← Guy Newland

Understanding Emptiness: In Search of Reality (12 March 2010)

Guy Newland · 12 March 2010 · 1 h 48 min · Tse Chen Ling via Internet Archive

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  • 8:59

    Going from relying on a teacher and how to listen to the teachings and taking refuge up through realizing emptiness in combination with meditative concentration. If you've done all this stuff, then you should be about ready to begin to practice tantra. That's the last page of the book at the end of the third volume. Then he got on to that.

  • 26:15

    Emptiness, no self, it's a sheer lack, a sheer lack, like a complete absence of something, which we'll talk about, but absence of not everything, not anything, that would be not emptiness, but nothingness, right? His absence of things having some intrinsic character or feature that enables them to exist on their own power doesn't cancel out all existence. So this is, of course, a huge source of confusion and difficulty for people. When I teach emptiness at the university, they just, after I explain emptiness and I say all the words in the right order, then like about a third of them will write on their paper, Buddhists believe that everything is nothing or, and then I said, it's like, well.

  • 31:38

    And as we were whirling around in the prison of cyclic existence, feeling like cycles of dissatisfaction, Lama Yeshe says, it's like finding out that about emptiness is like finding out that... We had the key to the prison in our back pocket all along or that maybe when somebody says you have a magical key to the prison and then it turns out it's really a note that says that the door's never been locked all along. And it was our own misapprehension that was keeping us imprisoned.

  • 43:23

    Basically this problem that we're thinking of Tsongkhapa being up against, how to talk about things and people and ethics, karma, compassion, while at the same time talking about no self and emptiness. So you have to have... You know, the two wings of the bird, the compassion side of the path and the method side of the path and the idea of confidence and karma and the actions that we do have an effect.

  • 1:21:08

    There's so much commonality between these traditions. On the other hand, there is this idea, as I mentioned, that what's distinctive in our tradition and what we ultimately need to have for liberation. at the root of afflictions is to come to understanding emptiness and so and as I talked about before to start with that you have to study and understand the ideas and then meditate on the basis of that so He means Tsongkhapa.

0:00 That same kind of connection led to me being here. I thought I would introduce myself briefly and then just sort of talk about what it is that I wanted to do with this time. Report an error

0:22 We're going to be working our way through this book, so if you have read the book, then... It will be closely related, what I talk about, to some of the material in there. If you haven't and you can get a copy, it would be good to read it because what I'll be doing is trying to, just starting with the plan, since I'm going to be talking five times, is sort of try to cover things that relate to two chapters per session, roughly, starting tonight. Report an error

0:54 And we'll see how that goes. We don't have to stick to that, but that's at least an idea. and, um, hmm. And to sort of talk for maybe an hour and a half and then see if people have questions or discussions they want to have about what I've said that could go on for a while after that. That's my idea. We have a person. Report an error

1:20 So, first of all, I'm, as Charles said, I'm a professor of Buddhism and that's, I just wanted to say that that's what I am. I'm not something else. I'm a professor. I translate Tibetan philosophical texts. That's what I like to do. And I'm a Buddhist, but I'm not like anything more than an ordinary Buddhist and just happens to know a lot about Buddhist philosophy from studying it for a long time. Report an error

1:51 So I'm not like a meditation teacher. And also I'm not like any kind of regular on even the Dharma Center circuit or anything like that, if there is such a thing. I guess there is. But I'm not on it, so I wouldn't... I've just, this is maybe only the... Until this week, I've only spoken at two other Dharma Centers before in my life. Report an error

2:18 And so it's not my regular kind of thing to do, but I enjoy doing it because people are interested and motivated and it's so much different from my regular undergraduate classes, which can be a struggle mainly to get people interested, and that never seems to be a problem at these kinds of audiences. Report an error

2:41 So anyway, that's something about who I am. I How this came to be that I wrote a book on emptiness that's dealing with a particularly complicated presentation by Tsongkhapa of emptiness, but then trying to write an accessible book based on a particularly complicated presentation of emptiness. Quickly, the story is like this. The book is dedicated to Geshe Ngawang Wangyal, who's a Kalmyk Mongolian Lama. Report an error

3:14 You may not have heard of him, but he's actually quite important in the history of Buddhism in America. You can probably find him in How the Swans Came to the Lake, just that little section on there, because he's the root teacher for both Jeffrey Hopkins and Bob Thurman, being the teacher of two of these major Western Buddhist teachers and professors. Report an error

3:44 And also, you know, had a lot of other people, including like Betsy Knapper from the Tibetan Nuns Project and Don Lopez, all originally studied Buddhism with Geshe Wangyal at a little center in a place called Washington, New Jersey, called the Tibetan Buddhist Learning Center, which is still there. So he's extremely charismatic and a teacher. Report an error

4:07 um and uh And sort of had a role in Tibetan Buddhism, getting a foothold early on in the West. But after his passing, the center then had, it was still there and it had funds, but it didn't have a charismatic teacher. There wasn't sort of a new person to take over. It's always a problem. And so the idea among many of us who were around... Report an error

4:38 Around the country who had connections and knew Tibetan and had connections with the center had the idea we should do something together. And Don Lopez had the idea, well, we'll just translate Tsongkhapa's Great Treatise on the Stage of the Path to Enlightenment because we have a whole bunch of people who know Tibetan and we'll divide it up and work around it. Report an error

4:56 So we translated the whole thing. It took a long time. But then we had all these chunks and they were all different. They didn't really read like a translation so then many more years were spent trying to smooth it out and that was one of the things that I was involved in and when we got to the end and we had the three volumes were all published and people said well I can read the first two but I can't read the third one it doesn't seem to make any sense it's all like so complicated that it doesn't seem like it would be helpful for my practice and Report an error

5:30 So then I was asked to try, since I had been editing that part, those more philosophical part about emptiness, I was asked if I could explain what that part said in a way that people would have some idea what it was trying to convey. And so then that's how I came to write this book, Introduction to Emptiness, trying to explain the philosophical section of Tsongkhapa's... Report an error

5:55 Tsongkhapa's great treatise on the stages of the path. Now Tsongkhapa's great treatise, so that's what this book is about, each chapter sort of, we started to leave out like footnotes that, but anyway all the chapters sort of tell you roughly what part of the volume three or in a few cases volume two that each chapter is based on and in the rare cases where something's out of order then we try to put a little note in to tell you where we're basing that on. Report an error

6:21 So Tsongkhapa's Lamrim Chemo or Great Treatise on the Stage of the Path to Enlightenment is like an extremely important book in the history of Tibetan Buddhism and history of Tibetan philosophy in a whole bunch of different ways. And I don't know, His Holiness, this is in a way that, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, in commemoration and response to the fact that the whole thing had been translated into English, came. Report an error

6:50 To the United States in 2008 to Lehigh University and taught the whole thing over a week. And at that time, he opened up his teachings by saying that when he had fled Tibet, that he had carried with him this book, the very book that he had open on the table in front of him on his person. Report an error

7:17 As he came across, everybody was like, you know, chills were going through. There were 4,000 people and we all were going, just like you did. But it was like he was expressing how central it was to his sense of what was vital. Report an error

7:39 One thing that I could say is that this was the first mature work by... One of the great geniuses of world religion, but the first of the mature works by the founder of the Gelugpa Order. He had written some before, but this was the first work published in 1401 or 1402, some people say, that first mature work that laid out his whole system and differentiated it very clearly from what other people had said before. Report an error

8:16 He didn't call the other people names. But, at all, but he did have a crisp tone of... Making delineations. It's not like, well, they say like this and I'm sure they all mean the same thing that we do and everything will be okay, but we'd rather say it like that. It's not like that. It's like you have to be very clear about these things and this is the way that it should be said or you're going to get confused and go astray. Report an error

8:46 So it delineates a system and it covers the entire path, not including tantra. Tantra comes up at the end of the book where he says, and if you've done all this stuff, Going from relying on a teacher and how to listen to the teachings and taking refuge up through realizing emptiness in combination with meditative concentration. Report an error

9:14 If you've done all this stuff, then you should be about ready to begin to practice tantra. That's the last page of the book at the end of the third volume. Report an error

9:25 Then he got on to that. in later writings. But. So his intention was to say that there's so much problem, one of the great problems that he saw was that There were so many teachings that come from India and everybody would focus on the one that they felt comfortable with and just become an expert in this one thing or that one thing. Report an error

9:53 And that it was difficult to find a way where the whole practice of the path was laid out and taken seriously from beginning to end. He said, well, this is a system where everything that the Buddha taught can be practiced by one practitioner on one cushion. It's not just people picking which thing that they wanted to focus on and just doing that, but having the whole thing from beginning to end. Report an error

10:17 So anyway, that was one of the key ideas, and that was very influential. But just in terms of the philosophical side, when you get in the later part of the book, there's a huge contribution in terms of his idea about what... Ultimate reality is or what emptiness is and exactly how to explain it. It's quite different from what other people had been saying in Tibet. Report an error

10:46 And even people who disagreed with it, this became like a reference point that everybody had to touch back to and criticize or react to his explanation. Report an error

11:00 His Holiness charged with the job of teaching these three really thick... Volumes, you know, in six days basically at Lehigh, you know, he couldn't go through every line of the text and give us his commentary on it. And so what he basically did was as he went through hitting what he picked as the high points, he would really explain how all of these things trace back to emptiness as a distinctive point. Report an error

11:27 It was very, well, you could say for some of the things he talked about, he would just say dependent arising. But then he would say that means the same thing as emptiness when we really understand it. And many of the things he would just say, well, this is what we say, but to understand it really you have to see how it works in the context of emptiness. Report an error

11:45 And then whatever topic he was on, the refuge or how to rely on a teacher or Four Noble Truths, they all turned out to be about emptiness. So that was the way he taught the book when he taught it to us at Lehigh. And I don't know, have you guys seen... Probably there's a really popular Dharma book right now called What Makes You Not a Buddhist. Did you guys see that? What Makes You Not a Buddhist? So it turns out to be organized around the four seals. Report an error

12:19 So all products are impermanent, all afflicted phenomena are miserable. All phenomena are selfless. Nirvāṇa is peace. He sort of goes through each of those one at a time. If you don't agree with these things, if that doesn't comport with your view, and he explains what each of them means from his point of view, then you're not a Buddhist. Report an error

12:43 I don't know. I had sort of been thinking more in terms of that a Buddhist is somebody who goes to three jewels for refuge, not somebody who holds necessarily a Buddhist doctrine that corresponds. corresponds to the four seals. When His Holiness was talking about what it really means to take refuge, he said, well, you know, the refuge means. Report an error

13:08 Going to the three jewels for refuge, but the Christians have their three jewels and the Muslims have their three jewels. They have their teacher and they have their teaching and then they have their community of people who they regard as like embodying that teaching in the world today. And so, you know, everybody has their three jewels like thing. That's not just saying, well, we have, you know, these and they have those. Report an error

13:33 It doesn't really make it clear what the refuge really is. And so he made this argument, which is a traditional Buddhist argument, that real refuge depends on taking refuge in a teacher who's understood the Dharma and a Saṅgha who embodies that Dharma. And that means you have to know the Dharma. And what turns out the Dharma to be, in that sense, is a mind that's realizing emptiness or knows ultimately what the reality of things is. Report an error

14:04 So it turned, you know, to start to get this impression that to really be a Buddhist, you'll have to have realized emptiness. And it's not just as, you know, and there goes all the Buddhists except for, you know, a handful of people evaporating. But I don't know. I would think that in general, we want to not disparage the refuge of people who haven't had the opportunity. Report an error

14:35 The liberty and endowment or leisure and opportunity to study Buddhist philosophy or meditate and practice on the basis of that and just say that for those of us who do, to have kind of authenticity in our refuge, it can't be just the word Dharma or a picture of a book or sort of a vague image. But it has to be saying, well, what is really at the heart of that that makes it distinctively Buddhist? And this is what His Holiness said. Report an error

15:12 It's like, well, it's very good that all these religions have these teachers and teachings and most of them are extremely helpful. But what makes ours distinctive is this idea that all of these things are devoid of any intrinsic nature. All of these things are empty and the other traditions aren't teaching that about their three jewels. So this is why ours are a path to liberation as we see it. Report an error

15:42 So that being the case, I started my book Introduction to Emptiness with the idea that we suffer needlessly because we don't see things as they are. Which I thought was a very simple sentence that sums up a lot of what is in the Four Noble Truths, that obviously we suffer, but not just that, that we don't have to, that there is a possibility of becoming free from suffering. Report an error

16:21 Implying but not spelling out what the way to get there is. But that crucially that we're suffering because we're not seeing reality. We're seeing things in a different way from how they actually are. Report an error

16:33 It's not self-evident that everybody would say that that's the case. That seeing more reality will make you happier. A lot of people approach the world in just the opposite way. It's like too much reality. We need less of that. Report an error

16:53 So, I don't know, Gary Snyder has this wonderful passage in his book, The Practice of the Wild, where he says, well, when it really comes down to it, we're all apprenticed to the same teacher, reality itself. I always thought it was like, that is like the school of hard knocks in some sense. It's sort of universal, but people have to really be paying attention to their lessons. Report an error

17:20 And if they pay attention closely enough, then we would think they would start to notice things that lined up with the four seals. Although maybe other people wouldn't see it that way. But if you think, well, I'm taking a step and just leave it at that, that's one thing. But if you say, well, what is a step? Report an error

17:41 What does it feel like to be a person taking a step? What is that? Is there a stepness to the step? What is it when you breathe? It's not just a breath and then how can we use this breath of life to get something. It's like, well, just pay attention to what's there in that moment. See what information is there and how it might be different from the story that we're telling each other about what's there. So, I don't know, that's one thing I think, certainly that's the idea is that there's some way in which things are. Report an error

18:20 We could call it reality or the mode of abiding or the way things really exist. And through being mistaken about that, we have problems and we have gross and fundamentally unnecessary problems and we become happier and have more harmony to the extent that we can see things more realistically. That's the idea. Report an error

18:50 Beyond that, of course, what we're going to be saying is that that reality at the deepest level is emptiness, which is very baffling to everybody else in all the other traditions. It's like, why do you want to have a religion founded on emptiness? This is like the worst possible idea. It's so counterintuitive. Report an error

19:11 intuitive. It's like, you know, Buddha, Buddha. Buddha didn't have a marketing consultant to help him think of like a good word. I've had students who said, well, you know, if it just means that everything's connected to everything else, wouldn't it be nicer to call it fullness and then everybody would feel good about it, right? Report an error

19:31 Well, there is a reason to this, you know, craziness of saying no self or emptiness. It goes against the grain, right, for us. Report an error

19:42 That's because the grain for us is this cycle of dissatisfaction, of seeing things in an unrealistic way. We can think about, oh yeah, everything's connected, but to us that means, yeah, things are able to form connections with other things because they're real in themselves to start with and that's what gives them the power to go out and hook up. Report an error

20:04 If they weren't real, then how could they make these connections? So if you just say, I believe everything's related, then you haven't gotten at this idea that there's some fundamental... Essence or intrinsic reality that's there in each thing that we're grabbing onto. I don't know if you follow, but that's like really important, I think, to say, as we say, you know, emptiness is emptiness and dependent arising. Report an error

20:31 Nagarjuna taught that these are the same import. And Tsongkhapa in the Great Treatise makes this a huge point, you know, that they're of the same import, right? But if you just teach people, okay, things are related. Okay, the Buddhism is about everything's related and you don't say. And that means that they're utterly devoid of existing in the way that you ordinarily think. Report an error

20:56 Then you haven't actually gotten to the root of the problem, unfortunately. I mean unfortunately because it would be nicer if we lived in a hypothetical universe where we didn't have this. You know, where you could just say everything's connected and then people would be happy. But it's not like that. You know, we have this false superimposition that things exist in and of themselves. Report an error

21:21 So you have to go against the grain. You have to pull the hair the wrong way and tell people something bad news that they don't want to hear. You know, it's like you exist, but like when I say that, you're already confused because you can't distinguish inherent existence, which you're utterly devoid of. Report an error

21:42 from merely existing and yeah I don't know, I've been thinking a little bit about whether some non-Buddhists nowadays might have some ideas that are just ideas or philosophical ideas. Philosophy of science, you know, Wittgenstein, you know, post-Wittgensteinian philosophers, different kinds of literary theory and so forth, where there's some kinds of ideas in the West among intellectuals and academics and philosophers have in some ways an import that's like the idea of emptiness. Report an error

22:26 I think more and more philosophers tend to think that that may be the case, although, you know. The context is so completely different because contemporary philosophy and academic analysis of the unfindability of things like an author or a particle. When we really look for them, they're not talking about those things in the context of, yes, and that's why we suffer needlessly in the world, because we have the wrong idea about that. Report an error

22:57 In other words, they're saying, well, the world is different from the way people ordinarily think, but they don't say, and that's why there's all these horrible problems, and here's what we can do about it, right, with these kinds of systems of mind training. So that's a big difference, you know. But there have been some things and I don't know if you've heard of process theology or process philosophy. Report an error

23:24 It's not a new thing in Christianity to say among a few liberal Christians and not sweeping across the country. Report an error

23:36 But there's the thing, right, of saying, look, it's the classical idea of a god that's like an all-powerful being that makes and controls everything, just doesn't make sense. But what we do have is a world where there's like a vast number of entities, some like the quark that's at the top of my liver and some like a cell in my spleen and some like... Report an error

24:01 My whole body and some like the United States and some like God and that all these different things interact and constantly change in a process of interaction whereby each one has a little bit of influence and some have more influence and some have a lot of influence but nothing absolutely controls and as they all interact and change moment by moment, something new appears in the next moment each time, right? And that's a Christian philosophy called... Report an error

24:30 Process theology, and they don't call it dependent arising, they call it concrescence, which sounds like they made up a Latin word for roots for something like dependent arising, being born together, collaborative, giving birth to each other. So John Hick is a Christian philosopher and theologian, he believes in this. Report an error

24:52 He started talking to Buddhists and listening to what they had to say and noticing that it seems like very similar. But then he said, but then they say that this dependent arising is of the same important meaning of emptiness. And we never talked about that or thought about it. And then he said, well, but they're right in a way. That's once you accept this idea and think about its implications, it means all these things are co-creating each other. Report an error

25:17 None of them has within itself its own power. To just be on its own and that's really crucial. Now whether he goes the next step and says that false attribution of an exaggerated nature and thing is what causes all the unnecessary misery of the world is unclear. But anyway, people can make steps in that direction I think across different traditions because it's not like you need to – we have – have the data of our senses, and we have the faculty of reason, and it's possible to learn about things that different traditions are saying and think about all of these from within any tradition and try to figure out what's really making sense. Report an error

26:01 Okay, so anyway, in our tradition we do say that we suffer unnecessarily because we don't see things as they are, and how things are is finally, ultimately, this. Emptiness, no self, it's a sheer lack, a sheer lack, like a complete absence of something, which we'll talk about, but absence of not everything, not anything, that would be not emptiness, but nothingness, right? Report an error

26:34 His absence of things having some intrinsic character or feature that enables them to exist on their own power doesn't cancel out all existence. So this is, of course, a huge source of confusion and difficulty for people. When I teach emptiness at the university, they just, after I explain emptiness and I say all the words in the right order, then like about a third of them will write on their paper, Buddhists believe that everything is nothing or, and then I said, it's like, well. Report an error

27:02 No, I said that it wasn't nothing. It was, yeah, but you said everything was empty. And I said, yeah, but I told you that empty didn't mean nothing. And it's like, they can't differentiate. It's very hard to think of. It's a sheer absence. It's a sheer lack. If you're saying the fundamental nature of things is a mere absence, then anything you say after that is not going to cancel out. Report an error

27:29 What the impression that that's created in the mind, right? It seems, for some people at least. But of course it's important to recognize that the fact that things are utterly devoid of any intrinsic nature of their own doesn't destroy them. It's what allows them to work. It's what makes it possible for the world to exist and to function and interact and change moment to moment. Report an error

27:55 If things have some... essential nature of their own from their own side, then they would be established naturally as that. They would be fixed as that. And things wouldn't be able to interact and change. And there wouldn't be Buddhism. There wouldn't be life. I don't know if one can imagine that. But it's just like, anyway, certainly everything would have to be frozen. Report an error

28:17 What allows things to work and flow and change Which we do observe, but what makes that actually possible is that they don't have any fixed, objective, essential, intrinsic nature of their own on their own side. And the lack of that is the ultimate nature of things. We'll talk about why we call it the ultimate nature of things in a little bit. But first just talking about this idea that it's a lack. Report an error

28:49 People, like, I don't know, you know, I say, well... think about the lack of clouds in the sky I don't know, that's good think about if you're driving around the block over and over and over and over and over again and then you see a lack of car like there in a space on the side and you're like, oh, a lack Report an error

29:10 I'm liberated from the cycles of driving around it's like a very good thing to find this absence Absinthe. There's no car there. Report an error

29:22 No car turns out to be like wonderful thing to find, right? So if that's not, you know. The most apt analogy, but even though it's a fun one, it's more like if we're suffering unnecessarily because we think that there's a mad elephant storming through the center, or we think that we see a snake when there's no snake there, then the sheer absence of snake there in the... Report an error

29:59 The gag snake, the rubber gag snake, the sheer absence of any venom in that turns out to be not just to relieve a kind of false thought, it's not just, oh, Dr. Spock has determined that this is not an actual snake. No, it's like, I'm free from all the fear and the anxiety. And so all of our other afflictions, like if it's... Report an error

30:26 If it's some kind of things, it could be fear. If it's other kinds of things that we are falsely attributing, it's bound up with our anger. And others, it could be with our desire. It's like somebody thinking that something's there that's extremely valuable. And when it's just superimposed. Fool's gold. Killing each other over fool's gold. Report an error

30:50 right? Yeah. So realizing the absence of gold, the sheer and utter absence of any gold. What is that, AU? There's no AU in the pyrite. There's no, right? None whatsoever I gather from other people. I don't know this from my own personal investigation, but people who know about rocks tell me there's not any trace of gold in the fool's gold. Report an error

31:17 None whatsoever. And when you find that out, then you've corrected your misapprehension, but then you're not fighting and killing and grabbing and hurting each other over it in that way. Okay, so it's kind of a very liberating absence. Some kinds of absences are really good to know about. And as we were whirling around in the prison of cyclic existence, feeling like cycles of dissatisfaction, Lama Yeshe says, it's like finding out that about emptiness is like finding out that... Report an error

31:54 We had the key to the prison in our back pocket all along or that maybe when somebody says you have a magical key to the prison and then it turns out it's really a note that says that the door's never been locked all along. And it was our own misapprehension that was keeping us imprisoned. Report an error

32:18 So that idea that like a false or exaggerated idea about how things exist is what causes our needless misery is really the heart, I think, of Buddhism in this way of understanding the view and that understanding that we have As I've been saying, we have no essential nature, that we have no essential nature. It means that even though we have desire and hatred and affliction and jealousy and anger and fear and so forth, that they're not essential to our character or nature. Report an error

32:55 They're eradicable. Our minds are constantly changing. They have no fixed state. The fact that we have afflictions... Doesn't mean that it is of our essential nature, that it is of our nature that we must always have afflictions because we have no fixed nature. Because we're empty, we're going to change. We can change into anything that's possible to exist. Report an error

33:26 So we can change into the most perfect possible kind of thing that can exist because there's no essential nature in us that separates us from that. And that's what makes, that's the idea, like we can become liberated because we're not, all of our afflictions that bind us in sickly existence don't essentially exist. Report an error

33:44 At the same time, because as Mahāyāna Buddhists we're not just concerned about like how fast we can get out of the burning house. Report an error

33:53 We realize that the afflictions of other beings are also not built into their character, essentially. And this is really important, you know, because of course we can have compassion for other beings, but, you know, that's really kind of too bad for them. But if that's their character to have these afflictions, there's a limit to what you can do, right? Report an error

34:16 And you may get compassion fatigue for these intractable cases, right? You know, well, that's, you know, yeah. It's flashing in my mind to think of Calvinist philosophy, Calvinist theology, you know, and the idea that some people are elect and predestined by God, you know, to work out all right for them in the end. Report an error

34:39 But then there's a whole bunch of the rest of us and, you know, we're... be rough. It's just in our nature that it's going to be difficult. And I'm sure that the good people that have been predetermined to be okay will have pity for us and show their good nature by throwing us a little bit of this or that. Report an error

34:58 But there's nothing really they can do in a deep way to help us because it's in our nature to be stuck and, you know, burn basically, right? So, but then, you know, this is the idea is that these, these, there they're there's Here we go. no Report an error

35:13 People are miserable. They get stuck in cycles of addiction and self-defeating behavior. And sometimes it seems as though it's intractable. But it's not absolutely or essentially intractable, even if it's very difficult to change, because they don't have any essential nature of being as messed up as they are. Report an error

35:38 right? Report an error

35:42 That, I think, makes it possible to put it in a down-to-earth way. That's what helps with compassion fatigue. It's not an endless process. It's a difficult process, but it is possible to bring about change. The idea that all of us are devoid of any essential nature. fatigue right is that these people there is a Report an error

36:10 And all of us, therefore, are devoid of any essential afflictions that we're now currently plagued with, means that we can all become transformed into Buddhas, and of course that is what the Lotus Sūtra taught and becomes the foundation of our way of looking at what's possible for humans. Report an error

36:34 So, yeah, the idea is that... that because we don't have any fixed nature, our minds are changing all the time. They're going to be changing anyway. So what the choices that we make and the way we interact with other people going to make a difference in terms of setting up the causes and conditions for which direction those changes go, It makes it... Report an error

36:58 What I'm saying is, because things are empty, what we do makes a difference. If things weren't empty, they had some fixed nature of having some intrinsic problem in such and such a way, then we really couldn't do that much to help. Because things are empty, because they have no fixed nature, because they can change radically into anything that's possible, because people's minds are changing all the time, moment by moment, our choices are causes and conditions which contribute to either making that change go in a good direction or a bad direction. Report an error

37:34 That's the point I was trying to make. So now coming to Tsongkhapa, J. Rinpoche, I sometimes say, he was in a situation when he was writing in the very beginning of the 15th century in Tibet where he felt that a lot of the Tibetan Buddhists who had preceded him had been falling to a nihilistic, I mean, especially in regard to what they thought about conventional reality. That is, some people have followed Chandrakirti and following Chandrakirti had understood him as saying that everything being empty, we can't hold anything at the conventional level. Report an error

38:28 and therefore they're We don't really have, can't have within our own system any foundation for teaching about good ethical behavior, what's skillful, what's unskillful. We can't have any foundation for having vows or making vows or keeping vows or even believing that there are, we can't posit in our own system that there are living beings who suffer. Report an error

38:57 For whom we should have compassion, because positing any of those things would be sort of saying that, you know, we think they exist. And to say that we think they exist would be say we don't really understand emptiness. That's what a lot of people thought. Report an error

39:12 And then there were some other people, you know, who didn't necessarily go with Chandrakirti. You know, they thought Chandrakirti was, that that was too, you know. So what did the, just to stick with the first people for a second, what did they say then? You know, it's like they didn't just abandon all ethics necessarily, but they would say, Well, you know, being a very high realized person who knows emptiness and has tantric training, I'm beyond good and evil. Report an error

39:40 But because you people are beginners and low, I will like out of compassion give you a few dummy rules, you know, in an as if mode, like let's act as if. There were a difference between good and bad. Let's pretend there are beings who are suffering. And by making this pretense, I will train you. And eventually, if I train you long enough, then you'll get up to be where I am, where you know that this is all just sort of in brackets and doesn't really exist. Report an error

40:14 So that's the way they did that. You could say, well, maybe that would work for some people, but for some people it really definitely didn't work because people would think, okay, I got it now, and then they would engage in all kinds of misbehavior, either based on their presumed profound understanding of emptiness or based on the fact that they were... Report an error

40:37 Thinking they understood emptiness and then were doing tantric practices, which led them into all kinds of misbehavior. So there was corruption in Tibetan Buddhism, which wasn't necessarily based on ill will, but in Tsongkhapa's view was based on a bad philosophy about what the nature of reality was. Report an error

40:56 Then there were other people who said, yeah, Chandrakirti is too nihilist, so we're not going to go with Chandrakirti. We're going to believe that there is a fundamental reality. Report an error

41:07 mind vajra or a mind or a basic... And some people would say, well, this thing intrinsically exists in and of itself and everything else doesn't exist or exists only in so far as it's kind of a dance that's emanating out of the one thing that is essentially real. Okay, so some people said like that. Report an error

41:37 And Tsongkhapa's view was that all of these people were deprecating. Conventional truths, conventional, deprecating conventional reality, saying there was not saying, giving enough reality to the conventional side. In fact, he had a vision and he took him years to work out his ideas, you know. And as part of that, Manjushri, you know, appeared to him and said, value conventionalities. Report an error

42:04 And also at the same time, told him to rely on Chandrakirti, which is like a tough. Job, right? Because Chandrakirti was the one of the philosophers in India who had some of the most radical ideas about emptiness, that nothing exists intrinsically at all. It wasn't just that, gosh, people don't exist intrinsically, but when you get right down to it. Report an error

42:26 There's something that these people are made out of that's real that we can grab hold of. No, nothing exists intrinsically at all. It seems like a bad candidate for a big reform movement to pick the most nihilist sort of Buddhist philosophy from India. It's very interesting, right? You think, well, why didn't he just pick... Report an error

42:47 He could have picked a mind-only system or he could have taken Baba Viveka where they have intrinsic nature conventionally. But he didn't do that. He went with the most radical kind of emptiness and yet tried to show, I think did show, that it's only within that context actually that you can talk about and posit conventional existence. Report an error

43:13 Okay. All right. So... So, um, Report an error

43:23 Basically this problem that we're thinking of Tsongkhapa being up against, how to talk about things and people and ethics, karma, compassion, while at the same time talking about no self and emptiness. So you have to have... You know, the two wings of the bird, the compassion side of the path and the method side of the path and the idea of confidence and karma and the actions that we do have an effect. Report an error

43:55 And at the same time, in order to be liberated, we have to understand that everything's fundamentally empty. This idea that there are people, that their actions have effect, what we do makes a difference. You should have compassion and love and at the same time everything's empty. This is the core, this is the anti-matter, anti-matter reactor at the heart of Buddhist intellectual history. Report an error

44:26 It goes back to the very beginning, you know, from the time of Buddhist teachings down to what's happening right today. People are constantly... Report an error

44:37 Interpreting and explaining and trying to refine their way of understanding how these two things work together. And everybody has different ideas about it, frankly. There's lots of different systems. If we say in the Buddhist way, we would say that's good because there's lots of different kinds of beings with different kinds of minds. Report an error

45:02 In Dr. Buddha's pharmacy, For some people, at some point... Ultimately, we'll say, ultimately to be free from sickle existence, everybody needs to hear it and will hear it because, you know, that's in their potential but in the long run. But in the meantime, for some people, it could be like a really bad thing to hear about and these other kinds of Buddhist ways of understanding might work better for them. Report an error

45:39 So, anyway, I think of that tension as kind of like... Tsongkhapa is grappling with this problem with just one instance of attention that's been there throughout Buddhist philosophy. One of the first Buddhism classes I taught, we had a book by Edward Kansa who had translated the Perfection of Wisdom Sutras and then he wrote in his introduction explaining what his ideas about Buddhism were. Report an error

46:11 He cited a passage from the Diamond Sūtra that says, although innumerable beings have been led to nirvāṇa, no being at all has been led to nirvāṇa. That's what it says in the word of the Buddha. And so Kansa understandably, and you have to realize of course that he'd read by that time thousands of passages like that in the Perfection of Wisdom Sutras, although that one's a pretty blunt one. Report an error

46:40 Innumerable beings have been led to nirvāṇa. No being at all has been led to nirvāṇa. So he concluded, and this was in the first, probably the first Buddhism book I read, a bodhisattva is a being compounded of two contradictory forces, wisdom and compassion. Report an error

46:58 In his wisdom, I guess the bodhisattvas were all men in those days, in his wisdom he sees no persons and in his compassion he is resolved to save them. There's no persons, but... We're going to say it was easy to save them all if they're none. That's no sweat, right? Report an error

47:22 He saw this as a contradiction. It's like a mystical contradiction. Buddhism is a very mystical religion of the East. And the fact that it's a contradiction makes it very profound. Report an error

47:35 I guess that was sort of how he understood that, right? But then it is a difficult thing to think about, all right, what are you going to do with that, right? And people have had different ideas. And just, I don't know, in the 1990s when a guy, David Eccle, wrote a book on Gyanagarbha, you know, one of the great Madhyamaka philosophers, and he said, you know, no matter how you cut it, however you read what Gyanagarbha is saying, the element of paradox is essential. Report an error

48:05 You can't get away from it. And he also called it unstable irony. Which is like an idea where there's two different perspectives and each of them is undermining the other in a cycle so that it's not just one. Usually stable irony, you just have one perspective but there's subtly another perspective that's... Report an error

48:24 undermining it and unstable irony each perspective that's sort of being presented so the ultimate is undermining the conventional and the conventional is undermining the ultimate and so that was his idea you can't get out of that idea in presenting what Madhyamaka philosophy has said Also, and along those lines I have... Report an error

48:49 My friend Jay Garfield, a Buddhist philosopher, a Buddhist and a philosopher, and a Buddhist philosopher, and a cognitive philosopher as well, very good philosopher. And he's translated Rick Begyatso, Tsongkhapa's basically commentary on Nagarjuna's root text, the Karikas. And he says that the basic truth of Buddhism is that there's... Report an error

49:19 The ultimate truth of Buddhism is that there's no ultimate truth and that those two things are both true. There is an ultimate truth and that truth is that there is no ultimate truth. And I'm like, I don't, that's not, but of course, you know, I'm not thinking, well, that's, I'm attached to thinking he must be wrong because I'm not going by what Tsongkhapa said, but it could be, you know, another way of talking, right? Report an error

49:45 So, yeah. And so he says, it's not that. There's no such thing as logic. It's that when you try to have a way to describe the world, that sometimes there are contradictory statements in some cases which are true. It's not like everything is a mystical contradiction, but that sometimes there's such thing as a true contradiction. That's one point of view about how to deal with this. Report an error

50:15 um it's Not Tsongkhapa's point of view. And I think Jay understands that. He's just saying that that's his point of view. He's read a lot of Tsongkhapa and he still thinks that. Report an error

50:30 Tsongkhapa's point of view is that emptiness and conventional reality, compassion and person's support, these things are compatible. And they're logically compatible as well as spiritually compatible. And in fact... As I was sort of alluding to, it's not only possible to have people within the context of emptiness, but it's only because things are empty that you have people and ethics and so forth. Report an error

51:01 And that in terms of the context of practice, it's not only possible to have compassion and wisdom, but they're synergistic, that they reinforce each other and fuel each other. and uh... you know in in Introduction to emptiness, I tried to think about what are a few of the ways that's really true, that that works. And we know some of these, if you've done some Buddhist practice, you know the idea of... Report an error

51:32 Cultivating compassion through undermining, self-cherishing and switching self and other. And how do you switch your sense of self and other? You have to realize that there's no intrinsically existent self. There's no intrinsically existent difference between me and the other person. So that's just one example. Report an error

51:51 His Holiness at Lehigh commenting on the Great Treatise, he said, well, the very best way, in his opinion, for people... For people who... Good minds, people with good mental faculties, that the best way to cultivate compassion is to do the switching of self and other method and that requires you to understand that there's no intrinsically real person on this side and no intrinsically real person on the other side and then get a sense of why should I so strongly always seem to be cherishing this one since it's not essentially different from that one. Report an error

52:26 So anyway, that's just one example. I mentioned already that the idea that, you know, we can become Buddhas only because we're empty. But that's what in turn makes it possible to have bodhicitta, you know, think of people with altruistic aspiration to become a Buddha for the sake of all sentient beings as part of the method side of the path. Report an error

52:47 But it's like, you know, if I'm going to aspire to become a Buddha over countless lifetimes, I guess I better believe it's possible to become a Buddha. How do you know? And how am I possibly going to become a Buddha? The only way, they say that if you have very, very, very, very strong faith that you could just trust because Buddha said this, but that... Report an error

53:09 By and large, for most people, we'll have to have some reason to think that it's possible for them to become a Buddha because it really doesn't seem like we're any very Buddha-like now. And so what would that reason be? We have to realize that we're empty of any intrinsic difference between ourselves and Buddha. We're empty of any intrinsically existent afflictions which obstruct us from becoming. Report an error

53:29 So in other words, to have an aspiration to become a Buddha, to have the bodhicitta in mind, that you have to realize emptiness. Most people do. Anyway, there's many other examples of this, the way the two work together. Report an error

53:52 Frequently, for example, it's talked about the way that the perfection of wisdom purifies the other perfections, giving ethics, patience, effort. effort that you can't, you know, that We can practice generosity, but if we're constantly seeing ourselves as the giver and the gift that we're giving and so forth as having their own intrinsic character, that it remains deeply afflicted. Report an error

54:20 And giving becomes purified when we let go of the idea of, when we mix our understanding of emptiness together with our practice of generosity. Report an error

54:31 You're combining the two sides of the path, right? You're combining a generosity basic practice on the method side with understanding of emptiness. And that idea of combining, that's the alchemy of Buddhahood right there, is bringing together as much as you can on the path these two aspects of compassion and wisdom, conventional engagement with conventional reality, but at the same time doing it within the context of understanding ultimate reality. Report an error

54:59 Anyway... For Tsongkhapa, wisdom is an extremely important concept and most of the time we will be using the idea of wisdom or mind knowing ultimate reality as sort of the same thing that wisdom means a consciousness, knowing emptiness, seeing into the deepest nature of things, realizing that things are empty of intrinsic existence. Report an error

55:27 But for Tsongkhapa, It's just a crucial idea in his whole book that there's different kinds of wisdom, that you have to think of wisdom as operating on that level, that is getting at the mode of abiding, seeing how it is that things ultimately exist, but then that you can also talk about real wisdom that exists without making such inquiries into the final nature of things, without reducing everything to emptiness. Report an error

55:55 How do we know what to do next? If we try to decide what to do next on the basis of our profound wisdom knowing the nature of reality, what's the cash value of that guidance? Let's see, this choice is empty, that choice is empty, this one's really utterly empty, that one's completely and utterly empty, but that one's completely and utterly empty. Report an error

56:25 I actually can't find any trace of intrinsic... goodness about this one or that one. So then what? You have to have some other kind of wisdom. You have to have some kind of wisdom that doesn't ask the question, what is this ultimately? But says, okay, what's going to work here? What's going to be most helpful? What's going to be most skillful? And wisdom, Tsongkhapa is on about this, right? Report an error

56:55 That wisdom that... ...operates, that you can do analysis and make inquiries and refine your way of thinking and practicing and living in the world at the conventional level. It's not just conventional means we don't analyze, we don't think. Then when we analyze and think about what things really are, it all goes to emptiness. No, it's not like that. We can think about how... Report an error

57:23 You know, mind training works or so forth. You take things to mind, you analyze, you think about how your mind's working, you think about what you're behaving, you watch your own behavior, you think about your motivation. What are you doing? You know, if you're just thinking about what's the final nature of each thing, things at each moment, then it's all empty and you're not getting anywhere, right? Report an error

57:44 You have to be able to make a distinction between... This kind of consciousness seems helpful. This kind of action seems helpful. And this one, not so helpful right now. So Tsongkhapa, that there's two kinds of wisdom, you could say two kinds of knowledge, two kinds of understanding are both helpful in the path. Report an error

58:05 Figuring things out, how to make them work best at the conventional level. Not destroying that by... Not letting the wisdom knows emptiness right over and tromp all of that into nothing and just say, well, we'll just see what happens or, you know, let it flow. But no, you have to be doing analysis and thinking about what's the best way to behave at the conventional level. Yeah, that's the way Jay Rinpoche teaches. Report an error

58:34 In a very emphatic way, I mean I think he really thinks that a huge amount of problems come from people not getting that and thinking that everything just gets reduced to emptiness every time that you have any kind of wisdom. Report an error

58:48 Okay, so it seems that a really, and this is a problem I alluded to, that a lot of Buddhists and also some non-Buddhists might have the idea that emptiness Report an error

59:19 actions don't have any intrinsic nature of causing those effects, therefore it doesn't really matter what kind of cause we put in because they'll all be devoid of an intrinsic nature of causing a good effect, right? Then you don't have any basis for practice on the conventional side. You just have to Emptiness is the truth, so we have these polite fictions or as if kind of ethics that I was talking about. Or you could say, yeah, we have to have ethics, so this emptiness thing must be wrong. Report an error

59:50 People could go that way. I think that would be maybe... You know, well, a lot of people have gone that way, right? Theists and some Buddhists who think that, you know, like, hey, we need to have a foundation for our ethics, right? So we're going to say that something's real. Or there's the other way. There's a third way, which is to say these things are absolutely contradictory, but that's okay because it doesn't matter to us that they're contradictory because we have a mystical... Report an error

1:00:23 Trans, making sense kind of way of looking at things. So setting aside, then Newton was like, well, does that mean that there's no basis for reasoning because contradiction is now okay? And if there's no basis for reason, then how are you going to do this kind of analysis? The answer, by the way, from Garfield and his group, is that reason does work and contradiction is not okay. Report an error

1:00:50 Except in special cases where it turns out to be because that happens to be the way ultimate reality is, as it can only best be described by contradiction. Anyway, so that being the case, the fact that we have to get things sorted out at the conventional level, Report an error

1:01:10 Tsongkhapa's very big point for him that in order to refine our practice, we have to study. That studying the Dharma... is a practice of the Dharma. Report an error

1:01:27 He calls it the studying the scriptures and their commentaries as a sacred life force of the path. And he says that, you know, some people, I don't know if he's, he obviously thinks he's just Tibetan Buddhism. Well, there's the scholars and then there's the yogis. Yogis don't, that yogis might, they have, their Lama teaches them something or maybe they have a little handbook. Report an error

1:01:52 On how to do the sadhana and then the scholars have these big piles of books and these two people don't, they're like different categories of people and you know well Tsongkhapa was both a great scholar in yogi so it was I guess it was natural that his perspective was that you really have to read all the stuff in order to know what you're doing when you meditate. Report an error

1:02:15 And he has, well this isn't in my book, but if you look in volume one of the Great Treatise, there's this quote where he says, he quotes one of the Gautama masters who was Neldorchen who says that Atisha supposedly said, it doesn't matter whether you brag about just having read one little sadhana book or whether you're ashamed of it. Report an error

1:02:41 Either way, you'll never get enlightened unless you read a yaks load of books. That's kind of like a Buddhist hadith. I don't know if Atisha really said that, but he said to have said that. He didn't write it down. Report an error

1:03:01 I discovered something that I haven't seen written in the tradition about the Great Treatise when I was... I was like, yeah. Report an error

1:03:11 Doing it and then doing it over again a few times. And that is that in the third volume, Tsongkhapa quotes one verse from one sūtra, the Samādhi Raja Sūtra, King of Concentration Sūtra. He quotes this one verse three different times. He quotes it at a crucial point in the section on meditative stabilization. And then he quotes it both at the beginning and the end. Report an error

1:03:39 And this is it. Report an error

1:03:59 If you analytically discern the lack of self in phenomena, and if you cultivate that very analysis in meditation, these four lines are kind of the core of his argument. Report an error

1:04:10 This will cause the result, attainment of nirvāṇa. There is no peace through any other means. So this is very pointed. He says there's not peace by just setting your mind non-conceptually in nothingness. There's not peace by just practicing good karma. There's not peace by just cultivating meditative stabilization. Not peace by just being a compassionate person. You have to analyze. Report an error

1:04:39 Analytically discern, and what you have to analytically discern is specifically the ultimate nature of reality. But analytically, conceptually, through reasoning, discern what it means for things to be empty. And then take that which you have understood and cultivate that in meditation. That's what he says. Report an error

1:05:00 I mean, we can like it or not, but that is really the thrust of Tsongkhapa's teachings. teachings is that... When he says, oh, study is really important and analysis is really important, he's not saying, well, when you be a Buddha, then you'll be like a really good analyzer and we want to be the best analyzer, so let's start analyzing a lot really now. Report an error

1:05:24 It turns out, of course, that like other Buddhists, the idea is that That Buddha is completely beyond any conceptual thought and just responds compassionately and spontaneously without thinking to do this or that. And naturally, a person could and many people have and do think, well, if Buddha is beyond all conceptual thought, why should she or he not be given that conceptual thought is so gross and dualistic and is basically mistaken in the way it... Report an error

1:06:00 Confuses what appears to it with what that's representing. Then Buddha's beyond all that. Why do we want it? Let's just get rid of it as quickly as possible. Let's stop thinking right now and be done with it. This is, of course, a major part of the tradition, for better or worse. Report an error

1:06:27 Tsongkhapa says for worse, definitely. Definitely. You know, I guess I grew up a little bit biased, you know, having the idea that, well, Tsongkhapa has the right idea about, you know, how reason and analysis are part of a spiritual practice. But those Zen people, you know, they're the bad ones. So then I read, I got a little more educated about that over time. Report an error

1:06:56 And the thing that just really blew me away was my favorite. Anti-let's-just-space-out quote turns out to be from a Chan master, the very recently deceased and wonderful Chan teacher who founded Dharma Drum in Taiwan, Sheng Yen. And he says, he taught, he said, says this in teaching his students on retreat. Just because a person doesn't have any scattered thoughts does not mean that his problems are resolved. Report an error

1:07:29 If you're interested in a thoughtless state, just ask someone to come along and hit you quite hard on the back of the head. There are too many people who cannot distinguish true wisdom and a mere state of peacefulness. If you don't understand the distinction, and it doesn't matter how hard you practice, you're still being foolish. Report an error

1:07:47 foolish he wasn't he was yeah he wasn't uh he wasn't messing around yeah um it seemed like he had quite I was in a bit of temper about that almost in a way that it does correspond to the sense that you have that J. Rinpoche is kind of fed up with this contentlessness spacing out as like that this is the path to liberation. Report an error

1:08:15 liberation that is like The fact that Buddha has no conceptual thought and that we can and will and aspire to become Buddhas does not follow that therefore we must immediately stop having thoughts because the non-conceptual experience of enlightenment is not content-free. Report an error

1:08:36 It's a specific non-conceptual wisdom that gets at the nature of reality with regard to which we're just beginning to get a clue. And we have to understand. understand what it is and then take that as the thing that we meditate on conceptually then having that in place, then refine our non-conceptual meditative understanding of emptiness into something that's yogic and non-dualistic and direct. Report an error

1:09:05 And that's how Tsongkhapa understands the path to enlightenment. The title of Report an error

1:09:19 the book by Shen Yang. Report an error

1:09:26 I think the title of the book is Faith in Mind, which is a major Chinese Buddhist text. I think it's his commentary on that. I actually found it excerpted in a book called Chinese Religion by Deborah Sommer. But a really nice book is Footprints in the Snow, if you want to read about Shangyan. Isn't that a beautiful book? Report an error

1:09:57 So, let's see. Okay, Report an error

1:10:05 I'm coming to the end of the first chapter of my book, which was the one that I had the most to say about, so we won't be here all night. Report an error

1:10:18 One of the things that Tsongkhapa, in talking about wisdom and peace of mind, Calming the mind and then using it to analyze and how these two relate to each other in the practice of the path. He finds a Buddhist text, this is actually the end of volume two of the translation of the Great Treatise, that says that everything good in this world and beyond derives from serenity or deep meditative stabilization and insight into the nature of reality. Report an error

1:10:53 And these are like technical terms that refer to, you know, advance Buddhist meditative states. And so it certainly makes one wonder, well, how could all the virtue in the world, all the virtue of all the beings in all the world, be derived from meditative states that only a few Buddhists have realized? Report an error

1:11:17 And then Tsongkhapa raised that qualm and he said, well, what we really mean when we say everything traces back to insight and serenity, all virtue traces back, we really mean... These terms in a non-technical, much broader way. And what it really adds up to is this. And this is his little epigram that you can pull out of there and consider whether you think it's worth remembering. Report an error

1:11:42 All virtue everywhere can be traced back to the mental practice of reflecting on facts with an undistracted mind. So that's the... that's the that's the that's the Report an error

1:11:54 Non-superpower amazing of the fifth and sixth perfections, right? Undistracted mind, paying attention to what's actually going on. More kind of calmness and stability, lack of distraction we have, and using that kind of power that comes from not being scattered, being calm, to do something, not just to enjoy it for its own value or use it to... Report an error

1:12:25 I don't know what this just means. We're not talking about emptiness necessarily. That would be just only one unusual case. Just paying attention, as I was saying. Pay attention, in a calm way, paying attention to what it feels like when you give or smile or breathe or walk or choose in this way or act in that way. Report an error

1:13:06 And so this is the claim now. We can consider it a little bit. All virtue can be traced back to the mental practice of reflecting on facts with an undistracted mind. So if we're cultivating... So compassion in the, you know, seven cause and effect way. Everybody is our mother, mother, mother, mother, mother, mother. That's reflecting on facts with an undistracted, you know, make your mind calm and think these things through. Report an error

1:13:33 As you think them through, you're retraining your mind, cultivating love and compassion. Okay, so switching yourself and other, same thing, you know, reflecting on facts with an undistracted mind causes, it brings about a transformation of the mind in a way that makes it more loving. Report an error

1:13:49 And I started, you know, it's like I'm... Trying to think, well, do I really agree with that? Can we think of some exceptions or counterexamples? Anyway, I just invite you to mess around with it. I was thinking of things like this, like in Theravāda Buddhism, when they cultivate loving kindness, the idea is, well, feel, may I be well, may I have happiness and the cause of happiness. Report an error

1:14:18 Sitting with that, you know. And then it's like cultivating, practicing having a wish of wellness for yourself and then establishing what it feels like to love yourself in that way, wishing well for yourself as one. Then expanding that bubble of care and concern bigger and bigger. So I was thinking about, well, I'm not sure if that's reflecting on facts with an undistracted mind because it's more like you're starting with a feeling. Report an error

1:14:51 You're practicing having that feeling and then you're practicing making that feeling bigger. But then I was talking about to some people who know about this more and they say, yeah, but if you read Buddhaghosa, you know, and he's talking about, well, how do we actually do this practice? Then it does involve reasons that you bring to mind when you come to a sticking point and you're having a difficulty sort of including Charles Manson and so forth in your bubble of loving kindness. Report an error

1:15:16 Then you have things that you're supposed to think about to like get past the sticking points, right? So maybe that's not. Then I was thinking about, you know, all this research about mirror neurons and how. Even before people think about it, just as part of the way we're constituted biologically or we would say karmically, our brains already sort of can have a feeling for what others are feeling when others are around us, right? Report an error

1:15:45 You heard about this, why is it if one person in the room yawns without even noticing it, then other people yawn? We're so tuned in to each other's behavior and that when one person is feeling pain, there's certain neurons in your brain that are firing that just as though you were having pain. The other day, when I was staying up at Shravasti Abbey, one of the monks got a piece of wood embedded in his eyeball. And yeah, see? Report an error

1:16:21 You guys felt that. I felt it too. I was like squirming around and I was thinking, well, it's not as bad as having a piece of wood in my eyeball, but I do feel kind of uncomfortable, right? Yeah. So anyway, that's mirror neurons. Now, is that virtue? I mean, did we reflect on facts with an understanding? Report an error

1:16:43 I'm sorry, it's like, well, we have some sort of spontaneous feeling that could be the basis for cultivating virtue there anyway. But then it seems like in order to Make our kind of capacity to care for others and empathize with others stronger, less biased, which of course is extremely biased right now, and more stable so that it doesn't just get overridden as soon as we have some interest at stake. Report an error

1:17:13 That requires reflecting on facts with an undistracted mind one way or another, whatever you do. Anyway, that's my reflection on what... Tsongkhapa has to say there. Okay, so anyway... Anyway, that's all I have to say about Chapter 1 of my book. That's not all in the book, but that's my reflections on Chapter 1 of the book. Report an error

1:17:33 I'll be much briefer and say just a few things about Chapter 2. One of the things I sort of set up in this chapter is that people are aware of the construct that the path of Fourth Noble Truth is understood in terms of the three trainings, the training in ethics, training in metastabilization, training in wisdom, and that we understand the first two as being in great or substantive measure not uniquely Buddhist. Report an error

1:18:05 But in common with other traditions. And His Holiness talked about this a great deal at Lehi, but it's not like a new thing that, you know, what we need right now. For world peace and so forth, it's not for everybody to necessarily start believing in emptiness. If that were the case, it would be difficult, right? Report an error

1:18:28 But we need the people to, and this is what he teaches all the time, is to have people focus on how they can develop kindness. From within the tradition that they're already affiliated with and there are plenty of resources for doing that. So that's why you see these different sides of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the one that tells everybody that everybody wants happiness and doesn't want peace. Report an error

1:18:53 And he also even tells people that if Buddhism is not your tradition, you should be maybe... Report an error

1:19:07 loving within your own tradition, right? And it goes along with this idea that, you know, well, we have this distinctive thing called emptiness, but some people could be harmed by hearing about it if the foundation for their love and their compassion is their faith in a God and a sense that this God is their, you know, this is all His Holiness that all this talk is about. Report an error

1:19:29 They feel that God is their parent and they feel very intimate. with their parent and this sense of intimacy makes them want to align themselves with their parent and do what their parent wants because their very body comes from God. And then out of that, they can have a very sincere... Report an error

1:19:48 Dedicated bodhisattva-like behavior, going out, engaging in loving behavior in the world. And if you go around and tell all these people that, oh, by the way, God doesn't exist because it's kind of logically impossible, based on our analysis of emptiness, that there could be any such uncaused being that magically causes everything. Report an error

1:20:08 And he does all this analysis, of course. His Holiness is very adept at it. But he doesn't want to tell, he doesn't say, well, is it skillful to like point this out to people when that's the basis of their good behavior? And that's very, that just is like exactly what kind of behavior we need. Report an error

1:20:25 So, you know, he has this, tells us, he has a joke about visiting his Christian friend in Australia and he's speaking to a Christian audience in Australia and his Christian friend says, and here I want to introduce His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who's a very good Christian. Report an error

1:20:41 And His Holiness laughs, you know, instead of, he doesn't take any offense, he just laughs and he comes and he says, well, thank you very much, my friend, the very good Buddhist. Report an error

1:20:52 It's like, well, his, you know, it's like on the first two trainings and which are what? you know? Report an error

1:20:58 This is very, very important and what the world needs and what most people can benefit from the most in the immediate term and creates world peace. There's so much commonality between these traditions. On the other hand, there is this idea, as I mentioned, that what's distinctive in our tradition and what we ultimately need to have for liberation. Report an error

1:21:27 at the root of afflictions is to come to understanding emptiness and so and as I talked about before to start with that you have to study and understand the ideas and then meditate on the basis of that so He means Tsongkhapa. It talks about this question of that being the case, we're going to have to do the practice of emptiness in order to be free from sickle existence. And to do the practice of emptiness, we're going to have to understand what emptiness is. Report an error

1:22:02 That means we have to read some sutras and some shastras and Buddhist texts. And what texts should we read? And so that comes to the question of what are the definitive texts and what are the texts that require interpretation. Report an error

1:22:19 So the teaching in this tradition is that the definitive ones are the ones that teach the profound emptiness, the things that lack intrinsic nature. Because emptiness, and this is the argument they usually give, that emptiness is the end point of doing all analysis. It's the logical terminus of, you know, if you keep analyzing and analyzing, then ultimately you come to the ungraspability of things due to the lack of intrinsic nature. Report an error

1:22:50 The idea is that if you think about what the meaning of something is, you can't come to anything farther than its emptiness. And in that sense, the texts that teach this emptiness that is the end point of all analysis or interpretation. interpretation are the ones that are definitive because they're teaching about that which is the endpoint of all interpretation or analysis. So those are the definitive texts, the ones that teach the profound emptiness and ones ones to teach about it, all other conventional phenomena. Report an error

1:23:19 And you have to, I mean, I don't know, you guys may have heard this all before. I don't know because you haven't, I haven't. You haven't asked any questions yet, so I don't know what your level is, but the idea is completely different from saying which ones are literal and which ones are not literal. Report an error

1:23:37 You can have literal texts that are completely literal, but they still require interpretation. Why? Because they're not teaching about emptiness. And then you can have definitive texts that say, you know, Nothing exists. And I was like, I don't know, that's not actually a sūtra quote. But you have ones that essentially are saying there is no person. Report an error

1:24:02 There is no person anywhere, anyplace, anytime, something like that. I was like, well, that's considered definitive text, but you have to understand that that means no person such as you apprehend, no person such as you conceive, no person such as you're grasping onto, right? So it's not absolutely literal, but it is the definitive teaching. So definitive and interpretable is different from literal and non-literal. Report an error

1:24:26 Okay, then the other thing is that how do you know know which This is the criteria for which ones to rely upon. Sutras say all different things. I take that for granted. They say all different kinds of things. So how do we decide we're going to make the definitive ones the ones that are the ones that teach about emptiness? Report an error

1:24:53 This is like a big problem within Buddhism, right? Well, I can say the answer to that is that I look at the teachings of Akshayamati Sūtra. And that teaches me that definition. Buddha teaches in sūtra how to read the other sutras and know which ones are definitive and which ones are interpretable. So I'll rely on the teachings of Akshayamadi Sūtra and it gives me my criteria for knowing the difference between the definitive and the interpretable. Problem. Report an error

1:25:23 Buddha also teaches the Sandeep Nirmocana Sūtra, a different set of criteria for determining which sutras are interpretable and which ones are definitive, in which the answer comes out quite different. So His Holiness brings it up as like, well, you have these two different sutras and you have different sutras giving you different criteria for deciding which other sutras you can rely on. Report an error

1:25:43 Then which sūtra would you rely on to know which other sutras to rely on? You would have to have another sūtra to tell you which of those two sutras to rely on. And then how would you know whether that one was reliable or not unless you had some meta, meta, meta, meta, meta sūtra about how this, you know, right? So obviously there's no, in his conclusion, it's like, well, you have to think about it. Report an error

1:26:03 You have to use reason. You cannot ultimately rely on sūtra to know which sūtra to rely on to know which sūtra to rely on. That's what His Holiness said at Lehi. He said knowing how to read sūtra comes down to reason because there's so many different things in all the sutras including different things about how to read the sutras. Report an error

1:26:25 Okay. And then when you do this kind of practice and you do Study the right texts, form the right kinds of understanding. Tsongkhapa argues that relying on the right sutras, then you're also going to rely on Nagarjuna as the person to explain what the sutras meant. And then you're going to rely on Chandrakirti as the right person to tell you what Nagarjuna meant. And he doesn't get into a lot of detail early in the text in telling you why that's the case, but he tells you up front that that's going to be the right answer. Report an error

1:27:05 And then he discusses this idea of like, well, what is the self? Beginning to talk about like, well, what is the self? Intrinsic nature that we're trying to get rid of turns out to be a huge topic in his text. We have this concept that things are intrinsically existent but people have different ideas about what exactly that means and some people are falling into nihilism through misunderstanding and so forth. Report an error

1:27:35 So we have to understand that. But it's like that concept that things... Intrinsic existence is considered then an object negated by reason. Reason will negate or refute this. But they make that parallel to, I guess maybe you've heard, the concept of an object that's negated by the path. By practicing the path, we can't eliminate intrinsic existence because it never existed in the first place. Report an error

1:28:09 Right? Reason is proving that things aren't inherently existent. So that's object eliminated by reason. But object eliminated by the path or overcome by the path is what? Not inherent existence, but the concept of inherent existence, delusion that clings on to inherent existence. So that exists, unfortunately, right? Report an error

1:28:29 Quite intractably, or not quite intractably, but almost, you know, it seems deeply rooted in delusion. The path is getting at this wrong way of viewing the world, wrong thought, and then the path involves using reason, which is refuting the objects that's conceived of by this delusion. That's the idea. In the first part of the book, he talks a little about what is that wrong conception that people are holding on to. Report an error

1:29:03 You know, he's basically said, well, this is the conception of things as inherently existent in regard to either persons or phenomena. The point being that in many Buddhist schools there's a distinction between, well, persons are empty, but they're empty because they're made out of some subtler kind of phenomena which are not so empty. Report an error

1:29:22 And then later other people said, well, there's an emptiness of person that's kind of coarse and that like even maybe... Maybe those non-Mahāyāna people could even realize that people are empty, but we profound Mahāyāna philosophers realize that even those little tiny bits, those little particles, those little point instants of experience, even those are empty too. Report an error

1:29:48 So that's the subtle and profound emptiness, the emptiness of phenomena. And so then, you know, like in a mind-only system, for example, Mahāyāna school of philosophy, they have these two levels of emptiness. One's kind of gross and superficial, this idea that the person's empty of a substantially existent self, and then a subtle, profound emptiness that you need to get enlightened, which is that, you know, all phenomena are, even the ones that the person has built out. Report an error

1:30:18 Lack a difference of entity between subject and object in the case of Chittamantra. So this idea that self as a phenomena is subtle and self as a person is kind of a gross superficial emptiness. In Prasangika, in following Chandrakirti, and that's what Tsongkhapa is doing, that's not the way he looks at it. Emptiness is emptiness. Report an error

1:30:44 Emptiness means the emptiness of things lacking intrinsic existence and it applies the difference between the emptiness regard to the person and the emptiness of phenomena. The two selves, selflessness as a person and the selflessness of phenomena, they're both emptiness of intrinsic existence. It's just one when you're talking about persons and the other is when you're talking about other stuff. Report an error

1:31:06 That's it. That's the difference. If you realize that the person is empty, you have to go beyond just realizing the person is not substantially existent. You have to realize the person is completely devoid of any intrinsic nature whatsoever. Once you realize that, then you can also see if there's no intrinsically existent person, then there's no intrinsically existent hair of the person, no intrinsically nose of the person, no intrinsically existent, and those are all phenomena. Report an error

1:31:33 So all phenomena. That could be possessed by or interacted with the person or also intrinsically existent by the same, lack of intrinsic existence by the same token. Report an error

1:31:45 So Chandrakirti then has this idea that everything is, that even though the non-Mahāyāna schools like Sautranaka and Vaibhashika don't seem to teach this profound emptiness, that There has to be the case that people who aren't following the Mahāyāna can still realize this profound emptiness. Why? Because you have arhats, you have non-bodhisattva beings who are free from cyclic existence. And if they really got free from cyclic existence, they're not going to get free by realizing some coarse selflessness. Report an error

1:32:29 They have to realize the subtle, profound emptiness. So this is Chandrakirti, you know, so therefore it's Tsongkhapa, therefore it's, you know, this system. It's like that even the non-Mahāyāna practitioners have... have to be able to realize the most profound emptiness, despite that fact that that most profound emptiness doesn't seem to be taught in any of the sort of officially listed non-Mahāyāna schools of tenets. Report an error

1:32:56 Okay, so I know it's like getting to be a little bit long. Just let me say, this is about as long as I planned to go, but I can see that people are getting a little tired. So it's good. What I was... Planning to do next is, I mean with the next session tomorrow, is get into more, having done this, this is kind of laying a foundation of I think in the text and general Buddhist understanding is getting into the problem that is sort of I don't know, part of the heart of Tsongkhapa's argument and that is if when you're doing rational analysis and saying what is the person really, what is the table really, what is the chariot really and looking for the basis of imputation and you search and search and you can't find a shred of anything that's there as the nature of the person that holds up under analysis. Report an error

1:33:53 And doesn't that mean that rational analysis has refuted the existence of the person and shown that it doesn't exist? If that's the case, Tsongkhapa is going to say that when you analyze rationally, you don't find anything. So how can he then say that that doesn't refute those things and then go on with this business about things conventionally existing? Well, you just proved that they don't exist. Report an error

1:34:22 Then why are you insisting that they do? I'm not going to tell you. You have to come back. Report an error

1:34:34 Maybe I can find out something about what's going on in your minds. I don't know any of you. Report an error

1:35:01 Hi, Guy. This is wonderful. Thank you so much for being here. You hit on something that I think is something I've run into quite a bit, where you're trying to explain to non-Buddhists who say, well, What do Buddhists believe in? You don't believe in anything, ultimately. And then, of course, we're faced with the daunting word emptiness, which just has such a negative connotation for some reason to most Western minds. Report an error

1:35:28 In a nutshell, could you give a possible explanation that one could give to a non-Buddhist to kind of take the fear factor out of emptiness? Report an error

1:35:42 Well, you know, What His Holiness does is he just says, when my Christian friends ask me about emptiness, I said, that's not something that you want to know about. Report an error

1:35:55 Yeah, yeah, it does. It's like we have this secret, we have this secret thing. Yeah, it's like, and I was thinking about like, you know, that how in the Gelugpa traditional monastic education system, when they're educating, you know, young people, They don't teach them Prasangika, you know, they don't teach them Chandrakirti in the seventh grade. They don't say, well, I wanted to start out by telling you that everything's a mere imputation by thought, kids. Report an error

1:36:27 And there's nothing at all on the object side whatsoever that can, you know, really be found. It's not, but no, but what I'm saying is it's, you know, Genlo Sangatso, I gather Charles mentioned that he's one of my teachers, Genlo Sangatso is like, He repeated the famous saying that, oh, Asanga's lineage, by which you generally mean the practices of love and so forth, that this is good medicine for everybody. Report an error

1:36:58 But then Nagarjuna's lineage, it's the best medicine for a few people and poison for others. So it's like, well... Report an error

1:37:12 I've had difficulty with this myself. I've had these conversations with this Sufi friend and he's coming from a point of inclusionism, right? He wants everybody to be having different versions of the same belief so that we'll all be okay. And he keeps trying to like make it so that emptiness caches out as like God so that he can feel that. Report an error

1:37:38 I'm on the good team and not on the bad team. And I'm saying, well, no, it's not really like that. By empty, I didn't mean the ground of all being or something, you know, around like that. Report an error

1:37:56 Well, okay, to be a little more constructive in responding, I guess one thing that has worked is to... And it doesn't get at the heart of the matter, but then that's exactly the point. You can't get right to it. It's talk about dependent arising. That's what you have to do. Because everybody can, within, of course, feeling... I mean, they're not going to really get what you... You're not going to get that dependent arising means that nothing has any existence from its own side. Report an error

1:38:31 But that's okay, right? You start with the ideas like, well, you think that everything... This is what... Yeah, that's right. Bob Thurman has to go on the radio and say Buddhism and of course then they're going to cut him off in like a few seconds so he'll talk about interrelatedness or relativity and saying this is, you know, he doesn't say the word emptiness. Report an error

1:38:54 He doesn't say it. And so it's not really right in a way in sort of getting to the heart of the matter but then on the other hand, right, I mean, yeah, exactly. It's like that with everything. I mean, you can say the whole Gelugpa system is like that in a sense. Well, because it's all about concepts and words and dualistic categories and they never correspond exactly to sheer reality just as it is. Report an error

1:39:27 It's always the nature of things. is in some sense ultimately ineffable but then we have to have we're in this world of dualistic concepts so the idea is what kinds of concepts would be most useful for us and you Emptiness turns out to be a really, really powerful, useful way of thinking about the world, right? But it may not be the best tool, the best medicine for everybody. Report an error

1:39:57 everybody so I would say you have to respond to each person, don't you think? Definitely, definitely. I just have had people who were non-Buddhists raise the question about it because Buddhism is kind of au courant right now, so there's little bits of it here and there. And then they're not really sure exactly what you mean by it. Yeah. And then they're terrified. Well, then you can give them... Report an error

1:40:26 like, you know, give him... He pieces every step by Thich Nhat Hanh and say, well, that's the next thing. It's like, okay, everything's related. Okay, well, what do you mean by that? Okay, well, here's Thich Nhat Hanh. There's a cloud in this piece of paper. There's a cloud in this piece of paper. There's sun in this piece of paper. Report an error

1:40:46 What do you mean? That sounds, you know, well, that's because there wouldn't be a piece of paper if there weren't a cloud. There wouldn't be a piece of paper if there wasn't a tree. There wouldn't be a piece of paper and so forth. And it's like, oh, dependent arising means that... Things exist only because of other things. You know what I'm saying? And it starts to get edges in there a little bit. It's not just everything's related. It's that things are appearing only because of these interconnections. Report an error

1:41:10 I don't know. I'd say that's a good entry point. That's a good one. A follow-up to that. The other thing that I get from Buddhists is, well, we practice and all you Galukpa do is study. How do you counteract that? Report an error

1:41:28 Because I think you hit on something important, which is you use the analysis of understanding what we're supposed to study and then we go into meditation. Yeah. Sort of armed with this encyclopedia already in our minds. Yeah, yeah. Well, no, I mean, it's a big problem. Report an error

1:41:54 No, and it's not utterly baseless either. That's the thing. You can't just say, oh, well, that's absolutely wrong. There's a way in which, you know, I would say one thing is if you read Tsongkhapa, if you read Tsongkhapa, instead of, well, I actually did my original. This book was on yikcha, reading monastic debate textbooks, not reading Tsongkhapa, but reading what people hundreds of years later wrote about Tsongkhapa to teach their students. Report an error

1:42:29 So it becomes institutionalized, and it's interesting to see, well, when they institutionalized it, how did they interpret and explain and refine what Tsongkhapa was saying in order to create a massive educational system of the dominant sect? It's different from reading... Tsongkhapa himself, right? And if you read Tsongkhapa, it's clear that this is all about practice. He says, everything in this book you should take as personal instruction for practice. Report an error

1:43:00 Like I'm talking right to you and I'm your teacher and telling you this. And it's funny that sometimes there'll be long sections where he goes off and he kind of like, he's just... Quoting so many Shastras and doing all this complicated analysis. And then he'll turn around and he'll say, you know, take this to heart and practice it as the most precious thing you'd ever heard, you know, as the intimate advice of your Lama, you know. Report an error

1:43:26 Or he'll say, friends, like he's talking to us, friends. Second, goes into the second person, he says, friends, you know, don't fall into the trap of thinking that emptiness undermines dependent arising. And he just goes into this voice where he reminds us that this is supposed to be personal instructions for practice. It's really, I have to say, it really is easy in some parts of the book to lose, especially in volume three, it's easy to lose that feeling. Report an error

1:44:00 But in the first two volumes, he maintains it pretty well, even when he gets into a lot of Shastra quotes, that feeling that... You know, the reason we're talking about all these Shastra quotes is so that you'll get this straight and that'll be the basis of your practice. So, I mean, like, you know, he was the tradition, the great tradition for, you know, for Tsongkhapa and not just for him, but, you know, for great teachers of the other orders as well, was to... Report an error

1:44:30 do both, to study widely and then to go into extensive practice on the basis of what they learned and studied and try to it and have experience based in meditation that was based on the meanings that they had discerned. As far as defending the tradition per se, it's like, well... I don't know. I mean, I'm not, I don't feel, it's like, there's obviously some, there's the other problem, right? Report an error

1:45:10 Saying, right, we just have our little handbook and we don't really have to understand anything except what the guru whispers in our ear. And it's like, then we'll be okay, right? And that's like, so you can, if you want to get into fighting, there's things that we can say back, you know what I'm saying? Report an error

1:45:29 It's like, well, you don't. Right, but I mean, I don't know, I don't feel a strong need to be defensive like that. It's certainly not the approach that His Holiness takes. He takes the approach of saying all the great traditions have, he means all the major, the four Chaluk, the four Dharma systems have great scholars and great yogis and all of the, and he tries to emphasize that the greatest yogis have been also scholars. Report an error

1:46:02 That they were practicing on the basis of something that they really studied, and that it's not just studying and then not practicing, and it's not just practicing and thinking that that allows you to bypass study. And I think he has a point. What happens is that in each tradition over time, the accent goes on a different syllable, but the idea that both are important is not. Report an error

1:46:30 unique to one tradition or another. Report an error

1:46:55 you follow what I was saying? Was it too basic or too, no? It's good right on? Okay, so we have a foundation to go on tomorrow and explore the mysteries of rational analysis and why shouldn't it cancel? Why wouldn't not being able to find anything under analysis prove that things don't exist? Certainly it might seem to. Report an error

1:47:31 Thank you. I'll see you tomorrow morning, I hope. A Report an error

1:47:51 little too high, eh? Report an error

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Talk by Guy Newland, recorded 12 March 2010. Original at Tse Chen Ling Center for Tibetan Buddhist Studies via Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/GN_Emptiness_20100312. Licensed CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US. Transcript generated automatically and may contain errors; the audio is the authoritative version.

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