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01:20:33
okmin chökyi yingkyi phodrang né
düsum sangyé kün gyi ngowo nyi
rangsem chöku ngönsum tönzé pa
tsawai lamai shapla sölwa dep
Okay, so starting a little late today. And I was just asked if we could go to 12:30. So I hope that's alright for everyone.
Right. So we're going to talk some more about emptiness today. But first, I actually want to review one argument because it came up this morning for some of us. And it is basically the idea of the incomprehensibility of things that have spatial extension and a way of getting to emptiness that actually is using a reductive argument, but then flips to a relational argument. So this is the chig du drel, གཅིག་དུ་འབྲལ་བའི་གཏན་ཚིགས as they call it in Tibetan, or the ekānekavicāra, which as I said before, goes back very long way, the neither one nor many argument, or neither identical or different. So actually, these terms in Sanskrit is, in Sanskrit, it's eka and aneka. So eka means one, and aneka means many, or actually, literally not one. So that can mean like singular or plural, but can also mean that if you have two things, or maybe many things in relation to something, then you can ask, are those many things the same as they're related to or different than what they're related to? So it really means identity or difference, one or not one in the sense of identical or different. And with, so if we have like, let's use the vase, which is a one traditional example of bumpa, and this looks pretty like a traditional ghaṭa, as they say in Sanskrit, not too different from one. So the, the different parts of the vase, we can ask, are they the same as the vase or different than the vase? Right, so our intuition is that there's a single whole thing here that's a vase, correct? Right, everyone agrees with that? I'm not holding more than one vase, am I right? So, and we did a load of this before. Now someone really has to, you know, let's try to defend your intuition, don't just give up. Okay, so there's, I'm holding the vase, I am? What am I touching? Am I touching the vase? Student: You are touching the bottom of the vase. So I'm not touching the vase? I am touching the vase. So I'm touching both the vase and the bottom of the vase? Who wants to take the opposite? Who wants to defend? Okay.
Either way, but we have to, we have to respect non-deviant reasoning, so no contradictions and no excluded middle. What that means is you can't say it's both yes and no, and you can't say it's neither yes nor no. You can't say either of those. Then never mind.
Why can't we do that? Why do we respect, you remember, why do we respect those rules of non-deviant reasoning?
Yes, because they are the rules that we play in everyday life, kind of. We will sometimes reject them in everyday life, but maybe more accurately that our conceptual system, like when we're in doubt in our conceptual system, then the way our conceptual system functions, so as to give us the kind of conclusions that enable us to act in the world, when push comes to shove, so to speak, when we're pushed into a corner, then we're going to try to respect those rules. So if we, for example, or in cases that are very important, we're going to try to respect those rules. So if someone were to try to, let's say, build an airplane, and they're going to make something that is, is both is and is not the engine, we might not want to fly in that airplane, you know? If someone's going to perform an operation, you know, let's say you need a heart operation, but you get a doctor who says, I'm going to operate on your heart, or maybe it's not your, it's neither your heart nor not your heart, you might feel a little uncomfortable with that idea. We're going to do brain surgery on something that's neither your brain nor not, that is neither your brain nor not your brain.
Yeah, my madhyamaka surgery, right? No, it's like, no, I don't think we'd be very comfortable with that. So what the idea is that our, and the reason we get to those kind of rules is that we're essentializing. Like when we are pushed into, this is when our, that kind of reasoning actually makes, surfaces, what sometimes is a sort of somewhat hidden essentialism in our ordinary way of thinking, like, it either is or is not a heart, darn it. Okay, that makes sense? Yeah. So it is, in a sense, that reasoning, the respect, respecting this kind of classical non-deviant reasoning is what allows us to push that essentialism, bring it to the fore and then push it to its maximum point where it then falls apart. Okay, make sense? Okay. So, am I touching the vase? Yes. Am I touching the bottom of the vase? Yes. Is the bottom of the vase the same or different than the vase? It is the same. It is the same as the vase. Am I touching the vase? Yes. Am I touching the top of the vase? Yes. Is the top of the vase the same as the vase or different than the vase? Yes, it's the same. It's the same? Same. Therefore, this is, the top and the bottom are identical?
So I should be, I'm not going to make a mess.
Well, I would have to say yes in that moment. I would have to say yes because I said yes twice. Yeah. You would be compelled to say yes. Correct. Thank you, Daniel. Because by the rules of that form of reasoning you can think of this as like algebraic, if A is identical to B and B is identical to C, excuse me, if A is identical to B and A is also identical to C, then B is identical to C. If, if the whole is identical to the bottom and the whole is identical to the top, then the bottom and the top are identical. Yes?
Yes.
So the otherwise is only true for the empty set? Yes, the empty set, which is actually not anything, correct? Unless you want to absolutize nothing, in which case we already found out we're in trouble when we go to that extent. So if you talk about the empty set, then it's true, no? Yeah, right. What's true, like the excluded middle is exactly, is the empty set, right? And contradictions, depending on how you think, the excluded middle is that, so the empty set is like, or the set of all things in the universe, let's say, or let's say that just in terms of the set of the things that are members of the set of vase parts, right? Right? So if we have this universe of the vase and its parts, then the stuff that is neither identical nor different is going to be outside of that set. It doesn't belong to that set, which means that it's not there at all. But one of the things about set theory is it allows us to then concretize the abstraction, so that we can think that the empty set is in some set a real sense, a real thing. But that obviously doesn't make a lot of sense, does it? Unless we're like pushed, you know, to the maximum point of platonic realism. But we'll maybe come back to that later. For now, not worrying about treating the empty set as just meaning it doesn't exist, right? So we can't say that the top, so if I say I'm touching the top vase and I'm touching the bottom, the bottom is the same as the vase, I'm touching the top and the top is the same as the vase, and that means that the top and the bottom are the same, so it shouldn't matter whether I hold it this way or that way, right? Or the size of the vase is the same as the size of both the top and the base, just that high. So all kinds of absurd things follow, right? What if I say it's different? Then what? The vase is different than the top, it's different than the bottom, different than the sides. What happens then? Well, then you could move the vase without moving the rest. I can take all the vase parts away and I should still have a vase, which would make, you know, producing vases and traveling with them and things like that, very, storing them, you could store an infinite number of vases in your closet, you know, you could be, vase collecting would really be fun and easy. Am I right? Does that make sense? Does that, so that's with anything that has parts, we can do that, right? Tables... So this is very interesting. What it's saying is that when you see things and your visual system clumps it together as a single thing, there's a kind of visual binding of those spatial elements, you know, maybe because of contours and edges, right? That, you know, we kind of see a single thing but actually it's not a single thing.
All right? When you really get into that it starts to be a little sort of almost, if you really experience that it's quite interesting and you can do that, you like, invite you to try to do that meditatively, just conceptually, you know, you can take an actual object and look at it and see if it starts to like fall apart, you know, or there's this again that movie I Heart Huckabees, there's this point where they're looking at somebody, somebody's looking at somebody's face and the face starts to go like, breaks into bits and like, where's the one face? Okay, is that clear? So logically, this is not a single thing. That does not mean that the elements or parts of this, if we for the moment assert that there are elements or parts, that doesn't mean that they can't work together to perform certain functions. So in early Buddhism, when we say that the elements or parts are truly real, we get down to that infinitesimally small particle, right? Those particles can all work together and they can affect each other so that they can, so that in a sense they can form a kind of what we might call a system, such that they interact in a way that they can perform functions at the system level, that as individuals they couldn't do. Okay, that makes sense? You could call the vase a system, I guess, in a way, right? So there's a causal like capacity that they get together, but what this kind of approach is doing is it's refusing to ontologize this system level entity. It's refusing to say that's a real thing, okay? Now there are certain problems with that that maybe come up, but we can maybe come back to that later, because what we want to do now is we want to then say, okay, we keep going down, down, down, down, down, we get to what's supposed to be the part-less particle, right? So that part-less particle is something you can't break down any further, or can you? Right? So Rinpoche, those of you who heard that and make a few comments this morning, he was pointing this out. Ha... so why, what happened?
What's that? The pill. So uh... what, what happened, what can we do with the particle? Well, we can agglomerate particles into larger things, right? We have particles of matter, some kind of particle of matter, and it agglomerates into a larger thing. If it agglomerates into a larger thing, does it need to have size?
Does it have to have some kind of spatial dimension? If you accumulate a whole bunch of things with no spatial dimension, how big would it be?
It would be infinitely, it would be no size at all, right? Right? So this is a model of matter, a particular model of matter, that's saying that things that accumulate into larger things have to themselves also somehow occupy some degree of space. Otherwise, if they accumulate, they don't make any size. How would they occupy, how would you get a larger area of space if they things that constitute this larger thing are themselves not occupying space at all, right? That's the idea of this model. But is there a problem with that? If they occupy space, then what? So let's think of that, we're gonna have the other particles around it, right? And we can have different models about how many different particles there need to be. But somehow then the central particle in there something that's, you know, larger than just the size of a particle, it's got to be somehow connected to those other particles, right? It's got to be in relation to those other particles. What would happen if it were in relation to only one? So that means that, for example, it's got a particle, let's just call these, you know, up, down, left, and right, just for convenience. If the particle on the right-hand side is connecting here, then it's got a right-hand side. What would happen if the right-hand side is the same and then the particle here is connecting to the left-hand side, right? So it's gonna have a right and left-hand side. If the right-hand side is the same as the particle, it's supposed to be partless, and the left-hand side is the same as the particle, then actually the right-hand side and the left-hand side are identical, which means that you're back to something with no size, right? So this is actually from, not from a Mādhyamika text, actually, this is from a text called the Viṃśatikā, the 20 verses, and a different philosophy we're gonna talk about tomorrow a little bit, or maybe today. Okay, so what that means is that we can like say, well, this is actually, now we have a new candidate, we were wrong, this is not a partless particle, because it has to relate to other particles in a way that allows space to be occupied, which means it's got to have some kind of dimensions that, that are it's, that constitute that particle. And that means that we can break it down, right? So now what happens? Well, we can take another, right, we have, we can have a new candidate, okay, let's look at, we're just gonna look at one dimension, but then we end in the same problem. It just, it's in infinite regress. And so the conclusion for the Buddhists to this argument is that if you posit the idea of a partless particle, that's actually incoherent. That the reductive argument, which in some sense is almost arbitrarily stopped by the Abhidharma tradition, so that you still end up with matter, here like, we don't end up with, matter is gone. With that, at least on that model, matter doesn't make sense, right? Like bits of stuff that take up space don't make sense. So that's one way you get to, like, so when, as was quoted in the text that um... that Khenpo la was talking about, was teaching about, from Śāntarakṣita's Madhyamakālaṃkāra, but also as really is almost a direct quote from Dharmakīrti, you can say this thing doesn't have an essential nature. In other words, the vase doesn't exist essentially, objectively, independently, because you can't specify whether the vase is the same or different than its parts. But then likewise, you can't do that even with the individual atoms, because you can't specify whether the atom is the same or different than its dimensions. And you take a single dimension, if it too has to somehow satisfy the need to occupy space, you're back to the same place. The dimension has to have dimensions that enable it to occupy space. So that means that you can't specify even that a dimension of a allegedly partless atom truly exists, because you can't specify whether it's the same or different than its dimensions, the metadimensions of the dimensions of the partless particle. Right? Just keeps going. It's, you know, like partlessness all the way down. You just keep trying to find that partless thing and you can't get there. You see that? It's kind of interesting, like, if you really... I think, did I... I can't remember if I told this here, but there's, you know, if you really, like, think about... I was one time in, like, 1983 when I first started studying this particular argument. I was driving a bunch of Gyuto monks around in the United States and I was like thinking about it on the highway and it's like everything is falling apart, you know. It's like, whoa! And the monk next to me goes, are you okay? He's like, watch the road. What road? You know, there's no spatial extension, you know. It's a little dangerous. Don't drive and do this, please. No cutting things, you know. That's exactly my question now, when you just said that, so it doesn't make sense. Then I was like, okay, but still the things appear. So it's our conclusion, things appear, but it just doesn't make sense. So there's a... so that's going to be the difference between the conceptual understanding and the experiential understanding. And then when you bring that to an experiential understanding, then when you see this, it stops looking like a single thing to you, really.
It's like got this sort of, oh yeah, kind of, you know, and therefore it has this sort of dreamlike quality to it, right? And there are different ways that that experience can manifest and there can be degrees, like it can really just start to fall apart. And then later, as you're walking around, it doesn't quite fall apart, but it's like, I sort of know what it's, I know that that's not really what it looks like. Just like when you look at your face in a mirror, most of the time, when we look at our face in the mirror, we don't go, oh, that's not my face. Maybe you do that after you've had a hard night of something, or rather it was like, ah, who's that in the mirror? But otherwise, right, we don't usually think, oh, that's not, but, but still we don't, even when we're looking at our face, it's kind of like, we know we sort of, but some part of us knows that's a reflection. We don't think, oh, like if someone goes up to it and it goes, we didn't go, ow! It's not like the rubber hand illusion, if some of you that are familiar with that, where you trick people into thinking of rubber hand, you have a certain experimental setup, and you have their real hand, you know, their left hand, and then their right hand, they sort of set it up so that there's a rubber hand in place of their right hand. And then you take like a pin and you go, and people go, ow, you know, that's not going into their hand, but they've sort of believe it's their hand. That's not really true with the mirror. Like if I go up and I go on the mirror, you don't go, ow, it doesn't feel like it's really your face. So it's like that. You know, everything's like a reflection, for example. Okay.
Why an atom doesn't have a spatial dimension? Well, if it has a spatial dimension, okay, if the atom has a spatial, the atom needs a spatial dimension, needs size, so that it can occupy space. But if it has size, then that means that the other atoms that are accumulating around it to make something larger have to be connecting to some part of that size. So now it has, you know, chok in Tibetan. So if you heard Rinpoche, he was talking about, he was talking about sides or chok, or in Sanskrit, pakṣa. So you can say it has a side, but another way you can say it has some kind of a dimension. And if all the dimensions are just the same as each other, then all the atoms around it also have dimensions that are just identical to the atom itself, and everything ends up being just the size of one atom. Right? So it doesn't occupy space anymore. Right? Huh? What? Does the floor work? Do we need to get like, walk around with flippers on so we don't fall through the...
There's a... Bob Thurman used to tell this story of the, I think it was the quantum physicist who like kind of lost it and had to walk around in his lab wearing, you know, flippers for swimming, because he was afraid he'd fall through the floor. This is mostly space where it's just probabilities, like, you know, maybe just very unlikely probability that it's just going to go... The scientist, I don't know, Robert Thurman was there when I was an undergraduate, I stayed with Bob, and Bob was a very helpful teacher and still is mentor for me in many ways. So anyway, Uh, what we end up with then is this kind of, you can get to an experiential level with this. But there's also another kind, very important other kind of argument that goes with this, which is that the um, uh... that the parts also, and we can do a relational argument as well, without going into the kind of infinite regress, we can also say that the whole is a whole only in relation to the parts, and the parts are parts only in relation to the whole.
Okay? The whole is a whole only in relation to the parts, and the parts are defined as parts only in relation to the whole. But if the whole cannot be established independently of the parts, and the parts can't be established as parts, as part of a system, unless that system or that whole is already established, then we've got a problem. Which is established first? Do we first have the whole or the system, and then the hard parts are defined as a member of that whole? Or are the parts defined as parts of a system first, and then because they're parts of a system, the whole emerges?
Right? You see that? There's a relational problem. And this is the fundamental problem here is the basic problem, the basic problem of, of relations. All right? So let me just say something about that for a second. The basic, the basic problem of relations before we say more. If two things are in relation, are they the same or different?
They're different. Okay? So let's say these two things are in relation, and there's a third thing over here that's not in relation to them. Okay? So is this, you know, I could even maybe do it with this diagram. So let's say we have these three things that you're about to see. Okay? All right? And we're saying these, these two, the ones that are horizontal to each other, are in some kind of relation. And the one below here is not in relation to them. Why do we say that? If there's... If these are totally different, this is also different, then why would you say they're in relation?
Right? This is also different. This is different from, they're all different from each other. Why do we say these two are in relation and this one isn't?
Why do we do that? They're all different. What would happen if we say the two things in relation are the same? Then how many things are there? One. Can a thing be in relation to itself? Some people would say yes.
You know, that's when you, like, I married myself and things went, things went bad real quick, and I couldn't get a divorce, you know, so.
So like they're tied, in some sense they're together. So then the obvious answer to this question is this. Oh, they're in relation because there is an entity that's a relation that ties them together. Right? And then what do we do with that? Using the neither one or many argument, there's always something you ask. What do you ask? Is it same or different? Is the relation, is this relation, this thing, whoops, is the relation this, okay, is, can you see the laser pointer? Okay, is the relation the same as the relata, these two things? Or is it different than them?
If it's different, then what's wrong? What happens? We need another relation to tie the relation to the relate to the relata. And then we ask the same question. Is the second order relation the same or different than the things it's tying together? And the answer is, if it's different, we need a third order relation. If it's the same, then there's no two-ness such that the relation is necessary. And we end up in another infinite regress. So relationality, if you essentialize things, like they're either essentially the same or they're essentially different, relationality falls apart. It doesn't make sense. They have to be kind of the same and kind of not the same, right?
And then we fall out of the non-deviant reasoning and we're back and we're into a place and that means that, if we're saying that what it means to something to exist ultimately is that it exists essentially, then these things do not ultimately exist. We're back to the problem as well, how do they exist then? And this short answer that Mādhyamika provides is: interdependently. Another term that you'll see, especially in Tibetan versions of this, is pentsun tendrub ཕན་ཚུན་བརྟེན་གྲུབ་, which means mutually uh, mutually dependent establishment. Basically, another way of just saying interdependence. So you know, then you can say, well, let's come up with a model that makes sense of this, that tries not to essentialize things. How do you, like... You know, if we don't assume that things have to be absolutely identical or absolutely different, what kind of a model can we come up with that doesn't just become incoherent? Right? And then one version of that model might be something that is context-bound, that says they're different in one way and identical in another way, for example, or some other way of trying to talk about relationality that doesn't essentialize. Right? And I think quantum physics is the place where this kind of problem starts to come up. But in any case, our ordinary way of thinking where we essentialize things, the confused perspective, that's the issue here, right? So if we think they have to be either essentially identical or essentially different, we end up in incoherence, which means that that assumption is wrong, which means that they don't have that kind of essence, which means that they're empty. Okay? Did you have a question, please? Yeah, more a comment to that. So like this properties of spaces or like of entities in mathematics, it's called topology. Yes. So it's like kind of the study of properties of spaces that are invariant under continuous deformation. So invariant under continuous deformation. So as soon as you have an object with a hole, you will never get rid of the hole if you deform it Right. continuously. So not like um... And the other comment is like, with the vase, of the button and the top, there's also mathematics, it's called like set theory, which also deals with that, that you have like a subset of a set. Right. So one of the things that's always interesting to ask about this, these kinds of in these contexts is you have a mathematical abstraction. Hmm, exactly. And is the mathematical abstraction the same as this concrete entity or different than it? And this is like how you do like also the proofs in set theory. So you compare it and question that. Right. Yea. And I remember like when I was like a student, the professor there also like made stuff up and then in the order you just proved it for the empty set. Yes, right. Yeah. But then the only problem is, you know, do you remember we had that verse yesterday, like this verse here, like clinging to śūnyatā is not a good idea. Clinging to śūnyatā, the equivalent of that is like thinking the set empty set is a real thing.
Right. Instead of concluding that, oh, that, you know, that's, that should tell us something about the problematic ontology that we're assuming from the beginning. Instead, we can ontologize that. That's so that's basically like part of what I'm pointing to, which that book, The Blind Spot you know, gets into is the, is our tendency to ontologize mathematical objects, which has just become more and more powerful as the modern period has progressed. And that's, you know, the, this, this system would definitely question and try to undermine that kind of ontology. Where mathematical characterization's of things like sets or topology would be useful but they are not real things in the world the mathematical objects is not a real thing in the world. Now, when you, you know, I realized that a lot of mathematicians would feel very uncomfortable with that. But I have a friend, Bob McCauley, who just as a quick story. His colleague, Mark Johnson, who worked with George Lakoff on kind of metaphor theory. and conceptual metaphor theory, and then also the embodied nature of things like mathematical objects, how they actually have, how you can, you can argue for the way in which they relate to embodiments. And then he gave a talk at the, for the, at Georgia Tech some years ago, according to Bob. Bob was there. He didn't know there are many people from the math department were in the room. And he's saying, so mathematical objects are actually emerging from the features of human cognition and our embodiment. They're not real things in the world. And they almost threw him out this third floor window. Like, What? Mathematical objects aren't real? They were not happy about this. So in Austria, when you finish mathematics as a study, you just get, just get a a degree of a doctor in philosophy. So philosophy, not of science. Yeah, there you go. Yes. So did we have another question? And then I want to move on.
You presented now the interdependent model as an alternative to the, like to the essentialist model, right? Yes, correct. Yeah. How is it different from relationality, interdependence versus relation? So what, what interdependence assumes is there's some like, yeah, that to the extent that things exist, they exist in some way that is relational, meaning they don't have autonomous essences, but it doesn't give you a model for that. So one model for that, like one approach to that, that basically Candrakīrti, a very important commentator on Nāgārjuna, that many academics have worked on, and I'm currently translating his best known commentary. I think Anne McDonald at Vienna is also working on that. And Candrakīrti basically says, you know, whatever worldly, whatever kind of worldly reasoning that even experts kind of develop, the experts have essentialized it, just use that and know it's not essential. So he doesn't like say, oh, you can come up with like a better model of the conventional. Once you understand that it's not essentially real, like you say, you know, just use your ordinary common sense intuitions and just know that this, this, your ordinary common sense intuitions are, are coming out of a place of delusion. But you can just use that, right? As long as you want to just undermine it. No, it's, in other words, oh, it looks like, you know, that's a single thing and fine. Yeah, it's a single thing. But I even feel that it's not, it's, it feels dreamlike and so on. But in the context of the dream, it's one thing. So that's what he would say. Just use kind of ordinary worldly pramāṇas as they're called, means of valid cognition. But another argument might be, well, maybe we can come up with, once we have undermined essentialism, maybe we can come up with a better model that is a non-essentialist model of relations and stuff. What do you think might be the problem with that?
Anybody?
That it is again essentialistic because if we talk about relations, something has to be in relation? Kind of. That we might think that this new, supposedly anti-relation or anti-essentialist model of interdependent reality is reality. That we might absolutize it in some fashion. Maybe that's, maybe in some fashion, that's not exactly about essences. But in other words, that we will again mistake the map for the territory. And that's why Candrakīrti resists that in some, many Mādhyamika philosophers, we're not going to kind of get into these details, but many Mādhyamika philosophers kind of resist the attempt to update our world models based on a Mādhyamika ontology, which is a non-ontology. Like, there are really are no essentially real things, there's only conventionally real things. So let's come up with a new model of the world that, you know, kind of doesn't essentialize things, but gives us good descriptions or is more even more effective or what have you. And Mādhyamika philosophers like Candrakīrti say, no, don't do that. That's a bad idea, because you're just going to do the same thing again. You're just going to make your new model into the true reality. Like this is, you know, you're going to sort of give lip service to, oh, there are no essences, but here's what's really going on. You know, it's quantum physics or string theory, or, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, then everybody says, oh, yeah, what's really going on? blah, blah, blah, blah is going on. And, you know, then we're back to square one. So that's a long debate, actually, in Mādhyamika that goes on into Tibet. But isn't that already the case for, like, just making any kind of statement, even if it is negation? Like even Candrakīrti? Yes. So that's, that's a great, that's a great point. And so that's why Mādhyamikas, I don't have this in the slide. So I'll just explain this. Mādhyamikas proceed, are meant to proceed. So there's eventually becomes a debate between Mādhyamikas, who kind of, in a way, want to produce better models, or at least want to kind of do a kind of non-essential reasoning in some fashion, in order to, to kind of, as a method for helping others come to the Mādhyamika perspective. But Candrakīrti, the seventh century commentator on Nāgārjuna, says, that's a bad idea, because you're basically doing what I just said. You're like, on... ontologizing your supposedly de-essentialized reasoning. And what he says is, the only thing you can do is use absurd consequences. So I don't have a position. And this, and here he's drawing on one of, one of Nāgārjuna's texts, which is called the Vigrahavyāvartanī, one of his smaller texts, the rebuttal and debates, debates and rebuttals, Vigrahavyāvartanī. And in that text, basically, his opponent is a kind of one of this, one of the early schools that develops this style of reasoning. It's not a Buddhist school, that really gets into how do you reason? Uh how do you, uh, uh... What are the rules of debates? What constitutes non-deviant reasoning? How do you do inferences? What's the nature of perception in terms of, in terms of providing us with justified beliefs and all those kinds of issues, epistemology? Uh... This school is called the Nyāyaḥ school. And the opponent in that text is really a Naiyāyika, person in that school. And that... and the Naiyāyika says, Nāgārjuna, you know, you're just, have a self-defeating argument because what you're saying is anything you say is ultimately false, but you're saying things. So how are you going to prove that? And Nāgārjuna says, oh, let's just go have a drink. No, Nāgārjuna says, uh... na me pratijñā asti I do not have a thesis that I'm trying to prove. Slippery guy, isn't he? Right? And I'm not trying to prove anything. I'm just showing how your beliefs and reasoning fall apart using absurd conclusions that follow from your beliefs. So those are called this, this method of argumentation is called prasaṅga. So don't try to prove emptiness because emptiness, if I tried to prove emptiness, then there would be something established. Because, you know, because reasoning is essentializing. So I would just prove an essentialized thing and I'd be, you know, I'd be in that terrible situation of an incurable believer in emptiness. Right? So instead of that, I just use absurd consequences. Now, later, there are both in India and Tibet, Mādhyamika philosophers who say, no, actually, we can, we can prove things we can, we don't have to just do absurd consequential reasoning, reductio ad absurdum in Western philosophy, we don't have to just do that. Uh... And even even some that would say we can prove emptiness. But especially kind of in the tradition that Gomde is in, that's not a, that's not a position that's usually adopted. Because we're for various reasons. Yes? So this defeating the essentialist view, does it also, is it a result of the context that these teachings turned up? I'm especially asking if from the standpoint of a theistic religion, would these arguments prove or disprove God? Well that depends... Or does it have to do, does it anyway have nothing to do with it? It proves and dis... It disproves the existence of any entity that is supposedly ultimately real. So if I'm not familiar with any theistic tradition that says God is not real.
There are some close candidates for kind of via negativa style of theology. So one that's frequently cited is Meister Eckhart, uh, who prayed to God that he may not believe in God and was then excommunicated for such things. Uh, 12th century, I think. So um... Uh, but, you know, so they're close candidates, quite possibly, and we're going to see that there is a style of Mādhyamika that kind of brings a little bit of affirmation back, but we're not going to talk about that now. But basically, there are other Buddhists had other arguments against God, Creator God. So, you know, and Parimal Patil at Harvard wrote this book against the Hindu God in which he talks about some of those arguments. And the main argument is, if God is a crea... is a um... uh, is the first cause, a creator, then, you know, how does that work? Because, you know, what if you're causal, you have to be in a causal chain, like, how do you have a first? How do you have a first cause? It's just incoherent. If we also maintain that God somehow is eternal and unchanging, then how does an unchanging entity engage in causality, which requires change? So those are a couple of kinds of arguments that come up. So yeah. But, you know, there are other kinds of models of God, like, you know, that via negativa that like, it's different, but but the point being that the essentialization is what this is going after. And essentialization is not dependent on being a theist or not a theist, everyone has that. We all have the reality habit. According to this, it's like built into our cognitive system. It's what we do. And uh... We, you know, we're living in a world that actually isn't essentially real, and but our cognitive system keeps telling us that it is. And then that causes all kinds of problems. Right? Okay, is that clear? So it's not about belief in God or anything like that. In fact, you know, like modern models about the belief in God are really mostly about many of them in cognitive science are mostly about like the social role of deity of supreme deities in creating large scale societies, for example.
Okay. And we go, did you need something, Philippe?
Sure. So Paul Dirac, a British physicist was a very strong atheist, and he always said after his talks, and there is no God. At the end of every talk. Every talk and there is no God. Wolfgang Pauli got obsessed with that. Oh, yes. Yeah. And then he said in the end of his talks, and there is no God. And Dirac is his prophet.
Dirac, also this other physicist, which is the artist, is its prophet. That's great. So there is no God. And Dirac is his prophet. That's great. I love it.
Okay. There are no empty sets. And who's the prophet? And Philippe is the prophet. Okay. Śūnyatā is the ultimate reality of all persons and things. We've done this. If you look for the essence, you don't find it. So things are empty of essence. It's the conclusion for the search for what a person really is. Right? Let me turn this.
I think I click it again. Yes. Uh, and therefore, śūnyatā is the ultimate reality, ultimate nature of all things. Right? It's not itself. Ultimately real. We just want to review this. We already did that. Emptiness is not really emptiness. Clinging to śūnyatā is a bad idea. We did that. Right? sūnyatā sarva-dṛṣṭīnām proktā niḥsaraṇaṃ jinaiḥ So another way of saying this is that emptiness is the relinquishment of all maps.
Right? You don't like hold on to the map. The famous story also of the Buddha, you know, in the Ālāgaddūpama Sūtra, again, the water snake Sūtra. It's kind of like, I always think of it as, you know, the monks are kind of the, um... you know, like the straight man for the comic, you know, and they're talking about the role of philosophy. Like, again, the snake that's incorrectly held. Philosophy is a snake. Hold it incorrectly. It bites you. Philosophy is also a raft. You know, and this comes up in the Sūtra and basically there are people who are kind of clinging to the philosophy itself. So the Buddha says, hey, monks, what do you think? If you had, if you came to a river, you could build a raft, right? Yeah, Buddha. And then could you get across with the raft and say, yeah, you could, Buddha. And then would you carry the raft across the desert to get to the city you're going to? They say uh... maybe not, Buddha.
Yeah, but we like the raft. No, we don't, you know, need the raft anymore. Right? So in a way you can say like the, a Buddha is not a Buddhist. Right? The Buddha doesn't need the philosophy, teaches or appears to teach, but it's not like he's a believer in his philosophy.
So being a believer is actually, might be a good thing sometimes to be a believer, but really what this saying is, you know, abandon beliefs without being a nihilist.
You don't want to believe in nothing. We don't want to be the German nihilist from the Big Lebowski. Just remember that. The handful of Germans in the audience, they're not a good role model.
Okay? We're not going to believe in nothing. So that's, don't exist at all. So this is an important point I wanted to raise, and then we should stop soon, right? Then we go a little while longer, I guess. Um... Uh... which is that, we had this slide, but I made a slight variation here. As you'll see, ultimately all persons and things are empty of essence. That is, they have no non-relational identity. Right? If you try to find that, you just don't find it. That's what it means for them to be empty. When we say, what's the nature of this? What's the nature of anything? Ultimately, emptiness. And, but conventionally, persons and things exist with relational identities from the standpoint of deluded sentient beings. So that's a key additional phrase that also came up in a conversation this morning with Rinpoche. And you can think of this as perspectivalism. The ultimate, we speak about the ultimate as being from the perspective of the Ārya's equipoise. And here there's this, it's especially a kind of Tibetan phrase, you know,
phag-pé nyam-zhak gi ngo-wor འཕགས་པའི་མཉམ་བཞག་གི་ངོ་བོར from the perspective of the equipoise of the Nyam shak ཉམ་ཤག, there's that word again, of the Ārya. So an Ārya here is a term that's used to describe, a Sanskrit word that's used to describe someone who has had a direct realization of the ultimate, and which in this context means direct realization of emptiness. So someone is like that, like, what is the ultimate? Emptiness, strictly speaking, is from that perspective. And you could say it's even true from that perspective. As an ordinary being, you can also have a kind of what's called, and this is not in Nāgārjuna, but later, but it's still very useful, you can have what's called the actual ultimate, that's from the perspective of an Ārya's experience in a meditation. Like when the Ārya is out of meditation, before they become a Buddha, they come back to, you know, our ordinary shared realities. But they look dreamlike. So... So there are still those kinds of appearances for them, but they don't look real, but they're still having those exper..., those appearances. Uh, but the ordinary beings can know a version of the ultimate that is a conceptual version, through reasoning. So this is what we call the distinction between the actual ultimate, or the non metaphorical ultimate, aparyāya paramārtha nyam drang ma yin pé dön-dam ཉམས་དྲངས་མ་ཡིན་པའི་དོན་དམ and the metaphorical ultimate, paryāya paramārtha the nyams drangs pa’i don dam ཉམས་དྲངས་པའི་དོན་དམ in Tibetan. Okay, so you so that, but that is that like, this is that transition from conceptual learning and so on to actual experience or meditation. The conventional is from the standpoint of deluded sentient beings, the way the world looks to deluded sentient beings. Right? That's the conventional. There's a kind of experience happening like the weird sound in the room right now, from the standpoint of deluded sentient beings. And the difference between the experience of an Ārya and the experience of a deluded sentient being, when the Ārya is not in meditation, when they're in what's called the subsequent state, the pṛṣṭhalabdha state or the je thob རྗེས་ཐོབ state after not in equipoise, is that for the Ārya, for the sentient being, the conventional is a conventional reality, or conventional truth. And for the Ārya, the conventional is merely conventional. It's not true. This is actually Candrakīrti's innovation. Again, some Mādhyamikas don't like that. So what that means, it's in one way this is described is like, if you look again, if you look at your face in the mirror, if an ordinary being looks at their face in the mirror, it doesn't look real to them. And you'll know that because again, you can like, you know, throw something at it or whatever, and the person doesn't go, Oh. Right? they don't feel like it's actually their face. They know it's not their face. It's just a reflection. All reality is like that for the Ārya. They're walking around in, or can participate in the realities of ordinary beings. But they don't think it's it doesn't feel real to them in the way it feels real to ordinary beings. Okay. All right. Which, of course, suggests that there may be certain kinds of possibilities that you, that become available. If you're not stuck in the reality of things, you can, so to speak, think outside the box, perhaps. And here's that famous verse again. Emptiness is interdependence. So for the for the Ārya in particular, like the experience of, of, you know, walking around is an experience of, of, you know, not of reality, but of interdependence. Dream like interdependence. And conceptually, to get into that conceptual form of understanding the ultimate, not the actual ultimate, but that kind of conceptual ultimate. Now that you come to a real clear understanding of emptiness that enables you to engage in emptiness meditation. Really, in some ways, this verse that we've heard a few times really characterizes that, right? 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 the word person is not actually in that verse, you could just say to one for whom. Maybe that's a better translation. I could change that. Okay? Like, when that really works for you, then you've got a good conceptual understanding of emptiness. When it feels like, oh, if all things are empty, then how does, how could there be causality? How could, you know, you eliminate suffering and uh, and uh, and all that and attain nirvana? And as Khenpo was saying yesterday, I think, like, if they weren't empty, you couldn't attain nirvana. Because non-empty things have essences, which means they are stuck in their, what they are, and they cannot be, you can't do anything to them. If something is essentially existent, you can't make it non-existent. You can't, like, take its essence out and put it in a new essence. Because now it's a different thing. If you change its essence, it's a different thing. Right? So that's this... So it's actually the fact that things are not essentially real, that makes our reality possible.
Okay, so here's a really interesting question that we're going to be getting on to. We have a little time. You guys okay? We're not, we're not taking a break because you're all right. Śūnyatā describes the endpoint of this search, like, what's the thing really or truly? So it's the proper description of what things are in ultimate terms. So if you're going to use a word to say what things are, you say śūnyatā, ultimately. What is this ultimately? Śūnyatā. Emptiness. Okay?
But unlike things like, I could say, if I might be an absolutist and say, what's this ultimately? It's ultimately an existent thing. Or I could be a nihilist and say, what's this thing? Ultimately, ultimately, it's nothing.
And those are referring the words existent and nothing or non-existent, are referring to like they're meant to refer to an object. Just like if I say the word vase, it seems to refer to a thing, right? Table, person, person, person, eye, eye. Right? It seems the words seem to refer, like they're pointing something out. All right? Emptiness does not refer to anything. Again, there are some interpretations that say it does, but in this style, this is the best way of talking about it. It's not like there's a thing that's emptiness that it refers to, that the word refers to. Because that would be turning emptiness into something, which you'd have to refute again. You'd have to go to emptiness of emptiness. And then you'd be really in trouble if you thought that this, the phrase emptiness of emptiness referred to something. Right? Okay? So emptiness does not name something. Because ultimately there's nothing to be named. Is that clear? Okay. Conventionally, it's sort of names. So one way this works out, like, ultimately, there's a famous sūtra, the uh... Uh, Śrīmālā Siṃhanāda Sūtra, which was very popular in China, the, the lion's roar of Queen Śrīmālā. And, you know, basically her answer to like, okay, well, what is emptiness? Could just tell us, like, what's the ultimate? And there's the lion's roar.
That's it.
And it's not, but it's not a nothing. This is very important. It's not a like mystical nothing that's, well, I can't tell you what it really is, but it's there.
So when it says it's beyond word and concepts, you don't want it to be the kind of beyond word and concepts like,
you know what I mean?
I know, but I can't tell you.
There's a very important way of saying like, I know, but I can't tell you in this tradition. But there's a very problematic way of saying that. Right? A sort of mystical silence. So you don't want that way of being silent. Queen Śrīmālā's way. Okay. So, did you have a question? There's two questions, but one is already too, I think, too far gone. And the other one, I wanted to ask, why do we translate it to emptiness and not essencelessness? Because we have a word for essencelessness, nairātmya. Okay. Okay. Um... Another question. Khenpo la also talked about luminosity and Buddha nature as opposed to mere emptiness. Will you come to that point later? Yes. And so will Eric, I think, in more experiential terms. Yes, we're definitely going to get there. Uh, in fact, we're kind of getting there right now. Uh, so, uh, but I do want to say one thing about śūnyatā. So this word itself is actually a word śūnya with an abstract suffix on it, tā. And that abstract suffix on it, really, that abstract suffix, like, maps very closely onto abstract suffixes and other Indo-European languages. You know, remember Sanskrit is an Indo-European language, like ness in Tibetan, or I guess rickly -keit in German, right? Uh, -té in French, like spontanéité, right? réalité. Dad in Spanish, realidad, right? So it's śūnyatā, emptiness, but actually, it's śūnyaness. Śūnya is, and there are some people who are very uncomfortable with that word, and you'll find like openness or other translations. I'm not a big fan of that, because I think it's missing a very deliberate choice. Like, the Heart Sutra doesn't say there's no eye, it doesn't say this kind of no eye and kind of no ear, like there's an open eye you know, it says there is no eye and there is no ear, and so on. Right? It's very clearly a series of negations. And the word śūnyatā is referring to is very specific kind of negation. One of them is like the empty space of something is like the empty space within a vase is śūnya. Like the vase is śūnya, that space inside. Our ordinary way of using the word empty, like it's an empty house, you'd say śūnya. But also, very importantly, around this, I think around the same time as Nāgārjuna, actually, I'm not sure. I think so. Maybe a little, not after, I don't believe. śūnya is coined, is used by Indian mathematicians for zero. And I believe that they, I think they, there's some, I've heard, I don't, I've never read this, so, and maybe, you know, but, Phillipe, but a, I've heard that they coined this as a mathematical concept and zero. But in any case, it means zero. So emptiness says zero-ness, which is like the empty set. Right?
So that, like, zero-ness, if I say, so there's, Candrakīrti has this great story, like, you know, a fellow walks into a shop. This is in the Madhyamakāvatāra, in the introduction of the Middle Way. Guy walks into his shop. You know, you can sort of see Candrakīrti up on the stage at the mic. So, let me tell you, the guy walks into the shop like... A fellow walks into his... Maybe we should make it a bar, we'll make it a bar, right? You know, an essentialist walks into the bar. A nihilist walks into the bar and says, Hey, you got any whiskey? No. Get any gin? No. Got any vodka? No. What do you got? Actually, we got nothing. I'll have some of that.
It's a slightly updated version of the story. Right? It's like, I want some zero.
Right? I got a lot of zero in my room. It's kind of expensive, but if you want some, I'll, you know, I'll think about giving you some. Make a nice zero cocktail.
Yes? Gives you a terrible hangover, though.
Um, where does the concept of void... I don't know if that's from the Theravada tradition, but I'm familiar with reading some things about the void. Some people translate emptiness as voidness. Yep. So that's just an equivalent translation. Uh... I'm not sure. Something in the Theravada. There is a kind of dimensionality of the highest dimension of like samsara and also meditative experience within samsara. That's like beyond something and nothing. Yeah. It's like falling into the pit of the void or something. Yea, there can be that sort of... Oh, there's also experiential things in the stages of insight where you feel like everything's like turning into nothing. Yes. And how does that relate to what we're studying here? That's not emptiness. Yeah, that's a thing you're making nothingness into a thing. Into a thing that you're falling into, yes. Ah, I see. That's why you're afraid of it. Yes. And you need to realize that nothingness is empty. Exactly. Ah, got it. Yes, thank you, actually. I'm glad you mentioned that because, Rowan, because actually one of the things about emptiness, you know, again, Candrakīrti says in another text, is you have to be really careful explaining emptiness because people can freak out, basically. Because they can think it means everything is nothing.
Right? That the ultimate reality is nothing. Nothingness. But it's not nothingness. Why isn't it nothingness? Why isn't nothingness ultimately real?
Yeah, kind of, yes. Can you say more? Nothingness, it's no thing.
There's a very good hint. Why isn't nothingness ultimately real? What does it mean for something to be ultimately real? It's completely independent. It exists in and of itself objectively from its own side, transcontextually, without depending on anything else. Why isn't nothingness ultimately real? Nothing would have to be dependent on something. Exactly.
Yep, exactly. So there's no ultimate nothing. And in some ways I find this view is kind of nicer than the concept or the idea of a void that's truly real. Well, yeah, that's for sure, because that would be really a bummer, don't you think? I mean, like, you know, it doesn't really have very happy conclusion to say everything's just nothing. Again, the German nihilist, right? You know, it's like, doesn't look like a very attractive lifestyle.
It's, yeah, it would be awful to think that. And it would make life meaningless. You know, there are some forms of existentialism that are kind of like this. And then you just, even though life is meaningless, you sort of push ahead anyway with your ecstatic project. And, you know, maybe just better to get over the idea that it's nothing. Because that's incoherent. An ultimate nothing is just as incoherent as an ultimate something. Or even an ultimate neither nothing nor something.
And so in Hīnayāna, the concept of emptiness is still very much present. it's just a different type of śūnyatā. There are definitely predecessors in the non-Mahāyāna texts of emptiness. The word is actually used. And also there is a usage of the term emptiness in the context of the noble's four truths as one of the four features of the truth of suffering. But usually in the non-Mahāyāna context, that term is understood to mean that there's selflessness is one of the four. So there's impermanence, there's impermanence, suffering, selflessness, and emptiness are the four aspects of the truth of suffering. And selflessness means you don't have that kind of self we've been talking about. Emptiness in that context means that the stuff that belongs to the self, which really means the aggregates, there's also nothing that belongs to the self. Since there's no self, there can't be anything that belongs to the self. So that's what emptiness is usually understood to mean in the context, non-Mahāyāna context of that term there. But there's definitely, and the late Louis Gomez, a great Buddhist scholar, wrote an article many years ago, like a predecessors of emptiness in the Pali canon. So it's, yeah, this stuff doesn't come out of nowhere. So I guess we should, yeah, we should start. We're going to do this in the afternoon, and we're going to get... But this is the real question, so what does it mean to know emptiness?
It doesn't refer to anything.
You could say, well, you can have a concept of it, correct. You can have that, what we saw before, where to go, blah, blah, blah... You can have that conceptual version of the ultimate, and that you can know as a conceptual object, as a constructed conceptual object. But to actually know it like in meditative concentration. What does the Ārya know when the holy one, when a person who is having a direct realization in meditation, non-conceptual direct realization of emptiness, or just walking around in it for a moment, what are they knowing?
Does anyone want to vote for that they're knowing nothing?
Better not say you're doing nothing.
You know, in Zen they have this stick they carry around.
Right? So we know it's not, you're not knowing nothing. So what do you, are you knowing something? No. And go ahead, you want to say something? And if śūnyatā is non-referring, it cannot be the knowing of something. Right. Part of the reason it can't be a knowing of something is that to know something is for a subject to know an object.
If you have an object, is it the same or different than the subject? Ultimately. Different. Ultimately. Ultimately it's not different and not the same. Yeah, meaning it doesn't make sense. Right. Right, it... If you go through those four possibilities, it's both, it's different. It's not different. It's both, it's neither. And you end up saying, well, that none of those make sense. So therefore there can't be objects. Which also means what? That there are no subjects. Correct. There's no knowing subjects. There's no knower that is the subject that is knowing, then they engaged in the, in the action of knowing in relation to knowing a object. This is called the, uh, uh, uh, uh, in, in Tibetan, the Korsum. And the Triputa is it? Uh, I kind of forget the most standard Sanskrit translation of that, but it, it means agent, object, action.
That is not what's had. No, actually direct realization of emptiness can have no agent, no object and no action because without an agent and object, there can't be an action. But the action of knowing can't occur without agents and objects. Without objects, you can't have, we're going to go through these arguments later. So this is the triadic version. Dharmakṛti had, I mean, Nāgārjuna has a dyadic and a triadic version of this relational argument that we'll look at later. So there's no objects. That means there can't be any subjects. That means there can't be any action of knowing. No object that's known, no action, no knower that's knowing, and no action of knowing.
It's a non-conceptual state that is free of the three spheres, agent, object, action. So it's the khorsum nampar mi tokpé yeshe, འཁོར་གསུམ་རྣམ་པར་མི་རྟོག་པའི་ཡེ་ཤེས you probably heard Rinpoche say many times, the primordial wakefulness that is free of the conceptualization of the three spheres. khorsum nampar mitokpé yeshe
I'm not sure there's an attested equivalent in Sanskrit of that, but we don't need that because we're heading toward a certain tradition, which is Māhamudrā Dzogchen, right? All right. So then what is it? What, huh? What do, then what... How do you know it?
Candrakīrti's answer is, you know it by way of not knowing.
It's super helpful description.
It is in a way, but he's... So Candrakīrti is a certain style that is very hesitant about anything, like it's it's saying anything you might, that might push you into an extreme, but then that kind of could lead you into nihilism. Like he's very hesitant about the absolute extreme of absolutism, which sometimes makes it seem a little more dangerous in terms of the nihilistic extreme. Maybe, maybe you could say that about Candrakīrti, but in any case later, Uh Mādhyamikas after him, then we'll talk a little bit about them, say, are more comfortable with trying to say something about this. But it's just a very interesting question to ask yourself.
What does it mean to know directly, experientially, not conceptually, to, to exp... to be in a state that is the direct realization of emptiness, if you want to call it a state? What is that?
Yeah, certainly in this tradition, if you're really fully in that state at this, you know, when we understand that, then in, in... then yeah in a sense, you're Buddha right then for that moment. But what is it?
Should we even try to say, maybe if we try to say, we're gonna like, you know, just create a new ultimate? You know, let me tell you what it really is. It's... Did you get that? No, could you say it again? No, sorry.
Oh, no, wait, I think it's actually...
Okay, so let's stop now and have lunch a little late. And I guess we'll still start at four today. Okay, just dedicate the merit. sönam diyi thamché sikpa nyi thopné nyepai dranam phamjé né kyega nachi balap trukpa yi sipai tsolé drowa drölwar shok tönpa jikten khamsu jönpa dang tenpa nyiö shindu salwa dang tenzin phunu shindu thönpa yi tenpa yünring nepai tashi shok Oh, thank you.
Okay, so starting a little late today. And I was just asked if we could go to 12:30. So I hope that's alright for everyone.
Right. So we're going to talk some more about emptiness today. But first, I actually want to review one argument because it came up this morning for some of us. And it is basically the idea of the incomprehensibility of things that have spatial extension and a way of getting to emptiness that actually is using a reductive argument, but then flips to a relational argument. So this is the chig du drel, གཅིག་དུ་འབྲལ་བའི་གཏན་ཚིགས as they call it in Tibetan, or the ekānekavicāra, which as I said before, goes back very long way, the neither one nor many argument, or neither identical or different. So actually, these terms in Sanskrit is, in Sanskrit, it's eka and aneka. So eka means one, and aneka means many, or actually, literally not one. So that can mean like singular or plural, but can also mean that if you have two things, or maybe many things in relation to something, then you can ask, are those many things the same as they're related to or different than what they're related to? So it really means identity or difference, one or not one in the sense of identical or different. And with, so if we have like, let's use the vase, which is a one traditional example of bumpa, and this looks pretty like a traditional ghaṭa, as they say in Sanskrit, not too different from one. So the, the different parts of the vase, we can ask, are they the same as the vase or different than the vase? Right, so our intuition is that there's a single whole thing here that's a vase, correct? Right, everyone agrees with that? I'm not holding more than one vase, am I right? So, and we did a load of this before. Now someone really has to, you know, let's try to defend your intuition, don't just give up. Okay, so there's, I'm holding the vase, I am? What am I touching? Am I touching the vase? Student: You are touching the bottom of the vase. So I'm not touching the vase? I am touching the vase. So I'm touching both the vase and the bottom of the vase? Who wants to take the opposite? Who wants to defend? Okay.
Either way, but we have to, we have to respect non-deviant reasoning, so no contradictions and no excluded middle. What that means is you can't say it's both yes and no, and you can't say it's neither yes nor no. You can't say either of those. Then never mind.
Why can't we do that? Why do we respect, you remember, why do we respect those rules of non-deviant reasoning?
Yes, because they are the rules that we play in everyday life, kind of. We will sometimes reject them in everyday life, but maybe more accurately that our conceptual system, like when we're in doubt in our conceptual system, then the way our conceptual system functions, so as to give us the kind of conclusions that enable us to act in the world, when push comes to shove, so to speak, when we're pushed into a corner, then we're going to try to respect those rules. So if we, for example, or in cases that are very important, we're going to try to respect those rules. So if someone were to try to, let's say, build an airplane, and they're going to make something that is, is both is and is not the engine, we might not want to fly in that airplane, you know? If someone's going to perform an operation, you know, let's say you need a heart operation, but you get a doctor who says, I'm going to operate on your heart, or maybe it's not your, it's neither your heart nor not your heart, you might feel a little uncomfortable with that idea. We're going to do brain surgery on something that's neither your brain nor not, that is neither your brain nor not your brain.
Yeah, my madhyamaka surgery, right? No, it's like, no, I don't think we'd be very comfortable with that. So what the idea is that our, and the reason we get to those kind of rules is that we're essentializing. Like when we are pushed into, this is when our, that kind of reasoning actually makes, surfaces, what sometimes is a sort of somewhat hidden essentialism in our ordinary way of thinking, like, it either is or is not a heart, darn it. Okay, that makes sense? Yeah. So it is, in a sense, that reasoning, the respect, respecting this kind of classical non-deviant reasoning is what allows us to push that essentialism, bring it to the fore and then push it to its maximum point where it then falls apart. Okay, make sense? Okay. So, am I touching the vase? Yes. Am I touching the bottom of the vase? Yes. Is the bottom of the vase the same or different than the vase? It is the same. It is the same as the vase. Am I touching the vase? Yes. Am I touching the top of the vase? Yes. Is the top of the vase the same as the vase or different than the vase? Yes, it's the same. It's the same? Same. Therefore, this is, the top and the bottom are identical?
So I should be, I'm not going to make a mess.
Well, I would have to say yes in that moment. I would have to say yes because I said yes twice. Yeah. You would be compelled to say yes. Correct. Thank you, Daniel. Because by the rules of that form of reasoning you can think of this as like algebraic, if A is identical to B and B is identical to C, excuse me, if A is identical to B and A is also identical to C, then B is identical to C. If, if the whole is identical to the bottom and the whole is identical to the top, then the bottom and the top are identical. Yes?
Yes.
So the otherwise is only true for the empty set? Yes, the empty set, which is actually not anything, correct? Unless you want to absolutize nothing, in which case we already found out we're in trouble when we go to that extent. So if you talk about the empty set, then it's true, no? Yeah, right. What's true, like the excluded middle is exactly, is the empty set, right? And contradictions, depending on how you think, the excluded middle is that, so the empty set is like, or the set of all things in the universe, let's say, or let's say that just in terms of the set of the things that are members of the set of vase parts, right? Right? So if we have this universe of the vase and its parts, then the stuff that is neither identical nor different is going to be outside of that set. It doesn't belong to that set, which means that it's not there at all. But one of the things about set theory is it allows us to then concretize the abstraction, so that we can think that the empty set is in some set a real sense, a real thing. But that obviously doesn't make a lot of sense, does it? Unless we're like pushed, you know, to the maximum point of platonic realism. But we'll maybe come back to that later. For now, not worrying about treating the empty set as just meaning it doesn't exist, right? So we can't say that the top, so if I say I'm touching the top vase and I'm touching the bottom, the bottom is the same as the vase, I'm touching the top and the top is the same as the vase, and that means that the top and the bottom are the same, so it shouldn't matter whether I hold it this way or that way, right? Or the size of the vase is the same as the size of both the top and the base, just that high. So all kinds of absurd things follow, right? What if I say it's different? Then what? The vase is different than the top, it's different than the bottom, different than the sides. What happens then? Well, then you could move the vase without moving the rest. I can take all the vase parts away and I should still have a vase, which would make, you know, producing vases and traveling with them and things like that, very, storing them, you could store an infinite number of vases in your closet, you know, you could be, vase collecting would really be fun and easy. Am I right? Does that make sense? Does that, so that's with anything that has parts, we can do that, right? Tables... So this is very interesting. What it's saying is that when you see things and your visual system clumps it together as a single thing, there's a kind of visual binding of those spatial elements, you know, maybe because of contours and edges, right? That, you know, we kind of see a single thing but actually it's not a single thing.
All right? When you really get into that it starts to be a little sort of almost, if you really experience that it's quite interesting and you can do that, you like, invite you to try to do that meditatively, just conceptually, you know, you can take an actual object and look at it and see if it starts to like fall apart, you know, or there's this again that movie I Heart Huckabees, there's this point where they're looking at somebody, somebody's looking at somebody's face and the face starts to go like, breaks into bits and like, where's the one face? Okay, is that clear? So logically, this is not a single thing. That does not mean that the elements or parts of this, if we for the moment assert that there are elements or parts, that doesn't mean that they can't work together to perform certain functions. So in early Buddhism, when we say that the elements or parts are truly real, we get down to that infinitesimally small particle, right? Those particles can all work together and they can affect each other so that they can, so that in a sense they can form a kind of what we might call a system, such that they interact in a way that they can perform functions at the system level, that as individuals they couldn't do. Okay, that makes sense? You could call the vase a system, I guess, in a way, right? So there's a causal like capacity that they get together, but what this kind of approach is doing is it's refusing to ontologize this system level entity. It's refusing to say that's a real thing, okay? Now there are certain problems with that that maybe come up, but we can maybe come back to that later, because what we want to do now is we want to then say, okay, we keep going down, down, down, down, down, we get to what's supposed to be the part-less particle, right? So that part-less particle is something you can't break down any further, or can you? Right? So Rinpoche, those of you who heard that and make a few comments this morning, he was pointing this out. Ha... so why, what happened?
What's that? The pill. So uh... what, what happened, what can we do with the particle? Well, we can agglomerate particles into larger things, right? We have particles of matter, some kind of particle of matter, and it agglomerates into a larger thing. If it agglomerates into a larger thing, does it need to have size?
Does it have to have some kind of spatial dimension? If you accumulate a whole bunch of things with no spatial dimension, how big would it be?
It would be infinitely, it would be no size at all, right? Right? So this is a model of matter, a particular model of matter, that's saying that things that accumulate into larger things have to themselves also somehow occupy some degree of space. Otherwise, if they accumulate, they don't make any size. How would they occupy, how would you get a larger area of space if they things that constitute this larger thing are themselves not occupying space at all, right? That's the idea of this model. But is there a problem with that? If they occupy space, then what? So let's think of that, we're gonna have the other particles around it, right? And we can have different models about how many different particles there need to be. But somehow then the central particle in there something that's, you know, larger than just the size of a particle, it's got to be somehow connected to those other particles, right? It's got to be in relation to those other particles. What would happen if it were in relation to only one? So that means that, for example, it's got a particle, let's just call these, you know, up, down, left, and right, just for convenience. If the particle on the right-hand side is connecting here, then it's got a right-hand side. What would happen if the right-hand side is the same and then the particle here is connecting to the left-hand side, right? So it's gonna have a right and left-hand side. If the right-hand side is the same as the particle, it's supposed to be partless, and the left-hand side is the same as the particle, then actually the right-hand side and the left-hand side are identical, which means that you're back to something with no size, right? So this is actually from, not from a Mādhyamika text, actually, this is from a text called the Viṃśatikā, the 20 verses, and a different philosophy we're gonna talk about tomorrow a little bit, or maybe today. Okay, so what that means is that we can like say, well, this is actually, now we have a new candidate, we were wrong, this is not a partless particle, because it has to relate to other particles in a way that allows space to be occupied, which means it's got to have some kind of dimensions that, that are it's, that constitute that particle. And that means that we can break it down, right? So now what happens? Well, we can take another, right, we have, we can have a new candidate, okay, let's look at, we're just gonna look at one dimension, but then we end in the same problem. It just, it's in infinite regress. And so the conclusion for the Buddhists to this argument is that if you posit the idea of a partless particle, that's actually incoherent. That the reductive argument, which in some sense is almost arbitrarily stopped by the Abhidharma tradition, so that you still end up with matter, here like, we don't end up with, matter is gone. With that, at least on that model, matter doesn't make sense, right? Like bits of stuff that take up space don't make sense. So that's one way you get to, like, so when, as was quoted in the text that um... that Khenpo la was talking about, was teaching about, from Śāntarakṣita's Madhyamakālaṃkāra, but also as really is almost a direct quote from Dharmakīrti, you can say this thing doesn't have an essential nature. In other words, the vase doesn't exist essentially, objectively, independently, because you can't specify whether the vase is the same or different than its parts. But then likewise, you can't do that even with the individual atoms, because you can't specify whether the atom is the same or different than its dimensions. And you take a single dimension, if it too has to somehow satisfy the need to occupy space, you're back to the same place. The dimension has to have dimensions that enable it to occupy space. So that means that you can't specify even that a dimension of a allegedly partless atom truly exists, because you can't specify whether it's the same or different than its dimensions, the metadimensions of the dimensions of the partless particle. Right? Just keeps going. It's, you know, like partlessness all the way down. You just keep trying to find that partless thing and you can't get there. You see that? It's kind of interesting, like, if you really... I think, did I... I can't remember if I told this here, but there's, you know, if you really, like, think about... I was one time in, like, 1983 when I first started studying this particular argument. I was driving a bunch of Gyuto monks around in the United States and I was like thinking about it on the highway and it's like everything is falling apart, you know. It's like, whoa! And the monk next to me goes, are you okay? He's like, watch the road. What road? You know, there's no spatial extension, you know. It's a little dangerous. Don't drive and do this, please. No cutting things, you know. That's exactly my question now, when you just said that, so it doesn't make sense. Then I was like, okay, but still the things appear. So it's our conclusion, things appear, but it just doesn't make sense. So there's a... so that's going to be the difference between the conceptual understanding and the experiential understanding. And then when you bring that to an experiential understanding, then when you see this, it stops looking like a single thing to you, really.
It's like got this sort of, oh yeah, kind of, you know, and therefore it has this sort of dreamlike quality to it, right? And there are different ways that that experience can manifest and there can be degrees, like it can really just start to fall apart. And then later, as you're walking around, it doesn't quite fall apart, but it's like, I sort of know what it's, I know that that's not really what it looks like. Just like when you look at your face in a mirror, most of the time, when we look at our face in the mirror, we don't go, oh, that's not my face. Maybe you do that after you've had a hard night of something, or rather it was like, ah, who's that in the mirror? But otherwise, right, we don't usually think, oh, that's not, but, but still we don't, even when we're looking at our face, it's kind of like, we know we sort of, but some part of us knows that's a reflection. We don't think, oh, like if someone goes up to it and it goes, we didn't go, ow! It's not like the rubber hand illusion, if some of you that are familiar with that, where you trick people into thinking of rubber hand, you have a certain experimental setup, and you have their real hand, you know, their left hand, and then their right hand, they sort of set it up so that there's a rubber hand in place of their right hand. And then you take like a pin and you go, and people go, ow, you know, that's not going into their hand, but they've sort of believe it's their hand. That's not really true with the mirror. Like if I go up and I go on the mirror, you don't go, ow, it doesn't feel like it's really your face. So it's like that. You know, everything's like a reflection, for example. Okay.
Why an atom doesn't have a spatial dimension? Well, if it has a spatial dimension, okay, if the atom has a spatial, the atom needs a spatial dimension, needs size, so that it can occupy space. But if it has size, then that means that the other atoms that are accumulating around it to make something larger have to be connecting to some part of that size. So now it has, you know, chok in Tibetan. So if you heard Rinpoche, he was talking about, he was talking about sides or chok, or in Sanskrit, pakṣa. So you can say it has a side, but another way you can say it has some kind of a dimension. And if all the dimensions are just the same as each other, then all the atoms around it also have dimensions that are just identical to the atom itself, and everything ends up being just the size of one atom. Right? So it doesn't occupy space anymore. Right? Huh? What? Does the floor work? Do we need to get like, walk around with flippers on so we don't fall through the...
There's a... Bob Thurman used to tell this story of the, I think it was the quantum physicist who like kind of lost it and had to walk around in his lab wearing, you know, flippers for swimming, because he was afraid he'd fall through the floor. This is mostly space where it's just probabilities, like, you know, maybe just very unlikely probability that it's just going to go... The scientist, I don't know, Robert Thurman was there when I was an undergraduate, I stayed with Bob, and Bob was a very helpful teacher and still is mentor for me in many ways. So anyway, Uh, what we end up with then is this kind of, you can get to an experiential level with this. But there's also another kind, very important other kind of argument that goes with this, which is that the um, uh... that the parts also, and we can do a relational argument as well, without going into the kind of infinite regress, we can also say that the whole is a whole only in relation to the parts, and the parts are parts only in relation to the whole.
Okay? The whole is a whole only in relation to the parts, and the parts are defined as parts only in relation to the whole. But if the whole cannot be established independently of the parts, and the parts can't be established as parts, as part of a system, unless that system or that whole is already established, then we've got a problem. Which is established first? Do we first have the whole or the system, and then the hard parts are defined as a member of that whole? Or are the parts defined as parts of a system first, and then because they're parts of a system, the whole emerges?
Right? You see that? There's a relational problem. And this is the fundamental problem here is the basic problem, the basic problem of, of relations. All right? So let me just say something about that for a second. The basic, the basic problem of relations before we say more. If two things are in relation, are they the same or different?
They're different. Okay? So let's say these two things are in relation, and there's a third thing over here that's not in relation to them. Okay? So is this, you know, I could even maybe do it with this diagram. So let's say we have these three things that you're about to see. Okay? All right? And we're saying these, these two, the ones that are horizontal to each other, are in some kind of relation. And the one below here is not in relation to them. Why do we say that? If there's... If these are totally different, this is also different, then why would you say they're in relation?
Right? This is also different. This is different from, they're all different from each other. Why do we say these two are in relation and this one isn't?
Why do we do that? They're all different. What would happen if we say the two things in relation are the same? Then how many things are there? One. Can a thing be in relation to itself? Some people would say yes.
You know, that's when you, like, I married myself and things went, things went bad real quick, and I couldn't get a divorce, you know, so.
So like they're tied, in some sense they're together. So then the obvious answer to this question is this. Oh, they're in relation because there is an entity that's a relation that ties them together. Right? And then what do we do with that? Using the neither one or many argument, there's always something you ask. What do you ask? Is it same or different? Is the relation, is this relation, this thing, whoops, is the relation this, okay, is, can you see the laser pointer? Okay, is the relation the same as the relata, these two things? Or is it different than them?
If it's different, then what's wrong? What happens? We need another relation to tie the relation to the relate to the relata. And then we ask the same question. Is the second order relation the same or different than the things it's tying together? And the answer is, if it's different, we need a third order relation. If it's the same, then there's no two-ness such that the relation is necessary. And we end up in another infinite regress. So relationality, if you essentialize things, like they're either essentially the same or they're essentially different, relationality falls apart. It doesn't make sense. They have to be kind of the same and kind of not the same, right?
And then we fall out of the non-deviant reasoning and we're back and we're into a place and that means that, if we're saying that what it means to something to exist ultimately is that it exists essentially, then these things do not ultimately exist. We're back to the problem as well, how do they exist then? And this short answer that Mādhyamika provides is: interdependently. Another term that you'll see, especially in Tibetan versions of this, is pentsun tendrub ཕན་ཚུན་བརྟེན་གྲུབ་, which means mutually uh, mutually dependent establishment. Basically, another way of just saying interdependence. So you know, then you can say, well, let's come up with a model that makes sense of this, that tries not to essentialize things. How do you, like... You know, if we don't assume that things have to be absolutely identical or absolutely different, what kind of a model can we come up with that doesn't just become incoherent? Right? And then one version of that model might be something that is context-bound, that says they're different in one way and identical in another way, for example, or some other way of trying to talk about relationality that doesn't essentialize. Right? And I think quantum physics is the place where this kind of problem starts to come up. But in any case, our ordinary way of thinking where we essentialize things, the confused perspective, that's the issue here, right? So if we think they have to be either essentially identical or essentially different, we end up in incoherence, which means that that assumption is wrong, which means that they don't have that kind of essence, which means that they're empty. Okay? Did you have a question, please? Yeah, more a comment to that. So like this properties of spaces or like of entities in mathematics, it's called topology. Yes. So it's like kind of the study of properties of spaces that are invariant under continuous deformation. So invariant under continuous deformation. So as soon as you have an object with a hole, you will never get rid of the hole if you deform it Right. continuously. So not like um... And the other comment is like, with the vase, of the button and the top, there's also mathematics, it's called like set theory, which also deals with that, that you have like a subset of a set. Right. So one of the things that's always interesting to ask about this, these kinds of in these contexts is you have a mathematical abstraction. Hmm, exactly. And is the mathematical abstraction the same as this concrete entity or different than it? And this is like how you do like also the proofs in set theory. So you compare it and question that. Right. Yea. And I remember like when I was like a student, the professor there also like made stuff up and then in the order you just proved it for the empty set. Yes, right. Yeah. But then the only problem is, you know, do you remember we had that verse yesterday, like this verse here, like clinging to śūnyatā is not a good idea. Clinging to śūnyatā, the equivalent of that is like thinking the set empty set is a real thing.
Right. Instead of concluding that, oh, that, you know, that's, that should tell us something about the problematic ontology that we're assuming from the beginning. Instead, we can ontologize that. That's so that's basically like part of what I'm pointing to, which that book, The Blind Spot you know, gets into is the, is our tendency to ontologize mathematical objects, which has just become more and more powerful as the modern period has progressed. And that's, you know, the, this, this system would definitely question and try to undermine that kind of ontology. Where mathematical characterization's of things like sets or topology would be useful but they are not real things in the world the mathematical objects is not a real thing in the world. Now, when you, you know, I realized that a lot of mathematicians would feel very uncomfortable with that. But I have a friend, Bob McCauley, who just as a quick story. His colleague, Mark Johnson, who worked with George Lakoff on kind of metaphor theory. and conceptual metaphor theory, and then also the embodied nature of things like mathematical objects, how they actually have, how you can, you can argue for the way in which they relate to embodiments. And then he gave a talk at the, for the, at Georgia Tech some years ago, according to Bob. Bob was there. He didn't know there are many people from the math department were in the room. And he's saying, so mathematical objects are actually emerging from the features of human cognition and our embodiment. They're not real things in the world. And they almost threw him out this third floor window. Like, What? Mathematical objects aren't real? They were not happy about this. So in Austria, when you finish mathematics as a study, you just get, just get a a degree of a doctor in philosophy. So philosophy, not of science. Yeah, there you go. Yes. So did we have another question? And then I want to move on.
You presented now the interdependent model as an alternative to the, like to the essentialist model, right? Yes, correct. Yeah. How is it different from relationality, interdependence versus relation? So what, what interdependence assumes is there's some like, yeah, that to the extent that things exist, they exist in some way that is relational, meaning they don't have autonomous essences, but it doesn't give you a model for that. So one model for that, like one approach to that, that basically Candrakīrti, a very important commentator on Nāgārjuna, that many academics have worked on, and I'm currently translating his best known commentary. I think Anne McDonald at Vienna is also working on that. And Candrakīrti basically says, you know, whatever worldly, whatever kind of worldly reasoning that even experts kind of develop, the experts have essentialized it, just use that and know it's not essential. So he doesn't like say, oh, you can come up with like a better model of the conventional. Once you understand that it's not essentially real, like you say, you know, just use your ordinary common sense intuitions and just know that this, this, your ordinary common sense intuitions are, are coming out of a place of delusion. But you can just use that, right? As long as you want to just undermine it. No, it's, in other words, oh, it looks like, you know, that's a single thing and fine. Yeah, it's a single thing. But I even feel that it's not, it's, it feels dreamlike and so on. But in the context of the dream, it's one thing. So that's what he would say. Just use kind of ordinary worldly pramāṇas as they're called, means of valid cognition. But another argument might be, well, maybe we can come up with, once we have undermined essentialism, maybe we can come up with a better model that is a non-essentialist model of relations and stuff. What do you think might be the problem with that?
Anybody?
That it is again essentialistic because if we talk about relations, something has to be in relation? Kind of. That we might think that this new, supposedly anti-relation or anti-essentialist model of interdependent reality is reality. That we might absolutize it in some fashion. Maybe that's, maybe in some fashion, that's not exactly about essences. But in other words, that we will again mistake the map for the territory. And that's why Candrakīrti resists that in some, many Mādhyamika philosophers, we're not going to kind of get into these details, but many Mādhyamika philosophers kind of resist the attempt to update our world models based on a Mādhyamika ontology, which is a non-ontology. Like, there are really are no essentially real things, there's only conventionally real things. So let's come up with a new model of the world that, you know, kind of doesn't essentialize things, but gives us good descriptions or is more even more effective or what have you. And Mādhyamika philosophers like Candrakīrti say, no, don't do that. That's a bad idea, because you're just going to do the same thing again. You're just going to make your new model into the true reality. Like this is, you know, you're going to sort of give lip service to, oh, there are no essences, but here's what's really going on. You know, it's quantum physics or string theory, or, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, then everybody says, oh, yeah, what's really going on? blah, blah, blah, blah is going on. And, you know, then we're back to square one. So that's a long debate, actually, in Mādhyamika that goes on into Tibet. But isn't that already the case for, like, just making any kind of statement, even if it is negation? Like even Candrakīrti? Yes. So that's, that's a great, that's a great point. And so that's why Mādhyamikas, I don't have this in the slide. So I'll just explain this. Mādhyamikas proceed, are meant to proceed. So there's eventually becomes a debate between Mādhyamikas, who kind of, in a way, want to produce better models, or at least want to kind of do a kind of non-essential reasoning in some fashion, in order to, to kind of, as a method for helping others come to the Mādhyamika perspective. But Candrakīrti, the seventh century commentator on Nāgārjuna, says, that's a bad idea, because you're basically doing what I just said. You're like, on... ontologizing your supposedly de-essentialized reasoning. And what he says is, the only thing you can do is use absurd consequences. So I don't have a position. And this, and here he's drawing on one of, one of Nāgārjuna's texts, which is called the Vigrahavyāvartanī, one of his smaller texts, the rebuttal and debates, debates and rebuttals, Vigrahavyāvartanī. And in that text, basically, his opponent is a kind of one of this, one of the early schools that develops this style of reasoning. It's not a Buddhist school, that really gets into how do you reason? Uh how do you, uh, uh... What are the rules of debates? What constitutes non-deviant reasoning? How do you do inferences? What's the nature of perception in terms of, in terms of providing us with justified beliefs and all those kinds of issues, epistemology? Uh... This school is called the Nyāyaḥ school. And the opponent in that text is really a Naiyāyika, person in that school. And that... and the Naiyāyika says, Nāgārjuna, you know, you're just, have a self-defeating argument because what you're saying is anything you say is ultimately false, but you're saying things. So how are you going to prove that? And Nāgārjuna says, oh, let's just go have a drink. No, Nāgārjuna says, uh... na me pratijñā asti I do not have a thesis that I'm trying to prove. Slippery guy, isn't he? Right? And I'm not trying to prove anything. I'm just showing how your beliefs and reasoning fall apart using absurd conclusions that follow from your beliefs. So those are called this, this method of argumentation is called prasaṅga. So don't try to prove emptiness because emptiness, if I tried to prove emptiness, then there would be something established. Because, you know, because reasoning is essentializing. So I would just prove an essentialized thing and I'd be, you know, I'd be in that terrible situation of an incurable believer in emptiness. Right? So instead of that, I just use absurd consequences. Now, later, there are both in India and Tibet, Mādhyamika philosophers who say, no, actually, we can, we can prove things we can, we don't have to just do absurd consequential reasoning, reductio ad absurdum in Western philosophy, we don't have to just do that. Uh... And even even some that would say we can prove emptiness. But especially kind of in the tradition that Gomde is in, that's not a, that's not a position that's usually adopted. Because we're for various reasons. Yes? So this defeating the essentialist view, does it also, is it a result of the context that these teachings turned up? I'm especially asking if from the standpoint of a theistic religion, would these arguments prove or disprove God? Well that depends... Or does it have to do, does it anyway have nothing to do with it? It proves and dis... It disproves the existence of any entity that is supposedly ultimately real. So if I'm not familiar with any theistic tradition that says God is not real.
There are some close candidates for kind of via negativa style of theology. So one that's frequently cited is Meister Eckhart, uh, who prayed to God that he may not believe in God and was then excommunicated for such things. Uh, 12th century, I think. So um... Uh, but, you know, so they're close candidates, quite possibly, and we're going to see that there is a style of Mādhyamika that kind of brings a little bit of affirmation back, but we're not going to talk about that now. But basically, there are other Buddhists had other arguments against God, Creator God. So, you know, and Parimal Patil at Harvard wrote this book against the Hindu God in which he talks about some of those arguments. And the main argument is, if God is a crea... is a um... uh, is the first cause, a creator, then, you know, how does that work? Because, you know, what if you're causal, you have to be in a causal chain, like, how do you have a first? How do you have a first cause? It's just incoherent. If we also maintain that God somehow is eternal and unchanging, then how does an unchanging entity engage in causality, which requires change? So those are a couple of kinds of arguments that come up. So yeah. But, you know, there are other kinds of models of God, like, you know, that via negativa that like, it's different, but but the point being that the essentialization is what this is going after. And essentialization is not dependent on being a theist or not a theist, everyone has that. We all have the reality habit. According to this, it's like built into our cognitive system. It's what we do. And uh... We, you know, we're living in a world that actually isn't essentially real, and but our cognitive system keeps telling us that it is. And then that causes all kinds of problems. Right? Okay, is that clear? So it's not about belief in God or anything like that. In fact, you know, like modern models about the belief in God are really mostly about many of them in cognitive science are mostly about like the social role of deity of supreme deities in creating large scale societies, for example.
Okay. And we go, did you need something, Philippe?
Sure. So Paul Dirac, a British physicist was a very strong atheist, and he always said after his talks, and there is no God. At the end of every talk. Every talk and there is no God. Wolfgang Pauli got obsessed with that. Oh, yes. Yeah. And then he said in the end of his talks, and there is no God. And Dirac is his prophet.
Dirac, also this other physicist, which is the artist, is its prophet. That's great. So there is no God. And Dirac is his prophet. That's great. I love it.
Okay. There are no empty sets. And who's the prophet? And Philippe is the prophet. Okay. Śūnyatā is the ultimate reality of all persons and things. We've done this. If you look for the essence, you don't find it. So things are empty of essence. It's the conclusion for the search for what a person really is. Right? Let me turn this.
I think I click it again. Yes. Uh, and therefore, śūnyatā is the ultimate reality, ultimate nature of all things. Right? It's not itself. Ultimately real. We just want to review this. We already did that. Emptiness is not really emptiness. Clinging to śūnyatā is a bad idea. We did that. Right? sūnyatā sarva-dṛṣṭīnām proktā niḥsaraṇaṃ jinaiḥ So another way of saying this is that emptiness is the relinquishment of all maps.
Right? You don't like hold on to the map. The famous story also of the Buddha, you know, in the Ālāgaddūpama Sūtra, again, the water snake Sūtra. It's kind of like, I always think of it as, you know, the monks are kind of the, um... you know, like the straight man for the comic, you know, and they're talking about the role of philosophy. Like, again, the snake that's incorrectly held. Philosophy is a snake. Hold it incorrectly. It bites you. Philosophy is also a raft. You know, and this comes up in the Sūtra and basically there are people who are kind of clinging to the philosophy itself. So the Buddha says, hey, monks, what do you think? If you had, if you came to a river, you could build a raft, right? Yeah, Buddha. And then could you get across with the raft and say, yeah, you could, Buddha. And then would you carry the raft across the desert to get to the city you're going to? They say uh... maybe not, Buddha.
Yeah, but we like the raft. No, we don't, you know, need the raft anymore. Right? So in a way you can say like the, a Buddha is not a Buddhist. Right? The Buddha doesn't need the philosophy, teaches or appears to teach, but it's not like he's a believer in his philosophy.
So being a believer is actually, might be a good thing sometimes to be a believer, but really what this saying is, you know, abandon beliefs without being a nihilist.
You don't want to believe in nothing. We don't want to be the German nihilist from the Big Lebowski. Just remember that. The handful of Germans in the audience, they're not a good role model.
Okay? We're not going to believe in nothing. So that's, don't exist at all. So this is an important point I wanted to raise, and then we should stop soon, right? Then we go a little while longer, I guess. Um... Uh... which is that, we had this slide, but I made a slight variation here. As you'll see, ultimately all persons and things are empty of essence. That is, they have no non-relational identity. Right? If you try to find that, you just don't find it. That's what it means for them to be empty. When we say, what's the nature of this? What's the nature of anything? Ultimately, emptiness. And, but conventionally, persons and things exist with relational identities from the standpoint of deluded sentient beings. So that's a key additional phrase that also came up in a conversation this morning with Rinpoche. And you can think of this as perspectivalism. The ultimate, we speak about the ultimate as being from the perspective of the Ārya's equipoise. And here there's this, it's especially a kind of Tibetan phrase, you know,
phag-pé nyam-zhak gi ngo-wor འཕགས་པའི་མཉམ་བཞག་གི་ངོ་བོར from the perspective of the equipoise of the Nyam shak ཉམ་ཤག, there's that word again, of the Ārya. So an Ārya here is a term that's used to describe, a Sanskrit word that's used to describe someone who has had a direct realization of the ultimate, and which in this context means direct realization of emptiness. So someone is like that, like, what is the ultimate? Emptiness, strictly speaking, is from that perspective. And you could say it's even true from that perspective. As an ordinary being, you can also have a kind of what's called, and this is not in Nāgārjuna, but later, but it's still very useful, you can have what's called the actual ultimate, that's from the perspective of an Ārya's experience in a meditation. Like when the Ārya is out of meditation, before they become a Buddha, they come back to, you know, our ordinary shared realities. But they look dreamlike. So... So there are still those kinds of appearances for them, but they don't look real, but they're still having those exper..., those appearances. Uh, but the ordinary beings can know a version of the ultimate that is a conceptual version, through reasoning. So this is what we call the distinction between the actual ultimate, or the non metaphorical ultimate, aparyāya paramārtha nyam drang ma yin pé dön-dam ཉམས་དྲངས་མ་ཡིན་པའི་དོན་དམ and the metaphorical ultimate, paryāya paramārtha the nyams drangs pa’i don dam ཉམས་དྲངས་པའི་དོན་དམ in Tibetan. Okay, so you so that, but that is that like, this is that transition from conceptual learning and so on to actual experience or meditation. The conventional is from the standpoint of deluded sentient beings, the way the world looks to deluded sentient beings. Right? That's the conventional. There's a kind of experience happening like the weird sound in the room right now, from the standpoint of deluded sentient beings. And the difference between the experience of an Ārya and the experience of a deluded sentient being, when the Ārya is not in meditation, when they're in what's called the subsequent state, the pṛṣṭhalabdha state or the je thob རྗེས་ཐོབ state after not in equipoise, is that for the Ārya, for the sentient being, the conventional is a conventional reality, or conventional truth. And for the Ārya, the conventional is merely conventional. It's not true. This is actually Candrakīrti's innovation. Again, some Mādhyamikas don't like that. So what that means, it's in one way this is described is like, if you look again, if you look at your face in the mirror, if an ordinary being looks at their face in the mirror, it doesn't look real to them. And you'll know that because again, you can like, you know, throw something at it or whatever, and the person doesn't go, Oh. Right? they don't feel like it's actually their face. They know it's not their face. It's just a reflection. All reality is like that for the Ārya. They're walking around in, or can participate in the realities of ordinary beings. But they don't think it's it doesn't feel real to them in the way it feels real to ordinary beings. Okay. All right. Which, of course, suggests that there may be certain kinds of possibilities that you, that become available. If you're not stuck in the reality of things, you can, so to speak, think outside the box, perhaps. And here's that famous verse again. Emptiness is interdependence. So for the for the Ārya in particular, like the experience of, of, you know, walking around is an experience of, of, you know, not of reality, but of interdependence. Dream like interdependence. And conceptually, to get into that conceptual form of understanding the ultimate, not the actual ultimate, but that kind of conceptual ultimate. Now that you come to a real clear understanding of emptiness that enables you to engage in emptiness meditation. Really, in some ways, this verse that we've heard a few times really characterizes that, right? 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 the word person is not actually in that verse, you could just say to one for whom. Maybe that's a better translation. I could change that. Okay? Like, when that really works for you, then you've got a good conceptual understanding of emptiness. When it feels like, oh, if all things are empty, then how does, how could there be causality? How could, you know, you eliminate suffering and uh, and uh, and all that and attain nirvana? And as Khenpo was saying yesterday, I think, like, if they weren't empty, you couldn't attain nirvana. Because non-empty things have essences, which means they are stuck in their, what they are, and they cannot be, you can't do anything to them. If something is essentially existent, you can't make it non-existent. You can't, like, take its essence out and put it in a new essence. Because now it's a different thing. If you change its essence, it's a different thing. Right? So that's this... So it's actually the fact that things are not essentially real, that makes our reality possible.
Okay, so here's a really interesting question that we're going to be getting on to. We have a little time. You guys okay? We're not, we're not taking a break because you're all right. Śūnyatā describes the endpoint of this search, like, what's the thing really or truly? So it's the proper description of what things are in ultimate terms. So if you're going to use a word to say what things are, you say śūnyatā, ultimately. What is this ultimately? Śūnyatā. Emptiness. Okay?
But unlike things like, I could say, if I might be an absolutist and say, what's this ultimately? It's ultimately an existent thing. Or I could be a nihilist and say, what's this thing? Ultimately, ultimately, it's nothing.
And those are referring the words existent and nothing or non-existent, are referring to like they're meant to refer to an object. Just like if I say the word vase, it seems to refer to a thing, right? Table, person, person, person, eye, eye. Right? It seems the words seem to refer, like they're pointing something out. All right? Emptiness does not refer to anything. Again, there are some interpretations that say it does, but in this style, this is the best way of talking about it. It's not like there's a thing that's emptiness that it refers to, that the word refers to. Because that would be turning emptiness into something, which you'd have to refute again. You'd have to go to emptiness of emptiness. And then you'd be really in trouble if you thought that this, the phrase emptiness of emptiness referred to something. Right? Okay? So emptiness does not name something. Because ultimately there's nothing to be named. Is that clear? Okay. Conventionally, it's sort of names. So one way this works out, like, ultimately, there's a famous sūtra, the uh... Uh, Śrīmālā Siṃhanāda Sūtra, which was very popular in China, the, the lion's roar of Queen Śrīmālā. And, you know, basically her answer to like, okay, well, what is emptiness? Could just tell us, like, what's the ultimate? And there's the lion's roar.
That's it.
And it's not, but it's not a nothing. This is very important. It's not a like mystical nothing that's, well, I can't tell you what it really is, but it's there.
So when it says it's beyond word and concepts, you don't want it to be the kind of beyond word and concepts like,
you know what I mean?
I know, but I can't tell you.
There's a very important way of saying like, I know, but I can't tell you in this tradition. But there's a very problematic way of saying that. Right? A sort of mystical silence. So you don't want that way of being silent. Queen Śrīmālā's way. Okay. So, did you have a question? There's two questions, but one is already too, I think, too far gone. And the other one, I wanted to ask, why do we translate it to emptiness and not essencelessness? Because we have a word for essencelessness, nairātmya. Okay. Okay. Um... Another question. Khenpo la also talked about luminosity and Buddha nature as opposed to mere emptiness. Will you come to that point later? Yes. And so will Eric, I think, in more experiential terms. Yes, we're definitely going to get there. Uh, in fact, we're kind of getting there right now. Uh, so, uh, but I do want to say one thing about śūnyatā. So this word itself is actually a word śūnya with an abstract suffix on it, tā. And that abstract suffix on it, really, that abstract suffix, like, maps very closely onto abstract suffixes and other Indo-European languages. You know, remember Sanskrit is an Indo-European language, like ness in Tibetan, or I guess rickly -keit in German, right? Uh, -té in French, like spontanéité, right? réalité. Dad in Spanish, realidad, right? So it's śūnyatā, emptiness, but actually, it's śūnyaness. Śūnya is, and there are some people who are very uncomfortable with that word, and you'll find like openness or other translations. I'm not a big fan of that, because I think it's missing a very deliberate choice. Like, the Heart Sutra doesn't say there's no eye, it doesn't say this kind of no eye and kind of no ear, like there's an open eye you know, it says there is no eye and there is no ear, and so on. Right? It's very clearly a series of negations. And the word śūnyatā is referring to is very specific kind of negation. One of them is like the empty space of something is like the empty space within a vase is śūnya. Like the vase is śūnya, that space inside. Our ordinary way of using the word empty, like it's an empty house, you'd say śūnya. But also, very importantly, around this, I think around the same time as Nāgārjuna, actually, I'm not sure. I think so. Maybe a little, not after, I don't believe. śūnya is coined, is used by Indian mathematicians for zero. And I believe that they, I think they, there's some, I've heard, I don't, I've never read this, so, and maybe, you know, but, Phillipe, but a, I've heard that they coined this as a mathematical concept and zero. But in any case, it means zero. So emptiness says zero-ness, which is like the empty set. Right?
So that, like, zero-ness, if I say, so there's, Candrakīrti has this great story, like, you know, a fellow walks into a shop. This is in the Madhyamakāvatāra, in the introduction of the Middle Way. Guy walks into his shop. You know, you can sort of see Candrakīrti up on the stage at the mic. So, let me tell you, the guy walks into the shop like... A fellow walks into his... Maybe we should make it a bar, we'll make it a bar, right? You know, an essentialist walks into the bar. A nihilist walks into the bar and says, Hey, you got any whiskey? No. Get any gin? No. Got any vodka? No. What do you got? Actually, we got nothing. I'll have some of that.
It's a slightly updated version of the story. Right? It's like, I want some zero.
Right? I got a lot of zero in my room. It's kind of expensive, but if you want some, I'll, you know, I'll think about giving you some. Make a nice zero cocktail.
Yes? Gives you a terrible hangover, though.
Um, where does the concept of void... I don't know if that's from the Theravada tradition, but I'm familiar with reading some things about the void. Some people translate emptiness as voidness. Yep. So that's just an equivalent translation. Uh... I'm not sure. Something in the Theravada. There is a kind of dimensionality of the highest dimension of like samsara and also meditative experience within samsara. That's like beyond something and nothing. Yeah. It's like falling into the pit of the void or something. Yea, there can be that sort of... Oh, there's also experiential things in the stages of insight where you feel like everything's like turning into nothing. Yes. And how does that relate to what we're studying here? That's not emptiness. Yeah, that's a thing you're making nothingness into a thing. Into a thing that you're falling into, yes. Ah, I see. That's why you're afraid of it. Yes. And you need to realize that nothingness is empty. Exactly. Ah, got it. Yes, thank you, actually. I'm glad you mentioned that because, Rowan, because actually one of the things about emptiness, you know, again, Candrakīrti says in another text, is you have to be really careful explaining emptiness because people can freak out, basically. Because they can think it means everything is nothing.
Right? That the ultimate reality is nothing. Nothingness. But it's not nothingness. Why isn't it nothingness? Why isn't nothingness ultimately real?
Yeah, kind of, yes. Can you say more? Nothingness, it's no thing.
There's a very good hint. Why isn't nothingness ultimately real? What does it mean for something to be ultimately real? It's completely independent. It exists in and of itself objectively from its own side, transcontextually, without depending on anything else. Why isn't nothingness ultimately real? Nothing would have to be dependent on something. Exactly.
Yep, exactly. So there's no ultimate nothing. And in some ways I find this view is kind of nicer than the concept or the idea of a void that's truly real. Well, yeah, that's for sure, because that would be really a bummer, don't you think? I mean, like, you know, it doesn't really have very happy conclusion to say everything's just nothing. Again, the German nihilist, right? You know, it's like, doesn't look like a very attractive lifestyle.
It's, yeah, it would be awful to think that. And it would make life meaningless. You know, there are some forms of existentialism that are kind of like this. And then you just, even though life is meaningless, you sort of push ahead anyway with your ecstatic project. And, you know, maybe just better to get over the idea that it's nothing. Because that's incoherent. An ultimate nothing is just as incoherent as an ultimate something. Or even an ultimate neither nothing nor something.
And so in Hīnayāna, the concept of emptiness is still very much present. it's just a different type of śūnyatā. There are definitely predecessors in the non-Mahāyāna texts of emptiness. The word is actually used. And also there is a usage of the term emptiness in the context of the noble's four truths as one of the four features of the truth of suffering. But usually in the non-Mahāyāna context, that term is understood to mean that there's selflessness is one of the four. So there's impermanence, there's impermanence, suffering, selflessness, and emptiness are the four aspects of the truth of suffering. And selflessness means you don't have that kind of self we've been talking about. Emptiness in that context means that the stuff that belongs to the self, which really means the aggregates, there's also nothing that belongs to the self. Since there's no self, there can't be anything that belongs to the self. So that's what emptiness is usually understood to mean in the context, non-Mahāyāna context of that term there. But there's definitely, and the late Louis Gomez, a great Buddhist scholar, wrote an article many years ago, like a predecessors of emptiness in the Pali canon. So it's, yeah, this stuff doesn't come out of nowhere. So I guess we should, yeah, we should start. We're going to do this in the afternoon, and we're going to get... But this is the real question, so what does it mean to know emptiness?
It doesn't refer to anything.
You could say, well, you can have a concept of it, correct. You can have that, what we saw before, where to go, blah, blah, blah... You can have that conceptual version of the ultimate, and that you can know as a conceptual object, as a constructed conceptual object. But to actually know it like in meditative concentration. What does the Ārya know when the holy one, when a person who is having a direct realization in meditation, non-conceptual direct realization of emptiness, or just walking around in it for a moment, what are they knowing?
Does anyone want to vote for that they're knowing nothing?
Better not say you're doing nothing.
You know, in Zen they have this stick they carry around.
Right? So we know it's not, you're not knowing nothing. So what do you, are you knowing something? No. And go ahead, you want to say something? And if śūnyatā is non-referring, it cannot be the knowing of something. Right. Part of the reason it can't be a knowing of something is that to know something is for a subject to know an object.
If you have an object, is it the same or different than the subject? Ultimately. Different. Ultimately. Ultimately it's not different and not the same. Yeah, meaning it doesn't make sense. Right. Right, it... If you go through those four possibilities, it's both, it's different. It's not different. It's both, it's neither. And you end up saying, well, that none of those make sense. So therefore there can't be objects. Which also means what? That there are no subjects. Correct. There's no knowing subjects. There's no knower that is the subject that is knowing, then they engaged in the, in the action of knowing in relation to knowing a object. This is called the, uh, uh, uh, uh, in, in Tibetan, the Korsum. And the Triputa is it? Uh, I kind of forget the most standard Sanskrit translation of that, but it, it means agent, object, action.
That is not what's had. No, actually direct realization of emptiness can have no agent, no object and no action because without an agent and object, there can't be an action. But the action of knowing can't occur without agents and objects. Without objects, you can't have, we're going to go through these arguments later. So this is the triadic version. Dharmakṛti had, I mean, Nāgārjuna has a dyadic and a triadic version of this relational argument that we'll look at later. So there's no objects. That means there can't be any subjects. That means there can't be any action of knowing. No object that's known, no action, no knower that's knowing, and no action of knowing.
It's a non-conceptual state that is free of the three spheres, agent, object, action. So it's the khorsum nampar mi tokpé yeshe, འཁོར་གསུམ་རྣམ་པར་མི་རྟོག་པའི་ཡེ་ཤེས you probably heard Rinpoche say many times, the primordial wakefulness that is free of the conceptualization of the three spheres. khorsum nampar mitokpé yeshe
I'm not sure there's an attested equivalent in Sanskrit of that, but we don't need that because we're heading toward a certain tradition, which is Māhamudrā Dzogchen, right? All right. So then what is it? What, huh? What do, then what... How do you know it?
Candrakīrti's answer is, you know it by way of not knowing.
It's super helpful description.
It is in a way, but he's... So Candrakīrti is a certain style that is very hesitant about anything, like it's it's saying anything you might, that might push you into an extreme, but then that kind of could lead you into nihilism. Like he's very hesitant about the absolute extreme of absolutism, which sometimes makes it seem a little more dangerous in terms of the nihilistic extreme. Maybe, maybe you could say that about Candrakīrti, but in any case later, Uh Mādhyamikas after him, then we'll talk a little bit about them, say, are more comfortable with trying to say something about this. But it's just a very interesting question to ask yourself.
What does it mean to know directly, experientially, not conceptually, to, to exp... to be in a state that is the direct realization of emptiness, if you want to call it a state? What is that?
Yeah, certainly in this tradition, if you're really fully in that state at this, you know, when we understand that, then in, in... then yeah in a sense, you're Buddha right then for that moment. But what is it?
Should we even try to say, maybe if we try to say, we're gonna like, you know, just create a new ultimate? You know, let me tell you what it really is. It's... Did you get that? No, could you say it again? No, sorry.
Oh, no, wait, I think it's actually...
Okay, so let's stop now and have lunch a little late. And I guess we'll still start at four today. Okay, just dedicate the merit. sönam diyi thamché sikpa nyi thopné nyepai dranam phamjé né kyega nachi balap trukpa yi sipai tsolé drowa drölwar shok tönpa jikten khamsu jönpa dang tenpa nyiö shindu salwa dang tenzin phunu shindu thönpa yi tenpa yünring nepai tashi shok Oh, thank you.
okmin chökyi yingkyi phodrang né
düsum sangyé kün gyi ngowo nyi
rangsem chöku ngönsum tönzé pa
tsawai lamai shapla sölwa dep
Okay, so starting a little late today. And I was just asked if we could go to 12:30. So I hope that's alright for everyone.
Right. So we're going to talk some more about emptiness today. But first, I actually want to review one argument because it came up this morning for some of us. And it is basically the idea of the incomprehensibility of things that have spatial extension and a way of getting to emptiness that actually is using a reductive argument, but then flips to a relational argument. So this is the chig du drel, གཅིག་དུ་འབྲལ་བའི་གཏན་ཚིགས as they call it in Tibetan, or the ekānekavicāra, which as I said before, goes back very long way, the neither one nor many argument, or neither identical or different. So actually, these terms in Sanskrit is, in Sanskrit, it's eka and aneka. So eka means one, and aneka means many, or actually, literally not one. So that can mean like singular or plural, but can also mean that if you have two things, or maybe many things in relation to something, then you can ask, are those many things the same as they're related to or different than what they're related to? So it really means identity or difference, one or not one in the sense of identical or different. And with, so if we have like, let's use the vase, which is a one traditional example of bumpa, and this looks pretty like a traditional ghaṭa, as they say in Sanskrit, not too different from one. So the, the different parts of the vase, we can ask, are they the same as the vase or different than the vase? Right, so our intuition is that there's a single whole thing here that's a vase, correct? Right, everyone agrees with that? I'm not holding more than one vase, am I right? So, and we did a load of this before. Now someone really has to, you know, let's try to defend your intuition, don't just give up. Okay, so there's, I'm holding the vase, I am? What am I touching? Am I touching the vase? Student: You are touching the bottom of the vase. So I'm not touching the vase? I am touching the vase. So I'm touching both the vase and the bottom of the vase? Who wants to take the opposite? Who wants to defend? Okay.
Either way, but we have to, we have to respect non-deviant reasoning, so no contradictions and no excluded middle. What that means is you can't say it's both yes and no, and you can't say it's neither yes nor no. You can't say either of those. Then never mind.
Why can't we do that? Why do we respect, you remember, why do we respect those rules of non-deviant reasoning?
Yes, because they are the rules that we play in everyday life, kind of. We will sometimes reject them in everyday life, but maybe more accurately that our conceptual system, like when we're in doubt in our conceptual system, then the way our conceptual system functions, so as to give us the kind of conclusions that enable us to act in the world, when push comes to shove, so to speak, when we're pushed into a corner, then we're going to try to respect those rules. So if we, for example, or in cases that are very important, we're going to try to respect those rules. So if someone were to try to, let's say, build an airplane, and they're going to make something that is, is both is and is not the engine, we might not want to fly in that airplane, you know? If someone's going to perform an operation, you know, let's say you need a heart operation, but you get a doctor who says, I'm going to operate on your heart, or maybe it's not your, it's neither your heart nor not your heart, you might feel a little uncomfortable with that idea. We're going to do brain surgery on something that's neither your brain nor not, that is neither your brain nor not your brain.
Yeah, my madhyamaka surgery, right? No, it's like, no, I don't think we'd be very comfortable with that. So what the idea is that our, and the reason we get to those kind of rules is that we're essentializing. Like when we are pushed into, this is when our, that kind of reasoning actually makes, surfaces, what sometimes is a sort of somewhat hidden essentialism in our ordinary way of thinking, like, it either is or is not a heart, darn it. Okay, that makes sense? Yeah. So it is, in a sense, that reasoning, the respect, respecting this kind of classical non-deviant reasoning is what allows us to push that essentialism, bring it to the fore and then push it to its maximum point where it then falls apart. Okay, make sense? Okay. So, am I touching the vase? Yes. Am I touching the bottom of the vase? Yes. Is the bottom of the vase the same or different than the vase? It is the same. It is the same as the vase. Am I touching the vase? Yes. Am I touching the top of the vase? Yes. Is the top of the vase the same as the vase or different than the vase? Yes, it's the same. It's the same? Same. Therefore, this is, the top and the bottom are identical?
So I should be, I'm not going to make a mess.
Well, I would have to say yes in that moment. I would have to say yes because I said yes twice. Yeah. You would be compelled to say yes. Correct. Thank you, Daniel. Because by the rules of that form of reasoning you can think of this as like algebraic, if A is identical to B and B is identical to C, excuse me, if A is identical to B and A is also identical to C, then B is identical to C. If, if the whole is identical to the bottom and the whole is identical to the top, then the bottom and the top are identical. Yes?
Yes.
So the otherwise is only true for the empty set? Yes, the empty set, which is actually not anything, correct? Unless you want to absolutize nothing, in which case we already found out we're in trouble when we go to that extent. So if you talk about the empty set, then it's true, no? Yeah, right. What's true, like the excluded middle is exactly, is the empty set, right? And contradictions, depending on how you think, the excluded middle is that, so the empty set is like, or the set of all things in the universe, let's say, or let's say that just in terms of the set of the things that are members of the set of vase parts, right? Right? So if we have this universe of the vase and its parts, then the stuff that is neither identical nor different is going to be outside of that set. It doesn't belong to that set, which means that it's not there at all. But one of the things about set theory is it allows us to then concretize the abstraction, so that we can think that the empty set is in some set a real sense, a real thing. But that obviously doesn't make a lot of sense, does it? Unless we're like pushed, you know, to the maximum point of platonic realism. But we'll maybe come back to that later. For now, not worrying about treating the empty set as just meaning it doesn't exist, right? So we can't say that the top, so if I say I'm touching the top vase and I'm touching the bottom, the bottom is the same as the vase, I'm touching the top and the top is the same as the vase, and that means that the top and the bottom are the same, so it shouldn't matter whether I hold it this way or that way, right? Or the size of the vase is the same as the size of both the top and the base, just that high. So all kinds of absurd things follow, right? What if I say it's different? Then what? The vase is different than the top, it's different than the bottom, different than the sides. What happens then? Well, then you could move the vase without moving the rest. I can take all the vase parts away and I should still have a vase, which would make, you know, producing vases and traveling with them and things like that, very, storing them, you could store an infinite number of vases in your closet, you know, you could be, vase collecting would really be fun and easy. Am I right? Does that make sense? Does that, so that's with anything that has parts, we can do that, right? Tables... So this is very interesting. What it's saying is that when you see things and your visual system clumps it together as a single thing, there's a kind of visual binding of those spatial elements, you know, maybe because of contours and edges, right? That, you know, we kind of see a single thing but actually it's not a single thing.
All right? When you really get into that it starts to be a little sort of almost, if you really experience that it's quite interesting and you can do that, you like, invite you to try to do that meditatively, just conceptually, you know, you can take an actual object and look at it and see if it starts to like fall apart, you know, or there's this again that movie I Heart Huckabees, there's this point where they're looking at somebody, somebody's looking at somebody's face and the face starts to go like, breaks into bits and like, where's the one face? Okay, is that clear? So logically, this is not a single thing. That does not mean that the elements or parts of this, if we for the moment assert that there are elements or parts, that doesn't mean that they can't work together to perform certain functions. So in early Buddhism, when we say that the elements or parts are truly real, we get down to that infinitesimally small particle, right? Those particles can all work together and they can affect each other so that they can, so that in a sense they can form a kind of what we might call a system, such that they interact in a way that they can perform functions at the system level, that as individuals they couldn't do. Okay, that makes sense? You could call the vase a system, I guess, in a way, right? So there's a causal like capacity that they get together, but what this kind of approach is doing is it's refusing to ontologize this system level entity. It's refusing to say that's a real thing, okay? Now there are certain problems with that that maybe come up, but we can maybe come back to that later, because what we want to do now is we want to then say, okay, we keep going down, down, down, down, down, we get to what's supposed to be the part-less particle, right? So that part-less particle is something you can't break down any further, or can you? Right? So Rinpoche, those of you who heard that and make a few comments this morning, he was pointing this out. Ha... so why, what happened?
What's that? The pill. So uh... what, what happened, what can we do with the particle? Well, we can agglomerate particles into larger things, right? We have particles of matter, some kind of particle of matter, and it agglomerates into a larger thing. If it agglomerates into a larger thing, does it need to have size?
Does it have to have some kind of spatial dimension? If you accumulate a whole bunch of things with no spatial dimension, how big would it be?
It would be infinitely, it would be no size at all, right? Right? So this is a model of matter, a particular model of matter, that's saying that things that accumulate into larger things have to themselves also somehow occupy some degree of space. Otherwise, if they accumulate, they don't make any size. How would they occupy, how would you get a larger area of space if they things that constitute this larger thing are themselves not occupying space at all, right? That's the idea of this model. But is there a problem with that? If they occupy space, then what? So let's think of that, we're gonna have the other particles around it, right? And we can have different models about how many different particles there need to be. But somehow then the central particle in there something that's, you know, larger than just the size of a particle, it's got to be somehow connected to those other particles, right? It's got to be in relation to those other particles. What would happen if it were in relation to only one? So that means that, for example, it's got a particle, let's just call these, you know, up, down, left, and right, just for convenience. If the particle on the right-hand side is connecting here, then it's got a right-hand side. What would happen if the right-hand side is the same and then the particle here is connecting to the left-hand side, right? So it's gonna have a right and left-hand side. If the right-hand side is the same as the particle, it's supposed to be partless, and the left-hand side is the same as the particle, then actually the right-hand side and the left-hand side are identical, which means that you're back to something with no size, right? So this is actually from, not from a Mādhyamika text, actually, this is from a text called the Viṃśatikā, the 20 verses, and a different philosophy we're gonna talk about tomorrow a little bit, or maybe today. Okay, so what that means is that we can like say, well, this is actually, now we have a new candidate, we were wrong, this is not a partless particle, because it has to relate to other particles in a way that allows space to be occupied, which means it's got to have some kind of dimensions that, that are it's, that constitute that particle. And that means that we can break it down, right? So now what happens? Well, we can take another, right, we have, we can have a new candidate, okay, let's look at, we're just gonna look at one dimension, but then we end in the same problem. It just, it's in infinite regress. And so the conclusion for the Buddhists to this argument is that if you posit the idea of a partless particle, that's actually incoherent. That the reductive argument, which in some sense is almost arbitrarily stopped by the Abhidharma tradition, so that you still end up with matter, here like, we don't end up with, matter is gone. With that, at least on that model, matter doesn't make sense, right? Like bits of stuff that take up space don't make sense. So that's one way you get to, like, so when, as was quoted in the text that um... that Khenpo la was talking about, was teaching about, from Śāntarakṣita's Madhyamakālaṃkāra, but also as really is almost a direct quote from Dharmakīrti, you can say this thing doesn't have an essential nature. In other words, the vase doesn't exist essentially, objectively, independently, because you can't specify whether the vase is the same or different than its parts. But then likewise, you can't do that even with the individual atoms, because you can't specify whether the atom is the same or different than its dimensions. And you take a single dimension, if it too has to somehow satisfy the need to occupy space, you're back to the same place. The dimension has to have dimensions that enable it to occupy space. So that means that you can't specify even that a dimension of a allegedly partless atom truly exists, because you can't specify whether it's the same or different than its dimensions, the metadimensions of the dimensions of the partless particle. Right? Just keeps going. It's, you know, like partlessness all the way down. You just keep trying to find that partless thing and you can't get there. You see that? It's kind of interesting, like, if you really... I think, did I... I can't remember if I told this here, but there's, you know, if you really, like, think about... I was one time in, like, 1983 when I first started studying this particular argument. I was driving a bunch of Gyuto monks around in the United States and I was like thinking about it on the highway and it's like everything is falling apart, you know. It's like, whoa! And the monk next to me goes, are you okay? He's like, watch the road. What road? You know, there's no spatial extension, you know. It's a little dangerous. Don't drive and do this, please. No cutting things, you know. That's exactly my question now, when you just said that, so it doesn't make sense. Then I was like, okay, but still the things appear. So it's our conclusion, things appear, but it just doesn't make sense. So there's a... so that's going to be the difference between the conceptual understanding and the experiential understanding. And then when you bring that to an experiential understanding, then when you see this, it stops looking like a single thing to you, really.
It's like got this sort of, oh yeah, kind of, you know, and therefore it has this sort of dreamlike quality to it, right? And there are different ways that that experience can manifest and there can be degrees, like it can really just start to fall apart. And then later, as you're walking around, it doesn't quite fall apart, but it's like, I sort of know what it's, I know that that's not really what it looks like. Just like when you look at your face in a mirror, most of the time, when we look at our face in the mirror, we don't go, oh, that's not my face. Maybe you do that after you've had a hard night of something, or rather it was like, ah, who's that in the mirror? But otherwise, right, we don't usually think, oh, that's not, but, but still we don't, even when we're looking at our face, it's kind of like, we know we sort of, but some part of us knows that's a reflection. We don't think, oh, like if someone goes up to it and it goes, we didn't go, ow! It's not like the rubber hand illusion, if some of you that are familiar with that, where you trick people into thinking of rubber hand, you have a certain experimental setup, and you have their real hand, you know, their left hand, and then their right hand, they sort of set it up so that there's a rubber hand in place of their right hand. And then you take like a pin and you go, and people go, ow, you know, that's not going into their hand, but they've sort of believe it's their hand. That's not really true with the mirror. Like if I go up and I go on the mirror, you don't go, ow, it doesn't feel like it's really your face. So it's like that. You know, everything's like a reflection, for example. Okay.
Why an atom doesn't have a spatial dimension? Well, if it has a spatial dimension, okay, if the atom has a spatial, the atom needs a spatial dimension, needs size, so that it can occupy space. But if it has size, then that means that the other atoms that are accumulating around it to make something larger have to be connecting to some part of that size. So now it has, you know, chok in Tibetan. So if you heard Rinpoche, he was talking about, he was talking about sides or chok, or in Sanskrit, pakṣa. So you can say it has a side, but another way you can say it has some kind of a dimension. And if all the dimensions are just the same as each other, then all the atoms around it also have dimensions that are just identical to the atom itself, and everything ends up being just the size of one atom. Right? So it doesn't occupy space anymore. Right? Huh? What? Does the floor work? Do we need to get like, walk around with flippers on so we don't fall through the...
There's a... Bob Thurman used to tell this story of the, I think it was the quantum physicist who like kind of lost it and had to walk around in his lab wearing, you know, flippers for swimming, because he was afraid he'd fall through the floor. This is mostly space where it's just probabilities, like, you know, maybe just very unlikely probability that it's just going to go... The scientist, I don't know, Robert Thurman was there when I was an undergraduate, I stayed with Bob, and Bob was a very helpful teacher and still is mentor for me in many ways. So anyway, Uh, what we end up with then is this kind of, you can get to an experiential level with this. But there's also another kind, very important other kind of argument that goes with this, which is that the um, uh... that the parts also, and we can do a relational argument as well, without going into the kind of infinite regress, we can also say that the whole is a whole only in relation to the parts, and the parts are parts only in relation to the whole.
Okay? The whole is a whole only in relation to the parts, and the parts are defined as parts only in relation to the whole. But if the whole cannot be established independently of the parts, and the parts can't be established as parts, as part of a system, unless that system or that whole is already established, then we've got a problem. Which is established first? Do we first have the whole or the system, and then the hard parts are defined as a member of that whole? Or are the parts defined as parts of a system first, and then because they're parts of a system, the whole emerges?
Right? You see that? There's a relational problem. And this is the fundamental problem here is the basic problem, the basic problem of, of relations. All right? So let me just say something about that for a second. The basic, the basic problem of relations before we say more. If two things are in relation, are they the same or different?
They're different. Okay? So let's say these two things are in relation, and there's a third thing over here that's not in relation to them. Okay? So is this, you know, I could even maybe do it with this diagram. So let's say we have these three things that you're about to see. Okay? All right? And we're saying these, these two, the ones that are horizontal to each other, are in some kind of relation. And the one below here is not in relation to them. Why do we say that? If there's... If these are totally different, this is also different, then why would you say they're in relation?
Right? This is also different. This is different from, they're all different from each other. Why do we say these two are in relation and this one isn't?
Why do we do that? They're all different. What would happen if we say the two things in relation are the same? Then how many things are there? One. Can a thing be in relation to itself? Some people would say yes.
You know, that's when you, like, I married myself and things went, things went bad real quick, and I couldn't get a divorce, you know, so.
So like they're tied, in some sense they're together. So then the obvious answer to this question is this. Oh, they're in relation because there is an entity that's a relation that ties them together. Right? And then what do we do with that? Using the neither one or many argument, there's always something you ask. What do you ask? Is it same or different? Is the relation, is this relation, this thing, whoops, is the relation this, okay, is, can you see the laser pointer? Okay, is the relation the same as the relata, these two things? Or is it different than them?
If it's different, then what's wrong? What happens? We need another relation to tie the relation to the relate to the relata. And then we ask the same question. Is the second order relation the same or different than the things it's tying together? And the answer is, if it's different, we need a third order relation. If it's the same, then there's no two-ness such that the relation is necessary. And we end up in another infinite regress. So relationality, if you essentialize things, like they're either essentially the same or they're essentially different, relationality falls apart. It doesn't make sense. They have to be kind of the same and kind of not the same, right?
And then we fall out of the non-deviant reasoning and we're back and we're into a place and that means that, if we're saying that what it means to something to exist ultimately is that it exists essentially, then these things do not ultimately exist. We're back to the problem as well, how do they exist then? And this short answer that Mādhyamika provides is: interdependently. Another term that you'll see, especially in Tibetan versions of this, is pentsun tendrub ཕན་ཚུན་བརྟེན་གྲུབ་, which means mutually uh, mutually dependent establishment. Basically, another way of just saying interdependence. So you know, then you can say, well, let's come up with a model that makes sense of this, that tries not to essentialize things. How do you, like... You know, if we don't assume that things have to be absolutely identical or absolutely different, what kind of a model can we come up with that doesn't just become incoherent? Right? And then one version of that model might be something that is context-bound, that says they're different in one way and identical in another way, for example, or some other way of trying to talk about relationality that doesn't essentialize. Right? And I think quantum physics is the place where this kind of problem starts to come up. But in any case, our ordinary way of thinking where we essentialize things, the confused perspective, that's the issue here, right? So if we think they have to be either essentially identical or essentially different, we end up in incoherence, which means that that assumption is wrong, which means that they don't have that kind of essence, which means that they're empty. Okay? Did you have a question, please? Yeah, more a comment to that. So like this properties of spaces or like of entities in mathematics, it's called topology. Yes. So it's like kind of the study of properties of spaces that are invariant under continuous deformation. So invariant under continuous deformation. So as soon as you have an object with a hole, you will never get rid of the hole if you deform it Right. continuously. So not like um... And the other comment is like, with the vase, of the button and the top, there's also mathematics, it's called like set theory, which also deals with that, that you have like a subset of a set. Right. So one of the things that's always interesting to ask about this, these kinds of in these contexts is you have a mathematical abstraction. Hmm, exactly. And is the mathematical abstraction the same as this concrete entity or different than it? And this is like how you do like also the proofs in set theory. So you compare it and question that. Right. Yea. And I remember like when I was like a student, the professor there also like made stuff up and then in the order you just proved it for the empty set. Yes, right. Yeah. But then the only problem is, you know, do you remember we had that verse yesterday, like this verse here, like clinging to śūnyatā is not a good idea. Clinging to śūnyatā, the equivalent of that is like thinking the set empty set is a real thing.
Right. Instead of concluding that, oh, that, you know, that's, that should tell us something about the problematic ontology that we're assuming from the beginning. Instead, we can ontologize that. That's so that's basically like part of what I'm pointing to, which that book, The Blind Spot you know, gets into is the, is our tendency to ontologize mathematical objects, which has just become more and more powerful as the modern period has progressed. And that's, you know, the, this, this system would definitely question and try to undermine that kind of ontology. Where mathematical characterization's of things like sets or topology would be useful but they are not real things in the world the mathematical objects is not a real thing in the world. Now, when you, you know, I realized that a lot of mathematicians would feel very uncomfortable with that. But I have a friend, Bob McCauley, who just as a quick story. His colleague, Mark Johnson, who worked with George Lakoff on kind of metaphor theory. and conceptual metaphor theory, and then also the embodied nature of things like mathematical objects, how they actually have, how you can, you can argue for the way in which they relate to embodiments. And then he gave a talk at the, for the, at Georgia Tech some years ago, according to Bob. Bob was there. He didn't know there are many people from the math department were in the room. And he's saying, so mathematical objects are actually emerging from the features of human cognition and our embodiment. They're not real things in the world. And they almost threw him out this third floor window. Like, What? Mathematical objects aren't real? They were not happy about this. So in Austria, when you finish mathematics as a study, you just get, just get a a degree of a doctor in philosophy. So philosophy, not of science. Yeah, there you go. Yes. So did we have another question? And then I want to move on.
You presented now the interdependent model as an alternative to the, like to the essentialist model, right? Yes, correct. Yeah. How is it different from relationality, interdependence versus relation? So what, what interdependence assumes is there's some like, yeah, that to the extent that things exist, they exist in some way that is relational, meaning they don't have autonomous essences, but it doesn't give you a model for that. So one model for that, like one approach to that, that basically Candrakīrti, a very important commentator on Nāgārjuna, that many academics have worked on, and I'm currently translating his best known commentary. I think Anne McDonald at Vienna is also working on that. And Candrakīrti basically says, you know, whatever worldly, whatever kind of worldly reasoning that even experts kind of develop, the experts have essentialized it, just use that and know it's not essential. So he doesn't like say, oh, you can come up with like a better model of the conventional. Once you understand that it's not essentially real, like you say, you know, just use your ordinary common sense intuitions and just know that this, this, your ordinary common sense intuitions are, are coming out of a place of delusion. But you can just use that, right? As long as you want to just undermine it. No, it's, in other words, oh, it looks like, you know, that's a single thing and fine. Yeah, it's a single thing. But I even feel that it's not, it's, it feels dreamlike and so on. But in the context of the dream, it's one thing. So that's what he would say. Just use kind of ordinary worldly pramāṇas as they're called, means of valid cognition. But another argument might be, well, maybe we can come up with, once we have undermined essentialism, maybe we can come up with a better model that is a non-essentialist model of relations and stuff. What do you think might be the problem with that?
Anybody?
That it is again essentialistic because if we talk about relations, something has to be in relation? Kind of. That we might think that this new, supposedly anti-relation or anti-essentialist model of interdependent reality is reality. That we might absolutize it in some fashion. Maybe that's, maybe in some fashion, that's not exactly about essences. But in other words, that we will again mistake the map for the territory. And that's why Candrakīrti resists that in some, many Mādhyamika philosophers, we're not going to kind of get into these details, but many Mādhyamika philosophers kind of resist the attempt to update our world models based on a Mādhyamika ontology, which is a non-ontology. Like, there are really are no essentially real things, there's only conventionally real things. So let's come up with a new model of the world that, you know, kind of doesn't essentialize things, but gives us good descriptions or is more even more effective or what have you. And Mādhyamika philosophers like Candrakīrti say, no, don't do that. That's a bad idea, because you're just going to do the same thing again. You're just going to make your new model into the true reality. Like this is, you know, you're going to sort of give lip service to, oh, there are no essences, but here's what's really going on. You know, it's quantum physics or string theory, or, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, then everybody says, oh, yeah, what's really going on? blah, blah, blah, blah is going on. And, you know, then we're back to square one. So that's a long debate, actually, in Mādhyamika that goes on into Tibet. But isn't that already the case for, like, just making any kind of statement, even if it is negation? Like even Candrakīrti? Yes. So that's, that's a great, that's a great point. And so that's why Mādhyamikas, I don't have this in the slide. So I'll just explain this. Mādhyamikas proceed, are meant to proceed. So there's eventually becomes a debate between Mādhyamikas, who kind of, in a way, want to produce better models, or at least want to kind of do a kind of non-essential reasoning in some fashion, in order to, to kind of, as a method for helping others come to the Mādhyamika perspective. But Candrakīrti, the seventh century commentator on Nāgārjuna, says, that's a bad idea, because you're basically doing what I just said. You're like, on... ontologizing your supposedly de-essentialized reasoning. And what he says is, the only thing you can do is use absurd consequences. So I don't have a position. And this, and here he's drawing on one of, one of Nāgārjuna's texts, which is called the Vigrahavyāvartanī, one of his smaller texts, the rebuttal and debates, debates and rebuttals, Vigrahavyāvartanī. And in that text, basically, his opponent is a kind of one of this, one of the early schools that develops this style of reasoning. It's not a Buddhist school, that really gets into how do you reason? Uh how do you, uh, uh... What are the rules of debates? What constitutes non-deviant reasoning? How do you do inferences? What's the nature of perception in terms of, in terms of providing us with justified beliefs and all those kinds of issues, epistemology? Uh... This school is called the Nyāyaḥ school. And the opponent in that text is really a Naiyāyika, person in that school. And that... and the Naiyāyika says, Nāgārjuna, you know, you're just, have a self-defeating argument because what you're saying is anything you say is ultimately false, but you're saying things. So how are you going to prove that? And Nāgārjuna says, oh, let's just go have a drink. No, Nāgārjuna says, uh... na me pratijñā asti I do not have a thesis that I'm trying to prove. Slippery guy, isn't he? Right? And I'm not trying to prove anything. I'm just showing how your beliefs and reasoning fall apart using absurd conclusions that follow from your beliefs. So those are called this, this method of argumentation is called prasaṅga. So don't try to prove emptiness because emptiness, if I tried to prove emptiness, then there would be something established. Because, you know, because reasoning is essentializing. So I would just prove an essentialized thing and I'd be, you know, I'd be in that terrible situation of an incurable believer in emptiness. Right? So instead of that, I just use absurd consequences. Now, later, there are both in India and Tibet, Mādhyamika philosophers who say, no, actually, we can, we can prove things we can, we don't have to just do absurd consequential reasoning, reductio ad absurdum in Western philosophy, we don't have to just do that. Uh... And even even some that would say we can prove emptiness. But especially kind of in the tradition that Gomde is in, that's not a, that's not a position that's usually adopted. Because we're for various reasons. Yes? So this defeating the essentialist view, does it also, is it a result of the context that these teachings turned up? I'm especially asking if from the standpoint of a theistic religion, would these arguments prove or disprove God? Well that depends... Or does it have to do, does it anyway have nothing to do with it? It proves and dis... It disproves the existence of any entity that is supposedly ultimately real. So if I'm not familiar with any theistic tradition that says God is not real.
There are some close candidates for kind of via negativa style of theology. So one that's frequently cited is Meister Eckhart, uh, who prayed to God that he may not believe in God and was then excommunicated for such things. Uh, 12th century, I think. So um... Uh, but, you know, so they're close candidates, quite possibly, and we're going to see that there is a style of Mādhyamika that kind of brings a little bit of affirmation back, but we're not going to talk about that now. But basically, there are other Buddhists had other arguments against God, Creator God. So, you know, and Parimal Patil at Harvard wrote this book against the Hindu God in which he talks about some of those arguments. And the main argument is, if God is a crea... is a um... uh, is the first cause, a creator, then, you know, how does that work? Because, you know, what if you're causal, you have to be in a causal chain, like, how do you have a first? How do you have a first cause? It's just incoherent. If we also maintain that God somehow is eternal and unchanging, then how does an unchanging entity engage in causality, which requires change? So those are a couple of kinds of arguments that come up. So yeah. But, you know, there are other kinds of models of God, like, you know, that via negativa that like, it's different, but but the point being that the essentialization is what this is going after. And essentialization is not dependent on being a theist or not a theist, everyone has that. We all have the reality habit. According to this, it's like built into our cognitive system. It's what we do. And uh... We, you know, we're living in a world that actually isn't essentially real, and but our cognitive system keeps telling us that it is. And then that causes all kinds of problems. Right? Okay, is that clear? So it's not about belief in God or anything like that. In fact, you know, like modern models about the belief in God are really mostly about many of them in cognitive science are mostly about like the social role of deity of supreme deities in creating large scale societies, for example.
Okay. And we go, did you need something, Philippe?
Sure. So Paul Dirac, a British physicist was a very strong atheist, and he always said after his talks, and there is no God. At the end of every talk. Every talk and there is no God. Wolfgang Pauli got obsessed with that. Oh, yes. Yeah. And then he said in the end of his talks, and there is no God. And Dirac is his prophet.
Dirac, also this other physicist, which is the artist, is its prophet. That's great. So there is no God. And Dirac is his prophet. That's great. I love it.
Okay. There are no empty sets. And who's the prophet? And Philippe is the prophet. Okay. Śūnyatā is the ultimate reality of all persons and things. We've done this. If you look for the essence, you don't find it. So things are empty of essence. It's the conclusion for the search for what a person really is. Right? Let me turn this.
I think I click it again. Yes. Uh, and therefore, śūnyatā is the ultimate reality, ultimate nature of all things. Right? It's not itself. Ultimately real. We just want to review this. We already did that. Emptiness is not really emptiness. Clinging to śūnyatā is a bad idea. We did that. Right? sūnyatā sarva-dṛṣṭīnām proktā niḥsaraṇaṃ jinaiḥ So another way of saying this is that emptiness is the relinquishment of all maps.
Right? You don't like hold on to the map. The famous story also of the Buddha, you know, in the Ālāgaddūpama Sūtra, again, the water snake Sūtra. It's kind of like, I always think of it as, you know, the monks are kind of the, um... you know, like the straight man for the comic, you know, and they're talking about the role of philosophy. Like, again, the snake that's incorrectly held. Philosophy is a snake. Hold it incorrectly. It bites you. Philosophy is also a raft. You know, and this comes up in the Sūtra and basically there are people who are kind of clinging to the philosophy itself. So the Buddha says, hey, monks, what do you think? If you had, if you came to a river, you could build a raft, right? Yeah, Buddha. And then could you get across with the raft and say, yeah, you could, Buddha. And then would you carry the raft across the desert to get to the city you're going to? They say uh... maybe not, Buddha.
Yeah, but we like the raft. No, we don't, you know, need the raft anymore. Right? So in a way you can say like the, a Buddha is not a Buddhist. Right? The Buddha doesn't need the philosophy, teaches or appears to teach, but it's not like he's a believer in his philosophy.
So being a believer is actually, might be a good thing sometimes to be a believer, but really what this saying is, you know, abandon beliefs without being a nihilist.
You don't want to believe in nothing. We don't want to be the German nihilist from the Big Lebowski. Just remember that. The handful of Germans in the audience, they're not a good role model.
Okay? We're not going to believe in nothing. So that's, don't exist at all. So this is an important point I wanted to raise, and then we should stop soon, right? Then we go a little while longer, I guess. Um... Uh... which is that, we had this slide, but I made a slight variation here. As you'll see, ultimately all persons and things are empty of essence. That is, they have no non-relational identity. Right? If you try to find that, you just don't find it. That's what it means for them to be empty. When we say, what's the nature of this? What's the nature of anything? Ultimately, emptiness. And, but conventionally, persons and things exist with relational identities from the standpoint of deluded sentient beings. So that's a key additional phrase that also came up in a conversation this morning with Rinpoche. And you can think of this as perspectivalism. The ultimate, we speak about the ultimate as being from the perspective of the Ārya's equipoise. And here there's this, it's especially a kind of Tibetan phrase, you know,
phag-pé nyam-zhak gi ngo-wor འཕགས་པའི་མཉམ་བཞག་གི་ངོ་བོར from the perspective of the equipoise of the Nyam shak ཉམ་ཤག, there's that word again, of the Ārya. So an Ārya here is a term that's used to describe, a Sanskrit word that's used to describe someone who has had a direct realization of the ultimate, and which in this context means direct realization of emptiness. So someone is like that, like, what is the ultimate? Emptiness, strictly speaking, is from that perspective. And you could say it's even true from that perspective. As an ordinary being, you can also have a kind of what's called, and this is not in Nāgārjuna, but later, but it's still very useful, you can have what's called the actual ultimate, that's from the perspective of an Ārya's experience in a meditation. Like when the Ārya is out of meditation, before they become a Buddha, they come back to, you know, our ordinary shared realities. But they look dreamlike. So... So there are still those kinds of appearances for them, but they don't look real, but they're still having those exper..., those appearances. Uh, but the ordinary beings can know a version of the ultimate that is a conceptual version, through reasoning. So this is what we call the distinction between the actual ultimate, or the non metaphorical ultimate, aparyāya paramārtha nyam drang ma yin pé dön-dam ཉམས་དྲངས་མ་ཡིན་པའི་དོན་དམ and the metaphorical ultimate, paryāya paramārtha the nyams drangs pa’i don dam ཉམས་དྲངས་པའི་དོན་དམ in Tibetan. Okay, so you so that, but that is that like, this is that transition from conceptual learning and so on to actual experience or meditation. The conventional is from the standpoint of deluded sentient beings, the way the world looks to deluded sentient beings. Right? That's the conventional. There's a kind of experience happening like the weird sound in the room right now, from the standpoint of deluded sentient beings. And the difference between the experience of an Ārya and the experience of a deluded sentient being, when the Ārya is not in meditation, when they're in what's called the subsequent state, the pṛṣṭhalabdha state or the je thob རྗེས་ཐོབ state after not in equipoise, is that for the Ārya, for the sentient being, the conventional is a conventional reality, or conventional truth. And for the Ārya, the conventional is merely conventional. It's not true. This is actually Candrakīrti's innovation. Again, some Mādhyamikas don't like that. So what that means, it's in one way this is described is like, if you look again, if you look at your face in the mirror, if an ordinary being looks at their face in the mirror, it doesn't look real to them. And you'll know that because again, you can like, you know, throw something at it or whatever, and the person doesn't go, Oh. Right? they don't feel like it's actually their face. They know it's not their face. It's just a reflection. All reality is like that for the Ārya. They're walking around in, or can participate in the realities of ordinary beings. But they don't think it's it doesn't feel real to them in the way it feels real to ordinary beings. Okay. All right. Which, of course, suggests that there may be certain kinds of possibilities that you, that become available. If you're not stuck in the reality of things, you can, so to speak, think outside the box, perhaps. And here's that famous verse again. Emptiness is interdependence. So for the for the Ārya in particular, like the experience of, of, you know, walking around is an experience of, of, you know, not of reality, but of interdependence. Dream like interdependence. And conceptually, to get into that conceptual form of understanding the ultimate, not the actual ultimate, but that kind of conceptual ultimate. Now that you come to a real clear understanding of emptiness that enables you to engage in emptiness meditation. Really, in some ways, this verse that we've heard a few times really characterizes that, right? 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 the word person is not actually in that verse, you could just say to one for whom. Maybe that's a better translation. I could change that. Okay? Like, when that really works for you, then you've got a good conceptual understanding of emptiness. When it feels like, oh, if all things are empty, then how does, how could there be causality? How could, you know, you eliminate suffering and uh, and uh, and all that and attain nirvana? And as Khenpo was saying yesterday, I think, like, if they weren't empty, you couldn't attain nirvana. Because non-empty things have essences, which means they are stuck in their, what they are, and they cannot be, you can't do anything to them. If something is essentially existent, you can't make it non-existent. You can't, like, take its essence out and put it in a new essence. Because now it's a different thing. If you change its essence, it's a different thing. Right? So that's this... So it's actually the fact that things are not essentially real, that makes our reality possible.
Okay, so here's a really interesting question that we're going to be getting on to. We have a little time. You guys okay? We're not, we're not taking a break because you're all right. Śūnyatā describes the endpoint of this search, like, what's the thing really or truly? So it's the proper description of what things are in ultimate terms. So if you're going to use a word to say what things are, you say śūnyatā, ultimately. What is this ultimately? Śūnyatā. Emptiness. Okay?
But unlike things like, I could say, if I might be an absolutist and say, what's this ultimately? It's ultimately an existent thing. Or I could be a nihilist and say, what's this thing? Ultimately, ultimately, it's nothing.
And those are referring the words existent and nothing or non-existent, are referring to like they're meant to refer to an object. Just like if I say the word vase, it seems to refer to a thing, right? Table, person, person, person, eye, eye. Right? It seems the words seem to refer, like they're pointing something out. All right? Emptiness does not refer to anything. Again, there are some interpretations that say it does, but in this style, this is the best way of talking about it. It's not like there's a thing that's emptiness that it refers to, that the word refers to. Because that would be turning emptiness into something, which you'd have to refute again. You'd have to go to emptiness of emptiness. And then you'd be really in trouble if you thought that this, the phrase emptiness of emptiness referred to something. Right? Okay? So emptiness does not name something. Because ultimately there's nothing to be named. Is that clear? Okay. Conventionally, it's sort of names. So one way this works out, like, ultimately, there's a famous sūtra, the uh... Uh, Śrīmālā Siṃhanāda Sūtra, which was very popular in China, the, the lion's roar of Queen Śrīmālā. And, you know, basically her answer to like, okay, well, what is emptiness? Could just tell us, like, what's the ultimate? And there's the lion's roar.
That's it.
And it's not, but it's not a nothing. This is very important. It's not a like mystical nothing that's, well, I can't tell you what it really is, but it's there.
So when it says it's beyond word and concepts, you don't want it to be the kind of beyond word and concepts like,
you know what I mean?
I know, but I can't tell you.
There's a very important way of saying like, I know, but I can't tell you in this tradition. But there's a very problematic way of saying that. Right? A sort of mystical silence. So you don't want that way of being silent. Queen Śrīmālā's way. Okay. So, did you have a question? There's two questions, but one is already too, I think, too far gone. And the other one, I wanted to ask, why do we translate it to emptiness and not essencelessness? Because we have a word for essencelessness, nairātmya. Okay. Okay. Um... Another question. Khenpo la also talked about luminosity and Buddha nature as opposed to mere emptiness. Will you come to that point later? Yes. And so will Eric, I think, in more experiential terms. Yes, we're definitely going to get there. Uh, in fact, we're kind of getting there right now. Uh, so, uh, but I do want to say one thing about śūnyatā. So this word itself is actually a word śūnya with an abstract suffix on it, tā. And that abstract suffix on it, really, that abstract suffix, like, maps very closely onto abstract suffixes and other Indo-European languages. You know, remember Sanskrit is an Indo-European language, like ness in Tibetan, or I guess rickly -keit in German, right? Uh, -té in French, like spontanéité, right? réalité. Dad in Spanish, realidad, right? So it's śūnyatā, emptiness, but actually, it's śūnyaness. Śūnya is, and there are some people who are very uncomfortable with that word, and you'll find like openness or other translations. I'm not a big fan of that, because I think it's missing a very deliberate choice. Like, the Heart Sutra doesn't say there's no eye, it doesn't say this kind of no eye and kind of no ear, like there's an open eye you know, it says there is no eye and there is no ear, and so on. Right? It's very clearly a series of negations. And the word śūnyatā is referring to is very specific kind of negation. One of them is like the empty space of something is like the empty space within a vase is śūnya. Like the vase is śūnya, that space inside. Our ordinary way of using the word empty, like it's an empty house, you'd say śūnya. But also, very importantly, around this, I think around the same time as Nāgārjuna, actually, I'm not sure. I think so. Maybe a little, not after, I don't believe. śūnya is coined, is used by Indian mathematicians for zero. And I believe that they, I think they, there's some, I've heard, I don't, I've never read this, so, and maybe, you know, but, Phillipe, but a, I've heard that they coined this as a mathematical concept and zero. But in any case, it means zero. So emptiness says zero-ness, which is like the empty set. Right?
So that, like, zero-ness, if I say, so there's, Candrakīrti has this great story, like, you know, a fellow walks into a shop. This is in the Madhyamakāvatāra, in the introduction of the Middle Way. Guy walks into his shop. You know, you can sort of see Candrakīrti up on the stage at the mic. So, let me tell you, the guy walks into the shop like... A fellow walks into his... Maybe we should make it a bar, we'll make it a bar, right? You know, an essentialist walks into the bar. A nihilist walks into the bar and says, Hey, you got any whiskey? No. Get any gin? No. Got any vodka? No. What do you got? Actually, we got nothing. I'll have some of that.
It's a slightly updated version of the story. Right? It's like, I want some zero.
Right? I got a lot of zero in my room. It's kind of expensive, but if you want some, I'll, you know, I'll think about giving you some. Make a nice zero cocktail.
Yes? Gives you a terrible hangover, though.
Um, where does the concept of void... I don't know if that's from the Theravada tradition, but I'm familiar with reading some things about the void. Some people translate emptiness as voidness. Yep. So that's just an equivalent translation. Uh... I'm not sure. Something in the Theravada. There is a kind of dimensionality of the highest dimension of like samsara and also meditative experience within samsara. That's like beyond something and nothing. Yeah. It's like falling into the pit of the void or something. Yea, there can be that sort of... Oh, there's also experiential things in the stages of insight where you feel like everything's like turning into nothing. Yes. And how does that relate to what we're studying here? That's not emptiness. Yeah, that's a thing you're making nothingness into a thing. Into a thing that you're falling into, yes. Ah, I see. That's why you're afraid of it. Yes. And you need to realize that nothingness is empty. Exactly. Ah, got it. Yes, thank you, actually. I'm glad you mentioned that because, Rowan, because actually one of the things about emptiness, you know, again, Candrakīrti says in another text, is you have to be really careful explaining emptiness because people can freak out, basically. Because they can think it means everything is nothing.
Right? That the ultimate reality is nothing. Nothingness. But it's not nothingness. Why isn't it nothingness? Why isn't nothingness ultimately real?
Yeah, kind of, yes. Can you say more? Nothingness, it's no thing.
There's a very good hint. Why isn't nothingness ultimately real? What does it mean for something to be ultimately real? It's completely independent. It exists in and of itself objectively from its own side, transcontextually, without depending on anything else. Why isn't nothingness ultimately real? Nothing would have to be dependent on something. Exactly.
Yep, exactly. So there's no ultimate nothing. And in some ways I find this view is kind of nicer than the concept or the idea of a void that's truly real. Well, yeah, that's for sure, because that would be really a bummer, don't you think? I mean, like, you know, it doesn't really have very happy conclusion to say everything's just nothing. Again, the German nihilist, right? You know, it's like, doesn't look like a very attractive lifestyle.
It's, yeah, it would be awful to think that. And it would make life meaningless. You know, there are some forms of existentialism that are kind of like this. And then you just, even though life is meaningless, you sort of push ahead anyway with your ecstatic project. And, you know, maybe just better to get over the idea that it's nothing. Because that's incoherent. An ultimate nothing is just as incoherent as an ultimate something. Or even an ultimate neither nothing nor something.
And so in Hīnayāna, the concept of emptiness is still very much present. it's just a different type of śūnyatā. There are definitely predecessors in the non-Mahāyāna texts of emptiness. The word is actually used. And also there is a usage of the term emptiness in the context of the noble's four truths as one of the four features of the truth of suffering. But usually in the non-Mahāyāna context, that term is understood to mean that there's selflessness is one of the four. So there's impermanence, there's impermanence, suffering, selflessness, and emptiness are the four aspects of the truth of suffering. And selflessness means you don't have that kind of self we've been talking about. Emptiness in that context means that the stuff that belongs to the self, which really means the aggregates, there's also nothing that belongs to the self. Since there's no self, there can't be anything that belongs to the self. So that's what emptiness is usually understood to mean in the context, non-Mahāyāna context of that term there. But there's definitely, and the late Louis Gomez, a great Buddhist scholar, wrote an article many years ago, like a predecessors of emptiness in the Pali canon. So it's, yeah, this stuff doesn't come out of nowhere. So I guess we should, yeah, we should start. We're going to do this in the afternoon, and we're going to get... But this is the real question, so what does it mean to know emptiness?
It doesn't refer to anything.
You could say, well, you can have a concept of it, correct. You can have that, what we saw before, where to go, blah, blah, blah... You can have that conceptual version of the ultimate, and that you can know as a conceptual object, as a constructed conceptual object. But to actually know it like in meditative concentration. What does the Ārya know when the holy one, when a person who is having a direct realization in meditation, non-conceptual direct realization of emptiness, or just walking around in it for a moment, what are they knowing?
Does anyone want to vote for that they're knowing nothing?
Better not say you're doing nothing.
You know, in Zen they have this stick they carry around.
Right? So we know it's not, you're not knowing nothing. So what do you, are you knowing something? No. And go ahead, you want to say something? And if śūnyatā is non-referring, it cannot be the knowing of something. Right. Part of the reason it can't be a knowing of something is that to know something is for a subject to know an object.
If you have an object, is it the same or different than the subject? Ultimately. Different. Ultimately. Ultimately it's not different and not the same. Yeah, meaning it doesn't make sense. Right. Right, it... If you go through those four possibilities, it's both, it's different. It's not different. It's both, it's neither. And you end up saying, well, that none of those make sense. So therefore there can't be objects. Which also means what? That there are no subjects. Correct. There's no knowing subjects. There's no knower that is the subject that is knowing, then they engaged in the, in the action of knowing in relation to knowing a object. This is called the, uh, uh, uh, uh, in, in Tibetan, the Korsum. And the Triputa is it? Uh, I kind of forget the most standard Sanskrit translation of that, but it, it means agent, object, action.
That is not what's had. No, actually direct realization of emptiness can have no agent, no object and no action because without an agent and object, there can't be an action. But the action of knowing can't occur without agents and objects. Without objects, you can't have, we're going to go through these arguments later. So this is the triadic version. Dharmakṛti had, I mean, Nāgārjuna has a dyadic and a triadic version of this relational argument that we'll look at later. So there's no objects. That means there can't be any subjects. That means there can't be any action of knowing. No object that's known, no action, no knower that's knowing, and no action of knowing.
It's a non-conceptual state that is free of the three spheres, agent, object, action. So it's the khorsum nampar mi tokpé yeshe, འཁོར་གསུམ་རྣམ་པར་མི་རྟོག་པའི་ཡེ་ཤེས you probably heard Rinpoche say many times, the primordial wakefulness that is free of the conceptualization of the three spheres. khorsum nampar mitokpé yeshe
I'm not sure there's an attested equivalent in Sanskrit of that, but we don't need that because we're heading toward a certain tradition, which is Māhamudrā Dzogchen, right? All right. So then what is it? What, huh? What do, then what... How do you know it?
Candrakīrti's answer is, you know it by way of not knowing.
It's super helpful description.
It is in a way, but he's... So Candrakīrti is a certain style that is very hesitant about anything, like it's it's saying anything you might, that might push you into an extreme, but then that kind of could lead you into nihilism. Like he's very hesitant about the absolute extreme of absolutism, which sometimes makes it seem a little more dangerous in terms of the nihilistic extreme. Maybe, maybe you could say that about Candrakīrti, but in any case later, Uh Mādhyamikas after him, then we'll talk a little bit about them, say, are more comfortable with trying to say something about this. But it's just a very interesting question to ask yourself.
What does it mean to know directly, experientially, not conceptually, to, to exp... to be in a state that is the direct realization of emptiness, if you want to call it a state? What is that?
Yeah, certainly in this tradition, if you're really fully in that state at this, you know, when we understand that, then in, in... then yeah in a sense, you're Buddha right then for that moment. But what is it?
Should we even try to say, maybe if we try to say, we're gonna like, you know, just create a new ultimate? You know, let me tell you what it really is. It's... Did you get that? No, could you say it again? No, sorry.
Oh, no, wait, I think it's actually...
Okay, so let's stop now and have lunch a little late. And I guess we'll still start at four today. Okay, just dedicate the merit. sönam diyi thamché sikpa nyi thopné nyepai dranam phamjé né kyega nachi balap trukpa yi sipai tsolé drowa drölwar shok tönpa jikten khamsu jönpa dang tenpa nyiö shindu salwa dang tenzin phunu shindu thönpa yi tenpa yünring nepai tashi shok Oh, thank you.
Okay, so starting a little late today. And I was just asked if we could go to 12:30. So I hope that's alright for everyone.
Right. So we're going to talk some more about emptiness today. But first, I actually want to review one argument because it came up this morning for some of us. And it is basically the idea of the incomprehensibility of things that have spatial extension and a way of getting to emptiness that actually is using a reductive argument, but then flips to a relational argument. So this is the chig du drel, གཅིག་དུ་འབྲལ་བའི་གཏན་ཚིགས as they call it in Tibetan, or the ekānekavicāra, which as I said before, goes back very long way, the neither one nor many argument, or neither identical or different. So actually, these terms in Sanskrit is, in Sanskrit, it's eka and aneka. So eka means one, and aneka means many, or actually, literally not one. So that can mean like singular or plural, but can also mean that if you have two things, or maybe many things in relation to something, then you can ask, are those many things the same as they're related to or different than what they're related to? So it really means identity or difference, one or not one in the sense of identical or different. And with, so if we have like, let's use the vase, which is a one traditional example of bumpa, and this looks pretty like a traditional ghaṭa, as they say in Sanskrit, not too different from one. So the, the different parts of the vase, we can ask, are they the same as the vase or different than the vase? Right, so our intuition is that there's a single whole thing here that's a vase, correct? Right, everyone agrees with that? I'm not holding more than one vase, am I right? So, and we did a load of this before. Now someone really has to, you know, let's try to defend your intuition, don't just give up. Okay, so there's, I'm holding the vase, I am? What am I touching? Am I touching the vase? Student: You are touching the bottom of the vase. So I'm not touching the vase? I am touching the vase. So I'm touching both the vase and the bottom of the vase? Who wants to take the opposite? Who wants to defend? Okay.
Either way, but we have to, we have to respect non-deviant reasoning, so no contradictions and no excluded middle. What that means is you can't say it's both yes and no, and you can't say it's neither yes nor no. You can't say either of those. Then never mind.
Why can't we do that? Why do we respect, you remember, why do we respect those rules of non-deviant reasoning?
Yes, because they are the rules that we play in everyday life, kind of. We will sometimes reject them in everyday life, but maybe more accurately that our conceptual system, like when we're in doubt in our conceptual system, then the way our conceptual system functions, so as to give us the kind of conclusions that enable us to act in the world, when push comes to shove, so to speak, when we're pushed into a corner, then we're going to try to respect those rules. So if we, for example, or in cases that are very important, we're going to try to respect those rules. So if someone were to try to, let's say, build an airplane, and they're going to make something that is, is both is and is not the engine, we might not want to fly in that airplane, you know? If someone's going to perform an operation, you know, let's say you need a heart operation, but you get a doctor who says, I'm going to operate on your heart, or maybe it's not your, it's neither your heart nor not your heart, you might feel a little uncomfortable with that idea. We're going to do brain surgery on something that's neither your brain nor not, that is neither your brain nor not your brain.
Yeah, my madhyamaka surgery, right? No, it's like, no, I don't think we'd be very comfortable with that. So what the idea is that our, and the reason we get to those kind of rules is that we're essentializing. Like when we are pushed into, this is when our, that kind of reasoning actually makes, surfaces, what sometimes is a sort of somewhat hidden essentialism in our ordinary way of thinking, like, it either is or is not a heart, darn it. Okay, that makes sense? Yeah. So it is, in a sense, that reasoning, the respect, respecting this kind of classical non-deviant reasoning is what allows us to push that essentialism, bring it to the fore and then push it to its maximum point where it then falls apart. Okay, make sense? Okay. So, am I touching the vase? Yes. Am I touching the bottom of the vase? Yes. Is the bottom of the vase the same or different than the vase? It is the same. It is the same as the vase. Am I touching the vase? Yes. Am I touching the top of the vase? Yes. Is the top of the vase the same as the vase or different than the vase? Yes, it's the same. It's the same? Same. Therefore, this is, the top and the bottom are identical?
So I should be, I'm not going to make a mess.
Well, I would have to say yes in that moment. I would have to say yes because I said yes twice. Yeah. You would be compelled to say yes. Correct. Thank you, Daniel. Because by the rules of that form of reasoning you can think of this as like algebraic, if A is identical to B and B is identical to C, excuse me, if A is identical to B and A is also identical to C, then B is identical to C. If, if the whole is identical to the bottom and the whole is identical to the top, then the bottom and the top are identical. Yes?
Yes.
So the otherwise is only true for the empty set? Yes, the empty set, which is actually not anything, correct? Unless you want to absolutize nothing, in which case we already found out we're in trouble when we go to that extent. So if you talk about the empty set, then it's true, no? Yeah, right. What's true, like the excluded middle is exactly, is the empty set, right? And contradictions, depending on how you think, the excluded middle is that, so the empty set is like, or the set of all things in the universe, let's say, or let's say that just in terms of the set of the things that are members of the set of vase parts, right? Right? So if we have this universe of the vase and its parts, then the stuff that is neither identical nor different is going to be outside of that set. It doesn't belong to that set, which means that it's not there at all. But one of the things about set theory is it allows us to then concretize the abstraction, so that we can think that the empty set is in some set a real sense, a real thing. But that obviously doesn't make a lot of sense, does it? Unless we're like pushed, you know, to the maximum point of platonic realism. But we'll maybe come back to that later. For now, not worrying about treating the empty set as just meaning it doesn't exist, right? So we can't say that the top, so if I say I'm touching the top vase and I'm touching the bottom, the bottom is the same as the vase, I'm touching the top and the top is the same as the vase, and that means that the top and the bottom are the same, so it shouldn't matter whether I hold it this way or that way, right? Or the size of the vase is the same as the size of both the top and the base, just that high. So all kinds of absurd things follow, right? What if I say it's different? Then what? The vase is different than the top, it's different than the bottom, different than the sides. What happens then? Well, then you could move the vase without moving the rest. I can take all the vase parts away and I should still have a vase, which would make, you know, producing vases and traveling with them and things like that, very, storing them, you could store an infinite number of vases in your closet, you know, you could be, vase collecting would really be fun and easy. Am I right? Does that make sense? Does that, so that's with anything that has parts, we can do that, right? Tables... So this is very interesting. What it's saying is that when you see things and your visual system clumps it together as a single thing, there's a kind of visual binding of those spatial elements, you know, maybe because of contours and edges, right? That, you know, we kind of see a single thing but actually it's not a single thing.
All right? When you really get into that it starts to be a little sort of almost, if you really experience that it's quite interesting and you can do that, you like, invite you to try to do that meditatively, just conceptually, you know, you can take an actual object and look at it and see if it starts to like fall apart, you know, or there's this again that movie I Heart Huckabees, there's this point where they're looking at somebody, somebody's looking at somebody's face and the face starts to go like, breaks into bits and like, where's the one face? Okay, is that clear? So logically, this is not a single thing. That does not mean that the elements or parts of this, if we for the moment assert that there are elements or parts, that doesn't mean that they can't work together to perform certain functions. So in early Buddhism, when we say that the elements or parts are truly real, we get down to that infinitesimally small particle, right? Those particles can all work together and they can affect each other so that they can, so that in a sense they can form a kind of what we might call a system, such that they interact in a way that they can perform functions at the system level, that as individuals they couldn't do. Okay, that makes sense? You could call the vase a system, I guess, in a way, right? So there's a causal like capacity that they get together, but what this kind of approach is doing is it's refusing to ontologize this system level entity. It's refusing to say that's a real thing, okay? Now there are certain problems with that that maybe come up, but we can maybe come back to that later, because what we want to do now is we want to then say, okay, we keep going down, down, down, down, down, we get to what's supposed to be the part-less particle, right? So that part-less particle is something you can't break down any further, or can you? Right? So Rinpoche, those of you who heard that and make a few comments this morning, he was pointing this out. Ha... so why, what happened?
What's that? The pill. So uh... what, what happened, what can we do with the particle? Well, we can agglomerate particles into larger things, right? We have particles of matter, some kind of particle of matter, and it agglomerates into a larger thing. If it agglomerates into a larger thing, does it need to have size?
Does it have to have some kind of spatial dimension? If you accumulate a whole bunch of things with no spatial dimension, how big would it be?
It would be infinitely, it would be no size at all, right? Right? So this is a model of matter, a particular model of matter, that's saying that things that accumulate into larger things have to themselves also somehow occupy some degree of space. Otherwise, if they accumulate, they don't make any size. How would they occupy, how would you get a larger area of space if they things that constitute this larger thing are themselves not occupying space at all, right? That's the idea of this model. But is there a problem with that? If they occupy space, then what? So let's think of that, we're gonna have the other particles around it, right? And we can have different models about how many different particles there need to be. But somehow then the central particle in there something that's, you know, larger than just the size of a particle, it's got to be somehow connected to those other particles, right? It's got to be in relation to those other particles. What would happen if it were in relation to only one? So that means that, for example, it's got a particle, let's just call these, you know, up, down, left, and right, just for convenience. If the particle on the right-hand side is connecting here, then it's got a right-hand side. What would happen if the right-hand side is the same and then the particle here is connecting to the left-hand side, right? So it's gonna have a right and left-hand side. If the right-hand side is the same as the particle, it's supposed to be partless, and the left-hand side is the same as the particle, then actually the right-hand side and the left-hand side are identical, which means that you're back to something with no size, right? So this is actually from, not from a Mādhyamika text, actually, this is from a text called the Viṃśatikā, the 20 verses, and a different philosophy we're gonna talk about tomorrow a little bit, or maybe today. Okay, so what that means is that we can like say, well, this is actually, now we have a new candidate, we were wrong, this is not a partless particle, because it has to relate to other particles in a way that allows space to be occupied, which means it's got to have some kind of dimensions that, that are it's, that constitute that particle. And that means that we can break it down, right? So now what happens? Well, we can take another, right, we have, we can have a new candidate, okay, let's look at, we're just gonna look at one dimension, but then we end in the same problem. It just, it's in infinite regress. And so the conclusion for the Buddhists to this argument is that if you posit the idea of a partless particle, that's actually incoherent. That the reductive argument, which in some sense is almost arbitrarily stopped by the Abhidharma tradition, so that you still end up with matter, here like, we don't end up with, matter is gone. With that, at least on that model, matter doesn't make sense, right? Like bits of stuff that take up space don't make sense. So that's one way you get to, like, so when, as was quoted in the text that um... that Khenpo la was talking about, was teaching about, from Śāntarakṣita's Madhyamakālaṃkāra, but also as really is almost a direct quote from Dharmakīrti, you can say this thing doesn't have an essential nature. In other words, the vase doesn't exist essentially, objectively, independently, because you can't specify whether the vase is the same or different than its parts. But then likewise, you can't do that even with the individual atoms, because you can't specify whether the atom is the same or different than its dimensions. And you take a single dimension, if it too has to somehow satisfy the need to occupy space, you're back to the same place. The dimension has to have dimensions that enable it to occupy space. So that means that you can't specify even that a dimension of a allegedly partless atom truly exists, because you can't specify whether it's the same or different than its dimensions, the metadimensions of the dimensions of the partless particle. Right? Just keeps going. It's, you know, like partlessness all the way down. You just keep trying to find that partless thing and you can't get there. You see that? It's kind of interesting, like, if you really... I think, did I... I can't remember if I told this here, but there's, you know, if you really, like, think about... I was one time in, like, 1983 when I first started studying this particular argument. I was driving a bunch of Gyuto monks around in the United States and I was like thinking about it on the highway and it's like everything is falling apart, you know. It's like, whoa! And the monk next to me goes, are you okay? He's like, watch the road. What road? You know, there's no spatial extension, you know. It's a little dangerous. Don't drive and do this, please. No cutting things, you know. That's exactly my question now, when you just said that, so it doesn't make sense. Then I was like, okay, but still the things appear. So it's our conclusion, things appear, but it just doesn't make sense. So there's a... so that's going to be the difference between the conceptual understanding and the experiential understanding. And then when you bring that to an experiential understanding, then when you see this, it stops looking like a single thing to you, really.
It's like got this sort of, oh yeah, kind of, you know, and therefore it has this sort of dreamlike quality to it, right? And there are different ways that that experience can manifest and there can be degrees, like it can really just start to fall apart. And then later, as you're walking around, it doesn't quite fall apart, but it's like, I sort of know what it's, I know that that's not really what it looks like. Just like when you look at your face in a mirror, most of the time, when we look at our face in the mirror, we don't go, oh, that's not my face. Maybe you do that after you've had a hard night of something, or rather it was like, ah, who's that in the mirror? But otherwise, right, we don't usually think, oh, that's not, but, but still we don't, even when we're looking at our face, it's kind of like, we know we sort of, but some part of us knows that's a reflection. We don't think, oh, like if someone goes up to it and it goes, we didn't go, ow! It's not like the rubber hand illusion, if some of you that are familiar with that, where you trick people into thinking of rubber hand, you have a certain experimental setup, and you have their real hand, you know, their left hand, and then their right hand, they sort of set it up so that there's a rubber hand in place of their right hand. And then you take like a pin and you go, and people go, ow, you know, that's not going into their hand, but they've sort of believe it's their hand. That's not really true with the mirror. Like if I go up and I go on the mirror, you don't go, ow, it doesn't feel like it's really your face. So it's like that. You know, everything's like a reflection, for example. Okay.
Why an atom doesn't have a spatial dimension? Well, if it has a spatial dimension, okay, if the atom has a spatial, the atom needs a spatial dimension, needs size, so that it can occupy space. But if it has size, then that means that the other atoms that are accumulating around it to make something larger have to be connecting to some part of that size. So now it has, you know, chok in Tibetan. So if you heard Rinpoche, he was talking about, he was talking about sides or chok, or in Sanskrit, pakṣa. So you can say it has a side, but another way you can say it has some kind of a dimension. And if all the dimensions are just the same as each other, then all the atoms around it also have dimensions that are just identical to the atom itself, and everything ends up being just the size of one atom. Right? So it doesn't occupy space anymore. Right? Huh? What? Does the floor work? Do we need to get like, walk around with flippers on so we don't fall through the...
There's a... Bob Thurman used to tell this story of the, I think it was the quantum physicist who like kind of lost it and had to walk around in his lab wearing, you know, flippers for swimming, because he was afraid he'd fall through the floor. This is mostly space where it's just probabilities, like, you know, maybe just very unlikely probability that it's just going to go... The scientist, I don't know, Robert Thurman was there when I was an undergraduate, I stayed with Bob, and Bob was a very helpful teacher and still is mentor for me in many ways. So anyway, Uh, what we end up with then is this kind of, you can get to an experiential level with this. But there's also another kind, very important other kind of argument that goes with this, which is that the um, uh... that the parts also, and we can do a relational argument as well, without going into the kind of infinite regress, we can also say that the whole is a whole only in relation to the parts, and the parts are parts only in relation to the whole.
Okay? The whole is a whole only in relation to the parts, and the parts are defined as parts only in relation to the whole. But if the whole cannot be established independently of the parts, and the parts can't be established as parts, as part of a system, unless that system or that whole is already established, then we've got a problem. Which is established first? Do we first have the whole or the system, and then the hard parts are defined as a member of that whole? Or are the parts defined as parts of a system first, and then because they're parts of a system, the whole emerges?
Right? You see that? There's a relational problem. And this is the fundamental problem here is the basic problem, the basic problem of, of relations. All right? So let me just say something about that for a second. The basic, the basic problem of relations before we say more. If two things are in relation, are they the same or different?
They're different. Okay? So let's say these two things are in relation, and there's a third thing over here that's not in relation to them. Okay? So is this, you know, I could even maybe do it with this diagram. So let's say we have these three things that you're about to see. Okay? All right? And we're saying these, these two, the ones that are horizontal to each other, are in some kind of relation. And the one below here is not in relation to them. Why do we say that? If there's... If these are totally different, this is also different, then why would you say they're in relation?
Right? This is also different. This is different from, they're all different from each other. Why do we say these two are in relation and this one isn't?
Why do we do that? They're all different. What would happen if we say the two things in relation are the same? Then how many things are there? One. Can a thing be in relation to itself? Some people would say yes.
You know, that's when you, like, I married myself and things went, things went bad real quick, and I couldn't get a divorce, you know, so.
So like they're tied, in some sense they're together. So then the obvious answer to this question is this. Oh, they're in relation because there is an entity that's a relation that ties them together. Right? And then what do we do with that? Using the neither one or many argument, there's always something you ask. What do you ask? Is it same or different? Is the relation, is this relation, this thing, whoops, is the relation this, okay, is, can you see the laser pointer? Okay, is the relation the same as the relata, these two things? Or is it different than them?
If it's different, then what's wrong? What happens? We need another relation to tie the relation to the relate to the relata. And then we ask the same question. Is the second order relation the same or different than the things it's tying together? And the answer is, if it's different, we need a third order relation. If it's the same, then there's no two-ness such that the relation is necessary. And we end up in another infinite regress. So relationality, if you essentialize things, like they're either essentially the same or they're essentially different, relationality falls apart. It doesn't make sense. They have to be kind of the same and kind of not the same, right?
And then we fall out of the non-deviant reasoning and we're back and we're into a place and that means that, if we're saying that what it means to something to exist ultimately is that it exists essentially, then these things do not ultimately exist. We're back to the problem as well, how do they exist then? And this short answer that Mādhyamika provides is: interdependently. Another term that you'll see, especially in Tibetan versions of this, is pentsun tendrub ཕན་ཚུན་བརྟེན་གྲུབ་, which means mutually uh, mutually dependent establishment. Basically, another way of just saying interdependence. So you know, then you can say, well, let's come up with a model that makes sense of this, that tries not to essentialize things. How do you, like... You know, if we don't assume that things have to be absolutely identical or absolutely different, what kind of a model can we come up with that doesn't just become incoherent? Right? And then one version of that model might be something that is context-bound, that says they're different in one way and identical in another way, for example, or some other way of trying to talk about relationality that doesn't essentialize. Right? And I think quantum physics is the place where this kind of problem starts to come up. But in any case, our ordinary way of thinking where we essentialize things, the confused perspective, that's the issue here, right? So if we think they have to be either essentially identical or essentially different, we end up in incoherence, which means that that assumption is wrong, which means that they don't have that kind of essence, which means that they're empty. Okay? Did you have a question, please? Yeah, more a comment to that. So like this properties of spaces or like of entities in mathematics, it's called topology. Yes. So it's like kind of the study of properties of spaces that are invariant under continuous deformation. So invariant under continuous deformation. So as soon as you have an object with a hole, you will never get rid of the hole if you deform it Right. continuously. So not like um... And the other comment is like, with the vase, of the button and the top, there's also mathematics, it's called like set theory, which also deals with that, that you have like a subset of a set. Right. So one of the things that's always interesting to ask about this, these kinds of in these contexts is you have a mathematical abstraction. Hmm, exactly. And is the mathematical abstraction the same as this concrete entity or different than it? And this is like how you do like also the proofs in set theory. So you compare it and question that. Right. Yea. And I remember like when I was like a student, the professor there also like made stuff up and then in the order you just proved it for the empty set. Yes, right. Yeah. But then the only problem is, you know, do you remember we had that verse yesterday, like this verse here, like clinging to śūnyatā is not a good idea. Clinging to śūnyatā, the equivalent of that is like thinking the set empty set is a real thing.
Right. Instead of concluding that, oh, that, you know, that's, that should tell us something about the problematic ontology that we're assuming from the beginning. Instead, we can ontologize that. That's so that's basically like part of what I'm pointing to, which that book, The Blind Spot you know, gets into is the, is our tendency to ontologize mathematical objects, which has just become more and more powerful as the modern period has progressed. And that's, you know, the, this, this system would definitely question and try to undermine that kind of ontology. Where mathematical characterization's of things like sets or topology would be useful but they are not real things in the world the mathematical objects is not a real thing in the world. Now, when you, you know, I realized that a lot of mathematicians would feel very uncomfortable with that. But I have a friend, Bob McCauley, who just as a quick story. His colleague, Mark Johnson, who worked with George Lakoff on kind of metaphor theory. and conceptual metaphor theory, and then also the embodied nature of things like mathematical objects, how they actually have, how you can, you can argue for the way in which they relate to embodiments. And then he gave a talk at the, for the, at Georgia Tech some years ago, according to Bob. Bob was there. He didn't know there are many people from the math department were in the room. And he's saying, so mathematical objects are actually emerging from the features of human cognition and our embodiment. They're not real things in the world. And they almost threw him out this third floor window. Like, What? Mathematical objects aren't real? They were not happy about this. So in Austria, when you finish mathematics as a study, you just get, just get a a degree of a doctor in philosophy. So philosophy, not of science. Yeah, there you go. Yes. So did we have another question? And then I want to move on.
You presented now the interdependent model as an alternative to the, like to the essentialist model, right? Yes, correct. Yeah. How is it different from relationality, interdependence versus relation? So what, what interdependence assumes is there's some like, yeah, that to the extent that things exist, they exist in some way that is relational, meaning they don't have autonomous essences, but it doesn't give you a model for that. So one model for that, like one approach to that, that basically Candrakīrti, a very important commentator on Nāgārjuna, that many academics have worked on, and I'm currently translating his best known commentary. I think Anne McDonald at Vienna is also working on that. And Candrakīrti basically says, you know, whatever worldly, whatever kind of worldly reasoning that even experts kind of develop, the experts have essentialized it, just use that and know it's not essential. So he doesn't like say, oh, you can come up with like a better model of the conventional. Once you understand that it's not essentially real, like you say, you know, just use your ordinary common sense intuitions and just know that this, this, your ordinary common sense intuitions are, are coming out of a place of delusion. But you can just use that, right? As long as you want to just undermine it. No, it's, in other words, oh, it looks like, you know, that's a single thing and fine. Yeah, it's a single thing. But I even feel that it's not, it's, it feels dreamlike and so on. But in the context of the dream, it's one thing. So that's what he would say. Just use kind of ordinary worldly pramāṇas as they're called, means of valid cognition. But another argument might be, well, maybe we can come up with, once we have undermined essentialism, maybe we can come up with a better model that is a non-essentialist model of relations and stuff. What do you think might be the problem with that?
Anybody?
That it is again essentialistic because if we talk about relations, something has to be in relation? Kind of. That we might think that this new, supposedly anti-relation or anti-essentialist model of interdependent reality is reality. That we might absolutize it in some fashion. Maybe that's, maybe in some fashion, that's not exactly about essences. But in other words, that we will again mistake the map for the territory. And that's why Candrakīrti resists that in some, many Mādhyamika philosophers, we're not going to kind of get into these details, but many Mādhyamika philosophers kind of resist the attempt to update our world models based on a Mādhyamika ontology, which is a non-ontology. Like, there are really are no essentially real things, there's only conventionally real things. So let's come up with a new model of the world that, you know, kind of doesn't essentialize things, but gives us good descriptions or is more even more effective or what have you. And Mādhyamika philosophers like Candrakīrti say, no, don't do that. That's a bad idea, because you're just going to do the same thing again. You're just going to make your new model into the true reality. Like this is, you know, you're going to sort of give lip service to, oh, there are no essences, but here's what's really going on. You know, it's quantum physics or string theory, or, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, then everybody says, oh, yeah, what's really going on? blah, blah, blah, blah is going on. And, you know, then we're back to square one. So that's a long debate, actually, in Mādhyamika that goes on into Tibet. But isn't that already the case for, like, just making any kind of statement, even if it is negation? Like even Candrakīrti? Yes. So that's, that's a great, that's a great point. And so that's why Mādhyamikas, I don't have this in the slide. So I'll just explain this. Mādhyamikas proceed, are meant to proceed. So there's eventually becomes a debate between Mādhyamikas, who kind of, in a way, want to produce better models, or at least want to kind of do a kind of non-essential reasoning in some fashion, in order to, to kind of, as a method for helping others come to the Mādhyamika perspective. But Candrakīrti, the seventh century commentator on Nāgārjuna, says, that's a bad idea, because you're basically doing what I just said. You're like, on... ontologizing your supposedly de-essentialized reasoning. And what he says is, the only thing you can do is use absurd consequences. So I don't have a position. And this, and here he's drawing on one of, one of Nāgārjuna's texts, which is called the Vigrahavyāvartanī, one of his smaller texts, the rebuttal and debates, debates and rebuttals, Vigrahavyāvartanī. And in that text, basically, his opponent is a kind of one of this, one of the early schools that develops this style of reasoning. It's not a Buddhist school, that really gets into how do you reason? Uh how do you, uh, uh... What are the rules of debates? What constitutes non-deviant reasoning? How do you do inferences? What's the nature of perception in terms of, in terms of providing us with justified beliefs and all those kinds of issues, epistemology? Uh... This school is called the Nyāyaḥ school. And the opponent in that text is really a Naiyāyika, person in that school. And that... and the Naiyāyika says, Nāgārjuna, you know, you're just, have a self-defeating argument because what you're saying is anything you say is ultimately false, but you're saying things. So how are you going to prove that? And Nāgārjuna says, oh, let's just go have a drink. No, Nāgārjuna says, uh... na me pratijñā asti I do not have a thesis that I'm trying to prove. Slippery guy, isn't he? Right? And I'm not trying to prove anything. I'm just showing how your beliefs and reasoning fall apart using absurd conclusions that follow from your beliefs. So those are called this, this method of argumentation is called prasaṅga. So don't try to prove emptiness because emptiness, if I tried to prove emptiness, then there would be something established. Because, you know, because reasoning is essentializing. So I would just prove an essentialized thing and I'd be, you know, I'd be in that terrible situation of an incurable believer in emptiness. Right? So instead of that, I just use absurd consequences. Now, later, there are both in India and Tibet, Mādhyamika philosophers who say, no, actually, we can, we can prove things we can, we don't have to just do absurd consequential reasoning, reductio ad absurdum in Western philosophy, we don't have to just do that. Uh... And even even some that would say we can prove emptiness. But especially kind of in the tradition that Gomde is in, that's not a, that's not a position that's usually adopted. Because we're for various reasons. Yes? So this defeating the essentialist view, does it also, is it a result of the context that these teachings turned up? I'm especially asking if from the standpoint of a theistic religion, would these arguments prove or disprove God? Well that depends... Or does it have to do, does it anyway have nothing to do with it? It proves and dis... It disproves the existence of any entity that is supposedly ultimately real. So if I'm not familiar with any theistic tradition that says God is not real.
There are some close candidates for kind of via negativa style of theology. So one that's frequently cited is Meister Eckhart, uh, who prayed to God that he may not believe in God and was then excommunicated for such things. Uh, 12th century, I think. So um... Uh, but, you know, so they're close candidates, quite possibly, and we're going to see that there is a style of Mādhyamika that kind of brings a little bit of affirmation back, but we're not going to talk about that now. But basically, there are other Buddhists had other arguments against God, Creator God. So, you know, and Parimal Patil at Harvard wrote this book against the Hindu God in which he talks about some of those arguments. And the main argument is, if God is a crea... is a um... uh, is the first cause, a creator, then, you know, how does that work? Because, you know, what if you're causal, you have to be in a causal chain, like, how do you have a first? How do you have a first cause? It's just incoherent. If we also maintain that God somehow is eternal and unchanging, then how does an unchanging entity engage in causality, which requires change? So those are a couple of kinds of arguments that come up. So yeah. But, you know, there are other kinds of models of God, like, you know, that via negativa that like, it's different, but but the point being that the essentialization is what this is going after. And essentialization is not dependent on being a theist or not a theist, everyone has that. We all have the reality habit. According to this, it's like built into our cognitive system. It's what we do. And uh... We, you know, we're living in a world that actually isn't essentially real, and but our cognitive system keeps telling us that it is. And then that causes all kinds of problems. Right? Okay, is that clear? So it's not about belief in God or anything like that. In fact, you know, like modern models about the belief in God are really mostly about many of them in cognitive science are mostly about like the social role of deity of supreme deities in creating large scale societies, for example.
Okay. And we go, did you need something, Philippe?
Sure. So Paul Dirac, a British physicist was a very strong atheist, and he always said after his talks, and there is no God. At the end of every talk. Every talk and there is no God. Wolfgang Pauli got obsessed with that. Oh, yes. Yeah. And then he said in the end of his talks, and there is no God. And Dirac is his prophet.
Dirac, also this other physicist, which is the artist, is its prophet. That's great. So there is no God. And Dirac is his prophet. That's great. I love it.
Okay. There are no empty sets. And who's the prophet? And Philippe is the prophet. Okay. Śūnyatā is the ultimate reality of all persons and things. We've done this. If you look for the essence, you don't find it. So things are empty of essence. It's the conclusion for the search for what a person really is. Right? Let me turn this.
I think I click it again. Yes. Uh, and therefore, śūnyatā is the ultimate reality, ultimate nature of all things. Right? It's not itself. Ultimately real. We just want to review this. We already did that. Emptiness is not really emptiness. Clinging to śūnyatā is a bad idea. We did that. Right? sūnyatā sarva-dṛṣṭīnām proktā niḥsaraṇaṃ jinaiḥ So another way of saying this is that emptiness is the relinquishment of all maps.
Right? You don't like hold on to the map. The famous story also of the Buddha, you know, in the Ālāgaddūpama Sūtra, again, the water snake Sūtra. It's kind of like, I always think of it as, you know, the monks are kind of the, um... you know, like the straight man for the comic, you know, and they're talking about the role of philosophy. Like, again, the snake that's incorrectly held. Philosophy is a snake. Hold it incorrectly. It bites you. Philosophy is also a raft. You know, and this comes up in the Sūtra and basically there are people who are kind of clinging to the philosophy itself. So the Buddha says, hey, monks, what do you think? If you had, if you came to a river, you could build a raft, right? Yeah, Buddha. And then could you get across with the raft and say, yeah, you could, Buddha. And then would you carry the raft across the desert to get to the city you're going to? They say uh... maybe not, Buddha.
Yeah, but we like the raft. No, we don't, you know, need the raft anymore. Right? So in a way you can say like the, a Buddha is not a Buddhist. Right? The Buddha doesn't need the philosophy, teaches or appears to teach, but it's not like he's a believer in his philosophy.
So being a believer is actually, might be a good thing sometimes to be a believer, but really what this saying is, you know, abandon beliefs without being a nihilist.
You don't want to believe in nothing. We don't want to be the German nihilist from the Big Lebowski. Just remember that. The handful of Germans in the audience, they're not a good role model.
Okay? We're not going to believe in nothing. So that's, don't exist at all. So this is an important point I wanted to raise, and then we should stop soon, right? Then we go a little while longer, I guess. Um... Uh... which is that, we had this slide, but I made a slight variation here. As you'll see, ultimately all persons and things are empty of essence. That is, they have no non-relational identity. Right? If you try to find that, you just don't find it. That's what it means for them to be empty. When we say, what's the nature of this? What's the nature of anything? Ultimately, emptiness. And, but conventionally, persons and things exist with relational identities from the standpoint of deluded sentient beings. So that's a key additional phrase that also came up in a conversation this morning with Rinpoche. And you can think of this as perspectivalism. The ultimate, we speak about the ultimate as being from the perspective of the Ārya's equipoise. And here there's this, it's especially a kind of Tibetan phrase, you know,
phag-pé nyam-zhak gi ngo-wor འཕགས་པའི་མཉམ་བཞག་གི་ངོ་བོར from the perspective of the equipoise of the Nyam shak ཉམ་ཤག, there's that word again, of the Ārya. So an Ārya here is a term that's used to describe, a Sanskrit word that's used to describe someone who has had a direct realization of the ultimate, and which in this context means direct realization of emptiness. So someone is like that, like, what is the ultimate? Emptiness, strictly speaking, is from that perspective. And you could say it's even true from that perspective. As an ordinary being, you can also have a kind of what's called, and this is not in Nāgārjuna, but later, but it's still very useful, you can have what's called the actual ultimate, that's from the perspective of an Ārya's experience in a meditation. Like when the Ārya is out of meditation, before they become a Buddha, they come back to, you know, our ordinary shared realities. But they look dreamlike. So... So there are still those kinds of appearances for them, but they don't look real, but they're still having those exper..., those appearances. Uh, but the ordinary beings can know a version of the ultimate that is a conceptual version, through reasoning. So this is what we call the distinction between the actual ultimate, or the non metaphorical ultimate, aparyāya paramārtha nyam drang ma yin pé dön-dam ཉམས་དྲངས་མ་ཡིན་པའི་དོན་དམ and the metaphorical ultimate, paryāya paramārtha the nyams drangs pa’i don dam ཉམས་དྲངས་པའི་དོན་དམ in Tibetan. Okay, so you so that, but that is that like, this is that transition from conceptual learning and so on to actual experience or meditation. The conventional is from the standpoint of deluded sentient beings, the way the world looks to deluded sentient beings. Right? That's the conventional. There's a kind of experience happening like the weird sound in the room right now, from the standpoint of deluded sentient beings. And the difference between the experience of an Ārya and the experience of a deluded sentient being, when the Ārya is not in meditation, when they're in what's called the subsequent state, the pṛṣṭhalabdha state or the je thob རྗེས་ཐོབ state after not in equipoise, is that for the Ārya, for the sentient being, the conventional is a conventional reality, or conventional truth. And for the Ārya, the conventional is merely conventional. It's not true. This is actually Candrakīrti's innovation. Again, some Mādhyamikas don't like that. So what that means, it's in one way this is described is like, if you look again, if you look at your face in the mirror, if an ordinary being looks at their face in the mirror, it doesn't look real to them. And you'll know that because again, you can like, you know, throw something at it or whatever, and the person doesn't go, Oh. Right? they don't feel like it's actually their face. They know it's not their face. It's just a reflection. All reality is like that for the Ārya. They're walking around in, or can participate in the realities of ordinary beings. But they don't think it's it doesn't feel real to them in the way it feels real to ordinary beings. Okay. All right. Which, of course, suggests that there may be certain kinds of possibilities that you, that become available. If you're not stuck in the reality of things, you can, so to speak, think outside the box, perhaps. And here's that famous verse again. Emptiness is interdependence. So for the for the Ārya in particular, like the experience of, of, you know, walking around is an experience of, of, you know, not of reality, but of interdependence. Dream like interdependence. And conceptually, to get into that conceptual form of understanding the ultimate, not the actual ultimate, but that kind of conceptual ultimate. Now that you come to a real clear understanding of emptiness that enables you to engage in emptiness meditation. Really, in some ways, this verse that we've heard a few times really characterizes that, right? 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 the word person is not actually in that verse, you could just say to one for whom. Maybe that's a better translation. I could change that. Okay? Like, when that really works for you, then you've got a good conceptual understanding of emptiness. When it feels like, oh, if all things are empty, then how does, how could there be causality? How could, you know, you eliminate suffering and uh, and uh, and all that and attain nirvana? And as Khenpo was saying yesterday, I think, like, if they weren't empty, you couldn't attain nirvana. Because non-empty things have essences, which means they are stuck in their, what they are, and they cannot be, you can't do anything to them. If something is essentially existent, you can't make it non-existent. You can't, like, take its essence out and put it in a new essence. Because now it's a different thing. If you change its essence, it's a different thing. Right? So that's this... So it's actually the fact that things are not essentially real, that makes our reality possible.
Okay, so here's a really interesting question that we're going to be getting on to. We have a little time. You guys okay? We're not, we're not taking a break because you're all right. Śūnyatā describes the endpoint of this search, like, what's the thing really or truly? So it's the proper description of what things are in ultimate terms. So if you're going to use a word to say what things are, you say śūnyatā, ultimately. What is this ultimately? Śūnyatā. Emptiness. Okay?
But unlike things like, I could say, if I might be an absolutist and say, what's this ultimately? It's ultimately an existent thing. Or I could be a nihilist and say, what's this thing? Ultimately, ultimately, it's nothing.
And those are referring the words existent and nothing or non-existent, are referring to like they're meant to refer to an object. Just like if I say the word vase, it seems to refer to a thing, right? Table, person, person, person, eye, eye. Right? It seems the words seem to refer, like they're pointing something out. All right? Emptiness does not refer to anything. Again, there are some interpretations that say it does, but in this style, this is the best way of talking about it. It's not like there's a thing that's emptiness that it refers to, that the word refers to. Because that would be turning emptiness into something, which you'd have to refute again. You'd have to go to emptiness of emptiness. And then you'd be really in trouble if you thought that this, the phrase emptiness of emptiness referred to something. Right? Okay? So emptiness does not name something. Because ultimately there's nothing to be named. Is that clear? Okay. Conventionally, it's sort of names. So one way this works out, like, ultimately, there's a famous sūtra, the uh... Uh, Śrīmālā Siṃhanāda Sūtra, which was very popular in China, the, the lion's roar of Queen Śrīmālā. And, you know, basically her answer to like, okay, well, what is emptiness? Could just tell us, like, what's the ultimate? And there's the lion's roar.
That's it.
And it's not, but it's not a nothing. This is very important. It's not a like mystical nothing that's, well, I can't tell you what it really is, but it's there.
So when it says it's beyond word and concepts, you don't want it to be the kind of beyond word and concepts like,
you know what I mean?
I know, but I can't tell you.
There's a very important way of saying like, I know, but I can't tell you in this tradition. But there's a very problematic way of saying that. Right? A sort of mystical silence. So you don't want that way of being silent. Queen Śrīmālā's way. Okay. So, did you have a question? There's two questions, but one is already too, I think, too far gone. And the other one, I wanted to ask, why do we translate it to emptiness and not essencelessness? Because we have a word for essencelessness, nairātmya. Okay. Okay. Um... Another question. Khenpo la also talked about luminosity and Buddha nature as opposed to mere emptiness. Will you come to that point later? Yes. And so will Eric, I think, in more experiential terms. Yes, we're definitely going to get there. Uh, in fact, we're kind of getting there right now. Uh, so, uh, but I do want to say one thing about śūnyatā. So this word itself is actually a word śūnya with an abstract suffix on it, tā. And that abstract suffix on it, really, that abstract suffix, like, maps very closely onto abstract suffixes and other Indo-European languages. You know, remember Sanskrit is an Indo-European language, like ness in Tibetan, or I guess rickly -keit in German, right? Uh, -té in French, like spontanéité, right? réalité. Dad in Spanish, realidad, right? So it's śūnyatā, emptiness, but actually, it's śūnyaness. Śūnya is, and there are some people who are very uncomfortable with that word, and you'll find like openness or other translations. I'm not a big fan of that, because I think it's missing a very deliberate choice. Like, the Heart Sutra doesn't say there's no eye, it doesn't say this kind of no eye and kind of no ear, like there's an open eye you know, it says there is no eye and there is no ear, and so on. Right? It's very clearly a series of negations. And the word śūnyatā is referring to is very specific kind of negation. One of them is like the empty space of something is like the empty space within a vase is śūnya. Like the vase is śūnya, that space inside. Our ordinary way of using the word empty, like it's an empty house, you'd say śūnya. But also, very importantly, around this, I think around the same time as Nāgārjuna, actually, I'm not sure. I think so. Maybe a little, not after, I don't believe. śūnya is coined, is used by Indian mathematicians for zero. And I believe that they, I think they, there's some, I've heard, I don't, I've never read this, so, and maybe, you know, but, Phillipe, but a, I've heard that they coined this as a mathematical concept and zero. But in any case, it means zero. So emptiness says zero-ness, which is like the empty set. Right?
So that, like, zero-ness, if I say, so there's, Candrakīrti has this great story, like, you know, a fellow walks into a shop. This is in the Madhyamakāvatāra, in the introduction of the Middle Way. Guy walks into his shop. You know, you can sort of see Candrakīrti up on the stage at the mic. So, let me tell you, the guy walks into the shop like... A fellow walks into his... Maybe we should make it a bar, we'll make it a bar, right? You know, an essentialist walks into the bar. A nihilist walks into the bar and says, Hey, you got any whiskey? No. Get any gin? No. Got any vodka? No. What do you got? Actually, we got nothing. I'll have some of that.
It's a slightly updated version of the story. Right? It's like, I want some zero.
Right? I got a lot of zero in my room. It's kind of expensive, but if you want some, I'll, you know, I'll think about giving you some. Make a nice zero cocktail.
Yes? Gives you a terrible hangover, though.
Um, where does the concept of void... I don't know if that's from the Theravada tradition, but I'm familiar with reading some things about the void. Some people translate emptiness as voidness. Yep. So that's just an equivalent translation. Uh... I'm not sure. Something in the Theravada. There is a kind of dimensionality of the highest dimension of like samsara and also meditative experience within samsara. That's like beyond something and nothing. Yeah. It's like falling into the pit of the void or something. Yea, there can be that sort of... Oh, there's also experiential things in the stages of insight where you feel like everything's like turning into nothing. Yes. And how does that relate to what we're studying here? That's not emptiness. Yeah, that's a thing you're making nothingness into a thing. Into a thing that you're falling into, yes. Ah, I see. That's why you're afraid of it. Yes. And you need to realize that nothingness is empty. Exactly. Ah, got it. Yes, thank you, actually. I'm glad you mentioned that because, Rowan, because actually one of the things about emptiness, you know, again, Candrakīrti says in another text, is you have to be really careful explaining emptiness because people can freak out, basically. Because they can think it means everything is nothing.
Right? That the ultimate reality is nothing. Nothingness. But it's not nothingness. Why isn't it nothingness? Why isn't nothingness ultimately real?
Yeah, kind of, yes. Can you say more? Nothingness, it's no thing.
There's a very good hint. Why isn't nothingness ultimately real? What does it mean for something to be ultimately real? It's completely independent. It exists in and of itself objectively from its own side, transcontextually, without depending on anything else. Why isn't nothingness ultimately real? Nothing would have to be dependent on something. Exactly.
Yep, exactly. So there's no ultimate nothing. And in some ways I find this view is kind of nicer than the concept or the idea of a void that's truly real. Well, yeah, that's for sure, because that would be really a bummer, don't you think? I mean, like, you know, it doesn't really have very happy conclusion to say everything's just nothing. Again, the German nihilist, right? You know, it's like, doesn't look like a very attractive lifestyle.
It's, yeah, it would be awful to think that. And it would make life meaningless. You know, there are some forms of existentialism that are kind of like this. And then you just, even though life is meaningless, you sort of push ahead anyway with your ecstatic project. And, you know, maybe just better to get over the idea that it's nothing. Because that's incoherent. An ultimate nothing is just as incoherent as an ultimate something. Or even an ultimate neither nothing nor something.
And so in Hīnayāna, the concept of emptiness is still very much present. it's just a different type of śūnyatā. There are definitely predecessors in the non-Mahāyāna texts of emptiness. The word is actually used. And also there is a usage of the term emptiness in the context of the noble's four truths as one of the four features of the truth of suffering. But usually in the non-Mahāyāna context, that term is understood to mean that there's selflessness is one of the four. So there's impermanence, there's impermanence, suffering, selflessness, and emptiness are the four aspects of the truth of suffering. And selflessness means you don't have that kind of self we've been talking about. Emptiness in that context means that the stuff that belongs to the self, which really means the aggregates, there's also nothing that belongs to the self. Since there's no self, there can't be anything that belongs to the self. So that's what emptiness is usually understood to mean in the context, non-Mahāyāna context of that term there. But there's definitely, and the late Louis Gomez, a great Buddhist scholar, wrote an article many years ago, like a predecessors of emptiness in the Pali canon. So it's, yeah, this stuff doesn't come out of nowhere. So I guess we should, yeah, we should start. We're going to do this in the afternoon, and we're going to get... But this is the real question, so what does it mean to know emptiness?
It doesn't refer to anything.
You could say, well, you can have a concept of it, correct. You can have that, what we saw before, where to go, blah, blah, blah... You can have that conceptual version of the ultimate, and that you can know as a conceptual object, as a constructed conceptual object. But to actually know it like in meditative concentration. What does the Ārya know when the holy one, when a person who is having a direct realization in meditation, non-conceptual direct realization of emptiness, or just walking around in it for a moment, what are they knowing?
Does anyone want to vote for that they're knowing nothing?
Better not say you're doing nothing.
You know, in Zen they have this stick they carry around.
Right? So we know it's not, you're not knowing nothing. So what do you, are you knowing something? No. And go ahead, you want to say something? And if śūnyatā is non-referring, it cannot be the knowing of something. Right. Part of the reason it can't be a knowing of something is that to know something is for a subject to know an object.
If you have an object, is it the same or different than the subject? Ultimately. Different. Ultimately. Ultimately it's not different and not the same. Yeah, meaning it doesn't make sense. Right. Right, it... If you go through those four possibilities, it's both, it's different. It's not different. It's both, it's neither. And you end up saying, well, that none of those make sense. So therefore there can't be objects. Which also means what? That there are no subjects. Correct. There's no knowing subjects. There's no knower that is the subject that is knowing, then they engaged in the, in the action of knowing in relation to knowing a object. This is called the, uh, uh, uh, uh, in, in Tibetan, the Korsum. And the Triputa is it? Uh, I kind of forget the most standard Sanskrit translation of that, but it, it means agent, object, action.
That is not what's had. No, actually direct realization of emptiness can have no agent, no object and no action because without an agent and object, there can't be an action. But the action of knowing can't occur without agents and objects. Without objects, you can't have, we're going to go through these arguments later. So this is the triadic version. Dharmakṛti had, I mean, Nāgārjuna has a dyadic and a triadic version of this relational argument that we'll look at later. So there's no objects. That means there can't be any subjects. That means there can't be any action of knowing. No object that's known, no action, no knower that's knowing, and no action of knowing.
It's a non-conceptual state that is free of the three spheres, agent, object, action. So it's the khorsum nampar mi tokpé yeshe, འཁོར་གསུམ་རྣམ་པར་མི་རྟོག་པའི་ཡེ་ཤེས you probably heard Rinpoche say many times, the primordial wakefulness that is free of the conceptualization of the three spheres. khorsum nampar mitokpé yeshe
I'm not sure there's an attested equivalent in Sanskrit of that, but we don't need that because we're heading toward a certain tradition, which is Māhamudrā Dzogchen, right? All right. So then what is it? What, huh? What do, then what... How do you know it?
Candrakīrti's answer is, you know it by way of not knowing.
It's super helpful description.
It is in a way, but he's... So Candrakīrti is a certain style that is very hesitant about anything, like it's it's saying anything you might, that might push you into an extreme, but then that kind of could lead you into nihilism. Like he's very hesitant about the absolute extreme of absolutism, which sometimes makes it seem a little more dangerous in terms of the nihilistic extreme. Maybe, maybe you could say that about Candrakīrti, but in any case later, Uh Mādhyamikas after him, then we'll talk a little bit about them, say, are more comfortable with trying to say something about this. But it's just a very interesting question to ask yourself.
What does it mean to know directly, experientially, not conceptually, to, to exp... to be in a state that is the direct realization of emptiness, if you want to call it a state? What is that?
Yeah, certainly in this tradition, if you're really fully in that state at this, you know, when we understand that, then in, in... then yeah in a sense, you're Buddha right then for that moment. But what is it?
Should we even try to say, maybe if we try to say, we're gonna like, you know, just create a new ultimate? You know, let me tell you what it really is. It's... Did you get that? No, could you say it again? No, sorry.
Oh, no, wait, I think it's actually...
Okay, so let's stop now and have lunch a little late. And I guess we'll still start at four today. Okay, just dedicate the merit. sönam diyi thamché sikpa nyi thopné nyepai dranam phamjé né kyega nachi balap trukpa yi sipai tsolé drowa drölwar shok tönpa jikten khamsu jönpa dang tenpa nyiö shindu salwa dang tenzin phunu shindu thönpa yi tenpa yünring nepai tashi shok Oh, thank you.
Session 11 — Neither One Nor Many
Teacher:
Location:
- Gomde Germany-Austria
- Date: July 25, 2024
Description >>
In this session, John D. Dunne revisits and deepens the classical Madhyamaka argument that phenomena are neither truly one nor many. By analyzing objects such as a vase, he shows that a whole cannot be identical to its parts, nor completely separate from them, leading to contradictions in both cases. Extending this reasoning, the analysis also undermines the idea of partless particles, revealing an infinite regress that dissolves any notion of fundamentally real building blocks. The session then introduces a relational perspective, showing that wholes and parts depend on each other and cannot be established independently. Through these arguments, the teaching demonstrates that all phenomena are empty of intrinsic essence and exist only through interdependence.
