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0% Complete 0/6 Steps

Day3 – 4 sessions

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54:00

Autoscroll:

Chomden de jampé yang la chaktsal lo gang gi lodrö drib nyi trindral nyi tar namdak rabsalwé jinyé dön kün jizhin zik chir nyi kyi tukkar lekbam dzin gangdak sipé tsönrar marik mün tum dukngal gyi zirwé dro tsok kün la bu chik tar tsé yenlak drukchü yangden sung druk tar cher drok nyönmong nyi long lé kyi chak drok droldzé ching marik münsel dukngal nyugu jinyé chödzé raldri nam döné dak ching sa chü tar sön yönten lü dzok gyalsé tuwö ku chu trak chu dang chunyi gyen tré dak lö münsel jampé yang la dü om a ra pa tsa na dhih om a ra pa tsa na dhih...
tseden khyé kyi khyen rab özer gyi dak lö timuk münpa rabsal né ka dang tenchö zhung luk tokpa yi lodrö pobpé nangwa tsal du sol gang tsé tawar döpa am chungzé driwar dö na yang gönpo jamyang khyé nyi ni gek mepar yang tongwar shok
Well, uh, yesterday we completed the first of the logical argument.
The diamond splinter investigation of the cause. And today we are going to in the investigation of the result, refuting existent and non-existent effects.
So in the context of the cause and the effect, we will investigate whether, there is a result that is actually arising, or non-arising.
Whether the result is existent or non-existent.
Uh, if it's, if the result is already existent, if the cause is producing a result that is already existent, then the cause has nothing to do.
The cause has no function. If the result is already existent, then the cause has no function to perform. Okay.
Yeah, if the cause isn't performing a function, then you can't say that there is an effect.
And um, when, if there is an existent result, then how could there be a condition?
Actually, so, uh, so, because of all this, if one says that the result is already existent, then causation doesn't make any sense.
And if there is no result, uh, to say that something has been produced also doesn't make sense.
From something non-existent, nothing existent can come about.
In general, when we speak about these two terms of existent and non-existent, they are mutually exclusive. Something existent could not coincide with something non-existent.
In the world, whatever we can think of in this world, It's not possible to think of a cause that would have a non-existent result. Or it couldn't take something that is non-existent and make it existent.
There is this traditional example of the flower that is growing in the sky, and so this is an example for something non-existent. And we could, we could take all the various causes that exist in this world, take them all and try to make that flower grow in the sky, it wouldn't happen.
So something non-existent cannot become existent.
So a non-existent result cannot be newly produced as something existent.
And if we say that a result is both, that what's being produced is both previously existent and previously non-existent results, then all of the previous flaws apply to that.
And it's also, it's also not possible that, to say that they are neither existent nor non-existent.
And then there is an argument that says that they are naturally produced, that the, these results, both existent and non-existent, are naturally produced.
So there is this, this flaw that we will also reveal in this argument that says that both an existent result and a non-existent result are naturally present or naturally produced. Or intrinsically established.
So all of this is about results which exist or non-exist in a way that is intrinsically established.
Usually we say that the result will be produced from a cause.
What is lo i tak? Uh, it's designated conceptually or by the mind. Mentally designated. So this idea of production, first we don't see something and then we see something. The idea of this being causal production is designated by the mind. It's not intrinsically established.
So and likewise, the fact that there was nothing and then that there is something existent, that is also something that is designated by the mind.
Yea, the idea of something that's existent and then going out of existence, or the idea of something that's non-existent coming into existence, all of this is just conceptually or mentally designated. It is, is not established on it's, intrinsically by itself.
All this is, all of this is just merely interdependent appearances.
And uh, the interdependence means that there is no intrinsic existence, that nothing is intrinsically established. And so anything is possible?
if something was intrinsically established, then it would there would be both existence and non-existence.
And in the, in the context of interdependent production, then we can accommodate the the cause and the effect, as long as we do not go into any sorts of analysis, of examination.
Uh, yes, this cause and effect without analysis or examination conventionally, but not ultimately.
if you have any questions about the, about that, please ask.
The, the way we, the way we see causality from our own standpoint may seem a little bit different than, what is presented in the text.
Student: Does it work? Yeah, I have a question.
Did I understand right that you said if something would be intrinsically established, it would be both simultaneously, like it would be both existent and non-existent. Why non-existent?
Answer: So something is, actually it's not that they are simultaneously existent, but rather that existence and non-existence are contradictories. So if something is truly established as existent, then it is, it is exclusively existent and not non-existent. And, and then also likewise, something that's truly established as non-existent, is in itself non-existent and can't be existent. So they exist in this contradictory relationship. Student:Yes, that makes sense. Thank you.
So the idea is that when you're saying something's truly real, truly established, intrinsically established, it's this, that's what it is. This one thing is that. This, that's all it is.
So the question is, so the idea here is, well, if we're talking about an effect from this kind of essentialized perspective, if we're talking about an effect, then it has to be an already existent effect, intrinsically, or an already non, or an non-existent effect. Before the production of the effect, either it's already existent, intrinsically, or it's already non-existent. Those are the only two options.
And this is actual, but this is from the perspective of, of inquiring rationally, by analyzing. Like what is this, what is this thing? Is this effect existent or non-existent? So that requires this kind of analysis.
But in our ordinary kind of worldly point of view, our sort of common sense point of view, we don't analyze in this way and inquire in this way. It just seems to us that an effect is newly produced from a cause.
So the idea here is that, sort of not analyzing, what's happening is that we are imputing this conceptually or mentally, that we are mentally or conceptually imputing or constructing that causality, by not actually inquiring. So suspending any kind of inquiry, any analysis, we're just conceptually constructing this causality.
So when we say that something is essentially existent or non-existent, however, and we inquire like, oh, well, under that circumstances, an essentially non-existent thing can't be made into something that's essentially existent, because they are contradictory, and an essentially existent thing can't be made into something non-existent.
So, for example, if we have the idea that fire is essentially hot, that heat is an essential quality of fire, then that means that fire, being essentially hot, can't be made cold.
So again, from our kind of ordinary perspective, it seems like something currently non-existent is newly created, in a causal process, but actually, when we think of this, from the perspective of this idea that it's essentially established, that doesn't make sense. You can't make something non-existent, essentially non-existent, into something essentially existent.
Right? So again, something that's essentially rang shin gi, in terms of its svabhāva or essence, existent, also you can't make that essentially non-existent.
And so this is the kind of distinctions that we have to make.
So the main point here is the idea that an essence, or a, or a, an intrinsic nature, or svabhāva in Sanskrit, can't change. You can't change something that's essential.
So if the, if, if the existent... So if the existent, if so, if we're thinking of the effect, right, before its actual arising, we'll say this effect is gonna be produced, we say, well, is the effect that's going to be produced, prior to its production, does it exist essent, is it already essentially existent? Or is it already, or is it essentially non-existent at that point? If it's truly established as existent, then you can't, you don't need to produce it. Does that make sense? And if it's intrinsically established as non-existent, you can't make something that's intrinsically non-existent into something existent, because its essence is to be non-existent.
So when we look at this from the perspective of the Mādhyamika philosophy, in terms of this kind of notion of it being intrinsically established, then whether we look at causes and effects, what we find is that causality just doesn't make sense anymore.
And so wha, so what that means is that we're confused, actually, about causality.
And so, likewise, if causality, if a causal process is an intrinsically established process, then it's not possible to become free from it. It's not possible to stop it. But if it's not tru, eh, if that causal process is not intrinsically established, not essentially established, then it is possible to become free from it.
So what, we're taking this specific example, looking at specific examples of causality, but you can sort of expand the context and see that really what this applies to is saṃsāra, nirvāṇa, the path and all of that.
So actually when the blessed Buddha spoke about this idea of conditioned things being impermanent, actually that has a really tremendous meaning, because what it points to is in fact that things are also, the fact of them being changing, that they change, inherently change, that that also means that they are not truly established. They're not essentially established.
So if saṃsāra, if our saṃsāric world truly existed, if it were truly established, we wouldn't be able to change it.
So again, if you, if you, if we claim that, if we believe that saṃsāra is truly real, truly established, unchanging, permanent and so on in its nature, then we cannot give it up. We can't abandon saṃsāra, we can't stop it.
So then in contrast, if we say that it's not truly established, then something that in its nature is not truly established can actually be transformed. It, it can be changed.
So likewise, in various texts, it's also said that our kleśas, our afflictive mental states, our obscurations, that they are, they are adventitious. They're āgantuka, they're adventitious. Uh, they are not essential. And in that sense, that means they also can be eliminated.
So when we say that things are impermanent, when we say that they are not inherent, ultimately real, that they are not intrinsically established, what it means precisely also therefore is that, they can be, one can put an end to them, one can transform them, one become, one can become free from them, that the possibility of doing all that is precisely because of them not being intrinsically established, of being impermanent.
And also interdependent, sorry. And so therefore what we say is that what is empty, empty of intrinsic establishment, is necessarily interdependent.
And yesterday we had a question related to this, which was something like, well if all things are empty, well does that mean that nothing exists whatsoever? That there's just non-existence?
So even, so uh, from the standpoint of the way things truly are, yes it is true that things do not exist in the way that they are, that they are constructed and the way in which they appear, but from the standpoint conventionally of the way of mere appearance we can talk about them existing.
So on the one hand we can say things are empty, but on the other hand we can say that from the standpoint of them being empty but also therefore interdependent of being mere appearances, then from that standpoint we can say that there is virtue and non-virtue, that there's karma and kleśa, that there's saṃsāra and nirvāṇa and so on.
But if, on the other hand, we say, well, uh, is in some sense, like there, we could say that there's an intrinsically established saṃsāra and then somehow it's going to become empty, well, that doesn't make sense, because it's actually by the fact of being intrinsically established and it's established essentially in some way, such as existent, non-existent, permanent, what have you.
But in contrast, if we say, in terms of the way it is ultimately, we say that it is empty, then that means precisely that, it is possible for it to be conventionally in the standpoint of mere appearance, occurring as interdependent.
So we can talk about interdependence in various ways. In the Mādhyamika system, we talk about, we've been talking about causal interdependence, we can talk about the interdependence here is that word pratītyasamutpāda, we can talk about causal interdependence, uh, we can talk about um the interdepen, mutual interdependence, but actually the sort of place where Mādhyamika really comes down and focuses in on in a subtle way is what we call the interdependence that has to do with mental or conceptual designation,
And so, in this context, then we get this very well known verse, this statement, for whom emptiness makes sense, everything makes sense. Or you can also say, for whom everything, for whom emptiness is reasonable or is possible even, everything is reasonable or possible.
And for one to whom emptiness makes no sense, doesn't seem possible, doesn't seem reasonable, nothing makes sense, nothing is possible, nothing is reasonable.
And so then, right after that it says, for whom, we say that, that which is interdependence, that is emptiness.
It is dependent designation, the verse continues, it is dependent designation, that is the middle way.
And then uh, and then finally, anything that is not interdependent, there is no dharma, no thing whatsoever, which is not interdependent.
And likewise, it continues, there is no, no dharma whatsoever, no thing whatsoever, that is not empty.
And so this is exactly what we have just been quoting, is precisely these verses from Nāgārjuna's text on the middle way.
And you can see that what we have been talking about really, really aligns quite precisely with what we see with Nāgārjuna's words.
So actually, when you think of this emptiness in these terms, then you see that it is really quite a sort of spacious concept, flexible concept.
As opposed to kind of having an essentialist perspective on things, no, they have to be essentially real, or essentially existent, or essentially non-existent, which is kind of uptight.
There is no like, there is not a lot of wiggle room.
Whereas in contrast, in emptiness, like yea, whatever, everything is possible.
That's why you get this verse, for whom emptiness makes sense, everything makes sense, or for whom emptiness is possible, everything is possible.
One way to think about this is, you know if you are watching some kind of a show or something, like, in the context of the show, they can do anything, they can make up anything for the performance.
So if it is not, since it's not truly, yea, a depiction of what's truly the case, then you can make up anything you want.
So like you know, someone who is an actor, so you know an actor who is doing this, right, they can sometimes be the villain, they can sometimes be the hero, sometimes yea, they could be the king, they could be a poor person, so the actor you know, can do anything in the context of a drama like that.
But in contrast, if you know someone thinks I am really the king, then well, they'd rather be the king, they can't be anything, they can't be the poor person, whatever.
So you know, if it, if, if we have this perspective oh things are truly real, they are essentially established, then you know there is not much we can do about them. Whereas if we don't see things that way, then the possibility, there is lots that we can do.
Uh, so you know, in this way, the actor can also then, because he is not intrinsically a king or whatever it is, he can turn down the role. He can say, I don't want to play an actor, I don't want to play a king or a villain or whatever.
But it's not easy for a real king to say, well, I'm not the king. I don't want to be the king.
It's really hard. You know like, if you're the king, well, your like, you're essentially truly really the king. It's kind of hard to not be that.
So and so again, going back to you know the saṃsāric world of suffering, if, if that is not truly established in its intrinsic identity as saṃsāra, then there's something to be done. And where there is, liberation is possible. But if not, then there's not much you can do about it.
This is really the main point of the Mādhyamika philosophy.
So the way things appear to us now, the way we're experiencing things now, are they truly established? It's precisely that they are interdependent, then when we examine them, they are not truly established. That means that we can become free, that we can, that transformation is possible.
But we might feel, wait, no, can we really like become free in this way? Uh, we might have this doubt. They're like, they, they, they look so real. It's so real. And that's when, of course, we examine, we analyze, to see that they're not truly established.
So we, when we say to ourselves, they're real, right, it seems real, then what we need to do is examine carefully, engage in a careful inquiry, and then we find that there's really no basis. We can't give any reason that establishes them to be truly real.
But even though we can't come up with a reason to justify the sense that they're truly real, they still feel that way to us. They still seem that way to us.
And so the point here is that, well, if we you know, feel something or believe something, uh, even though there's no justification for it, you know, we need to ask, is this a correct, justified belief, or cognition, or is this actually just confusion?
And so when we talk about, as you've heard, this idea that all things are like appear, like illusions, they're like a dream, this is actually pointing directly to their, to their reality, to their nature, the way things are.
And seeing saṃsāra in this way as being like a dream, being like an illusion, then our attachment and aversion in saṃsāra becomes less and less, and we are, we are able to attain freedom.
And so emptiness actually is very powerful, it's very powerful. If you are able to correctly understand it.
But you don't want to think of this as, emptiness is this kind of like, you know, absolute nothingness.
The, so in the context of, in general, in this context, we talk, we talk about both emptiness and also what we call luminosity, prakāśa or selwa གསལ་བ་ in Tibetan. And, the Mādhyamika focuses on emptiness. It's especially focused on that issue. But along with emptiness, there is what, what correlates with it, which is this luminosity.
So when we say, when we speak of emptiness, we don't mean that emptiness is just an absolute nothingness, it's just some kind of like an empty, an empty sky, an empty space, an absolute nothingness. We don't mean that.
And when you're, in terms of practice, when one is practicing with this notion of emptiness, then the uh, what, what emerges is that what becomes, one is not fixated or attached to things.
When we are, our mind, what happens ordinarily with our, our, our mind or experience is that we fixate on things as being non-existent, or we fixate on things as being existent, but in emptiness, the, both this notion of existence and non-existence fall away.
Sorry, so, in so in this context of practice we say, there is a saying which is, if you are fixated on things as existent, then there is no liberation. If you are fixated on things as non-existent, then there is no elevation, or... which means basically, you will end up in negative rebirths. There is no, There is no uh, blessed... yea, it's no, it kind of means birth as a human or a god, is what it means.
Because basically if you are practicing in a way that is fixated on things as being just absolutely non-existent, then you are practicing a form of nihilism.
And if you fixate on things as absolutely existent, then one is unable to undermine the fabrication that is imputing that existence. And so even though one can reach all the way to the highest dimensions of saṃsāra, you cannot become free.
And so our practice needs to be one in which our kind of mode of apprehension, so to speak, the way in which we're engaging, is free of fixation on either existence or non-existence.
Now when we talk about, our practice, we do want our practice to be based in what is true, in what is real, so to speak.
Yea so, you know, in the context of saṃsāra, all that, what is appearing to us, objects, our sense of subjectivity, they seem to be truly real and so on, but actually they are not truly established, they are not truly real. But if we take those dualistic kinds of conceptions as the basis of our practice, that's not okay.
In other words, all of that is appearing, you know, the forms, the visual forms, the sounds, the smells, the tastes, the touches, the appearances, these should not be the basis of our practice.
Likewise, the five aggregates, the form aggregate, the sensation aggregate, and so on, these too, are not truly established. It should not be the basis of our practice. We need our, our, our practice to transcend all that.
Eh, so that’s what it, yea you know... That's what it means to really like get emptiness.
So, but you know, you know I'm not just kind of making this up, this is really what we find in our, in the tradition, in the texts, so for example in the, in the Heart Sutra, the Perfection of Wisdom Heart Sutra, there it says there is no form, there is no feeling, and so on, that in that text when it's talking about that, this is really talking about emptiness, this is teaching emptiness.
So when you are meditating on emptiness, if what you are doing is meditating on form, that's not going to work, that's not, that's not right.
And if you're meditating on sensations, that's also not okay. Not for, not for practice of emptiness.
So if you are meditating on any of the five aggregates, as we said, or any of the five sensory objects for example, that's not a meditation on emptiness. That's not the practice of emptiness.
Even if we meditate somehow just on kind of the cognitive structure of subject and object itself, that's also not it. This, this involves the, the fixation on objects and subjects, it involves duality. So how should you meditate?
If you think about this well, and then listen carefully to Rinpoche's teachings that he was giving, then you'll get an answer.
The... What one needs is not to be meditating on something that is conceptually fabricated, but rather something that is free of that conceptual fabrication, that is the cho nyid ཆོས་ཉིད་ the dharmatā, the essence of things, the way things truly are, the ultimate. And there are, and what you need thus is the special instructions or the me ngak མན་ངག་ for that meditative process.
So, and of course what we're talking about there in terms of the, the dharmatā and so on, that's emptiness. And as one studies and thinks about or contemplates emptiness, the notion of emptiness, then yes, certainly one begins to understand more and more and to experience more and more. There is a kind of gradual developmental process there.
But it is the actual sort of meditation on emptiness is when one is having a direct experience.
And so in other words, the, that process begins by relying on the conventional. And this is what Nāgārjuna said, by relying on the conventional, one realizes the ultimate.
Uh, so relying on the conven, without relying on the conventional, you cannot realize the ultimate, and without realizing the ultimate, you cannot achieve awakening.
And when it says the ultimate, that means emptiness.
And so as uh... Longchenpa. As Longchenpa said, what we want to really, we want to pay careful attention to his to his uh, caution when he says, the words, the, the learning just ends up as dead words. The um, uh...
So the words, the learning, so there is learning, contemplating and meditating. Well, words end up, words could end up as, rather learning could end up as dead words. Meditation, and contemplating or thinking about those words ends up as just concepts, and meditation ends up as just pretension.
But when we are talking about the practice on the ultimate, on the dharmatā, the way things really are, then that is non, non-distracted, undistracted non-meditation. Undistracted, non-meditation.
And because if you are distracted, then you are caught in concepts. If you are trying to meditate, you are caught in dualistic mind.
So if you listen attentively to Rinpoche's teachings, then you will see how he is articulating, you have a chance to see, and to understand how he is articulating this style of practice, which is free of this mental effort?
And this we speak of as emptiness, as the ultimate, practice of emptiness, the ultimate.
Okay, let's take a little break.
sönam diyi thamché sikpa nyi thopné nyepai dranam phamjé né kyega nachi balap trukpa yi sipai tsolé drowa drölwar shok

Autoscroll:

Session 7 — Deepening the Analysis of Emptiness

Teacher:

Khenpo Pema Namgyal

Location:

Gomde Germany-Austria

Date: July 24, 2024

Description >>

In this session, Khenpo Pema Namgyal continues the analytical exploration of emptiness by refining the examination of inherent existence. He emphasizes the importance of applying reasoning carefully to investigate how phenomena appear and how they are designated. Through classical Madhyamaka methods, the session further clarifies how things cannot be found to exist independently when analyzed. This process helps weaken the habitual tendency to grasp at phenomena as truly existing. As the analysis deepens, the teachings guide students toward a more precise understanding of emptiness as the absence of intrinsic nature.

Video

Audio

53:45

Autoscroll:

Oh, okay. Apparently we have an online question.
Bibi: The first one is, so does this mean science is trapped? Are there areas in science that can cross this ontological boundary? Then we have, so is time and aspect also in viewing? Can we just do one? Yeah.
I think the first question to ask is whether science or scientists in general uh, would assert that things are intrinsically established or not.
If one has the attitude that things are intrinsically essentially established, then there doesn't seem to be really a way to do effective research.
But if one has an attitude that things are not intrinsically established, essentially established, then it's possible for research to improve more and more.
So if a scientist um, sort of engages in some kind of experimental work and has, has conclusions, if they don't hold that this is just the final, intrinsically established finding, but rather that some future scientists can continue this experimental work and, and find more results, subtler results, and so on, then science can advance.
And so the main thing, question is, so do, do they hold that things are intrinsically established or not?
I think they probably don't think that they're intrinsically essentially established in that way.
Because if they think that things are truly established, then there would be no way to advance research. You know, you'd find a result and that'd be it.
But in contrast then, you know, in the context of science, we always talk about scientific advancement, development.
Science is all into updates.
So, you know, there's the updating ourselves here. That's very important. From a... Scientists are about that. It... Progress.
Another question. And then we also have a question here. Bibi: My question is related to this. Oh, we have a... OK.
Student: I'm just wondering whether, similar to science, Buddhism is also uh, advancing or updating when we make new discoveries. Is it on? Student says: It should be. Like this?
Student says: So, I am wondering whether, similar to science, Buddhism is also continuously advancing or progressing when making new discoveries? Or is it more... I don't know.
Do you think it's good, would be better if there is an update or not? What do you think is better? Student says: I don't know. For me it's a conflict. Student: For me it's a conflict inside because I do think that when a tradition is so old Student: and uh, so well established, then uh, it definitely probably Student: is very valuable to keep to those traditions. Student: But my very um, yea, superficial impression of Buddhism so far is that Student: it is also a continuous search for understanding uh, of the world and of the mind. Student: So in my viewpoint I could see a space for updates and advancements in this as well.
Uh, so, one thing you could say is that the final nature of things can't be updated.
In reality is that the way... there's no updates to reality.
As I said before, this well-known statement, as I said yesterday, like, whether or not there are the Buddhas, the nature of things, the Dharmatā, is wha... is there regardless. Is what it is regardless.
Uh, so when we really are talking about what the nature of things are, we're you know coming to a single conclusion in that regard.
And it seems that, if we talk again about the ultimate nature of things, then uh, that's not something that should be variable. So it doesn't seem like we can do any updating.
We like what we wouldn't, we couldn't say that, for example, the previous Buddhas attained full awakening by virtue of their realization of the ultimate nature of things. But like, they sort of were somewhat incomplete in that, so that the later Buddhas got the updates, and they got you know, the better Buddhahood. That doesn't really work for us.
So you can certainly say that in terms of scientific research, yes, there is an idea of progress, you know. Earlier research has improved upon, but that doesn't really make sense in the context of Buddhahood, of attaining awakening.
And so we say the, that the essence of things, the Dharmatā, that isn't variable. That's invariable.
But even though, like when we talk about what the ultimate nature of things is, that's no variability there, there is an opportunity for updating in terms of the way people are engaging with that, in terms of the way it appears to them, in terms of their predilections, and so on.
And so one way to think about this is the tradition of what are called treasure texts, ter gyi chur or terma, and these occur at various times over history, and you can think of these as being updates in that sense, that they are sort of updating for what is needed at that particular time and place.
So you know, in those various uh, treasure teachings then, that occur, occur at various points historically, then the people at that time and in that place, uh, through engaging with that particular style of teaching, then are going to, based on their uh, uh, their motivation to realize the ultimate, they then make, they then advance on the path. But that's going to look a little different depending on which particular uh, time and place it is, which particular treasure text is involved. But in the end, of course, they're all driving toward the same realization of the ultimate. And in other words, their final meaning is the same.
You can say it's a little bit like, you know, we can have water in a glass, we can have it in a metal container, a wooden container, a brass container, we can have it in various containers, but the water is the same.
You can't really update water.
Uh, we're talking about not, you know, like super water or something. It's like pure water, no one's put anything in it. You can't update just plain pure water. 100% pure. Then I think better understand.
So that's how it is there. Thank you.
Student: So talking about ultimate truth and like full understanding, um, I once read that like Student: realizing ultimate truth means like there's no object of not knowing anymore. Student: So what, like what does it refer to? Like what can you know? Student: Like if you know everything, if there's everything to know. Student: Also these stories of um, Buddha's predicting the future kind of, Student: like when the iron bird flies, and when they talk about, yeah, at this Student: time there will be another reincarnation, and then this text will be needed. Student: Of course it's always hard to talk about this, but if you could explain a bit Student: how to imagine this ultimate knowledge, what was the name?
So here's a way to understand this. When we say we're um, we're understanding, coming to an understanding of the ultimate, what we're understanding is the nature of things. That's what, that's really initially what we're talking about.
So even with regard to all of these different various things that we may be examining, we're talking about them in terms of having this same nature.
So you could say that this single, the ultimate, this single nature that we say is characterizing all things, in that sense all things are included therein.
So we don't actually you know, need to make some kind of a distinction between like an exterior, the nature of exterior world, the nature of the uh, interior mind, or anything like that. We don't need to make those distinctions.
And so uh, in the context of the Perfection of Wisdom text, the, the Buddha spoke of the 18 forms of emptiness, and this is just a way of pointing out that however, what kind of conceptual distinctions you're making in terms of what's being examined, in the end you'll always arrive just at emptiness when you do the ultimate analysis.
Uh, so and therefore what we say is that when you, if one is able to realize, have a direct realization of this emptiness, the ultimate, then you have accomplished all virtue.
So when we talk about um, attaining what we say is omniscience, which occurs with Buddhahood, at that time it's not just having that sort of realization, but it means that you're constantly never separated from that realization, that that is constantly ongoing, the direct realization of the ultimate, direct awareness of the ultimate.
In other words, one is always in the state of what we call nyam par shak pa ཉམས་པར་བཤགས་པ་ or nyam shak, samāpatti, which means... uh, uh, o, um... What's a good translation of nyamshak? Yeah, equipoise, meditative equipoise. Absorption. I never know how to translate that word well. It, a typical translations are meditative equipoise, absorption, the meditative state, nyamshak ཉམས་བཤགས་.
So one way to talk about what this word means, samāpatti in Sanskrit or nyamshak ཉམས་བཤགས་ in Tibetan, is it doesn't mean you had to be in this meditative position it means that the mind is never displaced or fal, or um, falling into any particular conceptual mode.
It's completely free of any kind of distinctions about good and bad, about what needs to be done and what needs to be avoided. This con... This absorption or equipoise. And it's completely effortless.
So whether the bo... the whether the, the Buddha is going some, walking somewhere, whether he's lying down or eating whatever the awakened one, an awakened one is doing, their, the Buddhas are always in this nyamshak ཉམས་བཤགས་, in this equipoise.
And we say, of this we say that this is the awakened mind, the primordial non-conceptual wisdom or wakefulness.
But within this completely non-conceptual uh, awakened mind all uh, um, all normal things are available.
Eh uh, eh, all the... Everything of the three times, past, present and future, is clearly known.
The, so this kind of complete total omniscience really is, only applies to a fully awakened Buddha. Uh, the, you know, persons can attain what we refer to as uh, um, con... literally contaminated types of special awareness. Where uh, and this could apply to what we call abhijñār, or um, uh, a special awareness, special cognitive capacity, special capacities, conscious capacities. And they could be bodhisattvas, they could be arhats, they could be persons at various levels of the path. And they'll have, people will attain these various levels, but that's not that omniscience that we're talking about.
Bibi: Yes, there is um, there two more online, maybe even three.
Bibi: Okay, I have three questions online. Do you want to hear one after the other? Yeah, better one at a time. Bibi: Okay, so the first one is that it's clear that this way of reasoning helps us to have insight into ultimate reality. But other than that, does it also on a relative level help us to navigate the physical world, for example illnesses or yea, anything related to the physical world?
Yes, it's helpful.
When we have, you know, when we're ill or have other kinds of difficulties like that, mentally we often think, oh, this is real, this is, this, this is a real thing happening.
And so uh, that feeling of them not being truly established, of them not being ultimately real, that can sort of decrease in that context.
Or rather, excuse me, that, by thinking that way, then that can decrease that attitude.
In other words, by that attitude of things not being truly established and so on, then you kn... then one can know, feel that these, this suffering, this illness, these difficulties, they will change.
Uh, so if you have an attitude of things that is not changing at all, then when they actually change, that can feel very uncomfortable, that can cause you suffering.
When something that exists becomes non-existent, there's a kind of suffering that can happen there?
When what, what has gathered been gathered together, or meet, has met together, persons, things, when they fall apart, there's suffering.
When uh, when you've reached a certain height and then fall from there, there's suffering. When what's been accumulated is lost, there's suffering.
So when, when, so what's going on here is that when we think of what's existing as being really truly existent, and then it becomes non-existent. And to what, wh, what we've come, what we've met together with, who we've come together with, that that is truly existent, that relationship is truly existent, or that what we've accumulated, this accumulation, this wealth that's truly existent, or the level we've reached, the status we've reached is truly existent, then when it becomes, not when the existence becomes non-existent, that meeting together ends up in a parting, when the um, when that heights, when one falls from that height down to the depths, when one uh, loses what has been accumulated, then there's suffering because it was thought that, oh, that was truly real, but if the truly real shouldn't change, and when it changes, then one suffers.
So when things are in flux in this way, that kind of attitude makes it difficult to bear mentally. But if one has the attitude of recognizing that, recog, of recognizing change, then you don't have that kind of suffering.
So when one understands that what it means for things to be interdependently occurring, that means that they're not truly real, that they are in flux, that they change, and therefore, as a result of that, one's uh, of realizing that, then one's attachment and aversion are less, and one's suffering is therefore less.
Uh, but there's no benefit.
But there's not a lot of benefit in just, you know, when some kind of problem comes up, you just go, oh, it's empty. That doesn't really help.
But rather, when you've be, when have been studying, thinking about this, trying to understand this perspective for a while, like habituating yourself to this perspective, then uh, your tendency toward fixation and grasping is lessened. That's when it's going to help. If real difficulty comes, either need to run out, either need to eat medicine is a better idea. Then through, the result can come quickly, then we can think through this kind of understanding, then pain will be going to shrink and shrink.
And so when you're, you know, when you actually have a dif, difficulty, let's say maybe you do need to take medication or what have you, but the idea here is that if you have really accustomed yourself to this attitude of emptiness and lessened the grasping, then the suffering will be less.
So uh, you can actually find this in special instructions that Rinpoche himself has given, in some of the teachings that Rinpoche has given, in what we call tri yig. Uh, and there, the idea here is not that you just immediately, just by thinking of emptiness or something, that disease and so on is going to be less for one, that the suffering is going to be less. But rather that, through that process of training, so to speak, of uh, of really understanding an, an, and cultivating that notion of emptiness, then that will lessen one's attachments and fixation and lead to less suffering.
In other words, for us beginners, if we're beginners then that's not going to immediately happen.
But then, uh, the uh, like the previous great holy ones have, in contrast, those great holy ones, when they have this kind of even intense illness, because they have this kind of, they're quite filled with this kind of attitude, they're able to lessen their attachment and therefore not suffer as much.
Uh, for example, the 16th Karmapa, even though he was suffering greatly from intense cancer, he still remained, like in his face, he had a smiling face.
And for example, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, with every kind of issues that he faces, uh you know, physically, you always see him like smiling.
And he's you know, he hears all kinds of troubles and faces all kinds of difficulties, and yet he still can maintain this very positive attitude, appearance.
For example, Khyabje Tenga Rinpoche actually had to have both legs amputated. And yet, when you went to see him after that, he was smiling.
So, because these great lamas have, you know practiced so thoroughly, then they don't have that much attachment, they don't have that much fixation, and so they don't face the same kind of degree of difficulty and suffering and misery.
Uh, so when, uh, when, Khamtrul, Khamtrul Rinpoche Oh, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche went to Germany to get an eye operation, they weren't able to give him anesthetic that would make him unconscious. And so they did the operation without anesthetic. Like, wow, that's kind of amazing.
So this is the kind of experiences that people can have, what, the way they experience these challenges when they have done a practice that is really a practice of non-fixation, non-grasping.
And this, we're not talking about you know, some ancient stories, we're actually talking about things that have happened quite recently, and there are plenty of people you can ask about who have seen these things.
Student: Um, you, earlier you said that if one attains Buddhahood, or the Buddha himself, Student: that he knew the past, present and the future at the same time. Student: And if one knows the future, for example, then it must be true. Student: So therefore by knowing the future, Student: he determines the future, therefore there is no free will in there. So everything that's happening will happen.
That's a free will.
Student: Can I add on something too? Maybe let's do that first. That's, I think, enough to start, if you don't mind.
He's not knowing the future as someone who's making it happen, the Buddha.
In other words, he's not doing that like a creator, but rather he's doing it from the perspective of someone who is understanding the results of sentient beings' karmic conditioning and kleśas.
And so he, the Buddha, of course, the direct, knows, sees that all sentient beings' nature is to have Buddha nature. And so from his perspective, there is pure appearance.
So he knows that all of us are going to become Buddhas in the future.
And therefore he has great respect for all sentient beings who are future Buddhas.
Uh, and so if you see all sentient beings as Buddhas in this sense, then you don't have these negative attitudes about them.
So it's just that when we talk about knowing the future, it's referring to knowing how, as a result, the kinds of things that occur as a result of sentient beings' karmic conditioning and negative mental states.
In brief, if you do something positive, you'll end up with positive results. And if you do something negative, you'll end up with negative results.
Uh, he doesn't think, though, that like...
It's not like, oh, if he does good things, then he will become good. If he does bad things, he'll become bad. But rather like, you know, when this certain good things happen, this positive results will happen. When bad things happen, bad things are done. Negative things are done. These negative results will occur.
No, it's not like a kind of... you know, It's not about knowing a fixed future.
In other words, if you follow this positive sort of path, then you're going to end up here. If you follow this negative path, you're going to end up here.
Yeah, so which path you end up on, that's up to you.
Is that good enough? Student: Yes, for the moment.
One of the things here is that when we think of there being a creator deity, like then there's this notion that everything is just fixed. The whole future is fixed. This is not what we say in Buddhist philosophy.
In other words, it's more like the Buddha is knowing the possible outcomes depending on what people choose to do, positive or negative.
So therefore it doesn't depend on you.
Normal logic, right? Common sense.
Student: Um, we talked about with you yesterday that there are like certain stuff that's real, Student: like particles in physics, but if you go down, down, down, then there are dharmas, exactly. Student: And then there are mental dharmas. Yes. Student: And um, since there are like... Student: As I understood, it's like a chain reaction. Right, but...
But that, remember, that's, that assumes the intrinsic existence of those things. So this is not that system. This system, this, that system can sound like, oh, there's like fixed causality. But we're going to talk today about the refu... So what Nāgārjuna does is say those kinds of things don't exist that way. Okay?
So there is a... for example, in India, ancient India, there is this tradition of rishis, ...kind of sages who gain capacities, for example, to know what people are dreaming. But the way they know that is not as that they actually enter into the dream of the person and experience the dream, sort of watch the person experiencing the dream. That's a kind of a metaphor for the way in which the Buddha is experiencing our futures. It's like experiencing our futures through our eyes, from the standpoint of our own confused experience. Not as something fixed in its nature, in other words.
And just to be clear that the person who is entering the dream is awake, but is able to kind of enter the dream and see the dream. So likewise, the Buddha sort of experiences the world, even now, our world through our own eyes, so to speak, from our own perspective. But it's not, which means it's from the perspective of our confusion. We think the world is ultimately real, but it's not. So the Buddha is not experiencing the world as ultimately real. It's not an ultimately real or fixed future that the Buddha is experiencing.
Yea, so we experience our lives as seeming... as real. We think, oh, this is just all real, really happening, it's all really happening and the Buddha doesn't experience it that way.
Okay, so maybe last question. Bibi: Yeah, there's one question that I've been trying to figure out how to ask it, Bibi: but I'll just read it out. Bibi: So is time and aspect also in viewing this? Is emptiness eternal, the opposite? Bibi: Is it the opposite of time and space? Eternity meaning timeless?
Yeah, that's right.
So in the sense that time itself, as well as existence and non-existence, these are all just mentally or conceptually imputed.
And if your... you can't posit time without it being posited from the standpoint of experience or the mind.
Uh, but the mind is, but rather, emptiness is in a sense beyond the confines of that dualistic mind.
And actually this is something that the different chapters of Nāgārjuna's main text um, on the Mādhyamika has different chapters. One chapter, for example, addresses time specifically, analysis of time.
And but this is actually, this is a good question because, you know, for example, there are definitely philosophical systems that posit uh, not only that there is time, but that things, in some sense, that existent things, are present in all three times. That a thing exists in the past, present and future.
And so what that means is that they see things as having like different conditions or states in these different temporal modes so that they have an intrinsically established state in the past, an intrinsically established state in the present, and an intrinsically established state in the future.
But the emptin... the perspective of emptiness will say that actually this perspective, the ultimate, that is to say emptiness, is completely beyond all that.
So when we're, when we're meditating on emptiness, we are doing emptiness meditation, it's not about meditating on the past, it's not meditating on the future. And since the present depends on, on the conceptual construction of the past and the future, it's also not about the present.
And so actually we need to understand what is said about this style of practice, or the emptiness practice, which is that it is not contaminated by the three times.
So in that kind of style of practice, the emptiness practice, if you're thinking, I'm going to be doing this in the future, well, you're not doing emptiness practice. Yea or if you think, oh, I did that in the past. Was that a good or a bad thing? And yet that's also not emptiness practice.
But if then, if one also right now is meditating but not fixating on the present, uh, in other words, one is meditating without fixation, free of fixation of attachment and aversion, then that is the meditation, the emptiness meditation.
Concerning these things, you need to listen again and again to Rinpoche's teachings.
If I say something, it's just going to be dry words.
But Rinpoche is speaking about these things, this style of practice from his own experience. And so there's really a special kind of meaning you can get out of them.
So this is the kind of thing where we were talking about guru yoga yesterday. This is yea, where guru yoga is really appropriate.
Uh, this is the basis for, you can say, the non-conceptual primordial wakefulness.
This is the mind of all the Buddhas, free of concepts.
Lhaso. Okay, now we need to stop.
So we spoke of the five types of great reasons in the Mādhyamika system. We talked about the ones that analyze, the reasoning analyzing the... the cause, the diamond sliver is the reasoning analyzing effect, whether existent or non, pre-existent or pre-non-existent effects. And also we spoke about the uh... the great reason of interdependence. Uh and uh, the professor has spoken a little bit to you about the analysis through neither one nor many, and he will continue to do that as well.
And tomorrow Khenpo, I just said Khenpo, I said he should say that he's leaving. Khenpo la is leaving tomorrow to go with Rinpoche to England.
So really, in terms of really understanding kind of the pith of the Mādhyamika system, of what Mādhyamika is really about, it's that whatever is appearing is what, in other words, something that's appearing that's happening interdependently, that is necessarily not established intrinsically. In other words, it's empty. It's empty of any kind of intrinsic establishment. And being empty of intrinsic establishment, that means everything is possible. Transformation is possible. And it also means that if something is empty of intrinsic establishment, that it's not fixed in some kind of essential nature, it is therefore, what is occurring is interdependent. Thank you. Bibi: Thank you so much, dearest Khenpo Pema Namgyal, Bibi: for teaching us here again at Gomde Germany - Austria. Bibi: We hope that you will continue to teach here countless times. Bibi: You will come again and again at least five times a year, six times, seven times a year. Bibi: And we just love having you and love having your insight, and your... Bibi: Um, it's just deeply impressive at such a young age, how you can really know Bibi: all the philosophies so well that you can answer every question that comes your way. Bibi: Um, it's just wonderful to have such a teacher with us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Without Professor John Dunne I am mute, I cannot speak all of those things. So thankful for him very much because then he make more easy in English terminology because I don't know this terminology. Then it's also not so easy to translate this terminology. So thank you for him. And thank you for all of you listening very carefully. Then I also become more interested and more put attention. How can explanation, yeah? If listener is not interested, then I just want to finish the timing, yeah? Listening also very carefully, very question and answer. Then I also need to put more attention. How can I clarify easy way to understand? Okay, thank you. So now we go to dedication, page number nine. Dedication and page nine of the text, if you have it.
sönam diyi thamché sikpa nyi thopné nyepai dranam phamjé né kyega nachi balap trukpa yi sipai tsolé drowa drölwar shok jangchup semchok rinpoché ma kyepa nam kyé gyurchik kyepa nyampa mepa yang gongné gongdu phelwar shok

Autoscroll:

Session 8 — Q&A: Emptiness, Science, and Practice

Teacher:

Khenpo Pema Namgyal

Location:

Gomde Germany-Austria

Date: July 24, 2024

Description >>

In this session, Khenpo Pema Namgyal responds to a range of questions that clarify key aspects of Madhyamaka philosophy and its practical application. He discusses the relationship between science and emptiness, explaining that scientific progress depends on not holding phenomena as intrinsically established, while the ultimate nature of reality itself does not change. Addressing questions about omniscience and Buddhahood, he explains that realizing the ultimate means directly knowing the nature of all phenomena as emptiness, beyond conceptual distinctions. The session also explores how understanding emptiness can reduce suffering in everyday life by weakening attachment and fixation, especially in the face of illness and change. Through these exchanges, the teachings highlight both the depth of Madhyamaka reasoning and its relevance for transforming how we experience reality.

Video

Audio

01:12:09

Autoscroll:

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?

Autoscroll:

Session 9 — Analyzing Reality: The Logic of “Neither One Nor Many”

Teacher:

John D. Dunne

Location:

Gomde Germany-Austria

Date: July 24, 2024

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.

Video

Audio

38:19

Autoscroll:

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

Autoscroll:

Session 10 — No Fixed Essence: Understanding Emptiness in Context

Teacher:

John D. Dunne

Location:

Gomde Germany-Austria

Date: July 24, 2024

Description >>

This session explores the meaning of emptiness through the breakdown of fixed, essential identities. Using examples like football rules, the teacher shows that things only function within contexts, not as absolute realities. When we try to assign inherent, unchanging existence to things—causes, effects, or objects—reasoning collapses, revealing that all phenomena are relational and empty of essence. Emptiness is not nihilism; rather, it means that things lack independent identity but still function conventionally through relationships and causes. Understanding emptiness, especially together with compassion, allows one to engage flexibly with others’ perspectives and ultimately makes transformation and liberation possible.

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Day3 – 4 sessions

Session 7 — Deepening the Analysis of Emptiness

Session 8 — Q&A: Emptiness, Science, and Practice

Session 9 — Analyzing Reality: The Logic of “Neither One Nor Many”

Session 10 — No Fixed Essence: Understanding Emptiness in Context

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