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Session 10 — No Fixed Essence: Understanding Emptiness in Context
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Collection:
- Buddhist Classics and Philosophy
Location:
- Gomde Germany-Austria
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Excerpt
The teaching explains that all phenomena lack fixed, inherent identity and only exist relationally within contexts, which is what emptiness means. Properly understood, emptiness is not nothingness but the basis that allows change, understanding, and compassionate engagement with others.
Description
This session explores the meaning of emptiness through the breakdown of fixed, essential identities. Using examples like football rules, the teacher shows that things only function within contexts, not as absolute realities. When we try to assign inherent, unchanging existence to things—causes, effects, or objects—reasoning collapses, revealing that all phenomena are relational and empty of essence. Emptiness is not nihilism; rather, it means that things lack independent identity but still function conventionally through relationships and causes. Understanding emptiness, especially together with compassion, allows one to engage flexibly with others’ perspectives and ultimately makes transformation and liberation possible.
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.
Video
Audio
38:19
And I want to thank Philipp
Haslinger. I called him Stefan,
but Philipp Haslinger for the
insights in quantum physics.
It's a very interesting place to start
thinking about this.
And during the break Josh was asking,
well, I'm a little confused.
You know, are you saying that things can
exist and not exist?
So, let me give you an example,
you know football, the real football,
not American football, if the ball
rolls over between the goal posts, rolls over the goal line. I think it's more than half, right? Is that what it is? Or it's completely... I forget the current rule. Anyway, let's say it rolls completely over the goal line. Is it a goal?
So, yeah, I think so too. That's why I say when my local team plays before the game, game, I go and I kick the ball into the goal line. A few times, but it never registers. I don't know why they don't register it on the scoreboard.
What is he talking about? So it is definitively a goal. Like if the ball is in the back of the net, there's no doubt it's a goal during the game. So the correct answer to that question is it's a goal and it's not a goal.
Or in American football, the way I do this, because it's kind of fun, you know, my university has a big football team and in American football you get four chances to go start from where you got the ball to go ten yards, about ten meters. And so, and then if you get it, if you do that, you manage to get it within four chances, then you get to start again with a new chance. It's called first down. And then the referee does this thing, first down. So I like to ask my students, is ten yards a first down? And they go, yeah, ten yards a first down. And then I say, that's why when you see me walking across campus, every ten yards I go, first down.
First down.
Sometime I'm going to actually do that, just get somebody to record me.
Right, so it's not a first. Ten yards is not a first down. It's a first down in a particular context. So when we have that kind of reasoning, like in a particular context, things are either existent or non-existent. But what we're, when we talk about idea of essential reality, like I said before, we're talking about identities and therefore reasoning that's supposed to be trans-contextual.
And when we try to reason that way, then reason falls apart.
So if we try to reason with things that, with the assumption that things have fixed absolute non-contextual identities so that a ball in the back of the football net is essentially a goal, then, like, we're in trouble.
It doesn't make sense. If a cause is either essentially existent or non-existent, then as Khenpo pointed out, excuse me, if an effect is essentially existent or non-existent, then either there's no point in causing it, because it already exists, or no matter how many causes you try to use, you'll never produce it, because it's essential identities to be non-existent. Right? At the time of the cause, before the effect manifests, either the, and we're thinking of it in terms of having an essential identity, which is independent of the time. That's what it means to have an essential identity. You have an essential identity, if we say that we can talk about the effects before the cause, and we say that we can do that intelligently, then we have to talk about what the essence, what the effect is in essence, which is not time-dependent.
And then it's either essentially existent or essentially non-existent. And if it's essentially non-existent, then that's essential identities is to not exist, which means that it doesn't matter how many causes we use, it will never be produced. And then we look and we see, oh, you know, the farmer, who fortunately hasn't studied Mādhyamika, no, I'm kidding, but you know, he's like, not worried about these things, plants the seeds and the sprouts arise. And now we know that that's not true, that way of thinking about the world, even though it is intuitive to us, as like built into our system as a reality habit, that that is actually a confused way of thinking about the world. And what is a kind of challenge there is that what that does kind of get at, I was talking actually with Philipp about, you know, how you know, one way of thinking about that reality habit is you could kind of connect it to this rather faddish account of how the brain works called predictive processing, where basically the brain is constantly generating a model of the world and of the self in the world. And you know, the goal of that model is to enable us to act successfully in the world, especially to survive, but hopefully more than that. And kind of built into that model is some sense like, okay, that's this, this is that, I don't want to have to recalculate, so to speak, if this is a cup, that's it, it's a cup. Right? And then so that's that kind of like that reality habits, like okay, that's a cup, this is this, this is that, that's it. And what's challenging sometimes about this philosophy, but this is a good thing is it can kind of feel like, oh, man, wait, everything I thought was like, just obviously the case, is not obviously the case. And then there is this kind of even discomfort that can come with that. And that's okay. That's even good. Right? That there is like, oh, you know, the ground is kind of shifting underneath me. And that's okay. Because actually, part of what that does then is eventually leads to, you know, a much... because that's actually that model is fragile. As Khenpo was pointing out to us, you know, those world models are fragile. So like, oh, yeah, you know, whatever this is, I have all this money, everything's good. And then poof, it's gone somehow. Or I have this great relationship or whatever. And then poof, it's over. Like, and while it was there, it's like, oh, everything's perfect. That's the way it is. Great. But it's not the way that way.
So the that sense of, oh, there's a sort of instability. You know, really embracing that, which goes is like really embracing impermanence sometimes can feel like a little, you know, throws you off balance a little bit, but actually, eventually puts you into a much stronger balance. Because now you're in accord with the way things really are, instead of trying to pretend they're otherwise. And you're not trying to pretend you're, they're otherwise, your system is doing that. It's just the way in a sense, we, we are built, so to speak, where we have evolved the way it what it means to be human and not just human.
Okay, I don't know. So enough of that. I don't know. Maybe that makes sense. We've already talked about this. What's the problem with essences? Things can't change. The only option is escape. But if they're not, if they're not fixed in their essences, you can make you can build the Buddha field. Right.
And then another really important thing is, if your goal is to if you're really driven by compassion, this is very important, because the idea here is you really can't fully get emptiness without compassion. And one reason for that is, in a sense, you know, just to kind of manage your own suffering, just undoing that self model is pretty much sufficient, it seems. Emptiness can help you with that also with the self model. But you don't need full blown emptiness, at least theoretically, in order to, you know, undo that self model that's causing suffering. But you need emptiness, if you're going to help other people to do it. Partially because, you know, emptiness is what enables you to remain engaged in the world. But also partially because emptiness is what enables you to not be stuck in one reality, so to speak. You can really see from other person's perspectives. And, uh... you can only uproot that tendency, this kind of grasping or fixation. I mean, in order to do that, you have to uproot your own kind of fixation on your own reality, which is never really just your own, you know, it's created in conjunction with other persons. You can think of it as having cultural features, family culture, social culture, and so on. But if you're stuck in that, you can't really see the world from other person's perspective. So to be maximally effective at helping them, you have to be able to do that. And that means you really have to directly realize emptiness. Okay. And why is this not working? There we go. So we've talked about this, what it means that you look for some X, what is it thing really, right? If you find what the thing is really, then you found its ultimate nature. If you keep talking about some non-X, then you're saying, well, for example, my little cup here, if I say, what's the cup really? Oh, it's really a top and a bottom and a side and so on. Now I'm not saying there isn't a cup there, there's just a top and a bottom, you know, a top and a handle, a top, a side, a handle and a bottom. That's what's really there. And of course, I can keep going, but what's the handle really, so on and so forth. Right? So if I use that kind of analysis, I just, I'm not... I'm saying that there really isn't a cup there, there's something other than a cup there.
And then the point in the Mādhyamika context is not using just that reductive analysis, but in a relational analysis that we will go through tomorrow, go through more of the relational analysis. If you're really thorough, and then what you always end up saying is like, for example, let's say we get all the way down to the part-less infinitesimally small particle, we say what's that really? Well, it's the causal, it's an effect of some previous particles. Then suddenly, even with the part-less particle, I'm not doing an analysis that's reducing it. But I'm doing an analysis that says, well, it's what it is because of its relationship to this other thing, its cause. So then characterizing what it really is, I again start to talk about something else.
You see? Okay, so that means when I get to that point, and every time I try to say what a thing really is, I end up talking about something else. That means it's empty of being what it really is. It's empty of this fixed absolute identity. It's empty of essence. So that's what emptiness is. You try to find what x really is, and you don't find it. You always end up talking about something else. You specify something else. So what's the... if we say the conclusion of our search for the ultimate nature of some x is emptiness, then what we're saying is that the conclusion of the search for the ultimate nature is that it does not have an ultimate nature.
Okay?
Is that clear? In other words, x, like, ultimately, the cup is not really a cup. Ultimately, consciousness is not really consciousness. And that's what emptiness is. So when I say the cup, the ultimate nature of the cup is emptiness, what I'm saying is, if you look for the ultimate nature of a cup, you won't find it. But emptiness is not nothing. Really key, as Khenpo was saying this morning, right? So, part of the way we can understand that is the relationship, remember the two truths, the ultimate and the conventional. So let me be obedient to Khenpo's request and pull out the Sanskrit because I haven't memorized some of these verses. So... we have some verses here that are really key that Khenpo actually cited some of these this morning. I think almost all of these this morning. dve satye samupāśritya buddhānāṃ dharmadeśanā loka-saṃvṛti-satyaṃ ca satyaṃ ca paramārthataḥ The Buddhists teach the Dharma by relying on the two realities. One is the reality of worldly conventions, the other is ultimate reality. ye ’nayor na vijānanti vibhāgaṃ satyayor dvayoḥ te tattvaṃ na vijānanti gambhīraṃ buddhaśāsane One who does not know how to distinguish between these two realities does not discern the profound tattva, the ultimate within the Buddhist teaching.
vyavahāram anāśritya paramārtho na deśyate paramārtham anāgamya nirvāṇaṃ nādhigamyate Ultimate reality is not taught without relying on conventions. Without understanding ultimate reality, nirvāṇa is not obtained. Okay, let's stop there for a second. So this is what this is telling us, which is really key is that the process of coming to emptiness is not like sort of intuiting the ultimate, you know, like, I don't know, someone hits you on the head, you go, ah, the ultimate. Or we, you know, shoot you up with some drugs and then oh, I saw the gremlins or the gnomes in the wall. And finally, I know the way you think, whatever it is, you know, I saw the light, the divine light. Uh, whatever you saw, it's like, it's not that it's like working with where you are now, and really trying to understand what the way you, the way you were the way we experienced the world, what it actually concludes in.
So in a way, it's, in a sense, just really paying careful attention to what's going on, the way we're operating, and then using the way we're operating to examine that.
And so when you do that, with that reasoning, as I was saying like that, the way we reason emerges out of that kind of essentialist perspective.
When that reasoning is applied in this kind of universal way, trans-contextual way, like we perfectly understand reasoning that is context bound, like within the context of, you know, American football, you can pick up the ball. So I can just say, like, can I pick up the ball and run with it to make a goal? And someone said, Yeah, sure. So then I get on the soccer field, as we call it, and I pick up the ball and I run and make a goal. Why not?
It's actually, there's an Irish Gaelic football, which is like that, you know. And there's also hurling with the sticks where they just beat each other. But it's my ancestry, you know, actually, I'm an Irish citizen. But, um... So or soon will be. Um... So, uh... we understand that there are rules and there's kinds of reasoning with those rules that can be context bound in the case of games, for example, or even a legal system. So we perfectly understand that reasoning can, can be, have be circumscribed. But built, again, built into our system is some sense in which there's a reality that is not contextual. There's just the way it is.
And the reasoning emerges from that. And when we use that reasoning to examine that kind of world, it falls apart.
So a big part of like the idea that we have to rely on the conventional to realize the ultimate is that we're actually using our own experience and carefully examining it and using the reasoning that emerges from our experience to discover that, hey, certain aspects of our experience really don't make sense. OK, so without doing that, we actually can't obtain nirvāṇa.
Uh, but and here's a key thing, like a poisonous snake, whoops, I should read this. Here we go in a second.
vināśayati durdṛṣṭā śūnyatā mandamedhasām sarpo yathā durgṛhīto vidyā vā duṣprasāritā Like a poisonous snake when held incorrectly, or a magic spell when improperly used emptiness, when incorrectly understood, devastates the mind, devastates the simple minded.
Okay, what, in other words, we use reasoning to get to this place where it falls apart. And that, in a sense, is emptiness. Where a whole like ontological fixation reality falls apart. But if we're not careful, like if you grab a snake the right way, then you can take it and you can get the poison out of the fangs and make medicine out of it. And that's kind of so the snake is reasoning. This is actually a metaphor that you find quite early on, like in the Alagaddūpama Sutta, the water snake simile Sutta in the Pali Canon. So if you grab the snake the wrong way, it's going to turn around and bite you.
So reasoning is like that. So reasoning, if you use it the right way, it can be a kind of medicine that leads you to understand emptiness correctly. If you grab it the wrong way, then you're in trouble. And...
Uh this is why in this famous verse that from the Lalitavistra, that um, um... that Rinpoche often cites actually, that Buddha hesitated... athāsthāya pratyātārthaṃ cittaṃ deśayituṃ muneḥ dharmam asyādhigamyaṃ mandabuddher avagāhyedam
No, hence the sage decided that unintelligent people would find it difficult to penetrate his Dharma. So he hesitated to teach the Dharma.
śūnyatāyām adhilayaṃ yaṃ punaḥ kurute bhavān doṣaprasaṅgo nāsmākaṃ sa śūnye nopapadyate And this is kind of all a response to a series of objections to Śūnyatā, to emptiness that the other person makes, which are based on the idea that if everything is empty, then nothing works. But it's actually the opposite.
sarvaṃ yujyate tasya śūnyatā yasya yujyate sarvaṃ na yujyate tasya śūnyatā yasya na yujyate To a person for whom emptiness makes sense, everything makes sense. To a person for whom emptiness does not make sense, nothing makes sense. And you could say make sense is possible, works is reasonable. And hence this most famous verse, we've already cited today, yaḥ pratītyasamutpādaḥ śūnyatāṃ tāṃ pracakṣmahe sā prajñaptir upādāya pratipat saiva madhyamā Right, a few verses later. So the issue here that's really key is that emptiness is...
We're going to skip some stuff, come back to it later. It's the ultimate reality of all persons and things, right? If you look for what they are, you don't find it. So things are all empty of essence. So if you ask what a person or thing really is, it's emptiness, right? But emptiness is not ultimately real.
This is key. Emptiness is the answer to the question, what is this thing ultimately? And then, but emptiness itself is not ultimately real. Emptiness is not emptiness, ultimately. If you try to look for the essence of emptiness, you don't find it. If you do the same thing, like what is emptiness in and of itself, you come to the same conclusion.
You find that the essence of Śūnyatā is that it is not really Śūnyatā. Emptiness is empty of really being emptiness. This is called the Śūnyatā Śūnyatā.
Okay? And, an and... But if you turn emptiness into your ultimate, right? Like, I don't know, who's seen the movie, The Big Lebowski? Okay. And in that movie, there are the German nihilists. Remember those guys? They do believe in something. What do they believe in? Nicht. Wir bleiben auf nichts, with the big scissors. Remember that thing is? Right? We are the German nihilists. Right? So that's where you end up. Like believing you turn emptiness into nothing. Emptiness is not nothing.
śūnyatā sarva-dṛṣṭīnām proktā niḥsaraṇaṃ jinaiḥ yeṣāṃ tu śūnyatā dṛṣṭis tān asādhyān babhāṣire The victors, meaning the Buddhists, have said that emptiness is the relinquishment of all views. It's really key. We talked about the view. But in a way, the view is to abandon views.
But that abandoning of views does not mean like believing in nothing. They were kind of incompetent, too. Remember the German nihilists? Like they couldn't... They were quite... If you go watch the movie again, they're like pretty incompetent bad guys.
But they said that for those whose view is emptiness, if you make emptiness into like, I believe in emptiness, then you're incurable. This has been mistranslated by a few people over the years. But this term asādhyān here means... asādhyan in this usage is like the target of a medical procedure, of a medical treatment. So it means there's no treatment for you. You're incurable.
Right? Like you go Śūnyatā... That's the reality. And then you go Śūn... No, emptiness is empty of emptiness. Oh, Śūnyatā Śūnyatā that's the reality. That's why they don't bother with Śūnyatā Śūnyatā Śūnyatā It's like, okay, if you don't get it after Śūnyatā Śūnyatā, it's like you're incurable.
So this is really super important. Persons and things... It doesn't mean that persons and things do not exist in any way at all.
All persons and things are empty of essence. they, they're... but we ask whether they are ultimately... We say Śūnyatā. Which means they don't... persons and things... No person or thing has a non-relational identity.
But conventionally, meaning, in a sense, from the standpoint of our human experience, and the models that we are using to talk about things, in other words, our concepts, persons and things have identities, but they're relational identities. Even though our concepts, our models, our mathematics, perhaps, seem to suggest that those things have identities that are kind of fixed and independent, that's not the case. And notice that concepts and so on, reasoning still works to a certain extent. So even though built into that, so our tendency is to absolutize identities, it's like, we still can reason quite well, and we can do lots of great things with manne... mathematics, and so on. But we've reached a certain limit, you know, both sides, like quantum physics is a great example, where certain kinds of limits are met. But also, importantly, there are side effects of having that kind of essentialist attitude. And we become, we basically perpetuate suffering. So if we could use some of the same tools without that kind of essentialist attitude, think about how much better things could be. Right? If we're not essentializing our abstractions, our models of the world, if we're not mistaking the map for the territory, right, think about how much better things could be. And again, that verse,
yaḥ pratītyasamutpādaḥ śūnyatāṃ tāṃ pracakṣmahe sā prajñaptir upādāya pratipat saiva madhyamā okay, emptiness makes everything possible.
All right, so I think, unless there's a burning question right now, maybe, okay, yeah, go ahead. We do have four minutes.
Yeah, I guess this final conclusion isn't fully making sense to me yet. Why is everything possible? Because they're still, like, isn't there still sort of, like, relative fixed identities in the sense that there's still constraints on what is possible? Like, you said you cannot make an orange tree from an apple seed, apple tree seed. Well, actually, we don't really know that.
Who knows what's possible?
Actually, so I wouldn't even, you know, who knows what you could, how you could manipulate a process genetically. What we do know, right, is that we have certain kinds of causal accounts. It was in the constraints of our understanding, with those causal accounts, those causal regularities act as constraints. But that doesn't mean that those are, those constraints are completely inflexible. Right? That's the point. But so with... But the key to this verse, what this verse means, really, is that, you know, and it has this verb in it, yujyate which can be translated various ways.
sarvaṃ yujyate tasya śūnyatā yasya yujyate sarvaṃ na yujyate tasya śūnyatā yasya na yujyate Yujyate, that's the verb yujyate. And it has, it's actually the same verb as the verb yoga, actually, interestingly. It's the same verb as the verb they use for reasoning. Yukti, same root. Putting things together. Uh... Can also have a sense of, like, making use of things. So it has a, you know, you could say it makes sense, it's reasonable, it's possible, it works. And all it really is saying is that, if things were fixed in absolute objective identities, that means those identities are totally non-dependent. And if they're totally non-dependent, then like when you're seeing me, or you're hearing me, you're coming into relation to me or to little sounds or these visual objects. In order to do that, if you were just completely, if somehow there's like a little real you in there, that is just existing independently and autonomously, then relationality is impossible. You can't come into relation with anything, really. If who you really are is totally non-relational, then, you know, you, your real you is, you know, in a little black box. Never knows anything, never feels anything, right? My inner you try to make it happy, but nothing I do works. So...
So instead it's saying it's totally relational. That's all we have. And if we try to make sense of relationality with an essentialist point of view, like, if two things are in relation, are they the same or different?
The same. Really? That's great, because then I can just be married to myself. If two things are in relation. Let me tell you, you know, I'm a terrible spouse. God, I just yell at myself all the time and really a jerk. I don't clean up after myself. I make myself make dinner all the time. It's a disaster. Well, they're not fully the same, not fully different. Exactly. Which, of course, if they're essential, now we're violating, what did we just do. We violated, we violated non-deviant reasoning. We're saying they're kind of one thing, kind of the other. But if were a ta... but... eh... But our essentialist habit, our reality habit says, no, you can't do that. The fact is that we do do that, sometime... Like, we're kind of comfortable with that to a point. And then that reality habit takes over, especially like when things really matter. Like, either you love me or you don't.
And then I say to myself, sorry, I don't love you. Well, I don't love you either.
I'm cracking myself up like, .....
Yeah. Right? So it's like, you know, that's the thing to note. And this is also very helpful. I mentioned this the other day, and then we'll stop. Is, you know, Je Tsongkhapa, the great founder of the Gelugpa tradition, really emphasized this idea of identifying what's to be negated. What is emptiness really going after? What is the philosophy of emptiness is really going after? And it's not always that manifest in our experience. It's kind of maybe subtly in the background. But there are times when it really becomes manifest. And it's those times when like, you know, it really matters. Either you're with us, or you're against us. Right? Like something really matters. And then that stuff kicks in. And that's the best place to really notice it. Like in terms of, you know, negating the essential identity in relation to the self. They say one of the best times is when, you know, you're falsely accused of... What's your name, by the way? Jasper. Jasper. Jasper, why did you destroy Gomde? Do you see what... what did... the kitchen? Why did you make that mess? And then, you know, of course, you don't take me seriously. But if you did take me seriously, then you're like this... Maybe even just a little bit like that. They even say just hearing your name. Jasper? Who? Me? Jasper?
So that's sort of like, there's this thing that kicks in that's not always that obvious. And that's with reality, too. Like, not just us. It's a little sometimes even harder to detect. Because generally, the things that matter to us are the things that are a matter about our, you know, personal identity. But we could also see sometimes how we have kind of that our account of the world, which is, of course, tied to our personal identity, how that account of the world also are times when it gets pushed on really hard. And then this tendency like, no, this is reality, pops back. And that's the target. Because that's the cause of suffering.
Oh lhaso. OK, at least anyway, that's, that's what they tell me. Alrighty, so let's dedicate the merit. sönam diyi thamché sikpa nyi thopné nyepai dranam phamjé né kyega nachi balap trukpa yi sipai tsolé drowa drölwar shok jangchup semchok rinpoché ma kyepa nam kyé gyurchik kyepa nyampa mepa yang gongné gongdu phelwar shok
Okay, thank you.
rolls over between the goal posts, rolls over the goal line. I think it's more than half, right? Is that what it is? Or it's completely... I forget the current rule. Anyway, let's say it rolls completely over the goal line. Is it a goal?
So, yeah, I think so too. That's why I say when my local team plays before the game, game, I go and I kick the ball into the goal line. A few times, but it never registers. I don't know why they don't register it on the scoreboard.
What is he talking about? So it is definitively a goal. Like if the ball is in the back of the net, there's no doubt it's a goal during the game. So the correct answer to that question is it's a goal and it's not a goal.
Or in American football, the way I do this, because it's kind of fun, you know, my university has a big football team and in American football you get four chances to go start from where you got the ball to go ten yards, about ten meters. And so, and then if you get it, if you do that, you manage to get it within four chances, then you get to start again with a new chance. It's called first down. And then the referee does this thing, first down. So I like to ask my students, is ten yards a first down? And they go, yeah, ten yards a first down. And then I say, that's why when you see me walking across campus, every ten yards I go, first down.
First down.
Sometime I'm going to actually do that, just get somebody to record me.
Right, so it's not a first. Ten yards is not a first down. It's a first down in a particular context. So when we have that kind of reasoning, like in a particular context, things are either existent or non-existent. But what we're, when we talk about idea of essential reality, like I said before, we're talking about identities and therefore reasoning that's supposed to be trans-contextual.
And when we try to reason that way, then reason falls apart.
So if we try to reason with things that, with the assumption that things have fixed absolute non-contextual identities so that a ball in the back of the football net is essentially a goal, then, like, we're in trouble.
It doesn't make sense. If a cause is either essentially existent or non-existent, then as Khenpo pointed out, excuse me, if an effect is essentially existent or non-existent, then either there's no point in causing it, because it already exists, or no matter how many causes you try to use, you'll never produce it, because it's essential identities to be non-existent. Right? At the time of the cause, before the effect manifests, either the, and we're thinking of it in terms of having an essential identity, which is independent of the time. That's what it means to have an essential identity. You have an essential identity, if we say that we can talk about the effects before the cause, and we say that we can do that intelligently, then we have to talk about what the essence, what the effect is in essence, which is not time-dependent.
And then it's either essentially existent or essentially non-existent. And if it's essentially non-existent, then that's essential identities is to not exist, which means that it doesn't matter how many causes we use, it will never be produced. And then we look and we see, oh, you know, the farmer, who fortunately hasn't studied Mādhyamika, no, I'm kidding, but you know, he's like, not worried about these things, plants the seeds and the sprouts arise. And now we know that that's not true, that way of thinking about the world, even though it is intuitive to us, as like built into our system as a reality habit, that that is actually a confused way of thinking about the world. And what is a kind of challenge there is that what that does kind of get at, I was talking actually with Philipp about, you know, how you know, one way of thinking about that reality habit is you could kind of connect it to this rather faddish account of how the brain works called predictive processing, where basically the brain is constantly generating a model of the world and of the self in the world. And you know, the goal of that model is to enable us to act successfully in the world, especially to survive, but hopefully more than that. And kind of built into that model is some sense like, okay, that's this, this is that, I don't want to have to recalculate, so to speak, if this is a cup, that's it, it's a cup. Right? And then so that's that kind of like that reality habits, like okay, that's a cup, this is this, this is that, that's it. And what's challenging sometimes about this philosophy, but this is a good thing is it can kind of feel like, oh, man, wait, everything I thought was like, just obviously the case, is not obviously the case. And then there is this kind of even discomfort that can come with that. And that's okay. That's even good. Right? That there is like, oh, you know, the ground is kind of shifting underneath me. And that's okay. Because actually, part of what that does then is eventually leads to, you know, a much... because that's actually that model is fragile. As Khenpo was pointing out to us, you know, those world models are fragile. So like, oh, yeah, you know, whatever this is, I have all this money, everything's good. And then poof, it's gone somehow. Or I have this great relationship or whatever. And then poof, it's over. Like, and while it was there, it's like, oh, everything's perfect. That's the way it is. Great. But it's not the way that way.
So the that sense of, oh, there's a sort of instability. You know, really embracing that, which goes is like really embracing impermanence sometimes can feel like a little, you know, throws you off balance a little bit, but actually, eventually puts you into a much stronger balance. Because now you're in accord with the way things really are, instead of trying to pretend they're otherwise. And you're not trying to pretend you're, they're otherwise, your system is doing that. It's just the way in a sense, we, we are built, so to speak, where we have evolved the way it what it means to be human and not just human.
Okay, I don't know. So enough of that. I don't know. Maybe that makes sense. We've already talked about this. What's the problem with essences? Things can't change. The only option is escape. But if they're not, if they're not fixed in their essences, you can make you can build the Buddha field. Right.
And then another really important thing is, if your goal is to if you're really driven by compassion, this is very important, because the idea here is you really can't fully get emptiness without compassion. And one reason for that is, in a sense, you know, just to kind of manage your own suffering, just undoing that self model is pretty much sufficient, it seems. Emptiness can help you with that also with the self model. But you don't need full blown emptiness, at least theoretically, in order to, you know, undo that self model that's causing suffering. But you need emptiness, if you're going to help other people to do it. Partially because, you know, emptiness is what enables you to remain engaged in the world. But also partially because emptiness is what enables you to not be stuck in one reality, so to speak. You can really see from other person's perspectives. And, uh... you can only uproot that tendency, this kind of grasping or fixation. I mean, in order to do that, you have to uproot your own kind of fixation on your own reality, which is never really just your own, you know, it's created in conjunction with other persons. You can think of it as having cultural features, family culture, social culture, and so on. But if you're stuck in that, you can't really see the world from other person's perspective. So to be maximally effective at helping them, you have to be able to do that. And that means you really have to directly realize emptiness. Okay. And why is this not working? There we go. So we've talked about this, what it means that you look for some X, what is it thing really, right? If you find what the thing is really, then you found its ultimate nature. If you keep talking about some non-X, then you're saying, well, for example, my little cup here, if I say, what's the cup really? Oh, it's really a top and a bottom and a side and so on. Now I'm not saying there isn't a cup there, there's just a top and a bottom, you know, a top and a handle, a top, a side, a handle and a bottom. That's what's really there. And of course, I can keep going, but what's the handle really, so on and so forth. Right? So if I use that kind of analysis, I just, I'm not... I'm saying that there really isn't a cup there, there's something other than a cup there.
And then the point in the Mādhyamika context is not using just that reductive analysis, but in a relational analysis that we will go through tomorrow, go through more of the relational analysis. If you're really thorough, and then what you always end up saying is like, for example, let's say we get all the way down to the part-less infinitesimally small particle, we say what's that really? Well, it's the causal, it's an effect of some previous particles. Then suddenly, even with the part-less particle, I'm not doing an analysis that's reducing it. But I'm doing an analysis that says, well, it's what it is because of its relationship to this other thing, its cause. So then characterizing what it really is, I again start to talk about something else.
You see? Okay, so that means when I get to that point, and every time I try to say what a thing really is, I end up talking about something else. That means it's empty of being what it really is. It's empty of this fixed absolute identity. It's empty of essence. So that's what emptiness is. You try to find what x really is, and you don't find it. You always end up talking about something else. You specify something else. So what's the... if we say the conclusion of our search for the ultimate nature of some x is emptiness, then what we're saying is that the conclusion of the search for the ultimate nature is that it does not have an ultimate nature.
Okay?
Is that clear? In other words, x, like, ultimately, the cup is not really a cup. Ultimately, consciousness is not really consciousness. And that's what emptiness is. So when I say the cup, the ultimate nature of the cup is emptiness, what I'm saying is, if you look for the ultimate nature of a cup, you won't find it. But emptiness is not nothing. Really key, as Khenpo was saying this morning, right? So, part of the way we can understand that is the relationship, remember the two truths, the ultimate and the conventional. So let me be obedient to Khenpo's request and pull out the Sanskrit because I haven't memorized some of these verses. So... we have some verses here that are really key that Khenpo actually cited some of these this morning. I think almost all of these this morning. dve satye samupāśritya buddhānāṃ dharmadeśanā loka-saṃvṛti-satyaṃ ca satyaṃ ca paramārthataḥ The Buddhists teach the Dharma by relying on the two realities. One is the reality of worldly conventions, the other is ultimate reality. ye ’nayor na vijānanti vibhāgaṃ satyayor dvayoḥ te tattvaṃ na vijānanti gambhīraṃ buddhaśāsane One who does not know how to distinguish between these two realities does not discern the profound tattva, the ultimate within the Buddhist teaching.
vyavahāram anāśritya paramārtho na deśyate paramārtham anāgamya nirvāṇaṃ nādhigamyate Ultimate reality is not taught without relying on conventions. Without understanding ultimate reality, nirvāṇa is not obtained. Okay, let's stop there for a second. So this is what this is telling us, which is really key is that the process of coming to emptiness is not like sort of intuiting the ultimate, you know, like, I don't know, someone hits you on the head, you go, ah, the ultimate. Or we, you know, shoot you up with some drugs and then oh, I saw the gremlins or the gnomes in the wall. And finally, I know the way you think, whatever it is, you know, I saw the light, the divine light. Uh, whatever you saw, it's like, it's not that it's like working with where you are now, and really trying to understand what the way you, the way you were the way we experienced the world, what it actually concludes in.
So in a way, it's, in a sense, just really paying careful attention to what's going on, the way we're operating, and then using the way we're operating to examine that.
And so when you do that, with that reasoning, as I was saying like that, the way we reason emerges out of that kind of essentialist perspective.
When that reasoning is applied in this kind of universal way, trans-contextual way, like we perfectly understand reasoning that is context bound, like within the context of, you know, American football, you can pick up the ball. So I can just say, like, can I pick up the ball and run with it to make a goal? And someone said, Yeah, sure. So then I get on the soccer field, as we call it, and I pick up the ball and I run and make a goal. Why not?
It's actually, there's an Irish Gaelic football, which is like that, you know. And there's also hurling with the sticks where they just beat each other. But it's my ancestry, you know, actually, I'm an Irish citizen. But, um... So or soon will be. Um... So, uh... we understand that there are rules and there's kinds of reasoning with those rules that can be context bound in the case of games, for example, or even a legal system. So we perfectly understand that reasoning can, can be, have be circumscribed. But built, again, built into our system is some sense in which there's a reality that is not contextual. There's just the way it is.
And the reasoning emerges from that. And when we use that reasoning to examine that kind of world, it falls apart.
So a big part of like the idea that we have to rely on the conventional to realize the ultimate is that we're actually using our own experience and carefully examining it and using the reasoning that emerges from our experience to discover that, hey, certain aspects of our experience really don't make sense. OK, so without doing that, we actually can't obtain nirvāṇa.
Uh, but and here's a key thing, like a poisonous snake, whoops, I should read this. Here we go in a second.
vināśayati durdṛṣṭā śūnyatā mandamedhasām sarpo yathā durgṛhīto vidyā vā duṣprasāritā Like a poisonous snake when held incorrectly, or a magic spell when improperly used emptiness, when incorrectly understood, devastates the mind, devastates the simple minded.
Okay, what, in other words, we use reasoning to get to this place where it falls apart. And that, in a sense, is emptiness. Where a whole like ontological fixation reality falls apart. But if we're not careful, like if you grab a snake the right way, then you can take it and you can get the poison out of the fangs and make medicine out of it. And that's kind of so the snake is reasoning. This is actually a metaphor that you find quite early on, like in the Alagaddūpama Sutta, the water snake simile Sutta in the Pali Canon. So if you grab the snake the wrong way, it's going to turn around and bite you.
So reasoning is like that. So reasoning, if you use it the right way, it can be a kind of medicine that leads you to understand emptiness correctly. If you grab it the wrong way, then you're in trouble. And...
Uh this is why in this famous verse that from the Lalitavistra, that um, um... that Rinpoche often cites actually, that Buddha hesitated... athāsthāya pratyātārthaṃ cittaṃ deśayituṃ muneḥ dharmam asyādhigamyaṃ mandabuddher avagāhyedam
No, hence the sage decided that unintelligent people would find it difficult to penetrate his Dharma. So he hesitated to teach the Dharma.
śūnyatāyām adhilayaṃ yaṃ punaḥ kurute bhavān doṣaprasaṅgo nāsmākaṃ sa śūnye nopapadyate And this is kind of all a response to a series of objections to Śūnyatā, to emptiness that the other person makes, which are based on the idea that if everything is empty, then nothing works. But it's actually the opposite.
sarvaṃ yujyate tasya śūnyatā yasya yujyate sarvaṃ na yujyate tasya śūnyatā yasya na yujyate To a person for whom emptiness makes sense, everything makes sense. To a person for whom emptiness does not make sense, nothing makes sense. And you could say make sense is possible, works is reasonable. And hence this most famous verse, we've already cited today, yaḥ pratītyasamutpādaḥ śūnyatāṃ tāṃ pracakṣmahe sā prajñaptir upādāya pratipat saiva madhyamā Right, a few verses later. So the issue here that's really key is that emptiness is...
We're going to skip some stuff, come back to it later. It's the ultimate reality of all persons and things, right? If you look for what they are, you don't find it. So things are all empty of essence. So if you ask what a person or thing really is, it's emptiness, right? But emptiness is not ultimately real.
This is key. Emptiness is the answer to the question, what is this thing ultimately? And then, but emptiness itself is not ultimately real. Emptiness is not emptiness, ultimately. If you try to look for the essence of emptiness, you don't find it. If you do the same thing, like what is emptiness in and of itself, you come to the same conclusion.
You find that the essence of Śūnyatā is that it is not really Śūnyatā. Emptiness is empty of really being emptiness. This is called the Śūnyatā Śūnyatā.
Okay? And, an and... But if you turn emptiness into your ultimate, right? Like, I don't know, who's seen the movie, The Big Lebowski? Okay. And in that movie, there are the German nihilists. Remember those guys? They do believe in something. What do they believe in? Nicht. Wir bleiben auf nichts, with the big scissors. Remember that thing is? Right? We are the German nihilists. Right? So that's where you end up. Like believing you turn emptiness into nothing. Emptiness is not nothing.
śūnyatā sarva-dṛṣṭīnām proktā niḥsaraṇaṃ jinaiḥ yeṣāṃ tu śūnyatā dṛṣṭis tān asādhyān babhāṣire The victors, meaning the Buddhists, have said that emptiness is the relinquishment of all views. It's really key. We talked about the view. But in a way, the view is to abandon views.
But that abandoning of views does not mean like believing in nothing. They were kind of incompetent, too. Remember the German nihilists? Like they couldn't... They were quite... If you go watch the movie again, they're like pretty incompetent bad guys.
But they said that for those whose view is emptiness, if you make emptiness into like, I believe in emptiness, then you're incurable. This has been mistranslated by a few people over the years. But this term asādhyān here means... asādhyan in this usage is like the target of a medical procedure, of a medical treatment. So it means there's no treatment for you. You're incurable.
Right? Like you go Śūnyatā... That's the reality. And then you go Śūn... No, emptiness is empty of emptiness. Oh, Śūnyatā Śūnyatā that's the reality. That's why they don't bother with Śūnyatā Śūnyatā Śūnyatā It's like, okay, if you don't get it after Śūnyatā Śūnyatā, it's like you're incurable.
So this is really super important. Persons and things... It doesn't mean that persons and things do not exist in any way at all.
All persons and things are empty of essence. they, they're... but we ask whether they are ultimately... We say Śūnyatā. Which means they don't... persons and things... No person or thing has a non-relational identity.
But conventionally, meaning, in a sense, from the standpoint of our human experience, and the models that we are using to talk about things, in other words, our concepts, persons and things have identities, but they're relational identities. Even though our concepts, our models, our mathematics, perhaps, seem to suggest that those things have identities that are kind of fixed and independent, that's not the case. And notice that concepts and so on, reasoning still works to a certain extent. So even though built into that, so our tendency is to absolutize identities, it's like, we still can reason quite well, and we can do lots of great things with manne... mathematics, and so on. But we've reached a certain limit, you know, both sides, like quantum physics is a great example, where certain kinds of limits are met. But also, importantly, there are side effects of having that kind of essentialist attitude. And we become, we basically perpetuate suffering. So if we could use some of the same tools without that kind of essentialist attitude, think about how much better things could be. Right? If we're not essentializing our abstractions, our models of the world, if we're not mistaking the map for the territory, right, think about how much better things could be. And again, that verse,
yaḥ pratītyasamutpādaḥ śūnyatāṃ tāṃ pracakṣmahe sā prajñaptir upādāya pratipat saiva madhyamā okay, emptiness makes everything possible.
All right, so I think, unless there's a burning question right now, maybe, okay, yeah, go ahead. We do have four minutes.
Yeah, I guess this final conclusion isn't fully making sense to me yet. Why is everything possible? Because they're still, like, isn't there still sort of, like, relative fixed identities in the sense that there's still constraints on what is possible? Like, you said you cannot make an orange tree from an apple seed, apple tree seed. Well, actually, we don't really know that.
Who knows what's possible?
Actually, so I wouldn't even, you know, who knows what you could, how you could manipulate a process genetically. What we do know, right, is that we have certain kinds of causal accounts. It was in the constraints of our understanding, with those causal accounts, those causal regularities act as constraints. But that doesn't mean that those are, those constraints are completely inflexible. Right? That's the point. But so with... But the key to this verse, what this verse means, really, is that, you know, and it has this verb in it, yujyate which can be translated various ways.
sarvaṃ yujyate tasya śūnyatā yasya yujyate sarvaṃ na yujyate tasya śūnyatā yasya na yujyate Yujyate, that's the verb yujyate. And it has, it's actually the same verb as the verb yoga, actually, interestingly. It's the same verb as the verb they use for reasoning. Yukti, same root. Putting things together. Uh... Can also have a sense of, like, making use of things. So it has a, you know, you could say it makes sense, it's reasonable, it's possible, it works. And all it really is saying is that, if things were fixed in absolute objective identities, that means those identities are totally non-dependent. And if they're totally non-dependent, then like when you're seeing me, or you're hearing me, you're coming into relation to me or to little sounds or these visual objects. In order to do that, if you were just completely, if somehow there's like a little real you in there, that is just existing independently and autonomously, then relationality is impossible. You can't come into relation with anything, really. If who you really are is totally non-relational, then, you know, you, your real you is, you know, in a little black box. Never knows anything, never feels anything, right? My inner you try to make it happy, but nothing I do works. So...
So instead it's saying it's totally relational. That's all we have. And if we try to make sense of relationality with an essentialist point of view, like, if two things are in relation, are they the same or different?
The same. Really? That's great, because then I can just be married to myself. If two things are in relation. Let me tell you, you know, I'm a terrible spouse. God, I just yell at myself all the time and really a jerk. I don't clean up after myself. I make myself make dinner all the time. It's a disaster. Well, they're not fully the same, not fully different. Exactly. Which, of course, if they're essential, now we're violating, what did we just do. We violated, we violated non-deviant reasoning. We're saying they're kind of one thing, kind of the other. But if were a ta... but... eh... But our essentialist habit, our reality habit says, no, you can't do that. The fact is that we do do that, sometime... Like, we're kind of comfortable with that to a point. And then that reality habit takes over, especially like when things really matter. Like, either you love me or you don't.
And then I say to myself, sorry, I don't love you. Well, I don't love you either.
I'm cracking myself up like, .....
Yeah. Right? So it's like, you know, that's the thing to note. And this is also very helpful. I mentioned this the other day, and then we'll stop. Is, you know, Je Tsongkhapa, the great founder of the Gelugpa tradition, really emphasized this idea of identifying what's to be negated. What is emptiness really going after? What is the philosophy of emptiness is really going after? And it's not always that manifest in our experience. It's kind of maybe subtly in the background. But there are times when it really becomes manifest. And it's those times when like, you know, it really matters. Either you're with us, or you're against us. Right? Like something really matters. And then that stuff kicks in. And that's the best place to really notice it. Like in terms of, you know, negating the essential identity in relation to the self. They say one of the best times is when, you know, you're falsely accused of... What's your name, by the way? Jasper. Jasper. Jasper, why did you destroy Gomde? Do you see what... what did... the kitchen? Why did you make that mess? And then, you know, of course, you don't take me seriously. But if you did take me seriously, then you're like this... Maybe even just a little bit like that. They even say just hearing your name. Jasper? Who? Me? Jasper?
So that's sort of like, there's this thing that kicks in that's not always that obvious. And that's with reality, too. Like, not just us. It's a little sometimes even harder to detect. Because generally, the things that matter to us are the things that are a matter about our, you know, personal identity. But we could also see sometimes how we have kind of that our account of the world, which is, of course, tied to our personal identity, how that account of the world also are times when it gets pushed on really hard. And then this tendency like, no, this is reality, pops back. And that's the target. Because that's the cause of suffering.
Oh lhaso. OK, at least anyway, that's, that's what they tell me. Alrighty, so let's dedicate the merit. sönam diyi thamché sikpa nyi thopné nyepai dranam phamjé né kyega nachi balap trukpa yi sipai tsolé drowa drölwar shok jangchup semchok rinpoché ma kyepa nam kyé gyurchik kyepa nyampa mepa yang gongné gongdu phelwar shok
Okay, thank you.
And I want to thank Philipp
Haslinger. I called him Stefan,
but Philipp Haslinger for the
insights in quantum physics.
It's a very interesting place to start
thinking about this.
And during the break Josh was asking,
well, I'm a little confused.
You know, are you saying that things can
exist and not exist?
So, let me give you an example,
you know football, the real football,
not American football, if the ball
rolls over between the goal posts, rolls over the goal line. I think it's more than half, right? Is that what it is? Or it's completely... I forget the current rule. Anyway, let's say it rolls completely over the goal line. Is it a goal?
So, yeah, I think so too. That's why I say when my local team plays before the game, game, I go and I kick the ball into the goal line. A few times, but it never registers. I don't know why they don't register it on the scoreboard.
What is he talking about? So it is definitively a goal. Like if the ball is in the back of the net, there's no doubt it's a goal during the game. So the correct answer to that question is it's a goal and it's not a goal.
Or in American football, the way I do this, because it's kind of fun, you know, my university has a big football team and in American football you get four chances to go start from where you got the ball to go ten yards, about ten meters. And so, and then if you get it, if you do that, you manage to get it within four chances, then you get to start again with a new chance. It's called first down. And then the referee does this thing, first down. So I like to ask my students, is ten yards a first down? And they go, yeah, ten yards a first down. And then I say, that's why when you see me walking across campus, every ten yards I go, first down.
First down.
Sometime I'm going to actually do that, just get somebody to record me.
Right, so it's not a first. Ten yards is not a first down. It's a first down in a particular context. So when we have that kind of reasoning, like in a particular context, things are either existent or non-existent. But what we're, when we talk about idea of essential reality, like I said before, we're talking about identities and therefore reasoning that's supposed to be trans-contextual.
And when we try to reason that way, then reason falls apart.
So if we try to reason with things that, with the assumption that things have fixed absolute non-contextual identities so that a ball in the back of the football net is essentially a goal, then, like, we're in trouble.
It doesn't make sense. If a cause is either essentially existent or non-existent, then as Khenpo pointed out, excuse me, if an effect is essentially existent or non-existent, then either there's no point in causing it, because it already exists, or no matter how many causes you try to use, you'll never produce it, because it's essential identities to be non-existent. Right? At the time of the cause, before the effect manifests, either the, and we're thinking of it in terms of having an essential identity, which is independent of the time. That's what it means to have an essential identity. You have an essential identity, if we say that we can talk about the effects before the cause, and we say that we can do that intelligently, then we have to talk about what the essence, what the effect is in essence, which is not time-dependent.
And then it's either essentially existent or essentially non-existent. And if it's essentially non-existent, then that's essential identities is to not exist, which means that it doesn't matter how many causes we use, it will never be produced. And then we look and we see, oh, you know, the farmer, who fortunately hasn't studied Mādhyamika, no, I'm kidding, but you know, he's like, not worried about these things, plants the seeds and the sprouts arise. And now we know that that's not true, that way of thinking about the world, even though it is intuitive to us, as like built into our system as a reality habit, that that is actually a confused way of thinking about the world. And what is a kind of challenge there is that what that does kind of get at, I was talking actually with Philipp about, you know, how you know, one way of thinking about that reality habit is you could kind of connect it to this rather faddish account of how the brain works called predictive processing, where basically the brain is constantly generating a model of the world and of the self in the world. And you know, the goal of that model is to enable us to act successfully in the world, especially to survive, but hopefully more than that. And kind of built into that model is some sense like, okay, that's this, this is that, I don't want to have to recalculate, so to speak, if this is a cup, that's it, it's a cup. Right? And then so that's that kind of like that reality habits, like okay, that's a cup, this is this, this is that, that's it. And what's challenging sometimes about this philosophy, but this is a good thing is it can kind of feel like, oh, man, wait, everything I thought was like, just obviously the case, is not obviously the case. And then there is this kind of even discomfort that can come with that. And that's okay. That's even good. Right? That there is like, oh, you know, the ground is kind of shifting underneath me. And that's okay. Because actually, part of what that does then is eventually leads to, you know, a much... because that's actually that model is fragile. As Khenpo was pointing out to us, you know, those world models are fragile. So like, oh, yeah, you know, whatever this is, I have all this money, everything's good. And then poof, it's gone somehow. Or I have this great relationship or whatever. And then poof, it's over. Like, and while it was there, it's like, oh, everything's perfect. That's the way it is. Great. But it's not the way that way.
So the that sense of, oh, there's a sort of instability. You know, really embracing that, which goes is like really embracing impermanence sometimes can feel like a little, you know, throws you off balance a little bit, but actually, eventually puts you into a much stronger balance. Because now you're in accord with the way things really are, instead of trying to pretend they're otherwise. And you're not trying to pretend you're, they're otherwise, your system is doing that. It's just the way in a sense, we, we are built, so to speak, where we have evolved the way it what it means to be human and not just human.
Okay, I don't know. So enough of that. I don't know. Maybe that makes sense. We've already talked about this. What's the problem with essences? Things can't change. The only option is escape. But if they're not, if they're not fixed in their essences, you can make you can build the Buddha field. Right.
And then another really important thing is, if your goal is to if you're really driven by compassion, this is very important, because the idea here is you really can't fully get emptiness without compassion. And one reason for that is, in a sense, you know, just to kind of manage your own suffering, just undoing that self model is pretty much sufficient, it seems. Emptiness can help you with that also with the self model. But you don't need full blown emptiness, at least theoretically, in order to, you know, undo that self model that's causing suffering. But you need emptiness, if you're going to help other people to do it. Partially because, you know, emptiness is what enables you to remain engaged in the world. But also partially because emptiness is what enables you to not be stuck in one reality, so to speak. You can really see from other person's perspectives. And, uh... you can only uproot that tendency, this kind of grasping or fixation. I mean, in order to do that, you have to uproot your own kind of fixation on your own reality, which is never really just your own, you know, it's created in conjunction with other persons. You can think of it as having cultural features, family culture, social culture, and so on. But if you're stuck in that, you can't really see the world from other person's perspective. So to be maximally effective at helping them, you have to be able to do that. And that means you really have to directly realize emptiness. Okay. And why is this not working? There we go. So we've talked about this, what it means that you look for some X, what is it thing really, right? If you find what the thing is really, then you found its ultimate nature. If you keep talking about some non-X, then you're saying, well, for example, my little cup here, if I say, what's the cup really? Oh, it's really a top and a bottom and a side and so on. Now I'm not saying there isn't a cup there, there's just a top and a bottom, you know, a top and a handle, a top, a side, a handle and a bottom. That's what's really there. And of course, I can keep going, but what's the handle really, so on and so forth. Right? So if I use that kind of analysis, I just, I'm not... I'm saying that there really isn't a cup there, there's something other than a cup there.
And then the point in the Mādhyamika context is not using just that reductive analysis, but in a relational analysis that we will go through tomorrow, go through more of the relational analysis. If you're really thorough, and then what you always end up saying is like, for example, let's say we get all the way down to the part-less infinitesimally small particle, we say what's that really? Well, it's the causal, it's an effect of some previous particles. Then suddenly, even with the part-less particle, I'm not doing an analysis that's reducing it. But I'm doing an analysis that says, well, it's what it is because of its relationship to this other thing, its cause. So then characterizing what it really is, I again start to talk about something else.
You see? Okay, so that means when I get to that point, and every time I try to say what a thing really is, I end up talking about something else. That means it's empty of being what it really is. It's empty of this fixed absolute identity. It's empty of essence. So that's what emptiness is. You try to find what x really is, and you don't find it. You always end up talking about something else. You specify something else. So what's the... if we say the conclusion of our search for the ultimate nature of some x is emptiness, then what we're saying is that the conclusion of the search for the ultimate nature is that it does not have an ultimate nature.
Okay?
Is that clear? In other words, x, like, ultimately, the cup is not really a cup. Ultimately, consciousness is not really consciousness. And that's what emptiness is. So when I say the cup, the ultimate nature of the cup is emptiness, what I'm saying is, if you look for the ultimate nature of a cup, you won't find it. But emptiness is not nothing. Really key, as Khenpo was saying this morning, right? So, part of the way we can understand that is the relationship, remember the two truths, the ultimate and the conventional. So let me be obedient to Khenpo's request and pull out the Sanskrit because I haven't memorized some of these verses. So... we have some verses here that are really key that Khenpo actually cited some of these this morning. I think almost all of these this morning. dve satye samupāśritya buddhānāṃ dharmadeśanā loka-saṃvṛti-satyaṃ ca satyaṃ ca paramārthataḥ The Buddhists teach the Dharma by relying on the two realities. One is the reality of worldly conventions, the other is ultimate reality. ye ’nayor na vijānanti vibhāgaṃ satyayor dvayoḥ te tattvaṃ na vijānanti gambhīraṃ buddhaśāsane One who does not know how to distinguish between these two realities does not discern the profound tattva, the ultimate within the Buddhist teaching.
vyavahāram anāśritya paramārtho na deśyate paramārtham anāgamya nirvāṇaṃ nādhigamyate Ultimate reality is not taught without relying on conventions. Without understanding ultimate reality, nirvāṇa is not obtained. Okay, let's stop there for a second. So this is what this is telling us, which is really key is that the process of coming to emptiness is not like sort of intuiting the ultimate, you know, like, I don't know, someone hits you on the head, you go, ah, the ultimate. Or we, you know, shoot you up with some drugs and then oh, I saw the gremlins or the gnomes in the wall. And finally, I know the way you think, whatever it is, you know, I saw the light, the divine light. Uh, whatever you saw, it's like, it's not that it's like working with where you are now, and really trying to understand what the way you, the way you were the way we experienced the world, what it actually concludes in.
So in a way, it's, in a sense, just really paying careful attention to what's going on, the way we're operating, and then using the way we're operating to examine that.
And so when you do that, with that reasoning, as I was saying like that, the way we reason emerges out of that kind of essentialist perspective.
When that reasoning is applied in this kind of universal way, trans-contextual way, like we perfectly understand reasoning that is context bound, like within the context of, you know, American football, you can pick up the ball. So I can just say, like, can I pick up the ball and run with it to make a goal? And someone said, Yeah, sure. So then I get on the soccer field, as we call it, and I pick up the ball and I run and make a goal. Why not?
It's actually, there's an Irish Gaelic football, which is like that, you know. And there's also hurling with the sticks where they just beat each other. But it's my ancestry, you know, actually, I'm an Irish citizen. But, um... So or soon will be. Um... So, uh... we understand that there are rules and there's kinds of reasoning with those rules that can be context bound in the case of games, for example, or even a legal system. So we perfectly understand that reasoning can, can be, have be circumscribed. But built, again, built into our system is some sense in which there's a reality that is not contextual. There's just the way it is.
And the reasoning emerges from that. And when we use that reasoning to examine that kind of world, it falls apart.
So a big part of like the idea that we have to rely on the conventional to realize the ultimate is that we're actually using our own experience and carefully examining it and using the reasoning that emerges from our experience to discover that, hey, certain aspects of our experience really don't make sense. OK, so without doing that, we actually can't obtain nirvāṇa.
Uh, but and here's a key thing, like a poisonous snake, whoops, I should read this. Here we go in a second.
vināśayati durdṛṣṭā śūnyatā mandamedhasām sarpo yathā durgṛhīto vidyā vā duṣprasāritā Like a poisonous snake when held incorrectly, or a magic spell when improperly used emptiness, when incorrectly understood, devastates the mind, devastates the simple minded.
Okay, what, in other words, we use reasoning to get to this place where it falls apart. And that, in a sense, is emptiness. Where a whole like ontological fixation reality falls apart. But if we're not careful, like if you grab a snake the right way, then you can take it and you can get the poison out of the fangs and make medicine out of it. And that's kind of so the snake is reasoning. This is actually a metaphor that you find quite early on, like in the Alagaddūpama Sutta, the water snake simile Sutta in the Pali Canon. So if you grab the snake the wrong way, it's going to turn around and bite you.
So reasoning is like that. So reasoning, if you use it the right way, it can be a kind of medicine that leads you to understand emptiness correctly. If you grab it the wrong way, then you're in trouble. And...
Uh this is why in this famous verse that from the Lalitavistra, that um, um... that Rinpoche often cites actually, that Buddha hesitated... athāsthāya pratyātārthaṃ cittaṃ deśayituṃ muneḥ dharmam asyādhigamyaṃ mandabuddher avagāhyedam
No, hence the sage decided that unintelligent people would find it difficult to penetrate his Dharma. So he hesitated to teach the Dharma.
śūnyatāyām adhilayaṃ yaṃ punaḥ kurute bhavān doṣaprasaṅgo nāsmākaṃ sa śūnye nopapadyate And this is kind of all a response to a series of objections to Śūnyatā, to emptiness that the other person makes, which are based on the idea that if everything is empty, then nothing works. But it's actually the opposite.
sarvaṃ yujyate tasya śūnyatā yasya yujyate sarvaṃ na yujyate tasya śūnyatā yasya na yujyate To a person for whom emptiness makes sense, everything makes sense. To a person for whom emptiness does not make sense, nothing makes sense. And you could say make sense is possible, works is reasonable. And hence this most famous verse, we've already cited today, yaḥ pratītyasamutpādaḥ śūnyatāṃ tāṃ pracakṣmahe sā prajñaptir upādāya pratipat saiva madhyamā Right, a few verses later. So the issue here that's really key is that emptiness is...
We're going to skip some stuff, come back to it later. It's the ultimate reality of all persons and things, right? If you look for what they are, you don't find it. So things are all empty of essence. So if you ask what a person or thing really is, it's emptiness, right? But emptiness is not ultimately real.
This is key. Emptiness is the answer to the question, what is this thing ultimately? And then, but emptiness itself is not ultimately real. Emptiness is not emptiness, ultimately. If you try to look for the essence of emptiness, you don't find it. If you do the same thing, like what is emptiness in and of itself, you come to the same conclusion.
You find that the essence of Śūnyatā is that it is not really Śūnyatā. Emptiness is empty of really being emptiness. This is called the Śūnyatā Śūnyatā.
Okay? And, an and... But if you turn emptiness into your ultimate, right? Like, I don't know, who's seen the movie, The Big Lebowski? Okay. And in that movie, there are the German nihilists. Remember those guys? They do believe in something. What do they believe in? Nicht. Wir bleiben auf nichts, with the big scissors. Remember that thing is? Right? We are the German nihilists. Right? So that's where you end up. Like believing you turn emptiness into nothing. Emptiness is not nothing.
śūnyatā sarva-dṛṣṭīnām proktā niḥsaraṇaṃ jinaiḥ yeṣāṃ tu śūnyatā dṛṣṭis tān asādhyān babhāṣire The victors, meaning the Buddhists, have said that emptiness is the relinquishment of all views. It's really key. We talked about the view. But in a way, the view is to abandon views.
But that abandoning of views does not mean like believing in nothing. They were kind of incompetent, too. Remember the German nihilists? Like they couldn't... They were quite... If you go watch the movie again, they're like pretty incompetent bad guys.
But they said that for those whose view is emptiness, if you make emptiness into like, I believe in emptiness, then you're incurable. This has been mistranslated by a few people over the years. But this term asādhyān here means... asādhyan in this usage is like the target of a medical procedure, of a medical treatment. So it means there's no treatment for you. You're incurable.
Right? Like you go Śūnyatā... That's the reality. And then you go Śūn... No, emptiness is empty of emptiness. Oh, Śūnyatā Śūnyatā that's the reality. That's why they don't bother with Śūnyatā Śūnyatā Śūnyatā It's like, okay, if you don't get it after Śūnyatā Śūnyatā, it's like you're incurable.
So this is really super important. Persons and things... It doesn't mean that persons and things do not exist in any way at all.
All persons and things are empty of essence. they, they're... but we ask whether they are ultimately... We say Śūnyatā. Which means they don't... persons and things... No person or thing has a non-relational identity.
But conventionally, meaning, in a sense, from the standpoint of our human experience, and the models that we are using to talk about things, in other words, our concepts, persons and things have identities, but they're relational identities. Even though our concepts, our models, our mathematics, perhaps, seem to suggest that those things have identities that are kind of fixed and independent, that's not the case. And notice that concepts and so on, reasoning still works to a certain extent. So even though built into that, so our tendency is to absolutize identities, it's like, we still can reason quite well, and we can do lots of great things with manne... mathematics, and so on. But we've reached a certain limit, you know, both sides, like quantum physics is a great example, where certain kinds of limits are met. But also, importantly, there are side effects of having that kind of essentialist attitude. And we become, we basically perpetuate suffering. So if we could use some of the same tools without that kind of essentialist attitude, think about how much better things could be. Right? If we're not essentializing our abstractions, our models of the world, if we're not mistaking the map for the territory, right, think about how much better things could be. And again, that verse,
yaḥ pratītyasamutpādaḥ śūnyatāṃ tāṃ pracakṣmahe sā prajñaptir upādāya pratipat saiva madhyamā okay, emptiness makes everything possible.
All right, so I think, unless there's a burning question right now, maybe, okay, yeah, go ahead. We do have four minutes.
Yeah, I guess this final conclusion isn't fully making sense to me yet. Why is everything possible? Because they're still, like, isn't there still sort of, like, relative fixed identities in the sense that there's still constraints on what is possible? Like, you said you cannot make an orange tree from an apple seed, apple tree seed. Well, actually, we don't really know that.
Who knows what's possible?
Actually, so I wouldn't even, you know, who knows what you could, how you could manipulate a process genetically. What we do know, right, is that we have certain kinds of causal accounts. It was in the constraints of our understanding, with those causal accounts, those causal regularities act as constraints. But that doesn't mean that those are, those constraints are completely inflexible. Right? That's the point. But so with... But the key to this verse, what this verse means, really, is that, you know, and it has this verb in it, yujyate which can be translated various ways.
sarvaṃ yujyate tasya śūnyatā yasya yujyate sarvaṃ na yujyate tasya śūnyatā yasya na yujyate Yujyate, that's the verb yujyate. And it has, it's actually the same verb as the verb yoga, actually, interestingly. It's the same verb as the verb they use for reasoning. Yukti, same root. Putting things together. Uh... Can also have a sense of, like, making use of things. So it has a, you know, you could say it makes sense, it's reasonable, it's possible, it works. And all it really is saying is that, if things were fixed in absolute objective identities, that means those identities are totally non-dependent. And if they're totally non-dependent, then like when you're seeing me, or you're hearing me, you're coming into relation to me or to little sounds or these visual objects. In order to do that, if you were just completely, if somehow there's like a little real you in there, that is just existing independently and autonomously, then relationality is impossible. You can't come into relation with anything, really. If who you really are is totally non-relational, then, you know, you, your real you is, you know, in a little black box. Never knows anything, never feels anything, right? My inner you try to make it happy, but nothing I do works. So...
So instead it's saying it's totally relational. That's all we have. And if we try to make sense of relationality with an essentialist point of view, like, if two things are in relation, are they the same or different?
The same. Really? That's great, because then I can just be married to myself. If two things are in relation. Let me tell you, you know, I'm a terrible spouse. God, I just yell at myself all the time and really a jerk. I don't clean up after myself. I make myself make dinner all the time. It's a disaster. Well, they're not fully the same, not fully different. Exactly. Which, of course, if they're essential, now we're violating, what did we just do. We violated, we violated non-deviant reasoning. We're saying they're kind of one thing, kind of the other. But if were a ta... but... eh... But our essentialist habit, our reality habit says, no, you can't do that. The fact is that we do do that, sometime... Like, we're kind of comfortable with that to a point. And then that reality habit takes over, especially like when things really matter. Like, either you love me or you don't.
And then I say to myself, sorry, I don't love you. Well, I don't love you either.
I'm cracking myself up like, .....
Yeah. Right? So it's like, you know, that's the thing to note. And this is also very helpful. I mentioned this the other day, and then we'll stop. Is, you know, Je Tsongkhapa, the great founder of the Gelugpa tradition, really emphasized this idea of identifying what's to be negated. What is emptiness really going after? What is the philosophy of emptiness is really going after? And it's not always that manifest in our experience. It's kind of maybe subtly in the background. But there are times when it really becomes manifest. And it's those times when like, you know, it really matters. Either you're with us, or you're against us. Right? Like something really matters. And then that stuff kicks in. And that's the best place to really notice it. Like in terms of, you know, negating the essential identity in relation to the self. They say one of the best times is when, you know, you're falsely accused of... What's your name, by the way? Jasper. Jasper. Jasper, why did you destroy Gomde? Do you see what... what did... the kitchen? Why did you make that mess? And then, you know, of course, you don't take me seriously. But if you did take me seriously, then you're like this... Maybe even just a little bit like that. They even say just hearing your name. Jasper? Who? Me? Jasper?
So that's sort of like, there's this thing that kicks in that's not always that obvious. And that's with reality, too. Like, not just us. It's a little sometimes even harder to detect. Because generally, the things that matter to us are the things that are a matter about our, you know, personal identity. But we could also see sometimes how we have kind of that our account of the world, which is, of course, tied to our personal identity, how that account of the world also are times when it gets pushed on really hard. And then this tendency like, no, this is reality, pops back. And that's the target. Because that's the cause of suffering.
Oh lhaso. OK, at least anyway, that's, that's what they tell me. Alrighty, so let's dedicate the merit. sönam diyi thamché sikpa nyi thopné nyepai dranam phamjé né kyega nachi balap trukpa yi sipai tsolé drowa drölwar shok jangchup semchok rinpoché ma kyepa nam kyé gyurchik kyepa nyampa mepa yang gongné gongdu phelwar shok
Okay, thank you.
rolls over between the goal posts, rolls over the goal line. I think it's more than half, right? Is that what it is? Or it's completely... I forget the current rule. Anyway, let's say it rolls completely over the goal line. Is it a goal?
So, yeah, I think so too. That's why I say when my local team plays before the game, game, I go and I kick the ball into the goal line. A few times, but it never registers. I don't know why they don't register it on the scoreboard.
What is he talking about? So it is definitively a goal. Like if the ball is in the back of the net, there's no doubt it's a goal during the game. So the correct answer to that question is it's a goal and it's not a goal.
Or in American football, the way I do this, because it's kind of fun, you know, my university has a big football team and in American football you get four chances to go start from where you got the ball to go ten yards, about ten meters. And so, and then if you get it, if you do that, you manage to get it within four chances, then you get to start again with a new chance. It's called first down. And then the referee does this thing, first down. So I like to ask my students, is ten yards a first down? And they go, yeah, ten yards a first down. And then I say, that's why when you see me walking across campus, every ten yards I go, first down.
First down.
Sometime I'm going to actually do that, just get somebody to record me.
Right, so it's not a first. Ten yards is not a first down. It's a first down in a particular context. So when we have that kind of reasoning, like in a particular context, things are either existent or non-existent. But what we're, when we talk about idea of essential reality, like I said before, we're talking about identities and therefore reasoning that's supposed to be trans-contextual.
And when we try to reason that way, then reason falls apart.
So if we try to reason with things that, with the assumption that things have fixed absolute non-contextual identities so that a ball in the back of the football net is essentially a goal, then, like, we're in trouble.
It doesn't make sense. If a cause is either essentially existent or non-existent, then as Khenpo pointed out, excuse me, if an effect is essentially existent or non-existent, then either there's no point in causing it, because it already exists, or no matter how many causes you try to use, you'll never produce it, because it's essential identities to be non-existent. Right? At the time of the cause, before the effect manifests, either the, and we're thinking of it in terms of having an essential identity, which is independent of the time. That's what it means to have an essential identity. You have an essential identity, if we say that we can talk about the effects before the cause, and we say that we can do that intelligently, then we have to talk about what the essence, what the effect is in essence, which is not time-dependent.
And then it's either essentially existent or essentially non-existent. And if it's essentially non-existent, then that's essential identities is to not exist, which means that it doesn't matter how many causes we use, it will never be produced. And then we look and we see, oh, you know, the farmer, who fortunately hasn't studied Mādhyamika, no, I'm kidding, but you know, he's like, not worried about these things, plants the seeds and the sprouts arise. And now we know that that's not true, that way of thinking about the world, even though it is intuitive to us, as like built into our system as a reality habit, that that is actually a confused way of thinking about the world. And what is a kind of challenge there is that what that does kind of get at, I was talking actually with Philipp about, you know, how you know, one way of thinking about that reality habit is you could kind of connect it to this rather faddish account of how the brain works called predictive processing, where basically the brain is constantly generating a model of the world and of the self in the world. And you know, the goal of that model is to enable us to act successfully in the world, especially to survive, but hopefully more than that. And kind of built into that model is some sense like, okay, that's this, this is that, I don't want to have to recalculate, so to speak, if this is a cup, that's it, it's a cup. Right? And then so that's that kind of like that reality habits, like okay, that's a cup, this is this, this is that, that's it. And what's challenging sometimes about this philosophy, but this is a good thing is it can kind of feel like, oh, man, wait, everything I thought was like, just obviously the case, is not obviously the case. And then there is this kind of even discomfort that can come with that. And that's okay. That's even good. Right? That there is like, oh, you know, the ground is kind of shifting underneath me. And that's okay. Because actually, part of what that does then is eventually leads to, you know, a much... because that's actually that model is fragile. As Khenpo was pointing out to us, you know, those world models are fragile. So like, oh, yeah, you know, whatever this is, I have all this money, everything's good. And then poof, it's gone somehow. Or I have this great relationship or whatever. And then poof, it's over. Like, and while it was there, it's like, oh, everything's perfect. That's the way it is. Great. But it's not the way that way.
So the that sense of, oh, there's a sort of instability. You know, really embracing that, which goes is like really embracing impermanence sometimes can feel like a little, you know, throws you off balance a little bit, but actually, eventually puts you into a much stronger balance. Because now you're in accord with the way things really are, instead of trying to pretend they're otherwise. And you're not trying to pretend you're, they're otherwise, your system is doing that. It's just the way in a sense, we, we are built, so to speak, where we have evolved the way it what it means to be human and not just human.
Okay, I don't know. So enough of that. I don't know. Maybe that makes sense. We've already talked about this. What's the problem with essences? Things can't change. The only option is escape. But if they're not, if they're not fixed in their essences, you can make you can build the Buddha field. Right.
And then another really important thing is, if your goal is to if you're really driven by compassion, this is very important, because the idea here is you really can't fully get emptiness without compassion. And one reason for that is, in a sense, you know, just to kind of manage your own suffering, just undoing that self model is pretty much sufficient, it seems. Emptiness can help you with that also with the self model. But you don't need full blown emptiness, at least theoretically, in order to, you know, undo that self model that's causing suffering. But you need emptiness, if you're going to help other people to do it. Partially because, you know, emptiness is what enables you to remain engaged in the world. But also partially because emptiness is what enables you to not be stuck in one reality, so to speak. You can really see from other person's perspectives. And, uh... you can only uproot that tendency, this kind of grasping or fixation. I mean, in order to do that, you have to uproot your own kind of fixation on your own reality, which is never really just your own, you know, it's created in conjunction with other persons. You can think of it as having cultural features, family culture, social culture, and so on. But if you're stuck in that, you can't really see the world from other person's perspective. So to be maximally effective at helping them, you have to be able to do that. And that means you really have to directly realize emptiness. Okay. And why is this not working? There we go. So we've talked about this, what it means that you look for some X, what is it thing really, right? If you find what the thing is really, then you found its ultimate nature. If you keep talking about some non-X, then you're saying, well, for example, my little cup here, if I say, what's the cup really? Oh, it's really a top and a bottom and a side and so on. Now I'm not saying there isn't a cup there, there's just a top and a bottom, you know, a top and a handle, a top, a side, a handle and a bottom. That's what's really there. And of course, I can keep going, but what's the handle really, so on and so forth. Right? So if I use that kind of analysis, I just, I'm not... I'm saying that there really isn't a cup there, there's something other than a cup there.
And then the point in the Mādhyamika context is not using just that reductive analysis, but in a relational analysis that we will go through tomorrow, go through more of the relational analysis. If you're really thorough, and then what you always end up saying is like, for example, let's say we get all the way down to the part-less infinitesimally small particle, we say what's that really? Well, it's the causal, it's an effect of some previous particles. Then suddenly, even with the part-less particle, I'm not doing an analysis that's reducing it. But I'm doing an analysis that says, well, it's what it is because of its relationship to this other thing, its cause. So then characterizing what it really is, I again start to talk about something else.
You see? Okay, so that means when I get to that point, and every time I try to say what a thing really is, I end up talking about something else. That means it's empty of being what it really is. It's empty of this fixed absolute identity. It's empty of essence. So that's what emptiness is. You try to find what x really is, and you don't find it. You always end up talking about something else. You specify something else. So what's the... if we say the conclusion of our search for the ultimate nature of some x is emptiness, then what we're saying is that the conclusion of the search for the ultimate nature is that it does not have an ultimate nature.
Okay?
Is that clear? In other words, x, like, ultimately, the cup is not really a cup. Ultimately, consciousness is not really consciousness. And that's what emptiness is. So when I say the cup, the ultimate nature of the cup is emptiness, what I'm saying is, if you look for the ultimate nature of a cup, you won't find it. But emptiness is not nothing. Really key, as Khenpo was saying this morning, right? So, part of the way we can understand that is the relationship, remember the two truths, the ultimate and the conventional. So let me be obedient to Khenpo's request and pull out the Sanskrit because I haven't memorized some of these verses. So... we have some verses here that are really key that Khenpo actually cited some of these this morning. I think almost all of these this morning. dve satye samupāśritya buddhānāṃ dharmadeśanā loka-saṃvṛti-satyaṃ ca satyaṃ ca paramārthataḥ The Buddhists teach the Dharma by relying on the two realities. One is the reality of worldly conventions, the other is ultimate reality. ye ’nayor na vijānanti vibhāgaṃ satyayor dvayoḥ te tattvaṃ na vijānanti gambhīraṃ buddhaśāsane One who does not know how to distinguish between these two realities does not discern the profound tattva, the ultimate within the Buddhist teaching.
vyavahāram anāśritya paramārtho na deśyate paramārtham anāgamya nirvāṇaṃ nādhigamyate Ultimate reality is not taught without relying on conventions. Without understanding ultimate reality, nirvāṇa is not obtained. Okay, let's stop there for a second. So this is what this is telling us, which is really key is that the process of coming to emptiness is not like sort of intuiting the ultimate, you know, like, I don't know, someone hits you on the head, you go, ah, the ultimate. Or we, you know, shoot you up with some drugs and then oh, I saw the gremlins or the gnomes in the wall. And finally, I know the way you think, whatever it is, you know, I saw the light, the divine light. Uh, whatever you saw, it's like, it's not that it's like working with where you are now, and really trying to understand what the way you, the way you were the way we experienced the world, what it actually concludes in.
So in a way, it's, in a sense, just really paying careful attention to what's going on, the way we're operating, and then using the way we're operating to examine that.
And so when you do that, with that reasoning, as I was saying like that, the way we reason emerges out of that kind of essentialist perspective.
When that reasoning is applied in this kind of universal way, trans-contextual way, like we perfectly understand reasoning that is context bound, like within the context of, you know, American football, you can pick up the ball. So I can just say, like, can I pick up the ball and run with it to make a goal? And someone said, Yeah, sure. So then I get on the soccer field, as we call it, and I pick up the ball and I run and make a goal. Why not?
It's actually, there's an Irish Gaelic football, which is like that, you know. And there's also hurling with the sticks where they just beat each other. But it's my ancestry, you know, actually, I'm an Irish citizen. But, um... So or soon will be. Um... So, uh... we understand that there are rules and there's kinds of reasoning with those rules that can be context bound in the case of games, for example, or even a legal system. So we perfectly understand that reasoning can, can be, have be circumscribed. But built, again, built into our system is some sense in which there's a reality that is not contextual. There's just the way it is.
And the reasoning emerges from that. And when we use that reasoning to examine that kind of world, it falls apart.
So a big part of like the idea that we have to rely on the conventional to realize the ultimate is that we're actually using our own experience and carefully examining it and using the reasoning that emerges from our experience to discover that, hey, certain aspects of our experience really don't make sense. OK, so without doing that, we actually can't obtain nirvāṇa.
Uh, but and here's a key thing, like a poisonous snake, whoops, I should read this. Here we go in a second.
vināśayati durdṛṣṭā śūnyatā mandamedhasām sarpo yathā durgṛhīto vidyā vā duṣprasāritā Like a poisonous snake when held incorrectly, or a magic spell when improperly used emptiness, when incorrectly understood, devastates the mind, devastates the simple minded.
Okay, what, in other words, we use reasoning to get to this place where it falls apart. And that, in a sense, is emptiness. Where a whole like ontological fixation reality falls apart. But if we're not careful, like if you grab a snake the right way, then you can take it and you can get the poison out of the fangs and make medicine out of it. And that's kind of so the snake is reasoning. This is actually a metaphor that you find quite early on, like in the Alagaddūpama Sutta, the water snake simile Sutta in the Pali Canon. So if you grab the snake the wrong way, it's going to turn around and bite you.
So reasoning is like that. So reasoning, if you use it the right way, it can be a kind of medicine that leads you to understand emptiness correctly. If you grab it the wrong way, then you're in trouble. And...
Uh this is why in this famous verse that from the Lalitavistra, that um, um... that Rinpoche often cites actually, that Buddha hesitated... athāsthāya pratyātārthaṃ cittaṃ deśayituṃ muneḥ dharmam asyādhigamyaṃ mandabuddher avagāhyedam
No, hence the sage decided that unintelligent people would find it difficult to penetrate his Dharma. So he hesitated to teach the Dharma.
śūnyatāyām adhilayaṃ yaṃ punaḥ kurute bhavān doṣaprasaṅgo nāsmākaṃ sa śūnye nopapadyate And this is kind of all a response to a series of objections to Śūnyatā, to emptiness that the other person makes, which are based on the idea that if everything is empty, then nothing works. But it's actually the opposite.
sarvaṃ yujyate tasya śūnyatā yasya yujyate sarvaṃ na yujyate tasya śūnyatā yasya na yujyate To a person for whom emptiness makes sense, everything makes sense. To a person for whom emptiness does not make sense, nothing makes sense. And you could say make sense is possible, works is reasonable. And hence this most famous verse, we've already cited today, yaḥ pratītyasamutpādaḥ śūnyatāṃ tāṃ pracakṣmahe sā prajñaptir upādāya pratipat saiva madhyamā Right, a few verses later. So the issue here that's really key is that emptiness is...
We're going to skip some stuff, come back to it later. It's the ultimate reality of all persons and things, right? If you look for what they are, you don't find it. So things are all empty of essence. So if you ask what a person or thing really is, it's emptiness, right? But emptiness is not ultimately real.
This is key. Emptiness is the answer to the question, what is this thing ultimately? And then, but emptiness itself is not ultimately real. Emptiness is not emptiness, ultimately. If you try to look for the essence of emptiness, you don't find it. If you do the same thing, like what is emptiness in and of itself, you come to the same conclusion.
You find that the essence of Śūnyatā is that it is not really Śūnyatā. Emptiness is empty of really being emptiness. This is called the Śūnyatā Śūnyatā.
Okay? And, an and... But if you turn emptiness into your ultimate, right? Like, I don't know, who's seen the movie, The Big Lebowski? Okay. And in that movie, there are the German nihilists. Remember those guys? They do believe in something. What do they believe in? Nicht. Wir bleiben auf nichts, with the big scissors. Remember that thing is? Right? We are the German nihilists. Right? So that's where you end up. Like believing you turn emptiness into nothing. Emptiness is not nothing.
śūnyatā sarva-dṛṣṭīnām proktā niḥsaraṇaṃ jinaiḥ yeṣāṃ tu śūnyatā dṛṣṭis tān asādhyān babhāṣire The victors, meaning the Buddhists, have said that emptiness is the relinquishment of all views. It's really key. We talked about the view. But in a way, the view is to abandon views.
But that abandoning of views does not mean like believing in nothing. They were kind of incompetent, too. Remember the German nihilists? Like they couldn't... They were quite... If you go watch the movie again, they're like pretty incompetent bad guys.
But they said that for those whose view is emptiness, if you make emptiness into like, I believe in emptiness, then you're incurable. This has been mistranslated by a few people over the years. But this term asādhyān here means... asādhyan in this usage is like the target of a medical procedure, of a medical treatment. So it means there's no treatment for you. You're incurable.
Right? Like you go Śūnyatā... That's the reality. And then you go Śūn... No, emptiness is empty of emptiness. Oh, Śūnyatā Śūnyatā that's the reality. That's why they don't bother with Śūnyatā Śūnyatā Śūnyatā It's like, okay, if you don't get it after Śūnyatā Śūnyatā, it's like you're incurable.
So this is really super important. Persons and things... It doesn't mean that persons and things do not exist in any way at all.
All persons and things are empty of essence. they, they're... but we ask whether they are ultimately... We say Śūnyatā. Which means they don't... persons and things... No person or thing has a non-relational identity.
But conventionally, meaning, in a sense, from the standpoint of our human experience, and the models that we are using to talk about things, in other words, our concepts, persons and things have identities, but they're relational identities. Even though our concepts, our models, our mathematics, perhaps, seem to suggest that those things have identities that are kind of fixed and independent, that's not the case. And notice that concepts and so on, reasoning still works to a certain extent. So even though built into that, so our tendency is to absolutize identities, it's like, we still can reason quite well, and we can do lots of great things with manne... mathematics, and so on. But we've reached a certain limit, you know, both sides, like quantum physics is a great example, where certain kinds of limits are met. But also, importantly, there are side effects of having that kind of essentialist attitude. And we become, we basically perpetuate suffering. So if we could use some of the same tools without that kind of essentialist attitude, think about how much better things could be. Right? If we're not essentializing our abstractions, our models of the world, if we're not mistaking the map for the territory, right, think about how much better things could be. And again, that verse,
yaḥ pratītyasamutpādaḥ śūnyatāṃ tāṃ pracakṣmahe sā prajñaptir upādāya pratipat saiva madhyamā okay, emptiness makes everything possible.
All right, so I think, unless there's a burning question right now, maybe, okay, yeah, go ahead. We do have four minutes.
Yeah, I guess this final conclusion isn't fully making sense to me yet. Why is everything possible? Because they're still, like, isn't there still sort of, like, relative fixed identities in the sense that there's still constraints on what is possible? Like, you said you cannot make an orange tree from an apple seed, apple tree seed. Well, actually, we don't really know that.
Who knows what's possible?
Actually, so I wouldn't even, you know, who knows what you could, how you could manipulate a process genetically. What we do know, right, is that we have certain kinds of causal accounts. It was in the constraints of our understanding, with those causal accounts, those causal regularities act as constraints. But that doesn't mean that those are, those constraints are completely inflexible. Right? That's the point. But so with... But the key to this verse, what this verse means, really, is that, you know, and it has this verb in it, yujyate which can be translated various ways.
sarvaṃ yujyate tasya śūnyatā yasya yujyate sarvaṃ na yujyate tasya śūnyatā yasya na yujyate Yujyate, that's the verb yujyate. And it has, it's actually the same verb as the verb yoga, actually, interestingly. It's the same verb as the verb they use for reasoning. Yukti, same root. Putting things together. Uh... Can also have a sense of, like, making use of things. So it has a, you know, you could say it makes sense, it's reasonable, it's possible, it works. And all it really is saying is that, if things were fixed in absolute objective identities, that means those identities are totally non-dependent. And if they're totally non-dependent, then like when you're seeing me, or you're hearing me, you're coming into relation to me or to little sounds or these visual objects. In order to do that, if you were just completely, if somehow there's like a little real you in there, that is just existing independently and autonomously, then relationality is impossible. You can't come into relation with anything, really. If who you really are is totally non-relational, then, you know, you, your real you is, you know, in a little black box. Never knows anything, never feels anything, right? My inner you try to make it happy, but nothing I do works. So...
So instead it's saying it's totally relational. That's all we have. And if we try to make sense of relationality with an essentialist point of view, like, if two things are in relation, are they the same or different?
The same. Really? That's great, because then I can just be married to myself. If two things are in relation. Let me tell you, you know, I'm a terrible spouse. God, I just yell at myself all the time and really a jerk. I don't clean up after myself. I make myself make dinner all the time. It's a disaster. Well, they're not fully the same, not fully different. Exactly. Which, of course, if they're essential, now we're violating, what did we just do. We violated, we violated non-deviant reasoning. We're saying they're kind of one thing, kind of the other. But if were a ta... but... eh... But our essentialist habit, our reality habit says, no, you can't do that. The fact is that we do do that, sometime... Like, we're kind of comfortable with that to a point. And then that reality habit takes over, especially like when things really matter. Like, either you love me or you don't.
And then I say to myself, sorry, I don't love you. Well, I don't love you either.
I'm cracking myself up like, .....
Yeah. Right? So it's like, you know, that's the thing to note. And this is also very helpful. I mentioned this the other day, and then we'll stop. Is, you know, Je Tsongkhapa, the great founder of the Gelugpa tradition, really emphasized this idea of identifying what's to be negated. What is emptiness really going after? What is the philosophy of emptiness is really going after? And it's not always that manifest in our experience. It's kind of maybe subtly in the background. But there are times when it really becomes manifest. And it's those times when like, you know, it really matters. Either you're with us, or you're against us. Right? Like something really matters. And then that stuff kicks in. And that's the best place to really notice it. Like in terms of, you know, negating the essential identity in relation to the self. They say one of the best times is when, you know, you're falsely accused of... What's your name, by the way? Jasper. Jasper. Jasper, why did you destroy Gomde? Do you see what... what did... the kitchen? Why did you make that mess? And then, you know, of course, you don't take me seriously. But if you did take me seriously, then you're like this... Maybe even just a little bit like that. They even say just hearing your name. Jasper? Who? Me? Jasper?
So that's sort of like, there's this thing that kicks in that's not always that obvious. And that's with reality, too. Like, not just us. It's a little sometimes even harder to detect. Because generally, the things that matter to us are the things that are a matter about our, you know, personal identity. But we could also see sometimes how we have kind of that our account of the world, which is, of course, tied to our personal identity, how that account of the world also are times when it gets pushed on really hard. And then this tendency like, no, this is reality, pops back. And that's the target. Because that's the cause of suffering.
Oh lhaso. OK, at least anyway, that's, that's what they tell me. Alrighty, so let's dedicate the merit. sönam diyi thamché sikpa nyi thopné nyepai dranam phamjé né kyega nachi balap trukpa yi sipai tsolé drowa drölwar shok jangchup semchok rinpoché ma kyepa nam kyé gyurchik kyepa nyampa mepa yang gongné gongdu phelwar shok
Okay, thank you.
