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Session 14 — Emptiness, Interdependence, and Non-Dual Knowing
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Collection:
- Buddhist Classics and Philosophy
Location:
- Gomde Germany-Austria
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- Subtitles ,
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Excerpt
John D. Dunne explains emptiness and interdependence as two perspectives on the same reality, depending on whether one is seeing conventionally or through ultimate analysis. The session also points toward non-dual knowing by showing that emptiness cannot ultimately be grasped as an object of thought.
Description
In this session, John D. Dunne clarifies the relationship between emptiness and interdependence, showing that they are not two separate realities but two ways of understanding the same phenomenon. From the perspective of ordinary beings, things appear as solid and truly real, while from the perspective of a noble one they are experienced as interdependent appearances, like reflections in a mirror. He explains that emptiness is not a property inhering in things, nor a concept that refers to some hidden object, but the result of ultimate analysis when no independent essence can be found. The session also explores how Madhyamaka reasoning may function not merely as proof, but as a method that induces a shift from conceptual understanding toward direct experience. In this way, the teaching points toward non-dual knowing, where emptiness is no longer grasped as an object but approached as lived insight.
Related Course Info
- 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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Audio
01:05:07
okmin chökyi yingkyi phodrang né
düsum sangyé kün gyi ngowo nyi
rangsem chöku ngönsum tönzé pa
tsawai lamai shapla sölwa dep
All right, an invitation to settle the mind for a moment with the body alert but relaxed.
And then bringing to mind our motivation in the Mahāyāna, we aspire to achieve awakening for the sake of all beings out of great compassion.
All right, let's begin. So uh, since uh, we didn't really get a chance to um, we had a somewhat shorter question period at the end of the day yesterday. If there are any questions now...
any questions now? Yes, Ron?
I'll have a little coffee so I can answer.
Student: Um, I remember you had one slide that, if I recall correctly, said emptiness is the same as interdependence. yaḥ pratītyasamutpādaḥ śūnyatāṃ tāṃ pracakṣmahe Does that answer your question? Now I get it. Yeah, now, oh, I didn't just say that before. It's so obvious. It's so obvious. Prajakshmahe means we say. And so it's Nāgārjuna he's like speaking in the plural, sometimes that's a sign of humility so it could be that in Sanskrit but he may also mean like people who are thinking like me. We say that, that which is... yaḥ pratītyasamutpādaḥ śūnyatāṃ tāṃ pracakṣmahe that which is pratītyasamutpādaḥ that is emptiness. So we're saying that, what do we mean by emptiness? It's that which is dependently originated or interdependent. So it doesn't really mean that they're the same and actually, you know, this is where a certain kind of perspectivalism can come in, meaning it depends on the context or how you're looking, so to speak, or what you're bringing to bear on whatever. So on the one hand, if we have our flower or our vase, from the ultimate perspective, from the perspective of the noble one in meditative equipoise on the ultimate, it's emptiness. From the perspective of deluded sentient beings, it's a flower in a vase. But that is what's going on there at the level of sentient beings is they think that's essentially real, but really it's interdependent. So what it means for something to be empty, so sentient beings' ordinary experience, so remember the metaphor of the um, of the mirror, right? So when you're looking at a mirror, we know behaviorally that you don't think it's really your face. It's again not like the rubber hand illusion. And because if we hit it or something, you don't go, ow. So even though you don't maybe consciously think, oh, that's not really my face in the mirror, maybe don't get to that level of analyzing things, it doesn't, we're not really feeling like it's our face, because we don't behave that way. But uh, if you actually touch your face or whatever, or somebody starts to go towards slapping your face, like you, this feels real. This sensation of face feels real. So in that sense, that's not like your, like the mirror. That's real. To the ar.., to the noble one, this is like the mirror. It's not, It doesn't present itself as real. It just presents itself as an appearance, an interdependent appearance. So the difference, you can say, in terms of the conventional reality between a noble one, a Mahāyāna noble one, someone who's realized the Mādhyamika view, and an ordinary person, is that they think when they see this, first of all, they think, like in some sense, this is ultimate. The way it looks is the way it really is, like there's some essentially real thing here. But for the Ārya, it doesn't, the Ārya knows, the noble one knows, that, that this is empty, ultimately this is empty. There's not something essentially real there, ultimately. And conventionally what's appearing doesn't appear as ultimately real or essentially real. It appears as an interdependent appearance. Okay, so it's like two different perspectives. So when you are participating in the, in the uh, perspective of ordinary sentient beings, then you're dealing with appearances in saṃsāra, and that's, but from the standpoint of the uh, the noble one, and of course the Buddha, those are just interdependent appearances. Right? And the difference between a Buddha and a noble one is that the noble ones are still having their own appearances, but the Buddha is really just having other beings' appearances, as Khenpo was explaining. Does that make sense? Yeah, thank you. So in other words, you're like two sides of the same coin. And what makes them not exactly equal? Because uh, But they are in a sense like, so this is exactly the same, another way to say this is, you know,
to quote the Heart sūtra in Sanskrit and Tibetan. Form is emptiness, so form means visual objects in this context. Form is empty, emp... Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. It's not like they're different entities. It's kind of two different ways of seeing the same thing. Right? But when you're seeing this, so and how do you see it, what's the difference there is that without analysis, and this is a key term that Khenpo also mentioned, when we don't analyze it, like what's really there, then without analysis, we, we uh, you know, there's just this appearance. And as long as you leave it unanalyzed, you don't ask what's really there, then you're dealing with an interdependent appearance. So that's the mode of the conventional. But when you analyze, you look for what's really there, then what, all that remains then is, or not even remains, what you end up with is emptiness. There isn't an interdependent appearance anymore, there's emptiness. And even saying there is, as we know, is a problem. It's not like emptiness is a thing that's there. Okay? So, you know, it's, but it's not like the emptiness is something other than this, or this is other than the appearance, or that the appearance is something other than emptiness. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Form is not other than emptiness, emptiness is not other than form.
Yes?
There was also a slide saying that emptiness is non-referring to anything. Correct. But can't you, is it not more the thing that emptiness refers to everything? It's not, emptiness is not a subject as itself, no thing, but it's a quality of everything. I don't think I would be, so, okay, so...
If you're talking about something being a quality of something, then there needs to be like a subject, an entity of which the quality is predicated, right? So you want to say that emptiness is a predicate of this. Does this exist such that emptiness could be a predicate of it?
Yeah, it's actually worse than a circle. Because from the perspective in which emptiness applies, which is the ultimate, this does not exist.
It also doesn't not exist. It's not an absolute nothing, it's not an absolute something. There's nothing of which emptiness could be predicated. So there are going to be philosophers, especially in Tibet, who really don't like that. They kind of want emptiness to be a predicate that you can apply to things. And there's a way in which we can do that. Remember we said there's a version of emptiness which is like a conceptual version. It's not the actual version of emptiness, but it's like a concep, it's a concept that we work with, that we use to get to the actual experience of emptiness. So it's like the arguments, you could say the conclusions of the arguments, right? So when we go through an argument and say that, you know, this vase is not ultimately real, because it's a causal product, but causality doesn't ultimately make sense. Or because it is a whole constituted by parts and that doesn't actually make sense. Or because it's an object that's being, the way we know it is as an object for a subject, but we can't make sense of the relationship between objects and subjects. In a very simple way of saying it is, it's not ultimately real because it's interdependent. We can't specify its identity in and of itself, independent of anything else. Whenever we say, what is it really, we end up talking about something else. Its causes, its parts, the subjectivities that are knowing it, or whatever. Okay? So that's an argument, and you could say, oh, you come to a conclusion, like a logical conclusion, a rational conclusion, which is a conceptual cognition. And in that case, you can sort of speak of emptiness as sort of, you know, the concept that is that conclusion. Uh, but that's not, that's just a, a way of talking about a sort of bridge from a conceptual to a non-conceptual experience. But another way of talking about that is, you go through that argument, and rather than coming to a conceptual conclusion, what you come to is...
Like your head explodes, you know that, what the... You don't come to a concept, you come to an experience. That the argument induces a state in you. Right? So philosophers kind of prefer not to think that, you know, the goal of arguments is to induce states. They like arguments to, you know, have definitive meaning that they can then prove or disprove and so on. So you'll find a lot of people, in contemporary people who study Mādhyamika, often don't like to think about that as like what the arguments are doing is rather than proving something, they're inducing a state. But I think especially for certain contemplative traditions, it makes much more sense to think of what Nāgārjuna is doing is inducing a state in you. He's not trying to prove something. And he even says that, I don't have a thesis to prove. Right? We did that already. na me pratijñā asti I'm not proving anything. I'm disabusing you of your crazy ideas, he says to us.
Okay? So then in that case, emptiness I don't think can refer to everything, because it doesn't refer to anything. It's not a property of things, because there's nothing of which it could be a property.
And you'll find competing interpretations that don't like that. They'll talk about the basis of emptiness and then emptiness as, what the, you know, what is instantiated or in some sense qualifying that basis, the dong shi གདོང་གཞི in Tibetan. But that really, I don't think that works well with the kind, with this style of interpretation we're trying to head toward. Where non-dual, non-duality is key. Okay? Yeah, but in the end, emptiness is also the quality. To be empty is the quality of emptiness. There isn't any emptiness of which emptiness could be a quality.
Isn't it? Right? I know, it's so frustrating. Damn it! There is a way in which, so one of the things that Sarah McClintock, my co-author on the Nāgārjuna, on the Ratnāvalī translation, wrote this article about, based on a philosopher we're going to talk about, Śāntarakṣita, that she's worked quite a lot on. um, the uh, you know like you, One way to say, oh the Buddha is omniscient is what he knows is emptiness. And emptiness characterizes everything. So by knowing emptiness you know everything. But it's a trick. Because there isn't everything to be known. Right? And that's why also then when you talk about omniscience, since she wrote a book about omniscience where you can read about this, they often talk about two styles, types of omniscience. Yathā bhutanyana and Yāvat bhutanyana. Ji tar kempa, ་ཇི་ལྟ་བ་མཁྱེན་པ and Jinye kempa, ཇི་སྙེད་པ་མཁྱེན་པ in Tibetan. So there's omniscience meaning knowing things as they truly are, which means knowing, whatever knowing is, nondualistically, in our interpretation, nondualistically knowing emptiness, which is not an object that's being known. That's knowing the ultimate. How many emptiness’s are there?
And then there's knowing things as numerous as they are. Like meaning the conventional appearances from the standpoint of deluded sentient beings. So that's our more common way of thinking about omniscience, right? Like in theistic context. But there, again, it's really not... It's not like... And another characteristic of this style of interpretation is that there are some styles of interpretation that basically the idea of the conventional reality is kind of... Everything sort of is the same. The only thing that's different is you take out essences. But everything else, like, you know, sort of scientifically, so to speak, is the same. In other words, it's just one conventional reality that we're all in. But on this interpretation, there isn't one conventional reality at all. There are multiple, basically infinite, conventional realities. Because there are many different kinds of sentient beings who are, have different kinds of shared realities in different universes. You know? So our physics is a product of a particular kind of embodiment and, you know, a particular kind of even cultural history and so on. It doesn't mean it doesn't work. It works. But that's just one account. Whereas there are some interpretations of the... Mādhyamika interpretations of the conventional, which would take something as like the laws of physics and say, yeah, that's all completely true. You know, there's just that. Just don't essentialize it. But yeah, it's all like that. So even the idea of knowing everything, as numerous as they are, becomes really complicated because, well, which reality are you talking about? Whose reality? It's never a singular reality, right? It's multiple beings with shared, you know, that are multiply sharing worl, sharing and creating worlds together.
Because as we will see, this has to do with the certain update to, you know, to Mādhyamika, so to speak, that happens. Historically, that's very important for the Mādhyamika that goes to Tibet. Sorry, I'm like going on and on and on and on.
Okay?
Yes. So what you said earlier about the philosophers, trying to argue and reach certain conclusions instead of states, it provoked me to, you know, think about phenomenology and how they, what their methods are. Yes. And, you know, and their methods were to induce a certain state. Right. A phenomenological attitude or in some cases Heidegger induced boredom in his students to, you know, reach certain existential depths. But my question is actually more related to the overlap that we already talked about a little bit between the methods such as phenomenological reduction epoché and eidetic variation. And so do you have, it may be a little bit too technical question for now, but I don't know if you can talk a little bit about it and explain your view on the overlap and how can the methods from the phenomenological tradition maybe achieve similar states or lead to similar states and to what extent?
We'll be talking about that later.
So let's ask that question then. Is that okay? I think it's a very good point to say that, you know, phenomenologists were not really interested in apodictic conclusions from, you know, rational argumentation. That, that's, that is not to say they didn't use rationality. But unfortunately that has been, there are very few interpreters of, if any actually, interpreters of Nāgārjuna in any, certainly in any recent time who are really trying to take a phenomenological approach. I'm trying to think. There must be some people. But the dominant approaches have tended to be more analytic philosophy
where, you know, argumentation, like the idea that Nāgārjuna is like not trying to come to some kind of an argument is really problematic to the point that you have interpreters of Nāgārjuna who say that he's engaged in a style of logic that actually accepts contradiction. Instead of seeing his use of contradiction as a way of getting us out of the need to come to a conclusion, they see him adopting that style of logic. So that's kind of, I think that's a big mistake, frankly. But that's, like if you're very analytic in your approach, that's where you can end up. Maybe just a quick follow-up, and we can also talk about it later, but just to throw it out there, I think, would it be also important to separate here the intentions behind the Buddhist philosophers and phenomenological philosophers, such as that Buddhist is necessarily like strongly ethically motivated, whereas phenomenological philosophers, of course, we all are, but. I think you could see definitely some ethical... I'm not sure I would make that strong a distinction there, but certainly there's ideas about soteriology, about liberation, that are not applying to the phenomenologists in quite the same way. Although I do think Husserl, for example, was very concerned with certain objectivist developments in Western science, and that he saw that as really potentially very dangerous.
But I'm no scholar of Husserl by any means. But I think certainly there are differences, but we're going to talk about one major difference later. That really brings a lot of stuff into question. Okay, we can do an online question and then maybe we... Not that I have the answers, but, you know, I'll say something. We have several, we have two, and I tell you both and you tell me which one you want to answer. A general question, are there teachings about forgetfulness rather than ignorance in Buddhist traditions? First question, and the second one is, what is actually the traditional view and what is your personal view on how Nāgārjuna came to his view? Through philosophical reasoning or through some kind of realization he already started with? Okay, maybe I do the second one first. There are various kind of accounts of Nāgārjuna's life and one of them is that he encountered the perfection of wisdom sūtras by traveling to the land of the Nāgas where they'd been hidden and then recovering them from there and I guess the idea is like that I can't quite remember though why he did that, but then it's the sūtras that, oh, you know that are are propounding emptiness, sometimes with reasoning but sometimes often in other ways. So that's, I think you could say that it was almost through the word of the Buddha traditionally that Nāgārjuna is engaging with the philosophy of emptiness. There maybe, I'm sure there are other tales, there are some very long accounts in Chinese of Nāgārjuna's life, some of which have been translated I think by Etienne Le Mote, if I remember correctly. Uh, I think, um, I'm not too sure. But uh, so but there is a concept in general in our Chakdzok tradition, Mahāmudrā Dzogchen tradition, you know, of the combination of the Chokling Tersar and the Baro Kagyu, but actually not just that tradition, like in general in Mahāmudrā Dzogchen, like in Tsele Natsok Rangdröl mentions this. And I don't know who first talks about this, but it's the idea that you can come to the view through meditation or you can come to meditation through the view. And of these, the, coming to the view through meditation is considered to be very difficult and rare, like you just meditate kind of somehow figure things out, you come, you uncover the view. Because in that context also the view you would be uncovering would be not the conceptual view, it would be the non-conceptual actual view. So that would be very difficult without anyone giving you any kind of conceptual guidance, you just sort of somehow figure it out, so to speak. That sounds, that's hard. Whereas as opposed to that you come to the meditation, the experience, through learning the view, through like the conceptual view basically, like what we're doing, and that's much more common. Now which qualifies Nāgārjuna? I don't know. They do say he was at least a first stage bodhisattva. Now in the first stage which means he was a noble one, he was an Ārya who had attained the path of seeing, had a direct experience of the ultimate. So that's like, at least that much is certainly, you know, commonly accepted.
Uh, there's the whole thing of the five paths and the ten stages, and the list, more lists, but we won't go into those details right now. Let's just say, you know, Nāgārjuna was not just doing concepts. That's, I think, the tradition definitely agrees with that. And this, what was the other one again?
Uh, not really, no. No, because forgetfulness would mean you sort of know something, but you just aren't paying attention, so you forget it. And this context is, ignorance is an obscuration. It's not like, uh, oh, you know, like if I forget my phone, I kind of know where my phone is, and then I've just forgotten it. But this is where there's something that's actually preventing me, I don't know what, you know, like I have more than forgetfulness, I have something that's actually blocking me from seeing something. Right? So, and it's delicate because, you know, I can see there's a reason to ask that question, which is, there is a sense in which already within our experience is, in a sense, the kind of non-dual awareness, primordial wakefulness, that is the, that is, you know, Buddha mind, so to speak. But it's not exactly that we're forgetting that, it's more like there's something that's sort of blocking that from becoming fully manifest in our experience. And that's what ignorance is. There is a notion of forgetfulness, which is in the context of mindfulness, which plays a very important role as well in all of this, where mindfulness is basically, it's called mindfulness, the literal word in Sanskrit is smṛti, or in Pali it's sati, in Tibetan it's dran pa དྲན་པ , and that literally means memory. But, you know, that's really a metaphor, because memory here means it's the opposite of forgetting, saṃpramoṣa, which is, and forgetting means being distracted. So when you're being not mindful, your mind is being pulled in various directions by whatever, things are capturing your attention. So you can be mindful without being focused on an object, you can have non-dual or objectless mindfulness, which is a very important part of the, of the practice in Mahāmudrā, what they call the ma yeng tsam gyi drenpa མ་ཡེངས་ཙམ་གྱི་དྲན་པ, the mindfulness of mere non-distraction, because mindfulness's function, even technical function in the Abhidharma is to prevent distraction. It's not, doesn't, it's not talking about being focused on an object, there are other mental functions which do the object focus part, it's just what prevents you from getting pulled away. So you can be not focused on an object and just not pulled away. Right? So that's where forgetting is very important. Forgetting is kind of getting lost, as Mingyur Rinpoche says, like you're not lost. You're just not lost. So ma ying mi gom མ་ཡིང མི་གོམ is a common way of talking about Mahāmudrā, Dzogchen, non-dual style meditation is not undistracted, not meditating. And that doesn't mean you're like, you know, just asleep. It means that your mind is not being pulled away by other objects. You can have content, but your mind is not caught, the attention is not caught by that, whether it's thoughts or sensations. You're not trying to close down your mind, but you're not caught on the one hand, and on the other hand, you're not trying to do meditation in the sense of focus on something. Right? So the mental function that is responsible for focus in the Abhidharma, so, so mindfulness, smṛti or sati or dren pa, is a uh, is one of these dharmas, actually. Remember the elements that make up the mind-body system? It's one of those in that system. And those ideas continue to be used by the Mahāyāna philosophers, like by Mādhyamikas. They continue to use those methods. They just say, you know, it's not ultimately real, but this is still a good way of talking about how the mind's working, certain aspects of it at least. And so mindfulness, the technical definition of mindfulness, in the Tibetan world, this is called sem སེམས semjung སེམས་བྱུང , mind and mental functions. You can see it in the second volume of the series called Science and Philosophy in the Indian Buddhist Classics, Volume 2, The Mind, which I co-translated and wrote some essays for. I think I mentioned that before. And so mindfulness is what prevents distraction, and what actually accounts for attention, one of the key mental functions for attention is called manasikāra, which basically means attention. A very low level, kind of primitive level of attention. And which is said to occur, according to the Abhidharma, in every moment of cognition. But in the Mahāmudrā tradition, as it develops, you know, the style of philosophy in India that we're going to talk some about, as it develops, they say, Oh, you know what our practice is? You guys do mindfulness, and you focus with your manasikāra, with your attention on objects. Well, we do amanasikāra, non-attention. So the philosopher Advayavajra, also known as Maitrīpa, is very important for Mahāmudrā tradition. Right? He says, what our meditation is, being inattentive. Ha, Ha, Ha. You know, it's like, it's clearly sort of a joke. But it's also not just a joke. It's also meaning we're not focusing on something. We're not being dualistic. But we're not distracted.
Right? So undistracted non meditation, which is very easy to say.
Not so easy to do. But yes, or maybe it's so easy.
Yeah, anyway. Okay.
All righty then. So maybe we move along now.
Okay. Um, I guess I was just struggling a bit with the uh, uh, Nāgārjuna's arguments on the emptiness of time. Yeah, good, good. Illusionaryness of time. Like, isn't it problematic that it's based on uh, a type of logical reasoning that already sort of negates time? Like, if we already, already excludes time. Like, if you go back to the relation between cause and effect. Yes. Like, that relation is not simply one as in, for instance, the relation between X equals two. It's more like the sort of the nature of the relation is that the cause ceases to exist. Yes. So that it can have an effect. Because it's by being impermanent, by changing, Yeah. um, that it can have an effect.
So they're definitely the same on the one hand, but they're not the same in the sense that they can coexist at the same time. And in the same sense, is it also not the case that past, present and future are definitely the same on one level, but also the nature of the relation is that present can only exist when past ceases to exist and future can only become present when present... no, yea... Right, so in other words, he's kind of loaded the deck. He's cheating because he's deliberately chosen something where the things you're trying to define in terms of each other, we understand to be like, they can't exist at the same time. Let's do a different one then, okay? So how many objects are here? Let's count this as one. Is that okay? I'll take the flower out of here. How many containers are here? Three. Okay, everyone is in agreement. Three. Do they all exist at the same time?
No, this one is actually fluttering in an account quantum reality, which is good. No, I'm kidding. Of course, they exist at the same time. It's a macro level object. Can't play with quantum stuff with macro, okay? Unless it's sci-fi. All right, okay? So there's three. One, two, three. We're going to make a set of these. One, two, three. They belong in that set of a three-fold set, okay? Is there threeness? So there's a threeness characterizing this set, right? Correct? The number three. The quantity three. Is the three the same as this? Uh, no. It's not?
Well, yes and no.
So the threeness is also the same as this, yes and no, isn't it? And that's not in the set. It's a part-whole relation. Exactly. And we already know where that goes, don't we? Very simple. I think number is a really good one here. And they do, the Mādhyamika's worked with numbers too, because that was also considered to be a kind of abstract. So the idea is what we're doing is we're creating an abstract entity that is meant to be instantiated in particular actual things, concrete things. And that's going to be that same kind of distributed entity. It's a one in many. And the minute we do that, the claim is, you know, that we're going to run into this, we're going to run into a contradiction or an excluded middle. We're going to have to either say that the threeness, the entity, well you can call it the set, is different than the members, than the things that are qualified by the number, or it's the same. And neither of those work. What we can do, like, you know, the philosopher Bradley, who did myriological stuff, you know, where we can say, oh, well, things like wholes or sets kind of exist in a different way than concrete things. And then, you know, the real question is, well, how do you know that?
Like, can I just make up abstract things? Like, every three, with every three, there's also a gumagitika that exists, the gumagitika exists abstractly with every number three. And you say to me, how do I know that? And I say, well, because without the gumagitika, three can't exist. And I say, how do I know that? It's just, you know, obvious. What do you mean?
So like our abstractions, like numbers, like we say, oh, three. You say, well, and I say, where's the threeness? Can you, can you point, point to the threeness?
Anybody want to extend the threeness? Point. Please point to the threeness.
People on camera couldn't see you go like this.
Usually my undergraduates go like this. I'm pointing to the threeness. That's a good one, though. That's really good. But of course, each of these is pointing to an individual, right? You can't point to the threeness. It's an abstraction. It doesn't exist in our perception. It exists in our conceptuality.
It exists in the map. It's not the territory. That doesn't mean it's like there's something wrong. Like if I say there's four there, you know, it's not like a Mādhyamika engineer would think, oh, well, three, four, it's all abstractions. you know, like... Don't fly in a Mādhyamika airplane because... It's not like that. No, it's saying that, yes, of course, you can still, there are conceptual maps that are good, that work, conceptual maps that aren't good. And there's a version of Buddhist philosophy that becomes combined with Mādhyamika that we'll talk about a little bit that is you know, really inquiring into, okay, how do we figure out what works and what doesn't work? But the Mādhyamika position is that what definitely doesn't work is when you think the map is the reality, when you take the abstraction that is derived from experience and then you make that real, even to the point where that becomes more real than the concrete thing.
Okay? So, for example, here's a very interesting thing. Uh, how... Okay.
Do you see this? You see it, right? Okay. How do you know this is here?
And there's an object in my hand. How do you know that?
Came along and told you, whispered in your ear, he has an object.
Can you see it? What's going on when you see it? Give me some model. I see an object. I know it as a small vase. Yeah, but give me a model of the process. Just any, some reasonably good model. A visual perception. Physical or experiential, right? Yeah, both, yeah. Both? You can do whatever you want. Okay. The photons bounce off the vase...
trigger my... Yeah, right, right. So there's a causal process. Great. Okay. What is required for that to happen? What if this never changed? Right, changes. It has to change. So there has to be... Like this has to come into... This has to, like, photons have to bounce off of it. Or there are all kinds of interactions that are happening in order for you to see it, right? What would happen if three changed the number three? What does it mean for something to change? It means it becomes something other than what it was a moment ago. So three would become four if it changed, right? So does... So now I say, this is four. That doesn't work, does it? Right? So what does that mean about things like three? They're unchanging. Which means, can you see them? Can you perceive them? No. Can they do anything causal? No. So why do we think they're real?
Who knows? Because it works. Exactly. Exactly. Because it works. And again, if our conceptual system, if the philosopher mouse were like, you know, how many saber-toothed tigers are coming toward me right now? Not much of a meal for a saber-toothed tiger, but maybe, you know, maybe it's a really big mouse. There were really big mice, apparently, prehistorically, seriously. There's just some recent research on that. So it's a big, you know, were-mouse, huge like... But it's a philosopher one. And, you know, like three saber-toothed tigers are coming toward it and it goes, well, in my perceptual experience, there is all of this coming and I can construct the number three as the...
Right, you know, the conceptual map needs to be, is like built into the system is, in a sense for survival, is like the world model is real, because that keeps us alive. And it can get updated, right? But some things get like, invariable. And they don't need to be, they don't need updating anymore. Until you do, until what? Until you start to really analyze. Then things that seem like really invariable, you get down, down, down, and it's like, oh, that's not really what we thought. Like, oh, this is not really quite solid in the way we thought it was.
Right? But there are things like solidity and so on which seem just, oh, that's, you know, the way things are in our experience and we don't update those things. And so we think, because they're so stable, we think they're real, because they work, they are real. Right? And because our system has developed, evolved in a way, we're like, yeah, like your model of the world is reality. So that you behave, you know, like you just, when you need to jump out of the way, you jump out of the way, or whatever it is. Right? So if you're a, if you're a mouse, you know, to survive in saṃsāra, that's good. If you're a human, that kind of is not, again, it's not so adaptive anymore.
Especially if you're a human who can build, you know, nuclear weapons and believe in the reality of, let's say, I don't know, a country more than the concrete touch of a hand. Then you've got a real problem.
Well, I'm just blabbing again. Alrighty. Yes. You want to ask one more? One more. One quick, if it's quick, because we really should. So is it correct to say that on the ultimate level there is no causality? Yes, correct. Causality is apparent. Right? But from the apparent standpoint, we're not denying causality. It's just that another way to say it is, you know, this is somewhat like Hume, I suppose, is that causality is a model. Right? A way of us understanding what's happening in experience and abstraction from experience. That really works well, by the way. And a Buddha would be able to perceive non-causality? You don't... No, you can't see non-causality. Can you see the non-causality in my hand?
I can sell you some later if you want, you know. I've got a whole bag of non-causality in my room. And, you know... Okay.
Yeah. Remember the, remember uh, you know the story from Candrakīrti? Guy goes into a bar. Remember that story? You don't want to be the guy who says, I'll have a glass of nothing.
Okay then. On we go. So, these are... I just wanted to do a quick historical thing Nāgārjuna and then we have his main. These are all rough dates, you know, we don't really know exact dates until we get... until the end where we have figures who went to Tibet. And even those dates, actually, there's debate about. I think both of them, but especially Kamalaśīla. But anyway, Nāgārjuna, then Āryadeva, who is said to be his disciple, then Bhulapālita, a very important interpreter who emphasizes the use of prasaṅga. At least that's traditionally said to be the case. Emphasizes the use of just absurd consequences. Bhāviveka, who's said to introduce more positive reasoning, meaning not just absurd consequences, but like we can actually use affirmative reasoning. Candrakīrti, who critiques Bhāviveka for doing that. Uh, then we have three figures. Jñānagarbha, Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla, who are known as the three Eastern Mādhyamika's by the Tibetans, the uma shar sum, because they were from Bengal, I think. And uh, they are, two of them, Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla, actually go to Tibet. And they are very important for the development of Mādhyamika in Tibet. Later, Candrakīrti's works are translated a couple centuries or more later. Yeah, more than a couple centuries later. And they, and people, for various reasons, kind of become very fond of Candrakīrti, because he solves, in some ways, gives them the tools to do certain things that Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla's approach to Mādhyamika didn't enable them to do. But ironically, you have to sort of pick and choose. So basically, some of what, one stream of interpretation in Tibet likes Candrakīrti, because he is very critical of the Yogācāra philosophy that we're going to talk about. And another stream of Candrakīrti, totally different stream, that the two of these two streams kind of disagree with each other and some fundamental things. Another stream of interpretation likes Candrakīrti, because he rejects the use of certain kinds of epistemological tools. So some people like Candrakīrti for his rejection of Yogācāra idealism, we can call it, maybe, Yogācāra philosophy. It's not really idealism, but... And some people like him for the rejection of epistemology, formal epistemology. But the people who like him because he rejects Yogācāra also really like formal epistemology. And the people who really like Yogācāra, the people who reject formal epistemology like Yogācāra. You get that?
So this is, you know, not traditionally those two sides will say, well, we're our interpretation of Candrakīrti is correct. Academically, and also me personally, I think both sides are sort of ignoring the part of Candrakīrti they don't like.
Right? Okay, so when you hear Candrakīrti being cited, you should be, you know, just be aware that he's being used in certain ways, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it all works out entirely in terms of his philosophy. To Western, there's been Western, in this area, I think Western academics has done a good job of really pointing out something that's important to know, even, you know, within a traditional context. Okay, what are the key questions of Yogacara, Yogācāra that we, you know, talked about at the end of last time? Yogācāra is going to be this new style of philosophy that emerges, again, based on sūtras that are said to have been taught by the Buddha long before that. And these are sūtras that are said to be in the third turning of the wheel. So there are three turnings of the wheel of Dharma, of the Dharmachakra. There is the, you know, that's this gesture that you saw in one of the icons that was on a slide, you know, the icon where, I say, we went from just an empty throne to an actual figure. So that icon is showing the Buddha turning the wheel of Dharma when he turns, there's the first turning in Sarnath where he teaches the Nobles four truths. So that's like early Buddhism. Then we have the second turning is the perfection of wisdom and that's Nāgārjuna in terms of philosophy and all those other figures you just saw. And then the third turning involves especially Yogācāra, okay, and that's going to be not perfection of wisdom sūtras but a whole bunch of other sūtras. Some of them are often referred to as the Vaipulya Sūtras, the extensive sūtras, right, and there are sūtras, very important sūtras like the Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra, the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, which the Mādhyamika's also cite sometimes, okay. So this then emerges after Nāgārjuna and it's going to have a series of questions that even though some of these early figures where Yogācāra is developing in philosophy, not just in the sūtra literature, they don't actually directly seem to talk about Nāgārjuna but it seems pretty clear that they're grappling with some of the issues that Nāgārjuna has raised. And one of them is, what is prapañca? Remember, prapañca is kind of that thing that's even deeper than conceptuality, Right? So we have the one level of saying, well, our problem is that we have bad maps or we're taking our maps too seriously. But prapañca's saying is that, well, actually there's something that's even prior to our map making, that's a problem, the reality habit itself. And so that's one question, like, what is this reality habit, if you like? What is known in the experience of emptiness as ultimate reality? Like, you know, what is it like? I mean, how do we, can we describe it? Is it even knowing? And how does one, you know, like what is known, what are you knowing and how are you knowing it? So both of those questions together you could think of as kind of what's the phenomenology, for example. What's the experience of knowing the ultimate? And does it mean that there's like, you're knowing nothing? Obviously that's not going to work for Nāgārjuna. But does that mean if it's not nothing, does that mean there's something there, something left, something that's kind of not negated by emptiness? Okay, so the major thinkers, just real quick, Asaṅga, Vasubandhu are the two original thinkers and then Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, the epistemologists. Uh, who, uh, you know, work with these ideas. What starts even with the Mādhyamika Bhāviveka, but actually really picks up with Dharmakīrti in particular, is the idea of doing levels of analysis. So this becomes very important in the kind of Buddhism that goes to Tibet. Like we're going to kind of progress from one thing to the next to the next. I'll say more about that. One level of analysis, to the next level of analysis, to the next level of analysis. To kind of lead you through, from, starting with your ordinary experience to a realization of the ultimate. Another important commentator is Sthiramati. Another one that I think is important but is not often just talked about is Vinītadeva. So these are all again in the Sanskrit, right? Tradition, they're all prior to or just prior to or maybe somewhat coinciding with the introduction of Buddhism to Tibet. Especially when we think of Buddhism as the founding of the Samye Monastery in Tibet where philosophical Buddhism starts to occur in the 8th century. Okay. So one of the texts that is very important here is a text that was said to have been transmitted to Asaṅga by the future Buddha Maitreya. In a kind of celestial encounter. And then his half brother Vasubandhu wrote a commentary on this text. Their mother, it's said, was a nun who gave up her robes because she was so worried about what was going on with the dharma and then she produced, she gave birth to and raised the two greatest philosophers, arguably, certainly two of the greatest philosophers. Of these, I will say that the Tibetans especially talk about the six ornaments, six philosophers who are the ornaments. Four of them are here. Right? Asaṅga, Vasubandhu, Dignāga, Dharmakīrti and then in the, sorry, in the Mādhyamika list, Nāgārjuna and Candrakīrti. So it's interesting that four of them actually are not Mādhyamika philosophers. Okay, so what's in this text? It says, abhūta-parikalpo ’sti dvayaṃ tatra na vidyate śūnyatā vidyate tatra tasyām api sa vidyate I think I remember that right. And that means the conceptual construction of the unreal exists. Duality does not exist in it. But emptiness exists in it. It also exists in terms of that, namely emptiness. Completely obvious, right? Okay, let's talk about something first before we go further. And then we'll take a break, which is duality. There are basically two kinds of duality. There is ontological duality and epistemological or phenomenological duality. Okay? Ontological duality comes up a lot in Nāgārjuna. Uh, because what Nāgārjuna can, remember Nāgārjuna works with a dyadic analysis, an analysis of things that are paired to each other. And sometimes, often those analyses, so some of those analyses are things, about things that are paired in some way that doesn't make them contradictories. Like, remember desire and the desirous person or the desirous mind? Those aren't contradictories, right? If there's one, you need the other. Right? But some of his dyadic analyses are about what we call logically contradictories. A contradictory is something that... So hot and cold are not contradictories. Because there are things that are neither hot nor cold. They don't have temperature. Right? Like the number two.
It's kind of lukewarm. Right? So we think of the number two as an object of knowledge we can think of it, but we don't attribute temperature to it. So uh, uh, hot and cold are called contraries. Right? Which means that they can't be instantiated together in the same thing simultaneously. But not everything has to instantiate them. Those qualities. Existence and non-existence are contradictories. Every knowable thing is either existent or non-existent. The number two either exists or doesn't exist. And you can parameterize that. You could say the number two either ultimately exists or ultimately doesn't exist. So everything has to be one or the other of those. It can't be both, can't be neither. That's a contradictory. Okay? So that's, when we talk about duality in Nāgārjuna, that's the kind of ontological duality that he undermines. So in that verse of praise that I say at the beginning, which is by Nāgārjuna,
it says, you're not real, you're not unreal, you're not discontinuous, meaning you just last a moment and stop. You're not eternal, meaning you're continuous over time. You're not permanent, you're not impermanent. To you, the non-dual, I bow. Right? So advaya is this word in Sanskrit for non-duality or the non-dual. And each of those pairs are ontological dualities. Existence, they're contradictory. Existence, non-existence, permanent, impermanent, continuous, discontinuous. Right? They all, at least in the way Nāgārjuna would think about these things, they have to apply to everything that we could possibly know. Everything we possibly know either is unchanging or changing. So either existed or non-existent. Okay? So that's one form of duality. That's a very important form of duality. But that is not the kind of duality when we say non-dual awareness, non-dual primordial awareness, it is not about that. Okay? The non-dual, the non-duality that applies in that context is uh, it's phenomenological or epistemological non-duality. In other words, it's a non-duality about the way that cognition occurs. And one way to think about that kind of cog, that, that way, that notion of duality is just, it's very simply, if we take our favorite vase here, and you're looking at the vase, right? One question is, everyone sees it, right? Where is the vase? Thank you. Wait, do you have like a weird eye disease that makes you... Can you point to the vase, right? Like, you guys can do that, right? I'm not trying to trick you.
Right? It's like over here, right? Okay? And you have, as you're looking at the vase, you have a sense like this, of like a sense of somebody's looking at it. Right? So that's a sense of subjectivity looking at an object. Like there's an in here and an out there. In here, out there, right? Does this look like it's like in here with the one who's looking at it? No. Right, everyone on board with that? That's the kind of duality we're talking about. There's like world and self. Object and subject. Okay? So when you hear non-duality in the context of Mahāmudrā, Dzogchen, it's not talking about ontological duality. It's about this duality in experience. Okay? That's really very important to understand. So we're, we're, as you can see in this verse, this philosophy is going to say that, that duality doesn't actually exist. It seems to exist. But it does not actually exist. It is not ultimately real. We're going to come back to that, but first we're going to take a break. Until, you guys probably need more than five minutes, right? So until 11:20. Okay.
sönam diyi thamché sikpa nyi thopné nyepai dranam phamjé né kyega nachi balap trukpa yi sipai tsolé drowa drölwar shok Okay. Thank you.
All right, an invitation to settle the mind for a moment with the body alert but relaxed.
And then bringing to mind our motivation in the Mahāyāna, we aspire to achieve awakening for the sake of all beings out of great compassion.
All right, let's begin. So uh, since uh, we didn't really get a chance to um, we had a somewhat shorter question period at the end of the day yesterday. If there are any questions now...
any questions now? Yes, Ron?
I'll have a little coffee so I can answer.
Student: Um, I remember you had one slide that, if I recall correctly, said emptiness is the same as interdependence. yaḥ pratītyasamutpādaḥ śūnyatāṃ tāṃ pracakṣmahe Does that answer your question? Now I get it. Yeah, now, oh, I didn't just say that before. It's so obvious. It's so obvious. Prajakshmahe means we say. And so it's Nāgārjuna he's like speaking in the plural, sometimes that's a sign of humility so it could be that in Sanskrit but he may also mean like people who are thinking like me. We say that, that which is... yaḥ pratītyasamutpādaḥ śūnyatāṃ tāṃ pracakṣmahe that which is pratītyasamutpādaḥ that is emptiness. So we're saying that, what do we mean by emptiness? It's that which is dependently originated or interdependent. So it doesn't really mean that they're the same and actually, you know, this is where a certain kind of perspectivalism can come in, meaning it depends on the context or how you're looking, so to speak, or what you're bringing to bear on whatever. So on the one hand, if we have our flower or our vase, from the ultimate perspective, from the perspective of the noble one in meditative equipoise on the ultimate, it's emptiness. From the perspective of deluded sentient beings, it's a flower in a vase. But that is what's going on there at the level of sentient beings is they think that's essentially real, but really it's interdependent. So what it means for something to be empty, so sentient beings' ordinary experience, so remember the metaphor of the um, of the mirror, right? So when you're looking at a mirror, we know behaviorally that you don't think it's really your face. It's again not like the rubber hand illusion. And because if we hit it or something, you don't go, ow. So even though you don't maybe consciously think, oh, that's not really my face in the mirror, maybe don't get to that level of analyzing things, it doesn't, we're not really feeling like it's our face, because we don't behave that way. But uh, if you actually touch your face or whatever, or somebody starts to go towards slapping your face, like you, this feels real. This sensation of face feels real. So in that sense, that's not like your, like the mirror. That's real. To the ar.., to the noble one, this is like the mirror. It's not, It doesn't present itself as real. It just presents itself as an appearance, an interdependent appearance. So the difference, you can say, in terms of the conventional reality between a noble one, a Mahāyāna noble one, someone who's realized the Mādhyamika view, and an ordinary person, is that they think when they see this, first of all, they think, like in some sense, this is ultimate. The way it looks is the way it really is, like there's some essentially real thing here. But for the Ārya, it doesn't, the Ārya knows, the noble one knows, that, that this is empty, ultimately this is empty. There's not something essentially real there, ultimately. And conventionally what's appearing doesn't appear as ultimately real or essentially real. It appears as an interdependent appearance. Okay, so it's like two different perspectives. So when you are participating in the, in the uh, perspective of ordinary sentient beings, then you're dealing with appearances in saṃsāra, and that's, but from the standpoint of the uh, the noble one, and of course the Buddha, those are just interdependent appearances. Right? And the difference between a Buddha and a noble one is that the noble ones are still having their own appearances, but the Buddha is really just having other beings' appearances, as Khenpo was explaining. Does that make sense? Yeah, thank you. So in other words, you're like two sides of the same coin. And what makes them not exactly equal? Because uh, But they are in a sense like, so this is exactly the same, another way to say this is, you know,
to quote the Heart sūtra in Sanskrit and Tibetan. Form is emptiness, so form means visual objects in this context. Form is empty, emp... Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. It's not like they're different entities. It's kind of two different ways of seeing the same thing. Right? But when you're seeing this, so and how do you see it, what's the difference there is that without analysis, and this is a key term that Khenpo also mentioned, when we don't analyze it, like what's really there, then without analysis, we, we uh, you know, there's just this appearance. And as long as you leave it unanalyzed, you don't ask what's really there, then you're dealing with an interdependent appearance. So that's the mode of the conventional. But when you analyze, you look for what's really there, then what, all that remains then is, or not even remains, what you end up with is emptiness. There isn't an interdependent appearance anymore, there's emptiness. And even saying there is, as we know, is a problem. It's not like emptiness is a thing that's there. Okay? So, you know, it's, but it's not like the emptiness is something other than this, or this is other than the appearance, or that the appearance is something other than emptiness. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Form is not other than emptiness, emptiness is not other than form.
Yes?
There was also a slide saying that emptiness is non-referring to anything. Correct. But can't you, is it not more the thing that emptiness refers to everything? It's not, emptiness is not a subject as itself, no thing, but it's a quality of everything. I don't think I would be, so, okay, so...
If you're talking about something being a quality of something, then there needs to be like a subject, an entity of which the quality is predicated, right? So you want to say that emptiness is a predicate of this. Does this exist such that emptiness could be a predicate of it?
Yeah, it's actually worse than a circle. Because from the perspective in which emptiness applies, which is the ultimate, this does not exist.
It also doesn't not exist. It's not an absolute nothing, it's not an absolute something. There's nothing of which emptiness could be predicated. So there are going to be philosophers, especially in Tibet, who really don't like that. They kind of want emptiness to be a predicate that you can apply to things. And there's a way in which we can do that. Remember we said there's a version of emptiness which is like a conceptual version. It's not the actual version of emptiness, but it's like a concep, it's a concept that we work with, that we use to get to the actual experience of emptiness. So it's like the arguments, you could say the conclusions of the arguments, right? So when we go through an argument and say that, you know, this vase is not ultimately real, because it's a causal product, but causality doesn't ultimately make sense. Or because it is a whole constituted by parts and that doesn't actually make sense. Or because it's an object that's being, the way we know it is as an object for a subject, but we can't make sense of the relationship between objects and subjects. In a very simple way of saying it is, it's not ultimately real because it's interdependent. We can't specify its identity in and of itself, independent of anything else. Whenever we say, what is it really, we end up talking about something else. Its causes, its parts, the subjectivities that are knowing it, or whatever. Okay? So that's an argument, and you could say, oh, you come to a conclusion, like a logical conclusion, a rational conclusion, which is a conceptual cognition. And in that case, you can sort of speak of emptiness as sort of, you know, the concept that is that conclusion. Uh, but that's not, that's just a, a way of talking about a sort of bridge from a conceptual to a non-conceptual experience. But another way of talking about that is, you go through that argument, and rather than coming to a conceptual conclusion, what you come to is...
Like your head explodes, you know that, what the... You don't come to a concept, you come to an experience. That the argument induces a state in you. Right? So philosophers kind of prefer not to think that, you know, the goal of arguments is to induce states. They like arguments to, you know, have definitive meaning that they can then prove or disprove and so on. So you'll find a lot of people, in contemporary people who study Mādhyamika, often don't like to think about that as like what the arguments are doing is rather than proving something, they're inducing a state. But I think especially for certain contemplative traditions, it makes much more sense to think of what Nāgārjuna is doing is inducing a state in you. He's not trying to prove something. And he even says that, I don't have a thesis to prove. Right? We did that already. na me pratijñā asti I'm not proving anything. I'm disabusing you of your crazy ideas, he says to us.
Okay? So then in that case, emptiness I don't think can refer to everything, because it doesn't refer to anything. It's not a property of things, because there's nothing of which it could be a property.
And you'll find competing interpretations that don't like that. They'll talk about the basis of emptiness and then emptiness as, what the, you know, what is instantiated or in some sense qualifying that basis, the dong shi གདོང་གཞི in Tibetan. But that really, I don't think that works well with the kind, with this style of interpretation we're trying to head toward. Where non-dual, non-duality is key. Okay? Yeah, but in the end, emptiness is also the quality. To be empty is the quality of emptiness. There isn't any emptiness of which emptiness could be a quality.
Isn't it? Right? I know, it's so frustrating. Damn it! There is a way in which, so one of the things that Sarah McClintock, my co-author on the Nāgārjuna, on the Ratnāvalī translation, wrote this article about, based on a philosopher we're going to talk about, Śāntarakṣita, that she's worked quite a lot on. um, the uh, you know like you, One way to say, oh the Buddha is omniscient is what he knows is emptiness. And emptiness characterizes everything. So by knowing emptiness you know everything. But it's a trick. Because there isn't everything to be known. Right? And that's why also then when you talk about omniscience, since she wrote a book about omniscience where you can read about this, they often talk about two styles, types of omniscience. Yathā bhutanyana and Yāvat bhutanyana. Ji tar kempa, ་ཇི་ལྟ་བ་མཁྱེན་པ and Jinye kempa, ཇི་སྙེད་པ་མཁྱེན་པ in Tibetan. So there's omniscience meaning knowing things as they truly are, which means knowing, whatever knowing is, nondualistically, in our interpretation, nondualistically knowing emptiness, which is not an object that's being known. That's knowing the ultimate. How many emptiness’s are there?
And then there's knowing things as numerous as they are. Like meaning the conventional appearances from the standpoint of deluded sentient beings. So that's our more common way of thinking about omniscience, right? Like in theistic context. But there, again, it's really not... It's not like... And another characteristic of this style of interpretation is that there are some styles of interpretation that basically the idea of the conventional reality is kind of... Everything sort of is the same. The only thing that's different is you take out essences. But everything else, like, you know, sort of scientifically, so to speak, is the same. In other words, it's just one conventional reality that we're all in. But on this interpretation, there isn't one conventional reality at all. There are multiple, basically infinite, conventional realities. Because there are many different kinds of sentient beings who are, have different kinds of shared realities in different universes. You know? So our physics is a product of a particular kind of embodiment and, you know, a particular kind of even cultural history and so on. It doesn't mean it doesn't work. It works. But that's just one account. Whereas there are some interpretations of the... Mādhyamika interpretations of the conventional, which would take something as like the laws of physics and say, yeah, that's all completely true. You know, there's just that. Just don't essentialize it. But yeah, it's all like that. So even the idea of knowing everything, as numerous as they are, becomes really complicated because, well, which reality are you talking about? Whose reality? It's never a singular reality, right? It's multiple beings with shared, you know, that are multiply sharing worl, sharing and creating worlds together.
Because as we will see, this has to do with the certain update to, you know, to Mādhyamika, so to speak, that happens. Historically, that's very important for the Mādhyamika that goes to Tibet. Sorry, I'm like going on and on and on and on.
Okay?
Yes. So what you said earlier about the philosophers, trying to argue and reach certain conclusions instead of states, it provoked me to, you know, think about phenomenology and how they, what their methods are. Yes. And, you know, and their methods were to induce a certain state. Right. A phenomenological attitude or in some cases Heidegger induced boredom in his students to, you know, reach certain existential depths. But my question is actually more related to the overlap that we already talked about a little bit between the methods such as phenomenological reduction epoché and eidetic variation. And so do you have, it may be a little bit too technical question for now, but I don't know if you can talk a little bit about it and explain your view on the overlap and how can the methods from the phenomenological tradition maybe achieve similar states or lead to similar states and to what extent?
We'll be talking about that later.
So let's ask that question then. Is that okay? I think it's a very good point to say that, you know, phenomenologists were not really interested in apodictic conclusions from, you know, rational argumentation. That, that's, that is not to say they didn't use rationality. But unfortunately that has been, there are very few interpreters of, if any actually, interpreters of Nāgārjuna in any, certainly in any recent time who are really trying to take a phenomenological approach. I'm trying to think. There must be some people. But the dominant approaches have tended to be more analytic philosophy
where, you know, argumentation, like the idea that Nāgārjuna is like not trying to come to some kind of an argument is really problematic to the point that you have interpreters of Nāgārjuna who say that he's engaged in a style of logic that actually accepts contradiction. Instead of seeing his use of contradiction as a way of getting us out of the need to come to a conclusion, they see him adopting that style of logic. So that's kind of, I think that's a big mistake, frankly. But that's, like if you're very analytic in your approach, that's where you can end up. Maybe just a quick follow-up, and we can also talk about it later, but just to throw it out there, I think, would it be also important to separate here the intentions behind the Buddhist philosophers and phenomenological philosophers, such as that Buddhist is necessarily like strongly ethically motivated, whereas phenomenological philosophers, of course, we all are, but. I think you could see definitely some ethical... I'm not sure I would make that strong a distinction there, but certainly there's ideas about soteriology, about liberation, that are not applying to the phenomenologists in quite the same way. Although I do think Husserl, for example, was very concerned with certain objectivist developments in Western science, and that he saw that as really potentially very dangerous.
But I'm no scholar of Husserl by any means. But I think certainly there are differences, but we're going to talk about one major difference later. That really brings a lot of stuff into question. Okay, we can do an online question and then maybe we... Not that I have the answers, but, you know, I'll say something. We have several, we have two, and I tell you both and you tell me which one you want to answer. A general question, are there teachings about forgetfulness rather than ignorance in Buddhist traditions? First question, and the second one is, what is actually the traditional view and what is your personal view on how Nāgārjuna came to his view? Through philosophical reasoning or through some kind of realization he already started with? Okay, maybe I do the second one first. There are various kind of accounts of Nāgārjuna's life and one of them is that he encountered the perfection of wisdom sūtras by traveling to the land of the Nāgas where they'd been hidden and then recovering them from there and I guess the idea is like that I can't quite remember though why he did that, but then it's the sūtras that, oh, you know that are are propounding emptiness, sometimes with reasoning but sometimes often in other ways. So that's, I think you could say that it was almost through the word of the Buddha traditionally that Nāgārjuna is engaging with the philosophy of emptiness. There maybe, I'm sure there are other tales, there are some very long accounts in Chinese of Nāgārjuna's life, some of which have been translated I think by Etienne Le Mote, if I remember correctly. Uh, I think, um, I'm not too sure. But uh, so but there is a concept in general in our Chakdzok tradition, Mahāmudrā Dzogchen tradition, you know, of the combination of the Chokling Tersar and the Baro Kagyu, but actually not just that tradition, like in general in Mahāmudrā Dzogchen, like in Tsele Natsok Rangdröl mentions this. And I don't know who first talks about this, but it's the idea that you can come to the view through meditation or you can come to meditation through the view. And of these, the, coming to the view through meditation is considered to be very difficult and rare, like you just meditate kind of somehow figure things out, you come, you uncover the view. Because in that context also the view you would be uncovering would be not the conceptual view, it would be the non-conceptual actual view. So that would be very difficult without anyone giving you any kind of conceptual guidance, you just sort of somehow figure it out, so to speak. That sounds, that's hard. Whereas as opposed to that you come to the meditation, the experience, through learning the view, through like the conceptual view basically, like what we're doing, and that's much more common. Now which qualifies Nāgārjuna? I don't know. They do say he was at least a first stage bodhisattva. Now in the first stage which means he was a noble one, he was an Ārya who had attained the path of seeing, had a direct experience of the ultimate. So that's like, at least that much is certainly, you know, commonly accepted.
Uh, there's the whole thing of the five paths and the ten stages, and the list, more lists, but we won't go into those details right now. Let's just say, you know, Nāgārjuna was not just doing concepts. That's, I think, the tradition definitely agrees with that. And this, what was the other one again?
Uh, not really, no. No, because forgetfulness would mean you sort of know something, but you just aren't paying attention, so you forget it. And this context is, ignorance is an obscuration. It's not like, uh, oh, you know, like if I forget my phone, I kind of know where my phone is, and then I've just forgotten it. But this is where there's something that's actually preventing me, I don't know what, you know, like I have more than forgetfulness, I have something that's actually blocking me from seeing something. Right? So, and it's delicate because, you know, I can see there's a reason to ask that question, which is, there is a sense in which already within our experience is, in a sense, the kind of non-dual awareness, primordial wakefulness, that is the, that is, you know, Buddha mind, so to speak. But it's not exactly that we're forgetting that, it's more like there's something that's sort of blocking that from becoming fully manifest in our experience. And that's what ignorance is. There is a notion of forgetfulness, which is in the context of mindfulness, which plays a very important role as well in all of this, where mindfulness is basically, it's called mindfulness, the literal word in Sanskrit is smṛti, or in Pali it's sati, in Tibetan it's dran pa དྲན་པ , and that literally means memory. But, you know, that's really a metaphor, because memory here means it's the opposite of forgetting, saṃpramoṣa, which is, and forgetting means being distracted. So when you're being not mindful, your mind is being pulled in various directions by whatever, things are capturing your attention. So you can be mindful without being focused on an object, you can have non-dual or objectless mindfulness, which is a very important part of the, of the practice in Mahāmudrā, what they call the ma yeng tsam gyi drenpa མ་ཡེངས་ཙམ་གྱི་དྲན་པ, the mindfulness of mere non-distraction, because mindfulness's function, even technical function in the Abhidharma is to prevent distraction. It's not, doesn't, it's not talking about being focused on an object, there are other mental functions which do the object focus part, it's just what prevents you from getting pulled away. So you can be not focused on an object and just not pulled away. Right? So that's where forgetting is very important. Forgetting is kind of getting lost, as Mingyur Rinpoche says, like you're not lost. You're just not lost. So ma ying mi gom མ་ཡིང མི་གོམ is a common way of talking about Mahāmudrā, Dzogchen, non-dual style meditation is not undistracted, not meditating. And that doesn't mean you're like, you know, just asleep. It means that your mind is not being pulled away by other objects. You can have content, but your mind is not caught, the attention is not caught by that, whether it's thoughts or sensations. You're not trying to close down your mind, but you're not caught on the one hand, and on the other hand, you're not trying to do meditation in the sense of focus on something. Right? So the mental function that is responsible for focus in the Abhidharma, so, so mindfulness, smṛti or sati or dren pa, is a uh, is one of these dharmas, actually. Remember the elements that make up the mind-body system? It's one of those in that system. And those ideas continue to be used by the Mahāyāna philosophers, like by Mādhyamikas. They continue to use those methods. They just say, you know, it's not ultimately real, but this is still a good way of talking about how the mind's working, certain aspects of it at least. And so mindfulness, the technical definition of mindfulness, in the Tibetan world, this is called sem སེམས semjung སེམས་བྱུང , mind and mental functions. You can see it in the second volume of the series called Science and Philosophy in the Indian Buddhist Classics, Volume 2, The Mind, which I co-translated and wrote some essays for. I think I mentioned that before. And so mindfulness is what prevents distraction, and what actually accounts for attention, one of the key mental functions for attention is called manasikāra, which basically means attention. A very low level, kind of primitive level of attention. And which is said to occur, according to the Abhidharma, in every moment of cognition. But in the Mahāmudrā tradition, as it develops, you know, the style of philosophy in India that we're going to talk some about, as it develops, they say, Oh, you know what our practice is? You guys do mindfulness, and you focus with your manasikāra, with your attention on objects. Well, we do amanasikāra, non-attention. So the philosopher Advayavajra, also known as Maitrīpa, is very important for Mahāmudrā tradition. Right? He says, what our meditation is, being inattentive. Ha, Ha, Ha. You know, it's like, it's clearly sort of a joke. But it's also not just a joke. It's also meaning we're not focusing on something. We're not being dualistic. But we're not distracted.
Right? So undistracted non meditation, which is very easy to say.
Not so easy to do. But yes, or maybe it's so easy.
Yeah, anyway. Okay.
All righty then. So maybe we move along now.
Okay. Um, I guess I was just struggling a bit with the uh, uh, Nāgārjuna's arguments on the emptiness of time. Yeah, good, good. Illusionaryness of time. Like, isn't it problematic that it's based on uh, a type of logical reasoning that already sort of negates time? Like, if we already, already excludes time. Like, if you go back to the relation between cause and effect. Yes. Like, that relation is not simply one as in, for instance, the relation between X equals two. It's more like the sort of the nature of the relation is that the cause ceases to exist. Yes. So that it can have an effect. Because it's by being impermanent, by changing, Yeah. um, that it can have an effect.
So they're definitely the same on the one hand, but they're not the same in the sense that they can coexist at the same time. And in the same sense, is it also not the case that past, present and future are definitely the same on one level, but also the nature of the relation is that present can only exist when past ceases to exist and future can only become present when present... no, yea... Right, so in other words, he's kind of loaded the deck. He's cheating because he's deliberately chosen something where the things you're trying to define in terms of each other, we understand to be like, they can't exist at the same time. Let's do a different one then, okay? So how many objects are here? Let's count this as one. Is that okay? I'll take the flower out of here. How many containers are here? Three. Okay, everyone is in agreement. Three. Do they all exist at the same time?
No, this one is actually fluttering in an account quantum reality, which is good. No, I'm kidding. Of course, they exist at the same time. It's a macro level object. Can't play with quantum stuff with macro, okay? Unless it's sci-fi. All right, okay? So there's three. One, two, three. We're going to make a set of these. One, two, three. They belong in that set of a three-fold set, okay? Is there threeness? So there's a threeness characterizing this set, right? Correct? The number three. The quantity three. Is the three the same as this? Uh, no. It's not?
Well, yes and no.
So the threeness is also the same as this, yes and no, isn't it? And that's not in the set. It's a part-whole relation. Exactly. And we already know where that goes, don't we? Very simple. I think number is a really good one here. And they do, the Mādhyamika's worked with numbers too, because that was also considered to be a kind of abstract. So the idea is what we're doing is we're creating an abstract entity that is meant to be instantiated in particular actual things, concrete things. And that's going to be that same kind of distributed entity. It's a one in many. And the minute we do that, the claim is, you know, that we're going to run into this, we're going to run into a contradiction or an excluded middle. We're going to have to either say that the threeness, the entity, well you can call it the set, is different than the members, than the things that are qualified by the number, or it's the same. And neither of those work. What we can do, like, you know, the philosopher Bradley, who did myriological stuff, you know, where we can say, oh, well, things like wholes or sets kind of exist in a different way than concrete things. And then, you know, the real question is, well, how do you know that?
Like, can I just make up abstract things? Like, every three, with every three, there's also a gumagitika that exists, the gumagitika exists abstractly with every number three. And you say to me, how do I know that? And I say, well, because without the gumagitika, three can't exist. And I say, how do I know that? It's just, you know, obvious. What do you mean?
So like our abstractions, like numbers, like we say, oh, three. You say, well, and I say, where's the threeness? Can you, can you point, point to the threeness?
Anybody want to extend the threeness? Point. Please point to the threeness.
People on camera couldn't see you go like this.
Usually my undergraduates go like this. I'm pointing to the threeness. That's a good one, though. That's really good. But of course, each of these is pointing to an individual, right? You can't point to the threeness. It's an abstraction. It doesn't exist in our perception. It exists in our conceptuality.
It exists in the map. It's not the territory. That doesn't mean it's like there's something wrong. Like if I say there's four there, you know, it's not like a Mādhyamika engineer would think, oh, well, three, four, it's all abstractions. you know, like... Don't fly in a Mādhyamika airplane because... It's not like that. No, it's saying that, yes, of course, you can still, there are conceptual maps that are good, that work, conceptual maps that aren't good. And there's a version of Buddhist philosophy that becomes combined with Mādhyamika that we'll talk about a little bit that is you know, really inquiring into, okay, how do we figure out what works and what doesn't work? But the Mādhyamika position is that what definitely doesn't work is when you think the map is the reality, when you take the abstraction that is derived from experience and then you make that real, even to the point where that becomes more real than the concrete thing.
Okay? So, for example, here's a very interesting thing. Uh, how... Okay.
Do you see this? You see it, right? Okay. How do you know this is here?
And there's an object in my hand. How do you know that?
Came along and told you, whispered in your ear, he has an object.
Can you see it? What's going on when you see it? Give me some model. I see an object. I know it as a small vase. Yeah, but give me a model of the process. Just any, some reasonably good model. A visual perception. Physical or experiential, right? Yeah, both, yeah. Both? You can do whatever you want. Okay. The photons bounce off the vase...
trigger my... Yeah, right, right. So there's a causal process. Great. Okay. What is required for that to happen? What if this never changed? Right, changes. It has to change. So there has to be... Like this has to come into... This has to, like, photons have to bounce off of it. Or there are all kinds of interactions that are happening in order for you to see it, right? What would happen if three changed the number three? What does it mean for something to change? It means it becomes something other than what it was a moment ago. So three would become four if it changed, right? So does... So now I say, this is four. That doesn't work, does it? Right? So what does that mean about things like three? They're unchanging. Which means, can you see them? Can you perceive them? No. Can they do anything causal? No. So why do we think they're real?
Who knows? Because it works. Exactly. Exactly. Because it works. And again, if our conceptual system, if the philosopher mouse were like, you know, how many saber-toothed tigers are coming toward me right now? Not much of a meal for a saber-toothed tiger, but maybe, you know, maybe it's a really big mouse. There were really big mice, apparently, prehistorically, seriously. There's just some recent research on that. So it's a big, you know, were-mouse, huge like... But it's a philosopher one. And, you know, like three saber-toothed tigers are coming toward it and it goes, well, in my perceptual experience, there is all of this coming and I can construct the number three as the...
Right, you know, the conceptual map needs to be, is like built into the system is, in a sense for survival, is like the world model is real, because that keeps us alive. And it can get updated, right? But some things get like, invariable. And they don't need to be, they don't need updating anymore. Until you do, until what? Until you start to really analyze. Then things that seem like really invariable, you get down, down, down, and it's like, oh, that's not really what we thought. Like, oh, this is not really quite solid in the way we thought it was.
Right? But there are things like solidity and so on which seem just, oh, that's, you know, the way things are in our experience and we don't update those things. And so we think, because they're so stable, we think they're real, because they work, they are real. Right? And because our system has developed, evolved in a way, we're like, yeah, like your model of the world is reality. So that you behave, you know, like you just, when you need to jump out of the way, you jump out of the way, or whatever it is. Right? So if you're a, if you're a mouse, you know, to survive in saṃsāra, that's good. If you're a human, that kind of is not, again, it's not so adaptive anymore.
Especially if you're a human who can build, you know, nuclear weapons and believe in the reality of, let's say, I don't know, a country more than the concrete touch of a hand. Then you've got a real problem.
Well, I'm just blabbing again. Alrighty. Yes. You want to ask one more? One more. One quick, if it's quick, because we really should. So is it correct to say that on the ultimate level there is no causality? Yes, correct. Causality is apparent. Right? But from the apparent standpoint, we're not denying causality. It's just that another way to say it is, you know, this is somewhat like Hume, I suppose, is that causality is a model. Right? A way of us understanding what's happening in experience and abstraction from experience. That really works well, by the way. And a Buddha would be able to perceive non-causality? You don't... No, you can't see non-causality. Can you see the non-causality in my hand?
I can sell you some later if you want, you know. I've got a whole bag of non-causality in my room. And, you know... Okay.
Yeah. Remember the, remember uh, you know the story from Candrakīrti? Guy goes into a bar. Remember that story? You don't want to be the guy who says, I'll have a glass of nothing.
Okay then. On we go. So, these are... I just wanted to do a quick historical thing Nāgārjuna and then we have his main. These are all rough dates, you know, we don't really know exact dates until we get... until the end where we have figures who went to Tibet. And even those dates, actually, there's debate about. I think both of them, but especially Kamalaśīla. But anyway, Nāgārjuna, then Āryadeva, who is said to be his disciple, then Bhulapālita, a very important interpreter who emphasizes the use of prasaṅga. At least that's traditionally said to be the case. Emphasizes the use of just absurd consequences. Bhāviveka, who's said to introduce more positive reasoning, meaning not just absurd consequences, but like we can actually use affirmative reasoning. Candrakīrti, who critiques Bhāviveka for doing that. Uh, then we have three figures. Jñānagarbha, Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla, who are known as the three Eastern Mādhyamika's by the Tibetans, the uma shar sum, because they were from Bengal, I think. And uh, they are, two of them, Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla, actually go to Tibet. And they are very important for the development of Mādhyamika in Tibet. Later, Candrakīrti's works are translated a couple centuries or more later. Yeah, more than a couple centuries later. And they, and people, for various reasons, kind of become very fond of Candrakīrti, because he solves, in some ways, gives them the tools to do certain things that Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla's approach to Mādhyamika didn't enable them to do. But ironically, you have to sort of pick and choose. So basically, some of what, one stream of interpretation in Tibet likes Candrakīrti, because he is very critical of the Yogācāra philosophy that we're going to talk about. And another stream of Candrakīrti, totally different stream, that the two of these two streams kind of disagree with each other and some fundamental things. Another stream of interpretation likes Candrakīrti, because he rejects the use of certain kinds of epistemological tools. So some people like Candrakīrti for his rejection of Yogācāra idealism, we can call it, maybe, Yogācāra philosophy. It's not really idealism, but... And some people like him for the rejection of epistemology, formal epistemology. But the people who like him because he rejects Yogācāra also really like formal epistemology. And the people who really like Yogācāra, the people who reject formal epistemology like Yogācāra. You get that?
So this is, you know, not traditionally those two sides will say, well, we're our interpretation of Candrakīrti is correct. Academically, and also me personally, I think both sides are sort of ignoring the part of Candrakīrti they don't like.
Right? Okay, so when you hear Candrakīrti being cited, you should be, you know, just be aware that he's being used in certain ways, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it all works out entirely in terms of his philosophy. To Western, there's been Western, in this area, I think Western academics has done a good job of really pointing out something that's important to know, even, you know, within a traditional context. Okay, what are the key questions of Yogacara, Yogācāra that we, you know, talked about at the end of last time? Yogācāra is going to be this new style of philosophy that emerges, again, based on sūtras that are said to have been taught by the Buddha long before that. And these are sūtras that are said to be in the third turning of the wheel. So there are three turnings of the wheel of Dharma, of the Dharmachakra. There is the, you know, that's this gesture that you saw in one of the icons that was on a slide, you know, the icon where, I say, we went from just an empty throne to an actual figure. So that icon is showing the Buddha turning the wheel of Dharma when he turns, there's the first turning in Sarnath where he teaches the Nobles four truths. So that's like early Buddhism. Then we have the second turning is the perfection of wisdom and that's Nāgārjuna in terms of philosophy and all those other figures you just saw. And then the third turning involves especially Yogācāra, okay, and that's going to be not perfection of wisdom sūtras but a whole bunch of other sūtras. Some of them are often referred to as the Vaipulya Sūtras, the extensive sūtras, right, and there are sūtras, very important sūtras like the Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra, the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, which the Mādhyamika's also cite sometimes, okay. So this then emerges after Nāgārjuna and it's going to have a series of questions that even though some of these early figures where Yogācāra is developing in philosophy, not just in the sūtra literature, they don't actually directly seem to talk about Nāgārjuna but it seems pretty clear that they're grappling with some of the issues that Nāgārjuna has raised. And one of them is, what is prapañca? Remember, prapañca is kind of that thing that's even deeper than conceptuality, Right? So we have the one level of saying, well, our problem is that we have bad maps or we're taking our maps too seriously. But prapañca's saying is that, well, actually there's something that's even prior to our map making, that's a problem, the reality habit itself. And so that's one question, like, what is this reality habit, if you like? What is known in the experience of emptiness as ultimate reality? Like, you know, what is it like? I mean, how do we, can we describe it? Is it even knowing? And how does one, you know, like what is known, what are you knowing and how are you knowing it? So both of those questions together you could think of as kind of what's the phenomenology, for example. What's the experience of knowing the ultimate? And does it mean that there's like, you're knowing nothing? Obviously that's not going to work for Nāgārjuna. But does that mean if it's not nothing, does that mean there's something there, something left, something that's kind of not negated by emptiness? Okay, so the major thinkers, just real quick, Asaṅga, Vasubandhu are the two original thinkers and then Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, the epistemologists. Uh, who, uh, you know, work with these ideas. What starts even with the Mādhyamika Bhāviveka, but actually really picks up with Dharmakīrti in particular, is the idea of doing levels of analysis. So this becomes very important in the kind of Buddhism that goes to Tibet. Like we're going to kind of progress from one thing to the next to the next. I'll say more about that. One level of analysis, to the next level of analysis, to the next level of analysis. To kind of lead you through, from, starting with your ordinary experience to a realization of the ultimate. Another important commentator is Sthiramati. Another one that I think is important but is not often just talked about is Vinītadeva. So these are all again in the Sanskrit, right? Tradition, they're all prior to or just prior to or maybe somewhat coinciding with the introduction of Buddhism to Tibet. Especially when we think of Buddhism as the founding of the Samye Monastery in Tibet where philosophical Buddhism starts to occur in the 8th century. Okay. So one of the texts that is very important here is a text that was said to have been transmitted to Asaṅga by the future Buddha Maitreya. In a kind of celestial encounter. And then his half brother Vasubandhu wrote a commentary on this text. Their mother, it's said, was a nun who gave up her robes because she was so worried about what was going on with the dharma and then she produced, she gave birth to and raised the two greatest philosophers, arguably, certainly two of the greatest philosophers. Of these, I will say that the Tibetans especially talk about the six ornaments, six philosophers who are the ornaments. Four of them are here. Right? Asaṅga, Vasubandhu, Dignāga, Dharmakīrti and then in the, sorry, in the Mādhyamika list, Nāgārjuna and Candrakīrti. So it's interesting that four of them actually are not Mādhyamika philosophers. Okay, so what's in this text? It says, abhūta-parikalpo ’sti dvayaṃ tatra na vidyate śūnyatā vidyate tatra tasyām api sa vidyate I think I remember that right. And that means the conceptual construction of the unreal exists. Duality does not exist in it. But emptiness exists in it. It also exists in terms of that, namely emptiness. Completely obvious, right? Okay, let's talk about something first before we go further. And then we'll take a break, which is duality. There are basically two kinds of duality. There is ontological duality and epistemological or phenomenological duality. Okay? Ontological duality comes up a lot in Nāgārjuna. Uh, because what Nāgārjuna can, remember Nāgārjuna works with a dyadic analysis, an analysis of things that are paired to each other. And sometimes, often those analyses, so some of those analyses are things, about things that are paired in some way that doesn't make them contradictories. Like, remember desire and the desirous person or the desirous mind? Those aren't contradictories, right? If there's one, you need the other. Right? But some of his dyadic analyses are about what we call logically contradictories. A contradictory is something that... So hot and cold are not contradictories. Because there are things that are neither hot nor cold. They don't have temperature. Right? Like the number two.
It's kind of lukewarm. Right? So we think of the number two as an object of knowledge we can think of it, but we don't attribute temperature to it. So uh, uh, hot and cold are called contraries. Right? Which means that they can't be instantiated together in the same thing simultaneously. But not everything has to instantiate them. Those qualities. Existence and non-existence are contradictories. Every knowable thing is either existent or non-existent. The number two either exists or doesn't exist. And you can parameterize that. You could say the number two either ultimately exists or ultimately doesn't exist. So everything has to be one or the other of those. It can't be both, can't be neither. That's a contradictory. Okay? So that's, when we talk about duality in Nāgārjuna, that's the kind of ontological duality that he undermines. So in that verse of praise that I say at the beginning, which is by Nāgārjuna,
it says, you're not real, you're not unreal, you're not discontinuous, meaning you just last a moment and stop. You're not eternal, meaning you're continuous over time. You're not permanent, you're not impermanent. To you, the non-dual, I bow. Right? So advaya is this word in Sanskrit for non-duality or the non-dual. And each of those pairs are ontological dualities. Existence, they're contradictory. Existence, non-existence, permanent, impermanent, continuous, discontinuous. Right? They all, at least in the way Nāgārjuna would think about these things, they have to apply to everything that we could possibly know. Everything we possibly know either is unchanging or changing. So either existed or non-existent. Okay? So that's one form of duality. That's a very important form of duality. But that is not the kind of duality when we say non-dual awareness, non-dual primordial awareness, it is not about that. Okay? The non-dual, the non-duality that applies in that context is uh, it's phenomenological or epistemological non-duality. In other words, it's a non-duality about the way that cognition occurs. And one way to think about that kind of cog, that, that way, that notion of duality is just, it's very simply, if we take our favorite vase here, and you're looking at the vase, right? One question is, everyone sees it, right? Where is the vase? Thank you. Wait, do you have like a weird eye disease that makes you... Can you point to the vase, right? Like, you guys can do that, right? I'm not trying to trick you.
Right? It's like over here, right? Okay? And you have, as you're looking at the vase, you have a sense like this, of like a sense of somebody's looking at it. Right? So that's a sense of subjectivity looking at an object. Like there's an in here and an out there. In here, out there, right? Does this look like it's like in here with the one who's looking at it? No. Right, everyone on board with that? That's the kind of duality we're talking about. There's like world and self. Object and subject. Okay? So when you hear non-duality in the context of Mahāmudrā, Dzogchen, it's not talking about ontological duality. It's about this duality in experience. Okay? That's really very important to understand. So we're, we're, as you can see in this verse, this philosophy is going to say that, that duality doesn't actually exist. It seems to exist. But it does not actually exist. It is not ultimately real. We're going to come back to that, but first we're going to take a break. Until, you guys probably need more than five minutes, right? So until 11:20. Okay.
sönam diyi thamché sikpa nyi thopné nyepai dranam phamjé né kyega nachi balap trukpa yi sipai tsolé drowa drölwar shok Okay. Thank you.
okmin chökyi yingkyi phodrang né
düsum sangyé kün gyi ngowo nyi
rangsem chöku ngönsum tönzé pa
tsawai lamai shapla sölwa dep
All right, an invitation to settle the mind for a moment with the body alert but relaxed.
And then bringing to mind our motivation in the Mahāyāna, we aspire to achieve awakening for the sake of all beings out of great compassion.
All right, let's begin. So uh, since uh, we didn't really get a chance to um, we had a somewhat shorter question period at the end of the day yesterday. If there are any questions now...
any questions now? Yes, Ron?
I'll have a little coffee so I can answer.
Student: Um, I remember you had one slide that, if I recall correctly, said emptiness is the same as interdependence. yaḥ pratītyasamutpādaḥ śūnyatāṃ tāṃ pracakṣmahe Does that answer your question? Now I get it. Yeah, now, oh, I didn't just say that before. It's so obvious. It's so obvious. Prajakshmahe means we say. And so it's Nāgārjuna he's like speaking in the plural, sometimes that's a sign of humility so it could be that in Sanskrit but he may also mean like people who are thinking like me. We say that, that which is... yaḥ pratītyasamutpādaḥ śūnyatāṃ tāṃ pracakṣmahe that which is pratītyasamutpādaḥ that is emptiness. So we're saying that, what do we mean by emptiness? It's that which is dependently originated or interdependent. So it doesn't really mean that they're the same and actually, you know, this is where a certain kind of perspectivalism can come in, meaning it depends on the context or how you're looking, so to speak, or what you're bringing to bear on whatever. So on the one hand, if we have our flower or our vase, from the ultimate perspective, from the perspective of the noble one in meditative equipoise on the ultimate, it's emptiness. From the perspective of deluded sentient beings, it's a flower in a vase. But that is what's going on there at the level of sentient beings is they think that's essentially real, but really it's interdependent. So what it means for something to be empty, so sentient beings' ordinary experience, so remember the metaphor of the um, of the mirror, right? So when you're looking at a mirror, we know behaviorally that you don't think it's really your face. It's again not like the rubber hand illusion. And because if we hit it or something, you don't go, ow. So even though you don't maybe consciously think, oh, that's not really my face in the mirror, maybe don't get to that level of analyzing things, it doesn't, we're not really feeling like it's our face, because we don't behave that way. But uh, if you actually touch your face or whatever, or somebody starts to go towards slapping your face, like you, this feels real. This sensation of face feels real. So in that sense, that's not like your, like the mirror. That's real. To the ar.., to the noble one, this is like the mirror. It's not, It doesn't present itself as real. It just presents itself as an appearance, an interdependent appearance. So the difference, you can say, in terms of the conventional reality between a noble one, a Mahāyāna noble one, someone who's realized the Mādhyamika view, and an ordinary person, is that they think when they see this, first of all, they think, like in some sense, this is ultimate. The way it looks is the way it really is, like there's some essentially real thing here. But for the Ārya, it doesn't, the Ārya knows, the noble one knows, that, that this is empty, ultimately this is empty. There's not something essentially real there, ultimately. And conventionally what's appearing doesn't appear as ultimately real or essentially real. It appears as an interdependent appearance. Okay, so it's like two different perspectives. So when you are participating in the, in the uh, perspective of ordinary sentient beings, then you're dealing with appearances in saṃsāra, and that's, but from the standpoint of the uh, the noble one, and of course the Buddha, those are just interdependent appearances. Right? And the difference between a Buddha and a noble one is that the noble ones are still having their own appearances, but the Buddha is really just having other beings' appearances, as Khenpo was explaining. Does that make sense? Yeah, thank you. So in other words, you're like two sides of the same coin. And what makes them not exactly equal? Because uh, But they are in a sense like, so this is exactly the same, another way to say this is, you know,
to quote the Heart sūtra in Sanskrit and Tibetan. Form is emptiness, so form means visual objects in this context. Form is empty, emp... Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. It's not like they're different entities. It's kind of two different ways of seeing the same thing. Right? But when you're seeing this, so and how do you see it, what's the difference there is that without analysis, and this is a key term that Khenpo also mentioned, when we don't analyze it, like what's really there, then without analysis, we, we uh, you know, there's just this appearance. And as long as you leave it unanalyzed, you don't ask what's really there, then you're dealing with an interdependent appearance. So that's the mode of the conventional. But when you analyze, you look for what's really there, then what, all that remains then is, or not even remains, what you end up with is emptiness. There isn't an interdependent appearance anymore, there's emptiness. And even saying there is, as we know, is a problem. It's not like emptiness is a thing that's there. Okay? So, you know, it's, but it's not like the emptiness is something other than this, or this is other than the appearance, or that the appearance is something other than emptiness. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Form is not other than emptiness, emptiness is not other than form.
Yes?
There was also a slide saying that emptiness is non-referring to anything. Correct. But can't you, is it not more the thing that emptiness refers to everything? It's not, emptiness is not a subject as itself, no thing, but it's a quality of everything. I don't think I would be, so, okay, so...
If you're talking about something being a quality of something, then there needs to be like a subject, an entity of which the quality is predicated, right? So you want to say that emptiness is a predicate of this. Does this exist such that emptiness could be a predicate of it?
Yeah, it's actually worse than a circle. Because from the perspective in which emptiness applies, which is the ultimate, this does not exist.
It also doesn't not exist. It's not an absolute nothing, it's not an absolute something. There's nothing of which emptiness could be predicated. So there are going to be philosophers, especially in Tibet, who really don't like that. They kind of want emptiness to be a predicate that you can apply to things. And there's a way in which we can do that. Remember we said there's a version of emptiness which is like a conceptual version. It's not the actual version of emptiness, but it's like a concep, it's a concept that we work with, that we use to get to the actual experience of emptiness. So it's like the arguments, you could say the conclusions of the arguments, right? So when we go through an argument and say that, you know, this vase is not ultimately real, because it's a causal product, but causality doesn't ultimately make sense. Or because it is a whole constituted by parts and that doesn't actually make sense. Or because it's an object that's being, the way we know it is as an object for a subject, but we can't make sense of the relationship between objects and subjects. In a very simple way of saying it is, it's not ultimately real because it's interdependent. We can't specify its identity in and of itself, independent of anything else. Whenever we say, what is it really, we end up talking about something else. Its causes, its parts, the subjectivities that are knowing it, or whatever. Okay? So that's an argument, and you could say, oh, you come to a conclusion, like a logical conclusion, a rational conclusion, which is a conceptual cognition. And in that case, you can sort of speak of emptiness as sort of, you know, the concept that is that conclusion. Uh, but that's not, that's just a, a way of talking about a sort of bridge from a conceptual to a non-conceptual experience. But another way of talking about that is, you go through that argument, and rather than coming to a conceptual conclusion, what you come to is...
Like your head explodes, you know that, what the... You don't come to a concept, you come to an experience. That the argument induces a state in you. Right? So philosophers kind of prefer not to think that, you know, the goal of arguments is to induce states. They like arguments to, you know, have definitive meaning that they can then prove or disprove and so on. So you'll find a lot of people, in contemporary people who study Mādhyamika, often don't like to think about that as like what the arguments are doing is rather than proving something, they're inducing a state. But I think especially for certain contemplative traditions, it makes much more sense to think of what Nāgārjuna is doing is inducing a state in you. He's not trying to prove something. And he even says that, I don't have a thesis to prove. Right? We did that already. na me pratijñā asti I'm not proving anything. I'm disabusing you of your crazy ideas, he says to us.
Okay? So then in that case, emptiness I don't think can refer to everything, because it doesn't refer to anything. It's not a property of things, because there's nothing of which it could be a property.
And you'll find competing interpretations that don't like that. They'll talk about the basis of emptiness and then emptiness as, what the, you know, what is instantiated or in some sense qualifying that basis, the dong shi གདོང་གཞི in Tibetan. But that really, I don't think that works well with the kind, with this style of interpretation we're trying to head toward. Where non-dual, non-duality is key. Okay? Yeah, but in the end, emptiness is also the quality. To be empty is the quality of emptiness. There isn't any emptiness of which emptiness could be a quality.
Isn't it? Right? I know, it's so frustrating. Damn it! There is a way in which, so one of the things that Sarah McClintock, my co-author on the Nāgārjuna, on the Ratnāvalī translation, wrote this article about, based on a philosopher we're going to talk about, Śāntarakṣita, that she's worked quite a lot on. um, the uh, you know like you, One way to say, oh the Buddha is omniscient is what he knows is emptiness. And emptiness characterizes everything. So by knowing emptiness you know everything. But it's a trick. Because there isn't everything to be known. Right? And that's why also then when you talk about omniscience, since she wrote a book about omniscience where you can read about this, they often talk about two styles, types of omniscience. Yathā bhutanyana and Yāvat bhutanyana. Ji tar kempa, ་ཇི་ལྟ་བ་མཁྱེན་པ and Jinye kempa, ཇི་སྙེད་པ་མཁྱེན་པ in Tibetan. So there's omniscience meaning knowing things as they truly are, which means knowing, whatever knowing is, nondualistically, in our interpretation, nondualistically knowing emptiness, which is not an object that's being known. That's knowing the ultimate. How many emptiness’s are there?
And then there's knowing things as numerous as they are. Like meaning the conventional appearances from the standpoint of deluded sentient beings. So that's our more common way of thinking about omniscience, right? Like in theistic context. But there, again, it's really not... It's not like... And another characteristic of this style of interpretation is that there are some styles of interpretation that basically the idea of the conventional reality is kind of... Everything sort of is the same. The only thing that's different is you take out essences. But everything else, like, you know, sort of scientifically, so to speak, is the same. In other words, it's just one conventional reality that we're all in. But on this interpretation, there isn't one conventional reality at all. There are multiple, basically infinite, conventional realities. Because there are many different kinds of sentient beings who are, have different kinds of shared realities in different universes. You know? So our physics is a product of a particular kind of embodiment and, you know, a particular kind of even cultural history and so on. It doesn't mean it doesn't work. It works. But that's just one account. Whereas there are some interpretations of the... Mādhyamika interpretations of the conventional, which would take something as like the laws of physics and say, yeah, that's all completely true. You know, there's just that. Just don't essentialize it. But yeah, it's all like that. So even the idea of knowing everything, as numerous as they are, becomes really complicated because, well, which reality are you talking about? Whose reality? It's never a singular reality, right? It's multiple beings with shared, you know, that are multiply sharing worl, sharing and creating worlds together.
Because as we will see, this has to do with the certain update to, you know, to Mādhyamika, so to speak, that happens. Historically, that's very important for the Mādhyamika that goes to Tibet. Sorry, I'm like going on and on and on and on.
Okay?
Yes. So what you said earlier about the philosophers, trying to argue and reach certain conclusions instead of states, it provoked me to, you know, think about phenomenology and how they, what their methods are. Yes. And, you know, and their methods were to induce a certain state. Right. A phenomenological attitude or in some cases Heidegger induced boredom in his students to, you know, reach certain existential depths. But my question is actually more related to the overlap that we already talked about a little bit between the methods such as phenomenological reduction epoché and eidetic variation. And so do you have, it may be a little bit too technical question for now, but I don't know if you can talk a little bit about it and explain your view on the overlap and how can the methods from the phenomenological tradition maybe achieve similar states or lead to similar states and to what extent?
We'll be talking about that later.
So let's ask that question then. Is that okay? I think it's a very good point to say that, you know, phenomenologists were not really interested in apodictic conclusions from, you know, rational argumentation. That, that's, that is not to say they didn't use rationality. But unfortunately that has been, there are very few interpreters of, if any actually, interpreters of Nāgārjuna in any, certainly in any recent time who are really trying to take a phenomenological approach. I'm trying to think. There must be some people. But the dominant approaches have tended to be more analytic philosophy
where, you know, argumentation, like the idea that Nāgārjuna is like not trying to come to some kind of an argument is really problematic to the point that you have interpreters of Nāgārjuna who say that he's engaged in a style of logic that actually accepts contradiction. Instead of seeing his use of contradiction as a way of getting us out of the need to come to a conclusion, they see him adopting that style of logic. So that's kind of, I think that's a big mistake, frankly. But that's, like if you're very analytic in your approach, that's where you can end up. Maybe just a quick follow-up, and we can also talk about it later, but just to throw it out there, I think, would it be also important to separate here the intentions behind the Buddhist philosophers and phenomenological philosophers, such as that Buddhist is necessarily like strongly ethically motivated, whereas phenomenological philosophers, of course, we all are, but. I think you could see definitely some ethical... I'm not sure I would make that strong a distinction there, but certainly there's ideas about soteriology, about liberation, that are not applying to the phenomenologists in quite the same way. Although I do think Husserl, for example, was very concerned with certain objectivist developments in Western science, and that he saw that as really potentially very dangerous.
But I'm no scholar of Husserl by any means. But I think certainly there are differences, but we're going to talk about one major difference later. That really brings a lot of stuff into question. Okay, we can do an online question and then maybe we... Not that I have the answers, but, you know, I'll say something. We have several, we have two, and I tell you both and you tell me which one you want to answer. A general question, are there teachings about forgetfulness rather than ignorance in Buddhist traditions? First question, and the second one is, what is actually the traditional view and what is your personal view on how Nāgārjuna came to his view? Through philosophical reasoning or through some kind of realization he already started with? Okay, maybe I do the second one first. There are various kind of accounts of Nāgārjuna's life and one of them is that he encountered the perfection of wisdom sūtras by traveling to the land of the Nāgas where they'd been hidden and then recovering them from there and I guess the idea is like that I can't quite remember though why he did that, but then it's the sūtras that, oh, you know that are are propounding emptiness, sometimes with reasoning but sometimes often in other ways. So that's, I think you could say that it was almost through the word of the Buddha traditionally that Nāgārjuna is engaging with the philosophy of emptiness. There maybe, I'm sure there are other tales, there are some very long accounts in Chinese of Nāgārjuna's life, some of which have been translated I think by Etienne Le Mote, if I remember correctly. Uh, I think, um, I'm not too sure. But uh, so but there is a concept in general in our Chakdzok tradition, Mahāmudrā Dzogchen tradition, you know, of the combination of the Chokling Tersar and the Baro Kagyu, but actually not just that tradition, like in general in Mahāmudrā Dzogchen, like in Tsele Natsok Rangdröl mentions this. And I don't know who first talks about this, but it's the idea that you can come to the view through meditation or you can come to meditation through the view. And of these, the, coming to the view through meditation is considered to be very difficult and rare, like you just meditate kind of somehow figure things out, you come, you uncover the view. Because in that context also the view you would be uncovering would be not the conceptual view, it would be the non-conceptual actual view. So that would be very difficult without anyone giving you any kind of conceptual guidance, you just sort of somehow figure it out, so to speak. That sounds, that's hard. Whereas as opposed to that you come to the meditation, the experience, through learning the view, through like the conceptual view basically, like what we're doing, and that's much more common. Now which qualifies Nāgārjuna? I don't know. They do say he was at least a first stage bodhisattva. Now in the first stage which means he was a noble one, he was an Ārya who had attained the path of seeing, had a direct experience of the ultimate. So that's like, at least that much is certainly, you know, commonly accepted.
Uh, there's the whole thing of the five paths and the ten stages, and the list, more lists, but we won't go into those details right now. Let's just say, you know, Nāgārjuna was not just doing concepts. That's, I think, the tradition definitely agrees with that. And this, what was the other one again?
Uh, not really, no. No, because forgetfulness would mean you sort of know something, but you just aren't paying attention, so you forget it. And this context is, ignorance is an obscuration. It's not like, uh, oh, you know, like if I forget my phone, I kind of know where my phone is, and then I've just forgotten it. But this is where there's something that's actually preventing me, I don't know what, you know, like I have more than forgetfulness, I have something that's actually blocking me from seeing something. Right? So, and it's delicate because, you know, I can see there's a reason to ask that question, which is, there is a sense in which already within our experience is, in a sense, the kind of non-dual awareness, primordial wakefulness, that is the, that is, you know, Buddha mind, so to speak. But it's not exactly that we're forgetting that, it's more like there's something that's sort of blocking that from becoming fully manifest in our experience. And that's what ignorance is. There is a notion of forgetfulness, which is in the context of mindfulness, which plays a very important role as well in all of this, where mindfulness is basically, it's called mindfulness, the literal word in Sanskrit is smṛti, or in Pali it's sati, in Tibetan it's dran pa དྲན་པ , and that literally means memory. But, you know, that's really a metaphor, because memory here means it's the opposite of forgetting, saṃpramoṣa, which is, and forgetting means being distracted. So when you're being not mindful, your mind is being pulled in various directions by whatever, things are capturing your attention. So you can be mindful without being focused on an object, you can have non-dual or objectless mindfulness, which is a very important part of the, of the practice in Mahāmudrā, what they call the ma yeng tsam gyi drenpa མ་ཡེངས་ཙམ་གྱི་དྲན་པ, the mindfulness of mere non-distraction, because mindfulness's function, even technical function in the Abhidharma is to prevent distraction. It's not, doesn't, it's not talking about being focused on an object, there are other mental functions which do the object focus part, it's just what prevents you from getting pulled away. So you can be not focused on an object and just not pulled away. Right? So that's where forgetting is very important. Forgetting is kind of getting lost, as Mingyur Rinpoche says, like you're not lost. You're just not lost. So ma ying mi gom མ་ཡིང མི་གོམ is a common way of talking about Mahāmudrā, Dzogchen, non-dual style meditation is not undistracted, not meditating. And that doesn't mean you're like, you know, just asleep. It means that your mind is not being pulled away by other objects. You can have content, but your mind is not caught, the attention is not caught by that, whether it's thoughts or sensations. You're not trying to close down your mind, but you're not caught on the one hand, and on the other hand, you're not trying to do meditation in the sense of focus on something. Right? So the mental function that is responsible for focus in the Abhidharma, so, so mindfulness, smṛti or sati or dren pa, is a uh, is one of these dharmas, actually. Remember the elements that make up the mind-body system? It's one of those in that system. And those ideas continue to be used by the Mahāyāna philosophers, like by Mādhyamikas. They continue to use those methods. They just say, you know, it's not ultimately real, but this is still a good way of talking about how the mind's working, certain aspects of it at least. And so mindfulness, the technical definition of mindfulness, in the Tibetan world, this is called sem སེམས semjung སེམས་བྱུང , mind and mental functions. You can see it in the second volume of the series called Science and Philosophy in the Indian Buddhist Classics, Volume 2, The Mind, which I co-translated and wrote some essays for. I think I mentioned that before. And so mindfulness is what prevents distraction, and what actually accounts for attention, one of the key mental functions for attention is called manasikāra, which basically means attention. A very low level, kind of primitive level of attention. And which is said to occur, according to the Abhidharma, in every moment of cognition. But in the Mahāmudrā tradition, as it develops, you know, the style of philosophy in India that we're going to talk some about, as it develops, they say, Oh, you know what our practice is? You guys do mindfulness, and you focus with your manasikāra, with your attention on objects. Well, we do amanasikāra, non-attention. So the philosopher Advayavajra, also known as Maitrīpa, is very important for Mahāmudrā tradition. Right? He says, what our meditation is, being inattentive. Ha, Ha, Ha. You know, it's like, it's clearly sort of a joke. But it's also not just a joke. It's also meaning we're not focusing on something. We're not being dualistic. But we're not distracted.
Right? So undistracted non meditation, which is very easy to say.
Not so easy to do. But yes, or maybe it's so easy.
Yeah, anyway. Okay.
All righty then. So maybe we move along now.
Okay. Um, I guess I was just struggling a bit with the uh, uh, Nāgārjuna's arguments on the emptiness of time. Yeah, good, good. Illusionaryness of time. Like, isn't it problematic that it's based on uh, a type of logical reasoning that already sort of negates time? Like, if we already, already excludes time. Like, if you go back to the relation between cause and effect. Yes. Like, that relation is not simply one as in, for instance, the relation between X equals two. It's more like the sort of the nature of the relation is that the cause ceases to exist. Yes. So that it can have an effect. Because it's by being impermanent, by changing, Yeah. um, that it can have an effect.
So they're definitely the same on the one hand, but they're not the same in the sense that they can coexist at the same time. And in the same sense, is it also not the case that past, present and future are definitely the same on one level, but also the nature of the relation is that present can only exist when past ceases to exist and future can only become present when present... no, yea... Right, so in other words, he's kind of loaded the deck. He's cheating because he's deliberately chosen something where the things you're trying to define in terms of each other, we understand to be like, they can't exist at the same time. Let's do a different one then, okay? So how many objects are here? Let's count this as one. Is that okay? I'll take the flower out of here. How many containers are here? Three. Okay, everyone is in agreement. Three. Do they all exist at the same time?
No, this one is actually fluttering in an account quantum reality, which is good. No, I'm kidding. Of course, they exist at the same time. It's a macro level object. Can't play with quantum stuff with macro, okay? Unless it's sci-fi. All right, okay? So there's three. One, two, three. We're going to make a set of these. One, two, three. They belong in that set of a three-fold set, okay? Is there threeness? So there's a threeness characterizing this set, right? Correct? The number three. The quantity three. Is the three the same as this? Uh, no. It's not?
Well, yes and no.
So the threeness is also the same as this, yes and no, isn't it? And that's not in the set. It's a part-whole relation. Exactly. And we already know where that goes, don't we? Very simple. I think number is a really good one here. And they do, the Mādhyamika's worked with numbers too, because that was also considered to be a kind of abstract. So the idea is what we're doing is we're creating an abstract entity that is meant to be instantiated in particular actual things, concrete things. And that's going to be that same kind of distributed entity. It's a one in many. And the minute we do that, the claim is, you know, that we're going to run into this, we're going to run into a contradiction or an excluded middle. We're going to have to either say that the threeness, the entity, well you can call it the set, is different than the members, than the things that are qualified by the number, or it's the same. And neither of those work. What we can do, like, you know, the philosopher Bradley, who did myriological stuff, you know, where we can say, oh, well, things like wholes or sets kind of exist in a different way than concrete things. And then, you know, the real question is, well, how do you know that?
Like, can I just make up abstract things? Like, every three, with every three, there's also a gumagitika that exists, the gumagitika exists abstractly with every number three. And you say to me, how do I know that? And I say, well, because without the gumagitika, three can't exist. And I say, how do I know that? It's just, you know, obvious. What do you mean?
So like our abstractions, like numbers, like we say, oh, three. You say, well, and I say, where's the threeness? Can you, can you point, point to the threeness?
Anybody want to extend the threeness? Point. Please point to the threeness.
People on camera couldn't see you go like this.
Usually my undergraduates go like this. I'm pointing to the threeness. That's a good one, though. That's really good. But of course, each of these is pointing to an individual, right? You can't point to the threeness. It's an abstraction. It doesn't exist in our perception. It exists in our conceptuality.
It exists in the map. It's not the territory. That doesn't mean it's like there's something wrong. Like if I say there's four there, you know, it's not like a Mādhyamika engineer would think, oh, well, three, four, it's all abstractions. you know, like... Don't fly in a Mādhyamika airplane because... It's not like that. No, it's saying that, yes, of course, you can still, there are conceptual maps that are good, that work, conceptual maps that aren't good. And there's a version of Buddhist philosophy that becomes combined with Mādhyamika that we'll talk about a little bit that is you know, really inquiring into, okay, how do we figure out what works and what doesn't work? But the Mādhyamika position is that what definitely doesn't work is when you think the map is the reality, when you take the abstraction that is derived from experience and then you make that real, even to the point where that becomes more real than the concrete thing.
Okay? So, for example, here's a very interesting thing. Uh, how... Okay.
Do you see this? You see it, right? Okay. How do you know this is here?
And there's an object in my hand. How do you know that?
Came along and told you, whispered in your ear, he has an object.
Can you see it? What's going on when you see it? Give me some model. I see an object. I know it as a small vase. Yeah, but give me a model of the process. Just any, some reasonably good model. A visual perception. Physical or experiential, right? Yeah, both, yeah. Both? You can do whatever you want. Okay. The photons bounce off the vase...
trigger my... Yeah, right, right. So there's a causal process. Great. Okay. What is required for that to happen? What if this never changed? Right, changes. It has to change. So there has to be... Like this has to come into... This has to, like, photons have to bounce off of it. Or there are all kinds of interactions that are happening in order for you to see it, right? What would happen if three changed the number three? What does it mean for something to change? It means it becomes something other than what it was a moment ago. So three would become four if it changed, right? So does... So now I say, this is four. That doesn't work, does it? Right? So what does that mean about things like three? They're unchanging. Which means, can you see them? Can you perceive them? No. Can they do anything causal? No. So why do we think they're real?
Who knows? Because it works. Exactly. Exactly. Because it works. And again, if our conceptual system, if the philosopher mouse were like, you know, how many saber-toothed tigers are coming toward me right now? Not much of a meal for a saber-toothed tiger, but maybe, you know, maybe it's a really big mouse. There were really big mice, apparently, prehistorically, seriously. There's just some recent research on that. So it's a big, you know, were-mouse, huge like... But it's a philosopher one. And, you know, like three saber-toothed tigers are coming toward it and it goes, well, in my perceptual experience, there is all of this coming and I can construct the number three as the...
Right, you know, the conceptual map needs to be, is like built into the system is, in a sense for survival, is like the world model is real, because that keeps us alive. And it can get updated, right? But some things get like, invariable. And they don't need to be, they don't need updating anymore. Until you do, until what? Until you start to really analyze. Then things that seem like really invariable, you get down, down, down, and it's like, oh, that's not really what we thought. Like, oh, this is not really quite solid in the way we thought it was.
Right? But there are things like solidity and so on which seem just, oh, that's, you know, the way things are in our experience and we don't update those things. And so we think, because they're so stable, we think they're real, because they work, they are real. Right? And because our system has developed, evolved in a way, we're like, yeah, like your model of the world is reality. So that you behave, you know, like you just, when you need to jump out of the way, you jump out of the way, or whatever it is. Right? So if you're a, if you're a mouse, you know, to survive in saṃsāra, that's good. If you're a human, that kind of is not, again, it's not so adaptive anymore.
Especially if you're a human who can build, you know, nuclear weapons and believe in the reality of, let's say, I don't know, a country more than the concrete touch of a hand. Then you've got a real problem.
Well, I'm just blabbing again. Alrighty. Yes. You want to ask one more? One more. One quick, if it's quick, because we really should. So is it correct to say that on the ultimate level there is no causality? Yes, correct. Causality is apparent. Right? But from the apparent standpoint, we're not denying causality. It's just that another way to say it is, you know, this is somewhat like Hume, I suppose, is that causality is a model. Right? A way of us understanding what's happening in experience and abstraction from experience. That really works well, by the way. And a Buddha would be able to perceive non-causality? You don't... No, you can't see non-causality. Can you see the non-causality in my hand?
I can sell you some later if you want, you know. I've got a whole bag of non-causality in my room. And, you know... Okay.
Yeah. Remember the, remember uh, you know the story from Candrakīrti? Guy goes into a bar. Remember that story? You don't want to be the guy who says, I'll have a glass of nothing.
Okay then. On we go. So, these are... I just wanted to do a quick historical thing Nāgārjuna and then we have his main. These are all rough dates, you know, we don't really know exact dates until we get... until the end where we have figures who went to Tibet. And even those dates, actually, there's debate about. I think both of them, but especially Kamalaśīla. But anyway, Nāgārjuna, then Āryadeva, who is said to be his disciple, then Bhulapālita, a very important interpreter who emphasizes the use of prasaṅga. At least that's traditionally said to be the case. Emphasizes the use of just absurd consequences. Bhāviveka, who's said to introduce more positive reasoning, meaning not just absurd consequences, but like we can actually use affirmative reasoning. Candrakīrti, who critiques Bhāviveka for doing that. Uh, then we have three figures. Jñānagarbha, Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla, who are known as the three Eastern Mādhyamika's by the Tibetans, the uma shar sum, because they were from Bengal, I think. And uh, they are, two of them, Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla, actually go to Tibet. And they are very important for the development of Mādhyamika in Tibet. Later, Candrakīrti's works are translated a couple centuries or more later. Yeah, more than a couple centuries later. And they, and people, for various reasons, kind of become very fond of Candrakīrti, because he solves, in some ways, gives them the tools to do certain things that Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla's approach to Mādhyamika didn't enable them to do. But ironically, you have to sort of pick and choose. So basically, some of what, one stream of interpretation in Tibet likes Candrakīrti, because he is very critical of the Yogācāra philosophy that we're going to talk about. And another stream of Candrakīrti, totally different stream, that the two of these two streams kind of disagree with each other and some fundamental things. Another stream of interpretation likes Candrakīrti, because he rejects the use of certain kinds of epistemological tools. So some people like Candrakīrti for his rejection of Yogācāra idealism, we can call it, maybe, Yogācāra philosophy. It's not really idealism, but... And some people like him for the rejection of epistemology, formal epistemology. But the people who like him because he rejects Yogācāra also really like formal epistemology. And the people who really like Yogācāra, the people who reject formal epistemology like Yogācāra. You get that?
So this is, you know, not traditionally those two sides will say, well, we're our interpretation of Candrakīrti is correct. Academically, and also me personally, I think both sides are sort of ignoring the part of Candrakīrti they don't like.
Right? Okay, so when you hear Candrakīrti being cited, you should be, you know, just be aware that he's being used in certain ways, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it all works out entirely in terms of his philosophy. To Western, there's been Western, in this area, I think Western academics has done a good job of really pointing out something that's important to know, even, you know, within a traditional context. Okay, what are the key questions of Yogacara, Yogācāra that we, you know, talked about at the end of last time? Yogācāra is going to be this new style of philosophy that emerges, again, based on sūtras that are said to have been taught by the Buddha long before that. And these are sūtras that are said to be in the third turning of the wheel. So there are three turnings of the wheel of Dharma, of the Dharmachakra. There is the, you know, that's this gesture that you saw in one of the icons that was on a slide, you know, the icon where, I say, we went from just an empty throne to an actual figure. So that icon is showing the Buddha turning the wheel of Dharma when he turns, there's the first turning in Sarnath where he teaches the Nobles four truths. So that's like early Buddhism. Then we have the second turning is the perfection of wisdom and that's Nāgārjuna in terms of philosophy and all those other figures you just saw. And then the third turning involves especially Yogācāra, okay, and that's going to be not perfection of wisdom sūtras but a whole bunch of other sūtras. Some of them are often referred to as the Vaipulya Sūtras, the extensive sūtras, right, and there are sūtras, very important sūtras like the Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra, the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, which the Mādhyamika's also cite sometimes, okay. So this then emerges after Nāgārjuna and it's going to have a series of questions that even though some of these early figures where Yogācāra is developing in philosophy, not just in the sūtra literature, they don't actually directly seem to talk about Nāgārjuna but it seems pretty clear that they're grappling with some of the issues that Nāgārjuna has raised. And one of them is, what is prapañca? Remember, prapañca is kind of that thing that's even deeper than conceptuality, Right? So we have the one level of saying, well, our problem is that we have bad maps or we're taking our maps too seriously. But prapañca's saying is that, well, actually there's something that's even prior to our map making, that's a problem, the reality habit itself. And so that's one question, like, what is this reality habit, if you like? What is known in the experience of emptiness as ultimate reality? Like, you know, what is it like? I mean, how do we, can we describe it? Is it even knowing? And how does one, you know, like what is known, what are you knowing and how are you knowing it? So both of those questions together you could think of as kind of what's the phenomenology, for example. What's the experience of knowing the ultimate? And does it mean that there's like, you're knowing nothing? Obviously that's not going to work for Nāgārjuna. But does that mean if it's not nothing, does that mean there's something there, something left, something that's kind of not negated by emptiness? Okay, so the major thinkers, just real quick, Asaṅga, Vasubandhu are the two original thinkers and then Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, the epistemologists. Uh, who, uh, you know, work with these ideas. What starts even with the Mādhyamika Bhāviveka, but actually really picks up with Dharmakīrti in particular, is the idea of doing levels of analysis. So this becomes very important in the kind of Buddhism that goes to Tibet. Like we're going to kind of progress from one thing to the next to the next. I'll say more about that. One level of analysis, to the next level of analysis, to the next level of analysis. To kind of lead you through, from, starting with your ordinary experience to a realization of the ultimate. Another important commentator is Sthiramati. Another one that I think is important but is not often just talked about is Vinītadeva. So these are all again in the Sanskrit, right? Tradition, they're all prior to or just prior to or maybe somewhat coinciding with the introduction of Buddhism to Tibet. Especially when we think of Buddhism as the founding of the Samye Monastery in Tibet where philosophical Buddhism starts to occur in the 8th century. Okay. So one of the texts that is very important here is a text that was said to have been transmitted to Asaṅga by the future Buddha Maitreya. In a kind of celestial encounter. And then his half brother Vasubandhu wrote a commentary on this text. Their mother, it's said, was a nun who gave up her robes because she was so worried about what was going on with the dharma and then she produced, she gave birth to and raised the two greatest philosophers, arguably, certainly two of the greatest philosophers. Of these, I will say that the Tibetans especially talk about the six ornaments, six philosophers who are the ornaments. Four of them are here. Right? Asaṅga, Vasubandhu, Dignāga, Dharmakīrti and then in the, sorry, in the Mādhyamika list, Nāgārjuna and Candrakīrti. So it's interesting that four of them actually are not Mādhyamika philosophers. Okay, so what's in this text? It says, abhūta-parikalpo ’sti dvayaṃ tatra na vidyate śūnyatā vidyate tatra tasyām api sa vidyate I think I remember that right. And that means the conceptual construction of the unreal exists. Duality does not exist in it. But emptiness exists in it. It also exists in terms of that, namely emptiness. Completely obvious, right? Okay, let's talk about something first before we go further. And then we'll take a break, which is duality. There are basically two kinds of duality. There is ontological duality and epistemological or phenomenological duality. Okay? Ontological duality comes up a lot in Nāgārjuna. Uh, because what Nāgārjuna can, remember Nāgārjuna works with a dyadic analysis, an analysis of things that are paired to each other. And sometimes, often those analyses, so some of those analyses are things, about things that are paired in some way that doesn't make them contradictories. Like, remember desire and the desirous person or the desirous mind? Those aren't contradictories, right? If there's one, you need the other. Right? But some of his dyadic analyses are about what we call logically contradictories. A contradictory is something that... So hot and cold are not contradictories. Because there are things that are neither hot nor cold. They don't have temperature. Right? Like the number two.
It's kind of lukewarm. Right? So we think of the number two as an object of knowledge we can think of it, but we don't attribute temperature to it. So uh, uh, hot and cold are called contraries. Right? Which means that they can't be instantiated together in the same thing simultaneously. But not everything has to instantiate them. Those qualities. Existence and non-existence are contradictories. Every knowable thing is either existent or non-existent. The number two either exists or doesn't exist. And you can parameterize that. You could say the number two either ultimately exists or ultimately doesn't exist. So everything has to be one or the other of those. It can't be both, can't be neither. That's a contradictory. Okay? So that's, when we talk about duality in Nāgārjuna, that's the kind of ontological duality that he undermines. So in that verse of praise that I say at the beginning, which is by Nāgārjuna,
it says, you're not real, you're not unreal, you're not discontinuous, meaning you just last a moment and stop. You're not eternal, meaning you're continuous over time. You're not permanent, you're not impermanent. To you, the non-dual, I bow. Right? So advaya is this word in Sanskrit for non-duality or the non-dual. And each of those pairs are ontological dualities. Existence, they're contradictory. Existence, non-existence, permanent, impermanent, continuous, discontinuous. Right? They all, at least in the way Nāgārjuna would think about these things, they have to apply to everything that we could possibly know. Everything we possibly know either is unchanging or changing. So either existed or non-existent. Okay? So that's one form of duality. That's a very important form of duality. But that is not the kind of duality when we say non-dual awareness, non-dual primordial awareness, it is not about that. Okay? The non-dual, the non-duality that applies in that context is uh, it's phenomenological or epistemological non-duality. In other words, it's a non-duality about the way that cognition occurs. And one way to think about that kind of cog, that, that way, that notion of duality is just, it's very simply, if we take our favorite vase here, and you're looking at the vase, right? One question is, everyone sees it, right? Where is the vase? Thank you. Wait, do you have like a weird eye disease that makes you... Can you point to the vase, right? Like, you guys can do that, right? I'm not trying to trick you.
Right? It's like over here, right? Okay? And you have, as you're looking at the vase, you have a sense like this, of like a sense of somebody's looking at it. Right? So that's a sense of subjectivity looking at an object. Like there's an in here and an out there. In here, out there, right? Does this look like it's like in here with the one who's looking at it? No. Right, everyone on board with that? That's the kind of duality we're talking about. There's like world and self. Object and subject. Okay? So when you hear non-duality in the context of Mahāmudrā, Dzogchen, it's not talking about ontological duality. It's about this duality in experience. Okay? That's really very important to understand. So we're, we're, as you can see in this verse, this philosophy is going to say that, that duality doesn't actually exist. It seems to exist. But it does not actually exist. It is not ultimately real. We're going to come back to that, but first we're going to take a break. Until, you guys probably need more than five minutes, right? So until 11:20. Okay.
sönam diyi thamché sikpa nyi thopné nyepai dranam phamjé né kyega nachi balap trukpa yi sipai tsolé drowa drölwar shok Okay. Thank you.
All right, an invitation to settle the mind for a moment with the body alert but relaxed.
And then bringing to mind our motivation in the Mahāyāna, we aspire to achieve awakening for the sake of all beings out of great compassion.
All right, let's begin. So uh, since uh, we didn't really get a chance to um, we had a somewhat shorter question period at the end of the day yesterday. If there are any questions now...
any questions now? Yes, Ron?
I'll have a little coffee so I can answer.
Student: Um, I remember you had one slide that, if I recall correctly, said emptiness is the same as interdependence. yaḥ pratītyasamutpādaḥ śūnyatāṃ tāṃ pracakṣmahe Does that answer your question? Now I get it. Yeah, now, oh, I didn't just say that before. It's so obvious. It's so obvious. Prajakshmahe means we say. And so it's Nāgārjuna he's like speaking in the plural, sometimes that's a sign of humility so it could be that in Sanskrit but he may also mean like people who are thinking like me. We say that, that which is... yaḥ pratītyasamutpādaḥ śūnyatāṃ tāṃ pracakṣmahe that which is pratītyasamutpādaḥ that is emptiness. So we're saying that, what do we mean by emptiness? It's that which is dependently originated or interdependent. So it doesn't really mean that they're the same and actually, you know, this is where a certain kind of perspectivalism can come in, meaning it depends on the context or how you're looking, so to speak, or what you're bringing to bear on whatever. So on the one hand, if we have our flower or our vase, from the ultimate perspective, from the perspective of the noble one in meditative equipoise on the ultimate, it's emptiness. From the perspective of deluded sentient beings, it's a flower in a vase. But that is what's going on there at the level of sentient beings is they think that's essentially real, but really it's interdependent. So what it means for something to be empty, so sentient beings' ordinary experience, so remember the metaphor of the um, of the mirror, right? So when you're looking at a mirror, we know behaviorally that you don't think it's really your face. It's again not like the rubber hand illusion. And because if we hit it or something, you don't go, ow. So even though you don't maybe consciously think, oh, that's not really my face in the mirror, maybe don't get to that level of analyzing things, it doesn't, we're not really feeling like it's our face, because we don't behave that way. But uh, if you actually touch your face or whatever, or somebody starts to go towards slapping your face, like you, this feels real. This sensation of face feels real. So in that sense, that's not like your, like the mirror. That's real. To the ar.., to the noble one, this is like the mirror. It's not, It doesn't present itself as real. It just presents itself as an appearance, an interdependent appearance. So the difference, you can say, in terms of the conventional reality between a noble one, a Mahāyāna noble one, someone who's realized the Mādhyamika view, and an ordinary person, is that they think when they see this, first of all, they think, like in some sense, this is ultimate. The way it looks is the way it really is, like there's some essentially real thing here. But for the Ārya, it doesn't, the Ārya knows, the noble one knows, that, that this is empty, ultimately this is empty. There's not something essentially real there, ultimately. And conventionally what's appearing doesn't appear as ultimately real or essentially real. It appears as an interdependent appearance. Okay, so it's like two different perspectives. So when you are participating in the, in the uh, perspective of ordinary sentient beings, then you're dealing with appearances in saṃsāra, and that's, but from the standpoint of the uh, the noble one, and of course the Buddha, those are just interdependent appearances. Right? And the difference between a Buddha and a noble one is that the noble ones are still having their own appearances, but the Buddha is really just having other beings' appearances, as Khenpo was explaining. Does that make sense? Yeah, thank you. So in other words, you're like two sides of the same coin. And what makes them not exactly equal? Because uh, But they are in a sense like, so this is exactly the same, another way to say this is, you know,
to quote the Heart sūtra in Sanskrit and Tibetan. Form is emptiness, so form means visual objects in this context. Form is empty, emp... Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. It's not like they're different entities. It's kind of two different ways of seeing the same thing. Right? But when you're seeing this, so and how do you see it, what's the difference there is that without analysis, and this is a key term that Khenpo also mentioned, when we don't analyze it, like what's really there, then without analysis, we, we uh, you know, there's just this appearance. And as long as you leave it unanalyzed, you don't ask what's really there, then you're dealing with an interdependent appearance. So that's the mode of the conventional. But when you analyze, you look for what's really there, then what, all that remains then is, or not even remains, what you end up with is emptiness. There isn't an interdependent appearance anymore, there's emptiness. And even saying there is, as we know, is a problem. It's not like emptiness is a thing that's there. Okay? So, you know, it's, but it's not like the emptiness is something other than this, or this is other than the appearance, or that the appearance is something other than emptiness. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Form is not other than emptiness, emptiness is not other than form.
Yes?
There was also a slide saying that emptiness is non-referring to anything. Correct. But can't you, is it not more the thing that emptiness refers to everything? It's not, emptiness is not a subject as itself, no thing, but it's a quality of everything. I don't think I would be, so, okay, so...
If you're talking about something being a quality of something, then there needs to be like a subject, an entity of which the quality is predicated, right? So you want to say that emptiness is a predicate of this. Does this exist such that emptiness could be a predicate of it?
Yeah, it's actually worse than a circle. Because from the perspective in which emptiness applies, which is the ultimate, this does not exist.
It also doesn't not exist. It's not an absolute nothing, it's not an absolute something. There's nothing of which emptiness could be predicated. So there are going to be philosophers, especially in Tibet, who really don't like that. They kind of want emptiness to be a predicate that you can apply to things. And there's a way in which we can do that. Remember we said there's a version of emptiness which is like a conceptual version. It's not the actual version of emptiness, but it's like a concep, it's a concept that we work with, that we use to get to the actual experience of emptiness. So it's like the arguments, you could say the conclusions of the arguments, right? So when we go through an argument and say that, you know, this vase is not ultimately real, because it's a causal product, but causality doesn't ultimately make sense. Or because it is a whole constituted by parts and that doesn't actually make sense. Or because it's an object that's being, the way we know it is as an object for a subject, but we can't make sense of the relationship between objects and subjects. In a very simple way of saying it is, it's not ultimately real because it's interdependent. We can't specify its identity in and of itself, independent of anything else. Whenever we say, what is it really, we end up talking about something else. Its causes, its parts, the subjectivities that are knowing it, or whatever. Okay? So that's an argument, and you could say, oh, you come to a conclusion, like a logical conclusion, a rational conclusion, which is a conceptual cognition. And in that case, you can sort of speak of emptiness as sort of, you know, the concept that is that conclusion. Uh, but that's not, that's just a, a way of talking about a sort of bridge from a conceptual to a non-conceptual experience. But another way of talking about that is, you go through that argument, and rather than coming to a conceptual conclusion, what you come to is...
Like your head explodes, you know that, what the... You don't come to a concept, you come to an experience. That the argument induces a state in you. Right? So philosophers kind of prefer not to think that, you know, the goal of arguments is to induce states. They like arguments to, you know, have definitive meaning that they can then prove or disprove and so on. So you'll find a lot of people, in contemporary people who study Mādhyamika, often don't like to think about that as like what the arguments are doing is rather than proving something, they're inducing a state. But I think especially for certain contemplative traditions, it makes much more sense to think of what Nāgārjuna is doing is inducing a state in you. He's not trying to prove something. And he even says that, I don't have a thesis to prove. Right? We did that already. na me pratijñā asti I'm not proving anything. I'm disabusing you of your crazy ideas, he says to us.
Okay? So then in that case, emptiness I don't think can refer to everything, because it doesn't refer to anything. It's not a property of things, because there's nothing of which it could be a property.
And you'll find competing interpretations that don't like that. They'll talk about the basis of emptiness and then emptiness as, what the, you know, what is instantiated or in some sense qualifying that basis, the dong shi གདོང་གཞི in Tibetan. But that really, I don't think that works well with the kind, with this style of interpretation we're trying to head toward. Where non-dual, non-duality is key. Okay? Yeah, but in the end, emptiness is also the quality. To be empty is the quality of emptiness. There isn't any emptiness of which emptiness could be a quality.
Isn't it? Right? I know, it's so frustrating. Damn it! There is a way in which, so one of the things that Sarah McClintock, my co-author on the Nāgārjuna, on the Ratnāvalī translation, wrote this article about, based on a philosopher we're going to talk about, Śāntarakṣita, that she's worked quite a lot on. um, the uh, you know like you, One way to say, oh the Buddha is omniscient is what he knows is emptiness. And emptiness characterizes everything. So by knowing emptiness you know everything. But it's a trick. Because there isn't everything to be known. Right? And that's why also then when you talk about omniscience, since she wrote a book about omniscience where you can read about this, they often talk about two styles, types of omniscience. Yathā bhutanyana and Yāvat bhutanyana. Ji tar kempa, ་ཇི་ལྟ་བ་མཁྱེན་པ and Jinye kempa, ཇི་སྙེད་པ་མཁྱེན་པ in Tibetan. So there's omniscience meaning knowing things as they truly are, which means knowing, whatever knowing is, nondualistically, in our interpretation, nondualistically knowing emptiness, which is not an object that's being known. That's knowing the ultimate. How many emptiness’s are there?
And then there's knowing things as numerous as they are. Like meaning the conventional appearances from the standpoint of deluded sentient beings. So that's our more common way of thinking about omniscience, right? Like in theistic context. But there, again, it's really not... It's not like... And another characteristic of this style of interpretation is that there are some styles of interpretation that basically the idea of the conventional reality is kind of... Everything sort of is the same. The only thing that's different is you take out essences. But everything else, like, you know, sort of scientifically, so to speak, is the same. In other words, it's just one conventional reality that we're all in. But on this interpretation, there isn't one conventional reality at all. There are multiple, basically infinite, conventional realities. Because there are many different kinds of sentient beings who are, have different kinds of shared realities in different universes. You know? So our physics is a product of a particular kind of embodiment and, you know, a particular kind of even cultural history and so on. It doesn't mean it doesn't work. It works. But that's just one account. Whereas there are some interpretations of the... Mādhyamika interpretations of the conventional, which would take something as like the laws of physics and say, yeah, that's all completely true. You know, there's just that. Just don't essentialize it. But yeah, it's all like that. So even the idea of knowing everything, as numerous as they are, becomes really complicated because, well, which reality are you talking about? Whose reality? It's never a singular reality, right? It's multiple beings with shared, you know, that are multiply sharing worl, sharing and creating worlds together.
Because as we will see, this has to do with the certain update to, you know, to Mādhyamika, so to speak, that happens. Historically, that's very important for the Mādhyamika that goes to Tibet. Sorry, I'm like going on and on and on and on.
Okay?
Yes. So what you said earlier about the philosophers, trying to argue and reach certain conclusions instead of states, it provoked me to, you know, think about phenomenology and how they, what their methods are. Yes. And, you know, and their methods were to induce a certain state. Right. A phenomenological attitude or in some cases Heidegger induced boredom in his students to, you know, reach certain existential depths. But my question is actually more related to the overlap that we already talked about a little bit between the methods such as phenomenological reduction epoché and eidetic variation. And so do you have, it may be a little bit too technical question for now, but I don't know if you can talk a little bit about it and explain your view on the overlap and how can the methods from the phenomenological tradition maybe achieve similar states or lead to similar states and to what extent?
We'll be talking about that later.
So let's ask that question then. Is that okay? I think it's a very good point to say that, you know, phenomenologists were not really interested in apodictic conclusions from, you know, rational argumentation. That, that's, that is not to say they didn't use rationality. But unfortunately that has been, there are very few interpreters of, if any actually, interpreters of Nāgārjuna in any, certainly in any recent time who are really trying to take a phenomenological approach. I'm trying to think. There must be some people. But the dominant approaches have tended to be more analytic philosophy
where, you know, argumentation, like the idea that Nāgārjuna is like not trying to come to some kind of an argument is really problematic to the point that you have interpreters of Nāgārjuna who say that he's engaged in a style of logic that actually accepts contradiction. Instead of seeing his use of contradiction as a way of getting us out of the need to come to a conclusion, they see him adopting that style of logic. So that's kind of, I think that's a big mistake, frankly. But that's, like if you're very analytic in your approach, that's where you can end up. Maybe just a quick follow-up, and we can also talk about it later, but just to throw it out there, I think, would it be also important to separate here the intentions behind the Buddhist philosophers and phenomenological philosophers, such as that Buddhist is necessarily like strongly ethically motivated, whereas phenomenological philosophers, of course, we all are, but. I think you could see definitely some ethical... I'm not sure I would make that strong a distinction there, but certainly there's ideas about soteriology, about liberation, that are not applying to the phenomenologists in quite the same way. Although I do think Husserl, for example, was very concerned with certain objectivist developments in Western science, and that he saw that as really potentially very dangerous.
But I'm no scholar of Husserl by any means. But I think certainly there are differences, but we're going to talk about one major difference later. That really brings a lot of stuff into question. Okay, we can do an online question and then maybe we... Not that I have the answers, but, you know, I'll say something. We have several, we have two, and I tell you both and you tell me which one you want to answer. A general question, are there teachings about forgetfulness rather than ignorance in Buddhist traditions? First question, and the second one is, what is actually the traditional view and what is your personal view on how Nāgārjuna came to his view? Through philosophical reasoning or through some kind of realization he already started with? Okay, maybe I do the second one first. There are various kind of accounts of Nāgārjuna's life and one of them is that he encountered the perfection of wisdom sūtras by traveling to the land of the Nāgas where they'd been hidden and then recovering them from there and I guess the idea is like that I can't quite remember though why he did that, but then it's the sūtras that, oh, you know that are are propounding emptiness, sometimes with reasoning but sometimes often in other ways. So that's, I think you could say that it was almost through the word of the Buddha traditionally that Nāgārjuna is engaging with the philosophy of emptiness. There maybe, I'm sure there are other tales, there are some very long accounts in Chinese of Nāgārjuna's life, some of which have been translated I think by Etienne Le Mote, if I remember correctly. Uh, I think, um, I'm not too sure. But uh, so but there is a concept in general in our Chakdzok tradition, Mahāmudrā Dzogchen tradition, you know, of the combination of the Chokling Tersar and the Baro Kagyu, but actually not just that tradition, like in general in Mahāmudrā Dzogchen, like in Tsele Natsok Rangdröl mentions this. And I don't know who first talks about this, but it's the idea that you can come to the view through meditation or you can come to meditation through the view. And of these, the, coming to the view through meditation is considered to be very difficult and rare, like you just meditate kind of somehow figure things out, you come, you uncover the view. Because in that context also the view you would be uncovering would be not the conceptual view, it would be the non-conceptual actual view. So that would be very difficult without anyone giving you any kind of conceptual guidance, you just sort of somehow figure it out, so to speak. That sounds, that's hard. Whereas as opposed to that you come to the meditation, the experience, through learning the view, through like the conceptual view basically, like what we're doing, and that's much more common. Now which qualifies Nāgārjuna? I don't know. They do say he was at least a first stage bodhisattva. Now in the first stage which means he was a noble one, he was an Ārya who had attained the path of seeing, had a direct experience of the ultimate. So that's like, at least that much is certainly, you know, commonly accepted.
Uh, there's the whole thing of the five paths and the ten stages, and the list, more lists, but we won't go into those details right now. Let's just say, you know, Nāgārjuna was not just doing concepts. That's, I think, the tradition definitely agrees with that. And this, what was the other one again?
Uh, not really, no. No, because forgetfulness would mean you sort of know something, but you just aren't paying attention, so you forget it. And this context is, ignorance is an obscuration. It's not like, uh, oh, you know, like if I forget my phone, I kind of know where my phone is, and then I've just forgotten it. But this is where there's something that's actually preventing me, I don't know what, you know, like I have more than forgetfulness, I have something that's actually blocking me from seeing something. Right? So, and it's delicate because, you know, I can see there's a reason to ask that question, which is, there is a sense in which already within our experience is, in a sense, the kind of non-dual awareness, primordial wakefulness, that is the, that is, you know, Buddha mind, so to speak. But it's not exactly that we're forgetting that, it's more like there's something that's sort of blocking that from becoming fully manifest in our experience. And that's what ignorance is. There is a notion of forgetfulness, which is in the context of mindfulness, which plays a very important role as well in all of this, where mindfulness is basically, it's called mindfulness, the literal word in Sanskrit is smṛti, or in Pali it's sati, in Tibetan it's dran pa དྲན་པ , and that literally means memory. But, you know, that's really a metaphor, because memory here means it's the opposite of forgetting, saṃpramoṣa, which is, and forgetting means being distracted. So when you're being not mindful, your mind is being pulled in various directions by whatever, things are capturing your attention. So you can be mindful without being focused on an object, you can have non-dual or objectless mindfulness, which is a very important part of the, of the practice in Mahāmudrā, what they call the ma yeng tsam gyi drenpa མ་ཡེངས་ཙམ་གྱི་དྲན་པ, the mindfulness of mere non-distraction, because mindfulness's function, even technical function in the Abhidharma is to prevent distraction. It's not, doesn't, it's not talking about being focused on an object, there are other mental functions which do the object focus part, it's just what prevents you from getting pulled away. So you can be not focused on an object and just not pulled away. Right? So that's where forgetting is very important. Forgetting is kind of getting lost, as Mingyur Rinpoche says, like you're not lost. You're just not lost. So ma ying mi gom མ་ཡིང མི་གོམ is a common way of talking about Mahāmudrā, Dzogchen, non-dual style meditation is not undistracted, not meditating. And that doesn't mean you're like, you know, just asleep. It means that your mind is not being pulled away by other objects. You can have content, but your mind is not caught, the attention is not caught by that, whether it's thoughts or sensations. You're not trying to close down your mind, but you're not caught on the one hand, and on the other hand, you're not trying to do meditation in the sense of focus on something. Right? So the mental function that is responsible for focus in the Abhidharma, so, so mindfulness, smṛti or sati or dren pa, is a uh, is one of these dharmas, actually. Remember the elements that make up the mind-body system? It's one of those in that system. And those ideas continue to be used by the Mahāyāna philosophers, like by Mādhyamikas. They continue to use those methods. They just say, you know, it's not ultimately real, but this is still a good way of talking about how the mind's working, certain aspects of it at least. And so mindfulness, the technical definition of mindfulness, in the Tibetan world, this is called sem སེམས semjung སེམས་བྱུང , mind and mental functions. You can see it in the second volume of the series called Science and Philosophy in the Indian Buddhist Classics, Volume 2, The Mind, which I co-translated and wrote some essays for. I think I mentioned that before. And so mindfulness is what prevents distraction, and what actually accounts for attention, one of the key mental functions for attention is called manasikāra, which basically means attention. A very low level, kind of primitive level of attention. And which is said to occur, according to the Abhidharma, in every moment of cognition. But in the Mahāmudrā tradition, as it develops, you know, the style of philosophy in India that we're going to talk some about, as it develops, they say, Oh, you know what our practice is? You guys do mindfulness, and you focus with your manasikāra, with your attention on objects. Well, we do amanasikāra, non-attention. So the philosopher Advayavajra, also known as Maitrīpa, is very important for Mahāmudrā tradition. Right? He says, what our meditation is, being inattentive. Ha, Ha, Ha. You know, it's like, it's clearly sort of a joke. But it's also not just a joke. It's also meaning we're not focusing on something. We're not being dualistic. But we're not distracted.
Right? So undistracted non meditation, which is very easy to say.
Not so easy to do. But yes, or maybe it's so easy.
Yeah, anyway. Okay.
All righty then. So maybe we move along now.
Okay. Um, I guess I was just struggling a bit with the uh, uh, Nāgārjuna's arguments on the emptiness of time. Yeah, good, good. Illusionaryness of time. Like, isn't it problematic that it's based on uh, a type of logical reasoning that already sort of negates time? Like, if we already, already excludes time. Like, if you go back to the relation between cause and effect. Yes. Like, that relation is not simply one as in, for instance, the relation between X equals two. It's more like the sort of the nature of the relation is that the cause ceases to exist. Yes. So that it can have an effect. Because it's by being impermanent, by changing, Yeah. um, that it can have an effect.
So they're definitely the same on the one hand, but they're not the same in the sense that they can coexist at the same time. And in the same sense, is it also not the case that past, present and future are definitely the same on one level, but also the nature of the relation is that present can only exist when past ceases to exist and future can only become present when present... no, yea... Right, so in other words, he's kind of loaded the deck. He's cheating because he's deliberately chosen something where the things you're trying to define in terms of each other, we understand to be like, they can't exist at the same time. Let's do a different one then, okay? So how many objects are here? Let's count this as one. Is that okay? I'll take the flower out of here. How many containers are here? Three. Okay, everyone is in agreement. Three. Do they all exist at the same time?
No, this one is actually fluttering in an account quantum reality, which is good. No, I'm kidding. Of course, they exist at the same time. It's a macro level object. Can't play with quantum stuff with macro, okay? Unless it's sci-fi. All right, okay? So there's three. One, two, three. We're going to make a set of these. One, two, three. They belong in that set of a three-fold set, okay? Is there threeness? So there's a threeness characterizing this set, right? Correct? The number three. The quantity three. Is the three the same as this? Uh, no. It's not?
Well, yes and no.
So the threeness is also the same as this, yes and no, isn't it? And that's not in the set. It's a part-whole relation. Exactly. And we already know where that goes, don't we? Very simple. I think number is a really good one here. And they do, the Mādhyamika's worked with numbers too, because that was also considered to be a kind of abstract. So the idea is what we're doing is we're creating an abstract entity that is meant to be instantiated in particular actual things, concrete things. And that's going to be that same kind of distributed entity. It's a one in many. And the minute we do that, the claim is, you know, that we're going to run into this, we're going to run into a contradiction or an excluded middle. We're going to have to either say that the threeness, the entity, well you can call it the set, is different than the members, than the things that are qualified by the number, or it's the same. And neither of those work. What we can do, like, you know, the philosopher Bradley, who did myriological stuff, you know, where we can say, oh, well, things like wholes or sets kind of exist in a different way than concrete things. And then, you know, the real question is, well, how do you know that?
Like, can I just make up abstract things? Like, every three, with every three, there's also a gumagitika that exists, the gumagitika exists abstractly with every number three. And you say to me, how do I know that? And I say, well, because without the gumagitika, three can't exist. And I say, how do I know that? It's just, you know, obvious. What do you mean?
So like our abstractions, like numbers, like we say, oh, three. You say, well, and I say, where's the threeness? Can you, can you point, point to the threeness?
Anybody want to extend the threeness? Point. Please point to the threeness.
People on camera couldn't see you go like this.
Usually my undergraduates go like this. I'm pointing to the threeness. That's a good one, though. That's really good. But of course, each of these is pointing to an individual, right? You can't point to the threeness. It's an abstraction. It doesn't exist in our perception. It exists in our conceptuality.
It exists in the map. It's not the territory. That doesn't mean it's like there's something wrong. Like if I say there's four there, you know, it's not like a Mādhyamika engineer would think, oh, well, three, four, it's all abstractions. you know, like... Don't fly in a Mādhyamika airplane because... It's not like that. No, it's saying that, yes, of course, you can still, there are conceptual maps that are good, that work, conceptual maps that aren't good. And there's a version of Buddhist philosophy that becomes combined with Mādhyamika that we'll talk about a little bit that is you know, really inquiring into, okay, how do we figure out what works and what doesn't work? But the Mādhyamika position is that what definitely doesn't work is when you think the map is the reality, when you take the abstraction that is derived from experience and then you make that real, even to the point where that becomes more real than the concrete thing.
Okay? So, for example, here's a very interesting thing. Uh, how... Okay.
Do you see this? You see it, right? Okay. How do you know this is here?
And there's an object in my hand. How do you know that?
Came along and told you, whispered in your ear, he has an object.
Can you see it? What's going on when you see it? Give me some model. I see an object. I know it as a small vase. Yeah, but give me a model of the process. Just any, some reasonably good model. A visual perception. Physical or experiential, right? Yeah, both, yeah. Both? You can do whatever you want. Okay. The photons bounce off the vase...
trigger my... Yeah, right, right. So there's a causal process. Great. Okay. What is required for that to happen? What if this never changed? Right, changes. It has to change. So there has to be... Like this has to come into... This has to, like, photons have to bounce off of it. Or there are all kinds of interactions that are happening in order for you to see it, right? What would happen if three changed the number three? What does it mean for something to change? It means it becomes something other than what it was a moment ago. So three would become four if it changed, right? So does... So now I say, this is four. That doesn't work, does it? Right? So what does that mean about things like three? They're unchanging. Which means, can you see them? Can you perceive them? No. Can they do anything causal? No. So why do we think they're real?
Who knows? Because it works. Exactly. Exactly. Because it works. And again, if our conceptual system, if the philosopher mouse were like, you know, how many saber-toothed tigers are coming toward me right now? Not much of a meal for a saber-toothed tiger, but maybe, you know, maybe it's a really big mouse. There were really big mice, apparently, prehistorically, seriously. There's just some recent research on that. So it's a big, you know, were-mouse, huge like... But it's a philosopher one. And, you know, like three saber-toothed tigers are coming toward it and it goes, well, in my perceptual experience, there is all of this coming and I can construct the number three as the...
Right, you know, the conceptual map needs to be, is like built into the system is, in a sense for survival, is like the world model is real, because that keeps us alive. And it can get updated, right? But some things get like, invariable. And they don't need to be, they don't need updating anymore. Until you do, until what? Until you start to really analyze. Then things that seem like really invariable, you get down, down, down, and it's like, oh, that's not really what we thought. Like, oh, this is not really quite solid in the way we thought it was.
Right? But there are things like solidity and so on which seem just, oh, that's, you know, the way things are in our experience and we don't update those things. And so we think, because they're so stable, we think they're real, because they work, they are real. Right? And because our system has developed, evolved in a way, we're like, yeah, like your model of the world is reality. So that you behave, you know, like you just, when you need to jump out of the way, you jump out of the way, or whatever it is. Right? So if you're a, if you're a mouse, you know, to survive in saṃsāra, that's good. If you're a human, that kind of is not, again, it's not so adaptive anymore.
Especially if you're a human who can build, you know, nuclear weapons and believe in the reality of, let's say, I don't know, a country more than the concrete touch of a hand. Then you've got a real problem.
Well, I'm just blabbing again. Alrighty. Yes. You want to ask one more? One more. One quick, if it's quick, because we really should. So is it correct to say that on the ultimate level there is no causality? Yes, correct. Causality is apparent. Right? But from the apparent standpoint, we're not denying causality. It's just that another way to say it is, you know, this is somewhat like Hume, I suppose, is that causality is a model. Right? A way of us understanding what's happening in experience and abstraction from experience. That really works well, by the way. And a Buddha would be able to perceive non-causality? You don't... No, you can't see non-causality. Can you see the non-causality in my hand?
I can sell you some later if you want, you know. I've got a whole bag of non-causality in my room. And, you know... Okay.
Yeah. Remember the, remember uh, you know the story from Candrakīrti? Guy goes into a bar. Remember that story? You don't want to be the guy who says, I'll have a glass of nothing.
Okay then. On we go. So, these are... I just wanted to do a quick historical thing Nāgārjuna and then we have his main. These are all rough dates, you know, we don't really know exact dates until we get... until the end where we have figures who went to Tibet. And even those dates, actually, there's debate about. I think both of them, but especially Kamalaśīla. But anyway, Nāgārjuna, then Āryadeva, who is said to be his disciple, then Bhulapālita, a very important interpreter who emphasizes the use of prasaṅga. At least that's traditionally said to be the case. Emphasizes the use of just absurd consequences. Bhāviveka, who's said to introduce more positive reasoning, meaning not just absurd consequences, but like we can actually use affirmative reasoning. Candrakīrti, who critiques Bhāviveka for doing that. Uh, then we have three figures. Jñānagarbha, Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla, who are known as the three Eastern Mādhyamika's by the Tibetans, the uma shar sum, because they were from Bengal, I think. And uh, they are, two of them, Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla, actually go to Tibet. And they are very important for the development of Mādhyamika in Tibet. Later, Candrakīrti's works are translated a couple centuries or more later. Yeah, more than a couple centuries later. And they, and people, for various reasons, kind of become very fond of Candrakīrti, because he solves, in some ways, gives them the tools to do certain things that Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla's approach to Mādhyamika didn't enable them to do. But ironically, you have to sort of pick and choose. So basically, some of what, one stream of interpretation in Tibet likes Candrakīrti, because he is very critical of the Yogācāra philosophy that we're going to talk about. And another stream of Candrakīrti, totally different stream, that the two of these two streams kind of disagree with each other and some fundamental things. Another stream of interpretation likes Candrakīrti, because he rejects the use of certain kinds of epistemological tools. So some people like Candrakīrti for his rejection of Yogācāra idealism, we can call it, maybe, Yogācāra philosophy. It's not really idealism, but... And some people like him for the rejection of epistemology, formal epistemology. But the people who like him because he rejects Yogācāra also really like formal epistemology. And the people who really like Yogācāra, the people who reject formal epistemology like Yogācāra. You get that?
So this is, you know, not traditionally those two sides will say, well, we're our interpretation of Candrakīrti is correct. Academically, and also me personally, I think both sides are sort of ignoring the part of Candrakīrti they don't like.
Right? Okay, so when you hear Candrakīrti being cited, you should be, you know, just be aware that he's being used in certain ways, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it all works out entirely in terms of his philosophy. To Western, there's been Western, in this area, I think Western academics has done a good job of really pointing out something that's important to know, even, you know, within a traditional context. Okay, what are the key questions of Yogacara, Yogācāra that we, you know, talked about at the end of last time? Yogācāra is going to be this new style of philosophy that emerges, again, based on sūtras that are said to have been taught by the Buddha long before that. And these are sūtras that are said to be in the third turning of the wheel. So there are three turnings of the wheel of Dharma, of the Dharmachakra. There is the, you know, that's this gesture that you saw in one of the icons that was on a slide, you know, the icon where, I say, we went from just an empty throne to an actual figure. So that icon is showing the Buddha turning the wheel of Dharma when he turns, there's the first turning in Sarnath where he teaches the Nobles four truths. So that's like early Buddhism. Then we have the second turning is the perfection of wisdom and that's Nāgārjuna in terms of philosophy and all those other figures you just saw. And then the third turning involves especially Yogācāra, okay, and that's going to be not perfection of wisdom sūtras but a whole bunch of other sūtras. Some of them are often referred to as the Vaipulya Sūtras, the extensive sūtras, right, and there are sūtras, very important sūtras like the Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra, the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, which the Mādhyamika's also cite sometimes, okay. So this then emerges after Nāgārjuna and it's going to have a series of questions that even though some of these early figures where Yogācāra is developing in philosophy, not just in the sūtra literature, they don't actually directly seem to talk about Nāgārjuna but it seems pretty clear that they're grappling with some of the issues that Nāgārjuna has raised. And one of them is, what is prapañca? Remember, prapañca is kind of that thing that's even deeper than conceptuality, Right? So we have the one level of saying, well, our problem is that we have bad maps or we're taking our maps too seriously. But prapañca's saying is that, well, actually there's something that's even prior to our map making, that's a problem, the reality habit itself. And so that's one question, like, what is this reality habit, if you like? What is known in the experience of emptiness as ultimate reality? Like, you know, what is it like? I mean, how do we, can we describe it? Is it even knowing? And how does one, you know, like what is known, what are you knowing and how are you knowing it? So both of those questions together you could think of as kind of what's the phenomenology, for example. What's the experience of knowing the ultimate? And does it mean that there's like, you're knowing nothing? Obviously that's not going to work for Nāgārjuna. But does that mean if it's not nothing, does that mean there's something there, something left, something that's kind of not negated by emptiness? Okay, so the major thinkers, just real quick, Asaṅga, Vasubandhu are the two original thinkers and then Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, the epistemologists. Uh, who, uh, you know, work with these ideas. What starts even with the Mādhyamika Bhāviveka, but actually really picks up with Dharmakīrti in particular, is the idea of doing levels of analysis. So this becomes very important in the kind of Buddhism that goes to Tibet. Like we're going to kind of progress from one thing to the next to the next. I'll say more about that. One level of analysis, to the next level of analysis, to the next level of analysis. To kind of lead you through, from, starting with your ordinary experience to a realization of the ultimate. Another important commentator is Sthiramati. Another one that I think is important but is not often just talked about is Vinītadeva. So these are all again in the Sanskrit, right? Tradition, they're all prior to or just prior to or maybe somewhat coinciding with the introduction of Buddhism to Tibet. Especially when we think of Buddhism as the founding of the Samye Monastery in Tibet where philosophical Buddhism starts to occur in the 8th century. Okay. So one of the texts that is very important here is a text that was said to have been transmitted to Asaṅga by the future Buddha Maitreya. In a kind of celestial encounter. And then his half brother Vasubandhu wrote a commentary on this text. Their mother, it's said, was a nun who gave up her robes because she was so worried about what was going on with the dharma and then she produced, she gave birth to and raised the two greatest philosophers, arguably, certainly two of the greatest philosophers. Of these, I will say that the Tibetans especially talk about the six ornaments, six philosophers who are the ornaments. Four of them are here. Right? Asaṅga, Vasubandhu, Dignāga, Dharmakīrti and then in the, sorry, in the Mādhyamika list, Nāgārjuna and Candrakīrti. So it's interesting that four of them actually are not Mādhyamika philosophers. Okay, so what's in this text? It says, abhūta-parikalpo ’sti dvayaṃ tatra na vidyate śūnyatā vidyate tatra tasyām api sa vidyate I think I remember that right. And that means the conceptual construction of the unreal exists. Duality does not exist in it. But emptiness exists in it. It also exists in terms of that, namely emptiness. Completely obvious, right? Okay, let's talk about something first before we go further. And then we'll take a break, which is duality. There are basically two kinds of duality. There is ontological duality and epistemological or phenomenological duality. Okay? Ontological duality comes up a lot in Nāgārjuna. Uh, because what Nāgārjuna can, remember Nāgārjuna works with a dyadic analysis, an analysis of things that are paired to each other. And sometimes, often those analyses, so some of those analyses are things, about things that are paired in some way that doesn't make them contradictories. Like, remember desire and the desirous person or the desirous mind? Those aren't contradictories, right? If there's one, you need the other. Right? But some of his dyadic analyses are about what we call logically contradictories. A contradictory is something that... So hot and cold are not contradictories. Because there are things that are neither hot nor cold. They don't have temperature. Right? Like the number two.
It's kind of lukewarm. Right? So we think of the number two as an object of knowledge we can think of it, but we don't attribute temperature to it. So uh, uh, hot and cold are called contraries. Right? Which means that they can't be instantiated together in the same thing simultaneously. But not everything has to instantiate them. Those qualities. Existence and non-existence are contradictories. Every knowable thing is either existent or non-existent. The number two either exists or doesn't exist. And you can parameterize that. You could say the number two either ultimately exists or ultimately doesn't exist. So everything has to be one or the other of those. It can't be both, can't be neither. That's a contradictory. Okay? So that's, when we talk about duality in Nāgārjuna, that's the kind of ontological duality that he undermines. So in that verse of praise that I say at the beginning, which is by Nāgārjuna,
it says, you're not real, you're not unreal, you're not discontinuous, meaning you just last a moment and stop. You're not eternal, meaning you're continuous over time. You're not permanent, you're not impermanent. To you, the non-dual, I bow. Right? So advaya is this word in Sanskrit for non-duality or the non-dual. And each of those pairs are ontological dualities. Existence, they're contradictory. Existence, non-existence, permanent, impermanent, continuous, discontinuous. Right? They all, at least in the way Nāgārjuna would think about these things, they have to apply to everything that we could possibly know. Everything we possibly know either is unchanging or changing. So either existed or non-existent. Okay? So that's one form of duality. That's a very important form of duality. But that is not the kind of duality when we say non-dual awareness, non-dual primordial awareness, it is not about that. Okay? The non-dual, the non-duality that applies in that context is uh, it's phenomenological or epistemological non-duality. In other words, it's a non-duality about the way that cognition occurs. And one way to think about that kind of cog, that, that way, that notion of duality is just, it's very simply, if we take our favorite vase here, and you're looking at the vase, right? One question is, everyone sees it, right? Where is the vase? Thank you. Wait, do you have like a weird eye disease that makes you... Can you point to the vase, right? Like, you guys can do that, right? I'm not trying to trick you.
Right? It's like over here, right? Okay? And you have, as you're looking at the vase, you have a sense like this, of like a sense of somebody's looking at it. Right? So that's a sense of subjectivity looking at an object. Like there's an in here and an out there. In here, out there, right? Does this look like it's like in here with the one who's looking at it? No. Right, everyone on board with that? That's the kind of duality we're talking about. There's like world and self. Object and subject. Okay? So when you hear non-duality in the context of Mahāmudrā, Dzogchen, it's not talking about ontological duality. It's about this duality in experience. Okay? That's really very important to understand. So we're, we're, as you can see in this verse, this philosophy is going to say that, that duality doesn't actually exist. It seems to exist. But it does not actually exist. It is not ultimately real. We're going to come back to that, but first we're going to take a break. Until, you guys probably need more than five minutes, right? So until 11:20. Okay.
sönam diyi thamché sikpa nyi thopné nyepai dranam phamjé né kyega nachi balap trukpa yi sipai tsolé drowa drölwar shok Okay. Thank you.
