occurring. How do you define what desire is? It's what's occurring in a desirous mind. Like, so, is it that, oh, the mind is desirous, therefore we can establish that this is desire? Like, we define the mind as desirous, and then in relation to that, we say this is desire. What's desire? It's what occurs in a desirous mind. So this again is where the identity of a thing is being defined in terms of something else. Remember that? Like, and so we're trying to say this is, or what's this really, is what occurs there. But what's this really? It's where this is occurring. So, if you can't say what this is, how can you say what this is? If you can't say what this is, how can you say what this is? And then you might say, oh, they're just occurring together. What's the problem? Well, the problem is, to say that they're occurring together, first of all, there's the one or many. That's also in this chapter, chapter six. Like, are they the same or different? If they're the same, then they're not occurring together, because things, one thing doesn't occur together with itself. If they're different, and also then the mind would be the same as a function, a piece of the mind, so to speak, an element of the mind. But then if they're different, then what's the problem? Well, then you have to say there's this and there's that, and they're relating. But how do you say there's this and there's that, if they can only be defined by each other? You see? You've got to say there are these two things, and they're in relation. But how can you say there's these two things, if the only way they can be... if they already have to already be in relation before they're defined as these two things? Right? So, since they are not established to exist separately, the occurrence with each other is not established. Which then exists separately, so you assert that they occur together. You see that?
Okay, so that's really key, and that's the same with fire and fuel. So this is this dyadic analysis.
So that is key, and you have these verses. You can think about them, and you can go through them, and we can talk about them tomorrow. They're just little bits. There's more to the arguments in each of these chapters. But I thought it might be useful, and we can go over them tomorrow in greater detail, or even later today.
Uh, and we went through these already. But then, of course, here's an older example of a dyad. That's especially good. na saṃsārasya nirvāṇāt kiṃcid asti viśeṣaṇam na nirvāṇasya saṃsārāt kiṃcid asti viśeṣaṇam There is not anything at all that distinguishes saṃsāra from nirvāna. Saṃsāra doesn't have a viśeṣaṇa, like a distinguishing characteristic, a thing that makes it different from nirvāna, like some essential identity. And likewise, nirvāna doesn't have some special characteristic that distinguishes it from saṃsāra. So this is that, so this also that kind of principle then, like the idea that somehow there's an essentially real saṃsāra, that means the only way you coul... that there, you know saṃsāra is essentially saṃsāra, so nirvāna has to be somewhere else. But again, there are two problems with that. One of them is, if saṃsāra is essentially saṃsāra, then you can't put an end to it. Right? As Khenpo la was explaining before. Because it's essentially, like this process, it's essentially real. You can't just flip your fingers and take away its essence. Causality, in other words, causality, the idea of putting an end to something is that you somehow stop its causes. Right? But we already see that causality doesn't make sense if we're talking about essentialized causality. So you wouldn't be able to stop anything. You also wouldn't be able to start anything. Or if you started something, it would last forever.
So causality, that doesn't work if it's essentialized. So that's one problem. But the other problem is, if you're kind of, you could say, if the paradigm of practice is about not escaping from the world but being in the world, then what enables that kind of practice and that kind of goal, that kind of ethics, the emphasis on compassion, is a world that's not stuck. Whereas saṃsāra itself can be transformed into the Buddha field. Okay? So that's also, as we said before, really necessary. And then these are some verses from chapter 18, which we've been talking about. We just looked at these first ones here. And then I wanted to mention something about this verse. I won't read the Sanskrit for now because I forgot my iPad, so. The Buddhas have, well we could, no I won't. The Buddhas have used the label self and they also have taught the selfless. So too, the Buddhas have taught there is neither the self nor the selfless at all. Okay? We should skip to 18. The sequential teaching of the Buddha is this. Everything is real in itself. Everything is unreal in itself. Everything is real in itself and unreal in itself. Everything is neither unreal in itself nor real in itself. Okay? And then 18 and not known through another, meaning you have to know it through your own experience, quieted, unstructured through fabrication, non-conceptual, non-plural. This is the definition of the ultimate.
Okay? So part of, what we're se... So what's going on here? So one thing that's going on here is that...
and I do kind of want to look at that...
Right? He taught self, not self, and so on.
I just want to go to this verse. Where did it go?
Everything is real. Everything is unreal and so on. sarvaṁ tattvaṁ na tattvaṁ ca tattvaṁ cātattvam eva ca naivātattvaṁ na tattvaṁ ca etad buddhānāṁ śāsanam But then especially this one. apratyayaṁ śāntaṁ prapañcopaśamaṁ śivam nirvikalpam anānārthaṁ tattvasya lakṣaṇam So it's very interesting to see the sequencing. This is the commentary by the way, by Candrakīrti that we're working on translating. It's very interesting to see the sequencing of these verses. Like, so first we get this, okay, you got to stop fabrication. And then what does Nāgārjuna say? He doesn't say like, let me tell you what fabrication is. He talks about like different modalities of teaching. Why do you think he does that?
What's the point there? Why would you tell somebody, if in fact all things are ultimately unreal, why would you say, Uh, you know... You just don't have a self, but there is all this real stuff
that you're mistakenly thinking is a self. And then later you say, there isn't real stuff. Why would you do that? Yes?
Student: Because it depends on where the person is in their understanding and whether it can be harmful for their spiritual path or not. Exactly. Yes. What would be the danger in teaching emptiness to someone? What kinds of dangers could you imagine? Student: Abandoning the path. Why? Student: Because they don't find it to be true um, or they feel unhappy. Yeah, so it could be. That's one and that's a good one. Like basically like, oh, what a bummer. You know, all of my favorite Netflix series don't really exist. Like, oh man, you know, what a bummer, dude.
I don't want to do this thing anymore. This Buddhist thing. Or maybe it makes you afraid. Student: Or more confused. Or you feel more confused. Or you become very sure that there's nothing. So that's a biggie. So one of the things that is really for this style of philosophy that's really important is not prematurely teaching people emptiness. Not prematurely teaching people anything that's in a sense too much for them.
And the main danger in prematurely teaching emptiness is certainly like abandoning path and so on. But one of the main, the biggest danger, not the only danger, but probably the biggest danger is that people will think it's nihilism. And you know, you even find Western, you know, scholars who have interpreted it as nihilistic. And certainly there were, you know, non-Buddhist philosophers in India who said, hey, you guys are nihilists. And hopefully by now it's very clear why it's not nihilism. Because nihilism requires the absolute affirmation of nothing. But nothing doesn't really exist. Nothing is not really nothing. Right? We got that part. So it's not nihilism for sure, but it could be interpreted that way. Uh, so part of what this is showing, and we'll come back, we'll circle back to that in a minute, but there's something else I think that's quite interesting about this kind of sequencing, especially number eight maybe,
which is, which of these is the true map?
None of them. Right? Remember that verse? It's the sāvratrṣṭinām niśaraṇam. Emptiness is the relinquishing of all views. So like he says, it's this, it's that, and none of these, you know, and even just the way they're kind of put together, it's clearly like, uh, if you think one of these is the right answer, you're missing the point.
We're just trying to get you to, you know, this place, niṣprapañca, not known through another. apratyayaṁ really means, again, that you are not, um, it's not a cognition that comes about through someone else. You've got to have this yourself, because it's got to be non-conceptual. It's got to be without prapañca. It can't be mediated by concepts. Or it can't be mediated in any way at all, actually. And then second, it's...
Right? It's unstructured through fabrication, which is what it means for it to be śāntam. That's the same words like śānti, śānti, śānti, peace, right? It's śāntam, pacified. And what's pacified is really the kleśas, suffering. But what it means to be pacified also is that it's not prapañcad by prapañca. It's not fabricated or unstructured or fabricated. We could do fabricated. Unfabricated.
And it's therefore non-conceptual, but it's the right kind of non-conceptual.
Right? This... So that brings us to one of the key here, issues here in terms of the non-conceptual. A non-conceptual experience is one in which conceptuality is not operating, but it's one in which prapañca could still be operating. Right? Remember how we said? Because concepts come from prapañca, but you could have prapañca, which means you could have prapañca without concepts. So you could be in a non-conceptual state. What would characterize that state? For sure, duality. But maybe also temporality, like a sense of temporal consciousness, a non-conceptual or a pre-conceptual sense of temporality, a non-conceptual or a pre-conceptual sense of space, a spatial location. A non... Right?
Maybe other kinds of pre-conceptual, other kinds of structures that are necessary for non-conceptual sensory experience that kind of, that still count as prapañca. Very interesting question to ask what those are. Certainly, clearly duality, space and time, but maybe there are other things as well? Interesting. Something for you to contemplate. So then the, the real you know, kind of... one of the questions then becomes, right, how do we, what, how are we going to... like after Nāgārjuna, there are certain kinds of issues that Nāgārjuna gets rolling. One of the things he gets rolling and many sutras that now become manifest in the human world, whether you're a Western historian and you say somebody like wrote them or you're a traditional Buddhist and you say they became, you know, manifest, even though they were taught 500 years earlier. Whatever you say, that this... what's clear is that these different texts start to become manifest, especially what are called the perfection of wisdom sutras. Because the kind of wisdom we're talking about here, in a way, to kind of distinguish it from the wisdom that's knowing personal selflessness. This is the wisdom that's knowing the selflessness or essencelessness of everything that's coming through not just the self-habit but the reality habit. And that's the perfection of wisdom, prajñāpāramitā, also embodied as a goddess. And the culmination of uh, the practice of the bodhisattva's six perfections, for example. Okay? Which all the others lead up to. Because that's what is going to enable one to cut through the ignorance that prevents Buddhahood. So, uh, that... So when all that gets going and Nāgārjuna is doing his philosophy, there are certain kinds of issues that come up. And one of these concerns, of course, is going to be definitely about nihilism.
Like, are we, you know, that there is in the Buddhist community as well, a kind of concern like, oh, there's, you know, we could fall into a nihilistic interpretation.
Along with that is going to be a related concern, which is how do we account for, which is not on the slide, but how do we account for or like, what does it mean to know emptiness?
If it's just not complete non-knowing, and Candrakīrti basically articulates it that way. And no, not very many Tibetan interpreters were very fond of that articulation. And so he was, it was reinterpreted in various ways. Like, knowing through not knowing can sound just like, again, nihilism. Just you're unconscious. But you're not unconscious. So what kind of knowing is it? So both of these emerge after Nāgārjuna in various developments. And we're going to look at one development now and then stop and take some further questions. And this development is about this idea, like, one way in which the tradition responds to what Nāgārjuna brings up, and what the perfection of wisdom text brings up, and the notion of emptiness brings up, is this idea of Buddha nature, or Tathāgatagarbha. And it's really kind of saying, there's a continuity between the ordinary consciousness, the ordinary kind of mind, of an ordin, the ordin... the mind of an ordinary person filled with ignorance, and the mind of a Buddha. There's something that is the same, you can say. At least conceptually. What is the same? Well, there's a kind of scale, basically. And here we're gonna, we're gonna borrow, actually, terms from Christian theology. So, when we talk about apophatic theology, it means, like Master Eckhart, actually, a kind of theological perspective that just refuses to say anything affirmative about the nature of God. And so you can have a perspective here as well, that is refusing to say anything affirmative about the nature of the ultimate, about the ultimate nature of the mind. And so what you, in a very apophatic interpretation, and by the way, this is coming from the works of Maitreya, and this is Maitreya said to be the future Buddha, this is a bodhisattva, this is a representation of Maitreya as a bodhisattva. And as you can see, it looks quite Greek, because this is from Gandhara, actually the same, generally the same region where that same Greek king several hundred years before that had that dialogue with Nāgasena about the chariot. So uh, it's quite interesting to see how there is that overlap. Remember that Buddhism was very strong all the way into Afghanistan, and some of the major, some major Buddhist monastic universities were in Afghanistan. Uh, so it's quite interesting to reflect on that. In any case, so a truly apophatic account of what's the continuity between uh, uh, your mind and Buddha mind is that they're both empty. That's not very apo, that's not just, you're not really affirming anything. And philosophically some schools that, but almost no one in Tibet really totally goes that apophatic. Even Candrakīrti doesn't quite go that apophatic. Right? Because if we go back to, for a second, if we go back to, no, I can't do it that way. If we go back to, you know what he's saying in chapter 18.
Uh, not singular, not plural, not annihilated, not internal, such is the deathless nectar that is the teaching of the Buddhas, the amrita, the ambrosia.
Uh, the, this, this... speaking of it as being Śānta, speaking of it in the verses of praise as being peace, śivam, which is also the name of the god Śiva. Right? It's like little bits, even in Candrakīrti, little bits of affirmation going on. So the really strong version of affirmation that can happen where you go, like, you can go on the other end of the scale. So there, you say there's just emptiness, and you could say there's a heck of a lot more than emptiness. So there are some schools that would even go so far as to say, so you know the Buddha has 32 major marks and 80 secondary signs that characterize his, what's called Nirmāṇakāya, the kind of body that a Buddha has that appears to, you know, people like us. And you can see the Buddha here in the back. The Buddha has an uṣṇīṣa, little crown kind of protrusion, which, you know, they say no matter how high you go, you can never see the top of it. Like it looks like it's just that high, but you try to go see the top and it's like... There's some great stories about the gods like trying to go up, wait a second, you know. And he's got long, these long earlobes, he's got arms that reach down to his knees, so he can give you a really good hug.
So there are all of these features that a Buddha has that are called these major marks and secondary signs. And, you know, there are some interpretations of Buddha nature that say somehow you already have all that. Some were like it's kind of in some latent form already in your mind, you have all this stuff in your mind stream. Okay, so that's clearly very... Most people didn't go there either. That's a little too much. But most have some... they want to say something, there is some kind of like affirmation that's going along with emptiness. And especially if what we're saying is that the affirmation, what we need for this continuity is that what it means to be a Buddha is in some sense to have primordial wakefulness, to be, to have wisdom. Wisdom is not, you know, the absence of awareness. So therefore, it's kind of one of the minimal things that people add, that the philosophers add, and that we see especially important in the Tibetan chak dzog, ཕྱག་རྫོགས you know, non-dual, Mahāmudrā, Dzogchen traditions, is this idea of luminosity, which we'll talk a lot more about tomorrow,
this basic idea of luminosity. But to talk about luminosity, we're also uh, where'd it go? Is this it?
Is that it? No.
We're also going to have to talk about the matrix,
just to prepare you. Right? So, you'll see why. And this is going to be related to a development called Yogācāra. It's a style of philosophy that emerges after the Bud... after Nāgārjuna. And it's like, what is this prapañca exactly? What is the experience of emptiness? You know, what are you knowing and how are you knowing it? And if you're... and if this is not an awareness of nothing, and if there is awareness, then there's something left over. And that's going to get combined with Mādhyamika eventually. And that's what goes to Tibet. That form of Mādhyamika goes to Tibet and is very important for these non-dual traditions. And uh... they're going to speak especially of this idea of not just emptiness, but luminosity. And luminosity in Sanskrit is prakāśa or prabhāsvara. They kind of get conflated. They're slightly different. And a very famous phrase that you repeated in various ways is uh, is in Dharmakīrti's version of it, who's a Yogācāra thinker, but maybe also in Mādhyamika is prabhāsvaram idaṁ cittaṁ prakṛtyā ’gantavo malāḥ Which means, this mind, by its nature, is luminous. The defilements are adventitious. They're not essential. So now emptiness is going to be involving definitely emptiness, emptiness of fixed identity, emptiness of those defilements of the kleśas. They're not essential to the mind. But an affirmation, what's meant to be a subtle affirmation of this sheer luminosity, which is like a metaphor, you can say, and sometimes also a description, of just consciousness itself. But obviously, what's the danger there?
Yeah, you essentialize consciousness.
Then we got a problem. Okay? So we're going to try to look at that tomorrow, and try to understand this idea of sel tong zung juk སེམས་སྟོང་ཟུང་འཇུག་ in Tibetan, the complete integration of emptiness and luminosity, which is kind of the next step in Mādhyamika. All right, we have a couple of minutes. We've been doing a little questions, but we didn't do a lot of questions today. But maybe everyone just can't take it anymore anyway. So... But if you have a question or two, or you just want to get out of here. Do we have a question? Yeah? Student: How is prapañca related to grasping? Yes, so uh, that's a great question. And this word, dzin pa འཛིན་པ་ in Tibetan, is used uh like, more in kind of oral discourse and so on, than in uh, than in Indian texts. They have the word graha. But dzin pa འཛིན་པ་ starts to have this sort of flavor that is um, kind of like really trying to point to some experiential features. And... And I think in some contexts, it's, they're really just the same. Yeah, they're really just the same. In some contexts, maybe grasping or fixation is another translation which I like, that you'll hear, is a, is a, is not as subtle as སྤྲོ་པ་ thro pa, as prapañca Actually you could maybe kind of be like... Grasping or fixation has a kind of almost behavioral feature to it. And certainly experiential. Like you're kind of... You know, the metaphor is like... Right? So...
You might say there's a kind of, let's say... And that's very dualistic. So maybe like the actual kind of conceptualization of objects would certainly involve grasping, dualistic fixation. But is the mere perception of an object grasping? Maybe? Then there's a theoretician... That's not the right word. There's a scholar, practitioner, you know, quite important for, at least I think for, you know, this tradition named Tsele Ngatsok Rangdrol, from I believe eh, like 16th... Is that right? I'm not good at the dating game. I think he's 17th century. And uh, uh... So he's pretty late, comparatively speaking. And uh, he speaks about this idea of དེར་འཛིན་ཀྱི་བློ der dzin gi lo. There may be something, some others before him talk about it. So it's like a cognition or a cognitive state, which is dzin འཛིན་, apprehending, holding something as that. Just like... Just as that. And that could certainly be conceptual, like, oh, that's a vase. But it sounds even just like object selection, like mere object selection. Then that would seem that, then, you know, like... is prapañca even subtler than that?
It's a very interesting, it's an interesting question. Right? Student: Early 17th century. Early 17th. Okay, thank you. Yeah, I thought so. Yeah. Bibi: There's an online question as well. Okay. Bibi: Could you review compassion in light of what we are discussing? Uh, yes. I was thinking we might do more of that tomorrow. But yeah, sure. So uh, the um, the basic here... So if we think about this in terms of the six perfections and like the Bodhicaryāvatāra, the guide to the bodhisattva's way of life, those six perfections culminate in wisdom. And in the ninth chapter, which is the wisdom chapter, so in the eighth chapter, which is technically the, the, about the perfection of meditation, the fifth perfection, uh, it's really a chapter about the cultivation of compassion. And uh, you know, so the previous chapters about giving and ethics and so on, those are, you know, giving ethics, uh, effort and, and patience. Those are um, you know, building toward, in a way you could see those as building toward compassion and then compassion culminates in the wisdom chapter. And in that, in the fifth, in the eighth chapter, um, where he's talking about the perfection of meditation, which is really just about cultivation of compassion, the uh, Śāntideva, you know, famously uses the, introduced the technique of the exchange of self and other as a um, as a method for cultivating compassion. And um... so compassion is, you know, clearly essential. It's one of the five uh, perfections. But it is, in the first chap... first verse of the ninth chapter, Uh... you know, he says, uh, all of the previous perfections that we've discussed are means for, for obtaining the perfection of wisdom. Okay? So this very important idea here, which is that you have... So one of the ways we talk about, um, like whenever we look at any of the Buddhist systems, we can talk about shi lam dre ཞི་ལམ་འབྲས་ The shi ཞི་ literally, like the foundation is the ontology. Like what is their account of reality? Lam ལམ་ is the path, and dre འབྲས་ or dre bu འབྲས་བུ.is the result of that path. So in the Mahāyāna, the ontology, like the basis, is the two truths, ultimate and conventional, that we've been talking about. And uh, the path is... And the result is Buddhahood in two aspects, the Dharmakāya, the mind of the Buddha, and the Rūpakāya, the form body of the Buddha, which has two aspects itself, the emanation body, the Nirmāṇakāya, and the celestial body, the Saṃbhogakāya. But the path is prajñā and upāya, wisdom and method. We already heard this before, when we cited a verse or paraphrased a verse from the Abhisamayālaṅkāra, the ornament of realization, which is the Buddhas are in unlocated nirvāna. Why? Because wisdom keeps them out of saṃsāra. That's key. If you don't... Compassion cannot eliminate suffering. That's really important. Cannot eliminate suffering. No matter how much compassion you have, you can't eliminate suffering. Because suffering is caused by ignorance. And so that's really important to understand. And, and sometimes because there is... Compassion is so important, sometimes we can sort of fixate on compassion as being the, you know, uh, as being um, uh, like somehow ultimate. Right? It's gonna... That's the solution. And this is in a, in a text called the ཆེ་ཆེན་ཉེས་དམིགས་རྒྱ་མཚོ che chen nye mig gyatso . This is called Compassion Arising as an Enemy.
སྙིང་རྗེ་དྲ་དུ་ལང་བ Nyingje Dradu langba. Uh, where we kind of get stuck in that perspective. But, if you don't have compassion, right? Great compassion. Great compassion. Compassion here is not just like compassion for some others. And what is compassion defined as? It's the motivation, the wish that another be free of suffering. Great compassion is the wish for all others to be free of suffering. Right? So like when the bodhisattva is practicing, the bodhisattva is practicing to relieve the suffering of all sentient beings. And the bodhisattva doesn't just have great compassion, the bodhisattva has... the, uh, the uh, when in Tibet it's called the ལྷག་བསམ lhag sam, the atiśhaya, the special intention to be responsible for that. It's not just like, oh, may all sentient beings be free from suffering, which of course is a very powerful and positive motivation, attitude to have. But it's like, and I'm going to do it. You know, whatever it takes, I'm going to do that. That's bodhicitta, the uh, the awakening mind, which is, is, which is, is, required to retain, uh, or it's technically conventional bodhicitta, is required to retain Buddhahood. So, if you don't have that, you could still have plenty of compassion, and certainly like non-Mahāyāna practitioners, arhats, they have compassion, love and compassion, no question. But the idea is that they don't have this special commitment to actually do that. And therefore they do end saṃsāra for themselves. They, their wisdom eliminates their ignorance. But since they don't have that special intention, the great compassion and the intention to actually do that, therefore they can't eliminate that second level of ignorance, which is the reality habit.
Why do you need to r get r... Why does one need, why does the bodhisattva need to get rid of the reality habit? Because... the bodhisattva needs to be, then becomes to become maximally effective, to become a Buddha. One way to think of what a Buddha is, maximally effective at helping others relieve their suffering. Which means completely able to inhabit the realities of other people. Completely. And not really having your own reality. Right? Because you're not, it's like you don't have this, you know. Not only, you know, do you not have a reality habit, you just don't have a reality. It's like you know, it's all everybody else's reality.
So, if you don't have great compassion, you don't need that. There would be no point, you wouldn't have any, you wouldn't have the motivation to do that. Right? So why would you bother? You wouldn't. But also, there's another thing, which is like, what is it that is that last layer of obstacle, what's called the jñeyāvaraṇa, the obscuration to getting to that point, which is described as a kind of omniscience, of kind of seeing all the multiple realities, conventional realities. You know?
What is it that's the obstacle? It's like kind of having your own thing going on in some fashion. Like, you know, your standpoint. You've got your standpoint. And emotionally,
one way to get past that standpoint is to value others, is to have, instead of rang che zin, རང་གཅེས་འཛིན་ self-cherishing, you have other cherishing. So like, the kind of affective or emotional process of compassion is not just a motivator, but it's like what sort of shifts you out of your standpoint, which is like part of what the reality habit is. Like, oh, there's reality. And I'm going to tell you what it is. Right? So being shifted so that the compassion practice is, is, is a method, you could say, but it also in a way is part of the result.
And so even though uh, there's a lot of debate, like should you include the compassion as a descriptor of Buddha mind in some ultimate sense, you know, in practical terms, it clearly is like part of what Buddha mind is. Because that's what's driving. So another way to say it is this. Wisdom gets us out... keeps us from being stuck in reality. All sentient beings, right? That's what's going to get people out of their, out of the prison of saṃsāra. Like in the Mañjuśrī prayer. Right? But what's going to rebuild? Like, what's the engine of saṃsāra? What drives saṃsāra? What's building the prison? Who builds the prison? The prisoners.
How do they build it? With ignorance. What's... once they're freed, what are they going to make? The Buddha field.
And how do they build that? What's the engine of saṃsāra? Ignorance. What's the engine, so to speak, of the Buddha field, of nirvāna? Compassion.
Right? So compassion is completely essential, but there's three levels of compassion. I'll stop soon. I'll try to be compassionate. Sorry, I just blah, blah, blah...
You can have compassion for people. Right? And actually that can be quite problematic, I'll be frank. That kind of compassion can be really problematic if there's no wisdom behind it at all. I'll tell a quick story. When my mother was, my mother lived for seven years amazingly with uh, stage four lung cancer and at a certain point she passed away in 2012 and had a very good life, those seven years were quite good, but there were times when she was hospitalized with pain and really quite difficult stuff going on. And the one time during a hospitalization she uh, there was a, you know, in the US you have chaplains in the hospital who were often also qualified as social workers and they come through and they see you and there was one and I happened to be visiting her, you know, I spent a lot of time with her during that period and she, there was this chaplain came in the room and like, you know, and my mother, I just saw my mother's face like, oh no, not her again. And she's, my mother's like, nice to see you.
Yeah, right. And so, you know, and the thing was this very well-intentioned person, but she was projecting a kind of suffering into my mother that my mother was not having. Like, oh, I hope you're okay today. I'm here to, you know, I really feel so much for you.
Right, that kind of compassion where you're like, oh, you're suffering and let me save you. That is not, that's actually not a good thing. Right, that's actually can be very, and sometimes can be even destructive.
Yeah, it's like pity, but there is like, oh, I'm going to help you. You're suffering, like, but I, so that kind of compassion does, can... you can have compassion for people, but sometimes you have, what you have compassion for is your model of the person. Not for the person. You don't see the person. And so you're like, project there your model of suffering onto that person, which was what was happening with my mother. My mother was suffering, but not in the ways that this person thought.
And so she just found it annoying and actually made her suffer more.
You know, like, oh, you, you don't believe in Zippy the Pinhead, I'm so sorry for you.
No Zippy fans out there, but anyway.
So, yeah, where was I? So then there's compassion for the elements. You don't have compassion for a person. You have compassion for all of this psycho, because there aren't really persons, right? Person is a convenient designation for a bunch of psycho physical elements, fizzing. You have compassion for that.
That's probably definitely better in a way than having compassion for persons.
And then there's the highest level of compassion is called anālambana or nirālamba, I think both, karuṇā or a ma migpe, ma migpe nyingje མ་མིགས་པའི་སྙིང་རྗེ
uh, objectless compassion. It's just compassion without, it's non-dual compassion.
Right? Completely like there isn't, you're not having compassion for something. It's just this energy that is relieving suffering wherever it is. This affective state, whatever you want to call it. Which is what Buddhas have. And high practitioners. So anyway, sorry I took a long time, compassion, but there you go. So maybe we'll say a little more tomorrow. Sorry about that. Okay, shall we uh, dedicate?
sönam diyi thamché sikpa nyi thopné nyepai dranam phamjé né kyega nachi balap trukpa yi sipai tsolé drowa drölwar shok jangchup semchok rinpoché ma kyepa nam kyé gyurchik kyepa nyampa mepa yang gongné gongdu phelwar shok
All right, thank you. That's from Śāntideva. It means through all this that I have done, through the, throught the merit, by means of the merit that I have accumulated through what we have done, may I become one who puts an end to all suffering.
In other words, a Buddha. Okay, thank you.
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