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Session 12 — From Conceptuality to Non-Dual Knowing
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- Buddhist Classics and Philosophy
Location:
- Gomde Germany-Austria
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Excerpt
John D. Dunne explains that true knowledge of emptiness is non-dual and cannot be grasped through subject-object cognition. By examining the role of prapañca, the session shows how both conceptual and pre-conceptual distortions sustain the illusion of reality.
Description
In this session, John D. Dunne explores what it means to know emptiness, emphasizing that it cannot be known as an object by a subject. He explains that ordinary conceptual cognition is inherently dualistic, structured around subject and object, and rooted in a distorted self-model that drives attachment and aversion. Building on Nāgārjuna’s analysis, the session introduces the notion of prapañca—the deeper, pre-conceptual “fabrication” that gives rise to the sense of reality and makes conceptual thinking possible. Even when the self-model is removed, as in the case of an arhat, this more subtle “reality habit” can remain, sustaining dualistic perception. The realization of emptiness therefore involves the cessation of this fabrication, leading toward a non-dual mode of knowing that undercuts both conceptual and pre-conceptual distortions.
Related Course Info
- Emptiness, Luminosity and Compassion Nāgārjuna and the Madhyamaka Tradition Teachings by John D. Dunne and Khenpo Pema Namgyal exploring Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way and the relationship between emptiness, the luminous nature of mind, and compassion.
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59:24
okmin chökyi yingkyi phodrang né
düsum sangyé kün gyi ngowo nyi
rangsem chöku ngönsum tönzé pa
tsawai lamai shapla sölwa dep
Alright, let's just take a moment to
settle our minds.
Dropping down into the body. Simply present here and now.
And now bringing to mind our motivation and the Mahāyāna. Our highest motivation is to attain awakening for the sake of all beings.
Alright, let's begin. So, this is where we ended. What does it mean to know emptiness?
Before we go on, does anyone want to offer an opinion?
Can you know emptiness as an object?
So, what does that mean?
Maybe sort of means knowing that you don't know, like a complete dropping of all your own assumptions. Maybe. So, the way you get rid of... one of the ways to understand ignorance, avidyā, is also can be called ājñāna, not knowing. So, we're going to eliminate not knowing by not knowing.
And there is no we that can know it, and there is no it that can be known. Yes, good. So, what does that mean? What kind of knowing is that? Anyone want to...
What kind of knowing is it when you have a subject knowing an object? How can you describe that? What's that structure? What? Yes, dualistic, or in Western philosophy, intentionality as a subject-object intentionality. It's a dualistic structure. So, if we don't have that structure, what kind of knowing would be going on? Non-dual.
Exactly. So, that's already a hint about where we're headed. But let's do some other things first. Uhhhh, Yes. So, first of all, I want to review some things about um... the sort of process that emptiness is... how emptiness is meant to be leading to liberation. And that process is actually... This is from the 18th chapter of Nāgārjuna's main text. And in the 18th chapter, what he says is... mameti ahameti kṣīṇe bāhyādhyātmam eva ca nirudhyate hy upādānaṃ tad-abhāvāj janmanaḥ kṣayaḥ My screen is a little... Actually, this is kind of terribly in the way.
mameti ahameti kṣīṇe bāhyādhyātmam eva ca nirudhyate hy upādānaṃ tad-abhāvāj janmanaḥ kṣayaḥ Internally and externally, when I and my have ceased... I wouldn't even need to use the thoughts, but you could put it in there. When I and my have ceased... These are my translations, by the way. Appropriation ceases. Through the cessation of appropriation, birth ceases. So, if anyone is familiar with the 12 links of dependent origination, that describes the process that leads to samsaric, cycling in samsara. So, samsara is also called the cycle of, of becoming, the bhavacakra, the wheel of becoming. And there's even a kind of traditional depiction in the Tibetan world of this wheel, there's like a demon. Maybe I'll show you a picture later. But, uh, uh, and uh, it represents different aspects of that process and what, and different places you can end up, so to speak. But, uh, the, uh... There are 12 aspects of that process that cycle through to lead one to be compulsively reborn in samsara. But also, in a way, they are kind of you know, it's also pointing to a compulsive process that's happening all the time, not just about rebirth, but every moment. And uh, that process, the main part of that process, you could say, involves uh a, a, thirst, tṛṣṇā, to be, bhava, right? Just the thirst to be, that has to do with, with a sense of an I, that same kind of I, Right? Which is the personal identity that is the target of the analysis into selflessness, not emptiness. So at that first layer that we've been talking about, the sense that there is some kind of essential I or identity, somewhere in the mind-body system. And that sense of essential I is what's driving, there isn't that kind of an I, but on early Buddhism what does exist is the thirst to kind of make that happy and to not suffer and to just continue to be, to kind of survive, for that I to survive. And that is what is driving this process. So when you have put an end to that, that, that root cause, which is basically ignorance, right? Not basically, it is ignorance at the first level, the fixation on that sense of I. When you put an end to that, that's, that's the root kleśa, the root affliction. When you put an end to that, then you don't produce karma. And when you don't produce karma, you don't perpetuate samsara. Right? And then on the early model, you attain nirvāṇa during your lifetime, that's nirvāṇa with a remainder, and then you die and you attain nirvāṇa without remainder. The remainder is the karmic remainder that's still occurring, but you're not producing new karma. Okay? Everyone remember that? That's clear? So what these verses refer to is that, like, you know, it's not saying anything new in a way. That, it's just saying that if you can get rid of this idea of I and mine, what's the mine or my? That is, so there's I, the unchanging, absolute, unitary, controlling, experiencing Self, capital S, the ātman, which actually doesn't exist. Right? We're all clear on that. And then the mine, or the my, is what it owns, which is the mind-body stuff. So when your sense of I is gone, you can't, there's also the sense that this is mine, also goes away. So this is called the ātmīya in Sanskrit. So there's the ātman, the ātman and the ātmīya. The I, or the self, and the self-owned. The ātman is the Self, capital S, and the ātmīya is what is owned by the Self. Okay? Meaning the psychophysical aggregates, what belongs to the Self, or what's under the control of this imaginary Self, the imaginary control of the imaginary Self. Okay? So here this is expressed with pronouns, māma means mine, and aham means I, is what's there in Sanskrit. So that's like clear. Okay. That's just kind of standard, you know, Buddhist theory uh... from the, and so Nāgārjuna is just kind of reiterating, but everyone, all Buddhist scholars of his time were fully familiar with. And then he says, karma-kleśa-kṣayād mokṣaḥ Through the cessation of karma and afflictive mental states, or kleśa, comes liberation. So that's what we just said, right? In a way, that statement is just a restatement of this. Because what's the kleśa that's going on here? It's the kleśa that causes one to think I and my. In other words, it's ignorance. Ignorance about, not about the world yet, that’s not, it's not emptiness yet, it's not about emptiness yet, it's about just a sense like, ah, there's an I here and this is mine. Okay? So if you get rid of that kleśa, that root kleśa, you get rid of all the other kleśas, especially attachment and aversion, which means you're no longer feeling compelled to engage in karmic actions. So those have been used up, and therefore you attain liberation from samsara. Okay? And then he says, karma-kleśā vikalpataḥ
te prapañcāt prapañcāstu śūnyatāyāṃ nirudhyate Karma and afflictive mental states come from concepts, vikalpa, or nam tok རྣམ་རྟོག in Tibetan, yea nam tok རྣམ་རྟོག . And they, and they come from fabrication. Fabrication, however, ceases in emptiness. So there's this word, which I didn't actually put, oh yeah, there it is, prapañca. It's a really, fabrication is one translation that Jay Garfield recommended to me. We'll talk about some other possible translations. But uh, prapañca is a really key idea here. And that is something kind of new, in a way. Like Nāgārjuna is introducing something that leads us past just personal selflessness to that idea of the selflessness even of the dharmas, of the supposed elements. Right? So this is moving into Mahāyāna philosophy now. So, and even this is a very interesting. Karma and afflictive mental states come from concepts. All right? In what sense? So what's a concept here? Well, one type of model that you can think of that we also discussed earlier is that there's a kind of pre-conceptual moment. Maybe I should show you that, actually, come to think of it. Yes, there we go. Okay. So you remember this model we had? Because you can't see it? Oh, I thought I put it on screen mirroring. Okay. Well, here we go. So this model, right? And then you get these different moments, right? So we can think of this moment of interpretation as, uh... this moment of interpretation as being conceptual. And this is eventually what really becomes very clear in later philosophical analysis of cognition in the works of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti. And they're going to say there is a pre-conceptual and therefore non-conceptual moment in perception that then is conceptualized. So when, when, one way of thinking of what Nāgārjuna is saying is that it is actually our conceptual framework. So we have a um, a... What we have is a grasping or fixation on personal identity. And there's a conceptual framework that's going with that. And we're interpreting everything through that framework. So, so when we see something, we go, oh, that's good or that's bad. Even a very minimal kind of conceptualization like that, right? Very minimal conceptualization that's already... like it's almost not even... we almost hardly notice it. We don't realize we're conceptualizing. That when we're doing that, the reason we're conceptualizing is that in some sense we're conceptualizing things because we're trying to decide if they're good or bad for us at a very basic level. So the claim is that even higher order concepts are actually rooted in this kind of getting and avoiding, getting and avoiding. That's good, that's bad. And this is actually similar in very interesting ways to the inactive perspective that Francesco Varela and Evan Thompson and Eleanor Roche first developed in The Embodied Mind. And then Evan has continued with a lot of different work in that area. So, uh... When we're conceptualizing, we're not just picking out categories in the world. We're actually constructing categories based upon our, based upon basically like we want to make this self-happy and avoid suffering. But the self-model we're working with, as we discussed before, is like we're trying to make a square circle happy or not suffer. You know? So our self-model is already distorted, which means that this whole process doesn't work, right? Because we can't make a non-existent entity happy. So, again, we can think of evolutionary reasons why we might, or why our cognitive systems might have developed this illusory sense of a false self. You know? But setting all that aside, what we know, not the claim in the Buddhist context is, regardless of whether that was good for us for samsaric survival, from this point of view of really solving the problem of suffering, it's maladaptive to have that illusory false self as the basis for our conceptual framework. So Nāgārjuna is saying that this conceptualization that disturbing, occurring at the level of interpretation is uh... that that conceptualization is, um... because it's distorted, it's leading to a distorted intention to action. And remember, this intention to action, that's karma, right? So the... that distorted intention to action that emerges from that conceptualization is what's driving the whole process. But... let me go back...
I know.
The final frontier. So... Uh... It is a screen grab from Star Trek, actually. Uh, uh so, uh... That conceptualization is distorted, it leads to karma. So if we stop that distorted conceptualization, we don't produce karma anymore. Okay? So it doesn't mean, very importantly, like, the kind of intentions that a uh, arhat has that's still alive, you know, it's not like they just stop moving. Right? They're still alive and they still do things. But they don't... and there's even debates about do arhats feel pain if they step on a thorn, does an arhat feel pain or not? You know, and things like that. Even though they're in nirvāṇa. So the question is, you know, those kinds of things. So the I... idea is that there's still a process going on, like the arhat makes his way in the world, he or she or he makes their way in the world, but they're not producing the kinds of intentions that produce karma. Okay? That perpetuates samsara. Because samsara is specifically perpetuated by the kind of intention that is about, I need to live. This thing needs to be happy. Keep it going. Right? Which doesn't mean if you have that, you stop or you know, you don't want to live anymore. But it's just that that particular kind of causal process of life is stopped. And that's why also, you know, in Mahāyāna, they can say that a Buddha is still doing activities, but not with karmic intentions. Right? So it's not like karmic... it's not like activity in and of itself, it has to be driven by karma. Okay? You can have actually the same word in Sanskrit. Karma is translated two ways in Tibetan. One is le and one is thrinle. And le means karma. And thrinle means enlightened activities, what Buddhas do. But it's actually the same word in Sanskrit. So, uh, so... The problem is this distorted is what's going on with the distortion. And... The, that in of course, we know that this process is like a cyclical process. It's just it's reinforcing that kleśas, which produce more karma, which produce more kleśa, which reinforce the kleśas and so on. Right? So and the point here is that the interpretation is distorted by ignorance. But now the Nāgārjuna is going to point to how something pre-conceptual is distorted by ignorance. Like not even just that we have a pre-conceptual, we have a conceptual moment where we get some like sense data, you just see, you know, the world. And you of course, it's not just a picture of the world, like you're still have your appetite and so on. And that conditions what you're seeing, but it's still not being conceptualized in that moment. And then you do this interpretation. Oh, that's good. That's bad. I want this and I want that. Right? And then you approach or avoid or, you know, try to do something. But the idea is there's a pre-conceptual thing. It's still not like a just a picture of the world, but it's not distorted by conceptuality. But it is, for Nāgārjuna, somehow still caught in something that is actually before concepts.
All right? And that means it's not just about, in a sense, for Nāgārjuna that means it's not just about, not, not, not just distorting your things in relation to a sense of self, like a conceptual self model, it's actually distorting all experience. And that this distortion is, and this is this kind of then dzin, this, you know, grasping to reality or grasping to truth, fixation on reality, the reality habit, the just sense of seeing everything in a certain way, even pre-conceptually. Before you're conceptualizing it as, because since all conceptualizations are, this is good, that's bad, this is the sense of feeling real that comes before even saying that's good, that's bad. You see what I'm saying? Do you understand? Like if I really just, you know, knew right away that this, let's say, you know, for some reason I'm a vase collector, but that this, you know, I'm in a dream or something, and I know I'm in a dream, and there's this thing, it's pointless to even think about it, right? Because it's just a dream. I'm not that much of an obsessive vase collector that I even do it in my dreams. Maybe some of us are, but... Right? So if I don't have a sense like this is real, I'm not even going to bother to conceptualize it. I'm just, my, my, my system is just going to ignore it. I'm not even going to pay attention to it. Right? I don't, if I'm, you know, dying of thirst, I don't bother to run to the mirage. If it doesn't look real to me, I'm not going to go there. And I'm not even, in a way, not even going to see it. Okay? Like the invisible gorilla. So the fact of feeling real precedes the conceptualizations that involve that self-model, that false self-model. You get it? So what accounts for that sense of feeling real even before you conceptualize? That's what... were, wer... like what's required for concepts. Where specifically, when we're using this word vikalpa, concepts, we're specifically talking about concepts that are in the framework of the self-model, that are about getting and avoiding, that are afflicted, already confused. Okay? So again, if we go back to this diagram for a second, when I'm doing this conceptualization at the level of interpretation, I'm doing that on the basis of seeing things that feel real. So this conceptualization is caught up in that self-model, but it requires a sense of seeing real things in order for it to operate. Okay? And of course, it's that seeing real things that even if you get rid of, even if we get rid of the distortion, even if we get rid of the distortion of the self-model in this interpretation, so what happens if we get rid of the... of this uh, eh, uh, they... So this is distorted by ignorance, specifically the ignorance of the self-model. If I get rid of that, I stop having intentions that produce karma and samsara ends. But I would still have a reality-based... I'm still conceptualizing. I'm in nirvāṇa, but I'm alive, and I'm still conceptualizing, making my way through concepts. And in that context, as an arhat, and in that context, what's happening, I'm conceptualizing on the basis of a reality-model. Not a self-model, but a reality-model. Because I have not eliminated the kind of what's causing the world to look real to me. And remember, if the world just looks real to me, which means like, oh, you know in a, in finely grained terms, that the infinitesimally small bits of mind and matter are truly existent, then I can't change it, because it's stuck in its nature, in its essence. So I've gotten rid of the self-model, and I'm not walking around interpreting the world in terms of the self-model, but I am walking around interpreting the world in terms of a reality-model, or an essential reality-model, to be more precise. So what accounts for that essential reality-model, that's prapañca. That makes conceptualization possible. Okay? Sure, ask a question.
Can you hear me? Yes? What is the relation between prapañca and imprint? Is it the same? Uh, no. Because an imprint is not active, and prapañca is active.
But you have imprints that are the basis for prapañca. They are the basis for prapañca? Yeah. But prapañca, imprints are latent, and prapañca is something that's active, that's occurring. In Tibetan it's called tropa. So to think of tropa, on my view at least, as just an imprint would be a mistake, because it has to be actually functional in cognition. Okay? Okay. Can you put the model on the screen, please? This one? Yes. And intention is dualistic, or is it? Yeah, so all of this is, is... Eh, right now this is representing... This is the process uh, where uh, you know ignorance is operated of either here, or even if you got rid of that, and I could delete all of these little balloons, right? You'd still have this ignorance here.
Okay? So if I, you know, so... You know, when we're active as an ordinary person, we're not an Arhat yet, then we become an Arhat, and we get rid of ignorance at that level, the first level, which is what's called the afflictive ignorance that causes samsara, which is basically what causes, or what constitutes that dysfunctional self-model that is the framework for our conceptualizations. Then I get rid of it, and that happens. But this process, right... continues, but we don't have, actually what we'd have to do is we delete, like, imprint. There's no imprint anymore. Right? So now we can still, as an Arhat, we can still, like, make our way in the world, but the way I'm presenting this is that the Arhats are still conceptualizing based upon a reality model, because they haven't eliminated the ignorance at this level. Okay. Okay? But uh, uh, uh, but what about uh, uh what about animals? They have no language, and what is the role of language in this? Uh you... yea I said before, there's some famous work on concept use in pigeons. Did you hear me talk about that? Yeah, so pigeons use concepts. This doesn't have to be linguistic. So the mere capacity to kind of interpret sensory experience... Without language. Without language. That's already concepts. So the definition of a concept here, and here I'm kind of bringing in somewhat anachronistically, because he's not until... Dignāga is like, I mean, fifth century, and Dharmakīrti is sixth, seventh century, so they're after Nāgārjuna, but you can see traces of their ideas in this earlier phase, and the idea here is that all that a concept means is repeatability. So if you train a pigeon to see Charlie Brown, by, you know when it sees Charlie Brown, it pecks a lever and it gets food. So you train that to do that, and then every time it sees Charlie Brown,
then excuse me, then eventually it recognizes Charlie Brown and it knows to peck the lever so it can get food. And it sees Charlie Brown again and again and again, whether he's upside down or just the top of his head or whatever, and the pigeons can do that. And the rea, and for the Buddhists, what's going on is it's basically the repeated cognition, what's called the repeated cognition, which means basically this is that again, this is that again, because each of those instances of Charlie Brown is slightly different, but the pigeon sees them as the same, just as we do, like this is a petal and this is a petal and this is a petal. Your actual sensory content of each of these is slightly different, right? But we think they're the same, they're a petal. So we create sameness where there is no sameness. And that's how our process... And the reason we do that is not just for fun, we do that because we're trying to survive and preferably not just survive, but get happy. Okay? So that's the idea of how the conceptual system, the baseline conceptual system operates and even higher-order concepts are built like that. And animals... So animals can be dualistic? They are dualistic, not can. They are dualistic? They are. All consciousness of this type is dualistic. And so dualism has nothing to do with language? No. But it does have something to do with language, which is that if you're being linguistic, you're necessarily being conceptual, which means you're necessarily being dualistic. Okay? If you're being conceptual, you're necessarily being dualistic. If you're being dualistic, you're not necessarily being conceptual and you're not necessarily using language. You can be dualistic before language. And we're going to find that, we're going to talk about that maybe soon. Like real soon. Okay? Is that clear? Yes, that was crucial. Yes, I'm glad you asked. So the key with conceptualization is, so why is conceptualization inherently... So first of all, language as being inherently conceptual should be obvious, because what's a concept now? The notion of a concept is a concept that involves repeatability. This is that again. This is that again. This is that again. Now I'm using language to do that, but when a pigeon identifies Charlie Brown repeatedly, and they deliberately make the images of Charlie Brown different sizes, different angles, and so on, right? Uh, the pigeon is saying, this is Charlie Brown again, but it's not saying that because it can't speak and it doesn't have language, but it has a way of categorizing non-linguistically. Right? So, you know, Jonardon Ganeri wrote an article about this as what he calls feature placement. I think drawing on Strawson's work. P.F. Strawson's work. And so the basic idea is like, you know, this here now kind of thing, but it's not linguistic. But it's got like a subject predicate structure, a very simple subject predicate structure. And so you just do again, this is again, here again, this again, this again, you know, water again, water again, water, predator again, predator again, predator again. But not, you know, with words. So, while you're conceptualizing, which we do and animals do, why is it inherently dualistic?
Because I said so. No. It's a bad reason. Why?
Why? Yes?
Um, because there needs to be a subject-object formation. Why?
That's correct. But why? Because... Why am I conceptualizing? Because you have the perception of a self. But what's the purpose of the conceptualization? To serve yourself, to avoid an... Yes, exactly. To avoid or approach something. Yes. To be an agent acting in the world. So because concepts are about agents acting in the world, to get what they want and avoid what they don't want, they're inherently dualistic. Right? Does that make sense? So that's why concepts are inherently dualistic. Yeah? And this is nice because I had exactly the question about this. Does the Arhat live, still have a subject-object duality because they're still a dharma that is, that they see as an ultimately real thing? Or have they abandoned subject-object because they don't have a self model anymore? They have no, on... So on most interpretations the Arhats have not realized selflessness of things. And so that means that they have, that they have a sense that what they're seeing is real. The whole is not real, but there's like stuff that is causing their perceptions. Real stuff causing their perceptions. And they're still operating, therefore, in the basic features of this model, they're just not conceptualizing things through the self model. But they're still dualistic, yes. That would be the usual interpretation. Yep. You know, they're not in perpetual, non-conceptual wakefulness. Or that's not fully manifest for them. That would be kind of the typical interpretation that I'm passing along here. Okay? That's still quite an accomplishment. It's very important for us to not think, oh, wow, you know, gee, the poor Arhat, he hasn't... It's like, you know, if any of you guys manage to be an Arhat, please tell me how, because it would be nice not to be caught in samsara. Wouldn't it? So it's like we sometimes think, oh, gee, those guys, you know, what losers. Like, no, it's not, not at all. It's like, greatest respect. It's just that that is, you know, in another way... Okay, here's another thing, the way to think about this. The Arya even, the Mahāyāna Arya, who's directly realized emptiness, in meditative equipoise, there's not even the distortion at this level of perception.
Oh, it means meditative concentration. A meditative state on emptiness.
Meditative, so when the Aryas are in equipoise on emptiness, they're fully absorbed, directly realizing emptiness... And so an Arya or a noble one is one who has directly, has achieved what's called the path of seeing, which means they have direct experience of the ultimate. Although experience of sounds dualistic, so we have to be careful there, because it's not going to be dualistic. And it's, that's non conceptual. But then they come out of the experience and until they're a Buddha, they go back into the conceptual framework.
The world comes back, so to speak, like the dualistic world comes back, but it's kind of thinned out. And that's why it looks dreamlike, like this force of that habit is much less. Right? And when you become a completely awakened, then the framework, the dualistic framework falls away completely. And yet you're still able to operate. But you're not at all operating anymore with that dualistic framework. So this would be, you could say that the perceptions are still in a way, just because they haven't completely eliminated that second level of ignorance that causes the reality habit. There's still some of, some distortion even in the perception, there's still dualistic perception in the post meditative state. Everyone clear about this? Okay. So this process is operating for them as well. It's just that there's not, it's not an afflictive process.
All right? So then the question that really comes up is, okay, so what is the distortion at this level?
That distortion is going to be the thing that is eliminated in emptiness. And that's identified here as prapañca.
Okay? So I'm just going to use that word for now. Prapañca. Prapañca. Okay? I'm going to pra punch ya.
And... Sorry. It's like one of those bad dad jokes kind of level of... pra punch ya.
So, but now you'll remember it probably. So prapañca, what is it? It's what is required for concepts to occur, which remember are inherently dualistic. Okay? And what happens, what's emptiness? Like, why are we meditating on emptiness? So prapañca is what's creating that sense somehow of reality, of things having fixed essences. At least it's doing at least that much. But it may be even subtler than that. And we'll come there in a second. And uh, uh, what happens in emptiness is that it disappears, it stops. It ceases in emptiness. And a very interesting little side note here, for the logical side note, if as, if you look at the Tibetan version of this text, when they translated it, the Tibetans tended to translate these Sanskrit texts very precisely, and developed a way of writing Tibetan that was deliberately almost like a code. So it's not quite like natural Tibetan. You have to sort of learn to read it a little bit. Canonical Tibetan. And in the Sanskrit language, this says śūnya tāyam. So you have the word śūnyatā, and that's in a case, a locative case, śūnyatā yam. So uh, fabrication ceases in emptiness, śūnyatā yam. But in the Tibetan, they have an instrumental case, śūnyatā yah. And you can hear even just śūnyatā yam or śūnyatā yah. So they're very close to each other, and you can imagine that when someone's... and the way they're written as well is quite similar. So you can imagine somebody when they're writing, kind of making a small mistake, and then it gets carried along. But it's very interesting to think about the difference between those two. If something is an instrument, then you're getting... Your that, s...then it would be that prapañca ceases by means of emptiness. Like emptiness is doing something. But here it's prapañca ceases in emptiness, which makes emptiness seem like, and which I think is the best interpretation, is more like a kind of state, like a meditative state, or and not just meditative. It's a way of, it's a way in which the cognitive system is operating, if you like. A way in which it's a type of consciousness, emptiness consciousness. It's specifically a consciousness that doesn't have prapañca. So emptiness meditation, whatever else it has to be, is it has to be niṣprapañca, or trö dral in Tibetan. And this is, so that's the negative of prapañca. Un-prapañca. Punch ya, no, uh, prapañca. Non-prapañca.
Okay, so in Tibetan, trö dral, it's a negative. Erik Pema Kunzang, I think, for good reasons, translated this without the negation and called it simplicity. So you may have heard that term, and seen that term in some translations. But I think especially when we're working through the Mādhyamika text, it's useful to keep the negative.
So you could say non-prapañca, or just absence of prapañca. Right? Unfabricated or unfabrication, non-fabrication.
So then the question is, okay, we know, first of all, the things we know is that,
this prapañca has to be in place, you know, if this way of interpreting things is correct, then prapañca is operating even at the level of perception,
that it is going to be responsible for whatever makes conceptualizations possible.
Right? That it is also in some fashion, but accounts for the difference between an Arhat, who's gotten rid of the self model, but not the reality model. Okay? So, what is it?
Okay, so one's very, so I've talked, so, you know, one translation is fabrication, another translation is conceptual structuring. Is it also compoundedness? Because uncompounded luminosity, is that unfabricated luminosity?
No. Well, so there's another, people also use unfabricated for ma chö. And chö means to like fix something, so it means you're not trying to fix it. So that's different, that's not the same, that has a totally different thing. It not directly has anything to do with prapañca. It's more like about technique, actually.
And we'll talk about it later, or Eric will, I'm sure.
Because it has to do with effort, whether you make effort and why you can't be making effort, which will become clearer later, maybe already is clearer, because one of the things about conceptuality is it necessarily involves effort. But it might not seem like it. We'll talk about that later.
These... whatever it is, it's somehow, conceptual structuring maybe is already kind of not that great. I used to like that translation and now I don't, because it's sort of missing the point that it's pre-conceptual.
It certainly seems to be somehow what accounts for dualistic cognition, pre-conceptual dualistic cognition.
Yeah, I don't like that at all. That's even worse, because some people translate prapañca, Tropa, as like, oh, it's like the profusion of concepts. But this is something that, as you can see from the verse, it's not like the profusion of concepts means it's like after conceptualization. This comes before conceptualization.
So you could say profusion of concepts, it has to be what makes concepts possible, and you could say the habit of conceptualization, which you could say involves the habit of the imputation of essence onto objects, like in order to c... conceptualizing things, we conceptualize them on the basis of the reality habit. And the reality habit has to involve some notion of essences, that things have essences. So maybe prapañca is just like imputation of essences, but like pre-conceptual imputation of essences.
That seems, that's okay as a reading of prapañca.
But I think that in itself is maybe not quite enough to say, like, what else do you need? What else do you need to conceptualize? What goes with dualistic cognition? Is that enough to conceptualize?
Or what's required to even be dualistic, for there to be objects and subjects?
What else do you need?
Coffee, it looks like.
Based on the... I can't take it anymore. What else do you need?
Pizza? Any? Yeah? Yeah, unique consciousness. But are we going to get rid of awareness? No, that's key. Right? We're not just like... Because if we get rid of awareness, then, you know, can't save, can't serve beings to help them find their way out of suffering. You can't be a Buddha if you're unconscious. Maybe the AI Buddha will make that and then you'll be...
Okay, so what? You definitely need consciousness, but we want to preserve, in some sense, that. So what else do you need? Attachment and aversion on this model could certainly be... There's the thirst, the self-model involves that thirst. But attachment and... We're saying you can have conceptualizations without attachment and aversion. You could still be conceptualizing.
Right?
Like a high-stage bodhisattva on arhat can be involved in the post-meditative state where they're, you know, consciously using language and so on, but they're not caught in attachment and aversion.
At least, sometimes not, at least. So then what?
How about, let's say, what's required for the concept of a vase?
What kinds of things? Just like brainstorm here.
No, listen, not the mind. Yeah, okay, the mind. You need discernment? Yes. And what does that mean you need? What's discernment?
Yes, so you need that repeatability. So you need memory of what? An object that's...
You need senses? Yeah. What else, though? How is that, how is the object presented that makes it possible to conceptualize it? Yeah, you definitely need duality. We've got space. Who said space? The artist said space, of course. You need space. You have to have space. And if you have memory, what else do you need? Time.
Space and time.
What does Nāgārjuna say about time?
Let's have a look at what Nāgārjuna says about time.
I'm going to try to make this go back to what it was supposed to be before. I don't know what happened. Oh, you flipped it. You changed the display, didn't you? You bastard. No, excuse me.
That's right, you did. That's what happened.
Mirror for built-in display. Now don't do anything. Okay. Can you see okay?
Is it big enough?
If the present and the future were dependent on the past... Ah, we might as well just follow khenpo's request, quickly do them.
This is the 19th chapter, the analysis of time.
If the present and future were dependent on the past, then the present and the future would exist in the past. If, however, the present and the future do not exist in the past, then would the present and the future be dependent on the past? Moreover, without depending on the past, there is no establishment of those two. Therefore, the present and the future do not exist through this procedure. The remaining two permutations should point out the nature of triads, such as superior, inferior and middling, and also the singularity and such of these ordered triads. So this is about a triadic analysis. You have three things that depend on each other. And time is especially easy for this analysis because it's very clear that it makes no sense for even though we have three things that depend on each other, we also intuitively know like the past and the future, the past... the present and the future don't exist in the past. We know just like... unless you're a certain kind of philosopher, we don't intuitively think that the present and the future exist in the past. Right? So that means that it's quite easy for us to see that the present and the future have to be defined in terms of the past. And yet, they don't exist in the past. So how can they be depending on something if they're not existing yet? Alternatively, the past doesn't exist in the present, and the future also doesn't exist in the present. So how could the present be defined as that which is after the past and before the future? It would be like defining it in terms of squirkels. Defining it in terms of non-existent things. They don't exist.
And of course, if the past and the future exist in the present, then there's no time. Because what time means is something that flows from past to present to future.
So now there's no time. So therefore, time does not ultimately exist.
I really need a coffee now. And this can also be done... I think I can just remember this one. na gataṃ gamyate tāvat nāgataṃ gamyate tathāgatāgata-vinirmuktaṃ gamyamānaṃ na gamyate It is not the case that one is now walking where one already walked. One is not walking where one has not yet walked. And without the spots where one already walked and where one has not yet walked, the currently walked upon spot is not being walked upon.
In a way, Candrakīrti, it's actually the verb he uses is gam, which means to go. But like gehen in German, that also kind of means you're going by walking. So in, especially as a monk, he wasn't allowed to ride in vehicles, so he had to be walking when he was going. So I've translated this as meaning walking. And it's also very clear from his commentary, because it even gets to the point where he's looking at the atoms in the foot. Like where is the walked upon spot right now? It's like you're walking, it's right here.
But is that spot, how do you define the right here, is that it's not there and it's not back here. It's not the atom in front and not the atom in back, like of your heel. Right? And where is the motion occurring? Where is walking happening right now? It has to be defined in terms of like where you just walked and where you have not yet walked. But where you just walked requires that there be, it has to be defined in terms of motion. But there's no motion happening where you just walked, and there's no motion happening where you're about to walk. Because the motion is happening now, but you have to define that in terms of where you just walked and where you didn't yet walk. Which means you can't define it.
Huh, what? So next time you go for a walk, and he clearly seemed to be thinking of doing, this is a formal kind of walking meditation on what's called the caṅkrama. You go for a walk, a very deliberate mindfulness style walk. And he's like, you know, meditating on the ireality of walking. That is, there's no ultimately no walking, no motion. Another triadic thing. There's no ultimate, ultimately, even our essentialized concept of activity. So I'm assuming I'm going to, you know, on the break here, some of you... I'm going to find some of you like frozen on the stairs.
Help! Help him! He studied too much Mādhyamika!
Yes. Okay, so, prapañca, maybe it's also about things like space and time. Right? So what does that leave us? No duality, no space, no time.
I think it's time for a break. Okay, we come back a quarter after, is that okay? Okay.
sönam diyi thamché sikpa nyi thopné nyepai dranam phamjé né kyega nachi balap trukpa yi sipai tsolé drowa drölwar shok Oh Lhaso.
Dropping down into the body. Simply present here and now.
And now bringing to mind our motivation and the Mahāyāna. Our highest motivation is to attain awakening for the sake of all beings.
Alright, let's begin. So, this is where we ended. What does it mean to know emptiness?
Before we go on, does anyone want to offer an opinion?
Can you know emptiness as an object?
So, what does that mean?
Maybe sort of means knowing that you don't know, like a complete dropping of all your own assumptions. Maybe. So, the way you get rid of... one of the ways to understand ignorance, avidyā, is also can be called ājñāna, not knowing. So, we're going to eliminate not knowing by not knowing.
And there is no we that can know it, and there is no it that can be known. Yes, good. So, what does that mean? What kind of knowing is that? Anyone want to...
What kind of knowing is it when you have a subject knowing an object? How can you describe that? What's that structure? What? Yes, dualistic, or in Western philosophy, intentionality as a subject-object intentionality. It's a dualistic structure. So, if we don't have that structure, what kind of knowing would be going on? Non-dual.
Exactly. So, that's already a hint about where we're headed. But let's do some other things first. Uhhhh, Yes. So, first of all, I want to review some things about um... the sort of process that emptiness is... how emptiness is meant to be leading to liberation. And that process is actually... This is from the 18th chapter of Nāgārjuna's main text. And in the 18th chapter, what he says is... mameti ahameti kṣīṇe bāhyādhyātmam eva ca nirudhyate hy upādānaṃ tad-abhāvāj janmanaḥ kṣayaḥ My screen is a little... Actually, this is kind of terribly in the way.
mameti ahameti kṣīṇe bāhyādhyātmam eva ca nirudhyate hy upādānaṃ tad-abhāvāj janmanaḥ kṣayaḥ Internally and externally, when I and my have ceased... I wouldn't even need to use the thoughts, but you could put it in there. When I and my have ceased... These are my translations, by the way. Appropriation ceases. Through the cessation of appropriation, birth ceases. So, if anyone is familiar with the 12 links of dependent origination, that describes the process that leads to samsaric, cycling in samsara. So, samsara is also called the cycle of, of becoming, the bhavacakra, the wheel of becoming. And there's even a kind of traditional depiction in the Tibetan world of this wheel, there's like a demon. Maybe I'll show you a picture later. But, uh, uh, and uh, it represents different aspects of that process and what, and different places you can end up, so to speak. But, uh, the, uh... There are 12 aspects of that process that cycle through to lead one to be compulsively reborn in samsara. But also, in a way, they are kind of you know, it's also pointing to a compulsive process that's happening all the time, not just about rebirth, but every moment. And uh, that process, the main part of that process, you could say, involves uh a, a, thirst, tṛṣṇā, to be, bhava, right? Just the thirst to be, that has to do with, with a sense of an I, that same kind of I, Right? Which is the personal identity that is the target of the analysis into selflessness, not emptiness. So at that first layer that we've been talking about, the sense that there is some kind of essential I or identity, somewhere in the mind-body system. And that sense of essential I is what's driving, there isn't that kind of an I, but on early Buddhism what does exist is the thirst to kind of make that happy and to not suffer and to just continue to be, to kind of survive, for that I to survive. And that is what is driving this process. So when you have put an end to that, that, that root cause, which is basically ignorance, right? Not basically, it is ignorance at the first level, the fixation on that sense of I. When you put an end to that, that's, that's the root kleśa, the root affliction. When you put an end to that, then you don't produce karma. And when you don't produce karma, you don't perpetuate samsara. Right? And then on the early model, you attain nirvāṇa during your lifetime, that's nirvāṇa with a remainder, and then you die and you attain nirvāṇa without remainder. The remainder is the karmic remainder that's still occurring, but you're not producing new karma. Okay? Everyone remember that? That's clear? So what these verses refer to is that, like, you know, it's not saying anything new in a way. That, it's just saying that if you can get rid of this idea of I and mine, what's the mine or my? That is, so there's I, the unchanging, absolute, unitary, controlling, experiencing Self, capital S, the ātman, which actually doesn't exist. Right? We're all clear on that. And then the mine, or the my, is what it owns, which is the mind-body stuff. So when your sense of I is gone, you can't, there's also the sense that this is mine, also goes away. So this is called the ātmīya in Sanskrit. So there's the ātman, the ātman and the ātmīya. The I, or the self, and the self-owned. The ātman is the Self, capital S, and the ātmīya is what is owned by the Self. Okay? Meaning the psychophysical aggregates, what belongs to the Self, or what's under the control of this imaginary Self, the imaginary control of the imaginary Self. Okay? So here this is expressed with pronouns, māma means mine, and aham means I, is what's there in Sanskrit. So that's like clear. Okay. That's just kind of standard, you know, Buddhist theory uh... from the, and so Nāgārjuna is just kind of reiterating, but everyone, all Buddhist scholars of his time were fully familiar with. And then he says, karma-kleśa-kṣayād mokṣaḥ Through the cessation of karma and afflictive mental states, or kleśa, comes liberation. So that's what we just said, right? In a way, that statement is just a restatement of this. Because what's the kleśa that's going on here? It's the kleśa that causes one to think I and my. In other words, it's ignorance. Ignorance about, not about the world yet, that’s not, it's not emptiness yet, it's not about emptiness yet, it's about just a sense like, ah, there's an I here and this is mine. Okay? So if you get rid of that kleśa, that root kleśa, you get rid of all the other kleśas, especially attachment and aversion, which means you're no longer feeling compelled to engage in karmic actions. So those have been used up, and therefore you attain liberation from samsara. Okay? And then he says, karma-kleśā vikalpataḥ
te prapañcāt prapañcāstu śūnyatāyāṃ nirudhyate Karma and afflictive mental states come from concepts, vikalpa, or nam tok རྣམ་རྟོག in Tibetan, yea nam tok རྣམ་རྟོག . And they, and they come from fabrication. Fabrication, however, ceases in emptiness. So there's this word, which I didn't actually put, oh yeah, there it is, prapañca. It's a really, fabrication is one translation that Jay Garfield recommended to me. We'll talk about some other possible translations. But uh, prapañca is a really key idea here. And that is something kind of new, in a way. Like Nāgārjuna is introducing something that leads us past just personal selflessness to that idea of the selflessness even of the dharmas, of the supposed elements. Right? So this is moving into Mahāyāna philosophy now. So, and even this is a very interesting. Karma and afflictive mental states come from concepts. All right? In what sense? So what's a concept here? Well, one type of model that you can think of that we also discussed earlier is that there's a kind of pre-conceptual moment. Maybe I should show you that, actually, come to think of it. Yes, there we go. Okay. So you remember this model we had? Because you can't see it? Oh, I thought I put it on screen mirroring. Okay. Well, here we go. So this model, right? And then you get these different moments, right? So we can think of this moment of interpretation as, uh... this moment of interpretation as being conceptual. And this is eventually what really becomes very clear in later philosophical analysis of cognition in the works of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti. And they're going to say there is a pre-conceptual and therefore non-conceptual moment in perception that then is conceptualized. So when, when, one way of thinking of what Nāgārjuna is saying is that it is actually our conceptual framework. So we have a um, a... What we have is a grasping or fixation on personal identity. And there's a conceptual framework that's going with that. And we're interpreting everything through that framework. So, so when we see something, we go, oh, that's good or that's bad. Even a very minimal kind of conceptualization like that, right? Very minimal conceptualization that's already... like it's almost not even... we almost hardly notice it. We don't realize we're conceptualizing. That when we're doing that, the reason we're conceptualizing is that in some sense we're conceptualizing things because we're trying to decide if they're good or bad for us at a very basic level. So the claim is that even higher order concepts are actually rooted in this kind of getting and avoiding, getting and avoiding. That's good, that's bad. And this is actually similar in very interesting ways to the inactive perspective that Francesco Varela and Evan Thompson and Eleanor Roche first developed in The Embodied Mind. And then Evan has continued with a lot of different work in that area. So, uh... When we're conceptualizing, we're not just picking out categories in the world. We're actually constructing categories based upon our, based upon basically like we want to make this self-happy and avoid suffering. But the self-model we're working with, as we discussed before, is like we're trying to make a square circle happy or not suffer. You know? So our self-model is already distorted, which means that this whole process doesn't work, right? Because we can't make a non-existent entity happy. So, again, we can think of evolutionary reasons why we might, or why our cognitive systems might have developed this illusory sense of a false self. You know? But setting all that aside, what we know, not the claim in the Buddhist context is, regardless of whether that was good for us for samsaric survival, from this point of view of really solving the problem of suffering, it's maladaptive to have that illusory false self as the basis for our conceptual framework. So Nāgārjuna is saying that this conceptualization that disturbing, occurring at the level of interpretation is uh... that that conceptualization is, um... because it's distorted, it's leading to a distorted intention to action. And remember, this intention to action, that's karma, right? So the... that distorted intention to action that emerges from that conceptualization is what's driving the whole process. But... let me go back...
I know.
The final frontier. So... Uh... It is a screen grab from Star Trek, actually. Uh, uh so, uh... That conceptualization is distorted, it leads to karma. So if we stop that distorted conceptualization, we don't produce karma anymore. Okay? So it doesn't mean, very importantly, like, the kind of intentions that a uh, arhat has that's still alive, you know, it's not like they just stop moving. Right? They're still alive and they still do things. But they don't... and there's even debates about do arhats feel pain if they step on a thorn, does an arhat feel pain or not? You know, and things like that. Even though they're in nirvāṇa. So the question is, you know, those kinds of things. So the I... idea is that there's still a process going on, like the arhat makes his way in the world, he or she or he makes their way in the world, but they're not producing the kinds of intentions that produce karma. Okay? That perpetuates samsara. Because samsara is specifically perpetuated by the kind of intention that is about, I need to live. This thing needs to be happy. Keep it going. Right? Which doesn't mean if you have that, you stop or you know, you don't want to live anymore. But it's just that that particular kind of causal process of life is stopped. And that's why also, you know, in Mahāyāna, they can say that a Buddha is still doing activities, but not with karmic intentions. Right? So it's not like karmic... it's not like activity in and of itself, it has to be driven by karma. Okay? You can have actually the same word in Sanskrit. Karma is translated two ways in Tibetan. One is le and one is thrinle. And le means karma. And thrinle means enlightened activities, what Buddhas do. But it's actually the same word in Sanskrit. So, uh, so... The problem is this distorted is what's going on with the distortion. And... The, that in of course, we know that this process is like a cyclical process. It's just it's reinforcing that kleśas, which produce more karma, which produce more kleśa, which reinforce the kleśas and so on. Right? So and the point here is that the interpretation is distorted by ignorance. But now the Nāgārjuna is going to point to how something pre-conceptual is distorted by ignorance. Like not even just that we have a pre-conceptual, we have a conceptual moment where we get some like sense data, you just see, you know, the world. And you of course, it's not just a picture of the world, like you're still have your appetite and so on. And that conditions what you're seeing, but it's still not being conceptualized in that moment. And then you do this interpretation. Oh, that's good. That's bad. I want this and I want that. Right? And then you approach or avoid or, you know, try to do something. But the idea is there's a pre-conceptual thing. It's still not like a just a picture of the world, but it's not distorted by conceptuality. But it is, for Nāgārjuna, somehow still caught in something that is actually before concepts.
All right? And that means it's not just about, in a sense, for Nāgārjuna that means it's not just about, not, not, not just distorting your things in relation to a sense of self, like a conceptual self model, it's actually distorting all experience. And that this distortion is, and this is this kind of then dzin, this, you know, grasping to reality or grasping to truth, fixation on reality, the reality habit, the just sense of seeing everything in a certain way, even pre-conceptually. Before you're conceptualizing it as, because since all conceptualizations are, this is good, that's bad, this is the sense of feeling real that comes before even saying that's good, that's bad. You see what I'm saying? Do you understand? Like if I really just, you know, knew right away that this, let's say, you know, for some reason I'm a vase collector, but that this, you know, I'm in a dream or something, and I know I'm in a dream, and there's this thing, it's pointless to even think about it, right? Because it's just a dream. I'm not that much of an obsessive vase collector that I even do it in my dreams. Maybe some of us are, but... Right? So if I don't have a sense like this is real, I'm not even going to bother to conceptualize it. I'm just, my, my, my system is just going to ignore it. I'm not even going to pay attention to it. Right? I don't, if I'm, you know, dying of thirst, I don't bother to run to the mirage. If it doesn't look real to me, I'm not going to go there. And I'm not even, in a way, not even going to see it. Okay? Like the invisible gorilla. So the fact of feeling real precedes the conceptualizations that involve that self-model, that false self-model. You get it? So what accounts for that sense of feeling real even before you conceptualize? That's what... were, wer... like what's required for concepts. Where specifically, when we're using this word vikalpa, concepts, we're specifically talking about concepts that are in the framework of the self-model, that are about getting and avoiding, that are afflicted, already confused. Okay? So again, if we go back to this diagram for a second, when I'm doing this conceptualization at the level of interpretation, I'm doing that on the basis of seeing things that feel real. So this conceptualization is caught up in that self-model, but it requires a sense of seeing real things in order for it to operate. Okay? And of course, it's that seeing real things that even if you get rid of, even if we get rid of the distortion, even if we get rid of the distortion of the self-model in this interpretation, so what happens if we get rid of the... of this uh, eh, uh, they... So this is distorted by ignorance, specifically the ignorance of the self-model. If I get rid of that, I stop having intentions that produce karma and samsara ends. But I would still have a reality-based... I'm still conceptualizing. I'm in nirvāṇa, but I'm alive, and I'm still conceptualizing, making my way through concepts. And in that context, as an arhat, and in that context, what's happening, I'm conceptualizing on the basis of a reality-model. Not a self-model, but a reality-model. Because I have not eliminated the kind of what's causing the world to look real to me. And remember, if the world just looks real to me, which means like, oh, you know in a, in finely grained terms, that the infinitesimally small bits of mind and matter are truly existent, then I can't change it, because it's stuck in its nature, in its essence. So I've gotten rid of the self-model, and I'm not walking around interpreting the world in terms of the self-model, but I am walking around interpreting the world in terms of a reality-model, or an essential reality-model, to be more precise. So what accounts for that essential reality-model, that's prapañca. That makes conceptualization possible. Okay? Sure, ask a question.
Can you hear me? Yes? What is the relation between prapañca and imprint? Is it the same? Uh, no. Because an imprint is not active, and prapañca is active.
But you have imprints that are the basis for prapañca. They are the basis for prapañca? Yeah. But prapañca, imprints are latent, and prapañca is something that's active, that's occurring. In Tibetan it's called tropa. So to think of tropa, on my view at least, as just an imprint would be a mistake, because it has to be actually functional in cognition. Okay? Okay. Can you put the model on the screen, please? This one? Yes. And intention is dualistic, or is it? Yeah, so all of this is, is... Eh, right now this is representing... This is the process uh, where uh, you know ignorance is operated of either here, or even if you got rid of that, and I could delete all of these little balloons, right? You'd still have this ignorance here.
Okay? So if I, you know, so... You know, when we're active as an ordinary person, we're not an Arhat yet, then we become an Arhat, and we get rid of ignorance at that level, the first level, which is what's called the afflictive ignorance that causes samsara, which is basically what causes, or what constitutes that dysfunctional self-model that is the framework for our conceptualizations. Then I get rid of it, and that happens. But this process, right... continues, but we don't have, actually what we'd have to do is we delete, like, imprint. There's no imprint anymore. Right? So now we can still, as an Arhat, we can still, like, make our way in the world, but the way I'm presenting this is that the Arhats are still conceptualizing based upon a reality model, because they haven't eliminated the ignorance at this level. Okay. Okay? But uh, uh, uh, but what about uh, uh what about animals? They have no language, and what is the role of language in this? Uh you... yea I said before, there's some famous work on concept use in pigeons. Did you hear me talk about that? Yeah, so pigeons use concepts. This doesn't have to be linguistic. So the mere capacity to kind of interpret sensory experience... Without language. Without language. That's already concepts. So the definition of a concept here, and here I'm kind of bringing in somewhat anachronistically, because he's not until... Dignāga is like, I mean, fifth century, and Dharmakīrti is sixth, seventh century, so they're after Nāgārjuna, but you can see traces of their ideas in this earlier phase, and the idea here is that all that a concept means is repeatability. So if you train a pigeon to see Charlie Brown, by, you know when it sees Charlie Brown, it pecks a lever and it gets food. So you train that to do that, and then every time it sees Charlie Brown,
then excuse me, then eventually it recognizes Charlie Brown and it knows to peck the lever so it can get food. And it sees Charlie Brown again and again and again, whether he's upside down or just the top of his head or whatever, and the pigeons can do that. And the rea, and for the Buddhists, what's going on is it's basically the repeated cognition, what's called the repeated cognition, which means basically this is that again, this is that again, because each of those instances of Charlie Brown is slightly different, but the pigeon sees them as the same, just as we do, like this is a petal and this is a petal and this is a petal. Your actual sensory content of each of these is slightly different, right? But we think they're the same, they're a petal. So we create sameness where there is no sameness. And that's how our process... And the reason we do that is not just for fun, we do that because we're trying to survive and preferably not just survive, but get happy. Okay? So that's the idea of how the conceptual system, the baseline conceptual system operates and even higher-order concepts are built like that. And animals... So animals can be dualistic? They are dualistic, not can. They are dualistic? They are. All consciousness of this type is dualistic. And so dualism has nothing to do with language? No. But it does have something to do with language, which is that if you're being linguistic, you're necessarily being conceptual, which means you're necessarily being dualistic. Okay? If you're being conceptual, you're necessarily being dualistic. If you're being dualistic, you're not necessarily being conceptual and you're not necessarily using language. You can be dualistic before language. And we're going to find that, we're going to talk about that maybe soon. Like real soon. Okay? Is that clear? Yes, that was crucial. Yes, I'm glad you asked. So the key with conceptualization is, so why is conceptualization inherently... So first of all, language as being inherently conceptual should be obvious, because what's a concept now? The notion of a concept is a concept that involves repeatability. This is that again. This is that again. This is that again. Now I'm using language to do that, but when a pigeon identifies Charlie Brown repeatedly, and they deliberately make the images of Charlie Brown different sizes, different angles, and so on, right? Uh, the pigeon is saying, this is Charlie Brown again, but it's not saying that because it can't speak and it doesn't have language, but it has a way of categorizing non-linguistically. Right? So, you know, Jonardon Ganeri wrote an article about this as what he calls feature placement. I think drawing on Strawson's work. P.F. Strawson's work. And so the basic idea is like, you know, this here now kind of thing, but it's not linguistic. But it's got like a subject predicate structure, a very simple subject predicate structure. And so you just do again, this is again, here again, this again, this again, you know, water again, water again, water, predator again, predator again, predator again. But not, you know, with words. So, while you're conceptualizing, which we do and animals do, why is it inherently dualistic?
Because I said so. No. It's a bad reason. Why?
Why? Yes?
Um, because there needs to be a subject-object formation. Why?
That's correct. But why? Because... Why am I conceptualizing? Because you have the perception of a self. But what's the purpose of the conceptualization? To serve yourself, to avoid an... Yes, exactly. To avoid or approach something. Yes. To be an agent acting in the world. So because concepts are about agents acting in the world, to get what they want and avoid what they don't want, they're inherently dualistic. Right? Does that make sense? So that's why concepts are inherently dualistic. Yeah? And this is nice because I had exactly the question about this. Does the Arhat live, still have a subject-object duality because they're still a dharma that is, that they see as an ultimately real thing? Or have they abandoned subject-object because they don't have a self model anymore? They have no, on... So on most interpretations the Arhats have not realized selflessness of things. And so that means that they have, that they have a sense that what they're seeing is real. The whole is not real, but there's like stuff that is causing their perceptions. Real stuff causing their perceptions. And they're still operating, therefore, in the basic features of this model, they're just not conceptualizing things through the self model. But they're still dualistic, yes. That would be the usual interpretation. Yep. You know, they're not in perpetual, non-conceptual wakefulness. Or that's not fully manifest for them. That would be kind of the typical interpretation that I'm passing along here. Okay? That's still quite an accomplishment. It's very important for us to not think, oh, wow, you know, gee, the poor Arhat, he hasn't... It's like, you know, if any of you guys manage to be an Arhat, please tell me how, because it would be nice not to be caught in samsara. Wouldn't it? So it's like we sometimes think, oh, gee, those guys, you know, what losers. Like, no, it's not, not at all. It's like, greatest respect. It's just that that is, you know, in another way... Okay, here's another thing, the way to think about this. The Arya even, the Mahāyāna Arya, who's directly realized emptiness, in meditative equipoise, there's not even the distortion at this level of perception.
Oh, it means meditative concentration. A meditative state on emptiness.
Meditative, so when the Aryas are in equipoise on emptiness, they're fully absorbed, directly realizing emptiness... And so an Arya or a noble one is one who has directly, has achieved what's called the path of seeing, which means they have direct experience of the ultimate. Although experience of sounds dualistic, so we have to be careful there, because it's not going to be dualistic. And it's, that's non conceptual. But then they come out of the experience and until they're a Buddha, they go back into the conceptual framework.
The world comes back, so to speak, like the dualistic world comes back, but it's kind of thinned out. And that's why it looks dreamlike, like this force of that habit is much less. Right? And when you become a completely awakened, then the framework, the dualistic framework falls away completely. And yet you're still able to operate. But you're not at all operating anymore with that dualistic framework. So this would be, you could say that the perceptions are still in a way, just because they haven't completely eliminated that second level of ignorance that causes the reality habit. There's still some of, some distortion even in the perception, there's still dualistic perception in the post meditative state. Everyone clear about this? Okay. So this process is operating for them as well. It's just that there's not, it's not an afflictive process.
All right? So then the question that really comes up is, okay, so what is the distortion at this level?
That distortion is going to be the thing that is eliminated in emptiness. And that's identified here as prapañca.
Okay? So I'm just going to use that word for now. Prapañca. Prapañca. Okay? I'm going to pra punch ya.
And... Sorry. It's like one of those bad dad jokes kind of level of... pra punch ya.
So, but now you'll remember it probably. So prapañca, what is it? It's what is required for concepts to occur, which remember are inherently dualistic. Okay? And what happens, what's emptiness? Like, why are we meditating on emptiness? So prapañca is what's creating that sense somehow of reality, of things having fixed essences. At least it's doing at least that much. But it may be even subtler than that. And we'll come there in a second. And uh, uh, what happens in emptiness is that it disappears, it stops. It ceases in emptiness. And a very interesting little side note here, for the logical side note, if as, if you look at the Tibetan version of this text, when they translated it, the Tibetans tended to translate these Sanskrit texts very precisely, and developed a way of writing Tibetan that was deliberately almost like a code. So it's not quite like natural Tibetan. You have to sort of learn to read it a little bit. Canonical Tibetan. And in the Sanskrit language, this says śūnya tāyam. So you have the word śūnyatā, and that's in a case, a locative case, śūnyatā yam. So uh, fabrication ceases in emptiness, śūnyatā yam. But in the Tibetan, they have an instrumental case, śūnyatā yah. And you can hear even just śūnyatā yam or śūnyatā yah. So they're very close to each other, and you can imagine that when someone's... and the way they're written as well is quite similar. So you can imagine somebody when they're writing, kind of making a small mistake, and then it gets carried along. But it's very interesting to think about the difference between those two. If something is an instrument, then you're getting... Your that, s...then it would be that prapañca ceases by means of emptiness. Like emptiness is doing something. But here it's prapañca ceases in emptiness, which makes emptiness seem like, and which I think is the best interpretation, is more like a kind of state, like a meditative state, or and not just meditative. It's a way of, it's a way in which the cognitive system is operating, if you like. A way in which it's a type of consciousness, emptiness consciousness. It's specifically a consciousness that doesn't have prapañca. So emptiness meditation, whatever else it has to be, is it has to be niṣprapañca, or trö dral in Tibetan. And this is, so that's the negative of prapañca. Un-prapañca. Punch ya, no, uh, prapañca. Non-prapañca.
Okay, so in Tibetan, trö dral, it's a negative. Erik Pema Kunzang, I think, for good reasons, translated this without the negation and called it simplicity. So you may have heard that term, and seen that term in some translations. But I think especially when we're working through the Mādhyamika text, it's useful to keep the negative.
So you could say non-prapañca, or just absence of prapañca. Right? Unfabricated or unfabrication, non-fabrication.
So then the question is, okay, we know, first of all, the things we know is that,
this prapañca has to be in place, you know, if this way of interpreting things is correct, then prapañca is operating even at the level of perception,
that it is going to be responsible for whatever makes conceptualizations possible.
Right? That it is also in some fashion, but accounts for the difference between an Arhat, who's gotten rid of the self model, but not the reality model. Okay? So, what is it?
Okay, so one's very, so I've talked, so, you know, one translation is fabrication, another translation is conceptual structuring. Is it also compoundedness? Because uncompounded luminosity, is that unfabricated luminosity?
No. Well, so there's another, people also use unfabricated for ma chö. And chö means to like fix something, so it means you're not trying to fix it. So that's different, that's not the same, that has a totally different thing. It not directly has anything to do with prapañca. It's more like about technique, actually.
And we'll talk about it later, or Eric will, I'm sure.
Because it has to do with effort, whether you make effort and why you can't be making effort, which will become clearer later, maybe already is clearer, because one of the things about conceptuality is it necessarily involves effort. But it might not seem like it. We'll talk about that later.
These... whatever it is, it's somehow, conceptual structuring maybe is already kind of not that great. I used to like that translation and now I don't, because it's sort of missing the point that it's pre-conceptual.
It certainly seems to be somehow what accounts for dualistic cognition, pre-conceptual dualistic cognition.
Yeah, I don't like that at all. That's even worse, because some people translate prapañca, Tropa, as like, oh, it's like the profusion of concepts. But this is something that, as you can see from the verse, it's not like the profusion of concepts means it's like after conceptualization. This comes before conceptualization.
So you could say profusion of concepts, it has to be what makes concepts possible, and you could say the habit of conceptualization, which you could say involves the habit of the imputation of essence onto objects, like in order to c... conceptualizing things, we conceptualize them on the basis of the reality habit. And the reality habit has to involve some notion of essences, that things have essences. So maybe prapañca is just like imputation of essences, but like pre-conceptual imputation of essences.
That seems, that's okay as a reading of prapañca.
But I think that in itself is maybe not quite enough to say, like, what else do you need? What else do you need to conceptualize? What goes with dualistic cognition? Is that enough to conceptualize?
Or what's required to even be dualistic, for there to be objects and subjects?
What else do you need?
Coffee, it looks like.
Based on the... I can't take it anymore. What else do you need?
Pizza? Any? Yeah? Yeah, unique consciousness. But are we going to get rid of awareness? No, that's key. Right? We're not just like... Because if we get rid of awareness, then, you know, can't save, can't serve beings to help them find their way out of suffering. You can't be a Buddha if you're unconscious. Maybe the AI Buddha will make that and then you'll be...
Okay, so what? You definitely need consciousness, but we want to preserve, in some sense, that. So what else do you need? Attachment and aversion on this model could certainly be... There's the thirst, the self-model involves that thirst. But attachment and... We're saying you can have conceptualizations without attachment and aversion. You could still be conceptualizing.
Right?
Like a high-stage bodhisattva on arhat can be involved in the post-meditative state where they're, you know, consciously using language and so on, but they're not caught in attachment and aversion.
At least, sometimes not, at least. So then what?
How about, let's say, what's required for the concept of a vase?
What kinds of things? Just like brainstorm here.
No, listen, not the mind. Yeah, okay, the mind. You need discernment? Yes. And what does that mean you need? What's discernment?
Yes, so you need that repeatability. So you need memory of what? An object that's...
You need senses? Yeah. What else, though? How is that, how is the object presented that makes it possible to conceptualize it? Yeah, you definitely need duality. We've got space. Who said space? The artist said space, of course. You need space. You have to have space. And if you have memory, what else do you need? Time.
Space and time.
What does Nāgārjuna say about time?
Let's have a look at what Nāgārjuna says about time.
I'm going to try to make this go back to what it was supposed to be before. I don't know what happened. Oh, you flipped it. You changed the display, didn't you? You bastard. No, excuse me.
That's right, you did. That's what happened.
Mirror for built-in display. Now don't do anything. Okay. Can you see okay?
Is it big enough?
If the present and the future were dependent on the past... Ah, we might as well just follow khenpo's request, quickly do them.
This is the 19th chapter, the analysis of time.
If the present and future were dependent on the past, then the present and the future would exist in the past. If, however, the present and the future do not exist in the past, then would the present and the future be dependent on the past? Moreover, without depending on the past, there is no establishment of those two. Therefore, the present and the future do not exist through this procedure. The remaining two permutations should point out the nature of triads, such as superior, inferior and middling, and also the singularity and such of these ordered triads. So this is about a triadic analysis. You have three things that depend on each other. And time is especially easy for this analysis because it's very clear that it makes no sense for even though we have three things that depend on each other, we also intuitively know like the past and the future, the past... the present and the future don't exist in the past. We know just like... unless you're a certain kind of philosopher, we don't intuitively think that the present and the future exist in the past. Right? So that means that it's quite easy for us to see that the present and the future have to be defined in terms of the past. And yet, they don't exist in the past. So how can they be depending on something if they're not existing yet? Alternatively, the past doesn't exist in the present, and the future also doesn't exist in the present. So how could the present be defined as that which is after the past and before the future? It would be like defining it in terms of squirkels. Defining it in terms of non-existent things. They don't exist.
And of course, if the past and the future exist in the present, then there's no time. Because what time means is something that flows from past to present to future.
So now there's no time. So therefore, time does not ultimately exist.
I really need a coffee now. And this can also be done... I think I can just remember this one. na gataṃ gamyate tāvat nāgataṃ gamyate tathāgatāgata-vinirmuktaṃ gamyamānaṃ na gamyate It is not the case that one is now walking where one already walked. One is not walking where one has not yet walked. And without the spots where one already walked and where one has not yet walked, the currently walked upon spot is not being walked upon.
In a way, Candrakīrti, it's actually the verb he uses is gam, which means to go. But like gehen in German, that also kind of means you're going by walking. So in, especially as a monk, he wasn't allowed to ride in vehicles, so he had to be walking when he was going. So I've translated this as meaning walking. And it's also very clear from his commentary, because it even gets to the point where he's looking at the atoms in the foot. Like where is the walked upon spot right now? It's like you're walking, it's right here.
But is that spot, how do you define the right here, is that it's not there and it's not back here. It's not the atom in front and not the atom in back, like of your heel. Right? And where is the motion occurring? Where is walking happening right now? It has to be defined in terms of like where you just walked and where you have not yet walked. But where you just walked requires that there be, it has to be defined in terms of motion. But there's no motion happening where you just walked, and there's no motion happening where you're about to walk. Because the motion is happening now, but you have to define that in terms of where you just walked and where you didn't yet walk. Which means you can't define it.
Huh, what? So next time you go for a walk, and he clearly seemed to be thinking of doing, this is a formal kind of walking meditation on what's called the caṅkrama. You go for a walk, a very deliberate mindfulness style walk. And he's like, you know, meditating on the ireality of walking. That is, there's no ultimately no walking, no motion. Another triadic thing. There's no ultimate, ultimately, even our essentialized concept of activity. So I'm assuming I'm going to, you know, on the break here, some of you... I'm going to find some of you like frozen on the stairs.
Help! Help him! He studied too much Mādhyamika!
Yes. Okay, so, prapañca, maybe it's also about things like space and time. Right? So what does that leave us? No duality, no space, no time.
I think it's time for a break. Okay, we come back a quarter after, is that okay? Okay.
sönam diyi thamché sikpa nyi thopné nyepai dranam phamjé né kyega nachi balap trukpa yi sipai tsolé drowa drölwar shok Oh Lhaso.
okmin chökyi yingkyi phodrang né
düsum sangyé kün gyi ngowo nyi
rangsem chöku ngönsum tönzé pa
tsawai lamai shapla sölwa dep
Alright, let's just take a moment to
settle our minds.
Dropping down into the body. Simply present here and now.
And now bringing to mind our motivation and the Mahāyāna. Our highest motivation is to attain awakening for the sake of all beings.
Alright, let's begin. So, this is where we ended. What does it mean to know emptiness?
Before we go on, does anyone want to offer an opinion?
Can you know emptiness as an object?
So, what does that mean?
Maybe sort of means knowing that you don't know, like a complete dropping of all your own assumptions. Maybe. So, the way you get rid of... one of the ways to understand ignorance, avidyā, is also can be called ājñāna, not knowing. So, we're going to eliminate not knowing by not knowing.
And there is no we that can know it, and there is no it that can be known. Yes, good. So, what does that mean? What kind of knowing is that? Anyone want to...
What kind of knowing is it when you have a subject knowing an object? How can you describe that? What's that structure? What? Yes, dualistic, or in Western philosophy, intentionality as a subject-object intentionality. It's a dualistic structure. So, if we don't have that structure, what kind of knowing would be going on? Non-dual.
Exactly. So, that's already a hint about where we're headed. But let's do some other things first. Uhhhh, Yes. So, first of all, I want to review some things about um... the sort of process that emptiness is... how emptiness is meant to be leading to liberation. And that process is actually... This is from the 18th chapter of Nāgārjuna's main text. And in the 18th chapter, what he says is... mameti ahameti kṣīṇe bāhyādhyātmam eva ca nirudhyate hy upādānaṃ tad-abhāvāj janmanaḥ kṣayaḥ My screen is a little... Actually, this is kind of terribly in the way.
mameti ahameti kṣīṇe bāhyādhyātmam eva ca nirudhyate hy upādānaṃ tad-abhāvāj janmanaḥ kṣayaḥ Internally and externally, when I and my have ceased... I wouldn't even need to use the thoughts, but you could put it in there. When I and my have ceased... These are my translations, by the way. Appropriation ceases. Through the cessation of appropriation, birth ceases. So, if anyone is familiar with the 12 links of dependent origination, that describes the process that leads to samsaric, cycling in samsara. So, samsara is also called the cycle of, of becoming, the bhavacakra, the wheel of becoming. And there's even a kind of traditional depiction in the Tibetan world of this wheel, there's like a demon. Maybe I'll show you a picture later. But, uh, uh, and uh, it represents different aspects of that process and what, and different places you can end up, so to speak. But, uh, the, uh... There are 12 aspects of that process that cycle through to lead one to be compulsively reborn in samsara. But also, in a way, they are kind of you know, it's also pointing to a compulsive process that's happening all the time, not just about rebirth, but every moment. And uh, that process, the main part of that process, you could say, involves uh a, a, thirst, tṛṣṇā, to be, bhava, right? Just the thirst to be, that has to do with, with a sense of an I, that same kind of I, Right? Which is the personal identity that is the target of the analysis into selflessness, not emptiness. So at that first layer that we've been talking about, the sense that there is some kind of essential I or identity, somewhere in the mind-body system. And that sense of essential I is what's driving, there isn't that kind of an I, but on early Buddhism what does exist is the thirst to kind of make that happy and to not suffer and to just continue to be, to kind of survive, for that I to survive. And that is what is driving this process. So when you have put an end to that, that, that root cause, which is basically ignorance, right? Not basically, it is ignorance at the first level, the fixation on that sense of I. When you put an end to that, that's, that's the root kleśa, the root affliction. When you put an end to that, then you don't produce karma. And when you don't produce karma, you don't perpetuate samsara. Right? And then on the early model, you attain nirvāṇa during your lifetime, that's nirvāṇa with a remainder, and then you die and you attain nirvāṇa without remainder. The remainder is the karmic remainder that's still occurring, but you're not producing new karma. Okay? Everyone remember that? That's clear? So what these verses refer to is that, like, you know, it's not saying anything new in a way. That, it's just saying that if you can get rid of this idea of I and mine, what's the mine or my? That is, so there's I, the unchanging, absolute, unitary, controlling, experiencing Self, capital S, the ātman, which actually doesn't exist. Right? We're all clear on that. And then the mine, or the my, is what it owns, which is the mind-body stuff. So when your sense of I is gone, you can't, there's also the sense that this is mine, also goes away. So this is called the ātmīya in Sanskrit. So there's the ātman, the ātman and the ātmīya. The I, or the self, and the self-owned. The ātman is the Self, capital S, and the ātmīya is what is owned by the Self. Okay? Meaning the psychophysical aggregates, what belongs to the Self, or what's under the control of this imaginary Self, the imaginary control of the imaginary Self. Okay? So here this is expressed with pronouns, māma means mine, and aham means I, is what's there in Sanskrit. So that's like clear. Okay. That's just kind of standard, you know, Buddhist theory uh... from the, and so Nāgārjuna is just kind of reiterating, but everyone, all Buddhist scholars of his time were fully familiar with. And then he says, karma-kleśa-kṣayād mokṣaḥ Through the cessation of karma and afflictive mental states, or kleśa, comes liberation. So that's what we just said, right? In a way, that statement is just a restatement of this. Because what's the kleśa that's going on here? It's the kleśa that causes one to think I and my. In other words, it's ignorance. Ignorance about, not about the world yet, that’s not, it's not emptiness yet, it's not about emptiness yet, it's about just a sense like, ah, there's an I here and this is mine. Okay? So if you get rid of that kleśa, that root kleśa, you get rid of all the other kleśas, especially attachment and aversion, which means you're no longer feeling compelled to engage in karmic actions. So those have been used up, and therefore you attain liberation from samsara. Okay? And then he says, karma-kleśā vikalpataḥ
te prapañcāt prapañcāstu śūnyatāyāṃ nirudhyate Karma and afflictive mental states come from concepts, vikalpa, or nam tok རྣམ་རྟོག in Tibetan, yea nam tok རྣམ་རྟོག . And they, and they come from fabrication. Fabrication, however, ceases in emptiness. So there's this word, which I didn't actually put, oh yeah, there it is, prapañca. It's a really, fabrication is one translation that Jay Garfield recommended to me. We'll talk about some other possible translations. But uh, prapañca is a really key idea here. And that is something kind of new, in a way. Like Nāgārjuna is introducing something that leads us past just personal selflessness to that idea of the selflessness even of the dharmas, of the supposed elements. Right? So this is moving into Mahāyāna philosophy now. So, and even this is a very interesting. Karma and afflictive mental states come from concepts. All right? In what sense? So what's a concept here? Well, one type of model that you can think of that we also discussed earlier is that there's a kind of pre-conceptual moment. Maybe I should show you that, actually, come to think of it. Yes, there we go. Okay. So you remember this model we had? Because you can't see it? Oh, I thought I put it on screen mirroring. Okay. Well, here we go. So this model, right? And then you get these different moments, right? So we can think of this moment of interpretation as, uh... this moment of interpretation as being conceptual. And this is eventually what really becomes very clear in later philosophical analysis of cognition in the works of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti. And they're going to say there is a pre-conceptual and therefore non-conceptual moment in perception that then is conceptualized. So when, when, one way of thinking of what Nāgārjuna is saying is that it is actually our conceptual framework. So we have a um, a... What we have is a grasping or fixation on personal identity. And there's a conceptual framework that's going with that. And we're interpreting everything through that framework. So, so when we see something, we go, oh, that's good or that's bad. Even a very minimal kind of conceptualization like that, right? Very minimal conceptualization that's already... like it's almost not even... we almost hardly notice it. We don't realize we're conceptualizing. That when we're doing that, the reason we're conceptualizing is that in some sense we're conceptualizing things because we're trying to decide if they're good or bad for us at a very basic level. So the claim is that even higher order concepts are actually rooted in this kind of getting and avoiding, getting and avoiding. That's good, that's bad. And this is actually similar in very interesting ways to the inactive perspective that Francesco Varela and Evan Thompson and Eleanor Roche first developed in The Embodied Mind. And then Evan has continued with a lot of different work in that area. So, uh... When we're conceptualizing, we're not just picking out categories in the world. We're actually constructing categories based upon our, based upon basically like we want to make this self-happy and avoid suffering. But the self-model we're working with, as we discussed before, is like we're trying to make a square circle happy or not suffer. You know? So our self-model is already distorted, which means that this whole process doesn't work, right? Because we can't make a non-existent entity happy. So, again, we can think of evolutionary reasons why we might, or why our cognitive systems might have developed this illusory sense of a false self. You know? But setting all that aside, what we know, not the claim in the Buddhist context is, regardless of whether that was good for us for samsaric survival, from this point of view of really solving the problem of suffering, it's maladaptive to have that illusory false self as the basis for our conceptual framework. So Nāgārjuna is saying that this conceptualization that disturbing, occurring at the level of interpretation is uh... that that conceptualization is, um... because it's distorted, it's leading to a distorted intention to action. And remember, this intention to action, that's karma, right? So the... that distorted intention to action that emerges from that conceptualization is what's driving the whole process. But... let me go back...
I know.
The final frontier. So... Uh... It is a screen grab from Star Trek, actually. Uh, uh so, uh... That conceptualization is distorted, it leads to karma. So if we stop that distorted conceptualization, we don't produce karma anymore. Okay? So it doesn't mean, very importantly, like, the kind of intentions that a uh, arhat has that's still alive, you know, it's not like they just stop moving. Right? They're still alive and they still do things. But they don't... and there's even debates about do arhats feel pain if they step on a thorn, does an arhat feel pain or not? You know, and things like that. Even though they're in nirvāṇa. So the question is, you know, those kinds of things. So the I... idea is that there's still a process going on, like the arhat makes his way in the world, he or she or he makes their way in the world, but they're not producing the kinds of intentions that produce karma. Okay? That perpetuates samsara. Because samsara is specifically perpetuated by the kind of intention that is about, I need to live. This thing needs to be happy. Keep it going. Right? Which doesn't mean if you have that, you stop or you know, you don't want to live anymore. But it's just that that particular kind of causal process of life is stopped. And that's why also, you know, in Mahāyāna, they can say that a Buddha is still doing activities, but not with karmic intentions. Right? So it's not like karmic... it's not like activity in and of itself, it has to be driven by karma. Okay? You can have actually the same word in Sanskrit. Karma is translated two ways in Tibetan. One is le and one is thrinle. And le means karma. And thrinle means enlightened activities, what Buddhas do. But it's actually the same word in Sanskrit. So, uh, so... The problem is this distorted is what's going on with the distortion. And... The, that in of course, we know that this process is like a cyclical process. It's just it's reinforcing that kleśas, which produce more karma, which produce more kleśa, which reinforce the kleśas and so on. Right? So and the point here is that the interpretation is distorted by ignorance. But now the Nāgārjuna is going to point to how something pre-conceptual is distorted by ignorance. Like not even just that we have a pre-conceptual, we have a conceptual moment where we get some like sense data, you just see, you know, the world. And you of course, it's not just a picture of the world, like you're still have your appetite and so on. And that conditions what you're seeing, but it's still not being conceptualized in that moment. And then you do this interpretation. Oh, that's good. That's bad. I want this and I want that. Right? And then you approach or avoid or, you know, try to do something. But the idea is there's a pre-conceptual thing. It's still not like a just a picture of the world, but it's not distorted by conceptuality. But it is, for Nāgārjuna, somehow still caught in something that is actually before concepts.
All right? And that means it's not just about, in a sense, for Nāgārjuna that means it's not just about, not, not, not just distorting your things in relation to a sense of self, like a conceptual self model, it's actually distorting all experience. And that this distortion is, and this is this kind of then dzin, this, you know, grasping to reality or grasping to truth, fixation on reality, the reality habit, the just sense of seeing everything in a certain way, even pre-conceptually. Before you're conceptualizing it as, because since all conceptualizations are, this is good, that's bad, this is the sense of feeling real that comes before even saying that's good, that's bad. You see what I'm saying? Do you understand? Like if I really just, you know, knew right away that this, let's say, you know, for some reason I'm a vase collector, but that this, you know, I'm in a dream or something, and I know I'm in a dream, and there's this thing, it's pointless to even think about it, right? Because it's just a dream. I'm not that much of an obsessive vase collector that I even do it in my dreams. Maybe some of us are, but... Right? So if I don't have a sense like this is real, I'm not even going to bother to conceptualize it. I'm just, my, my, my system is just going to ignore it. I'm not even going to pay attention to it. Right? I don't, if I'm, you know, dying of thirst, I don't bother to run to the mirage. If it doesn't look real to me, I'm not going to go there. And I'm not even, in a way, not even going to see it. Okay? Like the invisible gorilla. So the fact of feeling real precedes the conceptualizations that involve that self-model, that false self-model. You get it? So what accounts for that sense of feeling real even before you conceptualize? That's what... were, wer... like what's required for concepts. Where specifically, when we're using this word vikalpa, concepts, we're specifically talking about concepts that are in the framework of the self-model, that are about getting and avoiding, that are afflicted, already confused. Okay? So again, if we go back to this diagram for a second, when I'm doing this conceptualization at the level of interpretation, I'm doing that on the basis of seeing things that feel real. So this conceptualization is caught up in that self-model, but it requires a sense of seeing real things in order for it to operate. Okay? And of course, it's that seeing real things that even if you get rid of, even if we get rid of the distortion, even if we get rid of the distortion of the self-model in this interpretation, so what happens if we get rid of the... of this uh, eh, uh, they... So this is distorted by ignorance, specifically the ignorance of the self-model. If I get rid of that, I stop having intentions that produce karma and samsara ends. But I would still have a reality-based... I'm still conceptualizing. I'm in nirvāṇa, but I'm alive, and I'm still conceptualizing, making my way through concepts. And in that context, as an arhat, and in that context, what's happening, I'm conceptualizing on the basis of a reality-model. Not a self-model, but a reality-model. Because I have not eliminated the kind of what's causing the world to look real to me. And remember, if the world just looks real to me, which means like, oh, you know in a, in finely grained terms, that the infinitesimally small bits of mind and matter are truly existent, then I can't change it, because it's stuck in its nature, in its essence. So I've gotten rid of the self-model, and I'm not walking around interpreting the world in terms of the self-model, but I am walking around interpreting the world in terms of a reality-model, or an essential reality-model, to be more precise. So what accounts for that essential reality-model, that's prapañca. That makes conceptualization possible. Okay? Sure, ask a question.
Can you hear me? Yes? What is the relation between prapañca and imprint? Is it the same? Uh, no. Because an imprint is not active, and prapañca is active.
But you have imprints that are the basis for prapañca. They are the basis for prapañca? Yeah. But prapañca, imprints are latent, and prapañca is something that's active, that's occurring. In Tibetan it's called tropa. So to think of tropa, on my view at least, as just an imprint would be a mistake, because it has to be actually functional in cognition. Okay? Okay. Can you put the model on the screen, please? This one? Yes. And intention is dualistic, or is it? Yeah, so all of this is, is... Eh, right now this is representing... This is the process uh, where uh, you know ignorance is operated of either here, or even if you got rid of that, and I could delete all of these little balloons, right? You'd still have this ignorance here.
Okay? So if I, you know, so... You know, when we're active as an ordinary person, we're not an Arhat yet, then we become an Arhat, and we get rid of ignorance at that level, the first level, which is what's called the afflictive ignorance that causes samsara, which is basically what causes, or what constitutes that dysfunctional self-model that is the framework for our conceptualizations. Then I get rid of it, and that happens. But this process, right... continues, but we don't have, actually what we'd have to do is we delete, like, imprint. There's no imprint anymore. Right? So now we can still, as an Arhat, we can still, like, make our way in the world, but the way I'm presenting this is that the Arhats are still conceptualizing based upon a reality model, because they haven't eliminated the ignorance at this level. Okay. Okay? But uh, uh, uh, but what about uh, uh what about animals? They have no language, and what is the role of language in this? Uh you... yea I said before, there's some famous work on concept use in pigeons. Did you hear me talk about that? Yeah, so pigeons use concepts. This doesn't have to be linguistic. So the mere capacity to kind of interpret sensory experience... Without language. Without language. That's already concepts. So the definition of a concept here, and here I'm kind of bringing in somewhat anachronistically, because he's not until... Dignāga is like, I mean, fifth century, and Dharmakīrti is sixth, seventh century, so they're after Nāgārjuna, but you can see traces of their ideas in this earlier phase, and the idea here is that all that a concept means is repeatability. So if you train a pigeon to see Charlie Brown, by, you know when it sees Charlie Brown, it pecks a lever and it gets food. So you train that to do that, and then every time it sees Charlie Brown,
then excuse me, then eventually it recognizes Charlie Brown and it knows to peck the lever so it can get food. And it sees Charlie Brown again and again and again, whether he's upside down or just the top of his head or whatever, and the pigeons can do that. And the rea, and for the Buddhists, what's going on is it's basically the repeated cognition, what's called the repeated cognition, which means basically this is that again, this is that again, because each of those instances of Charlie Brown is slightly different, but the pigeon sees them as the same, just as we do, like this is a petal and this is a petal and this is a petal. Your actual sensory content of each of these is slightly different, right? But we think they're the same, they're a petal. So we create sameness where there is no sameness. And that's how our process... And the reason we do that is not just for fun, we do that because we're trying to survive and preferably not just survive, but get happy. Okay? So that's the idea of how the conceptual system, the baseline conceptual system operates and even higher-order concepts are built like that. And animals... So animals can be dualistic? They are dualistic, not can. They are dualistic? They are. All consciousness of this type is dualistic. And so dualism has nothing to do with language? No. But it does have something to do with language, which is that if you're being linguistic, you're necessarily being conceptual, which means you're necessarily being dualistic. Okay? If you're being conceptual, you're necessarily being dualistic. If you're being dualistic, you're not necessarily being conceptual and you're not necessarily using language. You can be dualistic before language. And we're going to find that, we're going to talk about that maybe soon. Like real soon. Okay? Is that clear? Yes, that was crucial. Yes, I'm glad you asked. So the key with conceptualization is, so why is conceptualization inherently... So first of all, language as being inherently conceptual should be obvious, because what's a concept now? The notion of a concept is a concept that involves repeatability. This is that again. This is that again. This is that again. Now I'm using language to do that, but when a pigeon identifies Charlie Brown repeatedly, and they deliberately make the images of Charlie Brown different sizes, different angles, and so on, right? Uh, the pigeon is saying, this is Charlie Brown again, but it's not saying that because it can't speak and it doesn't have language, but it has a way of categorizing non-linguistically. Right? So, you know, Jonardon Ganeri wrote an article about this as what he calls feature placement. I think drawing on Strawson's work. P.F. Strawson's work. And so the basic idea is like, you know, this here now kind of thing, but it's not linguistic. But it's got like a subject predicate structure, a very simple subject predicate structure. And so you just do again, this is again, here again, this again, this again, you know, water again, water again, water, predator again, predator again, predator again. But not, you know, with words. So, while you're conceptualizing, which we do and animals do, why is it inherently dualistic?
Because I said so. No. It's a bad reason. Why?
Why? Yes?
Um, because there needs to be a subject-object formation. Why?
That's correct. But why? Because... Why am I conceptualizing? Because you have the perception of a self. But what's the purpose of the conceptualization? To serve yourself, to avoid an... Yes, exactly. To avoid or approach something. Yes. To be an agent acting in the world. So because concepts are about agents acting in the world, to get what they want and avoid what they don't want, they're inherently dualistic. Right? Does that make sense? So that's why concepts are inherently dualistic. Yeah? And this is nice because I had exactly the question about this. Does the Arhat live, still have a subject-object duality because they're still a dharma that is, that they see as an ultimately real thing? Or have they abandoned subject-object because they don't have a self model anymore? They have no, on... So on most interpretations the Arhats have not realized selflessness of things. And so that means that they have, that they have a sense that what they're seeing is real. The whole is not real, but there's like stuff that is causing their perceptions. Real stuff causing their perceptions. And they're still operating, therefore, in the basic features of this model, they're just not conceptualizing things through the self model. But they're still dualistic, yes. That would be the usual interpretation. Yep. You know, they're not in perpetual, non-conceptual wakefulness. Or that's not fully manifest for them. That would be kind of the typical interpretation that I'm passing along here. Okay? That's still quite an accomplishment. It's very important for us to not think, oh, wow, you know, gee, the poor Arhat, he hasn't... It's like, you know, if any of you guys manage to be an Arhat, please tell me how, because it would be nice not to be caught in samsara. Wouldn't it? So it's like we sometimes think, oh, gee, those guys, you know, what losers. Like, no, it's not, not at all. It's like, greatest respect. It's just that that is, you know, in another way... Okay, here's another thing, the way to think about this. The Arya even, the Mahāyāna Arya, who's directly realized emptiness, in meditative equipoise, there's not even the distortion at this level of perception.
Oh, it means meditative concentration. A meditative state on emptiness.
Meditative, so when the Aryas are in equipoise on emptiness, they're fully absorbed, directly realizing emptiness... And so an Arya or a noble one is one who has directly, has achieved what's called the path of seeing, which means they have direct experience of the ultimate. Although experience of sounds dualistic, so we have to be careful there, because it's not going to be dualistic. And it's, that's non conceptual. But then they come out of the experience and until they're a Buddha, they go back into the conceptual framework.
The world comes back, so to speak, like the dualistic world comes back, but it's kind of thinned out. And that's why it looks dreamlike, like this force of that habit is much less. Right? And when you become a completely awakened, then the framework, the dualistic framework falls away completely. And yet you're still able to operate. But you're not at all operating anymore with that dualistic framework. So this would be, you could say that the perceptions are still in a way, just because they haven't completely eliminated that second level of ignorance that causes the reality habit. There's still some of, some distortion even in the perception, there's still dualistic perception in the post meditative state. Everyone clear about this? Okay. So this process is operating for them as well. It's just that there's not, it's not an afflictive process.
All right? So then the question that really comes up is, okay, so what is the distortion at this level?
That distortion is going to be the thing that is eliminated in emptiness. And that's identified here as prapañca.
Okay? So I'm just going to use that word for now. Prapañca. Prapañca. Okay? I'm going to pra punch ya.
And... Sorry. It's like one of those bad dad jokes kind of level of... pra punch ya.
So, but now you'll remember it probably. So prapañca, what is it? It's what is required for concepts to occur, which remember are inherently dualistic. Okay? And what happens, what's emptiness? Like, why are we meditating on emptiness? So prapañca is what's creating that sense somehow of reality, of things having fixed essences. At least it's doing at least that much. But it may be even subtler than that. And we'll come there in a second. And uh, uh, what happens in emptiness is that it disappears, it stops. It ceases in emptiness. And a very interesting little side note here, for the logical side note, if as, if you look at the Tibetan version of this text, when they translated it, the Tibetans tended to translate these Sanskrit texts very precisely, and developed a way of writing Tibetan that was deliberately almost like a code. So it's not quite like natural Tibetan. You have to sort of learn to read it a little bit. Canonical Tibetan. And in the Sanskrit language, this says śūnya tāyam. So you have the word śūnyatā, and that's in a case, a locative case, śūnyatā yam. So uh, fabrication ceases in emptiness, śūnyatā yam. But in the Tibetan, they have an instrumental case, śūnyatā yah. And you can hear even just śūnyatā yam or śūnyatā yah. So they're very close to each other, and you can imagine that when someone's... and the way they're written as well is quite similar. So you can imagine somebody when they're writing, kind of making a small mistake, and then it gets carried along. But it's very interesting to think about the difference between those two. If something is an instrument, then you're getting... Your that, s...then it would be that prapañca ceases by means of emptiness. Like emptiness is doing something. But here it's prapañca ceases in emptiness, which makes emptiness seem like, and which I think is the best interpretation, is more like a kind of state, like a meditative state, or and not just meditative. It's a way of, it's a way in which the cognitive system is operating, if you like. A way in which it's a type of consciousness, emptiness consciousness. It's specifically a consciousness that doesn't have prapañca. So emptiness meditation, whatever else it has to be, is it has to be niṣprapañca, or trö dral in Tibetan. And this is, so that's the negative of prapañca. Un-prapañca. Punch ya, no, uh, prapañca. Non-prapañca.
Okay, so in Tibetan, trö dral, it's a negative. Erik Pema Kunzang, I think, for good reasons, translated this without the negation and called it simplicity. So you may have heard that term, and seen that term in some translations. But I think especially when we're working through the Mādhyamika text, it's useful to keep the negative.
So you could say non-prapañca, or just absence of prapañca. Right? Unfabricated or unfabrication, non-fabrication.
So then the question is, okay, we know, first of all, the things we know is that,
this prapañca has to be in place, you know, if this way of interpreting things is correct, then prapañca is operating even at the level of perception,
that it is going to be responsible for whatever makes conceptualizations possible.
Right? That it is also in some fashion, but accounts for the difference between an Arhat, who's gotten rid of the self model, but not the reality model. Okay? So, what is it?
Okay, so one's very, so I've talked, so, you know, one translation is fabrication, another translation is conceptual structuring. Is it also compoundedness? Because uncompounded luminosity, is that unfabricated luminosity?
No. Well, so there's another, people also use unfabricated for ma chö. And chö means to like fix something, so it means you're not trying to fix it. So that's different, that's not the same, that has a totally different thing. It not directly has anything to do with prapañca. It's more like about technique, actually.
And we'll talk about it later, or Eric will, I'm sure.
Because it has to do with effort, whether you make effort and why you can't be making effort, which will become clearer later, maybe already is clearer, because one of the things about conceptuality is it necessarily involves effort. But it might not seem like it. We'll talk about that later.
These... whatever it is, it's somehow, conceptual structuring maybe is already kind of not that great. I used to like that translation and now I don't, because it's sort of missing the point that it's pre-conceptual.
It certainly seems to be somehow what accounts for dualistic cognition, pre-conceptual dualistic cognition.
Yeah, I don't like that at all. That's even worse, because some people translate prapañca, Tropa, as like, oh, it's like the profusion of concepts. But this is something that, as you can see from the verse, it's not like the profusion of concepts means it's like after conceptualization. This comes before conceptualization.
So you could say profusion of concepts, it has to be what makes concepts possible, and you could say the habit of conceptualization, which you could say involves the habit of the imputation of essence onto objects, like in order to c... conceptualizing things, we conceptualize them on the basis of the reality habit. And the reality habit has to involve some notion of essences, that things have essences. So maybe prapañca is just like imputation of essences, but like pre-conceptual imputation of essences.
That seems, that's okay as a reading of prapañca.
But I think that in itself is maybe not quite enough to say, like, what else do you need? What else do you need to conceptualize? What goes with dualistic cognition? Is that enough to conceptualize?
Or what's required to even be dualistic, for there to be objects and subjects?
What else do you need?
Coffee, it looks like.
Based on the... I can't take it anymore. What else do you need?
Pizza? Any? Yeah? Yeah, unique consciousness. But are we going to get rid of awareness? No, that's key. Right? We're not just like... Because if we get rid of awareness, then, you know, can't save, can't serve beings to help them find their way out of suffering. You can't be a Buddha if you're unconscious. Maybe the AI Buddha will make that and then you'll be...
Okay, so what? You definitely need consciousness, but we want to preserve, in some sense, that. So what else do you need? Attachment and aversion on this model could certainly be... There's the thirst, the self-model involves that thirst. But attachment and... We're saying you can have conceptualizations without attachment and aversion. You could still be conceptualizing.
Right?
Like a high-stage bodhisattva on arhat can be involved in the post-meditative state where they're, you know, consciously using language and so on, but they're not caught in attachment and aversion.
At least, sometimes not, at least. So then what?
How about, let's say, what's required for the concept of a vase?
What kinds of things? Just like brainstorm here.
No, listen, not the mind. Yeah, okay, the mind. You need discernment? Yes. And what does that mean you need? What's discernment?
Yes, so you need that repeatability. So you need memory of what? An object that's...
You need senses? Yeah. What else, though? How is that, how is the object presented that makes it possible to conceptualize it? Yeah, you definitely need duality. We've got space. Who said space? The artist said space, of course. You need space. You have to have space. And if you have memory, what else do you need? Time.
Space and time.
What does Nāgārjuna say about time?
Let's have a look at what Nāgārjuna says about time.
I'm going to try to make this go back to what it was supposed to be before. I don't know what happened. Oh, you flipped it. You changed the display, didn't you? You bastard. No, excuse me.
That's right, you did. That's what happened.
Mirror for built-in display. Now don't do anything. Okay. Can you see okay?
Is it big enough?
If the present and the future were dependent on the past... Ah, we might as well just follow khenpo's request, quickly do them.
This is the 19th chapter, the analysis of time.
If the present and future were dependent on the past, then the present and the future would exist in the past. If, however, the present and the future do not exist in the past, then would the present and the future be dependent on the past? Moreover, without depending on the past, there is no establishment of those two. Therefore, the present and the future do not exist through this procedure. The remaining two permutations should point out the nature of triads, such as superior, inferior and middling, and also the singularity and such of these ordered triads. So this is about a triadic analysis. You have three things that depend on each other. And time is especially easy for this analysis because it's very clear that it makes no sense for even though we have three things that depend on each other, we also intuitively know like the past and the future, the past... the present and the future don't exist in the past. We know just like... unless you're a certain kind of philosopher, we don't intuitively think that the present and the future exist in the past. Right? So that means that it's quite easy for us to see that the present and the future have to be defined in terms of the past. And yet, they don't exist in the past. So how can they be depending on something if they're not existing yet? Alternatively, the past doesn't exist in the present, and the future also doesn't exist in the present. So how could the present be defined as that which is after the past and before the future? It would be like defining it in terms of squirkels. Defining it in terms of non-existent things. They don't exist.
And of course, if the past and the future exist in the present, then there's no time. Because what time means is something that flows from past to present to future.
So now there's no time. So therefore, time does not ultimately exist.
I really need a coffee now. And this can also be done... I think I can just remember this one. na gataṃ gamyate tāvat nāgataṃ gamyate tathāgatāgata-vinirmuktaṃ gamyamānaṃ na gamyate It is not the case that one is now walking where one already walked. One is not walking where one has not yet walked. And without the spots where one already walked and where one has not yet walked, the currently walked upon spot is not being walked upon.
In a way, Candrakīrti, it's actually the verb he uses is gam, which means to go. But like gehen in German, that also kind of means you're going by walking. So in, especially as a monk, he wasn't allowed to ride in vehicles, so he had to be walking when he was going. So I've translated this as meaning walking. And it's also very clear from his commentary, because it even gets to the point where he's looking at the atoms in the foot. Like where is the walked upon spot right now? It's like you're walking, it's right here.
But is that spot, how do you define the right here, is that it's not there and it's not back here. It's not the atom in front and not the atom in back, like of your heel. Right? And where is the motion occurring? Where is walking happening right now? It has to be defined in terms of like where you just walked and where you have not yet walked. But where you just walked requires that there be, it has to be defined in terms of motion. But there's no motion happening where you just walked, and there's no motion happening where you're about to walk. Because the motion is happening now, but you have to define that in terms of where you just walked and where you didn't yet walk. Which means you can't define it.
Huh, what? So next time you go for a walk, and he clearly seemed to be thinking of doing, this is a formal kind of walking meditation on what's called the caṅkrama. You go for a walk, a very deliberate mindfulness style walk. And he's like, you know, meditating on the ireality of walking. That is, there's no ultimately no walking, no motion. Another triadic thing. There's no ultimate, ultimately, even our essentialized concept of activity. So I'm assuming I'm going to, you know, on the break here, some of you... I'm going to find some of you like frozen on the stairs.
Help! Help him! He studied too much Mādhyamika!
Yes. Okay, so, prapañca, maybe it's also about things like space and time. Right? So what does that leave us? No duality, no space, no time.
I think it's time for a break. Okay, we come back a quarter after, is that okay? Okay.
sönam diyi thamché sikpa nyi thopné nyepai dranam phamjé né kyega nachi balap trukpa yi sipai tsolé drowa drölwar shok Oh Lhaso.
Dropping down into the body. Simply present here and now.
And now bringing to mind our motivation and the Mahāyāna. Our highest motivation is to attain awakening for the sake of all beings.
Alright, let's begin. So, this is where we ended. What does it mean to know emptiness?
Before we go on, does anyone want to offer an opinion?
Can you know emptiness as an object?
So, what does that mean?
Maybe sort of means knowing that you don't know, like a complete dropping of all your own assumptions. Maybe. So, the way you get rid of... one of the ways to understand ignorance, avidyā, is also can be called ājñāna, not knowing. So, we're going to eliminate not knowing by not knowing.
And there is no we that can know it, and there is no it that can be known. Yes, good. So, what does that mean? What kind of knowing is that? Anyone want to...
What kind of knowing is it when you have a subject knowing an object? How can you describe that? What's that structure? What? Yes, dualistic, or in Western philosophy, intentionality as a subject-object intentionality. It's a dualistic structure. So, if we don't have that structure, what kind of knowing would be going on? Non-dual.
Exactly. So, that's already a hint about where we're headed. But let's do some other things first. Uhhhh, Yes. So, first of all, I want to review some things about um... the sort of process that emptiness is... how emptiness is meant to be leading to liberation. And that process is actually... This is from the 18th chapter of Nāgārjuna's main text. And in the 18th chapter, what he says is... mameti ahameti kṣīṇe bāhyādhyātmam eva ca nirudhyate hy upādānaṃ tad-abhāvāj janmanaḥ kṣayaḥ My screen is a little... Actually, this is kind of terribly in the way.
mameti ahameti kṣīṇe bāhyādhyātmam eva ca nirudhyate hy upādānaṃ tad-abhāvāj janmanaḥ kṣayaḥ Internally and externally, when I and my have ceased... I wouldn't even need to use the thoughts, but you could put it in there. When I and my have ceased... These are my translations, by the way. Appropriation ceases. Through the cessation of appropriation, birth ceases. So, if anyone is familiar with the 12 links of dependent origination, that describes the process that leads to samsaric, cycling in samsara. So, samsara is also called the cycle of, of becoming, the bhavacakra, the wheel of becoming. And there's even a kind of traditional depiction in the Tibetan world of this wheel, there's like a demon. Maybe I'll show you a picture later. But, uh, uh, and uh, it represents different aspects of that process and what, and different places you can end up, so to speak. But, uh, the, uh... There are 12 aspects of that process that cycle through to lead one to be compulsively reborn in samsara. But also, in a way, they are kind of you know, it's also pointing to a compulsive process that's happening all the time, not just about rebirth, but every moment. And uh, that process, the main part of that process, you could say, involves uh a, a, thirst, tṛṣṇā, to be, bhava, right? Just the thirst to be, that has to do with, with a sense of an I, that same kind of I, Right? Which is the personal identity that is the target of the analysis into selflessness, not emptiness. So at that first layer that we've been talking about, the sense that there is some kind of essential I or identity, somewhere in the mind-body system. And that sense of essential I is what's driving, there isn't that kind of an I, but on early Buddhism what does exist is the thirst to kind of make that happy and to not suffer and to just continue to be, to kind of survive, for that I to survive. And that is what is driving this process. So when you have put an end to that, that, that root cause, which is basically ignorance, right? Not basically, it is ignorance at the first level, the fixation on that sense of I. When you put an end to that, that's, that's the root kleśa, the root affliction. When you put an end to that, then you don't produce karma. And when you don't produce karma, you don't perpetuate samsara. Right? And then on the early model, you attain nirvāṇa during your lifetime, that's nirvāṇa with a remainder, and then you die and you attain nirvāṇa without remainder. The remainder is the karmic remainder that's still occurring, but you're not producing new karma. Okay? Everyone remember that? That's clear? So what these verses refer to is that, like, you know, it's not saying anything new in a way. That, it's just saying that if you can get rid of this idea of I and mine, what's the mine or my? That is, so there's I, the unchanging, absolute, unitary, controlling, experiencing Self, capital S, the ātman, which actually doesn't exist. Right? We're all clear on that. And then the mine, or the my, is what it owns, which is the mind-body stuff. So when your sense of I is gone, you can't, there's also the sense that this is mine, also goes away. So this is called the ātmīya in Sanskrit. So there's the ātman, the ātman and the ātmīya. The I, or the self, and the self-owned. The ātman is the Self, capital S, and the ātmīya is what is owned by the Self. Okay? Meaning the psychophysical aggregates, what belongs to the Self, or what's under the control of this imaginary Self, the imaginary control of the imaginary Self. Okay? So here this is expressed with pronouns, māma means mine, and aham means I, is what's there in Sanskrit. So that's like clear. Okay. That's just kind of standard, you know, Buddhist theory uh... from the, and so Nāgārjuna is just kind of reiterating, but everyone, all Buddhist scholars of his time were fully familiar with. And then he says, karma-kleśa-kṣayād mokṣaḥ Through the cessation of karma and afflictive mental states, or kleśa, comes liberation. So that's what we just said, right? In a way, that statement is just a restatement of this. Because what's the kleśa that's going on here? It's the kleśa that causes one to think I and my. In other words, it's ignorance. Ignorance about, not about the world yet, that’s not, it's not emptiness yet, it's not about emptiness yet, it's about just a sense like, ah, there's an I here and this is mine. Okay? So if you get rid of that kleśa, that root kleśa, you get rid of all the other kleśas, especially attachment and aversion, which means you're no longer feeling compelled to engage in karmic actions. So those have been used up, and therefore you attain liberation from samsara. Okay? And then he says, karma-kleśā vikalpataḥ
te prapañcāt prapañcāstu śūnyatāyāṃ nirudhyate Karma and afflictive mental states come from concepts, vikalpa, or nam tok རྣམ་རྟོག in Tibetan, yea nam tok རྣམ་རྟོག . And they, and they come from fabrication. Fabrication, however, ceases in emptiness. So there's this word, which I didn't actually put, oh yeah, there it is, prapañca. It's a really, fabrication is one translation that Jay Garfield recommended to me. We'll talk about some other possible translations. But uh, prapañca is a really key idea here. And that is something kind of new, in a way. Like Nāgārjuna is introducing something that leads us past just personal selflessness to that idea of the selflessness even of the dharmas, of the supposed elements. Right? So this is moving into Mahāyāna philosophy now. So, and even this is a very interesting. Karma and afflictive mental states come from concepts. All right? In what sense? So what's a concept here? Well, one type of model that you can think of that we also discussed earlier is that there's a kind of pre-conceptual moment. Maybe I should show you that, actually, come to think of it. Yes, there we go. Okay. So you remember this model we had? Because you can't see it? Oh, I thought I put it on screen mirroring. Okay. Well, here we go. So this model, right? And then you get these different moments, right? So we can think of this moment of interpretation as, uh... this moment of interpretation as being conceptual. And this is eventually what really becomes very clear in later philosophical analysis of cognition in the works of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti. And they're going to say there is a pre-conceptual and therefore non-conceptual moment in perception that then is conceptualized. So when, when, one way of thinking of what Nāgārjuna is saying is that it is actually our conceptual framework. So we have a um, a... What we have is a grasping or fixation on personal identity. And there's a conceptual framework that's going with that. And we're interpreting everything through that framework. So, so when we see something, we go, oh, that's good or that's bad. Even a very minimal kind of conceptualization like that, right? Very minimal conceptualization that's already... like it's almost not even... we almost hardly notice it. We don't realize we're conceptualizing. That when we're doing that, the reason we're conceptualizing is that in some sense we're conceptualizing things because we're trying to decide if they're good or bad for us at a very basic level. So the claim is that even higher order concepts are actually rooted in this kind of getting and avoiding, getting and avoiding. That's good, that's bad. And this is actually similar in very interesting ways to the inactive perspective that Francesco Varela and Evan Thompson and Eleanor Roche first developed in The Embodied Mind. And then Evan has continued with a lot of different work in that area. So, uh... When we're conceptualizing, we're not just picking out categories in the world. We're actually constructing categories based upon our, based upon basically like we want to make this self-happy and avoid suffering. But the self-model we're working with, as we discussed before, is like we're trying to make a square circle happy or not suffer. You know? So our self-model is already distorted, which means that this whole process doesn't work, right? Because we can't make a non-existent entity happy. So, again, we can think of evolutionary reasons why we might, or why our cognitive systems might have developed this illusory sense of a false self. You know? But setting all that aside, what we know, not the claim in the Buddhist context is, regardless of whether that was good for us for samsaric survival, from this point of view of really solving the problem of suffering, it's maladaptive to have that illusory false self as the basis for our conceptual framework. So Nāgārjuna is saying that this conceptualization that disturbing, occurring at the level of interpretation is uh... that that conceptualization is, um... because it's distorted, it's leading to a distorted intention to action. And remember, this intention to action, that's karma, right? So the... that distorted intention to action that emerges from that conceptualization is what's driving the whole process. But... let me go back...
I know.
The final frontier. So... Uh... It is a screen grab from Star Trek, actually. Uh, uh so, uh... That conceptualization is distorted, it leads to karma. So if we stop that distorted conceptualization, we don't produce karma anymore. Okay? So it doesn't mean, very importantly, like, the kind of intentions that a uh, arhat has that's still alive, you know, it's not like they just stop moving. Right? They're still alive and they still do things. But they don't... and there's even debates about do arhats feel pain if they step on a thorn, does an arhat feel pain or not? You know, and things like that. Even though they're in nirvāṇa. So the question is, you know, those kinds of things. So the I... idea is that there's still a process going on, like the arhat makes his way in the world, he or she or he makes their way in the world, but they're not producing the kinds of intentions that produce karma. Okay? That perpetuates samsara. Because samsara is specifically perpetuated by the kind of intention that is about, I need to live. This thing needs to be happy. Keep it going. Right? Which doesn't mean if you have that, you stop or you know, you don't want to live anymore. But it's just that that particular kind of causal process of life is stopped. And that's why also, you know, in Mahāyāna, they can say that a Buddha is still doing activities, but not with karmic intentions. Right? So it's not like karmic... it's not like activity in and of itself, it has to be driven by karma. Okay? You can have actually the same word in Sanskrit. Karma is translated two ways in Tibetan. One is le and one is thrinle. And le means karma. And thrinle means enlightened activities, what Buddhas do. But it's actually the same word in Sanskrit. So, uh, so... The problem is this distorted is what's going on with the distortion. And... The, that in of course, we know that this process is like a cyclical process. It's just it's reinforcing that kleśas, which produce more karma, which produce more kleśa, which reinforce the kleśas and so on. Right? So and the point here is that the interpretation is distorted by ignorance. But now the Nāgārjuna is going to point to how something pre-conceptual is distorted by ignorance. Like not even just that we have a pre-conceptual, we have a conceptual moment where we get some like sense data, you just see, you know, the world. And you of course, it's not just a picture of the world, like you're still have your appetite and so on. And that conditions what you're seeing, but it's still not being conceptualized in that moment. And then you do this interpretation. Oh, that's good. That's bad. I want this and I want that. Right? And then you approach or avoid or, you know, try to do something. But the idea is there's a pre-conceptual thing. It's still not like a just a picture of the world, but it's not distorted by conceptuality. But it is, for Nāgārjuna, somehow still caught in something that is actually before concepts.
All right? And that means it's not just about, in a sense, for Nāgārjuna that means it's not just about, not, not, not just distorting your things in relation to a sense of self, like a conceptual self model, it's actually distorting all experience. And that this distortion is, and this is this kind of then dzin, this, you know, grasping to reality or grasping to truth, fixation on reality, the reality habit, the just sense of seeing everything in a certain way, even pre-conceptually. Before you're conceptualizing it as, because since all conceptualizations are, this is good, that's bad, this is the sense of feeling real that comes before even saying that's good, that's bad. You see what I'm saying? Do you understand? Like if I really just, you know, knew right away that this, let's say, you know, for some reason I'm a vase collector, but that this, you know, I'm in a dream or something, and I know I'm in a dream, and there's this thing, it's pointless to even think about it, right? Because it's just a dream. I'm not that much of an obsessive vase collector that I even do it in my dreams. Maybe some of us are, but... Right? So if I don't have a sense like this is real, I'm not even going to bother to conceptualize it. I'm just, my, my, my system is just going to ignore it. I'm not even going to pay attention to it. Right? I don't, if I'm, you know, dying of thirst, I don't bother to run to the mirage. If it doesn't look real to me, I'm not going to go there. And I'm not even, in a way, not even going to see it. Okay? Like the invisible gorilla. So the fact of feeling real precedes the conceptualizations that involve that self-model, that false self-model. You get it? So what accounts for that sense of feeling real even before you conceptualize? That's what... were, wer... like what's required for concepts. Where specifically, when we're using this word vikalpa, concepts, we're specifically talking about concepts that are in the framework of the self-model, that are about getting and avoiding, that are afflicted, already confused. Okay? So again, if we go back to this diagram for a second, when I'm doing this conceptualization at the level of interpretation, I'm doing that on the basis of seeing things that feel real. So this conceptualization is caught up in that self-model, but it requires a sense of seeing real things in order for it to operate. Okay? And of course, it's that seeing real things that even if you get rid of, even if we get rid of the distortion, even if we get rid of the distortion of the self-model in this interpretation, so what happens if we get rid of the... of this uh, eh, uh, they... So this is distorted by ignorance, specifically the ignorance of the self-model. If I get rid of that, I stop having intentions that produce karma and samsara ends. But I would still have a reality-based... I'm still conceptualizing. I'm in nirvāṇa, but I'm alive, and I'm still conceptualizing, making my way through concepts. And in that context, as an arhat, and in that context, what's happening, I'm conceptualizing on the basis of a reality-model. Not a self-model, but a reality-model. Because I have not eliminated the kind of what's causing the world to look real to me. And remember, if the world just looks real to me, which means like, oh, you know in a, in finely grained terms, that the infinitesimally small bits of mind and matter are truly existent, then I can't change it, because it's stuck in its nature, in its essence. So I've gotten rid of the self-model, and I'm not walking around interpreting the world in terms of the self-model, but I am walking around interpreting the world in terms of a reality-model, or an essential reality-model, to be more precise. So what accounts for that essential reality-model, that's prapañca. That makes conceptualization possible. Okay? Sure, ask a question.
Can you hear me? Yes? What is the relation between prapañca and imprint? Is it the same? Uh, no. Because an imprint is not active, and prapañca is active.
But you have imprints that are the basis for prapañca. They are the basis for prapañca? Yeah. But prapañca, imprints are latent, and prapañca is something that's active, that's occurring. In Tibetan it's called tropa. So to think of tropa, on my view at least, as just an imprint would be a mistake, because it has to be actually functional in cognition. Okay? Okay. Can you put the model on the screen, please? This one? Yes. And intention is dualistic, or is it? Yeah, so all of this is, is... Eh, right now this is representing... This is the process uh, where uh, you know ignorance is operated of either here, or even if you got rid of that, and I could delete all of these little balloons, right? You'd still have this ignorance here.
Okay? So if I, you know, so... You know, when we're active as an ordinary person, we're not an Arhat yet, then we become an Arhat, and we get rid of ignorance at that level, the first level, which is what's called the afflictive ignorance that causes samsara, which is basically what causes, or what constitutes that dysfunctional self-model that is the framework for our conceptualizations. Then I get rid of it, and that happens. But this process, right... continues, but we don't have, actually what we'd have to do is we delete, like, imprint. There's no imprint anymore. Right? So now we can still, as an Arhat, we can still, like, make our way in the world, but the way I'm presenting this is that the Arhats are still conceptualizing based upon a reality model, because they haven't eliminated the ignorance at this level. Okay. Okay? But uh, uh, uh, but what about uh, uh what about animals? They have no language, and what is the role of language in this? Uh you... yea I said before, there's some famous work on concept use in pigeons. Did you hear me talk about that? Yeah, so pigeons use concepts. This doesn't have to be linguistic. So the mere capacity to kind of interpret sensory experience... Without language. Without language. That's already concepts. So the definition of a concept here, and here I'm kind of bringing in somewhat anachronistically, because he's not until... Dignāga is like, I mean, fifth century, and Dharmakīrti is sixth, seventh century, so they're after Nāgārjuna, but you can see traces of their ideas in this earlier phase, and the idea here is that all that a concept means is repeatability. So if you train a pigeon to see Charlie Brown, by, you know when it sees Charlie Brown, it pecks a lever and it gets food. So you train that to do that, and then every time it sees Charlie Brown,
then excuse me, then eventually it recognizes Charlie Brown and it knows to peck the lever so it can get food. And it sees Charlie Brown again and again and again, whether he's upside down or just the top of his head or whatever, and the pigeons can do that. And the rea, and for the Buddhists, what's going on is it's basically the repeated cognition, what's called the repeated cognition, which means basically this is that again, this is that again, because each of those instances of Charlie Brown is slightly different, but the pigeon sees them as the same, just as we do, like this is a petal and this is a petal and this is a petal. Your actual sensory content of each of these is slightly different, right? But we think they're the same, they're a petal. So we create sameness where there is no sameness. And that's how our process... And the reason we do that is not just for fun, we do that because we're trying to survive and preferably not just survive, but get happy. Okay? So that's the idea of how the conceptual system, the baseline conceptual system operates and even higher-order concepts are built like that. And animals... So animals can be dualistic? They are dualistic, not can. They are dualistic? They are. All consciousness of this type is dualistic. And so dualism has nothing to do with language? No. But it does have something to do with language, which is that if you're being linguistic, you're necessarily being conceptual, which means you're necessarily being dualistic. Okay? If you're being conceptual, you're necessarily being dualistic. If you're being dualistic, you're not necessarily being conceptual and you're not necessarily using language. You can be dualistic before language. And we're going to find that, we're going to talk about that maybe soon. Like real soon. Okay? Is that clear? Yes, that was crucial. Yes, I'm glad you asked. So the key with conceptualization is, so why is conceptualization inherently... So first of all, language as being inherently conceptual should be obvious, because what's a concept now? The notion of a concept is a concept that involves repeatability. This is that again. This is that again. This is that again. Now I'm using language to do that, but when a pigeon identifies Charlie Brown repeatedly, and they deliberately make the images of Charlie Brown different sizes, different angles, and so on, right? Uh, the pigeon is saying, this is Charlie Brown again, but it's not saying that because it can't speak and it doesn't have language, but it has a way of categorizing non-linguistically. Right? So, you know, Jonardon Ganeri wrote an article about this as what he calls feature placement. I think drawing on Strawson's work. P.F. Strawson's work. And so the basic idea is like, you know, this here now kind of thing, but it's not linguistic. But it's got like a subject predicate structure, a very simple subject predicate structure. And so you just do again, this is again, here again, this again, this again, you know, water again, water again, water, predator again, predator again, predator again. But not, you know, with words. So, while you're conceptualizing, which we do and animals do, why is it inherently dualistic?
Because I said so. No. It's a bad reason. Why?
Why? Yes?
Um, because there needs to be a subject-object formation. Why?
That's correct. But why? Because... Why am I conceptualizing? Because you have the perception of a self. But what's the purpose of the conceptualization? To serve yourself, to avoid an... Yes, exactly. To avoid or approach something. Yes. To be an agent acting in the world. So because concepts are about agents acting in the world, to get what they want and avoid what they don't want, they're inherently dualistic. Right? Does that make sense? So that's why concepts are inherently dualistic. Yeah? And this is nice because I had exactly the question about this. Does the Arhat live, still have a subject-object duality because they're still a dharma that is, that they see as an ultimately real thing? Or have they abandoned subject-object because they don't have a self model anymore? They have no, on... So on most interpretations the Arhats have not realized selflessness of things. And so that means that they have, that they have a sense that what they're seeing is real. The whole is not real, but there's like stuff that is causing their perceptions. Real stuff causing their perceptions. And they're still operating, therefore, in the basic features of this model, they're just not conceptualizing things through the self model. But they're still dualistic, yes. That would be the usual interpretation. Yep. You know, they're not in perpetual, non-conceptual wakefulness. Or that's not fully manifest for them. That would be kind of the typical interpretation that I'm passing along here. Okay? That's still quite an accomplishment. It's very important for us to not think, oh, wow, you know, gee, the poor Arhat, he hasn't... It's like, you know, if any of you guys manage to be an Arhat, please tell me how, because it would be nice not to be caught in samsara. Wouldn't it? So it's like we sometimes think, oh, gee, those guys, you know, what losers. Like, no, it's not, not at all. It's like, greatest respect. It's just that that is, you know, in another way... Okay, here's another thing, the way to think about this. The Arya even, the Mahāyāna Arya, who's directly realized emptiness, in meditative equipoise, there's not even the distortion at this level of perception.
Oh, it means meditative concentration. A meditative state on emptiness.
Meditative, so when the Aryas are in equipoise on emptiness, they're fully absorbed, directly realizing emptiness... And so an Arya or a noble one is one who has directly, has achieved what's called the path of seeing, which means they have direct experience of the ultimate. Although experience of sounds dualistic, so we have to be careful there, because it's not going to be dualistic. And it's, that's non conceptual. But then they come out of the experience and until they're a Buddha, they go back into the conceptual framework.
The world comes back, so to speak, like the dualistic world comes back, but it's kind of thinned out. And that's why it looks dreamlike, like this force of that habit is much less. Right? And when you become a completely awakened, then the framework, the dualistic framework falls away completely. And yet you're still able to operate. But you're not at all operating anymore with that dualistic framework. So this would be, you could say that the perceptions are still in a way, just because they haven't completely eliminated that second level of ignorance that causes the reality habit. There's still some of, some distortion even in the perception, there's still dualistic perception in the post meditative state. Everyone clear about this? Okay. So this process is operating for them as well. It's just that there's not, it's not an afflictive process.
All right? So then the question that really comes up is, okay, so what is the distortion at this level?
That distortion is going to be the thing that is eliminated in emptiness. And that's identified here as prapañca.
Okay? So I'm just going to use that word for now. Prapañca. Prapañca. Okay? I'm going to pra punch ya.
And... Sorry. It's like one of those bad dad jokes kind of level of... pra punch ya.
So, but now you'll remember it probably. So prapañca, what is it? It's what is required for concepts to occur, which remember are inherently dualistic. Okay? And what happens, what's emptiness? Like, why are we meditating on emptiness? So prapañca is what's creating that sense somehow of reality, of things having fixed essences. At least it's doing at least that much. But it may be even subtler than that. And we'll come there in a second. And uh, uh, what happens in emptiness is that it disappears, it stops. It ceases in emptiness. And a very interesting little side note here, for the logical side note, if as, if you look at the Tibetan version of this text, when they translated it, the Tibetans tended to translate these Sanskrit texts very precisely, and developed a way of writing Tibetan that was deliberately almost like a code. So it's not quite like natural Tibetan. You have to sort of learn to read it a little bit. Canonical Tibetan. And in the Sanskrit language, this says śūnya tāyam. So you have the word śūnyatā, and that's in a case, a locative case, śūnyatā yam. So uh, fabrication ceases in emptiness, śūnyatā yam. But in the Tibetan, they have an instrumental case, śūnyatā yah. And you can hear even just śūnyatā yam or śūnyatā yah. So they're very close to each other, and you can imagine that when someone's... and the way they're written as well is quite similar. So you can imagine somebody when they're writing, kind of making a small mistake, and then it gets carried along. But it's very interesting to think about the difference between those two. If something is an instrument, then you're getting... Your that, s...then it would be that prapañca ceases by means of emptiness. Like emptiness is doing something. But here it's prapañca ceases in emptiness, which makes emptiness seem like, and which I think is the best interpretation, is more like a kind of state, like a meditative state, or and not just meditative. It's a way of, it's a way in which the cognitive system is operating, if you like. A way in which it's a type of consciousness, emptiness consciousness. It's specifically a consciousness that doesn't have prapañca. So emptiness meditation, whatever else it has to be, is it has to be niṣprapañca, or trö dral in Tibetan. And this is, so that's the negative of prapañca. Un-prapañca. Punch ya, no, uh, prapañca. Non-prapañca.
Okay, so in Tibetan, trö dral, it's a negative. Erik Pema Kunzang, I think, for good reasons, translated this without the negation and called it simplicity. So you may have heard that term, and seen that term in some translations. But I think especially when we're working through the Mādhyamika text, it's useful to keep the negative.
So you could say non-prapañca, or just absence of prapañca. Right? Unfabricated or unfabrication, non-fabrication.
So then the question is, okay, we know, first of all, the things we know is that,
this prapañca has to be in place, you know, if this way of interpreting things is correct, then prapañca is operating even at the level of perception,
that it is going to be responsible for whatever makes conceptualizations possible.
Right? That it is also in some fashion, but accounts for the difference between an Arhat, who's gotten rid of the self model, but not the reality model. Okay? So, what is it?
Okay, so one's very, so I've talked, so, you know, one translation is fabrication, another translation is conceptual structuring. Is it also compoundedness? Because uncompounded luminosity, is that unfabricated luminosity?
No. Well, so there's another, people also use unfabricated for ma chö. And chö means to like fix something, so it means you're not trying to fix it. So that's different, that's not the same, that has a totally different thing. It not directly has anything to do with prapañca. It's more like about technique, actually.
And we'll talk about it later, or Eric will, I'm sure.
Because it has to do with effort, whether you make effort and why you can't be making effort, which will become clearer later, maybe already is clearer, because one of the things about conceptuality is it necessarily involves effort. But it might not seem like it. We'll talk about that later.
These... whatever it is, it's somehow, conceptual structuring maybe is already kind of not that great. I used to like that translation and now I don't, because it's sort of missing the point that it's pre-conceptual.
It certainly seems to be somehow what accounts for dualistic cognition, pre-conceptual dualistic cognition.
Yeah, I don't like that at all. That's even worse, because some people translate prapañca, Tropa, as like, oh, it's like the profusion of concepts. But this is something that, as you can see from the verse, it's not like the profusion of concepts means it's like after conceptualization. This comes before conceptualization.
So you could say profusion of concepts, it has to be what makes concepts possible, and you could say the habit of conceptualization, which you could say involves the habit of the imputation of essence onto objects, like in order to c... conceptualizing things, we conceptualize them on the basis of the reality habit. And the reality habit has to involve some notion of essences, that things have essences. So maybe prapañca is just like imputation of essences, but like pre-conceptual imputation of essences.
That seems, that's okay as a reading of prapañca.
But I think that in itself is maybe not quite enough to say, like, what else do you need? What else do you need to conceptualize? What goes with dualistic cognition? Is that enough to conceptualize?
Or what's required to even be dualistic, for there to be objects and subjects?
What else do you need?
Coffee, it looks like.
Based on the... I can't take it anymore. What else do you need?
Pizza? Any? Yeah? Yeah, unique consciousness. But are we going to get rid of awareness? No, that's key. Right? We're not just like... Because if we get rid of awareness, then, you know, can't save, can't serve beings to help them find their way out of suffering. You can't be a Buddha if you're unconscious. Maybe the AI Buddha will make that and then you'll be...
Okay, so what? You definitely need consciousness, but we want to preserve, in some sense, that. So what else do you need? Attachment and aversion on this model could certainly be... There's the thirst, the self-model involves that thirst. But attachment and... We're saying you can have conceptualizations without attachment and aversion. You could still be conceptualizing.
Right?
Like a high-stage bodhisattva on arhat can be involved in the post-meditative state where they're, you know, consciously using language and so on, but they're not caught in attachment and aversion.
At least, sometimes not, at least. So then what?
How about, let's say, what's required for the concept of a vase?
What kinds of things? Just like brainstorm here.
No, listen, not the mind. Yeah, okay, the mind. You need discernment? Yes. And what does that mean you need? What's discernment?
Yes, so you need that repeatability. So you need memory of what? An object that's...
You need senses? Yeah. What else, though? How is that, how is the object presented that makes it possible to conceptualize it? Yeah, you definitely need duality. We've got space. Who said space? The artist said space, of course. You need space. You have to have space. And if you have memory, what else do you need? Time.
Space and time.
What does Nāgārjuna say about time?
Let's have a look at what Nāgārjuna says about time.
I'm going to try to make this go back to what it was supposed to be before. I don't know what happened. Oh, you flipped it. You changed the display, didn't you? You bastard. No, excuse me.
That's right, you did. That's what happened.
Mirror for built-in display. Now don't do anything. Okay. Can you see okay?
Is it big enough?
If the present and the future were dependent on the past... Ah, we might as well just follow khenpo's request, quickly do them.
This is the 19th chapter, the analysis of time.
If the present and future were dependent on the past, then the present and the future would exist in the past. If, however, the present and the future do not exist in the past, then would the present and the future be dependent on the past? Moreover, without depending on the past, there is no establishment of those two. Therefore, the present and the future do not exist through this procedure. The remaining two permutations should point out the nature of triads, such as superior, inferior and middling, and also the singularity and such of these ordered triads. So this is about a triadic analysis. You have three things that depend on each other. And time is especially easy for this analysis because it's very clear that it makes no sense for even though we have three things that depend on each other, we also intuitively know like the past and the future, the past... the present and the future don't exist in the past. We know just like... unless you're a certain kind of philosopher, we don't intuitively think that the present and the future exist in the past. Right? So that means that it's quite easy for us to see that the present and the future have to be defined in terms of the past. And yet, they don't exist in the past. So how can they be depending on something if they're not existing yet? Alternatively, the past doesn't exist in the present, and the future also doesn't exist in the present. So how could the present be defined as that which is after the past and before the future? It would be like defining it in terms of squirkels. Defining it in terms of non-existent things. They don't exist.
And of course, if the past and the future exist in the present, then there's no time. Because what time means is something that flows from past to present to future.
So now there's no time. So therefore, time does not ultimately exist.
I really need a coffee now. And this can also be done... I think I can just remember this one. na gataṃ gamyate tāvat nāgataṃ gamyate tathāgatāgata-vinirmuktaṃ gamyamānaṃ na gamyate It is not the case that one is now walking where one already walked. One is not walking where one has not yet walked. And without the spots where one already walked and where one has not yet walked, the currently walked upon spot is not being walked upon.
In a way, Candrakīrti, it's actually the verb he uses is gam, which means to go. But like gehen in German, that also kind of means you're going by walking. So in, especially as a monk, he wasn't allowed to ride in vehicles, so he had to be walking when he was going. So I've translated this as meaning walking. And it's also very clear from his commentary, because it even gets to the point where he's looking at the atoms in the foot. Like where is the walked upon spot right now? It's like you're walking, it's right here.
But is that spot, how do you define the right here, is that it's not there and it's not back here. It's not the atom in front and not the atom in back, like of your heel. Right? And where is the motion occurring? Where is walking happening right now? It has to be defined in terms of like where you just walked and where you have not yet walked. But where you just walked requires that there be, it has to be defined in terms of motion. But there's no motion happening where you just walked, and there's no motion happening where you're about to walk. Because the motion is happening now, but you have to define that in terms of where you just walked and where you didn't yet walk. Which means you can't define it.
Huh, what? So next time you go for a walk, and he clearly seemed to be thinking of doing, this is a formal kind of walking meditation on what's called the caṅkrama. You go for a walk, a very deliberate mindfulness style walk. And he's like, you know, meditating on the ireality of walking. That is, there's no ultimately no walking, no motion. Another triadic thing. There's no ultimate, ultimately, even our essentialized concept of activity. So I'm assuming I'm going to, you know, on the break here, some of you... I'm going to find some of you like frozen on the stairs.
Help! Help him! He studied too much Mādhyamika!
Yes. Okay, so, prapañca, maybe it's also about things like space and time. Right? So what does that leave us? No duality, no space, no time.
I think it's time for a break. Okay, we come back a quarter after, is that okay? Okay.
sönam diyi thamché sikpa nyi thopné nyepai dranam phamjé né kyega nachi balap trukpa yi sipai tsolé drowa drölwar shok Oh Lhaso.
