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Session 9 — Analyzing Reality: The Logic of “Neither One Nor Many”
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- Buddhist Classics and Philosophy
Location:
- Gomde Germany-Austria
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Excerpt
John D. Dunne presents the Madhyamaka argument that phenomena are neither truly one nor many. This analysis demonstrates the absence of intrinsic existence while preserving the functioning of conventional reality.
Description
In this session, John D. Dunne introduces one of the central Madhyamaka arguments: the analysis of phenomena as neither truly one nor truly many. Through careful reasoning, he shows that if something were inherently one, it could not have parts, and if it were inherently many, those parts could not form a coherent whole. This line of inquiry reveals that phenomena cannot withstand ultimate analysis and therefore lack intrinsic existence. At the same time, appearances continue to function conventionally, illustrating the compatibility of emptiness and dependent arising. The session deepens the understanding of how logical analysis can dismantle deeply held assumptions about reality.
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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01:12:09
Okay.
Welcome back, everybody.
So...
I just say that I do some verses of invocation, and it's very traditional to do that. And, you know, everyone kind of does their own thing to a certain extent, you may have already noticed. And what I do is I do a verse... I do two verses in Sanskrit because we still have those verses in their original language. And the English translations are not so beautiful. And then I do one verse that was originally in Sanskrit, but that uh, uh, we don't have the Sanskrit anymore, so I do the Tibetan because, again, I'm not super fond of the English. Maybe I'm a little snobbish about it, I don't know. And then the last one is only in Tibetan. So the first verse is from Dharmakīrti's Pramāṇa-vārttika, but it's about but it's about Samantabhadra, so people assume it's the Bodhisattva Samantabhadra, but, you know, who knows? And it uh... is saying that, Uh Samant... I pay homage to Samantabhadra, the one in whom the web of concepts has been torn apart, who has vast and profound bodies, and who shines light everywhere. And then the second one is from Nāgārjuna's Achintya Stava, one of, Nāgārjuna wrote six philosophical texts and then a series of praises, and in one of them he says, you're not real, you're not unreal, you're not discontinuous, you're not continuous, you're not permanent, you're not impermanent, to you the non-dual I bow. And then the third one is the one that you've been doing with Khenpo in the mornings, the sh... not the long praise of Mañjuśrī, but the short one. And then the fourth one, Khenpo also does, Khenpo does that one too when he teaches, and then, as do many people, and then, because that one is about, as you've seen in the English, it's about sort of being inspired with wisdom. And then the fourth one is a sort of invocation of the guru, which many of you already know too. Okay, just thought you might be interested. So if anyone comes up with beautiful English translations, just let me know. Maybe they're out there already. And also, part of this idea is someday, maybe our Buddhist university will help produce scholar practitioners who will write their own independent, originally composed in German or French or some European language, English, independent verses, meaning, you know, within their own cultural mode, which is that last of those four that I do, the last one is written originally in Tibetan, actually. Okay.
Okay, so I invite you to just take a moment to settle the mind. You've been practicing with Eric, who doesn't like it when I call him Lama Eric. But anyway. I'm just allowing the mind to settle.
No need to get caught in a web of concepts. No need to push them away either.
And now bringing up our motivation in the Mahāyāna, in our Mahāmudrā Dzogchen tradition. Our highest motivation is the aspiration to attain awakening for the sake of all beings. And let's begin. So um...
Uh... righto, here we go.
Oh, that's, here we are. Uh... could ask if there are any, maybe this is dangerous to do this right away, but if there are any, like, if anyone has a really, like, like, I gotta ask this question right now, you can do that. Otherwise we'll definitely have time for questions later. Okay, and then move forward, unless there's an urgent question.
Okay, let's go on. Yes.
I guess I don't fully grasp yet how the insight of emptiness um, rids us of suffering. Because I feel like the way it was explained that it is more through a sort of secondhand insight of the nature of impermanence, but I feel like what it's really pointing to is something more direct. Yeah, yes it is. And so Khenpo's point wasn't that impermanence and emptiness are the same thing, but that if you really kind of fully understand impermanence, it sort of leads you to emptiness. I think that's what I understand him to be trying to say. But if, you're right, like, realizing impermanence is not the same as realizing emptiness. Emptiness is as... and we'll see exactly why emptiness is connected to the relief of suffering. That's going to be part of what we do right now. Okay, but that's a great question because he did, I don't think Khenpo, you know, I mean, I'm not, I don't mean to speak for Khenpo, who, it was great, by the way, to have him here, I wish he could continue, but he has to travel. But um... Uh... you know, I think the point is that, and Rinpoche has been talking a lot about impermanence, not just recently even, but, you know, for some time, and that it is a sort of pathway into a number of different things, and one of them is emptiness. Because part of, as we will see, part of what emptiness really means is interdependence, and part of what interdependence requires is change. Like, without change, there's no interdependence, and change is impermanence. So if you really understand impermanence, then the pathway from that to interdependence, and therefore the pathway to emptiness, because you can't have interdependence, two things that are completely autonomously existent can't be interdependent, because they can't relate. Totally autonomously existent is what we call intrinsically established things, things that have a svabhāva, they can't relate to each other. So interdependence is impossible. So if you really understand change, impermanence, that means you see that change then leads you into, oh, well, change is like what happens when things are in relation to each other, and things that are in relationship to each other have to be empty of essence. So it's that kind of a pathway, as I see it. Okay, quick review of some goals. We had this term of the Hīnayāna, which or we could even call this the common vehicle, you know and uh, uh the uh... so this is basically the kind of perspective that comes out of early Buddhism. And we see, when people talk about the Theravāda tradition, it's not exactly the same. No, no, there is a claim that, and I think a reasonable claim, that it traces back to the very earliest period, but it's not going to be quite identical to, it's had some historical development, but some of these things would apply to modern day Theravāda. The ideal practitioner is a monk, the goal is to become an arhat and to kind of attain a type of nirvana that's just a cessation. Remember that nirvana without a remainder, right? Uh, like you can attain nirvana while you're alive, and then basically you just wait for the karma that's made your aggregates occur to run down, and then basically you die, and then it's all over. And whether something happens after that, the Buddha refused to say. Then in Mahāyāna some five... approximately 500 years after the Buddha, this becomes kind of publicly available, as it were. The ideal practitioner is a monk also, but also especially a lay person, especially sort of in literary expression. It's often lay people who are used to kind of represent the bodhisattva. Not all the time, but you see that often. And a bodhisattva, being intent on awakening, intent on becoming a Buddha for the sake of relieving the suffering of all sentient beings. And it has bodhicitta, that intention or aspiration, that awakening mind, bodhi, awakening mind, citta. And this word bodhi comes from the same verb as Buddha. So bodhi means awakening, and Buddha means awakened. And so that's where you're headed is to become a Buddha and to attain this unlocated nirvana. You're neither in saṃsāra because wisdom stops saṃsāra. Stops your... More accurately, wisdom stops you from being trapped in saṃsāra. So also in that longer Mañjuśrī prayer, it talks about the prison of saṃsāra. So you no longer are imprisoned, but you can still do a prison break. Right? So you you don't... like you, you get, you get people out. And the reason you do that is that you are, you have compassion. So you don't just escape out of the prison. You're not caught there anymore, but you're there to help beings escape, so to speak, or maybe just escape at first. But is the perspective that came up this morning with Khenpo La, actually, is that we won't be, we probably won't say too much about this this week. But, and Rinpoche talked about a little bit last week, but is the idea that actually all the... the final destiny of all beings is awakening, is Buddhahood uh, in this tradition. And we said, you know, there's also that we see how this occurs in art. So on the left is called an aniconic representation of the Buddha with just an empty throne. Sometimes you also see like just his footprints. And then that's from around 200 BCE, I think, and this one of the tōraṇa, one of the kind of gates at the great stupa of Sanchi. And then the Buddha is back, you know, suddenly, starting around the start of the Common Era, where now he's depicted in physical form. Okay? And then we talked about Nāgārjuna. I just wanted to say that um... the you can... and that the main text that we'll be looking at a little bit is this text, Wisdom Prajña, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, the root verses on the Mādhyamika philosophy, the middle way. We'll see a little more what middle may, middle way means soon. But if you want to read more about Nāgārjuna and sort of the academic accounts of Nāgārjuna, you can find that this in the introduction to this volume that just came out, which is a translation of a very important and interesting text by Nāgārjuna, considered generally one of his six philosophical texts, some debate about that, but generally considered that he's authored it and also that it's one of his philosophical texts. It certainly has philosophical content, but it's also presented as a letter to a king, a Sātavāhana king, and it's advice about like how to lead a good life as a lay person and also how to be a ruler, how to be a leader. So it's a very interesting text that way. And in the introduction in this text, and Sara, esp... Sara McClintock, my co-author especially, did a lot of work on the introduction, and I contributed too, of course. It's a quite good sort of summary of the state of the scholarship about Nāgārjuna as a person and some of the historical details and so on and then some important about his work in general and then the Ratnāvalī itself, the precious garland itself. So this is available... Did we ever get a copy? Oh, okay. So it's available, and you don't have to buy it. I'm sure somebody's already uploaded a PDF somewhere, but if you want to buy it, you can. So anyway... Uh... Yes, money, money. So let's just review a couple of things. For the Abhidharma... So this term is a... This is a way of referring to the followers of Abhidharma. Abhidharma is this... Basically, without getting into detail, is this style of analysis, philosophical analysis that is typical of the early period. Uh, and for them, the ignorance is the belief in the true ultimate existence of things that are actually just made of irreducible elements and not even that much. So you could say... Now, ignorance in the end is primarily about... And maybe I should have changed this, actually, but ignorance is definitely... If I think that this is ultimately real, that there's one ultimately real thing here, the vase or the flower, as we were talking about, if I think that holes are ultimately real, I'm already caught in ignorance. Right? Because they're going to say that this is, they're really just irreducible elements here. But the reason... That's a kind of secondary expression of ignorance for them, because the main problem is that we take that to be... We take this kind of psycho physical stuff. Our intuition is not that there's just one thing in here that is the self, but that kind of the whole package constitutes the self. And that there's like one... There's one person here, one thing, which is a person that is here. And so there's a very famous dialogue between a monk Nāgasena and a Greek Bactrian king, you know one of the kings who is left behind from Alexander's adventures in Asia, a descendant of that, the King Melinda or Mithrandar, his Greek name. And they have dialogue, basically, you know, the king says, Oh, what do you mean I'm not a person? You know, look at me, there's one person here, right? That's me. I have a self. And Nāgasena says, Well, how'd you get here? Well, I came in a chariot. And he said, Yeah, well, is the... Okay, well, is the chariot the wheels? Is it the axle? Is it the reins? Is it this? Is it that? So that same part-whole analysis goes way back. And that's used especially to counteract kind of the most fundamental and perhaps common sense intuition, which is that there's a single person here, and there isn't one element that constitutes that person. It's all of them together somehow, or some key elements together that constitute this one thing, which is therefore a whole, right? Remember that idea of a distributed entity? So that neither one nor enemy, uh 'enemy', that neither one nor 'many' analysis, right? That part whole analysis is really targeting that intuition. And what... So for the Abhidharmikas, there is something that you will see when you look for things. You're trying to find out what's really here. You do end up coming to saying what is really here, which is these irreducible elements that would be in case of something physical. And then what's really here, right, is irreducible. Some of them are physical elements, but also irreducible mental elements. Okay, and they are ultimately real, for this first layer of philosophy. Okay? But the Mādhyamikas, and this is the term for a philosopher who follows the mādhyamaka, slightly different spelling in Sanskrit. This is a kind of adjectival form. They're also known as the Śūnyatāvādins, those who espouse or speak of emptiness, śūnyatā. Right, for them, what is ignorance? It's the belief that there's anything whatsoever that exists truly or ultimately by virtue of its essence, svabhāva. And that's what it means to exist ultimately, is to have an essence. We're going to find out what that means soon. And wisdom is just like, you know, in general, in Buddhist philosophy, you say, what is wisdom? It means, yathābhūta darśana in Sanskrit, which means seeing things as they truly are. So what are you seeing here? You're seeing emptiness. And I'm doing little quotation marks because how do you see emptiness? And that's going to be one of our big questions. So just again, somewhat as a review, both the Abhidharmikas and the Mādhyamikas, and we're talking about the Abhidharmikas, by the way, because Nāgārjuna is going to be reacting to them to a very great extent. All right. So the Abhidharmikas and Nāgārjuna, they're both going to agree that the aim is to eliminate suffering. Although the Mādhyamikas, also are focused on ending the suffering of everyone and actively participating in that. In other words, becoming a Buddha who's able to help all beings to do that. Right? So that is a key difference. And suffering is eliminated by eliminating its cause, which is ignorance. Everyone agrees on that. Ignorance is an error. It does not see the world the way it really is. And wisdom eliminates ignorance because it sees the way the world really is. Right? Okay. So all of that is kind of the same. A bit of a review in some way. Uh... So what did Abhidharmikas think? They maintained that there are holes, things that have parts and other kinds of distributed entities, like we talked about before, like a universal or a platonic form. That would be another example of this. Any of those kinds of things do not truly exist because they can be reduced to their parts. Right? You know, the flower is not one thing. We can say, what's the flower really? Well, it's really a bunch of petals and so on and so on. And then we could even take one of the petals and say, what's that really? Well, it's really a bunch of atoms interacting in a certain way. Right? So when we ask the question, what is it really? We keep going down, down, down, breaking further, further, further, until we get to something that can't be broken down any further. So that's called a reductionistic analysis, called reductionism. There is kinds of reductionism, but that's one. Sort of atomistic reductionism. Right? And you come down to this fundament... these kind of fundamental elements or parts that constitute everything. And they truly exist because they can't be reduced further. And, and what is said about them, as I said yesterday, is that what we mean by them not truly existing is that they have an intrinsic nature. They have a svabhāva. You can say that's an essence, intrinsic nature, a true identity, Uh, literally translatable as own being, svabhāva.
And yesterday we heard about the Ātman term. What's the difference between this Hindu term and this svabhāva? I think I have a...
Maybe I took that slide out. The Ātman being something like a soul or capital S self. Let's do this. We'll go here for a second. Okay, so... the Ātman can be thought of as a um... particular version of an essence. Okay? And that particular version of an essence is the essence of a person. So the Abhidharmakers are going after that. Right? So they're saying in this mind-body system, there isn't something that somehow is the essence of that system that maybe might be characterized as what the system altogether constitutes the system as a whole, for example, or constitutes the identity of the system as a single thing. Okay? Or that supports that or controls it. So that's the Ātman of a person, the pudgala of the pudgala. So when we talk about the essencelessness, the absence of that kind of self, we talk about the absence of a personal self. Okay? Or the essencelessness of persons, or you can say selflessness of persons, that's fine. And then what the Mādhyamakas are going to go after, and actually all Mahāyāna philosophers, is they're going to say that not just these elements, not only is there no person here, but the elements, just as the person lacks an essence, the elements also lack... the person lacks an essence or a self, the elements also lack any kind of essence. And you can even use the word self there. But of course, it kind of sounds silly to say that an atom is selfless, because atoms aren't living beings, so we don't think of them as having selves. So there it's better to say... So sometimes you hear about the two kinds of selflessness, the selflessness of persons and the selflessness of things, but we don't think of vases as having a self. Does anyone think of the vase as having a self? Sorry. You know, it's like, no, we don't really think that way. Right? You, you know. Did I insult you? No, it's like you don't really feel like that. Vases have essences, right? Things have essences. Persons maybe have selves, essential selves. So the Mahāyāna and the Mādhyamika is historically the first to do that. They're going to say that not only is there no essence of a person, which we can call a self, there's also no essence of things, and that's called the dharma nirāmaya, where nirāmaya can literally be rendered as selflessness, but in this context, we have to think of it as essencelessness. There's no essence. Okay? So...
Uh, where am I? So the Abhidharmikas are going to say that things have an essence. And one... so there are a few features of that essence that we really want to get to, right? And one of them, and Khenpo has been talking about this, like what's a svabhāva? And we're going to examine some of that. Uh, the... Uh... so when we say that these things have a svabhāva, what we're saying is that they exist ultimately. All right? And so what's a svabhāva? It's what a thing really is. Here are a few ways of thinking about it, and we'll come back to this, but, you know, what is an essence? Uh, first of all, you have these alternative translations, own being, nature, intrinsic nature, okay? And you could say what is an... One way to think about this is, what is, is, you know, when you're asking, what is... when you're trying to understand what this concept is pointing to, it's saying, it's kind of the answer to the question, what is X really?
And one way to think about what the essence is, is what the answer to that question when you finally stop referring to something else in order to answer the question. So let's take our vase again, all right? Or we'll take our flower.
So we say like, well, what is the flower really?
Right, it's a bunch of parts, so we say maybe like it's a petal and so on, and I say, okay, well, what's the petal really? It's a top and a bottom side. What's that really? What are the top really? The blah, blah, blah, we keep going down, down, down. And then we finally get to something in which we say, well, it's just, what's really there? A part less momentary bit of matter. And we say, what's that really? And we say, it's a part less momentary bit of matter. Right? So... Because we can't reduce further. When we're thinking of this in terms of reduction, and we keep reducing, reducing, reducing, we've gone as far down as we can go, so to speak, when we do a reductionistic analysis. Okay? You get that? So that means we've found the thing that has, that's now what the svabhāva is, or, you know, when we are able to answer that question, then we're pointing to the svabhāva of a thing. And there are a few things about that that are really key. First of all, what that means is that this thing exists in terms of its essence. It also means that if you have, like, just imagining, like let's say, this you know the smallest bit of matter, that thing, that identity of that smallest bit of matter needs to be stable. As long as that bit of matter is existent, right? Even if it's just for a moment, we can't say, oh, it just changed. Because then that's not what it really is. It's become something else. Change means becoming something else. So, for whatever duration there is of a thing that has a svabhāva, that nature, that identity has to be unchanging. Also, precisely in the way we've pointed to here, that identity is independent. It's autonomous. It has an identity that is not dependent on anything else for being what it is. The flower's identity depends on a whole lot of other things. But when we get all the way down to those infinitesimally small bits of matter, the idea is that that's it. Like, they don't depend on anything else for their identity. They are what they are in themselves. And sometimes you get this expression, from their own side. So part of what that also means is, we can say that in that Rangi Nguni, they're established from their own side. We use this word, drupa གྲུ་པ in Tibetan, or siddha in Sanskrit. We say things are established. What it means, it basically means they're existent, or they're even proven to be, right? But proven implies someone going through an act of proof. And that's not always what we mean by established. It just means that they exist that way. This is the way it is. Right? So when we say that the atom is established, this part less infinitesimally small bit of matter, the paramāṇu is established, established by virtue of its own svabhāva, its svabhāva siddha. We mean that it exists. It is the case that that's what it is, just in and of itself. It doesn't depend on anything. That svabhāva is stable, it's not going to change, as long as that thing exists. It is non-dependent. It also is objective. Okay, so one way we... It's a term we could use. What that means is, it doesn't matter how you look at it, or who looks at it. It is what it is, regardless of whatever cognition somebody might be having about it. Okay? Another, so that's a term that definitely you can see within the philosophy, but also when we try to translate that into kind of Western context, that's a very helpful term. The... I think that exists by virtue of its svabhāva, exists objectively. It's com... Not only is it independent of anything else, it's independent of our or any other sentient beings' cognition of it. Okay? It's also, if it exists by virtue of its svabhāva, it is context-independent. Or it's trans-contextual. That's also very important. This is sometimes when we talk about essential identities in the context of things like modal logic, you know, we can say that a thing that, when we talk about the essence of a thing, we can say that's what the thing is in every possible universe. Whatever is true of it, in any context you put it in, that remains true. You know, like I could have, in one universe maybe I have horns, in another universe I'm blue, or you know, in another universe I have five heads. But if there's something that's the same about me in all of those universes, then that's my essence. Okay? In all those possible worlds. So likewise, that means if you take something with a svabhāva and you put it out floating around Pluto, or you put it in another galaxy or whatever, or it's stuck in your ear or whatever it is, it doesn't matter where it is, that identity stays the same. It doesn... The identity doesn't change with context. Okay? So that could be true also of a person. Right? That you have a... If we're talking about persons as having an essence, that they have a context-independent identity, which by the way is especially typical of Western cultures, interestingly, in the modern period. We tend to have much more context-independent sense of our identity. Uh, and there's a whole thing there in what's called weird psychology. Western-educated industrialized rich democratic societies. Yes, it's a great acronym. It's very interesting. There's a whole thing. We did a meeting with the Dalai Lama, and Joe Hendricks at Harvard, who coined this term along with his colleagues, presented it to the Dalai Lama. It's a very interesting idea. So that's the kind of identity on a personal level we're also getting after. Like, oh, you have who you really are. It doesn't matter who you're talking to or what context you're in. You're always the same. That's your true authentic self. Like, no, it's not. That's your square circle. Okay? But we also then, not only do we think we have that about our self, we also have this about things. Okay? That somehow things just look real in a particular way. They look like they're just objectively truly real. I'm looking at the vase. It doesn't matter what my cognitive system is like. It doesn't matter what context we're in. It's just like the vase is what it is. That would be thinking that the vase itself is like intrinsically objectively real. Or I go down to whatever fundamental bits of whatever I think make up the universe and I say, oh, you know, doesn't matter who's observing it, doesn't matter whether you know, whether there's a conscious person seeing something or not or whatever. It's just like that thing. It doesn't matter whether it's in relation to other things. It just has, it is what it is in and of itself. Okay? And the idea here is just like we have an intuition about ourselves existing with a certain kind of essence. We have an intuition, which you might call, my old teacher, Robert Thurman, used to call this the reality habit, right? Which is in Tibetan, tendzin, grasping to reality. Sometimes you hear grasping to truth, but there denpa བདེན་པ really means reality. It means satya in Sanskrit. Grasping to reality. Like, oh, it's just real, that's real, that's real, that's real, that's real. In our cul... again, speaking in evolutionary terms, you know, maybe it's a good thing that our cognitive system evolved to just think that whatever is presented in our perception, for example, or even in our thought is real because it helps us to survive. And we don't become like our friend the philosopher mouse. Remember him? Poor fellow. He's a great philosopher, but didn't make it. In saṃsāra. But again, maybe that's now maladaptive, especially for us humans. Okay? So everyone get that point? So it's that reality habit, instead of being focused on ourselves, now there's an intuition just about things being like that. Okay. So, of course, the Abhidharmikas think that there are entities that exist like that, there are specifically these irreducible things, and the Mādhyamikas say there aren't.
Right? Why do you remember why? Why are the Mādhyamikas going to go after not just the reality habit in relation to our personal identity, but a reality habit in relationship even to the objects of the world? Why do they go after that?
Because they needed to be employed, and if they did that, then...
they'd have long careers at the monastic university trying to explain this to people.
Or it was just a hobby, you know? Is that why? Why did they do that? Do you remember? We did talk about that. What is the conclusion? Okay, so, in the early system, what's the problem? Suffering. What causes suffering? Karma and kleśa. Specific, what's the root kleśa? Ignorance. Ignorance about what? Personal identity. We think that this mind-body system constitutes or somewhere there is there or or is owned by a truly real independent, essentially, objectively real self. Right? We look for it. We do analysis. And we discover that all that's really here is just a bunch of infinitesimally, uh infinitesimal irreducible bits of mind and matter. Right? But they're real. Where did the infinitesimal bits of mind and matter come from? Who made them? Anybody?
The devil.
No, the creator did not make. Who made them? Who's the creator of the infinitesimal bits of mind and matter? Who made a... who made a... who... Where did the dharmas that make up your mind-body system come from? What caused them in the early system? What? Yeah, karma. Whose karma? Your karma. Your karma made everyone else's, no. Each of our karma. Right? Okay, and why, why? What causes karma? What is karma, remember? Do you remember? I don't think I have the other slides. Intention to volitional actions? Yes, intention to volitional actions. Thank you. And... Right? That's what perpetuates and creates this mind-body stuff.
And if you stop the karma, you stop saṃsāra. You stop and what's saṃsāra? Flowing together, the flowing together of what? Of this stuff.
Right? Footnote, the Buddha stops karma. Just like Arhat in the early system does. How do you stop karma? Take medication? How do you stop karma? Eliminate ignorance? Yeah, because it's being driven by kleśas. And the root kleśa is ignorance. Which ign.. Which version of ignorance? In this case, it's about the self. Okay? So we stop the karma, the saṃsāra stops. Eventually the karma runs out. The karma that made this mind-body system runs out. And then the Arhat dies. Right? The Buddha sticks around because instead of having karma to keep things going, you have great compassion to keep things going.
Karma is afflicted. It's, it's produced by what? By afflictions. Specifically, in the end, by ignorance. Okay, we got that? So what does that mean on the early system? What's really here? A bunch of truly real, ultimately real, essentially real dharmas, elements, mental and physical elements. There's no self here, even though we feel like there is. Once we truly directly realize that, we stop the, the process that's producing the karma that produces this stuff. What does that mean about the stuff that is there?
The stuff in the early system that makes us the mind-body system is necessarily contaminated by ignorance.
So, in the end, on this view, like it's not just your mind-body system, it's like everything emerges from the beings, from the karma, like the whole world, the physical world even, is shaped by the karma of the beings in that world. Like, you know, we create our own environmental niches, so to speak, in a kind of mutual process. And so, that means the whole world is contaminated by karma. Which means, it's the whole world is, you know, caught up in suffering because of the four, remember those four seals? All conditioned things are impermanent. It's the first one, Sarva Saṃskṛta Dharmaḥ Nityaḥ. And the second one is sarva saṃskārā dharmāḥ duḥkhaḥ. All contaminated things, which means contaminated by ignorance, are of the nature of suffering. So saṃsāra is of the nature of suffering, the Mādhyamikas agree with that, but the difference here is that for the early period, saṃsāra consists in, is made out of, this fundamental irreducible stuff. And that's all conditioned by ignorance. So it's all contaminated, therefore it's all of the nature of suffering. So there is no possibility of being in a world that is not suffering. Because all the worlds are created by karma. Okay? Get it?
If, so what, how do you solve that problem?
You could, yes, so if you're an early Buddhist, you just escape. Okay? Like you get to the point and your, while you're living, where you're not producing new karma, the karma that caused this stuff eventually runs out, you die and, you know, you're in the final nirvana.
What happens for Mahāyāna?
If you want to have the possibility of building the Buddha field, the buddhakṣetra, if you want to have the possibility of not escaping the world, but transforming the world, then what you need is a philosophy that says, all this stuff does not exist, essentially. That it's not stuck in its essence. Okay? You get it? And what's especially important for that, as we said last time, is a causal process. Because the idea here is that we're talking about these things that make up the mind-body system are called saṃskṛta Dharma. They're conditioned things, which means specifically causally conditioned things. What's the causal condition process? The same one, you know, technically the twelve links of dependent origination, but just that simple process we've been talking about. There's, you know, kleśa produces karma, produces this stuff, and on it goes. Right? So if things, nature, their essence, the svabhāva, is actually a result of their causal history, they come from certain causes, like ignorance, and ignorance is one of the conditions, one of the, is part of that causal history. So the thing, if it's truly real, part of its identity is to be produced by ignorance.
But if we say that causal process does not create that kind of fixed identity, fixed, absolute, unchanging identity, just like, again, in causal, the causal intuition is, if I say, oh, you know, here's an apple seed, but you know what? It's going to produce an orange tree this time. Like, no one thinks that, right? I hope not. It's like, better not be a farmer. But, uh... Right? That's just like our intuition, like, oh, this is the way, you know, these things are fixed by their causal history. So, you know, it's like, that's it, out of luck. Saṃsāra is just, you know, as if that story of Śāriputra, like, it's just filled with cesspools. It's the way it is. And so, if you want to say, no, it isn't that way, we can actually, you know, take the cesspool and turn it into a swimming pool, like our nice swimming pool here in Gomde. I don't think it started as a cesspool, but that would have been a great story, I have to say. Right? Then what do we need? Like, we need it to not be fixed by that causal history. It doesn't have an identity, an essential identity that is a result of its causal history. So you can be radically transformed. All right, so that's really, it's very important to understand that because there's like, it's not empty, philosophy of emptiness is not just like, oh, it's just coming out of nowhere, you know, why would anyone think about that? Why would anyone come up with this kind of thing? You know, why did the Buddha teach that or whatever? Like, whoever you, wherever you think it comes from, like, why would anyone say this? It's because you're, it's going with a view where the goal is no longer to escape. It's to change, to escape the world, it's to change the world. And that's really key. So that the bodhisattva activity is not about like getting out of here, it's about being here. So, you know, Vimalakīrti in the Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra, you know, goes into the brothels, goes to the pubs and wherever. Okay? All right so uh... Really, I know I've said that a few times, but since no one, either you're all too tired, maybe everyone needs to go have a quick espresso downstairs, you know, when we take a break. But uh... that should just be immediately obvious, like, why do we need emptiness? Because we, so that the world is now ultimately transformable. Not ultimately. So the world is radically transformable. Like, as, as, Rinpo..., as uh, as Khenpo la said, like, was it this morning, I think, like, if it's, you know, the essentialist view, like, everything has essences, it's kind of uptight. It's like, well, you know, you're stuck. It's the way it is.
Just, you know, get used to it. Or it's like, emptiness is like, really, like, kind of open view. I'm like, hey, man, don't worry. We'll figure it out.
Take a chill pill and we'll take it from there. You know, like, it's going to be okay. Was it... I think I see a few questions coming up. Ah, that's great.
Yeah, we take, I'll take one here. And then I want to get us to a certain point and then...
Um, is also the reason that uh, laypersons are more included in the Mahāyāna view because of this view of emptiness, it's more workable as a layperson to gain realization? Uh... That's an interesting thought. I don't know if it's... I think lay life can just make, can be hard, depends on the structure of your life. So, you know, what the advantage of a monastic lifestyle is that you're a professional Buddhist, so to speak. You don't have a... It's not, you know, like being a musician. You have your day job and then you play jazz at night. Like, no, it's all the time. Uh and uh... so, and, no, I don't, not per se, but I think what, at least in literature, and I think in fact, the idea is that the layperson becomes very important as a kind of symbol of this, because it's like you're not retreating outside or into the monastery. You're like engaged in the world. Now, you can be a monk, and we know monks like that who are engaged, but sort of the lay, the symbol, at least, of the layperson is very important to represent that. And then the actuality is that you can have, like, much more engagement. So, you know, there's some speculation historically that part of what the Mahāyāna, not cause the Mahāyāna, but what helps the Mahāyāna to spread were merchants. You know, it goes to China, right, through the Silk Road, initially, and maybe somewhat through, like, Indonesia and the southern route. But... No, this was an attractive way, this new way of new style, or it's not new in the sense from the traditional point of view, like, it was always there, but it was hidden. But when this becomes available, like, merchants were very, found that an attractive form of Buddhism. So they were happy to have a monk teacher in their caravan, you know, especially one who would teach this version. So the lay, the kind of identity of the lay person also, I think, became a social kind of identity for Buddhists, where you could be a serious practitioner and still a lay person. Thank you. Okay, let's do a little more. Right, so this is kind of a more historical way of thinking that is more characteristic of kind of Western academics. So that's why we say, like, we're kind of doing Buddhist academics, right? Buddhist-inflected academics. Okay, so quick thing here. So the neither one nor many argument in Western philosophy, we call this a mereiological argument. That's this kind of fancy term, mereology, the study of parts and wholes. And the upshot is, you know, like, if you look at Bradley's account of mereology, he's going to come to a very different conclusion, but um... the Buddhist conclusion is actually that wholes just don't exist. They exist conventionally, right? You can talk about wholes, it's fine to talk about wholes, because the way you talk about them, especially if you know when you say, oh, there's a vase, you know what it really means is, there is a very large number of infinitesimally small part less particles that are interacting in such a way that they can hold a certain quantity of water and a flower. It's a lot easier to say vase, right? But that's what it means. If you know that's what it means, then that word becomes completely unproblematic. Okay? So it's a convenient designation. But... uh... for the Mādhyamika, they're going to use a different kind of argument. They'll also continue to use mereiological arguments, part-whole arguments, neither one nor many arguments. But like the key kind of argument is not a reductive argument. It's a relational argument. The conclusion of the analysis through interdependence or relations is that the very notion of something having an ultimate existence, existence by virtue of its own essence, is incoherent. And if we say that ultimate irreducible part less entities, whether mental or physical, exist ultimately by virtue of this kind of essence, then we're wrong. That's not possible. And we're going to see why. And Khenpo has done that, also gone through some of those arguments. But the main argument there is the one where he also mentioned the verse today, like, yaḥ pratītya-samutpādaḥ śūnyatāṃ tāṃ pracakṣmahe sā prajñaptir upādāya pratipattir madhyamā Khenpo yesterday said, you be sure to recite the Sanskrit. It's a blessing. Uh, that, we say that that which is interdependence is emptiness. It is dependent designation. Like to the extent things are there, they're interdependently arisen, what we're doing is we're just mentally designating them or imputing them that way. That is the middle way. Okay, that's chapter 24, verse 18. And what is that? The middle way in what sense? It doesn't fall into... There are many different ways of thinking about the middle. But it's a middle... A key aspect of the middle is it's neither absolutistic nor nihilistic. It's not affirming absolutized essential existence. But it's not falling into a nihilistic denial of any existence whatsoever.
So we had... that's... In other words, it's based in the two truths, the ultimate and the conventional. Right? Okay? And what it's saying is, from the perspective of the ultimate, we're saying all things are empty of any fixed, absolute, objective, essential identity. From the perspective of that conventional, what that means is that they exist interdependently. Because that's the only way they can exist. If we're going to talk about existence, that's a very important little caveat that we'll come back to later. Okay? So all of this is about withstanding analysis, even for the early Buddhists, but they use a different analysis. Remember, they do reductionistic analysis, the Mādhyamikas are going to do relational analysis. So anything that with sta... and ultimately real entity, it withstands analysis. It's vichāra utsaha. And this non, what it really means for something to withstand analysis is that it is not refuted by non-deviant reasoning.
Okay? We'll come back to that a little bit. But basically, non-deviant reasoning means you accept that uh... contradictions are nonsensical. There are some people who think that Mādhyamikas don't agree with that and I think they're really wrong. I'm not alone in that, but some modern scholars, but, I do not accept that interpretation. So you have to say there are no contradictions. You can't... If your reasoning leads to a contradiction, then you have to conclude that your premise is... that in some... somewhere along the way, you've in a sense made a mistake. So if you want to assert that things do exist, essentially, and that leads to a contradiction when you do analysis, then you know that your initial assertion was wrong. And the other thing is you have to accept for non-deviant reas... non-deviant reasoning is what's called the law of the excluded middle. And all that means is that when you're dealing with exhaustive predicates or categories like we had today... In Tibetan, these are called phen tsun phan gyal, or in Sanskrit, paravirodasthiti. Uh, the, uh, eh, uh... When you say something is contradictory, then if all the things we're talking about are charact, are characterizable as either existent or non-existent, then you can't say there's something that is neither.
You get it? Is that clear?
Is that clear? This is called a contradict, logical contradictory.
Okay, so if you have a universe of things, and those univer, all everything in that... or if you just have a set of things, we can talk about equality and its opposite that characterizes everything in that set. And in order to be in that set, each member of the set has to have one or the other quality. If we want to say all thing... anything that can be called a thing is either existent or non-existent, or anything that we can call knowable is either existent or non-existent, then to be characterized as a knowable, to be in the set of knowable things, or the set of all things in the universe, we say all things in the universe are either existent or non-existent. And that set of things, you have to have one of those qualities, which means if you say... that you want to try to say there's something in the universe that is neither existent nor non-existent, then you're being nonsensical. You're not following, you're being deviant in your reasoning. Okay? Does that make sense? Like, you could say that um...
I'm trying to think of a good example here that's not too confusing. You know, if we have a set of billiard balls and they're all either white or black, then if I assert, oh, there's some billiard ball in this set that's neither white nor black, then I say, no, that's not true. This set of billiard balls are characterized as either white or black. Right? Or a better way to put it, either white or not white. Right? Or all members, let's say we have a bunch of shapes, right? All members of this set of things that have a shape are either triangular or not triangular.
And then if I say, oh, well, here's a thing that's a shape but it's not a triangle and it's not a non-triangle. That doesn't work, sorry.
Okay? That's a very important thing. So, you know, trying to... so you can't assert that something is both a triangle and not... if you're talking about the set of things that have shapes, you can't say, oh, this thing is both a triangle and not a triangle. And you also can't say this thing is neither a triangle nor not a triangle.
And then if we're talking about things, we could assert if something is a thing, it's either an existent thing or a non-existent thing. Which means we can't assert that there's a thing that is both existent and non-existent. And we also can't assert that there's a thing that is neither existent nor non-existent.
So this leads to what's called the Catuṣkoṭi, the four options, which are used repeatedly by Mādhyamikas, in different ways. You heard it in the context of causality. Right? So if something is produced, so in the universe of things that are effects, Right? So we have the set of all things that are causal effects, which we would call saṃskṛta dharma, conditioned things. If something is a conditioned the thing, then it's been produced from something that is either identical to itself or not identical to itself.
In other words, it's either produced by self, by what is self, or by what is other. And so Khenpo was going through those arguments, demonstrating that what self... it doesn't make sense for it to be produced from self, it doesn't make sense for it to be produced from other, and both and neither also don't work.
Everyone see that? Okay? Why do both not work? You can, you could assert, so I set that up in such a way that it's got to be either, so that they're contradictories. We could also set it up in a way in which the, they... we can allow that they're not contradictories. So everything in the set could have, be produced partially by both. We could assert the set of causal things is produced by something that's partially by itself and partially by something else. And that, then we use a different argument to reject that option. It depends on how you consider what causation is. And the classic argument really is the one in which, okay, sure, maybe it's a little of both,
but logically speaking, the other one is cleaner.
Okay? So also then we can talk about um... what we've mentioned, existence. You can do this with impermanence and impermanence, right? So anything that has temporal existence either changes or does not change. Can't be both, can't be neither. If it's, excuse me, anything that has temporal existence either essentially changes or does not essentially change. In other words, its essence is to change or not to change. You have to add that. Right? Intrinsically it's a changing thing or intrinsically not a changing thing. It can't be both and it can't be neither. Okay? Is that clear? So that kind of reasoning is very important. And the reason, this is related to something we're going to go through in a minute, but first we'll take a little break. This is related to how we use the conventional. Because as I was saying the other day, the, the, you know we have these intuitions, but the way we sort of sort through our intuitions and refine them and correct them is through this kind of reasoning. Right? Which is also used in, you know, science. And if we don't have that kind of careful reasoning, we would probably not have survived this far as humans. So this is actually part of the way we operate conventionally. We operate with this kind of reasoning when push comes to shove. You know sometimes just intuitively you know, you run the red light, you're in your car, there's a red light, and then you don't stop, and then the police come and stop you. And they say, you ran a red light. And you say, well, it was kind of red and not red.
You can try that next time, that the police stop you, see how that goes.
Okay? Now, because the idea here is that this kind of reasoning is actually rooted in the assumptions about essences. Like things are what they are. So it's either, if we have contradictories like existence and non-existence, then what follows from that ontology, actually, is that things can't be both and they can't be neither. So interestingly, this kind of reasoning is actually derivative of our tendency to essentialize. Okay? You can have other kinds of reasoning, and there are, I mean, logicians work with other kinds of reasoning that violate one or both of those principles. But you can't do that and maintain a kind of essentialist ontology. That's key. All right? Yeah. Stefan, real quick, and then we break.
Thanks. Let me comment on this from a quantum physics point of view. Yes. So that we have like this matter-particle duality. So that particles can also have as matter wave duality. Right. Particle wave duality that particles... Behave like particles sometimes and waves others depending on how you... yea. Especially like we have this famous experiment, this double slit experiment, Yea. where one particle can go through both doors, through both slits at the same time. Yeah. And if you set it up one way, you just see particles hitting the board. If you put two slits, then suddenly you see a wave interference pattern. Exactly, yeah. And it can only be true if it goes, if the particle, if this intent... intenity, like one thing goes through both at the same time. Right. So if we maintain that it's either a particle or not a particle, it can't be both and it can't be neither. In other words, if we essentialize its identity as a particle, that kind, then like when we see the double slit experiment, wait a sec, this is illogical. So then you have to step back from the idea that its essential identity has to be either that it's a particle or it's not a particle. Now it has a different kind of like contextual identity. Right? It's an identity that, in a sense, how we identify it, what we call it, what model we use to describe it, is context-dependent. Like if we have one way of measuring or one kind of experimental setup, then we call it a particle. If we have another kind of experimental setup, then we call it a wave. So we measure it actually as a particle or as a click. Right, exactly. Yes. It does something. So there's this one point in time where you have the event of detection. Yes. We call it click. Because it hits the screen and it makes the original experiment. And it's with one point, no. Yea. A single one. But like in between, we can prove that it goes through these two slits. Yeah, because of the interference pattern. Yes, exactly. So what that's showing is that the particle is kind of, in a sense, refusing just to be a particle. It's refusing the essential identity of just being a particle. Or being in one state of position. Yes. Right. Which is another way, you could say like, if we have an essentialized notion of what it means to exist in space-time, then either a thing is here now or it's not. Maybe it's not a property of a particle being on one position at one time. Right. So we have a wrong view of what the particle actually is. Right. For us, a particle is something which has a position. Yes. Right. So one answer to that is, well, it's got a special kind of essence that somehow enables it to do that. But for me, the more interesting answer, and I'm not a quantum physicist, I've done a little work with some of them, a kind of answer that like you get from somebody like Chris Fuchs in cubism, is like, what we're seeing is something that's context-dependent. Like the particle's behavior, or quantum level, weird quantum level stuff, is not that it's just weird things that have these weird essences, but rather that the behaviors are contextual. And so depending on what we do, how we measure, how we set up an experiment, we get different results because there isn't just a single identity, objectively real thing there, there's a relational thing there that is context-dependent. But I don't know, like I know a lot of quantum physicists don't think that way, but I think some do, yeah. Anyway, thank you, Stefan. It's a very good example, like, where we can then, we do have to actually violate that kind of reasoning. And the point of this type of approach is to point out that when we assume that there are essences, we end up violating it. Like we end up having to reject essences because we either find ourselves in a contradiction or in an excluded middle. We either find ourselves saying, for example, oh, it's both existent and non-existent, or it's neither existent nor non-existent. And instead of like just clinging to that, it's still truly real, it's objectively essentially real, the answer that emptiness is saying to us is, uh, why don't you give up that model of it being really, like, essentially real? How about that solution? So we know in our world that like either realism or locality is violated. So by the Bellini quality, with this entangled photon pairs, where like two years ago, Zeilinger, these others got the Nobel Prize for. Yes, right. And realism is that particles have properties, necessarily, so that can be violated, that particles, or like objects don't necessarily have a property, or that locality, that space-like separated measurements are not space-like separated. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, so quantum physics is a great place where, in that book, The Blind Spot, I mentioned, also does a very nice job of pointing out how the kinds of contradictions you end up in, even in quantum physics, are very much dependent on a certain type of objectivist view, and if you abandon that view, they're much easier to resolve.
Okay, so let's take a five-minute break. We didn't get quite as far, or five-ish minute break. Okay, come back at 25 after, is that okay?
I just say that I do some verses of invocation, and it's very traditional to do that. And, you know, everyone kind of does their own thing to a certain extent, you may have already noticed. And what I do is I do a verse... I do two verses in Sanskrit because we still have those verses in their original language. And the English translations are not so beautiful. And then I do one verse that was originally in Sanskrit, but that uh, uh, we don't have the Sanskrit anymore, so I do the Tibetan because, again, I'm not super fond of the English. Maybe I'm a little snobbish about it, I don't know. And then the last one is only in Tibetan. So the first verse is from Dharmakīrti's Pramāṇa-vārttika, but it's about but it's about Samantabhadra, so people assume it's the Bodhisattva Samantabhadra, but, you know, who knows? And it uh... is saying that, Uh Samant... I pay homage to Samantabhadra, the one in whom the web of concepts has been torn apart, who has vast and profound bodies, and who shines light everywhere. And then the second one is from Nāgārjuna's Achintya Stava, one of, Nāgārjuna wrote six philosophical texts and then a series of praises, and in one of them he says, you're not real, you're not unreal, you're not discontinuous, you're not continuous, you're not permanent, you're not impermanent, to you the non-dual I bow. And then the third one is the one that you've been doing with Khenpo in the mornings, the sh... not the long praise of Mañjuśrī, but the short one. And then the fourth one, Khenpo also does, Khenpo does that one too when he teaches, and then, as do many people, and then, because that one is about, as you've seen in the English, it's about sort of being inspired with wisdom. And then the fourth one is a sort of invocation of the guru, which many of you already know too. Okay, just thought you might be interested. So if anyone comes up with beautiful English translations, just let me know. Maybe they're out there already. And also, part of this idea is someday, maybe our Buddhist university will help produce scholar practitioners who will write their own independent, originally composed in German or French or some European language, English, independent verses, meaning, you know, within their own cultural mode, which is that last of those four that I do, the last one is written originally in Tibetan, actually. Okay.
Okay, so I invite you to just take a moment to settle the mind. You've been practicing with Eric, who doesn't like it when I call him Lama Eric. But anyway. I'm just allowing the mind to settle.
No need to get caught in a web of concepts. No need to push them away either.
And now bringing up our motivation in the Mahāyāna, in our Mahāmudrā Dzogchen tradition. Our highest motivation is the aspiration to attain awakening for the sake of all beings. And let's begin. So um...
Uh... righto, here we go.
Oh, that's, here we are. Uh... could ask if there are any, maybe this is dangerous to do this right away, but if there are any, like, if anyone has a really, like, like, I gotta ask this question right now, you can do that. Otherwise we'll definitely have time for questions later. Okay, and then move forward, unless there's an urgent question.
Okay, let's go on. Yes.
I guess I don't fully grasp yet how the insight of emptiness um, rids us of suffering. Because I feel like the way it was explained that it is more through a sort of secondhand insight of the nature of impermanence, but I feel like what it's really pointing to is something more direct. Yeah, yes it is. And so Khenpo's point wasn't that impermanence and emptiness are the same thing, but that if you really kind of fully understand impermanence, it sort of leads you to emptiness. I think that's what I understand him to be trying to say. But if, you're right, like, realizing impermanence is not the same as realizing emptiness. Emptiness is as... and we'll see exactly why emptiness is connected to the relief of suffering. That's going to be part of what we do right now. Okay, but that's a great question because he did, I don't think Khenpo, you know, I mean, I'm not, I don't mean to speak for Khenpo, who, it was great, by the way, to have him here, I wish he could continue, but he has to travel. But um... Uh... you know, I think the point is that, and Rinpoche has been talking a lot about impermanence, not just recently even, but, you know, for some time, and that it is a sort of pathway into a number of different things, and one of them is emptiness. Because part of, as we will see, part of what emptiness really means is interdependence, and part of what interdependence requires is change. Like, without change, there's no interdependence, and change is impermanence. So if you really understand impermanence, then the pathway from that to interdependence, and therefore the pathway to emptiness, because you can't have interdependence, two things that are completely autonomously existent can't be interdependent, because they can't relate. Totally autonomously existent is what we call intrinsically established things, things that have a svabhāva, they can't relate to each other. So interdependence is impossible. So if you really understand change, impermanence, that means you see that change then leads you into, oh, well, change is like what happens when things are in relation to each other, and things that are in relationship to each other have to be empty of essence. So it's that kind of a pathway, as I see it. Okay, quick review of some goals. We had this term of the Hīnayāna, which or we could even call this the common vehicle, you know and uh, uh the uh... so this is basically the kind of perspective that comes out of early Buddhism. And we see, when people talk about the Theravāda tradition, it's not exactly the same. No, no, there is a claim that, and I think a reasonable claim, that it traces back to the very earliest period, but it's not going to be quite identical to, it's had some historical development, but some of these things would apply to modern day Theravāda. The ideal practitioner is a monk, the goal is to become an arhat and to kind of attain a type of nirvana that's just a cessation. Remember that nirvana without a remainder, right? Uh, like you can attain nirvana while you're alive, and then basically you just wait for the karma that's made your aggregates occur to run down, and then basically you die, and then it's all over. And whether something happens after that, the Buddha refused to say. Then in Mahāyāna some five... approximately 500 years after the Buddha, this becomes kind of publicly available, as it were. The ideal practitioner is a monk also, but also especially a lay person, especially sort of in literary expression. It's often lay people who are used to kind of represent the bodhisattva. Not all the time, but you see that often. And a bodhisattva, being intent on awakening, intent on becoming a Buddha for the sake of relieving the suffering of all sentient beings. And it has bodhicitta, that intention or aspiration, that awakening mind, bodhi, awakening mind, citta. And this word bodhi comes from the same verb as Buddha. So bodhi means awakening, and Buddha means awakened. And so that's where you're headed is to become a Buddha and to attain this unlocated nirvana. You're neither in saṃsāra because wisdom stops saṃsāra. Stops your... More accurately, wisdom stops you from being trapped in saṃsāra. So also in that longer Mañjuśrī prayer, it talks about the prison of saṃsāra. So you no longer are imprisoned, but you can still do a prison break. Right? So you you don't... like you, you get, you get people out. And the reason you do that is that you are, you have compassion. So you don't just escape out of the prison. You're not caught there anymore, but you're there to help beings escape, so to speak, or maybe just escape at first. But is the perspective that came up this morning with Khenpo La, actually, is that we won't be, we probably won't say too much about this this week. But, and Rinpoche talked about a little bit last week, but is the idea that actually all the... the final destiny of all beings is awakening, is Buddhahood uh, in this tradition. And we said, you know, there's also that we see how this occurs in art. So on the left is called an aniconic representation of the Buddha with just an empty throne. Sometimes you also see like just his footprints. And then that's from around 200 BCE, I think, and this one of the tōraṇa, one of the kind of gates at the great stupa of Sanchi. And then the Buddha is back, you know, suddenly, starting around the start of the Common Era, where now he's depicted in physical form. Okay? And then we talked about Nāgārjuna. I just wanted to say that um... the you can... and that the main text that we'll be looking at a little bit is this text, Wisdom Prajña, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, the root verses on the Mādhyamika philosophy, the middle way. We'll see a little more what middle may, middle way means soon. But if you want to read more about Nāgārjuna and sort of the academic accounts of Nāgārjuna, you can find that this in the introduction to this volume that just came out, which is a translation of a very important and interesting text by Nāgārjuna, considered generally one of his six philosophical texts, some debate about that, but generally considered that he's authored it and also that it's one of his philosophical texts. It certainly has philosophical content, but it's also presented as a letter to a king, a Sātavāhana king, and it's advice about like how to lead a good life as a lay person and also how to be a ruler, how to be a leader. So it's a very interesting text that way. And in the introduction in this text, and Sara, esp... Sara McClintock, my co-author especially, did a lot of work on the introduction, and I contributed too, of course. It's a quite good sort of summary of the state of the scholarship about Nāgārjuna as a person and some of the historical details and so on and then some important about his work in general and then the Ratnāvalī itself, the precious garland itself. So this is available... Did we ever get a copy? Oh, okay. So it's available, and you don't have to buy it. I'm sure somebody's already uploaded a PDF somewhere, but if you want to buy it, you can. So anyway... Uh... Yes, money, money. So let's just review a couple of things. For the Abhidharma... So this term is a... This is a way of referring to the followers of Abhidharma. Abhidharma is this... Basically, without getting into detail, is this style of analysis, philosophical analysis that is typical of the early period. Uh, and for them, the ignorance is the belief in the true ultimate existence of things that are actually just made of irreducible elements and not even that much. So you could say... Now, ignorance in the end is primarily about... And maybe I should have changed this, actually, but ignorance is definitely... If I think that this is ultimately real, that there's one ultimately real thing here, the vase or the flower, as we were talking about, if I think that holes are ultimately real, I'm already caught in ignorance. Right? Because they're going to say that this is, they're really just irreducible elements here. But the reason... That's a kind of secondary expression of ignorance for them, because the main problem is that we take that to be... We take this kind of psycho physical stuff. Our intuition is not that there's just one thing in here that is the self, but that kind of the whole package constitutes the self. And that there's like one... There's one person here, one thing, which is a person that is here. And so there's a very famous dialogue between a monk Nāgasena and a Greek Bactrian king, you know one of the kings who is left behind from Alexander's adventures in Asia, a descendant of that, the King Melinda or Mithrandar, his Greek name. And they have dialogue, basically, you know, the king says, Oh, what do you mean I'm not a person? You know, look at me, there's one person here, right? That's me. I have a self. And Nāgasena says, Well, how'd you get here? Well, I came in a chariot. And he said, Yeah, well, is the... Okay, well, is the chariot the wheels? Is it the axle? Is it the reins? Is it this? Is it that? So that same part-whole analysis goes way back. And that's used especially to counteract kind of the most fundamental and perhaps common sense intuition, which is that there's a single person here, and there isn't one element that constitutes that person. It's all of them together somehow, or some key elements together that constitute this one thing, which is therefore a whole, right? Remember that idea of a distributed entity? So that neither one nor enemy, uh 'enemy', that neither one nor 'many' analysis, right? That part whole analysis is really targeting that intuition. And what... So for the Abhidharmikas, there is something that you will see when you look for things. You're trying to find out what's really here. You do end up coming to saying what is really here, which is these irreducible elements that would be in case of something physical. And then what's really here, right, is irreducible. Some of them are physical elements, but also irreducible mental elements. Okay, and they are ultimately real, for this first layer of philosophy. Okay? But the Mādhyamikas, and this is the term for a philosopher who follows the mādhyamaka, slightly different spelling in Sanskrit. This is a kind of adjectival form. They're also known as the Śūnyatāvādins, those who espouse or speak of emptiness, śūnyatā. Right, for them, what is ignorance? It's the belief that there's anything whatsoever that exists truly or ultimately by virtue of its essence, svabhāva. And that's what it means to exist ultimately, is to have an essence. We're going to find out what that means soon. And wisdom is just like, you know, in general, in Buddhist philosophy, you say, what is wisdom? It means, yathābhūta darśana in Sanskrit, which means seeing things as they truly are. So what are you seeing here? You're seeing emptiness. And I'm doing little quotation marks because how do you see emptiness? And that's going to be one of our big questions. So just again, somewhat as a review, both the Abhidharmikas and the Mādhyamikas, and we're talking about the Abhidharmikas, by the way, because Nāgārjuna is going to be reacting to them to a very great extent. All right. So the Abhidharmikas and Nāgārjuna, they're both going to agree that the aim is to eliminate suffering. Although the Mādhyamikas, also are focused on ending the suffering of everyone and actively participating in that. In other words, becoming a Buddha who's able to help all beings to do that. Right? So that is a key difference. And suffering is eliminated by eliminating its cause, which is ignorance. Everyone agrees on that. Ignorance is an error. It does not see the world the way it really is. And wisdom eliminates ignorance because it sees the way the world really is. Right? Okay. So all of that is kind of the same. A bit of a review in some way. Uh... So what did Abhidharmikas think? They maintained that there are holes, things that have parts and other kinds of distributed entities, like we talked about before, like a universal or a platonic form. That would be another example of this. Any of those kinds of things do not truly exist because they can be reduced to their parts. Right? You know, the flower is not one thing. We can say, what's the flower really? Well, it's really a bunch of petals and so on and so on. And then we could even take one of the petals and say, what's that really? Well, it's really a bunch of atoms interacting in a certain way. Right? So when we ask the question, what is it really? We keep going down, down, down, breaking further, further, further, until we get to something that can't be broken down any further. So that's called a reductionistic analysis, called reductionism. There is kinds of reductionism, but that's one. Sort of atomistic reductionism. Right? And you come down to this fundament... these kind of fundamental elements or parts that constitute everything. And they truly exist because they can't be reduced further. And, and what is said about them, as I said yesterday, is that what we mean by them not truly existing is that they have an intrinsic nature. They have a svabhāva. You can say that's an essence, intrinsic nature, a true identity, Uh, literally translatable as own being, svabhāva.
And yesterday we heard about the Ātman term. What's the difference between this Hindu term and this svabhāva? I think I have a...
Maybe I took that slide out. The Ātman being something like a soul or capital S self. Let's do this. We'll go here for a second. Okay, so... the Ātman can be thought of as a um... particular version of an essence. Okay? And that particular version of an essence is the essence of a person. So the Abhidharmakers are going after that. Right? So they're saying in this mind-body system, there isn't something that somehow is the essence of that system that maybe might be characterized as what the system altogether constitutes the system as a whole, for example, or constitutes the identity of the system as a single thing. Okay? Or that supports that or controls it. So that's the Ātman of a person, the pudgala of the pudgala. So when we talk about the essencelessness, the absence of that kind of self, we talk about the absence of a personal self. Okay? Or the essencelessness of persons, or you can say selflessness of persons, that's fine. And then what the Mādhyamakas are going to go after, and actually all Mahāyāna philosophers, is they're going to say that not just these elements, not only is there no person here, but the elements, just as the person lacks an essence, the elements also lack... the person lacks an essence or a self, the elements also lack any kind of essence. And you can even use the word self there. But of course, it kind of sounds silly to say that an atom is selfless, because atoms aren't living beings, so we don't think of them as having selves. So there it's better to say... So sometimes you hear about the two kinds of selflessness, the selflessness of persons and the selflessness of things, but we don't think of vases as having a self. Does anyone think of the vase as having a self? Sorry. You know, it's like, no, we don't really think that way. Right? You, you know. Did I insult you? No, it's like you don't really feel like that. Vases have essences, right? Things have essences. Persons maybe have selves, essential selves. So the Mahāyāna and the Mādhyamika is historically the first to do that. They're going to say that not only is there no essence of a person, which we can call a self, there's also no essence of things, and that's called the dharma nirāmaya, where nirāmaya can literally be rendered as selflessness, but in this context, we have to think of it as essencelessness. There's no essence. Okay? So...
Uh, where am I? So the Abhidharmikas are going to say that things have an essence. And one... so there are a few features of that essence that we really want to get to, right? And one of them, and Khenpo has been talking about this, like what's a svabhāva? And we're going to examine some of that. Uh, the... Uh... so when we say that these things have a svabhāva, what we're saying is that they exist ultimately. All right? And so what's a svabhāva? It's what a thing really is. Here are a few ways of thinking about it, and we'll come back to this, but, you know, what is an essence? Uh, first of all, you have these alternative translations, own being, nature, intrinsic nature, okay? And you could say what is an... One way to think about this is, what is, is, you know, when you're asking, what is... when you're trying to understand what this concept is pointing to, it's saying, it's kind of the answer to the question, what is X really?
And one way to think about what the essence is, is what the answer to that question when you finally stop referring to something else in order to answer the question. So let's take our vase again, all right? Or we'll take our flower.
So we say like, well, what is the flower really?
Right, it's a bunch of parts, so we say maybe like it's a petal and so on, and I say, okay, well, what's the petal really? It's a top and a bottom side. What's that really? What are the top really? The blah, blah, blah, we keep going down, down, down. And then we finally get to something in which we say, well, it's just, what's really there? A part less momentary bit of matter. And we say, what's that really? And we say, it's a part less momentary bit of matter. Right? So... Because we can't reduce further. When we're thinking of this in terms of reduction, and we keep reducing, reducing, reducing, we've gone as far down as we can go, so to speak, when we do a reductionistic analysis. Okay? You get that? So that means we've found the thing that has, that's now what the svabhāva is, or, you know, when we are able to answer that question, then we're pointing to the svabhāva of a thing. And there are a few things about that that are really key. First of all, what that means is that this thing exists in terms of its essence. It also means that if you have, like, just imagining, like let's say, this you know the smallest bit of matter, that thing, that identity of that smallest bit of matter needs to be stable. As long as that bit of matter is existent, right? Even if it's just for a moment, we can't say, oh, it just changed. Because then that's not what it really is. It's become something else. Change means becoming something else. So, for whatever duration there is of a thing that has a svabhāva, that nature, that identity has to be unchanging. Also, precisely in the way we've pointed to here, that identity is independent. It's autonomous. It has an identity that is not dependent on anything else for being what it is. The flower's identity depends on a whole lot of other things. But when we get all the way down to those infinitesimally small bits of matter, the idea is that that's it. Like, they don't depend on anything else for their identity. They are what they are in themselves. And sometimes you get this expression, from their own side. So part of what that also means is, we can say that in that Rangi Nguni, they're established from their own side. We use this word, drupa གྲུ་པ in Tibetan, or siddha in Sanskrit. We say things are established. What it means, it basically means they're existent, or they're even proven to be, right? But proven implies someone going through an act of proof. And that's not always what we mean by established. It just means that they exist that way. This is the way it is. Right? So when we say that the atom is established, this part less infinitesimally small bit of matter, the paramāṇu is established, established by virtue of its own svabhāva, its svabhāva siddha. We mean that it exists. It is the case that that's what it is, just in and of itself. It doesn't depend on anything. That svabhāva is stable, it's not going to change, as long as that thing exists. It is non-dependent. It also is objective. Okay, so one way we... It's a term we could use. What that means is, it doesn't matter how you look at it, or who looks at it. It is what it is, regardless of whatever cognition somebody might be having about it. Okay? Another, so that's a term that definitely you can see within the philosophy, but also when we try to translate that into kind of Western context, that's a very helpful term. The... I think that exists by virtue of its svabhāva, exists objectively. It's com... Not only is it independent of anything else, it's independent of our or any other sentient beings' cognition of it. Okay? It's also, if it exists by virtue of its svabhāva, it is context-independent. Or it's trans-contextual. That's also very important. This is sometimes when we talk about essential identities in the context of things like modal logic, you know, we can say that a thing that, when we talk about the essence of a thing, we can say that's what the thing is in every possible universe. Whatever is true of it, in any context you put it in, that remains true. You know, like I could have, in one universe maybe I have horns, in another universe I'm blue, or you know, in another universe I have five heads. But if there's something that's the same about me in all of those universes, then that's my essence. Okay? In all those possible worlds. So likewise, that means if you take something with a svabhāva and you put it out floating around Pluto, or you put it in another galaxy or whatever, or it's stuck in your ear or whatever it is, it doesn't matter where it is, that identity stays the same. It doesn... The identity doesn't change with context. Okay? So that could be true also of a person. Right? That you have a... If we're talking about persons as having an essence, that they have a context-independent identity, which by the way is especially typical of Western cultures, interestingly, in the modern period. We tend to have much more context-independent sense of our identity. Uh, and there's a whole thing there in what's called weird psychology. Western-educated industrialized rich democratic societies. Yes, it's a great acronym. It's very interesting. There's a whole thing. We did a meeting with the Dalai Lama, and Joe Hendricks at Harvard, who coined this term along with his colleagues, presented it to the Dalai Lama. It's a very interesting idea. So that's the kind of identity on a personal level we're also getting after. Like, oh, you have who you really are. It doesn't matter who you're talking to or what context you're in. You're always the same. That's your true authentic self. Like, no, it's not. That's your square circle. Okay? But we also then, not only do we think we have that about our self, we also have this about things. Okay? That somehow things just look real in a particular way. They look like they're just objectively truly real. I'm looking at the vase. It doesn't matter what my cognitive system is like. It doesn't matter what context we're in. It's just like the vase is what it is. That would be thinking that the vase itself is like intrinsically objectively real. Or I go down to whatever fundamental bits of whatever I think make up the universe and I say, oh, you know, doesn't matter who's observing it, doesn't matter whether you know, whether there's a conscious person seeing something or not or whatever. It's just like that thing. It doesn't matter whether it's in relation to other things. It just has, it is what it is in and of itself. Okay? And the idea here is just like we have an intuition about ourselves existing with a certain kind of essence. We have an intuition, which you might call, my old teacher, Robert Thurman, used to call this the reality habit, right? Which is in Tibetan, tendzin, grasping to reality. Sometimes you hear grasping to truth, but there denpa བདེན་པ really means reality. It means satya in Sanskrit. Grasping to reality. Like, oh, it's just real, that's real, that's real, that's real, that's real. In our cul... again, speaking in evolutionary terms, you know, maybe it's a good thing that our cognitive system evolved to just think that whatever is presented in our perception, for example, or even in our thought is real because it helps us to survive. And we don't become like our friend the philosopher mouse. Remember him? Poor fellow. He's a great philosopher, but didn't make it. In saṃsāra. But again, maybe that's now maladaptive, especially for us humans. Okay? So everyone get that point? So it's that reality habit, instead of being focused on ourselves, now there's an intuition just about things being like that. Okay. So, of course, the Abhidharmikas think that there are entities that exist like that, there are specifically these irreducible things, and the Mādhyamikas say there aren't.
Right? Why do you remember why? Why are the Mādhyamikas going to go after not just the reality habit in relation to our personal identity, but a reality habit in relationship even to the objects of the world? Why do they go after that?
Because they needed to be employed, and if they did that, then...
they'd have long careers at the monastic university trying to explain this to people.
Or it was just a hobby, you know? Is that why? Why did they do that? Do you remember? We did talk about that. What is the conclusion? Okay, so, in the early system, what's the problem? Suffering. What causes suffering? Karma and kleśa. Specific, what's the root kleśa? Ignorance. Ignorance about what? Personal identity. We think that this mind-body system constitutes or somewhere there is there or or is owned by a truly real independent, essentially, objectively real self. Right? We look for it. We do analysis. And we discover that all that's really here is just a bunch of infinitesimally, uh infinitesimal irreducible bits of mind and matter. Right? But they're real. Where did the infinitesimal bits of mind and matter come from? Who made them? Anybody?
The devil.
No, the creator did not make. Who made them? Who's the creator of the infinitesimal bits of mind and matter? Who made a... who made a... who... Where did the dharmas that make up your mind-body system come from? What caused them in the early system? What? Yeah, karma. Whose karma? Your karma. Your karma made everyone else's, no. Each of our karma. Right? Okay, and why, why? What causes karma? What is karma, remember? Do you remember? I don't think I have the other slides. Intention to volitional actions? Yes, intention to volitional actions. Thank you. And... Right? That's what perpetuates and creates this mind-body stuff.
And if you stop the karma, you stop saṃsāra. You stop and what's saṃsāra? Flowing together, the flowing together of what? Of this stuff.
Right? Footnote, the Buddha stops karma. Just like Arhat in the early system does. How do you stop karma? Take medication? How do you stop karma? Eliminate ignorance? Yeah, because it's being driven by kleśas. And the root kleśa is ignorance. Which ign.. Which version of ignorance? In this case, it's about the self. Okay? So we stop the karma, the saṃsāra stops. Eventually the karma runs out. The karma that made this mind-body system runs out. And then the Arhat dies. Right? The Buddha sticks around because instead of having karma to keep things going, you have great compassion to keep things going.
Karma is afflicted. It's, it's produced by what? By afflictions. Specifically, in the end, by ignorance. Okay, we got that? So what does that mean on the early system? What's really here? A bunch of truly real, ultimately real, essentially real dharmas, elements, mental and physical elements. There's no self here, even though we feel like there is. Once we truly directly realize that, we stop the, the process that's producing the karma that produces this stuff. What does that mean about the stuff that is there?
The stuff in the early system that makes us the mind-body system is necessarily contaminated by ignorance.
So, in the end, on this view, like it's not just your mind-body system, it's like everything emerges from the beings, from the karma, like the whole world, the physical world even, is shaped by the karma of the beings in that world. Like, you know, we create our own environmental niches, so to speak, in a kind of mutual process. And so, that means the whole world is contaminated by karma. Which means, it's the whole world is, you know, caught up in suffering because of the four, remember those four seals? All conditioned things are impermanent. It's the first one, Sarva Saṃskṛta Dharmaḥ Nityaḥ. And the second one is sarva saṃskārā dharmāḥ duḥkhaḥ. All contaminated things, which means contaminated by ignorance, are of the nature of suffering. So saṃsāra is of the nature of suffering, the Mādhyamikas agree with that, but the difference here is that for the early period, saṃsāra consists in, is made out of, this fundamental irreducible stuff. And that's all conditioned by ignorance. So it's all contaminated, therefore it's all of the nature of suffering. So there is no possibility of being in a world that is not suffering. Because all the worlds are created by karma. Okay? Get it?
If, so what, how do you solve that problem?
You could, yes, so if you're an early Buddhist, you just escape. Okay? Like you get to the point and your, while you're living, where you're not producing new karma, the karma that caused this stuff eventually runs out, you die and, you know, you're in the final nirvana.
What happens for Mahāyāna?
If you want to have the possibility of building the Buddha field, the buddhakṣetra, if you want to have the possibility of not escaping the world, but transforming the world, then what you need is a philosophy that says, all this stuff does not exist, essentially. That it's not stuck in its essence. Okay? You get it? And what's especially important for that, as we said last time, is a causal process. Because the idea here is that we're talking about these things that make up the mind-body system are called saṃskṛta Dharma. They're conditioned things, which means specifically causally conditioned things. What's the causal condition process? The same one, you know, technically the twelve links of dependent origination, but just that simple process we've been talking about. There's, you know, kleśa produces karma, produces this stuff, and on it goes. Right? So if things, nature, their essence, the svabhāva, is actually a result of their causal history, they come from certain causes, like ignorance, and ignorance is one of the conditions, one of the, is part of that causal history. So the thing, if it's truly real, part of its identity is to be produced by ignorance.
But if we say that causal process does not create that kind of fixed identity, fixed, absolute, unchanging identity, just like, again, in causal, the causal intuition is, if I say, oh, you know, here's an apple seed, but you know what? It's going to produce an orange tree this time. Like, no one thinks that, right? I hope not. It's like, better not be a farmer. But, uh... Right? That's just like our intuition, like, oh, this is the way, you know, these things are fixed by their causal history. So, you know, it's like, that's it, out of luck. Saṃsāra is just, you know, as if that story of Śāriputra, like, it's just filled with cesspools. It's the way it is. And so, if you want to say, no, it isn't that way, we can actually, you know, take the cesspool and turn it into a swimming pool, like our nice swimming pool here in Gomde. I don't think it started as a cesspool, but that would have been a great story, I have to say. Right? Then what do we need? Like, we need it to not be fixed by that causal history. It doesn't have an identity, an essential identity that is a result of its causal history. So you can be radically transformed. All right, so that's really, it's very important to understand that because there's like, it's not empty, philosophy of emptiness is not just like, oh, it's just coming out of nowhere, you know, why would anyone think about that? Why would anyone come up with this kind of thing? You know, why did the Buddha teach that or whatever? Like, whoever you, wherever you think it comes from, like, why would anyone say this? It's because you're, it's going with a view where the goal is no longer to escape. It's to change, to escape the world, it's to change the world. And that's really key. So that the bodhisattva activity is not about like getting out of here, it's about being here. So, you know, Vimalakīrti in the Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra, you know, goes into the brothels, goes to the pubs and wherever. Okay? All right so uh... Really, I know I've said that a few times, but since no one, either you're all too tired, maybe everyone needs to go have a quick espresso downstairs, you know, when we take a break. But uh... that should just be immediately obvious, like, why do we need emptiness? Because we, so that the world is now ultimately transformable. Not ultimately. So the world is radically transformable. Like, as, as, Rinpo..., as uh, as Khenpo la said, like, was it this morning, I think, like, if it's, you know, the essentialist view, like, everything has essences, it's kind of uptight. It's like, well, you know, you're stuck. It's the way it is.
Just, you know, get used to it. Or it's like, emptiness is like, really, like, kind of open view. I'm like, hey, man, don't worry. We'll figure it out.
Take a chill pill and we'll take it from there. You know, like, it's going to be okay. Was it... I think I see a few questions coming up. Ah, that's great.
Yeah, we take, I'll take one here. And then I want to get us to a certain point and then...
Um, is also the reason that uh, laypersons are more included in the Mahāyāna view because of this view of emptiness, it's more workable as a layperson to gain realization? Uh... That's an interesting thought. I don't know if it's... I think lay life can just make, can be hard, depends on the structure of your life. So, you know, what the advantage of a monastic lifestyle is that you're a professional Buddhist, so to speak. You don't have a... It's not, you know, like being a musician. You have your day job and then you play jazz at night. Like, no, it's all the time. Uh and uh... so, and, no, I don't, not per se, but I think what, at least in literature, and I think in fact, the idea is that the layperson becomes very important as a kind of symbol of this, because it's like you're not retreating outside or into the monastery. You're like engaged in the world. Now, you can be a monk, and we know monks like that who are engaged, but sort of the lay, the symbol, at least, of the layperson is very important to represent that. And then the actuality is that you can have, like, much more engagement. So, you know, there's some speculation historically that part of what the Mahāyāna, not cause the Mahāyāna, but what helps the Mahāyāna to spread were merchants. You know, it goes to China, right, through the Silk Road, initially, and maybe somewhat through, like, Indonesia and the southern route. But... No, this was an attractive way, this new way of new style, or it's not new in the sense from the traditional point of view, like, it was always there, but it was hidden. But when this becomes available, like, merchants were very, found that an attractive form of Buddhism. So they were happy to have a monk teacher in their caravan, you know, especially one who would teach this version. So the lay, the kind of identity of the lay person also, I think, became a social kind of identity for Buddhists, where you could be a serious practitioner and still a lay person. Thank you. Okay, let's do a little more. Right, so this is kind of a more historical way of thinking that is more characteristic of kind of Western academics. So that's why we say, like, we're kind of doing Buddhist academics, right? Buddhist-inflected academics. Okay, so quick thing here. So the neither one nor many argument in Western philosophy, we call this a mereiological argument. That's this kind of fancy term, mereology, the study of parts and wholes. And the upshot is, you know, like, if you look at Bradley's account of mereology, he's going to come to a very different conclusion, but um... the Buddhist conclusion is actually that wholes just don't exist. They exist conventionally, right? You can talk about wholes, it's fine to talk about wholes, because the way you talk about them, especially if you know when you say, oh, there's a vase, you know what it really means is, there is a very large number of infinitesimally small part less particles that are interacting in such a way that they can hold a certain quantity of water and a flower. It's a lot easier to say vase, right? But that's what it means. If you know that's what it means, then that word becomes completely unproblematic. Okay? So it's a convenient designation. But... uh... for the Mādhyamika, they're going to use a different kind of argument. They'll also continue to use mereiological arguments, part-whole arguments, neither one nor many arguments. But like the key kind of argument is not a reductive argument. It's a relational argument. The conclusion of the analysis through interdependence or relations is that the very notion of something having an ultimate existence, existence by virtue of its own essence, is incoherent. And if we say that ultimate irreducible part less entities, whether mental or physical, exist ultimately by virtue of this kind of essence, then we're wrong. That's not possible. And we're going to see why. And Khenpo has done that, also gone through some of those arguments. But the main argument there is the one where he also mentioned the verse today, like, yaḥ pratītya-samutpādaḥ śūnyatāṃ tāṃ pracakṣmahe sā prajñaptir upādāya pratipattir madhyamā Khenpo yesterday said, you be sure to recite the Sanskrit. It's a blessing. Uh, that, we say that that which is interdependence is emptiness. It is dependent designation. Like to the extent things are there, they're interdependently arisen, what we're doing is we're just mentally designating them or imputing them that way. That is the middle way. Okay, that's chapter 24, verse 18. And what is that? The middle way in what sense? It doesn't fall into... There are many different ways of thinking about the middle. But it's a middle... A key aspect of the middle is it's neither absolutistic nor nihilistic. It's not affirming absolutized essential existence. But it's not falling into a nihilistic denial of any existence whatsoever.
So we had... that's... In other words, it's based in the two truths, the ultimate and the conventional. Right? Okay? And what it's saying is, from the perspective of the ultimate, we're saying all things are empty of any fixed, absolute, objective, essential identity. From the perspective of that conventional, what that means is that they exist interdependently. Because that's the only way they can exist. If we're going to talk about existence, that's a very important little caveat that we'll come back to later. Okay? So all of this is about withstanding analysis, even for the early Buddhists, but they use a different analysis. Remember, they do reductionistic analysis, the Mādhyamikas are going to do relational analysis. So anything that with sta... and ultimately real entity, it withstands analysis. It's vichāra utsaha. And this non, what it really means for something to withstand analysis is that it is not refuted by non-deviant reasoning.
Okay? We'll come back to that a little bit. But basically, non-deviant reasoning means you accept that uh... contradictions are nonsensical. There are some people who think that Mādhyamikas don't agree with that and I think they're really wrong. I'm not alone in that, but some modern scholars, but, I do not accept that interpretation. So you have to say there are no contradictions. You can't... If your reasoning leads to a contradiction, then you have to conclude that your premise is... that in some... somewhere along the way, you've in a sense made a mistake. So if you want to assert that things do exist, essentially, and that leads to a contradiction when you do analysis, then you know that your initial assertion was wrong. And the other thing is you have to accept for non-deviant reas... non-deviant reasoning is what's called the law of the excluded middle. And all that means is that when you're dealing with exhaustive predicates or categories like we had today... In Tibetan, these are called phen tsun phan gyal, or in Sanskrit, paravirodasthiti. Uh, the, uh, eh, uh... When you say something is contradictory, then if all the things we're talking about are charact, are characterizable as either existent or non-existent, then you can't say there's something that is neither.
You get it? Is that clear?
Is that clear? This is called a contradict, logical contradictory.
Okay, so if you have a universe of things, and those univer, all everything in that... or if you just have a set of things, we can talk about equality and its opposite that characterizes everything in that set. And in order to be in that set, each member of the set has to have one or the other quality. If we want to say all thing... anything that can be called a thing is either existent or non-existent, or anything that we can call knowable is either existent or non-existent, then to be characterized as a knowable, to be in the set of knowable things, or the set of all things in the universe, we say all things in the universe are either existent or non-existent. And that set of things, you have to have one of those qualities, which means if you say... that you want to try to say there's something in the universe that is neither existent nor non-existent, then you're being nonsensical. You're not following, you're being deviant in your reasoning. Okay? Does that make sense? Like, you could say that um...
I'm trying to think of a good example here that's not too confusing. You know, if we have a set of billiard balls and they're all either white or black, then if I assert, oh, there's some billiard ball in this set that's neither white nor black, then I say, no, that's not true. This set of billiard balls are characterized as either white or black. Right? Or a better way to put it, either white or not white. Right? Or all members, let's say we have a bunch of shapes, right? All members of this set of things that have a shape are either triangular or not triangular.
And then if I say, oh, well, here's a thing that's a shape but it's not a triangle and it's not a non-triangle. That doesn't work, sorry.
Okay? That's a very important thing. So, you know, trying to... so you can't assert that something is both a triangle and not... if you're talking about the set of things that have shapes, you can't say, oh, this thing is both a triangle and not a triangle. And you also can't say this thing is neither a triangle nor not a triangle.
And then if we're talking about things, we could assert if something is a thing, it's either an existent thing or a non-existent thing. Which means we can't assert that there's a thing that is both existent and non-existent. And we also can't assert that there's a thing that is neither existent nor non-existent.
So this leads to what's called the Catuṣkoṭi, the four options, which are used repeatedly by Mādhyamikas, in different ways. You heard it in the context of causality. Right? So if something is produced, so in the universe of things that are effects, Right? So we have the set of all things that are causal effects, which we would call saṃskṛta dharma, conditioned things. If something is a conditioned the thing, then it's been produced from something that is either identical to itself or not identical to itself.
In other words, it's either produced by self, by what is self, or by what is other. And so Khenpo was going through those arguments, demonstrating that what self... it doesn't make sense for it to be produced from self, it doesn't make sense for it to be produced from other, and both and neither also don't work.
Everyone see that? Okay? Why do both not work? You can, you could assert, so I set that up in such a way that it's got to be either, so that they're contradictories. We could also set it up in a way in which the, they... we can allow that they're not contradictories. So everything in the set could have, be produced partially by both. We could assert the set of causal things is produced by something that's partially by itself and partially by something else. And that, then we use a different argument to reject that option. It depends on how you consider what causation is. And the classic argument really is the one in which, okay, sure, maybe it's a little of both,
but logically speaking, the other one is cleaner.
Okay? So also then we can talk about um... what we've mentioned, existence. You can do this with impermanence and impermanence, right? So anything that has temporal existence either changes or does not change. Can't be both, can't be neither. If it's, excuse me, anything that has temporal existence either essentially changes or does not essentially change. In other words, its essence is to change or not to change. You have to add that. Right? Intrinsically it's a changing thing or intrinsically not a changing thing. It can't be both and it can't be neither. Okay? Is that clear? So that kind of reasoning is very important. And the reason, this is related to something we're going to go through in a minute, but first we'll take a little break. This is related to how we use the conventional. Because as I was saying the other day, the, the, you know we have these intuitions, but the way we sort of sort through our intuitions and refine them and correct them is through this kind of reasoning. Right? Which is also used in, you know, science. And if we don't have that kind of careful reasoning, we would probably not have survived this far as humans. So this is actually part of the way we operate conventionally. We operate with this kind of reasoning when push comes to shove. You know sometimes just intuitively you know, you run the red light, you're in your car, there's a red light, and then you don't stop, and then the police come and stop you. And they say, you ran a red light. And you say, well, it was kind of red and not red.
You can try that next time, that the police stop you, see how that goes.
Okay? Now, because the idea here is that this kind of reasoning is actually rooted in the assumptions about essences. Like things are what they are. So it's either, if we have contradictories like existence and non-existence, then what follows from that ontology, actually, is that things can't be both and they can't be neither. So interestingly, this kind of reasoning is actually derivative of our tendency to essentialize. Okay? You can have other kinds of reasoning, and there are, I mean, logicians work with other kinds of reasoning that violate one or both of those principles. But you can't do that and maintain a kind of essentialist ontology. That's key. All right? Yeah. Stefan, real quick, and then we break.
Thanks. Let me comment on this from a quantum physics point of view. Yes. So that we have like this matter-particle duality. So that particles can also have as matter wave duality. Right. Particle wave duality that particles... Behave like particles sometimes and waves others depending on how you... yea. Especially like we have this famous experiment, this double slit experiment, Yea. where one particle can go through both doors, through both slits at the same time. Yeah. And if you set it up one way, you just see particles hitting the board. If you put two slits, then suddenly you see a wave interference pattern. Exactly, yeah. And it can only be true if it goes, if the particle, if this intent... intenity, like one thing goes through both at the same time. Right. So if we maintain that it's either a particle or not a particle, it can't be both and it can't be neither. In other words, if we essentialize its identity as a particle, that kind, then like when we see the double slit experiment, wait a sec, this is illogical. So then you have to step back from the idea that its essential identity has to be either that it's a particle or it's not a particle. Now it has a different kind of like contextual identity. Right? It's an identity that, in a sense, how we identify it, what we call it, what model we use to describe it, is context-dependent. Like if we have one way of measuring or one kind of experimental setup, then we call it a particle. If we have another kind of experimental setup, then we call it a wave. So we measure it actually as a particle or as a click. Right, exactly. Yes. It does something. So there's this one point in time where you have the event of detection. Yes. We call it click. Because it hits the screen and it makes the original experiment. And it's with one point, no. Yea. A single one. But like in between, we can prove that it goes through these two slits. Yeah, because of the interference pattern. Yes, exactly. So what that's showing is that the particle is kind of, in a sense, refusing just to be a particle. It's refusing the essential identity of just being a particle. Or being in one state of position. Yes. Right. Which is another way, you could say like, if we have an essentialized notion of what it means to exist in space-time, then either a thing is here now or it's not. Maybe it's not a property of a particle being on one position at one time. Right. So we have a wrong view of what the particle actually is. Right. For us, a particle is something which has a position. Yes. Right. So one answer to that is, well, it's got a special kind of essence that somehow enables it to do that. But for me, the more interesting answer, and I'm not a quantum physicist, I've done a little work with some of them, a kind of answer that like you get from somebody like Chris Fuchs in cubism, is like, what we're seeing is something that's context-dependent. Like the particle's behavior, or quantum level, weird quantum level stuff, is not that it's just weird things that have these weird essences, but rather that the behaviors are contextual. And so depending on what we do, how we measure, how we set up an experiment, we get different results because there isn't just a single identity, objectively real thing there, there's a relational thing there that is context-dependent. But I don't know, like I know a lot of quantum physicists don't think that way, but I think some do, yeah. Anyway, thank you, Stefan. It's a very good example, like, where we can then, we do have to actually violate that kind of reasoning. And the point of this type of approach is to point out that when we assume that there are essences, we end up violating it. Like we end up having to reject essences because we either find ourselves in a contradiction or in an excluded middle. We either find ourselves saying, for example, oh, it's both existent and non-existent, or it's neither existent nor non-existent. And instead of like just clinging to that, it's still truly real, it's objectively essentially real, the answer that emptiness is saying to us is, uh, why don't you give up that model of it being really, like, essentially real? How about that solution? So we know in our world that like either realism or locality is violated. So by the Bellini quality, with this entangled photon pairs, where like two years ago, Zeilinger, these others got the Nobel Prize for. Yes, right. And realism is that particles have properties, necessarily, so that can be violated, that particles, or like objects don't necessarily have a property, or that locality, that space-like separated measurements are not space-like separated. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, so quantum physics is a great place where, in that book, The Blind Spot, I mentioned, also does a very nice job of pointing out how the kinds of contradictions you end up in, even in quantum physics, are very much dependent on a certain type of objectivist view, and if you abandon that view, they're much easier to resolve.
Okay, so let's take a five-minute break. We didn't get quite as far, or five-ish minute break. Okay, come back at 25 after, is that okay?
Okay.
Welcome back, everybody.
So...
I just say that I do some verses of invocation, and it's very traditional to do that. And, you know, everyone kind of does their own thing to a certain extent, you may have already noticed. And what I do is I do a verse... I do two verses in Sanskrit because we still have those verses in their original language. And the English translations are not so beautiful. And then I do one verse that was originally in Sanskrit, but that uh, uh, we don't have the Sanskrit anymore, so I do the Tibetan because, again, I'm not super fond of the English. Maybe I'm a little snobbish about it, I don't know. And then the last one is only in Tibetan. So the first verse is from Dharmakīrti's Pramāṇa-vārttika, but it's about but it's about Samantabhadra, so people assume it's the Bodhisattva Samantabhadra, but, you know, who knows? And it uh... is saying that, Uh Samant... I pay homage to Samantabhadra, the one in whom the web of concepts has been torn apart, who has vast and profound bodies, and who shines light everywhere. And then the second one is from Nāgārjuna's Achintya Stava, one of, Nāgārjuna wrote six philosophical texts and then a series of praises, and in one of them he says, you're not real, you're not unreal, you're not discontinuous, you're not continuous, you're not permanent, you're not impermanent, to you the non-dual I bow. And then the third one is the one that you've been doing with Khenpo in the mornings, the sh... not the long praise of Mañjuśrī, but the short one. And then the fourth one, Khenpo also does, Khenpo does that one too when he teaches, and then, as do many people, and then, because that one is about, as you've seen in the English, it's about sort of being inspired with wisdom. And then the fourth one is a sort of invocation of the guru, which many of you already know too. Okay, just thought you might be interested. So if anyone comes up with beautiful English translations, just let me know. Maybe they're out there already. And also, part of this idea is someday, maybe our Buddhist university will help produce scholar practitioners who will write their own independent, originally composed in German or French or some European language, English, independent verses, meaning, you know, within their own cultural mode, which is that last of those four that I do, the last one is written originally in Tibetan, actually. Okay.
Okay, so I invite you to just take a moment to settle the mind. You've been practicing with Eric, who doesn't like it when I call him Lama Eric. But anyway. I'm just allowing the mind to settle.
No need to get caught in a web of concepts. No need to push them away either.
And now bringing up our motivation in the Mahāyāna, in our Mahāmudrā Dzogchen tradition. Our highest motivation is the aspiration to attain awakening for the sake of all beings. And let's begin. So um...
Uh... righto, here we go.
Oh, that's, here we are. Uh... could ask if there are any, maybe this is dangerous to do this right away, but if there are any, like, if anyone has a really, like, like, I gotta ask this question right now, you can do that. Otherwise we'll definitely have time for questions later. Okay, and then move forward, unless there's an urgent question.
Okay, let's go on. Yes.
I guess I don't fully grasp yet how the insight of emptiness um, rids us of suffering. Because I feel like the way it was explained that it is more through a sort of secondhand insight of the nature of impermanence, but I feel like what it's really pointing to is something more direct. Yeah, yes it is. And so Khenpo's point wasn't that impermanence and emptiness are the same thing, but that if you really kind of fully understand impermanence, it sort of leads you to emptiness. I think that's what I understand him to be trying to say. But if, you're right, like, realizing impermanence is not the same as realizing emptiness. Emptiness is as... and we'll see exactly why emptiness is connected to the relief of suffering. That's going to be part of what we do right now. Okay, but that's a great question because he did, I don't think Khenpo, you know, I mean, I'm not, I don't mean to speak for Khenpo, who, it was great, by the way, to have him here, I wish he could continue, but he has to travel. But um... Uh... you know, I think the point is that, and Rinpoche has been talking a lot about impermanence, not just recently even, but, you know, for some time, and that it is a sort of pathway into a number of different things, and one of them is emptiness. Because part of, as we will see, part of what emptiness really means is interdependence, and part of what interdependence requires is change. Like, without change, there's no interdependence, and change is impermanence. So if you really understand impermanence, then the pathway from that to interdependence, and therefore the pathway to emptiness, because you can't have interdependence, two things that are completely autonomously existent can't be interdependent, because they can't relate. Totally autonomously existent is what we call intrinsically established things, things that have a svabhāva, they can't relate to each other. So interdependence is impossible. So if you really understand change, impermanence, that means you see that change then leads you into, oh, well, change is like what happens when things are in relation to each other, and things that are in relationship to each other have to be empty of essence. So it's that kind of a pathway, as I see it. Okay, quick review of some goals. We had this term of the Hīnayāna, which or we could even call this the common vehicle, you know and uh, uh the uh... so this is basically the kind of perspective that comes out of early Buddhism. And we see, when people talk about the Theravāda tradition, it's not exactly the same. No, no, there is a claim that, and I think a reasonable claim, that it traces back to the very earliest period, but it's not going to be quite identical to, it's had some historical development, but some of these things would apply to modern day Theravāda. The ideal practitioner is a monk, the goal is to become an arhat and to kind of attain a type of nirvana that's just a cessation. Remember that nirvana without a remainder, right? Uh, like you can attain nirvana while you're alive, and then basically you just wait for the karma that's made your aggregates occur to run down, and then basically you die, and then it's all over. And whether something happens after that, the Buddha refused to say. Then in Mahāyāna some five... approximately 500 years after the Buddha, this becomes kind of publicly available, as it were. The ideal practitioner is a monk also, but also especially a lay person, especially sort of in literary expression. It's often lay people who are used to kind of represent the bodhisattva. Not all the time, but you see that often. And a bodhisattva, being intent on awakening, intent on becoming a Buddha for the sake of relieving the suffering of all sentient beings. And it has bodhicitta, that intention or aspiration, that awakening mind, bodhi, awakening mind, citta. And this word bodhi comes from the same verb as Buddha. So bodhi means awakening, and Buddha means awakened. And so that's where you're headed is to become a Buddha and to attain this unlocated nirvana. You're neither in saṃsāra because wisdom stops saṃsāra. Stops your... More accurately, wisdom stops you from being trapped in saṃsāra. So also in that longer Mañjuśrī prayer, it talks about the prison of saṃsāra. So you no longer are imprisoned, but you can still do a prison break. Right? So you you don't... like you, you get, you get people out. And the reason you do that is that you are, you have compassion. So you don't just escape out of the prison. You're not caught there anymore, but you're there to help beings escape, so to speak, or maybe just escape at first. But is the perspective that came up this morning with Khenpo La, actually, is that we won't be, we probably won't say too much about this this week. But, and Rinpoche talked about a little bit last week, but is the idea that actually all the... the final destiny of all beings is awakening, is Buddhahood uh, in this tradition. And we said, you know, there's also that we see how this occurs in art. So on the left is called an aniconic representation of the Buddha with just an empty throne. Sometimes you also see like just his footprints. And then that's from around 200 BCE, I think, and this one of the tōraṇa, one of the kind of gates at the great stupa of Sanchi. And then the Buddha is back, you know, suddenly, starting around the start of the Common Era, where now he's depicted in physical form. Okay? And then we talked about Nāgārjuna. I just wanted to say that um... the you can... and that the main text that we'll be looking at a little bit is this text, Wisdom Prajña, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, the root verses on the Mādhyamika philosophy, the middle way. We'll see a little more what middle may, middle way means soon. But if you want to read more about Nāgārjuna and sort of the academic accounts of Nāgārjuna, you can find that this in the introduction to this volume that just came out, which is a translation of a very important and interesting text by Nāgārjuna, considered generally one of his six philosophical texts, some debate about that, but generally considered that he's authored it and also that it's one of his philosophical texts. It certainly has philosophical content, but it's also presented as a letter to a king, a Sātavāhana king, and it's advice about like how to lead a good life as a lay person and also how to be a ruler, how to be a leader. So it's a very interesting text that way. And in the introduction in this text, and Sara, esp... Sara McClintock, my co-author especially, did a lot of work on the introduction, and I contributed too, of course. It's a quite good sort of summary of the state of the scholarship about Nāgārjuna as a person and some of the historical details and so on and then some important about his work in general and then the Ratnāvalī itself, the precious garland itself. So this is available... Did we ever get a copy? Oh, okay. So it's available, and you don't have to buy it. I'm sure somebody's already uploaded a PDF somewhere, but if you want to buy it, you can. So anyway... Uh... Yes, money, money. So let's just review a couple of things. For the Abhidharma... So this term is a... This is a way of referring to the followers of Abhidharma. Abhidharma is this... Basically, without getting into detail, is this style of analysis, philosophical analysis that is typical of the early period. Uh, and for them, the ignorance is the belief in the true ultimate existence of things that are actually just made of irreducible elements and not even that much. So you could say... Now, ignorance in the end is primarily about... And maybe I should have changed this, actually, but ignorance is definitely... If I think that this is ultimately real, that there's one ultimately real thing here, the vase or the flower, as we were talking about, if I think that holes are ultimately real, I'm already caught in ignorance. Right? Because they're going to say that this is, they're really just irreducible elements here. But the reason... That's a kind of secondary expression of ignorance for them, because the main problem is that we take that to be... We take this kind of psycho physical stuff. Our intuition is not that there's just one thing in here that is the self, but that kind of the whole package constitutes the self. And that there's like one... There's one person here, one thing, which is a person that is here. And so there's a very famous dialogue between a monk Nāgasena and a Greek Bactrian king, you know one of the kings who is left behind from Alexander's adventures in Asia, a descendant of that, the King Melinda or Mithrandar, his Greek name. And they have dialogue, basically, you know, the king says, Oh, what do you mean I'm not a person? You know, look at me, there's one person here, right? That's me. I have a self. And Nāgasena says, Well, how'd you get here? Well, I came in a chariot. And he said, Yeah, well, is the... Okay, well, is the chariot the wheels? Is it the axle? Is it the reins? Is it this? Is it that? So that same part-whole analysis goes way back. And that's used especially to counteract kind of the most fundamental and perhaps common sense intuition, which is that there's a single person here, and there isn't one element that constitutes that person. It's all of them together somehow, or some key elements together that constitute this one thing, which is therefore a whole, right? Remember that idea of a distributed entity? So that neither one nor enemy, uh 'enemy', that neither one nor 'many' analysis, right? That part whole analysis is really targeting that intuition. And what... So for the Abhidharmikas, there is something that you will see when you look for things. You're trying to find out what's really here. You do end up coming to saying what is really here, which is these irreducible elements that would be in case of something physical. And then what's really here, right, is irreducible. Some of them are physical elements, but also irreducible mental elements. Okay, and they are ultimately real, for this first layer of philosophy. Okay? But the Mādhyamikas, and this is the term for a philosopher who follows the mādhyamaka, slightly different spelling in Sanskrit. This is a kind of adjectival form. They're also known as the Śūnyatāvādins, those who espouse or speak of emptiness, śūnyatā. Right, for them, what is ignorance? It's the belief that there's anything whatsoever that exists truly or ultimately by virtue of its essence, svabhāva. And that's what it means to exist ultimately, is to have an essence. We're going to find out what that means soon. And wisdom is just like, you know, in general, in Buddhist philosophy, you say, what is wisdom? It means, yathābhūta darśana in Sanskrit, which means seeing things as they truly are. So what are you seeing here? You're seeing emptiness. And I'm doing little quotation marks because how do you see emptiness? And that's going to be one of our big questions. So just again, somewhat as a review, both the Abhidharmikas and the Mādhyamikas, and we're talking about the Abhidharmikas, by the way, because Nāgārjuna is going to be reacting to them to a very great extent. All right. So the Abhidharmikas and Nāgārjuna, they're both going to agree that the aim is to eliminate suffering. Although the Mādhyamikas, also are focused on ending the suffering of everyone and actively participating in that. In other words, becoming a Buddha who's able to help all beings to do that. Right? So that is a key difference. And suffering is eliminated by eliminating its cause, which is ignorance. Everyone agrees on that. Ignorance is an error. It does not see the world the way it really is. And wisdom eliminates ignorance because it sees the way the world really is. Right? Okay. So all of that is kind of the same. A bit of a review in some way. Uh... So what did Abhidharmikas think? They maintained that there are holes, things that have parts and other kinds of distributed entities, like we talked about before, like a universal or a platonic form. That would be another example of this. Any of those kinds of things do not truly exist because they can be reduced to their parts. Right? You know, the flower is not one thing. We can say, what's the flower really? Well, it's really a bunch of petals and so on and so on. And then we could even take one of the petals and say, what's that really? Well, it's really a bunch of atoms interacting in a certain way. Right? So when we ask the question, what is it really? We keep going down, down, down, breaking further, further, further, until we get to something that can't be broken down any further. So that's called a reductionistic analysis, called reductionism. There is kinds of reductionism, but that's one. Sort of atomistic reductionism. Right? And you come down to this fundament... these kind of fundamental elements or parts that constitute everything. And they truly exist because they can't be reduced further. And, and what is said about them, as I said yesterday, is that what we mean by them not truly existing is that they have an intrinsic nature. They have a svabhāva. You can say that's an essence, intrinsic nature, a true identity, Uh, literally translatable as own being, svabhāva.
And yesterday we heard about the Ātman term. What's the difference between this Hindu term and this svabhāva? I think I have a...
Maybe I took that slide out. The Ātman being something like a soul or capital S self. Let's do this. We'll go here for a second. Okay, so... the Ātman can be thought of as a um... particular version of an essence. Okay? And that particular version of an essence is the essence of a person. So the Abhidharmakers are going after that. Right? So they're saying in this mind-body system, there isn't something that somehow is the essence of that system that maybe might be characterized as what the system altogether constitutes the system as a whole, for example, or constitutes the identity of the system as a single thing. Okay? Or that supports that or controls it. So that's the Ātman of a person, the pudgala of the pudgala. So when we talk about the essencelessness, the absence of that kind of self, we talk about the absence of a personal self. Okay? Or the essencelessness of persons, or you can say selflessness of persons, that's fine. And then what the Mādhyamakas are going to go after, and actually all Mahāyāna philosophers, is they're going to say that not just these elements, not only is there no person here, but the elements, just as the person lacks an essence, the elements also lack... the person lacks an essence or a self, the elements also lack any kind of essence. And you can even use the word self there. But of course, it kind of sounds silly to say that an atom is selfless, because atoms aren't living beings, so we don't think of them as having selves. So there it's better to say... So sometimes you hear about the two kinds of selflessness, the selflessness of persons and the selflessness of things, but we don't think of vases as having a self. Does anyone think of the vase as having a self? Sorry. You know, it's like, no, we don't really think that way. Right? You, you know. Did I insult you? No, it's like you don't really feel like that. Vases have essences, right? Things have essences. Persons maybe have selves, essential selves. So the Mahāyāna and the Mādhyamika is historically the first to do that. They're going to say that not only is there no essence of a person, which we can call a self, there's also no essence of things, and that's called the dharma nirāmaya, where nirāmaya can literally be rendered as selflessness, but in this context, we have to think of it as essencelessness. There's no essence. Okay? So...
Uh, where am I? So the Abhidharmikas are going to say that things have an essence. And one... so there are a few features of that essence that we really want to get to, right? And one of them, and Khenpo has been talking about this, like what's a svabhāva? And we're going to examine some of that. Uh, the... Uh... so when we say that these things have a svabhāva, what we're saying is that they exist ultimately. All right? And so what's a svabhāva? It's what a thing really is. Here are a few ways of thinking about it, and we'll come back to this, but, you know, what is an essence? Uh, first of all, you have these alternative translations, own being, nature, intrinsic nature, okay? And you could say what is an... One way to think about this is, what is, is, you know, when you're asking, what is... when you're trying to understand what this concept is pointing to, it's saying, it's kind of the answer to the question, what is X really?
And one way to think about what the essence is, is what the answer to that question when you finally stop referring to something else in order to answer the question. So let's take our vase again, all right? Or we'll take our flower.
So we say like, well, what is the flower really?
Right, it's a bunch of parts, so we say maybe like it's a petal and so on, and I say, okay, well, what's the petal really? It's a top and a bottom side. What's that really? What are the top really? The blah, blah, blah, we keep going down, down, down. And then we finally get to something in which we say, well, it's just, what's really there? A part less momentary bit of matter. And we say, what's that really? And we say, it's a part less momentary bit of matter. Right? So... Because we can't reduce further. When we're thinking of this in terms of reduction, and we keep reducing, reducing, reducing, we've gone as far down as we can go, so to speak, when we do a reductionistic analysis. Okay? You get that? So that means we've found the thing that has, that's now what the svabhāva is, or, you know, when we are able to answer that question, then we're pointing to the svabhāva of a thing. And there are a few things about that that are really key. First of all, what that means is that this thing exists in terms of its essence. It also means that if you have, like, just imagining, like let's say, this you know the smallest bit of matter, that thing, that identity of that smallest bit of matter needs to be stable. As long as that bit of matter is existent, right? Even if it's just for a moment, we can't say, oh, it just changed. Because then that's not what it really is. It's become something else. Change means becoming something else. So, for whatever duration there is of a thing that has a svabhāva, that nature, that identity has to be unchanging. Also, precisely in the way we've pointed to here, that identity is independent. It's autonomous. It has an identity that is not dependent on anything else for being what it is. The flower's identity depends on a whole lot of other things. But when we get all the way down to those infinitesimally small bits of matter, the idea is that that's it. Like, they don't depend on anything else for their identity. They are what they are in themselves. And sometimes you get this expression, from their own side. So part of what that also means is, we can say that in that Rangi Nguni, they're established from their own side. We use this word, drupa གྲུ་པ in Tibetan, or siddha in Sanskrit. We say things are established. What it means, it basically means they're existent, or they're even proven to be, right? But proven implies someone going through an act of proof. And that's not always what we mean by established. It just means that they exist that way. This is the way it is. Right? So when we say that the atom is established, this part less infinitesimally small bit of matter, the paramāṇu is established, established by virtue of its own svabhāva, its svabhāva siddha. We mean that it exists. It is the case that that's what it is, just in and of itself. It doesn't depend on anything. That svabhāva is stable, it's not going to change, as long as that thing exists. It is non-dependent. It also is objective. Okay, so one way we... It's a term we could use. What that means is, it doesn't matter how you look at it, or who looks at it. It is what it is, regardless of whatever cognition somebody might be having about it. Okay? Another, so that's a term that definitely you can see within the philosophy, but also when we try to translate that into kind of Western context, that's a very helpful term. The... I think that exists by virtue of its svabhāva, exists objectively. It's com... Not only is it independent of anything else, it's independent of our or any other sentient beings' cognition of it. Okay? It's also, if it exists by virtue of its svabhāva, it is context-independent. Or it's trans-contextual. That's also very important. This is sometimes when we talk about essential identities in the context of things like modal logic, you know, we can say that a thing that, when we talk about the essence of a thing, we can say that's what the thing is in every possible universe. Whatever is true of it, in any context you put it in, that remains true. You know, like I could have, in one universe maybe I have horns, in another universe I'm blue, or you know, in another universe I have five heads. But if there's something that's the same about me in all of those universes, then that's my essence. Okay? In all those possible worlds. So likewise, that means if you take something with a svabhāva and you put it out floating around Pluto, or you put it in another galaxy or whatever, or it's stuck in your ear or whatever it is, it doesn't matter where it is, that identity stays the same. It doesn... The identity doesn't change with context. Okay? So that could be true also of a person. Right? That you have a... If we're talking about persons as having an essence, that they have a context-independent identity, which by the way is especially typical of Western cultures, interestingly, in the modern period. We tend to have much more context-independent sense of our identity. Uh, and there's a whole thing there in what's called weird psychology. Western-educated industrialized rich democratic societies. Yes, it's a great acronym. It's very interesting. There's a whole thing. We did a meeting with the Dalai Lama, and Joe Hendricks at Harvard, who coined this term along with his colleagues, presented it to the Dalai Lama. It's a very interesting idea. So that's the kind of identity on a personal level we're also getting after. Like, oh, you have who you really are. It doesn't matter who you're talking to or what context you're in. You're always the same. That's your true authentic self. Like, no, it's not. That's your square circle. Okay? But we also then, not only do we think we have that about our self, we also have this about things. Okay? That somehow things just look real in a particular way. They look like they're just objectively truly real. I'm looking at the vase. It doesn't matter what my cognitive system is like. It doesn't matter what context we're in. It's just like the vase is what it is. That would be thinking that the vase itself is like intrinsically objectively real. Or I go down to whatever fundamental bits of whatever I think make up the universe and I say, oh, you know, doesn't matter who's observing it, doesn't matter whether you know, whether there's a conscious person seeing something or not or whatever. It's just like that thing. It doesn't matter whether it's in relation to other things. It just has, it is what it is in and of itself. Okay? And the idea here is just like we have an intuition about ourselves existing with a certain kind of essence. We have an intuition, which you might call, my old teacher, Robert Thurman, used to call this the reality habit, right? Which is in Tibetan, tendzin, grasping to reality. Sometimes you hear grasping to truth, but there denpa བདེན་པ really means reality. It means satya in Sanskrit. Grasping to reality. Like, oh, it's just real, that's real, that's real, that's real, that's real. In our cul... again, speaking in evolutionary terms, you know, maybe it's a good thing that our cognitive system evolved to just think that whatever is presented in our perception, for example, or even in our thought is real because it helps us to survive. And we don't become like our friend the philosopher mouse. Remember him? Poor fellow. He's a great philosopher, but didn't make it. In saṃsāra. But again, maybe that's now maladaptive, especially for us humans. Okay? So everyone get that point? So it's that reality habit, instead of being focused on ourselves, now there's an intuition just about things being like that. Okay. So, of course, the Abhidharmikas think that there are entities that exist like that, there are specifically these irreducible things, and the Mādhyamikas say there aren't.
Right? Why do you remember why? Why are the Mādhyamikas going to go after not just the reality habit in relation to our personal identity, but a reality habit in relationship even to the objects of the world? Why do they go after that?
Because they needed to be employed, and if they did that, then...
they'd have long careers at the monastic university trying to explain this to people.
Or it was just a hobby, you know? Is that why? Why did they do that? Do you remember? We did talk about that. What is the conclusion? Okay, so, in the early system, what's the problem? Suffering. What causes suffering? Karma and kleśa. Specific, what's the root kleśa? Ignorance. Ignorance about what? Personal identity. We think that this mind-body system constitutes or somewhere there is there or or is owned by a truly real independent, essentially, objectively real self. Right? We look for it. We do analysis. And we discover that all that's really here is just a bunch of infinitesimally, uh infinitesimal irreducible bits of mind and matter. Right? But they're real. Where did the infinitesimal bits of mind and matter come from? Who made them? Anybody?
The devil.
No, the creator did not make. Who made them? Who's the creator of the infinitesimal bits of mind and matter? Who made a... who made a... who... Where did the dharmas that make up your mind-body system come from? What caused them in the early system? What? Yeah, karma. Whose karma? Your karma. Your karma made everyone else's, no. Each of our karma. Right? Okay, and why, why? What causes karma? What is karma, remember? Do you remember? I don't think I have the other slides. Intention to volitional actions? Yes, intention to volitional actions. Thank you. And... Right? That's what perpetuates and creates this mind-body stuff.
And if you stop the karma, you stop saṃsāra. You stop and what's saṃsāra? Flowing together, the flowing together of what? Of this stuff.
Right? Footnote, the Buddha stops karma. Just like Arhat in the early system does. How do you stop karma? Take medication? How do you stop karma? Eliminate ignorance? Yeah, because it's being driven by kleśas. And the root kleśa is ignorance. Which ign.. Which version of ignorance? In this case, it's about the self. Okay? So we stop the karma, the saṃsāra stops. Eventually the karma runs out. The karma that made this mind-body system runs out. And then the Arhat dies. Right? The Buddha sticks around because instead of having karma to keep things going, you have great compassion to keep things going.
Karma is afflicted. It's, it's produced by what? By afflictions. Specifically, in the end, by ignorance. Okay, we got that? So what does that mean on the early system? What's really here? A bunch of truly real, ultimately real, essentially real dharmas, elements, mental and physical elements. There's no self here, even though we feel like there is. Once we truly directly realize that, we stop the, the process that's producing the karma that produces this stuff. What does that mean about the stuff that is there?
The stuff in the early system that makes us the mind-body system is necessarily contaminated by ignorance.
So, in the end, on this view, like it's not just your mind-body system, it's like everything emerges from the beings, from the karma, like the whole world, the physical world even, is shaped by the karma of the beings in that world. Like, you know, we create our own environmental niches, so to speak, in a kind of mutual process. And so, that means the whole world is contaminated by karma. Which means, it's the whole world is, you know, caught up in suffering because of the four, remember those four seals? All conditioned things are impermanent. It's the first one, Sarva Saṃskṛta Dharmaḥ Nityaḥ. And the second one is sarva saṃskārā dharmāḥ duḥkhaḥ. All contaminated things, which means contaminated by ignorance, are of the nature of suffering. So saṃsāra is of the nature of suffering, the Mādhyamikas agree with that, but the difference here is that for the early period, saṃsāra consists in, is made out of, this fundamental irreducible stuff. And that's all conditioned by ignorance. So it's all contaminated, therefore it's all of the nature of suffering. So there is no possibility of being in a world that is not suffering. Because all the worlds are created by karma. Okay? Get it?
If, so what, how do you solve that problem?
You could, yes, so if you're an early Buddhist, you just escape. Okay? Like you get to the point and your, while you're living, where you're not producing new karma, the karma that caused this stuff eventually runs out, you die and, you know, you're in the final nirvana.
What happens for Mahāyāna?
If you want to have the possibility of building the Buddha field, the buddhakṣetra, if you want to have the possibility of not escaping the world, but transforming the world, then what you need is a philosophy that says, all this stuff does not exist, essentially. That it's not stuck in its essence. Okay? You get it? And what's especially important for that, as we said last time, is a causal process. Because the idea here is that we're talking about these things that make up the mind-body system are called saṃskṛta Dharma. They're conditioned things, which means specifically causally conditioned things. What's the causal condition process? The same one, you know, technically the twelve links of dependent origination, but just that simple process we've been talking about. There's, you know, kleśa produces karma, produces this stuff, and on it goes. Right? So if things, nature, their essence, the svabhāva, is actually a result of their causal history, they come from certain causes, like ignorance, and ignorance is one of the conditions, one of the, is part of that causal history. So the thing, if it's truly real, part of its identity is to be produced by ignorance.
But if we say that causal process does not create that kind of fixed identity, fixed, absolute, unchanging identity, just like, again, in causal, the causal intuition is, if I say, oh, you know, here's an apple seed, but you know what? It's going to produce an orange tree this time. Like, no one thinks that, right? I hope not. It's like, better not be a farmer. But, uh... Right? That's just like our intuition, like, oh, this is the way, you know, these things are fixed by their causal history. So, you know, it's like, that's it, out of luck. Saṃsāra is just, you know, as if that story of Śāriputra, like, it's just filled with cesspools. It's the way it is. And so, if you want to say, no, it isn't that way, we can actually, you know, take the cesspool and turn it into a swimming pool, like our nice swimming pool here in Gomde. I don't think it started as a cesspool, but that would have been a great story, I have to say. Right? Then what do we need? Like, we need it to not be fixed by that causal history. It doesn't have an identity, an essential identity that is a result of its causal history. So you can be radically transformed. All right, so that's really, it's very important to understand that because there's like, it's not empty, philosophy of emptiness is not just like, oh, it's just coming out of nowhere, you know, why would anyone think about that? Why would anyone come up with this kind of thing? You know, why did the Buddha teach that or whatever? Like, whoever you, wherever you think it comes from, like, why would anyone say this? It's because you're, it's going with a view where the goal is no longer to escape. It's to change, to escape the world, it's to change the world. And that's really key. So that the bodhisattva activity is not about like getting out of here, it's about being here. So, you know, Vimalakīrti in the Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra, you know, goes into the brothels, goes to the pubs and wherever. Okay? All right so uh... Really, I know I've said that a few times, but since no one, either you're all too tired, maybe everyone needs to go have a quick espresso downstairs, you know, when we take a break. But uh... that should just be immediately obvious, like, why do we need emptiness? Because we, so that the world is now ultimately transformable. Not ultimately. So the world is radically transformable. Like, as, as, Rinpo..., as uh, as Khenpo la said, like, was it this morning, I think, like, if it's, you know, the essentialist view, like, everything has essences, it's kind of uptight. It's like, well, you know, you're stuck. It's the way it is.
Just, you know, get used to it. Or it's like, emptiness is like, really, like, kind of open view. I'm like, hey, man, don't worry. We'll figure it out.
Take a chill pill and we'll take it from there. You know, like, it's going to be okay. Was it... I think I see a few questions coming up. Ah, that's great.
Yeah, we take, I'll take one here. And then I want to get us to a certain point and then...
Um, is also the reason that uh, laypersons are more included in the Mahāyāna view because of this view of emptiness, it's more workable as a layperson to gain realization? Uh... That's an interesting thought. I don't know if it's... I think lay life can just make, can be hard, depends on the structure of your life. So, you know, what the advantage of a monastic lifestyle is that you're a professional Buddhist, so to speak. You don't have a... It's not, you know, like being a musician. You have your day job and then you play jazz at night. Like, no, it's all the time. Uh and uh... so, and, no, I don't, not per se, but I think what, at least in literature, and I think in fact, the idea is that the layperson becomes very important as a kind of symbol of this, because it's like you're not retreating outside or into the monastery. You're like engaged in the world. Now, you can be a monk, and we know monks like that who are engaged, but sort of the lay, the symbol, at least, of the layperson is very important to represent that. And then the actuality is that you can have, like, much more engagement. So, you know, there's some speculation historically that part of what the Mahāyāna, not cause the Mahāyāna, but what helps the Mahāyāna to spread were merchants. You know, it goes to China, right, through the Silk Road, initially, and maybe somewhat through, like, Indonesia and the southern route. But... No, this was an attractive way, this new way of new style, or it's not new in the sense from the traditional point of view, like, it was always there, but it was hidden. But when this becomes available, like, merchants were very, found that an attractive form of Buddhism. So they were happy to have a monk teacher in their caravan, you know, especially one who would teach this version. So the lay, the kind of identity of the lay person also, I think, became a social kind of identity for Buddhists, where you could be a serious practitioner and still a lay person. Thank you. Okay, let's do a little more. Right, so this is kind of a more historical way of thinking that is more characteristic of kind of Western academics. So that's why we say, like, we're kind of doing Buddhist academics, right? Buddhist-inflected academics. Okay, so quick thing here. So the neither one nor many argument in Western philosophy, we call this a mereiological argument. That's this kind of fancy term, mereology, the study of parts and wholes. And the upshot is, you know, like, if you look at Bradley's account of mereology, he's going to come to a very different conclusion, but um... the Buddhist conclusion is actually that wholes just don't exist. They exist conventionally, right? You can talk about wholes, it's fine to talk about wholes, because the way you talk about them, especially if you know when you say, oh, there's a vase, you know what it really means is, there is a very large number of infinitesimally small part less particles that are interacting in such a way that they can hold a certain quantity of water and a flower. It's a lot easier to say vase, right? But that's what it means. If you know that's what it means, then that word becomes completely unproblematic. Okay? So it's a convenient designation. But... uh... for the Mādhyamika, they're going to use a different kind of argument. They'll also continue to use mereiological arguments, part-whole arguments, neither one nor many arguments. But like the key kind of argument is not a reductive argument. It's a relational argument. The conclusion of the analysis through interdependence or relations is that the very notion of something having an ultimate existence, existence by virtue of its own essence, is incoherent. And if we say that ultimate irreducible part less entities, whether mental or physical, exist ultimately by virtue of this kind of essence, then we're wrong. That's not possible. And we're going to see why. And Khenpo has done that, also gone through some of those arguments. But the main argument there is the one where he also mentioned the verse today, like, yaḥ pratītya-samutpādaḥ śūnyatāṃ tāṃ pracakṣmahe sā prajñaptir upādāya pratipattir madhyamā Khenpo yesterday said, you be sure to recite the Sanskrit. It's a blessing. Uh, that, we say that that which is interdependence is emptiness. It is dependent designation. Like to the extent things are there, they're interdependently arisen, what we're doing is we're just mentally designating them or imputing them that way. That is the middle way. Okay, that's chapter 24, verse 18. And what is that? The middle way in what sense? It doesn't fall into... There are many different ways of thinking about the middle. But it's a middle... A key aspect of the middle is it's neither absolutistic nor nihilistic. It's not affirming absolutized essential existence. But it's not falling into a nihilistic denial of any existence whatsoever.
So we had... that's... In other words, it's based in the two truths, the ultimate and the conventional. Right? Okay? And what it's saying is, from the perspective of the ultimate, we're saying all things are empty of any fixed, absolute, objective, essential identity. From the perspective of that conventional, what that means is that they exist interdependently. Because that's the only way they can exist. If we're going to talk about existence, that's a very important little caveat that we'll come back to later. Okay? So all of this is about withstanding analysis, even for the early Buddhists, but they use a different analysis. Remember, they do reductionistic analysis, the Mādhyamikas are going to do relational analysis. So anything that with sta... and ultimately real entity, it withstands analysis. It's vichāra utsaha. And this non, what it really means for something to withstand analysis is that it is not refuted by non-deviant reasoning.
Okay? We'll come back to that a little bit. But basically, non-deviant reasoning means you accept that uh... contradictions are nonsensical. There are some people who think that Mādhyamikas don't agree with that and I think they're really wrong. I'm not alone in that, but some modern scholars, but, I do not accept that interpretation. So you have to say there are no contradictions. You can't... If your reasoning leads to a contradiction, then you have to conclude that your premise is... that in some... somewhere along the way, you've in a sense made a mistake. So if you want to assert that things do exist, essentially, and that leads to a contradiction when you do analysis, then you know that your initial assertion was wrong. And the other thing is you have to accept for non-deviant reas... non-deviant reasoning is what's called the law of the excluded middle. And all that means is that when you're dealing with exhaustive predicates or categories like we had today... In Tibetan, these are called phen tsun phan gyal, or in Sanskrit, paravirodasthiti. Uh, the, uh, eh, uh... When you say something is contradictory, then if all the things we're talking about are charact, are characterizable as either existent or non-existent, then you can't say there's something that is neither.
You get it? Is that clear?
Is that clear? This is called a contradict, logical contradictory.
Okay, so if you have a universe of things, and those univer, all everything in that... or if you just have a set of things, we can talk about equality and its opposite that characterizes everything in that set. And in order to be in that set, each member of the set has to have one or the other quality. If we want to say all thing... anything that can be called a thing is either existent or non-existent, or anything that we can call knowable is either existent or non-existent, then to be characterized as a knowable, to be in the set of knowable things, or the set of all things in the universe, we say all things in the universe are either existent or non-existent. And that set of things, you have to have one of those qualities, which means if you say... that you want to try to say there's something in the universe that is neither existent nor non-existent, then you're being nonsensical. You're not following, you're being deviant in your reasoning. Okay? Does that make sense? Like, you could say that um...
I'm trying to think of a good example here that's not too confusing. You know, if we have a set of billiard balls and they're all either white or black, then if I assert, oh, there's some billiard ball in this set that's neither white nor black, then I say, no, that's not true. This set of billiard balls are characterized as either white or black. Right? Or a better way to put it, either white or not white. Right? Or all members, let's say we have a bunch of shapes, right? All members of this set of things that have a shape are either triangular or not triangular.
And then if I say, oh, well, here's a thing that's a shape but it's not a triangle and it's not a non-triangle. That doesn't work, sorry.
Okay? That's a very important thing. So, you know, trying to... so you can't assert that something is both a triangle and not... if you're talking about the set of things that have shapes, you can't say, oh, this thing is both a triangle and not a triangle. And you also can't say this thing is neither a triangle nor not a triangle.
And then if we're talking about things, we could assert if something is a thing, it's either an existent thing or a non-existent thing. Which means we can't assert that there's a thing that is both existent and non-existent. And we also can't assert that there's a thing that is neither existent nor non-existent.
So this leads to what's called the Catuṣkoṭi, the four options, which are used repeatedly by Mādhyamikas, in different ways. You heard it in the context of causality. Right? So if something is produced, so in the universe of things that are effects, Right? So we have the set of all things that are causal effects, which we would call saṃskṛta dharma, conditioned things. If something is a conditioned the thing, then it's been produced from something that is either identical to itself or not identical to itself.
In other words, it's either produced by self, by what is self, or by what is other. And so Khenpo was going through those arguments, demonstrating that what self... it doesn't make sense for it to be produced from self, it doesn't make sense for it to be produced from other, and both and neither also don't work.
Everyone see that? Okay? Why do both not work? You can, you could assert, so I set that up in such a way that it's got to be either, so that they're contradictories. We could also set it up in a way in which the, they... we can allow that they're not contradictories. So everything in the set could have, be produced partially by both. We could assert the set of causal things is produced by something that's partially by itself and partially by something else. And that, then we use a different argument to reject that option. It depends on how you consider what causation is. And the classic argument really is the one in which, okay, sure, maybe it's a little of both,
but logically speaking, the other one is cleaner.
Okay? So also then we can talk about um... what we've mentioned, existence. You can do this with impermanence and impermanence, right? So anything that has temporal existence either changes or does not change. Can't be both, can't be neither. If it's, excuse me, anything that has temporal existence either essentially changes or does not essentially change. In other words, its essence is to change or not to change. You have to add that. Right? Intrinsically it's a changing thing or intrinsically not a changing thing. It can't be both and it can't be neither. Okay? Is that clear? So that kind of reasoning is very important. And the reason, this is related to something we're going to go through in a minute, but first we'll take a little break. This is related to how we use the conventional. Because as I was saying the other day, the, the, you know we have these intuitions, but the way we sort of sort through our intuitions and refine them and correct them is through this kind of reasoning. Right? Which is also used in, you know, science. And if we don't have that kind of careful reasoning, we would probably not have survived this far as humans. So this is actually part of the way we operate conventionally. We operate with this kind of reasoning when push comes to shove. You know sometimes just intuitively you know, you run the red light, you're in your car, there's a red light, and then you don't stop, and then the police come and stop you. And they say, you ran a red light. And you say, well, it was kind of red and not red.
You can try that next time, that the police stop you, see how that goes.
Okay? Now, because the idea here is that this kind of reasoning is actually rooted in the assumptions about essences. Like things are what they are. So it's either, if we have contradictories like existence and non-existence, then what follows from that ontology, actually, is that things can't be both and they can't be neither. So interestingly, this kind of reasoning is actually derivative of our tendency to essentialize. Okay? You can have other kinds of reasoning, and there are, I mean, logicians work with other kinds of reasoning that violate one or both of those principles. But you can't do that and maintain a kind of essentialist ontology. That's key. All right? Yeah. Stefan, real quick, and then we break.
Thanks. Let me comment on this from a quantum physics point of view. Yes. So that we have like this matter-particle duality. So that particles can also have as matter wave duality. Right. Particle wave duality that particles... Behave like particles sometimes and waves others depending on how you... yea. Especially like we have this famous experiment, this double slit experiment, Yea. where one particle can go through both doors, through both slits at the same time. Yeah. And if you set it up one way, you just see particles hitting the board. If you put two slits, then suddenly you see a wave interference pattern. Exactly, yeah. And it can only be true if it goes, if the particle, if this intent... intenity, like one thing goes through both at the same time. Right. So if we maintain that it's either a particle or not a particle, it can't be both and it can't be neither. In other words, if we essentialize its identity as a particle, that kind, then like when we see the double slit experiment, wait a sec, this is illogical. So then you have to step back from the idea that its essential identity has to be either that it's a particle or it's not a particle. Now it has a different kind of like contextual identity. Right? It's an identity that, in a sense, how we identify it, what we call it, what model we use to describe it, is context-dependent. Like if we have one way of measuring or one kind of experimental setup, then we call it a particle. If we have another kind of experimental setup, then we call it a wave. So we measure it actually as a particle or as a click. Right, exactly. Yes. It does something. So there's this one point in time where you have the event of detection. Yes. We call it click. Because it hits the screen and it makes the original experiment. And it's with one point, no. Yea. A single one. But like in between, we can prove that it goes through these two slits. Yeah, because of the interference pattern. Yes, exactly. So what that's showing is that the particle is kind of, in a sense, refusing just to be a particle. It's refusing the essential identity of just being a particle. Or being in one state of position. Yes. Right. Which is another way, you could say like, if we have an essentialized notion of what it means to exist in space-time, then either a thing is here now or it's not. Maybe it's not a property of a particle being on one position at one time. Right. So we have a wrong view of what the particle actually is. Right. For us, a particle is something which has a position. Yes. Right. So one answer to that is, well, it's got a special kind of essence that somehow enables it to do that. But for me, the more interesting answer, and I'm not a quantum physicist, I've done a little work with some of them, a kind of answer that like you get from somebody like Chris Fuchs in cubism, is like, what we're seeing is something that's context-dependent. Like the particle's behavior, or quantum level, weird quantum level stuff, is not that it's just weird things that have these weird essences, but rather that the behaviors are contextual. And so depending on what we do, how we measure, how we set up an experiment, we get different results because there isn't just a single identity, objectively real thing there, there's a relational thing there that is context-dependent. But I don't know, like I know a lot of quantum physicists don't think that way, but I think some do, yeah. Anyway, thank you, Stefan. It's a very good example, like, where we can then, we do have to actually violate that kind of reasoning. And the point of this type of approach is to point out that when we assume that there are essences, we end up violating it. Like we end up having to reject essences because we either find ourselves in a contradiction or in an excluded middle. We either find ourselves saying, for example, oh, it's both existent and non-existent, or it's neither existent nor non-existent. And instead of like just clinging to that, it's still truly real, it's objectively essentially real, the answer that emptiness is saying to us is, uh, why don't you give up that model of it being really, like, essentially real? How about that solution? So we know in our world that like either realism or locality is violated. So by the Bellini quality, with this entangled photon pairs, where like two years ago, Zeilinger, these others got the Nobel Prize for. Yes, right. And realism is that particles have properties, necessarily, so that can be violated, that particles, or like objects don't necessarily have a property, or that locality, that space-like separated measurements are not space-like separated. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, so quantum physics is a great place where, in that book, The Blind Spot, I mentioned, also does a very nice job of pointing out how the kinds of contradictions you end up in, even in quantum physics, are very much dependent on a certain type of objectivist view, and if you abandon that view, they're much easier to resolve.
Okay, so let's take a five-minute break. We didn't get quite as far, or five-ish minute break. Okay, come back at 25 after, is that okay?
I just say that I do some verses of invocation, and it's very traditional to do that. And, you know, everyone kind of does their own thing to a certain extent, you may have already noticed. And what I do is I do a verse... I do two verses in Sanskrit because we still have those verses in their original language. And the English translations are not so beautiful. And then I do one verse that was originally in Sanskrit, but that uh, uh, we don't have the Sanskrit anymore, so I do the Tibetan because, again, I'm not super fond of the English. Maybe I'm a little snobbish about it, I don't know. And then the last one is only in Tibetan. So the first verse is from Dharmakīrti's Pramāṇa-vārttika, but it's about but it's about Samantabhadra, so people assume it's the Bodhisattva Samantabhadra, but, you know, who knows? And it uh... is saying that, Uh Samant... I pay homage to Samantabhadra, the one in whom the web of concepts has been torn apart, who has vast and profound bodies, and who shines light everywhere. And then the second one is from Nāgārjuna's Achintya Stava, one of, Nāgārjuna wrote six philosophical texts and then a series of praises, and in one of them he says, you're not real, you're not unreal, you're not discontinuous, you're not continuous, you're not permanent, you're not impermanent, to you the non-dual I bow. And then the third one is the one that you've been doing with Khenpo in the mornings, the sh... not the long praise of Mañjuśrī, but the short one. And then the fourth one, Khenpo also does, Khenpo does that one too when he teaches, and then, as do many people, and then, because that one is about, as you've seen in the English, it's about sort of being inspired with wisdom. And then the fourth one is a sort of invocation of the guru, which many of you already know too. Okay, just thought you might be interested. So if anyone comes up with beautiful English translations, just let me know. Maybe they're out there already. And also, part of this idea is someday, maybe our Buddhist university will help produce scholar practitioners who will write their own independent, originally composed in German or French or some European language, English, independent verses, meaning, you know, within their own cultural mode, which is that last of those four that I do, the last one is written originally in Tibetan, actually. Okay.
Okay, so I invite you to just take a moment to settle the mind. You've been practicing with Eric, who doesn't like it when I call him Lama Eric. But anyway. I'm just allowing the mind to settle.
No need to get caught in a web of concepts. No need to push them away either.
And now bringing up our motivation in the Mahāyāna, in our Mahāmudrā Dzogchen tradition. Our highest motivation is the aspiration to attain awakening for the sake of all beings. And let's begin. So um...
Uh... righto, here we go.
Oh, that's, here we are. Uh... could ask if there are any, maybe this is dangerous to do this right away, but if there are any, like, if anyone has a really, like, like, I gotta ask this question right now, you can do that. Otherwise we'll definitely have time for questions later. Okay, and then move forward, unless there's an urgent question.
Okay, let's go on. Yes.
I guess I don't fully grasp yet how the insight of emptiness um, rids us of suffering. Because I feel like the way it was explained that it is more through a sort of secondhand insight of the nature of impermanence, but I feel like what it's really pointing to is something more direct. Yeah, yes it is. And so Khenpo's point wasn't that impermanence and emptiness are the same thing, but that if you really kind of fully understand impermanence, it sort of leads you to emptiness. I think that's what I understand him to be trying to say. But if, you're right, like, realizing impermanence is not the same as realizing emptiness. Emptiness is as... and we'll see exactly why emptiness is connected to the relief of suffering. That's going to be part of what we do right now. Okay, but that's a great question because he did, I don't think Khenpo, you know, I mean, I'm not, I don't mean to speak for Khenpo, who, it was great, by the way, to have him here, I wish he could continue, but he has to travel. But um... Uh... you know, I think the point is that, and Rinpoche has been talking a lot about impermanence, not just recently even, but, you know, for some time, and that it is a sort of pathway into a number of different things, and one of them is emptiness. Because part of, as we will see, part of what emptiness really means is interdependence, and part of what interdependence requires is change. Like, without change, there's no interdependence, and change is impermanence. So if you really understand impermanence, then the pathway from that to interdependence, and therefore the pathway to emptiness, because you can't have interdependence, two things that are completely autonomously existent can't be interdependent, because they can't relate. Totally autonomously existent is what we call intrinsically established things, things that have a svabhāva, they can't relate to each other. So interdependence is impossible. So if you really understand change, impermanence, that means you see that change then leads you into, oh, well, change is like what happens when things are in relation to each other, and things that are in relationship to each other have to be empty of essence. So it's that kind of a pathway, as I see it. Okay, quick review of some goals. We had this term of the Hīnayāna, which or we could even call this the common vehicle, you know and uh, uh the uh... so this is basically the kind of perspective that comes out of early Buddhism. And we see, when people talk about the Theravāda tradition, it's not exactly the same. No, no, there is a claim that, and I think a reasonable claim, that it traces back to the very earliest period, but it's not going to be quite identical to, it's had some historical development, but some of these things would apply to modern day Theravāda. The ideal practitioner is a monk, the goal is to become an arhat and to kind of attain a type of nirvana that's just a cessation. Remember that nirvana without a remainder, right? Uh, like you can attain nirvana while you're alive, and then basically you just wait for the karma that's made your aggregates occur to run down, and then basically you die, and then it's all over. And whether something happens after that, the Buddha refused to say. Then in Mahāyāna some five... approximately 500 years after the Buddha, this becomes kind of publicly available, as it were. The ideal practitioner is a monk also, but also especially a lay person, especially sort of in literary expression. It's often lay people who are used to kind of represent the bodhisattva. Not all the time, but you see that often. And a bodhisattva, being intent on awakening, intent on becoming a Buddha for the sake of relieving the suffering of all sentient beings. And it has bodhicitta, that intention or aspiration, that awakening mind, bodhi, awakening mind, citta. And this word bodhi comes from the same verb as Buddha. So bodhi means awakening, and Buddha means awakened. And so that's where you're headed is to become a Buddha and to attain this unlocated nirvana. You're neither in saṃsāra because wisdom stops saṃsāra. Stops your... More accurately, wisdom stops you from being trapped in saṃsāra. So also in that longer Mañjuśrī prayer, it talks about the prison of saṃsāra. So you no longer are imprisoned, but you can still do a prison break. Right? So you you don't... like you, you get, you get people out. And the reason you do that is that you are, you have compassion. So you don't just escape out of the prison. You're not caught there anymore, but you're there to help beings escape, so to speak, or maybe just escape at first. But is the perspective that came up this morning with Khenpo La, actually, is that we won't be, we probably won't say too much about this this week. But, and Rinpoche talked about a little bit last week, but is the idea that actually all the... the final destiny of all beings is awakening, is Buddhahood uh, in this tradition. And we said, you know, there's also that we see how this occurs in art. So on the left is called an aniconic representation of the Buddha with just an empty throne. Sometimes you also see like just his footprints. And then that's from around 200 BCE, I think, and this one of the tōraṇa, one of the kind of gates at the great stupa of Sanchi. And then the Buddha is back, you know, suddenly, starting around the start of the Common Era, where now he's depicted in physical form. Okay? And then we talked about Nāgārjuna. I just wanted to say that um... the you can... and that the main text that we'll be looking at a little bit is this text, Wisdom Prajña, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, the root verses on the Mādhyamika philosophy, the middle way. We'll see a little more what middle may, middle way means soon. But if you want to read more about Nāgārjuna and sort of the academic accounts of Nāgārjuna, you can find that this in the introduction to this volume that just came out, which is a translation of a very important and interesting text by Nāgārjuna, considered generally one of his six philosophical texts, some debate about that, but generally considered that he's authored it and also that it's one of his philosophical texts. It certainly has philosophical content, but it's also presented as a letter to a king, a Sātavāhana king, and it's advice about like how to lead a good life as a lay person and also how to be a ruler, how to be a leader. So it's a very interesting text that way. And in the introduction in this text, and Sara, esp... Sara McClintock, my co-author especially, did a lot of work on the introduction, and I contributed too, of course. It's a quite good sort of summary of the state of the scholarship about Nāgārjuna as a person and some of the historical details and so on and then some important about his work in general and then the Ratnāvalī itself, the precious garland itself. So this is available... Did we ever get a copy? Oh, okay. So it's available, and you don't have to buy it. I'm sure somebody's already uploaded a PDF somewhere, but if you want to buy it, you can. So anyway... Uh... Yes, money, money. So let's just review a couple of things. For the Abhidharma... So this term is a... This is a way of referring to the followers of Abhidharma. Abhidharma is this... Basically, without getting into detail, is this style of analysis, philosophical analysis that is typical of the early period. Uh, and for them, the ignorance is the belief in the true ultimate existence of things that are actually just made of irreducible elements and not even that much. So you could say... Now, ignorance in the end is primarily about... And maybe I should have changed this, actually, but ignorance is definitely... If I think that this is ultimately real, that there's one ultimately real thing here, the vase or the flower, as we were talking about, if I think that holes are ultimately real, I'm already caught in ignorance. Right? Because they're going to say that this is, they're really just irreducible elements here. But the reason... That's a kind of secondary expression of ignorance for them, because the main problem is that we take that to be... We take this kind of psycho physical stuff. Our intuition is not that there's just one thing in here that is the self, but that kind of the whole package constitutes the self. And that there's like one... There's one person here, one thing, which is a person that is here. And so there's a very famous dialogue between a monk Nāgasena and a Greek Bactrian king, you know one of the kings who is left behind from Alexander's adventures in Asia, a descendant of that, the King Melinda or Mithrandar, his Greek name. And they have dialogue, basically, you know, the king says, Oh, what do you mean I'm not a person? You know, look at me, there's one person here, right? That's me. I have a self. And Nāgasena says, Well, how'd you get here? Well, I came in a chariot. And he said, Yeah, well, is the... Okay, well, is the chariot the wheels? Is it the axle? Is it the reins? Is it this? Is it that? So that same part-whole analysis goes way back. And that's used especially to counteract kind of the most fundamental and perhaps common sense intuition, which is that there's a single person here, and there isn't one element that constitutes that person. It's all of them together somehow, or some key elements together that constitute this one thing, which is therefore a whole, right? Remember that idea of a distributed entity? So that neither one nor enemy, uh 'enemy', that neither one nor 'many' analysis, right? That part whole analysis is really targeting that intuition. And what... So for the Abhidharmikas, there is something that you will see when you look for things. You're trying to find out what's really here. You do end up coming to saying what is really here, which is these irreducible elements that would be in case of something physical. And then what's really here, right, is irreducible. Some of them are physical elements, but also irreducible mental elements. Okay, and they are ultimately real, for this first layer of philosophy. Okay? But the Mādhyamikas, and this is the term for a philosopher who follows the mādhyamaka, slightly different spelling in Sanskrit. This is a kind of adjectival form. They're also known as the Śūnyatāvādins, those who espouse or speak of emptiness, śūnyatā. Right, for them, what is ignorance? It's the belief that there's anything whatsoever that exists truly or ultimately by virtue of its essence, svabhāva. And that's what it means to exist ultimately, is to have an essence. We're going to find out what that means soon. And wisdom is just like, you know, in general, in Buddhist philosophy, you say, what is wisdom? It means, yathābhūta darśana in Sanskrit, which means seeing things as they truly are. So what are you seeing here? You're seeing emptiness. And I'm doing little quotation marks because how do you see emptiness? And that's going to be one of our big questions. So just again, somewhat as a review, both the Abhidharmikas and the Mādhyamikas, and we're talking about the Abhidharmikas, by the way, because Nāgārjuna is going to be reacting to them to a very great extent. All right. So the Abhidharmikas and Nāgārjuna, they're both going to agree that the aim is to eliminate suffering. Although the Mādhyamikas, also are focused on ending the suffering of everyone and actively participating in that. In other words, becoming a Buddha who's able to help all beings to do that. Right? So that is a key difference. And suffering is eliminated by eliminating its cause, which is ignorance. Everyone agrees on that. Ignorance is an error. It does not see the world the way it really is. And wisdom eliminates ignorance because it sees the way the world really is. Right? Okay. So all of that is kind of the same. A bit of a review in some way. Uh... So what did Abhidharmikas think? They maintained that there are holes, things that have parts and other kinds of distributed entities, like we talked about before, like a universal or a platonic form. That would be another example of this. Any of those kinds of things do not truly exist because they can be reduced to their parts. Right? You know, the flower is not one thing. We can say, what's the flower really? Well, it's really a bunch of petals and so on and so on. And then we could even take one of the petals and say, what's that really? Well, it's really a bunch of atoms interacting in a certain way. Right? So when we ask the question, what is it really? We keep going down, down, down, breaking further, further, further, until we get to something that can't be broken down any further. So that's called a reductionistic analysis, called reductionism. There is kinds of reductionism, but that's one. Sort of atomistic reductionism. Right? And you come down to this fundament... these kind of fundamental elements or parts that constitute everything. And they truly exist because they can't be reduced further. And, and what is said about them, as I said yesterday, is that what we mean by them not truly existing is that they have an intrinsic nature. They have a svabhāva. You can say that's an essence, intrinsic nature, a true identity, Uh, literally translatable as own being, svabhāva.
And yesterday we heard about the Ātman term. What's the difference between this Hindu term and this svabhāva? I think I have a...
Maybe I took that slide out. The Ātman being something like a soul or capital S self. Let's do this. We'll go here for a second. Okay, so... the Ātman can be thought of as a um... particular version of an essence. Okay? And that particular version of an essence is the essence of a person. So the Abhidharmakers are going after that. Right? So they're saying in this mind-body system, there isn't something that somehow is the essence of that system that maybe might be characterized as what the system altogether constitutes the system as a whole, for example, or constitutes the identity of the system as a single thing. Okay? Or that supports that or controls it. So that's the Ātman of a person, the pudgala of the pudgala. So when we talk about the essencelessness, the absence of that kind of self, we talk about the absence of a personal self. Okay? Or the essencelessness of persons, or you can say selflessness of persons, that's fine. And then what the Mādhyamakas are going to go after, and actually all Mahāyāna philosophers, is they're going to say that not just these elements, not only is there no person here, but the elements, just as the person lacks an essence, the elements also lack... the person lacks an essence or a self, the elements also lack any kind of essence. And you can even use the word self there. But of course, it kind of sounds silly to say that an atom is selfless, because atoms aren't living beings, so we don't think of them as having selves. So there it's better to say... So sometimes you hear about the two kinds of selflessness, the selflessness of persons and the selflessness of things, but we don't think of vases as having a self. Does anyone think of the vase as having a self? Sorry. You know, it's like, no, we don't really think that way. Right? You, you know. Did I insult you? No, it's like you don't really feel like that. Vases have essences, right? Things have essences. Persons maybe have selves, essential selves. So the Mahāyāna and the Mādhyamika is historically the first to do that. They're going to say that not only is there no essence of a person, which we can call a self, there's also no essence of things, and that's called the dharma nirāmaya, where nirāmaya can literally be rendered as selflessness, but in this context, we have to think of it as essencelessness. There's no essence. Okay? So...
Uh, where am I? So the Abhidharmikas are going to say that things have an essence. And one... so there are a few features of that essence that we really want to get to, right? And one of them, and Khenpo has been talking about this, like what's a svabhāva? And we're going to examine some of that. Uh, the... Uh... so when we say that these things have a svabhāva, what we're saying is that they exist ultimately. All right? And so what's a svabhāva? It's what a thing really is. Here are a few ways of thinking about it, and we'll come back to this, but, you know, what is an essence? Uh, first of all, you have these alternative translations, own being, nature, intrinsic nature, okay? And you could say what is an... One way to think about this is, what is, is, you know, when you're asking, what is... when you're trying to understand what this concept is pointing to, it's saying, it's kind of the answer to the question, what is X really?
And one way to think about what the essence is, is what the answer to that question when you finally stop referring to something else in order to answer the question. So let's take our vase again, all right? Or we'll take our flower.
So we say like, well, what is the flower really?
Right, it's a bunch of parts, so we say maybe like it's a petal and so on, and I say, okay, well, what's the petal really? It's a top and a bottom side. What's that really? What are the top really? The blah, blah, blah, we keep going down, down, down. And then we finally get to something in which we say, well, it's just, what's really there? A part less momentary bit of matter. And we say, what's that really? And we say, it's a part less momentary bit of matter. Right? So... Because we can't reduce further. When we're thinking of this in terms of reduction, and we keep reducing, reducing, reducing, we've gone as far down as we can go, so to speak, when we do a reductionistic analysis. Okay? You get that? So that means we've found the thing that has, that's now what the svabhāva is, or, you know, when we are able to answer that question, then we're pointing to the svabhāva of a thing. And there are a few things about that that are really key. First of all, what that means is that this thing exists in terms of its essence. It also means that if you have, like, just imagining, like let's say, this you know the smallest bit of matter, that thing, that identity of that smallest bit of matter needs to be stable. As long as that bit of matter is existent, right? Even if it's just for a moment, we can't say, oh, it just changed. Because then that's not what it really is. It's become something else. Change means becoming something else. So, for whatever duration there is of a thing that has a svabhāva, that nature, that identity has to be unchanging. Also, precisely in the way we've pointed to here, that identity is independent. It's autonomous. It has an identity that is not dependent on anything else for being what it is. The flower's identity depends on a whole lot of other things. But when we get all the way down to those infinitesimally small bits of matter, the idea is that that's it. Like, they don't depend on anything else for their identity. They are what they are in themselves. And sometimes you get this expression, from their own side. So part of what that also means is, we can say that in that Rangi Nguni, they're established from their own side. We use this word, drupa གྲུ་པ in Tibetan, or siddha in Sanskrit. We say things are established. What it means, it basically means they're existent, or they're even proven to be, right? But proven implies someone going through an act of proof. And that's not always what we mean by established. It just means that they exist that way. This is the way it is. Right? So when we say that the atom is established, this part less infinitesimally small bit of matter, the paramāṇu is established, established by virtue of its own svabhāva, its svabhāva siddha. We mean that it exists. It is the case that that's what it is, just in and of itself. It doesn't depend on anything. That svabhāva is stable, it's not going to change, as long as that thing exists. It is non-dependent. It also is objective. Okay, so one way we... It's a term we could use. What that means is, it doesn't matter how you look at it, or who looks at it. It is what it is, regardless of whatever cognition somebody might be having about it. Okay? Another, so that's a term that definitely you can see within the philosophy, but also when we try to translate that into kind of Western context, that's a very helpful term. The... I think that exists by virtue of its svabhāva, exists objectively. It's com... Not only is it independent of anything else, it's independent of our or any other sentient beings' cognition of it. Okay? It's also, if it exists by virtue of its svabhāva, it is context-independent. Or it's trans-contextual. That's also very important. This is sometimes when we talk about essential identities in the context of things like modal logic, you know, we can say that a thing that, when we talk about the essence of a thing, we can say that's what the thing is in every possible universe. Whatever is true of it, in any context you put it in, that remains true. You know, like I could have, in one universe maybe I have horns, in another universe I'm blue, or you know, in another universe I have five heads. But if there's something that's the same about me in all of those universes, then that's my essence. Okay? In all those possible worlds. So likewise, that means if you take something with a svabhāva and you put it out floating around Pluto, or you put it in another galaxy or whatever, or it's stuck in your ear or whatever it is, it doesn't matter where it is, that identity stays the same. It doesn... The identity doesn't change with context. Okay? So that could be true also of a person. Right? That you have a... If we're talking about persons as having an essence, that they have a context-independent identity, which by the way is especially typical of Western cultures, interestingly, in the modern period. We tend to have much more context-independent sense of our identity. Uh, and there's a whole thing there in what's called weird psychology. Western-educated industrialized rich democratic societies. Yes, it's a great acronym. It's very interesting. There's a whole thing. We did a meeting with the Dalai Lama, and Joe Hendricks at Harvard, who coined this term along with his colleagues, presented it to the Dalai Lama. It's a very interesting idea. So that's the kind of identity on a personal level we're also getting after. Like, oh, you have who you really are. It doesn't matter who you're talking to or what context you're in. You're always the same. That's your true authentic self. Like, no, it's not. That's your square circle. Okay? But we also then, not only do we think we have that about our self, we also have this about things. Okay? That somehow things just look real in a particular way. They look like they're just objectively truly real. I'm looking at the vase. It doesn't matter what my cognitive system is like. It doesn't matter what context we're in. It's just like the vase is what it is. That would be thinking that the vase itself is like intrinsically objectively real. Or I go down to whatever fundamental bits of whatever I think make up the universe and I say, oh, you know, doesn't matter who's observing it, doesn't matter whether you know, whether there's a conscious person seeing something or not or whatever. It's just like that thing. It doesn't matter whether it's in relation to other things. It just has, it is what it is in and of itself. Okay? And the idea here is just like we have an intuition about ourselves existing with a certain kind of essence. We have an intuition, which you might call, my old teacher, Robert Thurman, used to call this the reality habit, right? Which is in Tibetan, tendzin, grasping to reality. Sometimes you hear grasping to truth, but there denpa བདེན་པ really means reality. It means satya in Sanskrit. Grasping to reality. Like, oh, it's just real, that's real, that's real, that's real, that's real. In our cul... again, speaking in evolutionary terms, you know, maybe it's a good thing that our cognitive system evolved to just think that whatever is presented in our perception, for example, or even in our thought is real because it helps us to survive. And we don't become like our friend the philosopher mouse. Remember him? Poor fellow. He's a great philosopher, but didn't make it. In saṃsāra. But again, maybe that's now maladaptive, especially for us humans. Okay? So everyone get that point? So it's that reality habit, instead of being focused on ourselves, now there's an intuition just about things being like that. Okay. So, of course, the Abhidharmikas think that there are entities that exist like that, there are specifically these irreducible things, and the Mādhyamikas say there aren't.
Right? Why do you remember why? Why are the Mādhyamikas going to go after not just the reality habit in relation to our personal identity, but a reality habit in relationship even to the objects of the world? Why do they go after that?
Because they needed to be employed, and if they did that, then...
they'd have long careers at the monastic university trying to explain this to people.
Or it was just a hobby, you know? Is that why? Why did they do that? Do you remember? We did talk about that. What is the conclusion? Okay, so, in the early system, what's the problem? Suffering. What causes suffering? Karma and kleśa. Specific, what's the root kleśa? Ignorance. Ignorance about what? Personal identity. We think that this mind-body system constitutes or somewhere there is there or or is owned by a truly real independent, essentially, objectively real self. Right? We look for it. We do analysis. And we discover that all that's really here is just a bunch of infinitesimally, uh infinitesimal irreducible bits of mind and matter. Right? But they're real. Where did the infinitesimal bits of mind and matter come from? Who made them? Anybody?
The devil.
No, the creator did not make. Who made them? Who's the creator of the infinitesimal bits of mind and matter? Who made a... who made a... who... Where did the dharmas that make up your mind-body system come from? What caused them in the early system? What? Yeah, karma. Whose karma? Your karma. Your karma made everyone else's, no. Each of our karma. Right? Okay, and why, why? What causes karma? What is karma, remember? Do you remember? I don't think I have the other slides. Intention to volitional actions? Yes, intention to volitional actions. Thank you. And... Right? That's what perpetuates and creates this mind-body stuff.
And if you stop the karma, you stop saṃsāra. You stop and what's saṃsāra? Flowing together, the flowing together of what? Of this stuff.
Right? Footnote, the Buddha stops karma. Just like Arhat in the early system does. How do you stop karma? Take medication? How do you stop karma? Eliminate ignorance? Yeah, because it's being driven by kleśas. And the root kleśa is ignorance. Which ign.. Which version of ignorance? In this case, it's about the self. Okay? So we stop the karma, the saṃsāra stops. Eventually the karma runs out. The karma that made this mind-body system runs out. And then the Arhat dies. Right? The Buddha sticks around because instead of having karma to keep things going, you have great compassion to keep things going.
Karma is afflicted. It's, it's produced by what? By afflictions. Specifically, in the end, by ignorance. Okay, we got that? So what does that mean on the early system? What's really here? A bunch of truly real, ultimately real, essentially real dharmas, elements, mental and physical elements. There's no self here, even though we feel like there is. Once we truly directly realize that, we stop the, the process that's producing the karma that produces this stuff. What does that mean about the stuff that is there?
The stuff in the early system that makes us the mind-body system is necessarily contaminated by ignorance.
So, in the end, on this view, like it's not just your mind-body system, it's like everything emerges from the beings, from the karma, like the whole world, the physical world even, is shaped by the karma of the beings in that world. Like, you know, we create our own environmental niches, so to speak, in a kind of mutual process. And so, that means the whole world is contaminated by karma. Which means, it's the whole world is, you know, caught up in suffering because of the four, remember those four seals? All conditioned things are impermanent. It's the first one, Sarva Saṃskṛta Dharmaḥ Nityaḥ. And the second one is sarva saṃskārā dharmāḥ duḥkhaḥ. All contaminated things, which means contaminated by ignorance, are of the nature of suffering. So saṃsāra is of the nature of suffering, the Mādhyamikas agree with that, but the difference here is that for the early period, saṃsāra consists in, is made out of, this fundamental irreducible stuff. And that's all conditioned by ignorance. So it's all contaminated, therefore it's all of the nature of suffering. So there is no possibility of being in a world that is not suffering. Because all the worlds are created by karma. Okay? Get it?
If, so what, how do you solve that problem?
You could, yes, so if you're an early Buddhist, you just escape. Okay? Like you get to the point and your, while you're living, where you're not producing new karma, the karma that caused this stuff eventually runs out, you die and, you know, you're in the final nirvana.
What happens for Mahāyāna?
If you want to have the possibility of building the Buddha field, the buddhakṣetra, if you want to have the possibility of not escaping the world, but transforming the world, then what you need is a philosophy that says, all this stuff does not exist, essentially. That it's not stuck in its essence. Okay? You get it? And what's especially important for that, as we said last time, is a causal process. Because the idea here is that we're talking about these things that make up the mind-body system are called saṃskṛta Dharma. They're conditioned things, which means specifically causally conditioned things. What's the causal condition process? The same one, you know, technically the twelve links of dependent origination, but just that simple process we've been talking about. There's, you know, kleśa produces karma, produces this stuff, and on it goes. Right? So if things, nature, their essence, the svabhāva, is actually a result of their causal history, they come from certain causes, like ignorance, and ignorance is one of the conditions, one of the, is part of that causal history. So the thing, if it's truly real, part of its identity is to be produced by ignorance.
But if we say that causal process does not create that kind of fixed identity, fixed, absolute, unchanging identity, just like, again, in causal, the causal intuition is, if I say, oh, you know, here's an apple seed, but you know what? It's going to produce an orange tree this time. Like, no one thinks that, right? I hope not. It's like, better not be a farmer. But, uh... Right? That's just like our intuition, like, oh, this is the way, you know, these things are fixed by their causal history. So, you know, it's like, that's it, out of luck. Saṃsāra is just, you know, as if that story of Śāriputra, like, it's just filled with cesspools. It's the way it is. And so, if you want to say, no, it isn't that way, we can actually, you know, take the cesspool and turn it into a swimming pool, like our nice swimming pool here in Gomde. I don't think it started as a cesspool, but that would have been a great story, I have to say. Right? Then what do we need? Like, we need it to not be fixed by that causal history. It doesn't have an identity, an essential identity that is a result of its causal history. So you can be radically transformed. All right, so that's really, it's very important to understand that because there's like, it's not empty, philosophy of emptiness is not just like, oh, it's just coming out of nowhere, you know, why would anyone think about that? Why would anyone come up with this kind of thing? You know, why did the Buddha teach that or whatever? Like, whoever you, wherever you think it comes from, like, why would anyone say this? It's because you're, it's going with a view where the goal is no longer to escape. It's to change, to escape the world, it's to change the world. And that's really key. So that the bodhisattva activity is not about like getting out of here, it's about being here. So, you know, Vimalakīrti in the Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra, you know, goes into the brothels, goes to the pubs and wherever. Okay? All right so uh... Really, I know I've said that a few times, but since no one, either you're all too tired, maybe everyone needs to go have a quick espresso downstairs, you know, when we take a break. But uh... that should just be immediately obvious, like, why do we need emptiness? Because we, so that the world is now ultimately transformable. Not ultimately. So the world is radically transformable. Like, as, as, Rinpo..., as uh, as Khenpo la said, like, was it this morning, I think, like, if it's, you know, the essentialist view, like, everything has essences, it's kind of uptight. It's like, well, you know, you're stuck. It's the way it is.
Just, you know, get used to it. Or it's like, emptiness is like, really, like, kind of open view. I'm like, hey, man, don't worry. We'll figure it out.
Take a chill pill and we'll take it from there. You know, like, it's going to be okay. Was it... I think I see a few questions coming up. Ah, that's great.
Yeah, we take, I'll take one here. And then I want to get us to a certain point and then...
Um, is also the reason that uh, laypersons are more included in the Mahāyāna view because of this view of emptiness, it's more workable as a layperson to gain realization? Uh... That's an interesting thought. I don't know if it's... I think lay life can just make, can be hard, depends on the structure of your life. So, you know, what the advantage of a monastic lifestyle is that you're a professional Buddhist, so to speak. You don't have a... It's not, you know, like being a musician. You have your day job and then you play jazz at night. Like, no, it's all the time. Uh and uh... so, and, no, I don't, not per se, but I think what, at least in literature, and I think in fact, the idea is that the layperson becomes very important as a kind of symbol of this, because it's like you're not retreating outside or into the monastery. You're like engaged in the world. Now, you can be a monk, and we know monks like that who are engaged, but sort of the lay, the symbol, at least, of the layperson is very important to represent that. And then the actuality is that you can have, like, much more engagement. So, you know, there's some speculation historically that part of what the Mahāyāna, not cause the Mahāyāna, but what helps the Mahāyāna to spread were merchants. You know, it goes to China, right, through the Silk Road, initially, and maybe somewhat through, like, Indonesia and the southern route. But... No, this was an attractive way, this new way of new style, or it's not new in the sense from the traditional point of view, like, it was always there, but it was hidden. But when this becomes available, like, merchants were very, found that an attractive form of Buddhism. So they were happy to have a monk teacher in their caravan, you know, especially one who would teach this version. So the lay, the kind of identity of the lay person also, I think, became a social kind of identity for Buddhists, where you could be a serious practitioner and still a lay person. Thank you. Okay, let's do a little more. Right, so this is kind of a more historical way of thinking that is more characteristic of kind of Western academics. So that's why we say, like, we're kind of doing Buddhist academics, right? Buddhist-inflected academics. Okay, so quick thing here. So the neither one nor many argument in Western philosophy, we call this a mereiological argument. That's this kind of fancy term, mereology, the study of parts and wholes. And the upshot is, you know, like, if you look at Bradley's account of mereology, he's going to come to a very different conclusion, but um... the Buddhist conclusion is actually that wholes just don't exist. They exist conventionally, right? You can talk about wholes, it's fine to talk about wholes, because the way you talk about them, especially if you know when you say, oh, there's a vase, you know what it really means is, there is a very large number of infinitesimally small part less particles that are interacting in such a way that they can hold a certain quantity of water and a flower. It's a lot easier to say vase, right? But that's what it means. If you know that's what it means, then that word becomes completely unproblematic. Okay? So it's a convenient designation. But... uh... for the Mādhyamika, they're going to use a different kind of argument. They'll also continue to use mereiological arguments, part-whole arguments, neither one nor many arguments. But like the key kind of argument is not a reductive argument. It's a relational argument. The conclusion of the analysis through interdependence or relations is that the very notion of something having an ultimate existence, existence by virtue of its own essence, is incoherent. And if we say that ultimate irreducible part less entities, whether mental or physical, exist ultimately by virtue of this kind of essence, then we're wrong. That's not possible. And we're going to see why. And Khenpo has done that, also gone through some of those arguments. But the main argument there is the one where he also mentioned the verse today, like, yaḥ pratītya-samutpādaḥ śūnyatāṃ tāṃ pracakṣmahe sā prajñaptir upādāya pratipattir madhyamā Khenpo yesterday said, you be sure to recite the Sanskrit. It's a blessing. Uh, that, we say that that which is interdependence is emptiness. It is dependent designation. Like to the extent things are there, they're interdependently arisen, what we're doing is we're just mentally designating them or imputing them that way. That is the middle way. Okay, that's chapter 24, verse 18. And what is that? The middle way in what sense? It doesn't fall into... There are many different ways of thinking about the middle. But it's a middle... A key aspect of the middle is it's neither absolutistic nor nihilistic. It's not affirming absolutized essential existence. But it's not falling into a nihilistic denial of any existence whatsoever.
So we had... that's... In other words, it's based in the two truths, the ultimate and the conventional. Right? Okay? And what it's saying is, from the perspective of the ultimate, we're saying all things are empty of any fixed, absolute, objective, essential identity. From the perspective of that conventional, what that means is that they exist interdependently. Because that's the only way they can exist. If we're going to talk about existence, that's a very important little caveat that we'll come back to later. Okay? So all of this is about withstanding analysis, even for the early Buddhists, but they use a different analysis. Remember, they do reductionistic analysis, the Mādhyamikas are going to do relational analysis. So anything that with sta... and ultimately real entity, it withstands analysis. It's vichāra utsaha. And this non, what it really means for something to withstand analysis is that it is not refuted by non-deviant reasoning.
Okay? We'll come back to that a little bit. But basically, non-deviant reasoning means you accept that uh... contradictions are nonsensical. There are some people who think that Mādhyamikas don't agree with that and I think they're really wrong. I'm not alone in that, but some modern scholars, but, I do not accept that interpretation. So you have to say there are no contradictions. You can't... If your reasoning leads to a contradiction, then you have to conclude that your premise is... that in some... somewhere along the way, you've in a sense made a mistake. So if you want to assert that things do exist, essentially, and that leads to a contradiction when you do analysis, then you know that your initial assertion was wrong. And the other thing is you have to accept for non-deviant reas... non-deviant reasoning is what's called the law of the excluded middle. And all that means is that when you're dealing with exhaustive predicates or categories like we had today... In Tibetan, these are called phen tsun phan gyal, or in Sanskrit, paravirodasthiti. Uh, the, uh, eh, uh... When you say something is contradictory, then if all the things we're talking about are charact, are characterizable as either existent or non-existent, then you can't say there's something that is neither.
You get it? Is that clear?
Is that clear? This is called a contradict, logical contradictory.
Okay, so if you have a universe of things, and those univer, all everything in that... or if you just have a set of things, we can talk about equality and its opposite that characterizes everything in that set. And in order to be in that set, each member of the set has to have one or the other quality. If we want to say all thing... anything that can be called a thing is either existent or non-existent, or anything that we can call knowable is either existent or non-existent, then to be characterized as a knowable, to be in the set of knowable things, or the set of all things in the universe, we say all things in the universe are either existent or non-existent. And that set of things, you have to have one of those qualities, which means if you say... that you want to try to say there's something in the universe that is neither existent nor non-existent, then you're being nonsensical. You're not following, you're being deviant in your reasoning. Okay? Does that make sense? Like, you could say that um...
I'm trying to think of a good example here that's not too confusing. You know, if we have a set of billiard balls and they're all either white or black, then if I assert, oh, there's some billiard ball in this set that's neither white nor black, then I say, no, that's not true. This set of billiard balls are characterized as either white or black. Right? Or a better way to put it, either white or not white. Right? Or all members, let's say we have a bunch of shapes, right? All members of this set of things that have a shape are either triangular or not triangular.
And then if I say, oh, well, here's a thing that's a shape but it's not a triangle and it's not a non-triangle. That doesn't work, sorry.
Okay? That's a very important thing. So, you know, trying to... so you can't assert that something is both a triangle and not... if you're talking about the set of things that have shapes, you can't say, oh, this thing is both a triangle and not a triangle. And you also can't say this thing is neither a triangle nor not a triangle.
And then if we're talking about things, we could assert if something is a thing, it's either an existent thing or a non-existent thing. Which means we can't assert that there's a thing that is both existent and non-existent. And we also can't assert that there's a thing that is neither existent nor non-existent.
So this leads to what's called the Catuṣkoṭi, the four options, which are used repeatedly by Mādhyamikas, in different ways. You heard it in the context of causality. Right? So if something is produced, so in the universe of things that are effects, Right? So we have the set of all things that are causal effects, which we would call saṃskṛta dharma, conditioned things. If something is a conditioned the thing, then it's been produced from something that is either identical to itself or not identical to itself.
In other words, it's either produced by self, by what is self, or by what is other. And so Khenpo was going through those arguments, demonstrating that what self... it doesn't make sense for it to be produced from self, it doesn't make sense for it to be produced from other, and both and neither also don't work.
Everyone see that? Okay? Why do both not work? You can, you could assert, so I set that up in such a way that it's got to be either, so that they're contradictories. We could also set it up in a way in which the, they... we can allow that they're not contradictories. So everything in the set could have, be produced partially by both. We could assert the set of causal things is produced by something that's partially by itself and partially by something else. And that, then we use a different argument to reject that option. It depends on how you consider what causation is. And the classic argument really is the one in which, okay, sure, maybe it's a little of both,
but logically speaking, the other one is cleaner.
Okay? So also then we can talk about um... what we've mentioned, existence. You can do this with impermanence and impermanence, right? So anything that has temporal existence either changes or does not change. Can't be both, can't be neither. If it's, excuse me, anything that has temporal existence either essentially changes or does not essentially change. In other words, its essence is to change or not to change. You have to add that. Right? Intrinsically it's a changing thing or intrinsically not a changing thing. It can't be both and it can't be neither. Okay? Is that clear? So that kind of reasoning is very important. And the reason, this is related to something we're going to go through in a minute, but first we'll take a little break. This is related to how we use the conventional. Because as I was saying the other day, the, the, you know we have these intuitions, but the way we sort of sort through our intuitions and refine them and correct them is through this kind of reasoning. Right? Which is also used in, you know, science. And if we don't have that kind of careful reasoning, we would probably not have survived this far as humans. So this is actually part of the way we operate conventionally. We operate with this kind of reasoning when push comes to shove. You know sometimes just intuitively you know, you run the red light, you're in your car, there's a red light, and then you don't stop, and then the police come and stop you. And they say, you ran a red light. And you say, well, it was kind of red and not red.
You can try that next time, that the police stop you, see how that goes.
Okay? Now, because the idea here is that this kind of reasoning is actually rooted in the assumptions about essences. Like things are what they are. So it's either, if we have contradictories like existence and non-existence, then what follows from that ontology, actually, is that things can't be both and they can't be neither. So interestingly, this kind of reasoning is actually derivative of our tendency to essentialize. Okay? You can have other kinds of reasoning, and there are, I mean, logicians work with other kinds of reasoning that violate one or both of those principles. But you can't do that and maintain a kind of essentialist ontology. That's key. All right? Yeah. Stefan, real quick, and then we break.
Thanks. Let me comment on this from a quantum physics point of view. Yes. So that we have like this matter-particle duality. So that particles can also have as matter wave duality. Right. Particle wave duality that particles... Behave like particles sometimes and waves others depending on how you... yea. Especially like we have this famous experiment, this double slit experiment, Yea. where one particle can go through both doors, through both slits at the same time. Yeah. And if you set it up one way, you just see particles hitting the board. If you put two slits, then suddenly you see a wave interference pattern. Exactly, yeah. And it can only be true if it goes, if the particle, if this intent... intenity, like one thing goes through both at the same time. Right. So if we maintain that it's either a particle or not a particle, it can't be both and it can't be neither. In other words, if we essentialize its identity as a particle, that kind, then like when we see the double slit experiment, wait a sec, this is illogical. So then you have to step back from the idea that its essential identity has to be either that it's a particle or it's not a particle. Now it has a different kind of like contextual identity. Right? It's an identity that, in a sense, how we identify it, what we call it, what model we use to describe it, is context-dependent. Like if we have one way of measuring or one kind of experimental setup, then we call it a particle. If we have another kind of experimental setup, then we call it a wave. So we measure it actually as a particle or as a click. Right, exactly. Yes. It does something. So there's this one point in time where you have the event of detection. Yes. We call it click. Because it hits the screen and it makes the original experiment. And it's with one point, no. Yea. A single one. But like in between, we can prove that it goes through these two slits. Yeah, because of the interference pattern. Yes, exactly. So what that's showing is that the particle is kind of, in a sense, refusing just to be a particle. It's refusing the essential identity of just being a particle. Or being in one state of position. Yes. Right. Which is another way, you could say like, if we have an essentialized notion of what it means to exist in space-time, then either a thing is here now or it's not. Maybe it's not a property of a particle being on one position at one time. Right. So we have a wrong view of what the particle actually is. Right. For us, a particle is something which has a position. Yes. Right. So one answer to that is, well, it's got a special kind of essence that somehow enables it to do that. But for me, the more interesting answer, and I'm not a quantum physicist, I've done a little work with some of them, a kind of answer that like you get from somebody like Chris Fuchs in cubism, is like, what we're seeing is something that's context-dependent. Like the particle's behavior, or quantum level, weird quantum level stuff, is not that it's just weird things that have these weird essences, but rather that the behaviors are contextual. And so depending on what we do, how we measure, how we set up an experiment, we get different results because there isn't just a single identity, objectively real thing there, there's a relational thing there that is context-dependent. But I don't know, like I know a lot of quantum physicists don't think that way, but I think some do, yeah. Anyway, thank you, Stefan. It's a very good example, like, where we can then, we do have to actually violate that kind of reasoning. And the point of this type of approach is to point out that when we assume that there are essences, we end up violating it. Like we end up having to reject essences because we either find ourselves in a contradiction or in an excluded middle. We either find ourselves saying, for example, oh, it's both existent and non-existent, or it's neither existent nor non-existent. And instead of like just clinging to that, it's still truly real, it's objectively essentially real, the answer that emptiness is saying to us is, uh, why don't you give up that model of it being really, like, essentially real? How about that solution? So we know in our world that like either realism or locality is violated. So by the Bellini quality, with this entangled photon pairs, where like two years ago, Zeilinger, these others got the Nobel Prize for. Yes, right. And realism is that particles have properties, necessarily, so that can be violated, that particles, or like objects don't necessarily have a property, or that locality, that space-like separated measurements are not space-like separated. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, so quantum physics is a great place where, in that book, The Blind Spot, I mentioned, also does a very nice job of pointing out how the kinds of contradictions you end up in, even in quantum physics, are very much dependent on a certain type of objectivist view, and if you abandon that view, they're much easier to resolve.
Okay, so let's take a five-minute break. We didn't get quite as far, or five-ish minute break. Okay, come back at 25 after, is that okay?
